On witness stand, Andre McDonald describes how he killed his wife … – San Antonio Express-News

It was the culmination of an argument the night of Feb. 28, 2019, during which he told her he was going to divorce her, McDonald said. The fight started hours after he learned that she had cut him out of his ownership stake in her $1 million company, he said.

The trial had begun with the revelation that Andre McDonald had admitted days earlier, in a phone call to Andreen McDonald’s mother and sister, that he had killed her.

Now the jury was hearing it in his own words.

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“I said, ‘Get out of my face, you are trying to get me in trouble.’ She spits, she says, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ so I grabbed her head — we had a clash of heads,” McDonald said.

He said Andreen grabbed her face, ran into the bathroom and turned on the light switch. When she realized her face was bleeding, the defendant said, she became angry and went across the room to attack him.

“She’s throwing punches,” Andre McDonald said. “I grabbed her and tripped her. She fell and I kicked her twice, landed a couple of kicks while she was on the floor. When she got the second kick, I heard some wheezing.”

“I just gave her a couple of kicks to knock the wind out of her,” he said.

At that moment, McDonald heard the sound of feet running and realized their daughter, 7, was still awake, and he took her back upstairs to put her to bed, not wanting her to see any family violence, he testified.

While upstairs for about half an hour, McDonald said, he thought his wife would call police and “make up some story,” but when he returned, she was dead.

When defense attorney John A. Convery asked his client what was going through his head at the time, McDonald said, “She’s dead on the floor, we just had a fight, I’m going to get blamed, I have a kid upstairs. It was a scary situation.”

On ExpressNews.com: Andre McDonald was being watched by police from Day One

He admitted he sent Andreen’s phone a text to ask where she was that night, then went to the garage to get trash bags, adding, “I was trying to get her out of the house.”

“When she was attacking me, I was trying to defend myself,” he told the jury. “She’s bigger than me.”

When asked by prosecutor Steven Speir if he tried to call EMS to help his wife, he responded, “There’s no one to help. I never thought of calling anybody to save a dead person.”

Andreen McDonald, 29, was reported missing March 1, 2019, and Bexar County sheriff’s deputies arrested her husband the next day on a charge of tampering with evidence. He was charged with murder that July, when his wife’s remains were found on a ranch on Specht Road in North Bexar County.

Marks on her skull and neck bones were likely made by hammer blows that were hard enough to kill her, though an exact cause of death could not be determined, testimony Friday by a Bexar County medical examiner established.

McDonald testified that he disposed of Andreen’s body the night he killed her. He took her clothes off, put large trash bags over her head, covered her feet and legs and used a belt to tie the two bags around her body, he said.

He dragged her outside, put her into the couple’s Chevrolet Malibu, drove to the ranch and left her near a dead cow, McDonald said. “It was quite a hassle” to get his wife’s body out of the trunk and through the gates of the ranch, he said.

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Speir asked McDonald if he took his daughter to the ranch with him. McDonald said no.

“You left your daughter alone in the house?” the prosecutor asked.

“It was a tough decision. Why would I want to take my daughter to move her dead mother?” McDonald replied.

He said he never stomped on his wife, as Andreen’s mother and sister testified he had told them. They were lying about that, McDonald said — he had kicked her, twice, but had not stomped on her, he said.

The defendant was calm on the witness stand and showed no emotion as he described his anger and frustration. He told the jury that he married Andreen, who was 10 years younger than him, brought her to the United States, paid for her college education and supported her as she got her business started, running assisted living centers.

She was having an affair with an ex-boyfriend in Jamaica, which made him increasingly “angry and enraged.” Then he found out she was dropping him from ownership of the company.

Sheriff’s deputies detained McDonald on March 2 for “13 to 14 hours,” and as soon as he was released, “I was pretty angry” and drove back to the ranch where he had dumped his wife’s body, McDonald said.

“I started hitting the body with the hammer, in the face and neck area,” he said. “I used the claw to hit her neck, it got stuck, and I pulled it out.”

He said he thought, “Why the hell did this have to happen to me?”

Earlier Monday, prosecutors rested their case after presenting evidence that seemed to show McDonald sought online information on what investigators might find out from an examination of his wife’s remains.

Testimony said 393 searches on his cellphone, from May 14 to July 13, 2019, the day he was rearrested, included the terms, “Murder without a weapon,” “Cases without eyewitnesses,” “Determining cause of death from skeletal remains” and “How fire affects DNA.”

One by one, Tony Kobryn, a sheriff’s office investigator, read the searches from McDonald’s Samsung J7 phone.

“Can someone fall and break their neck?,” “Recovering DNA outdoors versus indoors,” “Fingerprints found outside,” “How do bones become fossils?” “How long do bones take to become dry and brittle?” Kobryn continued, reading from the list.

McDonald’s initial arrest on the evidence tampering charge stemmed the attempted destruction of receipts detailing the purchase of an ax, two hatchets, gas cans and contractor’s trash bags.

ezavala@express-news.net