What She Buried | 4. The Job Offer

Kwaneta concocts another complicated plan and convinces someone else to confess to her own crimes. - 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 00

  Listen to every episode of What She Buried ad-free right now when you subscribe to The Binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else, get exclusive bonus episodes, and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap Subscribe, or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  The morning I interview Quinetta, she wakes up in her cell. It's the size of a parking bay with a window that's nailed shut. She washes in a small metal sink that's welded to a toilet, puts on her prison whites and her giant, state-issued sunglasses. She's shackled. She's marched over to the visiting area, strip-searched, then placed in a concrete cubicle, facing me across the glass. There I am, this person she's written to, that she's talked to on the phone. She likes me. She trusts me, I think.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  After all, we've had a relationship of sorts for five years, and I'd written about her already in several articles. Quinetta read them. She said it helped, just to have some light shined on a dark place, to have her name in the world. After the articles were published, Quinetta told me that the warden had wandered by her cell and asked her, "You writing to that Communist Yankee Reporter again?" I loved the nickname. So did Quinetta. And that's how she addressed me from then on. C.Y.R., Communist Yankee Reporter. Quinetta saw me as an ally, maybe a friend.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  She wasn't wrong. But on that February morning when we met in the visiting room, I was trying to reconcile Quinetta's version of events with what the police had found. Quinetta told me she'd killed Michael Giles because she'd been in an inconceivable situation. She'd reacted. She wasn't some criminal mastermind.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  In Detroit, in my home, the first thing that they said is, "Oh, we know this wasn't right." I keep saying it's premeditated. This isn't premeditated. If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have lured him here, and somebody would have gave him a shot of bad dope. Take him over to such and such funeral home, pay a couple thousand, they'll premate him.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Quinetta's argument was simple. If she had meant to kill Michael Giles, she would have done a better job.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  This was chaotic. This was a, "Oh shit, oops. I, I, I, oh my, this wasn't anything calculated."

• 3:31Speaker 00

  But stealing $200,000 from Michael Giles after his death by forging checks and power of attorney documents? That was the definition of deliberate. I told Quinetta that I was struggling with all this. How do you square the fact that she said it was this hectic accident with all these plans she made, one after another, after another? And she's like, "Allow me to explain."

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, as always, was free with his money to me, so I really didn't have no reason still, but because I did run my mouth to my ex, and, you know, he first thought was, "Only have money."

