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Justice for Jennifer
By Bill Hankins
The Paris News
Published June 17, 2009
BONHAM — Jennifer Harris-Holman, 28, was a vivacious redhead with a happy attitude and a smile that captured everyone around her.
When she left her grandmother’s Bonham home on Mother’s Day, May 12, 2002, to meet a friend, she announced she would be back in a few hours.
She never returned.
Jennifer’s Jeep was found near Lake Bonham a day later. Six days after that, her nude body was found in the Red River.
Though Oklahoma authorities could have taken the case because the body was found in Oklahoma jurisdiction, Fannin County authorities ended up with the investigation.
To date, no one has been charged or arrested in the case, though Fannin County officials have said two suspects remain after seven years of studying the details of the murder.
The autopsy of Jennifer’s body did not reveal a definite cause of death, but the medical examiner determined it was a homicide, possibly by strangulation.
The victim’s father, Jerry Harris of Dodd City, has spent the past seven years working to find his daughter’s killer.
It was Harris who led searches for his daughter after he reported her missing, and led searches for her clothing and personal items. And it was Harris and fellow searchers who found her clothing in a nearby creek bed and called the Fannin County Sheriff’s Department to retrieve it.
According to Harris, a nearby resident found what he believed to be the keys to her jeep alongside a road. The man told Harris he called the sheriff’s office several times, but said no one ever picked them up. The final time he talked to sheriff’s deputies, he told them he would leave the keys on his front porch for them.
The keys disappeared but apparently did not make their way into the evidence obtained in the case.
New methods of obtaining DNA results on the clothes have been developed in the seven years since the crime took place, and now a push is under way by the father and others to get the clothes re-examined, and perhaps narrow the two suspects to one.
Private investigators are working on the case and a website, justice4jennifer.org, has been established in the hunt for a solution to the murder.
Still the case goes unsolved.
Sheriff’s department officials have said recently they may be a step closer to solving the case, but Jennifer’s father said Tuesday they are no closer to an arrest than they were seven years ago.
“Her purse and shoes have never been found,” her father said. “They might contain fingerprints or something to point to her killer.”
According to Harris, Jennifer was in the process of filing for bankruptcy when she was killed. Her business partner is one of the two people of interest in the death, along with her ex-husband.
The place where her jeep was found was a familiar place for Jennifer. She went there often to think and to play with her dog Patton. Authorities think she was killed by someone she knew, but where she was killed and where her body entered the Red River remain a mystery.
That mystery led to debate over who had jurisdiction in the early days of the investigation.
Oklahoma could have claimed jurisdiction because of where the body was found. Fannin County claimed it in part by where the clothing was found.
“This thing may eventually end up in federal jurisdiction because of the transporting of the body between two states,” her father said. “No matter how it ends, we need to bring it to a conclusion by bringing a suspect to trial.”
He said a citizens group, troubled by the slowness of the investigation in Fannin County, now is pushing to bring the cold case back to the forefront.
“They are questioning the adequacy of the investigation, and asking officials to look at the case more closely,” he said.
A private investigator hired to look into the case, Jim Holloway of Dallas, said the clothes should be retested for DNA.
“I have talked with DNA experts, and they have told me if DNA ever was there, they can retrieve it,” Holloway said.
The victim’s uncle, Jeff Schneider, said some of the blame for not solving the case can be placed on the previous administration of the sheriff’s office, who led the investigation seven years ago. He said the case could have been easily solvable if the sheriff’s department had gotten the help or the expertise to do it right.
Fannin County Sheriff Kenneth Moore, who was not sheriff during the original investigation, said he thinks the case is solvable, but due to a lack of evidence, his investigators are no closer to solving the case than when it happened in May of 2002.
“Investigators don’t know where her body entered the river, so there’s no crime scene,” he said in an earlier interview. “Even the autopsy did not pinpoint a clear answer about how she died.”
Moore said he does not have that convincing piece of evidence that can get an indictment.
“She was a wonderful person,” her father said. “She was a wonderful person who cared about people and life and her killer should be brought to justice.”
Holloway said there likely is enough evidence, if it was handled right, to bring that killer to trial.
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