Snapped: Women Who Murder - Eric Christensen

Episode Date: November 16, 2025

When a beloved woman goes missing in Everett, Wash., police find that her apartment was the scene of a violent attack.Season 32 Episode 26Originally aired: Oct 22, 2023Watch full episodes of Snapped for FREE on the Oxygen app: https://oxygentv.app.link/WatchSnappedPodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shrouted in the midst of the Pacific Northwest, a beautiful young woman goes missing. She had this abundant energy and was always smiling. Min really loved Sherry, and there was never a point where she wasn't in a relationship. But her apartment reveals a harrowing tale. They find the carpet torn up and the linoleum and the smell of bleach. What they don't find is sharing. There was a lot of evidence in that bedroom that a serious assault took place.

The investigation leads detectives somewhere they weren't expecting. Witches try to live in harmony with the earth, but witchcraft draws people who want to have power over others. He tried to use that as a tool to control her. But they soon discover a terrifying truth. Black magic does exist. He wanted to break off and start his own Kevin. It was his sick, demented, twisted ideology.

To cut up people and discard their parts like garbage. It's not common that people go to that extreme. You broke your own. Her blood is garbage. Oathbreaker, traitor, enemy. And that's what she became. New Year's Day 2010. It's a misty day in the town of Everett, Washington.

And Julie Roberts is waiting for her friend Sherry Harlan to meet her after work. I was going on 10 years clean and sober, and Sherry and I had made plans to go to my meeting so I can get my 10-year chip. I was so happy. She was happy for me. But she didn't show up. She just didn't show up, and that wasn't like Sherry. I called. I must have called 13, 14 times, and left messages. Call me. And there was nothing. There was just no return, and I started getting worried about it.

Julie isn't the only one who's concerned. A co-worker of hers was worried because Sherry had missed several shifts. She didn't show up Saturday, and she didn't show up again on Tuesday. On Tuesday, January 5th, one of Sherry's co-workers called 911. She was really worried about if something was going on with Sherry. Sherry, her dog, and her car are missing. And so the police prepared to go to Sherry's apartment. The deputies that were working, they went to the location

and they were able to get in touch with a maintenance man who had a key to the apartment. And they went into the apartment, which is normal. They do a welfare check. You know, they're looking for her. The moment officers step inside, they know something's wrong. There was an obvious odor of bleach. Someone had made some efforts to clean the interior of the apartment.

But as they went in further, there were portions of both tile from the flooring and carpet that had been cut out. And then in the back bedroom, on all four walls, there was blood spatter. So it was pretty evident that violence had occurred in the bedroom. What they don't find is Sherry and her dog. Sherry Harlan was born on January 21st, 1974, in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Sherry lived with her brother and mother and father outside of Hillsboro. They were there until she was a teenager. and then her parents divorced

and she moved with her mother and stepfather and brother to Washington State. A lot of our friends, they described her as sweet and very kind and caring, a little naive. I met Sherry when we went to Rose Hill Junior High.

Throughout her entire life, she never walked into a room. She, like, bounced into a room. She had this abundant energy and was was always smiling and trying to make other people happy. Sherry finished high school in Washington State, and then she went to the community college for a couple of years, but she wasn't really into academics.

She mostly pursued relationships. Most of them were not great choices, so she had somebody that she was engaged to in Oregon, who had kids that were older than she was. We were 17 at that time, I think. The engagement fell apart, but Sherry kept looking for Mr. Wright. Unfortunately, her bad luck with relationships would continue into her 30s. Min really loved Sherry, and there was never a point where she wasn't in a relationship.

