Who Killed Jennifer Judd? - Ep.1: Homecoming

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

On June 25, 2011 31-year-old Angel Harris is found murdered in the heart of downtown Gainesville, Florida. Having grown up in the town, cold case investigator Sarah Cailean teams up with the current Gainesville Police Department as well as former GPD Detective and childhood friend Courtnay Roberts to reinvestigate the case. In an effort to get answers, Sarah and Courtnay connect with the lead investigator on the case who reveals the main suspect in Angel’s murder was caught on camera. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast explores themes of violence against women, sexual assault, and murder, and contains graphic descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised. It is Father's Day, 2011. 31-year-old Angel Harris is on the phone with her parents, Susie and Fred Hearn. Angel's life is not the life her parents had wished for her, but they love her as much as ever, and they want to encourage her in these moments. when she reaches out to them for help.

Angels' request today is an easy one. She just needs them to bring her bike to her in downtown Gainesville, Florida. The bike will make getting around so much easier. Days later, on June 25th, Angel's mom arrives with her bike at the St. Francis House in Gainesville, where the two had agreed to meet at 1 p.m. But Angel never shows. Just over six hours later, at approximately 7.30 p.m. and less than 200 yards away from where Susie Hearn was meant to meet her daughter that afternoon, Angel Harris's remains are found in the bushes next to an office building.

This wasn't an accidental death. This wasn't somebody who OD. This was a clear murder. The theory is kind of, it probably was consensual until it got back behind. this bush, and then she was violently murdered. You've got a 20-minute window when it happened. Within a month of Angels Remains being discovered, the Gainesville Police Department identifies a suspect, a known offender with a history of violence. He is the same guy that attacks me.

He's a rapist. Another detective called me, he goes, this is your guy, this is him. In spite of the fact that investigators collect a great deal of physical evidence, none of it yields results that point to a specific suspect. More than 15 years later, Angel's murder remains unsolved. From ID and dark media, I'm Sarah Kalin, and this is Who Killed Angel Harris? For the year-round locals, June in Gainesville, Florida, is as close to perfect as the

little city gets. Spring classes at the University of Florida have let out, so close to 40% of the school's 50,000 students are gone for the summer. Commutes are quicker, restaurants are easy to get into, and life is just a bit slower and quieter. The weather hasn't yet become unbearably hot and sticky, but as July comes into sight, everyone knows what's on the horizon. Saturday, June 25, 2011, falls right into that sweet spot. It is a lovely summer night

to eat outside, take in some live music, or stroll past the art galleries in Gainesville's historic downtown. These are the plans for some friends who meet up near the intersection of the city's primary arteries, Main Street and University Avenue. When two of them arrive on bicycles,

they go to stash them out of sight. The brick office building at 2.35 South Maine, which the locals know is the Sun Center, backs up to a sort of town square area, lined by bars and restaurants next to the massive hippodrome state theater. Tall hedges surround the building's south wall, making it a perfect place to hide the bikes,

close to all the action. At about 7.30 p.m., as the men go to stash their bikes, they make a terrible discovery, immediately prompting a 911 call. First, to respond to the 911 call is rookie officer. officer Alicia Davis. In June 2011, I was finishing up FTO or field training. And the field training officer that I was with, she was known as like this complete badass. Her resume is so full. I was like, this is going to be fantastic. You know, we're going to get along great, you know, because I'm

going to go get her. She's a go get her. And she was doing her job, but she refused to talk to me. And everything I was doing was wrong. So I was spiraling. I'm like, I'm going to fail. I'm not going to pass. And this call came up. There wasn't much information in it at all. Just a woman sleeping in the bushes behind the Sun Center. I vaguely remember I self-assigned to it because there was nothing else going on. I wanted to get some more stuff on my evaluation so I could pass. And so we're headed over to the call and I parked far, far away. And my field trainer, she goes, I think you can handle this one on your own. So I'm walking up and I come around the corner and I see two guys standing there. And they kind of look at me and I look at them and I walk

up to him and I'm like, hi, did you call for somebody sleeping in the bushes? And they said, yeah, you know, she's over there. She's in the bushes. But they're kind of, something about their demeanor kind of caught me off guard. Like they were kind of looking, like their eyes were pretty big. They were standing there kind of nervous. And I was like, why are you nervous about somebody sleeping in the bushes? Though many of the city's unhoused lived further down Main Street, in a wooded area known as Tent City, it still wasn't unheard of for an officer to respond to a call about someone sleeping or passed out in little hidden spots downtown like this.

