Queen of the County

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Speaker 4 The plot was hatched.

Speaker 4 This dreadful plot.

Speaker 5 It's like a movie script. It's family rivalries of betrayal and murder.

Speaker 4 Was so horrific. What were the last hours on Earth like for her?

Speaker 3 It lurks here on this storied family estate. A mystery as tangled and gnarled as the trees that reach for the sky.

Speaker 8 I think she's dead.

Speaker 9 It eats at me. I can't sleep most of the time.

Speaker 3 A crime like a storm. Everyone could see it coming.

Speaker 4 Everybody in the town has their suspicions.

Speaker 3 She was missing. The matriarch with a grip on her powerful family's fortune.

Speaker 6 Did someone have a powerful motive to do her harm?

Speaker 4 I saw bruises on Bonnie's arms, like somebody had grabbed her.

Speaker 9 She looked at him and said, you tried to kill me.

Speaker 3 Who was behind this? A search in the dark.

Speaker 12 Right there.

Speaker 3 A secret in the family. And a jailhouse interview to make your jaw drop.

Speaker 5 You said you wished she were dead. And then later she became dead.

Speaker 3 I'm Lester Holt, and this dateline is a twisted tale deep in the heart of Texas.

Speaker 13 People who are desperate will do desperate things.

Speaker 3 Tonight, Josh Menkiewicz with Queen of the County.

Speaker 14 In this country, we've always loved stories about power, money, and the struggle to get our hands on both.

Speaker 14 The story you're about to hear is like that.

Speaker 14 It's an epic tale of greed and betrayal, and it's set in San Saba,

Speaker 14 a tiny town in the Texas Hill Country.

Speaker 14 And it stars a family that learned how to make money grow on trees.

Speaker 5 Pecan trees.

Speaker 14 At the heart of the matter, a feud fueled by a lust for land, stoked by a battle of generations.

Speaker 14 And front and center, the life and times of the matriarch, Bonnie Harkey, who controlled a family fortune a century in the making.

Speaker 4 Well, I always say she was queen of the county because she really was a big fish in a small pond.

Speaker 14 This is Teresa Cook, Bonnie Harkey's niece.

Speaker 4 They were well off and they were property owners.

Speaker 5 And by local standards very wealthy.

Speaker 4 By local standards, sure.

Speaker 14 They were so prominent in fact that the Harki name is carved on monuments, painted on roadsigns in San Sabba.

Speaker 15 I'm the sixth generation in my family here in the county.

Speaker 14 Dwight Harky says all the Harkies descended from two brothers who came to the hill country in the 1850s.

Speaker 15 Well, there was two boys that came and they were cavalry scouts. And they found this country and nobody lived here.

Speaker 14 A proud family history, to be sure. But on March 25th, 2012, a new and bloody chapter was added.

Speaker 16 I remember that Sunday morning because of what happened the rest of the day.

Speaker 14 The events that would forever fix that day in the Reverend Sam Crosby's memory centered on 85-year-old Bonnie Harkey. an active member of the First Baptist Church of San Saba.

Speaker 14 You could set your watch by bonnie harkey coming to church you could she'd be right here she'd be right here right and even after she had to have 24-hour care your caretaker would bring her the trouble began a few hours after church out at the harkey place a few miles west of town 911 what's your emergency it was about 530 when the san saba sheriff's department dispatcher received this call from a young boy i found my mom on the floor um she i think think she's dead.

Speaker 8 I'm at the Harkey residence.

Speaker 14 Turns out the 11-year-old's mother was Karen Johnson, Bonnie Harkey's caretaker.

Speaker 5 And you don't know the address out there?

Speaker 8 No, ma'am.

Speaker 18 I'm just really, really worried.

Speaker 19 What phone are you using?

Speaker 8 Um I'm using uh Bonnie's house phone.

Speaker 18 I can't find Bonnie anywhere.

Speaker 14 Within minutes, the San Saba Sheriff's Department had deputies on the way.

