A woman who was serving a life sentence at a Wyoming prison for killing her husband over 40 years ago has died.

Alice Louise Uden, 80, died Wednesday at a hospital in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. She died from chronic health issues, according to a statement from Wyoming Department of Corrections spokesman Mark Horan.

Laramie County District Judge Steven K. Sharpe sentenced Uden to serve a life prison term in August 2014. Uden was convicted of second-degree murder for fatally shooting her husband in the 1970s and throwing his body down the shaft of an abandoned gold mine. 

During her trial, Uden had argued that she shot her husband in the head in order to protect her young child from him. She called him "a very frightening man."

Uden was born in Denver, Colorado.

She had been incarcerated in a medical unit at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington and was taken to the hospital on Wednesday.

An autopsy has been ordered per DOC policy.

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