Jury renders verdict in murder trial of Troy man accused of killing his mother
A Madison County jury has found a Troy man guilty of killing his mother, the widow of a former mayor who worked as a waitress.
Prosecutors had accused Neil Howard of strangling Norma Caraker, 60, with a bungee cord late Sept. 12 or early Sept. 13, 2023, in her Troy home shortly after her date with a St. Louis man she had met online.
Howard’s trial on two counts of first-degree murder began Feb. 3 at the Madison County Criminal Justice Center in Edwardsville. Attorneys presented closing arguments Monday morning. Jurors, including 10 women and two men, deliberated about three hours.
“I wasn’t expecting (a guilty verdict),” said Andrea Hall, one of Howard’s two sisters, after leaving the courtroom. She had supported her brother and served as a defense witness.
Hall told the BND last year that she believed Troy police had “jumped the gun” by arresting Howard, put too much weight on his past legal problems and conducted a sloppy investigation.
On Monday, Andrea Hall declined further comment, as did Dawn Hall, Howard’s fiance. She also had testified for the defense. Both women were sobbing and hugging as they boarded an elevator.
Howard’s other sister, Jenny Hosler, declined to comment throughout the trial. She and other family members had sat behind prosecutors and consulted with them during breaks.
State’s Attorney Tom Haine spoke to reporters on Monday after speaking privately with jurors.
“A young man taking it upon himself to kill his own mother in her own bed is one of the worst kinds of crimes,” he said. “We just pray for the family. We pray for their healing.
“We are very thankful for the verdict, but it’s a sad day because Norma should be here, and she’s not. She was beloved by so many in the community.”
History of domestic violence
At the trial, Assistant State’s Attorneys Luke Yager and Ryan Kemper described Howard, 46, as an angry, unemployed man with a history of domestic violence who lived in Caraker’s basement. They maintained that he tried to cover up his crime by throwing suspicion on his mother’s date, James Carter.
In his closing argument, Yager emphasized that Howard was the only person in Caraker’s home at 600 Lower Marine Road when police found her body about 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 13, 2023.
“This defendant had had enough of his mother,” Yager told jurors. “He’d had enough of her sleeping around. He’d had enough of her not giving him money.”
Yager showed body-camera footage of an inebriated Howard talking about a man running out a sliding-glass door before police determined the door had been locked from the inside. Yager also alleged that Howard took $58 in small bills, presumed to be Caraker’s tip money, out of her wallet.
The defense attorneys were Jeremy Sackett and David Fahrenkamp, who stated in court filings that they weren’t being paid because Howard had no money. After the verdict on Monday, Fahrenkamp told the BND that he expects the case to be appealed.
“I don’t argue things that I don’t believe in,” he said. “I believe in this case. I believe in Neil.”
At the trial, the defense attorneys argued that Troy police focused too heavily on Howard as a suspect initially and ignored other leads, notably failing to get a DNA sample from Carter until 15 months after the murder.
Defense witnesses testified that Caraker often left her doors unlocked, brought men home for sex and had named one on-and-off boyfriend as beneficiary to a life-insurance policy.
Fahrenkamp spent much of his closing argument talking about a report by a crime-lab technician, who testified that she had found DNA from Carter, but not Howard, on the bungee cord and under Caraker’s acrylic fingernails, including some that were ripped off.
“The gold standard of evidence ... The gold standard of forensic evidence is DNA,” Fahrenkamp told jurors.
Prosecutors maintained that Howard was wearing latex gloves at the time of Caraker’s strangulation and that his DNA wasn’t under her fingernails because she was grabbing the bungee cord and trying to pull it away from her neck instead of clawing at her attacker.
Yager pushed back on the defense argument that investigators decided in the “first 20 minutes” that Howard was the killer, telling jurors that they collected evidence throughout the home, used a drone and canine unit outside, conducted interviews and viewed video footage.
Last year, Troy Police Chief Chris Wasser declined to comment on evidence or witnesses in the Caraker case but answered “yes” when the BND asked if he believed his department had done a thorough investigation.
Waitress at two restaurants
Caraker was a waitress at Troy Family Restaurant in Troy and The Lucky Rooster Pub & Eatery in St. Jacob at the time of her death. She formerly worked at Sgt. Pepper’s Cafe in Edwardsville.