Speaker 20 All right, I'm going to Bonnie Harkey's right. I don't

Speaker 14 In a rural area where locals listen closely to police scanners, some worry deputies might be chasing some dangerous desperado.

Speaker 21 Is there somebody loose that I should be... Oh, no, no, no.
Okay, I just was wondering.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 20 There's all sitting up there near Miss Harkey's place.

Speaker 14 The Harkey Place was a local landmark, and John Wilkerson, a San Saba Sheriff's deputy in 2012, was among the first investigators to arrive.

Speaker 23 When I walked in, of course, Karen Johnson's body was laying face down in the doorway, which raised some suspicion.

Speaker 5 Sign of a struggle?

Speaker 23 There really wasn't any clear signs of struggle, and there was some questionable

Speaker 24 issues that were at play.

Speaker 6 Like what?

Speaker 23 The fact that she was dead right by the front door, that just didn't make a whole lot of sense. The fact that I found a broken fingernail on her hand.

Speaker 14 Karen Johnson's son, the boy who'd called 911,

Speaker 14 told investigators he'd been playing a video game in a spare bedroom all afternoon and had not heard or seen anything unusual.

Speaker 7 Strange.

Speaker 14 But what also concerned the lawman was the fact that Bonnie Harkey was not there.

Speaker 5 So you're thinking Bonnie Harkey is out there somewhere maybe in the orchards?

Speaker 23 That was the thought with Sheriff Brown.

Speaker 14 Bonnie had serious health problems. She was frail, suffered from dementia.
In short, she had to be found and fast.

Speaker 23 Sheriff Brown had called in prison dogs. He had the DPS helicopter out.

Speaker 7 She can't have gone very far.

Speaker 23 Correct. That's what our thoughts were.

Speaker 14 By nightfall, word of Bonnie Harkey's disappearance had spread far and wide.

Speaker 14 Her stepson, Bruce Harkey, who'd been visiting his brother in Fort Worth that weekend, called the sheriff's office wanting to know some details.

Speaker 21 This is Bruce Harkey. I'm getting some awful strange phone calls, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
What are these calls in reference to?

Speaker 21 She said they found some lady dead, and Bonnie was missing, and something about battle and having the road blocked off and everything.

Speaker 14 Even Bonnie's niece, Teresa, in Memphis, heard the news within a few hours of that first 911 call.

Speaker 4 My mother and I always speak on Sunday nights, and she had called me and said Bonnie's missing.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 we both kind of went, oh no.

Speaker 14 Teresa Cook may have been hundreds of miles from where searchers were looking for Bonnie Harkey.

Speaker 14 But she says she knew right away her aunt's disappearance was connected to the decades-long battle over the remains of the Harky fortune.

Speaker 5 Not home envisioned.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 7 Her family.

Speaker 3 When we come back, the search for the missing matriarch.

Speaker 4 I saw bruises on Bonnie's arms, like somebody had grabbed her.

Speaker 3 Somebody sure seemed to know something.

Speaker 18 Well, I might have some information about where Bonnie Harkey is.

Speaker 23 I was definitely concerned.

Speaker 14 If the Harkies of Sansaba were ever made into a television drama, it would be chock full of character actors.

Speaker 14 There'd be a gentleman farmer, a pair of impatient heirs-in-waiting, a ne'er-do-well grandson, his enabling girlfriend.

Speaker 14 And the rock of the family would be a white-haired matriarch named Bonnie Harkey.

Speaker 4 She had book clubs, she was red hat society, she was constantly socializing.

Speaker 14 There were roughly 200 acres to the Harky spread.

Speaker 14 With valuable water rights along the San Saba River, a rambling farmhouse, and nearly 3,000 pecan trees.

Speaker 5 When people hear the harkey name in that part of the country, what do they think?

Speaker 4 Man, the Harkies were the somebodies in town.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I know Bonnie enjoyed that.

