Police in Memphis charged the ex-wife of former NBA player Lorenzen Wright with first-degree murder in his 2010 slaying in Tennessee, the Commercial Appeal reported Friday night. Sherra Wright-Robinson also was charged with attempted murder because of a previous attempt on his life. She was arrested Friday night in California and has a court date there Monday ahead of her extradition to Tennessee.
Earlier this month, Memphis police charged Billy R. Turner with murder in the case. Turner was a deacon at the church where Wright-Robinson was a minister.
Wright’s decomposed body was found in a wooded area in Memphis on July 28, 2010, 10 days after he had last been seen. An autopsy revealed he had been shot at least five times. During the investigation, it emerged that a 911 call had been received from his cellphone early in the morning of July 19, but dispatchers didn’t notify police until eight days later, even though gunshots could be heard on the call.
Police in Memphis reopened the investigation into Wright’s slaying in 2016 after receiving new information. In November, they announced the discovery of one of the murder weapons, found in a Mississippi lake about 75 miles east of Memphis. On Dec. 5, Turner was charged with first-degree murder.
“We looked through this case and we did one thing: We followed the evidence, and the evidence led us to Billy Turner and Sherra Wright,” Memphis Police Major Darren Goods said during a news conference Saturday. “We wanted to investigate it as if it had just happened. We went to the crime scene and walked in Lorenzen’s final steps.”
Wright-Robinson had told the Commercial Appeal in 2015 that police did not consider her a suspect in her ex-husband’s murder, an assertion police disputed. In 2014, she agreed to a confidential settlement in a legal dispute over how she spent $1 million in insurance money, which was meant to benefit their six children. Deborah Marion, Wright’s mother, told the Commercial Appeal that she believes Wright-Robinson killed her son over the insurance policy.
“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! They got her! They got her!’’ Marion said Friday after receiving word that her former daughter-in-law had been arrested. “They need to bury her.’’
Wright-Robinson had written a fiction book, “Mr. Tell Me Anything,” that featured what appeared to be a thinly disguised depiction of her ex-husband. According to the Commercial Appeal, it told the “story of a deceitful, philandering basketball player who grows up in Mississippi, moves to Memphis, marries an older woman and becomes a top pro draft pick.” She also had told the paper that she had finished a sequel to the book in which Mr. Tell Me Anything is murdered.
Wright, who was 34 at the time of his death, was selected with the seventh pick of the 1996 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Clippers. He played for five teams in a career that lasted until 2009.