Original subtitles

[cars honking]

[ominous instrumental]

I'm Kelly Siegler

and I was a prosecutor for over 21 years.

I'd been involved in more than 200 trials,

around 60 murder cases and 20 death penalty cases.

Hello, Rhonda.

RHONDA: Hey, Kelly. How are you?

I'm good. How are you?

The prosecutor is the voice for the victim

and for their loved ones in that court room.

My job is to seek justice,

and when you meet the victim's family,

it's really easy to know who you're getting justice for.

What did that feel like?

Watching him take his last breath done before your eyes?

We were taught at our office

that your courtroom is your living room,

and anytime we can reenact and show exactly

what we think happened to the victim, we do that.

He turned that bedroom into a torture chamber

and that bed into a butcher block.

In 2004, I tried the case of the murder of Jeffrey Wright.

During the trial,

I brought the brutalness of the crime into the courtroom.

...where all of these injuries in the chest area

consistent with the knife being held in this direction.

To get my point across,

I used a tactic that was, at the time, controversial.

It garnered a lot of press and even more criticism.

This case changed the course of my career

in ways I've never talked about.

When my daughter started working as a prosecutor,

defense lawyers told her at her first day of work,

"You know, your mom was wrong,

"what she did in that courtroom."

I don't care. I'm glad I did it. I know why I did it.

I'm proud I did it and it was the right thing to do.

So, here's the bed pieces. Where's the mattress?

They burned it because it was--

-It was bad. -It was-- Yeah, that biohazard.

Where's everything else?

-Right around the corner. -Oh, come show me.

Today, I am at the Harris County Evidence Archives,

which is only open to lawyers.

The shovel I-- I didn't remember

if we recovered the shovel or not.

I haven't seen this stuff in over 20 years

and looking through all this makes me feel like

I'm right back in that courtroom all over again.

So, this knife is different than a typical knife

in a murder case because a piece is missing.

State's Exhibit 65 and that's the piece

that was found embedded in Jeffrey's skull.

I wanted the jury to have a true picture of the injuries.

Look how few are on his back.

So, that's how you know he was tied down the whole time.

This tells the whole story of the torture.

[ominous instrumental]

KELLY: The night that this case began started

like any other night, but it quickly changed into a case

that none of us involved would ever forget.

SGT. MARK: On a Saturday evening,

a defense attorney came into the District attorney's office

during non-public hours and said they could find a dead body

in the backyard of the house at this address.

[dramatic sting]

[sirens blaring]

It's really unusual

for a defense lawyer to report a crime.

He doesn't identify who the person is,

but we all figured out pretty quickly

that the reason Neal Davis was the reportee

was probably because he was representing somebody

that has something to do with

why that body was in the backyard.

[sirens blaring]

The people that lived at 10822 Berry Tree Drive

were Jeff and Susan Wright and their two children.

[ominous instrumental]

SGT. TRACY: This is a middle class neighborhood.

It's midnight. We're using flashlights

to try to light that area up and see.

SGT. CHUCK: When they looked inside the patio portion,

they saw the head and the shoulder

of what they believed to be a male subject.

[dramatic sting]

SGT. TRACY: You see an arm, part of a hand,

and you see it could be a head.

The rest of it is buried.

In Texas, the body actually belongs to the medical examiner,

and we don't touch it until they get there.

SGT. MARK: I'm looking at this body.

There was a ligature, a cloth tied around

both of the wrists,

and then there was one around one of the ankles.

And I could see there was a massive amount of stab wounds

to the front side of his body.

I was surprised at how much violence had--

had gone on there.

As we were looking at the scene and taking everything in,

we noticed a hunting knife.

It was near the body in a flower pot.

There was a good chance

that that was involved in our murder.

[indistinct radio chat]

SGT. MARK: There were no witnesses at the scene,

just constables, officers and a defense attorney.

SGT. TRACY: I spoke with him briefly.

He can't tell me much because attorney-client privilege.

