The Binge Cases: U R NEXT - What She Buried | 7. A Fly in the Soup

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

The full picture of Kwaneta starts to come into focus, despite her efforts to distance herself from the podcast. - For more of Justine’s work, read Unreasonable Women, which follows three women who have been punished for defending themselves. The result of seven years of reporting inside U.S. prisons, it's a gripping, urgent look at how survivors are criminalized, called "required reading for anyone who cares about women and justice," by Bookpage, "remarkable... riveting," by Kirkus, and "true crime at its finest," by Booklist. Available now on Amazon or Bookshop.org.  - Want more true crime? Binge over 60 ad-free series now by subscribing to ⁠The Binge+⁠. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to ⁠GetTheBinge.com⁠. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at ⁠Patreon.com/TheBinge⁠. What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Listen to every episode of What She Buried, ad-free right now when you subscribe to The Binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else, get exclusive bonus episodes,

and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to the Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap subscribe, or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The binge. Feed your true crime obsession. The binge. How'd you're ready to get here, gas? Oh, God. There's an old adage. A journalist has never met a guilty prisoner. It refers to the fact that most prisoners go to great lengths to convince reporters of their wrongful

incarceration. But it also refers to the fact that most journalists are trying to make an argument about our crooked criminal legal system. And the only way we can think to do it is by talking about entirely innocent people. But why do you need to tell the stories of the innocent to show that the system is corrupt? What does someone like Quenetta deserve? What do the women around her deserve? I would argue, nothing like what I heard on this last call with Quinella. Quenetta. Nothing like what the state of Texas does in the dark corners of its prisons or behind

the scenes in its courtrooms. Quenetta's personal failings don't negate the larger truths at play here. Truths that expose our system for being murky, cruel, punitive, and full of people who have had so much bad done to them, and who, for the most part, then also did bad. Quenetta was being held in a place where the windows were nailed shut, where there was no air conditioning, where temperatures hit 127 degrees and people died of the heat. Everything smelled like raw sewage. People were breaking down. One woman spent all day singing, another screaming, another cutting herself.

During this particular call, a woman was being extracted from a nearby cell, with the help of some sort of spray. Oh, they're going to do her dirty. They're out. You all have masks on at her cell door. Sometimes they'll talk to the girl into coming to the door while somebody else goes around to the window and the windows up and they'll double gas her. Wait, let me...

They'll gas her from the outside and they'll gas her from the inside. Can I hear her? Is that her screaming? That's her. Quenetta didn't know who the woman was. She called out to a friend down the wing to ask what was going on. You could hear the frenetic energy. like the concrete walls were vibrating.

I thought of Quenetta's first letter to me. Everyone called women in prison monsters, but she wrote, I've yet to encounter monsters, although I've met plenty of women with mental illness, untreated and undiagnosed. The woman who was screaming, she'd apparently been in solitary for a short stint.

Now the guards were telling her it was time to leave. But the woman wouldn't budge. They're taking off the helmets now. What does that mean? That means that they're not going to gas her. She's down here temporarily, probably as a result of a fight or bad hair cut. I don't know. She's for population.

And she was yelling how she's scared. She don't want to leave. So they brought all them in here to try to force her, like a cell extraction. Oh, she's young. That's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve people going out. Now, they don't have no stout for us to take showers, but they get stout for all this. So they're just taking her back to general population? Yes, and she, her face red, like she's been crying.

She's scared. She's twisting her body around, trying to resist. But she's outnumbered. A dozen guards with gear versus one girl. The guards hoist her up and march her away. Of course, from her cell, Quenetta could only peer down the hallway, just a bit.

Because of her failing eyesight, she couldn't see anything too clearly. And in a very different way, neither could I. From Sony music entertainment and campside media, this is what she buried. I'm Justine Vanderlune. Episode 7.

