Court documents provide new details on Cal Harris' conviction

This much is known: Michele Harris vanished 12½ years ago, leaving barely a trace in Tioga County.

Then, this story of wealth, a beautiful home and four children, a successful business and, finally, a marriage peeled bare of its promise gets complex.

In the story developed by police and prosecutors, Michele's estranged husband, prominent Tioga County automotive dealer Calvin Harris, killed her on Sept. 11, 2001, or early the next morning and disposed of her body. Two juries believed that version of the story, but two judicial rulings overturned the convictions. A third trial is set to begin Sept. 3 before Schoharie County Judge George R. Bartlett III.

In a second version of the story, Calvin Harris is innocent. An extensive search never located a body or a weapon. His defense attorneys have argued that any number of tragic circumstances could have unfolded in those uncertain hours after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

With the third trial expected to begin in six months, this newspaper reviewed hundreds of pages of trial transcripts and court documents to find never-before-published details about the case.

While the records outline an exhaustive search, enumerate thousands of pieces of evidence and shed light on the behavior of those close to Michele, the core fact of the case remains the same.

Michele has never been found.

Into the night

On what might have been the last day she was seen alive, Michele Harris had a headache.

Around 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, the 35-year-old mother of four was late — again — for her waitressing shift at Lefty's, a rough-and-tumble bar and restaurant in Waverly, N.Y.

Her work uniform was still in the dryer, and Michele was not yet fully dressed by the time the family babysitter, Barbara Thayer, arrived at the Harris home around 3.

Like everyone else, Michele was deeply affected by that day's terrorist attacks.

Those tragedies added to the concerns weighing on her mind. She was estranged but still living in the same home as her husband, millionaire car dealership owner Calvin Harris. In April, Michele took the job at Lefty's for spending money.

She also was trying to find the money for her half of a $10,000 down payment on a new home she hoped to buy with her 23-year-old boyfriend, Brian Earley. She had been planning to go to New York City on Sept. 14 and 15 to meet up with a college friend and try to sell some of her jewelry. Those plans were now in doubt because access to New York City was restricted following the attacks.

Michele also had an appointment the following afternoon to visit her divorce attorney in Waverly to prepare for a trial the next month in a bitter divorce proceeding.

Leaving those larger problems aside for now, Michele pulled her clothes out of the dryer, dressed for work, left her four children with Thayer and headed off for another shift at Lefty's.

Her waitressing shift ended at 9 that night, and she sat in the parking lot and shared drinks with two co-workers. The three talked about the day's terrorist attacks before parting ways, and Michele Harris made the drive to Earley's apartment in Smithboro, a hamlet about 10 miles east of Waverly.

She and Earley talked about the terrorist attacks for about an hour that night. While horrifying, they also helped her put her tumultuous life in context. She was thankful for what she had, and feeling good about the life ahead of her.

At about 11, Earley walked Michele to her gold 2000 Ford Windstar. She got in and shut the door, and he leaned in the window.

"I was talking to her for a few more minutes," Earley later said, "gave her a kiss good night, and watched her drive away."

By many accounts, Michele Harris was never seen again.

'Get in the damn car'

On mid-September mornings, the first glimmer of light shines on the gated driveway of the Harris property, at 381 Hagadorn Hill Road, at 5:45. At 6:15, an outline of the end of the driveway becomes visible, and at 6:30, the area is in full daylight.

On Sept. 12, 2001, a crisp summer day, sunrise was 5:40.

Two motorists driving by around 4:30 a.m. would later recount seeing a vehicle at the end of the driveway.

Between 5:30 and 6, Kevin Tubbs, a 23-year-old farmer, was driving his 10-foot-wide hay trailer north on Hagadorn Hill. He drove slowly because his vehicle lacked brakes, and he noticed something unusual.

An SUV was parked at the end of the driveway, and a pickup truck, black or dark blue, was parked behind it, perpendicular to Hagadorn Hill Road.

A man and a blonde-haired woman appeared to be having an argument. The woman, Tubbs would later say, matched the description of Michele Harris.

Tubbs waited six years before telling anyone what he saw.

At about 6 a.m., Waverly resident John Steele also was driving along Hagadorn Hill Road. He and a friend, unsettled by the terrorist attacks, had spent the night driving around and talking about their lives. As his truck passed 381 Hagadorn Hill Road, Steele also saw a truck at the end of the driveway.

