Woman Stabs Husband 193 Times; Self Defense?

Susan Wright has had six years in a Texas penitentiary to reflect on the bloody end to her troubled marriage - while longing for the children she's now legally prohibited from seeing.

"My heart hurts for everything that happened. We had two beautiful children. He had a full life ahead of him and so did I," she told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Richard Schlesinger in an exclusive interview. "Holidays are very hard, birthdays are hard," she says tearing up, "sometimes just waking up and missing everyone, it's very hard."

In March 2004, a Houston jury convicted Susan Wright of murder and sentenced her to 25 years for stabbing her husband, Jeff, almost 200 times.

"I'd honestly expected them to come back and say, 'not guilty'" Susan told Schlesinger.
"Because I had gotten up on the stand and I had told them what happened. And that's just the way that life was. I expected them to believe it."

Cindy Stewart saw her sister taken away after her conviction and has never stopped fighting to prove that Susan's story is true.

"I lost my sister that day," Stewart explained. "She was a stay-at-home mom. She's not a tough girl. She baked cookies everyday… she was going to be thrown into prison. I didn't know if she would survive."

Susan's trial quickly created headlines, not only because of the number of stab wounds, but because of the performance of prosecutor Kelly Siegler. She created quite a stir, to say the least, when she reenacted her theory of the murder by bringing Jeff and Susan's bed into the courtroom.

"Right, so if the defendant were tied to get up on top of Jeffrey Wright, something like this, and straddle him, and she's right handed, and how do you think she held the knife? Put it in my hand," Siegler said while sitting over a male prosecutor on top of the bed in front of the court.

Of Siegler's demonstration, Susan said, "I was just horrified that anyone thought that that was what happened."

"I felt sick," her sister, Cindy Stewart said. "I had no idea that law was more of a theatrical presentation than it was about justice."

Siegler has a legendary flair for the theatrical.

"Do you think a knife just magically appeared in her hand?" Siegler continued in court. "They're gonna tell you post-traumatic stress syndrome. How about cover-your-tail syndrome. That's what went on that week after she killed Jeffrey Wright."

Susan believes her young attorneys were no match for the toughest little prosecutor in Texas and they never put on proof of her claim that she was a battered wife.

"The original trial just didn't explain everything," Susan told Schlesinger.

According to Susan, to understand what happened the night she killed Jeff, you first need to know what happened in the years leading up to it.

"I just thought that we were going to have that fairytale marriage with the kids and the house, you know, the same thing that every other girl dreams about," she explained.

When they married, Susan was 22 and Jeff was 30 and a successful carpet salesman. Susan said Jeff changed shortly after the birth of their first child, Bradley.

She testified at her trial that Jeff started doing drugs and became abusive. "He told me what a fat ass that I was; he told me that I was stupid and that I was worthless," she said in the stand.

And then, she said, the abuse became physical. "He threw me up against the wall and he shook me by my arms as hard as he could, until he wasn't angry, and he began to punch me in the chest over and over again," she continued in court.

"Susan began to complain about his marijuana use, which escalated into complaints about cocaine use," said Stewart, who was worried for her sister's safety and, at one point, helped her leave Jeff.

"He had thrown Susan through a wall, and we witnessed this hole in the sheetrock that was the size of her back," explained Stewart.

But the very next day, Jeff showed up where Susan and Bradley were staying with a moving van and took them back home.

"There's not a doubt in my mind that she made up the whole story," Jeff's father, Ron Wright told Schlesinger. "She actually tortured him to death. He bled to death. She stabbed him in his eye while he was still alive."

Ron Wright, who thinks about what happened "almost every day," said in the four years Susan and his son were married, he never saw any sign of abuse. In fact, Susan never filed a single police report before exploding in violence on the night of Jan. 13, 2003.

Susan testified that Jeff had come home that night high and agitated.

"He had just gotten done with a boxing lesson and he wanted to box with Bradley… Jeff got his hands up in a boxing motion and started making jabs at Bradley's head," she said demonstrating with her hands.

But, she said, the 4-year-old didn't want to play.

