- [Narrator] Lifelong bachelor and classic car collector,
Byron Wright looks like he has finally meant the woman
of his dreams.
(camera shuttering)
A jailhouse informant has a story for two detectives
about a murder that neither has ever heard a whisper about.
- All the little details, it was really an unusual one.
(camera shuttering)
- [Narrator] It is confirmed
that human remains have been found beneath
the concrete floor of garage.
Detective Jim Scharf
of the Snohomish County Sheriff's Department
has just received the news he has been waiting weeks
to hear.
- The unsolved ones we have to stand up.
- And approach these cases in a way outside the box.
- Let the world know that those out there
that did commit a murder there are people
that are coming after you.
- There's just a lot of good people trying to do
the right thing.
- Because it's something
that you have to be passionate about.
- Solve this, bring some peace to the family at least,
just doing my job.
(intense music)
- [Narrator] Michelle Donohue has the unfortunate job
of telling her sister-in-law that her husband, Byron Wright
has decided to run off with another woman.
Sharon Diehl, the sister of Byron Wright has just received
a disturbing phone call from his wife, Michelle Donohue.
Growing up close as children, Sharon and Byron have always
looked out for each other, but since Byron's marriage
to Michelle, they seldom talk
and no longer see each other as often.
Byron always seems to be far too busy to call,
or attend family gatherings like he used to.
(intense music)
Sharon has decided to file a missing person's report
with a Snohomish County Sheriff's Department.
It is unlike her brother
to leave everything he's worked so hard for behind.
Arlington is that perfect mixture of rural
and big city.
In the northern part of Snohomish County
in Washington state, the city of Arlington is part
of the Seattle metropolitan area.
- The city lies at the base of the western foothills
of the Cascade Mountains alongside the Stillaguamish River.
It's a place attractive to both city dwellers
and lovers of the outdoors.
One of the biggest employers in that area
of the state is Boeing.
The Boeing site is so big it has its own security team,
fire department, several cafes and coffee shops,
even a daycare center.
- [Narrator] Boeing has over 30,000 workers
at its Everett facility,
one of these workers is Byron Wright,
a longtime employee and a very well liked one.
Byron was born in 1951 and grew up in a broken home.
In the late 1950's his father walked out on the family,
leaving his mother to raise four young children
as a single parent on government assistance.
Growing up poor Byron had a strong work ethic
and after working at Boeing for a number of years,
was able to buy a beautiful piece of rural property
with a large garage and mobile home.
At the same time, he also bought a second empty piece
of property beside the first.
Byron is also a huge fan of restoring
and racing classic cars.
He has worked hard since his his teenage years
to build a considerable collection reportedly
worth almost half a million dollars.
Some of his vehicles include a Rare Corvette Stingray,
a 65 Chevy Malibu, a couple of Chevelles at a race car.
- One of Byron's best friends described him as a homebody
who had no children of his own but doted on his nieces.
He would spend every holiday with his siblings,
and their children and he loved to hand out silly gifts.
- [Narrator] Though Byron has always seemed
to prefer spending time working on his classic cars,
or with a small group of friends, he's not opposed
to going out for a drink or two to the local bar
to unwind after a day at work.
21 year old Michelle Donohue is a wild child
who left home at an early age
'cause of conflicts against her strict upbringing.
Popular and known as a social butterfly,
she's already been married, divorced,
and has a young daughter named Heather.
Michelle decides she needs to start getting out more.
She's lonely and bored and soon meets Byron Wright
at her neighborhood tavern.
Though shy and not usually one to socialize, Byron is drawn
to the charismatic Michelle.
Even though Byron is 14 years Michelle's senior,
they quickly fall in love and decide
to share a life together.
Michelle and her daughter Heather soon move
into Byron's house on Wade Road and they're married in 2000.
By all accounts,
Michelle and Byron were very happy together.
Michelle also had an interest in classic cars
and could hold her own in a conversation
when talking about them.
