JUST IN: Arizona Sets Execution for Wendi Elizabeth Andriano After She Poisoned and Murdered Her….

On December 22nd, 2004, 3 days before Christmas, a Maricopa County jury sentenced Wendi Elizabeth Andriano to death by lethal injection. She was 34 years old, a mother of two, a woman who had once described herself as a devout Christian.  In this video, we will talk about what happened, the brutal murder she committed, and why she now sits on Arizona’s death row more than two decades later, still fighting to save her life.

But to understand how a wife could poison her dying husband, beat him 23 times in the skull with a bar stool, and then plunge a 13-in knife into his neck while he lay helpless on the floor, we have to go back to October 2000 and an apartment in Ahwatukee, Arizona, where a man fighting terminal cancer would lose his battle not to the disease eating away at his body, but to the woman who had vowed to love him in sickness and in health.

 A husband given 1 year to live who didn’t even get that. A wife who grew tired of waiting for death to do its work. Two children sleeping peacefully in the next room while their mother committed an act so brutal, so calculated, so devoid of humanity that even the prosecutor who put Jodi Arias behind bars would call it one of the most evil crimes he had ever seen.

 After poisoning her husband with a chemical she ordered online under a fake name after bludgeoning him until brain matter was visible through his shattered skull. After slitting his throat so deeply that his carotid artery was severed, Wendi Andriano would face a jury, a sentence, and a needle  that has yet to deliver its final verdict.

March 17th, 1992. St. Patrick’s Day. San Antonio, Texas, where a 21-year-old woman named Wendi Ochoa walked into a bar.  She was young, attractive, looking for a good time. Across the room, she spotted a man. His name was Joseph Andriano. Joe, as everyone called him, was charming, funny, the kind of guy who could make anyone laugh.

They started talking. They started drinking. They started a relationship that would end 8 years later in a pool of blood on a motel room floor. But on that St. Patrick’s Day in 1992, none of that mattered. Wendy had found someone, someone who would take her away from the turmoil of her childhood, someone who would give her a new life.

Or so she thought. Wendy’s childhood had been anything but stable. She was born on August 6th, 1970 in Groom, Texas, a tiny town in the Texas Panhandle with a population of barely 600 people. Her parents were young. Her mother was just 20 years old when Wendy was born. Her father was an alcoholic and according to later court documents an abuser.

Wendy’s mother had hoped that having a baby would save the marriage, but she had wanted a boy. Instead, she got Wendy. The marriage continued to spiral. When Wendy was just 3 years old, her parents divorced. Her childhood, according to her defense attorneys, was spent in nearly constant turmoil.  Her first few years of life were filled with fighting, screaming, violence between her parents.

 The family traveled with a ministry, moving from place to place, never settling down. Wendy’s upbringing was strict, religious, chaotic. Years later, she would claim that she had been sexually abused by her father when she was around 2 years old, though she said she didn’t remember the incident, she would also claim that a member of the ministry had exposed himself to her when she was between 6 and 8 years old.

These claims were never independently verified, but they painted a picture of a woman who had been damaged from the very beginning. A woman who, according to her lawyers, was not mentally and emotionally equipped to handle the physical, emotional, sexual, and religious trauma inflicted upon her throughout her life.

Whether or not these claims were true, one thing was certain. Wendy Ochoa grew up without stability, without guidance, without a moral compass. And when she met Joe Andriano in that bar on St. Patrick’s Day, 1992, she was looking for someone to save her. Within weeks of meeting, Joe moved in with Wendy. It was fast, too fast.

Family members noticed red flags immediately. They witnessed Joe being physically abusive toward Wendy. They asked her to slow down, but Wendy was determined. In January 1994, less than 2 years after they met,  Wendy and Joe got married. Wendy later claimed that her only reservation about marrying Joe had to do with the fact that he wasn’t a Christian.

