Appeals court upholds New Castle woman's 65-year murder sentence for killing her mother

NEW CASTLE, Ind. — The Indiana Court of Appeals has upheld the 65-year sentence a New Castle woman received for killing her mother.

Bonnie Katherine Joslin, 37, pleaded guilty to murder last year, and was later sentenced by Madison Circuit Court Judge Angela Warner Sims.

The 65-year prison term is the maximum penalty — short of execution or a life sentence — for a murder conviction in Indiana.

Joslin's mother, 53-year-old Mona Joslin Davis, had been dead for two weeks when police found her body, wrapped in plastic bags, in her north Anderson apartment in June 2019.

Joslin — arrested in New Castle a day after her mother's body was discovered — had told Madison County emergency dispatchers, among others, that her mother had moved to Florida. She posed as her mother in the call to dispatchers.

She also was accused of stealing a pickup truck her mother had borrowed from a friend, and pleaded guilty to additional counts of auto theft, false informing and identity deception.

More Muncie crime news: Muncie man accused of trying to abduct mother, child

After her arrest, the New Castle woman told a fellow inmate in the Madison County jail that she had used a pillow to suffocate her mother during an argument.

The appeals court first upheld Joslin's murder conviction and 65-year sentence in April. 

The three-member panel agreed to reconsider the case after Joslin contended they had failed to consider her argument that her sentence "was disproportionate to the nature of her offense."

In an opinion issued Tuesday, the judges again upheld the 65-year sentence, calling Joslin's crime "particularly heinous."

In the ruling, Judge Melissa May noted Joslin had "strangled her mother and left her body to rot in the June heat."

Joslin — incarcerated at the Rockville Correctional Facility — has a projected release date in April 2068, when she would be 82.

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Douglas Walker is a news reporter at The Star Press. Contact him at 765-213-5851 or at dwalker@muncie.gannett.com.