The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - What Happened to the Harrisons? | 6. Easy Ways to Kill and Get Away With It

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

It looks like the Harrisons might finally get justice. But as the trial approaches, key evidence is tossed out. And a strong motive comes to light. Want the full story? Binge every episode of What Happened to the Harrisons? ad-free 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 Happened to the Harrisons? is a production of Sony Music Entertainment. 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

One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna-Luc. I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation. Then people started asking questions. What a creep. Who else knows about this? From CBC's personally, this is Agent Leila, the story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on, let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to every episode of what happened to the Harrisons 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. After Melissa and Chris were arrested, police charged them both with a third count of murder for Bill's death. A key piece of evidence behind that charge was the airport wiretap, the one you heard last episode, where Melissa seemed confused about which murders Chris had confessed to, Bridget and Bill or Bridget and Caleb. So now, a mother of six and her second husband were accused of killing her ex and his entire family, years apart, in the same house. Chris had admitted to killing Caleb and Bridget, but afterward, he recanted. He'd say that he falsely confessed after a grueling police interrogation because he believed he was making a deal.

that would save his family. Melissa was a tougher case. The Crown had no direct evidence tying her to the killings. And Chris had told police she had nothing to do with it. Police believed Melissa was the brains behind the murder plot.

The question was, would a jury believe that? After a preliminary inquiry, a judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence to try Melissa for Bill's murder. It was the first crack in the case

police had built against her. One of the strongest pieces of evidence police had against Melissa was discovered after Chris's confession. Remember the storage trailer that Charitable Sue helped them out with? Well, inside the trailer, among the boxes of kids' toys and kitchen gear,

police found a lest. laptop, a family computer used by both Melissa and Chris. And there was a mountain of evidence in the hard drive. A long internet search history, the couple hadn't bothered to delete. Some of the searches dated back to before Bridget's death. If a grandparent has custody of children and they die, which of the parents gets the kids? This is retired Peel Region prosecutor Steve Sheriff again, reading the searchist that caught his eye. I called him to talk through the laptop evidence.

How long does it take to die from being choked? Now, the timing of this one is the first day of April of 2010. How does that fit into the timeline for Bridget's death? That is just a few weeks before she died. So this is a pretty damning internet search. Damning for Melissa and Chris, but also for the police. Because this internet search history would have been there for detectives to find in 2010 if they dug deeper and gathered enough evidence to get a warrant.

Sheriff continues. Next one is pretty explicit. Easy ways to kill and get away with it. It was typed in the years between Bridget's death and her sons. That one has stayed with me. There's a strange irony to it. A criminal reckless enough to ask the internet how to get away with murder. And yet for years, that's exactly what happened.

The searches go on and on. How long does it take for a person being strangled to pass out? and can you taste rat poison? This kind of evidence is a prosecutor's dream. Testimony can be disputed or contradicted. Memories are fallible. But internet search records, they're solid. If you're convinced of the guilt of your defendant,

so this is manna from heaven dropped in your lap. This is powerful, strong, meaningful evidence. But in this case, The jury would never get to see this evidence. The police tried to figure out who typed the searches, Melissa or Chris. And that's where things would start to go sideways. It's a very serious matter to have the truth excluded from a triple homicide case, a very, very serious matter. At trial, the jury would be presented with two versions of Melissa.

Was she a master manipulator who convinced her big lug of a boyfriend to kill for her than helped him cover it up? Or was she guilty of nothing more than helping Chris after the fact? Once it was already too late. From Sony Music Entertainment, This is What Happened to the Harrisons. I'm Amy Dempsey Raven. This is episode six.

Easy ways to kill and get away with it. After the third death in the Harrison family, relatives and close friends formed what they called the inner circle. This time, they wouldn't let the authorities off the hook. They wanted justice. A week after Caleb's murder, the group, met with senior members of the Peel Police Homicide Bureau at Liz's House in Mississauga. Two officers sat in the living room and faced 20 people staring daggers at them.

