'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse (20 page)

This rage was directed toward anyone who did not give her what she wanted, or withheld from her or disappointed her. In turn she was prompted to relive the feelings of murderous hatred that she experienced for the people in her life who had first rejected her—a transformation called traumatic reenactment. All of these people merge into one person (her husbands, her daughters, her lovers—basically everyone in her life). She threatens suicide as a manipulative ploy. Celeste could be fighting an underlying impulse to kill herself, and in an attempt to defend against it (or not feel it), she becomes ferocious and murderous to the people around her. Who did Steve Beard represent to her? She viewed him as a man who constricted her control over her own life.

Both Steve and Tracey were vulnerable when they met Celeste. Steve was a grieving widower and Tracey was a mentally ill, romantic obsessive, who had just been hospitalized. Celeste’s emotional zone was limited. She was either at a rest/calm state or in a state of rage. There were not a lot of subtleties in her emotional repertoire. This type of person can easily go into a homicidal frenzy when angered.

Celeste had some type of fantasy in her head of what Steve should be or should have done for her after she married him. He clearly did not live up to her fantasy. She felt extremely entitled and that all of his money was in fact hers. Without a broad range of feelings it does not matter if you are alive or dead. The only thing that matters is getting rid of the annoyance and the discomfort. Celeste did not have mature problem-solving skills. She just wanted to eliminate anyone who got in her way. It was her for her. The incest and abuse she had experienced could have contributed to her reasons for marrying Steve Beard. He was old enough to be her father. She might have married him as a way to have legitimate sex with her “father” instead of incestuous sex. But the marriage may have helped her to reexperience the murderous feelings she had toward her father.

I had a chance to meet and talk with Celeste’s two daughters during a
Catherine Crier Live
show on Court TV. They were decent girls who adored Steve Beard and considered him a loving adoptive father. They were deeply saddened by his death and remain close with the Beard family to this day. They also loved their biological father, whom they considered a loving man who had taken good care of them until his suicide. It is interesting to see that children, despite being genetically linked to their parents, can still be so constitutionally unlike them. Celeste Beard’s girls were nothing like her. They wanted to connect and to make something out of themselves and their lives. But in Celeste’s world, even her daughters weren’t safe, since their mother could not experience them as separate human beings. They were useful to her only if she could see them as extensions of herself. Once she couldn’t, she threatened to get rid of them, too.

9

The Revenge Killer

M
ANY
murders are motivated by revenge, a very common yet noxious desire for retribution.

Although revenge is frequently discussed in this book, the revenge killer’s motivation is leveling the score. For example, while some revenge murders are spontaneous, many are carried out with calm and precision. By nature, the revenge killer is a victim of his/her own emotions. Lacking the ability to handle negative emotions often leads to an overpowering sense of abandonment or rejection. Yet, unlike the average person who seeks help from the outside, the revenge killer remains tormented. It should be noted that many revenge killers have endured long-term abuse—be it verbal, sexual, and/or physical. Interestingly, while this perpetrator is unable to deal with an emotional crisis, he is very capable of organizing an attack. In such cases, the individual has reached a point where his emotions are insufferably disordered and torturous. A solution is found by pathologically attempting to regain some measure of control, and usually, murder is the
only
answer.

* * * * *

SUSAN WRIGHT
was a twenty-seven-year-old stay-at-home mother of two young children. She was blond and attractive, a former waitress and topless dancer. She met her husband, Jeff, thirty-two, a carpet salesman, in 1997 on a beach in Galveston, Texas. Eight months pregnant when they married, Susan was looking forward to a happy life, given her husband’s enthusiasm for a warm home and healthy family. But Jeff was also demanding, and as the years passed, Susan developed an uncanny level of perfectionism. She cooked and cleaned with neurotic precision, and dinner was
always
on time for her husband.

Until one day when she decided to stop.

O
N
January 18, 2003, Jeff Wright’s body was discovered in a shallow grave in the backyard of the Wrights’ suburban Houston home. He had been stabbed 193 times.

