Houston lawyer in the spotlight with cable TV show
Courtesy JOHN NOWAK/TNT
Kelly Siegler is a former Harris County prosecutor who solves cold cases on TNT's "Cold Justice." Since the series premiered in September, it has resulted in four confessions, eight indictments, 12 arrests, two guilty pleas and one 22-year sentence for murder.
- Emily Wilkinson
- Print Editor-Houston Business Journal
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Small town, USA, criminals should be very wary if Houston lawyer and former Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler comes their way.
On her cable network TV show "Cold Justice" — season two premieres June 20 at 7 p.m. on TNT — Siegler travels to small towns to investigate unsolved murders, and she has a 90 percent success rate.
“I think people are astounded by the results,” Siegler told the Houston Business Journal. Statistics show that a typical clearance rate for cold cases can be as low as 13 percent, she said.
During the 21 years Siegler worked in the Harris County's district attorney's office, she said the most challenging part was working on cold cases.
“Those are the hard ones that nobody wants to mess with,” she said.
Siegler ran for DA in 2008 but lost to Pat Lykos, after which she left the county's office and started her own practice in Houston, Kelly Siegler & Associates.
Soon after, she brought her idea of working on cold cases with small law enforcement agencies to Dick Wolf, who created the hit show "Law and Order." One thing led to another, and filming for season one started in 2012.
Siegler, who got her law degree fromSouth Texas College of Law in Houston, says being on TV has made her cynically aware that people pay more attention to television than to what’s going on with their local government.
"I bet you more people know that I have a show on TNT than ever knew that I ran for DA of Harris County," she told HBJ.
"Cold Justice" isn’t the first time Siegler has been in the limelight. When Houston residentJeff Wright was murdered by his wife, Susan Lucille Wright, in 2003 by being stabbed 193 times in a bed he was tied to, Siegler was the prosecutor. During the trial in 2004, Siegler brought the bloody mattress into the courtroom and re-enacted the killing by tying her colleague to the bed and straddling him, making headlines across the country. Susan was convicted of the murder.
The murder and court case were made into a Lifetime movie in 2012, “The Blue-Eyed Butcher.”
Emily Wilkinson leads the weekly edition of the Houston Business Journal, including special publications, centerpiece stories, Focus sections and the Deal of the Week. Follow her on Twitter for more.