• 4:10Speaker 00

  So according to Quinetta, stealing Michael Giles' money was all DeAndre's idea. Yes, Quinetta had killed Michael as a response to what happened between them, but DeAndre was the one to see the opportunity to profit off of Michael's death. Quinetta said, "Look at where the money went. It went mostly to mail purchases." Okay, yes, there were some, quote, "mail purchases" made. But the majority of the $200,000 that was liquidated from Michael Giles' accounts went to Quinetta. Only around $16,000 went to accounts that DeAndre controlled. I mean, the records do show the money more going to you.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  To what, like specifically, like?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Just like to Quinetta Harris' name.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Oh, the name, but not to like, um, vehicles and all that? Well, I guess, because I bought it, I got the money that I, he got the vehicles, he got the motorcycles, he got the, okay, that's fair.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  "Okay, that's fair," she said. She kind of gave in. It was pretty hard to counter the paper trail she'd left behind. I imagine that back in the fall of 2007, in the weeks after Quinetta was arrested, she knew very well that the money was going to be impossible to explain away, that it was going to make the killing look like a cold-blooded, premeditated act, motivated by greed, and only greed. A jury would hear about all of it and send her away to prison, maybe even to death row. She hadn't seen her kids in months. Would she get to see them again, ever?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Quinetta was backed into a corner, and as was her habit whenever she realized she was in too deep. She reacted by coming up with a plan, one that was pretty hard to wrap your head around. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is What She Buried. I'm Justine Vanderloon. Episode four, The Job Offer.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  When authorities uncovered the extent of financial fraud that occurred after Michael Giles' death, they increased Quinetta's charge from first-degree murder to capital murder. In Texas, capital murder is usually reserved for, say, killing the governor, or a police officer, or a child under 10, or for being a serial killer, or a mass shooter, or for intentionally committing a murder in the course of committing another crime, like robbery, as the state claimed in Quinetta's case. There are two punishments for capital murder: life without parole and death.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  The judge set a bond of $300,000. Quinetta didn't have that kind of cash sitting around. Nobody she knew did. So she could either stay at the Dallas County Jail until her trial, or she could find a bail bondsman who, for a fee, would front the money for bail.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And one time, I had 4,000 people on bond and $29 million on the street. Rapists, murderers, robbers, carjackers, ugh, yeah, some of the worst of the worst.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  That's David Wells. Back in 2007, David ran a bail bonds company. He was also a private investigator, a boxing coach, and generally, a man around town.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I didn't put my bail bond company down by the jail. My bail bond company was in the neighborhood, so people could walk to me. I became the man in the city that the mayor and judges and people of authority would go, "Call Dave, he can get it done, call Dave." But I became a product of who I am in that community, and still in my community. And if you look at the stories and the history, I dominated the bail bond. It was a white man's business, and you had maybe one African American, two African maybe in it. So my business grew tremendously, and I made millions of dollars doing it.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  David lives in a sprawling house, long stretches of gleaming floors, high ceilings. It's full of historical memorabilia, some of it from the civil rights era, most of it having to do with sports. We sat down to talk, and one piece caught my eye. I should mention the O.J. A photo of O.J. Simpson at the defense table at his murder trial, signed by O.J. himself.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  When he got the not guilty verdict, I was able to obtain a picture of him and a picture of his lawyers, and I was able to get a signed copy of it, and so that's what hangs on the wall.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  And then you got a quote emblazoned on that. On the lower part of the frame, there was a little engraved plaque with the words, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." What do you love about that quote?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Was not to love about it. I mean, it's factual. I mean, I deal with the courts every day. So it's a great quote. I've been blessed to be involved in a lot of high-profile cases. Quinetta is just one case of many cases that I've been involved in. And a lot of times, people are so overbearing with the police say and what the police do and what the prosecutor puts on, that we forget the little element of the defense.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  It was hard for me to tell if David Wells was the best or worst guy for Quinetta to have called back then. To her, he was kind of the only guy.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Her family reached out to me from Detroit and asked me, could I do the bond? The bond was $300,000. I'm like, shit, $300,000? I'm going to have to get something for it. I normally don't take collateral, but...

• 10:20Speaker 00

  But sometimes I do, like with Quinetta. So Quinetta's mom, Roberta, gives him around $30,000. David puts up the money and Quinetta bonds out of jail. The terms of her release require that she stay in Dallas. She can't go back to Detroit.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  And so when Quinetta got her deal, they said, well, we don't know what she's going to do. She's going to live with you. And at that time, I was single. I'm like, no, she can't come live with me. Not because I was scared that the offense, it just that I was single and dating women. I'm not this other woman as big as this house is. I was not going to have that. So I said, but I've got an apartment that she can live in.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  So Quinetta was just down the road from David.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  We would spend time, we would talk. We became pretty cool.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  But David has been hearing rumors about Quinetta from people in serious positions, official positions.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  One thing I was told right off the top is, don't fall for her because she's got a way of dealing with men. And she had a nice body, but she wasn't my style. You know what I'm saying? It's the style of woman. You know, I deal with women all the time, but they were like, she's very manipulative when it comes to men.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Why was she not your style?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I got a style of woman that I like. She wasn't my style.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  So she's not his style. And also, he doesn't trust her. He has an employee who does a lot of the legwork of his business. He tells the employee, keep an eye on Quinetta. Make sure she doesn't leave that apartment. Is that like, unique to Quinetta? Or are you always watching everyone? Because...

