Original subtitles

[music]

Yes.

We have a plethora of photo albums

and I have 10 scrapbooks

that are full of finished pages with no pictures

because pictures are hard.

There's my Christina.

There she is, playing with her sisters.

I've lost track of where I was going.

It's distracting even seeing them.

Over time, I've gone over the stages of grief.

But I don't believe, even now,

that I necessarily accept her death.

I needed to hold someone accountable for her death.

We all knew something bad just happened to her,

this isn't natural.

So we investigated, bought books,

and learned as much as we could.

This is like a travesty of justice.

September 29th, 2014, it just...

Is that even a real day? I don't know.

I think the whole day stands out.

It just seems surreal.

[Katrina] I just think of this on

the day the lights went out in Georgia,

it's like the day the lights weren't out,

like the world stopped, September 29th, 2014.

It halted and stayed there, and it's still there.

I feel like the Earth jolted on its axis

and it's just stuck.

My name is Katrina Sharon and I am the middle sister

to Christina Harris.

My name's Patricia Hutchinson

and I am the youngest sister of Christina Harris.

[Katrina] Christina is the oldest.

I am five years younger,

and Patricia is eight years younger than Christy.

We were a rowdy group of girls.

I was roughly three years old,

and I remember finding this really long lip gloss,

and it was strawberry flavored.

And so I asked Christy what it was.

And she said to me,

"Oh, you know what that's for?

That's to make your feet smell like strawberries."

So at three years old,

I'm rubbing this on the bottom of my bare feet,

and come to find out that was Mom's lip gloss.

[laughing]

[Patricia] Hopefully she didn't use it after.

She did is what I'm telling you.

[Patricia] Oh. Oh. Egh, gross.

[James] Christy was just very independent,

very tenacious.

When she learned to ride her bike,

she spent the whole day, wrecking the in backyard.

And by the end of the day, she could ride her bike.

And, of course, her knees were all scraped and dirty,

but she didn't seem to care.

She had accomplished her goal.

[Kathy] We are at one of her favorite places on Earth.

It's Pratt Lake, Gladwin, Michigan,

at her grandparents' lake house

that she spent summers when she was a child

and occasionally when she was a grownup.

When Christy met Jason, she was 21.

[Patricia] When they started dating,

he seemed to be good with Christy.

They like similar things. They like rock music.

[Katrina] I was Christy's maid of honor

for her wedding.

It was one of Christy's most favorite days ever.

And that's because she was the center of attention.

Christy's always wanted to be married, have kids,

and basically have the white picket fence,

that whole story.

[Kathy] When Christy got pregnant,

she was over the moon

because this was an experience, yeah, of her dreams.

It was finally happening for her.

[Katrina] Hailey was born November 1st, 2009.

Kaliann Jay was born on May 20th, 2014.

[Kathy] She loved it, she was happy,

and that was worth a million bucks right there.

Is Christy happy? Then I'm happy.

On September 29th, I was at my desk at work,

and I got a phone call from Jason,

Christy's husband.

He said, "Come to the house now."

And I was in the next town over.

I was concerned about finding out what was going on

because I had seen her the day before

and she was fine.

I trusted that Christy and the kids were safe

with him.

[James] I got in the car, drove to Christy's house,

pulled in, parked in front of the house.

There was an ambulance in the driveway.

Jason was there, looking sad.

So I went into the house,

and Christy was laying in the bed with a blanket over her.

And it was pretty much an out of body experience.

It's just disbelief.

It's literally like you're watching a movie of yourself

and it's like, how do you react to this?

[Kathy] I pulled up at the curb

right across from the front door.

And that's where Jim came out through the passenger side door

and told me that Christy was gone.

I got hysterical.

I said, "This isn't true."

And I'm like, "What is going on? What happened?"

Jason was telling me

that she was in bed and she didn't wake up,

and the neighbor had found her.

Jason was explaining to me

that there had been some problems

that, when breastfeeding, he didn't know

how many times he had gotten her a glass of water

and she would say it tasted chemically.

At this day in time,

what is breaking in our news, locally,

is the Flint city water crisis.

And I said, "Jason, you have well water,

but you have Davison city well water.