I cannot remember that ever happening on another scene.

KELLY: And I got a call

from Sheriff's department homicide,

who I worked with a lot, saying,

"Kelly, we need you to come out to a scene

"because we have a defense lawyer out here

"and we need you to run interference

"while we process the scene

"and figure out what the heck is going on."

Going into a scene in-person

is something that you never forget.

I'd never been asked to do that before.

I've never been asked to do that since.

I mean, I'm used to seeing really, really bad pictures,

but I'm not used to seeing it upfront and personal. No.

[tense instrumental]

When you're a girl prosecutor, mostly working with guys,

I remember always thinking, "Be cool. Be strong.

"Be in control and act like you know what you're doing,

"even when you don't."

There were all these things in the backyard

that should have been inside the house:

a mattress that was bloody, the sideboards,

the headboard, the footboard.

It was just chaos.

SGT. TRACY: When they shone a flashlight on the mattresses,

we could see dark stains.

You'd think it's blood, but you really can't tell at night.

It was saturated.

It hit me right then and there, somebody needs to show a jury

how this bed was used in the commission of this murder.

And I asked the crime scene guy to take the bed

and store it in the property room.

SGT. TRACY: When you get past the patio,

you go into the master bedroom,

it's a chaotic scene.

Something happened here.

This is probably where the murder occurred.

The bed is missing.

Obviously, the mattress and the box springs belong to that bed.

It looks like a tornado has come through this room.

There's all kinds of articles over the floor.

There's blood staining.

SGT. CHUCK: Blood spatter in various places on the walls.

It was on nightstands.

SGT. TRACY: When a stabbing occurs,

the first stab, you don't pull blood out

when you pull back.

It's the second one that goes in,

you're pulling blood out and it'll throw some cast out.

SGT. CHUCK: There was some pieces of the carpet

that had been cut out,

taken outside and thrown out there.

There was a paint can and a paint roller

off to the side on the floor.

It appeared to us that somebody was hastily trying

to clean up this crime scene.

There's signs of bleaching.

People always wanna use bleach

when they're trying to clean up a crime scene

to get rid of the blood.

It looked like a cover-up gone wrong.

When we pulled him out of the ground we think,

"This is Jeffrey Wright."

KELLY: We didn't know where Susan Wright was.

We didn't know where Jeffrey's children were.

Did somebody abduct them and kill Jeffrey?

There were a lot of unanswered questions.

JENNA: The media first hears about this murder

the next day.

Things like this did not happen in this part of Houston,

and they did not happen with families like the Wrights.

So, this instantly had the focus of media,

from not only Houston and Texas, but around the nation.

I was at work sitting at my desk and the phone rang

and it was our sales rep and he told me

what happened to Jeff.

And I was just in shock. I just couldn't believe it.

He was my friend.

JENNA: Jeff and Susan Wright, by all accounts,

were a happy couple.

They were young, beautiful. They had two little kids.

I mean, they seemed to be living the American dream.

JEFF: Oh, this is nice.

RETHA: He was a good father, a good family man.

Was just a good person. Jeff didn't deserve being stabbed.

[dramatic sting]

SGT. MARK: I start searching out Susan Wright

and her family members.

And we don't know what role any of 'em have

or what information any of 'em may have,

so several of my partners are out looking for 'em.

They find the home of Susan's parents.

They find the home of her sister,

but nobody responds to the investigators.

"What's going on here or why won't you let us talk to her?"

Later, we found out she "checked herself"

into a psychiatric facility.

[dramatic sting]

193 stab wounds.

BRIAN: I've seen all kinds of trials in this town

and this was gonna be the trial of the century.

KELLY: [thumping table] ...like you're mad, like you're afraid,

like you can't, can't stop. That's not--

NEAL: Objection, your Honor.

I'm going to ask the prosecutor

to get back down in her seat.

KELLY: Jeffrey Wright is brutally,

brutally, horribly murdered.

