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Dr. Teresa Sievers wanted to bring her message of holistic health to the world, hoping to one day have her own TV show where she could dish out wellness advice to a wider audience.
But she was brutally killed in her Bonita Springs, Florida, home before she ever got the chance to.
Teresa was found dead in her home on Monday, June 29, 2015 after she failed to show up at her holistic health clinic to see her patients, according to “The Road Trip” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
She was ambushed inside the home by two killers who bludgeoned her to death with a hammer just as she was returning home from a weekend trip to New York to celebrate her mother’s birthday.
It would take investigators weeks — and a trip of their own — to discover the men responsible for the grisly crime and uncover the chilling motive.
Who was Dr. Teresa Sievers?
Standing just under 5 feet tall, Teresa was known to many as a spitfire willing to do anything she could to help a patient in need, according to Dateline.
Teresa began her career in internal medicine but eventually found her way into holistic medicine.
She was so passionate about the approach to medicine that she launched a YouTube channel where she hosted her own show, and had dreams of one day taking her message to a more national audience.
“Getting you healthy is my passion, being healthy is your choice,” she told viewers in one video.
Along the way, the Florida doctor met a Missouri nurse named Mark Sievers, who had been vacationing in Florida, and romance sparked.
The couple got married, had two daughters, and opened their own holistic medicine practice in Bonita Springs. While Teresa handled all of the patient care, Mark managed the office and served as a modern day “Mr. Mom” to their children.
“They looked like they had it all,” Mark’s stepmother, Jennie Weckelman, told Dateline. “They looked happy in what they were doing, they looked focused, looking forward to what the next step would be.”
But those dreams would be cut short.
What happened to Teresa Sievers?
On June 28, 2015, Teresa arrived home just before midnight. She’d flown back early from a family trip in New York in order to see her patients in Florida, leaving her husband Mark and two daughters behind to finish out the vacation on their own.
Just moments after Teresa arrived back at home, she was brutally attacked in her kitchen.
The next morning, when Teresa didn’t show up to work, her concerned coworkers called Mark, who asked neighbor and fellow doctor Mark Petrites to run by the house to check on his wife.
Petrites let himself into the home and made the gruesome discovery.
“Uh, I’m at a friend’s house. Uh, he’s out of town and I came here to check on his wife. And she’s dead on the floor,” Petrites told a 911 dispatcher. “There’s a hammer at the side, and she’s bashed in the back of the head.”
The crime scene at the Sievers home
Detectives arrived to find the garage door of the home open. A suitcase lay in the garage that appeared to have been rifled through and there was evidence that someone may have tried to pry open the door to the house. Just inside the side door into the home, a dog bowl was found slightly askew and Teresa’s body was laying just inside the kitchen.
“When I looked at the body, she was face down… She was wearing a, like a black dress. She was in a large pool of blood,” Lt. Michael Downs of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office told Dateline.
Teresa’s purse, which also had been rifled through, sat on a nearby bar stool, leading detectives to conclude she’d been attacked moments after she’d walked in the door.
A medical examiner would later determine that Teresa had been struck with the hammer 17 times.
Detectives initially considered the possibility that Teresa had interrupted a burglary in progress, but it seemed that no valuables had been taken from the home. Crime scene technicians were also unable to find any fingerprints or DNA left behind by the killer.
But something seemed to be off with the home’s alarm system. Mark’s mother, Bonnie Sievers, had been taking care of the family’s pets and was in and out of the house all weekend. Bonnie said she’d been there Saturday night and swore that she had enabled the home’s alarm system, but said that when she arrived Sunday morning, the alarm had been off.
She said she told this to her son Mark, who told her that the system had been acting glitchy and not to worry about it, but detectives learned that someone had actually disabled the alarm at 6:09 on Sunday morning, hours before Teresa was killed.
Investigators question Mark Sievers
Although investigators often look at the spouse first when there’s been a crime, Mark had been hundreds of miles away at the time of the murder and Teresa’s family insisted that he was a devoted husband.
“Mark worshipped the ground that Teresa walked on,” her sister Annie Lisa told authorities.
Detectives looked into the possibility that Teresa may have been killed by a disgruntled employee or one of the people she helped through a charity aimed at serving troubled teen moms, but none of the leads panned out.
Without much to go on, detectives brought Mark down to the station for questioning to see if he could identify any other possible suspects.
“I can’t think of anybody — any situation — that would want to hurt Teresa,” Mark said in the interrogation room. “To take her life — it doesn’t make sense.”
