A 44-year-old Van Buren man has been sentenced to 35 years in prison after pleading guilty in Crawford County Circuit Court to first-degree murder in the February 2012 shooting death of his girlfriend.
Ronald Anthony Cash was scheduled for trial Monday in circuit court on a charge of capital murder but entered his plea Wednesday before Circuit Judge Mike Medlock.
Cash was accused of shooting Tammie Lea Schlude, 40, in the head with a .45-caliber pistol just after midnight on Feb. 5, 2012, in the parking lot of Blakemore Field in Van Buren.
According to the prosecutor’s office, Schlude was walking away from Cash when he shot her and would have shot her again but the magazine fell out of the gun and it wouldn’t fire again. After Cash drove off, Van Buren officers responding to the scene found the magazine on the ground.
In a statement he gave to investigators after his arrest, Cash said he had suspected Schlude of cheating on him with another man. He said she was constantly sending the man text messages. When he confronted her, he said in his statement, Schlude claimed she was sending the messages to a female friend in Oklahoma.
He continued to look for evidence she was cheating on him, he told investigators, such as checking her phone bills, and later found that she had been sending text messages to a man he contacted by text.
On Feb. 4, 2012, he put his .45-caliber pistol into his car because, according to his statement, he believed Schlude was going to meet with the man. Cash stated he planned to confront the man and beat him up.
That night, he saw Schlude leave a drive-in restaurant and he followed her. He telephoned her and told her to stop playing games with him and tell him the truth. She threatened to call the police because he was stalking her, he said in the statement.
Schlude then pulled into the Blakemore Field parking lot and Cash pulled in behind her, he said in his statement. She got out of her pickup and walked to Cash’s sport utility vehicle to confront him, banging on the window. He would not get out, according to his statement, and she began to walk back to her pickup when he brandished and cocked the gun.
As she walked back to the pickup, he told police, he got out of the SUV and shot her in the back of the head.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 8 on 02/08/2013