A Bay Area woman who's been serving a sentence of 11 years to life for the 2011 attempted murder of her estranged husband has, for the first time since her incarceration, been found suitable for parole.

Laura Jean Wenke, now 65 years old, was 50 when she came to her husband's workplace on September 15, 2011, as the two were in the midst of a bitter divorce, and after finding out that the husband had a new girlfriend. The former Los Altos resident premeditated the crime, wearing a layer of bubble wrap under a mechanic's jumpsuit, and drove to the Redwood City office of her husband, where she approached him while he was sitting at a computer, stunned him with a stun gun, and stabbed him several times in the chest and neck.

The couple had a son together who was eight years old at the time — he'd be 23 now — and the husband had a $2 million life insurance policy for which Wenke was still listed as the beneficiary.

Wenke apparently returned to the business after police arrived, responding to the stabbing, and was arrested — likely after her husband told police who his attacker was. She was later convicted in 2014 of premeditated attemtped murder and assault with a deadly weapon.

Wenke's defense attorneys failed to convince the jury that she was not guilty by reason of insanity — a second phase of her trial addressed this with expert testimony, which District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said at the time was an "uphill climb" for the defense, as the Los Altos Town Crier reported, after the jury had already rejected a first attempt at an insanity defense.

The case had some parallels with the infamous Betty Broderick case, though Broderick succeeded in murdering her ex-husband and his new wife in 1989.

After several days in the hospital, Wenke's husband survived the ordeal. And he was  reportedly in attendance, virtually or otherwise, on Tuesday at a parole board hearing at the  Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, delivering a victim statement in objection to Wenke's parole.

This was Wenke's sixth time going before the parole board, as KRON4 reports, having been denied eligibility in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2025. Reportedly, as of last year, the board still found that Wenke presented "an unreasonable risk of danger to the public."

But this year, she was deemed suitable for parole, and her case will now head for administrative review. Governor Gavin Newsom will still have the opportunity to reverse the decision, should he choose.