A fly in the soup. Quenetta was in the opposite position of that young woman who was carried away by the guards. At the time of our last phone call in February 2024, she was desperate to get out of solitary, back to general population. The reason she couldn't, I'd learn, was due to yet another maneuver that showed the lengths to which Quenetta was prepared to go to get free, and the lengths to which Texas would go to punish her. It was 2015. Quenetta was, was employed at the Braille facility. It's an elite gig.

Prisoners transcribe and embossed textbooks. Which means that, unlike almost everyone else in prison, the Braille facility workers have access to computers and printing materials. During the time that Quenetto was working at the Braille facility, two documents arrived at the headquarters of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the TDCJ. They were signed orders from a judge, a judge who had recently taken over the courtroom in Dallas,

where Quenetta's murder case had been tried back in 2009. These documents stated that the prison sentence of Quenetta Yatrice Harris had been reduced, from 50 years to eight years, which is exactly how long Quenetta had, at the time, been incarcerated. In other words, the document stated that Quenetta had served her time and should be released immediately. An administrative assistant at TDCJ flagged the document and called the judge's courtroom in Dallas for confirmation.

The clerk who answered the phone said the judge had never issued the order. Sounded like a forgery. TDCJ promptly put Quenetta in solitary. The former assistant district attorney Josh Healy, who had prosecuted Quenetta, this was all just further evidence of her depravity. She would have been out in society, and she's the type that would have either gone into hiding or done something bad again. It's kind of creative. I've got to, wow, that's pretty good. Forged judge's orders are in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

That's Richard Franklin, one of Quenetta's defense attorneys. If you try to escape a prison, you go to a wall or you hurt somebody or you kidnap somebody, that's one thing. But this is kind of Mickey Mouse to me. If that's why she's in AgSeg and that's the only reason, I don't like it at all. I think that's bad on their part. I've read the 232-page offense report produced by TDCJ's Office of the Inspector General. It raises some questions. Like, if Quenetta forged the document, how did she get it out of the prison so that it could be sent to TDCJ headquarters?

Who had she convinced to mail it off? How had she even communicated her plans to that person? As far as I could see, investigators never were able to get any definitive answers. Quenada maintained her innocence, and she had a theory for how a judge's order drastically reducing her sentence, ended up getting written, signed, and mailed to the proper authorities. The theory went like this. Another woman who worked at the Braille Workshop, she did it. This woman was a member of the Aryan sisterhood, and this Aryan sister had tried to free

Quenetta as a test case. If it had worked, if Quenada had gotten out, the Aryan sister would have forged other people, presumably for her white nationalist friends. Quenetta did eventually plead guilty to the forgery offense. She maintained to me that she only did so because she hoped it would get her out of solitary. There it was again, a pattern. Quenetta got desperate, so Quenetta came up with a scheme,

which she then denied. At the same time, TDCJ was not treating Quenetta properly. Quenna had been placed in solitary for an offense that TDCJ could never quite prove, and a nonviolent one at that. The United Nations has defined more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement as torture.

Quenetta was left in solitary confinement for more than 3,000 consecutive days. So, Quenetta had bad done to her. She did bad, she had more bad done to her, and on it went. A vicious circle. For as long as I'd been working on this project,

I've been trying to come to terms with what it all meant. Unlock all episodes of What She Buried, ad-free right now, by subscribing to the Binge Podcast Channel. And it doesn't stop at what she buried. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand-new series on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. And between drops, you've got ad-free access to crime scene,

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Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. while others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Quenetta told me that the only way prisoners in solitary can experience touch is in the exercise cages. There are a couple pens next to each other, and sometimes you get an hour to move around in them, alone.

If you climb about 20 feet up, there, at the top, there's a little gap in the fencing. If you balance precariously, and someone else in the next cage does the exact same thing, then you can press your fingertips to another person's. But, Quenna added, that's for the younger prisoners. She wasn't climbing anywhere. So, no physical touch. But she was also separated from information.

