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investigators described it as a one in a million chance a tiny manufacturing flaw on an envelope
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exposed a murderer who was willing to kill innocent victims to get at the one person he wanted dead
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[Music] [Music] so [Music] it was a typical monday morning at the transamerica title insurance company in
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tempe arizona there were only four employees all friends who spent their work days
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processing paperwork 46 year old julie williams had been working at transamerica for two months
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she had gotten this new job things were going really well for her she was happy when i talked to
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her on the phone she always expressed how well things were going and how she was really starting to feel a sense of
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peace and joy in her life on a monday morning around 9 00 a.m julie got a drink from the water cooler
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after taking a sip she said that her lips and tongue were burning and warned her co-workers not to
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drink the water she walks down to the bathroom she goes into the bathroom the people are kind of
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worried about her the other employees were baffled they got some water out of the water
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cooler and tasted it and it burned their mouths and they had to spit it out meanwhile
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julie never returned from the bathroom she's in the stall they can't open the
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door because her basically her body is against the door somebody has to crawl up over the staller underneath the stall
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they found julie unconscious completely unresponsive paramedics arrive minutes later and
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rushed her to the hospital she was in a coma and by that time we knew that that was pretty serious and that the doctors
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were telling us we needed to get there quickly because they really weren't sure
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how bad this was at first doctors thought julie had suffered a massive stroke but it was even worse
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mri tests and the cat scans and things like that were showing basically a flat line which
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meant that she was brain dead and we couldn't understand doctors told julie's three grown
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daughters she probably wouldn't survive her heart was fine her liver was fine
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her kidneys were fine and she could basically go on like this for who knows how long but she was never
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going to wake up the hospital asked police to check on transamerica's water supply
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when i went to the break room there was an obvious odor that i could smell to toxicologists
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this meant only one thing cyanide people say those who can smell it and it is genetically controlled that it smells
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like bitter almonds about 40 percent of the population can't smell it as a precaution everything inside the
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water cooler room was sent for testing on examining all the items that were in their coffee cups the coffee maker
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itself the coffee creamer you know just everything in there there appeared to be
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a crystalline crystalline substance in all of these investigators tested the substance with
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a chemical strip and it turned blue what you're producing is prussian blue which is one of the forms of cyanide
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a gas chromatograph test confirmed the findings scientists also found a massive amount
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of cyanide in the office coffee pot well five grams of pure cyanide given as a as it is in total is enough to kill
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probably about 25 people the water cooler alone had 32 grams of pure cyanide enough to kill
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150 people but who wanted to kill the employees of transamerica title company and
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why 48 hours after julie williams ingested a massive amount of cyanide her three
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daughters made the difficult decision to take her off life support there was nothing medical science could
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do that's a difficult decision you're not ready to say goodbye as it is you know and now suddenly you have to
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make the decision to end someone's life investigators found the source of the
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cyanide julie had ingested it was in the office coffee pot and water cooler it would not have been difficult for all
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four people in that office to have been killed because cyanide is really a strong
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poison i mean you know they could have died before anyone figured out what happened
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police questioned the three remaining employees in the transamerica office one of them
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diane harry made a startling admission she said that she may have been the intended target
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diane said that a few nights earlier she was drinking some scotch whiskey at home
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with her husband and it made her ill she also told him that there was something wrong with the
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tea kettle she tried to make coffee and the when she put the creamer in it curdled
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investigators tested the bottle of scotch from the harry's home and confirmed their suspicions the bottle
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contained lethal amounts of cyanide diane's husband louis harry said he thought he knew who was responsible
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he said it was roy fitzpatrick a 43 year old delivery man boy fitzpatrick was the ex-boyfriend of
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a girl that mr harry was now befriended that's why he described it fitzpatrick's ex-girlfriend
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was 33 year old sharon jones well i had dated mr fitzpatrick briefly and he would never accept no
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he would stalk me he would choke me and he threatened to kill me if i started dating anyone else
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mr harry was very very persistent that i go to get a restraining order against mr fitzpatrick
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he even went with me to the courthouse to get it done sharon jones and lewis harry then
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realized that the restraining order backfired it infuriated fitzpatrick who responded by sending threatening letters
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to lewis harry and his wife diane mr harry describing the content of the letter said that basically roy
