BENTON — A Traskwood woman charged with two counts of capital murder kept journals detailing the violent crimes and confessed to the killings in a suicide note she left after police searched her backyard, an affidavit says.
Police have said they found the bodies of two men in the backyard of Marissa Wright’s home at 2902 Main St. in Traskwood.
Authorities obtained multiple search warrants for the property after an anonymous tip from a female caller in the case of a Benton alderman’s missing son, Joe Lee Richards Jr., 39.
Benton police arrested Wright on Oct. 6 and charged her with one count of capital murder in the slaying of Richards.
The next day, Wright, 50, was charged by the Saline County sheriff’s office with a second count of capital murder in the death of Randal Anderson, 53.
A letter included with an affidavit and signed by deputy prosecutor Rebecca Bush says the prosecuting attorney’s office plans to seek the death penalty because of Wright’s history of violent crimes.
Wright, formerly Marissa Bragg Sharp, was charged as an accomplice in a murder 22 years ago.
She was granted immunity in 1993 in exchange for her testimony against Frank Pilcher in the April 3, 1989, shooting death of Jeff Rhodes in Benton. Pilcher was sentenced to life in prison.
The 25-page affidavit of probable cause unsealed Thursday by a Saline County circuit judge addresses evidence leading to Wright’s arrest in the death of Richards but gives few details about Anderson.
Saline County sheriff’s office spokesman Scottie Courtney said he anticipates that more information will be filed with the prosecuting attorney’s office in Anderson’s death before a Nov. 15 hearing.
Courtney said the investigation “is still very active” but that he could not confirm whether more arrests would happen.
The official causes of death from the state Crime Laboratory, as well as the autopsy reports for Richards and Anderson, have not been completed, authorities said.
According to the affidavit, Benton investigators were told early in the Richards investigation that he had spent time at Wright’s house on the night of his disappearance, Oct. 8, 2010, and that they had been in a romantic relationship.
Police interviewed Wright and other people who had been at her house that night and had been told that Richards left the house sometime between midnight and 1:30 a.m., the affidavit says.
Police received an anonymous call Nov. 16, 2010, from a pay phone outside the BP Food Mart in Benton. The caller said Wright had shot Richards to death in the bathroom of her house that night, the affidavit says.
The affidavit also says the caller added that Wright had tortured and killed a man named “Randy” in her bedroom two or three years ago. The caller said there was blood all over the walls before Wright painted over it, the document says.
The caller said she was afraid for her life and refused to identify herself, according to the affidavit.
Police pieced together through interviews that Richards had been trying to reach Wright the night of his disappearance, but she had told him to stay away.
The affidavit says Richards had driven to the Traskwood home, where two other people said they had been cooking methamphetamine in the bathroom.
Witnesses told police that Richards pushed his way into the house and into the bathroom, where he touched off an altercation by jumping on the back of a man cooking the methamphetamine. Witnesses said they heard a loud pop or two, and Richards fell to the ground, saying “she shot me,” the affidavit says.
The document says witnesses told investigators that Richards was rubbing his wrist while leaning against the bathtub, but he was speaking and awake before they gathered the methamphetamine supplies and fled.
The document says witnesses told police that Wright drove Richards’ truck to his father’s home later that night and gathered all of his belongings - including his laptop, wallet and money - and put them in the truck, leaving the keys in the ignition. They said they did not know what happened to Richards, but they did not see him again that night.
According to the affidavit, one witness told police that Wright said nobody would ever find Richards, and none of the witnesses said during the September interviews that they knew where his body was.
Police obtained a search warrant for Wright’s property but did not find the bodies in an Oct. 3 visit.
The affidavit says that on Oct. 4, Arkansas State Police Trooper Jeff Ramsey contacted Benton police, saying Wright’s father, R.B. Wright, had told his pastor where Richards’ body was. The pastor told the trooper that the body was buried under a koi pond behind the house, the affidavit says.
R.B. Wright told troopers who interviewed him in the hospital that his daughter had learned of the search warrant, felt guilty and told him that she had “messed up and had shot and killed Richards,” the document says.
Detectives went to the Traskwood home Oct. 4 to interview Marissa Wright and found her attempting suicide by swallowing pills, as well as turning on the gas stove and blowing out the pilot light.
She was taken to a hospital but told police she had left a note for them with a family member. According to the affidavit, the note details where the two bodies were buried.
Police went back to the home with a second search warrant Oct. 5 and found both bodies.
The body found under the koi pond was later identified as Anderson. Richards’ body was found a few feet away under some stones, according to the affidavit.
According to an application for a follow-up search warrant filed with the affidavit, Wright confessed to the killings Oct. 7 while detectives interviewed her.
According to the document, Wright told police that she had struck Anderson in the back with an ax or ax handle before killing him. A detective said investigators believed that ax was wedged in the wire fence behind the house.
She also told police that she had wrapped Anderson in plastic after killing him and that the details of both slayings were in journals she kept at the house, the affidavit says.
During that interview with police, Wright told investigators that she had used an “automotive creeper” - a small platform with wheels used by mechanics to work under cars - to move Richards’ body after she killed him, the affidavit says.
Detectives said in the affidavit that Wright’s aunt, Cindy Wright, approached them while they were searching the home to give them “a tan, hardback, hand-written journal with a picture of kittens on the cover.”
The aunt told police that she had removed it so that Marissa Wright’s father wouldn’t find it when he returned home from the hospital and read anything that would “worsen his condition,” the affidavit says.
According to the affidavit, police left with the journal and logged it into evidence but reported that they had not found the specific journal Wright had confessed to keeping.
A few days later, another relative called police to say Cindy Wright had the journal containing details of the murder, according to the court document.
Passages from the journal entries were not included in the affidavit.
The affidavit listed items taken from Wright’s home, including duct tape, a Fisher-Price toy scoop, gloves, hay string, .22-caliber spent rounds, drug paraphernalia, couch pillows, towels, sponges, pieces of floor tile, curtains, various ammunition, an ax handle, 12 notebooks and various scraps of paper. Police also took two handguns.
An affidavit of probable cause has not been released for Myra Terry, 53, who was charged Oct. 7 with hindering apprehension, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence in Richards’ death.
Terry was listed in the Wright affidavit as an ex-girlfriend of Richards who was a home-health-care nurse for Wright’s father at the Traskwood address.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/29/2011