Mark Sievers reveals secrets about his marriage to Teresa
Mark initially insisted that there was no infidelity in the marriage, but he later confessed that he and Teresa were “very occasional” swingers, and told detectives that they were in an open marriage. During a search of his phone, investigators found numerous photos and videos of women that Mark had been intimate with.
Mark had also been highly emotional during the conversation with investigators, sometimes sobbing or even hitting himself in the face. When he was left alone in the interrogation room, he began talking to his dead wife.
“Oh, my God, Teresa,” he said. “What could I have done? If I was with you, this wouldn’t have happened. If I came back, this wouldn’t have happened.”
To detectives, the behavior seemed over the top.
“He’s putting on a performance,” Downs said.
Although Mark insisted that the couple had a great relationship, neighbors reported hearing frequent arguing coming from the home.
But there was still no evidence to tie Mark to the crime at the time.
Break in case comes from Illinois
Detectives in Florida finally got the break they needed when an airport police chief from southern Illinois called to report that he knew a woman with some potentially valuable information about the case.
Detectives quickly headed to Illinois where they encountered a woman named Rose. She told investigators that during the weekend of Teresa’s murder, she’d been at a friend’s house and the friend’s daughter had said that her new husband, Curtis Wayne Wright, was in Florida for the weekend trying to solve an IT emergency for a friend. The woman noted that Wright, who lived in Missouri, had left his cell phone behind and couldn’t be reached all weekend.
Rose didn’t think anything of the brief conversation until she learned that Wright was Mark’s best friend and she discovered that Teresa had been killed that same weekend.
When authorities brought Wright in for questioning, he claimed he had been in Missouri all of that weekend — but his alibi was refuted by multiple friends and even his own wife. Detectives were also struck by the uncanny resemblance that Wright, who had a past criminal record for drugs, had to Mark.
“I’m like, wow, they have the same facial hair style, like, almost identical, both wear glasses, similar… receding hairlines — where they just gave up and shaved their head,” David Lebid, who was a lieutenant with the Lee County Sheriff’s Office at the time of the crime, told Dateline. “They frequently dressed similar too. It was very odd.”
GPS from Curtis Wayne Wright’s rental car reveals evidence
During a search of Wright’s rental car, investigators discovered a GPS device. Although the memory had been erased, technicians were able to recover the data, which showed a clear path from Missouri to Bonita Springs, Florida. Wright had even posted a Yelp review for a dumpling restaurant along the way.
The GPS device had also been paired with an email address belonging to Jimmy Ray Rodgers, a close friend of Wright who had his own criminal record. Surveillance footage from a Florida Walmart placed both men in the area at the time Teresa was killed.
Rodgers’ pregnant girlfriend also told police that Rodgers had confessed to killing Teresa with a hammer and instructed her to throw out a pair of coveralls used in the crime along the side of the road. She led authorities right to the discarded clothing.
Curtis Wayne Wright and Jimmy Ray Rodgers arrested
Both Rodgers and Wright were arrested, but it wasn’t until a few months later that the whole sinister plot was revealed. Wright agreed to turn on his best friend in exchange for consideration of a lesser sentence. He told police that Mark asked him to kill his wife in exchange for somewhere around $100,000.
Wright later testified that Mark said he believed that his wife had planned to leave him and didn’t want to give up time with their children, so he arranged for her murder, cashing in on $5.8 million in life insurance in the process.
According to Wright, Mark gave him the alarm code to the Sievers’ home and Wright and Rodgers got to the home early Sunday morning, before leaving for the day and returning later that night to kill the unsuspecting Teresa.
“She put her hands up and uh, was trying to defend herself,” Wright later testified. “She was surprised, I actually think she thought I was Mark. Um, she said, ‘Why?’”
Mark Sievers charged with wife Teresa Sievers’ murder
Mark was arrested in February of 2016 and charged with first-degree murder.
“Watching Mark Sievers be arrested, the smirk he had on his face, I’ll never forget. And I said there is no blood in his veins, this is a cold-blooded killer,” recalled Carmine Marceno, then undersheriff of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.
Rodgers was the first to go on trial in October of 2019. He was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Wright pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got a 25-year prison sentence in exchange for his testimony.
Mark was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in December of 2019. He was sentenced to death in 2020. Mark remains on death row, but continues to fight the ruling. In February of 2025, a judge granted him an evidentiary hearing, which would determine whether or not he’s granted a new trial, according to TV station WINK.
