The Cold Case of the Pierced Woman

I'm not sure what cold case we're going to tackle next because I've been busy. It's summer in Tennessee and the heat and humidity seem to bring out the worst in people. I've investigated four homicides so far this summer and it's not even Labor Day yet.

The case I'm thinking about isn't really all that old because it only went back to 1999.

The wife of a Mr. George Harrington drove him to the hospital. When she got him there, Mr. Harrington was unresponsive but was still taking shallow breaths and had a very weak pulse. The doctor and nurses began CPR while they wheeled him into an examination room.

Mr. Harrington was still alive when he reached the examination room, but about five minutes after the doctor began his examination he went into cardiac arrest. They attempted to revive him four times, but with no success.

Harry was assigned to the case after the emergency room doctor was 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 test they'd done as part of the diagnosis of Mr. Harrington's condition that he became suspicious.

The blood sample had yielded 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 a simple case of cardiac arrest was the concentration of Atenolol in his blood. 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 after the doctor told him that to get that much Atenolol in his system, Mr. Harrington would have had to ingest at least fifteen tablets at the same time, and probably more like twenty depending upon when he ingested them.

The doctor also told Harry something that made Harry question the circumstances of Mr. Harrington's death. After Mr. Harrington died, the doctor had gone to the waiting room to tell Mr. Harrington's wife 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 Mr. Harrington had been prescribed the medicine and had decided to take his own life.

After that, Harry was only able to find out three more things about the case.

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The first thing that made Harry suspicious about Mrs. Harrington were the arrangements for Mr. Harrington's burial. All she'd requested and paid for was a burial plot, an inexpensive casket, and the service of digging the grave, putting the casket in the vault, and then covering it back up. Harry thought it odd that she'd paid the five thousand dollar cost in hundred dollar bills instead of with a check. The funeral home told Harry when the burial was going to take place and he went, but Mrs. Harrington never showed up.

The second thing was the day after Mr. Harrington died, Mrs. Harrington sold her car. When the used car dealer drove it to his lot to park it and then came back, Mrs. Harrington was gone.

The last thing Harry found out came from the Harrington's bank. The account had been closed on the same day he died.

By then, Harry was certain Mrs. Harrington had killed her husband and was on the run. That was confirmed when he went back to their house.

What Harry saw was nothing -- no furniture, no pictures on the walls, no rugs on the floor. He went next door to speak the neighbor and the neighbor said the day after Mr. Harrington was taken to the hospital, two big U-Haul trucks pulled up in the drive. The truck drivers and two other men began taking things out of the house and putting them into their trucks. At about five, they closed up their trucks and left.

Harry watched Mr. and Mrs. Harrington's credit records for two weeks after that, but there were no transactions.

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.

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. 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 back in prison after being convicted of more burglaries. All four had the same story. They said some 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 paid them a thousand each to clean out the house and haul everything to the local dump.

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

The last set of prints were small, and the TBI said they were probably from a female or juvenile, but the 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 in their files. The TBI had forwarded both the prints and the DNA sequences to IAFIS and CODIS respectively.

That pretty much ended Harry's investigation. Without Mrs. Harrington, all he had was a suspicion. About all he could do was wait until IAFIS or CODIS matched a print or DNA to what he already had. That hadn't happened by he time Harry turned the case over to me.

I don't know about solving this one. Everything looks like a dead end to me, but Rochelle sometimes surprises me with her unique way of looking at a case. She seems eager to work on this one, so maybe she'll find something Harry overlooked.