There was always somebody there waiting to catch her if a relationship didn't, work out. I met Sherry about nine and a half months before. We just clipped. She'd just gotten back from Hawaii. She was there thinking things would work out with somebody and it didn't. So she was kind of in a low life spot and she just wanted to get her life back. By 2009, Sherry was struggling to get by, living out of her car and looking for work. Instead, she found two more chances at love. In the spring of 2009, she met Eric Christensen. They were both doing some online dating and going to some dating sites,

and they must have liked what they heard from the other in a conversation or her first meeting because they got together fairly quickly. Sherry is always positive so she came in and like any other relationship she's excited about it and at the time she wasn't working she was just kind of involved in the relationship Sherry had only been dating Eric for a few months when another man came into her life she met a man named Dan Young who was going through a divorce you had a motorcycle and and he and Sherry enjoyed taking off on that and doing some trips, and she was having a really good time. He was a general contractor, and he was working on a project locally,

and that he and Sherry had met on some sort of dating platform. He had money, and he wasn't shy about spending it on Sherry. He was a little bit older than her. He knew that she was seeing Eric, so he was aware of Eric. He bought her a laptop, and eventually, Actually, he helped with the down payment on a new apartment so she could have a new start again. We'd had a lot of talks about him. I hadn't met him yet.

He helped get the furniture for things that she couldn't get right away, and she was so happy. Sherry's new romantic prospects weren't the only changes in her life. That fall, while dating both men, She also landed a job at a department store. Sherry really liked her job at J.C. Penny. She loved the customers. She loved the friends she made, and she was very well liked. With a steady income, Sherry adopted a dog she named Roscoe.

Just a little mutt, just a magey mud. Time is a boxer rocks, but she loved that dog. 2010 was shaping up to be the best year of Sherry's life, which is why her friends and coworkers have grown increasingly concerned when no one has seen or heard from her in four days. After finding evidence of an attack inside Sherry's apartment, officers immediately call for backup. up.

Snohomish County detectives quickly respond to the scene. When we did the walkthrough, there was blood visible on a master bedroom in the bedroom, on a wall by the closet. There was blood on a glove. There was blood on a shirt. There was knife barks in the mattress with tissue at the bottom. There was a lot of evidence in that bedroom that this serious assault took place. There was spatter, you know, on all four. walls up high indicating you know some velocity of the various blows and the working

assumption at that point was that a knife had been used one thing is clear whoever attacked sherry tried to get rid of the evidence one of the things inside the apartment that we found was box of these white trash bags with red ties on them and the There was some blood on the box. You see this kind of evidence, reeking of bleach. We know bleach is used to clean and to cover, sometimes destroyed DNA. But one important clue survived the cleaning. There was a bloody footprint actually found on a t-shirt inside of the apartment.

It was in detail enough that they ever found a shoe that they thought might have made it. They would be able to compare the tread on the shoe to the bloody shoe print. Upon looking at the apartment and what we were finding in there, I didn't have a good feeling about it at all. I felt like she was either assaulted and hurt or that she was a homicide victim. Coming up, investigators dig into Sherry's complicated love life. One of the last text messages was this is what, you know, being with two men at the same time we'll do to you. But the truth is more bizarre than anyone can imagine.

She'd become a warlock. Police in Everett, Washington, are investigating the disappearance of 35-year-old Sherry Harlan. From the evidence in her apartment, it appears she was the victim of a victim of a violent attack. When somebody has taken the time to tear up the flooring, that's very concerning, which means that we need to start doing the victimology on the person who's missing. Who are the people closest to her? Sherry's neighbors tell detectives she was usually quiet and kept to herself.

The only time they saw her was when she was walking her dog. But several days ago, there was a disturbance. One of them reported that the Saturday prior, she had heard arguing. A male voice using expletives shut up, things being thrown around in what she believed was coming from Sherry's apartment. A few minutes later, the witness saw a strange man lurking near Sherry's car. It was parked by the dumpsters, the trunk was ajar, her dog. was tied to the inside on the driver's side,

and she saw a male crouching down in front of the vehicle. This neighbor saw him in the front of the car, dry heaving, and then he sneezed. And I'm thinking, what causes a person to dry heat? I'm thinking, well, we have an apartment where heavy bleach smell, floors are torn up. All these things are kind of adding up, and, you know, my concern was had he killed her and dismembered her, because that can be a very gruesome process.

Investigators prioritize identifying the suspicious mail and finding Sherry's missing car. To find out more, they ask the building manager for Sherry's apartment records. While the police are looking at the crime scene and looking for Sherry, they learned from the manager of the apartment house that Dan Young had helped Sherry with the down payment.

