Blood Money: It was a seemingly uncrackable case, with no trace evidence and a solid alibi for the prime suspect. Dogged police work would unlock the puzzle.
Unfriended: A social media spat turns ugly and escalates into threats and accusations. Soon it will spill over into the real world. With deadly consequences.
Trust No One: When Toni met Harold through a Christian dating site she thought she had found her ideal man. But when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Grosse Pointe Bob: Why give up half your fortune in a divorce when $20,000 to a mentally challenged hitman frees you of all marital obligations?
Motive and Opportunity: When a custody battle turns bitter, an estranged husband recruits his mother and father to help him carry out a truly horrendous crime.
Million Dollar Murder: A billionaire Swiss banker with plenty of enemies is found shot to death, wearing a latex S & M outfit. Who killed him and why?
Bad Intentions: A young woman vanishes from a suburban street in broad daylight. What happened to her is the stuff of nightmares.
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume 26
Kill or Be Killed
On the evening of January 18, 2003, an attorney named Neal
Davis walked into the District Attorney’s office in Houston, Texas, and handed
over his business card. “There’s an address written on the back,” he said.
“You’ll find a body buried there. I can’t say any more at this time.”
Tip-offs are, of course, an important tool for law
enforcement. But, as any investigator will tell you, they probably field a
hundred false leads for every one that turns out to be true. This one, coming
from an attorney with one of Houston’s most respected law firms, was
immediately taken seriously. Officers from Harris County Precinct 4 were
dispatched to check it out. They arrived after dark at a modest family home to
the north the city. There they soon discovered that this was no hoax. An area
of earth near the patio had recently been disturbed. Digging there, officers
quickly uncovered the corpse of a large man, buried just a couple of feet below
the surface. It was obvious how he’d died. The body had been perforated by multiple
knife wounds.
With the area cordoned off, officers got down to working the
scene and soon discovered a mattress, box spring, and comforter hidden in the
yard, all of them liberally soaked with blood. Inside the house, there was
evidence of an attempted cover-up. A wall had been recently painted and a
section of carpet had been cut out. Scissors, a box-cutter, and painting supplies
were stacked in a corner, along with a two-gallon vat of bleach. In the
bathroom, officers found a towel and a pair of women’s jeans soaking in a
bleach solution that was tinged brown with blood.
The body, meanwhile, had been removed to the morgue. The
police knew by now that he was Jeff Wright, a married father-of-two who lived
with his family at the address where he’d been found. Wright had not died
easily. The medical examiner would count a total of 193 knife wounds inflicted
on his face, neck, chest, abdomen, arms, legs, and penis. Two knives had been
used, and the blade of one of those had broken off in the victim’s skull. There
was also evidence that Wright had been restrained at the time he was killed.
The corpse had been found with ligatures (two neckties and a bathrobe sash)
around the wrists and the right ankle. Death was estimated to have occurred on
January 13, 2003, five days before the body was found. As to who had killed
Jeff Wright, there was only one suspect – his wife Susan. She was currently in
a psychiatric ward, having been placed there by her attorney.
Jeffrey and Susan had met on a blind date back in 1997 and
had been instantly attracted to one another. Jeff was a handsome and outgoing
man, who stood 6-foot-3 and had a way with the ladies. Susan was a pretty and
petite blonde who was working at the time as a waitress and supplementing her
income by performing as a topless dancer. It would be safe to say that she was
swept off her feet by the charming, good-looking man who inundated her with
phone calls, flowers, and gifts. Before long, Susan was pregnant and, in 1998,
she accepted Jeff’s proposal. Their son, Bradley, was born just a month after
the nuptials. A second child, Kaily, would be born three years later. By then,
Susan had long abandoned her dancing career and was a stay-at-home mom. Jeff,
meanwhile, worked as a sales representative for a carpeting company.
On the surface, the Wrights seemed to have a happy marriage.
Jeff appeared to be a loving husband and a devoted father. But all was not as
it seemed. According to Susan’s later testimony, her husband was an extremely
controlling man. Susan was required to keep him informed of her whereabouts at
all times and was only allowed to leave the house with his permission and for
short periods. Any deviation from this and Jeff would fly into a rage and
accuse her of cheating on him. He also expected the home to be perfect at all
times and would become angry and abusive if Susan’s housework did not match up
to his exacting standards. She’d be verbally abused, physically battered and
subjected to spousal rape on a regular basis.
Jeff was also a drug user and a philanderer. His drug of
choice was cocaine, and it often drove him to manic fits of rage. As for his
sleeping around, Susan might have looked the other way if Jeff had not infected
her with an STD and if his many lovers had not called the house at all hours of
the night and day.
And yet, despite the mistreatment, despite the affairs and
the drug taking, Susan stayed in the marriage. Her primary concern was for her
children. She would endure anything on their behalf. She would not, however,
stand by to see them endure the kind of abuse that she suffered.
On the evening of January 13, 2003, Jeff Wright arrived home
from a boxing lesson. Susan could see immediately that he was under the
influence of drugs, but for once the cocaine had not affected his mood. He
seemed decidedly upbeat as he started playing with Bradley, teaching the
four-year-old some boxing moves and encouraging him to spar. However, when
Bradley tired of the game, Jeff became angry and lashed out at the boy,
punching him in the chest. He then stalked off, leaving his son in tears.
To Susan, this was the last straw. After comforting Bradley
and then putting him and his sister to bed, she decided to confront Jeff about
his problems with drugs and violence. She knew better than to challenge him
head on, so she tried appealing to his better nature, begging him to consider
rehab and anger management sessions for the sake of his children. That seemed
to get through to Jeff, but then Susan made a crucial mistake. She warned her
husband that if he did not get help, she’d be forced to leave, taking the kids
with her.
