The Connie Villa Murder Case

      When Adam and Connie Villa were married in 2005 she had a 5-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. He was a member of the Arizona National Guard. The couple and the child, Aniarael Macias, resided in Casa Grande, a suburban community 50 miles south of Phoenix. In 2006 Adam Villa served a year in Iraq with his National Guard unit. By 2010 the couple had three children of their own.

     Adam and Connie Villa were divorced in 2012. Following the break-up the battle over legal custody of the children began.

     On Christmas day 2013 Adam Villa called 911 to report that his wife had stabbed him in the chest and that he was driving himself to the hospital. Police officers rushed to the Villa residence where they encountered Connie Villa holding a knife to her chest. Officers subdued the distraught 35-year-old woman and called for an ambulance.

     The three younger Villa children, ages three, five and eight, were in the house when the police arrived. The youngsters informed the officers that their mother had forced them to consume what turned out to be a narcotics-based prescription drug.

     In the bathroom officers discovered the body of 13-year-old Aniarael Macias. Because there were no marks on her officers assumed that Connie Villa had poisoned the girl to death with prescription drugs.

     While 33-year-old Adam Villa remained in stable condition at the Casa Grande Regional Medical Center, physicians at the Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix treated Connie Villa for superficial self-inflicted knife wounds. The three children, although there were traces of opiates in their bodies, were fine. The siblings were placed into the custody of relatives.

     On Sunday December 29, 2013, upon her release from the hospital, detectives took Connie Villa into custody. When questioned at the police station she admitted stabbing her husband and poisoning their three children. In the bathroom, after being unable to force Aniarael to ingest the prescription drug, the mother strangled her daughter to death with her hands.

     Detectives asked Connie why she had killed her oldest child, stabbed her husband and tried to poison the little ones to death. She said she was afraid the judge would grant custody of the children to her ex-husband. 

     On January 8, 2014 Pinal County Attorney Lando Voyles charged Connie Villa with premeditated first-degree murder, four counts of attempted murder, kidnapping and four counts of child abuse. The suspect, through her public defender attorney, pleaded not guilty to all charges. She was held in the Pinal County Jail without bond.

     In June 2014 a Pinal County Superior Court judge approved the prosecution's request to seek the death penalty in the case.

    After pleading guilty to first-degree murder in July 2017, Pinal County Judge Jason Holmberg sentenced Connie Villa to life without parole plus 155 years.