Nothing about this initially seems out of the ordinary for Officer Davis. So I told them, I said, hey, can you come show me where she is? And they both shake their head, no, we're not going back over there. So I said, is she sleeping? And the one guy said, well, her eyes are open. I walk around the corner to where they pointed at, and I found her in the bushes, and she was obviously murdered. Not sleeping, not passed out, murdered.

This very routine call, when a fresh trainee feels confident she can handle without having to ask for assistance, has quickly become something much too big for any officer to handle alone. I'm not going to go into her appearance or what she looked like that I want somebody later on to have that visual image in their head. But it was definitely something that was shocking. It was the first murder I'd probably ever seen. I thought I might pass out because everything kind of shrunk in around me.

All my hearing went gone. My vision kind of enclosed. And I was very aware that I'm in the bushes with a woman who had been murdered and two guys are standing behind me. And I'm like, oh, I'm all by myself. So I get on the radio and I say, oh, I need about five or six more officers and the sergeant and the lieutenant, send everybody that you got. And that's all I said. I didn't say anything else. And I went back out to the guys who were standing there and I start writing down their information.

There is a quality in Officer Davis's voice you can hear, almost like nervous laughter. not because she is taking this lightly, but because the circumstances are overwhelming and almost impossible to process, people can forget that in moments like these, first responders are only human, and the human mind struggles to make sense of death when confronted with it abruptly.

Even for the most seasoned and experienced officers, and even in the ones who might seem jaded or numb on the outside, The mind and body are having that all-too-human reaction just under the surface. Officer Davis's supervisor, Renee Guyon, is taking all of that in when she arrives, too, on top of her added feelings of duty and responsibility for her trainee's well-being. My first moment of walking up to the crime scene, unfortunately, was I felt horrible for letting Officer Davis stumble upon this, that I did have moments of guilt of not being with her during this time. Certainly she was capable of walking around

and looking for somebody that was injured or asleep. But this scene was particularly disturbing. And so as I came upon our victim, I just was met with just horrific sadness. The victim is identified that night as 31-year-old Angel Harris. Angel is a tall and slender white woman with sandy blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Though she doesn't recognize her immediately,

Officer Guyon is familiar with Angel. Many of the cops who work the downtown district at this time know or are familiar with Angel. They have interacted with her often. Sometimes she is under arrest, trapped in the cycle of addiction, substance use, and survival sex work. With that, run-ins with the law are commonplace.

Sometimes she is a victim of violence or a witness to violence against her friends, helping the police to identify and apprehend offenders. Sometimes she is just a friendly face, grateful for a meal or some clothes or a chat about what's going on in this unique ecosystem they all occupy together. The cops in that district know Angel is sometimes in-trial. trouble, but never is trouble. Angel is easygoing, kind, and many of the officers from the downtown district have been rooting for her for years. Once it became clear who it was, there was

a heaviness to the scene, recognizing who this was and the potential impacts that it was going to have, even with members of the department. My name is Donna Montague. I'm assigned to the internet crimes against children unit. June 2011, I was patrol. Because we are so heavily focused on community-oriented policing, for me, I got really invested in my zones and the people that live within those zones. I knew Angel because I was working the downtown area. She was houseless at the time, and I got to know her very well after an incident where she was a victim of a battery. So I kind of built a report with her. And from that point forward, I checked in with her weekly, making sure she was okay and safe and those kind of things.

When the call came out, that ended up being about Angel, I was devastated, shocked. When she lived on the street, she was very cautious and took measures to make sure she stayed safe, and I was not expecting to hear that she was a victim. She had ups and downs, but she was a great, great human. A little more than 36 hours after Angel's body is discovered, an autopsy is performed. The results will report that the manner of death is homicide, the likely cause of death, a combination of blunt force traumatic head injury, and asphyxiation by smothering.

A rape kit is taken and the results are submitted to the state lab at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. However, the medical examiner cannot state whether there was forcible or consensual sex. The medical examiner's report won't be completed and delivered back to the detectives for a few days, but the Gainesville Police Department starts digging in right away to uncover any potential leads. I really believe the detectives that were working at were really invested in solving that crime. I really wanted closure for her family and for her friends, her community. I think I was surprised probably a month then that no arrest had been made. One month turns into two, then three.

