On the night of September 11, 2001, Michele Anne Harris (born September 29, 1965)[1] of Spencer, New York, United States, left the restaurant where she worked as a waitress in nearby Waverly after finishing her shift, and shared drinks with two coworkers (one of whom she had been romantically involved with) in the parking lot. She then went to see a boyfriend in Smithboro and left shortly after 11 p.m. This was the last time anyone is known to have seen her. The next morning, her car was found on the road near the home she shared with her children and estranged husband, Cal. He was later tried for her murder four times and convicted twice before being acquitted.[2]
The investigation into her disappearance was hampered since many of the state troopers who would normally have been involved had been bused to New York City the previous day in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.[3] Suspicion centered on Cal, whose divorce from Michele had grown acrimonious as he could have lost a considerable portion of his family fortune in a settlement. Cal was described by some as seemingly unconcerned in the aftermath of his wife’s disappearance, dating other women and selling her belongings within weeks. Further evidence of foul play was also circumstantial, largely consisting of some blood in the house and a secondhand account of his threatening her.
Cal Harris was eventually charged with second-degree murder, and convicted despite Michele’s continued absence. The morning after Harris was convicted, a witness emerged who claimed to have seen Michele outside the family home on the morning of September 12. Cal was retried and convicted again. After he had served several years in state prison, his conviction was overturned on appeal. A jury in a different county deadlocked on a verdict, leading to a bench trial, which acquitted him.
Harris has continued to protest his innocence; he has sued the state police, the Tioga County District Attorney’s office and several others for malicious prosecution.[4] In 2017 he was arrested again after allegedly stalking one of the investigators. The lead defense investigator has written a book alleging his theory of how Cal Harris was framed, and focuses on one of the men Michele had reportedly dated at the time as a more likely suspect given some evidence found at his former house. Her friends and family believe just as strongly in Cal’s guilt, and continue to search for stronger evidence even though he cannot be prosecuted again; this has led to her family and her children becoming estranged from each other.
Background
Cal Harris, a Vestal High School graduate[5] who later became a star attackman and four-year letterman[6] for the Hobart College men’s lacrosse NCAA Division III champion teams[7] in the early 1980s,[8][9] met Michele Anne Taylor, who had earned an associate’s degree from the State University of New York at Morrisville,[10] later in the decade when she worked on the lot of one of the car dealerships his family owned in Tioga County, on the Southern Tier of upstate New York, between Binghamton and Elmira and south of Ithaca.[11] They married in 1990 and settled on a 252-acre (102 ha) estate outside the village of Spencer in northern Tioga County,[3] where Michele had grown up.[10] She had the first of the couple’s four children in 1994.[11]
In 1999 the marriage started to fail when Michele discovered, while pregnant with their youngest child, that Cal had been having an affair with another clerk on one of the car lots.[3] He justified this affair on the grounds she was not keeping the house clean enough.[11] When she confronted him, he promised to end it but, she later learned, did not,[3] rekindling it on a vacation trip to Barbados.[10]
After her son was born, in October 2000, she stopped sharing a bed with her husband, sleeping on the couch in the family’s home. A month later, at a bar, she met Brian Earley, a younger man visiting the area from Philadelphia, where he worked as a surveyor. Soon the two were having discreet meetings in the Poconos of nearby Northeastern Pennsylvania.[3] The two used phone cards when they called each other, so that the caller ID would display as a random jumble of numbers, in order to keep their relationship a secret from Cal Harris and the children.[10]
Divorce
At the beginning of 2001, Michele filed for divorce. During the first half of the year, Cal repeatedly told Michele he would not let her divorce him. Barb Thayer, the couple’s nanny, recalled hearing frequent loud arguments. Cal tried to get Michele’s family to talk her out of the divorce, believing she had been influenced by the people she was increasingly associating with and might even be using drugs. Michele told her sisters that at one point in March Cal told her during an argument that he would not need a gun to kill her and the police would never be able to find her body. She also let her hairdresser overhear Cal threaten to kill her and make her disappear over the phone in July.[10]
In June Cal was ordered to pay her $400 a month, and continue to pay all the expenses related to the house, until the divorce was finalized. Cal was also ordered to give all his guns to his brothers and father until the divorce was over and Michele had moved out. The court estimated his net worth at $5.4 million. He offered her full custody of the children and a settlement of $740,000 over the next ten years, but she rejected it.[10]
