Disappearance of Michele Anne Harris

In 2020 David Beers, a private investigator Cal had originally hired to find Michele who later worked for his defense team, published a book about the case, Reign of Injustice, arguing strongly for Cal's innocence as a victim of sloppy police work. At a talk he gave about the book in the Athens, Pennsylvania, public library in 2020, he shared some information that the defense had not highlighted during the trials:

The county sought to have it dismissed, arguing that the allegations were largely hyperbolic, but in August 2019 Judge David N. Hurd ruled that the allegations were specific enough for the defendants to form responses to them. In September it denied the accusations, beginning a lengthy process of discovery that includes all the trial transcripts and supporting evidentiary materials. Cal told a local newspaper he was confident of an outcome in his favor even though he knew it might take years; he regretted that any damages would largely be paid by taxpayers rather than the individual defendants. He has established a website, Tioga County Woodchucks, restating many of these allegations, as well as others about the individual defendants, and referencing the 1990s evidence-fabrication scandal involving several state police investigators in the area, and promoting it from his Twitter feed.

Harris has continued to protest his innocence; he has sued the state police, the Tioga County District Attorney's office and several others for malicious prosecution. In 2017 he was arrested again after allegedly stalking one of the investigators. The lead defense investigator has written a book alleging his theory of how Cal Harris was framed, and focuses on one of the men Michele had reportedly dated at the time as a more likely suspect given some evidence found at his former house. Her friends and family believe just as strongly in Cal's guilt, and continue to search for stronger evidence even though he cannot be prosecuted again; this has led to her family and her children becoming estranged from each other.

At the end of 2017 Cal was arrested again after a driver on Interstate 81 in northern Cortland County called police to report that a white pickup truck had struck their vehicle and driven away. When state troopers pulled the vehicle over Cal was behind the wheel. He was charged with driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident. Speaking to the media about the accident after being arraigned in January 2018, he admitted to having a had a few drinks hours beforehand, but denied striking the other vehicle; the driver who reported him to police had in fact been the one who had been driving erratically and cutting other drivers off. As he had with the stalking charge, he claimed the state police had again brought the charges to retaliate against him.

That conviction was upheld on appeal, with one justice dissenting. Cal appealed to the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, which reversed the lower appeals court on procedural grounds, again with one judge dissenting and calling for the indictment to be dismissed. For the third trial, a change of venue was granted to a different upstate county due to the publicity around the first two trials; that jury deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial. The judge granted Cal's motion for the fourth trial to be a bench trial, without a jury, and in 2016 Cal was acquitted.

Justice Richard Mott of the state Supreme Court became the fifth judge to preside over Cal's trials when he was designated for the fourth. To expedite the trial, he gave Cal the option of a bench trial, in which he alone would be the trier of fact, dispensing with a jury. Cal chose it and trial began in March 2016.

Jury selection began in January 2015. Judge George Bartlett would be the fourth judge to preside over the trial. Since Keene had resigned in order to assume Tioga County's judgeship after Sgueglia retired at the end of 2012, his replacement, a former assistant DA, Kirk Martin, took over the case for the prosecution.

Cal was freed on $500,000 bail pending the third trial, a week after the Court of Appeals ruling. Citing it, his attorneys moved for a change of venue. In January 2014, the case was removed to Schoharie County Court, a similar rural upstate county, 125 miles (201 km) away from Tioga.

Witnesses testified as to when Michele had last been seen, and her continuing absence. Thayer recounted finding her car on the road on the morning of September 12, and how Cal had not checked whether the keys were in the ignition before he asked her to take it back to the house, then gone to work without making a single inquiry all day as to whether his wife had reappeared anywhere. Thayer had worked for Cal for an additional year after Michele's disappearance, and also recalled how in the weeks afterward he had talked of having a garage sale to sell her clothes and other possessions, offering to split the proceeds with her. On what would have been her 35th birthday he began more openly dating a woman he had been seeing for most of the year, telling her she could spend the night at his house since Michele would not be coming home that night.

Cal appealed to the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals. It heard arguments on September 11, 2012, the 11th anniversary of Michele's disappearance, and came back with a decision a month later. All the judges but one affirmed the Third Department's holding that the verdict had been factually and legally sufficient. But all seven unanimously agreed with Malone that the denial of the challenge for cause and the jury instructions on Michele's sisters were reversible error, and ordered a new trial.

