The Murder of Dr. Teresa Sievers

In June of 2015, Dr. Teresa Sievers was on vacation with her family in Connecticut. She decided to cut it short and return home so she could see patients at her medical practice, while her husband stayed in Connecticut with their children. Dr. Sievers was last seen on surveillance in the airport after her flight arrived, as she made her way out and drove home. When she arrived home, she was brutally attacked by two unknown assailants, who ultimately took her life. For nearly two months, investigators chased every lead, but were running out of options when a tip came in that led them to the men responsible, nearly 1100 miles away.

Who Was Dr. Teresa Sievers?

Teresa Sievers was born Teresa Ann Grace Tottenham in November of 1968 in Connecticut. Teresa was raised by a single mother, and from early in her life, she wanted one thing. She was determined to become a doctor. When you ask a younger kid what they want to do for a job, Doctor feels like one of those answers you get along with “fireman, police officer, or astronaut.” It feels like a default answer that some kids give just because it’s one they know, and they know if they say it, the adults will be like “oh how precious?” But, Teresa wasn’t just saying it, she put in the work throughout her early education to form the building blocks of what she would need later in life. Teresa graduated from Ansonia High School as the Valedictorian in 1986. She then went on to Fairfield University where she graduated with a Masters of Science in Biology in 1990. Next, she graduated with honors from Ross University School of Medicine. She completed her residency at the University of Florida in Jacksonville where she was awarded resident of the year. Next, Teresa became board certified in internal medicine.

Teresa moved to Charleston, South Carolina where she was doing clinical research. She met Kenny Cousins and the two began dating, before marrying one another. Kenny later said that the two of them bonded over a love of the outdoors, the ocean, music, food, and just having a good time. They had what he described as a real “work hard, play hard ethic.” The young couple moved from South Carolina to Saint Pete. There, Teresa got a job working in an outpatient clinic in an underprivileged part of town. Kenny said that Teresa was frustrated because she didn’t think it was fair that she would have two to three thousand patients to see, and she was only allotted minutes to see these patients, who arguably needed help the most.

Unfortunately, after three years of marriage, the couple divorced, but remained good friends, emailing back and forth a couple of times per month. Within months though, Teresa had met someone and was getting married again; this time to Mark Sievers, an LPN and the brother of one of her friends. The couple moved to Bonita Springs, FL in 2006, and it was there that they started a practice, Restorative Health & Healing Center. Teresa was also on the staff of Naples Community Hospital. In 2008, Teresa completed a board certification and fellowship at the American Academy of Anti-Aging, Regenerative & Functional Medicine. Four years later, she obtained her Medical Master of Science Degree in Metabolic & Nutritional Medicine through the University of South Florida.

As her education grew more and more, Teresa became more intrigued by Eastern medicine and began exploring the effects of energetic healing. She was one of the first MDs in Southwest Florida to embrace many of the eastern philosophies when it came to healing her patients. She did everything she could to bridge the gap between the Eastern and Western medical philosophies. She and her partner at the practice were committed to taking healing to the next level. When talking to patients, she told them that her motto was: “I am passionate about empowering you to tap into the doctor within you.”

One of her patients, Marian, recalled that Teresa was “… a tiny thing and just as cute as a bug’s ear. [she was] uplifting, positive, full of energy, a dynamo, a dynamo in a tiny package.” Teresa stood at 4’11’’, so she was small, but people called her the Oprah Winfrey of Florida. She was just that popular amongst her patients.

Marian also talked about going to see Teresa at her office saying, “It was a calling she had and she fulfilled it in an exceptional way. It was not a 15-minute visit; it was an hour and a half visit. I’m grateful that I got that in this lifetime. That’s how rare she is.”

That’s not to say that everything was sunshine and rainbows. Teresa wasn’t the type of doctor who was going to let her patients off the hook if she felt like they weren’t living up to their end of the deal. People who worked at the clinic recalled several times when they would hear Teresa in with patients, yelling at them to try to get her point across. She felt like if she was putting all of herself into trying to heal someone, they needed to do the same. And, her attitude about this rubbed some people the wrong way. They felt like at times, she could be very lacking when it came to bedside manner.

Buttttt, according to many people in Teresa’s life, she felt like things were perfect. She was happily married and they had two beautiful children. Things at work were great. In fact, not long before her death, she was profiled in a local women’s magazine for her career and charity work.

June 29, 2015

On the morning of June 29th, a call was placed to 911 from a friend of the Sievers.

On the call, you hear the friend detail that he was called by Mark to go check the house because Teresa didn’t show up for work. The Sievers were on vacation in Connecticut, and Teresa had plans to return home early, while the rest of the family stayed up north. She had patients lined up at her practice, and it’s probably not a surprise, but she wanted to make sure she was there for them.