Her daughter, Heather says one of her favorite things
to do together as a family on a nice day
was to jump into Byron's classic convertible,
put the top down and the three of them would cruise down
the highway.
Tension has been steadily rising
the last year or so in the home between Byron and Michelle.
While Heather adores her stepfather, Michelle is tired
of being stuck with a homebody and all she really wants
to do is go out with her friends and party.
Heather spends more and more time at her father,
and stepmother's house and decides to go away
with them on a family vacation to Ireland.
- It can be very hard for children
to trust a new stepparent after witnessing a divorce,
especially a contentious one.
Children can also feel guilt towards their biological parent
and feel they're being disloyal if they bond
with the new stepparent.
- [Narrator] To add to the stress,
Byron is becoming increasingly isolated
from his own family and friends.
There are complaints that since he married Michelle
she has stopped him from having a relationship with anybody
that was part of his life from before their marriage.
Byron Wright has gone ahead
and done something nobody could have imagined.
Michelle alleges that tired of the constant arguing at home,
he's decided to run off to Wisconsin
with a wealthy redheaded 20 something
who drives an expensive sports car.
In doing so, he's left everything behind,
including his job, his car collection, his house,
and two properties worst of all, Michelle and Heather.
(intense music)
Michelle has kept it secret for almost a month hoping
that Byron would come back before she has to tell anybody
that he's even left.
Finally, she makes the decision to call his sister, Sharon
and tell her what has happened.
The Byron who ran off with another woman
and left everything behind is not the Byron that his family
and friends know.
He's worked too long and hard
to ever leave his beloved car collection behind no matter
how wealthy his new girlfriend might be.
Sharon makes call after call to other family,
friends and coworkers of Byron.
Except for calling in sick to his job at Boeing
for a couple of days, nobody has seen or heard from him
for over a month now, it's time to make a police report,
but is Byron really even missing?
This is a question that will take almost 10 years to answer.
(intense music)
Lifelong bachelor and classic car collector, Byron Wright
might have finally met the woman of his dreams.
But tension between Byron and Michelle
has been steadily rising in the home over the past year.
Byron Wright has gone ahead
and done something nobody could have imagined.
Michelle's daughter, Heather returns from vacation
with her father to Ireland and immediately goes over
to see her mom and Byron,
she doesn't know yet that Byron has gone for good
and has left everything behind.
She is shocked and can't understand what has happened,
especially when even the closet is still full of Byron's
clothes and his beloved car collection still sits outside.
Heather is still hurt and confused that Byron has left her
and her mother for another woman, even as young as she is,
it doesn't seem like something he would do.
To cheer her up, Michelle decides to surprise Heather
with a small sledding hill in their backyard.
- There wasn't a lot to do
for an only child in this rural location.
Heather always loved the outdoors,
Michelle ordered four loads of fill and 36 yards of dirt,
and as soon as it snowed, Heather had the perfect hill
to slide on.
- [Narrator] Sharon and Byron's other siblings
and friends have spent a month trying to track 'em down.
Nobody seems to know who this wealthy redhead
with the expensive sports car is or why he would take off
to Wisconsin with her and leave everything,
and everyone behind without a word.
Sharon has decided to file a missing person's report
with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Department.
- Unfortunately for Sharon
and the rest of his family and friends,
the sheriff's department doesn't think it's necessary
to issue a missing person report or investigate further.
From their point of view, he's an adult male
if it's his decision to run off
with a younger woman leaving behind a job of 23 years
and his prize car collection, that's his decision to make.
- [Narrator] Michelle almost immediately files for divorce
and tells everyone how Byron has run off
with another woman deserting her and Heather.
He threw it in her face that his new love is a younger,
wealthier woman and he no longer needs his job at Boeing,
or anything from his old life with Michelle.
- Michelle moves on quickly and soon meets Joel Donohue,
who is also into cars and partying.
The two hit it off and Joel soon moves into the Byron home
on Wade Road.
In the meantime, Michelle files for divorce by absentia,
it's granted when Byron doesn't show up for proceedings.