"Get in the car, just get in the damn car," Steele thought he heard the man say, listening through the slightly open passenger window of his truck.

Steele died shortly after offering a written account of what he had seen, and his statement was not offered as evidence to either of the two juries that convicted Calvin Harris of murdering his wife.

'Maybe she is hurt'

Calvin Harris called Thayer, the family babysitter who also considered herself a personal friend of Michele's, at about 7 a.m. Sept. 12.

Michele didn't come home last night, Calvin told Thayer. Could she come to get the kids ready for school?

Thayer put her contact lenses in and threw on her sweats without bothering to get fully dressed for the day. At 7:08 a.m., she made a call from her home phone to cancel horseback riding plans, and made the six-minute drive to the Harris household.

At the end of the quarter-mile-long Harris driveway, Thayer found Michele's van, unlocked, with the keys still in the ignition. After a brief search, she went to the house.

As Thayer entered the home, she shouted inside the house, wondering whether her friend had come home since she received Calvin Harris' phone call.

"Is Michele here?" she yelled. (Throughout this story, direct quotes taken from the trial testimony are shown in italics.)

She wasn't, but Calvin Harris was in the house. He was dressed in a suit and tie, ready for work.

"Michele's car is at the end of the driveway," Thayer told Calvin.

"We better go get it," he replied.

As Harris and Thayer drove to the end of the slightly curved driveway to pick up the van, they discussed where Michele might be. The end of the driveway is not visible from the large, 1½-story Harris house.

"Should we look for her?" Thayer said. "Maybe she is hurt or something, or in a ditch. Maybe she had been drinking and got out of the van and started walking in the wrong direction."

"No," Harris said. "She went to New York City to visit her friend Lisa."

While they spoke, rescuers were searching the rubble of the World Trade Center for survivors, and access to the city was limited as a result of the emergency response.

"How did she get there?" Thayer said. "Her car was at the end of the driveway."

"Oh," he replied. "She probably hitched a ride."

When they got to the van, Harris and Thayer looked inside.

"Oh, my God," Harris said. "This van is such a mess. I need to get this van cleaned."

The van was filled with mail, magazines, fast-food wrappers, children's toys, jackets, sweatshirts, coats and underwear.

Later that day, investigators would find other, more puzzling items in the van: Michele's cellphone with one missed call, a Rolex box without a watch, and a black, nylon bag with gold rings and a pearl necklace, among other things.

Thayer drove the van up the driveway and parked in the garage.

Later that morning, after Calvin left for work, Thayer called Michele's cellphone and then Michele's friend, Nicole Burdick, asking whether Burdick knew where Michele was.

Burdick called Michele's divorce attorney, Robert Miller. After a call to Lefty's and a call to Michele's cellphone failed to locate her, Miller reported her missing to police.

Calvin Harris did not telephone authorities that day.

Starting a family

Michele, born and raised in the Town of Spencer, Tioga County, was working as a secretary at a car dealership owned by Calvin Harris' brother when she met Calvin in the late 1980s.

Recognizable for her blonde hair and easy-going demeanor, Michele was a country girl with an associate's degree in business from the State University of New York at Morrisville.

Calvin was a high-profile businessman, a former high school and college lacrosse standout, and the son of a wealthy car dealership owner.

By August 1990, the two married, and in 1993, they moved to a large house on 253 acres in the Town of Spencer. Four children followed, born between 1994 and 1999.

By late 1999, their marriage was unraveling.

Calvin began having an affair with a woman who worked at a Cortland County automotive dealership owned by his brother.

Michele confronted Calvin about the affair in the fall of 1999, and it stopped for a time. But the relationship between Calvin and the woman rekindled when they met in Daytona Beach, Fla., in March 2000.

Starting in October 2000, Michele began sleeping on a couch downstairs in the family's home. She decided it was time to make a new life for herself and her children.

'I can make you disappear'

Although their marriage had been strained by infidelity, Calvin exploded at Michele when she told him on Dec. 8, 2000, that she wanted a divorce.

Michele's sister-in-law phoned her that evening and heard Calvin screaming at Michele as she pleaded with him not to come near her. Physically, Calvin towered over Michele, who stood 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed about 115 pounds.

After Michele filed for divorce on Jan. 19, 2001, Calvin began contacting her family and friends to ask for help in ending the divorce proceedings. He told them Michele's new friends concerned him, and he worried she might be using drugs. He admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, but also blamed the failure of the marriage on Michele, citing her inability to keep the house clean.