She wasn’t concerned about the abuse, she said, because in her eyes, Joe was no different than her father. Violence was normal to her. It was all she had ever known. The newlyweds settled in Ahwatukee, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. For a while, things seemed good. Wendy got a job as an apartment manager. Joe worked when he could.

 They were building a life together. And then, not long into the marriage, Joe fell ill. At first, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He went from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist, and receiving one misdiagnosis after another. The symptoms persisted. The pain worsened. And finally,  in 1998, after years of searching for answers, Joe received the diagnosis that would change everything.

Adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare form of cancer that affects the salivary glands. By the time doctors finally identified it, the cancer had progressed. It was terminal.  Joe Andriano, just 31 years old, was given approximately 1 year to live. The diagnosis  devastated the family. Joe tried holistic therapies at first, hoping to beat the cancer naturally.

Nothing worked. By 2000, he had resorted to chemotherapy. The treatment was brutal. It weakened  him, drained him, left him unable to work. The man who had once been charming and funny was now a shadow of himself, dependent on his wife for everything. Meanwhile, Wendy’s responsibilities had increased dramatically.

In 1997, she had given birth to a son, Nicholas. Just 6 months later, she gave birth to a daughter, Ashley. She was now caring for two small children and a terminally ill husband, all while working as an apartment manager to keep the family afloat. The stress was overwhelming. The finances were dire. At one point, the pressure became so intense that Wendy stole $2,000 from her employer.

She was caught.  She lost her job. The family was struggling. And somewhere along the way, something inside Wendy broke. In November 1999, Wendy became the manager of the San River Apartments in Ahwatukee. It was a fresh start, a new job, a chance to turn things around. But instead of focusing on her family, Wendy began focusing on herself.

She started drinking heavily. She started going to bars. And she started dancing and flirting and even groping and kissing men, according to later court documents. She was seen at clubs, at parties, acting like a single woman without a care in the world. Her husband was at home dying of cancer. Her children were at home, too young to understand what was happening.

And Wendy was out looking for escape, looking for attention, looking for something that Joe could no longer provide. In the summer of 2000, Wendy began an affair with a man who lived in the same apartment complex she managed. She pursued him aggressively. She showed up at his door in the middle of the night, banging, demanding to be let in, threatening to use her passkey if he didn’t open up.

 The man eventually rejected her when he learned she was married with children. But Wendy didn’t stop. On September 27th, 2000, just 11 days before she would murder her husband, Wendy had a sexual encounter with another man. Shortly afterward, she told this man that Joe had died from his cancer. It was a lie. Joe was still alive.

But in Wendy’s mind, perhaps, he was already dead. In February 2000, Wendy had told her hairdresser that she planned to divorce Joe if he wasn’t sick. By August 2000, she was telling people she wished Joe would just die so she could be free. The marriage was over in her heart. All that remained was the inconvenience of waiting for her husband’s body to catch up with her desires.

But Wendy didn’t want to wait. She didn’t want to go through a divorce and split their meager assets. She didn’t want to deal with custody battles and legal fees. And most importantly, she didn’t want to miss out on a potential windfall. The family had a pending medical malpractice lawsuit against Joe’s doctors for their years of misdiagnosis.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez would later argue that if Joe died before the lawsuit was resolved, Wendy could potentially receive as much as $20 million. Joe was worth more dead than alive. And Wendy knew  it. In the weeks before the murder, Wendy began making preparations. She started calling insurance companies trying to get life insurance policies on Joe.

But there was a problem. Joe was terminally ill. No insurance company would cover him after a medical examination. So Wendy came up with a plan. She asked not one, but two different men to impersonate Joe during the required physical exams. She offered one of them $10,000 to pose as her healthy husband and pass the medical screening.

Both men refused. The insurance scheme failed. No policy was ever purchased. But Wendy wasn’t deterred. She had another plan. A darker plan. A plan that didn’t require insurance companies or impersonators. A plan that only required poison. Wendy went online and ordered 500 g of sodium azide. Sodium azide is a highly toxic chemical compound commonly used as a pesticide and in automobile airbags.

