The Cold Case of Mr. Harrington

I knew I was pushing him hard. I also knew he was about out of lies because he didn't answer me for almost a minute. When he did, all he said was he thought he probably needed a lawyer. I asked if he had a lawyer he wanted to call and he shook his head and said he wanted a public defender. I said I'd make the call but it would probably be several hours.

"Our public defenders are pretty busy, but I'll see what I can do. It'll probably be tomorrow before one can get here. In the mean time, I can hold you for twenty-four hours before I have to charge you or let you go, so you'll be spending the night in a holding cell."

I went back to my desk then. I'd just sat down when Ron called me.

"Rich, I had to pull some strings, and the TBI lab used their new Rapid DNA equipment so I got the results about ten minutes ago. The DNA on the cup matches the DNA from the hair taken from the sink and shower in the Harrington house. That and the fingerprints are proof that this guy is Kenneth Harrington."

Well, that sped up my timing quite a bit. I'd told Mr. Weston I couldn't get him a lawyer before the next day, but that was so I'd have an excuse to keep him overnight. I figured if I let him go, that would be the last I'd ever see of him or Mrs. Weston. In half an hour, I let one of the public defenders into the interrogation room.

"Mr. Weston, this is Mr. Allen, one of our public defenders. He happened to be between cases so I asked him to represent you."

I turned to the public defender then.

"Mr. Allen, will an hour be enough time for you to find out what you want to know?"

He said it would be so I closed the door and went back to my desk. An hour later, I took my folder, now with the DNA match, and went back to the interrogation room and asked if they were done. Mr. Allen nodded, so I shut the door and sat down.

"OK, the first thing I need to do is advise Mr. Weston here of his Miranda rights.

"Mr. Weston, you can have an attorney present during my interrogation. You have the right to not answer any of my questions. Anything and everything you do say may be used against you during your trial. Do you understand these rights?"

Mr. Allen butted in then before Mr. Weston could answer.

"What trial? Criminal Impersonation is only a misdemeanor. All my client should get is an appearance before a judge and a fine."

I smiled.

"That charge has changed somewhat. Now, in addition to Criminal Impersonation, I'm charging Mr. Weston...or should I say...Mr. Harrington with the murder of Mr. Warren Langley and Mrs. Grace Harrington. I'm also going to charge him with defiling a corpse because he put Mrs. Hamilton in the same casket as Mr. Langley.

"Now, Mr. Harrington, do you understand these rights?"

Mr. Allen butted in again.

"Mr. Weston, don't answer. Detective, I need to talk with my client alone for a while."

I smiled.

"That's OK. I'll have an officer standing outside the door. When you get done talking, just tap on the door and he'll come get me. I have all night if that's what it takes to get Mr. Harrington to tell me what happened back in October of 1999."

I looked at Mr. Harrington then.

"Mr. Harrington, a double murder will put you in prison for at least fifty years without the possibility of parole. You're what, fifty-four now? That means you'll die in prison. Now, if you can convince me you didn't murder both people, I'll only charge you with one murder and with defiling a corpse. That'll only get you about thirty years without the possibility of parole, maybe twenty if the judge lets you serve the ten years for defiling a corpse concurrently.

"If you decide to confess, well, I can't speak for the DA, but I know he's lowered charges against people who have confessed before. It saves him the time and the cost of the trial. He might drop the charge to something that will only get you fifteen years with the possibility of parole. That'll put you out of prison when you're sixty-nine, maybe even when you're sixty if you keep your nose clean. You think about that."

When I got back to my desk, I called the DA and told him what I had. After I told him the cause of death for Mr. Langley and Mrs. Harrington, I explained what I thought had happened.

"Tom, I'm sure he killed Mrs. Harrington and I'm sure he's the one who put her in the casket with Mr. Langley. I don't think he killed Mr. Langley though. I think Mr. Langley's wife did. What I don't have is positive proof either of them killed anybody so my best bet is to get at least one of them to confess. In order to do that, I have to have something to trade.

