Murder on the Red River

0:00Music

0:15Yep. What Riding for Justice has done is reached out to people that knew Jennifer Harris. How often do you saddle up and ride? Once a month. We got a big crowd. Let's keep it safe.

0:34Something has touched the people of Fannin County about this case. Absolutely. Everybody in this county wants to see this case solved. To let something like this go on this long is uncalled for. Jennifer Harris was well-loved here. That's a Jennifer Harris case, everything that's involved. This is the whole investigation right here? This is it. Sheriff, I hope you don't mind me asking, but that doesn't seem like a whole lot for 15 years. Well, that's all we got to work with. It doesn't get any easier. There's not one day that I don't wake up and think about my sister. I wish I could only have a handful of the friends she had.

1:20She was amazing. She was the red-haired girl who was the goofball, adorable, lovable, Lucille Ball type. She smothered me with love. On Mother's Day, 2002, no different than any other day, you take the walk. Right. I saw a Jeep, but I didn't think anything about it. But then when it was here the second day, you're like, why is that Jeep still here? I get a phone call that her Jeep had been found. What did she do leaving her Jeep on the side of the road?

1:57There was a fisherman who was fishing on the Red River. He saw a body in the water. I remember going to the Red River, to the bridge, seeing the police officers, the sheriff. And I remember my dad being right there with him. and I just, let me see her, let me see her, let me see. It's got, is it hers? It can't be her, it has to, why? Is it her? Is it her? Whenever we move her, just move right into a boat. Is it really her? The body is completely naked. Not a stitch of clothing. Not a sock. The way she was disposed of, like a piece of trash. She didn't deserve that. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as homicidal violence.

2:55What is that? Were they strangled? Were they shot? Those are the things you need to know. Jennifer's murder impacted my wife and her family. You can't even put it in words. Cemetery 01. This is unlike anything that I've ever done as a filmmaker. I thought he said it the first time we were with him. Finding the killer and actually being able to prove where's the physical evidence, who the killer is. Let's continue with the timeline. This is much more than a passion project because this is family. We're going to follow through and we're going to get this done. You want to know who killed Jennifer Harris?

3:32Absolutely. I'm a Texas girl. I believe in justice, old school justice.

3:44In the northeast corner of Texas, where the banks of the Red River touch Oklahoma, you'll find Fannin County and the town of Bonham, one of the oldest cities in the Lone Star State. And it's where Mark Johnson, who had just wrapped up 32 years in law enforcement, decided to ditch retirement and run for sheriff in 2016. I met Jerry Harris, the father of the young lady, on the campaign trail. And he made a promise from one father to another to continue the investigation into the murder of Jerry's oldest daughter, 28-year-old Jennifer Harris, a case unsolved for more than 15 years. When I came here January 1, Are you sure of the thing?

4:35I demanded that case to be brought to me. That was the first thing you did? Yes, I wanted Jennifer Harris' case. Jennifer's father, a Marine and Vietnam veteran, finally has hope. I think he's serious about trying to solve this case. This is my office. And he's not the only one. For the last eight years, Darrell Parker has been working with Jerry Harris to solve his daughter's murder. first as a lieutenant in the Fannin County Sheriff's Office and now as a private investigator. A Marine never meets a stranger if he meets another Marine. He too was a Marine, and Parker has never charged Jerry a dime.

5:16I still have a lot of that Captain America justice kind of thing going on. I want Jerry and his family to find justice. In high school, Jennifer Harris was popular and athletic. Brilliant red-haired girl, bright brown eyes, played tennis, and was a cheerleader. Jennifer's younger sister, Alyssa. She was a dreamer. She was an idealist. And she knew that there was a bigger world outside of Bonham, Texas. Bonham is probably your prototypical small-town USA. Gossip is on an epic scale. When Jennifer Harris goes missing, how does that news play in Bonham? It was a bombshell because this girl was not too far removed from high school.

6:06To understand that she had been murdered, it disturbed a lot of people. She was only 28 years old. She was just beginning to come into her own right when she was murdered. The day that I came in here and looked at her cases, it opened those boxes. I wanted to sit down on the floor and cry. That's because after more than 15 years, this is all they have to work with. And what do we have in each of these boxes? This is all documentation that's in there. You know, when she first came up missing posters, they're looking for newspaper articles, business records. And this is just some case reports. You can see how this was wet.

