Teen’s life of abuse detailed to jurors
Michael Snyder
Jurors weighing the death penalty for Angela McAnulty saw a new side
of the admitted murderer Friday as they watched videotapes of her
interviews with detectives after her 15-year-old daughter’s 2009 death
from starvation and abuse.
McAnulty, a small, round-faced woman, has appeared meek and weepy in
court. But on videotape, in the hours after her daughter died, she was
agitated and combative as she lied about who “spanked,” starved and
deprived her daughter of medical care, turning Jeanette Marie Maples
from a seemingly healthy teen to a battered, infected and skeletal
corpse.
At turns apologetic and indignant in the videotape, McAnulty started
out blaming her husband and Jeanette herself for the teen’s hundreds
of injuries. Richard McAnulty also is charged with aggravated murder
in Jeanette’s death, apparently for failing to protect his
stepdaughter.
But on the videotape, Angela McAnulty changed her story over the next
few hours as Lane County Sheriff’s Office detectives Aaron Hoberg and
Kelly Fenley revealed that her husband and their 5-year-old son both
had said she inflicted Jeanette’s injuries.
In forceful, sometimes rapid-fire declarations on the videotape,
McAnulty first denied and then acknowledged hitting her eldest
daughter with a leather belt, with tree branch switches, and with a
wooden yardstick.
“I spanked my daughter,” she told detectives. “I don’t know how many
times. But only on the bottom.”
After more questioning, she admitted that infected sores extending to
the bone of Jeanette’s hips had started when McAnulty broke the skin
with a leather belt.
“I did wrong. It was horrible of me. I am very sorry. I wish I could
take it back,” the 42-year-old mother shouted, but insisted: “I didn’t
do the injury on the head. I know she probably died from that.”
She said an open wound, which the prosecution called “a hole” in the
back of Jeanette’s skull, occurred when the teen fell and struck her
head. “There is no yardstick mark on my kid’s head!” she shouted on
tape. “I swear to God.”
McAnulty also admitted on videotape to turning off the water supply to
the kitchen tap, leaving Jeanette to drink from the dog’s water dish
and even the toilet. She said she didn’t want her daughter “up at
night drinking all kinds of water.”
On the tape she denied starving the teen, though the jury later saw a
videotape of Richard McAnulty telling detectives that his wife
padlocked the family’s pantry to keep Jeanette from “stealing food.”
He said Angela had long singled out Jeanette for mistreatment, feeding
her peanut butter sandwiches while the rest of the family ate
Thanksgiving dinner.
While the family’s two younger children slept in beds, Jeanette slept
on the floor, a piece of cardboard beneath her to keep her bleeding
wounds from soiling the carpet.
Richard McAnulty said on tape that his wife considered it misbehavior
when Jeanette begged her to stop a beating. Besides what he also
called “spankings,” he said on videotape that Angela McAnulty punished
the teen by making her stand hours at a time with her arms raised over
her shoulders — even when she could not put weight on one foot because
her mother had stomped and injured it. She also made the girl kneel
with her hands behind her back, as if handcuffed, he told detectives.
He told detectives he did not seek help for Jeanette because he was
ailing from complications of a heart attack and was afraid of his
wife. Though he’s “a big guy” and she’s “a little guy,” she had hit
him in the past and controlled their home to the point he had to ask
her to use the bathroom because she kept the door locked from the
outside and carried the only key, he told detectives.
An Oregon State Police crime scene analyst led off Friday’s testimony,
telling jurors that she found a bowl containing bloody water and a
sponge in the bedroom where McAnulty reportedly whipped and beat her
daughter.
Despite someone’s apparent attempt to clean up the room, forensic
investigator Traci Rose reported that blood was still all over the
bedroom, spattered “floor to ceiling” on two walls and between tiles
of parquet wood on the floor. The droplets were so dense on the walls
that she could see blank rectangles where something once hung. Later,
Rose said, she found hidden away blood-spattered coloring book pages
and framed pictures that had occupied the spots.
The blood was Jeanette’s, a state police crime lab supervisor
testified later.
Hoberg cited the bowl of bloody water when he pressed McAnulty during
his final interview the morning after Jeanette was pronounced dead.
McAnulty discovered her daughter cold to the touch and impossible to
rouse the morning of Dec. 9, 2009, he said. But instead of calling 911
then, he charged, she set about cleaning up Jeanette’s blood and other
evidence before medics were summoned late that afternoon.
“She died because she didn’t get help,” he said. “That’s your job as
her mother.”