What Happened to the Harrisons? | 7. Karma is a Lie

With the killers convicted, the Harrisons expect answers. How the hell did three people die before this killing spree ended? Before the family can catch their breath, they get awful news. Want the full story? Binge every episode of What Happened to the Harrisons? 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 Happened to the Harrisons? is a production of Sony Music Entertainment. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced, government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, "This is what I believe," while your neighbor

• 0:44Speaker 00

  says, "I believe something completely different." And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Listen to every episode of What Happened to the Harrisons 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.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  The Binge.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  My name is Elizabeth Gallant. I am Bill Harrison's sister, sister-in-law to his wife Bridgette, and aunt to their son Caleb Harrison.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Liz is at a podium in a public hearing room. In front of her, around a U-shaped table, are a dozen or so members of the Peel Police Service Board, the civilian body that oversees the police. It's a few months after Melissa and Chris went to prison, and Liz has come to call the police out publicly.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  We now want to know what happened, what went wrong. Why did these death investigations fail our family?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  By now, Liz and her family know that the first two deaths were not properly investigated. They believe that if they had been, Caleb, and maybe even Bridgette, would still be alive.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  What needs to be fixed so no other family has to endure what we've been through?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  During the third homicide investigation, senior police officers promised the family that once the criminal case was over, there would be a full accounting of what went wrong. Liz thought they would finally get answers. Instead, the family would have to fight for them. They asked for an independent review, someone from outside the police force to examine what happened. But they were told the Peel Police would review its own work, and the report would not be made public.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  We cannot accept that such a secretive review process will ensure accountability. Why should we, in fact, anyone, put its faith in an in-house review conducted by fellow police officers when the Peel Police failed us so badly?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  The question Liz was asking, "How did this happen?", was never really answered at trial. But there was one surprising moment in court, when Liz got to hear a police officer acknowledge the failings. The officer was Detective Phil King, the guy who got Chris to confess. Halfway through the interrogation, the detective and Chris got into an argument about whether Bridgette's death was an accident or a homicide. Chris said he thought it was only a suspicious death.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  That's how he has it, is suspicious death, right?

• 4:19Speaker 04

  No, it's a murder. Rule of murder.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  And then, of all people, Chris was the one to put the important accountability question to the police officer.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  So how come they didn't investigate further?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  The coroner ruled this when they did the autopsy. They said, "We got some real problems with this, okay? Police, you need to go back and look at this. You need to keep working."

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Okay. I did that.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Not well enough. I'll take that. We didn't do a good enough job. We did not do to the nth degree on this that we should have done.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  This was a rare moment of admission, but he never said what they missed. It would take much longer to figure out how the police bungled the first two death investigations. Unanswered questions have always driven me crazy. It's why I became a journalist. After the trial, I spent months digging up records, filing Freedom of Information Requests, and working police sources. I spent so much time scanning documents at the courthouse that I pulled a muscle in my neck. I even took a university course in forensic pathology to better understand the evidence. I got some answers, many of them you've already heard in this podcast.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  But each finding led to more questions. And as months passed, it became clear the authorities weren't going to give the Harrisons the full story without a fight.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  And it isn't over yet.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  It isn't over yet. Oh, Lord.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  The trial was over, but for the Harrisons, and for me, the search for answers was just beginning.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  For Sony Music Entertainment, this is What Happened to the Harrisons. I'm Amy Dempsey-Raven. This is the finale. Episode 7.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Karma is a Lie.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I was at the board meeting the day Liz called the police out for their failures. The Peel Police Chief, Jennifer Evans, was there too. She promised the family they would get the answers they were seeking. And she apologized, sort of. Chief Evans had been ducking my questions for weeks, but after the meeting, she agreed to speak with me. We met in the hallway. The first thing I want to do is clarify the apology. What were you apologizing for?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  I'm apologizing for the fact that they feel that they can't trust me, that the way we've been communicating this has not been the way I wished it to be. And I was very sorry for the loss. I mean, these are tragic events, and I say, and I know when police officers go into investigations, all we want to do is find out the truth as to what happened, so.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Was any of that apology for mistakes made?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Right now, we're going to, I want to wait to see the results of the review. And if we made mistakes, I'll be the one who gets out and speaks.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  If we made mistakes? A police officer had already admitted to the killer that the force had messed up, but the chief wouldn't say it to the family.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  I never spoke to Evans again. The police did end up making the review public, but by the time it was published, she had stepped down. The report fell far short of a full accounting. Its main conclusion was that officers had been wrong to rule out foul play in Bridgette's death. To me, this seemed beyond obvious. The review felt like a slap in the face to Wanda Jamison, the family friend leading the Harrisons' push for justice.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  It raises many more questions than it answered. It was incomplete. It was rushed, had factual inaccuracies.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  It didn't even attempt to answer some of the most important questions, like, why didn't the homicide bureau take over Bridgette's death investigation? Who made that decision, and why? On top of that, the report went out of its way to point out moments after Bill and Bridgette's deaths when the Harrisons didn't voice their suspicion to investigators.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I am just really quite angry about that line from the police. They just didn't do their job, and they tried to put it on the family.

