Let us not forget Ann Marie Harrison,
every year on February 22 and March 22. We made her one of The 82 murdered children of Unit 1012
where we will not forget her. Let us remember how she lived on this earth.
Justice was served when two of her
kidnappers/killers were executed 25 years later. Michael Taylor on February
26, 2014 and Roderick Nunley on September 1, 2015.
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Ann Marie Harrison
(February 22, 1974 to March 22, 1989)
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article33153267.html
September
1, 2015 10:02 AM
From the archives: 15-year-old Ann Harrison was just waiting for the
bus…
By TONY
RIZZO
Editor's
Note: The graphic nature of this story may offend some readers. It originally
ran Feb. 2, 2006.
Kidnapped
at the dawn of a beautiful spring morning a month after she turned 15, Ann
Harrison fought two rapists and begged for mercy before they killed her.
For her,
the blitz of terror lasted 90 minutes, but the story of the Kansas City girl
snatched from her school bus stop, 60 feet from her front door, reverberated
across the community for years.
If Missouri
has its way, both of her confessed killers will die this year.
Just hours
before Michael A. Taylor was set be executed Wednesday, the 8th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals granted a stay and voted to hear arguments in his case.
Taylor and
Roderick Nunley each portrayed himself as a reluctant participant, high on
drugs and driven to murder by a violent companion.
But a
former prosecutor says it doesn't matter who said what or who blamed whom.
"They
were a sadistic tag team," Jeff Stigall said.
"They
were in it together the whole way."
Based on
court records, confessions to police and the recollections of Ann's parents and
others, the story that follows is the most complete ever published about the
case.
March 22,
1989.
"I'm
up," Ann Harrison called to her mother over the house intercom. It was
about 6:30 a.m.
Like many
mornings, Janel Harrison relied on the intercom to make sure her oldest
daughter awoke and got ready for school.
From her
bedroom, she heard Ann scuffling around the house. She heard water running in
the shower. She heard the front door creak open and slam shut. Routine sounds
of a routine morning.
Two days
into a cocaine binge, Taylor and Nunley cruised aimlessly in a car they had
stolen the night before in Grandview. It was an '84 Monte Carlo, blue with a
broken tail-light.
That defect
had caught the attention of a Lee's Summit police officer a few hours earlier.
He'd tried to pull them over, but they sped away. Following policy, the officer
declined to chase them for a minor traffic violation.
Just after
7 a.m., the Kansas City men turned onto Manchester Avenue and spotted a
brown-haired teenager standing by the mailbox in front of her house. She wore a
jean jacket festooned with buttons, mementos of Disneyland visits with her
grandparents.
They rolled
past, stopped, and backed up. Nunley hopped out. Gesturing with his hands and
asking directions, he closed the distance. With a rush he hit the girl and
roll-blocked her into the car's front seat. The athletic 5-foot-5 girl kicked
and screamed as her slightly built abductor tried to pin her to the floorboard.
Tires
squealed. The car sped down the street.
Two blocks
away another girl, like Ann waiting for the bus to Raytown South High School,
saw the Monte Carlo crest a hill and roar past. She looked at the driver but
didn't see anybody else.
Susan Crawford,
Ann's school bus driver since kindergarten, pulled up to the Harrison's house
three minutes early. Ann's books, purse and flute case were piled neatly under
the mailbox, like always. Crawford thought Ann must have run back inside for
something. She decided to wait.
Minutes
passed. Crawford honked the horn. She waited and honked. Waited and honked. The sound,
piercing above the low diesel rumbling of the idling bus, drew Janel Harrison
to the front door. She noticed Ann's belongings and came to the same conclusion
as Crawford. Her daughter must have run back inside.
She waved on the bus. Mom would have to drive Ann
today.
Unable to find Ann inside, Janel walked around to
the backyard to see if she was playing with the dog. She wasn't.
A pang of worry throbbed in her gut. Dependable and
conscientious, Ann earned honor roll grades while balancing a part-time job
sacking groceries with her love of sports and band.
Janel crossed the street to a neighbor's house.
Maybe Ann had walked there to see another teenager. But that girl's father said
his daughter already had driven to school. He volunteered to drive the
neighborhood to look for Ann.
Mom hurried home, where her two other daughters, 9
and 4, were waking. Sensing something was wrong, the older girl looked afraid.
The
neighbor returned minutes later. He had not seen Ann.
Janel
Harrison dialed 911. Then she called her husband, Bob, at work in Lenexa.
"Ann's
missing," she said.
With their
crying captive wedged on the floor between them, Taylor steered the Monte Carlo
toward the interstate then south to a house on east 118th Street, where
Nunley's mother lived. Nunley fashioned a blindfold from a piece of loose
clothing and threatened to kill the girl if she kept screaming.
