But 48-year-old Michele Donohue is sticking to the story
she told husband Byron Wright's company and a divorce court when he disappeared
in 2004 - that he left her for a young, rich, redheaded woman.
Detectives never even knew Wright was missing, though his
sister says she tried to report his disappearance in 2009 and was turned down.
They only started investigating his death in December
when a jailhouse informant stepped up, saying he knew someone involved in the
murder cover-up.
That informant knew a man named Michael Hueslein that
lived on the property and helped bury the body with two other men, including
the suspected murderer's current husband Joel Donohue.
The informant was sent on a visit to Hueslein who told
him that the body was buried in a garage on the property underneath a concrete
slab.
Detectives dug up the ground in the garage on Thursday
and found severed arms and legs in the dirt and the remainder of a human body
in a large plastic tote.
Cause of death and identity of the remains have not yet
been released by the medical examiner's office - but the body is presumed to be
Wright's.
When interviewed by police, Donohue's husband Joel
recounted how his wife confessed to stabbing her husband.
Apparently Donohue told witnesses her husband was abusive
and that's whey she stabbed him.
After the attack, Wright asked her to call police and she
said she would once he 'apologized'.
But he never did apologize so she left him on the floor
to die while she went to work.
Initially, she buried Wright under a pile a dirt, but
after meeting future-husband Joel, he offered to help find a more permanent
spot.
So the couple enlisted his best friend and a tenant who
lived on the property to help bury Wright in a plastic bin, underneath a
concrete floor and two feet of dirt 'where ground-penetrating radar could not
find it'.
The men allegedly looked up tips on the internet on how
to best dispose of the body.
Despite her husband admitting to hiding the body, Donohue
wouldn't budge and acted in 'disbelief' when officers came to arrest her -
uttering the same story about how Wright left her.
When Wright started not showing up his job at Boeing
(where he worked for 23 years) in the fall of 2004, his bosses called Donohue
up and she repeated the same story.
She continued that line when she filed for divorce soon
after his disappearance, saying she couldn't serve him with papers because she
didn't know where he was.
The divorce was made official and the court awarded
Donohue her former husband's house, the lot next to the house, eight vehicles,
Wright's Boeing stock, and half his pension.
Donohue sold the adjoining lot for $110,000 and received
approximately $125,000 of Wright's pension.
But there were some inconsistencies in her story. While
Donohue told the divorce court that the other woman had red hair, she told
Wright's sister-in-law that the mistress was a blonde.
The family thought his disappearance was strange as well,
since they never once heard from him. They also said he would never leave his
treasured cars. The family grew up poor and he took great pride in his home and
car collection, his siblings said.
Donohue was arrested and charged with second-degree
domestic violence murder on Thursday and is being held on $1million at the
Snohomish County Jail.
The men who helped hide Wright's body will not face any
charges since the statue of limitations have run out on their specific crimes.
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