The Cold Case of Mr. Harrington

On Sunday, October 10, 1999, Grace Harrington, the wife of a Mr. Kenneth Harrington, drove her husband to the emergency room of Mercy Hospital. When the nurses wheeled out a gurney, she told them she had barely been able to wake him up and then get him into her car. When the nurses wheeled Mr. Harrington into an examination room he was unresponsive but was still taking shallow breaths and had a very weak pulse. The emergency room doctor started his examination while Mrs. Harrington gave the desk nurse his name, age, and the fact that he'd had high blood pressure in the past. She also brought the bottle of a prescription he'd been given to control the high blood pressure.

About ten minutes after Mr. Harrington was wheeled into the examination room he went into cardiac arrest. The emergency room doctor attempted to revive him four times, but with no success.

Once Mr. Harrington had been declared dead, the emergency room doctor began attempting to determine a cause of death for Mr. Harrington's death certificate. He knew Mr. Harrington's heart had stopped beating, but not why. It was when he was reviewing the results of a blood tests they'd done as part of the diagnosis of Mr. Harrington's condition that he became suspicious and asked for a detective to be assigned to the case.

The blood sample had confirmed the information that Mr. Harrington had been taking Atenolol, a drug commonly prescribed for high blood pressure. What caused the doctor's suspicion that Mr. Harrington's death wasn't just a simple case of cardiac arrest was the concentration of Atenolol in his blood.

The normal concentration of Atenolol administered at the prescribed dosage level should have been about three milligrams per liter. The concentration of Atenolol in Mr. Harrington's blood was almost a hundred milligrams per liter. The doctor's diagnosis was that Mr. Harrington had been given or had taken an overdose of the drug, and the overdose had lowered his blood pressure to the point that his heart was starved for oxygen and just stopped pumping. That also explained why the attempts at restarting his heart had been futile.

His blood sugar was also extremely low, also a symptom of an overdose of Atenolol. It was the doctor's opinion that Mr. Harrington had either committed suicide by taking an overdose of Atenolol tablets or had been murdered. Per hospital procedure, the hospital contacted the police and Harry was assigned to figure out which was the case.

Harry talked to the emergency room doctor, and the doctor told him that to get that much Atenolol in his system, Mr. Harrington would have had to ingest at least fifty tablets at the same time, and probably more like sixty depending upon when he ingested them.

The doctor also told Harry something else that made Harry question the circumstances of Mr. Harrington's death. The doctor said Mr. Harrington didn't have any identification on him when the EMT's brought him to the ER, and that his wife had given Admitting her husband's name and their address. She didn't have the name of their insurance carrier so she said she'd have to call them back with that information. After Mr. Harrington died, the doctor had gone to the waiting room to tell her that Mr. Harrington had passed way. He wasn't able to do that because she'd left.

Harry's next stop was to speak with Mrs. Harrington. He'd planned to tell her that the doctors hadn't yet determined a cause of death and then observe her reaction. He also intended to ask her about any medical or mental problems Mr. Harrington had. Though Harry had his doubts, it was possible that since Mr. Harrington had been prescribed the medicine, he would have known the outcome of an overdose and had decided to take his own life.

When Harry knocked on the door of the Harrington house, he didn't get an answer. After knocking twice more, he walked next door to talk to the neighbor. The neighbor said when he walked out to get his newspaper at about nine, he saw that Mrs. Harrington's car wasn't in their drive. He hadn't seen her come back. He didn't know much about the couple except that Mr. Harrington worked construction and had told him he'd just finished up a job in Nashville and was now working on a new building in Knoxville.

Harry left his card on the door with a note asking Mrs. Harrington to call him. When she didn't the next day, Harry still wasn't too concerned. He knew it takes some time to make funeral arrangements and thought Mrs. Harrington was probably doing so. He called the hospital to see which funeral home had picked up the body. If Mrs. Harrington wouldn't come to him, he'd catch up to her after the funeral and burial ceremony.