So he's also somebody they need to check in, too. Sherry's friends and co-workers confirm that Dan is one of her boyfriends. She loved him so much. But he was married and he was leaving her and was going to be with Sherry. But she was worried about the husband-wife thing and when he was going to leave his wife. To season detectives, it's an immediate red flag. Sherry seemed convinced Dan loved her, but could he have been having second thoughts

about leaving his wife and looking for a way out? We discovered some text messages on her cell phone that coincided with the same weekend that she disappeared. She had texted Dan Young and she said, hey, I'm not feeling well. They were going back and forth and one of the last text messages that Mr. Young sent her was,

LOL, this is what, you know, being with two men at the same time will do to you. Sherry's friends say Dan was probably referring to her other boyfriend, Eric Christensen. Before Sherry's friends, say Dan, Sherry moved into her new apartment, she was living with Eric 30 miles away. Christensen lived out at a home out in Goldbar, which is a very rural area in East County. It was small, but it was owned by the parents of a friend of Christensen's,

and he gave it to him for nominal rent. It was fairly apparent that Sherry was seeing both Dan Young and Christensen at the same time. at the same time. Both men are a few years older than Sherry, but the similarities end there. Dan acted like Sherry's benefactor, while she and Eric shared a more spiritual connection. According to Sherry's friends, they bonded

over an interest in the pagan religion known as Wicca. Its practitioners sometimes refer to themselves as witches. Eric Christensen had been a fairly steady goer to the Wicca Church. He had introduced Sherry to that. Some of their mutual friends were also involved in Wicca. And this was something that he had some interest in. When I lived in Snohomish, I was going to the Wiccan Church. It was mindset community.

easygoing, friendly, no hostilities. It was just a place to meet up and find other people that were interested in the same beliefs. The Wiccan Church, Eric and Sherry belonged to, is in the neighboring town of Index Washington in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. I am the most reverend, Bill Adonnell Laveau,

at the Aquarian Tabernacle Church. I replaced the arch priest who was in charge of the church at that time. The religion of Wicca is an earth-based religion. We see Mother Nature as a deity of force. We see the different aspects of nature as spiritual. And we believe that all things are in balance. People tie Halloween to Wicca and Witchcraft

because it's our most sacred day. We honor our ancestors. We put an extra plate at the table. So it's evolved over the years. And Halloween and trick-or-treat and all of that kind of stuff is the children's side of it. You dress up like the dead, and you go around and you ask for alms.

That's the lore behind it. While Sherry embraced the religion's tenets of harmony and nonviolence, friends say Eric was more interested in its occult side. She was a very beloved member of the church. She was there all the time. She worked on the gardens and the property. I knew Eric for like a year. It was very strange.

had a lot of weird ideas, being like a lot of people at the church wanted to break off and start his own Kevin. He was trying to recruit people into that. He had these other ideas that aren't not really wicked that he wanted to incorporate into that coven culture. And law enforcement learned from church members, many of those ideas involved rituals to control others, including You know, witches try to live in harmony with the earth, but witchcraft draws people who want to have power over others. Just like in any kind of group, you have to figure out where the predators are and what the red flags are.

There was something odd about him. He was quick to anger. He was always just right on that edge of dangerous type. I didn't like it. He scared me. After learning about the two men, Sherry Harlan was dating at the time of her disappearance, investigators take a closer look at their histories.

Of the two, Eric Christensen's record and reputation draws investigators' suspicions. And police records show that isn't the only unsettling thing about him. Christensen had to register as a sex offender because he had a conviction for a statutory rape out of Oregon some 15, 20 years previous. A few years later, Eric was imprisoned for another offense. An ex-girlfriend had broken up with him,

and he had got his rifle and had attempted to sniper. And it indicated to law enforcement when they arrested him that the only reason that there we were alive because his sights were off on the rifle. There is a certain portion of the population that's not mentally ill, but is driven towards more psychopathic behavior. They don't empathize like the rest of us do.

They can only see it from the perspective of what does that mean for me? And how have I been wronged? Detectives learn Sherry met Eric not long after his release. But she didn't know about his violent past. She seemed happy with Eric at first, but within maybe six weeks, she could see what she was involved with. His whole face would change when he was angry.