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  Former prosecutor Steve Sheriff also found major flaws with the report.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  This is the worst investigative mess in a homicide case I've ever encountered. That's why it burns me.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  To this day, Sheriff gets worked up when he talks about this case.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  This has always bothered me, okay? Deeply bothered me.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Why?

• 9:46Speaker 05

  Because it didn't, there didn't need to be more murders, right? That was my job, was to prevent murder, not just to do it when it's too late. So I regret it. Yeah, I regret it.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  The coroner's office had its own internal review. Afterward, the chief coroner, Dr. Dirk Hyer, promised the Harrisons an inquest. An inquest would be a big deal. It's a public hearing. Witnesses can be compelled to testify under oath.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  That promise was made seven years ago, and the inquest still hasn't happened. It's been stalled by criminal appeals and a massive case backlog. For the Harrisons, an inquest matters because it could do what other reviews did not. It could put police, coroners, and pathologists in the same room and make them explain what went wrong, in public. Sheriff wants an inquest, too.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  If you're going to get better, if you're going to do better, you got to be able to invent mistakes. I see some systemic themes.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  ...here, which convinced me that this could happen again.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  In his view, the mistakes in this case come from three main problems. First, a drain of experience in the Peel Police homicide bureau.

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  The homicide squad was a shadow of its former self. It had been gutted.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Second, there were major communication problems between the police and the coroner's office. People holding different pieces of the puzzle were not putting them together. And third, in sheriff's view, the forensic pathologists presented their findings to police way too cautiously. He sees this as an aftershock of the gouge inquiry, the public probe that reviewed the work of the disgraced pediatric forensic pathologist, Charles Smith.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  In my view, this was an overcorrection. Charles Smith was a one-off. It was disgraceful. But it doesn't mean that you abandon common sense.

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  I often wonder about the mark a case like this leaves on the investigators. There's a line from the Peel Police Review that I think about a lot. At no time does a police officer wish to be involved in an investigation that fails to uncover the truth. I wanted to speak with the police officers who were involved to ask them what they would do differently now. But the Peel Police Force declined my request. So instead, I went looking for retired officers who would talk.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Earlier this year, I found myself driving to meet Steve Dolan, a former Peel Police officer, at his home north of Toronto, on a half-frozen lake, surrounded by swans. I was hoping he could give me some insight on who dropped the ball on Bridget's death investigation.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  It was minus 25 with the wind chill, well into the frostbite danger zone. We went inside and sat in his much warmer living room. Dolan has been retired for a decade now, but he got excited when we started talking about law enforcement. I could tell the job was in his blood.

• 13:32Speaker 06

  You've got to treat everything suspicious as police. We don't really believe in coincidences. You're not supposed to.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  As an inspector, Dolan oversaw all criminal investigations for 11 Division, the local detachment that investigated Bridget's death. He said soon after her body was found, one of his sergeants came to him and said, "This is a homicide." This sergeant had investigated the abduction of Caleb's kids. He knew the family history, the custody battle, and he believed Bridget had been murdered. So Dolan asked the homicide bureau to take over the investigation. Remember, for suspicious deaths, the homicide bureau

• 14:20Speaker 01

  had discretion. They could take the case or leave it with Dolan's team at the local division.

