An Ohio woman pleaded guilty on Friday to murdering her grandmother by drowning her in the sink and bathtub. As seen on body camera footage, defendant Heidi Michelle Matheny, 35, turned herself in to authorities and admitted drowning Alice J. Matheny, 93, at her home.
“I feel like I put the dog down,” Heidi Matheny told a responding Eaton police officer in the Preble County Sheriff’s Office lobby on Nov. 15.
At the time of the murder, Alice Matheny had been doing the dishes. Heidi Matheny claimed to have approached from behind and forced her head into the kitchen sink before putting her grandmother’s body on the couch. Then, believing Alice Matheny could still be alive, Heidi Matheny filled the bathtub and drowned her there for what she felt was 15 minutes.
“I just put her head in the sink, and held it there,” she said on body camera footage. “We fought, but I held it there until she quit blowing bubbles, and then I drug her to the couch, and she kept blowing bubbles, so I put her in the bathtub until she stopped.”
The responding officer asked what lead to this.
“Nothing special,” defendant Matheny said. “It’s just a day like any other day.”
She said, however, that they took Alice Matheny on Nov. 14 to a doctor, who said they could put the 93-year-old into a nursing home. It was what Alice Matheny wanted.
“But we can’t afford that,” defendant Matheny said, detailing financial problems and conflict within the family. “It’s a f—— nightmare. And I’m sick of seeing her. She’s stressed out. She has panic attacks every damn day. She shouldn’t have to live like that.”
Asked why she killed her grandmother, Heidi Matheny said that Alice Matheny called her every day, asking her to sit and listen with her.
“And I do it every day,” she said, but added that she couldn’t do it anymore.
She suggested she almost died by suicide.
“But I can’t drown myself,” she said.
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