"They're both in their fifties now, so almost any sentence longer than twenty years will mean they'll probably both die in prison. If I tell them you'll reduce the charges to manslaughter and ask for fifteen with the possibility of parole, that should be a pretty good incentive for them. They could be out in ten and at least have a little life left. If one confesses and implicates the other, I should be able to get the other one to confess as well. What do you think?"

He asked me what the odds were that I'd be able to come up with some proof and I said given the age of the case and the fact that most of the people who might know something were already dead or had moved away, it was doubtful.

I could tell he was struggling with himself when he said, "So if they don't confess, we're screwed. That about it?"

"Yes. All the evidence points to what I just told you except there's only some coincidences that tie either one to the murders."

I heard him say "fuck" under his breath.

"If I take the case to trial, the odds are about fifty-fifty of getting a conviction. Juries today want hard evidence like somebody's DNA on a murder weapon. Convictions based on circumstantial evidence are getting harder and harder to get. It sounds like the only thing you really have is that the guy has changed his name at some point. That's not fraud as long as he doesn't benefit from the change somehow. The only thing I can say to a jury is that it looks like he changed his name because he killed two people. Any good defense attorney will shoot that logic full of holes.

"It's not justice for the victims, but if you can get them to confess I'll agree to fifteen years and parole. I'll also agree to drop the charge of defiling a corpse."

I went back to my desk and called Rochelle to tell her I'd be late. Then, I sat there and waited.

It was almost five when the patrol officer I'd left outside the interrogation room door called and said they were ready to talk to me. When I walked into the interrogation room, it looked like somebody had sucked the air out of Mr. Harrington. He was just sitting there with his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.

It took another hour before he wrote out his confession, an hour during which the public defender kept whispering to him and nodding when Mr. Harrington nodded back.

Once he had written his confession, I called the police department in Cookville and asked them to arrest Mrs. Weston and bring her to Knoxville.

}{

Rochelle had been right about the way she looked. She was about the same height as Mrs. Harrington and had brown hair. She was a little heavier, but that would be because of her age.

It was almost eight when I showed her into an interrogation room and read her her rights. She looked scared to death when I told her she was being charged with the murder of her ex-husband, Mr. Langley.

"Mrs. Weston, Mr. Weston says you killed Mr. Langley and I believe him. That's why I'm charging you with his murder. That will get you at least twenty-five years without the possibility of parole. You'll be in your seventies when you get out if you last that long. You should know that the women in prison aren't like most of the women you know. In some cases, they're worse than the men.

"Now, if you confess, I'll offer you the same deal I offered Mr. Weston...or should I say, Mr. Harrington. If you write down everything that happened in October of 1999, I'll charge you with manslaughter instead of murder. The DA will ask the judge for fifteen years with the possibility of parole. That'll probably be after ten years so you'll be in your sixties when you get out. Do you want a lawyer before you talk with me? As I said, anything you tell me from now on will be used as evidence at your trial. Mr. Harrington has also agreed to testify at your trial if it comes to that, and before you or your lawyer tells me that a husband can't testify against his wife, Mr. Harrington has already admitted that you're not married."

I figured she'd start to cry, but she just sat there with a blank look on her face for a couple minutes before she said anything. What she said surprised me.

"I told him they'd find us but he said there was no way they could. I guess he was wrong. Did he tell you why we did it?"

}{

It was one in the morning when I finally got home. Part of the reason was Mr. Harrington hadn't brought his Atenolol with him so we had to send an officer to the hospital to explain why we needed it and then to bring it back. The other reason was just the fact that when you have a protocol to follow, it takes time. It was midnight before both Mr. Harrington and Mrs. Langley were booked and put in cells and I had both confessions in my case file.

I figured Rochelle had gone to bed, but she hadn't. She met me at the door and asked if I'd had anything to eat. When I said I hadn't, she said she'd saved the spaghetti she'd made and it was still warm. While I ate I told her what had happened.

"All our theories were right in some parts and wrong in others. The one about both couples having affairs wasn't. Mr. Harrington wasn't sleeping with Mrs. Langley and Mr. Langley wasn't sleeping with Mrs. Harrington. Their relationship was more one of friends helping friends.