One of the cops told me it was scary. The Harrisons asked pointed questions, and they made one thing absolutely clear. Here's Bridget's brother Doug. You know we're not going to go away. You know we're right here. You know we're going to be right on your tail. This is not going to be put on anybody's back burner anymore. The family needed to put someone in charge,

to field questions from the police, to figure out how to get answers. That person was Wanda Jameson. I felt so angry that all of this had happened on our watch. We are all bright people articulate. people who saw this happening and yet somehow were disempowered. Wanda is a management consultant, a person who gets things done. Her husband, Mike Harrington, grew up with Bridget.

She and Mike had been suspicious all along, but they had also trusted the authorities. They believed that if there had been a crime, investigators would have found evidence. I put my faith in the police service, in the coroner's office, and then this happens, you know? Wow. So after Caleb's murder, Wanda threw herself into figuring out how everything went off the rails. I felt all of a sudden I'm on a mission. The Harrisons had been there for Wanda and Mike when they faced a family tragedy. years earlier. Afterward, Bridget and Bill helped the family pick up the pieces.

These were the finest people I've ever known, finest people. They showed us, they trained us how to be elders. Now it was Wanda and Mike's turn to be good elders. After Melissa and Chris were charged, they decided they would see the case through, no matter how long it took. I think we thought it was important that someone bear witness to everything. That's exactly my answer would have been as well. And to support Liz, the family matriarch. For months at a time, Mike and Wanda would drive four hours to court for the pretrial hearings and stay with Liz for the week.

They did this for years, until finally, it was time for Melissa and Chris to face a jury. This family is on the brink of civil war. Mopland, the hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. We are the Harrogans. Don't know the Ants? And Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie. Do you want to step up the ladder? I won't call him dead. Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren.

Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want! Hald! Mobland, new season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. The trial began in September 2017 at a big Mawrins. modern courthouse in Brampton, another suburban city in Peel region. I was there, sitting in one of the wooden spectator benches, a few rows from the front. The trial would last three and a half months. It was the longest one I'd ever been to. There were two accused killers, five charges,

four defense lawyers, two prosecutors, a judge and the jury. Before proving who murdered the Harrisons, prosecutors had to prove they were actually murdered. The defense lawyers would argue the original causes of death, a heart arrhythmia, and a fall down the stairs, were correct. By then, I was a new mom, and things about the case would hit harder for me than they had before. The trial started the day after I went back to work from maternity leave. Bridget's brother Doug wasn't allowed in the courtroom that first week because he was going to be called as a witness. So he paced the halls.

At the beginning, I thought for sure this is a done deal. I mean, they just have to lay it out. And then after I saw things going along, I was thinking, you know what? Vittori is cooked. But Melissa, maybe not so much because it's what did you? she know and how can we prove what she knew? Four years had passed since Caleb died.

The house on Pitch Pine Crescent had been sold. The relatives and friends who used to gather there now came together in court. Bill's sister Liz was a steady presence. She walked into the courtroom slowly with a cane and sat near the front. She would be there nearly every day. She wore a court-issued headset hearing aid and took notes constantly. Melissa's father, Mike, was sitting on the defense side, with his arms crossed over his chest. After Caleb's murder, police had taken a close look at Mike.

They placed him under surveillance, seized garbage from his home, and got search warrants for his vehicles. But detectives found no evidence he was involved in the Harrison family deaths. Every time I write about the Harrisons, someone asks, wasn't Mike Merritt a police officer? Could Melissa have escaped scrutiny because police were protecting one of their own? But I found no evidence that Mike influenced the investigation or had any sway with Peel Police at all. He'd worked for a different police force in Toronto.

Throughout the trial, Melissa and Chris sat together in a prisoner's box with high plexiglass walls in the center of the room. She was 37 now. He was 39. If Melissa hadn't been in the box, I wouldn't have recognized her. She looked half the size she'd been when she was arrested. Her highlights had grown out,

and now she had dark hair that hung to her lower back. She stood and cried as she whispered her plea, not guilty. Chris looked like he'd had a glow-up. He wore a dark suit with a purple dress shirt and tie and glasses with thick, dark frames that made him look sort of bookish. Throughout the trial, he took a ton of notes like he was part of the legal team.

