What She Buried | 2. Digging a Hole

The police investigate Michael Giles' disappearance. What they find is a concrete slab and a convoluted story that leads them to Kwaneta Harris. - Want the full story? Binge every episode of What She Buried ad-free now by subscribing to ⁠The Binge+⁠. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to ⁠GetTheBinge.com⁠. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at ⁠Patreon.com/TheBinge⁠. What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. - For more of Justine’s work, read Unreasonable Women, which follows three women who have been punished for defending themselves. The result of seven years of reporting inside U. S. prisons, it's a gripping, urgent look at how survivors are criminalized, called "required reading for anyone who cares about women and justice," by Bookpage, "remarkable... riveting," by Kirkus, and "true crime at its finest," by Booklist. Available now on Amazon or Bookshop.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:02Speaker 01

  Campside Media.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Gary Sweet was the Garland, Texas, police detective leading the Michael Giles investigation. He's a tall, lanky guy, exceptionally courteous. He's retired now. He lives in the countryside southeast of Dallas, in a ranch home that's been immaculately decorated by his wife.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Not one thing in this house is mine that I put here. It's all her. I just pay for it. You know, married couples have his money, her money? We just have her money.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But look what her nice.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  No, I'm happy.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  I'll keep her.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Gary Sweet seems content enough in retirement, but he also misses the job.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I hate saying this. I know it probably comes off to the average person wrong, but some of those cases are a lot of fun to work. I mean, they are. I enjoyed 25 years of working homicide. I loved my job. I loved going to work. I loved when the phone rang at 2 o'clock in the morning. I loved it.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  So on Friday, October 12, 2007, Gary was happy to be the one to speak to the investigators from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the ones looking into Michael Giles' disappearance. And even though it was the end of the workday, he was happy to drive out to Michael Giles' house on Wood Creek Lane and inspect the concrete slab in the back. The concrete slab that did not look right. As soon as Gary saw the slab, he called out a canine unit with a cadaver dog.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  And the handler comes out, this lady, and they immediately start... she has a big pole with handles on it, and she's poking holes all around the yard. And then she pokes holes under that concrete slab.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  The canine handler has only been able to poke holes a few inches deep in most of the yard, but around that concrete slab, the entire pole sinks in, four feet deep. It means the soil hasn't settled. The cadaver dog perks up. The handler perks up, too.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  And she said, "I don't really consider that a true hit." Yes, it's a reaction. The dog barked and pawed at the ground, and it didn't do that in any other hole. But she wanted it to be stronger.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So, nothing definitive. Nonetheless, that slab, with its unusual shape, and its strange location, and its unsettled soil, it's all adding up for Gary. This can't end well.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is What She Buried. I'm Justine Vanderloon. Episode 2: Digging a Hole.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  The VA investigators, the ones who had met Michael Giles' sister Gwen in the Lowe's parking lot, who had shown up at the Garland Police Department and talked to Gary Sweet, they had been able to put together a rough timeline of what had happened at Michael Giles' house over the past 15 months. The months since Michael had bowed out of his sister Gwen's 4th of July barbecue.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  When Gwen had gone to check on Michael's house a couple weeks after the barbecue and saw it cleared out, she never went back. But there had been a "house for rent" sign in the window. What Gwen didn't know was that a local Realtor had been hired to facilitate the rental process. The woman who hired the Realtor said she was the goddaughter, or maybe the granddaughter, or maybe it was the daughter, of Michael Giles. Memories vary. Anyway, in August, a man rents the house. In September, he moves in with his young family. Then, three weird things happen.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  The first weird thing comes about two months after the renter moves in. One day, he's taking a shower when he hears a woman's voice coming from the direction of the backyard. He dresses, hustles out there, and notices that she's directing a contractor to do a bit of work. He's like, "Um, hello?" She walks up to him, and she says she's the owner's goddaughter, or granddaughter, or daughter. Again, lots of differing recollections here. Anyway, she's the one that's handling the property. She explains that she is having a contractor install a patio. The contractor's already there, getting ready to pour concrete. His end product is the slab.