Man Facing Execution Was Born And Raised In Chamber Of Horrors
VISALIA, Calif. - The Harris family was especially handsome, headed by a strapping hero of World War II. And like many before them, they came to California from the East in search of a better life.
But within weeks of the Harrises' arrival in this Central Valley farming town in 1962, authorities found that the man of the family had broken all parental taboos. Kenneth Harris Sr., an alcoholic, beat his children and molested his two oldest daughters.
Sometimes, he would load his rifle, tell the children to run, then go ``hunting'' for them. The older ones struggled to hush the babies for fear their hiding places would be uncovered. Harris' wife, Evelyn, an alcoholic who bore nine children, was too frail and battered to step in.
``It was probably the worst we ever dealt with,'' said Francis Beck, at the time a Tulare County probation officer, of the Harris family.
A quarter of a century later, Beck can still picture 10-year-old Robert, the fifth-oldest. He was particularly ``bright looking.'' But Beck was shocked by what he remembered as Robert's initial run-in with the local law: killing neighborhood cats.
Today, Robert Alton Harris, a convicted killer, sits on San Quentin's Death Row, passing what may be the last hours of his life. The state attorney general is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a stay of Harris' execution - scheduled at 3 a.m. tomorrow.
Defense lawyers are fighting to win Harris a new day in court. They argue that the crimes that landed Harris on Death Row may be the result of brain damage - his mother is said to have abused alcohol when she was pregnant with him; his father beat him into unconsciousness more than once. Therefore, the lawyers contend, he should not be executed.
In a case that shocked San Diego and the rest of California, Harris shot and killed John Mayeski and Michael Baker, both 16 and best friends, near Miramar Reservoir outside San Diego on July 5, 1978.
He reportedly laughed about the murders. He ate remnants
of the boys' lunches, and noticed a piece of flesh clinging to his gun barrel, then ``flicked the flesh out into the street.'' Those recollections came from Daniel Harris, his brother and accuser, whose testimony at Robert's 1979 trial caused an alternate juror to faint.
With Daniel in tow, Robert Harris had kidnapped the boys from a shopping center parking lot because he wanted Mayeski's car for a getaway from what a prosecutor called a ``lousy'' bank robbery. Robert Harris forced them to drive to the reservoir, promising no harm would come to them. But as they walked away, shooting began. Mayeski fell first. Then Robert chased Baker. The boy tried to hide, and pleaded for his life, Daniel Harris testified.
The Harris brothers were arrested minutes after the robbery. By nightfall, Robert had confessed to the murders. In past statements, he has said that he does not know why he killed the boys. Raymond Cameron, a San Diego County district attorney's investigator on the case, says that there is no mystery. A witness testified that Harris confided he ``couldn't have no punks walking around'' to identify him.
Harris has refused recent interview requests. But based on interviews with his siblings, friends and accusers - together with a review of court documents - it is apparent that his path to the brink of California's gas chamber began with life in a childhood chamber of horrors.
In a park in Visalia, Barbara Mason, Harris' oldest sister and a twice-divorced mother of four, recalled her father and her childhood.
Her paternal grandmother was a Sunday school teacher with Victorian attitudes toward sex, she said. In her father's twisted mind, Barbara said, he believed he could teach his children not to be ashamed of their bodies if he exposed himself.
When World War II broke out, he enlisted. He survived combat in Europe, won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart and spent three months recovering from a shrapnel wound to the chest. He attained the rank of warrant officer, and made the Army his career.
By the time his wife was pregnant with their fifth child, Kenneth Harris had become a big drinker. Convinced she was having an affair, he kicked her in the stomach and forced her into early labor. The baby, born at Fort Bragg, N.C., stayed two months in an Army hospital under intensive care.
``Robert was born in pain,'' Barbara said, ``and lived through pain all of his life.''
At Robert's trial, his mother said Kenneth Harris did not acknowledge he had fathered Robert until the boy became a teen and began to resemble him. But all through his younger years, Harris suffered for his father's jealousy. There was the time that the elder Harris knocked him out of his high chair.
``His nose bled so profusely that it bled clear through the pillow,'' Evelyn Harris said at Robert's trial. ``Oh, lookie, Evelyn,'' Kenneth Harris was quoted as saying, ``your baby is bleeding to death.'' She waited until her husband left before taking the boy to the Army infirmary.