Chris also pled not guilty to all three murder charges, despite his confession and the DNA evidence. The prosecution's opening statement connected the dots between the child custody battle and the deaths of all three Harrisons in a way that made it difficult to imagine how the earlier police investigations went nowhere. It was frustrating for the family

to hear how obvious it all sounded in hindsight. I think there was a long simmering what took you so fucking longer to get here. When I heard that they hadn't bothered to follow up on the alibis after Bridget's death. How flipping basic can you be? You don't even have to watch CSI to figure that stuff out. The case was argued by two senior Crown attorneys.

That's what we call them in Canada, Crown attorneys. It basically means the state. Anyway, Crown Brian McGuire was tall with wavy copper hair and he was known as a bit of a hothead. His partner, Eric Taylor, was shorter and bald. He was the calmer one. The Crown's office declined my request to speak with McGuire and Taylor, so you won't hear from them.

The two prosecutors argued that Melissa and Chris plotted together to kill Caleb and Bridget. Chris was the muscle, the person who actually killed them. But Melissa helped plan and cover it up. Prosecutors said she was equally responsible. The prosecutors also argued that the couple believed they would inherit millions from the Harrison estate. There's something I thought about a lot during the trial and after.

Early on, a court services officer warned Liz and the family that they weren't allowed to show a motion in the courtroom. An outburst could sway the jury, maybe even cause a mistrial. But imagine sitting there for months, looking at crime scene photos on a big screen, steps away from the people accused of killing your loved ones, hearing testimony that makes you seethe

and having to stay calm. Liz sat through it all. Doug, too, coped as best he could, but a few moments still haunt him. When I saw the picture of the side of my sister's head, my stomach convulsed. When I saw Fatorese, or show the interviewing detective how he ripped my sister's head, that made me want to vomit. But other than those two situations, I thought, you're caught.

Scrum all you want, you're caught. Hearing Chris describe how he killed Bridget made Doug look back at the police investigation with fresh rage. What they missed or must have missed just boggles my mind. He didn't leave a trace behind. He literally mulled her to death.

And you're telling me there wasn't a hair or a fiber. I'm just saying how could they not find anything. When Chris got on the witness stand, he said he lied about committing two first-degree murders because he believed he was making a deal so Melissa could get out of jail and be with their kids. He admitted to killing Caleb,

but said he only meant to rough him up to get a few extra days with the children. I studied the faces of the jury members as Chris spoke. Some of them, looked, to me, visibly annoyed. I thought they are not buying this story. Honestly, I wasn't either. Prosecutors jumped on the flaws in his tail. If he wasn't planning to kill Caleb, why would he need gloves and throw away sneakers? And why didn't he bring a mask to hide his

identity. Chris's testimony only made Doug more confident he'd be convicted. It's the actions of a guilty person. It's not like a kid's game. There's no takebacks. But Chris had only confessed to two of the three charges against him. He was also charged with the second-degree murder of Bill. Police and prosecutors knew that charge was going to be the hardest to prove, a real long shot. Because the original investigation failed to treat his death as a homicide, they were left with massive gaps in evidence. So at trial, prosecutors built their case another way by arguing that Bill's death looked too much like Bridget's and Caleb's to be a coincidence. Bill had died at a key moment in the custody battle, just like his wife and son.

And the injuries fit a pattern too. Bill had a fractured breastbone like Caleb who'd been struck in the chest with a baseball bat. He also had neck abrasions, like both Caleb and Bridget, who were ultimately found to have been strangled. A key witness for the crown was Ontario's chief forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Palanin, the guy who had wanted to exhume Bill's body after Bridget died. At trial, Dr. Palanin testified that he believed Bill was assaulted before he died, that he was struck in the head and chest.