6:49A lot of this stuff got wet. They had some pods out back. They stored a lot of evidence. They leaked. A lot of stuff got wet. Contaminated. Yes. Some of them got destroyed. The file was very light. The duplicates of the same paperwork over and over and over again. It was a mess. Although the original investigators have said they did their best, Jennifer's laptop computer and clothing, a shirt, bra, and jeans that might have been hers, were booked into evidence, but somehow mysteriously disappeared. It's just been mishandled. Why would it be mishandled? I honestly don't know. The only thing I can gather out of it is lack of experience, lack of training.

7:33It was Mother's Day 2002. Jennifer was visiting her friend Christy Farr in the early evening. It gets to be close to 8 o 'clock, and Jennifer's like, I gotta go? Correct. She never told Christy where she was going, But Jennifer Harris never returned home that night. The next day, Jennifer's Jeep was discovered, parked just down the road from a local music spot. While she was still missing, authorities reached out to the two men in her life. I know I'm not guilty of anything. Her former boyfriend and business partner, James Hamilton, and her ex-husband, Rob Holman. Rob, how you doing? Pretty good.

8:14Both agreed to speak with investigators without a lawyer present. They had not been arrested, but both men were read their Miranda rights. So you have the right to make silence. Anything you say can't move you against the court of law. And both denied seeing Jennifer the night she disappeared. I would love to know that she's okay, that she's happy. According to his police interview, Jennifer's former boyfriend, James Hamilton, was with a friend more than an hour away from Bonham at this McDonald's around the time investigators believe Jennifer disappeared. He even took and passed a lie detector test.

8:53He had an alibi for that evening. Alibi checked out. But ex-husband Rob Holman seemed concerned about his alibi. I'm just worried and scared because I know that I don't have anybody to say where I was at that night. Rob told investigators he had gone out that night to buy beer and visit friends. But when they weren't home, he drove around alone for five hours on the roads of rural Fanning County.

9:30But when the investigator pushes harder, it sounds like Rob is admitting he did see her Jeep that night.

9:48By now, Jennifer had been missing for 72 hours. The search would continue for three more days. I was getting about three or four hours sleep a night. Spent the rest of my time searching, driving country roads, looking for buzzards. That's a hell of a thing for a father to have to do. That's what I did until they found her. Things seemed to go in slow motion. It was very surreal. Finding Jennifer's body six days after her disappearance devastated her father, Jerry. But it did little to clear up the mystery of what had happened to her. She was so badly decomposed, the medical examiner couldn't determine the cause of death.

10:36Jennifer was in... But Jennifer's family believes they know the answer. Her sister Alyssa and her filmmaker husband Barry Wernick are on a mission to prove who killed Jennifer and why. In the time you've been looking into this, have you gone from, I want the facts to shape my opinion, to now having a sense of who killed Jennifer? Absolutely.

11:16To think about how beautiful she was, and her red hair, and just how—and to think about how she was found.

11:31And that's what I just can't let go of until justice is done. There's the prom dress. There's that prom dress. Filmmaker Barry Wernick married Jennifer Harris' sister Alyssa eight years after Jennifer's murder. When Alyssa first told me about her sister's murder, the first thing that came to my mind was, who did it? Do you know who did it? All these things started going through my mind. Barry and Alyssa are determined to answer those questions by making a docuseries. Didn't transcribe that? Barry, an experienced filmmaker, was a consultant on this broadcast. I felt like I could use my filmmaking ability to do our own investigating, because it didn't seem like anyone was doing it.

12:17He is working hand-in-hand with Daryl Parker and another private eye, Jim Holloway, re-examining everything. We are in a place, this is central to your theory of what happened. Yes. The reason why Daryl Parker is so sure this is where Jennifer died is because of a clue that lies on the river's floor a short way down this dirt road. She had some blue mud on the front of her, according to fishermen. There are only two spots on the river within several miles that that mud is on the bottom. And this is one of them. This is that blue morrow mud that was on the body. Not far from the riverbank, there used to be a cottage.

13:03This is where the original, you know, caretaker cottage was. And it just so happened to burn down the night that Jennifer Harris disappeared. That is a piece of melted glass from the original fire. Parker suspects Jennifer left her friend Christy's house and met her killer here. He believes the cottage was burned to hide the evidence. No godly earth reason for that shack to burn. At the same night, Jennifer comes up missing. Parker hoped to find clues here. We came here with a crew and excavated the whole thing. 15 feet that way to another 10 feet that way on either side of this foundation. I see a well.

