A Newton County woman found guilty of murdering her own mother, among other charges, was sentenced Thursday to life in prison with the possibility of parole, officials said.
Carly Suzanne Walden, 37, of Covington, was found guilty by a jury last week on all charges related to her mother’s killing, Alcovy Judicial Circuit District Attorney Randy McGinley said. Walden was convicted of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, possession of methamphetamine and possession of amphetamines, McGinley said.
The incident took place on April 28, 2019, according to jail records. Walden called 911 around 7 a.m. to report that her mother, Andrea Walker, had been shot at the home where they both lived, the Newton sheriff’s office said. Deputies met Walden outside and searched the home, where they found Walker lying on the bed in a back bedroom, dead from a gunshot wound.
Walden was taken into custody and later charged with murder. At the time, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said investigators had not identified a motive.
The morning Walden called 911, she was taken by deputies to the sheriff’s office and made statements to investigators before she was read her Miranda rights, according to publicly available court documents. In the course of the trial, Walden’s lawyers filed a motion to suppress those statements. The trial court suppressed some of the statements Walden made to investigators before her rights were read, but not all of them.
Prosecutors in McGinley’s office appealed the suppression of those statements to the Georgia Supreme Court, which overturned the trial court’s decision, court documents show. The Supreme Court agreed with the prosecutors’ argument that Walden had not yet been taken into custody when she was talking with the deputies. Their decision was based on video recorded by deputies as Walden was taken to the sheriff’s office after calling 911, court documents show.
According to those documents, Walden was “highly agitated” when she first spoke with the responding deputies. She claimed that multiple men she had brought home from a party the night before tried to rape both her and her mother.
The deputy questioning her asked for details about the men, their car and how they escaped, but “his interest on that point faded somewhat when she mentioned that female companions of the men had danced on top of the ceiling fan,” the Supreme Court decision said.
Once at the sheriff’s office, Walden admitted to an investigator that she shot her mother but claimed it was an accident, according to the court documents. At that point, the investigator stopped the interview and left the room. When the investigator returned more than three hours later, he asked Walden a few more questions “apparently designed to evaluate Walden’s lucidity,” the Supreme Court said, then read the suspect her Miranda rights. At that point, she demanded an attorney and stopped answering questions.
Walden’s sentence includes life in prison with the possibility of parole plus 16 additional years in prison to be served consecutively, McGinley said. Georgia law requires those sentenced to life in prison for a murder conviction to serve at least 30 years before they become eligible for parole, the DA added.
— Staff writer Chelsea Prince contributed to this article.
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