"That just kept frustrating Jeff. The more that he didn't want to do it, he kept calling Bradley a 'sissy', and a 'little girl,'" she testified.

"Did Jeff end up hitting Bradley in the cheek?" her lawyer asked. "Yes, he did," she replied.

Susan said she put Bradley and his younger sister, Kaily, to bed and then confronted her husband. She told him she would leave if he didn't get help.

"…he came at me and he swung me around and threw me against the wall. And he told me not to give him any 'f-king ultimatums, bitch,' that I didn't have the right."

Susan told the court, later that night, Jeff raped her.

"My eyes were closed. And I heard his voice. And it was scary, it was calm. And he said 'die bitch.' And I opened my eyes."

She said Jeff was holding a knife. According to Susan, she kicked Jeff in the groin, grabbed the knife and started stabbing.

When asked where she stabbed him, she testified, "In his head, and in his chest, and in his neck, and in his stomach and in his leg, for when he kicked me. I stabbed him in his penis for all the times that he made me have sex and I didn't want to. And I couldn't stop, because he was gonna kill me and I couldn't stop."

Prosecutor Siegler doesn't believe a word of it, telling the court, "See, what you're left with is the word of a card-carrying, obvious, no doubt about it, caught red-handed, confirmed, documented liar."

In court, Prosecutor Kelly Siegler did not mince words. "All that battered wife abuse bull was just that, it was bull," she told jurors. "This case is not about self defense; it's about a slaughter."

Siegler ridiculed Susan Wright's claim that she killed her husband, Jeff, in self defense.

"For her to claim self defense and say she took a knife away from a man who outweighed her by 100 pounds is ridiculous," she said in court.

Six years after convicting Susan Wright, Siegler still believes that. She maintains Susan wasn't a battered wife because, "We never found any evidence of it."

The evidence, according to Siegler, tells a very different story. That's because Jeff's naked body was found with ties around his wrists and ankle.

It was, according to Siegler, all part of an elaborate seduction scene.

"She had to play it," she told "48 Hours." "She had to play the game from the minute he got home from work that day, if not sooner, to get him in the right mood, to set the scene… to get him tied up and defenseless; to pull out her knife."

Siegler believes the fact that melted wax was found on parts of Jeff's body was more evidence of the plan.

"The candle wax, to me was even more telling than the neckties wrapped around his wrist," she explained to Schlesinger. "It was my opinion, from seeing where the candle wax was melted on his body, that it was a love-making scene gone crazy, and a ruse to use an excuse to tie him up."

And that's why Siegler brought the bed into the courtroom - to demonstrate that Jeff was tied up and defenseless.

"You don't think you went too far?" Schlesinger asked the prosecutor.

"No," she replied. "She used that bed as a murder weapon, just like she used the knife. The bed was part of how she committed the crime."

Medical Examiner Dwayne Wolf backed up the prosecution's theory that Jeff Wright could not fight back.

"Out of his 193 stab wounds, almost all of them were on the front of the body," he explained. "And if a person is not restrained in some way, they'd be moving. I would be moving. I would have stab wounds predominantly on my back as I'm headed toward the door."

Regardless of what Dr. Wolf said, Susan insisted Jeff was not tied up… at least when she started stabbing him. But something made her stop.

While Susan was slashing at her husband, Bradley, their 4-year-old son, woke up and knocked at the bedroom door. Susan had to stop stabbing his father to put Bradley back to bed. And that's when she says she tied up her husband.

"…and then I tied up his right arm to the bed so that he couldn't get up because I was afraid he was gonna get up and come after me when I was putting Bradley back to sleep," she said, crying on the stand.

After calming Bradley, Susan said she got a fresh knife from the kitchen, came back into the bedroom, and started stabbing Jeff again.

When she finally finished stabbing him, Susan dragged his body off the bed and tied him to a dolly and took him to the nearby patio. Jeff Wright ended up in a shallow hole he dug himself as part of a home improvement project.

Exclusive: Never-before seen crime scene video

"I went back to the room and I was scared. I knew he was gonna kill me. And I was so scared because I didn't want to die," she said.