It’s deadly when ingested. Just a few grams can kill a healthy adult. And Wendy had ordered 500 g,  enough to kill dozens of people. She ordered it under a false name, trying to cover her tracks. When the package arrived, she hid it in a storage unit. She took some of the powder and put it into gelatin capsules, disguising the poison as herbal supplements.

She labeled the bottle accordingly. And she waited. In the weeks leading up to the murder, Wendy allegedly began adding the poisoned capsules to Joe’s coffee. Slowly,  methodically, watching her husband grow weaker and weaker, not from the cancer, but from the poison she was feeding him. She was killing him inch by inch, but it wasn’t happening fast enough.

October 7th, 2000, a Sunday evening, the Andriano family did what many Arizona families do in the fall. They hosted a backyard barbecue. Friends came over, food was served, the children  played. To anyone watching, it looked like a normal family gathering. A husband battling cancer, a wife caring for him.

Two young children, Nicholas and Ashley, ages three and two, too young to understand the darkness lurking beneath the surface. The barbecue ended around midnight. The family returned to their apartment in the San Rivas complex. Wendy and Joe put the children to bed, so they tucked them in.  They kissed them goodnight.

And then Wendy Andriano set her plan in motion. Sometime after the children were asleep, Wendy prepared a bowl of cream of mushroom soup for her husband. But this wasn’t ordinary soup. Wendy had laced it with sodium azide. She brought the soup to Joe. He ate it, and within minutes, the poison began and effect.

Joe’s body started to fail. He became violently ill. He started vomiting, gasping for air. His muscles weakened. He collapsed onto the living room floor, curling into the fetal position, unable to move, unable to defend himself. The sodium azide was shutting down his body from the inside. Joe lay on the floor dying, not from the cancer that had been slowly killing him for years, but from the poison his wife had just fed him. And Wendy watched.

 At 2:15 a.m. on October 8th, 2000,  Wendy picked up the phone, but she didn’t call 911.  Instead, she called Chris, a female co-worker who lived in the same apartment complex. She asked Chris to come over and watch the children while she took Joe to the doctor. Chris agreed. When she arrived at the apartment, Wendy met her outside.

 The first words out of Wendy’s mouth would later become some of the most chilling evidence at trial. “I have a problem,” Wendy said. “Don’t ask any questions. My husband’s on the floor dying, and I haven’t called 911 yet.” Chris was stunned. Her husband was dying on the floor, and she hadn’t called for help? Wendy added something even more disturbing.

“He doesn’t know I haven’t called 911.” She was keeping it a secret from her dying husband that she wasn’t trying to save him. Chris urged Wendy to call 911 immediately. Wendy went to another room to make the call. Meanwhile, Chris entered the apartment and found Joe lying on the living room floor. He was in the fetal position.

 He had vomited.  He was weak, struggling to breathe. His face was pale. His body was trembling. He looked like a man who was dying. And he was. But not from cancer. Chris knelt beside him.  Joe looked up at her and said something that would haunt her forever. “I need help.”  Joe whispered. “I have for a long time.

” He then asked why it was taking 45 minutes for the paramedics to arrive. It hadn’t been 45 minutes. It had only been a few minutes. But to Joe, lying on that floor,  poisoned and helpless, time had become meaningless. He was slipping away. And he knew it. The paramedics arrived within minutes. Four of them, along with Chris, approached the apartment with their equipment.

But before they could enter, Wendy came bursting out of the apartment screaming at them to leave. “Go away!” She yelled. “Get out of here!” She ran back inside and slammed the door. Chris and the paramedics stood outside, confused, alarmed.  They knocked on the door. No answer. They knocked again. Nothing.

They tried for 5 to 10 minutes to get someone to open the door. Finally, the Phoenix Fire Department alarm room called the Andrianos’ home phone. Someone answered. They were told that someone would come out to speak with the paramedics. But Wendy didn’t come out the front door. The front door opened directly into the living room where Joe was lying on the floor.

