Posted 3/03/2004 06:07:00 PM by Douglas

Poor Susan, the stripper with the heart o' gold.

She thought she found Mr. (w)Right, but it turns out she was subject to a vicious cycle of abuse.

After watching Susan Wright face a caustic cross-examination Tuesday, a jury began deliberating the fate of the former topless dancer accused of tying her husband to a bed and stabbing him 193 times.

She underwent three hours of cross-examination Tuesday morning by Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler, who asked why she dumped her husband's body in a hole in the back yard and covered it with gardening soil. It was recovered five days later.

"What was your plan? Were you going to make a little flowerbed there after everyone forgot about Jeff?" Siegler asked.

These are all good question. What was the plan here? Eventually, someone is going to notice that he's gone, even if it's just the insurance company when you go to collect the $200,000 life insurance policy.

Wright said she was suffering from post-traumatic stress delusions that her husband was still alive and trying to kill her.

"There was no plan," she said. "I thought I had to weigh him down because he was going to get up and be very mad."

I'm no doctor, but I think stab wounds 1 through 114 would probably be enough to keep him from getting up mad. But just to be sure, how about 79 more stab wounds for good measure? And I don't think there's any question about her "post-traumatic stress delusion" afterwards. Murder can be very stressful, I'd imagine.

Prosecutors say she used the seductive powers that she honed while working at a Houston strip club to lure her husband into their candlelit bedroom on Jan. 13, 2003, tie his wrists and ankles to the bedposts and then kill him.

Is there an easier scapegoat than Houston strip clubs? Maybe she was just mad because he stopped tipping her after they got married? I think it puts a big dent in her abuse defense if she "lured him into their candlelit bedroom" the night of the murder. He may have beaten the crap out of her the day before, but when you tie someone to the bed and stab them 193 times, it's really difficult to see that as anything but a heartless, brutal act of murder.

I love it when prosecutors become so abusive:

Siegler was skeptical of Wright's claim that she wrestled the knife away from a man who weighed 100 pounds more than she.

"It was my sheer will to live," Wright said.

"Say that again. That was good," Siegler said sarcastically. "What did you say? `My sheer will to live?' "

Siegler told jurors not to trust Wright.

Well that's pretty much his job, isn't it? "Sheer will to live?" That along with the restraints that she put on his appendages.

Earlier Tuesday, Wright broke down when Siegler showed her an autopsy photo of injuries to Jeffrey Wright's penis and accused her of torturing him.

"What you did was nick at it," Siegler said. "That's a slice, isn't it?"

"No, I didn't slice and nick at him," Wright said, raising her voice, sobbing and turning away from the photo.

Who's this Nick they keep talking about? I would think that out of 193 stabs, some of them would have to land south of the border.

Yet again, a Houston trial is getting lots of attention. The salacious details of this trial will no doubt garner some national media attention, whatever that's worth. But after Robert Durst, Andrea Yates, Clara Harris, Anna Nicole, and Enron, it's good to see a murdering stripper provide the courts of Harris County a little comic relief.