Hitchcock shot Wendell Hilhouse, 42, of Branson on Aug. 16. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Department got a call from a woman who said she had just witnessed her ex-husband kill her boyfriend.

The department said officers were told the body was in the woods near a monastery. They went there and found the body. It had two bullet holes and looked as if it had been beaten with a blunt instrument.

The woman told officers that Hitchcock, her ex-husband, had asked her and Hilhouse to help him move some vehicles. She said it was somewhere along County Road 335 that Hitchcock stopped his vehicle and put up the hood.

The woman and Hilhouse thought Hitchcock had car problems and stopped to help. She says Hitchcock opened the driver's side door of his vehicle and pulled out a long gun and shot Hilhouse twice and then dragged him into the woods, beating him with a baseball bat.

The circumstances of the assault led Douglas County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Wade to charge first-degree murder, which state law defines as “knowingly causes the death of another person after deliberation upon the matter.” The jury decided on second-degree murder, which state law defines as “Knowingly causes the death of another person or, with the purpose of causing serious physical injury to another person, causes the death of another person.”

Hitchcock’s trial started Tuesday. The jury convicted him after five hours of deliberation on Friday.

The judge scheduled sentencing for September. The penalty for second-degree murder is a 10- to 30-year prison sentence; the penalty for armed criminal action is a prison sentence of at least three years. If he'd been convicted of first-degree murder, his sentence would have been life in prison with no chance of parole.