"Mr. Langley had beat up Mrs. Langley like we already knew. She was thinking of divorcing him then, and I suppose she needed a shoulder to cry on. Since she was an accountant working for the contractor Mr. Harrington was working for, one of the things she did was take their paychecks to them every week.

"Apparently Mrs. Harrington thought those paycheck deliveries were more than that, especially once Mr. Harrington started coming home later on Fridays. He told her he was just stopping off for a beer, but she figured he was messing around with another woman.

"Mr. Harrington wasn't exactly innocent but there was no affair, or at least they weren't having sex. What he was doing was sitting in a bar and talking with Mrs. Langley and trying to make her feel better about herself. They both said the same thing about that, so I think they were telling the truth.

"Mr. Langley was in prison at the time so he didn't know anything about what his wife was doing. When he got out, he called Mrs. Langley and said he'd learned his lesson and he wanted them to get back together. Mrs. Langley told Mr. Harrington and he said that would never work out because he'd just start beating on her again. Mrs. Langley said she just wished her husband was dead.

"Mrs. Harrington found them together in the bar the night they had that conversation. She decided that was enough and told him she was leaving and was going to divorce him. She went to Bristol to live with her sister.

"The next day, she talked to a lawyer and he told her to go clean out their bank account. When she tried to do that, the teller told her Mr. Harrington had already done that. She drove to their house and that started the fight that ended up with Mr. Harrington strangling her. He put her in the big freezer they had while he figured out what to do with her. He also told Mrs. Langley what he'd done.

"I never got the whole story of how they figured out they were going to kill Mr. Langley, but it was like you thought. Mr. Harrington ground up sixty of his Atenolol pills and dissolved them in water. Then he filled a syringe and needle he'd bought at a farm supply store with the Atenolol and gave it to Mrs. Langley. They also had a plan to avoid drawing suspicion toward themselves.

"She showed up at house Mr. Langley had rented and said she wanted to get back together. She admitted to starting to have sex with him and once he had an erection, she jabbed his penis with the needle and pushed in the plunger.

"I asked her why she used his penis and she said it was because she wanted him to hurt like she had.

"She let him lay there on the bed until almost six the next morning and then called Mr. Harrington. Between the two of them, the put him in Mrs. Harrington's car. He was almost beyond walking by then, and by the time she got him to the hospital, he was barely alive.

"She showed Mrs. Harrington's driver's license to the desk nurse and told her the man was her husband and he'd had blood pressure problems in he past. Then she said she was going to go park her car and come back to wait until the doctor had decided what they were going to do. She did come back inside, but she waited just outside the examination room until she heard the doctor pronounce Mr. Langley dead. The next morning she drove to the Harrington's house and called the funeral home and asked them to pick up the body.

"That afternoon, she went to the funeral home and made the arrangements to bury Mr. Langley, again posing as Mr. Harrington's wife. She also told them she wanted a relative to dig his grave. The funeral home director said that wouldn't be a problem. Like we thought, that gravedigger was Mr. Harrington.

"I didn't know this, but a lot of electricians know how to operate a backhoe. Apparently the dimensions of the trenches for underground conduits are pretty important, so as often as not, it's an electrician who digs them.

"Anyway, the next morning, she called the courthouse and asked to speak to a parole officer. That's how they got the house cleared. They figured if the house was cleared, it would look like Mrs. Harrington had left and wasn't coming back. The only thing they kept was the title to Mrs. Harrington's car.

"That same day, she drove to Bristol and sold Mrs. Harrington's car. Mr. Harrington had followed her there, and picked her up just like you thought. After that, they stopped by Mr. Langley's bank and she emptied their joint account.

"The day of the burial, Mr. Harrington rented a backhoe and trailer, and pulled it to the cemetery with his pickup. He knew that grave diggers always cover the dirt pile with a piece of outdoor carpet that looks like grass, so he bought one big enough to wrap Mrs. Harrington in, wrapped her up, and then put her in his truck bed.