But Dr. Palanin couldn't say exactly how Bill died, because the original pathologist hadn't done a proper forensic autopsy. The problems with the autopsy are well documented in that there was limited documentation and no photographs. That's Dr. Christopher Milroy again. You heard from him in our first episode. He's the forensic pathologist based in Ottawa, who reviewed the case but wasn't directly involved. I appreciate that times change and standards develop

and we become more rigorous, but it wasn't difficult to photograph things in 2009. Dr. Palanin told the jury he couldn't exclude neck compression. In other words, Bill might have been strangled, but no one can ever know for sure. Defense lawyers said the pathologists were engaging in revisionist history. Bill wasn't murdered, they argued. The original conclusion, a heart arrhythmia, was the right one. Dr. Milroy doesn't agree.

It's clearly not a natural death, based upon the fact you've got, injuries and trauma, and you don't have an obvious natural disease to account for the death. That leaves two real possibilities. Accident or homicide. Prosecutors walked the jury through Bill's final hours. Since the trial, I've been able to piece together an even fuller picture of what his day looked like with the help of case files. The day Bill died, he was. He was a He went into work around 6 a.m. and ran into a colleague, a man who lived in the same townhouse complex as Melissa. The colleague told Bill that Melissa and Chris had packed up their house and were planning to leave. Bill was shocked.

When Bridget last spoke to Bill, after his shift around 2.30 that afternoon, he didn't tell her what he'd learned. At trial, prosecutors said Bill was a peacemaker and would have tried to handle it calmly. Because, as Crown Attorney McGuire put it, if you tell Bridget, she's going to push the alarm button. That afternoon, Bill showed up at the kids' school unexpectedly, even though it wasn't his day with them. But a secretary told him Melissa had picked them up early.

Around 3 p.m., Bill said, Swiped his card at the YMCA gym. We don't know when he left, but at some point, he picked up dinner from a Portuguese chicken restaurant around the corner from Pitch Pine and went home. Just after 9 p.m., Bridget found him in the bathroom. His body was stiff. He'd been dead for a while. So where were Melissa and Chris in the hours after Bill left the gym?

Banking records showed that Melissa's debit. card was used to buy gas in Mississauga around 8 p.m. That transaction placed the couple in the city less than an hour before Bridget called 911. By 7.30 the next morning, Melissa's debit card pinged again, this time in a town 280 miles away. These banking records suggested that Melissa and Chris didn't just leave Mississauga the same day Bill died. They left in the hours after. During the trial, prosecutors acknowledged there would always be unanswered questions about Bill's death. But their theory was that Bill must have spoken to or confronted Chris about what he'd learned.

And Chris killed him before he and Melissa left Mississauga. The defense pointed to the airport wiretap and argued it showed something very different, that Melissa and Chris didn't even seem to know when Bill died. Here, Melissa says, they're trying to get us on bills. And Chris replies, we weren't here when Bill died. Prosecutors said Melissa and Chris were just repeating lines. lines from a story they cooked up. Remember, we weren't here when Bill died, wink, wink.

Crown Attorney McGuire wrapped up this part of the case with a challenge to the jury. Police never connected Bill's death to the abduction, he said. But you can. When Chris first took the witness stand, everyone was wondering the same thing. Would he turn on Melissa? Prosecutors grilled him, trying to get him to admit she was in on the murders, but he stuck to his story that Melissa had nothing to do with it. So the Crown attorneys sought to prove her guilt without Chris by pointing to her motive.

The custody battle, they argued, was Melissa's fight. She wanted control of the children, and she wanted the Harrisons out of their lives. letters Melissa had written to her in-laws and ex became evidence. If Caleb isn't caring for the children, no one other than myself should be. I find it amazing how you can take court orders and apply them to best suit your desires. Anything to keep the children from me. Prosecutors argued that each death happened at a time when it would benefit Melissa, when a member of the Harrison family was standing in the way

of her control of the kids. They believed Melissa was the mastermind. That's what the family believed, too. In our mind, by that stage, she's the evil person. She is the person who lie. Chris Vitori, his life isn't made better by Caleb being dead unless she look at the money. So it's only her.