• 14:28Speaker 06

  We thought homicide should invoke their mandate because it's beyond our capabilities to investigate it budget-wise, experience-wise.

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  Dolan said the answer he got back was no. He was angry.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  There's no crime in the world more heinous or horrendous than homicide. And you have to the best of the best investigating that.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  He told me he pushed back. He called a superior and said...

• 15:02Speaker 06

  Some evil thing happened here. Invoke your mandate. Investigate it. It's not a coincidence, and it stinks to high heaven. Investigate it.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  And the answer you got back was?

• 15:13Speaker 06

  No.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  And was there a reason given?

• 15:18Speaker 06

  No, they don't give reasons. There are some people back then who don't care if it was a homicide or not. They just want it to go away.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Police sources had told me before that this case became a sort of hot potato. But this was the first time someone said it on the record. It was haunting to hear that there were people inside the police force pushing to have Bridget's death treated as a homicide back in 2010. And it wasn't. Dolan is still troubled by the way his police force handled the case and his own role in it. He said no one told him they were closing the investigation, and he doesn't know why it stopped.

• 16:08Speaker 06

  I wish I could have done more. I wish I broke all the rules and went in a rampage. But I wouldn't have accomplished anything because you have to backing. Not one of our finest investigative moments. You can only apologize. It's sad. And hopefully, they learn from it.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  This was the first real apology I'd heard from a police officer in this case.

• 16:34Speaker 06

  Sometimes people just want to hear, "I'm sorry. We didn't do our job. So sorry."

• 16:41Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us: the freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced, government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say,

• 17:23Speaker 00

  "This is what I believe," while your neighbor says, "I believe something completely different." And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  There is one independent report that looked at the conduct of some police officers in the Harrison death investigations. When the family couldn't get answers from Peel Police, they filed a complaint with Ontario's Police Watchdog, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, or OIPRD. The investigation was limited. It didn't look at the bigger systemic issues, only individual officer conduct. And the report wasn't public, but I have a copy. The Watchdog report weighed in on one of the central questions in the case. Did the

• 18:57Speaker 01

  pathologists bungle the investigation by failing to make clear to police that Bridget may have been murdered? Or did the police just not get it?

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  The Watchdog report found the police more at fault. It said officers ignored the clear message that an accidental death was the less likely explanation. One reason the police may have missed that message? The report found that none of the officers responsible for the investigation read Bridget's final autopsy report before closing the case. Mark Mendelson, the former homicide cop you heard from earlier in the series, found this astounding.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  How can you not read the post-mortem report? That is a key piece of evidence in your investigation and in any future prosecution.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  The watchdog report found that the police officers investigating Bridget's death developed reverse tunnel vision. They locked on to the idea that there was no foul play and would not be led away from that conclusion. Remember Detective Greg Amaroso, the officer in charge? The watchdog report found that while he initially took the proper investigative steps, he appeared to have washed his hands of the case just a couple of weeks in after he got a new assignment, and that he failed to follow up on issues raised by the coroner's office. It also found that Amaroso had few records related to the case because he deleted 20,000

• 20:41Speaker 01

  emails in a purge. The police watchdog found that Amaroso and another detective, Sean Brennan, the guy who monitored the case for the homicide bureau, had committed misconduct. Afterward, the new Peel Police Chief had the power to call a full public disciplinary hearing, but he chose not to. Instead, the two officers admitted to neglect of duty and accepted a punishment. Amaroso forfeited seven days off. Brennan lost one. To the Harrison family, the outcome was an insult. Two police officers got a slap on the wrist, and the larger institutional failures escaped

