48 Hours - Murder on the Red River
Episode Date: July 1, 2026On May 12, 2002, Jennifer Harris disappeared. Six days later her body was found floating in the Red River in Texas. Police learned that she had told her best friend that she was pregnant and the autop...sy revealed her uterus was missing. "48 Hours" correspondent Jim Axelrod reports. This classic "48 Hours" episode last aired on 7/6/2019. Watch all-new episodes of “48 Hours” on Saturdays and stream on demand on Paramount+.
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What riding for justice has done is reached out to people that knew Jennifer Harris.
How often do you saddle up and ride?
Once a month.
We've got a big crowd. Let's keep it safe.
Something has touched the people of Fannock County about this case.
Absolutely. Everybody in this county wants to see this case solved.
To let something like this go on this long is uncalled for her.
Jennifer Harris was well loved.
Harris was well loved here.
That's the Jennifer Harris case, everything that's involved.
This is the whole investigation right here?
This is it.
Sheriff, I hope you don't mind me asking, but that doesn't seem like a whole lot for 15 years.
Well, that's all we got to work with.
Doesn't get any easier.
There's not one day that I don't wake up and think about my sister.
I wish I could only have a handful of the friends
that she had. She was amazing. She was the red-haired girl who was the goofball, adorable,
lovable Lucille ball type. She smothered me with love. On Mother's Day, 2002, no different
than any other day, you'd take the walk. Right. I saw a Jeep, but I didn't think anything about it.
But then when it was here the second day, you're like, why is that Jeep still here? I get a phone call
that her Jeep had been found.
What did she do leaving her Jeep on the side of the road?
There was a fisherman who was fishing on the Red River.
He saw a body in the water.
I remember going to the Red River, to the bridge,
seeing the police officers, a sheriff.
And I remember my dad being right there with him,
and I just, let me see her, let me see her, let me see.
It's got, is it hers?
It can't be hurt.
It has to, why?
Is it her?
Is it her?
Whenever we move or just move right into a boat.
Is it really hurt?
The body is completely naked.
Not a stitch of clothing.
Not a sock.
The way she was disposed of like a piece of trash.
She didn't deserve that.
The medical examiner listed the college.
of death as homicidal violence.
What is that?
Were they strangled?
Were they shot?
Those are the things you need to know.
Jennifer's murder impacted my wife and her family.
You can't even put it in words.
Cemetery, one.
This is unlike anything that I've ever done as a filmmaker.
But I thought he said it.
First time we were with him, finding the killer,
and actually being able to prove.
Where's the physical evidence?
Who the killer is?
Let's continue with the timeline.
This is much more than a passion project.
than a passion project because this is family.
We're going to follow through and we're going to get this done.
You want to know who killed Jennifer Harris?
Absolutely.
I'm a Texas girl.
I believe in justice.
Old school justice.
In the northeast corner of Texas, where the banks of the Red River touch Oklahoma,
you'll find Fanning County and the town of Bonham,
one of the oldest cities in the Lone Star State.
And it's where Mark Johnson, who had just wrapped up 32 years in law enforcement,
decided to ditch retirement and run for sheriff in 2016.
I met Jerry Harris, the father of the young lady, on the campaign trail.
And he made a promise from one father to another
to continue the investigation into the murder of Jerry's oldest daughter,
28-year-old Jennifer Harris, a case unsolved for more than 15 years.
When I came here January 1, you're sure for the family?
I demanded that case to be brought to me.
That was the first thing you did?
Yes, I wanted Jennifer Harris case.
Jennifer's father, a Marine and Vietnam veteran, finally has hope.
I think he's serious about trying to solve this case.
This is my office.
And he's not the only one.
For the last eight years, Darrell Parker has been working with Jerry Harris to solve his daughter's murder.
First, as a lieutenant in the Fannin County Sheriff's Office, and now as a private investigator.
A Marine never meets a stranger if he meets another Marine.
He too was a Marine, and Parker has never charged Jerry a dime.
I still have a lot of that Captain America justice kind of thing going on.
I want Jerry and his family to find justice.
In high school, Jennifer Harris was popular and athletic.
Brilliant red-haired girl, bright brown eyes, played tennis, and was a cheerleader.
Jennifer's younger sister, Alyssa.
She was a dreamer.
She was an idealist, and she knew that there was a bigger world outside of Bonham, Texas.