Do I think that she's a killer? Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind that, you know, she just pointed the thug and he pulled the trigger. Crown Attorney McGuire argued it made no sense for Chris to kill the father of Melissa's children unless she was 100% on board. It was too risky. Chris needed an alibi ready and had too much to lose if Melissa learned what he'd done and freaked out. and to pull off the killings, he would need insider information only Melissa could give him. Melissa's defense lawyer,

Joel Hector, said the evidence showed that Melissa was at most an accessory after the fact. She only learned what Chris had done after Caleb was dead. The Crown's case didn't just have holes, Hector argued.

It was all holes. prosecutors had no DNA tying her to the scenes, no confession, no eyewitnesses. The case was entirely circumstantial. Hector was a character, a young lawyer who looked like he came from another century, with a long beard, a handlebar mustache, and suspenders under his court robes. Hector told me he doesn't speak to the press, so you won't hear from him in this show, which is too bad. He was a strong advocate for Melissa, and I want it to have his perspective.

Melissa and her family also declined to speak with us. In court, Hector said Melissa and Chris would have to be criminal masterminds to pull off what the prosecutors were alleging. If the crown was right, he said, Chris had somehow managed to hide his involvement in two murders for years, from highly trained investigators who looked at him with considerable suspicion. If the jury did believe Chris committed the murders, Hector argued, the evidence showed he was capable of acting alone.

Observe the North American Dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana, an offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, Dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch.

Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb in the same house, years apart. It's not a coincidence. This wasn't ghosts and goblins. Okay, these were murders.

From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrisons. Start listening today, wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free. The case against Melissa came down to a few pieces of evidence. First, the murder sneakers. Melissa had predicted, accurately, that the Walmart shoes Chris wore the night he killed Caleb were going to be a problem for her. You should not have received a shoe.

At trial, prosecutors argued that Melissa knew Chris went into the Walmart to buy the murder sneakers that night, and she intentionally left the Walmart stop out of her police statement as part of a rehearsed alibi to cover up the crime. Melissa's lawyer argued there was no evidence she knew about the shoes before Caleb was dead. Then there was the 4 a.m. alibi. Melissa and Chris had both told police nearly identical stories about the night of Caleb's murder. Chris was at home, in bed, when Melissa woke up to feed the baby. Prosecutors argued that Melissa said they slept close, and there was no way Chris could have gotten out of bed without her knowing.

Hector, Melissa's lawyer, accused the crown of overstating this evidence. He argued that Melissa never said there was no way Chris could have left without her knowing, only that she likely would have noticed. Here's Melissa's police interview. So it's possible that Chris may not have been there, but you're pretty sure that if he gets out of bed, you would know. I'm pretty sure, because Chris and I usually sleep touching some part of our body. There's all the times where we're not.

But the majority of the time, someone is usually touching the other person. This is where Hector's showmanship came in. He said, if they were going to cook up an alibi, you'd think they'd have come up with something better, something that covered the whole night, like a case of explosive diarrhea. Prosecutor McGuire clapped back in his closing argument. He said, ladies and gentlemen,

the art of a false alibi might be in its subtlety. The wiretaps were another major battleground. The Crown argued that the recordings showed Melissa didn't sound like a woman learning the details about a murder for the first time. She sounded like someone who'd been in on it from the get-go. I thought about this a lot while I was in court. At no point in the wiretap conversations did we hear Melissa say, I still can't believe you did this. You need to get me out of this mess you made.

