Beaten while pregnant and sexually assaulted with a curling iron, Lisa Moss did everything she could to hide the pain her husband inflicted on her from the world until one day her brother fought back.
Lisa was only 24 years old when she was sentenced to life without parole in 1990 after her brother Richard Lee Wright, shot dead her husband, Lanny Mike Moss, 37.
Lisa had confided in her sibling that Lanny had been sexually abusing both her and her three-year-old daughter.
Though Lisa was not the one who committed the crime, she was still charged in Oklahoma with felony murder and conspiracy and wrongly spent 34 years in prison. Her brother, who was 25 at the time, was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He is serving a life sentence without parole.
On January 8, after more than three decades behind bars a judge granted Lisa, now 59, her freedom. She became the ‘first’ person under Oklahoma’s new Survivor’s Act to have her case retried to prove that she was a victim of domestic abuse.
Lisa proclaimed her release is a ‘miracle’ and would not have happened without the help of her attorney Colleen McCarty. ‘Colleen worked so hard. She believed in me, and her team believed in me. Everything that we had hoped for, and everything that they had worked so hard for, it came true that day,’ she said choking back tears.
‘Thank you is not even an adequate word to how deeply I feel,’ she added.
Lisa opened up to DailyMail.com about her new found freedom, years in prison and the abuse that became more horrifying and sadistic when she was pregnant that still haunts her to this day. In one sexual assault, Wright used a curling iron to torture her.
Lisa Moss was released from prison last month after serving 34 years for a crime she did not commit
Lisa Moss with her brother Richard Wright
Lisa was 21 and the mother of a toddler when she met Mike in a parking lot and he asked her out on a date. He was 12 years her senior but described by Lisa as someone ‘who swept her off her feet’.
Lisa’s parents knew Mike since their families grew up together in their small Oklahoma town where everyone knew each other.
Mike’s mother and Lisa’s mother worked at the same beauty salon together and knew that Mike had been married and divorced three times.
After dating for nine months, the pair decided to tie the knot but her parents did not approve.
‘My parents knew exactly who he was. They knew of the abuse that he had implicated on his past wives,’ Lisa said.
‘When we told them we were getting married they were saying ‘we don’t approve and we won’t be there.’
She spoke about the challenges she faced as a new bride trying to please her new husband and her parents.
‘There was a division in my home. I always felt like I couldn’t win in either situation.’
While they were dating she described Mike as ‘loving, caring and protective’ until his behavior changed six months into their marriage and the abuse began.
‘The first time he put his hands on me he was angry about something. He grabbed me by the neck pushed me up against the fireplace and started choking me,’ she said. ‘It shocked me. He released his hands and walked away.’
She shared that he never apologized and instead blamed her for his violent episode.
‘It was always, ‘it’s your fault you shouldn’t have said that… you shouldn’t have done that… if you didn’t do this… I wouldn’t have put my hands on you,’ she recalled.
After that terrifying ordeal, she recalled Mike telling her ‘it would never happen again’.
She added: ‘I believed him.’ But it did happen again and it got worse.’
Lisa pictured with her baby girl. She was only 21 when she met her abuser and her daughter was a toddler
Lisa and her brother Richard when they were babies
Lisa’s daughter from a previous relationship and the son she had with her abusive husband
Lisa with her parents and her young daughter
‘I didn’t feel at the time I could go home and talk to my parents. They were so against our marriage. My mother saying, ‘this marriage is not going to work, and he’s not going to be good to you,’ she said.
When she became pregnant with her son that is when she said, ‘the abuse really amped up’.
She said Mike was not excited about the pregnancy and wanted her to have an abortion. When she refused, he told her, ‘Well, if you won’t have an abortion, then you’ll have a miscarriage.’
The beatings became more frequent during her pregnancy. ‘I found myself on the floor,’ she recalled, ‘and he’s beating on my stomach’.
She recalled the agony and despair.
‘There was a point that I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel like I could go home. He had threatened my parents. He knew that I was close with my parents, and he told me that he would kill anybody that I told about the abuse.
‘I believed him because he used his gun on me numerous, numerous times. So I believed it when he said it.’
So, Lisa endured the physical and emotional abuse for three years but the last beating she took was the one that would change her life forever.
‘He never hit me in the face, so people didn’t see bruises on my face,’ she said, ‘But there were bruises the day that I saw my brother and told my brother what was happening.’
‘I will never try to justify what happened to him. What happened to him never should have happened. And with that said, what happened to me and my children never should have occurred either.’
Through the years she kept a close relationship with her brother while they were both jailed in separate prisons through letter writing.
One of the ways she got through it was the friendship she formed with a woman in the ministry that helped her find God and who became a mentor and mother-figure.
‘When you go in with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, you don’t see any hope on the other side. You have to flip a switch in your mind to say, ‘Okay, this is where I’m at. This is where I’m going to be. I can either let prison swallow me up or I can make the most of the situation,’ she said.
‘It’s been a faith journey. Had I not had this strong faith-filled people around me that I did, lifting me up and continuing to pray for me, I don’t know that I could have survived prison.’
