Ex-wife: Rat-poison cocktail used in murder

BARTOW (FOX 13) - Sharon Ross did not drop just one bombshell in court on Thursday.  She dropped one right after the other.

She is the state's star witness against her ex-husband, Lester Ross. He is accused of killing his 3-year-old daughter MaSarah, then murdering her mother, Ronkeya Holmes, using soda laced with rat poison.

"The cord to the telephone, he took it and wrapped it (around her neck) and pulled it, and told me if I ever tell anybody, he would kill me," she told jurors.

Prosecutors painted a picture of Ross as an emotionally and physically abused wife, terrified to not comply with her husband's demands.

Ross testified that her ex-husband called her one day when she was at the store and told her to get home right away.  When she walked in, he was frantic, and she was shocked.

"He was telling me MaSarah was jumping on the bed and she fell off the bed," she said.  "He said, 'I put her in the tub, I tried to revive her. It was just an accident.'"

Investigators say Lester Ross put the baby's body in a freezer in the garage for months. When Holmes came from out of state to pick the child up, Sharon Ross says her ex-husband told her to buy rat poison and melt the pellets down on the stove.

"There was Coke in the refrigerator," she said.  "He said take some of that and pour it in, and just stir it down."

She says she did, then poured the deadly mixture back into a plastic Coke bottle and left it on the counter.

Later, Ross says he called her into their home office and forced her to help move Holmes' body into a car. He ordered her to drive to an orange grove in Winter Haven, where both bodies were eventually found in a shallow grave.

The state is expected to rest Friday.