When Harry called the funeral home, he learned that they had Mr. Harrington's body but Mrs. Harrington hadn't requested a visitation, funeral, or graveside service. All she'd requested and paid for was the embalming of his body, the least expensive casket they had, and a burial plot and vault. The funeral director said he thought it unusual that she'd paid the five thousand dollar cost in hundred dollar bills instead of writing a check.

Harry went to the cemetery on the day of the burial, that Wednesday, thinking that Mrs. Harrington would be there. The only thing he saw was some canvas screens around the grave and a backhoe operator waiting to fill in the grave after the people from the funeral home left. When she wasn't, he was pretty sure she'd poisoned her husband with Atenolol and then fled to avoid prosecution. He was more positive when he went back to the Harrington house that same day. He didn't get an answer when he knocked, so he started looking in the windows.

What Harry saw was nothing -- no furniture, no pictures on the walls, no rugs on the floor. He went next door to speak with the same neighbor as before and the neighbor said the day after he hadn't seen Mrs. Harrington's car in their drive, two big U-Haul trucks pulled up in the drive. The truck drivers and two other men unlocked the front door and than began taking things out of the house and putting them into their trucks. At about five, they closed up their trucks, locked the front door, and left.

Harry was sure then that Mrs. Harrington had killed her husband and had been busy erasing anything that could connect her to Knoxville or her husband. He got the VIN and license numbers for the 1990 Toyota owned by Mr. and Mrs. Harrington, and had put out a BOLO on the car. His intent was to arrest her on suspicion of murder.

Two days later, a patrol officer in Bristol looking to buy a car for his daughter stopped by a used car dealership and saw a Toyota that was the same color as the Toyota on the BOLO. When he checked the VIN number, it was the missing Toyota.

The car dealer told him he'd bought the car a couple days earlier from a woman. She had the title and what she wanted for the car was about fifty percent of its retail value, so he bought it. He'd paid her in cash and then driven the car into his lot to park it. When he came back, the woman was gone. He couldn't tell the officer much about her other than she was about average height, not skinny or fat, and had brown hair.

Harry kept trying to find Mrs. Harrington for the next two weeks, but found nothing. He was able to get her bank account information and the statements for her two credit cards. Those only reinforced Harry's opinion. The day of Mr. Harrington's death, their bank account had been closed, about fifteen thousand dollars, and she hadn't used either of her two credit cards since that date. Harry figured she'd closed the bank account and was paying for everything in cash because she didn't want to leave a paper trail of credit card charges.

Harry had one last way to find her, though it was a long shot. He got a court order to search the house and had the Crime Scene techs dust everything for prints and to look for anything that might have DNA. They found a bunch of fingerprints and also found some hair in both the bathroom sink and shower drains.

When they went outside, they found more prints on a trash can, and inside the trash can, an empty prescription bottle for Atenolol with Mr. Harrington's name as the patient. The prescription had been written by a doctor in Knoxville, and had been filled by the local Walmart a week earlier. Harry figured that prescription was his murder weapon.

Harry sent the prints and hair samples to the TBI along with the request that if they found any matches to give him a call. He figured that at worst, at least the prints and DNA would end up in the TBI database and that someday, some other detective would have prints or DNA that matched along with a name. If that happened, he'd have a lead he could pursue.

Harry did get a match for some of the prints. Four sets were from the guys who had taken the furniture from the house. Those prints were on file because all four had been convicted of burglary at one time or another. It was easy for Harry to track them down because all four were still on parole and their parole officers gave him their addresses and places of employment. All four had the same story. They said some a woman had contacted their parole officer and asked if there were any men who'd like a temporary job. When they accepted, the woman had given them the key to the front door and paid them five hundred dollars each in cash to clean out the house and haul everything to the town dump. They tossed the house key in with the rest like she'd told them to.

Another set of prints was matched to Mr. Harrington. He'd been fingerprinted when he enlisted in the US Army so his prints were on file in AIFIS. There had been no other print matches to his prints over the years.

The last set of prints were partials and were small. The TBI said they were probably from a female or juvenile, but they had no match in their files. Harry figured those were Mrs. Harrington's prints.

