Madison McDonald on trial for murdering her daughters Lillian Mae McDonald, 1, and Archer Hammond, 6. (Screenshot: KTVT)
Jurors convicted a Texas woman of murdering her two daughters after her defense tried to argue she was insane at the time she committed the brutal slayings.
Police said that Madison McDonald, then 30, smothered her daughters Lillian Mae McDonald, 1, and Archer Hammond, 6, to death, then went to the lobby of the Irving Police Department and used the phone there to call 911. Authorities also reportedly determined she gave the children a cocktail of sedatives.
It reportedly took less than an hour for jurors to reach a unanimous guilty verdict on two counts of capital murder.
“Disbelief, I don’t know,” Timothy Hammond, who was Archer’s father, testified about finding out she died. “It didn’t seem real.”
Testimony at trial reportedly showed that Madison McDonald harbored an irrational belief that some people were attempting to take the children and sell them into sex trafficking. The question before jurors was whether she understood at the time that what she did was wrong. Her mother, Julie Kidd, testified about the defendant being diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
“I had had multiple conversations with my daughter that morning which were very manic in nature, statements words, accusations, very negative, very hateful,” Kidd said.
“I knew she was bipolar from the get-go,” Hammond testified about meeting Madison McDonald.
The defense also brought up her paranoid delusions.
McDonald’s condition was so bad she rejected the diagnoses, Kidd said.
“In those last several months, she frequently believed that she did not have a diagnosis, that we had concocted all of this,” she said of the schizophrenia and bipolar diagnoses.
She made unsubstantiated claims against others, her mother said.
“Theft, physical sexual abuse of her children, people following her when she left the apartment, wire transfers out of a Morgan Stanley account, a Mac computer using digital wallets,” she testified.
McDonald’s numerous encounters with Texas Child Protective Services and Irving police were also detailed during trial testimony. There was also a several-week involuntary commitment because it was believed at the time that she was a danger to herself and her children.
Forensic psychologist Lisa Clayton, an expert for the defense, testified about McDonald experiencing paranoid delusions of the girls being sexually molested and being put in child porn. She said the defendant did not get adequate treatment for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“She had told them that she was having intrusive thoughts telling her that she should drown her daughter,” Clayton said.
The defense pressed forensic psychologist Kristi Compton, a prosecution expert, on her initial belief that McDonald was going to be found insane.
“When you left that day, you were 95 percent convinced yourself that she would meet the legal criteria for not guilty by reason of insanity,” an attorney said, according to KDFW.
“I was,” Compton said. She maintained, however, that she ultimately determined McDonald was not insane under the definition. She reportedly cited 13 examples of the defendant admitting wrongdoing. Compton noted that McDonald turned herself in, indicating an awareness of wrongdoing.
“In my opinion, she was mentally ill, and I believe that the mental illness undergirded the offense. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she reportedly said, but maintained the defendant did not meet the criteria of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Following the jury’s decision to convict, McDonald was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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