You do not have Flint well water.

Your water should not be tasting chemically."

I said, "That doesn't make sense."

I was not buying this scenario.

And then it hit me, what did he do?

She's healthy, she's 36.

She's a breastfeeding mother.

She's been going to the doctor for nine months.

And this isn't natural.

This isn't natural for her not to just wake up.

[Patricia] How did she not wake up?

It was as though I didn't know how to process that information.

[Katrina] My dad said, "You need to come home.

It's Christy."

I was in shock, driving,

and started shaking,

and didn't even know what to think.

And so I called my best friend.

[Stephany] I got a call from Katrina.

And I just couldn't make out what she was saying at first.

It was just, "Christy didn't wake up."

I'm like, "What do you mean?"

Nothing made sense.

[Katrina] And she's like, "How the eff does that happen?"

And that sentence

is what got me out of my crying, emotional,

and I was able to focus.

And I was like, "Yeah, how does that happen?"

[music]

I couldn't process anything in the moment that day.

[Katrina] I feel like, when I look back on the day,

we weren't just a mourning family.

We were screaming that this is not right.

[Patricia] My mom immediately just flipped a switch

and was like, "Okay, we gotta pursue this

'cause this didn't happen naturally."

I could not get the medical examiner

to sync up with me.

And I'm standing there, telling him,

"She's a breastfeeding mother. She's healthy.

I seen her yesterday. She wasn't feeling bad.

This makes no sense.

Why would a healthy 36-year-old

just not wake up in the morning?"

And Jason is standing there, listening to these conversations

and participating with this conversation

with the medical examiner.

There was absolutely no doubt in my mind

that this was not a natural cause.

[Stephany] It was just wrong. Everything sounded wrong.

So that's when we all headed over to Jim and Kathy's.

[Kathy] We were all sitting here in the living room,

asking the questions, how could this happen?

[Katrina] I had been trying to figure out,

what's the cause?

So I just said,

"What's everybody's conspiracy theory?"

[Kathy] I said, "Before Christy passed away,

she called me one day

and she said Jason was texting other women."

She sent me a copy of the phone record.

He transcribed all the text messages.

I transcribed all the text messages.

I saw the length that Jason went.

I mean, Christy pulled phone records

and there was thousands of texts

between him and these other women.

That she was worth more dead than alive.

[Kathy] And I said, "What happens

if he had done something?"

There was quiet.

[Katrina] Even knowing that the relationship was rocky,

I did not go mentally to foul play

like my mom had done.

I was 16 years old when I met Jason.

He was introduced to us as Jay.

I would go hang out at Christy's house,

so I was around him more often.

I would go over and play games for game nights,

and they would kiss three times,

and she would always say, "Past, present, future."

Jason was very much a part of the family.

On outward, you've seen the happy family,

but Christy let me know that there were issues.

And I think that was the catalyst,

subconsciously, the day she passed away,

for how I responded.

I remember feeling something that I never comprehended

who goes to the police.

How do you go to the police?

[James] Finally, we actually went in on October...

[Kathy] Well, speak to the police for the first time.

Yeah.

We went to see the Davison City Police Department

and we said we think that there's foul play.

We were told that they couldn't do anything

without the autopsy results.

[Katrina] A police officer told her

that it could be as soon as two weeks

or as long as 90 days

before any answers would come,

and that it just took time.

But if we really felt that there was foul play,

he said that we should start a notebook

and we needed to keep track

of any details that we thought of.

Now, I don't necessarily believe that he

realized who he was talking to.

So this was our version of what you would call a murder book.

This is all of the info that we pulled together.

So we've got in here the autopsy report,

which came from the medical examiner's.

About three weeks in,

the actual autopsy results came out.

Davison City Police Department called us up

and said, "Come in for a meeting tomorrow

and we'll discuss the autopsy results."

So at 11:03, we found out the death was heroin toxicity.

We sat there, blindsided,

with the chief and the detective.

[Katrina] She said, "The only thing it says

is heroin toxicity."

From that moment on, it was like, "Nope,

I know for a fact she didn't do it."

That's all I needed.

[James] They wrote it down

and gave us the impression

that they were gonna be moving forward

with the investigation.