The TBI was able to get DNA from the hair samples and had identified one female and one male, but had no match to either in their files. The TBI had forwarded both the prints and the DNA sequences to IAFIS and CODIS respectively. The last thing Harry did was list Mrs. Harrington on NCIC as wanted for suspicion of murder along with her driver's license photo.

That pretty much ended Harry's investigation. Without Mrs. Harrington or some other evidence, all he had was a suspicion. About all he could do was wait until IAFIA or CODIS matched a print or DNA to what he already had or he got a hit on his NCIC notice. That hadn't happened by he time Harry retired and turned the case over to me. I thought maybe I could solve the case because I had something Harry didn't have. I had Rochelle.

}{

I'm Detective Richard Owens of the Knoxville PD. I work homicides and part of that work is trying to solve cases that have gone cold over the years. I also have a partner, though Rochelle doesn't work for the Knoxville PD. She's a writer who writes mystery novels about actual cases. We worked on one case together before we figured out it was fun working together. We also found out that it was fun just being together, so for the last couple years I've been living with her.

Rochelle read through the first couple pages of Harry's final report and then frowned.

"There's a lot of information here that says the wife killed her husband, but there's nothing here that proves she did. What it looks like is she planned all this out, gave him an overdose, got him to the hospital and then fell off the face of the earth. There are more questions in this than answers.

"For instance, she sold her car but disappeared while the guy was parking it. How would she do that -- walk? She had to have somebody pick her up or the dealer would have seen her walking down the street. That makes me think she must have had a friend who knew what she was doing and was waiting to pick her up. Didn't Harry check into any friends the couple had?"

"I couldn't find anything that said he did, but in his report of his conversation with the neighbor, the neighbor told him they'd only lived in the house for a couple months. Maybe they didn't have time to make any friends. The neighbor said he never saw anyone coming to the house but them. He didn't know where they came from either."

Rochelle flipped through the pages of Harry's report and then frowned at me.

"The way she had him buried is another odd thing. I can understand that maybe their family lived too far away to make it to a visitation or a funeral, and caskets are expensive so I can understand why she wanted the cheapest one they had. What I don't understand is why would she incriminate herself by not at least showing up when the funeral home buried him? If she was smart enough to kill him with a drug he was already taking, she'd surely know that it would look bad if she didn't show up for his burial."

I nodded.

"That's what pretty much confirmed to Harry that she murdered her husband. If it had been a suicide, she'd have been there. Since she wasn't and then he found out she'd emptied out the house, he figured she'd taken off so she wouldn't have to answer any questions."

Rochelle frowned again.

"That's another thing that's wrong. If for some reason I had to get rid of everything in my house, I could do that except for a few things that I'd never get rid of. They're things that have sentimental value like pictures and my mother's china cabinet and her china. There's no way I'd let those get away from me, let alone pay somebody to haul them off to a dump.

I shrugged.

"Maybe she'd already taken everything she wanted."

"And just how was she suppose to take it away? She sold her car, remember?"

"Well, maybe she took it somewhere before she sold her car, like to wherever she went to live or maybe even a storage building somewhere. Maybe that friend helped her take the things she wanted. The neighbor said she never came back to the house, but if she came back at night, he might not have seen her."

"So, Mrs. Harrington killed her husband and has somehow managed to live off the grid for the last twenty plus years? There's almost no way she could do that. She could probably live on cash if she had a good enough job, but she'd still have to pay taxes and she'd have to have someplace to live. To rent an apartment, she'd have had to use her real name and undergo a credit check and that would have shown up on the credit history Harry got.

"What I think is she had somebody helping her and I'd bet that somebody was a lover. Statistically, infidelity is the biggest reason one spouse kills the other. Money is also a reason, but is a close second to infidelity. Either the spouse who's murdered has been sleeping around with another partner, or the spouse who murders the partner wants out of the marriage so they can move in with the person they're sleeping with.

"We don't have enough information to know which, but I'd bet her lover helped Mrs. Harrington do what she did and then helped her leave the area. They're probably living together somewhere and the lover is paying all the bills. It would have to be somebody she'd known for a while. Harry never found any other people they associated with?"