They parked
in the garage and led her into the house. To avoid being spotted from the
street, they made her crawl below a window. In the basement, they bound her
hands with wire and peeled off her jeans and panties.
Nunley
raped her first, Taylor second.
Cars would
not get out of Bob Harrison's way. It maddened him as he weaved in and out of
highway traffic, laying on the horn and waving frantically at vehicles in front
of him.
Driving
from near 99th Street and Pflumm Road, he beat police to his house between
Raytown and Swope Park.
The first
officer to arrive assumed that Ann had run away. But the officer, a woman,
quickly agreed with Janel Harrison that it was unlikely a girl would leave her
purse.
The
Harrisons knew Ann was no runaway. Excited to begin spring break the next day,
she planned to visit her boyfriend in the hospital that night. He was fighting
cancer, and Ann spent hours with him whenever she could.
Bob
Harrison called his brother, a Kansas City police captain and commander of the
department's helicopter unit. Within minutes, the craft began buzzing the
wooded hills and valleys of the triangular neighborhood between Missouri 350
and Interstate 435.
Eight and a
half miles away, Nunley and Taylor plotted their next move.
Nunley
didn't want to let the girl go. She had seen him before being blindfolded.
Taylor, who'd hidden his face, tried to talk his partner into releasing her.
Nunley was insistent. He told her to get in the trunk.
Whether she
overheard them or sensed their intent, the girl balked. She pleaded with them
to let her live. Her parents would give them money, she said.
To calm
her, they said they would drive her to a pay phone. Nunley pretended to write
down a telephone number she recited.
The men
lifted her and placed her in the trunk. Nunley headed upstairs and returned
with two kitchen knives.
On
Manchester, a 15-minute drive away, the Harrisons weren't content to wait for
something to happen. Workers at a nearby grocery store, where both Ann and her
mother worked part-time, ran off copies of fliers with Ann's picture. A sister
of Bob's worked at Arrowhead Stadium. She used a copier there to make more
fliers.
Someone
began calling trucking companies to ask drivers to watch for Ann.
Police
officers knocked on neighborhood doors. One woman, who most mornings saw Ann
waiting for the bus when she left for work, saw nothing this time. It was her
day off and she had been in bed.
Another
neighbor reported hearing a scream and squealing tires but saw nothing.
The girl
down the street gave investigators their first clue, describing the Monte
Carlo.
Nunley
handed one of the knives to Taylor.
"Come
on, man. We've got to be in this together," he said.
Nunley
grabbed the girl's head with one hand and raked the blade across her throat
then thrust it deep into her neck. He held on as she vainly tried to pull the
weapon away.
He told
Taylor to "stick her" too, and he did.
As the
blades plunged into her torso, Ann's body heaved, her lungs gasped for air. The
blindfold, pulled away in the struggle, revealed eyes rolling back in her head.
Each labored breath became shallower until she no longer moved.
One of the
killers slammed the trunk lid shut. They still didn't know the name of the girl
inside.
The Kansas
City community soon would.
Local media
began to broadcast news of Ann Harrison. A short item made the deadline for
that afternoon's Kansas City Star.
An
18-wheeler rumbled up Manchester. The driver wanted fliers to leave at truck
stops.
More and
more friends of the Harrisons came and asked for something to do.
About an
hour and a half after arriving in the Monte Carlo, Nunley drove it out of his
mother's garage and down the road.
He parked
on a quiet street just over a mile away then got into another car driven by
Taylor.
They
headed back to his mother's house.
No one in
the 11400 block of Ditman Avenue saw who parked the Monte Carlo. A neighbor
first noticed it about 8:30 a.m. but said nothing then to authorities.
By late
afternoon, the Harrisons mustered enough help to stop traffic on every street
in and out of the neighborhood. Volunteers handed fliers to motorists.
Officials
brought in search dogs. They followed Ann's scent to an entrance ramp to
southbound I-435, where the dogs lost the scent.
Linda
Taylor noticed something wrong as soon as her son, Michael, dragged himself in
the house early that afternoon. He acted hysterical. Tears stained his cheeks.
He
refused to tell his mother what was wrong. She begged him to let her help.
"Mama,"
he said, "only God can help me now."
He turned
and walked out.
Medication
helped the Harrisons sleep that night. At a news conference the next day, they
pleaded with the unknown person who abducted their daughter.
"If
there is any way that contact can be made to let us know how she is, we need
that," Bob Harrison told the television cameras surrounding him. "We
want Ann to know how much we want her and miss her and need her."
Janel
Harrison cried as she added, "We love Ann very much, and we want her back
home."
That
night, 36 hours after Ann vanished, someone reported the Monte Carlo as
abandoned.
Police
checked the license, learned it was stolen and called the owner.
When the
owner arrived, he added antifreeze because the engine had overheated. Then he
opened the trunk.