 Instead, Wendy went out the back door. She climbed over the patio wall. She walked around the entire apartment building. And when she finally appeared in front of the paramedics, something was different. >> [snorts] >> She had changed her shirt. Her hair was wet.

 She had clearly taken time to clean herself up while her husband lay dying on the floor. While paramedics waited outside to save his life. Wendy told the paramedics that Joe was dying of cancer and that he had a do not resuscitate order.  This is not the way he wanted to go, she said. The paramedics believed her. They left without entering the apartment.

They left Joe Andriano to die. One hour passed. During that hour, something horrific happened inside the apartment. Something so brutal, so violent, so devoid of any human compassion that it would shock even the most hardened homicide detectives. The poison hadn’t killed Joe fast enough.

 He was still alive, still breathing, and still aware of what was happening to him. And Wendy decided to finish the job herself. She grabbed a bar stool from the apartment, a heavy wooden bar stool, and she started swinging. She hit Joe in the back of the head once, twice, three times. She kept swinging. Joe tried to defend himself.

 His hands came up instinctively, trying to block the blows, but he was too weak. The poison had ravaged his body. The chemotherapy had destroyed his strength. He was a 33-year-old man who weighed over 200 lb, but he was as helpless as a child. Wendy kept swinging. She hit him four times, five times, six times. Blood splattered across the floor, across the walls, across Wendy’s clothes.

 She hit him 10 times, 15 times, 20 times. The bar stool began to break apart from the force of the blows. Our brain matter began to seep through the cracks in Joe’s skull.  And still, Wendy kept swinging. 21, 22, 23 times. The medical examiner would later determine that eight to 10 of those blows were independently fatal.

Any one of them could have killed Joe, but Wendy delivered 23. Joe’s body lay on the floor, motionless, broken. But Wendy wasn’t done.  She grabbed a 13-in kitchen knife. She knelt beside her husband’s body. And she plunged the knife into the left side of his neck. The blade severed his carotid artery.

Blood poured from the wound, pooling around his body, soaking into the carpet. Joe Andriano, a man who had been given 1 year to live, died that night not from the cancer that had been slowly killing him, but from the wife who had vowed to love him until death did them part. So, she had made sure that death came early.

At 3:39 a.m., Wendy called 911 again. The same paramedics responded. When they arrived, they found Wendy standing outside the apartment talking to a police officer. She was wearing a bloody shirt, the same bloody shirt she had apparently changed out of and back into. She looked calm. Too calm for a woman who had just watched her husband die.

When the paramedics entered the apartment, they found a scene of absolute carnage. Joe was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. His head was shattered, lacerations so deep that brain matter was visible. A deep stab wound gaped from the side of his neck. A broken bar stool lay nearby, covered in blood. Pieces of a lamp were scattered across the floor.

A bloody kitchen knife, a bloody pillow, a belt that had been placed beside the body after death. And the apartment looked like a slaughterhouse. The children were still asleep in the other room. Nicholas, 3 years old, Ashley, 2 years old. They had slept through everything, the screaming, the beating, the murder of their father.

 They would wake up the next morning without a daddy. They would grow up without ever really knowing him,  and they would spend the rest of their lives knowing that their mother was the one who took him away. Wendy told the police that she had killed Joe in self-defense. She claimed that Joe had been contemplating suicide because of his terminal illness.

She claimed that he had voluntarily swallowed the sodium azide capsules to end his own life. She claimed that when the poison didn’t kill him fast enough, he became enraged. She claimed that she had confessed her affair to him, and he had attacked her. Or she claimed that he had tried to strangle her with a telephone cord.

 She claimed that she had cut the cord with a knife to escape. She claimed that Joe had picked up the knife and was threatening to kill himself. She claimed that during a struggle to stop him, his throat was accidentally cut. She claimed that she had hit him with the bar stool in self-defense. 23 times. In self-defense.