Robert was especially close to a brother 13 months his senior. Today, the brother, who asked that his name not be used to protect his career in another state, tries to understand why he straightened himself out and Robert failed. They were two of a kind. As children, they explored together, they got into trouble together, and, when they could, they comforted one another.
``When you're a kid and you see your mother slapped down by your father, you know it's serious,'' the brother said. ``I remember me and Robbie, we would huddle up together.''
Perhaps, he said, Robert failed because he was ``slower'' than the other kids. ``Having parents who were so authoritarian, we'd get smacked upside the head or shouted at. He was slower, so he got it more than the rest of us.''
Perhaps, the brother said, ``I was just luckier.''
In the Harris family, luck was relative.
Kenneth Harris retired from the Army on Oct. 31, 1962. Leaving behind $2,500 in debts in South Carolina, he headed West in a 1956 Buick with a wife six months pregnant and eight children, ages 2 to 16.
On Dec. 7, 1962, they pulled into Linnell Center, a cluster of cabins and outhouses near Visalia used primarily by farm workers and run by the Tulare County Housing Authority.
On Jan. 17, 1963, two days after Robert Harris turned 10, police came for his father. It fell to William Brazil, 27, a probation officer, to investigate.
In stilted official language, Brazil's reports tell how Barbara, then 15, was detained for shoplifting. Fearing the wrath of her parents, not wanting to go home, she let loose with stories of sexual abuse by her father.
Rheadawn, her 12-year-old sister, confirmed it all. She told of the day she stayed home from school to care for her younger brothers. Her father, she said, called her into his room and abused her.
The elder Harris pleaded guilty to charges filed against him. A judge declared him to be a mentally disordered sex offender and sent him to Atascadero state hospital. Given his military background, he quickly adjusted to institutional life.
``It is considered,'' the impressed Atascadero psychologists said when they returned him to Visalia in June 1964, ``this man is unlikely to offend against society again.''
But that December, he went home one evening from the packing plant where he worked, began to drink whiskey and became abusive. Then, sitting at the dinner table, he began to choke and coughed up blood. His wife and Rheadawn helped him to a bedroom.
Evelyn Harris emerged from the bedroom and told a son to call the police. The officers arrived to find the elder Harris drunk and abusing Rheadawn. He was hauled away, in view of his crying children. This time, he served five years in prison.
The family's life continued to spiral downward. They lived on welfare. They followed the crops, sleeping in their car and a tent. Discipline disappeared.
``We were allowed to drink,'' said the older brother that Robert was close to. ``We were allowed to do whatever we wanted to do.''
The brother left home when he was 14. As Robert told it in his trial, his mother told him to hit the road soon after. At 14, he followed his brother to Oklahoma.
The arrangement didn't last. The brother caught Robert sniffing paint and glue. When he tried to intervene, they fought. Robert ran off. With two friends, he stole a car, made his way to Florida and was arrested. Because no parent was willing to take him, he remained in custody for five years.
He left jail tough and cold. But he did learn to weld, and for a time, it seemed, he was headed for success. He married in 1973 and had a son. But as he later told it, his wife left him when he ``beat her up pretty bad one day.'' She could not be reached, and has not been in contact with Harris in years. Harris hasn't seen his son, now about 16, since the boy was a baby.
In 1975, Harris' troubles turned deadly. He was living in the town of Seely, Calif., and one night was drinking with a neighbor named James Wheeler. Harris began slapping Wheeler in a play fight. Soon, the play became sadistic. He doused Wheeler with lighter fluid and tossed matches at him. By morning, Wheeler was dead.
Harris pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and served 2 1/2 years at the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo.
When he got out he hit on the idea of robbing a bank - an idea that eventually resulted in the murders of Mayeski and Baker.
As he investigated the murder in 1978, Cameron, of the district attorney's office, found Harris' father living in a trailer in Chula Vista, Calif. He wouldn't discuss his past problems. But he did have an explanation for Robert's actions: ``He never was any good.'' Kenneth Harris, emaciated and suffering from emphysema, turned a shotgun on himself in April 1989. Evelyn Harris died of cancer in 1981.
Harris' trial began in January 1979. It ended March, 14, 1979. Daniel served time for the bank robbery and was off parole by 1983.
While on Death Row, Robert Harris made one lasting friend, writer Michael Kroll, a lifelong death-penalty abolitionist. Kroll met Harris in 1982 and has visited him weekly since.
``He wishes that he could undo what he did,'' Kroll said. ``But he knows he can't. All the wishing in the world won't undo it.''