Bonham is probably your prototypical small town USA.
Gossip is on an epic scale.
When Jennifer Harris goes missing, how?
How does that news play in Bonham?
It was a bombshell because this girl was not too far removed from high school to understand
that she had been murdered.
It disturbed a lot of people.
She was only 28 years old.
She was just beginning to come into her own right when she was murdered.
The day that I came in here and looked at her cases, it opened in those boxes, I wanted to sit
down on the floor and crack.
That's because after more than 15 years, this is all.
all they have to work with.
And what do we have in each of these boxes?
These are, this is all documentation that's in there.
You know, when she first come up missing,
poster they're looking for, newspaper articles, business records,
and this is just some case reports.
You can see that now this was wet.
A lot of stuff got wet.
They had some pods out back.
They stored a lot of evidence.
They leaked.
A lot of stuff got wet.
Contaminated.
Yes, some of them got destroyed.
The file was very light.
The duplicates of the same paperwork over and over and over again.
It was a mess.
Although the original investigators have said they did their best,
Jennifer's laptop computer and clothing,
a shirt, bra, and jeans that might have been hers
were booked into evidence,
but somehow mysteriously disappeared.
It's just been mishandled.
Why would it be mishandled?
I honestly don't know.
The only thing I can gather out of it is lack of experience, lack of training.
It was Mother's Day 2002.
Jennifer was visiting her friend Christy Farr in the early evening.
It gets to be close to 8 o'clock, and Jennifer's like, I got to go?
Correct.
She never told Christy where she was going, but Jennifer Harris never returned home that night.
The next day, Jennifer's Jeep was discovered, parked just out of the car,
the road from a local music spot.
While she was still missing, authorities reached out
to the two men in her life.
I know I'm not guilty of anything.
Her former boyfriend and business partner, James Hamilton,
and her ex-husband, Rob Holman.
Well, how you down?
Pretty good.
Both agreed to speak with investigators without a lawyer present.
They had not been arrested,
but both men were read their Miranda rights.
So you have the right for me, so anything you say,
movie is to get you the quarter ball.
And both denied seeing Jennifer the night she disappeared.
I would love to know that she's okay, she's happy.
According to his police interview, Jennifer's former boyfriend, James Hamilton,
was with a friend, more than an hour away from Bonham, at this McDonald's,
around the time investigators believe Jennifer disappeared.
He even took and passed a lie detector test.
He had an alibi for that evening.
Alibi checked out.
But ex-husband, Rob Holman, seemed concerned about his alibi.
I'm just worried and scared because I know that I don't have anybody to say where I was at that night.
Rob told investigators he had gone out that night to buy beer and visit friends.
But when they weren't home, he drove around alone for five hours on the roads of rural Fannin County.
Sunday when you went around, you saw him.
I didn't see her something.
I saw a jeep, but I didn't see how much as it was.
But when the investigator pushes harder,
it sounds like Rob is admitting he did see her Jeep that night.
Where did you see her Jeep?
I was on 898, didn't stop, so about it didn't blink a lot of it.
Then I turned north, she was in front of him.
She was coming from town.
By now, Jennifer had been missing for 72 hours.
The search would continue for 30 minutes.
three more days.
I was getting about three or four hours
sleep a night. Spent the rest of my time
searching, driving, country roads, looking for
buzzards. That's a hell of a thing for a father to have to do.
That's what I did until they found her.
Things seemed to go in slow motion.
It was very surreal.
Finding Jennifer's body six days after her disappearance
devastated her father, Jerry.
But it did little to clear up the mystery of what had happened to her.
She was so badly decomposed, the medical examiner couldn't determine the cause of death.
Jennifer was in...
But Jennifer's family believes they know the answer.
Her sister Alyssa and her filmmaker husband, Barry Wernick, are on a mission to prove who killed Jennifer and why.
In the time you've been looking into this, have you gone from, I want the facts to shape my opinion, to now having a sense of who killed Jennifer?
Absolutely.
To think about how beautiful she was, and her red hair and just help.
And to think about how she was found.
That's what I just can't let go of until justice is done.
There's a prom dress.
There's that prom dress.
Filmmaker Barry Wernick married Jennifer Harris's sister Alyssa
eight years after Jennifer's murder.
When Alyssa first told me about her sister's murder,
the first thing that came to my mind was,
who did it, do you know who did it?
