Witnessed: Fade to Black - What Happened to the Harrisons? | 7. Karma is a Lie

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

With the killers convicted, the Harrisons expect answers. How the hell did three people die before this killing spree ended? Before the family can catch their breath, they get awful news. 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

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My name is Elizabeth Gallant. I am Bill Harrison's sister, sister-in-law to his wife, Bridget, and aunt to their son Caleb Harrison. Liz is at a podium in a public hearing room. In front of her, around a U-shaped table, are a dozen or so members of the Peel Police Service Board, the civilian body that oversees the police.

It's a few months after Melissa and Chris went to prison, and Liz has come to call the police out. publicly. We now want to know what happened, what went wrong. Why did these death investigations fail our family? By now, Liz and her family know that the first two deaths were not properly investigated. They believe that if they had been,

Caleb and maybe even Bridget would still be alive. What needs to be fixed? So no other family has to endure what we've been through. During the third homicide investigation, senior police officers promised the family that once the criminal case was over, there would be a full accounting of what went wrong. Liz thought they would finally get answers.

Instead, the family would have to fight for them. They asked for an independent review. someone from outside the police force to examine what happened. But they were told the Peel Police would review its own work, and the report would not be made public. We cannot accept that such a secretive review process will ensure accountability. Why should we, in fact, anyone put its faith in an in-house review conducted by fellow police officers when the Peel police failed us.

so badly. The question Liz was asking, how did this happen, was never really answered at trial. But there was one surprising moment in court when Liz got to hear a police officer acknowledge the failings. The officer was Detective Phil King,

the guy who got Chris to confess. Halfway through the interrogation, the detective and Chris got into an argument about whether Bridget's death was an accident. or a homicide. Chris said he thought it was only a suspicious death. That's how he has, it's only a suspicious death, right? No, it's a murder.

Rule the murder. And then, of all people, Chris was the one to put the important accountability question to the police officer. So how come they didn't investigate further? The coroner ruled this when they did the autopsy. They said, we got some real problems with this. Okay, please, you need to go back and look at this. You need to keep working.

Okay, I did that? Not well enough. I'll take that. We didn't do a good enough job. We did not do the nth degree on this that we should have done. This was a rare moment of admission, but he never said what they missed. It would take much longer to figure out how the police bungled the first two death investigations. Unanswered questions have always driven me crazy.

It's why I became a journalist. After the trial, I spent months digging up records, filing freedom of information requests, and working police sources. I spent so much time scanning documents at the courthouse that I pulled a muscle in my neck. I even took a university course in forensic pathology to better understand the evidence.

I got some answers. Many of them you've already heard. in this podcast. But each finding led to more questions. And as months passed, it became clear the authorities weren't going to give the Harrisons the full story without a fight. And it isn't over yet. It isn't over yet. Lord. The trial was over. But for the Harrisons and for me, the search for answers was just beginning. For Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrisons.

I'm Amy Dempsey Raven. This is the finale. Episode 7, Karma is a lie. I was at the board meeting the day Liz called the police out for their failures. The Peel Police Chief Jennifer Evans was there too. She promised the family they would get the answers they were seeking. And she apologized. Sort of. Chief Evans had been ducking my questions for weeks, but after the meeting, she agreed to speak with me. We met in the hallway. The first thing I wanted to do

was clarify the apology. What were you apologizing for? I'm apologizing for the fact that they feel that they can't trust me, that the way we've been communicating this has not been the way I wished it to be. And I was very sorry for the loss. I mean, these are tragic events in a say, and I know when police officers go into investigation, all we want to do is find out the truth as to what happened. Was any of that apology for mistakes made?

Right now, we're going to, I want to wait to see the results of the review. And if we made mistakes, I'll be the one who gets out and speaks. If we made mistakes, A police officer had already admitted to the killer that the force had messed up, but the chief wouldn't say it to the family. I never spoke to Evans again.

The police did end up making the review public, but by the time it was published, she had stepped down. The report fell far short of a full accounting. Its main conclusion was that officers had been wrong to rule out foul play in Bridget's death. To me, this seemed beyond obvious. The review felt like a slap in the face to Wanda Jameson, the family friend leading the Harrison's push for justice. It raises many more questions that it answered. It was incomplete. It was

rushed, had factual inaccuracies. It didn't even attempt to answer, some of the most important questions, like why didn't the Homicide Bureau take over Bridget's death investigation? Who made that decision and why? On top of that, the report went out of its way to point out moments after Bill and Bridget's deaths

when the Harrisons didn't voice their suspicion to investigators. I am just really quite angry about that line from the police. They just didn't do their job. they tried to put it on the family. Former prosecutor Steve Sheriff also found major flaws with the report. This is the worst investigative mess in a homicide case I've ever encountered. That's why it burns me.

