Man who kidnapped and killed Texarkana woman in 1997 asks federal judge again to let him out

TEXARKANA, Ark. – The man serving life without release for abducting a young Texarkana woman from her home in 1997 and shooting her in the Cass County woods is asking a federal judge for the second time to let him go, saying he is 70, failing in health and “not the same person who committed the offense.”

Steven W. Wooldridge filed the handwritten-signed motion himself from the federal medical prison complex at Butner, North Carolina. It was docketed Monday in U.S. District Court in Texarkana, two years after Chief U.S. District Judge Susan O. Hickey rejected his first bid and called his conduct heinous.

Wooldridge pleaded guilty in June 1998 to kidnapping resulting in death and agreed to a sentence of life without the possibility of release. In exchange, prosecutors withdrew their notice that they would seek the death penalty.

The victim, identified in the indictment as Hollie Calhoun Miller, was a recently married college student. Court filings since 2020 refer to her only as Jane Doe.

According to facts Wooldridge admitted at his plea hearing and recounted in Hickey’s 2024 order, he rented a warehouse in Texarkana, Texas, and went looking for a woman to abduct and assault. On the morning of April 11, 1997, he watched Miller working in the flowerbeds of her front yard in Texarkana, Arkansas, then knocked on her back door and asked to use her phone. When she turned to get it, he forced his way in with a knife to her throat, wrapped her in a blanket, bound her with cords and a television cable and drove her in her own car to the warehouse.

That evening, after she begged him to spare her life, he told her he would release her in the country. He drove her to a wooded area of Cass County, Texas, made her kneel with a towel over her head and told her to count to 1,000. He shot her with a .410 shotgun while she counted, then took her wedding band and other jewelry.

Prosecutors wrote in a 2020 filing that Wooldridge later told investigators that as he walked back to his minivan he thought, “That wasn’t hard, I will forget about it in a few days.”

Investigators broke the case 10 days after the abduction, when a driver in a neighboring county found three trash bags by the road holding her clothing, her driver’s license, restraints and a Walmart receipt from the morning she vanished. The receipt led to Wooldridge, who was on parole from an eight-year Texas sentence for breaking into a Houston woman’s apartment with a knife and trying to sexually assault her in 1992. He confessed in two recorded interviews after his arrest April 25, 1997, according to the government’s filing.

In the new motion, dated Sept. 22 and filed under the federal compassionate release law, Wooldridge lists congestive heart failure and a history of bypass surgery, cirrhosis of the liver with esophageal varices, diabetes that he says is threatening his eyesight, high blood pressure and a knee condition that limits his mobility. He writes that managing those conditions “is increasingly difficult in the prison setting, particularly as vision and mobility decline.”

He also points to what he calls a clean disciplinary record for decades, more than 20 years of work in the federal prison industries program and a move from high-security to medium-security housing. He asks Hickey to reduce his sentence to time served, or to time served plus home confinement, and to appoint him a lawyer if the court wants medical evidence presented.

Attached to the motion is a Bureau of Prisons program review dated Sept. 25 that lists no incident reports in the past six months, rates his recidivism risk as low, and shows him assigned to a care level for unstable, complex chronic medical conditions since February 2024. It also lists recent prison classes in crochet, calligraphy and softball officiating.

Wooldridge’s first motion, filed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, cited his age of 64, diabetes, high blood pressure and cirrhosis, and proposed that he live with his daughter in La Porte, Texas. The U.S. Attorney’s Office opposed it, arguing that he had waived the right to seek release in his plea deal, that a sentence imposed under the Federal Death Penalty Act is “without the possibility of release” by its terms, and that he remained a danger, “especially [to] women.” Prosecutors noted he had a prior conviction for sexual abuse of a child and had been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.

Hickey denied the motion in July 2024. She found his medical conditions could be treated in prison and wrote that his good conduct and programming, while commendable, “cannot outweigh the heinous conduct he displayed by abducting, assaulting, and murdering Jane Doe.” Wooldridge says in his new motion that the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals summarily affirmed that ruling.

The government had not responded to the new motion as of Tuesday, and the court had not set a schedule for one.

Wooldridge, who is 70 according to Bureau of Prisons records, has been in federal custody since Aug. 1, 1997.