By Shannon McFarlin WENK/WTPR News Director
Hartville, Ohio—An Ohio man has pleaded guilty to killing his wife after initially telling authorities that his wife died on a trip to Graceland and that he threw her body in the Tennessee River in Benton Co. on the way home.
That fabricated story led Benton Co. Sheriff Kenny Christopher, deputies, rescue squad members and the THP helicopter to spend several days in January searching for his wife, but her body was never recovered. Snider told investigators he had thrown her body into the Tennessee River near Interstate 40.
Snider was finally arrested for aggravated murder in April in his hometown of Hartville, near Canton. The body of his wife, Roberta Snider, age 70, is still missing.
As part of his guilty plea, Snider said he would disclose where he put his wife’s body. Prosecutors have agreed to recommend a sentence of 20 years to life in prison in exchange for that information.
During the course of the situation, Snider’s story kept changing. He arrived home without his wife and told family members that she had died on the trip. He first told his family that when she became ill, he flagged down an ambulance in a Memphis hotel’s parking lot and that the ambulance took her but he didn’t know where they had taken her so he drove home to Ohio.
Surveillance footage of the motel parking lot showed him arriving, but did not show an ambulance. When shown that surveillance video, Snider then said his wife had died between Columbus and Cincinnati and that he went ahead to Graceland and then dumped her body in the Tennessee River.
According to an article in the Akron Beacon-Journal, Snider later told a female undercover he befriended that he had killed his wife at their home, placed her body in their truck and then drove to Memphis, dumping her body somewhere along the way.
Snider pleaded guilty to aggravated murder, tampering with evidence and gross abuse of a corpse.
Judge Frank Forchione told Snider during Monday’s hearing, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for people like you.”