193
That’s how many times Susan Wright, a shy suburban mother of two, stabbed her husband in their bed before burying him in the backyard. In a wild trial that had all of Houston buzzing, she was convicted of murder and sent to prison. But what the jury didn’t know six years ago may soon set her free.
Alice says: This prosecutor sounds like the abusive husband when she says "battered woman’s syndrome" doesn’t exist, just like "postpartum depression" in the husbands eyes didn’t exist. When somebody stabs an abusive husband 193 times surely it is because that person snapped out of fear. If it was for the $200,000 then maybe she would have stapped him 4 or 5 times. People who haven’t been abused by a loved one just don’t understand. And if you don’t think the threat of killing her isn’t real then just look at all the woman who did leave there abusive spouse and are now dead because of it. (March 19th, 2010 at 4:49pm)
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To wice, the most glaring mistake the defense lawyers made was their refusal to call Dr. Jerome Brown. After Davis had Wright admitted to the psychiatric ward of Ben Taub, he asked Brown, a longtime Houston clinical psychologist who has testified extensively for both the prosecution and the defense in a variety of criminal cases, to examine her. Wright wouldn’t make eye contact with Brown. She sighed and broke into tears. “Her overall presentation had a distinctly dreamy, drifting, unfocused quality that clearly suggested that she was ‘somewhere else,’” Brown later said. When she did talk, she spoke in a flat voice and seemed to be in what Brown called a “dissociated” state, “as if she was up in the air looking down on herself, talking about things she was doing.”
When Brown began to ask about Jeffrey, she became terrified, telling him that her husband was looking for her and her children. She wept as she talked about the way he had punched and kicked her. She mentioned how she tried to “go away” in her mind on those occasions when he would rape her. Jeffrey “had embedded himself in her psyche in a way that made him bigger than life,” Brown said. “He was very, very powerful and very, very threatening.”
Gently, Brown asked her about the night she killed Jeffrey. According to Brown’s notes, Wright talked about the way Jeffrey had shouted at her and shaken her after she told him he needed help and how he’d forced her to have sex. Then Wright told him Jeffrey went to sleep. It was only after he was asleep, she said, that she went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and started stabbing him.
Wright told Brown the same story a month later. Brown assumed he would be testifying at her trial, and he planned to tell the jury that Wright, essentially, had snapped. “I think she had been able to tolerate the abuse as long as Jeffrey directed it on her,” Brown told me. “But when the abuse started spilling over to Bradly, she lost it. On the night she stabbed her husband, she had some kind of mental break. And she stayed that way for days, probably weeks. I don’t want to say she became completely psychotic, but she drifted in and out of reality. She didn’t have any real idea what she was doing, or why.”
But the day before jury selection, Davis called Brown and said he had just read his notes. He informed Brown that Wright had never told him or Ward about Jeffrey’s falling asleep. She had told them a story about Jeffrey’s wielding a knife and shouting, “Die, bitch!” Davis told Brown he would not be testifying. He and Ward wanted to go with her second version of events, which obviously gave them a chance to make a better argument that she faced “imminent harm” and killed Jeffrey in self-defense.
Brown replied that he could explain to a jury the discrepancy in Wright’s stories. He said that when he was seeing her, in the weeks immediately after the killing, she was still so traumatized that she was unable to recall everything that had happened. Maybe, he conjectured, her mind could not yet handle the scene of Jeffrey’s trying to stab her. But gradually, as time passed, more details came back to her. What happened to her was not much different from a case of someone who suffered severe sexual abuse as a child but who didn’t have any memories of the abuse until years later. Brown said that Wright’s telling one story about the killing and then telling another “was not unreasonable” from a psychological standpoint.
But Davis said presenting both the stories at trial would be a “deal breaker.” And as long as he didn’t call Brown to the stand, the psychologist’s conversation with Wright would remain privileged and Siegler would never find out about it. “To this day I wouldn’t have called [Brown] at her trial,” Davis said. But in the process, he lost the only qualified expert who had sat down with Wright and who was prepared to tell a jury that she was not a cold-blooded killer.
“Basically, Susan had been left to fend for herself,” Wice said. “She didn’t have a chance in hell of winning at her very own trial.”