On June 28th, Mark drove Teresa to LaGuardia Airport in New York City so she could catch her flight home. She can be seen on surveillance video at Southwest Florida International Airport after her plane arrived. She’s walking through the airport with her suitcase, making her way to the exit. She left the airport and made her way home, but she didn’t know that two men were waiting for her to arrive.

As Teresa went into her home, she was ambushed by the two men. They viciously attacked her with hammers. She was bludgeoned seventeen times before the men stopped their brutal assault and left. Teresa died from the injuries she sustained in the attack.

As we mentioned, the next day, Teresa was due at work, but when she didn’t show up, the office called Mark, who was the office manager. Teresa not showing up was waaaaaaaaay out of character, so he called their friend who went and checked at the house, leading to the 911 call we heard. The friend was a doctor himself and he entered the home and was immediately met with the crime scene. There was blood pooled around Teresa, and a hammer laying nearby. As he stated, she was cold to the touch, and he knew immediately that she was dead.

Investigators looked over the crime scene and it was evident to them that Teresa didn’t go without a fight, and that what happened to her wasn’t a quick thing. It took time. With no obvious smoking guns regarding a motive, they said that from the start that pretty much everyone was a suspect. They looked into everyone they could think of. Who did her hair, who did her nails? Who mowed their lawn? Was someone having an issue with her at work? But time and time again, nothing panned out.

They learned about Teresa’s “strong personality” as they put it, but ultimately they couldn’t make a connection between that and why someone might want to harm her.

Detectives also learned about an online group of people online who took an interest in Teresa’s case. Websleuths is an internet community that is focused on crime and missing persons. They’ve been involved in different cases before, and have done some good work on occasion. In 2014, Carl Koppelman, a member of Websleuths, believed that he had identified a match between a new image of Tammy Alexander, long missing from Hernando County, Florida, and a forensic portrait of a young unidentified homicide victim known as Caledonia Jane Doe, found in Livingston County, New York in 1979. He notified both the Sheriff’s offices and the NamUs database administrators. With this lead, police were able to make a DNA match between the victim and her half-sister, confirming her in January 2015 as Alexander more than 35 years after her death.

Websleuths had been looking into mysterious deaths of doctors who were also practitioners of holistic medicine. There were a couple that were spread across two to three states. The theory on Websleuths was that these doctors were all murdered because of their work and discoveries they might have made regarding holistic healing versus traditional healing. Because as we know, for many pharmaceutical companies, the money is in the treatment, not the cure. The detectives investigated this angle, because at this point they still didn’t really have an idea of who it might be, and everyone was a possibility.

By July 1st, Mark had returned to Florida and the police questioned him. As we know, any time there is a murder, the spouse is brought in, even if they were thousands of miles away when it occurred, like Mark was. Mark also had an airtight alibi that was corroborated by people in Connecticut.

While talking to detectives, Mark broke down many times and expressed how he blamed himself, if only he had told her to stay on vacation and not worry so much about the practice. Everyone the detectives talked to said the same thing about Mark and Teresa; Mark was her rock, and she was his. They spoke with Mark for a while, asking about if there were any infidelities in their marriage and Mark told them that neither he nor Teresa had ever done anything like that. They questioned him as to whether he knew of anyone who might have any type of unhealthy obsession with either Teresa, him, or their children. Mark said he couldn’t think of anyone who might fit that description. At points they left Mark alone and he can be seen talking to himself and going through sudden bursts of emotion. Eventually they let Mark leave because he had to plan Teresa’s funeral and be with his family. The funeral came and went, and at the funeral Mark wore a gun because he claimed that he was nervous someone might show up and try to hurt someone because Teresa’s killer hadn’t been caught yet. Family said that it seemed like Mark was in a “protective mode.” He was always keeping aware of his surroundings and seemed on edge.

Detectives kept coming up empty when it came to any leads they were following. There were some signs of a forced entry at the home, possible pry marks on a door, but they couldn’t find any kind of motive. The thought that maybe Teresa walked in on a robbery in progress was quickly set aside because Mark had an extensive gun collection that was left untouched, as well as forty thousand dollars in cash that was in the home. It was like someone was literally just waiting to kill Teresa.

The family did have an alarm system in their home, but it wasn’t active the day Teresa was killed. While they were out of town, they asked Mark’s mom to swing by the home periodically and make sure that the family pets were taken care of. The day that Teresa was murdered, Mark’s mom was having trouble with the system and couldn’t get it to set, so Mark just told her not to worry about it. She felt extreme guilt over what happened.

