“Some, yeah. Others were some of Ashley’s old friends from the area and her family.”
“None of them crashed here after the party?”
“Not according to the statements given by the family.”
“What’d they do on the Fourth?”
“Was just family, the nanny, and the manager,” she says. “Went into town to watch fireworks.”
“Someone could’ve gotten in then,” I say. “While they were in town.”
“Sure. They came back home and did a few of their own down on the beach. Everyone was tired. Crashed when they came in. Early night according to them.”
“Who put the kids to bed?” I ask.
“The nanny. Says Brett was still up playing a video game in his room when she went to bed, but Mariah was out like a light.”
We cross the room and climb the stairs, pausing at the landing on the second floor, before continuing to Mariah’s room.
“She was isolated from the parents up here,” I say, “but Brett and Nadine were on either side of her. You’d think one of them would’ve heard if there had been any screams or loud noises.”
Because the rooms are large, there is more space between them than normal, but the doors to them are within twenty feet of each other.
“Yeah. They say they didn’t, but I’m looking forward to re-interviewing all of them.”
“Me too.”
We stand at the door to the kids’ room where the notes and Mariah were found.
With the beds stripped and other items collected as evidence missing and the white walls and furniture still smudged with black fingerprinting powder and the evidence markers still scattered about and sections of carpet removed, the room is an incongruous contradiction of festive beachy pastel colors surrounded by white walls and bright multicolored carpet contrasted with the harsh, industrial, blunt, dirty, damaging remnants and reminders of a processed crime scene.
Mariah’s full-size bed is centered along the far wall in, the long side against the wall. To the left of it is a bright aqua-colored couch with a white pillow with bold pink letters on it that read Don’t Worry! Be Happy! To the right of her bed, along the right wall is a set of white wooden bunkbeds, a white ladder extending at an angle down to the floor. Two smallish windows, their blinds pulled up, look out onto the side yard and the next house, which though huge, is small compared to this one. Scattered throughout the room are a few nightstands, a dresser, a chest of drawers, a large wardrobe, a desk with some crayons, colored pencils, construction paper, and a partially open stapler, and a huge TV mounted to the wall. The other walls are decorated with beach, sea, and nautical items—all painted in a clash of bright primary and pastel colors. In the front left corner is a private bathroom.
We look through the room and bathroom, slowly, carefully, methodically, though we’re not here to collect evidence or spot something that might have been missed. The excellent FDLE crime scene team didn’t miss anything. We are here for our own benefit, to take a firsthand look at the house, see what crime scene photos can’t show us, get familiar with the area we’ll be talking about during the investigation and hopefully the court proceedings.
We then take a tour through the room Nadine was staying in. Followed by the room at the opposite end that Brett was staying in.
After we had seen everything there was to see on this level, we conducted a few tests. With all bedroom doors closed, Reggie stood in Mariah’s room and yelled and screamed while I listened from Nadine’s and then Brett’s. Though muffled and relatively low, I could hear her from both rooms.
We then walk through the other levels much more quickly and finish just as Ashley’s ex arrives.
220
“Am I a suspect?” Justin Harris asks.
We are standing in the enormous, open kitchen of the beachfront mansion where we’ve just asked him for his fingerprints and a writing sample.
“Are you refusing?” Reggie asks.
“No,” he says shaking his head. “Not at all. I’m just curious. I guess I would be—a suspect that is—I just . . . it’s just funny. I don’t know. I’m happy to help. I’m here to cooperate. I just thought I was here to answer questions about the house and share some things with you I think you need to know.”
“Write this please,” Reggie says, placing a sheet of paper with certain words on it beside the blank notebook paper and pen already on the marble top of the island.
“Sure,” he says. “No problem.”
Justin Harris is a mid-thirties man in navy work slacks, cheap dress shoes, and a white sports shirt with his name and the name of his rental company embroidered on it.
He presents as a man with an IQ on the low end of average who is working very hard to run the company he inherited from his father but struggling to do so.
“Can you talk while you do that?” Reggie asks.
The rhythm and strategy we had developed since we began working together is for her to take the lead and ask most of the early questions, allowing me to observe how the person responds and have time to think.
“Sure,” he says.
“Tell me about your relationship with Ashley,” she says.
“We were kids. Well, she was. I was, mentally. I was from down here. She was from Wewa. We met at a party. I was older. She was smoking hot. She was a teen mom, but that wasn’t something she told me ’til later—after I had fallen for her.”
As he talks, he continues to copy the words and sentences from the sample Reggie placed on the countertop. Without seeming to realize what he’s doing, he occasionally writes some of the words he’s saying along with the ones he’s copying.
“Between us . . . I think Ashley feels kinda bad for me,” he says. “Probably why they vacationed here. Knew I could use the commission.”
“Why would she feel bad for you?”
“Like guilty I mean,” he says. “My family had money. She was very poor. She pursued me. I think she was trying to find security and a father for her baby. She never said anything like that, and she wasn’t bad to me while we were together, but . . . the moment something better came along . . . she was gone.”
