Law&Crime Sidebar - ‘Gareth is Responsible’: Brother of Murdered Sex Therapist Amie Harwick Tells All

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

The brother of Hollywood sex therapist Dr. Amie Harwick spoke to the Law&Crime Network about the murder of his sister and her alleged killer, Gareth Pursehouse. Harwick was allegedly strangled at her California home in 2020 before being thrown off her third-floor balcony. Sidebar host Jesse Weber discusses the disturbing murder case with Christopher Harwick.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:Save 10% on your entire POM Pepper Spray order by using code LAWCRIME10 at https://bit.ly/3rkw6gnLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergWriting & Video Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa Bein & Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieThey Walk Among AmericaDevil In The DormThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. I have so much I need to say. Please give me a chance to just say it so I can accept it. Please. The brother of Dr. Amy Harwick, the therapist brutally murdered in her home allegedly by her ex-boyfriend, sits down with us to tell us more about. his sister and what he knows about her accused killer.

Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber. The new trial of Gareth Purse House started this week out in California. Purse House is accused of murdering Hollywood therapist Dr. Amy Harwick back in 2020. Dr. Amy Harwick was a 38-year-old family relationship and sex therapist originally from Pennsylvania. And she was quite high profile in Los Angeles. She was even engaged to comedian in Price's right host Drew Carrey at one point. in time. And Dr. Harwick appeared in magazines, podcasts, TV news. Here's the Deputy District Attorney

delivering the state's opening statement explaining what they claim happened. He broke into her house on Valentine's Day. He broke in there with a syringe, loaded with a lethal dose of nicotine. And then he waited for her until she got home. He waited there for hours for her. When she arrived, she went up to her third story, bedroom, and got caught by surprise by his

venue. He immediately attacked her, as evidence will show. He strangled her. And then her roommate who was asleep in the bottom level heard the screaming

and yelled out, alone. The evidence is going to show the defendant panic at that moment, took Amy's heartwick debilitated body over to her bedroom balcony, lifted her up over the balcony, and dropped her to her head. You're going to hear that she suffered injuries to her body. Her pelvis was shattered, liver damage. brain damage in the defendant's so it's believed that she was thrown over the third story balcony

the medical examiner would determine her death a homicide meaning that she was killed by somebody else and that she died from manual strangulation and blunt force trauma she was rushed to the hospital she was pronounced dead and investigators analyzed the crime scene and they determined that there was evidence of forced entry and a struggle they found blood on dr harwick's bedroom door beads from her necklace scattered in her bedroom. And then within 24 hours, Gareth Purshouse

is the person who was arrested for her murder. And it turns out that Gareth Purshouse was Dr. Harwick's ex-boyfriend from nine years earlier. And she had filed what we believe to be two protective orders against him. Harwick blocked Purshouse's number. She got new locks on her windows. She had a handyman and stole security cameras at her home. And by the way, after running into purse house and an event shortly before the killing. Harwick emailed herself what appeared to be a journal entry detailing how scared she was after seeing him. She called Persehouse obsessive and scary. So Persehouse's trial is underway, but what we can't forget in all of this is that an innocent life was lost in this case, Dr. Amy Harwick. And to shed

some light on who Amy Harwick was in more of this story, we welcome right now to sidebar her brother, Christopher Harwick. Christopher, thank you so much for coming here on Sidebar. First of all, we haven't met before. I just want to say, and following the case, I am so sorry for your loss,

for your family's loss. And I know particularly now with the trial going on, this must be a difficult time. So I appreciate you coming on to talk to us a little bit more about this. Of course.

I really appreciate you guys having me. I want to start up just to get a little bit better understanding about your sister, who she was and what she was like. So I guess for what the family kind of wants to convey, about my sister. Growing up, you know, Amy was just like any other teenage girl. She's like

hanging out with friends, going to parties and her and I had, I would call it pretty, pretty normal brother and sister relationship. We had her ups and downs, brothers and sisters fight. We would try to hang out as much as we could. We would go to concerts together and, you know, just have a lot of fun that way. In 2001, when she moved out to California, she was very excited to do that and start her life out there. She was married to a guy in a band. He was a great guy, but unfortunately it just didn't work out. And she decided to stay out there and pursue her career and her schooling. And Amy was very career driven. She knew what she wanted to do. She went to school, got her master's degree, and then eventually got her doctorate in psychology and family

and sex therapy. And she wrote a book. She was probably one of the most career-driven people I've ever met. She loved to help people. That was her goal in life was to be a good person and to be there for anybody that reached their hand out for help. Unfortunately, I think she was in her prime. She had a great career going. Her life was moving in the right direction. And, you know, tragically, it was cut short. From what I've heard from people have talked about her and I've seen videos, she seemed like such a happy person. You talk about her being career-driven and she was very successful. And I agree with you. I think she was in her prime.

She had a lot more to offer the world. But she just seemed like such a happy person. And people who were friends with her would say that she seemed so genuinely interested in them. And it was kind of like a magnetic thing. Do I have the right idea about your sister? Absolutely. She, you know, her and I would have conversations. I'd ask her how she was doing.