Where is his wife? Why is she hiding?

We didn't know what was going on in the beginning.

MURRAY: Defense attorney, Neal Davis,

informed the Harris County Sheriff's Office

that Susan Wright was receiving psychiatric care

in a hospital.

I believe the children were

with Susan's parents at that time.

Why is she in a psych ward? Who put her there?

How'd they get her in there?

All those questions, I didn't have the answers to

and it didn't make any sense.

[dramatic instrumental]

Susan has not given a statement to the police

and once Neal Davis has identified himself

as her lawyer,

all communications that law enforcement would attempt

with her have to go through him by law.

[dramatic sting]

[tense instrumental]

According to the fingerprints

taken by the medical examiner's office,

the deceased was in fact identified as Jeff Wright.

When he's laying on a table, you could see him

and you got this massive amount of stab wounds.

On his chest, on his abdomen, legs, and groin.

193 stab wounds.

The medical examiner was able to locate a piece of metal

in the top of his head, which was consistent

to the tip of the knife found in a flower pot.

They also found some red wax on his legs

and on his buttocks.

Whoever committed this murder didn't just kill Jeffrey.

There was this nick, not a stab, to his penis

and to his eyeball, and those to me

were the signs of torture.

We got into the investigation and it turns out

that three days before Jeff's body is discovered,

Susan reports Jeff to the police for abusing her and Bradley.

SGT. TRACY: Susan claimed that her and Jeff had a fight.

He had struck their son.

She claimed that he had assaulted her

and then threw a MasterCard at her for $100

and then walked away from his truck and wasn't coming back,

which would explain why his truck was still there.

The Jeff, that I knew, he would never abuse his children.

He loved them so much.

JEFF: Woohoo!

Finally, we were able to talk to Susan Wright's sister

and to Susan Wright's parents and to get confirmation

that their children were okay.

But we were never able to speak to Susan.

The only person doing all the talking

on behalf of Susan Wright was Neal Davis, her lawyer.

NEAL: She has been in psychiatric care.

She has been beaten for four years, verbally abused.

Her son was struck at least twice by the deceased.

KELLY: Neal Davis's argument to the media

is that she's a battered wife, she's abused,

and that she had to resort to this level to defend herself

and her children from the imminent threat

that Jeffrey Wright was.

We've got nothing to hide.

We're just interested in fairness and justice.

[dramatic sting]

I wasn't terribly surprised that they had to admit

she killed Jeffrey, because who in the heck else

would've done it.

I was more surprised with the way they presented

the abuse and why she felt the need to kill Jeffrey.

If you're a battered spouse, your state of mind,

based upon continuing chronic, systemic abuse,

is not going to be the same as any one of us

in this room when we're confronted with imminent danger.

You may have a different picture of what type of danger

is imminent and whether or not your response to use force

or deadly force is reasonable.

[dramatic sting]

Well, you have to remember that I grew up

in an abusive house and I lived with a mom

that let a man abuse her for way too long.

So, I was never gonna just discount a woman saying

she was abused and blow it off. That was not gonna happen.

But I also wanted the proof.

I took statements from friends and family

and we learned that Susan's family did not like Jeff.

They didn't want her marrying him to begin with

because he had a possession of marijuana.

He had been arrested for theft and a bad check.

Her parents had begged her to leave him and take the kids,

but no one saw any injuries.

There were no written reports

or documented incidents for domestic violence.

She also threw in the allegation that Jeffrey used cocaine,

and when he did, that would make him more prone

to lose his temper and become abusive to her and the kids.

Jeff had cocaine in his system at the time he died.

But on all of the interviews that were done with people

that knew Jeff, was that he was a hard worker,

a personable guy, a good provider.

He placed his family as a-- as a high priority in his life.

In Texas, if you intentionally take somebody's life,

that's a murder case.

If she was abused in this situation,

this night when the stabbing happened,

maybe she could claim self-defense at trial,

which would make her not guilty,

But she's still gonna be looking at murder charges

being filed against her.