Norma Caraker was the widow of former Troy mayor Charles “Tom” Caraker, who died in 2018. She had three children from a previous marriage and two stepchildren, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“Norma should be alive,” Haine said on Monday. “She didn’t deserve this. It’s a horrific case. The ripple effects will continue.
“This family has been torn apart in so many ways, and we’re thankful the jury did the right thing. They saw the evidence. The defendant tried to get away with it, and they didn’t let him.”
Troy police were responding to a 911 call for a welfare check from Howard when they found Caraker’s body in her bedroom about 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 13, 2023. The following day, Haine’s office charged Howard with two counts of first-degree murder by strangulation.
The coroner’s office later gave asphyxiation as Caraker’s cause of death. Howard was indicted by a grand jury. Since that time, he’s been held in the Madison County Jail on a $3 million bond.
Much of Howard’s trial centered on Caraker’s date on Sept. 12, 2023. Carter testified that they met at The Lucky Rooster then went to the Time Out Sports Bar & Grill in Troy before having sex at her home.
Early on, police told family members that Carter had an alibi for the time of Caraker’s death, according to Hall.
At Howard’s trial, a Madison County detective testified for the prosecution that an analysis of Carter’s cellphone signals showed that he left Caraker’s home about 11 p.m. and drove back to St. Louis. Defense attorney Fahrenkamp argued that such data can be unreliable.
“There are limitations to this kind of analysis,” he said during cross-examination of the detective.
A Troy investigator testified that he went to Carter’s home in south St. Louis the day after the murder and asked why he hadn’t returned calls from police; and that Carter denied receiving the calls and told him he had hired a lawyer.
Investigators didn’t get a DNA sample from Carter until Dec. 4, 2024. That prompted prosecutors to ask that Howard’s trial be postponed from January to February to give the state crime lab time to analyze the new evidence. The defense objected to the delay.
“It is clear from the actions of the State that there are reasonable doubts that they have charged the right person,” a defense motion stated. “The police investigation is not over as they continue to look at other suspects.”
Carter refused to meet with prosecutors until after they gave him “use immunity,” which prohibited them from using his statements against him in court, according to the defense motion.
Boyfriend had sued daughter
Another defense witness at Howard’s trial was Terry Deets, Caraker’s on-and-off boyfriend. He testified that her family didn’t like him, partly due to a perception that she was giving him money, and he had once sued Hosler, Howard’s sister, for defamation.
Deets told of stopping by The Lucky Rooster to eat on Sept. 12, 2023, because Caraker invited him.
“She knew I liked fried chicken,” he said.
Deets was listed as beneficiary for a life-insurance policy that Caraker had taken out. At Howard’s trial, he acknowledged calling the company shortly after her death to find out how much it was worth.
The defense also called Howard’s fiance, Dawn Hall, as a witness. She testified that Deets seemed to have unfettered access to Caraker’s home and that Hall and Howard caught him peering through a window at 3 a.m. on Sept. 7, 2023, while they were cleaning the garage.
In cross-examination, prosecutor Yager suggested that Dawn Hall could have been on drugs or lying to get Howard out of jail, given that she didn’t report the incident to police or mention it before the trial.
In his closing statement, Yager told jurors that, despite defense efforts to create suspicion around Deets, the slim man with health issues wouldn’t have been physically able to commit the crime.
Howard attended Cahokia High School, lived in Collinsville, Maryville and Hillsboro, Missouri, and formerly worked at Pilot Travel Center in Troy, court records show. He has three grown children.
Andrea Hall told the BND last year that she believed her brother’s story that Caraker called him from the bar, told him to clean up the kitchen and go down to his bedroom in the basement because she was bringing home a date and that Howard put in earbuds to give them privacy.
Andrea Hall said Howard later texted her and his girlfriend to tell them that he sensed something was wrong but delayed calling 911 because he was reluctant to interrupt his mother in the middle of the night.
“I told investigators that his story, what my brother told them, seemed very plausible,” Hall said in April, noting that she formerly lived with Caraker and Howard and knew their routines.
At the trial, defense attorney Fahrenkamp asked Andrea Hall what were the instructions that Caraker had given to her and Howard to follow when she brought a date home.
“Disappear,” Hall answered.
This story was originally published February 10, 2025 at 4:25 PM.