To this day, Sheriff gets worked up when he talks about this case. This has always bothered me, okay? Deeply bothered me. Why? Because there didn't need to be more murders, right? That was my job was to prevent murder, not just to do it when it's too late. So I regret it. Yeah, I regret it. The coroner's office had its own internal review.

Afterward, the chief coroner, Dr. Durkeyer, promised the Harrison's an inquest. An inquest would be a big deal. It's a public hearing. Witnesses can be compelled to testify under oath. That promise was made seven years ago, and the inquest still hasn't happened. It's been stalled by criminal appeals and a massive case backlog. For the Harrisons, an inquest matters because it could do what other reviews did not. It could put police, coroners, and pathologists in the same room

and make them explain what went wrong, in public. Sheriff wants an inquest too. If you're going to get better, if you're going to do better, you've got to be able to invent mistakes. I see some systemic themes here, which convinced me that this could happen again. In his view, the mistakes in this case come from three main problems. First, a drain of experience in the Peel Police Homicide Bureau. The Homicide Squad was a shadow of its former self. it had been gutted.

Second, there were major communication problems between the police and the coroner's office. People holding different pieces of the puzzle were not putting them together. And third, in sheriff's view, the forensic pathologists presented their findings to police way too cautiously.

He sees this as an aftershock of the gouge inquiry, the public probe that reviewed the work of the disgraced people psychiatric forensic pathologist Charles Smith. In my view, this was an overcorrection. Charles Smith was a one-off. It was disgraceful.

But it doesn't mean that you abandon common sense. I often wonder about the mark a case like this leaves on the investigators. There's a line from the Peel Police Review that I think about a lot. At no time does a police officer wish to be involved in an investigation that fails to uncover the truth. I wanted to speak with the police officers who were involved, to ask them what they would do differently now. But the Peel Police Force declined my request.

So instead, I went looking for retired officers who would talk. Earlier this year, I found myself driving to meet Steve Dolan, a former Peel police officer, at his home north of Toronto, on a half-frozen lake, surrounded by swans. I was hoping he could give me some insight on who dropped the ball on Bridget's death investigation. It was minus 25 with the wind chill, well into the frostbite danger zone.

We went inside and sat in his much warmer living room. Dolan has been retired for a decade now, but he got excited when we started talking about law enforcement. I could tell the job was in his blood. You got to treat everything suspicious as police. We don't really believe in coincidences. You're not supposed to. As an inspector, Dolan oversaw all criminal investigations for 11 division,

the local detachment that investigated Bridget's death. He said soon after her body was found, one of his sergeants came to him and said, this is a homicide. This sergeant had investigated. the abduction of Caleb's kids. He knew the family history, the custody battle. And he believed Bridget had been murdered.

So Dolan asked the Homicide Bureau to take over the investigation. Remember, for suspicious deaths, the Homicide Bureau had discretion. They could take the case or leave it with Dolan's team at the local division. We thought the homicide should invoke their mandate. Because it's beyond our capabilities to investigate it, budget-wise, experience-wise. Dolan said the answer he got back was no. He was angry. There's no crime in the world more heinous or horrendous than a homicide.

And you have to have to have to have the best of the best investigating that. He told me he pushed back. He called a superior and said, Some evil thing happened here. Invoke your mandate, investigate it. It's not a coincidence, and it stinks to high heaven. Investigate it. And the answer you got back was?

No. And was there a reason given? No. They don't give reasons. There's some people back then who don't care if it was a homicide or not. They just wanted to go away. Police sources had done. told me before that this case became a sort of hot potato.

But this was the first time someone said it on the record. It was haunting to hear that there were people inside the police force, pushing to have Bridget's death treated as a homicide back in 2010. And it wasn't. Dolan is still troubled by the way his police force handled the case and his own role in it. He said no one told him they, were closing the investigation, and he doesn't know why it stopped. I wish I could have done more.