That was the furthest thing from the truth.

It's like a different planet.

So we told him without a shadow of a doubt

this was not something Christy would do.

It was an instant "Oh, hell, no.

This is murder."

[music]

[Katrina] The death certificate had been released

that it was death by heroin toxicity.

And absolutely not.

I still stay absolutely not. That's my response to that.

"She's breastfeeding. There is no way

our sister did that."

So it only leaves one person.

[Patricia] I didn't wanna believe

that he would do something like that.

I mean, we're talking about a 16-year relationship.

This isn't just some new random person.

So how does somebody just do that?

[Katrina] You don't wanna think that your brother-in-law

is gonna murder your sister.

You just don't wanna mentally go there.

The medical examiner said

that Christy's cause of death

was a self-induced overdose.

And the death certificate stated "accident",

and it was put in a folder in a desk unworked.

No one was taking responsibility,

assuming it was at her own hands.

[Kathy] The next day, I contacted Jason,

because we also had two little girls

that we needed to deal with,

and one's an infant.

I'd do anything to keep the girls close.

Pretending with Jason is just what I had to do

'cause I just needed to know they were okay.

I said, if he wanted,

we would take the baby at nights

because Christy had been breastfeeding.

So the agreement was Jim and I would keep the baby

during the night

and bring her to daycare in the morning.

[James] Kali spent her first year here.

I'd get up in the middle of the night

and feed her the bottle--

the bottle with her mother's breast milk in it, by the way.

Jason brought over all of the breast milk

she had in the freezer,

literally months' worth of saved breast milk.

Because I had been to nursing school,

I always looked at the breast milk

as a sample to be tested.

Because it came from her body, it is evidence.

That literally was the only physical evidence

that we had

because we didn't have blood from her.

It wasn't like hair or anything.

But it was a substance from her person.

[Patricia] This wasn't a situation of pump-and-dump

and use drugs.

I mean, just because of the volume we had.

And we were all confident

that there was no heroin in Christy's breast milk.

So we just wanted to use that as proof.

We wanted to test the breast milk,

but we did not have the financial means

to find an exterior lab, and we wanted

to make sure that, if the breast milk was tested,

that it was done so that it would be admissible in court.

So we had told the police that we had that.

They said, "I'll make note of it."

But they never asked for it.

I ended up with insomnia.

And so I would lay in bed, thinking,

how can this be reality?

If she died of heroin,

we need proof that he gave it to her.

So where'd he get it?

I was awake at odd hours.

And so I would spend a lot of time

on the computer.

Technically, I do not have any investigative training,

but I am very good at research.

And I have no problem utilizing Google searches

to the best of my ability.

I knew that Jason was working at United Plastics.

The president of the company

worked with Narcotics Anonymous

to hire his workforce to help

get guys who are trying to stay clean

a good job.

There's a lot of addicts working at United Plastics.

So I knew his work environment could have been

where the drugs had come from.

The president of United Plastics

was aware of all the rumors

and knew a list of guys

who would share information.

So I started researching people

and who they're friends with,

and who their friends are friends with.

The information that came out of that

series of interviews we did with co-workers

was that Jason did talk to co-workers about killing her.

He asked about drugs.

Jason was asking what drugs could be not tasted

if put in water.

The employees did not advocate that.

[Patricia] One of my roller derby teammates,

her brother worked with Jason.

And my friend tells me the rumor at work

is that he killed her for life insurance money.

[James] Now, to us, that was the green light

to say this thing should really start moving.

I took that to the Davison City Police Department,

and the sad part is it went nowhere.

[Katrina] Christy's life insurance

was part of a medical insurance.

And she had changed her amount

to be a life insurance policy of $100,000.

The change was because the baby was born.

Unsure who, between Jason and Christy,

is the actual decision-maker

on the policy being what it was.

But even after doing it,

Christy believed that it was in excess.

Christy had made the comment to my mom,

"I am worth more dead than alive to him."

We realized that the life insurance

could have been the major driving force

as to why Christy was deceased.

I look back on the day and I remember

the viewing was on Friday.

I had lines of people wanting to say,

"I'm so sorry for the loss of your sister."