Cal’s payments to Michele supplemented what she earned from a part-time waitressing job at Lefty’s, a restaurant in the nearby village of Waverly,[3] she had started in April.[10] Earley left his girlfriend and moved to Tioga, another town in the area, that June, expecting that the two would marry soon after her divorce;[3] while she was interested in a long-term relationship with him she told her friends she did not plan to marry him. He gave Michele the keys to his house to let his dogs out if he was working late, and she left some belongings there, as some nights she would come there after work, as late as 2:30 a.m.[10]
Earley was not Michele’s only love interest at this time. For two months she had a relationship with[3] Lefty’s manager, Michael Kasper,[12] that she had told no one else about. Another employee of the Harris family dealerships later admitted to having makeout sessions in the back seats of cars on the lot, and there was also a man from Texas about whom little was known that she was linked to.[3]
The tension in the Harris house abated by August. Cal had offered Michele $80,000 annually in alimony and child support along with custody of the children. Through her attorney, she filed for a court-ordered appraisal of his business, to be charged to him at a cost of $30,000. Trial was set for October 22.[10]
As summer ended, on the weekend after Labor Day, Thayer noted that Michele seemed happier than she had in a while. Michele confided in her that she had decided to accept Cal’s offer, but had not yet informed him. “I’m finally getting my life back”, Michele told Thayer. “I can’t believe how I feel.” She was scheduled to talk to her lawyer on September 12.[11]
That was not the only significant event Michele had planned for the second week of September 2001. Over that coming weekend, she told Cal she was taking a trip to New York City to visit a college friend. She also informed some of her friends about the trip, but said her goal was to sell or pawn some of her jewelry, including her engagement ring, in order to make her half of the down payment on the home she and Earley had agreed to buy in Owego, the county seat, near where the children went to school.[10] She also reportedly had run up significant debt on her credit card and bounced checks.[13]
Disappearance
When Thayer arrived at the Harris house on the afternoon of September 11 to babysit the children, Michele was having a headache. Travel to New York City had been severely restricted in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks that morning, making it likely she would not be able to travel there the next weekend and sell her jewelry as planned. Since her work uniform of dark blue polo shirt and khaki shorts had not yet dried, she was late for the start of her shift.[10]
Michele worked until 9 p.m. that night, when Lefty’s closed. Afterwards, she stayed in the parking lot and discussed the day’s events over drinks with Kasper, the coworker she had an affair with earlier in the year. After an hour, she left for Earley’s apartment in Smithboro, where she stayed for another hour, sharing drinks with him and discussing how the day’s terrorist attacks had given her some perspective on her own problems. According to Earley, she left sometime between 11:00 and 11:30 p.m. No one has reported seeing her since then.[10]
At 7 a.m. the next morning, Cal called Thayer and told her Michele had not come home after work the night before. He asked if she could come to their house, a six-minute drive from her own, and help get the children ready for school. She dressed quickly, canceled an engagement for later that day, and left her house eight minutes later. On the road in front of the Harris’s driveway, she saw Michele’s gold Ford Windstar minivan parked on the side.[10]
Thayer parked briefly to take a look; the doors were unlocked and the keys still in the ignition. She drove down the Harris’s driveway, which curves through fields and woods a quarter-mile (400 m) to the house, making it impossible to see the road from it. In the house she called out Michele’s name, hoping she might have walked there from her car, but Cal responded, already dressed for work.[10]
Thayer told him that Michele’s car was on the road. “We better go get it”, he said, and the two drove back down to inspect it further. Thayer raised the possibility that Michele might still be in the vicinity, perhaps injured or disoriented; Cal told her that she had gone to New York City as she had told him she was going to. When Thayer asked how, since her car was on the road, Cal suggested she had perhaps hitchhiked.[10]
Cal took note of the many items in the vehicle—primarily clothing, mail, magazines, toys, and food wrappers—and said he needed to get the car cleaned. Thayer then drove the car back down the driveway and parked it in the garage, after which Cal left for work. Thayer called one of Michele’s friends and asked her if she knew Michele’s whereabouts, after which the friend called Michele’s divorce lawyer, whom she was scheduled to meet with later in the day. After learning that she had left Lefty’s at the end of her shift the night before, and her cell phone went unanswered, he called the New York State Police and reported her missing.[10]
Investigation
The state police in Tioga County had much more limited resources available to them that morning than they normally would for a missing-persons case, since the majority of troopers and investigators in the area had been bused down to New York City to provide additional security and manpower in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Among them were some experts in forensics;[3] many of the department’s dogs and aviation had also been diverted to Lower Manhattan.[14] Two of the investigators who remained went to see Cal at his dealership at 9:40 a.m.[10]
