Susan Harrison

[themaninblack]

It has been a very long time since i have been to this forum!
i am curious if there is any news on Susan Harrison case.
i think her husband is most likely guilty!

[wiseguy182]

There was only one update ever done on the case, but it was one of those "pseudo-updates" just to let you know that her body had been found by some hikers. Other than that, there has been no news, unfortunately.

[LooksLikeCRicci]

I hate doing this... but, is this the woman who broke up with her husband and moved into a little house and started designing lampshades? Her sons came to check on her and she was nowhere to be found? And then when UM did the update, they flashed out to some remote looking woodsy location and said that they had found her body?

Is this the lady y'all are talking about?

EDIT: I ran my own search on the boards and answered my own question. It IS the woman you're talking about. And yes, I totally think the husband is involved.

[NDAlum2003]

Yes, that's the lady.

Susan's sister, Molly Hurley Moran, published "Finding Susan" in 2003. It's a book about the case and is available on Amazon. This book is an excellent read if you want to learn more about the case.

Susan's husband, Jim Harrison, was never charged in the case, but many are very suspicious of him.

Nobody has ever been charged in her case and it has now been over 10 years since her body was discovered.

[themaninblack]

yeah i read an article about the book yesterday i believe...
the cops say the case is very cold as any evidence that was there has probably disappeared by now...

[wiseguy182]

The police determined that she was murdered. I wonder how (by what means) was she murdered.

I've stated numerous reasons in various threads why I think Jim Harrison is guilty, and I just thought of another after rewatching the segment last night.
The lack of signs of a struggle. This would indicate that Susan knew her assailant.

One thing that seems out of place is the front door being left open when one of the sons came to visit her.

[mozartpc27]

Is this case on any of crystaldawn's collections? Here's another one that sounds none too familiar.

[crystaldawn]

Originally Posted by mozartpc27

Is this case on any of crystaldawn's collections? Here's another one that sounds none too familiar.

Its on volume 9.

[valutime20]

I (along with everyone here) feel Jim Harrison was guilty. Jim even admitted to failing a polygraph test. He came off pretty bad in his interview as well. Why did he have to mention that she would use bad language? Was it that big a problem?

[mozartpc27]

Originally Posted by crystaldawn

Its on volume 9.

For some reason, this description did not register in my mind, but I had definitely seen the case before.

The scenario begins when Susan Harrison's son (according to him) confronts her and says she must finally end a long and abusive relationship with her second husband or risk losing contact with her sons forever. According to her sons, she responded to this ultimatum by resolving to break it off permanently. Two days later, one of her sons comes to meet her for a scheduled visit, only to find the door to her house ajar, her car missing, and a set of keys on the table (I don't believe the keys are ever mentioned again past this point --- whose keys were they? Did they ever identify to what car or house or whatever they belonged?). She is nowhere to be found. He waits through the night, goes home to sleep, and calls the next morning. Still no sign of her, so the police are contacted. They go straightaway to her estranged husband's house, and he admits to having seen her on "three separate occasions" on the "previous day" (the timeline is a little unclear to me here --- does this mean he claims she came to see him 3 times on the day she was supposed to meet her son? Or does it mean that he claims that she came to see him 3 times on the day before her son discovered her missing? The UM segment is a little vague). After the last visit, he went to bed in the middle of an argument, and she left, never to be seen again. Her car is later found at the airport, with the keys in the ignition, and a couple years later, her body is discovered out in the woods somewhere. So what happened?

At first glance, this is an obvious "the husband did it during a drunken argument" kind of thing, open and shut. I still think that is the most likely scenario, but there are a few things that don't quite "fit" in my mind. For example, I found it surprising, rewatching the case as I did last night, that Jim Harrison would admit to being in Susan Harrison's company for multiple stretches of time the day of her disappearance. In essence, he handed the police their case: he was the last person known to be alive with her. I don't know what he would have to gain by this --- wouldn't it have been better for him to say "I haven't seen her" since she allegedly ended their relationship once and for all? I don't see how the cops could have proven otherwise, unless neighbors would have recognized her car or heard them arguing and testified she had been there. But, if she was there, then this murder likely happened in the heat of an argument that in all probability, given their respective habits, would have been fueled in large part by alcohol consumption. If that's the case, why was her door found open, as her son testified? That fact would imply she was taken from her home.

