He ordered revenge killing of wife’s Lodi doctor. At 83, he’ll spend final years in prison
An 83-year-old Lodi man who ordered the revenge killing of his wife’s doctor — whom he blamed for her death — will spend the rest of his life in state prison.
Robert Elmo Lee was sentenced Monday in San Joaquin County Superior Court to life without the possibility of parole in the 2018 murder-for-hire of Lodi podiatrist Thomas Shock, 67.
Judge Lauren P. Thomasson handed down the life term. Prosecutors on Monday labeled the case as one of a husband’s devotion turning horribly wrong.
“Mr. Lee twisted a devotion for his late wife into a perverse obsession with Dr. Shock, one that led to inexcusable violence,” San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas said in a statement announcing Lee’s sentencing.
Lee’s wife, Bonnie, visited Shock for an ingrown toenail, but alleged substandard care led to her foot being partially amputated in 2014. Bonnie Lee died of an infection two years later, in 2016.
Shock was investigated and disciplined by the Medical Board of California before Bonnie Lee died, but it was not known whether Shock’s care contributed to the woman’s death, the Stockton Record reported.
Lee was convicted in March 2022 of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of murder for financial gain in Shock’s August 2018 killing at the doctor’s Lodi home. Lee hired three men to kill the doctor. Lodi police on Aug. 1, 2018, found the doctor dead of multiple gunshot wounds just inside his Rivergate Drive home.
A page of the medical complaint Lee’s wife filed was found near the doctor’s body, the Stockton Record reported at the time.
The three men Lee paid to execute Shock are all serving prison sentences in the kill-for-pay plot, San Joaquin County prosecutors said
Mallory Stewart pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree, as well as a weapons enhancement, for firing the fatal shots. Christopher Costello was found guilty for taking part in the scheme and getaway driver Raymond Jacquett IV, 29, also was sentenced for his role.
