Bradenton woman described killing her boyfriend in phone calls from jail. There are tapes
Roberta McDonald was crying when she made calls from the Manatee County jail where she was being held on charges that she stabbed her boyfriend to death in April 2019.
“The only thing I did was hit him in his leg,” McDonald said. “He was alive when I left.”
She denied news accounts in which the Bradenton Police Department claimed there was trauma to her Anthony Benard Wilson’s upper body. She had stabbed Wilson in an artery so he bled out, she explained
McDonald, 55, is on trial for second-degree murder. She has never denied stabbing Wilson, but McDonald claims she did so in self-defense because Wilson was beating her.
But McDonald offered several explanations as to why she stabbed Wilson in self-defense during a recorded interview with detectives. Among the accounts she provided detectives, McDonald claimed they were smoking crack cocaine together and Wilson got mad when they ran out of crack so he beat her and she stabbed him in self-defense. Jurors watched that interview on Tuesday, during the first day of testimony in the trial.
Just five months before Wilson’s death, McDonald had been charged with stabbing Wilson on multiple occasions and throwing a VCR at him. The State Attorney’s Office, however, chose not to prosecute the case.
On Wednesday morning, jurors listened to recordings of telephone calls in which McDonald also described where she had hidden her purse and the weapon.
Investigators searched the area described on the recorded jail call, but the knife believed to been used to kill Wilson was never found, Bradenton police Detective Andres Perez testified Wednesday afternoon.
Perez also questioned Wilson’s wife after his death, the detective said But Perez never questioned whether she had a key to her husband’s apartment. Perez also signed documentation for Wilson’s life insurance company that stated she was not a suspect.
Wilson’s wife of 27 years also took the stand on Wednesday and explained how they had met on the streets because of her decade-long addiction to crack cocaine at the time.
The couple were each in and out of jail or prison as they both struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine, smoking together daily for several years at one point in their marriage.
But the victim’s wife told prosecutor Dickey Hough that Wilson never punched, slapped or did anything ever to physically harm her, even when they were smoking crack cocaine.
The couple had been separated and living apart the last two years of Wilson’s life, she explained. But she was in regular contact with Wilson and was trying to help him get help for his addiction.
Five days before Wilson was found dead, the couple spoke when she found out that the electricity to his apartment had been cut off and she offered to help him.
“That was the last time I heard from him,” she said.
This story was originally published June 16, 2021 at 3:46 PM.