She claimed that she was a battered wife who had finally fought back. But the evidence told a different story. Police searched the apartment. They found gelatin capsules filled with sodium azide in a bottle labeled herbal supplements. They found trace amounts of sodium azide in a soup pot and two bowls in the kitchen.

They searched Wendy’s storage unit. They found a 500 g bottle of sodium azide, on two Tupperware containers filled with the poison, nine Q-tips, a plastic knife and fork, two pairs of latex gloves, and Wendy’s fingerprints were on the plastic knife and on the vacuum-packed bag in which the sodium azide had been shipped.

20.8 g of sodium azide were missing from the bottle. Enough to kill multiple people. The evidence was overwhelming. This wasn’t self-defense. This was premeditated murder. The medical examiner’s findings were equally damning. Joe had sustained brain hemorrhaging caused by no fewer than 23 blows to the back of his head.

Eight to 10 of those blows were independently capable of rendering him unconscious. Several were independently fatal. The stab wound to his neck had severed his carotid artery. Trace amounts of sodium azide were found in his blood and gastric contents. And he had been poisoned before he was beaten.

 He had been weakened before the assault began. He never had a chance. But perhaps the most telling evidence came from Joe’s hands. He had defensive wounds on his hands and wrists. Cuts, bruises, signs that he had tried to protect himself. Signs that he had been conscious during at least part of the attack. Signs that he had felt every blow, every cut, every moment of terror  as his wife beat him to death.

The blood spatter analysis told the same story. Joe had been lying down during the entire attack. He never got up. He never fought back effectively. He was too weak, too poisoned, too helpless. He had experienced, according to the Arizona Supreme Court, prolonged physical pain and mental anguish during the attack.

He had suffered. And Wendy  had made him suffer. Um the trial of Wendy Andriano began on August 23rd, 2004, nearly four years after the murder.  The prosecutor was Juan Martinez, a man who would later become famous for his aggressive prosecution of Jodi Arias. Martinez was known for his theatrical courtroom style, his relentless cross-examinations, his ability  to make defendants squirm on the witness stand.

Wendy Andriano would be his first female defendant sentenced to death by a jury. The trial lasted 17 weeks. Wendy took the stand in her own defense and testified for 9 days. 9 days of tears. 9 days of claims of abuse. 9 days of insisting that she was the real victim. She told the jury that Joe had been abusive throughout their marriage.

 She told them that he had controlled the family finances even though he rarely worked. She told them that he had isolated her from friends and family. She told them that she had been trapped in a violent marriage with no way out. She portrayed herself as a submissive devout Christian who had been pushed to the breaking point.

But the prosecution had a different story to tell. Martinez called witness after witness who testified that they had never seen any signs of abuse. Friends of the couple, family members,  co-workers. None of them had ever seen Joe hit Wendy. None of them had ever seen bruises on her body. None of them had ever heard her complain about being mistreated.

The abuse claims were unsupported by any evidence. Martinez also presented evidence of Wendy’s affairs, her drinking, her bar hopping, her aggressive pursuit of other men while her husband lay dying at home. He presented evidence of her insurance fraud attempts. The men she had asked to impersonate her husband.

The $10,000 she had offered. He presented evidence that she had told her hairdresser she wanted to divorce Joe. That she had told others she wished he would die. That she had lied to a sexual partner by saying Joe was already dead. The picture that emerged was not of a battered wife driven to desperation. It was of a cold, calculating woman who had grown tired of her husband and decided to eliminate him.

The jury deliberated for just 2 and 1/2 hours. They returned with a verdict of guilty. First-degree  murder. The trial immediately moved to the penalty phase. The jury had to decide whether Wendi Andriano should be sentenced to death or to life in prison. Martinez presented evidence of Wendi’s premeditation.

  All the poison ordered online under a fake name. The gelatin capsules disguised as supplements. The weeks of slowly poisoning Joe before the final attack. He argued that the murder had been committed in an especially cruel manner. 23 blows to the head. A stab wound that severed the carotid artery. A victim who was conscious and suffering during the attack.