MURRAY: In this case, the evidence available

was a very bloody, brutal crime scene.

You are looking at a body that had been stabbed 193 times

and buried, disposed of and hidden.

If you're a prosecutor who's been around

for longer than five minutes,

these things are not gonna scream out self-defense to you.

You're probably wondering,

"Well, then how did she get those bruises on her hands

"and fingers when she made her domestic violence report

"a few days before Jeffrey's body was even found?"

I think that Susan might've gotten

a couple of the bruises from murdering Jeffrey.

She might've gotten some of the scratches from the knife

she was holding, but I bet she got most of those bruises

from taking apart a four poster bed

and dragging a 220 pound body across her bedroom,

across her patio and putting him in that hole.

She probably got pretty dinged-up doing all that.

[dramatic sting]

We know from the medical examiner,

Jeffrey was killed on the 13th.

I think that after she committed her murder,

Susan somehow thought she could make it all go away.

Tell people that Jeffrey ran off.

It looked like a cover-up gone wrong

or a big old change in plans

because it just got overwhelming.

And so, the police report that Susan made

at the constable's office was on the 15th.

Then, she hired a lawyer and then she checked herself

into a psychiatric facility to hide out from the police.

Susan Wright had supportive parents.

Susan Wright had a wonderful sister.

Susan Wright is a beautiful, healthy American woman.

She could have gotten out. It might have been rough.

Jeffrey didn't want a divorce,

but that's not an excuse to commit murder.

[dramatic sting]

When charges are finally filed against Susan,

Neal Davis does what any good defense attorney

would do at that time, which is orchestrate her surrender.

*

As we are getting ready to go to trial,

Susan Wright is out on bond, which is not unexpected.

She's just living her life waiting

until time to go to trial.

To me, the evidence in this case was pretty clear.

Susan Wright murdered Jeffrey

and I need to show a jury how cold bloodedly

and diabolically she tied him up and got on top of him

before she started stabbing him.

funny to look at all this stuff

because it was such a part of my life 20 years ago,

and all of these things are such an important part

of the story.

[rousing instrumental]

In preparing to go to trial,

I would've been pretty stupid to not appreciate

all of the things that Susan had going for her

as a sympathetic defendant.

BRIAN: How could a woman who looks like she could be

the prototypical West Houston soccer mom

find herself charged with murder,

a crime that carries a possible punishment of 99 years

or a life in a penitentiary?

KELLY: She's beautiful. She's young.

She has a wonderfully supportive family.

Most of our murder defendants don't have

any of those things going for 'em,

much less all of those things.

So, what punishment do you give a defendant

who looks like her, who claims she was abused?

That was always gonna be the obstacle

and the issue in this case.

The only way to counteract that

is to make a jury understand, no matter how she looks,

what happened in that bedroom that night

was the opposite of anything you might ever think

this beautiful woman could have done.

MURRAY: Kelly is already very well known within

the District attorney's office.

She definitely had a reputation with her--

with her country accent and--

and her ability to relate to a jury and try tough cases.

Kelly Siegler versus Todd Ward and Neal Davis,

the State vs. Susan Wright was going to be

the Harris County trial of the century.

NEAL: I'm hopeful we'll have a jury who will be fair

and impartial and will set their emotions aside.

[dramatic sting]

Susan Lucille Wright stabbed

and mutilated her husband, Jeffrey Wright,

on January 13th, 2003.

Theirs was not a perfect marriage.

The evidence will show you that. But whose is?

Susan decided that she didn't want to get a divorce

and that her better answer was to just eliminate Jeffrey.

She also knew she was gonna get a life insurance policy.

$200,000. This case is not about self-defense.

This case is about selfishness.

She put all those wheels in motion

way before that horrible night in January.

"Die, bitch." Those were the words

that Jeffrey Wright told Susan Wright

the evening of January 13th, 2003,

when he hovered over her in the bed with a knife.