All these things started going through my mind.
Barry and Alyssa are determined to answer those questions
by making a docu series.
Didn't transcribe that?
Barry, an experienced filmmaker, was a consultant on this broadcast.
I felt like I could use my filmmaking ability to do our own investigating because it didn't seem like anyone was doing it.
He is working hand in hand with Daryl Parker and another private eye, Jim Holloway, reexamining everything.
We are in a place.
This is central to your theory of what happened.
Yes.
The reason why Daryl Parker is so sure this is what?
where Jennifer died is because of a clue that lies on the river's floor, a short way down this dirt road.
She had some blue mud on the front of her, according to fishermen. There were only two spots on the river
within several miles that that mud is on the bottom. And this is one of them. This is that blue
marl mud that was on the body. Not far from the riverbank, there used to be a cottage.
This is where the original, you know, caretaker cottage was.
And it just so happened to burn down the night that Jennifer Harris disappeared.
That is a piece of melted glass from the original fire.
Parker suspects Jennifer left her friend Christy's house and met her killer here.
He believes the cottage was burned to hide the evidence.
No godly earth reason for that shack to burn.
At the same night, Jennifer comes up missing.
Parker hoped to find clues here.
We came here with a crew and excavated the whole thing,
15 feet that way to another 10 feet that way
on either side of this foundation.
I see a well.
We drained the well, and then we dug down in the muck,
probably a foot or two, and we didn't come up with anything.
But years of coming up empty
hasn't deterred Darrell Parker or Barry and Alyssa Wernick,
and it hasn't shaken their conviction
of who killed Jennifer.
When I think about Jennifer, I think about Jennifer and Rob.
Rob and Jennifer were together for as long as anyone can remember.
She was a sixth grader when she began dating Rob, a fifth grader.
By high school, the teenagers were practically inseparable, says Jennifer's cousin, Susan Bowen.
He was just part of our family from the time we were growing up.
Jennifer was just in love with him.
She just adored everything about him.
Jennifer had big dreams, bigger than could take flight in small town Bonham.
Jennifer had potential to explore greater horizons than just Stanton County, Texas.
She moved three hours away to go to college.
A few years later, Rob followed her there, and the couple married in 1996.
It was gorgeous.
It was meticulously planned at a very very...
beautiful mansion out in the country.
Did it us do far?
One year after the wedding, Jennifer's mother died of cancer.
You could tell she had learned a lot in the few years that we lost our mother.
She became an adult that was very open-minded.
In 1999, the couple bought a house in suburban Dallas.
but there was friction brewing.
I think that my sister was growing and evolving and moving forward in her life, and Rob was stuck,
and he just wasn't going to change.
According to Jennifer's family, Rob, who was working in landscaping,
preferred the slower pace of rural Bonham while she enjoyed living near a big city.
Jennifer embraced a holistic lifestyle and enrolled in massage therapy school.
She transformed in front of my eyes.
She said that she had met someone who was like-minded
and who wanted to start a business that was a massage and wellness center.
That someone was James Hamilton, someone she'd met in that massage therapy school.
He was different.
In one way?
Well, he was new age and...
Touchy feeling?
A little bit.
Their relationship.
was complicated. James was living with the mother of his child and had another on the way.
Jennifer was still married to Rob. I told her that it was not a good idea.
What did she say? She didn't tell me a lot after that. She knew where I stood.
I went up there to see what was going on in their lives. When Jennifer's father got there,
he was shocked to see holes in the wall. While no one knows for sure how they got,
there, Jerry seemed certain Rob was responsible.
He took his fist and knocked five holes in the living room wall
about as big as a softball.
Jerry remembers the holes in the wall.
Alyssa remembers something worse.
My sister called me one night and was shaking in her voice.
She says Jennifer told her Rob came home drunk and forced himself on her.
Jennifer never reported the alleged attack, but Rob would later tell police after her disappearance
that Jennifer was the violent one in the relationship.
She not them would have married.
She'll leave her way.
Sometimes they'll grab her, wrap her up, keep hitting.
Rob moved back to Bonham, and Jennifer's new love interest, James Hamilton, moved in with her.
They became partners in a massage therapy business in suburban debt.
