Bradenton woman faces up to life in prison for stabbing boyfriend to death
A Bradenton woman faces up to life in prison after being found guilty of stabbing her boyfriend to death.
After deliberating for several hours, a jury late Thursday found Roberta McDonald, 56, guilty of second-degree murder. McDonald will be sentenced on a date to be scheduled later.
Anthony Bernard Wilson, also 56, was found dead inside his home in Treesdale Apartments in East Bradenton on April 12, 2019.
“I appreciate the jury’s hard work in the case,” prosecutor Dickey Hough said on Friday. “It was a complex case. They clearly saw through it and in the end arrived at the right verdict.”
McDonald admitted to detectives that she stabbed Wilson, but claimed she had done so in self-defense because he was beating her. She said she had stabbed him once in the leg and that he was alive when she left his apartment.
Wilson was stabbed from behind five times, prosecutors said.
“These aren’t slashing type wounds. These are penetrating wounds delivered by Ms. McDonald,” Hough told the jury during closing arguments.
The couple had a toxic relationship at best, he summarized. Wilson had long struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine and their relationship was intertwined with drug use and drinking.
The defense presented a timeline to the jury during closing arguments that intertwined most of the various accounts McDonald had given to detectives during videotaped interviews. The couple had been smoking crack cocaine but McDoanld claimed he got mad when they ran out and she wouldn’t get him more. Wilson had also been mad, she claimed, because he couldn’t go back to his wife because he found out he had AIDS.
“Roberta McDonald tussles with Anthony Wilson over this knife. The knife ends up in Ms McDonald’s hand,” public defender Anne Hunter said, after explaining that the knife had been on the nightstand. “She stabbed him in the leg to get him away from him.”
Wilson had been living apart from his wife for the last two years of his life, because of his addiction. His wife, also a recovering addict, detailed how they had spent years smoking crack together on a daily basis in the earlier part of their marriage.
But Wilson had never once physically harmed her, she testfiied on Wednesday.
The murder weapon was never found. But the jury heard recordings of calls made by McDonald from jail in which she told someone where she stashed her purse and the weapon.
Just five months before Wilson was killed, he reported that McDonald threatened to kill him and had stabbed. She had stabbed him a total of four times before and once threw a VCR at him.
But after the Bradenton Police Department charged her with four counts of aggravated domestic battery with a deadly weapon and one count of aggravated domestic battery, the State Attorney’s Office dropped the case.
This story was originally published June 18, 2021 at 1:38 PM.