Inside he
saw the body of a brown-haired teenage girl.
Janel and
Bob heard first on television.
A local
station cut into programming with a bulletin that their daughter had been
found.
The
bulletin didn't say if she was alive or dead.
The phone
rang.
A friend
who had seen it excitedly relayed what she thought was good news.
Almost
simultaneously there was a knock at the door. It was Bob Harrison's police
officer brother with his wife.
Paul had
come from the crime scene, where he had identified the body in the trunk.
The look
on his face told them. Ann was dead.
Pete
Edlund, who supervised the detective squad assigned to the case, felt
confident.
Hair and
semen collected on Ann's body and in the trunk eventually would nail the
killer, he thought.
The
grieving Harrisons experienced the community's generosity and concern. But they
also endured feeling suspicious and distrustful.
"You
start looking at neighbors, eyeing cars that drive by, you wonder," Bob
Harrison recalled recently.
Wild
rumors circulated of satanic cults or revenge because of the family's police
connection. Teens the Harrisons had never heard of claimed to be Ann's best
friend.
A prison
inmate tried to scam them out of $500 by claiming to have information about the
killers.
Three
months after Ann's death, the reward increased to $9,000. The next day, a
tipster told police of Taylor and Nunley. Both then confessed, but each blamed
the other as the instigator. The semen and hair matched Taylor.
He told
police: "I stuck her, two or three times, probably four, you know I stuck
'em in the stomach down here, you know, backed up on away from the car, you dig
... until she, you know, just you know, didn't wasn't moving no more, wasn't
breathing. And then I stayed and watched it, you know ... Her eyes rolled up in
her head, and she was sort of like trying to catch her, her breath. She
couldn't breathe you know."
For
Edlund, one of the most brutal and random cases he ever investigated had become
one of the best from an evidentiary perspective.
"We
had 'em dead bang."
For years
afterward, Bob Harrison had a recurring dream. It was the night after Ann
disappeared. Police cars lined the street outside the house. The front door
swung open and Ann walked in.
Waking,
Bob returned to his real nightmare.
Today, he
and Janel live in the same house.
While
others move from the scene of a traumatic event because of the memories, they
chose to stay for the same reason: the memories.
They want
to remember the girl with a soft heart for animals who carried on conversations
with neighborhood dogs and "rescued" worms from the driveway after it
rained so they wouldn't get run over.
When Ann
died, their other two daughters were 9 and 4. The youngest informed her parents
that Ann was in a spaceship with God and E.T.
The
Harrisons vowed to keep the girls from the limelight and give them as normal
lives as possible. Portraits show that both have grown into beautiful young
women. Ann, pictured next to them, is perpetually 15, braces visible in her
smile. Today, she would be 32.
Her
parents felt touched by the community response.
Volunteers
helped build a rose garden in her memory at the Cave Springs Interpretive
Center near their home.
Every
year, the Raytown softball league in which Ann played holds a fundraising
tournament in her honor. Proceeds go to the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children.
The
Harrisons have volunteered with the center and with the group Parents of
Murdered Children.
The pain
never goes away.
"You
just get better at hiding your emotions," Janel said.
They
don't look at the execution of their daughter's killers with any relish.
They
decided not to attend Taylor's, which got stayed Wednesday, and they don't buy
the idea that executions will bring "closure."
"I
don't know what closure is," Bob said.
What it
will bring them is the absolute assurance that Nunley and Taylor will never go
free.
"I
hope we can think of Ann without having to think of them," Bob said.
Last
week, in a phone conversation from his prison south of St. Louis, Michael A.
Taylor said that, more than anything else, he wanted to tell the Harrisons
this:
"I'm
sorry. I've never forgotten that day and I never will."
Courts
have stayed his execution temporarily. But Taylor, who turned 39 Monday, has
resigned himself to its inevitability.
"I
don't want to die," he said.
"But
it's out of my hands. I'm trying to stay in a peaceful state of mind."
Looking
back, he said he couldn't relate to the person involved in that crime.
Out of
his mind on cocaine and running with the wrong person, he got into something he
couldn't handle.
"I
did something wrong," he said. "That's why I pled."
Raised in
a loving, Christian, two-parent home, he served as a church usher and displayed
artistic talent. But when he and Nunley hooked up, they found trouble. Burglaries,
stealing to pay for drugs, and jail time became a way of life.
Taylor
said that before March 22, 1989, he never had committed a violent crime.
In
prison, he mentored younger persons, trying to impress on them the
ramifications of a criminal life.
He exists
now in a small holding cell 15 feet from the place he probably will die.
He reads,
visits with family, talks to his lawyer and waits.
As the
courts and lawyers argue his future, all he can do is pray.
"I
just pray for the next day."
To reach
Tony Rizzo, call (816) 234-4435 or send e-mail to trizzo@kcstar.com.