Cal told them Michele had never failed to return home after her evening shifts at Lefty’s. He accompanied the investigators back to his property and gave them written permission to search it, then returned to work. Cal added that if they needed to take the minivan, they could, but he wanted it back afterwards so he could have the oil changed, something he said Michele always neglected to do. He told the investigators that she may have been using cocaine with some of the people she had gotten to know in Waverly and that they should “pump the shit out of them.”[10]
Police also searched the Harris property with helicopters and dogs,[10] including divers and sonar in both the small pond near the driveway and 29-acre (12 ha) Empire Lake,[15] which borders it on the east. In Waverly, they interviewed staff at Lefty’s and talked to Kasper and his friend who Michele had shared drinks with in the parking lot before going to Earley’s. Suspicions were raised about the former pair when a background check revealed that Kasper had a history of cocaine use and a conviction for assaulting a former girlfriend,[10] and the other man had served a 10-year prison sentence in Arizona for rape.[11] There was no evidence connecting him to Michele’s disappearance, and after he, Kasper and Earley[a] (who had also allowed the police to search both his apartment and his family’s hunting cabin in neighboring Bradford County, Pennsylvania) all passed lie detector tests, they were cleared as suspects.[16]
That left Cal Harris himself, who, because of the pending divorce and the likelihood of a large settlement, had a motive to kill Michele. Three days after Michele disappeared, Joseph Andersen, a state police forensics investigator, entered the house’s open garage, where he saw what appeared to be red blood spatter on the wall. He also observed more on the doorway to the house. This was used to obtain a search warrant for the house, and further investigation discovered similar stains in the foyer and the kitchen near the garage; a presumptive test found the substance that left the stains to be human blood and it was collected and preserved for later DNA tests. Andersen also found evidence that indicated additional blood had been present but had been cleaned; the police now considered the house a crime scene.[10]
The same day, Cal and members of Michele’s family gathered for dinner in Cooperstown. There, two of her sisters confronted him about a threat he had made in March to kill Michele and dispose of her body such that it would never be found, as well as a 1996 incident in which Michele had called from a closet where she hid as Cal repeatedly cocked a shotgun outside. After denying the incidents, Cal eventually admitted to the threat but claimed that he had not been serious. The sisters testified later that the conversation was very uncomfortable for him.[5]
When Cal returned to Spencer, investigators asked him about the blood stains; he was initially unable to explain them but later said that Michele had cut herself in the garage the month before. With his permission, they searched his truck and all-terrain vehicle, and searched Michele’s car extensively, almost to the point of disassembly. Among its contents were Michele’s cell phone, which registered one missed call and a voicemail from a worried friend, and a black bag containing her jewelry. Forensic technicians found both Cal and Earley’s fingerprints, as well as those of a third person besides Michele, but no blood.[10]
Without further evidence, police tried more discreet investigative techniques. They had troopers watch Cal’s property using night vision goggles and camouflage to see if he might go anywhere under the cover of darkness. Starting in October, they also attached a GPS tracking unit to his truck for six months to see if his movements might indicate a possible disposal site.[b] Neither yielded any useful information.[10]
Arrest
After the initial investigations, the case went cold for the next several years. Local media coverage was limited to stories around the annual anniversary that rehashed the case and reported primarily that there was nothing new to report. The police continued to believe that Cal had killed Michele by some means and disposed of her body somehow, but also that they had insufficient evidence for a conviction.
In 2005, the anniversary stories said the police were expecting a break in the case soon.[10] That same year, they re-interviewed Jerome Wilczynski, the hairdresser whom Michele had allowed to overhear Cal’s violent and profane threats to her, including to kill her and make her disappear, over her cell phone less than two months before she disappeared. When police first spoke to Wilczynski shortly after the disappearance, he had not told them about the threats; he revealed this information in the 2005 interview. With evidence of a second threat closer in time to the homicide they believed had occurred, they felt they could now secure a conviction without the body.[5]
“The case wasn’t getting any better,” Mark Lester, the state police captain overseeing the investigation, told CBS’s 48 Hours for an episode on the case released in 2010. “There were really no new significant leads or evidence coming in. But win, lose, or draw, this case had to go to trial.” A Tioga County grand jury indicted Cal on one count of second-degree murder on September 30, 2005, after which state troopers went to his Ford dealership outside Owego and arrested him in front of his employees, not only handcuffing him but putting his legs in irons.[14]
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