Family of the jailed local teen awaiting trial as the main suspect in the shooting death of his parents almost a year ago spoke out on the day of his 18th birthday and said the case presented thus far was all wrong.
The father and brother of April Owenby, who are also the grandfather and uncle of Jesse Madison Holton, 18, said Holton is innocent and the case was being built to point in the youngster’s direction.
The guilty party they, say also, died that day – Michael Holton, described as the estranged husband of April, and father of Madison, who was 17 and living with his father at the time.
Michael Evans, April’s brother, did most of the talking in a Thursday interview with The Herald. April’s father, Charles Owenby, was almost too overwhelmed to complete a sentence.
They said Madison had spent the last year in jail unnecessarily.
Charles said having lost his daughter he also did not want to lose a grandson, which is significant considering his grandson has been shaped so far by state prosecutors at the testimony of Elmore County sheriff’s officials and investigators to be his daughter’s killer.
“I want the truth to be told, it just seems like this is being dragged out because they went to the store and didn’t have enough change,” said Owenby, “I do not believe that my grandson killed his parents.”
Evans contended the official narrative presented thus far was incorrect, and he called out recent reporting done by The Herald with the location of the gunshot wounds as an example.
The story, he said, started long before the incidents that took place on Sept. 11, 2016 and was rooted in the travails of a tormented man deeply into a spiral of substance abuse and a failed marriage.
Toxicology and autopsy reports obtained by The Herald show Holton had multiple substances in his system at the time of his death, including hydrocodone, oxycodone, tramadol and was positive for desmethyltramadol.
Autopsy reports also obtained by The Herald show that April Owenby had several bruises or contusions on both her inner thighs, her breast and bruising to her right cheek and eye.
She suffered two gunshot wounds, one to her right hand, the other the fatal wound to the front right side of her head, the bullet not exiting.
Michael Holton also had markings and wounds on his body according to the autopsy results.
The state medical examiner reported there were four small lacerations on the right side of his neck, an abrasion on his right cheek and a contusion on his left shoulder.
The gunshot that the report said killed Holton entered the back of his head on the right side and exited above his right eyebrow.
Evans said he believes it is evidence that Holton was assaulting Owenby, killed her and then himself.
The four scratches to the back of his neck, he said, were likely caused by Owenby’s wounded right hand and the other markings indicative of a defensive struggle.
As for the gunshot occurring to the back of Holton’s head, Evans said he knows of incidents where such wounds occurred similarly in suicides.
And that’s what he said he thinks happened, Holton killed Owenby and then himself.
He said there is more evidence he knows of that supports his theory, including a document he called a six-to-eight page suicide manifesto, written by Holton and found by the sheriff’s department.
The document, he said, detailed Holton’s intent to commit suicide and said the age at which he said he would end his life was 37, the same age both he and Owenby were at the time of their death.
Evans said the document did not detail the murder of his wife.
“It was definitely abundantly clear that he wanted to kill himself,” Evans said.
He said the substance abuse cost Holton his office as mayor of Eclectic for approximately one year. Holton resigned in 2014.
Reasons given by Holton for his resignation then in media reports were “family issues.”
A quote taken from the council meeting where Holton resigned as reported by The Observer cited him as saying, “My wife and my children deserve more of my time than they are getting.”
Court records show the couple was going through divorce proceedings, which Evans said were being finalized months before the incident.
Other evidence he said he had to support his theory that Holton was the shooter included a conversation he had with one of his sister’s friends.
In the alleged conversation between she and Holton, Evans said Holton expressed that he could not live knowing his ex-wife had found someone else.
Throughout the conversation, he said, the woman said Holton was rolling a bullet between his hands.
This, Evans said, occurred a month before the shooting and Holton found out about Owenby’s boyfriend about week prior to the fatal event.
“I never want to go and Monday morning quarterback anybody that works in law enforcement because decisions are based on what they think they have at the time, but what I’m saying is we’ve now been here a year more and more information is coming out. I think it’s time that we have a real conversation and go, ‘OK we need to revisit how this whole thing happened,’” said Evans.
Evans said from the beginning he believed the investigation got off track.
“The facts are the facts. I have yet to see anything that shows that Madison had anything to do with this except that he had a party the night before,” Evans said.
A deputy first responded on initial calls to the residence of the domestic incident, which occurred when a dispute arose over a party Madison reportedly held at his father’s house earlier.
The story goes that the responding deputy left and a neighbor made the second call after Madison sought their help, still in handcuffs.
Initially sheriff’s investigators brought as evidence that Madison was wearing handcuffs his father had placed him in and the room where they were shot was entered without signs of force.
“It was actually 11 minutes from the time the deputy left the first time and the second 911 phone call that they’d been shot,” Evans said and later clarified that was an estimate.
He calls into question the notion and the testimony Madison could have escaped, shot his parents, re-applied the handcuffs and called again from a neighbors house to stage the alleged murders in that time.
“When they got to the house they actually said that Michael killed April and killed himself and they let Madison leave…And then called about 15 minutes later and said, ‘OK you need to bring him back he’s lying.’”
Evans said he wants to raise public awareness to the issue, “My hope in this is to spur a conversation for people to start asking questions.”
Sheriff Bill Franklin said that the case is in its prosecutorial phase and mostly out of the hands of the ECSO.
Holton is still in Elmore County Jail, but his bond was recently reduced from $1,000,000 to $300,000, which Franklin noted.
He said so far no one has come to bail Holton out, saying, “We realize that Mr. Holton has been here for quite some time.”
As for what came back in the reports, Franklin said his department would accept whatever findings the forensic investigators produced.
But he said he did not want to hypothesize about might have happened based on those reports.
“We don’t purport to be pathologists … we’re well aware that there’s a lot of different scenarios that could have possibly happened at the Holton household,” Franklin said. “We pretty much will go with the findings that the Department of Forensic Science submits to us.”
As for when that might happen, the local DA’s office said no date has yet been set for Holton’s time in front of a grand jury.