Over time, the tense domestic relationship between Michele and Calvin eased. They worked out a schedule for caring for their children, and managed to live in the same house while their divorce proceedings grew acrimonious.

Cavlin's net worth was estimated at $5.4 million during the divorce, and the proceedings were putting his wealth in jeopardy.

On June 8, 2001, a judge ordered Calvin to pay Michele $400 per week. Under the order, all of Calvin's guns were to be put in the custody of his brother or father for safekeeping. Michele would have full custody of the children, and a $740,000 settlement — $200,000 paid immediately and $54,000 per year paid over a 10-year period.

But Michele did not accept the settlement, and the divorce appeared to be nowhere near a resolution.

During a July 2001 appointment with her Binghamton hairdresser, Jerome Wilczynski, Michele took a call from Calvin. She tipped the phone so the hairdresser could listen.

"I want you to hear how he talks to me," she told Wilczynski.

"Drop the divorce proceedings," the voice on the phone said. "I will (expletive) kill you, Michele. Do you hear me? I will (expletive) kill you. I can make you disappear. (Expletive) you, (expletive). Drop the divorce proceedings."

On Aug. 6, 2001, Michele filed legal paperwork seeking an appraisal of the Harris family's dealership and charging the $30,000 appraisal fee to Calvin.

A court trial in the divorce litigation was scheduled for Oct. 22, 2001.

'Please be with me'

As her marriage fell apart, Michele began drifting away from the comfortable life at Hagadorn Hill Road and tried to build a new life for herself.

Michele took the waitressing job at Lefty's in Waverly, near the New York-Pennsylvania border. She continued working there even after one employee exposed himself to her. In another incident, a co-worker grabbed her breast.

Two or three nights a week, she went out drinking with friends.

In late November 2000 at a bar called Wit's End in Nichols, Michele met Brian Earley, a surveyor for the City of Philadelphia. He was in northern Pennsylvania on a hunting trip.

Although he was 11 years younger, friends would later recall the two made an immediate connection. They exchanged phone numbers and began to speak three or four times a week, then every day. Earley started coming north to spend weekends with her.

In June 2001, Earley moved to New York and rented a small apartment in the Town of Tioga, less than a mile from Michele's parents' home. He gave Michele a key to his apartment to let his dogs out if he was working late as a surveyor for a Vestal firm. If Earley and Michele didn't see each other every day, they spoke by phone.

Earley broke up with his girlfriend in Philadelphia and intended to marry Michele. She picked out a white house on Main Street in Owego, near where her children attended St. Patrick's School. He made half of the $10,000 down payment without even walking inside the house.

Michele told associates she did not have intentions to marry Earley, though friends would later recall a loving relationship between the two.

While things appeared to be going well, the turbulence of Michele's quickly changing life took its toll. To conceal their relationship from her children and Calvin, she and Earley used calling cards when phoning each other so the incoming phone numbers appeared on a caller identification screen as a jumble of numbers. Earley would later say he never visited the home at 381 Hagadorn Hill Road.

Sometimes, she showed up at Earley's apartment late in the evenings, after a night out. Once he waited up until 2 a.m. for her, and she showed up at 2:30 after he had gone to sleep.

While Earley's affections for Michele grew, he never knew she had a sexual relationship for about two months starting in April 2001 with a co-worker at Lefty's. The man was a past cocaine user, and had a criminal history that included a conviction for assaulting his former girlfriend.

Investigators would later find an undated note, on Philadelphia Orchestra stationary, from Earley to Michele:

"Dear Michele,

"I would be really surprised if you are actually reading this. Please be with me. Let's figure this whole mess out soon. I am extremely happy with you in my life and I will do whatever it takes to be in your life. You said if you didn't love me you wouldn't go through with this either. Just talk to me and we'll work it out.

"Love always,

Brian"

On Sept. 12, the day after Michele's disappearance, Earley spoke with police investigators and allowed them access to his apartment, as well as his family's hunting cabin in Bradford County, Pa. Police scoured Earley's apartment for clues, taking Michele's toothbrush and cosmetics as evidence. A police investigator sniffed the Remington 870 Express 12-gauge shotgun resting on his dresser to see if it had been fired recently, and determined it had not. The hunting weapon was not taken into custody.

In December 2001, Earley moved back to Philadelphia and married his former girlfriend. They moved to Tioga County in 2002.