If Chris had secretly killed Melissa's ex and his parents and put her whole life at risk, wouldn't you expect lingering anger? The defense lawyers argued that the wiretaps were unreliable, that the transcripts prepared by police contained errors that when corrected changed the meaning of what was said. In one wiretap,

the police transcript had Chris saying about Caleb, I killed him fucking perfect. The defense argued that Chris actually said, I killed him, fucking prove it. Can you hear what that says? I can't. This part of the trial was frustrating for everyone. After all the work police had put into planting the wiretaps, this is a how the tape sounded? The airport wiretap was a little easier to hear and probably the most important

piece of evidence against Melissa. This was the conversation between the couple recorded when they believed they'd been accidentally placed in the same room. Prosecutors argued that the way they spoke

showed they were two co-conspirators trying to get their story straight. Melissa tells Chris, you shouldn't have said anything to the police. and Chris says, I was thinking about you and the children. Then, Melissa says something

that would end up being a key piece of evidence against her at trial. It's hard to hear the first few words. Police transcribed the clear part as the audio tapes would have fucked us anyways. They believed Melissa was saying, You shouldn't have confessed, but oh well, the audio tapes, meaning the wiretaps, would have fucked us anyways. Prosecutors argued that Melissa said,

I think the audio tapes would have fucked us anyways. In their view, Melissa was acknowledging that the wiretaps incriminated both her and Chris. Melissa's lawyer said the words were they think, as in the police think the audio tapes would have fucked them. In the defense view, Melissa wasn't admitting anything. She was just talking about what the police believed. That one word, they or I, would be debated in court, not just in this criminal trial, but for many years after.

There was another piece of evidence against Melissa that the jury never got to see. The internet searches from the old laptop. Here's what went wrong. The couple shared the computer. So investigators tried to match the searches to activity in their email accounts to see if they could prove who was using the laptop when the searches were typed. But while doing that, officers made a bunch of unauthorized searches that breached Melissa and Chris's rights under Canadian law, and the defense filed a motion to exclude the evidence.

The lawyers argued that the police not only messed up, but tried to cover up their mistakes, and worse, lied about it in court. The Crown said these were honest errors by officers dealing with a huge, complicated investigation and evolving rules around digital evidence. But the judge sided with the defense. He found evidence of disreputable, misleading, and negligent police conduct. The judge said the internet searches were reliable data. He even said the grandparent custody search was important to the case against Melissa. But he ruled the jury couldn't hear the evidence.

Here's former prosecutor Steve Sheriff again. It's painful to justice. to see the truth excluded. I think this could have put it over the finish line for her. I've often wondered how jury members feel when they learn later about evidence they weren't allowed to hear due to police screw-ups. Would it have made a difference?

We'll never know. In Canada, jurors are barred from talking publicly about what happened during deliberations. If the jury had heard those searches, they would have been, No doubt. This trial was so complex that the judge's instructions to the jury took four days to read in court. It was more than 400 pages.

As the trial came to an end, it seemed to me that the case against Chris was pretty solid. He'd likely go to prison. Melissa's case was harder to read. She'd spent four years in jail. waiting for her day in court, her chance to be reunited with her kids. To me, she looked confident. She looked like a person who believed she was about to get her freedom. The verdict came on a cold, snowy day in January 2018.

That morning, I got in my car at 7 a.m. and drove from the east end of Toronto to Mississauga. The courthouse was closed for the weekend, But a staff member was letting people in. Everyone waited in the hallway outside the courtroom. Liz and her daughter, Doug and his wife, Wanda and Mike. It was empty. We're all sitting in the hallway, right?

We're all in the hallway. You know, we're waiting, and then we go in and we get the verdict. The courtroom was packed. I took one of the last seats near Melissa's father. Everyone waited for the jury to be brought in. Chris and Melissa were in the box with the tall plexiglass walls. Chris looked nervous. He took off his glasses, wiped them, then put them back on.

Melissa laughed quietly with her lawyer. She seemed pretty relaxed. After 10 minutes, the jury filed in, and the foreman stood to read the verdicts. The foreman was very soft-spoken. I remember that, and it's like, are we actually? hearing what we're hearing. Wanda was sitting next to one of Doug's daughters. I remember I just had her hand.