That's how Susan Wright explained a lot of her actions around the time of the murder. She said she was convinced Jeff was still alive - and that her life was still in danger.

Defense attorney Todd Ward: Why didn't you call the police?
Susan: Because Jeff was still alive.
Ward: What do you mean he was still alive? This is not rational - you understand that now?
Susan: Now I understand that. Then he was still alive. He wasn't dead. All of the events that happened in that room, my brain wouldn't let me process it. It was so horrible. It was so terrifying."

Susan claimed she was in a fog the next few days.

"It's foggy; it's cloudy, and it's sort of like a daydream, it's like sometimes I'm just going through the motions, but I can't remember everything it's cloudy," Susan said in court.

"She took my son's name off of the answering machine. Which, you know, in a fog, that raises a little question, doesn't it?" said Ron Wright.

Kelly Siegler eagerly pointed out Susan cleaned up the bloody bedroom and emptied out the joint bank account. And for the first time, she filed an abuse complaint against Jeff - after he was already dead.

"She had the presence of mind to do all that," Siegler said. "So how foggy was she really?"

The prosecutor had a lot of questions about what Susan did and spent months preparing for her cross examination of Susan Wright:

Siegler: The week after you killed Jeff - Mrs. Wright, during this fog that you experience in and out that week, you always managed to take care of your children, though, did you not?
Susan: Yes, like I said before -
Siegler That was a yes or no answer. Did you not?
Susan: Yes ma'am, I'd always done that.
Siegler Thank you.

Siegler wanted to convince the jury that the real Susan was a scheming seductress. She wanted the jury to remember that for two months when she was 18 years old, Susan Wright was a topless dancer.

Siegler: You're gonna sit up there and tell this jury that y'all never practiced bondage?
Susan: Oh, no.
Siegler: "Oh, no." That was good, are you like, appalled at the idea? Is that where you get that "oh, no" from?

Watch excerpts of Siegler's cross examination of Susan Wright

When Cindy Stewart was asked how she would describe Siegler's cross examination of her sister, she replied, "I think that she's brutal."

"And when you stabbed him the 56th time, or the 89th time, or the 158th time, was your arm getting tired?" Siegler continued in court.

"She wanted it to seem like I did something horrible on purpose," Susan told Schlesinger. "And that night I was just fighting for my life."

Siegler: Did you hear the medical examiner testify that you didn't stab his penis, what you did was nick at it - and take off -
Susan: No. I did not slash at him, no.
Siegler: You didn't stab his penis? That's not a stab like this, (demonstrating) like you're mad, like you're afraid, like you can't stop."

Siegler left the jurors with one last powerful image: counting out loud the number of times Susan stabbed her husband, while making a stabbing motion. "Can you imagine 193 times," she said.

And it worked. The jurors convicted Susan Wright of murdering her own husband. They could have sentenced her to life; instead, she got a break and 25 years.

Ron Wright thought the sentence was "in bad taste. I thought that she should have gotten a lot more."

But at least one courtroom observer thought Susan Wright got a raw deal.

"You look at it and you think what happened wasn't right, it wasn't fair, and it wasn't just," said Brian Wice, a prominent appellate attorney.

No stranger to showmanship himself, Wice thought Kelly Siegler's bed scene was over the top and that Susan Wright deserved another chance - a new sentencing hearing before a new jury.

He thinks he can get her sentence reduced or even set her free.

Prosecutor Kelly Siegler's dramatic reenactment of the bedroom scene in Susan Wright's murder trial was the talk of the courthouse long after Susan Wright went to prison.

Susan's new lawyer, Brian Wice - who took the case for free - appealed her conviction arguing Siegler wanted to inflame rather than inform the jury.

"I couldn't believe that any judge in this building would let them reenact the third reel of 'Basic Instinct,'" he told Richard Schlesinger.

Siegler's style has made her a marquee name - and not just around the courthouse. She's even landed in the pages of People magazine.