But then, you know, more often not, she wanted to see what I was doing, what I was up to. Right. I mean, you know, her and I were, you know, separated by 3,000 miles. You know, she was in California. and I was in Pennsylvania. And a number of times, her and I were separated by ocean plus when I was deployed overseas. And she'd always asked me how I was doing in those certain circumstances.

But I was really interested in what she was doing. But she really tried to focus on me, which I always kind of thought that was kind of cool about my sister. Sometimes she was hard to get a hold of. Her life was very busy. She had a lot of things going on with her career. and with friends and doing side jobs and the other cool stuff that she was into, her life was it always seemed it was always full of things to do and and fun things to do.

There was very hardly any time where I really thought that she kind of like sat down and like chilled out for a while. She was just a very, very busy person. First, let me just say thank you for your service as well to the country. If you can, do you remember the last time you spoke to her on the phone? Sure. Last time I spoke to her, it was over, like, Facebook Messenger. And I was just about ready to redeploy out of Afghanistan. I guess I would have been in January of 2020, right at the end of January.

This would have been a couple of days after her interaction with Gareth. She didn't allude to any negative feelings that she was having of being afraid. She didn't tell me at all about any of this stuff. And I kind of wish she would have, you know, opened up to me about that. She really just tried to make it, make it a more positive experience in our conversation. Because I was getting ready to come home. I was gone for a year. Circumstances that I was in, she really didn't want to, like, I guess put that on me.

So in other words, she didn't even tell you that she ran into him? No. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And she wasn't saying anything about being afraid. She was just more focused on you at the time. Correct. And her cat.

She showed me a lot of her cat because, you know, Marquis, the cat was her main squeeze. How did you find out what happened? Like, like, that she was killed. Yeah. So I had just got back in Afghanistan like a couple of days before. And my wife and I went to Charleston, South Carolina for like a little Valentine's Day weekend. And my parents were at our house, at my house. watching our kids. It was probably, I'd say maybe 11 o'clock at night. And my wife's daughter was

texting her saying that the police were, we're at our house. So we're like, well, that's kind of strange. Like, that's never happened before. So I, I try to call my dad. And he finally answered. I said, hey, like, you know, why are the, why are the police at, you know, at the house? And that's when he told me that, you know, Amy's been murdered. And, you know, it was, it was a, it was like kind of one of those things right you've never in a million years thought you would ever hear that so it it caught me obviously caught me by surprise and it called my wife by surprise all of us you know caught all of us by surprise and we i got a phone with him and we packed up all of our stuff and and we immediately drove home got back that i guess it was that sunday morning it's just kind of one of those

things that you never really expect to hear or ever think of hearing that those words come out of your you know anybody's mouth in your family that you're you know one of your family members has killed. It's incredibly difficult to think about. And I'm so sorry for you and your family. And I can only imagine what that was like and hearing that. But Gareth Purshouse's name came into the mix relatively quickly. I mean, they arrested him pretty quickly. When you found out that he was arrested for the murder of your sister, were you shocked? Were you surprised? You knew who he was, right? Yeah. So I met Gareth in, I want to say it was either late 2009 or early 2010. And when a buddy of mine flew out to L.A. to spend about a week with my sister after I had gotten back for another deployment this time. That time was in Iraq. And I met him. I didn't have a lot of interaction with him. The majority of our time out there was pretty much just with my sister and her friends. There was, I honestly can't remember how long I spent with her and Gareth. It could have been more than a day. I heard things from my mom when, you know, her and I would talk about.

things because Amy never I wasn't like Amy's like confidant like she wouldn't like divulge there certain types of things to me and she never really divulged anything negative to me it was really like I said before it was more everything should she tried to keep on the up and up um between us did did you ever get a weird feeling when you were seeing talking to him I I mean his profession like I mean his lifestyle like I wouldn't have really agreed with it but um you know that that's what he was doing as as as work but I mean, we spent such a little time together interacting. I don't think I really got a good feeling of who the person was because it was just so short.

And I wasn't really focused on him. It was more of trying to spend time with my sister. Do you think he did this? Well, and again, this is just me talking. I believe with the whole hardness of my heart that Gareth is responsible for Amy's death. What makes you say that? Because his defense team, let me just tell you what they said in their opening statement, they said that the evidence is going to show that running into her at the event that he ran into her before the killing, put him into depression, that he was in pain. He said the evidence will show that he never intended to kill her. And they said that one of the ways the jury might look at this is that he didn't throw your sister over the balcony, that she ran to the railing to run away from him. and that she was trying to get away and she fell, and they said that he didn't tend to kill her.

What do you make of that? So, Amy was a very intelligent person. She had lived in a house for a long time, and with some of the evidence that I've seen from some prior court hearings, I went to the preliminary hearing, some of the evidence that was given there, some of the testimony that some of the people gave. And I'm trying not,

I don't want to talk a whole lot about the case, because I don't want... Right. Right. You know, so just all those things, like, in my mind, to me personally, point to him being as the person that, like, he intended to do it. He went there. I mean, nobody goes to somebody's house and breaks in for a good reason. Again, you know, I don't want to get into...

