by Amy Lloyd
‘Like I said, he wanted to cover for his friend.’
‘So did you resent Dennis?’
‘No.’
‘Not even after your son was expelled and sent to juvie for nine months?’
‘Not even then.’
‘Because some people say you had it in for Dennis after this. That it was you who knocked on his door after Holly’s body was found, though there was no reason to link him with this crime at all.’
Harries took a breath. He was still calm, still composed. ‘We had to investigate everyone in the area who had a record for sexual misconduct.’
‘Right, the public exposure charge you pushed for. What everyone recognised as a football prank and you insisted was sexual deviancy.’
‘I didn’t insist on anything. Dennis exposed himself in front of teenage girls.’
‘He was thrown naked from a moving car, after the football game, and had to run back to the gym. The same prank had been pulled every season.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that as I only know what’s reported. Some of those girls were very upset. We had to do our jobs.’
Sam clenched her fists, cracked a knuckle. The boom mic guy turned and shot her a look. To Sam, right then, Harries looked every part the villain. There was a shape to his lips, a not-quite smile, that suggested he didn’t believe a word he said and that he wanted them to know it. He rested his hands on his thighs, tapping the tips of his fingers while he spoke.
‘What about the real flasher?’ Carrie asked, looking through her notes, then back at Harries. ‘A man was reported for exposing himself to a group of girls at a cheerleading camp on the Saturday before the murder. The girls were interviewed and described the man as “short, dark-haired and a little pale”, and a police artist drew this …’ Carrie held out an iPad. The drawing looked undeniably similar to that of the Short Man, seen outside Holly’s school the week earlier. ‘Yet, months later, you spoke again to these girls and you showed them pictures of Dennis. You asked them if he was the man they’d seen. You interviewed them again, even after they’d said no, and you pushed and you pushed until one of them said maybe it could have been him.’
‘We felt we had compelling evidence that Dennis was our guy.’
‘But this picture couldn’t look less like Dennis!’
‘You don’t get accurate descriptions from people who are in shock. And when you’re dealing with children …’
‘What made you think Dennis could have murdered Holly Michaels?’
‘We had a witness who heard him outright confess, we had fibres from a carpet that matched the one in his house—’
‘Those fibres, according to our forensic specialist, are present in roughly seven out of every ten households in America. That’s hardly compelling.’
‘When you combine it with the witness statement—’
‘A fantasist, a woman who has since confessed she made the whole story up.’
‘Why would she do that?’ Harries’s voice rose. ‘It’s the pressure you put on her, the liberal media who hounded her year after year until she told you she lied just to get you to leave her alone.’ It was the first time he seemed rattled. He crossed and then uncrossed his legs. Sat taller.
‘She called us. Guilt-ridden, miserable. Said she tried to contact the police, the court, that she tried to undo what she’d said.’
Harries sighed, his eyes closed. ‘All I can say is that at the time she was a reliable witness, her story checked out. Dennis had a criminal background. My fellow officers had previously suspected him of being involved in the disappearance of Lauren Rhodes.’
‘He was never questioned though.’
‘No, not officially, that’s correct.’
‘Why was he a person of interest in the Lauren Rhodes case?’
‘They were acquainted with each other, went on a couple of dates before she disappeared.’
‘Several months before she disappeared.’
‘Any ex-boyfriend is always a person of interest in these cases.’
‘What made him different to the other ex-boyfriends?’
‘The night after Lauren was reported missing the whole town came together to search for her. Everyone was there. Dennis, he showed up and he was smiling, joking around. He didn’t even bring a flashlight. It was pitch-black. No flashlight.’
‘And this made you suspicious?’ Carrie cocked her head again. Harries took a look around the room and continued, his expression cemented.
‘It was my colleagues who were suspicious. They said it was like he wasn’t really there to look for her. More like he was there to watch us look for her. Like he was gloating.’
‘But you didn’t think this?’