She had no internet, no way to get reliable. Daily News. Her radio signal was shaky. She could only read books that people sent in, and magazines approved by the state. I knew that when Quenetta was told something inside prison, she wasn't really able to verify it. She couldn't call out without being monitored

or talk without being overheard. She had to go with her instincts. When Quenetta sent me that email telling me she was withdrawing cooperation, I wasn't sure what to think. Had someone scared her? Was she having regrets about the things she'd said? And then concocting yet another elaborate ploy rather than just, say, communicating her trepidation to me?

While I was trying to get my bearings, I started reaching out to women who had been incarcerated with Quenetta. I wanted an inside perspective on what Quenna was like in prison and how TDCJ treated her. Joy Brenby lives in his case. Houston now. But she spent a decade in prison in Gatesville, much of it in solitary confinement

alongside Quenetta. On a scale of one to ten, Joy told me, she knows Quenetta at a 10. Do you think to them, her being knowledgeable is more dangerous than somebody who killed the officer? Of course. Dangerous because Quenetta has

knowledge about how the levers of power work at TDCJ. And that's a threat, because you know how many inmates are there that are getting messed of and don't know who to go tell or the proper chain to come in or just think that they can't go to nobody outside or what's on the unit, she knows. The majority of people in prison, some estimates say around 75%, don't even have a high school diploma.

More than half of the women in Texas prisons have mental illness. It's not easy for them to advocate for themselves, and a disempowered population benefits TDCJ. Then, someone like Quenetta comes along. She helps people prepare legal documents. She offers to read over their paperwork. So inside the prison, even from solitary, Klonetta became kind of indispensable.

We called her Detroit, Ms. Detroit. Is she kind? She's like a mother. She's loving. She's a mentor. Everybody likes her. Joy told me that she had a business, body butter and hair grease.

And Quenetta had made it all possible. Had hooked her up with an accountant and had got her all set up so that when Joy walked free, she had a way to make money. Quenetta didn't benefit from this at all. She just did it. For real? Yes, I own the tax company here. And she helped you set that up?

Yes, with her friend. Her friend helped he set it up. Joy wasn't the only woman with a story like this. Others told me how Miss Detroit comforted them when they were in crisis, provided clothing or sanitary pads or food. She tied the items onto floss and fished them out between the bars, down the halls. Quenetta couldn't have expected anything from these women. She knew they had nothing to give her.

Nobody was watching. Quenetta never mentioned any of this to me. She just helped. You can charge a lot in prison for helping, particularly for providing highly skilled help, like vetting legal paperwork. But everyone told me, Quenetta did it all for free. And something about all this. It seems to have made the TDCJ higher-ups very upset with Quenetta Harris. They be going herself very frequently and they're standing there for like hours, just like combing through all her information.

They even got her mail. Like, they be saying that they're watching everybody. EMLTDC just be letting whatever come in. But like in the mail room, they'll send them a list of names that are hot. Hot, meaning read everything this person sends out and gets in. The orders to do this, Joy says, came from up high. Whenever I say they, I meet administration. Anybody who ever does anything to her as far as like casewise investigations,

it's always administration. Administration comes and raised her sale. administration is the ones that be tying up her money when it comes in. All the stuff that I'm saying, it all happens through administration. Joy's depiction of Quenetta and her treatment by TDCJ matched up with what Quenetta herself said again and again. They had it out for her. And I do think TDCJ views Quenetta as a threat. She's savvy.

She's informed. And she writes and speaks out about what's happening in the state. there. So the idea that they would force her to drop out of this podcast, to my mind, and in my experience, that was a real possibility. My producer Eric emailed the TDCJ press office and asked them about Quenada's claims. Had Quenetta been directed to withdraw from the podcast? Had she been told it would be better for her if I destroyed all my interviews and notes?

