‘She chose ... murder’: Wife gets 12 years for killing Texas husband who wanted divorce
Sheila Berry’s relationship with her brother held complications and layers. She lives in the Seattle area. Steven Behnke was in Arlington. They did not talk every day.
The siblings had begun by early 2020 to connect as they had not in years. Happiness flowed from Berry’s more regular chats with her brother.
By now they may have been discussing the pains of aging.
“I would have teased him about getting old and he would remind me I wasn’t far behind,” Berry said on Tuesday as she addressed via Zoom her brother’s wife, Wendy Behnke, inside a Fort Worth courtroom.
Conversations like those are not possible because, after Steven Behnke sought to divorce his wife amid years of emotional abuse and abandonment, she shot him to death, according to Allenna Bangs, a deputy chief in the criminal division at the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.
Wendy Behnke could not accept that he had moved on, the prosecutor said.
On Friday, Wendy Behnke pleaded guilty to murder as her trial was to begin in the 371st District Court in Tarrant County.
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A pool of about 120 potential jurors was summoned for selection to a smaller panel that would have heard evidence at the trial. The potential jurors were waiting outside the central jury room when the district attorney’s office made a new plea bargain offer, according to defense attorney Christy Jack of the law firm Varghese Summersett.
After negotiations, the state and defense settled at 12 years in prison. State District Judge Ryan Hill sentenced the defendant to that term.
Wendy Behnke, who is 48, will become eligible for parole after she serves six years. Had a jury found her guilty of murder, it would have considered a prison term of between five to 99 years or life.
“She deserves to spend the next 12 years in the penitentiary,” Bangs, the prosecutor, wrote in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Wendy Behnke shot her husband on March 16, 2020, at a home on Corona Court in Arlington. She then called 911 and said what she had done.
Steven Behnke, who was 49, died within an hour at a hospital of gunshot wounds of the chest and abdomen, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“This is a tragic case for all involved and there are no winners,“ Jack, the defense attorney, wrote in a statement to the Star-Telegram.
As Berry was speaking on Zoom, the judge signaled that the defendant should pay attention. Berry said she wondered what may have been — if Wendy Behnke had stayed in St. Louis, where she had moved for graduate school.
“My grief has been combined with anger,” Berry said. “Anger that Steven was murdered by his wife, a person who was supposed to love him. She was living in St. Louis, why couldn’t she just continue living her life and let him live his? She chose to return to Texas and murder Steven.”
Berry told her former sister-in-law that she has a wish that Behnke’s prison cellmate snores.