‘Hard for me to say. I wasn’t present and didn’t witness this behaviour myself. I was with the Rhodes family. We followed all leads and we came up short. Possible runaway. I don’t know, it’s the unsolved ones that haunt you.’
It was quiet for a moment. Sam felt they’d been manipulated, that he was buying himself time.
Carrie snapped them out of it. ‘Let’s get back to Holly Michaels. The hair.’
‘The hair?’
‘The hair found on Holly’s body, described in the forensics log as “short, dark brown/black, most likely from the head”, not belonging to the victim; not, it seems, a hair from Dennis’s body.’
‘Yeah, that was obviously one of the first things we sent for further testing. Unfortunately, as you well know, it was lost in transit.’
‘The single most important piece of evidence just went missing?’ Carrie’s eyebrows raised, shaking her head.
‘I’m not defending my department; that was one hell of a screw-up. Could have saved us months if we’d had a match on that. A few people got a disciplinary, careers were knocked off track, we had to regroup and focus on what we had left.’
‘Dennis is fair. Blond. The hair they found didn’t sound like a match for him, would you agree?’
‘We would have had to test it to say for certain. But following the rest of the evidence and the successful prosecution of Dennis I’d say it was pretty likely that if we had that evidence today we’d find it was a match.’
Carrie’s voice was firm and in control, it carried across the room and the power shifted with it; Harries was clearly less confident. ‘But there was no DNA evidence from Dennis at all. Nothing. The blood on the girl’s shirt was neither her own nor Dennis’s.’
‘We discussed the possibility of an accomplice.’
‘There was none of his DNA at all, nothing to suggest there were two murderers and nothing to suggest Dennis was ever present at the scene of the murder.’
‘The evidence—’
‘There was no evidence. Your department misplaced the hair. You led witnesses until they said what you needed them to. You put together a crazy story, and framed a teenage boy because you personally resented him for his friendship with your son.’
‘Listen to me, young lady, perhaps I did resent him but’ – Officer Harries looked into the camera – ‘I would never let that cloud my judgement as an officer of the law.’
Four
Extract from When the River Runs Red by Eileen Turner
Drugs were an industry in Red River. The school halls were rife with illicit deals and exchanges; you could buy anything from a couple of joints to prescription painkillers on your way to gym class. James Lucas remembers the drug ‘epidemic’ during his time as school principal: ‘We’d search lockers routinely. First we’d make an announcement over the speakers and request every student stay in the classroom they were in until we announced the search was over. Every locker would be opened and searched, no exceptions.’fn1 It wasn’t unusual to uncover a stash of narcotics during one of these searches but on one occasion the culprit was a surprise. Howard, son of respected police officer Eric Harries, was concealing a small fortune’s worth of controlled substances. In particular, Principal Lucas recalls, a couple of hundred baby blue pills. ‘Perhaps some
kind of imitation Valium,’ he speculates.
Officer Harries has always denied his son’s responsibilityfn2 and declined to be interviewed for this book but Howard made a statement to Principal Lucas in which he took full responsibility and admitted to selling the pills to fellow students. Harries tried to settle the matter privately but due to the street value of the find it was escalated, resulting in permanent expulsion and a six-month stretch in a juvenile detention centre for Howard. Following this, Howard was homeschooled and, sources say, Officer Harries developed a deep mistrust of Howard’s only friend, Dennis Danson, who he felt was responsible for his son’s arrest.
The blue pills became notorious in and around the school. It was widely speculated that it was the pills that led to the disappearance of the first girl, Donna Knox. She was last seen at a party attended by most of her classmates. Friends say she had a few drinks, her usual, Jack Daniel’s and Diet Coke, but didn’t drink excessively. A witness recalls her taking two pills around nine o’clock, ‘light blue, round, I didn’t know exactly what they were’fn3 and by nine forty-five Donna was reportedly intoxicated; unusually so, according to her friends. Her behaviour was bizarre. She became belligerent and refused all offers to drive her home. Friends let her storm off into the night, expecting her to return half an hour later, remorseful and embarrassed.