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fitzpatrick was threatening him and his wife and that they were getting increasingly
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more sinister the letters were laced with racial epithets this one was sent to diane harry
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i am having a hard time overlooking your husband i think i will take you away from him so
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that he can see how it feels and he wrote this to lewis you won't have to hurt for long because
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your ass is mine investigators asked roy fitzpatrick if he sent the threatening letters
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initially he denied it a day later he recontacted me and came in and decided he wanted to tell me the truth and
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admitted that he had sent letters to mr harry but fitzpatrick claimed he was angry with louis harry not because of
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the restraining order but because he was sexually involved with his ex-girlfriend sharon jones i
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met louis harry in a club i was in love with mr harry he had asked me to marry him
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as soon as the divorce was through he had said that we would get married roy fitzpatrick discovered this was all
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a lie mr fitzpatrick followed louis harry home one night from my condo and he called me within minutes of mr
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harry leaving stating that he was still married the wife was still in the home and that he wasn't going through any
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divorce when police confronted lewis harry about the affair he denied it and roy
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fitzpatrick gave police one last piece of information he admitted sending louis and diane
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harry four threatening letters but claimed that the three type written letters the most incriminating
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were forgeries investigators noticed that one of the typewritten letters was in an envelope
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with a distinctive flaw the spot where the flaps met was offset they didn't match up the way they were
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supposed to apparently this was a manufacturing flaw when you've been in the business for any
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length of time you know that this is a very significant find and that especially in a murder case this is
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going to be a very important piece of physical evidence on an envelope assembly line
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blades slice through reams of paper creating a form with four flaps when the flaps are glued
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the left and right ones are supposed to meet in the center of the envelope in this case
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the right flap overlapped the left these were coming down the assembly line they were moving
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further and further out of whack the way they should be investigators believed if they could
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find out who bought the flawed envelope they would find the killer [Music] police were investigating the sinai
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death the 46 year old julie williams and the attempted poisoning of her co-worker
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diane harry the prime suspect in the case roy fitzpatrick admitted sending diane harry
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and her husband louis for threatening letters but fitzpatrick denied sending the three most incriminating ones
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i was skeptical he said that uh he had done the first four but you know he'd
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given me something but now he was just you know taking away the last three letters and so it just you know caused
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more doubt and created some more issues that we were going to have to try to verify or
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confirm or not confirm but if fitzpatrick didn't send these three type written letters
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who did on a hunch investigators got a warrant to search lewis harry's office
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he worked in the physical education department of a local community college it was interesting that they went to mr
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harry's workplace and they took this big shelf that was in his office it's like
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five or six feet long that ended up going out to their expert out at asu arizona state university also in lewis
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harry's waste paper basket they found a receipt from chemonix a local chemical
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company the label had warning information from with regard to the use of cyanide
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but the receipt was signed by someone who identified himself as charles hawley he told the clerk he needed the cyanide
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for a college chemistry class forensic document examiner bill flynn was asked to compare this signature to
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lewis harry's known signature the second letter in the name holly is an ovate round letter
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it is also an ovate round letter in harry and there's a very distinctive style that he used to
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move from the h into the next ovate letter both last names ended with a y and flynn discovered that they were
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virtually identical as were the h's at the beginning of each name for instance the right side of the h
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in holly is made with that rightward curving clockwise rotation circular movement on
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the h which we saw is the characteristic that's replicated in harry's own name
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investigators went to the chemonix company and showed the sales clerk a photo lineup
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the clerk identified lewis harry as the man who purchased the cyanide so she sold him the
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cyanide under the phoenix college account and he signed a different name to the receipt
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in lewis harry's office investigators found an open box of envelopes when they looked at the ones left in the
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box they found that three of them had the same defect as the one with the threatening letter
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in fact it was a progressive and linear defect meaning that you could see the progression how the
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defect had enlarged as the envelopes had moved down the manufacturing line normally
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the people in post-production in the quality control would have culled those out rather than put them into the box i
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was actually just amazed that something like that would occur it was probably one in a million that this would have
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happened this proved that lewis harry sent himself at least one of the threatening letters perhaps
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more and on the shelf in his office scientists found trace amounts of cyanide but how did lewis harry gain access to