Prior to the discovery of the body, Susan told friends that the couple had an argument and Jeff had walked out. It was only
after
Jeff had been missing for nearly a week and was subsequently fired from his job that Susan came forth, via an attorney, claiming to have killed him. Susan argued that her husband returned home that night from a boxing lesson in a drug-induced state and slapped their son, Bradley. When she confronted Jeff, he became enraged and dragged her to the bedroom where he raped her and threatened her with a knife. Susan claimed she kicked Jeff in the groin, retrieved the knife, and stabbed him repeatedly, saying she couldn’t stop because she feared he would steal the knife back and kill her.

It was the end, she said, of a relationship that had soured soon after their son was born. Jeff, she said, became more controlling, even becoming abusive and violent when she failed to fulfill his wishes. Her life with Jeff, she said, was a living hell filled with constant beatings and mental torture. If she was late returning home from the store or her parents’ home, he would accuse her of cheating.

Susan’s family supported her claims of beatings and mental torture when the case went to trial in March 2004. Susan’s sister testified that she had intervened during one of the couple’s argument, bringing Susan and the two children to her home, where they spent one night before returning to Jeff. Susan’s mother testified that she had seen her daughter with blackened eyes, and Susan claimed that her husband’s temper would worsen when he did drugs. Indeed, the night Jeff was killed he had cocaine in his system. He was also unfaithful, she argued, and many of his girlfriends called their home. Worse still, Susan alleged that she had contracted herpes from him. Their marriage, said her attorney, was a “brutal, terrifying, sadistic relationship that spanned years” and Susan had to “kill or be killed.” Jeff died, Susan said, because she “didn’t want to die.”

Prosecutors, however, had a different version of the events that led up to Jeff’s death and pointed to evidence indicating his murder was calculated. They portrayed Jeff as a charming man who loved his family; an all-around good guy well liked by neighbors and coworkers. Friends testified that Susan and Jeff’s relationship was something out of
Ozzie and Harriet.
In effect, the prosecution’s case centered on the idea that Susan tied her husband to the bedpost with the promise of a romantic evening before killing him—all to gain his $200,000 life insurance. To prove their point, they said that after Susan stabbed her husband over and over and over again, she dragged his body to a makeshift pit in their backyard and buried him to hide the evidence. As for the extreme number of knife wounds, prosecutors argued that Susan rested at times before continuing. That, they said, gave her ample time to stop. Indeed, many of the 193 knife wounds were on the front, left side of his body, from the groin up to the face. She even stabbed him in the eye.

In the end, the jury believed the prosecution, and Susan Wright was found guilty of murder. She was sentenced to serve twenty-five years in prison.

* * * * *

I
T
is interesting that evidence was presented suggesting that Susan had grown up in an abusive household, with her mother suffering regular beatings at the hands of her father. During the trial, however, Susan’s mother testified there had been no abuse, and the line of questioning ended. Later, however, during a network interview, Susan’s sister, Cindy Stewart, a psychologist with a Ph.D., confirmed that the sisters repeatedly saw their mother abused by their father. The memory of the beatings, Cindy argued, lurked somewhere in Susan’s mind and left an indelible imprint. From this vantage point, Cindy said, she could understand why Susan stabbed her husband 193 times.

“She stabbed Jeff for all the times that he punched her in the chest, and she stabbed him for all of the times that he raped her in the middle of the night. And she stabbed Jeff because he was just like her father.”

Still, others argued that while Susan may have resented her husband for all the abuse heaped upon her, it was Jeff who secretly resented his wife, despite statements that the marriage had made him a “changed” man. As an example, during their whirlwind courtship, Susan told Jeff that she was taking birth control pills regularly, yet somehow she managed to get pregnant. Given that the pill is 99 percent effective, the most effective form of birth control on the market, Jeff couldn’t help but think Susan had lied. Feeling both pressured and enraged, Jeff nonetheless decided to do the right thing, and with Susan eight months pregnant, they married.

