Aussie mum accused of murdering her American stepdaughter makes bombshell claim about the cause of her death

A woman who faced the possibility of becoming the first Australian to be executed in the United States has blamed her stepdaughter’s death on antipsychotic drugs.

Lisa Marie Cunningham, 51, from Adelaide has spent more than seven years in a US maximum security prison after her seven-year-old stepdaughter Sanaa died in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2017.

She and her co-accused, American husband Germayne, 46, a former robbery-squad detective, have been charged with first-degree felony murder and have spent nearly eight years behind bars.

The charge means the prosecution believes the couple murdered the seven-year-old while committing a felony, in this case child abuse.

After lengthy trial delays, partially attributed to a backlog from Covid, they will go to trial next month. Arizona state prosecutors withdrew the death penalty in February.

The pair have pleaded not guilty to all charges including murder and child abuse.

In an interview for 7News Spotlight which aired on Sunday night, Cunningham said her daughter’s death was caused by the child taking an antipsychotic medication.

‘I think she died because of (the drug),’ she said from Estrella Women’s Jail, near Phoenix.

The child’s behaviour had changed and she was taken to multiple doctors before she was prescribed the drug Risperidone.

‘(It) kills people all the time,’ Cunningham claimed.

‘After about a week of her being on it, we started to research it online. And that’s when I said, this drug’s not even supposed to be given to anybody unless they’re 13.’

An autopsy found Sanaa died from sepsis related to a chest infection, an abscess in her right foot and multiple skin ulcers.

The report also detailed more than 100 cuts or bruises, but ruled the little girl’s death as ‘undetermined’, rather than ‘homicide’.

However, Cunningham angrily denied she harmed her daughter and claimed the injuries were self-inflicted.

‘How dare you, or anybody else, get to shame parents because they have a child that self-harms,’ she said.

Sanaa was diagnosed with an unspecified schizophrenia spectrum disorder.

She was one of Cunningham’s two children from a prior marriage. Germayne also had two children, and the couple had another two kids of their own.

Cunningham recalled the moment Sanaa died in Phoenix Children’s Hospital as doctors attempted to intubate her.

‘When they did that, her heart stopped and they did CPR for about 12 minutes. And then they came over and said, ‘I’m sorry she’s gone’,’ she said. 

The prosecution previously alleged the couple restrained Sanaa by tying her down so she couldn’t expel fluid from her lungs.

As part of the state’s evidence, it pointed to several incriminating texts in which the parents described zip-tying the girl to a water container so their other children could sleep.

However, Cunningham denies she or her husband abused Sanaa. 

‘It’s always been such a mystery to us why it is easier to believe that we tried to slowly kill her with this bizarre, delayed death torture story than it is to simply accept the fact that she entered into the early onset period of serious mental illness,’ she said.

Court papers reveal the defence’s case ‘consists of more than 50,000 documents and several dozen witnesses, many of whom are medical professionals’. 

Cunningham, a former prison guard, has been very vocal, through relatives, on social media about her innocence and struggle with living behind bars.

‘Look, I’ve been fighting to clear my name for more than eight years now,’ she dictated in one post.