Judge Jim Wallace had the best seat in the house during the prosecutor's performance in the original trial. Asked if Siegler is a good actress or a good lawyer, Judge Wallace said, "She's both. She's a very good lawyer. She's highly intelligent, but she's been able to polish that skill with a little theatrics. And I think it helps her tremendously."

The original defense attorneys objected to the demonstration, but Judge Wallace overruled them, telling Schlesinger, "I thought it was highly effective."

The appellate court agreed and upheld Susan's conviction. But Wice had a new idea; he'd argue that Susan's lawyers should have called more witnesses, including experts on how battered women behave.

"You can't try a case involving a defendant who's battered unless you have a battered women's expert. It is like doing Hamlet without Hamlet," Wice explained. "So many lay jurors fall back on the myths and misconceptions about battered women. Why don't they leave? Why don't they call the cops? Why don't they tell anybody?"

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Without any expert testimony, Wice said Kelly Siegler could easily rip apart Susan's claim that she was a battered wife.

Wice thinks the original jury should have heard from psychologist Jerome Brown, an expert on battered women's syndrome, who the defense actually hired but never called.

"I think that she was emotionally and physically battered by her deceased husband," Brown said.

"Over a period of time?" Schlesinger asks.

"Over years, yes."

Brown said Susan had grown so terrified of Jeff she couldn't take it anymore, explaining," she snapped and she killed him in a frenzy."

Dr. Brown evaluated Susan after her lawyers put her in a psychiatric center the week after Jeff's murder - when Susan Wright said she was in a fog.

"She would hear things or think things were there that weren't there - especially her deceased husband," Brown continued. "She still had trouble understanding or believing that he was really dead."

And Brian Wice had another new witness. Misty McMichael was once engaged to Jeff Wright.

"He was very charming, considerate, thoughtful, complimentary, everything that you want in a man, you think," Misty told Schlesinger.

But, like Susan, Misty said Jeff had another side.

"He would drink and when he would go out drinking and drugging, he would come home and be very angry," she continued. "He liked to get me on the ground, because once you're on the ground, you can get kicked. [And did he kick you?] Oh, yeah."

When asked what Misty McMichael does for his case, Wice said, "She corroborates Susan's claim of abuse. And she gives Susan's credibility a B-12 shot. She tells a story of Jeff Wright using her as a human punching bag on and off for four years."

The big difference is that one night Misty filed a police report.

"We were at a bar in Austin… So I must've looked at someone and he had a fit and threw a glass at me and it shattered and a piece of it went into my chin. And it's still there," she tells Schlesinger.

Jeff agreed to a plea deal on the assault charge and avoided jail. Misty fled one night when Jeff wasn't home - although Jeff's father said she never lost interest in his son.

"I know that she chased my son up until a week before he died," Ron Wright remarked. "Does that sound like a woman that's getting beat on?"

Misty denies that and said she was already happily married to Steve McMichael, known as Mongo, a former defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears.

"If you had taken the stand, you would've been cross-examined by Kelly Siegler," Schlesinger pointed out.

"Right, and that's fine," Misty said. "Bring it on."

But it could have been difficult. Because, like Susan, Misty was once a topless dancer.

"I was a topless dancer for 10 years. Whoo, whoo! Big wow…Does that mean I'm a crack head whore? No it does not," Misty told Schlesinger. "Does that mean Susan's a liar? No it does not. That just means that was our choice of profession. I enjoyed it. I had a great time."

"So is it just a coincidence that they're both telling similar stories?" Schlesinger asked Ron Wright.

"No," he replied. "For some reason, Misty is trying to save Susan's skin. Sisterhood of the strippers I guess."

"Are they both just liars?"

"From what I've seen, yes."

But now, both Misty McMichael and Dr. Jerome Brown will finally be heard.

Judge Wallace agreed to listen to Brian Wice's arguments and decide if Susan deserves a new sentencing hearing before a new jury. There are no guarantees, but right now, it's enough for Susan.

"How much hope do you have as we sit here now that this hearing is gonna make a difference?" Schlesinger asked her. "All of the hope in the world," she replied.

Attorney Brian Wice was granted an evidentiary hearing on Oct. 2, 2008.

