December 14, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

Timothy Harris

The black box that Tim Harris’s family keeps in memory of him holds a mixture of notes, journals, documents and photos that tell about who Harris was as a father, brother and friend and also about the unresolved mystery behind his death two years ago this week. It has been over a year since the family members have received any new information about Harris’s murder, and their frustration has turned to fatigue. They can neither close the box and put it away nor bear to open it for fear of hurtful memories.

Harris’s younger sister, Cynthia Harris, said on Monday that she was overwhelmed by the two years of thinking and wondering and imagining exactly what happened to her brother.

“Just knowing, it would be easier, that’s the closure you need,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about rumors anymore, you don’t have questions anymore.”

Harris’s body was found in his home on Pleasant Street on Dec. 16, 2004. His death two days before was ruled a homicide, from multiple blunt force injuries to the front of the head. Three months later, the police found Harris’s 1987 Corolla at a Xenia scrap yard.

The Yellow Springs police said last year that they were confident they knew what happened, and they had a “person of interest” who “wasn’t going anywhere.” Yet no suspects have been named, and police are reluctant to release crime lab results from DNA samples and other evidence taken from the crime scene. According to investigating officer Tom Jones, some of the results are still pending, though he would not specify which ones.

Yellow Springs Police Chief John Grote said the police are still actively working with the Greene County prosecutor to bring charges that will result in a conviction in the Harris case.

“We believe we know exactly what happened, but we are still building a case,” Grote said. “When it goes forward it will be on the prosecutor’s terms when we can take the best possible case to court; that’s our responsibility to the family and to the community. My hope is that this thing will be wrapped up soon.”

Suzanne Schmidt, from the county prosecutor’s office, would not say what information was delaying the prosecution. But she urged anyone with information regarding the case or an event around the time of Harris’ murder, even if it may seem unrelated, to call either the Yellow Springs Police Department or the prosecutor’s office at 937-562-5250.

“We are working the case, and we know it’s important to the Yellow Springs community to have it resolved,” she said.

Piecing together a story
The week Harris died, Cynthia Harris began a journal about all the people she talked to and the rumors she heard about what had happened to her brother. She and Harris, the seventh and eighth children of nine, were close and had shared the house on Pleasant Street for several years prior to Harris’s death. From the beginning she heard a lot more on the street than the police would tell her, and Cynthia Harris and her older brother Ron Harris, who also lives in Yellow Springs, were consumed with trying to figure out the truth.

Before Harris died, his daughters Portia and Alison Harris and his former partner Heidi Viemeister were planning to move back to town from Colorado to live with him. They moved back anyway after Harris’s death and joined the Harris siblings in a pattern of living between grief and investigation.

They all had suspicions about who may have killed Harris, who was a gregarious outdoorsman who liked to fish, hunt, play pool and drink with friends at the Dayton Street Gulch. Harris smoked marijuana, his family said, but he was not into using other drugs. “He was against all that stuff,” Ron Harris said. The coroner’s report showed alcohol in Harris’s system the night he was killed, but there were no other drugs present, he said.

Harris also had a penchant for helping people who were in need, even sometimes “scary people,” Cynthia Harris said. He was a solid man who did heavy lifting for TJM Construction for 25 years and was able to make short work of tough manual labor, she said. And because he “communed spiritually to a higher being” and was raised to help others, he did work for everyone from the elderly to the homeless and the drug addicted, she said, sometimes opening his home to those who needed a place to stay for a while.

The family members were close to Harris and knew many of the people he associated with. They found out from the cosmetologist at the funeral home that Harris had defensive wounds on his arms, which indicated a struggle. They also knew that he wasn’t likely to sell his car to a scrap yard because he needed it to get to work every day. In Harris’s house they found a bicycle that didn’t belong to Harris, a pair of wedding rings and a modest amount of cash in a locked safe that probably would have been taken if Harris had been murdered for money, Cynthia Harris said.

Viemeister also believes that Harris was killed after he had already settled in for the evening. Harris’s routine after work was to park his car at home, walk directly to the bar, hang out with friends and then walk home. She has his shoes, she said, which means he wasn’t wearing them when he was killed. He had taken them off after coming home and probably didn’t intend to go back out again, she surmised.

After a year and a half of piecing together bits of information and making educated guesses, the family still had no conclusive information. Then several months ago, Ron Harris said he spoke with an acquaintance who said he heard someone confess to murdering Tim Harris.

Ron and Cynthia Harris especially had so many questions, they said, and they wondered whether it was more rumors, a false accusation, or testimony to corroborate what the family had suspected all along. The whole Harris family was sick with disappointment with the slow and seemingly ineffective investigation of their brother’s murder, they said.

Answers long in coming
Within two months of Harris’s death, the family lost two aunts, their mother, Ople Harris, and Viemeister’s mother, Beverly Viemeister. Cynthia Harris, in particular, still raw from the shock of her brother’s murder, had a difficult time sorting through her family’s belongings, she said. She began attending meetings of the Ohio Victims of Crime Compensation Program and found solace in talking with other families who suffered like hers, she said.

Meanwhile, Viemeister was busy moving her daughters back to Yellow Springs, where they grew up, and then trying to find a job. Portia Harris had a son, Cerone, and was consumed with being a first-time mother. And this month, Alison Harris has also had a new baby, Trinity.

“There are a lot of things we went through after the death. It takes a long time for things to unfold, and there are a lot of hidden costs, emotionally and spiritually,” Cynthia Harris said. “Everyone has dealt with it in their own way.”

Portia Harris wants people to remember that her father’s death is still unresolved. She wishes he could have met her son, who was born two weeks after Harris’s death. Viemeister would like nothing more than to go to court and see those who are guilty “put away,” she said. Ron Harris wishes the police would be more open with family members about what they know, because anything is better than not knowing, he said.

Cynthia Harris misses her brother, she said. Harris lent her money when she was low and changed her tires when she had a flat. And she made food for him to take to potlucks and listened to the fishing stories Harris would tell about him and his dog Elvis. She misses his harmonica playing and watching him play billiards, she said. When she wants to talk to him, she goes to Ellis Park, where he liked to sit and watch the world go by.

In a booklet called “Altars of Yellow Springs,” published by Christine Johnson in 2001, Harris talked about his altar, the sky.

"When I see the sky, I can go into infinity. You can always follow the daylight. In the night sky, clouds can look just like the daytime. I like night for its stillness. People walking or a car driving by, I can ignore these things. I like to leave the curtains on my windows open (except on the neighbor’s side.) I like to see the sky. I think of unlimited things. I wonder about things like, “What is the wind? Who made up these things?”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com