Dallas. But Jennifer's infatuation with James quickly faded. Well, James wanted to marry her,
and she refused to marry him. And he was very upset about that. The private investigators say
Jennifer's relationship with Hamilton was Rocky. Real fiery, just fussing and fighting at each other
all the time. By the spring of 2002, your sister is leading one complicated life emotionally.
Jennifer had divorced Rob and her relationship with James was on the skits.
To add to the chaos, the massage business had failed, and Jennifer was forced to file for bankruptcy.
I think that everything was catching up to her, and she'd ever really grieved my mom's death, and I think she was exhausted.
She said, I'm not happy. I don't care about the business anymore.
With no job or income, Jennifer confided in cousin Susan.
that she'd been back in touch with her former husband, Rob Holman,
who now had a new girlfriend.
And she said, I still love him.
And she said, I want him back.
And she said, I even told him that.
In fact, Rob later admitted to police that even though he had a girlfriend,
he and Jennifer were still having sex.
Four or five times it's pretty.
Yeah.
So Jennifer was living a little bit of a split life.
To a certain extent,
but James didn't know it.
He knew nothing about it all.
Then one day, Susan saw Jennifer outside her apartment with a moving truck.
I said, what are you doing?
And she said, I'm moving to Bonham.
I thought, you're only going to Bonham because Rob's in Bonham.
Okay, and with that, I turned around and left, and that was the last time I ever saw her.
About six weeks later, Jennifer disappeared.
On the very day she went missing, she called Rob's.
Rob said she asked to see him, but he refused.
He had plans and was real rain.
She got real upset.
It was Mother's Day, I would come over.
Rob agreed to take a polygraph to back up his story,
but for some reason it was never administered.
Sheriff's investigators allowed him to go home.
They had a lot more digging to do,
and it centered around a secret Jennifer had shared
with her best friend Jill Wagner,
just weeks before she died.
You know, we started talking, and she's kind of,
you're not going to believe, you know, the mess I'm in,
and she told me how, you know, that, you know,
that you're pretty much a guess, I was like you're pregnant.
If Jennifer was pregnant, who was the father?
Was it Rob Holman or someone else?
That question became even more important
after the medical examiner's autopsy
revealed a stunning piece of information.
Her uterus was gone.
When they examined Jennifer Harris' body, investigators were shocked.
There was a wound that affected some of the internal organs.
Her uterus was missing.
Her death was classified as a, quote, violent homicide.
Her uterus had somehow been removed.
The question was, what damaged her?
What would have the motive been?
That she was possibly pregnant, and that the person who killed her was trying to destroy
that evidence.
And Bonham, where gossip is often taken for gospel, people couldn't stop talking.
The public grab a hold of that information, and they started concocting their own theories as to who did it and why.
But according to the case file, there was no scientific evidence to prove Jennifer was actually pregnant at the time of her death.
Still, Jennifer's best friend Jill Wagner told investigators she had talked to Jennifer about being pregnant.
And that's not all she said.
all she said. You know, she told me that it was Robb's and I was kind of shot.
Rob Holman, Jennifer's ex-husband. He had revealed to detectives in his police interview that he'd
met Jennifer a month before she disappeared near a drive-in movie theater.
She told me that she was pregnant. I definitely think that she brought it up with Rob, and in my mind,
And that's what led to her death.
Darrell Parker had long been familiar with the story of Jennifer being pregnant.
Eight years after her murder, Parker, then a lieutenant for the sheriff's department,
dropped by Rob Holman's house.
It was Sunday.
Mother's Day.
A calculated move by Parker.
So it was the anniversary of the crime.
I had picked out a number of photographs of her and Rob.
One of those being Jennifer swimming in a muddy body of water.
And when I gave him the stack of photographs, the very first one he picked out was that one with the muddy water.
He stood there for about five or six seconds, staring at that photograph.
But that's the one that caught his attention.
Like that.
You know, I said, well, if you want to talk, call me.
And I gave him my card, and I left.
A few hours later, to Parker Surprise, Holman called and wanted to talk.
But Parker had wanted to record the interview.
So he suggested they meet at the sheriff's office the next day.
That's where I screwed up.
I should have gone right then and there.
I think he was ready to talk and say something,
and I should have just done it.
This really has you still.
Why so emotional, Daryl?
You're really blaming yourself here?
Well, the previous investigation had failed in so many ways,
but he was responding to me.
He was responding to the pressure I was putting on.
and I let it slip away.
When Holman arrived for the interview with Parker,
he had a lawyer.
