A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story (1Department Entertainment Services, Lighthouse Pictures, Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 14) I wanted to watch a couple of Lifetime movies. My husband Charles decided not to join me for them, and quite frankly he didn’t miss much since both were in the mediocre-to-terrible department. The first one was called A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story, based on a true case from 1994 about Lisa Aguilar West (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and her scapegrace husband, golf pro Darren West (Jon McLaren). As the film opens she’s just learned that she’s pregnant with his first child, a boy (they test in advance via ultrasound) they decide to name Darren, Jr. Alas, Darren, Sr. also starts an extramarital affair with Michelle Morris (Cassandra Potenza), who works the snack bar at one of the golf clubs where he plays. By the time Lisa’s pregnancy is into its fifth month, Michelle suddenly discovers (writer Walter Klenhard wasn’t too clear how) that her new boyfriend is married to someone else. Naturally she’s put out by this, but he pleads with her to wait for him to divorce his legal spouse so they can get married. We’re already starting to hate Darren for screwing another woman while his wife is pregnant (sort of like Donald Trump with Stormy Daniels), and when Lisa is just two weeks away from her due date (which her doctors miscalculated so the baby is actually arriving two weeks ahead of schedule), Darren decides to dump Lisa permanently. He orders a gorilla mask from a costume shop and, as Lisa is coming home from a grocery run, attacks her with a knife and leaves her for dead. Fortunately, Lisa comes to after Darren leaves and punches 911 on her landline (the fact that her phone is a landline dates this movie, as does the pay phone on which Darren calls Michelle and tries to make a date with her while his wife is still in intensive care – quite rightly, she turns him down). She’s rescued and brought back to a semblance of life, though Darren’s attempts to cut her throat three times have left two permanent scars.

At first Lisa is utterly convinced that Darren is innocent and someone else was her attacker, but the cops gradually wear her down and make the case against him. She moves in with her parents, John (Jorge Molina, probably no relation to Alfred even though the two look similar) and Julie (Katie Griffin), along with Lisa’s grandmother (Marilu Henner, giving an air of gravitas to the proceedings until her sudden incapacitation midway through adds just one more stressor to Lisa’s already overburdened life), in San Diego. (The whole story takes place in California, and one of the giveaways to Lisa that her husband is seeing another woman is a lot of calls on his phone bill to Redding.) Ultimately she testifies against him at his trial, but before his attorney can cross-examine her she gets word that she won’t have to testify again because he and his attorney have decided to cop a plea and admit guilt in exchange for a lighter sentence: life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. The prosecutor, Angela Backers (Cynthia Preston), persuades the reluctant Lisa – who earlier actually contemplated suicide by driving her car off a cliff, only luckily for her the car lost traction and wouldn’t move when she put it in gear – to attend Darren’s first parole hearing and give a victim’s impact statement. During that, she takes off the scarf she usually wears and shows off the scars on her neck left there by Darren’s assault. A few where-are-they-now credits at the end explain what happened after that: Darren’s parole was rejected and he served 22 years in prison, and Lisa remarried and had two more kids by her new husband. She also changed Darren, Jr.’s first name to Connor, for understandable reasons.

A Husband to Die For was a major disappointment for a number of reasons, not least because Lifetime’s true-crime stories usually put Lifetime’s writers and directors (there were two directors credited, Colleen Rush and David Weaver) on their best behavior, but this was an exception. Also Lifetime usually casts genuinely hot and sexy men as their villains, but not this time: Jon McLaren is so wimpy, the kind of man who looks like they baked him out of Wonder Bread, one wonders what Lisa ever saw in him in the first place. It’s also not clear why Darren didn’t decide to divorce Lisa rather than trying to kill her; yes, it would have looked bad for him to dump a woman who was about to make him a father, but obviously attempted murder looked even worse. A Husband to Die For was a surprisingly blah telling of a story that had a lot more potential for genuine suspense and thrills.