How Lorenzen Wright's Ex-Wife Lured him To His Death, Explained
By WILLIAM FISCHER
History - Science
NBA player Lorenzen Wright's 2010 murder from 11 gunshot wounds left many in shock. Unknown to the public or the authorities at the time, he was actually the victim of an ambush.
On July 19, 2010, while visiting Memphis after moving to Atlanta, Wright met up with his ex-wife Sherra Wright, whom he'd just gotten a divorce from a few months prior.
Recreating the crime for A&E, inspector Darren Goods said that Sherra lured Wright into a wooded spot in Memphis where they used to have sex together.
When Wright arrived, he was shot and killed. It was part of a conspiracy formed by Sherra, her cousin Jimmie Martin, and her landscaper and sometime-lover Billy Ray Turner.
Immediately after Wright's death, Sherra maintained he left her home with a box of drugs and aimed to make $110,000 from "flip[ing] something," per the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
She was interviewed by police as a person of interest but faced no charges. She received $1 million from Wright's life insurance and she spent nearly all of it within months.
Then, in 2017, her cousin Jimmie Martin, who was in jail for the 2007 murder of his girlfriend, told authorities about the plan to kill Wright and even provided the gun's location.
Per Martin, Sherra and Billy Ray Turner hoped to kill Lorenzen Wright for his life insurance policy and had first tried to kill him in his Atlanta home before the Memphis attack.
Sherra and Turner were both arrested late in 2017. In 2019, Sherra took a plea deal, admitting to facilitating first-degree murder, and was sentenced to 30 years, per AP.