I wish I broke all the rules and went in a rampage, but I wouldn't have accomplished anything because you have to backing. Not one of our finest investigative moments. We can only apologize. It's sad. And hopefully they learned from it. This was the first real apology I'd heard from a police officer in this case. Sometimes people just want to hear, I'm sorry we didn't do our job.

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of the Independent Police Review Director, or OIPRD. The investigation was limited. It didn't look at the bigger systemic issues, only individual officer conduct. And the report wasn't public, but I have a copy. The Watchdog report weighed in on one of the central questions in the case. Did the pathologists bungle the investigation by failing to make clear to police that Bridget may have been murdered?

Or did the police just not get it? The watchdog report found the police more at fault. It said officers ignored the clear message that an accidental death was the less likely explanation. One reason the police may have missed that message? The report found that none of the officers' response for the investigation, read Bridget's final autopsy report before closing the case. Mark Mendelson, the former homicide cop you heard from earlier in the series, found this astounding.

How can you not read the post-mortar report? That is a key piece of evidence in your investigation and in any future prosecution. The watchdog report found that the police officers investigating Bridget's death developed reverse tunnel vision. They locked on to the idea that there was no foul play and would not be led away from that conclusion. Remember Detective Greg Amaroso, the officer in charge? The watchdog report found that while he initially took the proper investigative steps,

he appeared to have washed his hands of the case just a couple weeks in after he got a new assignment and that he failed to follow up on issues raised by the coroner's office. It also found that Amoroso had few records related to the case because he deleted 20,000 emails in a purge.

The police watchdog found that Amoroso and another detective, Sean Brennan, the guy who monitored the case for the Homicide Bureau, had committed misconduct. Afterward, the new Peel Police Chief had the power to call a full public disciplinary hearing, but he chose not to. Instead, the two officers admitted to neglect of duty and accepted a punishment.

Amoroso forfeited seven days off. Brennan lost one. To the Harrison family, the outcome was an insult. Two police officers got a slap on the wrist. and the larger institutional failures escaped scrutiny. Here's Wanda again. I think that everyone has a simmering anger. I don't think that simmering anger will ever go away for any of us.

It's always there. We realize it's a difficult job being a police officer, and these were complex cases, but that doesn't get you off the whole. hook. I wanted to speak with the two officers about all of this. Detective Brennan declined my interview request. When I first called Amaroso, he seemed interested in doing an interview. He told me there was more to the story and said higher-ups were passing the hot potato.

He hinted that he'd been the fall guy. After speaking with his lawyer, Amoroso said no to a recorded interview. but I heard from him again recently after I sent questions about the watchdog report. He disputed many of the report's conclusions about him and told me that he only accepted the punishment because he wanted to move on, not because he agreed with the misconduct finding.

From his perspective, the investigation failed because homicide refused to take the case, not because of his actions. I asked the Peel Police Service for interviews with the officers involved in the case and with the chief, and I sent them a long list of questions. They didn't respond.

Another person I wanted to speak with about Bridget's death investigation was Dr. Michael Pickup, the forensic pathologist who did her autopsy. He said no to a formal interview because of the pending inquest, the one everyone's been waiting for for seven years. But I did speak with Dr. Pickup

briefly on the record. He told me he believes he was clear with police about the evidence of homicide. But even so, he said he'd do things differently today. He would state more plainly to police that he was leaning toward homicide. The retired pathologist who did Bill's autopsy, Dr. Timothy Feltis, was willing to talk. Dr. Feltis warned me there's a lot he doesn't. He doesn't, remember. But he was adamant about one thing. I was not informed of all the circumstances at the time that the autopsy was done. I didn't know anything about the problem with the grandchildren. Dr. Feltes told me that if the police had hinted there was anything strange about the case

at all, he might have said, hold on here. Could someone have struck this man in the chest? Things would have been different if we had all the information up front. That's all it would have taken for him to view the case in a completely different light, and to take further action. Over the years, I'd heard versions of the same argument that Bridget's death was the obvious failure, and missing Bill's homicide was more understandable. After all these years deep into this case, I don't entirely buy that. Yes, Bridget's death was the more egregious failure,

but my reporting found there were many missed opportunities for Bill's death to be recognized as suspicious. The police watchdog group looked into Bill's death too and found that the investigation collapsed because of several small failures that occurred at the same time. The worst failure, I think, is that after the autopsy report was released, police officers failed to follow up on the broken breastbone. So the mystery of this astonishing injury was ignored for years. Here's what bothers me most. Liz knows her brother was murdered, deep in her core.

