on the night of July 19, Wright and a male acquaintance ignited a bonfire in the backyard fire pit of Sherra’s house in the suburb of Collierville. “I thought it was strange,” one neighbor, Patricia Coleman told reporters, “because it was like one of the hottest days of the year.”

Not surprisingly, scrutiny first centered on Sherra. When word leaked that Wright’s body had been found, hundreds of Memphians, including Hardaway, converged at the crime scene ringed by police tape. Wendy Wilson, a former personal assistant to Wright who was in the crowd, urged police to “look hard at his ex-wife.” Wilson would later claim to have voice recordings of Sherra threatening Lorenzen if she found him with another woman. (Deborah Marion said she heard the recordings, and theaudio files were turned over to the Memphis police.)

Sherra and Lorenzen Wright (far left and center) at a Grizzlies holiday event in 2003.

​Sherra was reportedly $3 million in debt, and speculation in some corners was that this gave her a financial motive in Lorenzen’s killing. Her attorney went public shooting down that theory, telling the New York Daily News that Lorenzen was “broke” at the time of his death.

The investigators, too, questioned Sherra initially, a common police practice when a spouse is murdered. She is the last known person to have seen him alive. On July 22, Sherra told Collierville police that Lorenzen had left her home on July 19 with an unknown person in an unknown vehicle.

What’s more, she said, he departed with cash and a box