• 21:26Speaker 01

  scrutiny. Here's Wanda again.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  I think that everyone has a simmering anger. I don't think that simmering anger will ever go away for any of us. It's always there. We realize it's a difficult job being a police officer, and these were complex cases, but that doesn't get you off the hook.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I wanted to speak with the two officers about all of this. Detective Brennan declined my interview request. When I first called Amaroso, he seemed interested in doing an interview. He told me there was more to the story and said higher-ups were passing the hot potato. He hinted that he'd been the fall guy. After speaking with his lawyer, Amaroso said no to a recorded interview, but I heard from him again recently after I sent questions about the watchdog report. He disputed many of the report's conclusions about him and told me that he only accepted the punishment because he wanted to move on, not because he agreed with the misconduct finding.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  From his perspective, the investigation failed because homicide refused to take the case, not because of his actions. I asked the Peel Police Service for interviews with the officers involved in the case and with the chief, and I sent them a long list of questions. They didn't respond.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Another person I wanted to speak with about Bridget's death investigation was Dr. Michael Pickup, the forensic pathologist who did her autopsy. He said no to a formal interview because of the pending inquest, the one everyone's been waiting for, for seven years. But I did speak with Dr. Pickup briefly on the record. He told me he believes he was clear with police about the evidence of homicide. But even so, he said he'd do things differently today. He would state more plainly to police that he was leaning toward homicide. The retired pathologist who did Bill's autopsy, Dr.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Timothy Feltes, was willing to talk. Dr. Feltes warned me there's a lot he doesn't remember, but he was adamant about one thing.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  I was not informed of all the circumstances at the time that the autopsy was done. I didn't know anything about the problem with the grandchildren.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Dr. Feltes told me that if the police had hinted there was anything strange about the case at all, he might have said, "Hold on here. Could someone have struck this man in the chest?"

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Things would have been different if we had all the information up front.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  That's all it would have taken for him to view the case in a completely different light and to take further action. Over the years, I'd heard versions of the same argument, that Bridget's death was the obvious failure and missing Bill's homicide was more understandable. After all these years deep into this case, I don't entirely buy that. Yes, Bridget's death was the more egregious failure, but my reporting found there were many missed opportunities for Bill's death to be recognized as suspicious.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  The police watchdog group looked into Bill's death too and found that the investigation collapsed because of several small failures that occurred at the same time. The worst failure, I think, is that after the autopsy report was released, police officers failed to follow up on the broken breastbone. So the mystery of this astonishing injury was ignored for years. Here's what bothers me most. Liz knows her brother was murdered, deep in her core, but for years, she has had to hear people question it.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  That would drive me crazy, and Liz just has to live with it.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  In light of what Dr. Feltes now knows, he believes Bill was probably murdered. Sheriff agrees. The chances of the first guy being in an accident with the kids being abducted the same day and the last two being murdered, I'd write that off as silly. I learned while reporting this podcast that there's someone else who has an opinion on how Bill died, someone whose take I never thought I'd hear.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Not everyone sees Melissa the way the Harrisons do. There are people in her life who believe Chris was the killer and Melissa got caught in the fallout.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  I don't believe she had anything to do with the planning of these deaths. I know that she would do anything to protect her kids. I know that, but I've never seen her as someone that would do something like that.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  That's Matthew Groves again, Melissa's high school boyfriend. He believes Melissa didn't know what Chris had done until after Caleb was dead.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  I totally understand her playing along at that point because, I mean, this is her whole family now is on the line. I could be wrong.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  A couple of things shaped Matthew's view. First, his parents went to nearly every day of Melissa's trial. They adored her and reconnected after her arrest. Matthew's parents believe Melissa was wrongly convicted.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  After Melissa was arrested, she wrote Matthew a letter. At first, he ignored it, but eventually they started writing and talking on the phone. Then Matthew visited her behind bars and heard Melissa's side of the story from her.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  She explained as much of it as she could to me at the time. Here's something else that I don't know if you know, is that while she was incarcerated, I mean, she and I were essentially back together for a little while.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Whoa, Matthew, no, I did not know that.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  She was explaining how some of the sneaky things that Chris Fator had done on those nights where the murders had happened.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Jail phone calls and letters are monitored, so Matthew said Melissa had to be careful what she said, but they still talked about the case.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  She swore that she had nothing to do with the planning of it. She subtly acknowledged realizing that Chris had done this after the fact and was kind of like in a situation where that's her man and the father of her kids and, you know, what is she gonna do?

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  Matthew agreed to speak with me because he believes Melissa isn't the monster she's been made out to be.