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  It's placed kind of randomly, the renter thinks, just a strip in the back of the house. There isn't even a door that leads to it.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  But the renter shrugs it off.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  The second weird thing happens a couple months later, in January 2007. The renter gets a letter with terrible news. The owner's goddaughter/granddaughter/daughter, the one who was having the slab poured, she has died. Sudden, tragic, apparently in a head-on collision, on the way to church, no less. The letter is signed by someone named Tracy Knight. Tracy Knight explains that she is also a relative of the owner. The house is being sold, and the renter, who just moved in, has to be out by the end of the next month. The third weird thing happens just a few weeks later.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  A postcard arrives, addressed to Michael Giles, the owner. It's from the VA, and it says that the house is being foreclosed on.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  The renter finds this whole thing very bizarre. His rent checks are being cashed, so why aren't Michael Giles' relatives paying the mortgage? Does Michael Giles even know about this? And why have his family members left instructions that no one, under any circumstance, can dig in the backyard? The renter contacts the VA and reports that he and the Realtor both suspect that something is amiss.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  That's the case that makes its way to Gary Sweet late in the day on Friday, October 12.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Quanetta Harris was the first name we got.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Quanetta Harris. That was the name of the woman the renter had met when the concrete slab was being poured.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  He was saying that it was Quanetta Harris at first, and then he had gotten a letter or something about that Quanetta Harris had been killed in an accident. So we start digging into Quanetta Harris and find out there's no record of Quanetta Harris dying anywhere. And we pull her up, and she has an alias of Tracy Knight.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Tracy Knight, the woman who had taken over after Quanetta Harris had supposedly died. Quanetta's middle name is Yatrice. Growing up, everyone called her Tracy. Now, Quanetta's name starts popping up everywhere.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  The Garland Police Investigators track down a teenager who sometimes does landscaping work with his father and uncle. The teenager remembers that two summers ago, he had been hired to dig a hole in the backyard of a house on Wood Creek Lane. He also remembers the dimensions of the hole, about six feet long, three feet wide. A woman hired him, looked him up and down, and said, "Make the hole kind of your size, but longer." And the teenage landscaper remembers where he had dug the hole, right where the concrete slab now sits.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  The detectives show him a photo lineup.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  All six pictures were together. And we showed him a lineup, and he picked out Quanetta Harris as the lady hired him to dig the hole.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Quanetta Harris, again.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  The teenage landscaper tells detectives something else, too. The woman he'd ID'd in the photo lineup as Quanetta Harris had offered his family all the furniture in Michael Giles' house for just $300. They took two truckloads, pretty much everything, except for the living room couch. It had a red stain on it. The woman told them, "It's just paint." The couch was long gone, never found, but the teenage landscaper remembered what he thought at the time. That red stain does not look like paint.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  So, now Quanetta Harris is the focus of Gary Sweet's investigation. But investigation into what exactly? Technically, Michael Giles is simply missing.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  We had a suspect before we even had the murder. In 25 years, in 250 murders, in my experience, I don't think I've ever had that, where I knew my suspect before I knew I had a victim.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 11:06Speaker 04

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• 11:34Speaker 01

  In prison, you're suspended in time. It's impossible to escape your past. Quinetta was clear on that when I visited her in Texas.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  That's one thing about solitary confinement. There is no distraction, so you can't run from yourself. People go mad. You can't run from yourself. You have to face. There's no TV, there's no social media, the radio doesn't work. When you're alone like that, everything you have ever done bad in your life, you think about. Things you thought you forgot. You just process them, and you wonder, what made me think this was a good idea? What made me think that was a good idea from when I was a teenager to doing stupid things, to as I got older, doing stupid things?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  The first stupid thing that came to mind?

