Former Lee County sheriff remembers Mark Sievers’ arrest for wife’s murder

In five days, a jury will decide if a man convicted of first-degree murder in his wife’s brutal killing will live or die.

Wednesday, a jury found Mark Sievers guilty for the murder of his wife, Dr. Teresa Sievers. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, orchestrating the plan to kill her.

Mark hired former best friend Curtis Wayne Wright to kill his wife. Wright hired Jimmy Rodgers as an accomplice, and they drove from their homes in Missouri down to Mark, Teresa and their daughters’ home in Bonita Springs in 2015, where Wright and Rodgers killed Teresa, bludgeoning her death with hammers.

At the time of Mark’s arrest as a suspect in Teresa’s murder, former Sheriff Mike Scott oversaw the arrest. We caught up with Scott to look back at what led to Mark’s arrest and talk about his recent conviction.

It took two months after Teresa’s murder for Lee County Sheriff’s Office to make the first arrest in the case, and it took eight months until Mark landed behind bars.

Scott explained why the process took the time that it did and how he feels about all three men involved now locked up and guilty of Teresa’s murder.

“I’m not 100 percent sure he’s got blood in his veins,” said Scott about Mark Sievers to WINK News in 2016. “I think he might have ice.”

After Mark’s conviction, Scott stands by those words.

“I’m pretty sure it’s ice,” Scott said. “[Mark is] very cold, very calculated.”

As for Mark’s arrest, it’s something Scott will never forget.

“I remember that like it was yesterday,” he said.

Scott says, although it took a while to make an arrest, LCSO knew immediately Teresa’s death was not a random act of violence.

“Again, despite their best efforts to make it look otherwise, we felt early on that it was, in fact, targeted,” Scott said.

But investigators still needed to process the crime scene and follow the trail of evidence and link it to Mark, Wright and Rodgers.

“It’s a complicated crime scene, and it’s one that we’re combing through every shred of evidence,” Scott told us in 2016. “No expense was spared. We were FedExing evidence back and forth. We weren’t even waiting for sometimes a more normal courier, and in some cases frankly we were taking it ourselves.”

Scott told us he doesn’t take any credit for the verdict the jury reached. He says justice would have never been served without his investigative team and the effort by prosecutors.

Three killers now found guilty four years later, with justice finally served.

“I had to almost chuckle when I saw one of his last remarks in court yesterday,” Scott said.

“I want to go home,” Mark Sievers said in court, prior to his conviction.

“Well he may be getting that wish,” Scott said. “That wish may come true for him. But it won’t be the home he was wanting to go to. He’s a killer. He did the unthinkable.”