[chris]

Andrew David Willson pleaded guilty but mentally ill to second-degree murder and felony firearm in the shooting death of his mother in Ingham County, Michigan, and was sentenced on November 7, 2018, to a minimum of 17 years in prison.

Willson, 19, lived with his mother, Lisa Marie Willson, 51, in Wheatfield Township, a rural township east of Lansing served by a Williamston mailing address. His father lived in Dansville, to the south. Willson had no prior criminal record. A few weeks before his mother's death, he found a puppy and wanted to keep it at the house.

On the evening of Thursday, September 7, 2017, Lisa Willson told her son that the puppy could not stay and would be going to his father's home in Dansville. Late that night, Willson took a .22 Magnum rifle from a locked cabinet, entered his mother's bedroom and shot her once in the back of the head as she slept. He drove around and disposed of the rifle near the house. Her death is dated September 8, 2017, in police and court records.

Willson called police just before 7 a.m. on September 8 and said he had come home to find his mother dead. Ingham County Sheriff's Office deputies found her in a bedroom. Investigators found no indication that anyone else had been in or had access to the house that night and concluded that mother and son had been the only two people there. Sheriff's detective Charles Buckland later testified that Lisa Willson had told her son hours before her death that the puppy would have to go to his father's home.

During his police interview that day, Willson first repeated his phone account that he had been out and returned to find his mother dead. He then admitted taking the rifle from the locked cabinet and shooting her as she slept, and told investigators where he had left the weapon. The interview's start time was not given, and the detectives in the room were not named.

Willson was arrested on September 8, 2017, and arraigned in 55th District Court in Mason on one count of open murder and one count of felony firearm. He was held without bond and ordered to undergo a forensic mental examination. On January 4, 2018, Judge Donald Allen ruled him competent to stand trial.

On October 3, 2018, in Ingham County Circuit Court, Willson entered his guilty but mentally ill pleas. The first-degree murder charge was dismissed as part of the agreement. Under Michigan law, a guilty but mentally ill plea is a conviction with the same sentence exposure as a straight guilty plea, not an insanity acquittal. His lawyer, Stephen Milks, told the court that high doses of chemotherapy years earlier may have affected Willson's judgment. Milks also said Willson was in a major depressive episode at the time and had been hearing voices telling him to kill her. Those were defense assertions, not findings of the court. Willson was 20 at sentencing. No appeal or later change to the sentence has been reported.

The video is a police interview-room recording that runs about 71 minutes. It contains the interview itself and opens with a short narrated introduction naming the people involved.

[chris]

Part 2 of 2 of the recording described above.