Let me ask you a plan to attend the trial at all? So I would like to go out there. The plan is for me to go out there. during the latter part of it, I would like to see, you know, closing arguments and the verdict, whatever the jury decides, you know, it's just with a full-time job and kids and life. It's hard for me to, I really can't just go out there for the whole thing, even though I would like to be out there, to be with my parents and to support them and her friends through this whole process, you know, it just wasn't, you know, it's just not the right

thing to do it with my job and all that stuff. No, I understand. So I do plan on going out there just when, just kind of have to wait and see how the trial progresses, and the assistant DAs will kind of let us know when they think that these milestones are going to happen and when it's a good time for me to come out there. I know you can't talk about the trial,

but just generally speaking, do you feel confident in the state's case? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I heard, you know, like I've met the assistant DAs, and their team a couple of times and they're very passionate about it. I believe that their case is pretty solid and they believe that their case is pretty solid. My parents believe that their case is real solid

so there should be no... We don't have any misgivings about their performance that they're going to make in the case that they're going to make against them. So we're 100% confident in those guys. I know you said that you weren't your sister's confid on. There was evidence coming out that she was fearful of Gareth, that she took out of protective order, at least one,

believe, two. There was in the opening statements by the prosecution, they talked about an email that she wrote to herself, talking about how scared she was of Gareth. During the course of the last several years, did she ever say anything to you that would strike you as she was nervous about him in any way? So, I mean, she might have mentioned it, like, you know, hey, you know, do you remember the guy that you met, you know, we're not together anymore? and he was just she never really gave any specifics to me she really kind of just said you know

we're not together anymore you know it just wasn't a good fit i would get most this most of this information you know from my mom and because she was she would really confide on my mom a lot and i would ask her about these things and you know she would try to change the subject and go to something more positive what has been the last what has it been like for the last three and a half years for you and your family and particularly now that the trial has just started so it's like a chapter in a book that you can't close um you know these past three years you know you always remember amy for who she was and she's always in your mind um you try to you know kind of do the best you can to move on with your life and you know do your your your normal daily things that you got to do

but it's always there and there hasn't been any closure I can't say that it's been very easy because it definitely hasn't and I think it'll be good for this trial to end and we get some type of verdict and then we get some type of closure

so we can maybe close this chapter and then move on to the next it's been tough for my parents they've been pretty strong through all this they've gone out there numerous times and sat through a couple court hearings and all the stuff that they've had to do with closing down parts of her life and interacting with her friends and hearing all these stories and then it's like every time another court hearing happens

or something else happens it brings back all those feelings again and you know it'll just be good for not only my parents and me but the rest of my family and her friends to finally get some type of ending to this chapter and whatever the jury decides. Hopefully it's in our favor. We don't want to think about the other option. But, you know, it's been tough the past three and a half years. It's been a long time. Well, listen, I'll just say I'm wishing you guys all the best.

My heart goes out to you. And I know, again, this is an incredibly difficult time. I really do appreciate you coming on to speak a little bit more about your sister and a little bit more about what we can expect. Christopher Harwick, thank you for taking the time. and, again, sending my best to you and the family. Sure. If I could just add, like, one more thing.

Absolutely. The police department that is in our area, I really want to say that they were extremely professional when the incident happened. A lot of people, I don't think a lot of people know this, but, you know, when it happened and the L.A., you know, the Los Angeles Police Department reached out to the police department that where my parents live, they went to their house and they weren't home because they were at my house watching our kids. So they immediately went to the next of Kim, which was me, and they contacted the police department that isn't in my area. And they came to our house. And this was,

like I said, when my wife's daughter was texting her that the police were there. The officer that came out, I can't remember his name, but he was extremely professional. After when he when he knocked on the door my wife's daughter answered and then my mom was like right behind my uh my wife's daughter and um the uh the officer was like hey you know do you know chris harrick and she goes yeah and he goes i need to you know i need to tell him something there was some small talk back and forth and he said that well i need to let him know that his sister's been murdered at that moment he realized that he was talking to my mom and uh my mom saw in his face um that uh that he kind of realized that like oh man like you know maybe i should have put two and two

together but he stayed with with my parents for a number of hours you know after that trying to you know call the the the los angeles uh police department and the detectives and he i think that he went above and beyond what he what his job was to do it because he stayed with them for so long And that's all I wanted to say was, you know, I appreciate, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, what they did as well. Chris, sir, thank you for sharing that. It's, you know, you think about these officers. That's a position that they never sometimes think about being in or want to be in. And the fact that they, uh, this officer took the time to be there for your family and understand it. I mean, that is just, that's incredible to hear. And I appreciate you sharing that with us. Again, I can't say it enough, but I'm really hoping and wishing for the best for you and your family because this is

an unbelievable tragedy, a terrible loss. And as you said, I hope that throughout the process and when this finally concludes, you and your family have some sense of closure. But Christopher Harwick, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you again. I appreciate you guys having. And that's all we have for you here on Sidebar, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time.

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