While Cal began serving his sentence, his lawyers prepared an appeal of the conviction to the Third Department of the state Supreme Court's Appellate Division. In 2011, a divided panel upheld the conviction, finding it both factually and legally sufficient and procedurally sound. Harris then appealed to the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court. Its decision, the following year, agreed that the jury had acted reasonably, again with one justice dissenting, but reversed the Third Department on the procedural issues and overturned the conviction.

Five justices were impaneled to hear the case. The department's presiding judge, Anthony Cardona, was among them but did not take part as he was terminally ill. His absence did not matter as when the decision came down in the middle of 2011, three of the justices upheld the trial court.

"The case wasn't getting any better", Mark Lester, the state police captain overseeing the investigation, told CBS's 48 Hours in 2010. "There were really no new significant leads or evidence coming in. But win, lose, or draw this case had to go to trial." A Tioga County grand jury indicted Cal on one count of second-degree murder on September 30, after which state troopers went to his Ford dealership outside Owego and arrested him in front of his employees, not only handcuffing him but putting his legs in irons.

After the verdict, Cal had told ABC that he was selling the Spencer estate where he and Michele and their children had lived. He had been trying to do so throughout the 2010s, asking nearly $2 million for the property at one point, but took it off the market in 2017. Michele's family remains convinced that Cal killed her. Cal and Michele's four children have continued to support their father and do not interact with her family much.

A different judge from a different neighboring county, James Hayden of Chemung County Court, was assigned to the second trial, held in August 2009. The prosecution presented largely the same circumstantial case as it had in the first trial. The defense called both Cal and Tubbs to the stand, the former to humanize him for the jurors, the latter because his testimony seriously complicated the prosecution's case theory.

Steele's name was redacted since at the time he himself had been with a woman he had been having an affair with, and he feared retaliation from the district attorney's office were he to be identified. For several months the prosecution, while its appeal of the order to set aside the verdict was pending, attempted to learn Steele's identity on the grounds it was needed for the ongoing police investigation. In October 2008 he died, mooting the question of his identity and preventing him from being cross-examined, so the court ruled his testimony inadmissible hearsay. The next month the order was unanimously affirmed on appeal, and a second trial was scheduled for 2009.

Dissenting Justice Bernard T. Malone Jr., who had written the 2008 opinion upholding County Court's motion to set aside the verdict of the first trial, castigated the majority for largely reiterating the prosecution's case, including its responses to defense arguments, while ignoring aspects of the defense case that had blunted or neutralized the prosecution. "In viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the People, this Court is required to resolve any conflicting evidence in the People's favor, as the jury presumably did", he wrote. "However, it is not required to ignore other uncontroverted evidence that may not favor or tend to prove the People's theory of the case, nor should it."

During deliberations, which lasted more than a day, the jury asked the judge for clarification on how to define reasonable doubt; they were instructed that "it must be a doubt for which some reason can be given." In early June 2007, the trial ended with the jury returning a guilty verdict. Sentencing was set for August.

The court granted the motion in November 2007. That month another man, John Steele, wrote the court a letter saying that he, too, had driven past the Harrises around the same time and seen a man and woman arguing next to two vehicles. He later filed an affidavit making largely the same claims but adding that he heard the man say "Just get in the damn car!"

Throughout the first half of 2006, Joseph Cawley, Cal's defense attorney, sought to challenge the indictment, filing a motion requesting that a transcript of its proceedings be turned over to the defense and that it be dismissed as legally and factually insufficient to support the charge. At the end of June Vincent Sgueglia, Tioga County Court's only judge, denied the motion and set the trial date for September 11, the fifth anniversary of Michele's disappearance. Shortly afterwards the prosecution turned over to the defense 12,000 pages of discovery, including the entire grand jury transcript; the trial was accordingly adjourned until January 2007 to allow the defense time to review it.

On cross-examination prosecutors questioned Tubbs closely, arguing first that it was too dim for him to have seen Michele closely enough to recognize her picture in the newspaper four years later. They put on a nearby neighbor who recalled hearing only a car door slam in the vicinity around that time. Finally, they brought up a 2006 incident where state police had arrested Tubbs after he was unable to pay for his purchase at an Owego gas station, which led to him suing the state for false arrest and excessive use of force. The prosecution alleged that Tubbs had been motivated to embellish or fabricate his testimony in order to retaliate against the state police; he became very angry and belligerent in response.

After the initial investigations, the case seemed to have gone cold for the next few years. Local media coverage was limited to stories around the annual anniversary that rehashed the case and reported primarily that there was nothing new to report. The police continued to believe that Cal had killed Michele by some means and disposed of her body somehow, but also that they had insufficient evidence for a conviction. In 2005, the anniversary stories said the police were expecting a break in the case soon.