One thing that is frustrating here is that, from what can be gleaned from the UM segment, no crime scene was ever identified. I guess the police never had enough probable cause to obtain a search warrant for Jim Harrison's home? I understand why this would have been so at the time the segment was filmed (no body at that time), but after her body was discovered, couldn't a search warrant have been obtained based on the fact that he was the last person seen with her and that there was a detailed police record of domestic violence in the case? And wouldn't a search with Luminal (or however you spell that chemical's name) reveal a crime scene had there been one?

The reason I bring this all up is that identifying the crime scene, in this instance, will dictate the likelihood that her husband was in fact her killer. If she was killed inside his home, the chances he did it are nearly 1:1.

If she was killed outside her home, the chances are maybe 3:1 he did it. Of course, I think, despite the curiously open door, it is unlikely home was the site of the assault that took her life, because there would have been some physical evidence of that, unless she was strangled on the doorstep. That's possible, but then we have to imagine that, drunk though he probably was, Jim Harrison was angry enough to follow her home, catch her before or just as she got inside, and killed her in such a fashion that no blood was spilled. Then he would have had to put her in her own car, driven her out into the woods in the middle of the night, dumped her body, driven the car to the airport, gotten a cab back to her house, and finally driven himself back to his own home. This seems like a pretty wild scenario, but, then again, if she was killed outside her home by someone other than Jim Harrison, the scenario is in some senses even more wild, so I'd say the chances that Jim Harrison did it if the crime scene was her own home are more like 2:1.

The third possibility is that she was taken from outside her own home, explaining the open door, but that she was killed out in the woods. If that's what happened, I think it was almost certianly not Jim Harrison, but either a random killer or someone else she knew who the police have not investigated. Jim Harrison claims she left as he went to bed after their final argument; I wonder how seriously the police ever took this claim? I would have at least hit every bar between her husband's house and her own and shown her picture. Is it possible she left and decided to finish what she started at some bar, only to be followed home by a predator? This would be not unlike what happened to Carolyn Killaby, who was murdered by Dennis Keith Smith. In that case, as I posted in the Dennis Keith Smith thread, the husband would have certainly been the classic suspect, very similar to many other husbands who apparently killed their still-missing wives (Steven Marfeo, Pamela Page, Paul Pollis, etc.), only it turned out his wife went to a bar and was followed home by a monster of a human being. Is it possible Susan met another man at a bar and agreed to go home with him, maybe even let him drive her car, and ended up his victim? It seems quite possible to me. Did the police even do that but it was left unmentioned in the UM segment?

I think Jim Harrison is very likely the guilty party here. But, even under the most obvious of circumstances --- where he and his wife perhaps got too drunk, fought, and he hit her too hard or too often and ended up killing her --- he'd still have to drive out to the middle of nowhere, intoxicated, in the middle of the night to dump her body, then drive her car to the airport, then get a cab back from the airport to his house. It seems to me that's a lot for a drunk guy to do, and that a cab ride might have easily been discovered. So it makes me wonder.

Finally, and this is where a more intimate knowledge of the timeline would come in handy, but I wonder, just a little, about the sons. They seem very frustrated not only with Jim Harrison in the segment, but, to some extent, with their mother. Suppose that the day she allegedly visited Jim Harrison three times was in fact the same day she was set to meet her son (the day on which she allegedly never showed). Now suppose she does leave Harrison's house, as Harrison claims, and comes home, drunk, perhaps with a shiner or other signs of abuse already, and crying, after she had promised she would never see this man again. Children who come from abused homes are, after all, the most likely to lapse into that sort of behavior themselves. I could see a scenario where the son just gets mad. Mad that she lied, mad that she could keep doing this to herself, mad that she drove drunk (AGAIN, because I doubt this would have been her first time), and perhaps an argument ensues. He's sober, rational, she's drunk, stammering, weak.