Susan’s depiction of her marriage spoke of a change in the couple’s relationship soon after the birth of their first child, Bradley. Jeff proved to be a perfectionist and, in turn, became very demanding of his new wife. Susan claimed that he would fly off the handle when something was out of place, such as a few of the kids’ toys strewn on the floor. For Jeff, if things were not exactly to his liking, anything could happen—and it usually wasn’t good. Furthermore, there were problems arising from Jeff’s drug dependence and his affairs with other women. Susan argued that such issues fueled episodes of rage, and it was she who was often the brunt of Jeff’s impulsive brutality.

If you believe the prosecution’s depiction, Susan had taken matters into her own hands using her own form of vigilante revenge. Her husband was not going to change, and if she wasn’t going to get rid of him, who was? Some people choose spouses because unconsciously the same negative and familiar feelings they have about themselves are experienced with their spouses. This is called repetition compulsion. We gravitate toward the familiar in an attempt to fix it and make it better. Prosecutor Kelly Siegler told the jury that it was clear that Susan and her husband had an unhealthy marriage that was destined for failure, but she argued this conditions still could not explain the degree of rage behind Jeff’s murder.

Behind her beautiful and seductive façade, Susan had an anger problem. While she and her husband allegedly had an abusive relationship, the severity of Jeff’s wounds and the way in which she attacked him could not be justified as self-defense. Susan had never sought medical attention for her wounds and she had not suffered the characteristic bruising and broken bones typical of battered wives. The people around her were not aware of the severity of the situation. Instead, it appeared more likely that there had indeed been a desire to even up some perceived score and that revenge had been the probable motivation.

But let us rewind back to the moment of the crime.

According to the police, Susan was sick of the lies and sick of the abuse. She had a lot of time to think about her escape route, and murder appeared to be the best way for her to escape. After Jeff returned home from a hard day’s work Susan knew exactly what she needed to do. Insisting that her husband never turned down a night of wild sex, after she put her two children to bed, she set the stage for the ultimate evening of sexual exhilaration. According to the prosecution’s reconstruction of the evening, there were flickering candles carefully placed around the bedroom and to further set the mood, Susan dripped hot red wax all over her husband’s excited body: first on his thigh, then on his genitals. There was even some left over for his buttocks.

Once the sex commenced, it was argued that Jeff was completely lost in his own desires. Susan was in the power seat now, and she coyly talked him into allowing her to tie him to the bedposts: first his left arm, then his right, and then finally his legs. Before Jeff realized what was happening, Susan pulled out a knife. Coolly and deliberately, she proceeded to stab him nearly two hundred times, from his head to his ankles. Many of the wounds came from directly on top of him, while others came from the side. There were superficial lacerations to the penis as well.

The logical interpretation here, as her sister Cindy argued, would be that Susan stabbed her husband in the penis for all the times he raped her, and in the leg for all the times he kicked her. One could also suggest that some of those 193 stab wounds were for all of the times Susan claimed her father beat her and her mother. Additionally, as we know, there was also evidence that Susan took a little break while on her vengeful rampage. This is particularly interesting. Why stop, pause, and then continue? While we may never know with certainty, a good guess would be that she wanted to be certain her victim was dead. Fear plays a major role in abusive relationships, and Susan Wright’s relationship was no exception. One could argue that by murdering her husband, Susan faced her greatest fear and defeated it.

After all was said and done she dragged her husband’s lifeless and bloodied body into a shallow grave in the family’s backyard. The murder weapon, a small hunting knife, was placed in a flowerpot on the patio. (The tip of the knife was later found in Jeffrey’s brain.) Susan then cut the bedroom rug and bought bleach and paint to cover up the bloodstains. The bed frame, box spring, and bloodstained mattress were found partially disassembled and placed in the backyard. Receipts confirmed the purchase of the bleach, paint, and the potting soil used to ensure that the body was completely covered. Susan’s revenge was complete.