Did you have anything to do with the death of Jennifer Harris?
No.
Jennifer's pregnancy.
Did you believe...
Did you believe she was pregnant?
No.
I didn't think she was.
Did you think that she believed she was pregnant?
No.
Remember, there was no evidence Jennifer was pregnant.
And in fact, forensic experts in Dallas would later conclude Jennifer's missing uterus wasn't even cut out by the killer.
Instead, her uterus and other body parts were destroyed by turtles and fish in the river.
But the rumors persisted, and they had plenty of company in Bonham.
A year after Jennifer's murder, this man found himself in the center of the storm.
They were saying that I had been arrested for this murder.
I mean, you hear this, and what's your reaction?
What are you talking about?
Where did this come from?
That's crazy.
Crazy, because Miles Porter was also the district attorney at the time, overseeing the case.
For the record, did you know Jennifer Harris?
No.
Had you ever met Jennifer Harris?
No.
Did you kill Jennifer Harris?
Absolutely not.
Porter says locals cooked up the story.
because they had a grudge against him over an unrelated case he tried.
Did this cost you your job?
Yeah, no doubt.
Miles Porter blames losing his reelection on the Jennifer Harris gossip.
Now in private practice, Porter still lives with the fallout from the unfounded allegations.
I've had on a number of occasions, random people throughout the county say,
I can't be fair in this case because you're with the lawyer and I think you killed Jennifer
Harris. Crazy. Fourteen, 15 years later? Absolutely. Still happens. In the court of public opinion,
he was definitely a suspect. Meanwhile, there's no shred of evidence that he was connected at all.
None. Daryl Parker thinks he knows who's responsible. Not Miles Porter, not James Hamilton,
not a random stranger. In my view, the evidence points directly at Rob Hulman.
Filmmaker Barry Wernick agrees.
We were going to let the facts take us where the facts took us,
and where it brought us was to one person that it had to be.
But they haven't been able to physically connect Rob Holman to Jennifer Harris
the night of her disappearance.
They're both hoping this woman can.
We need that eyewitness.
And in your view, Rhonda Fitzwater is that eyewitness?
Yes.
On this rural road in Fanning County, Texas, Rhonda Fitzwater could hold the key to Darrell Parker and Barry Wernick's theory that Rob Holman met up with Jennifer Harris that night.
So what do you make of this idea that somehow you saw Jennifer Harris and Rob Holman?
I've not ever heard that until you told me that.
Rhonda has always insisted that all she saw that night was Jennifer's parked Jeep.
Did you see anybody following the Jeep?
No.
It was already parked.
Did you see Jennifer Harris?
No, not at all.
But for years, Parker and Wernick have believed
there is more to Rhonda Fitzwater's story.
Only she says they are sorely mistaken.
After 15 years of investigation by people closely connected to Bonham,
maybe the best thing anyone can hope for is a fresh set of eyes.
I'm flying out to Dallas, Texas.
My job is really to look at the facts of the case.
Study the case.
Could the questions about a murder in Bonham
be answered by someone 1,700 miles away in Boston?
Meet Joe Mora, a private investigator and CBS News consultant.
Jennifer's been dead 15 years by the time you're looking at the file.
Absolutely, yeah.
What'd you make of that collection of papers?
I thought the file was very weak,
meaning that the investigation that went into it was extremely weak.
48 hours brought more to Texas
to take a closer look at the Jennifer Harris case.
You've got to speak to people, and that's what I've done.
So you got a little time for me?
I do. Come on back.
His first stop, Fanon County Sheriff, Mark Johnson.
I can see your frustration where you're in the job for one year.
You've got the public, and sure, the family still wants to know what happened to their daughter.
There's no physical evidence.
problem. In fact, today the sheriff won't call either Rob Holman or James Hamilton suspects,
even though detectives did early in the investigation in these documents. How come you can't
call them suspects? You have things that lead up to them that draw your interest to them,
but make them a person of interest, but you don't have that connection to make them a suspect
where you can tie some physical evidence into them. Filmmaker Barry Wernick took Mora to the
location of the cottage, privatized Parker at Holloway, had come to believe was burned to hide the
evidence of Jennifer's murder.
This is the shed that burned down that night.
The stuffed gem with a burning shed.
There's all kinds of theories about that.