Susan should perhaps have anticipated how Jeff would react
to this ultimatum. He grabbed her by the hair, beat her to the floor, kicked
her repeatedly in the stomach. Then he dragged her to the bed and raped her.
This time, however, Jeff was not going to stop there. After the sexual assault,
he walked out of the room, leaving Susan lying on the bed. When she opened her
eyes moments later, he was standing over her, holding a large kitchen knife.
Jeff Wright stood almost a foot taller than his wife and
outweighed her by 100 pounds. But self-preservation can trigger an
extraordinary response, and it did in this case. Susan fought desperately for
the knife and managed to wrest it from Jeff. Then she straddled him, pinned him
to the bed and started stabbing.
“I stabbed him in the head and I stabbed him in the neck and
I stabbed him in the chest,” she’d later testify. “I stabbed him in the
stomach, and I stabbed his leg for all the times he kicked me, and I stabbed
his penis for all the times he made me have sex when I didn't want to.” A total
of 193 wounds were inflicted on Jeffrey Wright. It was only when the blade
broke off in his skull that Susan stopped.
If Susan Wright’s story is to believed, then she killed her
husband in an act of self-defense. But her actions after the fact did not
reflect that. She could have called the police and reported the killing,
claiming justification. Instead, she loaded Jeff’s body onto a dolly and hauled
it out into the yard where there was already a hole dug – Jeff had planned on
installing a fountain. Over the days that followed, she bought potting soil to
fill in the grave and set about cleaning up the crime scene, painting, ripping
up carpet, disposing of the blood-stained mattress and box spring. She did all
of this, according to her testimony, “in a fog.” She barely ate during this
time, hardly slept. Eventually, five days after the killing, she told her
mother what had happened. Susan’s mother then contacted attorney Neal Davis,
who had Susan admitted to a mental-health facility before going to the District
Attorney.
Thus far, we have examined the story mostly from Susan
Wright’s perspective. But the State would offer an entirely different version
of events at trial. Prosecutor Kelly Siegler rejected Susan’s battered wife
story, contending that such abuse would have caused serious injuries, broken
bones, concussion and the like. Yet Susan had never once, during the course of
her seven-year marriage, required medical treatment for such injuries. The
prosecutor also ridiculed Susan’s version of her husband’s death. Susan stood
5-foot-5 and weighed 120 pounds; Jeff was 6-foot-3 and weighed 220. Was it
reasonable to believe that she’d somehow overpowered him, especially when he
was hopped up on coke and she had just suffered a savage beating and rape?
There was also the issue of defensive wounds. Jeff had cuts
to his hands and arms but Susan had none. In a violent struggle for the knife,
against a much stronger opponent, surely she would have sustained some injuries?
Why then did she have none? The prosecutor had a ready explanation. Jeff had
been lured by his wife with the offer of kinky sex and had allowed himself to
be tied up. Then, while he was thus restrained, she had attacked, stabbing him
to death in a vicious and sustained onslaught. That would explain how Susan
could have overpowered her much bigger husband; it would explain the lack of
defensive wounds; it would explain why Jeff was discovered with ligatures
around his wrists and ankle.
In order to drive its theory home, the prosecution then took
the extraordinary step of bringing the bed on which Jeff Wright had died
(including the heavily-stained mattress) into the courtroom. Prosecutor Siegler
suggested that she was about the same size as the defendant while her
colleague, Paul Doyle, was similar in height and weight to the victim. Siegler
then had Doyle strapped to the bed and straddled him to show how the murder had
been committed. The judge upheld an objection from the defense when Siegler
attempted to recreate Susan’s version of events.
The point, however, had been made. And it was a powerful
one. Siegler had demonstrated the only way in which Susan Wright could have
gotten the better of her bigger, stronger victim.
What the prosecution had yet to demonstrate, though, was a
motive. If spousal abuse was removed from the equation, what possible reason
did Susan Wright have to murder her husband? The oldest reason in the book,
according to Siegler. Jeffrey Wright was insured for $200,000 and Susan wanted
to get her hands on the money. There was evidence to support this, albeit
tenuous and hearsay. One of Jeff’s co-workers testified that she’d overheard
Susan berating Jeff about getting the paperwork for the life insurance policy
signed. Susan had also cleared out the couple’s joint bank account in the days
following the murder, a period during which she was supposedly “in a fog.”
During that same time frame, she had filed charges of assault against Jeff at a
local police station. She had also told several neighbors that Jeff had beaten
her up before taking off. She’d later repeated the same story to Jeff’s mother.
According to Siegler, this was an attempt at establishing motive after she had
already committed murder.
Defense attorney Neal Davis was left with the unenviable
task of undoing the powerful case presented by the prosecution. Some of his
thunder had already been stolen. Prosecutor Siegel had been wily enough to
admit that Jeff Wright had been no angel. He’d certainly had a drug problem,
and cocaine had been found in his system at the autopsy. And he definitely had
a propensity for violence; even his close buddies admitted that. He also had a
conviction for assaulting a stripper, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe
that he might have made a habit of beating his wife. The defense, in any case,
put forward several witnesses to testify that they’d seen Susan sporting
bruises and black eyes.
That Susan Wright was an abused wife was therefore not in
question, at least in the eyes of most observers. The problem for the defense
was that her version of events simply did not ring true. There is a vast
difference between killing a man during a violent struggle and knifing him to
death while he is tied to a bed and unable to defend himself. The jury might
have felt some sympathy for the abuse Susan had suffered, but in the end they
found her guilty of murder.
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