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Women to stand trial for murder in Park City man's death
WICHITA — Sharon Huddleston appeared to tell just about everyone she knew that she killed Todd Stover.
But police didn't know how the Park City man died for 10 years.
Huddleston's girlfriend, her daughter and a former roommate all testified today at a preliminary hearing that they heard Huddleston say she had injected the 37-year-old Stover with a lethal dose of insulin.
After hearing the testimony, Sedgwick County District Judge Warren Wilbert ordered Huddleston, 54, and her sister Rhonda Pischel, 53, to stand trial for the killing of the Park City man in May 2000.
Sharon Edwards, Huddleston's former girlfriend, testified she called police last March after years of silence because her health was failing.
"The Lord was guilting me," testified Edwards, who is diabetic. "I couldn't die with this on my heart."
When confronted by agent Jeff Newsum with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, both women confessed, he told the judge.
Huddleston was angry, Newsum said, because Stover promised to help her get a job at Boeing, then didn't deliver.
The women said they then took Stover's body to a rural area in Greenwood County and dumped it, Newsum testified.
Newsum said he talked to the women near Joplin, Mo., one day shy of the 10th anniversary of Stover's death.
Huddleston and Pischel were arrested in August by Joplin police and waived extradition to Kansas.
Authorities have said that the victim and suspects are former Park City residents.
The cause of Stover's death remained a mystery for years. His body was so badly decomposed when it was found, the insulin poisoning wasn't discovered, Sedgwick County Coroner Jaime Oeberst testified. It wasn't until after the confession that Oeberst said the cause of death was determined as insulin toxicity.
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