They found a place to live, but she was miserable. She wanted nothing more than to get the hell away from him. Sherry got her chance in November 2009. Their relationships started to get strained, and then when he was picked up in November for warrants, while he was in jail, she took that opportunity. that opportunity to leave. She was going on with her life for that month,

and Dan Young helped her get an apartment and helped her buying things to set up the apartment. She had gotten a job. But according to Sherry's friends, she knew Eric wouldn't let her go that easily. There's research that shows people that engage in acts of domestic violence. If they engage in one,

they're much more likely to engage in. multiple. I ran into her in J.C. Pennies, and she tells me that her boyfriend was in jail. I asked her what she's going to do next, and she's like, well, I have to go back to him. I'm like, okay, well, you know, there's places you can go. There's things we can do to help you. You don't have to go back. And she just very nonchantly said, no, you'll kill me if I leave. Eric wasn't aware of Dan until he got out of jail. When he got home, he realized Sherry had left. All of her stuff was gone.

And he started asking friends of hers, where is she? And one of her friends made the mistake of giving him the address of where she had moved to. Sherry's phone records show Eric was the last person to call her before she disappeared. A fact which makes police even more interested in tracking him down. They find him less than 24 hours after Sherry was reported missing. They find him at a nearby medical center where he's been treated for a wound to one hand. And they can tell he's been roughed up a bit. He has some scratches and some bruises and some cuts.

I figured I'm going to just record a statement with him. It's just standing here. And that turned out to be gold. We're here at the medical clinic today because you have some injuries to your hand. Tell me how that happened. I got to jump by three Mexican gangangers because they wanted to rob me. How did you fight three of them off? With my fists.

Detectives believe there's a simpler explanation. When a person is stabbing another person, It's a bloody affair. It is a messy, slippery event, and it's very consistent to see injuries on the stabbing hand. Eric did not present himself as a sophisticated liar. We talk about in our circle, in the police circle, as somebody who's thinking about one layer deep. They have that initial lie, and if you try to go any deeper in that, they stumble. And that's the way Eric was. When they ask about Sherry, Eric admits that.

that he became enraged when he learned she was seeing another man. Yeah, I was mad. I was really mad at her. Why were you mad? Because of her sugar daddy. On December 18, 2009, he went to her apartment to purify their relationship. That involved what Eric refers to as a Wiccan blood oath. Okay. And then what happened?

I asked her, why are you here? She told me that she was there because she wanted to say no to sugar daddy. And I also asked her, who does she want? She says she wanted me, me. And so she put three drops of her own blood in this mixture? Yes. And mix it off. Oh, and it's got burned.

According to Eric, the penalty for breaking such an oath is severe. If we were in the ancient times, you get stone, beaten, bludgeon, cast out, and in some cases, from what I understand, death. Two weeks after their December blood oath, on January 2nd, Eric found out Sherry was lying. He said that he ends up going through her phone, and he saw that she had been texting Daniel's Young, and this infuriated him.

That's when I confronted her. What'd you tell her? I said, you broke your oath. She was, what do you mean? What do you mean? I grabbed the phone. You broke your oath. So what does that mean?

That means that she is no good. Her blood is garbage, the ancient text. ways, she'd become a warlock. What's a warlock? That's what she became. It's a Scottish word. It means oath breaker, traitor, enemy. Eric admits to police that they had a fight.

She fell in, just tripped over her bed. She told me, get out of her apartment. I'm like, fine. Okay, does she seem to be hurt or anything? Mm-hmm. So I left, slammed the door. I started walking. Where do you think she went?

I have no clue. I personally don't care. I hope Carmen gives her what she serves. The more he shared, the more I believed, this man's definitely involved. Investigators officially rule out Sherry's other boyfriend Dan as a suspect. But now, they still need evidence tying Eric to the crime scene. Two days after Sherry was... was reported missing, they take Eric into custody and conduct a search warrant at his home.