13:43We drained the well, and then we dug down in the muck, probably a foot or two. And we didn't come up with anything. But years of coming up empty hasn't deterred Daryl Parker or Barry and Alyssa Wernick. And it hasn't shaken their conviction of who killed Jennifer. When I think about Jennifer, I think about Jennifer and Rob. Rob and Jennifer were together for as long as anyone can remember. She was a sixth grader when she began dating Rob, a fifth grader. By high school, the teenagers were practically inseparable, says Jennifer's cousin, Susan Bowen. He was just part of our family from the time we were growing up.

14:27Jennifer was just in love with him. She just adored everything about him. Jennifer had big dreams, bigger than could take flight in small-town Bonham. Jennifer had potential to explore greater horizons than just Fannin County, Texas. She moved three hours away to go to college. A few years later, Rob followed her there, and the couple married in 1996. It was gorgeous. It was meticulously planned at a very beautiful mansion out in the country. It led us to the park. One year after the wedding, Jennifer's mother died of cancer. You could tell she had learned a lot. In the few years that we lost our mother, she became an adult that was very open-minded.

15:22In 1999, the couple bought a house in suburban Dallas, but there was friction brewing. I think that my sister was growing and evolving and moving forward in her life, and Rob was stuck. And he just wasn't going to change. According to Jennifer's family, Rob, who was working in landscaping, preferred the slower pace of rural Bonham while she enjoyed living near a big city. Jennifer embraced a holistic lifestyle and enrolled in massage therapy school. She transformed in front of my eyes. She said that she had met someone who was like-minded and who wanted to start a business that was a massage and wellness center.

16:07That someone was James Hamilton, someone she'd met in that massage therapy school. He was different, but... In what way? Well, he was new age and... Touchy-feely? A little bit. Their relationship was complicated. James was living with the mother of his child and had another on the way. Jennifer was still married to Rob. I told her that it was not a good idea. And what did she say? She didn't tell me a lot after that. She knew where I stood. I went up there to see what was going on in their lives. When Jennifer's father got there, he was shocked to see holes in the wall. While no one knows for sure how they got there, Jerry seemed certain Rob was responsible.

16:57He took his fist and knocked five holes in the living room wall, about as big as a softball. Jerry remembers the holes in the wall. Alyssa remembers something worse. My sister called me one night and was shaking in her voice. She says Jennifer told her Rob came home drunk and forced himself on her. Jennifer never reported the alleged attack, but Rob would later tell police after her disappearance that Jennifer was the violent one in the relationship. She's hot temper. We're married. It was generally her way. Sometimes I'd grab her, wrap her up, keep hitting. Rob moved back to Bonham, and Jennifer's new love interest, James Hamilton, moved in with her.

17:49They became partners in a massage therapy business in suburban Dallas. But Jennifer's infatuation with James quickly faded. Well, James wanted to marry her, and she refused to marry him. And he was very upset about that. The private investigators say Jennifer's relationship with Hamilton was rocky. Real fiery, just fussing and fighting at each other all the time. By the spring of 2002, your sister is leading one complicated life emotionally. Jennifer had divorced Rob, and her relationship with James was on the skids. To add to the chaos, the massage business had failed, and Jennifer was forced to file for bankruptcy.

18:36I think that everything was catching up to her, and she never really grieved my mom's death, and I think she was exhausted. She said, I'm not happy. I don't care about the business anymore. With no job or income, Jennifer confided in cousin Susan that she'd been back in touch with her former husband, Rob Holman, who now had a new girlfriend. And she said, I still love him. And she said, I want him back. And she said, I even told him that. In fact, Rob later admitted to police that even though he had a girlfriend, he and Jennifer were still having sex. Four or five times it's pretty good. So Jennifer was living a little bit of a split life.

19:22To a certain extent, but James didn't know it. He knew nothing about it all. Then one day, Susan saw Jennifer outside her apartment with a moving truck. I said, what are you doing? And she said, I'm moving to Bonham. I thought, you're only going to Bonham because Rob's in Bonham. Okay, and with that, I turned around and left, and that was the last time I ever saw her. About six weeks later, Jennifer disappeared. On the very day she went missing, she called Rob. Rob says she asked to see him, but he refused. I had plans for his girlfriend. She got real upset because it was Mother's Day and I would come over.