But she never returned. Her boyfriend and her best friend left the party an hour later, drove slowly along the route she’d take home, but didn’t see her. They parked outside her house and looked up to her unlit bedroom window, assuming she must be asleep. They called the next morning and spoke to her anxious mother, who told them she’d never returned home the night before. Not wanting to rat out their friend, they told Mrs Knox that Donna had left the party early and had stayed with a friend. They reassured her that Donna would call her as soon as she woke up, that she was probably still in bed.
It was over a day before Mrs Knox reported her missing. ‘I didn’t know I should be afraid, I was so angry I didn’t even think to be afraid.’fn4 Two days after she disappeared her sweater was found, two miles off the path she’d taken home, just a short distance from the bank of the river.
The search focused on the water; forensic divers found no evidence of a body, but heavy rainfall in March can cause strong undercurrents and there was a chance the remains had been dragged to sea. Police didn’t suspect foul play. All evidence seemed to suggest Donna had been too drunk to navigate the roads in the dark, took a wrong turn and wandered into the tangled and dense woodland. Perhaps she stepped into the water willingly, discarding her sweater and jumping in for a swim, sucked into the powerful pull of the high river. Or perhaps she fell, her sweater caught on the low-hanging branches. Either way, police were not pursuing anybody in relation to her disappearance.
The blue pills have been discussed many times, particularly by the extensive piece, ‘The Girls of Red River’, published in The Red River Tribune in 1992 shortly before the arrest of Dennis Danson. The piece asks, ‘Why was this line of investigation not pursued? Little to no interest was shown in this piece of evidence at the time, even with ongoing concerns about the level of drug use at the school.’ And many agree it is a curious omission, one which ensured Howard Harries was not interviewed in relation to the girl’s disappearance.
Next Lauren Rhodes disappeared. Then Jenelle Tyler, Kelly Fuller, Sarah West. Vanished, no bodies, no blood. As if they’d never even existed.
Finally they found Holly Michaels. They looked at uncles and stepfathers and lonely men with suspicion. They imagined a monster; a psychopath who had the bones of girls sealed in cement in his basement, who had their friendship bracelets hung from a nail in his closet. They needed to know.
Someone was toying with them. Someone was taking their girls.
Five
Sam was starting to recognise certain things Dennis said or did with his face when he spoke, the little inflections she never expected him to have, like the way he blew hair out of his eyes as he talked, taking small pauses and continuing as if he’d never stopped. The way he said her whole name, ‘I’ve missed you too, Samantha,’ and shrugged his shoulders when he was pretending something wasn’t a big deal even though she could tell it was.
‘They said Johnny Depp is involved.’ Shrug. ‘I guess he wanted to visit in person soon or something.’
They pressed their fingers against the holes in the plastic divide, skin turning white, stroking the fraction of flesh that appeared. Even that was electric. Sam left feeling drunk, and had the air conditioning on full blast as she drove back to her hotel. Not being with Dennis was agony, being there but not being touched was somehow worse. They talked about the lawyers, the research, the billboards Sam drove past on her way to the prison that offered a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for new information. So far the line hadn’t yielded anything but the mutterings of the functioning insane, fantasists and a few psychics peddling unconvincing stories. But there was a resurgence of hope.
‘I just want to be with you,’ Dennis said, both of them leaning closer, their breath against the window.
‘Soon.’ Sam’s eyes searched for his behind the lenses. A guard asked them both to lean back.
‘You know more than I do,’ Dennis said. ‘What’s the atmosphere like? Out there?’
‘About you? It’s always so positive. I mean, on the internet. I would say ninety-five per cent positive, apart from Red River …’
‘It doesn’t matter about them. Everywhere else?’
‘Positive. We all want you out, Dennis. We can definitely win this.’
Sam hadn’t planned to stay more than a couple of weeks but before she knew it the Easter holidays were over and she found she wasn’t ready to leave. She called the school and told them she wouldn’t be coming back yet, she had personal issues that she needed to resolve. When they responded with kindness and sensitivity Sam only felt more miserable; she swaddled herself in her guilt.
