Michael Colucci was accused of killing his wife in 2015. But a hung jury, after a long and tangled trial in late 2018, meant the South Carolina jeweler was set free on bond after the judge declared a mistrial. Now, with prosecutors licking their wounds and determined to put him behind bars, Michael is preparing to face another jury.

Michael’s wife, Sara Moore-Colucci, died on May 20, 2015. First responders found her cold on the cement near the warehouse where the couple ran a gold-buying business near Summerville, about a 35-minute drive from Charleston. The 38-year-old mother’s face was blue, her neck was wounded, and her knees and feet were scraped.

“My wife, my wife. She’s gone,” Michael told the first deputy that arrived. 

Upon assessing the scene, first responders found a strand of Sara’s blonde hair on a hose that was looped around a 6-foot fence surrounding the warehouse. One end of that hose lay under her body. They also noted that Michael’s lip was swollen and bloody and his knuckles, wrist and arm had scrapes. 

The couple’s car was parked just 20 feet away from where Sara was found lifeless in a bee-print dress and pink stilettos. Michael claimed to have been sitting in the Toyota Prius when Sara committed suicide, but it’s worth noting that someone in the vehicle would have had an unobstructed view of the chain-link fence.

Prosecutors in Michael’s 2018 murder trial alleged that Michael, who was Sara’s third husband, strangled her with his hands. They alleged that the Coluccis’s supposedly picture-perfect blended family – they each had a daughter from a prior relationship – was strained by serious financial woes. Sara’s mother said that her daughter told her, hours before she died, that she planned to leave Michael over “drugs”.

One of Sara’s friends, Stephanie Merrell, told Charleston station WCBD in 2016 that she wasn’t surprised her friend died violently.

“He could be very volatile and she didn’t back down from things,” she said of Michael and Sara. “So their relationship got pretty heated a lot of times and yeah, it was a little bit scary sometimes.”

Toxicology tests showed that Sara’s blood alcohol content was .23 at the time of her death, three times the legal limit for driving, and that she also had cocaine and Xanax in her system. 

Medical experts failed to agree on the circumstances surrounding Sara’s death, but an autopsy showed she died of asphyxia by neck compression. In a trial that spanned from November to December, prosecutors tried to convince a jury of Michael’s wrongdoing while the defense tried to push the narrative that Sara had died by suicide or an accidental hanging. 

Defense attorneys argued that Sara was depressed and obsessed with the violent demise of her second husband in 2007. She died on the anniversary of his mysterious stabbing death.

Michael was facing at least 30 years in prison if convicted of murder.

If jurors had found that Michael played a role in his wife’s death, they had the option of convicting him of murder, or of a lesser crime such as voluntary manslaughter. According to a defense attorney Andy Savage, the jury cleared Michael of murder but couldn’t reach an agreement on manslaughter after two days of deliberations. That’s why the judge declared a mistrial on Dec. 7, 2018, and Michael was set free on bond.

Fast forward to today, however, and the time has almost come for Michael to return to trial. Slated to start on May 13, Michael’s new trial will arrive more than five years after his first, and almost exactly nine years after Sarah died.
Regardless of the outcome of the new trial, Michael remains one of two family members to face a murder charge. His stepfather, jeweler Ivo Colucci, was charged with murdering Michael’s mother, Doris, at a family jewelry store in North Charleston in April 2017. He was never convicted, however, because he was deemed unfit to stand trial on criminal charges after Ivo’s family said he suffered from dementia and “didn’t know what he was doing.” He was 84 when he died in hospice care on Nov. 9, 2020.