• 11:57Speaker 02

  I'm always watching everyone.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  I should revise. It's not just the one employee on Quinetta duty.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  But I was also friends with the people that live next door of the apartment company.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  You've got a lot of eyes and ears out.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  I do that in the street anyway. People would tell you, if anything in the streets, I'm going to... I get FBI, I get police, I got ears and stuff to the street.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  And the ears and stuff to the street pick up some unusual activity going on in Quinetta's apartment. David's recollection of what exactly she's up to, it's hazy. But he remembers that she's got folks going in and out.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  When she was at the apartment, she interviewed like, three or four people. She was a movie director and that she was going to do this deal.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  I'm going to stop for a moment and clarify what David says is happening here. He's saying that it appears that Quinetta was pretending to be a casting director as part of a scheme that she hoped would get her charges dismissed.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  What she did is took her situation, did the cast, had people audition for this situation, befriended this girl, and manipulated the girl so bad. She's like, now, you did great, you're fine, you did this, you did that. Now you've got to go to the courthouse and go to the DA's office, confess to the DA that you did this. I know that perfectly well, too, by this.

• 13:32Speaker 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.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Ryan's style is really gunning it in gold.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high. Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world. I'm Michelle Shepherd, and from CBC Podcasts and The Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian. Available now.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  It's late April 2008. It's been six months since Quinetta was arrested in Detroit, flown to Dallas, and booked into the county jail. Just before the new year, she bonded out. She's been living at David Wells apartment, and every so often, David's employee takes her to attend a hearing. Around this time, a woman named Teresa Kane enters the picture.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  I remember everything about the initial call, just because it was very odd. I had just left Barnes and Noble across from North Park Mall. It was at night, and I got a call from an unknown number.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Teresa doesn't pick up at first.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  The caller kept calling and left a message saying that it was an urgent matter.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Teresa Kane was a criminal defense attorney. Getting an after-hours call from someone with an emergency, part of the job. So she's in her car in the Barnes and Noble parking lot, and she calls back. A woman answers. She says that there's a seriously bad situation, and it concerns her niece.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  She was very cryptic at first, but then she basically told me that she, along with some other individuals, had murdered someone, and that her niece was headed to the police department to confess.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Teresa's thinking, this is unusual.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  It did ask questions that a normal defense attorney would ask, like, do you think she really did it? Do you, are the police even investigating this? And she was, you know, very adamant that her niece had actually committed this crime, was distraught, and really wanted to come clean. My first instinct is, well, I mean, this sounds horrible, but you know, if they're not looking for you, is that what you really want to do?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  The woman assures her, yes. My niece has thought this through, and she wants to come forward.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  And I think the next step was, I wanted to meet with her. And then it got a little, it started to get a little weird. There was all these excuses of why she couldn't come to my office. She wanted to meet me at the courthouse. And I thought that was strange. But you know, people who don't have money can't get around town.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Teresa agrees to meet at the courthouse.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  I had set up a tentative meeting with the prosecutor for that afternoon, if she showed up, if she wanted to talk, if, you know, whatever. And I hadn't told him really anything, other than I might have some information about a case he was working on.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  On Thursday, April 24, 2008, a young woman appears at the bottom of the long steps leading up to the Frank Crowley courthouse in downtown Dallas. It's an imposing complex, two 10-story brick buildings connected by a towering glass atrium. Set against that, the young woman looks minuscule. She's only 19. She's black, skinny with short hair, wearing a dark hoodie, jeans, sneakers. She's so soft-spoken that you have to really lean in to make out her words. Teresa greets her. They take an elevator downstairs and walk into an empty attorney workroom. Municipal gray carpets, beige walls. Teresa's like, what's going on?

• 17:58Speaker 05

  She seemed very, like, matter-of-fact about it. Like, she just really wanted to get this off her chest. And she told me a story about, and here's where I might not remember all the details, but it was something about some guy who was in a house, and I don't remember why, but she was there with some other guys.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  Somebody hit him over the head or something, and as I recall, I think they buried him in the backyard, and like, somebody had a cement patio poured over the burial spot. But...