“You said your family had money,” Reggie says. “Not anymore?”
“It’s a tough market right now,” he says.
The truth is there’s nothing wrong with the market. It’s the manager. The agency did extremely well when his dad ran it, but since his dad’s death and the company becoming his, everything except the market is down—rentals, income, valuation.
“So you need money?”
Obviously the family knows about the ransom note, but we’ve been able to keep it from going public. I wonder if he knows about it. Did Ashley tell him? Had they spoken since it happened?
He stops writing and looks up at her. “Everybody needs money, but I’m not like destitute or anything. I just think she . . . It’s her way of paying me back. I was good to her. And to Brett.”
He answers as if he doesn’t know about the ransom note.
“I don’t know if you suspect her or not,” he says. “Hell, if you suspect me, you must suspect everybody. But there’s no way she could kill anyone. And especially not a child. And that fact that she’s trying to pay me back for the help I gave her when she needed it shows what a decent person she is.”
He finishes the writing sample and drops the pen on it.
“Now we need to get you printed,” Reggie says.
“My prints will be all over this place,” he says. “This is one of my listings. I’m in here all the time.”
“That’s why we need them,” she says. “To exclude you.”
“Oh. Sure. Okay.”
As she rolls his fingers across the small portable digital reader, he says, “I still can’t believe what happened. What did happen exactly?”
“You don’t know?” I say.
“Just what’s online, but . . . that’s not much. Suspicious death, but no details.”
“You haven’t spoken to Ashely since it happened?
” I ask.
“Called and left a message for her, told her how sorry I was and to let me know if I could do anything, but I haven’t heard back from her yet.”
“We haven’t released any information like that to the public yet,” Reggie says.
What she doesn’t say is that we don’t yet have that information—and won’t until we hear back from the ME.
“How many sets of keys are there to this property?” I ask. “And who all has them?”
He shrugs. “I’m not sure exactly. I can try to find out, but . . . the owner, Roger Garrett, has a few sets I’m sure. We have three sets I think. I can look when I get back to the office. Did the killer use a key to get in?”
“Killer?” Reggie says. “How’d you get from suspicious death to killer?”
“Because of all this,” he says, nodding to her printing him. “And all the questions. And crime scene tape. And there are plenty of rumors flying around out there—locally, like here on the street, and on TV and the internet.”
“Are any of the sets of keys or individual keys you have missing?” I ask.
“Not that I know of, but . . . nothing like this has ever happened before. I . . . We’ve never had any problems or issues before. I’ll have to double check, but . . . I don’t think so. I just don’t know.”
“What about—how do the maids get into clean?” Reggie says.
“They come by the office and get their assignments and keys. I gave Arnie a list of our cleaners and recent guests.”
Reggie finishes printing him and he thanks her, which sounds odd.
“Don’t know why I said that,” he says. “Sorry.”
“Is there a hidden key anywhere on the property?” I ask.
When I say hidden he begins to nod, but by the time I get to the end of the sentence he’s shaking his head.
“No,” he says. “Not that I know of.”
“Why did you nod at first?” I ask. “What did you think I was asking? What else is hidden here?”
“The room,” he says. “I thought you meant the hidden room.”
221
“Looks like we won’t be releasing this property back to you today after all,” Reggie says.
“Really?” Justin asks. “Why?”
We are standing just above and outside the hidden room.
“Is that an actual question?” she says. “Because we have to have the crime scene techs process it.”
“Oh. Really? But if no one knew it was there and didn’t have a key to get in it . . .”
“We can’t know that for sure, can we?”
“Guess not. Sorry. But I really don’t think anyone knows about it but me and the owner.”
For what reason exactly I’m not sure, but the homeowner had a hidden room constructed in the house. It’s located in the bottom of the elevator shaft and is accessed by raising the false floor once the elevator has left the first level.
According to Justin, only two keys to this room exist. One is kept in the owner’s possession, the other stays locked in the safe at his office—except for days like today when he gets it out and brings it with him to the house.
With gloved hands, we take the key from him and follow his instructions on raising the elevator and lifting the false floor to reveal the locked door beneath.
“See?” he says. “No way anyone even knew about this, let alone got in it.”
“Tell you what,” Reggie says. “We’re gonna keep your key. You go back to your office and double check on the other sets of keys for us. We’re gonna process this room. When we’re finished—unless there are any other surprises you want to tell us about—we’ll bring your key to you and release the property.”
“No, no other surprises. Sorry about this one. I really didn’t think of it. Most owners who rent have a locked room they keep their personal things in.”
“Sure,” she says, “but not a hidden safe room in an elevator shaft.”
Twenty minutes later, with Justin gone and Jessica joining us, we enter Roger Garrett’s secret room.
Reggie has decided to let Jessica process the room instead of calling FDLE back in, but if we encounter anything that warrants calling them, we’ll ease out and do just that.