A Tip

For a period of time, there was basically no movement in the case. The detectives were in that pattern we’ve seen time and time again. Find a lead, investigate it, it turns out to be nothing… rinse and repeat. But then, the phone rang and detectives caught a break from a late night phone call. It had been about two weeks since Teresa was killed, and the voice on the other end mentioned a man named Curtis Wayne Wright Jr. Wright was a multiple time felon, and as the detectives dug more into his life, that led them to one of his friends, Jimmy Ray Rodgers whom he had met in jail while they were each serving out sentences. Side Note: Rodgers had a nickname “The Hammer,” but it was one of those instances where he gave himself the nickname and no one used it because….pathetic. Investigators went to the small town in Missouri where the tip came from and the men lived, some 1100 miles away from the crime scene. They talked to both men, but both denied having anything to do with it. Wright told them that he was not in Florida when Teresa was killed, but he was sick in bed. He later told them he worked on his car all weekend. Rodgers said he never talked to Wright, cause he was a nerd, and then he refused to speak with the detectives any more. After pushing and pushing, detectives returned to Florida, no closer to finding any proof that these men were involved.

While in Missouri, detectives had served warrants on both of the men’s property though, and in one of their vehicles, they found a GPS. They turned it over to their IT people, who were already hard at work going through Mark’s phone and computers, which Mark turned over voluntarily. With the GPS, they said that there was information that was deleted which was unrecoverable, but they kept trying. Detectives said that the team spent a significant amount of time trying to get through the code from the device and recover the deleted data, they estimated several hundred man hours were used… but it proved to be worth it.

They were able to use the data recovered to establish a route that was put into the device. From Wright’s home to Rodger’s home. Then, 1104 miles south, off the exit to Bonita Springs, and right to Jarvis Rd, where the Sievers lived. They were able to use addresses put into the GPS to track the men’s movements in Florida. They went to a Walmart that was across the street from a sheriff’s office and purchased several items. They can be seen on Walmart security cameras throughout the store. They bought a lock pick set (this is something you can just go to Walmart and buy?!?!), large garbage bags, several cleaning supplies, changes of clothes and rubber boots, things along those lines.

So at this point, detectives know for a fact that the men were lying and they were in Florida when Teresa was murdered, it’s plain as day right on the video. So, armed with all this new info, detectives returned to Missourah. They spoke with The Hammer’s girlfriend, Taylor Shomaker, and while talking, she broke down and said “I know what happened.” Taylor told them that they were laying in bed one night, and she already knew something was up. She kept asking questions and pressuring The Hammer, and said she knew he went to Florida and had something to do with Teresa’s death. He had told her originally that he was going with Wright to work a job and make some extra money. After she confronted him in bed, he confessed to her that he and Wright killed Teresa and they used a hammer to do it. Taylor was able to lead the detectives to a stretch of road where she had gone with Rodgers and he had her dump items out the window. They found pieces of his cell phone that he had destroyed and a blue jumpsuit, which he said he wore during the murder. Taylor said she was scared he would hurt her if she didn’t do what he said.

Sooo, they now had their killers and proof. But, Curtis Wayne Wright told the detectives that he had more information, information they would definitely want if a deal could be worked out. Wright told the investigators about his best friend from high school, when they both lived in Missouri… Mark Sievers.

Wright told them that in 2015, Mark went to Wright’s wedding in Missouri, and while there he confided in him that he was having marriage problems with Teresa. He told Wright that he was afraid that Teresa was planning on leaving him and taking the kids, and he didn’t have the kind of money it would take for a custody dispute. Then, Wright told detectives that Mark told him that the only option would be for Teresa to die. The two men then planned out how to murder Teresa, and Mark was going to pay Wright from the insurance money he would stand to collect. Detectives learned that there were five different life insurance policies that were taken out on Teresa, totaling over four point four million dollars. Wright then got Rodgers to help him without Mark’s knowledge.

Wright was actually known by many members of Mark’s family and even Teresa, since they had been friends for so long. Wright was into technology and actually worked doing computer repair and things like that. On many occasions, he had gone to Teresa’s practice and repaired computers in the office.

Wright said that the two of them rented a car and used the GPS to go to the Wright home around six AM on June 28th. They went into the home and disabled the security system before leaving and going to the Walmart, then a brief stop at the beach. Them being there so early and disabling the alarm system shines some light as to why Mark’s mom was probably having trouble with it. After their beach stop, the men returned to the home and waited for hours until Teresa arrived. As she walked in, they attacked her.

The Trials

Wright took his plea deal in exchange for testimony against Mark and Rodgers. He pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was given 25 years in prison. It would be four years before Rodgers and Mark Sievers went on trial.