Now, 15 years later, no arrest has been made in this case. But in looking at the facts of Angel's murder, I believe this case is solvable. It's time to find the person who killed Angel Harris. I've spent more than 25 years in policing, investigations, and research in the area of criminal behavior. I've been the third shift cop in a uniform and cruiser responding to calls in the middle of the night. I've been in the detective bureau working sex crimes. I've been in academics. studying serial predators and domestic violence.

I've done this work on cases all over the world, but I've never worked a case in the place that put me on that path to begin with. Though I never knew Angel, or really even any of the officers or detectives involved in her case, this one is personal for me, because Gainesville is my hometown. I wasn't born in Gainesville,

but I have memories here going back to when I was three years old. My grandparents taught at the university. My parents and I visited from Canada a lot. When I was nine, I came to live here permanently. And this city, the college, the sports, everything about this place, good and bad, became part of my foundation. Just a couple years into my life in Gainesville,

I met a kid named Courtney Roberts, on the school bus. Many of my middle and high school memories feature this boy. He was smart and funny and kind and protective. I've known Sarah since literally middle school. We grew up just kind of in the same circle

seeing each other all the time. Over the years of early adulthood, we mostly fell out of touch, like most people our age. But when social media became a thing, we reconnected, also the way most people our age did. I knew we'd both gone into law enforcement around the same time in our early 20s. I knew he'd even gone on to become an officer, a SWAT team leader, and a homicide detective

with the Gainesville Police Department. But most importantly, I knew I could always count on him as someone I could talk about gator sports with when I needed to celebrate or commiserate. But more and more, I found myself touching base with him about cases, vetting suspect theories I had, getting his input on interview strategies, thinking of him as a colleague as much as a friend. We finally formalized that dynamic when I invited him to join the cold case consultation team, I started building with a small group of forensics experts in 2020. I wanted to look into working a case in my hometown, and it knows. never even occurred to me to do it alone.

So this season, I'll be investigating with Courtney Roberts as my partner. She reached out to me and said, hey, look, the organization that backs what she does is interested in me doing something maybe back in my hometown. And I'm looking at cold cases in Gainesville. A, would you be interested in B, do you have any ideas of some cold cases that maybe, you know, would be worth looking into?

And I was like, yeah, that's, you know, I'd be interested in that. I knew that I wanted to work on something in Gainesville and with Courtney, but I hadn't lived in town since 1998. I looked at a few cases on the GPD website Cold Case page and wondered where we should start. But Courtney actually had one particular case in mind already. There was one that kind of stuck out in my mind because I was in the detective division when one of them happened. And it was a homicide of Angel Harris. When Courtney told me what he remembered about Angel and what happened to her, I knew he was right.

Angel's case is the one we need to focus on. As a 2011 case, it was by far the newest I'd ever worked on. I could see just from the preliminary information that the original investigation was done well, that evidence had been preserved and that the department is still actively invested in getting answers. This case is solvable. I'm sure of it. But there was something else. Angel's story and even her murder in some ways

mirror a case that I've been working on for years, one that I will either solve and close or die trying. The 1993 murder of Renee Bergeron in Mobile, Alabama. Renee's case involved so many of the same stories and types of characters. And though I haven't met them yet, I'm positive. There are people from Angel's World

who are as desperate for answers as Renee's loved ones. Cases like these, the cases of marginalized victims who are far too often discarded by society, these are the ones that drew me to cold casework in the first place. Courtney knew this when he suggested Angel's case.

He knew I'd give her case the attention it deserved. Angel was a sex worker. She battled with drug use and drug addiction as well. Kind of that marginalized community kind of fits right in Sarah's wheelhouse. I have high hopes that the Angel Harris case is solvable. Just before Thanksgiving in 2025, Courtney and I coordinate our schedules

and plan to meet up in Florida to start setting the wheels in motion. He doesn't live in the area anymore either, and even though he worked at the Gainesville Police Department for 16 years, years, he hasn't been back since 2018. We don't even know if they will be interested in having us come informally, or if we're going to have to work the whole thing on the outside as civilians. But we're certainly going to try. It's possible to work a case and make real headway from the outside. I've done it before. But to attempt it with full access and support significantly increases the odds of actually solving a case.

Courtney likes to joke that he should be allowed to do whatever he wants there because the building's got his name on it. He's not entirely kidding. His father, Courtney Roberts Sr., had been with the agency for decades and served as the chief of the Gainesville Police Department in the 1970s. Courtney's dad was a legendary fitness buff, so when GPD got a whole new complex, the training building and gym facilities were named for him.