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Marrying young because I wanted independence. And, um, not for love.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  She was referring to Tony, her first husband. The young Air Force recruit she met at the mall when they were both teenagers. The guy she married right away, just to get out of Detroit. Wherever Tony was stationed, Quinetta went. First to California, then to an Air Force base in England. There, whenever Tony was sent away on assignments, other airmen would check in on Quinetta. Michael Giles was one of them.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Everybody who tried to check, check on me, tried to screw me. Told Tony, told people, I said, I don't want nobody checking on me. But I was the youngest, but I was like 21 or so, and everyone else were older married people. And Giles was like, I'm just gonna check on you myself.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Michael Giles was a master sergeant, 12 years older than Quinetta and unmarried, no family of his own. At first, to Quinetta, he seemed paternal. Then, as her marriage with Tony was crumbling, Quinetta says her relationship with Michael became romantic.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  He helped me leave Tony, and I've always felt obligated to him for that.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Their relationship continued after Quinetta and Tony separated, after she moved back to Detroit, after Michael retired from the Air Force and returned home to Dallas. It was long distance, on again, off again, and basically a secret. Which is why in October 2007, when Detective Gary Sweet was finding out about the hole in the concrete slab and the red stain on the couch, nobody in Texas knew what the connection was between Michael Giles and Quinetta Harris. Not Detective Sweet, not Michael's sister Gwen, not his cousin Carnita. Nobody had ever even heard Quinetta's name.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Michael Giles didn't tell anyone about Quinetta Harris, and Quinetta Harris also kept their arrangement quiet, for the most part.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  I knew of Michael Giles maybe about four or five years before that tragic incident happened.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Princess Powell was almost like a sister to Quinetta back in the day.

• 14:37Speaker 05

  Our mothers are first cousins, and that makes us second cousins officially. But we were really close growing up, really, really close.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Princess knew Quinetta very well. She understood how her relationship with Michael Giles worked.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  She would go down there, she would visit him, she'll come back, what about five grand? He would, you know, pay for a lot of things. He's very generous with her. He would pay for her kids' school clothes, he would do this, he would do that, but it took a trip, you know?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  As far as Princess knew, these were two adults that had a quid pro quo going. Not just sex, but also companionship in exchange for money, or for help on a car payment, or a tuition fee. Transactional for both of them, to a point.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  Michael Giles was somebody she wasn't ever in love with. He was just a means to something. They had an agreeable relationship, and it was what it was. She was thankful for him at times, and they were really friendly and everything, but there was no great love there. You know, if she never saw Michael Giles again, she wouldn't sweat a tear. And if he never saw her, he may have been a little bit more, you know, because of her youth and her beauty, but for her, no, that wasn't somebody she wanted. If she wanted Michael Giles, she could have had him 10 times over.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Princess hadn't met Michael in person, but if he called when she and Quinetta were hanging out, Princess might hop on the line, say hi.