The days when Carrie and the crew weren’t around were lonely. Sam holed up in her hotel room, watching Netflix and eating fast food she bought at the drive-ins, cold by the time she got back, laid out in cardboard boxes and paper bags on the bedspread. But when Carrie arrived to pick her up for interviews Sam left her room reluctantly. The day they were due to shoot in Red River again she complained of a headache but Carrie pointed a thumb to the passenger seat.
‘Stop whining and just get in. I promised Dennis I’d look after you. Look at you, you’ve been here two months already and you look like raw chicken. Do you ever get out when I’m not here?’
Sam looked at herself in the side mirror. ‘Well …’
‘Get out there! Ride an airboat in the Everglades, drive down to Seaworld! I’m just kidding, have you seen Blackfish?’
But Sam wasn’t there for Seaworld or airboats. She was there for Dennis. Everything else just felt like killing time. She recognised it then, the isolation, the tendency to focus entirely on the relationship and let everything else come second. If she were in therapy they’d call it a pattern, she thought. With pity, they’d tell her it was an addiction. She thought of Dennis in his six-by-nine-foot cell, eating from a tray on his knees, the television a constant noise in the background. It seemed so much like her hotel room.
They stopped for iced coffee, Carrie slowly dragging Sam out of herself and into the world until she even found herself laughing. Instead of heading into town they skirted the edges of Red River, heavily wooded and secluded. They passed just one house, a dilapidated building, its skeleton black from fire damage.
On they drove, the SUV skidding in the mud the worse the road got. They parked in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, next to the white van she recognised from the interview with Officer Harries and another vehicle that could have been abandoned. They had to make their way on foot over fallen branches and the ground was soft underfoot from yesterday’s rain. Sam’s ballet flats were sucked from her feet and mud spat up the back of her calves.
‘Shit, I should have warned you, my bad,’ Carrie said, retrieving a pump and sliding it back on to Sam’s pointed foot. ‘Jackson wanted some material that shows the real Red River. The … character of the place, so to speak.’ They heard the noise of the crew through the trees and saw the side of a trailer covered with creeping plants and windows so dirty you couldn’t see inside.
Behind the trailer the earth fell away into a sinkhole so deep Sam could only see a blackness that seemed to pull her in. The remains of a house were teetering on the edge, splintered wood and wires dangling like spilled guts. The owner, Ed, stood stiff and uncomfortable while someone clipped a microphone on to his shirt. Sam had to take a few steps back from the hole, the pull of it like a deep breath, as though she might step forward and throw herself in. It made her bones ache.
‘Well, it happened like this,’ Ed started on command. ‘One night my wife told me she was going to bed early, I kissed her goodnight, she went to the bedroom which would have been right around here.’ He gestured to the edge of the hole, the beams still hanging over the abyss. ‘I’d had a few that night so when it seemed like the house was rockin’ a little I thought it was the beer. It was soft, not like an earthquake but like just before you pass out, like the whole world is gently swayin’ beneath you. Then there was this noise, unearthly, like a growlin’. Like old pipes, kind of. And then it was all at once. The whole left side of the house was just gone, sucked down in seconds. I didn’t even hear my wife scream or nothing. I went out there and I could see rubble. I tried to find her but the ground was still sucking everything in, like it was hungry. Water was bubbling up around me, little pools of filthy water burbling, like a fart in a bathtub. I didn’t know what to do. Phone was out – we’re pretty off the grid here.
‘I had to drive to get help. We never found her, she was just … gone, sucked into the soil while she slept. I wonder to myself: Did she drown? Was it like drownin’? Or did her nose and mouth fill with mud? Can you imagine that? Entombed alive in wet, stinkin’ mud. Couldn’t even bury her. She’s got a plaque, in the ground, at the chapel, but she ain’t there, she’s here.