Though Courtney and I have talked and texted regularly for ages now, sometimes daily, depending on what's going on in Gator Sports, we haven't actually seen each other in person in almost 20 years. This is going to be one hell of a homecoming. As kids, we were always pretty evenly matched in size. Obviously, in high school that started to change, but whereas I maxed out at a towering 5'1, Courtney Roberts kept on going.

Standing 6'3-3-and having adopted his father's dedication to strength training, Courtney is an imposing figure. From the minute I pick him up at the Jacksonville Airport, I feel like I'm driving around with my own personal security detail. All he's missing is some aviator shades and an earpiece. It's a Sunday afternoon in November. Courtney's been working behind the scenes for months to get us permission to access Angels case file,

but so far it's been an endless cycle of emails and waiting. He tells me we're going straight to a coffee shop on the north side of Gainesville to meet with Captain Summer Hallett. She is the person Courtney thinks will finally be able to get us an audience with the Gainesville Police Department's chief. Captain Hallett is in charge of GPD's criminal investigative division and Courtney believes that if we can get her on board, she will have the best chance of convincing the chief to let us in.

A couple days later, Captain Hallett tells Courtney she thinks it's a great idea and she's still trying to schedule a meeting for all of us with Chief Nelson Moia. 24 hours before we leave Gainesville, we finally find our house. ourselves in a room with Chief Moya and a whole table full of GPD's leadership team. We tell them what we can bring to the case, and we even tell Chief Moja, we can get publicity for Angel's case it's never had before, if that's something the department would support.

By the end of the meeting, the chief has just three questions. What do we do? How do we launch? Where do we sign? The Chief's sentiments are succinct and to the point, but his support is all-encompassing. Captain Hallett begins assembling the case documents. There are a lot of them. She starts a background clearance process for us so that Courtney and I can come and go as we need to and have access to anything and everything required for an effective investigation. As soon as she starts transmitting files to us, we start our review process. process. By the next time we get to Gainesville, Captain Hallett has set up an entire war room for us.

It feels like the red carpet treatment. It's so obvious that everyone there genuinely wants Angel's case solved, and they will go to any lengths to make it happen. It's a cold case investigator's dream. We have a new home base in our old hometown. By opening all that stuff up to Sarah and Courtney, it allows for just a fresh set of eyes and an unbiased view of things to say, hey, this might be something. Whereas if I just looked at it on my own, I would have been like, that's nothing. But it very much could be something that blows this case wide open in addition to other cases. It's great to have such strong support from the department. But it's just as important in an undertaking like this to make sure the victim's family is on board with us

revisiting the case. The whole point of this work is to help, so tearing open old wounds people would rather leave untouched would defeat much of the purpose. So during that November trip, when we first met up with GPD, Courtney and I also set out

to try to speak with Angel's parents. After identifying an old address on file for the family, we take a drive out to Hawthorne, Florida, where we are able to connect with them. Angel's mom and dad tell us that they are thrilled with us pursuing the case. During that visit, they urge us to reach out and speak with Angel's sisters, Debbie and Misty, who knew her best.

Angel was the oldest of three girls and a sort of second mom to her little sisters. With GPD on board, a home base at the department to work from, and the files all around us, it's time to start getting to know Angel Harris. The best way to do this is to talk with as many people as possible who knew and loved her. It's now March, 26, and for the last couple months, I've been emailing back and forth with Misty trying to coordinate a time for us to meet in person. When we get a hold of Angel's youngest sister, Debbie, she is eager to speak with us right away. She brings albums full of family photos.

We spread them out and go through them together while Debbie talks about the girls growing up in Hawthorne out in the country southeast of Gainesville, where Fred and Susie have stayed all these years. I have pictures of, like, her Christianing at church. In this picture, she had to be a teenager. It says February 97. I love this picture.

This is when my mom, angel, I think my dad, dad, and I think there was other people, they all had like a date. They all went to the movies and seen the three musketeers together when it first came out. Oh, wow. They kept the ticket stub. That's so cute. I used to do that from time to time. Though there are family resemblances, Debbie doesn't look much like Angel.