Nobody deserved to suffer the fate that Jeff Wright did.

But make no mistake, I think there was a side

of Jeff Wright that he did not want others to see.

That side existed.

For years before this incident,

Jeffrey Wright kicked, pushed and punched Susan Wright

BRIAN: I think that marriages where abuse is systemic,

women can't leave, women don't leave.

Susan Wright had two kids. She had nowhere to go.

They struggle and she gets the knife and she stabs Jeff.

And she stabs him several times but she's in such a panic.

She thought her husband was still alive.

She goes and she gets a neck ti and ties his hand to the bed

and she continues stabbing him.

She believed that she had to use, not just force,

but deadly force to repel and attack from her husband

that she believed meant the difference

between life and death.

[dramatic sting]

KELLY: How do you claim self-defense

when the person you're defending yourself against

can't use his hands and he is laying on a bed tied up

and he can't move?

What are you defending yourself against, exactly?

I always believed that I had to drive home to a jury

and not just tell 'em about what Susan did

in that bedroom that night, but show 'em.

We had left the bed downstairs in the special crimes division.

We had the bed brought up and me and the--

the sheriff's investigators put it back together.

[Susan sniveling]

KELLY: You gotta make it come alive.

You can't just sit in your chair

and talk to the witness in the stand

and just discuss it theoretically.

You gotta make it hit home to a jury.

Hit 'em upside the head with it. That's what you have to do.

And any prosecutor that doesn't do that,

is not doing their job.

I wanted the jury to go, "God! Okay.

"She did that and you want me to say Jeffrey was a jerk

"of a husband, therefore excuse our conduct? Uh-uh."

MURRAY: You have Neal and you have Todd

who are just looking at it like a freight train

that they can't get off the tracks for.

[chuckling] They had objected in advance,

but that freight train is coming.

[dramatic sting]

[ominous instrumental] wanted the b

and Jeffrey Wright admitted into evidence

because we wanted to take that bed

and show the jury exactly what that bed was

that night in their house.

It was a murder weapon, just like the knife.

The bed was assembled and it was showtime.

JUDGE: All rise for the jury please.

Kelly, absolutely, is known for the great level of empathy

that she has for the victims of any violent crime.

She had many meetings with Jeff Wright's family.

She wasn't gonna let them be surprised by--

by how upsetting the evidence was about to become for them.

When you're a prosecutor, your job is to seek justice.

Jeffrey Wright's family was a typical good family.

What happened to them was horrible.

KELLY: Detective Reynolds, are these the pieces recovered

from the scene on Barry Sea Road?

SGT. MARK: Yes, ma'am. They are

KELLY: If I stand next to the defendant

and we're both barefooted,

do we appear to be the same height?

-SGT. MARK: Very close. -Okay. Thank you.

Is Paul Doyle the same size and approximate height

as Jeffrey Wright?

-6'2", 220? -Yes, ma'am.

MURRAY: Paul Doyle is another prosecutor

that I had luckily convinced Kelly

had a much more similar stature and build

to Jeff Wright than I did.

I was definitely not gonna be the guy

they demonstrated in the bed.

KELLY: Do you think I could take a knife away from him?

NEAL: Objection. Speculation, your Honor.

The District Attorney's office at that time was--

It was still fairly old fashioned

and there was a rule in the employee handbook

that any female prosecutor in trial

had to wear a skirt or a dress.

KELLY: So on that day, I had to get permission

to wear a pants suit, not a skirt.

And I don't think I even told them

it was 'cause I need to straddle somebody.

How about if you stand at that corner right there,

right by Mr. Davis?

The risk I was taking with the jury,

trying to show them exactly how this went down,

they could have thought I was being too theatrical.

I didn't want to even have one juror kind of do this,

"Mm-hmm." Because it only takes one juror that you upset

and you're toast.

But I also hoped that by the time I argued to them,

they would understand why I did it

and they would deliver the verdict

that I thought was justice.