But for years, she has had to hear people. people question it. That would drive me crazy. And Liz just has to live with it. In light of what Dr. Feltis now knows, he believes Bill was probably murdered. Sheriff agrees. The chances of the first guy be in an accident with the kids being abducted the same day. And the last two being murder, I'd write that off as silly. learned while reporting this podcast that there's someone else who has an opinion on how Bill died. Someone whose take, I never thought I'd hear. Not everyone sees Melissa the way the Harrisons do.

There are people in her life who believe Chris was the killer, and Melissa got caught in the fallout. I don't believe she had anything to do with the planning of these deaths. I know that she would do anything to protect her kids. I know that, but I've never seen her as someone that would do something like that. That's Matthew Groves again, Melissa's high school boyfriend. He believes Melissa didn't know what Chris had done until after Caleb was dead. I totally understand her playing along at that point, because, I mean, this is her whole family now, is on the line. I could be wrong.

A couple of things shaped Matthew's view. First, his parents went to nearly every day of Melissa's trial. They adored her and reconnected after her arrest. Matthew's parents believe Melissa was wrongly convicted. After Melissa was arrested, she wrote Matthew a letter. At first, he ignored it. But eventually they started writing and talking on the phone. phone. Then Matthew visited her behind bars and heard Melissa's side of the story from her.

She explained as much of it as she could to me at the time. Here's something else that I don't know if you know, is that while she was incarcerated, I mean, she and I were essentially back together for a little while. Whoa, Matthew. No, I did not know that. She was explaining how some of the sneaky things that Chris Fetor had done on those nights where the murders had happened. Jail phone calls and letters are monitored, so Matthew said Melissa had to be careful what she said. But they still talked about the case. She swore that she had nothing to do with the planning of it. She subtly acknowledged realizing that Chris had done this after the fact and was kind of like in a situation.

where that's her man and the father of her kids and, you know, what is she going to do? Matthew agreed to speak with me because he believes Melissa isn't the monster she's been made out to be. Completely unfair, in my opinion. He worried about seeming like a fool that people would think,

what kind of person dates someone in prison on murder charges? But I understood why he felt the way he did. He came across as an honest guy, grappling with complicated feelings about his first love. Matthew told me a couple of things that blew my mind. There had always been suspicions that the fire at Melissa and Chris's farmhouse had been deliberately set.

But no proof. Matthew said he spoke to Melissa about the fire. She had told me that he confessed to her in a letter that he actually set the fire to claim the insurance money. Matthew said Melissa told him Chris burnt the house down. This is all secondhand. I don't know any of this as fact. I tried to ask Chris and Melissa about this, but they didn't respond.

One thing that made Matthew think Melissa was innocent was how frankly she spoke about her dislike of the Harrisons. I'm not going to circle. She was not a fan of them at all. She didn't have anything good to say about them. Matthew said Melissa told him about her reaction to Bridget's death. I hate to say, kind of he laid it over the news, and it was like a major problem in her life was gone.

Now that's cold. That's a very cold way to react to news like that, even if you don't like somebody. But that's what she told me. He said she even told him what she thought about Bill's death. She does think that Chris killed Bill. She thinks Chris killed, it's pretty sure, like Chris killed all three of them. That's what Matthew remembers Melissa telling him, that she believes Chris killed the whole family,

but she didn't know anything about it until after Caleb's death. Again, I'd really like to talk to Chris about this, but he said no to an interview. I did visit him in prison after the trial in 2018, and we talked about Bill then. I sat across from Chris in one of those booths with a plexiglass wall and a telephone. I asked him about Bill, and Chris again denied killing him. He said, I don't know how Bill died, but I had nothing to do with it. Chris had a tattoo of a wedding band on his ring finger, and another on his left forearm that said, love always and forever, Melissa, in her handwriting. I asked if he and Melissa were still a couple.

He said he wasn't sure. Their lawyers had advised them not to talk, but he spoke about her like a guy who was still in love. And so did Matthew. Matthew and Melissa parted ways several years ago, not on good terms for reasons he said he didn't want to get into. But he hasn't changed his mind. To Matthew, Melissa isn't the mastermind she's been made out to be.

