Businessman Killed His 29-year-old Wife and Only Got 10 Years in Prison That Life is Worth More Than That
It will be 10 years before Curtis Holliday, a businessman from Texas, can get out of jail. He killed his wife and put her body in a freezer.
In 2020, Holliday was arrested for beating his 29-year-old wife Chi Le over and over again and told he couldn’t have any contact with her. He killed her while he was out on bond.
Many years later, in June 2024, just before his trial in Harris County District Court began, Holliday, then 62 years old, pleaded guilty to murder in exchange for a 10-year term. (ABC 13 says he has already served two of those years.)
“We’re glad that we were able to get that to happen.” Assistant District Attorney Lindsey Bondurant told PEOPLE in a statement, “He made amends.”
Le met Holliday on WeChat in 2015, and they moved in together and started working for his business. They bought and sold used household items that customers had returned to stores.
Le, a Vietnamese refugee, gave birth to their daughter the next year. In 2019, they got married.
Early in 2020, Holliday was arrested on charges of assaulting a spouse. He reportedly hit his wife, kept her from getting food, locked her in a room against her will, and told her “that if he were to kill her, no one would know, care, or notice.” Court documents describe these abuses.
After four months, Holliday killed his wife. In his guilty plea, he said, “I was angry and jealous that Chi had chosen to leave me for another man.”
Someone found out about Le’s death in April 2020. It was her aunt Simone Le who noticed that she hadn’t talked to her niece in weeks.
The aunt called the police and told them it was strange for Le to miss their regular phone calls. She then asked that an officer come to the couple’s house. When cops arrived, they were shocked to find that the woman there was actually Holliday’s ex-wife, not Le. She was taking care of the couple’s daughter.
After one month, police found what prosecutors called a “large freezer that appeared to be brand new in the middle of a room.” They wrote that the device was big enough to hold a person and looked “out of place.”
An autopsy report says that the police were shocked to find Le’s body wrapped in plastic in the freezer, “frozen with frost on the skin.”
Later, Holliday admitted that he had put his wife in the freezer, but he said she had killed herself.
But the police weren’t sure, in part because Le’s aunt had seen a message on Facebook before her niece died: “If suddenly nobody can find me, or find me dead,” she wrote. “Please check my husband.” He has told me many times that he will kill me.
In July 2020, Holliday was charged with murder after a medical expert said Le’s death was caused by a murder. His lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, was going to say that his client had only gone to the couple’s house—even though the court had told him not to—found his wife’s body, freaked out, and put it in the freezer.
“We thought that a settlement would be better for him than going to court,” says Holliday’s lawyer DeGuerin. “He might be free and back with his daughter in eight years.”
Le had called the police and the courts before she was killed because she knew her life was in danger. People who work with victims of domestic abuse say that her case and Holliday’s short prison sentence are signs of bigger problems in society.
People talk to Amy Smith from the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council. She says, “It shows how few resources and supports there are for the victims.”
Andy Kahan of Crime Stoppers of Houston adds, “This case sends a scary message to victims of domestic violence.” “She deserves a lot more than 10 years of life.”