When they're going through where Eric lived, they found some blue jeans that had some blood spatter on it. They found what appeared to be a bloody sock, that efforts had been made to burn it. And they found a flat screen TV that matched in all measurables, the flat screen that had been at Sherry's apartment. And in the house is where we recovered the shoe that matched the print on the T-shirt that we found in Sherry's home. Everything points to the fact this was a homicide that took place, but there is no body, and they don't know where she is. We live in a smaller community out there, and, you know, that's definitely the talk of the town. There was no question in my mind. What had happened?

Coming up, detectives make a disturbing discovery. We found a skull on the front seat of the vehicle. And Sherry's friends question her killer's motives. This had nothing to do with a blood oath. That's all he wanted was control. After finding incriminating evidence in Eric Christensen's home in Goldbar, Washington, Snohomish County police arrest him for the murder of his girlfriend, Sherry Harlan. But they still face a problem.

They certainly had suspicions about what had occurred, but nobody have been located yet. Later that night, on January 7, 2010, investigators catch a lucky break. Police were tipped that somebody come across an abandoned vehicle out in the middle of nowhere on a gravel road. It is indeed Sherry's Nissan Centrist.

The car had been burnt out. We're always going to match it to the bin, Even if a vehicle is burnt, we can still figure out what the bin is. We realized it was her car. And in the car, we found a skull on the front seat. And there were also knives found in the vehicle front compartment as well as the vehicle trunk. It was as if, you know, somebody had posed the head and the knife in the front seat. The medical examiner came out and recovered the skull and it later was found to be Sherry's skull.

There was a knife tip that they found embedded in the skull. And we were later able to determine that the knife set had come from Sherry's apartment. The case is now a homicide and no longer a missing person's case. Four days after finding her skull, police get a tip about where to find the rest of Sherry's remains. On January 11th, a man named Ryan comes forward to share some information about his friend Eric with the police. There was something bothering him.

And basically, Ryan couldn't live with himself. He was involved to a certain degree. Ryan is very, very gullible and very easily to be manipulated. Ryan would come and help around the church, and he was always there to help if you needed him. He had indicated to law enforcement that he had been part of the blood oath via telephone. Ryan tells detectives Eric used him as a witness for Sherry's blood oath. Then on January 3rd, Eric called him again. Christensen wanted Ryan to meet him at a park and ride

where he supposedly locked his keys in his vehicle so Ryan goes there and he realizes it's Sherry's vehicle Ryan sees this rolled up carpet and rolled up vinyl and as they were driving in the car Eric said he had Sherry's body in the trunk Christensen indicated that he had in fact killed Sherry and that he needed help in that he needed help in

getting rid of the various portions of her body. And for two days, that's what Ryan did. He had driven to these locations around East County, up off Reader Road, and Eric would tell him, okay, stop here. Eric would throw something, and Ryan could hear it hitting the water or hitting the ground. Or Eric would get a bag from the back of the trunk, and would head into the woods with a shovel. So he knew exactly what was going on.

Ryan agrees to show investigators where Eric dumped the body parts. We drove to all of these locations. That way we could document the exact locations via GPS, where items were and where we needed to bring cadaver dogs so that we could find them. There were some parts that were never found. But her torso was found in one location just laying out in the open. I know we found a thigh and we found arms.

And I believe the medical examiner did find evidence that they were cut with a knife. There's not anything that you could do that would justify you killing somebody. He was trying to say these things. about Wicca that just were not true. We just don't, for the most part, believe in violence, dominating other people, making people do things they don't want to do. This is not what Wiccan practices. This means towards the satanic end of things.

An autopsy confirms police suspicions about the ritualistic attack. What the doctor was able to tell us that she had, tell us that she had several stab wounds to her torso and a stab wound to her head. The stab wounds to her body, assuming that she'd been alive when those had occurred, could have been fatal, but he was not able to determine with certainty that those who, in fact, were the cause of death. This is a really ugly, heinous, heinous crime. Eric has cut off her limbs.

He's also cut out her sexual organs. and really decimated the body. They thought he even tried to cut out her heart, but didn't manage to do it. But it says a lot about this crime and about him and about how the rage that he must have had towards her. You have to be able to overcome a certain psychological barrier to go through the process of dismemberment.