I can't rule out the possibility that I'm wrong. I don't know if there's anybody in the world that absolutely 100% knows the truth outside of her and him. I don't know if anybody ever will. Even though he and Melissa no longer speak, a part of him still loves her. I always will, and I wish her well, and I'm happy that she's out. That's right Melissa Merritt is out of prison

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Paul Greengrass, who wrote and directed that very same movie. So do not miss it. a second, it's going to be fabulous. In January 2023, five years after Melissa was convicted of first-degree murder, I got a text message from a source. It said, looks like Melissa Merritt is getting a new trial. This was a bombshell. The Ontario Court of Appeal had overturned Melissa's verdict in a unanimous decision. The court found that the trial judge made two errors in his instructions to the jury. Remember the 400-page document it took four days to get through in court? Two mistakes in that giant tome and the trial went out the window. Just for Melissa, though, Chris's verdicts were

upheld. The most serious mistake involved that infamous airport wiretap statement. They think, or I think, the audio tapes would have fucked us anyways. The Crown had treated that statement as an admission of guilt, but the appeal court said the judge should have told the jury that if they couldn't figure out the meaning of the whole statement, including the missing words, they couldn't use it against her. The appeal court found that a properly instructed jury could have been left with a reasonable doubt about Melissa's guilt. But to many, especially the Harrison family, the outcomes seemed outrageous, like Melissa had gotten off on a technicality. Here's Doug.

When the appeal was granted, they just ripped the stab off everything. When the family first heard she'd won, they were so caught. off guard that Wanda had to scramble to figure out what it all meant. Was Melissa getting out of jail now? It was very upsetting. Like, do we have to start, you know, locking our doors triply as of, you know, four o'clock today? Nobody knew really what the situation was going to be. Melissa stayed in jail. She would be tried again for two counts of first-degree murder. But soon after, she got a bail hearing, the chance to be free while awaiting a new trial. I was in court for the bail ruling.

Six years had passed since the trial, and we'd all been through a pandemic. Everyone seemed to have gone gray. Some of the lawyers had been on this case for 10 years. By now, I had three children, and I lived in a different city. Melissa had changed too. She was married, but not to Chris. In 2018, shortly after the trial, Melissa wed a jail guard. A woman named Sheena, who'd been working as a correctional officer at the women's prison while Melissa was an inmate there.

Melissa's lawyer, Joel Hector, argued that the Crown had been overstating its case against Melissa for years. He seemed to think there was no prospect of a conviction in the second trial and said Melissa should be granted bail. Melissa's parents were her proposed sureties, the people who put money up and supervise her on bail. The parents' testimony hinted at what they believed about the charges against her, that Chris was the bad guy, not Melissa. Without him around, they said, Melissa would follow her bail conditions. As Justice Jennifer Wolcombe took the bench, it became clear she did not buy that argument.

She delivered a searing ruling. Here's a friend of the show reading for the judge. I find it very difficult to accept that all of the applicant's poor choices and breaches of court orders in the past were because of Mr. Frateri's influence. I say that because they seem to have been motivated to advance her interests. While Mr. Fetori is without a doubt, the person who physically murdered Bridget and Caleb,

he stood to gain much less from these homicides than she did. The judge also tore into Melissa's father, Mike Merritt, the retired police officer. She found that he lied under oath and couldn't be trusted as a surety. Melissa did not get bail. The ruling gave some hope to Doug and Liz and their families. If the defense planned to argue at trial that Chris was the killer and Melissa did nothing wrong, maybe this was a sign it wouldn't work. But that's not what happened.

In Melissa's second trial in 2024, a jury found her not guilty of killing Bridgett, And for Caleb's death, the jury couldn't reach a verdict. There was going to be a third trial. I spoke to Doug after the verdicts. He was devastated. Bill had essentially been erased from Melissa's second trial. She wasn't charged in his death, and the details could be prejudicial to her,

so the jury wasn't allowed to hear them. In the third trial, the jury likely wouldn't hear about Bridget. It seems just horrendously wrong. My expectations are not high. This thing has been a train wreck from get-go. The case against Melissa took a big hit, and soon after, she made bail. She walked out of the courthouse with her lawyer into the sunshine of a spring day.

She was 44 years old, and for the first time in a decade, She was on the outside, reunited with her kids. Melissa's new trial was scheduled to take place a year later in March 2025, but we'd never get to it, because a few weeks before it was set to begin, Melissa cut a plea deal with the prosecution. She pled guilty to manslaughter in Caleb's death, but she only admitted to encouraging Chris,

to confront and threaten Caleb, to get him to agree to an increase in custody. Her sentence was time served. Melissa was free. For good. I've got to say, I was shocked that Melissa pled guilty to anything. I thought she'd maintain her innocence until the very end.