A man who was already dying of cancer, who should have been allowed to spend his final months with his children. Who should have been treated with dignity and compassion, not beaten to death by the woman who had promised to love him. The defense presented mitigating evidence. Wendi’s troubled childhood.

 The abuse she had allegedly suffered. The stress of caring for a terminally ill husband while raising two young children. And the mental health issues that her lawyers claimed had contributed to her actions. But the jury wasn’t moved. They deliberated for 8 hours. They found one aggravating factor, that the murder had been committed in an especially cruel manner.

And they found that the mitigating evidence was not sufficient to call for leniency. On December 22nd, 2004, 3 days before Christmas, the jury returned with their decision. Wendi Andriano should be sentenced to death. When the verdict was announced, Wendi sobbed and buried her head in her defense attorney’s chest.

She declined to make any statement. She was led away in handcuffs, knowing that she would spend the rest of her life on death row,  waiting for the state of Arizona to execute her. The families reacted to the verdict with a mixture of relief and sorrow. Joseph Andriano Sr., so Joe’s father, told reporters, “Closure isn’t the right word.

 I don’t think I’ll ever get over losing my son.” Jeannette Andriano, Joe’s mother, said, “He was such a likable man. He was a good-time Joe who had lots of friends and could make people laugh.” Gina Lambeth, Joe’s sister, who had taken custody of Nicholas and Ashley after the murder, had perhaps the most cutting words. “I don’t know who that person in the courtroom was,” she said.

 “She was the perfect liar. She played us all.” And then she added something that captured the family’s faith and their sense of justice.  “Nobody wins in this. This is not about who won or who lost. The person she needs to fear is not here on Earth.” Wendy Andriano was transported to the Lumley unit at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Perryville.

 She was assigned inmate number 191593. She joined a small group of women on Arizona’s death row.  As of today, there are only three women awaiting execution in Arizona. Wendy Andriano, Shawna Ford, convicted of a 2009 home invasion that killed a man and his 9-year-old daughter, and Samantha Allen, convicted of the 2011 murder of her 10-year-old cousin.

Three women, three brutal crimes, three sentences of death. Wendy immediately began the appeals process. In 2007, she filed  a post-conviction appeal arguing that evidence of her affairs and her attempts to buy life insurance had unfairly prejudiced the jury against her. She argued that jurors should have been allowed to consider lesser charges, such as second-degree murder or manslaughter.

The Arizona Supreme Court rejected her appeal, affirming her conviction and death sentence. The court noted, however, that prosecutor Juan Martinez had taken every opportunity to infuse the trial with marginally relevant information about Adrianne’s partying and man chasing.  It was a criticism of Martinez’s aggressive tactics, but it wasn’t enough to overturn the verdict.

In 2012, Wendy’s attorneys filed another appeal, this time claiming that Martinez’s emphasis on her affairs had constituted prosecutorial misconduct. They argued that he had ignited female stereotypes by portraying her as a promiscuous woman who had betrayed her dying husband. They also argued that her trial attorney had been ineffective.

 According to court documents, her lead defense attorney, David Delozier, had not eaten solid food for 70 days during the trial. His father was dying. A fellow attorney involved in the case had been murdered during the course of the trial. Ar- the defense argued that Delozier had been too distracted, too stressed, too compromised to provide effective representation.

But once again, the appeals court rejected these arguments. In 2016, Wendy filed for federal habeas corpus relief. In 2018, a federal district court denied her motion for evidentiary development. In April 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered her case to be returned to Maricopa County Superior Court for a post-conviction hearing regarding her death sentence.

 A 2023 Supreme Court ruling had established that juries must be informed that a defendant sentenced to life imprisonment would never be paroled. Wendy’s jury had not been given this instruction. It’s possible that this technicality could result in her death sentence being reduced to life in prison. The appeals continue.

 More than two decades after she strangled, beat, and stabbed her husband to death, Wendy Andriano is still fighting to save her own life. Today, Wendy Andriano is 55 years old. She has spent more than 20 years on death row. Her children, Nicholas and Ashley, are now adults. They were raised by their aunt Ginaia, far away from the mother who murdered their father.