Now, you just murdered somebody, but about 200 yards away from where you're disposed
in the body in the river, let's light up this shed and fire, attract people.
Makes no sense to you.
Absolutely not.
It certainly can't tie to this case, but people are trying to make it to tie in.
Wernick also brought him to the bank of the Red River
where he believes his sister-in-law's body was dumped.
There's nothing on the records of this case or any eyewitnesses
they'll tell you that this is where her body was disposed.
Right.
So we're just here basically guessing.
Mora sat down with the private eyes
who had been working the case for nearly a decade.
To me, I think it boils down to
who had the most to lose.
by killing her or not killing her.
But 18 years of child support?
Maybe. Maybe not.
She told me that she was pregnant.
And it's mine.
Well, I don't think that we need to speculate
about Rob Holman's motive because he made it clear
that she was applying pressure to him.
And there could be no more intense pressure
than I'm about to have a baby and you're the father.
That's right.
You have to consider it.
However, he disbelieves her.
And he admits that in the interviews.
Yeah, she said it, but I don't believe it.
I don't think she is pregnant.
Did you believe she was pregnant?
No.
I didn't think she was.
For his part, Morrow was surprised.
Authority seemed to quickly disregard James Hamilton,
the ex-boyfriend who wanted to marry Jennifer
before she left him when their business failed.
She covered all the finances for the business.
She's the one to put her name on the loans.
Jennifer's father, Jerry, made notes
that two months after Jennifer's death,
Hamilton called him, asking about her life insurance policy.
And in my experience, money, insurances, all that stuff is a big deal.
Money creates a lot of motive for a lot of people.
What's more, he believes investigators bought Hamilton's alibi,
that he was with a friend at that McDonald's more than 50 miles away without thoroughly vetting it.
And I'm not so thrilled about the checking they did on that alibi.
The one thing is you go check with the alibis,
and the next thing you look at, are these alibis lying to me?
So you've got to go check that out.
That was never done.
Why?
To Joe Mora, the investigation was flawed from the outset,
and had authorities approached it differently.
They may have gotten more from their interviews.
Here's what bothers me about this situation.
It's a missing person.
They're calling people and talking to people about a missing person,
and the first thing they do is the radio Miranda warnings.
Right.
You have the ride of the Marines
Now, that is
unheard of.
You're saying that, sure,
Rob said I don't have an alibi
and that might be incriminating.
That was after he already signed
the Miranda warning.
So he's already nervous
and he's already saying,
oh, I'm being charged.
God, I don't have an alibi.
Of course he was nervous.
Most people would be.
But at the end of the day,
the men who've been working this case
for years
see it very differently
than the man with the fresh set of eyes.
Circumstantially,
there is a lot of evidence in the case.
It is all circumstantial.
But Darrell, I think me and you are a little confused
in reference to circumstantial.
I'm saying to you, and I submit to you,
that there's very little circumstantial evidence.
Okay.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
Well, because I'm asking you to give me the facts
on what your circumstantial evidence is.
Sure.
And it's based on theory.
Theory ain't going to cut it.
Like Darrell Parker's theory
about Rhonda Fitzwater,
knowing more.
Everybody's put all the weight on this woman, and she has nothing to offer to the case.
Only that, yeah, that Jeep was there.
Well, we know the Jeep was there.
But what Joe Mora does find interesting in the case file is one of the least examined parts of the story.
One year after Jennifer's murder, this woman, Deborah Lambert, who had seen a news report about the unsolved case, told detective she saw something when she was driving.
driving across the Red River Bridge on Mother's Day.
There was three guys out there and a girl.
Okay.
Two guys had the girl by her elbows,
and it was like she was trying to get away from him,
and they were restraining her.
The girl she says she saw had reddish-brown hair.
And I made eye contact with her,
and she was scared, terrified look on her face.
My mom's seen her too, and she said,
That girl's because you get right, thank you.
But Lambert never called police back then.
She said she was too afraid to get involved.
What's more?
Her story didn't fit with the investigator's timeline.
She put Jennifer near the bridge at 5 o'clock p.m.
But detectives believed Jennifer left her friend Christy's house around 8 p.m.
Deborah Lambert's saying what she saw, she saw at 5 o'clock,
that's not a deal breaker for you.
Absolutely not. In the real world, people are not looking at their watches and clocks all the time.
She may be wrong on her time and not wrong on what she witnessed.
