The Franklin man who last month pleaded guilty to the murder of a 22-year-old Blackwater woman nearly two years ago was sentenced Monday afternoon to 32 years in the Missouri Department of Corrections. Emmett S. Wood, Jr. entered guilty pleas on March 28 in Howard County to one count of second-degree murder, a Class A felony, and one count of armed criminal action, an unclassified felony, in the stabbing death of Courtney Eileen Clardy on September 7, 2020.

Wood was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder charge, and seven years for the charge of armed criminal action. The sentences are to run consecutively for a total of 32 years.

Two charges of first-degree assault and one charge of second-degree kidnapping were dropped in exchange for the guilty plea.

Wood, shackled at his wrists and ankles, appeared before the court with his attorney, public defender Robert Fleming. Members of Wood’s family were also present at the sentencing.

Almost two dozen family members and friends of Clardy were in the courtroom when the sentence was pronounced. Her mother, Jennifer White, in a victim-impact statement, said that Clardy’s son, Henry, who was six days shy of his first birthday at the time of the murder, will never know his mother. “This will negatively impact him for the rest of his life in so many ways,” she said.

“My life is completely changed and any actual happiness is gone,” White said.

Christina White, Clardy’s aunt, told the court that Clardy’s life was taken “at the hands of a what words can only describe as a ‘monster’.” She said it was obvious that Wood has no regard for human life.

One man later shouted from the audience, “I just hope he burns in hell.”

Before Presiding Circuit Judge Scott Hayes pronounced the sentence, Fleming, sitting alongside Wood at the defense table, recounted the facts of the case. The facts involved Wood’s prior criminal history in Nebraska which included two counts of false imprisonment and use of a deadly weapon in 2001, and a second-degree assault conviction in 2017.

White alluded to those convictions during her earlier victim-impact statement. “My daughter’s murder finally got a violent re-offender off the streets.”

As was previously reported in the Fayette Advertiser, during a preliminary hearing in February 2021, Mike Neal, who was the Howard County Sheriff at the time of the murder, testified that a call came in shortly after 5 p.m. on September 7, 2020, stating that a woman at 404 Crews Street in Franklin was bleeding profusely. 

The defendant’s father, Sam, had apparently called 911 after witnessing his son stab Clardy with a homemade spear.

According to testimony from Neal, Sam had told a deputy that when he saw the victim on the floor, his son allegedly said, “She’s a cop, let her die.”

Howard County Prosecuting Attorney Deborah Riekhof told the court at the plea hearing in March that Wood committed the crime by stabbing the victim multiple times on various regions of her body. One wound went through the side of her neck, esophagus, and jugular vein. The cause of death was exsanguination, commonly known as severe loss of blood.

At that hearing, Riekhof told the court that the defendant’s father testified that Clardy attempted to leave the residence and the defendant “grabbed her hair and pulled her back in.” She explained that Wood had apparently fabricated a weapon that consisted of the shaft of a golf club with a blade at one end and a counterweight, probably a ball hitch from a vehicle, on the other.

Wood was apprehended in a cemetery in rural south Howard County by the Missouri State Highway Patrol the day following the murder. The weapon was found on a bench in the cemetery.

During Monday’s sentencing, Wood agreed to the facts as laid out by Fleming. Judge Hayes explained that while anguishing for the family to hear, the reading of the facts cuts off any further chances of having a trial in the future with regard to appeals made by Wood.