She is tall, though not as tall as Angel was. And her hair is dark and curly, very different from Angel's sandy blonde straight. But they both have the same sweet smile. There are so many photos. It's nice going through them with her. Debbie seems almost like she's reliving these captured moments as she pulls each one out. You have a favorite one? Now she brings out two photos of Angel,

snapshots like the ones you get in a photo booth. They are close-ups of her face. Her sandy blonde hair is down, falls just to her shoulders. One section brushes her cheeks. She's looking up at the camera ever so slightly, smiling, a little like she has a secret. I keep these two on my fridge. These were the most recent ones I had of her, and it's what I remember. Debbie shares with us that there was always a lot of love in the family,

but that things weren't always easy or straightforward. She tells us how navigating difficult times for her often meant leaning on Angel. Some of her favorite memories of Angel live in these difficult moments. She tells us a story of seeing Angel unexpectedly at a time when Debbie was feeling pretty down. Back then, you could just walk into a school. One of my favorite stories.

We were at lunch, and there was a big room, and I'm on the opposite side of the room. You know, you have all the lunch or the benches where people sit, and on the side is the walkway. and I see Angel turn the corner and it was the first time I'd seen her in years and it was like one of those movie moments where you know we just

we run to each other and we grasp each other you know it almost felt like you know she lifted me up maybe she did I don't know I was real skinny but we just held on to each other for so long and I just cried and it made a scene in the school too that was Hawthorne High School

And, like, everyone stops what they're doing to, like, stare at us and look at us. But it was a great moment. Like, I was always closest with her. Debbie idolized Angel growing up. Angel was such a good big sister. She kind of had, like, the mom type, you know. She cooked, she clean. She took care of us.

When we were in trouble, she would try to make it less. Like, whether that be her lying for us or taking the blame or changing the blame or changed the story, so it was a little different, so we went and get in as much trouble. The way Debbie looked up to Angel had a lot to do with how her big sister protected her, of course. But there was more than that. Angel was smart. She was musical. She was athletic. Things anyone would admire and seek to emulate in an older sibling. She did track and fill. She did flag with the band. So when the marching band would march in parades or whatever at games, she would be.

be up front with the flag line, twirling the flag and stuff like that. She also did band for a few years where she played the trumpets. And she wasn't the best at that, but she was good. You know, she got pretty good at it. As an adult and a mother now herself, Debbie thinks about the freedom they had as kids, how in some ways it may have been too much freedom for their age. We had a lot of freedom. We probably have way too much.

much freedom than what we should have had, and we were terrorizing our neighborhood. We weren't the best kids growing up. We also were the poor kids in the neighborhood. We lived in a very suburban middle-class neighborhood. Everyone has nice houses, but then you had our little trailer who was run down and stuff. So we were the outcasts of our neighborhood.

But that being said, all the kids would come to our house to do things they weren't allowed to do, or like to see movies they weren't allowed to, see or whatever. And Angel, she kind of was like an authority figure for basically a lot of the kids in the neighborhood because she was the oldest.

As they grew up, Angel continued to play a sort of parental role in Debbie's life. The last time I remember physically being with her, she was, I think, her and her boyfriend lived at that. Trailer Park on Walter Road. I don't even remember what my issue was, but I was crying, and I was in such a bad, horrible mood. And, you know, she's like, come to me, come on, come over here. And so I drove to her place, and, you know, she just comforts me.

You know, she hugs me, and we talk and just hang out, and she made me feel so much better. I stayed with her that night. Debbie shares with us the pain in seeing Angel fall into trouble with addiction, watching that spiral into sex work for survival. But that does seem like the smallest part of what she knows and shares with us about Angel, as it should be. Those details may make up a big part of her murder, but they are far outweighed by her love and devotion as a sister and friend

and her value as a human being. And that is evident in the way Debbie remembers her. When Angel is killed, Debbie is in jail on charges of petty theft and possession of cannabis and drug paraphernalia, her one and only time ever finding herself on the wrong side of the law. But it was the worst possible time. I don't remember if one of the guards came and physically told me they had to it. It was either on the intercon, on the loudspeaker, or they came to the door. And I learned I had a visit.