Could Deborah Lambert hold the answer to who killed Jennifer Harris?
A year and a half after Jennifer's murder, the Texas Rangers launched their own investigation into the case.
They re-interviewed Deborah Lambert.
In the story, it was the same. She was very detailed.
Redhead, three guys, two were wearing jeans, one was running shorts.
Lambert was asked to look at a photo lineup to see if she recognized any of the men the woman was with.
She did. She was very clear that one of the men she saw was Rob Holman.
Maybe Mrs. Lambert is believable. Now the situation is, I worry about how was that lineup done?
How many photographs are they show? In other words, do they have a,
a good old boy, Texan boy there with his baseball cap on,
and then they had three Mexican photos next to him.
Okay?
Those are the things I worry about.
The way that the lineup was conducted, we don't know anything about.
No, and that's crucial.
But Mora can't be confident because there are no details in the case file about how the lineup was done.
Still, Moore considers Deborah Lambert a missed opportunity to potentially side.
solve Jennifer's murder.
There's an open lead there that I feel wasn't closed.
Therefore, until that lead is closed, it's problematic to say,
I'm going to disregard what this woman saw,
and I'm still going to focus on Rob and James.
Rob Holman, on the advice of his attorney back then,
declined to speak with the Texas Rangers.
After working the case for a year,
they suspended their investigation.
We wanted to know why,
but they wouldn't comment on an un-enacted.
on an unsolved case.
The conclusion to their report,
no physical evidence, specific cause of death,
or credible witnesses link any particular person
as a suspect.
No one can actually follow up with Deborah Lambert.
She and her mother have both passed away.
But Alyssa and Barry Wernick now cling to Lambert's story.
In my mind, I always just believe that she got in the truck
with Rob.
And it was just the two of them.
This changes everything.
There are other people that know.
There are other people that could possibly speak up.
Now, knowing that there were two other people involved,
oh yeah, there's renewed hope.
The problem here, I suppose, is that Deborah Lambert's dead?
She's dead, but her interview isn't.
She's alive.
You can see what she said.
Neither James Hamilton nor Rob Holman
have ever been arrested or charged with any crime related
to Jennifer's murder.
During our reporting of this case,
we made several attempts to contact both men.
James, if this is your number,
I'm calling to follow up on a letter I sent you recently.
We got no response.
We sent you a letter a couple of weeks ago.
So on one of our trips to Texas,
we went to Rob Holman's home.
How are you?
Mr. Holman?
Jim Axorrod with CBS News.
Can that off?
Will you talk to me if I turn that camera off?
Yeah, I'll talk me to turn it off.
Holman told us off camera he never saw Jennifer that night, and he's been advised by his attorney not to talk to anyone.
His attorney provided this statement to 48 hours.
Robert Holman has neither been arrested nor charged with any criminal conduct as it relates to this investigation.
This notwithstanding, Mr. Holman has, from the inception of the investigation, been treated by law enforcement as a suspect.
Mr. Holman has maintained his innocence from the very beginning,
and his position has not wavered.
With no resolution in sight, filmmaker Barry Wernick has a new plan.
Barry wants to raise $50,000 under the theory that reward money could shake someone loose.
No shot.
You can't put money out there in thinking that that's going to create evidence.
for you. Joe Mora said as much to the sheriff.
This isn't a cold case. This is a frozen case. It's done. It's over.
If you have a prosecutor whose worth is weight, he would never bring this case to trial.
He has absolutely nothing on this case.
But Sheriff Mark Johnson is not giving up.
I want to solve the case. I want it solved and I want it done right.
Neither is private eye, Darrell Parker.
When Mr. Harris came to the sheriff's office and he got me involved, I told him that I would get results.
And I can't put it down.
Until I'm sure that either the person is held accountable or I can't do anything more, I have to carry it.
And if it takes another 15 years?
If it takes another 15 years.
The sadness is we all have kids, we all have family members, and I have a daughter.
It's devastating to not know.
I don't know how she was killed. I wish I did. I want closure.
I'm going to do everything I can to bring justice for Jennifer.
For my dad, he needs to see some justice done.
To have walked in my shoes for the last 15 and a half years hadn't been easy.
We miss her every day. We miss Jennifer not being here.
I still have high hopes that justice will prevail.
If you have any information about the Jennifer Harris case, contact the Fannin County Sheriff's Office at 903-583-2143.