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  Completely unfair, in my opinion.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  He worried about seeming like a fool, that people would think, "What kind of person dates someone in prison on murder charges?" But I understood why he felt the way he did. He came across as an honest guy grappling with complicated feelings about his first love. Matthew told me a couple of things that blew my mind.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  There had always been suspicions that the fire at Melissa and Chris's farmhouse had been deliberately set, but no proof. Matthew said he spoke to Melissa about the fire.

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  She had told me that he confessed to her in a letter that he actually set the fire to claim the insurance money.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Matthew said Melissa told him Chris burnt the house down.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  This is all secondhand. I don't know any of this as fact.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I tried to ask Chris and Melissa about this, but they didn't respond. One thing that made Matthew think Melissa was innocent was how frankly she spoke about her dislike of the Harrisons.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. She was not a fan of them at all. She didn't have anything good to say about them.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Matthew said Melissa told him about her reaction to Bridget's death.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  I hate to say kind of elated over the news, and it was like a major problem and her life was gone. Now, that's cold. That's a very cold. Hold way to react to news like that, even if you don't like somebody. But that's what she told me.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  He said she even told him what she thought about Bill's death.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  She does think that Chris killed Bill. She thinks Chris killed, is pretty sure like Chris killed all three of them.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  That's what Matthew remembers Melissa telling him. That she believes Chris killed the whole family. But she didn't know anything about it until after Caleb's death.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Again, I'd really like to talk to Chris about this, but he said no to an interview. I did visit him in prison after the trial in 2018, and we talked about Bill then. I sat across from Chris in one of those booths with a plexiglass wall and a telephone. I asked him about Bill, and Chris, again, denied killing him. He said, "I don't know how Bill died, but I had nothing to do with it."

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Chris had a tattoo of a wedding band on his ring finger and another on his left forearm that said, "Love always and forever, Melissa," in her handwriting.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I asked if he and Melissa were still a couple. He said he wasn't sure. Their lawyers had advised them not to talk. But he spoke about her like a guy who was still in love. And so did Matthew.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Matthew and Melissa parted ways several years ago, not on good terms, for reasons he said he didn't want to get into. But he hasn't changed his mind. To Matthew, Melissa isn't the mastermind she's been made out to be.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  I can't rule out the possibility that I'm wrong. I don't know if there's anybody in the world that absolutely 100% knows the truth outside of her and him. I don't know if anybody ever will.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Even though he and Melissa no longer speak, a part of him still loves her.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  I always will, and I wish her well.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  And I'm happy that she's out.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  That's right. Melissa Merritt is out of prison.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, "This is what I believe," while your neighbor

• 34:29Speaker 00

  says, "I believe something completely different." And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  In January 2023, five years after Melissa was convicted of first degree murder, I got a text message from a source. It said, "Looks like Melissa Merritt is getting a new trial."

• 35:04Speaker 01

  This was a bombshell. The Ontario Court of Appeal had overturned Melissa's verdict in a unanimous decision.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  The court found that the trial judge made two errors in his instructions to the jury. Remember the 400-page document it took four days to get through in court? Two mistakes in that giant tome, and the trial went out the window. Just for Melissa, though, Chris's verdicts were upheld. The most serious mistake involved that infamous airport wiretap statement. They think, or I think, the audio tapes would have fucked us anyways. The Crown had treated that statement as an admission of guilt. But the Appeal Court said the judge should have told the jury that if they couldn't

• 36:01Speaker 01

  figure out the meaning of the whole statement, including the missing words, they couldn't use it against her. The Appeal Court found that a properly instructed jury could have been left with a reasonable doubt about Melissa's guilt. But to many, especially the Harrison family, the outcome seemed outrageous, like Melissa had gotten off on a technicality. Here's Doug.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  When the appeal was granted, it just ripped the stab off everything.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  When the family first heard she'd won, they were so caught off guard that Wanda had to scramble to figure out what it all meant. Was Melissa getting out of jail now?