Investigation at the Harris house

At about 9:40 a.m. Sept. 12, New York State Police Investigator Michael Myers and Michael Young arrived at Calvin Harris' office at the Royal Ford dealership in Owego.

It was unusual for Michele not to be home in the morning, Calvin told the investigators. In fact, she had never not come home after working at Lefty's.

Harris cooperated fully with police. He signed paperwork consenting to a search of his property, and allowed the two investigators to travel to the family's home. Harris asked the police if they would need Michele's van as part of the investigation. He would like to get it back, he told them, because it needed an oil change. Michele never changed the oil, he said.

The investigators asked Calvin what might have happened to his estranged wife. Michele had evidently been using cocaine, Calvin told police.

"She's hanging out with a bad crowd in Waverly," he said. "You should pump the (expletive) out of them."

The Sept. 12 investigation began a series of coordinated ground and aerial searches of a 200-acre wooded area surrounding the Harrises' home. Divers and sonar equipment checked the lake bordering the Harris property, and nearby ponds and streams. The property's backyard borders the west side of Empire Lake, which is about 2,000 feet in length and 800 feet in width.

State police stationed troopers with night vision gear around the Harris home. In October 2001, a tracking device was placed on Calvin's truck to secretly monitor his movements for six months, with investigators hoping it would lead them to Michele's body.

The search was to no avail.

Blood spatter

State police Investigator Steven Andersen went inside the Harris home for the first time on Sept. 14. He entered through an open garage door and walked toward a doorway leading to the residence.

On the wall of the garage, Andersen saw dried stains. He stepped inside the doorway, where he found dried, red stains on the interior of the door and the door moldings.

Evidence technicians arrived and discovered blood on the tiled floor of a kitchen alcove, on door moldings and surfaces leading to the garage, and on the wall of the garage leading into the house. Later, when confronted about the blood during an interview with police, Harris said he couldn't think of anything that would have caused blood to be in the residence. Later in the interview, he said he remembered one time when his son cut his finger and left a few drops of blood in the garage.

The blood was later determined to be "medium-velocity blood spatter," in drops about the size of a pinhead. Spatter, at medium velocity, can be caused by anything from blunt force trauma to a handshake from someone who has a cut. Tests showed the DNA of the blood matched Michele, but it also could have been from one of her blood relatives.

Blood experts would later determine the tiny splotches of blood were at an angle demonstrating the victim would have had to be at or below 29 inches.

'Reasonable doubt'

In the days following Michele's disappearance, police investigators scoured the Harris property for signs of foul play.

The cracks and crevices in Michele's van were inspected for blood. Even the threads of screws were examined. No blood was found. Brian Earley's fingerprints were left on the strip of metal between the rear and front driver's side doors, pointed toward the driver's seat. Calvin Harris' fingerprints and those of a third person also were discovered.

Investigators also searched Calvin's truck and his all-terrain vehicle, and found no sign of blood.

Police also searched Michele's phone for messages.

"You need to come home as soon as possible," an unnamed friend said in a voicemail. "I am worried sick about you."

None of the voicemails was from Calvin.

Even though Michele was never found and a weapon never located, prosecutors considered the investigation a success.

Tioga County District Attorney Gerald Keene told juries in 2007 and 2009 that the evidence shows that between 11 p.m. Sept. 11 and 7 a.m. Sept. 12, Calvin Harris struck the mother of his children as she entered the home and incapacitated her.

As Michele fell to the garage floor, Keene maintained, her husband's attack sent tiny specks of blood around the garage doorway. After allegedly killing her, Calvin Harris allegedly disposed of her body and weapon in the span of less than eight hours.

Calvin Harris' defense attorneys argued the investigation focused on him and only him, that his behavior was abnormal due to the bizarre circumstances in which he suddenly found himself upon Michele's disappearance, and that some mysteries are never solved.

Tubbs' testimony after the first verdict resulted in a new trial for Harris in 2009.

The juries in both trials convicted Harris of second-degree murder.

But they also expressed reservations. In both cases, the juries deliberated for more than a day asked the presiding judge to define "reasonable doubt."

The weight of the task assigned to the jury seemed to defy any simple definition.

"When is a doubt of guilt a reasonable doubt under our law?" Judge Martin E. Smith said at the first trial. "A doubt of the defendant's guilt, to be a reasonable doubt, must be a doubt for which some reason can be given."