And I'm like, well, I'm getting so happy because, like, I have to. have a visit for the first time. I don't give visits. What? And then I go and I sit at the monitor because it's not in person visits or through the glass. It's through a monitor, a TV monitor or a computer monitor. And you sit on this metal stool in front of this monitor. And the monitor is behind a thick plexiglass. So it's not, you don't see real well. You can see, but it's like really bad, not good, not defined. So I'm sitting there and waiting. It's a lot. I'm sitting there. I'm a black screen. And then all of a sudden, you know, the image pops up and it's my mom and my dad. And I'm really happy. I'm smiles, right? But I can see, I can see their face and I could tell

something's wrong. And I don't remember, I think they just went into it. I don't even think there was small talk. But I remember they said, your sister's dead. And I just, I just, fell out. Like, I didn't literally fall on the ground, but the top half of me fell out. And I'm just bawling. It just, it didn't even like, immediately I started bawling. It wasn't even like a second to think about it. I just started bawling uncontrollably, which actually surprised me. And they can't see me at all anymore because the video camera for the monitor is on top. And I'm like down here and I'm crying for like a few, it had to be a long time because at this point, and it's early, early in the morning too. So most of my dorm is asleep and it is an open dorm. So you have a

whole bunch of women in one room with a bunch of bunks. So now like people are waking up and like apparently I'm loud, you know, and I'm making a scene just from crying and stuff and like people are coming up to me and like patting me on the back and asking me what's happening and I think they actually picked up the phone to talk to my mom to figure out why I was like this. And that's really the gist of what I remember. I just remember crying and crying. And, you know, them telling me they don't know who did it, that she was found in some bushes. My parents waited so late to tell me about the service that I could not get a furlough.

It sucks when you can't get out. to say your goodbyes or to wrap it up. I never got to agree properly over it. I never got to see her. You know, by the time I came home, her ass just was in a box over the fireplace. I miss her a lot. I don't think anyone has came into my life

that's ever made me feel loved like that. Debbie's unimaginable pain when she speaks about Angel is so clear. She will never fully get over this, never be able to let it go. But we are not going to let it go either. In order to start putting the puzzle pieces together, Courtney and I want to go back to the very beginning. We need to visit the scene of Angel's murder.

I cannot overstate the importance of walking through a crime scene in person to fully understand what happened. And what was possibly in the mind of the killer. during the act. Courtney and I make plans to meet at the Sun Center with the person most knowledgeable on this case, lead detective Benny Smith. Having served with GPD for decades, Benny Smith is now an investigator with the state attorney's office, but he's eager to do whatever can be done to move Angel's case forward and has set aside time from his day to meet with us and walk through the crime scene. When Courtney and I arrive at 235 South Main Street, Benny's already there. As soon as he's

out of the car, we jump into the events of June 25, 2011, from his perspective. That night, I was called at home, and I responded and met with the lieutenant on scene, and he took me over to where Angel was found. If we walk over here, there was a big bush that was here before. This might be the baby bush that used to be the big bush. Benny is looking up at the brick building we're all standing next to. It's the south side of the sun center. Today, just a few short bushes are scattered around the edges of this side of the building. But in 2011, they were more like hedges, easily five feet at their highest point.

She was laying here. She was nude from the waist down. Her kind of a dress-like thing was up, hiked above her waist. And she was bloody, and she was laying on her back, obviously deceased. She had blood on her torso in her hands and those kind of things. So, of course, forensics was called out. They brought two people, and they started doing all the typical forensic things. The crime scene texts that night collected blood, clothes, jewelry, a scrunchy, trash, wood chips, branches,

a palm print off the glass and a window above Angel's body. Every individual item in her purse, they were incredibly thorough. They photographed the scene. They located some items that never really tied to her. There was, I think, a soda can and some other items. I know there was a lighter found under. Her fingernails were scraped. Her body was printed and swabbed.

But unfortunately, nothing of value was identified. No latent prints, no DNA, nothing to point to a suspect. Going forward with a lot that they had collected, I was really surprised that there was no foreign DNA owner. And I'm still surprised that's just unheard of, you know, there not to be some foreign DNA when you have a physical confrontation of that, you know, level of violence. The blunt force had trauma and the asphyxiation, however, either of these was accomplished, it would have involved a great deal of close-up violence,

the killer's hands on the victim in numerous places. How could the attacker leave absolutely no trace behind? Fingerprints could be explained away by supposing that he wore gloves, but with no other DNA transfer, no blood or sweat of his own, no hairs or fibers, we can only speculate that something must exist, but that the technology in 2011 just couldn't pick it up. Ideally, this will be something we can examine with evolving technology,

in the present day with our current investigation. With no clear forensics to go on, Benny tells us that their next steps were to canvas the area and try to speak with people. This includes the men who found Angel, who they are able to quickly rule out as suspects. No other pertinent information seems to come from these conversations either. Benny's investigative team looks toward their next task,