On the night of September 11, 2001, Michele Anne Harris (born September 29, 1965) of Spencer, New York, United States, left the restaurant where she worked as a waitress in nearby Waverly after finishing her shift, and shared drinks with two coworkers (one of whom she had been romantically involved with) in the parking lot. She then went to see a boyfriend in Smithboro and left shortly after 11 p.m. This was the last time anyone is known to have seen her. The next morning, her car was found on the road near the home she shared with her children and estranged husband, Cal. He was later tried for her murder four times and convicted twice before being acquitted.

At the beginning of 2001, Michele filed for divorce. During the first half of the year, Cal repeatedly told Michele he would not let her divorce him. Barb Thayer, the couple's nanny, recalls hearing frequent loud arguments. Cal tried to get Michele's family to talk her out of the divorce, believing she had been influenced by the people she was increasingly associating with and might even be using drugs. Michele told her sisters that at one point in March Cal told her during an argument that he would not need a gun to kill her and the police would never be able to find her body. She also let her hairdresser overhear Cal threaten to kill her and make her disappear over the phone in July.

That was not the only significant event Michele had planned for the second week of September 2001. Over that coming weekend, she told Cal she was taking a trip to New York City to visit a college friend. She also informed some of her friends about the trip, but said her goal was to sell or pawn some of her jewelry, including her engagement ring, in order to make her half of the down payment on the home she and Earley had agreed to buy in Owego, the county seat, near where the children went to school. She also reportedly had run up significant debt on her credit card and bounced checks.

A month later, Cal was indicted again by a different grand jury. Trial began in late May. With neither a body nor a weapon in evidence, the prosecution laid out its circumstantial case against him, arguing that she had died violently at his hands in the house sometime after 11:30 p.m. on September 11, 2001, and that Cal had over the next eight hours taken advantage of the reduced law enforcement presence in the area to dispose of her body at a location unknown.

The morning after Cal was convicted, Kevin Tubbs, a farmhand who lived near the Harrises, looked at a newspaper with coverage of the verdict and saw Michele's picture on the front page. He came forward and said that only then had he recognized her as the woman he had seen on the morning of September 12, 2001, on the road next to the Harrises driveway, along with another vehicle, a pickup truck, next to which was a man arguing with Michele.

Wilczynski's account of the threat was also questioned. The defense argued that his schedule for 2001 showed no appointments for Michele later than that May. They also asked him why, when the state police came to talk to him in 2001, he had not mentioned Michele letting him overhear Cal's threat; he said that at the time he did not trust the police. The defense also noted that the investigator who had learned of the threat from Wilczynski in 2005, since retired, had been avoiding their attempts to serve him with a subpoena to testify.

After her son was born, in October 2000, she stopped sharing a bed with her husband, sleeping on the couch in the family's home. A month later, at a bar, she met Brian Earley, a younger man visiting the area from Philadelphia, where he worked as a surveyor. Soon the two were having discreet meetings in the Poconos of nearby Northeastern Pennsylvania. The two used phone cards when they called each other, so that the caller ID would display as a random jumble of numbers, in order to keep their relationship a secret from Cal Harris and the children.

In 1999 the marriage started to fail when Michele discovered, while pregnant with their youngest child, that Cal had been having an affair with another clerk on one of the car lots. He justified this affair on the grounds she was not keeping the house clean enough. When she confronted him, he promised to end it but, she later learned, did not, rekindling it on a vacation trip to Barbados.

The same day, Cal and members of Michele's family gathered for dinner in Cooperstown. There, two of her sisters confronted him about a threat he had made in March to kill Michele and dispose of her body such that it would never be found, as well as a 1996 incident in which Michele had called from a closet where she hid as Cal repeatedly cocked a shotgun outside. After denying the incidents, Cal eventually admitted to the threat but claimed that he had not been serious. The sisters testified later that the conversation was very uncomfortable for him.

Cal Harris, a Vestal High School graduate who later became a star attackman and four-year letterman for the Hobart College men's lacrosse NCAA Division III champion teams in the early 1980s, met Michele Anne Taylor, who had earned an associate's degree from the State University of New York at Morrisville, later in the decade when she worked on the lot of one of the car dealerships his family owned in Tioga County, on the Southern Tier of upstate New York, between Binghamton and Elmira and south of Ithaca. They married in 1990 and settled on a 252-acre (102 ha) estate outside the village of Spencer in northern Tioga County, where Michele had grown up. She had the first of the couple's four children in 1994.