A Volusia County woman was sentenced to life in prison Friday after she was convicted of first-degree murder for strangling her neighbor and then dismembering his body and cooking the body parts in order to hide the evidence.
Jurors in DeLand deliberated for more than three hours before convicting Angela Faye Stoldt, 42, of first-degree murder, abuse of a human body and tampering with physical evidence in the killing of her neighbor, 36-year-old James Sheaffer, in April 2013.
Stoldt, a mother of two, sat silently at counsel table and showed no emotion as the verdict was read. She was also sentenced to 15 years in prison on the abuse of a human body charged and five years in prison on the tampering charge. Both of those sentences are consecutive to the life sentence.
Prosecutors presented several days of evidence, including recorded interviews Stoldt gave to investigators detailing how she killed, dismembered and ultimately cooked Sheaffer’s body. Interviews with investigators from the Volusia County Sheriff's Office detailed how Stoldt gave Sheaffer a muscle relaxer, stabbed him in the eye with an ice pick and then strangled him with a wire.
She then drove back to her home and cut the man's body up using a hacksaw the following morning, documents state. She attempted to boil, bake and cook Sheaffer’s body in an attempt to dispose of the remains.
Stoldt then dispersed the man's body throughout Volusia County. Investigators were only able to recover 56 of the victim's 206 bones.
Jurors were not persuaded by Stoldt's claims that Sheaffer had attacked her first and that she only killed him in self-defense. Stoldt took the stand in her own defense, but her statements weren’t consistent with her prior interviews with law enforcement officials.