That means everything goes to Michelle,
the house, the cars, his pension.
- [Narrator] The newlyweds are having a great time spending
the money Michelle received from her divorce to Byron.
In addition, Michelle also receives a $124,000 payout
from Byron's Boeing pension.
Vacations, gambling, shopping,
and just plain having fun top their list
of what to spend the money on.
Byron driving off into the sunset with his new love interest
and deserting Michelle and her daughter Heather
is nothing but a distant memory.
- In December of 2013, my partner was Joe Dunn
and we were working cold cases and Joe had a good rapport
with a lot of people on the street.
He got to know a lot of people
that were involved in auto thefts and things of that nature.
So this guy gets booked into jail on an auto theft
where he is stripping cars and he tries to contact Joe,
telling him that he needs to talk to him about a murder.
Well, Joe isn't around to get the message,
so I think it took a week and the guy is persistent,
sends another message to Joe saying,
yeah, I really need to talk to you.
Well, Joe figures the guy is just looking for a way
to get out of jail 'cause he just knows the type
of person this guy is.
He's basically a career criminal because he's a drug addict
and he's a thief and he's been in and out,
and in and out of jail and prison for so many years,
he's just never gonna be rehabilitated.
- [Narrator] The inmate's persistence in trying
to contact Donn finally pays off.
He has a story for the two detectives about a murder
that neither has ever heard a whisper about before.
- So he gets us to come over and talk to him.
I'm hoping that we get a tip that solves the case
that I know that we already have is an unsolved murder.
We get over there and we get all the information out
of this guy and none of it sounds like any cold case
that I've ever worked on, and Joe also believes
that this sounds like a legitimate story too.
So we get this story and immediately we realized
that a guy by the name of Byron Wright is probably missing
and could be a victim of a murder by his wife,
and that she killed him and put him in the backyard
of her residence.
- [Narrator] According to the informant, Michelle Donohue
had buried her husband Byron Wright out beside the garage
and covered it with a amount of dirt she had brought in.
- So she recruited three people to move the body,
so that it can never be found.
Three people moved the body underneath a concrete slab
in a garage that Byron Wright had built
because he was a car guy.
And as the story went, one of the guys who helped move
the body and put it under the floor
of the garage had told this informant the story,
and now this informant was bringing it to us,
so they could help him get out of jail on the charges
that he was on.
But all the information sounded
to me like it was very plausible and that we really needed
to look into what happened to Byron Wright.
This informant, he also told us about what he had been doing
with the husband of the woman that committed the murder
and another guy that lived in the garage on the property,
that they were all stealing cars
and stripping them on the property
and that the husband of the wife was not living in the house
with the wife, but he was living in a camp trailer on
the property with a pregnant girlfriend.
- [Narrator] The informant is uneasy
with all of the stolen auto parts around,
and stripping vehicles on the property when clearly Michelle
is not on board.
- The informant brought up the question,
hey, we're causing too much problem here for Michelle
that she's gonna call the cops on us if we're not careful.
We gotta be worried about what we're doing here
'cause we're gonna get caught,
and if the cops don't catch us,
Michelle's gonna tip 'em off.
And the friend says, oh no, no, we don't have to worry
about Michelle because Michelle killed her previous husband
and recruited Joel, her current husband and me
and Walter Shoe to move the body and we buried it under
the slab of the concrete garage here.
And when the guy looked at the floor,
he could tell that there was a nice finish
to the concrete everywhere in the garage,
except this one corner where it was large enough
to probably bury five bodies in.
There was that much concrete torn up
that was repaved and poorly surfaced.
So everything fit that he believed
that Michelle's first husband was murdered,
and put there and he was telling us that this happened.
My immediate thought was this all sounds plausible
and what we need to do is first of all,
we need to find out who this first husband was,
find out when he was last seen to see
if he's still alive somewhere and if he's not,
then this story is probably true and if it's true,
how can we get it resolved?