I wondered if Liz and Doug and the family would find it validating at all to hear Melissa finally accept some responsibility for what happened to Caleb. But they told me it didn't. Melissa had admitted to a version of events they did not believe. There was no comfort or relief in that. For some family members, the outcome meant they would spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder. It felt like Melissa had won.

Since the verdict, Wanda, the family friend who spent years in court with Liz, has pushed even harder for a coroner's inquest, and the answers the family is still waiting for. I have to do this. This is my, this is the one thing I can do to somehow support everybody and ultimately, hopefully to get some justice. Liz is in her mid-80s now. Her brother died 17 years ago.

For years, she's been saying justice is on her bucket list. She worries she won't be around to see it. I would like a coroner's inquest to happen and to happen soon. We've been promised this for years. The last time I went to see Liz at her home in Mississauga, she had a new security system installed. It made me so sad. sad to see that she lived in fear.

We sat in the dining room drinking tea, and Liz told me about the last time she saw Melissa, on the day of the sentencing hearing. Liz didn't even recognize her at first. Two women got off the elevator, talking and laughing, being a little rowdy, Liz thought. Then Liz took a closer look and realized, that's her. It just burns me that she's walking the streets and I was just so angry that she could walk into court like that.

Liz was there to read a victim impact statement. The family wrote new ones after the manslaughter conviction. Her words suddenly felt meaningless. Liz got up there anyway. She pushed her walker to the witness stand and spoke directly to Melissa. Maybe for the last time.

She read the statement to me later. What you did is unforgivable and unforgettable. Caleb's murder traumatized us all. Because of your actions, we live in fear to this day. Now I cannot trust that a stranger on my doorstep doesn't have ulterior motives. One thing I haven't told you yet is that Caleb, in his will, named a family member as the guardian of his kids, his cousin, Anna Blackwell.

After Caleb died, Anna tried to get custody. This put her in direct conflict with the Merit family. My life was drastically altered as I became an important part of his children's lives. While at the same time, I was dragged into a decades-long, acrimonious custody battle. that had escalated into the murder of at least two of my family members. Anna has been through a lot, and she didn't want to do an interview for the show, but she shared a recording of her statement with me. Over 12 years has passed since the loss of the central figures in my Harrison family, and no one's recovered.

Family traditions remain in shambles, as those of us who remain try to make a decimated family fit together. my own young children will never experience the simple joys of a Harrison family breakfast or an over-the-top Harrison Christmas, but more importantly, they will never feel the easy love and stability of a large extended family untouched by murder. In the end, Caleb's family did not get custody of the Harrison children. Melissa's family did.

But Anna did grow close with the kids after their father did. died. And now, she worried Melissa would come after her. I fear for my life. I fear that Melissa will convince her Confederates to harm me, or worse, my children, to punish me for the time that I got to spend with her children while she was behind bars. If Melissa decides it's in her own best interest, I have no doubt that she will orchestrate more harm and more violence. As Melissa left the courtroom that day after the sentencing hearing, I wondered, what would she do with her life?

Would she disappear into a quiet existence with her wife and children? Or would she have more to say? I'm Melissa, and I'm the victim of a broken justice system. I was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for 11 years. You're hearing Melissa Merritt. In 2025, from a video posted on one of her social media pages, she's sitting on a sofa with a knit blanket in her lap. I am the mom of six beautiful children. I'm home now, but I wasn't for almost a decade. Since her release, Melissa has been trying to become a social media influencer. She's posted hundreds and hundreds of selfies.

and some motivational videos and memes. She asks people to follow and subscribe to her pages and donate through PayPal if they enjoy her content. Every day has its challenges, and today is proving not to be any different. But we got out of bed, and we're ready to face the day. Last year, after she pled guilty to manslaughter, Melissa started posting about her issues with the way police and prosecutors handled her case.

She called herself a wrongfully convicted person, the victim of a broken justice system. I was sent to prison on a life sentence and I had to fight that. Acarceration doesn't only impact the incarcerated party. It impacts their entire community. friends, family, neighbors. Everyone who knows that person has to deal with the harassment, trauma, and stigma associated with the crime. For nothing. For nothing at all.

