Ex-Warsawan's Accused Killer Says, 'I Just Snapped'
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By Kristin Holtz-
SHAKOPEE, Minn. – In a recorded jailhouse conversation with his brother, Charles Anthony “Tony” Maddox Jr. said he “snapped” while arguing with his wife late the night of Nov. 10, 2008. “We got into a fight and I choked her. She’s dead, Chris,” Maddox told his brother from the Scott County Jail. Scott County District Court jurors in the Maddox murder trial Thursday heard an audio recording of the telephone call Maddox made hours after he was arrested for killing his estranged wife, Ruth Anne Maddox. Tony Maddox, 47, is charged with the second-degree murder of the 45-year-old reporter for the Shakopee Valley News. A former Warsaw resident, Ruth Anne worked for the Times-Union from April 1, 1987, to July 8, 2003. During her tenure at the Times-Union, she covered general assignments, as well as police and courts under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long. The jury Thursday listened to seven phone calls Maddox made from the jail. They included three calls on Nov. 12, the day he was arrested – the first to his brother at 11:49 a.m. and two consecutive calls to his mother two hours later. Maddox’s family members in the courtroom were visibly emotional as they listened to the first call in which Maddox repeated a couple of times that Ruth Anne came at him with a knife, he kicked the door and choked her. “I didn’t mean to do it,” Maddox said. “ … I just snapped.” In the second call, Maddox told his mother he was scared. After giving his family contact numbers so they could come and get the couple’s beloved dogs, Maddox was asked whether he wanted a message forwarded to Kelsey, Ruth Anne’s daughter. “I don’t know what to say to her,” he said. In a Nov. 15 phone call to his girlfriend, Stephanie Rasmussen, Maddox sounded cheerful as they discussed his fantasy football picks. However, his tone changed when he apologized to Rasmussen for not telling her about Ruth Anne’s death and for the media coverage of the case. “They’re making it look like a bunch of abuse,” he said. During a Nov. 16 conversation, Rasmussen told Maddox that she was beating herself up about not having responded to a text Tony sent early in the morning of Nov. 12. She wondered if it would have changed anything. Maddox assured her that when she got the text message it was already done. The audio recordings followed morning testimony from a former co-worker of Tony Maddox who said she overheard Tony say he was “thinking of killing his wife” the week prior to Ruth Anne’s death. Elena Asibu, a host and event coordinator at Jimmy’s Food and Cocktails in Minnetonka where Maddox tended bar, said she overhead Maddox tell a delivery man that statement while they were opening the restaurant sometime around Nov. 5, 2008. The delivery man laughed the comment off, saying Maddox couldn’t do that because it would be hard to get rid of the body, Asibu said. Maddox responded by saying he thought he could do it, she added. Asibu, who brought the statement to the attention of her boss after hearing Tony was arrested for his wife’s murder, told police she “didn’t think they were serious” during a Nov. 13 statement. She said in court Thursday she knew the delivery man was joking, since he was laughing, but she didn’t know Tony well enough to know if he was joking. Defense attorney Fred Bruno asked if it isn’t common for people to talk trash during the midst of a divorce. Asibu replied that Tony didn’t seem that casual. Bruno questioned Asibu about whether she knew who the delivery man worked for or what he looked like. She said she didn’t know anything about his appearance. “I really didn’t look at him,” Asibu said. First thing Thursday, the state submitted as evidence the master bedroom door the defense alleges killed Ruth Anne. The lightweight, hollow-core door was torn off its hinges and found in the garage behind a work bench, Prior Lake police detective Chris Olson said. There was an indentation on the outside of the door. Also included among the evidence Thursday was a small, white-handled screwdriver. The approximately 3-inch-long screwdriver was collected from the kitchen sink, not Nov. 12 with the rest of the evidence, but a month later – Dec. 10 – at the request of the defense, Olson said. The defense has questioned several witnesses on the collection of the screwdriver, which it alleges Ruth Anne used to unlock a bedroom door to gain access to Tony. Bruno asked Olson whether he was aware Maddox told officers the night of his arrest that Ruth Anne had used the screwdriver to gain access to his bedroom. Olson said he was aware of a confrontation at the door but the reference to the screwdriver was ambiguous since he only heard the defendant mention something about a pick. He said Maddox was not enunciating and had his head down at the time. While he was coherent, Maddox appeared to be afraid and stressed, Olson said. Bruno asked whether two knives that had been taken into evidence were ever fingerprinted. Olson said he was unsure, but said that since both Ruth Anne and Tony were living in the house, he assumed their prints were on lots of the silverware. Also submitted into evidence was paperwork Maddox had on him at the time of his arrest, including a Walgreens receipt, suitcase tags, bus schedule and debit card belonging to Ruth Anne; two cell phones; a small suitcase, pair of black men’s slacks and photos of Ruth Anne Maddox’s Subaru Outback after it was found at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport Nov. 14. The prosecution presented photographs of several text messages sent between Tony and Ruth Anne Maddox’s cell phones on Oct. 24 and Nov. 11. The Oct. 24 messages sent from Tony’s phone to Ruth Anne’s suggested he was trying to get help for a personal issue, wanted the couple to spend more free time together and wondered whether Ruth Anne had spent the previous weekend with Craig Hoskins. Two messages were from the morning of Nov. 11, after Ruth Anne was dead, including one sent from Ruth Anne’s phone to Tony’s: “Tony, I’m tired of all this fighting. I’m going to try to get out of town. Will you PLEASE be gone when I get back either Sunday or Monday,” as read by Olson. Tony responded by asking whether she was heading back [to Indiana] to “piss off” her daughter or see Hoskins. He asked to the keep the dogs and then he’d do his best to get out, according to the message Olson read.