So I asked the guy directly, I said, would you be willing
to wear a wire and a recorder and go back in
and talk to Mike that was living in the garage, and get him
to tell you this whole story in as much detail as you can
get out of him while you're on this recording,
so that we can get a search warrant based on that story
and search the garage and find the body and solve the case.
You gotta be careful when you use informants
because you gotta be able to verify everything
that they tell you 'cause they could be telling you lies.
- Using confidential informants
is always risky business when it comes to prosecutions
and police investigations.
On the the one hand, if the information
that they provide is reliable, they can get certain benefits
such as financial compensation, reduce in their sentence,
or potentially even transferred to a different facility
if this happened while in custody.
On the flip side, they do always run the risk of being found
out by the criminal organizations that they've worked with,
but in the end they're always looking out for themselves.
- Now all we had to do was arrange with the prosecutor
to get him released from jail to be able to go up there
and try to get this recording done.
So Joe and I initially looked into Byron's missing status,
and we also went back to verify everything
that he told us about the trucks that they were stealing,
and the car parts they were taking and they were being sold
for drugs and all of this stuff.
Well, he told us that two of the trucks that they stole
and stripped, they dumped them behind a barn just down
the hill off of Wade Road from where Michelle lived.
So Joe and I go up there and sure enough, there's the trucks
that he said would be there that were stolen and we ran 'em
and they come back stolen.
So everything that he told us we were able to verify.
(intense music)
So then we ended up being able to find his sister
and his sister said, yeah, I tried to report Byron missing.
We contacted the Boeing company and they said,
yeah, his last day of work was here.
There was some notes that they had gotten saying
that he was gonna be sick for a couple days
and before he had quit showing up altogether.
So there was documentation that we were able to find
that he just flat disappeared right around this day
and I think it was October or November of 2004.
- [Narrator] Detectives now know that Byron Wright
is truly missing, but is it true that his body
is buried under the floor of his own garage?
(intense music)
Michelle Donohue tells friends that her husband,
Byron Wright has left for another woman
and moved to Wisconsin.
Almost a decade later, an informant offers police
some shocking information.
He claims some guys he knows at a local chop shop told him
how they buried a body.
- I asked him, are you willing to be recorded?
And he told us that he was.
- [Narrator] Detectives have come up with a plan
for the informant to get the guys talking
about the body they supposedly buried.
- I heard and knew
that the Major Crimes Unit had been out in Gold Bar
the previous month recovering a body
that was buried in a backyard underneath a pile of wood.
The story on that case was really bizarre,
they believed that his wife had helped him escape
from prison in Missouri and he just flat disappeared,
and this was years ago.
Well, when he got sick and was terminal,
he told his wife when I die, you can't call the coroner
and tell him to come and get my body,
you gotta hide it because if they figure out who I am,
they're gonna know who you are and they're gonna arrest you
for helping me escape from prison
and hide me out all these years.
He died and she had him buried behind the house
and they covered him up with a wood pile.
The FBI got involved somehow.
Somebody told them that this guy might be buried there,
and that he might have been this fugitive
that they had been looking for.
The Major Crimes Unit ended up going out there
and digging under the wood pile and finding a body,
and recovering it, and they were still in the process
of identifying it as that fugitive escapee.
So that's why it hadn't been reported into the news yet,
and they didn't wanna put it in the news until they got DNA
confirmation that it was him.
I knew the story and I thought this was a golden opportunity
to put that information in the Everett Herald newspaper,
so that we could take him outta jail
and have him take this newspaper down there
and show it to Mike and say,
hey Mike they found this body buried up in Gold Bar
just to open up the conversation and get Mike talking about
the body that he helped bury under the concrete floor
in the garage.
So people thought this was a good idea,
and it was really what we needed to open up
the conversation so that we didn't make our informant
look like he was tricking anybody because first of all,
he'd had such criminal history that it wouldn't be likely
that he would even be outta jail.
So they were gonna probably be questioning the fact
that he was even free when he shouldn't be,
and if he's pumping 'em for information
without having a good excuse to do it,
they probably would shut down and not tell him anything.