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  Yes. That's, you know, I mean, she had details, sufficient information. And as I remember, it wasn't all stuff that was like, in the paper.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  So you found her believable?

• 18:52Speaker 05

  I mean, I did. I mean, why would someone go confess to her if they didn't commit? You know, like, that's not something that usually happens in my line of work. I mean, people sometimes get brow-beaten by police and say, okay, okay, yeah, that's what I did. But this wasn't that kind of a situation. This was someone just coming forward on their own. And that's different. I just never had that happen before.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  What kind of person walks into a court and begs to confess to a murder? It's interesting to meet you because I just watched the interrogation videos, and you're...

• 19:26Speaker 06

  So quiet. Yeah, I was naive, quiet, didn't know. I was lost, honestly. I was lost.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  A little girl still, basically.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  This is the so-called niece. Her name is Erica Flores. She's 35 now. She lives in a bright, tidy apartment in southeast Dallas with her five kids and her partner. Erica feels stable and content these days. She's getting her bachelor's degree in psychology. But back in April 2008, when she met Teresa Kane at the courthouse, her life was a lot more precarious. She didn't have a job. The year before, her mom had been arrested for a DUI and sentenced to six months in jail. And Erica and her sisters were left to fend for themselves. No money, unprepared.

• 20:20Speaker 06

  We had to stay at the house by ourselves. Family members would come over and help us and stuff, but it was a task.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Erica also had a son who was born with Erb's palsy, a condition that causes arm paralysis.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  And he was about two years old. His dad was in and out, so I was kind of like any other typical teenager who's had a child young, just trying to make it and do what I can to provide.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Trying and failing. Erica was broke, and nobody was hiring her.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  I was at my wit's end. I was like, you know, I can't find a job.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Then, out of the blue, she gets a call.

• 21:05Speaker 06

  I can't remember what her name was, but she was African. Or she, you know, changed her voice.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  So Erica, who has no reason to suspect this odd stranger is actually Quinetta Harris, goes along with it. She agrees to listen.

• 21:20Speaker 06

  She was like, hey, I have this opportunity. It was a private investigator job.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  A private investigator job.

• 21:27Speaker 06

  And, you know, I was asking all these questions, like, I'm not qualified, don't you? And she was like, oh, no. You know, it was kind of took me real fast. So I'm like, oh, you know, job. So I'm all excited, like, okay. And she was like, well, we can meet downtown because the office is stormed in and it's raining. It leaks. I don't want to meet there. So we met downtown by El Centro College. We were like at a subway inside of the school.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  The potential employer is an older lady, as far as 19-year-old Erica can tell. And she's holding a briefcase and carrying paperwork. The woman sits down and makes her pitch. This job is not only going to pay well, it's also in the interest of justice.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  The job is how they're trying African-Americans. She made it like it was a race thing. And I'm like, okay. So she go into detail and say, the guy, Josh Healy.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Josh Healy, a Dallas County Assistant District Attorney.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  She described him as having a scar on top of his head. And he's like this badass, and he really doesn't like black people. But she gave you a scenario. Yeah, she gave me a scenario. She did. She was telling me everything, like, you met some Hispanic guy. I can't remember the name she told me at the time. But me and this Hispanic guy supposedly had went to their house to help her. I can remember everything that she just said, but I know it was, it was like, what?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  This would be Erica's audition for the job. All she had to do was memorize the details of a murder, a murder in which she killed a black man in Garland. Then Erica would march into the courthouse, tell all of this to Josh Healy, the allegedly racist prosecutor with the scar on his head. And he would put her away and treat her worse and charge her more harshly than a white woman who had recently confessed to something quite similar. Erica might have to sit in jail for a couple of days. But soon enough, her new employer would come and bail her out.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Erica would be rewarded with a plum job, and she'd have exposed systemic racism. I know. It all sounds so fantastical now. But it wasn't so fantastical back then. After all, Erica was a perfect mark. That's probably why Quinetta had chosen her. Because who would be more desperate for a job and more afloat in the world than this 19-year-old, single mom with a young child with a disability? Who would be more willing to believe that this job really existed?