It was very overwhelming.

And I felt very a part of the community.

But when heroin toxicity gets told,

people didn't know.

And we weren't talking about it

because there's an investigation.

And we're not gonna jeopardize an investigation

by saying my sister died of heroin toxicity

because he's obviously involved.

And I don't know who all talks to who.

It's a small community.

We didn't want Jason to know.

We knew he was involved.

Jason did not seem like a grieving widow at all.

He was bragging about the fact

that his refrigerator was stocked full of so much food.

The only way I can describe it is a manic high of,

"Look at all this stuff I'm getting."

[Patricia] I recall Jason went up

to one of the funeral directors

and was asking about when the mail came.

What, specifically, was delivered

to the funeral home? I guess I'm not sure.

It was the life insurance payout

that I believe was $20,000.

They do an instant payout,

so he was waiting for the check

because the funeral home would take their portion

and he would have the remainder.

And I remember he was very agitated

asking about when the mail was coming.

Yes.

He wanted access to those funds.

[Patricia] Jason made me feel very uncomfortable

at the funeral.

He cornered me in the vestibule area

of the funeral home when we were leaving

and basically said,

"You're gonna have to talk to me sometime,"

and he made me hug him.

And I just, I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

[James] While we were doing all this investigating,

there was one key thing that had to happen.

Jason Harris could not know about this

because Jason Harris had our two granddaughters.

And we knew he was a vindictive person.

We wanted to make sure any key parts

were still gathered.

So we stayed very close to Jason.

Jason had no idea what was going on

as far as us thinking,

perhaps, that maybe he was involved.

He couldn't have had any idea.

[Katrina] I know he has a very short fuse.

And I was more fearful of his interactions

and was afraid of what he might do to the kids

or myself or any of us

if he were found

in an environment with us alone with him.

"Kathy commented the detective

and the chief blew you off when you said

that the insurance money was a motive."

Mm-hmm.

[James] "Jason says that he wants

to purchase a house a couple streets over.

And he's been on an obvious spending spree."

[Katrina] Jason had put a down payment on a house

about a block or so away

from the house Christy passed away in.

And so New Year's Eve,

he had called and said

that if we wanted the Coca-Cola collection

that my mom had given Christy,

it was at the house and we could pick it up.

So my dad and I went to the house

to pick up the collection.

And we realized that he wasn't there.

So I took advantage of the opportunity.

- [James] There's no electricity? - [Katrina] Uh, no.

I videotaped a tour of the house

as it stood

with everything in it.

So far, I'm not finding anything

that isn't what Christy bought.

So pictures are still up.

I ended up finding the check stub

for the life insurance policy, showing where it was cashed.

I ended up finding an itinerary for a flight.

That was to the Massachusetts area

for January 2015.

And I realized the girl from Massachusetts

was on the phone record.

[Patricia] When we put all these pieces together,

it just seemed like there was a lot of pre-planning.

That's when I found a box in the basement.

The box had "Do not open."

I'm a bad person...

No, I haven't seen this since the night we went there.

[Katrina] I'm alone in the basement

and I'm whispering to myself.

I don't know. I'm scared of it.

I saw white powder and that freaked me out too

'cause it was all over the floor.

The bags had drug paraphernalia in it.

There was stuff on it. There's tinfoil.

To us, that was like the lightbulb went off.

Jason was using drugs in the basement

of the house that my sister was found in.

[Kathy] But it's information, fill in the blanks,

that we were trying to get the authorities

to use, to substantiate,

to move forward, or somehow get the case

more active than it had been.

And the fact that the police were doing nothing

stymied everything.

At that point, everything with Davison Police Department

basically just died.

[Katrina] We were frustrated with the authorities.

We believed that they didn't want to admit

there not being an investigation done efficiently.

[James] For us, this is not something that would go away.

It's not like a year into it,

we just go, "Ah, well, forget about it."

We couldn't do that

because, at the end of this, if you don't do

everything that you can do, how are you gonna feel?

[Katrina] And so I was continuing to research

everyone and everything.

And my mom was emailing,

trying to get anyone to listen

to see about getting movement.

We couldn't think, for one minute,

that he was drawing a free breath

and Christy was dead.