Because a mistake was made. For nothing at all. I am interested to know what mistake Melissa was talking about here. Is it what she pled guilty to? Manslaughter? In the eyes of the law, that's a serious crime, culpable homicide. The maximum sentence is life in prison.

Melissa served 11 years. Last spring, she launched a go-fund-me to raise money for a lawsuit. To ensure no one goes through the hell I did, she said. It's unclear who she wanted to sue, but it didn't go very well. I've received a total of $8 to my go-fund-me page to try to bring justice into our justice system.

I received that $8 from a 14-year-old boy. I'm going to take down my go-fummy page because it doesn't feel like people are interested in this cause. She also filed another appeal. She's challenging a legal ruling from before her plea deal, one where a judge denied her motion to throw out the prosecution's case. If she's allowed to appeal and wins, she could erase the manslaughter conviction and no longer be criminally responsible for Caleb's death.

It would restore her innocence. I wanted to hear Melissa's perspective on all of this, the custody battle, the criminal case, and her life now. I wanted to ask if she accepts any fault for what happened to the Harrisons, or if she sees herself, as a victim. I wonder what, if anything, she would do differently. But Melissa didn't want to talk. She's 46 now. She runs a business, crocheting stuffed animals and blankets.

Someone close to her told me life on the outside has been harder than Melissa expected. By the time she got out of prison, the children she had with Caleb were in their early 20s, starting their own adult lives. I don't know whether or how often she sees them. I think about Caleb's kids a lot, how they could have been raised by a big, blended family,

in separate homes by two flawed but loving parents. They could have had many more years with the incredible warmth and guidance of Bridget and Bill. Instead, they lost everything. I'm told Caleb's children are doing well, in spite of all they've been through. One day not long ago, I went for a walk on Pitch Pine Crescent to see the Harrison House again. A new family lives there now, but from the outside, it hasn't changed much. The same tidy front lawn with a big maple tree, the same tall front windows, the same stone pathway.

It was a spring morning, just like the day Bridget was killed. I thought about the story Chris told how he walked up that path in broad daylight, knocked on the door, then pushed his way inside. I thought about Bridget and the feeling she had early on that something was wrong and how in her final moments she would have known that she was right. In the early years after Caleb's death, Doug would come here sometime. I'd go by out of all times sake, just to park out front and take a look at the place and say, if all this shit hadn't happened, what would this place have been like now?

You know, Bridget and Bill were in their 80s. What a fantastic place this would have been. You know, you just, so I want to cry when I see that sort of thing. So, but compartmentalize I'm not going back. For Doug, the house didn't change all at once. The loss built over time. First, with Bill's death, that put a pall over the place. And then when Bridget died, there was no magic in the house anymore.

And then when Caleb was murdered, I mean, the neighbors started calling the house the murder house sort of deal. And that's just the way I felt in both of them too. Mostly as I stood there, I thought about what the house had been before the tragedy. A place full of warmth and light and laughter. A haven for everyone who knew and loved the Harrisons. Doug and his family spent every holiday there. He still remembers everyone gathered around the dinner table, Bill at one end smoking a cigar, Bridget at the other with a glass of red wine,

jazz playing on the stereo, everyone laughing and sharing stories. That was what the Harrisons did. They brought people together from different parts of their lives and made them feel like family. This is part of what makes their loss so hard to live with. They were the kind of people who made life better for the people. people around them. How could this happen to them? After the first trial, Caleb's cousin Anna put it in a way I've never forgotten.

She said, I'm angry that karma is a lie, that really shitty things happen to wonderful people for absolutely no justifiable reason. unlock all episodes of what happened to the Harrisons ad-free right now by subscribing to the binge podcast channel. 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.

And between drops, you've got ad-free access to crime scene, the binges weekly series, plus instant access to over 60 true crime podcasts, shows like Wild Boys, blink, and watching you. So you'll never be short on stories. 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 Coo. 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 Balance Kalasny and Ashley Ann Craigbaum. Fact-checking by Fendell Fulton.

Additional production support by Myron Kaplan. Our lawyer is Alison Sherry, voice acting from John Hasmetallie, Val McGivorin, and Virginia A special nod to Bianca Grimshaw, John O'Hion, and Wendy Gillis, whose help was invaluable. And thanks for all your support, Emily Rassick, Jamie Myers, Alison Haney, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment. 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. And finally, thank you to the Harrison, Blackwell, and Galant families for your trust and for your willingness to revisit painful memories in the hope of finding answers.

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