Show the jury the way the left wrist was tied.

Kelly made sure that Mark Reynolds did a really good job

of-- of duplicating and setting up the scene

to make it as close to the night of the murder.

SGT. MARK: I had examined the ligatures at the autopsy

when they were cleaned up,

and then later after they were removed.

KELLY: What Susan did that night,

she started out flirting.

She stripped down, he stripped down or she helped him,

she talked him and teased him into letting her tie up.

Probably his feet first and then his hands.

This wasn't the first time they did this.

They'd done it before.

And what tells me that is the candle wax.

It was found by his groin and by his penis.

'cause she was teasing him with that too, to set the scene.

So if-- if the defendant were to get up on top

of Jeffrey Wright, something like this and straddle him,

and she's right-handed and attack at the head area first,

which side of his face are most of the injuries

-gonna be on? -On the left side.

MURRAY: During the bed demonstration,

Susan is cognizant of the fact that people are watching her.

So, she is trying to act like this bed horrifies her.

It felt like she was making some mistakes

with when she would cry and how she would cry.

She wasn't coached very well, in my opinion.

Where were most of the wounds concentrated

on the body of Jeffrey Wright?

In the chest. The neck and the chest.

KELLY: Did you see anything consistent

with a stab to the penis?

Not to the penis itself. No.

KELLY: Because you saw what?

It was nicked. It-- it was a superficial cut.

Like more of a slicing.

KELLY: Superficial slicings like this?

-Right. -MURRAY: It was all Kelly.

She became Susan Wright and she got her message across

very loud and very clear on how horrible

the final moments of Jeff Wright actually were.

KELLY: We're never gonna have the time

to go through 193 stab wounds.

To me, in addition to the number,

was the fact that there was some overkill,

nicks and pricks.

Susan stuck him in the eye and stuck him in the penis.

How is that self-defense?

If he's like this, tied up and she's on top of him

somehow she can stab him towards the center of his back

or below that blade.

I think you'll be surprised at his mobility

once you put that knife in his chest.

Neal Davis wanted to make a big deal

out of the very few stab wounds that were toward the back

of Jeffrey's body, and Mark Reynolds answered him and said,

"If you're twisting and turning

"and trying with all your might to get away

"from being tied up, she's gonna slip a little.

"The knife is gonna get bloody a little.

"It's not gonna be a perfectly completely

"all in the front fight."

[rousing instrumental]

BRIAN: What Kelly did, recreating her take

on what happened was genius.

It was courtroom theater.

JENNA: Everyone was riveted.

We had not seen that level of drama and demonstration

in a courtroom ever.

KELLY: There are people out there to this day

that think it was too much, it was too dramatic.

I've heard the criticism,

but I'll stick with what I believe.

After putting on all those witnesses

and doing the demonstration and then turning out

as well as I hoped it would, we rested our case.

And then, it was time for us to hear once and for all

what the defense was really gonna say happened.

Your honor, the defense would call Susan Wright.

JUDGE: Hurry up.

MURRAY: If there was any moment

that was going to outshine the bed demonstration,

it was going to be Susan Wright's testimony.

When they called Susan Wright to the stand,

my first thought was, "Great!"

Because we have no idea what they're gonna say.

She's never been interviewed.

BRIAN: What type of things would set Jeff off?

SUSAN: If the light bills were more than what he thought

they should be, if the house wasn't perfect,

if dinner was bad.

Susan spends the entire first part of her testimony

describing her relationship with-- with Jeff.

SUSAN: He continually punched me in the chest

and in the stomach until he wasn't angry anymore.

He told me that he had a past problem with drugs,

but that he had been in recovery for quite a while.

The defense spent a good amount of time building up

how bad Jeffrey was.

That he was a jerk. That he was mean.

That he was insulting. And they should have.

That was a smart strategy to try to use.

BRIAN: Jeff came home the 13th Monday evening,

and what did he want to do?