Judge Jim Wallace agreed to hear evidence from new witnesses and decide whether Susan Wright deserved a new sentencing hearing before a new jury.

Wice thinks Susan, now 34, could have her 25-year prison term reduced or even be released.

Judge Wallace said asking for a new sentencing hearing is a big gamble.

"The old saying goes, 'be careful what you wish for.' And that's certainly true when you're talking about a person's life and liberty," he said.

What's at stake for Susan Wright? The judge said, "She's walking a razor's edge… and she might get life."

Susan said, "It could go either way, but I'm not worried. I just don't think that God would have brought me this far."

This is just the first step, but it could be the last if Wice cannot convince the judge the new testimony is strong enough to put before a new jury.

Wice opened by saying Susan's first lawyers, Todd Ward and Neal Davis, were not up to the job.

"The evidence is going to show that two well meaning, inexperienced, but ultimately overmatched lawyers dropped the ball," Wice told the court.

"I wish that my attorneys would have worked a little harder," Susan told Schlesinger. "I mean, I had never been to court. I had no clue what was going on, so I left my life in their hands and I trusted them."

Attorney Todd Ward was clearly not happy about finding himself on the stand.

"I don't believe Neil and I were ineffective," he told Wice.

Ward worried about the potential danger for his ex-client, Susan Wright. "Potentially, she could get a lot more than 25 years. It's a risk she's running and I hope she realizes that."

Wice asked, "But she could also get less time, correct?" Ward responded, "Yeah, a meteor could also jump in this room right now."

It was an uncomfortable proceeding. Wice wanted Susan's first attorneys to explain to Judge Wallace why they didn't call certain witnesses - like an expert on battered women.

"An expert on battered women's syndrome, you know, to me was not rocket science," Ward testified.

Wice told Schlesinger, "to me, one of the defining moments is Todd Ward saying, 'you know, battered women's syndrome it ain't rocket science' and I thought, 'shame on you Todd, shame on you.'"

Ward insisted that Susan's own testimony was the key to her defense - and she was well prepared to take the stand.

"If they didn't believe Susan, the ship was sunk," he said.

But her other attorney, Neal Davis, said he was planning to have Dr. Jerome Brown testify as an expert witness - until he finally read the psychologist's notes just before Susan's trial.

The problem: Brown said Susan told him a different story than the one she told at her trial.

"I threw my hands up. And I grabbed the knife. And I started kicking him," Susan testified in 2004.

Brown said she told him she started stabbing Jeff when was he asleep.

"She went, got the knife, and she started stabbing him. [As he slept?] As he slept and she says she couldn't stop," Brown testified.

Davis insisted Dr. Brown's testimony would have hurt Susan's case more than it would have helped.

"In light of that, to this day, I wouldn't have called him at her trial," he said in court.

Wice wouldn't let Susan answer "48 Hours'" questions about the two stories, but she did tell Texas Monthly magazine she doesn't remember telling Dr. Brown anything like that.

But Dr. Brown - who is now working for free - believes the effects of battered wife syndrome could explain Susan's two very different accounts of how she killed her husband.

"When I talked to her she was so fragile that day that she simply could not recount accurately the most violent events of that evening," Brown testified. "She's repressing events that are too horrible to think about."

"You think that was all sort of part of the syndrome?" Schlesinger asked Dr. Brown.

"Could be," he replied.

"Think the jury would have bought that?"

"I don't know," Dr. Brown said. "It's a tough sell. The whole thing's a tough sell."

According to Wice, "The only individual in a position to explain the unexplainable, to make rational the irrational, was Jerry Brown."

Wice: When Susan begins to stab Jeff Wright as he sleeps, did she think that her use of force was immediately necessary to protect herself?
Brown: I think that she thought that if she didn't do something like that, at that moment, that she was going to be killed or the children be killed, yes.

"Who is gonna believe that? That you are in fear for your life while your husband is laying there in the bed, snoring away, sound asleep. Come on," Siegler told "48 Hours."

Wice hoped any questions raised by Dr. Brown's testimony would be answered by Misty McMichael.