• 36:50Speaker 05

  It was very upsetting. Like, do we have to start, you know, locking our doors triply as of, you know, four o'clock today? Nobody knew really what the situation was going to be.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Melissa stayed in jail. She would be tried again for two counts of first degree murder. But soon after, she got a bail hearing, the chance to be free while awaiting a new trial.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I was in court for the bail ruling. Six years had passed since the trial, and we'd all been through a pandemic. Everyone seemed to have gone gray. Some of the lawyers had been on this case for 10 years. By now, I had three children, and I lived in a different city. Melissa had changed, too. She was married, but not to Chris. In 2018, shortly after the trial, Melissa wed a jail guard.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  A woman named Sheena, who'd been working as a correctional officer at the women's prison while Melissa was an inmate there. Melissa's lawyer, Joel Hector, argued that the Crown had been overstating its case against Melissa for years. He seemed to think there was no prospect of a conviction in the second trial, and said Melissa should be granted bail. Melissa's parents were her proposed sureties, the people who put money up and supervise her on bail. The parents' testimony hinted at what they believed about the charges against her, that Chris was the bad guy, not Melissa.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Without him around, they said, Melissa would follow her bail conditions. As Justice Jennifer Woolcomb took the bench, it became clear she did not buy that argument. She delivered a searing ruling. Here's a friend of the show reading for the judge.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  I find it very difficult to accept that all of the applicant's poor choices and breaches of court orders in the past were because of Mr. Fatorre's influence. I say that because they seem to have been motivated to advance her interests. While Mr. Fatorre is without a doubt the person who physically murdered Bridget and Caleb, he stood to gain much less from these homicides than she did.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  The judge also tore into Melissa's father, Mike Merritt, the retired police officer. She found that he lied under oath and couldn't be trusted as a surety. Melissa did not get bail. The ruling gave some hope to Doug and Liz and their families. If the defense planned to argue at trial that Chris was the killer and Melissa did nothing wrong, maybe this was a sign it wouldn't work.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  But that's not what happened. In Melissa's second trial in 2024, a jury found her not guilty of killing Bridget. And for Caleb's death, the jury couldn't reach a verdict. There was going to be a third trial.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  I spoke to Doug after the verdicts. He was devastated. Bill had essentially been erased from Melissa's second trial. She wasn't charged in his death, and the details could be prejudicial to her. So the jury wasn't allowed to hear them. In the third trial, the jury likely wouldn't hear about Bridget. It seems just horrendously wrong. My expectations are not high. This thing has been a train wreck from get-go. The case against Melissa took a big hit, and soon after, she made bail. She walked out of the courthouse with her lawyer into the sunshine of a spring day.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  She was 44 years old, and for the first time in a decade, she was on the outside, reunited with her kids. Melissa's new trial was scheduled to take place a year later, in March 2025. But we'd never get to it because a few weeks before it was set to begin, Melissa cut a plea deal with the prosecution. She pled guilty to manslaughter in Caleb's death, but she only admitted to encouraging Chris to confront and threaten Caleb, to get him to agree to an increase in custody.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Her sentence was time served. Melissa was free, for good.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I've got to say, I was shocked that Melissa pled guilty to anything. I thought she'd maintain her innocence until the very end. I wondered if Liz and Doug and the family would find it validating at all to hear Melissa finally accept some responsibility for what happened to Caleb. But they told me it didn't. Melissa had admitted to a version of events they did not believe. There was no comfort or relief in that. For some family members, the outcome meant they would spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder. It felt like Melissa had won. Since the verdict,

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Wanda, the family friend who spent years in court with Liz, has pushed even harder for a coroner's inquest and the answers the family is still waiting for.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  I have to do this. This is my... This is the one thing I can do to somehow support everybody and ultimately, hopefully to get some justice.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Liz is in her mid-80s now. Her brother died 17 years ago. For years, she's been saying "justice is on her bucket list." She worries she won't be around to see it.

• 43:42Speaker 07

  I would like a coroner's inquest to happen and to happen soon. We've been promised this for years.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  The last time I went to see Liz at her home in Mississauga, she had a new security system installed. It made me so sad to see that she lived in fear. We sat in the dining room drinking tea, and Liz told me about the last time she saw Melissa, on the day of the sentencing hearing. Liz didn't even recognize her at first. Two women got off the elevator, talking and laughing, being a little rowdy, Liz thought. Then Liz took a closer look and realized, "That's her."