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his wife's office building to poison the water a key card system is used to gain access
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on weekends you have to use a key a card to scan in to get into the door the office security system revealed
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someone entered the transamerica office on the weekend before the poisoning the card had been used was diane harry's and
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had been used at 10 18 on that saturday but diane insisted she hadn't gone into the office that
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weekend the information raised the question is number one who used the card and it
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obviously made sense that if someone used the car that knew her she also that person would
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also have access to the keys to the office no one reported seeing a woman entered
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the building that weekend but a workman recalled seeing a man enter the subject who had been there as a
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workman an outside contractor they've been there waiting to get inside the building because it was locked and he
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said it was sometime between 10 and 10 30 that african-american subject pulled up in a blue sports car got out was not
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very congenial opened the door for him he wasn't able to actually identify him
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or pick him out of the lineup but he remembered that the car had a tennis racket in the back seat mr harry had had
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a tennis racket he played tennis all the time lewis harry was arrested and charged
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with the murder of julie williams and the attempted murder of his wife diane but why
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did he do it [Music] about a year after julie williams murder 32 year old louis harry went on trial
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for murder and the attempted murder of his wife diane prosecutors believe lewis was unhappy in
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his marriage to diane whom he had been married to for less than three years then one night in a bar he met sharon
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jones a student at the community college where he worked [Music] initially he misled sharon by telling
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her he was separated it became serious very quickly within three to four weeks lewis proposed marriage to sharon while
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still living with his wife diane sharon's ex-boyfriend roy fitzpatrick learned about a relationship with lewis
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harry grew angry then mailed the threatening letters to lewis and his wife ironically they weren't fighting over me
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i could see that then i told them both i said you know what this isn't because
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you want me it's because of your egos these letters gave lewis what he believed to be
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the perfect alibi he'd kill his wife with cyanide pinned the murder on roy fitzpatrick
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then he'd be free to marry sharon he typed three more letters even more incriminating than the originals
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and mailed them to himself but lewis used an envelope with a significant manufacturing flaw that tied
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him to those letters lewis bought the cyanide in a local supply store using an alias
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but forensic handwriting analysis concluded that lewis signed the receipt lewis tried killing his wife
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by putting cyanide in her alcoholic beverage but she stopped drinking it because of its foul odor
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he also put cyanide in her tea kettle this too was unsuccessful so that's when
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lewis decided to use his wife's security pass to put cyanide in the office water
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cooler and coffee pot on monday morning julie williams was the first one to drink from the water cooler and she
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ingested a massive dose of cyanide she was an innocent victim of a marriage gone horribly wrong
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and really glad that he'll never be able to hurt anybody else again and really grateful for a system
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that protects its members from people who cannot control their own actions or who make bad choices in their life
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[Music] at the trial lewis's wife and his girlfriend sat together neither one thought he was
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capable of murder two girls would sit back there the two ladies look at me give me dirty looks
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and they were supporters of louis harry prosecutors presented what they believed
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to be a possible financial motive as well diane harry had the life insurance policy
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for 75 000 and he was the beneficiary if she died he was a beneficiary he would have
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gotten that money lewis harry was tried and convicted of first degree murder and four counts of
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attempted murder he was sentenced to life in prison after almost two decades his girlfriend
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is finally convinced of his guilt mr harry did a very horrendous thing i tried to forgive him and i can't
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i still can't forgive him diane harry's brother went into her attic found more cyanide i think it was
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only at that time that she realized that he'd been had been trying to kill her
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lewis harry is now in the arizona state prison complex during a recent telephone interview he
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still maintains his innocence i'm very sorry for julian's family you know for
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them to have to have gone through this as far as the actual crime itself i didn't commit to crime so it's kind of
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hard to have remorse for something that i didn't do investigators believe the evidence
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proves the exact opposite the handwriting the flawed envelopes the eyewitness and
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cyanide particles in his office all indicate that lewis harry was prepared to do anything to end his marriage
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even if it meant killing others to do it it'd have been much more difficult to
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obtain a conviction without the evidence of the matching envelopes and without the handwriting comparison
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it was like you know a work of art it started it grew and then it came to a completion and it was all there there
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was nothing they could dispute i don't care what defense they brought up we defeated all
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[Music] [Music] [Music] you