Jimmy Ray Rodgers, 29, has been found guilty of second-degree murder in the 2015 beating death of Dr. Teresa Sievers, 46. Prosecutors said that he and friend Curtis Wayne Wright Jr., 51, killed the victim at the behest of the victim’s husband Mark Sievers, 51. The defendant did not testify in his case.
Sentencing is set for November 18, 1:30 p.m. Rodgers faces up to life in prison.
Wright, who is Mark Sievers’s childhood friend, had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and took the stand for the state as the one witness who attested to how the victim died.
The state said Teresa Sievers returned to her Lee County, Florida home without her family after a vacation. That’s when Wright and Rodgers murdered her, they said.
Now it’s Mark Sievers’s turn to stand trial. The victim and her husband had been having martial problems, and there had been talk of divorce, according to a probable cause statement obtained by Law&Crime. Mark Sievers allegedly said he feared losing his daughters in a divorce, according to the state at Rodgers’s trial.
[Screengrab via Law&Crime Network]