Fifteen years after she pulled on a mechanic's jumpsuit over a layer of bubble wrap and stabbed her estranged husband at his Redwood City office, Laura Jean Wenke has, for the first time, been found suitable for parole.

Wenke, now 65, is serving 11 years to life for the premeditated 2011 attempted murder of her husband during a bitter divorce. On Tuesday, at her sixth appearance before California's parole board, commissioners reversed five prior denials and deemed her no longer an unreasonable danger to the public. The decision is not final: it now moves to administrative review, and Gov. Gavin Newsom retains the power to reverse it.

Laura Jean Wenke was 50 years old on Sept. 15, 2011, when she drove to her estranged husband's workplace in Redwood City in the middle of a contentious divorce. According to accounts of her 2014 trial, she had learned he had a new girlfriend. She wore a mechanic's jumpsuit over a layer of bubble wrap, approached him as he sat at a computer, shocked him with a stun gun, and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest and neck. He survived after several days in the hospital.

The premeditation was the state's case. Wenke was still the named beneficiary on her husband's $2 million life insurance policy, and the couple had an eight-year-old son at the time — now an adult. A San Mateo County jury convicted her in 2014 of premeditated attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and rejected her attempt to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Then-District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe described the insanity phase as an "uphill climb" for the defense, the Los Altos Town Crier reported at the time — the jury had already turned aside a first insanity argument before hearing the expert testimony.

What changed this week was not the facts of the crime but the board's assessment of the woman who committed it. This was Wenke's sixth time before the parole board, according to KRON4, which first reported the finding. She was denied in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and again in 2025 — as recently as last year, commissioners concluded she still represented "an unreasonable risk of danger to the public," the standard California uses to keep an inmate incarcerated past their minimum term. On Tuesday, at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, they reached the opposite conclusion.

A suitability finding is not a release date. The decision now heads to administrative review, and even after that, Newsom will have the opportunity to reverse it. Until his office acts, the finding is not settled.

The hearing also underscored the limits of a victim's voice in that process. Wenke's husband, who survived the attack she planned, was reportedly present — virtually or in person — and delivered a statement opposing her release. His objection did not change the outcome. Victims and their families are entitled to speak at parole hearings, but the board's mandate is forward-looking: whether the inmate poses a current risk, not whether the original crime was severe or whether the survivor consents.

The case drew comparisons in 2011 to the Betty Broderick saga — the San Diego woman who killed her ex-husband and his new wife in 1989. Broderick succeeded in killing; Wenke did not. That distinction, and 15 years of prison record, is the kind of ledger a parole board weighs when it decides someone in their sixties is no longer the person who committed the crime.

For now, Wenke, 65, remains in custody at Chowchilla while the review runs its course.