He had just gotten done with a boxing lesson

and he wanted to box with Bradley.

Jeff got his hands up and started making jabs

at Bradley's head.

BRIAN: What did Jeff's eyes look like?

SUSAN: Red and glassy.

He was very agitated and very excitable.

The fact that the autopsy showed

that Jeff had cocaine in his system

adds at least incrementally credence to Susan's story

because people who are high on cocaine sometimes

not only act out, but appear to have strength

beyond their normal parameters.

I walked up to him and I told him

that I thought that he needed help with his anger

and with drugs.

[shaking voice] He threw me to the ground.

My head hit the ottoman and he was kicking me.

And he said, "Die, bitch," and it opened up my eyes.

BRIAN: Did you see the same butcher knife you're seeing?

[Susan sniveling] I saw it in his hand and it was by his head

and it was shining off the lights.

And I got it from him.

I got it and it was in my right hand

and I pushed him as hard as I could.

I pushed him off of me.

KELLY: To say that Jeffrey and Susan struggled

over a knife makes no sense.

Jeffrey outweighed Susan by exactly 100 pounds

and he was almost a foot taller than her.

I was afraid that if I left the room

that Jeff was gonna get up and he was gonna come after me.

[sniffling] And then I tied up his right arm to the bed

so that he couldn't get up.

She's trying to make the jury believe

that she somehow is able to overpower him

and get the knife and she ties up his hands.

SUSAN: I started stabbing him again

and I couldn't stop because I was so scared.

And the reason she is stabbing him

because she is broken with reality.

BRIAN: You dragged him off the bed?

-Yes I did. -BRIAN: Did you hit anything?

SUSAN: I hit the nightstand

and the candle went flying and it fell on Jeff.

[dramatic sting]

KELLY: So, she said that the candle wax got knocked over

when she went to put him on the dolly

to take him outside to the hole.

But come on, think about where the end table is.

How the hell is it gonna get on his groin?

'Cause she was teasing him with that to set the mood,

to set the scene.

Now, at what point in the middle of him

being tightly tied up, it turned into rage

and violence and murder? I don't know.

When that gate opens, Kelly has to make a decision,

"Should I act like I'm sympathetic

"to what she has gone through or should I be dismissive of it

"and blow it out of the water?"

I started that cross-examination with the plan

to be very calm and even keeled and not get bitchy.

But it was easy to get annoyed with her

because she was lying.

By Saturday, you had gone to the doctor,

gone to the cops, tried bleach, tried paint,

tried to get rid of the carpet-

I was cleaning.

I thought it was dirty and I ha to make the house clean

because Jeff was going to be mad.

KELLY: That's right. And all the years of your marriage

to Jeff, you always cleaned up the dirt with paint, didn't you

No, but the house was dirty

and I had to make the house perfect.

She decided to go hard at Susan

and there was certainly a-- a risk in that.

KELLY: When you stabbed him the 89th time

or the 158th time, was your arm getting tired?

I was in such a-- a state of shock and panic

and sheer terror and fear that none of that

ever occurred to me.

I remember when I was handling this case,

my husband and I would talk about certain things,

and in this case, the brutalness of 193 stab wounds.

My daughter who was about ten,

she's the one who told me, "Mommy, didn't she get tired?"

And I thought, "Of course, she had to have gotten tired."

That's a picture of his penis.

Unlike what you see on TV, in Texas,

you're required to sit at council table

as you question a witness.

The only reason you get to let you approach a defendant

or a witness is to point out something with evidence.

And I approached Susan Wright because I had a picture.

It was the one of the stab wounds

close to Jeffrey's groin area and I wanted to show her that.

But she did that extra little, like,

she was so, "Oh, my God!"

Overwhelmed with that picture and that just pissed me off.

Don't be acting so offended by what you did.

You didn't stab his penis. That's not a stab like this.

[table thumping] Like you're mad. Like you're afraid.