• 44:30Speaker 07

  It just burns me that she's walking the streets. And I was just so pangry that she could walk into court like that.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Liz was there to read a victim impact statement. The family wrote new ones after the manslaughter conviction. Her words suddenly felt meaningless. Liz got up there anyway. She pushed her walker to the witness stand and spoke directly to Melissa. Maybe for the last time, she read the statement to me later.

• 45:06Speaker 07

  What you did is unforgivable and unforgettable. Caleb's murder traumatized us all. Because of your actions, we live in fear to this day. Now I cannot trust that a stranger on my doorstep doesn't have ulterior motives.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  One thing I haven't told you yet is that Caleb, in his will, named a family member as the guardian of his kids, his cousin, Anna Blackwell. After Caleb died, Anna tried to get custody. This put her in direct conflict with the Merritt family.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  My life was drastically altered as I became an important part of his children's lives, while at the same time, I was dragged into a decades-long, acrimonious custody battle that had escalated into the murder of at least two of my family members.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Anna has been through a lot, and she didn't want to do an interview for the show. But she shared a recording of her statement with me.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  Over 12 years has passed since the loss of the central figures in my Harrison family, and no one's recovered. Family traditions remain in shambles as those of us who remain try to make a decimated family fit together. My own young children will never experience the simple joys of a Harrison family breakfast or an over-the-top Harrison Christmas. But more importantly, they will never feel the easy love and stability of a large, extended family untouched by murder.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  In the end, Caleb's family did not get custody of the Harrison children. Melissa's family did. But Anna did grow close with the kids after their father died. And now, she worried Melissa would come after her.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  I fear for my life. I fear that Melissa will convince her confederates to harm me, or worse, my children, to punish me for the time that I got to spend with her children while she was behind bars. If Melissa decides it's in her own best interest, I have no doubt that she will orchestrate more harm and more violence.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  As Melissa left the courtroom that day after the sentencing hearing, I wondered, what would she do with her life? Would she disappear into a quiet existence with her wife and children? Or would she have more to say?

• 47:53Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Melissa, and I'm the victim of a broken justice system. I was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for 11 years.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  You're hearing Melissa Merritt in 2025 from a video posted on one of her social media pages. She's sitting on a sofa with a knit blanket in her lap.

• 48:20Speaker 07

  I am the mom of six beautiful children. I'm home now, but I wasn't for almost a decade.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Since her release, Melissa has been trying to become a social media influencer. She's posted hundreds and hundreds of selfies and some motivational videos and memes. She asks people to follow and subscribe to her pages and donate through PayPal if they enjoy her content.

• 48:51Speaker 07

  Every day has its challenges, and today is proving not to be any different. But we got out of bed, and we're ready to face the day.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Last year, after she pled guilty to manslaughter, Melissa started posting about her issues with the way police and prosecutors handled her case. She called herself "a wrongfully convicted person, the victim of a broken justice system."

• 49:24Speaker 07

  I was sent to prison on a life sentence, and I had to fight that. Incarceration doesn't only impact the incarcerated party. It impacts their entire community. Friends, family, neighbors. Everyone who knows that person has to deal with the harassment, trauma, and stigma associated with the crime. For nothing. For nothing at all. Because a mistake was made.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  For nothing at all. I am interested to know what mistake Melissa was talking about here. Is it what she pled guilty to? Manslaughter? In the eyes of the law, that's a serious crime. Culpable homicide. The maximum sentence is life in prison. Melissa served 11 years.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Last spring, she launched a GoFundMe to raise money for a lawsuit to ensure no one goes through the hell I did, she said. It's unclear who she wanted to sue, but it didn't go very well.

• 50:37Speaker 07

  I've received a total of $8 to my GoFundMe page to try to bring justice into our justice system. I received that $8 from a 14-year-old boy.

