MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “You have to blame somebody. Everybody wants to blame somebody. Everybody wants closure,” Sherra Wright said when she sat down in 2010 to talk to WREG about the death of her former pro basketball player husband Lorenzen Wright.
She knew in many people’s minds she was a prime suspect. She was one of the last people to see him the night he disappeared.
“He wasn’t able to spend the night because he wasn’t here quite that long. He ran out and he never came back,” she told us from her home shortly after Lorenzen’s disappearance.
But she adamantly denied knowing anything about his killing, even though she said the place he was found is a place they often went to talk.
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“Did you have anything to do with Lorenzen’s murder?” I asked her during the 2010 interview.
“No April … no,” she said back then.
A grand jury questioned Sherra and her friends, but nothing came of it back then.
But there were signs of trouble.
Wendy Wilson was Lorenzen’s personal assistant.
In the early 2000’s she says Sherra was leaving disturbing and frightening messages for Lorenzen. Wilson recounted those calls Monday when we talked with her by phone from Atlanta.
“They were very very concerning, threatening in nature … very, very off-key. She was very very jealous and very very insecure,” said Wilson.
She said she gave tapes of the calls to police because she was that worried.
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“If she ever caught him with anyone else … I think my story has never changed … that she said would kill him,” said Wilson.
Some say the fictional book Sherra authored, “Mr. Tell Me Anything,” was a reflection of their troubled marriage. The main character Sharon Roberson is married to an NBA player and deals with his constant cheating until she finds one woman who makes her think it is more than a fling.
She wrote, “She no longer made the comparison to any of her previous contenders. She was somewhat ‘special,’ this girl. And to make matters more crucial, she was a whole five years younger than Sharon.”
Sources say Lorenzen had a younger girlfriend when he and Sherra finally divorced.
Then there was the money, a question we raised with Sherra during our 2010 interview, was she in financial trouble after the divorce?
“I was married to an NBA basketball player for 13 years April. My watch is a car. My ring is a house. I have 12 house notes in my ear right now. I am just saying,” she told us back then.
In her book she writes ” … after a spurt of infidelity by her basketball husband, Sharon decided on a twelve karat tennis bracelet or a diamond tennis necklace. This fiasco would call for a little extra.”
But despite the suspicions that money or jealous may have led to Sherra being involved in Lorenzen’s murder, she adamantly denied it all.
“If I knew who did this to Lorenzen, you would know who did this to Lorenzen,” she said.
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We talked with Sherra Wright by phone this past Thursday, hours before her arrest. She never indicated she knew what was coming.
But she told me she and her children would be getting their story out soon with people they trusted. She said a lot of lies have been going around and they wanted the truth told.
Less than 24 hours later she was in jail.