• 16:03Speaker 05

  I always thought him to be a kind of happy-go-lucky type of guy, you know? I had no, no bad intuitions about him or anything. I just knew he was very friendly, and I knew he was very generous with her. And I'd tell them, okay, you guys, have fun, you know, just nice, short and sweet. And to her credit, she's never told me anything negative about him. She's never told me that he's ever beaten her, roughed her up, or anything of the matter. He actually treated her better than her official men.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Her official men. Ever since they were young, Princess noticed that Quinetta had no shortage of unsavory guys hanging around.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  Because sometimes, when you're light, you attract darker entities.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Quinetta was the light, as far as Princess was concerned. Even now, even after everything, Princess knows that a part of Quinetta has always been compassionate.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  She had a great big heart, and she did a lot of things for people, you know? She did a lot of things. She just wasn't just, she just, you know, she was the type of person that if she knew somebody down the street needed some food, she would give them food. She would buy the food, her and her mother, they were like that. They were very kind. They fed many and helped many people who were in need. If I need something, I can call her mother, and her mother will give it to me. If I say I'm hungry or whatever, her mother would fill my refrigerator up with food. That's just, you know, they had that kindness in them, that goodness in them.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Princess and Quinetta were both nurses. They worked together frequently, staffing nursing homes and rehabilitation centers. Princess saw how Quinetta's caring played out on a daily basis.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  She was very attentive to her patients, you know? She was very attentive to them, she did whatever was required.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Maybe the two cousins got along so well because they were yin and yang. Princess is introverted, always preferred to observe from the sidelines. Not Quinetta.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  She was born beautiful. She was always good-looking and all that. When she attracted a lot of people, she was never snoopy or snotty about it. She always wore the best clothes, even when my parents, my mother couldn't afford that stuff. So I wore hand-me-downs and stuff, but she wore everything designer and everything. So, you know, she was always the center of attention.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  As they grew older, Princess marveled at how smart her cousin was.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  She's highly intelligent, and she can retain a mass amount of information. She reads something, she knows it, and she'll remember it. She doesn't have to study in a way other people needs to study. So she has that type of brain power.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And Quinetta's intelligence was captivating.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  She'll talk, and she'll talk, and she's a talker. And she'll win people over, and they'd be so enamored with her. I mean, they are, they are. People, when they meet her, it's like they're on a high. And then slowly but surely, you know, that high comes down.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  But so should they be like on a high, and then what would happen?

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Well, you know, Quinetta's a liar too. So I always thought her as a, you know, one of those habitual liars. She'll lie just to keep the conversation going. If she's in a room with a doctor, you would swear she was a doctor. And she would give the impression that she was a doctor. And she was morphing to that role as being a doctor.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  There was something almost whimsical about that. Play-acting, like the movie Catch Me If You Can. Quinetta, Princess was saying, was smart and charismatic enough to convince people that she was like them, one of them. It seemed enviable. It could have been innocuous. Except there was a darker side to the way Quinetta operated, Princess was saying. The way she could slip into and out of situations, the way she could use her talents and other people's interests and weaknesses to get what she wanted, maybe what she felt she needed.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  It began with some shoplifting and light scamming. Back when Quinetta was still a young military wife, when she was married to Tony, pregnant with their son, and living in California. She got a job at a Toys R Us with the full intention of stealing things for her baby. She's told me as much. She also told me that later, she worked at Contempo Casuals, and she let some girls take clothes at a deep discount, pocketed the cash. Tony, her husband back then, he says there was more. He claims she also wrote fake checks when she was on military bases. Tony remembers that the Air Force Special Investigations Office looked into it. There were no charges.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And Tony also swears that Quinetta stole $3,500 from a "totally trolls" store where she briefly worked. She denies this. Again, no arrests, no charges. But Princess remembered Quinetta running scams too, years later, during their time working together.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  Some of the things she did, some of the scams she did, she used to sit down to me, break it all down and laugh. Guess what I did? This dumb motherfucker over here, I mean, that's just, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we'll have a drink or something, I'll be drinking. I said, "You did what?" And she was like, "Yeah, I did this." I was like, "Girl, you gonna go to jail, you gonna go to jail, you gonna go to jail." I scolded her. I told her, "You are fucking up. You are a nurse. You make good money. Why is you scamming people when your ass gonna go to jail and you're not gonna raise your kids?" You know? And I was pissed at her. And her only thing was, "What do you want to do? I can give you something." I was like, "No, no, no, no, no. You are fucking up."

• 21:50Speaker 01

  It came to a head in early 2006. The two didn't speak for a while. This always happened when Princess called her cousin out. Quinetta gave her the silent treatment, and then eventually, she came back. Toward the end of June, Princess's phone rang.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  I got a call, I don't know how many weeks later, "Can you take me to the airport?"

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Quinetta said she was going to Texas to see Michael Giles. Princess knew what that usually meant.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  She can go down there, and they're gonna screw, and they're gonna, you know, and she's gonna come back with $5,000, like she always does. So I was like, "Oh, you need school clothes money. School clothes coming up." And it was a joke. And that's all that was, until she came back.