So I convinced him that this newspaper story
was the ideal lead in to get the guy talking,
so that we could record the story
about what happened to Byron.
And we got the prosecutor on board,
we got the Herald on board,
and they printed the story on the front page
of the Everett Herald on the day
that the prosecutor was willing to let our informant out
to go and try to make this contact.
We had to get the courts to agree to release him,
and we had to have him on an ankle bracelet monitor
before we could get all this set up and we got it all set up
and we got him outta jail.
We got the newspaper article that came out that morning,
and we drove him all the way up
and we dropped him off just down the street
from Michelle Donohue's house.
He walked down to the back, went into the garage
with the newspaper and started a conversation up with Mike.
Our informant shows Mike the newspaper,
and Mike reads it and he says, well,
they're not gonna find this body.
It's buried under six feet of dirt under a concrete floor,
ground penetrating radar isn't even gonna find it
because it's too deep,
so they're never gonna find this body.
- [Narrator] Michelle is deep in debt so deep she's worried
that she'll lose the property to foreclosure
and the secret she has kept
for the last seven years will be found out.
Finally she decides that she needs to tell Joel
what really happened to her previous husband.
- Well that opens up the conversation
to where the informants now saying,
well, how did the body get here?
Who all put it here?
Well, it was me and Joel and Walter.
Michelle told us that she had killed her husband
and buried him in the backyard and she was worried
that she was gonna lose this house
'cause she was in debt so deep that she came to Joel
and said, I killed my first husband
and buried him back here, and if we don't get him off
of this property and get him out of here
to where he's never gonna be found,
I could end up in prison.
(intense music)
So Joel and Mike, and Walter Shoe got together,
and started talking about it and decided,
well, we don't want to take
the chance on transporting it somewhere else,
why don't we just chop up the concrete and dig a hole
and bury him right here in the middle of the night?
Nobody's caught us stripping cars here,
so they're not gonna catch us moving a body.
So he's telling him all this story on a tape.
He said, when we dug up the body,
it was in three different plastic bags
and it stunk horribly.
So we had rented this bobcat and we chopped up the concrete
and we dug a hole with the bobcat.
They went down and they got this great big Tupperware tub,
and put the body in it and then they tried
to pour stuff over to make it decay better
and put a lid on it, and we put it in this hole six feet
deep and we threw the bags
with the other body parts in next to it and we covered it up
and we poured a concrete floor over it again.
- [Narrator] Mike also tells the informant that after
the three of them finally finished reburying Byron's remains
and pouring the concrete over the hole they had dug,
they decided they should also say a few words
as a type of service.
- The informant took a picture of the concrete floor
that was a really poor job of finishing cement,
and he texted us the pictures and we had all the information
that we needed at that point to get a search warrant
to search the garage.
(intense music)
- [Narrator] An informant tells Seattle detectives
that he has information that he heard his partners
at a local chop shop discussing how they disposed
of a body on the property.
Is this related
to Byron Wright's disappearance a decade ago?
The detectives formulate a plan
for the informant to learn more
from his partners using a local newspaper story as cover.
- The Major Crimes Unit had been out in Gold Bar recovering
a body in a backyard underneath a pile of wood.
- [Narrator] The informant is told
that this is a different body and is then told exactly how
and where they buried their body.
- After the informant got the story from Mike,
he was still hanging out with Mike that day.
Michelle was married to Joel, but they weren't getting along
and Joel was living with a pregnant girlfriend in the camper
on the property.
- [Narrator] Mike and the informant
who was still wearing his wire head to the casino
to pick up Michelle and give her a ride home from work.
- She worked at the Tulalip Casino
and she needed a ride home that night.
So the informant, it took him a while that day
to be able to get the whole story.
So now they're down at the casino picking up Michelle
and they're driving her home and they talk
about her problems that she's having with her husband.
The informant ends up contacting us,
and I end up meeting the informant back near the casino
and I get the recording from him that night.