The press office wrote, these statements were not made to Quenetta Harris. I was expecting that answer. Because on the one hand, if TDCJ did exactly what Quenetta claimed they did, it's quite likely that they would deny everything. And on the other hand, if Quenetta made the whole thing up,

TDCJ would also deny everything. I think that Quenetta knew how this would all play. out. If I had to guess, I'd guess that she decided on her own to cut me off. Why? Maybe, after five years of corresponding, she worried she'd said too much. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was just being strategic now that she was a leading prison journalist. Would the media people who gave her awards and published her work be so eager to work with her if they knew the more convoluted version of her life. She'd encouraged me to report,

told me to find her ghosts, to talk to them. And I had. And while I suspect that this submerged part of Quenetta was desperate to come clean, another part of her was desperate to keep up the charade.

At a certain point, we both knew that this podcast wouldn't, couldn't go like we'd hoped. A month after all of this, in April 2024, Quenetta was finally released back to general population. There, she started writing about a new topic, true crime. For her first piece, the headline read,

True crime shows exploit and lie about women like me. The genre was racist and sexist, she argued. Then, Quenetta and her lawyer co-authored a law review article called The True Harms of True Crime. The abstract mentioned podcasts first. Quenetta said that killing Michael Giles was a mistake. She wished it had never happened. She told me that if his family thought she deserved 50 years, she'd take it.

But she never sounded terribly sorry about actually killing him. She once wrote to me, I didn't travel 3,000 miles planning to shoot him. He had put me through so much, and I believe he would have killed us both. Even though Quenetta still resented Michael Giles, she seemed genuinely sorry for his mother. She told me, no mother should have to bury their child. I don't wish that on nobody. Michael Giles' mother was named Janie Smith.

Janie never recovered from learning that her son, her favorite child, had been killed. By the time the trial came around, my mom had stopped eating and had lost so much weight that her doctors had us put her in a rehab center, and they had to put the tube in her stomach to feed her and stuff. Gwen Haney, Michael's sister, said that even before Michael's disappearance, Janie was fragile. She was exhibiting signs of dementia.

Gwen says she'd also had a mental breakdown. Once Michael's body was discovered, Janie refused to really face what had happened. She never would talk about Mike. I think in her mind she just pretended like he was still in the military. You know what I mean? Because he was there for so long. To Gwen, the most painful part wasn't just that Quenetta had killed Michael.

It's that she desecrated his memory. In covering her tracks, in the cleanup, Quenetta had destroyed everything. Even things that held only sentimental value. His family was left with nothing. I don't know what she did. all his military medals he had. She just threw him away.

His life just trashed everything. We didn't get anything. He had my family reunion, videotapes, VHSs. He was transferring to make copies for all the family members, you know, and just all of it gone. Just gone. Michael's money was gone too. Money he used to help his mom and other relatives. My mom hired a lawyer to do a...

civil suit. She gave him a $5,000 retainer, and nothing ever came of it. I found out that he had passed away, and the new law you knew nothing about it. So nothing ever came back to my mom. No, nothing whatsoever. Over the years, Janie deteriorated further. She may not have spoken about her son's death, but it haunted her. And I'll tell you, nobody knows this really and truly except immediate family for the most part, maybe some of my neighbors and all. My mom screamed. I got videos of her screaming to the top of her long. From the time she wake up in the morning until she goes to bed at night, I can't breathe.

She did that for at least 13, 14, 15, 5 years straight. And I think that she believed that Mike was buried alive or something, you know. Smith died in 2017. These days, for Gwen, there's just silence and absence. I remember a victim impact statement. I remember talking about, okay, I used to make a German chocolate cake from scratch every Christmas. And nobody ate coconut except for me and Mike.

So Mike would come over, it was always Christmas. He'd come over. After cake, two, three days later, he called me, you got any more cake? So ever since he had disappeared, I hadn't made that cake because nobody else ate it except me and him. And I remember the judge telling me I should make the cake. So it took me at least 10 years.