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• 23:10Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  As Gary Sweet was looking into the suspicious concrete slab in October 2007, as the name Quinetta Harris was popping up all over the place, the family of Michael Giles was just waiting. The days moved slowly. The family started a website, findmichaelgiles.com. The cruise ship wedding, which at one time had everyone in a panic, now they were praying it had really happened. Michael's sister Gwen was filled with dread, and she had one particular worry above all. If something happened to Michael, how would their mom go on?

• 24:25Speaker 07

  He was the golden child. He didn't do any wrong in my mom's eyes. He always was there for her.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  In the autumn of 2007, after a very difficult life, Gwen and Michael's mom was already in a fragile place.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  She raised six kids, plus three grandkids, nine kids total, and she had a nervous breakdown at that time, and you couldn't leave her by herself.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  So Gwen kept her mom in the dark for as long as she could.

• 24:50Speaker 07

  Detective Sweet called and said that they had been over to Mike's house, and that they found a area that hit on something and wanted to let us know, because he was all over the news and everything, missing military guy. And so, they told me that they were gonna be out there.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  The FBI Evidence Recovery Team would be breaking up the slab and digging beneath it. It had been exactly a week since Gwen had first heard that the VA was investigating her brother's disappearance. Now Gwen headed over to his old house to stand witness.

• 25:25Speaker 07

  Me and my sister Cheryl, we were all back there. They were there about 7:00 in the morning. They had the little tent up, and all the people with the white on and all that. Oh yeah, we stood out there the whole day waiting. And it was hot. There were helicopters flying all over, one of those big old things with all the cop center and all that.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  At the exact same time, Detective Gary Sweet was on his way to find Quinetta in Detroit. He'd never been there before, and he only had a passing awareness of the local history. How the big car manufacturers had outsourced jobs and shuttered factories. How middle-class union workers, many of them Black people who had left the South in hopes of making a better life, fell into poverty. How racist lending practices meant that the city was among the most segregated in America, and a housing crisis was ever worsening. But Gary Sweet knew about Detroit's reputation as a blighted place. Looking out the window of his car, that's what he focused on.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  You know, here in Texas, you drive down the road, and you see a cross on the side of the road, you know there was a traffic fatality there. About every third house, there's a cross on the porch. Houses are burnt down. The area we were in, and I'm not saying this about all of Detroit by any means, because there were some nice areas, but the area we were in, it was bad. Yeah, I was like, "Holy cow. This is a pretty depressed town."

• 26:56Speaker 01

  When Gary Sweet gets to Quinetta's neighborhood, he's relieved. She lives on a sweet block in a simple, comfortable house. He parks nearby.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  So as we're sitting there for maybe a few hours, just waiting, you know, we're getting constant feedback, "Hey, we're digging, we're digging." And then I was getting feedback that, "Hey, we're starting to get a smell of decomp." As we're waiting, she comes walking out. And now we've got a decision. I'm thinking, "Oh, crap, do we let her get in the car and try to follow her and lose her?" And so I think, "I'm just gonna go up and talk to her. I'm gonna stall her, because they're getting close." And we literally have a warrant pretty much typed out, waiting to add the final part to it, and get it signed immediately, once we find the body.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Gary figures Quinetta is probably just going to the store. But Canada's right across the river. He approaches her.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  "So you're going out here? So I'm Detective Sweet, Garland, Texas. I said, "I'm investigating a missing person, looking for Michael Giles." And she said, "Oh, Michael's missing?" I said, "Yeah, you know Michael?" She said, "Yeah, come in." And she invites us in the house.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  The place is clean and cute. Quinetta is calm and pleasant. Gary starts explaining.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  "The reason we're here talking to you is because his car is now registered to you, and you're using money out of his bank account. So we're here to find out how you know him." And I thought she had a really good answer for that. Of course, we were gonna check it out, but her reply was, "Oh yeah, we have a kid to get him. And he just put me on his accounts. So he doesn't pay child support, but whatever I need, I just get." And he gave me the car, and I thought, really? At first, just split second, I thought, "Oh, crap, maybe that's, you know, that could be."