Jessica has already dusted the false floor and door for prints and is now suited up and leading the way.
The steel door is heavy but on a hydraulic system that makes it easy to lift. As it comes up, soft lights around the room come on.
Beneath it, a set of metal stairs leads down into the room.
Though tall, the room is no wider than an elevator shaft. It sits on the ground floor in the center of the six-car garage, which from the outside just appears to be the enclosed shaft of the elevator.
The hidden room is essentially a bomb shelter or safe room with reinforced steel walls and its own air filtration system and power supply.
Apart from the paranoia and fear for a bleak future, the saddest thing about the room by far is it’s designed for one person—presumably Roger Garrett. A lone recliner sits in the center of the room surrounded by survival supplies, weapons, and communications devices.
“Can y’all see any sign that anyone’s been in here recently?” she says.
“Hard to tell,” Jessica says.
“Well, John and I will clear out of here and let you process it. Let me know if you find anything. Looks like ol’ Roger plans to ride out the apocalypse right here.”
“Or a hurricane or home invasion,” I say. “He’s equally set for all.”
222
That evening I met Merrill at the old gym to play basketball.
What everyone refers to as the old gym is a freestanding red brick gymnasium on Main Street that was once part of the elementary school. When the school was torn down, a few classrooms left on one end of the property were restored and remodeled and became part of a pre-school and across the now-empty field, where once stood the main body of the school, is the old gym.
Merrill is part of an area league team that practices here and has a key to this huge old building that looks and smells the same as it did decades ago.
I grew up loving basketball, but stopped playing after what happened to Martin Fisher in Atlanta.
After several years of not playing, I was playing again, and Merrill and I, who were on the high school team together, are playing more one-on-one these days than jogging or anything else.
Since high school, I had played mostly on outdoor asphalt courts, which presented challenges—such as heat, light, rain, wind—that having access to our own gym does not.
We sit lacing them up on the old wooden bleachers we had as kids when the Pottersville Elementary team played Wewa Elementary in after school afternoon matchups.
“We straight?” Merrill says.
It’s just the two of us in the enormous old gym and his words seem to get lost in all the open space.
“Always,” I say.
“Sorry I had to call in the second string to look out for Sam and Daniel,” he says.
I smile. “Not sure Dad and Verna see themselves as the second string, but it’s no problem.”
“It was only for the last day.”
“Wouldn’t matter if it had been for more. It’s all good.”
“How about me working Trace?” he asks. “You got a problem with that?”
I shake my head. “Wouldn’t matter if I did,” I say, “but I don’t.”
“Told him I’ll follow where the case takes me no matter where that is. He said that’s what he wants me to do because it won’t lead me back to him ’cause he didn’t do it. Said what he wants most in this world if he can’t have his little girl back is to find the fucker that took her from him.”
I nod.
“Thing is . . . you weren’t here,” he says. “Couldn’t count on the investigation going like it should from the beginning—most important time.”
I continue to nod, not pointing out that I can screw up the early hours of an investigation with the
best of them.
“I want whoever did this,” he says. “Don’t care who it is. Knew takin’ the job would give me access nobody else would have.”
He’s right. He does have access I’ll never get, and it could prove to be extremely useful.
“Not that I’m working for you or the po-lice or anyone else. I really don’t think he did it, but . . . it comes to it, I’ll be in a position to know shit and do shit.”
I would’ve thought it went without saying that he wasn’t working for me or law enforcement, but I would have been wrong.
“And I didn’t want this ending up like Girl X,” he says. “There was some attention at first, but I wondered how long it would last for the mixed girl of a mid-list rapper.”
Just days after JonBenét’s murder another young girl was savagely attacked in Chicago, but she didn’t receive even a fraction of the attention that JonBenét did. The nine-year-old African-American girl, who became known as Girl X to protect her identity, was viciously assaulted, brutally raped, choked, tortured, had gang signs scrawled on her body and roach poison poured down her throat and left for dead in an apartment at Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing complex. It seems as if the entire world knows who JonBenét is, but nearly no one has ever heard the name Shatoya Currie, who survived her rape and attempted murder, but has brain damage, blindness, deafness, and is wheelchair bound.
“Trace is paying me,” he says, “but I’m working for Mariah.”
“Never doubted it.”
“And if he did it, I’ll help you burn him just as quick as anybody else.”
223
The next morning we get the autopsy report back.
After reading and rereading it several times, there’s still much I don’t understand or know how to interpret.
Thankfully, the medical examiner has agreed to answer our questions.
Arnie, Keisha, Jessica, and I are with Reggie in her office. Dr. Luttrell is on speakerphone.
Raymond Luttrell is the medical examiner for the 14th Judicial Circuit, which covers Bay, Gulf, Calhoun, Holmes, Washington, and Jackson counties. He’s calling us from his office in Panama City.
True Crime Fiction Page 88