I'm listening to the recording on the weekend,
and I hear a discussion that happened with Michelle
where she brings up her problems that she's having with Joel
and she ends up saying she would like to have some way
of getting rid of him.
Heard her say something with the word murder.
- [Narrator] Not only is it likely
that Michelle Donohue's first husband, Byron Wright
is buried under the garage floor,
it sounds like she's hoping that her present husband,
Joel Donohue will soon be joining him.
- Because of all the information
that we had in the recording from Mike
and all the investigation that we had done to show
that Byron went missing in 2004,
and that we verified everything else
that the informant told us was true,
we were able to get a search warrant for the property
to dig up the body.
So we had to contact the County Public Works Department
to get the equipment out there to do this.
We had the state anthropologist there to be able to tell us
that when we dug up some bones that they were human bones.
We had the medical examiner's office there to take custody
of the body once we located it.
- [Narrator] The last thing Michelle thought would happen
that morning is instead of going to work
that she was going to be arrested.
- We planned to go out to the house and serve the warrant.
I was assigned to take Michelle Donohue into custody,
and that we were going to interview her while other people
were assigned to interview Joel and the girlfriend,
and Mike, anybody else that we found.
- [Narrator] The forensic anthropologist
from the King County Medical Examiner's Office confirms
that human remains have been found buried underneath
the concrete slab.
The arms and legs were wrapped in bags in a tarp,
buried in the dirt alongside a large plastic blue bin,
it contained the rest of the body of Byron Wright.
(intense music)
- I feel it's time to confront her, so I confront her
that we know that your husband didn't just disappear,
we know that he's been buried on your property
because we just dug him up,
so we've recovered his body on your property.
And she's like, really?
She tried to play dumb that she had no idea
that there was a body on her property.
Then we kept telling her that we've talked to Joel,
Joel's told us everything you've told him,
so we want to know what happened.
And she's like, well, I didn't kill him.
Well, if you didn't kill him then who did?
And why are you telling other people that you did do it?
So she finally got to the point
that she didn't want to talk to us anymore.
Part of the story that we were getting
from the other people was that Michelle had told them
the reason that they needed to move this body
was because she and Byron got into this big argument
in the kitchen and he came at her,
and she had to defend herself, she stabbed him with a knife
to keep him away from her,
and that's how she ended up maybe accidentally killing him
and that's why they had to get rid of his body.
So we had that information too.
I ended up getting up and leaving the room
to go find out what Joel was telling the other detectives,
and Joel was telling them the whole story
about how Michelle had asked him to move the body,
and how he was killed by this stabbing.
He demonstrated that she was backing away going like this,
and he came into the knife and that's what stabbed him.
And he fell on the floor and she left the house,
and when she came back, he was dead.
The whole crew was there to dig up
the body while we were interviewing Michelle and Joel.
So as soon as we left with the witnesses and the suspect,
the whole team and crew went down to the garage
and the person that had the ground penetrating radar said,
yes, there's definitely something in this area.
And he spray painted it and marked it all on the concrete,
and then used jackhammers, to remove the concrete,
and then to get down to where they found
the great big Tupperware tub and they removed it,
they found some bags that were thrown in around the tub
that had body parts in them,
and the state anthropologist examined 'em all,
opened the tub and found that there was plaster,
or something poured all over the body,
but the head was in there and it was all taken down
to the medical examiner's office that day
and we kept her there at the North Precinct under arrest
until I was able to get the booking paperwork done,
and got her transported to the jail
and booked for her second degree murder that night.
- [Narrator] Michelle Donohue had no idea
that when she left home earlier in the day,
it would be the last time for quite a while.
Fingerprinted, charged and with bail set at $1 million,
Donohue is about to start a whole new unexpected chapter
in her life.
(intense music)
Lifelong bachelor and classic car collector,
Byron Wright thought he had finally met the woman
of his dreams.
He had no idea that she would be the one
to destroy them instead.
- And she ends up saying on the tape,
she would like to have some way of getting rid of him,
heard her say something with the word murder.