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Could be, but in reality, it was not. Quinetta and Michael didn't have a child. Gary and Quinetta keep chatting. He's running low on material.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "Hurry up with this, results of this dig." Because now I've run out of official police talk. So now we're talking about her DVD collection. I'm stalling everything I've got, anything in the house, I'm trying to just talk. And then I get the call.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Back in Garland, the coroner's van has parked on Wood Creek Lane. The FBI team is finished.

• 29:23Speaker 07

  They came out and told us they found him.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Michael's body was buried under the slab.

• 29:28Speaker 07

  And the worst thing about it is, I had to leave and go tell my mom. That was the hardest thing I ever did, was to have to tell her that. And I couldn't even tell her. I gave her the flyer, and so she wanted to go over there, and so she got in the car. And we went over, and she talked to the people, and that was it. That was it. That's how we found him. Yep. When we went over that July 18th, my mom knew. Mike was in there. He was there. And I just thought that, huh. Yep.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  She knew it was her godchild.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And Gary knows that a body's been found. But he thinks, if I arrest Quinetta now, I'm not going to get a confession. He wants a confession.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  So he decides to appeal to the universal human desire to make bad shit go away.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  So at that point, instead of arresting her, I asked her, would you mind coming down to the station and talking to us? And she wasn't real keen on coming down to the police station. But I kind of prided myself in being a master BSer. So I said, hey, look, I said, there's computers there. We can verify some of the things you're telling us there at the station that we can't do here. And I said, if you can come to the station with us, we can get this over with and I won't have to bother you anymore. And I saw the lights go off in her head when I said, we won't have to bother you anymore. Like, oh, this will be over?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  That look, and it's not, she didn't actually say it. She goes, oh, well, yeah, sure.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  In 2007, Quinetta Yatris Harris was 35 years old. If you passed her by, you'd guess she was just a soccer mom. When she's not in her nursing scrubs, she wears sweats or jeans. Her hair is usually tied back in a ponytail. She doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, eats clean, loves to read women's fiction, plays a lot of Mary J. Blige. She drives a decent car, works a respectable job. Quinetta had big dreams when she was a kid. Maybe the biggest, she'd get out of Detroit.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  She tried, moved across the country, across the world, studied nursing, got her license. But by the time Gary Sweet walks up to her on that sidewalk, she's had two failed marriages, and she's back, a few blocks from the bungalow where she grew up, living with a guy she dated in high school. She's trying once again to make a family. She's just had her third child, a baby girl, four months old and still breastfeeding.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  She also has a 14-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter. So when Gary Sweet intercepts her on the sidewalk that day, everything is at stake for Quinetta Harris. Was it just lights going off in her head and this will be over, like Gary Sweet thought?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Maybe, in part. But Quinetta is a black woman born and raised in Detroit, a city with a long and documented history of police brutality.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  So no matter how genteel Gary Sweet is talking, and no matter how composed Quinetta seems, she has good reason to be scared.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  In her letters, she's shared with me how she feels about the police.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  "The cops in Detroit don't help us," she told me. "Anyone who thinks they might is from another planet."

• 33:23Speaker 01

  So Quinetta Harris, of Detroit, on planet Earth, meets Gary Sweet and makes a quick assessment. She decides, don't resist.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Acquiesce. Give yourself time to think.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  This is Detective Sweet with the Baltimore Police Department. We're in Detroit, Michigan, October the 19th, 2007, 6:20 PM. And your name?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Quinetta Harris.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Quinetta. Okay, Quinetta, as I told you before, this is your rights. I'm gonna read these to you and let you read along with me.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Gary and Quinetta are sitting in an interview room.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  He's laying it all out. Michael Giles' SUV, registered to her.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  All that man's money in her accounts. The teenage landscaper, pointing at her picture in the lineup, said, "That's the lady who hired me to dig the hole."

