A 56-year-old New Boston man will spend the rest of his life behind bars after a Bowie County jury sentenced him to 800 years in prison for sexually assaulting multiple children, including his own daughters, over a span of decades. Horace Colbert was convicted on 40 counts of sexual assault of a child, and the judge handed down the maximum 20-year sentence for each count, ordering all 40 to run one after another rather than at the same time.
According to KTBS, prosecutors said the abuse involved several victims and spanned multiple decades before it finally came to light in court. The trial itself detailed years of abuse, but the case's path to a courtroom was anything but straightforward. As reported by Texarkana Today, one of the victims recorded a cell phone video of Colbert assaulting her at his home in 2017 — but after Colbert discovered the recording and assaulted her again, family members intervened and flew the young victims out of state, to Indianapolis and the U.S. Virgin Islands, specifically to prevent Texarkana police from conducting forensic interviews.
A Cold Case Reopened Nearly a Decade Later
That family interference stalled the investigation for years. The case did not move forward again until 2024, when Bowie County investigator Cliff Harris reopened it as a cold case and tracked down both victims, who by then were adults, per the same account. Prosecutors reportedly attempted to negotiate a plea agreement that would have spared the victims the trauma of testifying at trial, but Colbert rejected the offer and chose to go to trial instead.
Evidence presented to the jury reportedly included allegations that Colbert sent sexually explicit text messages to one of his daughters while she was in ninth grade, and that his history of sexual misconduct dated back to an incident when he was 13 years old, involving a 5-year-old child, the outlet reports. The state filed notices of extraneous offenses to establish what prosecutors framed as a pattern spanning multiple decades. Colbert was represented at trial by attorneys from the Bowie County Public Defender's Office, the same report notes.
How Forty 20-Year Terms Become an 800-Year Sentence
The math behind the sentence comes down to a specific provision of state law. Under Texas Penal Code Section 3.03(b)(2)(A), trial judges have explicit statutory authority to order prison sentences for child sexual abuse convictions arising from the same criminal episode to run consecutively rather than concurrently, according to the Texas Courts Fourteenth Court of Appeals. Texas law otherwise defaults to concurrent sentences for crimes committed in the same episode, except for specific carve-outs like child sexual abuse.
That statutory stacking power is precisely why an 800-year total functions as a life sentence with no realistic path to release. Under Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles directives, inmates serving stacked felony sentences must be evaluated for parole separately and sequentially for each count, meaning an inmate has to satisfy parole requirements on one sentence before he can even begin serving, let alone seeking parole on the next. With 40 separate 20-year counts stacked in sequence, Colbert would need to work through each one individually before any possibility of release could even be considered.
Texas appellate courts have consistently upheld multi-century stacked sentences for repeat child sex offenders under Section 3.03, holding that trial courts have broad discretion to stack sentences to keep severe offenders incarcerated for life, and have rejected cruel-and-unusual-punishment challenges to similar stacked terms in child abuse cases.
The Judge and Prosecutors Behind the Case
The sentence was ordered by 202nd Judicial District Court Judge John Tidwell, who has served on the Bowie County district bench since winning election in November 2016, following an earlier career as a Texarkana high school agriculture teacher and attorney, according to Ballotpedia. Lead prosecutor Kelley Crisp, who serves as Chief Felony Prosecutor in the 202nd District Court and is the Republican DA-elect for Bowie County, tried the case alongside Assistant District Attorney Bradley Akins. Crisp joined the district attorney's office in 2010 and became the county's first female First Assistant District Attorney in 2019, per her campaign's website.
Child abuse investigations and victim advocacy in Bowie County are supported by the Texarkana Children's Advocacy Center, a multi-disciplinary partnership that coordinates local law enforcement, prosecution, and social service agencies to assist victims through forensic interviews and support services. The center works directly with the Bowie County District Attorney's Office and area police departments on cases like this one, underscoring the kind of institutional infrastructure that ultimately helped bring Colbert's case back from a stalled cold case to a courtroom conviction.