I think everybody had somebody's hand. Everyone leaned forward, straining to hear. At one point, I heard Melissa's father mutter, I can't hear a fucking thing. I felt kind of bad for him. His daughter might be going to prison for life. He just wanted to understand what was happening. Chris was found guilty.

of killing Caleb and Bridget. It turned out the jury didn't buy his story about the false confession. But he was found not guilty of killing Bill. This was a disappointment for Liz, though everyone knew getting a conviction for Bill's death would be a long shot. The verdict everyone was holding their breath for

was Melissa's. On her charge in Bridget's death, The jury couldn't reach a unanimous verdict. So the judge declared a mistrial on that one charge. But for the death of her ex, Melissa was found guilty. The courtroom spectators were under strict orders not to react. No shouting, no cheers, no crying. But there was an audible intake of breath.

And then an exhale. Not a slam dunk in terms of all three, but it was a feeling of relief. Melissa hung her head and cried. Her father sat with his arms crossed. His eyes were wet. I had a feeling the Merit family was surprised by the verdict. I wondered if Mike believed his daughter was innocent,

or if it even mattered, if he would support your child no matter what. A few days later, everyone returned to court for the sentencing hearing. Members of the jury showed up, this time as spectators. They didn't have to be there, but they wanted to. They looked shaken. Some of them cried as relatives read their victim impact statements. When it was Liz's turn to read hers, she walked slowly across the courtroom with her cane and sat in the witness box. She looked so small, but spoke powerfully. We can't broadcast court recordings in Ontario,

so I asked Liz to read her statement for me later. I cannot fathom how people who love their family, love their friends, love their community so greatly, could have been dealt such an injustice. We have all suffered from recurring violent nightmares of our loved ones last moment, and we will never forget the terror that plagued us for years, not knowing which family member might die under suspicious circumstances next or when.

Wanda read a statement for one of Doug's daughters that captured the bitter irony of the outcome. Chris Votori, Melissa Merritt, I hope that one day you realize that you destroyed an innocent family at the cost of your own. Melissa and Chris did not react to any of this. Melissa had been convicted of killing her ex to secure unfettered access to their children.

But now, because of her actions, the family she built had been torn apart. Melissa and Chris were sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 24. five years. Chris actually got two life sentences, one for Caleb and one for Bridget, but the judge didn't have the power to stack the sentences back to back. He had to run them at the same time. So in practical terms, Chris got the same sentence as Melissa. The earliest they could apply for parole would be 2039. Every member of the Harrison family stood shoulder to shoulder as the couple

were led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. No one moved until they were gone. It felt final, settled, like the last act in a senseless chain of loss. But Melissa's story was far from over. Her sentencing would not be her last day in court. Next time on what happened to the Harrisons. Melissa gets a new shot at freedom.

Is she going to get out now? It's like, do we have to start locking our doors triply as of, you know, four o'clock today? Nobody knew really what the situation was going to be. The case for her innocence. And I do believe that she didn't have anything to do with the planning of it. And how the authorities bungled two death investigations. And it isn't over yet.

Even over yet. Oh, Lord. Don't want to wait for the next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of what happened to the Harrison's early and ad-free right now by subscribing to the binge. And it doesn't stop at what happened to the Harrisons. 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. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to subscribe directly. What happened to The Harrison's is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. The show is hosted and reported by me, Amy Dempsey Raven. The lead producer is Cooper Mall. The series is written by me and Cooper.

From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. The series was sound designed and mixed by Scott Somerville. We use music from Epidemic Sound. Production managers are Tamika Ballance Kulasny and Ashley Ann Craigbaum. Fact-checking by Fendell Fulton. Additional production support by Myron Kaplan. Our lawyer is Alison Sherry. Special thanks to the Toronto Star,

where my reporting on this story began more than a decade ago. If you value local investigative journalism, subscribe to a newspaper where you live. Please rate and review what happened to the Harrisons. It helps spread the word. Thank you.