Woman convicted of killing husband
Wright to be sentenced Sept. 2 — on the two-year anniversary of incident

KINGMAN — A jury deliberated for just more than two hours Wednesday afternoon following a murder trial in Mohave County Superior Court in Kingman to determine a Lake Havasu City woman guilty of second-degree murder for killing her 73-year-old husband. The man was shot five times on Sept. 2, 2007, at the home the couple shared on Bear Drive.

An eight-day jury trial in the court of Judge Rick A. Williams that included 22 witness accounts concluded Candace Wright, 57, used a .32-caliber handgun to shoot her husband, William Wright, four times in the chest and once in the head.

“It was a tough case with no murder weapon, no confession, no motive and no physical evidence,” said Jeremy Huss, deputy county attorney of Mohave County Attorney’s Office. “It was an emotionally charged trial, like any murder trial is.”

Huss credits Lake Havasu City Police Department, saying they did a great job on a case that was purely circumstantial.

“They gathered enough facts to put the case together,” he said.

Wright, who called 911 at 7:05 p.m. the night of the shooting, initially told emergency responders said she left to purchase more steaks and returned home to find her husband dead on the kitchen floor, Huss said. The couple lived in the 4000 block of Bear Drive.

Wright said she had taken a 35-40-minute trip to Smith’s supermarket to purchase steaks, but authorities checked this information. Huss said authorities examined the store’s surveillance video, which showed Wright was in the store for just 4 minutes and 12 seconds. Then they added that time to the 13-minute roundtrip journey between Wright’s home and the supermarket, and authorities concluded that Wright was only out of the house for about 22 minutes, Huss explained.

Furthermore, William Wright’s autopsy determined he was killed between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. and that all five gunshots were fatal, according to earlier reports.

Another piece of the puzzle was a receipt that revealed William Wright had purchased twin .32-caliber pistols in 2001. One was located in the nightstand but the other was nowhere to be found. “We can only speculate on what happened to the other one,” Huss said of what is believed to be the murder weapon.

Initial police investigations did locate an empty gun holster in Candace Wright’s vehicle.

There was no history of domestic violence surrounding the case, but one witnessed testified William Wright did have a problem with the amount of alcohol his wife consumed, Huss said.

During the trial, public defenders Carlene Lacy and Jason Steffen called upon a neurophysiologist to testify in Wright’s defense that the odd statements she made during initial police investigations were related to alcoholism and its brain-damaging effects she suffered.

“Bill Wright made a fatal mistake by trying to take alcohol away from an alcoholic, and that was the theme of the case,” Huss said.

The couple had been married for about two years at the time of the murder and had moved into the home on Bear Drive four months prior. Candace Wright, a retired biologist, and William Wright, a retired Los Angeles firefighter, reportedly met through a dating Web site. Neither had a prior criminal record, according to earlier reports.

A second-degree murder conviction carries penalties of 10-22 years in prison, Huss said.

Wright’s sentencing hearing is coincidentally scheduled Sept. 2, the two-year anniversary of the murder. The hearing is scheduled 2 p.m. that day in Judge Williams’ court in Kingman.

You may contact the reporter at jhanson@havasunews.com.