collecting surveillance footage. Nest and ring cameras aren't popularized at this time, so our every move wasn't being captured on some sort of camera from somewhere. But by 2011, many of the businesses and buildings in and around the Sun Center do have security cameras of some sort. So detectives and uniformed officers went door to door, asking for any and all surveillance footage that might exist. When they retrieved the various videos that did exist,

they then spent hours reviewing every minute of it to see if any of the footage could help tell the story of what happened to Angel. In the collective hours upon hours of footage, two very short clips totaling just shy of a minute of potentially useful video are found. The detectives then started reviewing those videos. And while we're viewing those videos, there was a video from the northwest corner of this building here. The first video scene is captured at approximately 3.14 a.m. on the morning of June 25, 2011. The quality is poor, grainy, and from so high up on the building that we can make out only the most basic descriptors.

It's a man and a woman. The woman is wearing a dress. the man is in shorts and a tank top, and they do seem to be walking together deliberately. It captured two people. We knew Angel well enough to recognize her. She had a very distinct wall. Almost like a little bounding. Yeah, kind of a bounding, loping kind of thing.

And you could tell it was her, and we're like, there she is, you know. And then there was an African-American male walking a few steps behind her, and he's just following her. And there was nothing about the way they were walking that made us think that he was forcing her or it wasn't consensual or anything along his lines. The African-American male that was following her,

we could tell he had a tank top, like the old-fashioned tank tops, and I think he had shorts. The tank top that Benny is describing is often referred to as a wife beater, a white sleeveless-ribbed shirt. The shorts are long, knee-length. While scanning through the footage

from a few different security cameras around the Sun Center, detectives come across another key moment. It's in the footage at 3.14 a.m. when the detectives see, who they believe to be Angel being followed across the parking lot. At 3.34 a.m., there is a second bit of footage from a different building on the other side of the parking lot.

lot, a completely different angle that captures what appears to be the same man again. Only this time, there's no angel. We have the mail only leaving out the east side of the parking lot and then going south. As the man comes into view, we can see him cross that side of the lot beside the sun center. In one little area around a cluster of palms, we see him stop. He appears to bend down, but it's impossible to know if he's putting something down, picking something up, or adjusting something on himself. He stands up straight again and walks off toward the neighborhood behind the center.

At no point in all of this does he seem to move with any urgency. It hardly seems like it could be someone fleeing from the scene of a brutal homicide. The footage doesn't show a clear suspect, but it is helpful nonetheless. Benny Smith was given an exact timeline, something he might not have otherwise been able to get, and a pinpointed time of the crime can be incredibly useful down the line. The theory is kind of, it probably was consensual until it got back behind this bush. Until it wasn't. And then whatever happened happened.

And then she was violently murdered. You've got a 20-minute window when it happened. So we know pretty much when she died. is that 20 minutes. I mean, it's very isolated and very limited time frame. I don't think any doubt in anybody's mind, the person that followed her in and then came out is the person that did it.

Courtney and I have our work cut out for us. There is evidence to be retested. There are witnesses to talk to again. And above all, we need to identify the man in these video clips. But before any of that, we need to talk to Debbie again. Having been in jail at the time of Angel's murder, much of what Debbie's learned about her sister's death since has been a terrible game of telephone over the years.

That means she really has no idea what happened. Every story in the paper is a little different. Every rumor that makes its way back to her or her parents has something salacious or twisted added to it. So even before sitting down with us, Debbie sent a text message with questions pertaining to the investigative information. It's important for Courtney and me to give her any intel that we can in a way that can actually help ease her mind by having the truth, even if that truth is terrible. I do think, based on your text, bad information gets into the water and then it gets accepted as fact.

And then it gets passed around, almost like a game of telephone, you know? And so at this point right now, I kind of feel like you're our primary contact for the family. And I want to make sure that you have as much information as is necessary and is healthy for you. I don't want to go overboard because I think it's important for you to like your memories of Angel to be what they are and not be tainted. You know, it can be worse than the things I've thought about over the years. Yeah. You know, because this whole time I believe that she was literally beat to death with somebody's hands, you know. and then discarded in bushes.

I've thought a lot about it and how it would have happened and I just couldn't wrap my head around. And now even recently, that makes me think worse. Debbie's audio drops out right as she says the word strangulation. Debbie tells us that a friend of hers recently pulled up an article online that said strangulation. Knowing that's not what's actually in the report, Courtney and I give her info she's never had before.