• 34:21Speaker 01

  And Quinetta asks, "What hole?"

• 34:26Speaker 02

  You don't remember hiring somebody to dig?

• 34:27Speaker 03

  I didn't hire anybody to dig. I mean, I didn't hire nobody to dig no hole.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  I can picture her, what Gary Sweet probably saw. An attractive, put-together woman, self-possessed. And her tone, it's decisive. She doesn't skip a beat.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  He identified you out of six-picture lineup.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  And what bothers me about all this is we had this kid come back out to the house and he pointed where the concrete slab is and said, that's where you had him dig the hole. And then we're curious as to why the concrete slab was poured there. And we have another totally unrelated person that has nothing to do, just hear me out for just a second, that has nothing to do with this kid, don't even know that kid, says that you came out with a contractor and had him put this concrete slab there. This is what bothers me about it.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  I see what you're saying.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just...

• 35:25Speaker 03

  I mean, I understand what you're saying, I can see what you're saying or whatever, but at the same time, I'm sitting here thinking, I ain't never hired no kid to dig no hole.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Gary Sweet realizes he's not getting anywhere with this woman.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you, let me just get to the point and quit beating around the bush with the whole thing.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  We had the concrete slab torn up and we had it dug up.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  And Michael's not missing anywhere.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Okay, because...

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Because Michael was under that concrete slab that you had poured down there.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  I didn't have that poured down there.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And that hole that you had dug.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  I didn't have that hole dug.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  You're in a lot, a lot of trouble.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  How am I in trouble? I didn't have no teenager dig no hole, for real.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  The best thing you can do, you have a perfectly clear criminal history, as far as I can tell, and you've got some traffic tickets. We're looking at murder right here.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  You trying to say that I did something to Michael?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  She seems surprised, but she keeps her cool.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Michael's been found underneath that concrete slab that you were identified as having poured. We have a kid that identified you as having the hole dug to bury that person. The kid specifies the hole.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  And really, it's time to quit playing games.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  This is an eyewitness account that you're telling me that somebody identified me based on a photo?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Yes, a photo lineup, six-picture photo lineup. We put six random pictures, you as one of the six, and they picked you out. Every one of these people picked you out, every one of them.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  I never said I never visited.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  But they picked you out as doing these specific deeds. I'm telling you right now...

• 37:07Speaker 03

  You trying to drive me with murder?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  I am.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Murder, murder as in murder, like I can go to the death penalty?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  She's incredulous. This cannot possibly be happening.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Not necessarily the death penalty.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Murder?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  It could be, I guess it could be a capital murder.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  May I call my attorney now, please?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  You not want to speak to us anymore?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I'd like to terminate the interview. Call my attorney.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Next time, on What She Buried.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  We were arguing a lot, but it was cute at first, and then it just escalated. So I had my friend in the Detroit Police Department run his plates, and they was registered to jailhouse.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  I got in the truck, the smell, smelled like old blood.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  We found a notarized power of attorney granting her access to everything. And we want to find out who signed that, because he's dead.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Unlock all episodes of What She Buried ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. And it doesn't stop at What She Buried. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand-new series on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. And between drops, you've got ad-free access to Crime Scene, the Binge's weekly series, plus instant access to over 60 true crime podcasts, shows like Wild Boys, Blink, and My Fugitive Dad, so you'll never be short on stories. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to subscribe directly.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. This show was reported and hosted by me, Justine Vanderloon. Eric Benson is the executive producer. Ashley Anne Krigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose, Josie Duffy Rice, Mosi Secret, Emily Martinez, Shiba Joseph, and Michael Meyer. The story editor is Matthew Share. The series was mixed in sound design by Garrett Tiedemann, with support from Yuen Lai Trum Yuen. Fact-checking by Matthew Giles. A special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingle. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriades, and Matthew Share. If you enjoyed What She Buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. Burst the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.