A San Antonio, Texas, woman's lengthy capital murder trial, which included significant questions about the defendant's competency to stand trial along the way, ended with a 20-year prison sentence.
Ruth Ann Comer was sentenced by Judge Jennifer Pena last week, on April 6, in a Bexar County courtroom. The sentence was handed down more than a decade after Comer's 68-year-old boyfriend, Jerry Augustus Collins, was brutally killed in an unsolved 2012 trailer-home murder that prosecutors believed was connected to an ensuing 2013 murder-for-hire plot.
'I Want Kristina Gone, And if You Have to, Kill Jacob'
Ruth Ann Comer solicited a carnival worker in 2013 to kill her son Jacob Thomas, and his wife, Kristina Moore. "I want Kristina gone, and if you have to, kill Jacob," Comer told carnival worker Charles Grube.
However, Grube tipped authorities off to the murder-for-hire plot and agreed to record his interactions with the defendant. She also provided him with a handgun. After being arrested in 2013, her charges were dropped in 2014. The case was reopened in 2017 and she was indicted in 2018. On Dec. 9, 2022, Comer was found guilty of solicitation of capital murder by a jury.
Comer Stood to Gain Half a Million from Collins' Death
Comer, before her 2013 arrest, had previously been a person of interest in Collins' murder. He was found dead in his Texas home with his throat slit in January 2012. Comer was the person who claimed to find him that way.
The prosecution's theory of the case against Comer is that she was trying to tie up loose ends after Collins' death, which occurred not long after Comer was written into his will and stood to gain half a million dollars upon the hardware store owner's death, News4SA reported in 2018.
Authorities have long believed that Comer targeted Moore in the murder-for-hire plot several months later for a particular reason: to cover up her own involvement in orchestrating Collins' murder.
As part of the investigation into Comer's involvement in Collins' murder, the daughter-in-law, Moore, allegedly told a witness that Comer paid her $10,000 to find someone to kill Collins. To date, no one has been charged with murdering Jerry Collins.