It’s unclear whether they have any relationship with Wendy today. What is known is that they grew up knowing the truth about what happened that night in October 2000. They grew up knowing that their mother poisoned their father, beat him with a bar stool, stabbed him in the neck, left him to die on the living room floor while they slept peacefully in the next room.

 How do you process that as a child? How do you reconcile the memory of a mother who tucked you in at night with the knowledge of what she did after you closed your eyes? These are questions that Nicholas and Ashley Andriano will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The case of Wendy Andriano forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about human nature.

How could a wife do this to her husband? How could a mother commit such violence while her children slept nearby? How could anyone beat another person 23 times with a bar stool and then claim self-defense? The answers are disturbing. Wendy Andriano was tired of waiting. She was tired of caring for a dying husband.

She was tired of the financial strain, the emotional burden, the responsibilities that came with being a caregiver. She wanted freedom. She wanted money. She wanted to start a new life. Her and her husband’s terminal illness wasn’t killing him fast enough. So, she took matters into her own hands. She ordered poison online.

 She disguised it as herbal supplements. She fed it to her husband in his soup. And when the poison didn’t work quickly enough, she picked up a barstool and started swinging. 23 times, until his skull was shattered, until brain matter was exposed, until there was no doubt that Joseph Andriano would never take another breath.

And then she called 911 and claimed self-defense. She claimed she was the victim. She sat on the witness stand for 9 days and cried about her abusive marriage, her troubled childhood, her desperate circumstances. But the jury saw through the tears. They saw a woman who had planned this murder for weeks, who had ordered the poison under a fake name, who had researched how to kill on her computer, who had tried to get life insurance on her terminally ill husband so she could profit from his death, who had turned away paramedics who might

have saved his life, who had beaten him with such ferocity that even the broken barstool told the story of her rage. Wendy Andriano didn’t snap. She planned. She calculated. She executed. And when it was over, she tried to cover it up with a story about self-defense that made no logical sense. How does a woman who weighs significantly less than her 200-lb husband beat him 23 times in self-defense? How does she stab him in the neck in self-defense? How does she have time to change her clothes, wet her hair, and climb over a

patio wall while supposedly fighting for her life? The answers are simple. She doesn’t because it wasn’t self-defense. It was murder, cold, calculated,  premeditated murder. Joseph Andreano was a man who was dying. He had maybe a year to live, perhaps less. His body was being ravaged by cancer. His spirit was being broken by chemotherapy.

He should have been allowed to spend his final days with his children, to hold them, to tell them he loved them, to say goodbye. Instead, his life was cut short by the woman who had vowed to stand by him in sickness and in health. His children will never have those final memories. They will only have the knowledge that their father was murdered by their mother.

That while they slept, their daddy was being beaten to death in the next room. That the last sounds he ever made were gasps of pain and terror as blow after blow rained down on his skull. More than 24 years have passed since that night in October 2000. Our Wendi Andriano remains on death row filing appeal after appeal hoping that some legal technicality will save her from the needle.

The families of the victim continue to wait for justice. The children have grown up without a father or a mother.  And the questions remain. What makes someone capable of such cruelty? What breaks inside a person to allow them to beat their dying husband to death and then claim to be the victim? What does it say about humanity that Wendi Andriano is not unique? That there are others like her, that  people are capable of such darkness? Perhaps there are no answers.

Perhaps some acts are simply beyond understanding. But one thing is certain. Joseph Andriano deserved better. He deserved to die peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, with dignity and compassion. Instead, he died on a motel room floo,  rdispoisoned and beaten by the woman he had married, his skull shattered, his throat cut, his final moments filled with unimaginable pain  and terror.

And somewhere in another room, his children slept, unaware that their lives had just been shattered forever. That is the legacy of Wendy Andriano. That is the story of a wife who couldn’t wait.