Insanity plea filed for man charged in May 2023 murder of his homeless wife in Hagerstown
A Washington County Circuit Court judge ordered another mental health evaluation for Anthony Lee Donnelly on Tuesday after Donnelly's attorney entered an insanity plea regarding allegations Donnelly killed his wife a year ago.
Rachela Virginia Disandro, 37, of Hagerstown, was found dead early on May 26, 2023, inside a stone alcove beneath the porch of the Hager House, an 18th-century structure built by the city's founder that is in Hagerstown City Park.
Donnelly, 41, who like his wife was homeless, was indicted last September on charges including first-degree murder in Disandro's death.
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During a short hearing Tuesday morning, Judge Brett R. Wilson accepted a competency evaluation from the Maryland Department of Health and found Donnelly competent to stand trial for Disandro's murder.
Assistant Public Defender Robert Kline entered pleas last week on Donnelly's behalf of not guilty and not criminally responsible, the latter of which is an insanity plea.
The insanity plea is about Donnelly's mental state at the time of the alleged criminal acts and whether he had a mental disorder and "lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality and/or conform his conduct to the requirements of law," according to Kline's plea filing.
Wilson said he would sign an order Tuesday to have Donnelly evaluated for criminal responsibility.
Donnelly was already being held at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital for the previous evaluation to determine whether he was competent to stand trial, meaning whether he could assist in his defense. Perkins is the state's maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital in Howard County, Md.
Assistant State's Attorney Beverly Plutnick said in court last September that the medical examiner's report, which the prosecutors' office received the prior week, stated Disandro had at least 44 stab wounds.
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Donnelly was on probation for Charles County murder
At the time of Disandro's murder, Donnelly had been out on parole or probation for a different murder years ago, The Herald-Mail previously reported.
According to a July 28, 2002, Washington Post story about his plea hearing, Donnelly admitted to luring Jerome A. Brown, 44, from a shopping center parking lot shortly after midnight that June 29 to a dark area, where Robert M. Hall of Lusby, Md., hit Brown on the head with a baseball bat. Donnelly then robbed Brown of several hundred dollars he had from his pay as a sheet metal worker. Brown died a few days later.
Donnelly was sentenced to life in prison, with all but 30 years suspended from that earlier murder in Charles County, Md., Plutnick has said. Donnelly was paroled on Oct. 7, 2022. He was on five years probation for the 2001 murder when his wife was killed.
In July 2002, Donnelly pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for an incident in Charles County, Md., around June 29, 2001, according to his online court docket.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Insanity plea filed in case of murdered woman found in Hagerstown park