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Who would be more aware of the actual pitfalls and real-life implications of a racist DA? Erica had a lot of problems, and maybe this was the solution to all of them. So in that moment, listening to this woman offer her this bizarre assignment at El Centro College, Erica thinks, okay, I can make this work.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  She gave me money. She gave me $40. Honestly, I don't remember how I got there. It was right up the street.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  There, at the bottom of those long steps leading up to the Frank Crowley courthouse in downtown Dallas, Erica was ready to confess to a killing that Quinetta had committed.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  You're listening to a quick ad. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. Done. No hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means, by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Still haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

• 25:51Speaker 07

  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.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  In the weeks leading up to Erica Flores's arrival, Garland Police Detective Gary Sweet had been noticing an uptick in tips about the Michael Giles murder. Each tip suggests that maybe the case against Quinetta Harris isn't so simple after all.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  I started getting a lot of Crime Stoppers tips. And a lot of them were saying that a guy named T.O. is laughing, saying he got away with this, that they think this other woman did it. I also started getting tips about Juan and Vic. You know, I started hearing that these guys are doing it. And all these are coming through Crime Stoppers, anonymous tips, with no leads, nothing to follow up.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Then he gets a call from Josh Healy, the lead prosecutor in Quinetta's case, the man that Erica Flores was going to expose. Josh says, Gary, we've got someone at the courthouse confessing to the murder of Michael Giles.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And I'm thinking, there is no way.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Gary heads to the courthouse, and there he finds Josh Healy, Teresa Kane, the defense attorney, and 19-year-old Erica Flores.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  When I met her, she was very tiny, little, petite, very soft-spoken. I could barely hear her talk. She was so soft-spoken. And I'm like, trying to read her lips. And I'm thinking, there's no way in the world this girl killed anyone like she's describing.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Then Erica starts telling her story.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  She says that she's with some friends. They're driving around, looking for someone to rob. And they go by Walmart, and they see a guy loading groceries that's by himself. So they follow him home. And when he's carrying groceries in, they went in behind him. And she says, we robbed him. I shot him and killed him, and we left. I said, you're gonna have to give me a whole lot more details than this. A whole lot more details.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  She does. Turns out, Erica has an excellent memory.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  She says, he sat down on the couch. And I went over to him, and he was pleading for his life. And I shot him and killed him. I said, okay, still need more. Where did you shoot him at? In the head? Okay, that's right. And we knew he was most likely killed on the couch because the family bought all the furniture in the house except the sofa because it had a big red stain on it. So she's giving me the couch details. She's giving me the shot in the head. I said, okay, what caliber of gun did you? 9 millimeter. Well, that was correct also. So I said, well, tell me exactly step by step what happened. And she said, he was pleading for his life. She says, I went over, I stuck the gun up to his head.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  And I don't remember right now off the top of my head. It's been a few years. She said Juan or Vic, one of them stuck a pillow over his face and I shot him.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Now I'm thinking, okay, she's got a lot of details. Then what did you do? We wrapped him in a red blanket and we buried him in the backyard. Well, he was wrapped in a red blanket. So all those details were right there.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  In other words, it was a plausible confession, but...

