Murder on the Red River

48 Hours

The 48 Hours episode 'Murder on the Red River' investigates the unsolved 2002 murder of Jennifer Harris, a beloved young woman from Bonham, Texas, whose body was found six days after she vanished. Her case remains unreso

Key takeaways

Jennifer's body showed signs of violent homicide with her uterus missing

Transcript preview

What riding for justice has done is reached out to people is reached out to people that you're safe. Something has touched the people of finding county about this case. Absolutely. Everybody in this county wants to see this case. To let something like this go on this long is I'm called for it. Jennifer Harris was well loved here. That's the Jennifer Harris case, everything that's involved. This is the whole investigation right here. This is it. but that doesn't seem like a whole lot for 15 years. Well that's all we got to work with. It doesn't get any easier. There's not one day that I don't wake up and think about my sister. I wish I could only have a handful of the friends that she had. She was amazing. She was the red-haired girl who was the goofball, adorable, lovable, She smothered me with love. On Mother's Day, 2002, no different than the other day, you take the walk. Right. I saw a jeep, but I didn't think anything about it. But then when it was here the second day, you're like, why is that jeep still here? I get a phone call that her jeep had been found. What did she do leaving her jeep on the side of the road? he saw a body in the water. I remember going to the Red River, to the bridge, seeing the police officers, the sheriff. And I remember my dad being right there with him and I just let me see her, let me see her, let me see her, let me see her, let me see it. It's got, is it hers? Can't be hurt. Is it her? Whenever we move her just we move right into a boat. Is it really hurting? The body is completely naked. Not a stitch of clothing. Not a sock. The way she was disposed of like a piece of trash. She didn't deserve that. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as homicidal violence. What is that? Where is they strangled? Was they shot? She was Jennifer's murder impacted my wife and her family. You can't even put it in words. Cemetery all one. This is unlike anything that I've ever done as a filmmaker, but I thought he said it the first time we were with them. Finding the killer and actually being able to prove where's the physical evidence. Who the killer is? Let's continue with the timeline. This is much more than a passion project because this is family. We're going to follow it through and we're going to get this done. You want to know who killed Jennifer Harris? Absolutely. I'm a Texas girl. I believe in justice. Old school justice. And it's where Mark Johnson, who had just wrapped up 32 years in law enforcement, decided to ditch retirement and run for sheriff in 2016. I met Jerry Harris, the father, the young lady, on the campaign trail. And he made a promise from one father to another to continue the investigation into the murder of Jerry's oldest daughter, 28-year-old Jennifer Harris, a case unsolved for more than 15 years. When I came here January 1, I demanded that case to be brought to me. That was the first thing you did? Yes, I wanted the Jennifer Harris case. Jennifer's father, a marine and Vietnam veteran, finally, has hope. I think he's serious about trying to solve this case. This is my office. And he's not the only one. For the last eight years, Darry daughter's murder, first as a lieutenant in the Fannin County Sheriff's office, and now as a private investigator. A Marine never meets a stranger if he meets another Marine. He too was a Marine, and Parker has never charged Jerry a dime. I still have a lot of that Captain America justice kind of thing going on. I want Jerry and his family to find justice. In high school, Jennifer Harris was popular and athletic. red-haired girl, bright brown eyes, played tennis, and was a cheerleader. Jennifer's younger sister, Alyssa. She was a dreamer. She was an idealist and she knew that there was a bigger world outside of Bonham, Texas. Bonham is probably your prototypical small town, USA. Gossip is on an epic scale. When Jennifer Harris goes missing, how does that news? play in Bonham. It was a bombshell because this girl was not too far removed from high school to understand that she had been murdered. It disturbed a lot of people. She was only 28 years old. She was just beginning to come into her own right when she was murdered. The day that I came in here and looked at her case was, it opened in those boxes. I wanted to sit down at the floor and cry. That's because after more than 15 years, this is all they have to work with. And what do we have in each of these boxes? These are all, this is all documentation that's in there that, you know, when she first come up missing, poster they're looking for, newspaper articles, business records, and this is just some case reports. You can see that now this was wet. A lot of stuff got wet. They have some pods out back. They stored a lot of evidence daily. And a lot of stuff got wet. You can't. destroy it. The file was very light. The duplicates of the same paperwork over and over and over again. It was a mess. Although the original investigators have said they did their best, Jennifer's laptop computer and clothing, a shirt, bra, and jeans that might have been hers were booked into evidence, but somehow mysteriously disappeared. It's just been mishandled. Why would it be mishandled? I honestly don't know. The only thing I can gather out of it. its lack of experience, lack of training. It was Mother's Day 2002. Jennifer was visiting her friend, Christy Far, in the early evening. It gets to me close to 8 o'clock, and Jennifer's like, I gotta go? Correct. She never told Christie where she was going. But Jennifer Harris never returned home that night. The next day, Jennifer's jeep was discovered, parked just down the road from a local music spot. still missing. Authorities reached out to the two men in her life. Her former boyfriend and business partner, James Hamilton, and her ex-husband, Rob Holman. Well, hey, down, it's pretty good. Both agreed to speak with investigators without a lawyer present. They had not been arrested. But both men were read their Miranda rights. So you have the right for me. Anything you say can, well, he gets to the court law. seeing Jennifer the night she disappeared. According to his police interview, Jennifer's former boyfriend James Hamilton was with a friend more than an hour away from Bonham at this McDonald's around the time investigators believed Jennifer disappeared. He even took and passed a lie detector test. He had an alibi for that evening. Alibi checked out. But ex-husband, Rob Holman seemed concerned. about his alibi. I just worried and scared because I know that I don't have anybody to say where I was at that not. Rob told investigators he had gone out that night to buy beer and visit friends but when they weren't home he drove around alone for five hours on the roads of rural Fanning County. But when the investigator pushes harder, it sounds like Rob is admitting he did see her Jeep that night. I was on 898 that stopped, so I was being blinking like the foot. It's been up to her door, shooting the front of me. She was coming from. By now, Jennifer had been missing for 72 hours. The search would continue for three more days. I spent the rest of my time searching, driving country roads, looking for buzzards. That's a hell of a thing for a father to have to do. That's what I did until they found her. Things seemed to go in slow motion. It was very surreal. Finding Jennifer's body six days after her disappearance, devastated her father, Jerry. But it did little to clear up the mystery of what had happened to her. She was so badly decomposed the medical examiner couldn't determine the cause of death. Jennifer was in... But Jennifer's family believes they know the answer. Her sister, Alyssa, and her filmmaker husband Barry Wernick, are on a mission to prove who killed Jennifer and why. In the time you've been looking into this, have you gone from... I want the facts to shape my opinion, to now having a... of who killed Jennifer? Absolutely. To think about how beautiful she was in her red hair and her