He believed if Judge Wallace allowed Misty to testify that Jeff abused her too, a new jury would better understand what Susan went through.

So why wasn't Misty called to testify? Davis said he left several messages for Misty that she never answered.

"The tactic was if she ain't gonna call me back, she ain't gonna talk to us," he said on the stand.

Jeff Wright's friends had also raised questions about Misty's credibility.

Could Susan be betting too much on a woman she's never seen?
Susan Wright and Misty McMichael have never met before, but the two women say they have a lot in common: years of abuse by Jeff Wright.

"She needs me," Misty replied when asked why she chose to come and help a woman she's never met.

Misty McMichael is Brian Wice's star witness.

Misty and Susan both hope Misty's testimony will convince the judge to give Susan a new sentencing hearing.

"It's going to show that there was a past abuse," Susan tells Richard Schlesinger in an exclusive interview. "That this was just the way that he was."

Wice: What did his abuse consist of?
Misty: You name it. Hitting, punching, choking, kicking, slapping. He'd even use whatever was around to abuse you with.

Misty broke down and cried several times on the stand while she described being abused by Jeff Wright.

Wice: Has coming down here to testify been an easy or hard thing to for you to do?
Misty: Hard, very hard
Wice: Why has it been hard?
Misty: Because you have to relive things that you don't want to.
Wice: Like what?
Misty: Like his abuse.

Misty told the court that Jeff locked her in a windowless apartment at night and repeatedly pushed her down the stairs.

"And he would throw me down that staircase whenever he wanted to. And I mean, you could have easily have broken your neck or anything falling down that staircase," she testified, breaking down in tears.

She doesn't condone what Susan Wright did, but Misty, who is the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, thinks she understands why Susan did it.

Wice: Why weren't you surprised?
Misty: Because I knew that if anybody had children they would do anything to protect their babies.

Watch more of Misty's testimony

Of Misty's testimony Wice said, "I think she's a piece of the puzzle… even if Judge Wallace finds that she makes Anna Nicole Smith look like a rabbinical student, it doesn't make any difference. Nobody shakes her on the fact that she was abused by Jeff Wright."

When asked how Misty did on the stand, Susan said, "I think she did great. It's difficult to get up on a stand and tell a story. But no matter how we come across, the story is still the same. What happened did happen."

But one part of Misty's account could hurt Susan with a new jury.

"Is there a danger, do you think, that people might say, well, she was abused by this guy, but she left. She didn't stab him. Why didn't Susan Wright?" Schlesinger asked.

"She must have had a safe place to go, which I didn't," Susan explained. "I was in my house with my children. There was no where else for me to turn to."

After hearing from Misty and the other witnesses, Judge Wallace took four months to make up his mind while Susan sat in a prison three hours from Houston with her very future at stake.

Would the judge agree that the trial he presided over himself may not have ended fairly? It was always a long shot - but this gamble paid off.

Judge Wallace agreed to a new sentencing hearing before a new jury. This is not to determine if Susan's guilty, but to decide if she gets a different sentence.

Susan holds out hope she'll go free, but she could get anything from probation to life.

Wice called his client with the good news.

"Oh, Brian. You're serious? [I am] Oh, my God, I'm so excited. Thank you so much. You've just given me so much hope," she said over the phone.

It was not the news Jeff's father wanted to hear.

"When you got the word that she had been granted a new sentencing hearing, what did you make of that?" Schlesinger asked Ron Wright.

"I felt like throwing up. Literally," he replied.

Asked what he would you like to see happen now, Ron Wright said, "Well, life [in prison] would be nice… don't you think that animals should be locked up and kept behind bars?"

And that could still happen. The great irony of this case is that the one move Susan Wright hopes will set her free, could just as easily keep her in prison for the rest of her life.

But to her, the risk is worth the possible reward - the chance to see her children again.

"I would do anything in the world to be able to have them back. Just to be able to watch them grow up, to know who they are," she said.

Will that happen? She said, "I pray it does."

Her new sentencing hearing is expected in the fall of 2010.
Produced by Clare Friedland and Jenna Jackson