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Something kept pulling at me going, Quanetta did this. I've talked to Quanetta. I was, she did this. I know she did this. And I'm just not buying it.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Erica has said her accomplices in this murder were two men named Juan and Vic. That sounds familiar to Gary. The teenage landscaper and his uncle, the ones who dug the hole in Michael Giles' backyard, they went by the names Juan and Vic. But those guys have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  So Gary starts asking Erica for descriptions of them. She says they were both around 5'10", 180 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  That's close enough to the real guys.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Then Gary asks how old they were. The teenage landscaper, Vic, Erica says he was 19. Gary's thinking, that's about right. Then he asks about Juan, the uncle.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  How old was he? She said 19. He was 58.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Gary himself is in his 50s.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  So I looked at her and I said, Erica, if I told you I was 19, would you believe me? And she goes, no. I said, how come you told me Juan was 19? I said, Juan is 58 years old.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  And her eyes just kind of went, oh crap, I'm caught. Now, you gotta remember, this room is full. I've got Josh, I've got DAs, I've got DA investigators, I've got her attorney. I've got my partners with me. There's people everywhere in this room. And they're all kind of looking like, holy cow. I said, this is not true. This, it didn't happen like you said, did it? And she, she kind of lowered her head and said, no.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Erica also remembered this moment.

• 31:21Speaker 06

  Gary was like, you didn't do this. I'm like, no, I didn't do this. And that's when Gary started asking me, do you know Quanetta Harris? Do you know Mr. Giles? I'm like, no, I don't know. But I was like, my mom probably does. I'm not sure. You may want to call and ask my mom.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Quanetta Harris was in Dallas County Jail at one point, just like Erica's mom, Elizabeth Flores.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Gary puts Erica in the car and they drive over to her family's house.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  Knocked on the door and mom opened the door. And then at this time, like, it was a lot of craziness going on in my life. Mom was like drinking at the time, heavy. So she swings the door open. And Gary tells her, yeah, we were just about to give your daughter 50 years to life. Mom's like, what?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  And I wished I had mom in the beginning because mom drug the truth out of her immediately. What did she say she did? I said, well, she said that her and some friends followed a guy home, took him to his house. They shot him in the head. They drug him to the backyard and they dug a hole and they buried him.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  She looked at me and she went, that sounds like my homegirl Quanetta's story. And I'm like, oh, you know Quanetta? She's, we were cellmates in jail. And she says, we talk every day.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  For some time in 2007, Quanetta and Elizabeth lived together in a four woman cell. Then Elizabeth completed her sentence and Quanetta bonded out. They kept in touch. Quanetta called Elizabeth often, apparently just to check in, say hi. She was cool, a friend who'd also been through the wringer.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Elizabeth told Quanetta about her life, about her daughters.

• 33:11Speaker 06

  I was kind of upset with mom because I'm like, you told her stuff about me that's all she know?

• 33:18Speaker 06

  Daisy was still in contact with each other. I think she was going to try to do my older sister at first because we kind of both were looking for jobs. I guess she used me because at the time I was a dropout, you know? I guess she stereotyped me or whatever.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  It was sinking in for Erica. There was never a private investigator job. No sting on a racist prosecutor. She'd clearly been set up by someone to take the fall for murder.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  That night, sitting in an interview room at the Garland Police Headquarters, Erica was shown a six photo lineup. And there, staring at her, was a picture of the mysterious employer who had hired her. It was Quanetta.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  I felt dumb. I felt like a complete idiot. Like now thinking back, it could have been anybody.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Except it was her. It was Erica. She had been chosen quite deliberately. Quanetta identified a vulnerable young woman, put her on the path to a ruined life, and gave her a shove. There's an alternate reality here in which Erica Flores is arrested and put away for a long time. And when she realizes what happened, she begins to protest. Hey, I'm completely innocent. An African lady at a Subway sandwich shop at the community college hired me as a private investigator to expose racism. Hand to heart, that's actually what happened, I swear.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Prisons do have people like that telling those sorts of stories. They usually get medication, not exoneration.

• 35:15Speaker 06

  I don't mind sharing my story, but I don't like going back to that moment.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  How does it make you feel going back to the moment?

• 35:24Speaker 06

  I don't know, a number of things. Kind of like, makes me upset, then it kind of makes me nervous just thinking about it. But mainly upset.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  I had never asked Quanetta about what happened with Erica Flores, and she had never really told me about it.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  But when I went to visit Quanetta in prison, when we were finally face to face, I asked her. I'd met with Erica Flores just three days earlier. Okay, now that we're in thorny territory because we're already here.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  And what happened with Erica Flores? We, we found her.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  Oh, good, good. Did she tell you how she described me?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Erica had. She'd said, a tall black woman, around middle aged, with a hard to place foreign accent. Quanetta gave me this exasperated look. Was that not you?