Rodgers’ trial took place in October of 2019. The prosecutor laid it out as a classic case of murder for hire. He described what happened, in gruesome detail, with Teresa’s family in the courtroom. They had the video evidence of the men in Walmart along with Rodger’s now ex-girlfriend’s testimony regarding his confession. They were able to match a fiber found on Teresa’s body to fibers from the jumpsuit they found on the side of the road. Curtis Wright was called to the stand and said that he and Rodgers killed Teresa. He said that he hit her three times, but Rodgers kept hitting her over and over, in a frenzy. The defense called no witnesses, but told the jury that they shouldn’t believe Wright because he was just lying to save himself.

It took two days of deliberation, and the judge called everyone back into the courtroom when a verdict was reached. Rodgers was found guilty of second degree murder and given life in prison. He sat silently and showed no emotion as the verdict was read.

In November of 2019, Mark’s trial began. Mark had spent much of the prior years in jail, proclaiming his innocence to anyone who would listen. He was calm and cavalier in the courtroom, smiling and laughing with his attorneys. His family was standing behind him too. The courtroom was described almost like a wedding where Mark’s family was on one side, while Teresa’s was on the other.

As the trial started, Mark was unfazed, even though he was facing the possibility of receiving the death penalty. Prosecutors talked about how the case was a 21st century case where technology and data from computers, cell phones, cell phone towers, and GPS units were going to serve as evidence. The defense agreed that that info was available, but it didn’t point to Mark. It pointed clearly to Wright and The Hammer. The prosecution said that they knew they were going to have an uphill battle because they were asking the jury to believe an admitted murderer in Wright.

On the second day of the trial, Wright took the stand. The prosecution questioned him first. They asked who killed Teresa and Wright said that he and Rodgers did it physically, but that Mark was involved in the planning. When asked why he did it, he said that Mark asked him, and then he identified Mark in the courtroom. The prosecutor has said that he wasn’t a fan of Wright, and that they weren’t going to hold anything back regarding his own criminal past. They asked him why he lied originally when talking with the police and tried to pin it all on The Hammer. He admitted to trying to lie originally, but that before he was done with that statement, he had told the truth about his own involvement in the murder. Wright testified about how Mark approached him at the wedding about killing her. He was given a six hundred dollar check initially which would cover any expenses for his trip to Florida. He testified that Mark made an offer of at least one hundred thousand dollars to have her killed.

Okay, so on day three, Mark’s lawyer was cross examining Wright. And things got kinda weird. If you look at a picture of Mark and Wright, they could be brothers.. Or cousins… whatever you wanna say, they look a lot alike. People said that Wright did much more in this aspect to look like Mark than vice versa. In fact, when Mark started to lose his hair, Wright started shaving his head completely as well. But.. on day three, Mark’s lawyers tried to present that Wright was actually gay and in love with Mark; and that he wanted a sexual relationship with him. The prosecution immediately objected to the questions and the judge ordered them to move on. Mark’s lawyers later said that was a tough one to have to move on from because there was definitely something there. They described it as some air of possessiveness or intimacy, and that if Wright couldn’t have Mark, no one could.

Mark’s lawyers went on to say that they felt like Wright seeing Mark at the wedding was the final straw that pushed over the edge of jealousy. He was jealous of Mark’s beautiful Dr. wife, his daughters, and his beautiful family and life. He said that the anger over that along with his sexual attraction to Mark caused him to kill Teresa.

As Wright’s testimony continued, Mark’s jovial, joking attitude changed to tears and grief. During closing statements, the defense laid it out simply that this was a murder of hate and rage and not a murder for hire. He asked the jury if they trusted the multiple felon and admitted murderer Curtis Wayne Wright?

The case was turned over to the jury, and they deliberated for four hours.

Mark Sievers was found guilty of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Next was the question of punishment. The prosecution asked for the death penalty. Teresa’s mother gave a victim impact statement and talked about Teresa’s daughters missing everything they will go through growing up. For the death penalty to be imposed, the jury had to find that the murder was committed either for financial gain or that it was committed in a cold, calculated manner. The jury came back and found that it wasn’t for financial gain, but that it was committed in a cold, calculated manner. They recommended the death penalty for Mark Sievers.

The judge had the ability to overrule this, and before making a ruling read aloud a letter that the Siever’s eldest daughter wrote to him. Essentially, the letter said that at the current time she didn’t want any type of relationship with her father, if in the future she did, she wouldn’t be able to have that choice if he is given the death penalty. At the time of their mother’s murder, their daughters were eight and eleven years old. This would have been roughly four years later, so they were likely around 12 and 15 years old by this time. Mark Sievers made a statement, in it he still proclaimed his innocence and his love for Teresa and their children.

The judge said that there was not a question of his guilt, that the jury found him guilty, so he was guilty. He then ordered he be sentenced to death.

Mark Sievers remains on Death Row at Union Correctional Facility in Railford, Florida. He has appealed the guilty verdict and death sentence, but both have been denied.

Teresa’s mother was given custody of their daughters in May of 2016.