2 cases tagged “female killers”
Convicted: Susan Lucille Wright
On the night of January 13, 2003, a young Houston mother tied her husband to their bed with neckties and a bathrobe sash, then stabbed him 193 times. Forty-one wounds landed on his face. Forty-six on his chest. Seven in the groin. The force was so relentless that a knife tip snapped off inside his skull. Then she dragged his body to the backyard and buried it in a hole he had dug for a garden fountain. She was 26. He was 34, a six-foot-two flooring salesman who weighed 220 pounds. Their children, ages four and eighteen months, were somewhere in the house. Susan Wright's case became one of the most watched murder trials in Texas history: broadcast live on Court TV, dissected on Snapped and 48 Hours, and eventually turned into a Lifetime movie. A prosecutor climbed onto the blood-soaked mattress in open court to reenact the killing. A former fiancée came forward years later with new allegations of Jeff Wright's violence. And through it all, the central question never fully resolved: was Susan Wright a cold-blooded killer who seduced her husband into restraints to collect $200,000 in life insurance, or a battered woman who reached her limit on a January night and could not stop? The answer, locked somewhere in the details of that bedroom, has haunted the case ever since.
Convicted: Lee Ann Armanini Reidel
On a cold January night in 2001, a man stepped into the rear parking lot of a Long Island gym to grab a CD from his car. He never made it back inside. Alexander Algeri, 32, was shot three times in the head and neck by a hired killer who mistook him for his best friend. The intended target, Paul Reidel, was alive. His wife had paid to have him killed. The case of Lee Ann Reidel is a story about money, a crumbling marriage, a mob-connected boyfriend, and a conspiracy so tangled that it destroyed everyone it touched, including an innocent man who had been the best man at the very wedding that set these events in motion. When the jury finally returned its verdict in a Suffolk County courtroom in March 2004, Lee Ann wept. She had smiled through most of the six-week trial. That detail alone tells you something about the woman at the center of this story.
