Black deaf woman convicted of murder.

Daphne Wright

A heart of darkness can turn an ordinary home into a house of horrors. Jackie Chaz Moore has seen it happen. I just want to advise to other people, beware you cannot trust people. They may look innocent, they may have a smile, but check their behaviors, their references, because there's a lot of bad people out there, and they may be living in your home. In Jackie's basement, blue paint covers the stains of a grisly crime but memories can't be painted over so easily. I was just totally disgusted, totally blown away when I found out there was a chainsaw dismembering the body in my basement. It's something that I certainly will never forget. Sioux Falls South Dakota 2006, detective Troy Duncan investigates the disappearance of a local deaf woman Darlene Vandergiesen. Majority of missing person cases we have, the people turn up and there's a logical reasonable explanation of where they had been. But Darlene's disappearance has her family fearing the worst.

Darlene's parents family and friends were gathered at Darlene's apartment trying to put their heads together, trying to gather their wits to try and figure out where Darlene might be. Dee Vandergiesen welcomes a visit by her daughter's friends, one of them is Darlene's killer. She embraced Darlene’s mother she said to her mother I know that your daughter is missing, I am praying for you, I pray for her safe return. She said these things to Dee within hours of having dismembered Darlene's body and disposing of it in a dumpster. The previous spring the sun is shining in Sioux Falls. For Sally Collins and fellow deaf woman Daphne Wright, the world seems a happy place, Sally was a friend of Daphne's and she had moved in at the same time Daphne had in August the year before. Their landlady Jackie says she doesn't realize that Daphne and Sally are lovers. Deafness is the common bond that unites the couple. local journalist Joss verges discovers that for Daphne deafness has also been a barrier.

Definitely was the first deaf child born to hearing parents, her father was an alcoholic, her mother used limited signing to communicate with her, and didn't really learn sign language until Daphne was in high school. She did not have a pleasant upbringing. Daphne's childhood made her feel unwanted. It lays the foundation for a dangerous insecurity. I think Daphne was on a path to explode. One day, over time Daphne's demeanor changes, she becomes possessive and jealous. Daphne could be kind of jealous, controlling and angry at times. Sally gets a glimpse into her lover's dark heart. She doesn't like what lurks there. Not long before the murder Sally broke up with Debbie. A month after their breakup, Daphne visits Sally at her new apartment. She wants to make amends but there's a problem, Sally has a new friend, Darlene Vandergiesen. She was a deaf woman, she lived alone, she was a very popular employee with her colleagues.

State's attorney Dave Nelson would later prosecute Darlene's killer. One of the tragic parts about this case is that so many of us, who were involved in it, never got a chance to meet Darlene, because she sounds like she was really a remarkable woman. She may have been remarkable but to Daphne she represents one thing, a threat. Daphne Wright wanting to reestablish the relationship with Sally Collins and she believed Darlene was a threat to being able to accomplish that, got to a point where she felt that, the only way she was going to be able to reestablish that relationship with sally, was to remove Darlene from the picture. Outside Sioux Falls South Dakota scavengers swarm on a landfill site, not all the secrets that are dumped here remain buried. A search was conducted of the landfill. In probably ten days of a very frigid South Dakota February, her legs were found at the landfill, her torso was found in the landfill in separate pieces. The body parts belong to a local deaf woman named Darlene Vandergiesen.

A week earlier she meets another deaf woman for a meal, Daphne Wright. Daphne has been trying to get back with her ex girlfriend Sally, and lately Darlene seems to be in the way. Daphne became jealous of the relationship between Sally and Darlene, and she took extraordinary steps to try to keep Darlene away from Sally. She was motivated by jealousy but tonight Daphne's jealousy seems to have forgotten Daphne Wright scheduled a meeting with Darlene here in Sioux Falls, to occur on February 1st. She did that ostensibly to meet Darlene to plan for a birthday celebration or a Valentine's celebration for Sally Collins. That was a charade, it was a pretense in order to get Darlene to come to the restaurant. Darlene walks into a fatal trap, no one really knows what's happened, other than the people involved, but police suspected that Daphne somehow forced Darlene into her truck and took her to her home, killed her somehow.

At the time of the murder Daphne is living at Jackie Moore's house. One afternoon she sees Daphne in the basement dragging a large bundle and it looked like something was rolled up in there, and I looked down there. Daphne doesn't dispose of the body right away, for two days it lies in the basement. She's waiting for something. The defendant was broke, she had no money. She received a government disability check. Coincidentally on February 3rd, that Friday so at that point, when she finally had enough money to cut and purchase a chainsaw $53 at the hardware store. Now, Daphne can get to work. Daphne could have taken the body to a ditch or a dumpster area, something she chose to wait because she wanted to chop her up. Evidence of the intense rage within her, her weapon of choice splatters DNA Clues from floor to ceiling. Clues she will try to hide a week after the murder. Police investigate threatening emails sent to Darlene before her death, they come from Daphne Wright's home.

Daphne Wright was questioned by law enforcement about a week after the disappearance of Darlene. She told them a pack of lies. In Daphne's basement police find some grim evidence. We found in the concrete floor, we thought were marks that could possibly come from a chainsaw. They found fresh blue paint on the walls, it became clear that it was is used to cover something up. They later figured out that there were tiny bits of Darlene's nub flesh in there. Flesh and bone chainsaws are rarely used in dismemberment cases. They may be popular in Hollywood movies but in fact in real life they're not used very much. So, when we do see it, it certainly makes big headlines and paints the murderer as particularly evil and gruesome. Parts of Darlene's body turn up in a Sioux Falls landfill, others in a roadside ditch. Clues from the body and the crime scene proved Daphne Wright's guilt. We had evidence of motive, we had evidence of opportunity, we had physical evidence, we had the defendants own statements, we had DNA we had a tidal wave of evidence against this defendant.

Daphne Wright was convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree. A deaf woman who had a difficult childhood, Daphne Wright killed to defend the only love she'd known but when jealousy entered her heart it clouded her vision. She thought that Darlene was out to destroy her relationship with Sally Collins. That was not true, Darlene was heterosexual and known to date men. The motive for her murder was unfounded jealousy. Darlene and Sally Collins had struck up a friendship. They obviously enjoyed playing cards together and doing things together. They were only friends, there was no intimate relationship, it was all in Daphne's head. That tells me that Daphne had a very dark and dangerous rage growing inside her, probably for a long time. For Daphne Wright the guilty verdict leads to life behind bars.