But to do it. to be able to develop a plan and then act on that plan. Creates a significant amount of, call it emotional repression, and being able to do that. Two weeks after Sherry's disappearance, news spreads quickly about Eric's hand in her gruesome death, leaving the residents of Everett desperate for justice. I caught the news in there, Sherry's picture.

I said, oh, my God, he did it. Oh, my God, he killed Sherry. He was already in the Snohomish County Jail. And that's when I went ahead and added the murder charge. The defense in this particular case made the strategic decision to try to get this to trial as quickly as possible. We didn't have all of our forensic results in yet. We still needed to prove all of the elements of the...

crime. After a week-long investigation, 40-year-old Eric Christensen, has been charged with the first-degree murder of Sherry Harlan. But police suspect there is another victim. I know that Sherry really loved her dog, and I did make attempts, you know, to try to locate him, but unfortunately, he was never found. After learning of Eric's actions, the Wiccan Church distances itself from his twisted beliefs. The idea that you would have a blood oath is, it's just not heard of any relationship in Wicca.

Eric Christensen was an evil, demented, manipulative man that wanted to control. That's how he wanted. In May 2010, the story comes under even greater scrutiny when Eric's murder trial begins. What was presented to the jury was, this is a jealous control in man, was losing control. of his woman and that when he realized that she was going to continue doing these things that he did not want her to do, he took action. We believe that he murdered her in her bedroom.

And the dismemberment, I believe, happened in the kitchen, which would follow with why he would rip up the linoleum. There were nine various portions the body was cut into, and I think ultimately, law enforcement located six of them. The prosecution's star witness is Eric's friend, Ryan. We ultimately gave him immunity if he was willing to testify truthfully at trial in regards to what Christensen had told him and how he had hated Christensen and getting rid of the various body parts.

I think Ryan is an incredibly important witness in his case. There is no eyewitness to the actual murder, but you have a witness to someone saying, Eric had me drive her body around and dispose of it. Faced with the evidence, Eric's attorneys try to explain his attack instead of arguing his innocence. The defense in this particular case

was that they admitted that Christensen killed Sherry Harlan, but it wasn't premeditated. The argument was that, that he had come upon the text messages between Sherry and Dan Young and just lost it. Although Eric never speaks in his own defense, the jury still gets a chance to hear from him. My entire man on the street interview that was recorded was played for the jury. If we were in the ancient times, you get stoned, beaten. lunging, cast out, and in some cases, from what I understand, yeah.

When you look at the jurors and the looks on their faces, they are following, they are tracking, and they are coming up with the same responses I had to what Eric was saying. On June 18, 2010, the jury finds Eric guilty of first-degree murder. He's sentenced to 37-5 years in prison. What sticks out the most is that he just laughed about it. He was being let away and he just smirking and it's like he didn't even care. He was allowed to make a statement. And his statement was, I don't understand why this is such a big deal.

It was an accident. He just didn't care. He didn't care what happened. People get life in prison for killing somebody and they didn't even go to the extreme of dismembering the person so I never really understood

why he wasn't sentenced to Moore. There's no justice in 37 and a half years but I don't know that 99 years or the death penalty would be justice either. He had zero remorse and if you aren't sorry for what you've done there's nothing to stop you from doing it again. In the years since Sherry's death, her friends and those who worked to solve her murder are still haunted by it.

Eric always tried to paint the picture that either it was her fault, that their actions were guided by his view of the Wiccan faith. He tried to use that as a tool to control her. What he did was not Wicca. It was demonic, demented, sick. A criminal with criminal mind and criminal pain. And she suffered for it, and so did all of us. When you have homicide cases, it's not common that people go to that extreme to cut up people

and discard their parts like garbage. That's what bothered me most about this case. She was just a special person that always made everybody else around her smile. Even after 13 years, I still love her. She'll always have been my bestest friend. She was just Sherry, a beautiful, beautiful woman that got caught up with a very, very bad man. And she didn't deserve this. Eric Christensen is scheduled to be released from Stafford Creek Correction Center in Washington State in 2047.

He will be 78 years old.