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Ann Marie Harrison
(February 22, 1974 to March 22, 1989)
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article33153267.html]
|
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2010/10/the-murder-of-ann-harrison.html
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://fox4kc.com/2015/09/01/friend-of-ann-harrison-says-execution-of-second-convicted-killer-brings-much-needed-closure/
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.kmbc.com/news/planned-execution-of-ann-harrisons-killer-to-help-friends-move-on/35048568
Missouri
executes Ann Harrison's killer Roderick Nunley
Friends hope execution will help them
move on
UPDATED 8:45
AM CDT Sep 02, 2015
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Ann Marie Harrison
(February 22, 1974 to March 22, 1989)
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Roderick Nunley had been scheduled to
be executed at 6 p.m., but a late appeal postponed it until 9 p.m. The lethal
injection process began at 8:58 p.m. and he was pronounced dead about 10
minutes later.
Nunley was one of two men convicted in
the kidnapping and killing of Ann Harrison, 15, who was taken while she was
waiting for a school bus. Her body was found three days later in the trunk of a
stolen car. Police said she had been raped, sodomized and stabbed with kitchen
knives.
Michael Taylor, the other man
convicted in the case, was executed last year.
Nunley and Taylor confessed to the
killings with each arguing they were the ringleader. They both waived trials
and pleaded guilty before a judge sentenced them to die.
“If somebody had told me it was going
to take 25 years to get them executed, I would have said, ‘You are out of your
mind,’” said retired detective Pete Edlund, who worked the case.
He said police cracked the case when a
jailhouse snitched stepped forward for the reward money. He said that informant
faced robbery charges and needed money for bail and lawyer.
The executions were held up during
lengthy appeals and challenges to Missouri’s execution procedures. After
debates over which drugs should be used to give lethal injections, Missouri no
longer identifies the exact drugs it uses.
Harrison's parents, Bob and Janel,
released a statement that read in part:
"For
the last 26 years Janel and I have, on occasion, experienced a form of
compassion for not only Roderick Nunley and Michael Taylor but especially their
families. No one involved deserved the pain, suffering or anguish these two
cowards have bestowed on this community. This feeling diminishes rapidly as our
thoughts are uncontrollably diverted to the vision of Ann being dragged into
the stolen car by her hair and stomped to the floor board in an attempt to hide
her from sight as they transported her to Nunley's home."
The Harrisons' went on to say that
they don't know if the executions of Nunley and Taylor will bring them closure.
"Will it put the
heartbreak of reliving what they did to Ann during all the hearings, appeals
and seemingly endless stalling attempts?
"We certainly hope so.
"If this is the only
form of closure we receive, then we will gladly take it."
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster
noted that it took years for Nunley's sentence to be carried out.
"Despite openly admitting his
guilt to the court, it has taken 25 years to get him to the execution chamber.
Nunley's case offers a textbook example showing why society is so frustrated
with a system that has become too cumbersome,” Koster said.
"The two men who were found
guilty of Ann’s kidnapping, rape and murder have now had their sentences
carried out. But even as there is judicial closure tonight, we know that a
Missouri family will always miss and grieve the young woman who has been gone
for more than 26 years. We grieve with them," Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon
said. "I ask that Missourians join me in keeping the family of Ann
Harrison in their thoughts and prayers tonight."
Harrison's father, uncle and two
family friends were at the prison to witness the execution.
Harrison’s friends are now adults,
many with teenage children of their own.
“It is a tough day. It
brings back lots of feelings, emotions and memories,” said Carrie Willis, one of Harrison’s
friends.
She said this is a difficult, but
important day.
“Maybe now we can move on and remember
Ann,” she said. “Just remember Ann and not why it has taken so long.”
Harrison’s friends Kelly Potter and
Amy Kaye also posted a message on Facebook.
“Today is a tough day. It
has been over 26 years that those of us close to Ann Harrison have waited for
justice to be served.”
“Ann was a sweet, shy,
family oriented girl who loved life, was nice to everyone she met and would
help anyone who needed it. She was an excellent student, softball player and
had a love of music.”
“On that day in March of
1989, this earth lost a beautiful soul for no good reason. People are eternally
bonded through this tragedy. We will continue to honor the memory of our dear
friend and life that she lead and dreamed of leading. She remains in our hearts
and thoughts forever. We will always have #LoveForAnn.”
"I know that putting
these two to death will never bring back Ann. And while she's gone from this
Earth, she is most certainly with God and waiting for the day when she is
reunited with her loved ones. She is at peace. Her memory lives on in OUR
hearts and minds, and she will never be forgotten by any of us," friend Tricia Wear posted
on Facebook.
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Grave of Ann Marie Harrison
(February 22, 1974 to March 22, 1989)
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=95699930]
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