June 24, 2008
A Time To Kill
A Mother Disappears The Day After 9/11
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Michele Harris (CBS)
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Play CBS Video Video Exclusive: More On The Case Only On The Web: Erin Moriarty shares more details about the Michele Harris case, including information about the evidence.
Capt. Lester says a black plastic bag of bones was found. But they turned out to be animal bones.
The search went on for a year, then two. After four years and no sign of Michele, investigators felt it was now or never. "The case wasn’t getting any better," Lester explains. "There were really no new significant leads or evidence coming in. But win, lose or draw, this case had to go to trial."
On Sept. 30, 2005, Cal was arrested and charged with Michele's murder. But how much of a case is there? Defense attorney Joe Cawley is confident Cal will never be convicted.
"Because you can't find a murder weapon. You can't just say, 'Well, he must have disposed of it,'" Cawley says. "And because you can't find sufficient quantities of blood, he must have cleaned it up. He must have just done a really good job. And we can't find the body. Well, he must have done a good job of that, too. A lack of evidence is reasonable doubt."
Nothing has quite shaken the calm of Owego, N.Y., like the murder trial of Calvin Harris. It took nearly six years, but Cal's trial finally began on May 21, 2007.
Harris, out on a half a million dollar bail, came to court from the house where authorities believe he murdered his wife almost six years earlier.
"Have you ever had a case where there was no body and you’ve prosecuted someone for murder? No body? No witness. No murder weapon. Nothing?" Moriarty asks District Attorney Gerald Keene.
"No. This was the most difficult case that I've ever done," Keene says.
Defense attorney Bill Easton says Cal is on trial because of who he is, not because of anything he did. "In most cases we have admissions, or we have eye witnesses. That’s not this case. This case is 'She’s missing. He was divorcing from her. His behavior was odd, there’s very small amounts of blood that might suggest something.' And that’s it," he says.
That blood is the main focus at the trial -- the small amounts police found inside the Harris home two days after Michele disappeared. Six drops of her blood on the doorway between the kitchen and the garage, more drops on a kitchen throw rug and on the garage floor.
"These are sub-millimeter spots," says defense attorney Joe Cawley. "It's such a small amount you know, it’s just not indicative of criminal conduct."
But D.A. Gerald Keene says, "It wasn't really the amount of blood that was incriminating here. It was the size of the blood specks and the manner in which the blood was deposited."
With so much riding on the blood evidence in the case, the prosecution recruited world renowned criminologist Henry Lee, who testified on videotape.
Lee, best known for the work in the O.J. Simpson trial more than a decade ago, says the small amounts of blood in the Harris home tell the story of what happened to Michele.
The pattern of blood spots in the doorway, says Lee, was caused when Michele was hit, twice. The first punch knocked her down. The second hit caused her blood to fly.
Using red dye to demonstrate, senior forensic investigator Steve Andersen showed Moriarty how spatter similar to what was found in the Harris home is created.
Andersen says the spatter was approximately a millimeter in size and some smaller than that.
Asked if this was enough to tell him that that was a crime scene, Andersen tells Moriarty, "The very potential of a crime scene was there. Yes."
Andersen, who also testified at trial, believes Michele was hit with medium velocity by some kind of blunt instrument, like a hammer or even a fist. "To get that size you have to apply a force to break that up into smaller droplets and propel it through the air," he explains.
"Isn’t it normal in a family’s home to find blood? I mean, people bleed. There’s kids," Moriarty points out.
"Yes. But normally, not medium velocity impact spatter," Andersen says.
"It was blood spatter, so that it wouldn’t come from a bloody nose dripping or a cut finger," D.A. Keene says.
Produced By Lisa Freed and Marc Goldbaum
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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See all 48 CommentsTerrible jeff82, poor taste on your comment.
I''ll just leave it at that.
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