Like you can't-- can't stop.

NEAL: Objection. Your Honor, ask the prosecutor

to get back down in the seat please

and refrain from doing this two feet from the witness.

I did not sit there and slice at him. I did not do that.

-KELLY: Yes you did, didn't you -No, I did not. No.

KELLY: Immediately after the cross-examination,

we took a break and a couple of people said,

"Damn, girl. You went kind of hard at her."

And I thought, "Ooh, I don't know if I want to hear that."

So, I wasn't a 100% sure of what the jury thought.

You have to determine if Susan Wright was in imminent fear

and whether she acted in self-defense.

Because she looks like that she thinks she can get awa

with fooling all 12 of you.

She turned that bedroom into a torture chamber.

She turned that bed into a butcher block.

She is guilty of murder.

After a week and a half of testimony,

the jury took five hours to come up with a verdict.

JUDGE: Please stand.

JUDGE: We, the jury, find the defendant,

Susan Lucille Wright, guilty of murder

as charged in the indictment.

[cinematic rumbling bass]

KELLY: Obviously, I was happy with the answer,

but once the jury found Susan Wright guilty of murder,

the biggest, most important, most difficult part

of the trial was still to come; her punishment.

In Texas, we have a very unique system.

Texas lets juries, and not judges,

assess punishment in non-death penalty cases.

KELLY: The worries that I had going

into the punishment phase were that they were going

to buy into the marriage being a bad one

and they were gonna cut her slack.

There is a real world where Susan Wright can get

as little as five years probation for murder.

KELLY: The whole game in this trial

was making the jury understand she does not deserve probation

or the minimum range of punishment

or anywhere close to that

for what she did to Jeffrey Wright.

We certainly had the-- the very sympathetic testimony

of-- of Jeff's family.

MURRAY: Those were certainly emotional pulls

for the jury to consider.

Ultimately, the jury comes back pretty quickly.

KELLY: Jeffrey's family asked

why it wasn't life without parole,

but they're never gonna be happy with the answer.

How could they be? Their family had been broken forever.

And the kids, they went to live

with Jeffrey's brother and his wife.

To let them grow up without her being anywhere around them

to further ruin their lives.

[rousing instrumental]

The judge found that her trial lawyers

in our trial didn't put on enough of a defense

about a battered wife.

I remember thinking they didn't do it

the way I thought they would do it.

I can't argue with that.

Does she deserve a whole new punishment hearing

because of that strategic choice that they all made?

I didn't think she did.

I was able to get Susan a new punishment hearing

and shave, ultimately, five years off

of her original 25 years sentence.

So what? The second jury pretty much saw it

the exact same way.

They all had to go through all that misery

and pain all over again.

So in the end, what was the point?

[dramatic music]

Susan Wright, the woman dubbed "The Blue-Eyed Butcher,"

guess what folks? She's outta prison.

Released this morning at 9:30 from this facility,

this women's facility right behind me.

In December of 2020,

when Susan Wright was released from prison,

the media went crazy.

They were blowing up my phone. It was all over the news.

They were hounding her. It was a really big story.

Please don't do this to my family. Please stop.

Have a heart, please.

KELLY: If the courtroom is a theater of law,

then this trial had its share of theater.

Some would say more than its share.

I say, just enough.

People don't want me to talk about

what she was doing on top of that bed, on top of his body

'cause that's inflammatory and that's over the top

and that's grandstanding? Gimme a break.

It was the right thing to do.

'Cause I guarantee you, there is not one single person

that was in that courtroom that walked away

not knowing exactly what Susan Wright did that night

she decided to murder Jeffrey.

Susan Wright served her sentence.

Her children and Jeffrey's family are still

paying their sentence.

They're still suffering because Jeffrey's gone forever.

That's never gonna change. We don't use the word closure.

What the hell is closure? Closure means gaining peace.

That's a bunch of bull[bleep].

All we can try to get in the real world is justice.