Joe Andriano

Case background and investigation

Joe Andriano lived with his wife, Wendi, and their two children in an apartment complex in the Ahwatukee area of Phoenix, where she worked as the property manager. According to the Arizona Supreme Court's 2007 opinion in State v. Andriano, he had been diagnosed in 1998 with adenoid cystic carcinoma, which had spread to his lungs, and he was terminally ill by the autumn of 2000.

The court's summary of the trial evidence says the couple went to a barbecue on October 7, 2000, and returned home around midnight. At about 2:15 a.m. Wendi Andriano called a co-worker to the apartment, where Joe was lying on the floor, vomiting and struggling to breathe. Paramedics who arrived after a first emergency call were sent away. A second call was made at 3:39 a.m., and responders then found Joe Andriano dead in a pool of blood.

The medical evidence described in the opinion was that he had received at least 23 blows to the back of the head and a deep stab wound to the neck, and that traces of sodium azide, a toxic chemical, were in his blood. Investigators found a 500-gram bottle of sodium azide and capsules filled with it in the couple's storage unit. The opinion also records that Wendi Andriano had tried several times to buy insurance on her husband's life, telling insurers he did not have cancer.

At trial in Maricopa County in 2004 she testified that the poisoning had been part of an assisted suicide that her husband wanted, that he later became violent, and that she struck him with a bar stool in self-defense. She also said she had been abused; ABC15 reported that friends testified they had not seen signs of abuse. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder. ABC15 gives the verdict date as November 18, 2004, and the death sentence as December 22, 2004. The jury found one aggravating factor, that the killing was especially cruel.

The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on July 9, 2007. A state post-conviction court later held a hearing on claims that her lawyers had been ineffective at the penalty phase and had a conflict of interest, and rejected them; the Arizona Supreme Court declined review. She filed a federal habeas petition in March 2017, which U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton denied on January 19, 2021.

Wendi Andriano is held at the state women's prison at Perryville. The Death Penalty Information Center's list of women under sentence of death, current to June 24, 2026, still included her. No execution date was found in the sources reviewed.