Lisa relied on her faith during the decades she was behind bars
Lisa pictured with her parents while she was incarcerated
While behind bars she also got to see her parents and daughter, enrolled in college classes, earned her associates degree and bachelor’s degree.
After her release she got to finally meet her grandchildren and great-grandson for the first time.
She recalled it being ‘the most amazing experience’.
‘There were lots of tears. I don’t think anybody knew exactly what to expect, but it was the sweetest thing ever.’
However she is sad that she has been unable to reconnect with her son, who she hasn’t spoken to since he was three years old. He will be 36 this month.
‘His aunt and uncle actually took him and adopted him and raised him in another state. And of course, I’m (seen as) the monster,’ she said.
‘He’s not open to meeting me at this point. He does know that I’m released. He does know that I’m free,’ she said.
She choked back tears when she said: ‘I just have to pray and believe that there will be a day when I will be able to reunite with him and tell him the truth.’
Lisa pictured next to attorney Colleen McCarty who stuck by her side and other supporters. The group posed for a photo the day she was released from prison after serving 36 years
Colleen McCarty, founding Executive Director, Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, told DailyMail.com that she first became aware of Lisa’s case around the time she was applying for commutation in 2022/23.
At the time she was just an advocate for her. McCarty explained she had a different legal team and the parole board denied her for commutation. It was a devastating blow, she recalled.
During that time, they had legislation going through for the first time – the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act.
‘It was one of the only opportunities we felt at the time that Lisa might be able to get free. We tried to pass the bill here in Oklahoma in 2023, and it was not successful.
She said: ‘It ended up dying at the end of session because the legislators did not include language that would have been retroactive.’
But, after getting support from representative Jon Echols, the floor leader and Senator Greg Treat, they were able to bring the bill back again in 2024 with the language they wanted.
Through advocates, sponsors, volunteers in Oklahoma and across the state, and a coalition of domestic violence survivor organizations, things were looking up.
‘We worked really hard to get it passed. It also was vetoed by the governor here in April 2024. We had to scramble and get new language put back into another bill that he was okay with, and there was a lot of negotiations for that.’
McCarty said the bill was signed on May 21, 2024, and it went into effect August 29, 2024.
In September they filed the request for resentencing for Lisa and got the hearing date of January 8. She was the first person to go up for resentencing under the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act.
‘We were able to represent her in court in Seminole and she was released that same day after the court heard all the evidence of her abuse.’
‘It was a really remarkable day,’ she recalled.
McCarty told DailyMail.com that they were not expecting her to be able to be released that day.
‘The court had actually told us he wasn’t going to release her that day and that he wasn’t going to make a decision, but after he heard her testimony and her brother’s testimony, he was pretty much convinced that he needed to decide it that day.’
When asked why her legal team never appealed her conviction, McCarty explained that, Lisa’s conviction was a jury verdict. ‘There was no such thing back then as Battered Women’s Syndrome self-defense.’
‘There was no mitigating factors or anything that she could have brought up. Even to this day, it’s a righteous conviction. The jury believed that she did commit the crime, but there was no opportunity for her to really to talk about the abuse she experienced during that time.’
‘It was pretty much like, ‘You did this, and we don’t really care why. Even when her brother tried to talk to the court about the reason that he pulled the trigger, he was pretty much shut down and told not to continue speaking anymore.’
In the state of Oklahoma McCarty said that when you have a jury verdict ‘it’s very difficult to undo that. ‘
‘The system considers a jury verdict to be this all hallowed thing that can never be revisited. It was a very harsh sentence. But at the same time for the crime that she was being tried for, the only available sentences were life, life without parole or the death penalty.’
The chart shows that staggering rise in domestic violence cases from 1980 through 2022
Now, that has changed with the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act in place. ‘The only time someone could get less than that for these crimes is if they can prove they’re a survivor of abuse,’ she said.
McCarty said it isn’t just her that is doing this critical work but there are a coalition of over 100 organizations called the Oklahoma Survivor Justice Coalition. She is one of the main organizers and a co-founder of the coalition.
‘Lisa is not my only client that’s a survivor. We represent 17 criminalized survivors right now under the Survivors’ Act. So It’s been something that we’ve been working on at AppleSeed (Center for Law and Justice) for several years.’
McCarty explained that Oklahoma is number one for incidents of domestic violence, and number three for the number of women killed by men.
She said their state also has the highest for female incarceration for the last generation.
When New York passed the Survivors’ Act in 2019 – led by incarcerated advocates who were survivors – it took them 10 years to do it but said ‘they really, really paved the way for other states to follow in their footsteps’.
‘We were really taking a lot of notes and things from their movement. When they made it possible to pass it in New York, it just made it something that gave us the idea to try it here,’ she explained.
McCarty said the day she walked out of the courthouse with Lisa was a ‘pretty indescribable feeling when you’re really a nerdy lawyer’.
‘I hope there’s many more days like the day that we just had with Lisa where we get to walk our clients out of the front doors of the courthouse,’ she said.
‘There’s no better feeling than that for me that’s why I do what I do.’