There's no evidence for that scenario, and it is monstrous to imagine, but all the driving around that would have been required, etc. It just makes me wonder. If one of the sons did it and had help from the other, there would have been no need to get a cab back from the airport. Disposing of the body would become much easier. It just makes me wonder.

[wiseguy182]

I do appreciate you thinking outside the box mozart, but I'm pretty convinced Jim Harrison is the guilty party here. The sons seemed pretty genuine to me. I don't think they were mad at her, they were just being firm with her. They gave her a "us or him" ultimatum, and the options were her sons or somebody that abused her all the time, not exactly a tough decision. This case resembles Jules and Dottie Caylor alot, in that you have a man that probably got upset because not only was his wife going to leave him, but was going to be pretty happy and successful on top of that, and he couldn't handle it. I think it's just too much to be a coincidence that she disappeared the same day she told him she was leaving him for good.

[mozartpc27]

Originally Posted by wiseguy182

I do appreciate you thinking outside the box mozart, but I'm pretty convinced Jim Harrison is the guilty party here. The sons seemed pretty genuine to me. I don't think they were mad at her, they were just being firm with her. They gave her a "us or him" ultimatum, and the options were her sons or somebody that abused her all the time, not exactly a tough decision. This case resembles Jules and Dottie Caylor alot, in that you have a man that probably got upset because not only was his wife going to leave him, but was going to be pretty happy and successful on top of that, and he couldn't handle it. I think it's just too much to be a coincidence that she disappeared the same day she told him she was leaving him for good.

Yes, that's probably what happened, and I don't think I even really believe the sons were involved. But that open door at her house... that bugs me.

[mozartpc27]

I was just re-watching some cases and I looked at this one again.

I had, since the time I last saw this case, completely forgotten about my own posts on this case in the past, only stumbling upon them when I searched for Susan Harrison's name in the forum. I searched because I wanted to post.

And what did I want to post about? That open door. That's the whole thing right there. Evidently, it bothered me before, just as it bothered me now.

The open door strongly suggests she was taken from her home. Jim Harrison says she came to his house on three separate occasions right before she disappeared. This leaves me with two questions:

1. Is Jim Harrison telling the truth about her visiting him at all that day? What part of his story is true? All of it? Can any of it be verified?

2. If all of it is true, and it can be verified, then I feel the killer almost certainly must be somebody other than her husband, despite what the evidence suggests. If Jim Harrison was going to kill her, why wouldn't he kill her at his own home? And if he had killed her at his own home, why would her door be found ajar? Was Susan Harrison herself so drunk when she left her home to go to Jim Harrison's home for the last time that she forgot not only to lock but to close her own door? This seems possible but unlikely to me. The most plausible explanation for her door being left ajar is that she was taken away from her home under durress. Only why would Jim Harrison be the one doing the taking in that scenario? If he is telling the truth, he had her drunk and weak and vulnerable in his own home; he could have killed her there. Would his last rage at her really have lasted long enough to follow her home after she left, then get into the fatal confrontation with her at her own home?

[Mastermind]

If Jim Harrison was going to kill her, why wouldn't he kill her at his own home?

Because he would then have to clean up a crime scene in his home. Since most likely he planned this act, I'm pretty sure it occured to him that killing her at his home is not the best thing to do.

Only why would Jim Harrison be the one doing the taking in that scenario?

Because she was belligerent and refused to go with him willingly. Or it became apparent to Susan what was going to happen. It may be as simple as that.

Something I should mention here is that the murder scene might very well be outside rather than inside either home.

[Zlatko]

This case always frustrated me. It seems so clear cut that Jim Harrison was up to something, yet the police didn't nail him.

What also is bothersome is that Jim Harrison claimed that she was horribly abusive to him and that he was the innocent party. Hmm.. many people claimed to have seen marks on Susan. Yeah, talk about innocent.