Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 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.
Susan Wright, photographed at the Hobby Unit, in Marlin, on November 23, 2009.
Photograph by Matthew Rainwaters
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)
Susan Wright, the blue-eyed butcher of the Houston suburbs, is still a lovely young woman, still as polite and well-mannered as she was seven years ago, when she grabbed a knife, stabbed her husband at least 193 times, and buried him facedown in their backyard.
“Hi,” she said softly as she walked into the visiting room of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Hobby Unit, in Marlin, shaking my hand and ducking her head shyly. She was wearing dark-red Covergirl lipstick, which she keeps in a box for special occasions. She smelled nice too; just before my arrival, she had taken a couple perfume samples from a fashion magazine she receives in the mail and rubbed them across her neck. Her hair, blond at the time of the murder, had returned to its natural auburn shade. It was still damp from the shower she had been allowed to take an hour earlier. She settled into a chair at a table and nervously began to smooth out the wrinkles in her white uniform.
“How are you?” I asked. “Oh, I have nothing to complain about,” she said. “I live in a dormitory area with other women, and I have a photo of my children on a wall next to my pillow. Every morning I wake up and look at them.” For a moment, she stared at the floor and pressed her lips together. “Can you believe my son, Bradly, has turned eleven, and my little Kaily is almost eight?”
Bradly was only four and Kaily was not even two on January 18, 2003, when a lawyer named Neal Davis walked into the district attorney’s office and said that he represented a client who’d led him to believe that a body could be found at a small patio home in the heart of the White Oak Bend subdivision, in northwest Harris County. He refused to give any additional details, claiming attorney-client privilege. When police officers arrived at the address, they discovered the nude body of 34-year-old Jeffrey Wright, a 220-pound carpet and flooring salesman. He was partially visible in his grave because the Wright family’s dog had dug him up. Jeffrey had been stabbed all over the front of his body. Neckties were knotted around his wrists, and a bathrobe sash was wrapped around one of his ankles. Inside the house, blood was splattered throughout the master bedroom, including on the bed, the floors, the walls, the ceiling, and the ironing board.
Investigators called Davis and asked if his client happened to be Jeffrey’s wife, Susan, who was then 26 years old. Yes, Davis replied, but she would not be speaking to them. She was in the psychiatric ward of Ben Taub General Hospital, babbling to herself. She believed Jeffrey was roaming the hallways, trying to find her so that he could beat her to death.
And thus began one of the most macabre murder cases in modern Texas history, culminating in a trial so lurid that Court TV broadcast it, gavel to gavel, across the country. CBS’s weekly true-crime program, 48 Hours Mystery, devoted an entire show to the Wright killing; the obligatory pulp paperback, A Wife’s Revenge, was published about the case; and Hollywood producers came sniffing around, hoping to turn the whole saga into a made-for-television movie.
As a study in courtroom sensationalism, the drama was indeed difficult to beat—“the most exciting trial, bar none, that I’ve ever watched, the kind of thing you think only happens on Law & Order,” recalled Jenna Jackson, a veteran 48 Hours producer who saw all the testimony. When Wright took the witness stand, she tearfully told jurors one horrific tale after another about the abuse she had secretly endured during her five-year marriage. Beneath her husband’s congenial, backslapping persona, she testified, was a sadistic, drug-abusing brute who’d belittled and controlled her, kicked and punched her when she didn’t do what he wanted, and sexually assaulted her whenever he felt like it. On the evening of January 13, 2003, Susan said, Jeffrey returned home from a boxing lesson high on cocaine, tried to get Bradly to box with him, popped him in the face with his fist, and later attacked her after she told him he had to get help for his anger. He then ordered her to get into bed, where he raped her. Afterward he left for a few moments. When he returned, he was holding a butcher knife. He waved it over her head, shouting, “Die, bitch!”
“I threw my hands up, then I grabbed the knife, and I started kicking him with my right knee,” Wright testified to the riveted, standing-room-only crowd. “His grasp on the knife loosened just a little bit and I got it from him.” She said she first stabbed him in the neck, and then she kept stabbing him, because “I knew the second that I stopped that he was going to kill me.”
At one point during Wright’s frenzy, Bradly knocked on the bedroom door. Despite the fact that she had already stabbed Jeffrey multiple times, she was convinced that he was going to get up and come after her. So Wright said she tied her husband’s right arm to the bed with a necktie before hiding the knife and walking Bradly back to his room. Then she got another knife from the kitchen, thinking Jeffrey might have found the first one. “I knew he was going to kill me,” she said. “And I was so scared because I didn’t want to die. I started stabbing him again.” She said she began stabbing his legs for all the times he’d kicked her, and she stabbed his penis “for all the times that he made me have sex and I didn’t want to.”
Finally, she testified, she cut the tie connecting his hand to the bedpost and pulled him off the bed. His shoulder hit the nightstand, spilling the wax from a red candle Jeffrey had lit earlier that evening onto his body. She brought a dolly into the bedroom, propped him on it, used another necktie to fasten his left hand to the dolly, and used the sash of her bathrobe to secure his feet. Then she rolled Jeffrey outside to a hole that he had dug months earlier to install a fountain. She crammed his six-foot-two-inch body into it and covered him with dirt. But, she insisted, she still believed her husband was alive. She said she sat on the sofa for the rest of the night with the knife in her hands, “and I watched for Jeff to get up, because I was afraid the second I went to sleep he was going to get up and come after me again.”
Over and over, Wright told the jury that on the night of the killing, she had experienced some sort of mental breakdown, which lasted for days. She explained that the reason she didn’t initially tell anyone about what she had done was because “my brain still wouldn’t accept it. He was still alive and I was scared of him.” It wasn’t until Saturday morning, five days after the killing, that she began to realize that “something horrible had happened.”
Five-foot-four-inch Kelly Siegler, the fiercest prosecutor in the Harris County district attorney’s office, was having none of it. She rose on her black high heels and told the jury that Wright had most likely lured her husband to the bed and tied him to the posts, leading him to think they were going to engage in some sexual game playing. To get him even more aroused, Siegler suggested, Wright had poured candle wax on his body. At that point, Siegler declared, Wright had pulled out her knife and turned that bedroom “into a torture chamber.” The motive? According to Siegler, Wright wanted to cash in his $200,000 life insurance policy. “All that battered wife abuse bull was just that,” Siegler proclaimed to the jurors. “It was bull!”
In the most astonishing moment of the trial, Siegler, an attractive woman always stylishly turned out, had the bloodstained bed from the Wrights’ bedroom brought into the courtroom. A younger male prosecutor climbed onto the mattress and was tied to the posts. Wearing a tight-fitting Alberto Makali black pantsuit, Siegler took off her high heels, straddled her colleague, raised one of the actual knives that Wright had used to kill her husband, and reenacted the stabbings. (Her co-counsel didn’t participate in the reenactment because his girlfriend didn’t want Siegler writhing all over him.) The male prosecutor began to have difficulty breathing, because he had just stuck a large dip of snuff in his mouth and needed to spit. He strained at the ligatures, which were cutting off the circulation to his hands. Meanwhile, a grim-faced Siegler kept pretending to stab him.
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