The real info from the scene and from the autopsy report, which says asphyxiation, not strangulation. What the autopsy report says is asphyxation. It simply means there was no oxygen, like she couldn't breathe. It could be like something like a bag. It could also be like a chokehold, essentially, where you... You see, they call it this like a sleeper hole. Oh, I've been in one.

Yeah, it's been. Basically, you're cutting off blood and oxygen to the brain versus crushing a windpipe necessarily. So it's a small distinction between... Was her windpipe crushed? No. No. And her hyoid was not broken. So she was not manually strangled in the way that you're thinking.

I don't know how much comfort this is. There's no way to necessarily prove it. It's very likely that she lost consciousness very quickly. For the next hour, Courtney and I try to answer any more questions Debbie has. and ask some of our own. Did they go to her campsite? Because I was told at the time she was living at Cincinnati, right? Yeah, they did.

They went over and camped over there. And I think she was dating Ballhead? I don't know. She was dating Cowboy at the time. Baldhead, Cowboy, these are nicknames we will bring up and explain again later. For now, Debbie doesn't know really much of anything about either of them. Was there like a rape kit or whatever? You call those, was she?

So they can't determine whether or not there was consensual sex or even non-consensual sex. There was no DNA. So if there was consensual or non-consensual sex, it's very likely that the offender wore a condom. There's nothing that indicates a violent rape. But you could tell that she had sex? No, you can't actually tell. We have no way of knowing because there wasn't like what we would think of as like tearing or a brain. and stuff like that.

Courtney and I share details with Debbie that we know we can state as fact. We start with the two surveillance video clips that were captured from what is presumed to be the last time Angel is seen alive in the early morning hours of June 25, 2011. So what we know is that there is some extremely grainy, like bad quality security camera footage and it is definitely not enough to make out any details but you can see that it's angel and you can see that it is

likely a black male who is taller than she is. She was quite, she's like 5-8? Yeah, I believe so. Pretty tall. She might have been 5'9. Yeah, she looks really tall in pictures. Yeah, she's tall. Basically they cut across a parking lot in the sun center and it was

in these bushes back here where it appears that both the act happened and she was left. a different security camera. It's like in the building behind the SunCenter, looking down. You can actually see what we presume as the offender come away from the SunCenter building.

They're in like the same type of clothes or stuff? We're in the same thing, yeah. You see his face or it's too greeny? Not even close. Debbie is incredibly strong, hearing all this and staying focused on what the next steps are for the investigation. though she does express her disappointment

that her sister's case remains open to this day. When I see all this true crime and I'm seeing cases get closed with like nothing and then I think about my sister and all the time that's passed, I think the same thing like, why ain't this done or why ain't something happened? I tell Debbie what I tell every loved one when I take on a case. And I'm sure I can speak for Courtney in this moment too. We can't make any problem. to her about a solve. But we can promise that we will stay with the case however long it takes.

We will do everything in our power to get answers, to bring some measure of peace to Debbie and her family. While we are going over the case with Debbie, her dad, Fred, calls. We urge her to take the call because her mom has been in the hospital for weeks, but she says she wants to finish this. She'll go to the hospital to see them both when we're done talking this morning. Debbie's, Misties, and Angel's mom, Susie, passes away later that day. It now seems we owe Angel's family answers more than ever.

Coming up this season on who killed Angel Harris. I know who that is, but I don't know who it is by name. I said, I've seen him several times. because I said he's dressed the same. I still worked in that area, and I talked to a lot of the girls. They came to me to talk to me, and they had different theories on different people

who might have been involved or who was seen that night or what they thought they saw. I do know that one of my girls had a very, very similar encounter. I remember him being very confident, just so confident that he wasn't going to get caught with any of this.

I identified him as the guy that attacked me. Soon after her body was found, on October 18th near the 500 flock of Waldo Road, police announced Lisa LaVois was a murder victim. I remember I was in here working, and so I pulled up another case, and when I looked at the pictures, I just went, holy shit.

We see that same thing that we see in Erlene's scene, that we see in Shelley's scene, and that we kind of see an angel scene. Looking at this case, more likely than not, this is a serial killer. It wouldn't surprise me if this was one person, was one person that did all these crimes. Who Killed Angel Harris is produced by Arc Media for ID.

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