Robert Howard (triple jumper)

Robert Howard was an American triple and long jumper, a nine-time NCAA collegiate champion, and murderer.

In choosing a college, Howard elected to follow in the lengthy horizontal jumping tradition at the University of Arkansas, where he would follow in the footsteps of such luminary jumpers as Mike Conley, Sr., Edrick Floreal, Jérôme Romain, Brian Wellman and Erick Walder.

In 1997, he was named Collegiate Athlete of the Year by Track and Field News magazine for winning all four jumps in the two NCAA championship competitions.

[3] On August 14, 2004, shortly after his failure to make the Olympic team and in the opening hours of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Howard violently murdered his wife, Robin Mitchell, the chief neurosurgery resident at UAMS who was named a "soaring medical star" by the Times Herald Record,[4] and later leapt to his death from the 10th story of a medical school dormitory.

Police found Mitchell dead in the couple's bed with dozens of stab wounds to the head and torso.