Accused Aussie child killer Lisa Cunningham ‘treated stepdaughters differently’
AUSSIE mum Lisa Cunningham stands accused of the horrific murder of her seven-year-old stepdaughter. Now, a source has lifted the lid on what allegedly went on behind closed doors.
ACCUSED child killer Lisa Cunningham disciplined her stepdaughters more strictly than her own children, according to people who knew her in Phoenix.
The former Adelaide woman and prison guard will be the first Australian woman to face death row in America if she is found guilty of murdering her young stepdaughter Sanaa.
She and her husband Germayne are set to face trial in 2020 for the first-degree murder of the seven-year-old, who died in February last year after allegedly suffering horrific abuse including being restrained with cable ties and confined in a weighted straitjacket.
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They both deny they harmed Sanaa, who they say suffered from an array of serious mental health conditions. They are fighting the charges and say they were trying to protect the little girl and their other children from her actions. Cunningham’s daughter Cierra, 20, has reportedly said that “everything they were doing, they were trying to help her”.
A source close to the family told News Corp Australia that Sanaa and her older sister, who cannot be identified, were “treated different” to Cunningham’s own four children.
The blended Cunningham family included Lisa’s daughter Cierra, 20, and 16-year-old son, as well as Germayne’s daughters Sanaa and her older sister. Lisa and Germayne produced two children after getting together around 2011.
They are both now in custody after a judge revoked their bail last month and agreed to a “death note”, should they be found guilty.
Lisa’s 16-year-old son is now in the care of his father, her first husband Russ Anderson, a former US Air Force member whom she met in Australia and wed in the 1990s. Mother and son are now not in contact, according to the family source.
“He doesn’t want to talk to her,” the source said.
Sanaa’s older sister has been returned to her birth mother, Sylvia Norwood, who had lost custody to both girls Germayne in a messy divorce in 2010.
The two birth children of Lisa and Germayne are now in foster care. None of the children except Cierra and Sanaa can be identified for legal reasons.
“It was a blended family and Germayne’s kids were treated differently to Lisa’s kids ... a lot stricter compared to Lisa’s kids and they were just obviously treated differently,” said the source.
“The kids would tell me that she would treat them differently, that Germayne’s kids would get a spanking where the other kids never got a spanking.”
The source did not wish to be named in order to protect their relationship with Lisa and her children.
“If you asked me this 15 years ago, the Lisa that I knew, I would have said there was no way that Lisa would have done this,” they said of the alleged neglect.
The family source said Lisa’s personality had undergone a big change once she started working as a prison guard in 2003 and that she had become “tougher”.
“She changed when she met Germayne, she changed when she started working at the prison,” the source said.
“Before the prison Lisa was a very typical Australian, a very easygoing person, not really stressed, not very aggressive at all.
“But once she started working there, and I know you have to take on a personality when you work somewhere like that, but it was very dramatic from the time before to the time after she went through the academy and started working there. Her whole personality changed.”