• 50:51Speaker 07

  I'm going to take down my GoFundMe page because

• 50:55Speaker 07

  it doesn't feel like people are interested in this cause.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  She also filed another appeal. She's challenging a legal ruling from before her plea deal, one where a judge denied her motion to throw out the prosecution's case. If she's allowed to appeal and wins, she could erase the manslaughter conviction and no longer be criminally responsible for Caleb's death. It would restore her innocence. I wanted to hear Melissa's perspective on all of this: the custody battle, the criminal case, and her life now. I wanted to ask if she accepts any fault for what happened to the Harrisons, or if she sees herself as a victim.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  I wonder what, if anything, she would do differently. But Melissa didn't want to talk. She's 46 now. She runs a business crocheting stuffed animals in blankets. Someone close to her told me life on the outside has been harder than Melissa expected. By the time she got out of prison, the children she had with Caleb were in their early 20s, starting their own adult lives. I don't know whether or how often she sees them. I think about Caleb's kids a lot. How they could have been raised by a big blended family,

• 52:25Speaker 01

  in separate homes, by two flawed but loving parents. They could have had many more years with the incredible warmth and guidance of Bridgette and Bill. Instead, they lost everything. I'm told Caleb's children are doing well, in spite of all they've been through.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  One day not long ago, I went for a walk on Pitch Pine Crescent to see the Harrison house again.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  A new family lives there now, but from the outside, it hasn't changed much. The same tidy front lawn with a big maple tree, the same tall front windows, the same stone pathway. It was a spring morning, just like the day Bridgette was killed. I thought about the story Chris told, how he walked up that path in broad daylight, knocked on the door, then pushed his way inside. I thought about Bridgette and the feeling she had early on that something was wrong, and how, in her final moments, she would have known that she was right.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  In the early years after Caleb's death, Doug would come here sometimes.

• 53:51Speaker 06

  I'd go by out of all time, see, just to park out front and take a look at the place and say,

• 53:58Speaker 06

  if all this shit hadn't happened,

• 54:01Speaker 06

  what would this place have been like now? You know, Bridgette and Bill were in their 80s. What a fantastic place this would have been. You know, you just... So I want to cry when I see that sort of thing. So, but compartmentalize, I'm not going back.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  For Doug, the house didn't change all at once. The loss built over time.

• 54:24Speaker 06

  First, with Bill's death. That put a pall over the place. And then, when Bridgette died, there was no magic in the house anymore. And then, when Caleb was murdered, I mean, the neighbors started calling the house "The Murder House", sort of deal. And that's just the way I felt about it, too.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Mostly, as I stood there, I thought about what the house had been before the tragedy. A place full of warmth and light and laughter. A haven for everyone who knew and loved the Harrisons. Doug and his family spent every holiday there. He still remembers everyone gathered around the dinner table. Bill at one end, smoking a cigar. Bridgette at the other with a glass of red wine. Jazz playing on the stereo. Everyone laughing and sharing stories. That was what the Harrisons did. They brought people together from different parts of their lives and made them feel like family.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  This is part of what makes their loss so hard to live with. They were the kind of people who made life better for the people around them.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  How could this happen to them?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  After the first trial, Caleb's cousin Anna put it in a way I've never forgotten. She said,

• 56:03Speaker 07

  "I'm angry that karma is a lie, that really shitty things happen to wonderful people for absolutely no justifiable reason."

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Unlock all episodes of What Happened to the Harrisons ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. And it doesn't stop at What Happened to the Harrisons. 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 Watching You. 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.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  What Happened to the Harrisons is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. The show is hosted and reported by me, Amy Dempsey-Raven. The lead producer is Cooper Mall. The series is written by me and Cooper. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. The series was sound designed and mixed by Scott Somerville. We use music from Epidemic Sound. Production managers are Tamika Balance-Kalasny and Ashley-Anne Krigbaum. Fact-checking by Fendel Fulton. Additional production support by Myron Kaplan. Our lawyer is Alison Sherry. Voice acting from John Hazmatalli, Val McGivern, and Virginia Thorson. A special nod to Bianca Grimshaw, John O'Hyne, and Wendy Gillis, whose help was invaluable.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  And thanks for all your support, Emily Rassik, Jamie Myers, Alison Haney, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment. Special thanks to The Toronto Star, where my reporting on this story began more than a decade ago. If you value local investigative journalism, subscribe to a newspaper where you live. And finally, thank you to the Harrison, Blackwell, and Galant families for your trust and for your willingness to revisit painful memories in the hope of finding answers. Please rate and review What Happened to the Harrisons. It helps spread the word.

• 59:01Speaker 06

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