• 36:23Speaker 06

  That was one of the people who had helped me. There was someone that he knows, his friend. They were trying to help me. It was more of a, oh, handsome, we gotta help you get out of this.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Quanetta's claim is that a friend from Detroit, a person who was trying to help her out, he got a friend of his to hire Erica Flores. Quanetta herself had nothing to do with it. And as to Erica?

• 36:52Speaker 06

  I never met her.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Did you think it was a good idea?

• 36:56Speaker 06

  No, I told, no, I told them why it wasn't a good idea. You have to realize this was out of space and the death penalty initially. So this was, people who care about me and people who love me, they were panicking.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  When I was at the prison, talking to Quanetta face to face, a part of me thought, or hoped, maybe it was like she said.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Some other person did this, despite her protests. After all, Quanetta was on an ankle monitor. She was being watched by neighbors and by David Wells' employee. How would she have slipped out into downtown Dallas, dressed sharp, carrying a briefcase, and then made her way back to the apartment unseen?

• 37:47Speaker 00

  I'll never know for sure the woman who spoke with Erica in person was Quanetta. But I do know that the evidence leads back to Quanetta. And only Quanetta.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  That's not just because Erica Flores picked Quanetta out of a lineup. Or because Erica's mother, Elizabeth Flores, knew Quanetta and had talked to Quanetta about her daughter. Or because Quanetta's story about the mystery woman is far fetched, to say the least. In the days after Erica Flores' false confession, police searched the apartment where Quanetta had been staying. They found a sheet of paper listing all sorts of odd scenarios. Scenarios that corresponded with the tips that had flooded Gary Sweet's Crime Stoppers line. There was another piece of paper there with another more specific scenario. A bullet pointed breakdown of the story Erica Flores told authorities about Michael Giles' murder.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  So Quanetta was almost certainly lying to me about Erica Flores. But I was coming to realize her lies, they weren't senseless. They had an internal logic to them, an angle. The lies also followed a couple of patterns. Sometimes, they were like wishes. For example, I suspected that Quanetta wished she had powerful and connected supporters, even if those supporters had questionable morals. She wished that she hadn't been totally alone in Texas facing down a possible death penalty case.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Maybe she wished that she hadn't been the type of person to pop on a wig and try to wreck a young stranger's life.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  In her new persona as a prison journalist and truth seeker, Quinetta was trying to rewrite her own life. Not by facing what she'd done, but by obscuring it. She didn't want to be exposed as a person who'd once been willing to potentially send an innocent teenager to prison and take away the sole provider to a toddler with disabilities, a toddler that might have ended up in foster care. So she obfuscated. The other pattern, connected to the first, was that even Quinetta's falsehoods, they always contained some glimmer of a truth. They were based on a sort of submerged reality.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  And the more we talked, the more that reality would bubble up. A part of Quinetta, I knew, wanted to tell it all, to come clean. I thought there was a good chance that together, we could push that reality closer to the surface. So even if Quinetta lied to me, I wasn't going to dismiss her. I wanted to keep talking. I wanted to ask her about what had really happened the night she killed Michael Giles. I was never gonna call the police, because I'm not even supposed to be down here. So I was never gonna call the police. I was just thinking, get the gun.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  But I should have held it on him. It just, it didn't work like that. It didn't, it didn't happen like that. That's next time on What She Buried. 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.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Ashley Anne Krigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose, Josie Duffy Rice, Mosi Secret, Emily Martinez, Sheba 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 Trumien. Fact-checking by Matthew Giles. A special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingell. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, and Matthew Share. If you enjoyed What She Buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your

• 43:01Speaker 00

  podcasts.

• 43:09Speaker 07

  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.