| THE CLARA HARRIS STORY: IN HER OWN WORDS |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Tuesday, March 01 2005 |
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| GATESVILLE, Texas -- The Mountain View Unit of the Texas Corrections Department is a sterile set of one-story buildings surrounded by barbed wire in the middle of the Texas desert. Not the kind of place you would expect a professional woman with a thriving dental practice -- a mother of two, with a privileged lifestyle, million-dollar home and fancy car -- to be spending her days and nights.
But for now, this is the home of Dr. Clara Harris, and it will continue to be for the next 18 years unless her sentence for murdering her husband is overturned on appeal. Although to Clarita, as she is known to her friends, the justice system that put her there in the first place was not fair to her.
"Things are not as they seem," Harris told me during a one-hour interview in prison. Referring to the widely publicized video showing her Mercedes-Benz circling around a Hilton Hotel parking lot, she said the images do not portray a true picture of what happened on the night of July 24, 2002, seven days after she found out her husband was cheating on her. Prosecutors claimed she ran over orthodontist David Harris three times during a rage of jealousy.
She didn't deny striking him, but said the wheels of her car never went over his body after the initial impact. The hopping motion you see in the blurred video, she assured me, is actually the car going over a grassy area that divided the parking lot.
The jury believed the prosecution, found her guilty and, on what would have been her 11th wedding anniversary, sentenced her to 20 years behind bars. If the punishment seems lenient, it's because the jury heeded the defense's request to consider her "sudden passion" state in the sentencing process.
That infamous video -- shot by a private investigator whom the Colombian-born dentist hired to follow her cheating husband and his lover -- was the strongest evidence against her. But there is another video, which she claims proves her innocence.
It's a computerized simulation of the events that took place that night, created by a specialist in accident reconstruction. "He used the map of the tire marks left on the ground and took 1,400 measurements to show how it really happened," she said.
But when the specialist was asked in court if he included yet another tire mark the police had detected, he said no. The judge did not allow the simulation as evidence. "If the jury would have seen the video, they would have realized that the car never went over his body more than once; it was one tire, one time. It was an accident," she insisted. She's now hoping that a second appeal will allow what she considers her right, to have that video shown to a new jury.
Recounting the events that led to that moment is an agonizing experience for her: from the moment her beloved David told her there was another woman, to the evening when he compared his lover's voluptuous and petite body with hers. She recalled trying desperately to lose weight, making an appointment with a plastic surgeon, staying up all night trying to satisfy the sexual appetite his mistress had awakened in him.
She described with anger that phone call from the private investigators telling her where to find her husband and mistress. But from the moment she saw them walking out of the hotel elevator, she says her mind separated from her body, and she has only blurred memories of the rest. She never meant to hit him. She never meant to kill him. She just wanted to stop that woman from taking her man.
Without ever wanting it, Clara Harris became a heroine for women who wish they could kill their cheating husbands. With tears in her eyes, she said: "I hate that. It is not a glorious act. One has to be really stupid to think that it's the best solution a woman can take at a moment like that."
Harris is paying a high price for her "sudden passion." "Prison gets worse every day," she said. What she misses most isn't the luxuries she once enjoyed, it's being with her 6-year-old twin sons. Well-spoken and well-educated, she relives that fateful night every single day in prison. The former beauty queen, whose dark hair is beginning to gray, lost control of her Mercedes-Benz in a moment of emotional rage and has now sent her life into a frantic tailspin. |
