commentary by Patrick H. Moore
It’s truly amazing how people manage to wreck their lives without even trying. And of course there are varying degrees of disaster. The ultimate disaster, however, may be when you box yourself so far into the corner that the only way out is to commit the “perfect murder” only to discover – to your undying dismay – that like most of us you’re not capable of committing the perfect murder…
This is more or less what happened to a 42-year-old Deltona, FLA mom named Angela Stoldt who had gotten herself involved in an unwieldy relationship with her next door neighbor, a 36-year-old man named James Sheaffer.
It seems that Ms. Stoldt and Mr Jimmy shared a bank account. We don’t know why but it is reported that the bank account was gotting overdrawn with disturbing regularity – at least it was disturbing to Ms. Stoldt.
Things reportedly came to a head in April of last year when Mr. Jimmy demanded a $4,000 loan, from Ms. Stoldt’s father of all people. Meg Wagner of the New York Daily News writes:
Prosecutors said the saga started on April 3, 2013, when Stoldt and Sheaffer met at her house to discuss finances.
They shared a bank account ― although police have not said why ― and frequently overdrew funds, she told investigators.
While at the house, she mixed him a cocktail of vodka and prescription muscle relaxers to make him sleepy and confused, she said.
Thus, we see that at this juncture Ms. Stoldt was apparently plenty sick of Mr.Jimmy badgering her about money. Soma (or something similar) and vodka can certainly get you messed up, not that I would know from personal experience. 
Once she had slipped him the mickey, they drove, for unknown reasons, to a nearby cemetery, where things escalated. In his state of disrepair, Mr. Jimmy asked Ms. Stoldt “for a $4,000 loan from Stoldt’s dad”. According to Ms. Stoldt, who I’m not convinced is a particularly reliable witness, Mr. Jimmy then “became aggressive and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cough up the funds.”
At that point, our Floridian mother did a not particularly motherly thing.
“He starts coming at me and … he didn’t even really hit me, but he scared … me and I just snapped,” she said. ” He came at me and I stabbed him.”
She claimed she attacked him out of self-defense. According to the police, “she grabbed an ice pick from her car and dug it into Sheaffer’s eye. Then, she strangled him with a rope.”
I can handle the rope but the ice pick in the eye thing is nasty. In any event, as result of “all this jazz”, Ms. Stoldt found herself in the difficult position of being stuck with a large, dead body. If she had been a funeral director, she could have theoretically popped the corpse in a coffin in some kind of switcheroo scheme like the Chicago funeral director supposedly did recently.
Ms. Stoldt is not a funeral director, however, so she had to resort to more pedestrian measures.
She apparently managed to drag what was left of Mr. Jimmy back to her house. How she did this has not been explained, unless he was already in her car. Then she went to work in the following fashion, according to the police:
Step One: Dismemberment
Step Two was very odd. According to Ms. Stoldt, she “separated the limbs into two kiddie pools in her garage.” (Or as the song that they play constantly in L.A. says, “You gotta keep ‘em separated”.)
Step Three: Fire up that oven. Ms. Stoldt popped a leg in the oven and put the other limbs into pots on the stove.
Problem Child: Ms. Stoldt’s “daughter complained of the smell of burning skin,” but our murderess assured her it was nothing.
Not As Easy As It Looks: Despite all her efforts, Ms. Stoldt realized that the cooked body parts still looked like body parts. Oh, drat!
That’s when she put the pieces in trash bags and trashed them in a dumpster. She even got her son to help by telling him she needed to get rid of a deer’s corpse.
She spent the next few days destroying more evidence: she buried his cellphone and threw out the pots and pans she used in her kooky cooking plot.
Three weeks after the killing, she confessed her crimes to her family ― and her sister turned her in, police said.
Ms. Stoldt, who seems to have a knack for turning a pithy phrase, also stated:
“Thursday is when I was cooking him. Friday is when I was dumping him.”
Although Ms. Stoldt certainly appears to be accepting responsibility for her crime, she did point out that the reason she killed Mr. Jimmy was “because he ruined her life.”
“I’m sorry, but I put Jimmie where he belonged, in my opinion at the time.”
Based on her confession before the grand jury, Ms. Stoldt’s charges have been upgraded to first-degree-murder. Prosecutors have stated that they will not be seeking the death penalty.
Since she will most likely end up serving LWOP, Ms. Stoldt will have plenty of time to ponder just where she went wrong and how truly difficult it is to commit the perfect murder, even with the best of intentions.