Page 2 - Daphne Wright News Today

They also found bloody pieces of carpet and a blood-stained sweat shirt. >> it was a sweatshirt that had graphics on it of sign language. we knew right there there was a tie to the deaf community. >> testing proved it was darlenes blood on the sweatshirt, but someone elses dna was found inside the sweatshirt. >> i took cuttings from the inside of the sweatshirt hoping that one of them had transferred enough dna or skin cells inside. to get a full profile. i was fortunate and did get a profile an...

Bottle of chainsaw oil and we found a receipt from ace hardware for a chainsaw. >> this is a time of year in south dakota where chainsaws are not in huge demand. >> but there was no chainsaw in daphnes house or on her property. downstairs the basement had been painted with blue paint. >> there would be a spot painted here and a spot painted there and different sizes, parts of the wall, not a whole wall, a three or four foot section of the wall but not all the wall, parts of the steps but not all...

Take care of it was to eliminate her from the picture. >> but investigators still had a problem. they didnt have darlenes body. >> a jury like as body. a jury likes a murder weapon, and you just never know. you get that one skeptical juror who doesnt see the body and theres enough doubt to say not guilty in case like that. >> in the search police checked the dumpster where daphne and her neighbors disposed of the trash. >> by the time the officers got there, the dumpsters had been dumped into th...

>> once there the investigators showed the store owner the lineup including daphnes picture. >> one of the clerks was able to say, yes, i sold the chainsaw to a woman and she was deaf. that matches the description of daphne wright to a tee. >> she came in a note that said tree-cutting machine and he took her to the wrong section at first because he misunderstood, and then he took her to the chainsaw section. she was very worried about the price and she picked out the cheapest chain saul availabl...

More incriminating evidence from the wooden walls of the coal storage room. >> we were able to see small pieces of bone and tissue. >> they compared those samples to the dna they obtained from darlenes tooth and hair brushes. that that day we were met by a couple of detectives and we were escorted upstairs, and when we opened the room -- when they introduce you to the chaplain and the chief of police and all the detectives are in the room and ask you to sit down, you know the news youre going to...

Hope came back that possibly she was still alive somewhere. >> meanwhile investigators were able to trace the source of the threatening e-mails darlene received shortly before her disappearance. >> when we did receive the e-mails that darlene had received from wendy smith, that gave us the ability to send a subpoena to yahoo! to find out who may have created that yahoo! account. >> the e-mails came from this home in downtown sioux falls. the occupant was a deaf woman named daphne wright. >> daph...

Tied both victim and suspect together. >> 25 miles away, across the border in minnesota, a highway worker found darlenes torso and her severed head encased in plastic. the medical examiner found darlene suffered blunt force trauma to her head. >> it had been tied, cinched around her throat with a piece of cord that was matched by one of our forensic people in pier to a spool of cord hanging on the garage wall in the house that was occupied by daphne wright. >> the medical examiner had two theori...

Wright after this incident. >> she said, oh, mom, were friends now, were all made up, and were comfortable with each other, its all okay now. >> but when daphne wright was questioned about darlenes disappearance, the jealousy was still apparent. >> weve had a lot of problems, sally and i. >> did you think sally was cheating on you with darlene? >> yes. i thought so. and sometimes she lied. >> who lied? >> sally. >> okay. >> was darlene the victim of a love triangle gone wrong? daphnes whereabout...

>> prosecutors say daphne was convinced darlene was trying to steal her ex-girlfriend and wanted to prevent it. she asked darlene to meet her at the pizza restaurant. but once there, she changed her mind and asked darlene to come to her house instead. once there, daphne hit darlene with a heavy object. pushed her down the stairs. then tied a thick plastic bag around her head with cord from her home. she later bought a chainsaw to dismember darlenes body. she left behind the sales receipt, store ...

Daphne wright as just a cold-blooded murder. to be able to do dismember a human body with a chainsaw takes a lot of gall. takes a lot of spite. in my opinion you really have to dislike somebody to do that to them. >> daphne wright was convicted, but the jury spared her life. instead, shell spend the rest of her life in prison with no possibility of parole. >> one thing that kept coming back was what do we get out of sentencing her to the death penalty. what does she get out of it, what does soci...