It just wasn't gonna happen.

[Christy] Tada!

[James] So you have to keep the faith.

You always have to have a hope of justice.

During that time, Jason would use every opportunity

he could to withhold the girls.

That was his way of controlling us,

so the goal here was we did not let him know anything.

[music]

Yes, I'm the one that gets to hook up the printers,

and fix the printers,

and "My computer's not working right,"

and all that good stuff.

Whatever the new technology is,

I like to get ahold of it and see what I can do with it.

So approximately six months after Christy died,

I get a message from Jason,

telling me his laptop won't boot.

The real thing he wanted was all the pictures off.

Well, I took that as an opportunity

and I said, "Well, I can take a look at it."

I have some devices here at home

that you basically take the hard drive out,

and you plug in, and you can see the data,

as long as the hard drive's not shot.

So I was able to get access to his hard drive.

I don't think Jason's a smart person.

You've heard that saying,

"Not the smartest tool in the shed"?

He's not in the shed.

He never even made it to the shed.

I found a weblink where he had looked up

how a couple of drugs reacted with each other

with regard to if you give them to someone,

and just some searches that were questionable.

I knew Christy would not have any reason

to wanna look up.

Those just struck me as criminal.

Started moving the pictures, and that's when I found

a key picture that showed him in the basement

of his house on Bay Street

with all kinds of drug paraphernalia in front of him.

They're having a little drug party in the basement.

You've got the butane lighters

and you can see the drugs on a mirror.

So all that did for us

was anything he wanted to say

about, "No, I don't do that,"

well, explain this picture then.

[Katrina] My dad took that opportunity

to copy the hard drive and tell the police,

"I have this computer. It's his.

Do you want it?"

Police said, "Yes, we want it. Can you drop it off?"

My parents said, "No, we want you to obtain it legally.

You need a warrant.

So get a warrant. We'll give you the laptop."

At the same time, we informed the police

that we had the breast milk.

So they're like, "Well, we'll get the breast milk

when we get the laptop."

So in the spring of 2015,

they obtained a warrant to get the laptop and the breast milk.

They gathered both of those items,

sent them to the Michigan State Police.

And we, then, for the next three months,

the Davison City Police was telling us,

"We haven't heard anything. We haven't heard anything."

[James] The reality is that hard drive

was a six-month wait in purgatory

because every time I'd go to the police department,

"Well, we're waiting on hard drive,

waiting on the hard drive."

[Katrina] I ended up reaching out

to the Michigan State Police and saying,

"What happens to the evidence?

How long does it take to work through?"

I got a call from one of the head guys

at Michigan State Police,

saying, "We don't know what you're talking about."

The Michigan State Police ended up communicating

with the Davison City Police,

and the laptop was found,

and the Davison City Police detective

didn't know how to access the files in it.

[James] There are a lot of things

that you can do yourself.

You can't press charges against someone.

You can't arrest someone.

So if you're wanting the state

to bring charges against someone,

you can't just go out and say,

"I'm gonna hire a prosecutor

and I'm gonna go after somebody."

It's totally up to their time.

[Katrina] The city of Davison police department

stopped investigating

because the death certificate stated "accident."

[James] You cannot expect somebody else to do it.

Even if you have a top-notch police force

that's just all over it,

I don't think any of that means that you

can just back off and let them do it.

It's still something that you have to do

to get the result that you're wanting at the end.

That's one of the reasons

why we decided to do the civil case

because, as we looked into it,

we realized we do control this.

[Katrina] We had the information

of his communication with the other phone numbers

up until Christy had passed.

We had the search results from the laptop.

We had the photograph of Jason

having drug paraphernalia in front of him.

And we had the video of the home,

showing drug paraphernalia in a box in the home

that Christy was found in.

We had a plethora of information.

And we had the breast milk.

So we filed a wrongful death suit

against Jason.

Our main reason was not for the financial end of it,

but to get Jason on a stand and testifying.

We wanted him in front of somebody,

talking about the case.

We also... We also had tried

the Freedom of Information Act multiple times

to no avail.

And it was an avenue

to get us information.

We wanted to make sure

there wasn't any additional evidence

that was just going to end up disappearing.