At the hobby unit, Wright is known as a prison Martha Stewart. Using snacks from the vending machines, she can create a version of a cheesecake and a Snickerdoodle pie. She’s finally getting to take some college classes—she’s making A’s in algebra, history, and psychology—and she is reading Beth Moore Bible studies that Cindy mails to her. In November Wright spent a Saturday morning in the prison’s dayroom, watching television and taking note of commercials that advertised kids’ toys. She sent Cindy a list of the items she had seen, asking if any of them might make good Christmas gifts for her children. Bradly and Kaily are now living with Jeffrey’s brother, and they have no contact whatsoever with their mother, whose parental rights were terminated after her conviction. “I don’t think they know where I am or if I’m even alive,” said Wright. “But I still like the idea of acting like their mother, even if it is never going to happen.” She tried to smile, and then she put her face in her hands and wept.
Now Wright is left to wonder if a new jury will feel sympathy for her after considering the additional testimony and possibly give her a lighter sentence that would allow her to be released on parole. Members of Jeffrey’s family are hoping that the exact opposite will happen, that she will get sentenced to life. “I consider her some type of animal,” Jeffrey’s father, Ron, told 48 Hours.
Siegler also wants the jury to hit Wright with a tougher sentence. She has a lot invested in what happens: This was, after all, the case that made her famous. (People magazine even ran a laudatory story after the trial that was titled “Drama Queen.”) But she has her own deeply personal reasons as well. When Siegler decided to run for district attorney in 2008 (she narrowly lost in a runoff), she mentioned to the Houston Chronicle that she had watched her own mother being beaten by her stepfather. When I asked her recently if that experience had anything to do with her adamant belief that Wright was not a battered woman, she replied, “Of course all of that made all of the difference in the world. You don’t live through a childhood of watching your mom be abused and know that feeling of complete helplessness and not be affected.”
But she added, “The evidence of it all—the bruises, the one time we called law enforcement and they did nothing, the little bit we told our friends, the little bit that they witnessed, the visits to the doctor, the arguments both public and private—all in spite of our efforts to keep it secret, were still there. Susan Wright had no evidence of any of that. I looked for it as hard as I ever looked for evidence of any defendant’s guilt or innocence.”
Siegler insists that the new information that has emerged during Wright’s appeals only confirms her belief that Wright is an impostor. “Anyone who’s followed this case knows that the story she told Dr. Brown about stabbing Jeffrey while he was sleeping is the true story and the ‘Die, bitch!’ story was nothing more than a sick, pathetic lie,” she said, her voice rising.
I asked Siegler if she truly believed that Wright had stabbed her husband 193 times for a measly $200,000 in life insurance. “Oh, I don’t think anyone will ever figure out Susan Wright’s entire motive or understand the depth of her anger,” she replied. “I do think she was angry that she and Jeff had a very dysfunctional marriage. I also think she was angry with her father, and maybe she was angry about other parts of her own past. Her anger consumed her. But, please, she didn’t do what she did because she was a battered woman. We looked and looked for just one piece of evidence that proved she was being abused—a police report, a hospital record, a statement to CPS [Child Protective Services], something. There was nothing.”
When I told Wright what Siegler had said, she stared at the floor for several seconds. “Do you know that I sit here in this prison every day, asking myself why I didn’t, just once, go talk to a police officer or go to one of those shelters—or why I didn’t stay at my parents’ after Cindy moved me out of the house? Do you know how many times I’ve asked God for just one chance to do it all over again so that none of this would have happened? But I was so scared back then. I just got, well, paralyzed.”
“Be honest with me,” I said. “Why did you tell Dr. Brown that story about killing Jeffrey when he was sleeping?”
“I’ve racked my brain, but I don’t remember telling Dr. Brown anything like that,” Wright said. “I barely remember talking to him at all. I think two or three months passed before everything began coming back—Jeffrey with the knife and little sweet Bradly knocking on the door.”
There was a silence, and Wright glanced across the room at the prison guard, who was pacing back and forth. She gave me an apologetic look. “I think he’s ready for me to leave,” she said. “And I better not upset him.” She stood up and took a step to the door, but then turned to say one more thing. “If my appeal doesn’t work out, and I don’t get to go home, I want you to tell everyone I’ll be okay. At least I’ll be safe.” She smiled at me. “Isn’t it strange that I had to come to prison to feel safe?”
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