2 cases tagged “Lifetime movie”
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: Celeste Beard Johnson
At 3:00 in the morning on October 2, 1999, Tracey Tarlton crept into a sleeping man's bedroom in the affluent Westlake Hills neighborhood of Austin, Texas, and pressed a 20-gauge shotgun against his abdomen. Steven Beard, a 76-year-old retired Fox Broadcasting executive worth millions, never heard her coming. His much younger wife was asleep in a separate wing of their lakeside mansion. Or so she claimed. Celeste Beard Johnson was beautiful, charming, and seemingly devoted. She was also, investigators would discover, spending at a pace that defied grief: more than $670,000 burned through in the months surrounding her husband's wounding and death. When Tarlton was arrested six days after the shooting, police found a shrine of Celeste's photographs in her home. When Tarlton finally broke her silence, she described a calculated manipulation, a manufactured love affair, and a cold-blooded plot to collect an inheritance. Celeste's own twin daughters took the stand against her. A phone call, recorded by one of those daughters, captured Celeste screaming that she had 'hired somebody' to have Tarlton silenced. In March 2003, a Travis County jury found Celeste Beard Johnson guilty of capital murder. She is currently serving a life sentence at the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, Texas, with parole eligibility not until 2042, when she will be nearly 80 years old. She has always maintained her innocence. Her daughters disagree.
