Divorce by Homicide

Susan Wright was twenty-six and the mother of two small children when her marriage to Jeff Wright ended in the bedroom of their Houston-area house on Berry Tree Drive, in the White Oak Bend subdivision of unincorporated Harris County. On the night of January 13, 2003, she stabbed Jeff at least 193 times as he lay tied to their bed, using a hunting knife and then a kitchen knife.

She buried him in the back patio, in a hole he had dug for a garden fountain, then spent five days painting over blood, bleaching the house, and filing a domestic violence report that accused him of abuse. On January 18 she admitted it to her mother, and the lawyer her family hired alerted the Harris County district attorney’s office. Investigators found Jeff’s body under a mound of potting soil, and she was charged with murder on January 23.

At trial she testified that Jeff had raped her that night and come at her with the knife, and that she could not stop. Jurors rejected self-defense and sudden passion, convicting her on March 3, 2004; the sentence was twenty-five years. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a new punishment hearing, and in November 2010 the term was cut to twenty years. She was approved for parole in July 2020 and left the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville that December 30.