- [Narrator] After months of working with an informant,
investigators from the Snohomish County Sheriff's Department
are finally going to learn if their source is correct,
is Byron Wright's body buried under the floor of his garage?
- I went probably the next day to the autopsy
and they removed the body
and even though this was in 2014, 10 years later,
she had wrapped him in plastic and a sheet
to where when they opened him up, you could still see
that there was a slice mark all the way around his throat
and there were numerous stab wounds all over his back.
The medical examiner said
that one of the stab wounds hit him right in the spine,
in the spinal cord which could have paralyzed him
at that point from being able to fight back.
But all of the injuries were either the upper back,
or neck or the throat, and he was only wearing underpants
and he was wrapped in a sheet.
Well, when they searched the house,
we found two pillow cases with the same pattern on 'em.
- [Narrator] After the autopsy is concluded,
detective, Jim Scharf now knows that Michelle's whole story
about accidentally stabbing Byron while trying
to defend herself is nothing but a giant pack of lies.
- Some murderers continue to deny their guilt
because they don't believe there's enough evidence
to prove they are responsible,
or they believe they're smarter than law enforcement.
Others continue to deny their involvement
because they themselves can't face the truth
of their own actions.
- [Narrator] Michelle Donohue decides to change her plea
to guilty once she's confronted
with the overwhelming evidence.
She enters her plea on July 11th, 2014.
- In this case, Snohomish County District Court Judge,
George Bowden decided to sentence Donohue
to 16 years instead of the 15 years
that had been agreed to in the plea bargain.
He did this so that he could get the maximum amount
of supervision while out of custody
which was three years in this case.
Most states have their own sentencing guidelines,
so it varies depending on state to state
unless it's a federal crime.
- [Narrator] Judge Bowden goes on to tell the court
at the sentencing that six people have filed
victim impact statements.
They all feel that Donohue should have been charged
with first degree murder, however it has felt
that the state could not have proved premeditation.
The judge explains to the victims that he can only sentence
to the agreed upon guilty plea of second degree murder.
- Victim impact statements were created to give victims,
friends and family an opportunity
to be involved in the proceedings.
They're able to provide insights into who the victim was,
as well as detail, the mental, emotional
and sometimes financial effects that the crime had on them.
Victim impact statements allows them
to say what kind of person the victim was
and what they meant to them.
- [Narrator] Michelle Donohue is allowed
to speak at her sentencing and in tears apologizes
to Byron's family, saying she is so very sorry
for taking his life and that there is nothing she can do
to ease their pain.
- This was a really unusual case, the way that it happened
and the way that it all fell together
and all the little details that we found out about from it.
It was really an unusual one, but it was nice
that we were able to get it put together so quickly
and find his body and that she pled guilty,
and we didn't have to wait for a year for it to go to trial.
- Of course, there are always children
that will emulate their parents' criminality,
whether because they haven't experienced life any other way,
or they're looking for approval, it may also be out of fear
of what would happen to them if they don't.
There are plenty of children who grow up
to resent their parents' behavior.
In some cases, they are the ones
that turn their parents into the authorities.
- It's really sad
because her daughter was right there in the middle
of all of this and she didn't have anything
to look up to her mom.
She realized her mom is this evil person
and it's sad that you have to grow up,
and realize that about your own parent.
She was just a totally good person
that came out of this horrible situation.
When you put somebody that's a cold-blooded killer away,
you just got the satisfaction to know
that they finally got the system to deal with them properly.
- [Narrator] Michelle Donohue was sentenced to 16 years
for the murder of Byron Wright.
She was given credit for pleading guilty,
accepting responsibility,
and not having any prior criminal record.
Upon her release, Donohue will be under three years
required supervision and have to pay restitution.
Joel Donohue and the two accomplices that helped move
and rebury the body of Byron Wright were never charged due
to the statute of limitations expiring.
A few years later, Donohue died in a car accident.
- The main thing is is for the family to know
that they're held accountable and that they have the answers
to what happened.
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