[Patricia] I think there were people along the way

that had doubt just because of the time that passed.

It wasn't a matter of what evidence we collected

or what information we had.

It was just, "Okay, well, it's been four years.

It's not gonna happen if it hasn't happened already."

And we just kept pushing.

[music]

[James] With this case, civil case,

we were able to push it.

We were able to use subpoena power.

We were able to get people in

and get them to answer a line of questions

that we were involved with creating.

So from that point forward,

we actually felt like we were making progress.

One of the depositions from a former co-worker

at United Plastics

was that Jason hired somebody

to shoot Christy

and make it look like a random drive-by.

[James] He had asked co-workers to murder Christy.

That is solicitation of murder.

We listened to the deposition of Leah Miller,

who's Jason's live-in girlfriend.

She was saying she'd never seen Jason do drugs

and she was not aware of Jason doing drugs.

And in this picture, both of them are sitting there,

and it's like drug heaven.

[Katrina] At the end of the deposition,

the medical examiner ultimately changed the status

from a self-induced overdose to homicide.

That felt like validation.

The civil case then goes to Jason.

He has two choices.

He can agree and sign it that he caused the issue

or he can say, "I don't wanna sign it.

Let's go to court,"

and he can get up in front of a jury.

He did not do that.

He signed that he was responsible

for Christy's death.

So in August, 2019, we got called

to the state police for an update.

It was in that meeting that we heard

"Jason Harris has been arrested and is in custody."

[James] The three charges that he had

were capital murder in the first degree,

means that he planned it.

Second one was solicitation of murder--

he'd asked co-workers to murder Christy.

And the third was murder with a controlled substance

because it was heroin that he had given her.

While there was some initial relief

that he had been arrested,

it was brief

because the other thing that pops into your head is,

what about our granddaughters? Where are they?

[Patricia] Yeah, because if a jury said not guilty,

we'd probably never see those girls again.

[James] Yeah, yeah.

We really weren't safe when he was arrested.

We needed to hear guilty.

[James] We were at the trial.

The Genessee County prosecutor said

that they believed that Jason

put heroin in her cereal and fed her cereal,

which caused her death.

[Katrina] The expert testified and said

that if it was in cereal,

it would've been tasteless

because the sugar would overcompensate

the bitter taste that heroin has.

[Patricia] And the breast milk was evidence

used by the prosecutor.

Results of the breast milk came up clean.

There was nothing in it.

[James] And what that meant was we had proven

Christy could not have been doing drugs.

[Katrina] The verdict happened seven years after her death.

When the verdict was read,

I had Patricia to my left, my dad to my right,

my best friend directly behind me.

And when they said the first "guilty,"

I felt Tricia begin to cry.

I felt my dad start shaking from tears,

and my best friend hit me on the back.

And with every single "guilty," she was hitting me.

[James] The verdict was guilty on all counts

which was very emotional.

Jason Harris was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

So that means he will die in a penitentiary.

[Patricia] It was validating.

It was a rush of emotions.

The judge said everything we thought and felt

over the past seven years.

He got it.

Finally, after seven years, somebody got it.

I feel like justice was served.

[Katrina] There was always hope for justice.

We never stopped investigating because the four of us,

we have girls that need to be taken care of.

And that is at the forefront.

If I could say anything to Christy,

I don't know if I would say anything.

I'd probably just wanna sit and watch a movie.

Just be in the presence

'cause it's not like I have to tell her I love her

'cause I know she knew it.

[Kathy] Christy was a mother to me at times

as much as she was her sisters,

as much as she was her children.

And she lived to be the mother of her children,

her own children, her babies.

[James] The biggest thing that I wanna say to her

is how proud I was of her as a mother,

how proud I was to be her dad.

I miss her. I think about her all the time.

[music]

[music]

Burton: There were four victims

put in barrels out here in the woods.

Announcer: On the next episode of

"True Crime Story: Citizen Detective"...

These little girls and their mother were just nameless.

Why is nobody looking for them?

I started searching anything that might lead

to the identity of the victims.

I'm like, "Oh, my God.

Announcer: "True Crime Story: Citizen Detective."