By admin 
GRANT COUNTY, N.M. (Gray News) – A mother admitted to kidnapping her 11-month-old son and killing him because she didn’t want his father to have custody of him.
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Madeline Veronique Daly, 36, was convicted of killing baby Basil inside an RV in rural New Mexico, prosecutors said.
She pleaded guilty on Wednesday to first-degree murder.
In December 2025, Daly took Basil from Wyoming to New Mexico against a court order that had granted his father emergency custody.
Grant County sheriff’s deputies responded to a rural property along a highway in New Mexico after learning Daly had kidnapping charges against her in Wyoming.
Officers located her at a bunkhouse and saw her run to a nearby RV.
Then they heard a single gunshot and rushed in to see that Daly had fatally shot Basil in the face.
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Daly told police that she kidnapped her own son because “she was not going to allow her son to go back and forth from Nebraska to Wyoming twice a month,” Cowboy State Daily reported.
After her arrest, Daly told police she believed she was keeping her son “safe” and that killing the child was “worth it” if it meant the boy’s father and parental relatives would never have the chance to see him.
“When asked what went through her mind when she saw law enforcement walking up, she replied, ‘Jake can’t get Basil.”
She also made claims that Basil “would have been in danger and molested” if she got out of the trailer with him and that his father “never wanted anything to do with” the boy “financially, physically, emotionally ever.”
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She is facing the maximum sentence of life in prison.