And now I make it every Christmas again. And when I take that first bite, I say how good it is to him. I wish he was here to share it with me. Gwen has a generally calm demeanor, but beneath it, there's rage. I will tell you, though, I know prisons ain't got air conditioners. When it's hot out in the summer, and it's 110 degrees, I know her ass is sitting down there. She's probably smaller than Lord knows what now. But I hope they bring her out in a black bag.

I really and truly do. nothing's going to bring him back, and she's still got another judge to face when she leaves this world. That's between her and God. And I really hope that before she leaves this world, that she feels the pain that my mother had to deal with. I hope she feels the pain that my mother had to deal with. On my final call with Quenetta, we spoke about her three children.

It had been nearly a decade since she'd seen them in person. Do you remember your last visit with your kids? Yep, 2015. And what was that like? It was nice when they killed me because they didn't recognize me. And I was like, oh, my goodness. So, yeah, that was shocking. Before that, they hadn't visited for four years.

It was hard to get everyone from Michigan to Texas and expensive. Quenetta held her kids' hands. I remember they were so. hungry and I felt so bad because they were thinking that they would provide them with something because they can't go out and get anything to eat and they just gave them like cookies and like punch

and I felt like shit. I'm like this is what you've got to do to see me. I couldn't help but make a connection between the timing of that last visit and the forgery incident that landed Quenetta in solitary less than six weeks.

She'd been a model prisoner for years. Then, she walked into the room and her kids didn't recognize her. They were hungry, and she couldn't feed them. Of course, Quenetta wouldn't fully admit that she'd even done the forgery. It was among the many things she denied, things she just wouldn't deal with. And those denials, those lies, that was why we were in this hall of mirrors, where we could never tell what was real and what was a reflection. In that last call, I was trying to find a way out.

This story, you start trying to do it and then you're inside of it. Like, like, you're like, and you're like, I don't want to be in it. But what I think is like sort of happened is that all the truths and all the lies and all the real things that happen and all the fake things that happen have gotten like tangled together. There's reasons people do things. But if you have like lies in there or inaccuracies and things, then you can't even work out the reason. So that's what I'm trying to like figure out like how to like unravel it into as close to what like it really was. Because otherwise like any truth you say is not you, but.

It's corrupted. Like the old people said, if you lie about one thing, everything is corrupted. Everything is a lie. It's a fly in the suit. You know, that's how they used to teach us with your children. You just can't take the fly out of the soup and eat the suit. The whole soup is corrupted. Who is Quenetta Harris?

I asked that question to almost everyone I interviewed, including Quenetta herself. I got a different answer each time. But now I think the question itself was misguided. because she was always being defined by someone else, asked to conform to others' ideas about who she should be. And she didn't conform. Instead, she performed. She put on a mask.

Once, in a long letter, she told me about her family history, about her childhood, about all the expectations weighing upon her, to rise above stereotypes and circumstances. She wrote, with longing, I thought, how lucky people are to only be themselves. I suppose that's something Quenetta never managed,

to only be herself. But now, being herself would also mean facing herself. It would mean making an honest assessment, what she had done, who she had become, and where she wanted to go next. I'm going to find out. I mean, it's past time. I didn't realize this would be our last call. The clock was running out.

Texas prison phones turned off at exactly 8 p.m. What's your phone time tomorrow? It might be about maybe about five. I'll try five my time. I had a whole list of questions for Conetta, for when we talked again. So anyways, I just want to ask before it cuts off. So they, are you there? What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media.

This show was reported and hosted by me, Justine Banderlune. Eric Benson is the executive producer. Ashley Ann Crigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose, Josie Duffy Rice, Mosy Secret, Emily Martinez, Sheba Joseph, and Michael Meyer. The story editor is Matthew Cher. The series was mixed in sound design by Garrett Tiedemann, with support from Ewan Lai Tramune. Fact-checking by Matthew Giles. A special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingell.

From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatus, and Matthew Cher. If you enjoyed what she buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.