"No. What he did find out is they moved around a lot. Mr. Harrington was an electrician who mostly did construction work. He got his jobs from the IBEW jobs board. The contractor he was working for didn't know where Mr. Harrington had worked before except he thought it was in Nashville. That's what the neighbor told Harry too. The IBEW doesn't keep track of member's prior jobs, so there was nothing there for Harry to track down either."

"Well, she had to meet her lover somehow. Did she have a job? A lot of affairs start out at work."

I nodded.

"Yes, she was an assistant and secretary for a veterinarian. According to Harry's notes, there was just the vet and her who worked there. He talked to the vet and he said she was a good secretary and a better assistant but that she'd unexpectedly quit. He asked him when, and the date the vet told him was the Friday before she took Mr. Harrington to the hospital. He sent her last paycheck to her home address, but it came back with a stamp saying she wasn't there and had left no forwarding address with the Post Office."

Rochelle scratched her head and frowned.

"If she worked at the vet's office, surely she'd have talked to the vet about something other than her job. Maybe he'll remember something that didn't seem important at the time, like maybe where her family lives or where her husband worked last. I'll drive there tomorrow and see what I can find out."

When I got home the next night, Rochelle was reading Harry's report again. When I asked her if she'd found out anything useful, she shook her head.

"No, not really. The vet's office isn't there anymore. Well, the building still is, but it's a resale shop now. I talked to some people at the grocery store and they told me that after the vet died, his son inherited the business. He wasn't a vet and he couldn't find another vet to buy the practice, so he sold everything. His mother died two years later and they didn't know where he is now.

"I also went by the house the Harrington's were renting and talked to the neighbor, but that was a bust. The husband wasn't home, but his wife told me they'd bought the house in 2010 from the estate of the man who'd lived there. Apparently he wasn't married and had no heirs, so the estate was forfeited to Tennessee and it was the state that was selling the house.

"On the way home, I was thinking about how Mr. Harrington died. How could you force someone to take fifty pills at the same time? The prescription bottle said the dose was one tablet a day. If she'd tried to get him to take more, he'd have refused because his doctor would have told him about the risk of taking more.

There should have been an autopsy report that determined how the drug got into his system, but I couldn't find one in the file. Are you sure this is the whole file?"

"Yes, I'm sure, and I know there was no autopsy done because there was no need. Mr. Harrington's death was an attended death, so no autopsy was required by law. Once the doctor found the cause of death, he issued the death certificate and he was done. Tennessee only requires an autopsy in the event of a violent death or an unattended death, so it would have been up to Harry to request one and he'd have had to get consent of the next of kin. Since he couldn't find Mrs. Harrington, he wouldn't have been able to do that."

Rochelle put down the report.

"We could get one now though, couldn't we? I did some research and found out that since his wife has disappeared, Mr. Harrington's body basically belongs to the State of Tennessee. All you'd have to do is request that Mr. Harrington be exhumed and then taken to the morgue. Your coroner could do an actual autopsy then."

I nodded.

"Yes, but it's not quite that simple. Judges are really reluctant to issue an order for exhumation of a body without some very good reasons. I'm not sure we have enough to convince a judge we need an autopsy."

"Well, maybe we do. What if Mr. Harrington didn't take fifty pills of Atenolol? I found out it's available in a liquid for intravenous injection too. Maybe vets use it for animals too. Even if they don't, Mrs. Harrington could have ordered some for the vet practice. What if Mrs. Harrington took a bottle of Atenolol liquid and a syringe home with her from the vet's office and injected Mr. Harrington with it?"

"That's nice theory, but I don't think he'd just roll up his sleeve and let her stick a needle in him."

Rochelle smiled.

"I thought that too, but since she worked in a vet's office, she'd have had a lot of different medicines available to her. Since vets work with animals, I doubt it was a pill but there is one very common drug that vets use on large animals like horses before they anesthetize them for surgery. That's suxamethonium chloride. I used it in one of my novels. It's used by both doctors and vets to cause temporary paralysis prior to to administering anesthesia for surgery. It has only about a two week shelf life, so what if the vet threw a bottle away and but she took it home instead?