"After he'd lowered the casket into the vault and the funeral home director had left, he jumped down into the vault and used a tool to open the casket. I asked Ron about how he'd get one. Ron said almost all casket locks are the same inside and they all use the same key. A key comes with each casket, but most funeral homes have a lot of keys they don't use and they just throw them in the trash. You can buy them on eBay for a few dollars.

"Anyway, once he had the casket open, he unwrapped Mrs. Harrington and used his backhoe to lower her into the casket. I guess she was thawed out by then. Since all that was done behind the screens, no one saw him. He just closed up the casket, put the vault lid on, and filled the hole.

After he took the backhoe back to the rental agency, they drove to a hotel in Nashville. For a week, they watched the news to see if there was anybody looking for them. When they didn't see anything, they figured they'd gotten away with it.

"They pooled their money, changed their last names to Weston, and started the business in Cookville. Weston was a name Mr. Harrington had used in Illinois when he was doing jobs at less than union scale. He had the documentation from Illinois to support it, probably because he paid someone to falsify some records. They've been in Cookville ever since, and thought they were home free. They never married because they didn't want any more paper trail than they could avoid. She told me they were the same as married though.

"They both confessed. They'll go before a judge on Wednesday. The DA is going to ask for fifteen years for both of them with the possibility of parole. They'll be too old to do much when they get out, but I guess they'll have each other. I got the feeling they fell in love at some point, but maybe that was just because neither one could afford to trust anybody else."

Rochelle scooted closer and put her arms around my neck.

"So I did good?"

"Yes, you did good. Without the prints and DNA you got on that coffee cup, I wouldn't have been able to prove Mr. Harrington and Mr. Weston were one and the same."

Rochelle ran one finger down my chest then.

"It's too late tonight, but would you show me how good I did tomorrow morning?"

"I have to work tomorrow. How about tomorrow night?"

Rochelle stroked my cock through my pants.

"How about twice tomorrow night and then again the next morning?"

The next day I got in late because Rochelle said she couldn't wait into that night. The only thing I had left to do on the case was dispose of the two bodies in Ron's morgue.

I couldn't find any living relatives for either Mrs. Harrington or Mr. Langley. I did find their parents, but both were deceased. Neither had any siblings or cousins that I could find. They'll both be cremated and their ashes interred in the county plot for unclaimed remains.

Well, Rochelle has started another novel based on this case, but she's changing it some. She likes happy endings, so in the end...

No, I can't tell you how it's going to end. You might buy her book and that would spoil it for you.

I'm going through Harry's old file and looking for a case that looks like it's solvable. So far I have two possibles.

One is the case of an evangelistic preacher who was found stabbed to death in 1975. He had a cross a foot and a half long jammed up his rectum until the cross part stopped it and his penis had been cut off at the base and stuck in his mouth. Harry interviewed about fifty people who all said Mr. Elkhorn got what he deserved.

Apparently Mr. Elkhorn said God worked through his hands and he could cure anything if people donated enough money. He proved that on his weeky TV show. Someone who was crippled so badly they had to be helped onto his stage would come up and tell him their story. He'd pray for a while, then put his hand on their forehead, close his eyes, and shout "Heal". Usually the person fell down, but then stood up on their own and walked off the stage.

When one of his "cures" didn't cure a woman of cancer, her husband hired a PI to figure out what was really going on. What the PI found was that most of his supposed "cures" turned out to be paid actors. The few that were successful were people whose problem was just a mental thing.

Harry wasn't able to get enough evidence to charge anybody. The only evidence that was actually found was a butcher knife that was laying next to the body. That knife was still in the evidence box at the station, but Harry had it checked for prints and the tech's didn't find any.

The second is a case involving an older woman and her son who lived with her. The older woman was found in the chair she usually used in her living room with her throat cut. Harry interviewed the son and the son told him he'd seen another woman walking up to the door when he went to work. He gave a good description of the woman, and when asked, agreed to work with a sketch artist. Harry had the resulting picture placed in the newspaper. That one picture generated several leads. Harry had interviewed all the women who fit the description and somewhat resembled the picture, but all had alibis that checked out. No murder weapon was ever found.