20:05Rob agreed to take a polygraph to back up his story, but for some reason, it was never administered. Sheriff's investigators allowed him to go home. They had a lot more digging to do, and it centered around a secret Jennifer had shared with her best friend Jill Wagner just weeks before she died. You know, we started talking, and she was kind of, you're not going to believe, you know, the mess I'm in. And she told me how, you know, that I pretty much guessed. I was like, you're pregnant. If Jennifer was pregnant, who was the father? Was it Rob Holman or someone else? That question became even more important after the medical examiner's autopsy revealed a stunning piece of information.

20:50Her uterus was gone.

21:01You wake in the middle of the night alone in your apartment, and that feeling starts to set in that something is wrong. Realizing your home is no longer safe, you plan your escape. But he has other plans. The details are the kind that stay with you. Water running in an empty apartment. A locked door that shouldn't be locked. That uneasy feeling of being watched. That's the setup for Unhinged. The new immersive game experience on Netflix. Your phone becomes your controller, flashlight, and lifeline to your best friend. As the attacker in your building closes in, the phone in your hand will ring.

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22:31When they examined Jennifer Harris' body, investigators were shocked. There was a wound that affected some of the internal organs. Her uterus was missing. Her death was classified as a, quote, violent homicide. Her uterus had somehow been removed. The question was, what damaged her? What would have the motive been that she was possibly pregnant? and that the person who killed her was trying to destroy that evidence. In Bonham, where gossip is often taken for gospel, people couldn't stop talking. The public grabbed a hold of that information, and they started concocting their own theories as to who did it and why.

23:11But according to the case file, there was no scientific evidence to prove Jennifer was actually pregnant at the time of her death. Still, Jennifer's best friend Jill Wagner told investigators she had talked to Jennifer about being pregnant. And that's not all she said. You know, she told me that it was Rob's, and I was kind of shocked. Rob Holman, Jennifer's ex-husband. He had revealed to detectives in his police interview that he'd met Jennifer a month before she disappeared near a drive-in movie theater. She told me that she was pregnant. And it's mine. I definitely think that she brought it up with Rob, and in my mind, that's what led to her death.

23:57Daryl Parker had long been familiar with the story of Jennifer being pregnant. Eight years after her murder, Parker, then a lieutenant for the sheriff's department, dropped by Rob Holman's house. It was Sunday, Mother's Day, a calculated move by Parker. So it was the anniversary of the crime. I had picked out a number of photographs of her and Rob. One of those being Jennifer swimming in a muddy body of water. And when I gave him the stack of photographs, the very first one he picked out was that one with the muddy water. He stood there for about five or six seconds staring at that photograph.

24:35But that's the one that caught his attention. Like that. You know, I said, well, if you want to talk, call me. And I gave him my card and I left. A few hours later, to Parker's surprise, Holman called and wanted to talk. But Parker had wanted to record the interview, so he suggested they meet at the sheriff's office the next day. That's where I screwed up. I should have gone right then and there. I think he was ready to talk and say something, and I should have just done it.

25:09This really has you still. Why so emotional, Daryl? You're really blaming yourself here. Well, the previous investigation had failed in so many ways. But he was responding to me. He was responding to the pressure I was putting on him. And I let it slip away. When Holman arrived for the interview with Parker, he had a lawyer. Did you have anything to do with the death of Jennifer Harris? No. Jennifer's pregnancy. Did you believe she was pregnant? No. I didn't think she was. Did you think that she believed she was pregnant? No. Remember, there was no evidence Jennifer was pregnant. And in fact, forensic experts in Dallas would later conclude Jennifer's missing uterus wasn't even cut out by the killer.

26:07Instead, her uterus and other body parts were destroyed by turtles and fish in the river. But the rumors persisted, and they had plenty of company in Bonham. A year after Jennifer's murder, this man found himself in the center of the storm. They were saying that I had been arrested for this murder. I mean, you hear this, and what's your reaction? What are you talking about? Where did this come from? That's crazy. Crazy, because Miles Porter was also the district attorney at the time, overseeing the case. For the record, did you know Jennifer Harris? No. Had you ever met Jennifer Harris? No. Did you kill Jennifer Harris?