Speaker 14 And maybe that was just the way she pictured it, back in 1963 when Bonnie met and married Riley Harky. At the time, Riley was a recently divorced father with two boys.

Speaker 14 Bonnie, a single single mom with a teenage daughter of her own.

Speaker 4 It was a coup, you know, it was a coup, especially for a single mother who was really looking at having to either find a husband or work for the rest of her life.

Speaker 4 In the early 60s, it was tough to be a divorcee. It was tough to be a single mother.

Speaker 14 Now, nearly 50 years later, the queen of the county was missing.

Speaker 14 Searchers were still out in the orchards looking for Bonnie Harkey when a resident who'd been listening to the police scanner called with a vital clue.

Speaker 18 I know things are crazy going on right now, but I might have some information about where Bonnie Harkey is.

Speaker 14 The caller said she knew that Bonnie Harkey's 28-year-old grandson, Carl, had visited her that very afternoon.

Speaker 20 I'm 99%

Speaker 18 sure Carl Presley is involved.

Speaker 7 Who's Carl Presley?

Speaker 23 Carl Presley is the adopted grandson of Bonnie Harkey. Bonnie Harkey had a daughter, Connie.
Connie adopted Carl Presley at a very young age.

Speaker 5 When you hear that that calls come in, you're thinking, oh, this is what?

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 5 I was definitely concerned.

Speaker 14 Why so much concern over a grandson's visit to his elderly grandmother?

Speaker 14 That's a tangled tale, really. that begins with the way Carl Presley came to join the Harkey clan in the first place.

Speaker 4 Connie said that she adopted him from a homeless woman, a homeless couple that were living in a car.

Speaker 5 From a homeless couple. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And that they couldn't take care of him and so they were willing to give him up for adoption. That's what I know.

Speaker 14 Teresa says there was always something a little bit off about Carl, something that tended to make other people uncomfortable.

Speaker 4 It was very odd and very sad at the same time as he seemed to be a very lonely, needy child, very clingy child, and nobody really seemed to want him to cling to him.

Speaker 14 But Teresa says there was nothing Bonnie wouldn't do for Carl.

Speaker 4 She'd buy Carl a truck and he'd wreck the truck and then she'd buy him another one. And he'd get a job, he'd lose a job, she'd house him.

Speaker 4 He was stealing pecans from the harvest and selling them. I mean, she was constantly bailing him out of one situation or another, you know, giving him money.

Speaker 14 In spite of that, Carl, who had a harder shell than anything that came out of these trees, was known to be verbally abusive to his grandmother if he didn't get what he wanted.

Speaker 14 Teresa says that once when she dropped by to visit Bonnie, she had an unsettling encounter with Carl, who was also there.

Speaker 4 Everything I said, he'd argue against. He just fought with me, fought with me.
It was like he couldn't get along with anybody. And I saw bruises on Bonnie's arms, like somebody had grabbed her.

Speaker 4 And little old ladies bruised so easily that I said to my mother on the phone, I said, I would not be surprised if Carl pushed her down the basement stairs.

Speaker 14 Given that history, it was understandable then that investigators' ears perked up once they learned that the last person to have seen Bonnie Harkey the day she went missing was Carl Presley.

Speaker 23 We were pretty sure that if we were able to find Carl, we were going to be able to find Bonnie Harkey.

Speaker 14 According to the tipster, Carl was with his girlfriend, Lillian King. They were riding in her car.

Speaker 21 Do you have any information of her vehicle? All I know is she's driving a 2004 Mustang.

Speaker 14 Soon, just about every lawman in Texas was on the lookout for that 2004 Mustang. But in the meantime, Deputy Wilkerson says the San Sabba sheriff took a more personal approach.

Speaker 23 He's trying to call a cell phone. He's sending him multiple text messages.

Speaker 5 You have Carl's number because of his numerous brushes with law enforcement.

Speaker 7 Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 14 Wouldn't it be great if police could just text suspects and get them to come in? But the world doesn't work like that. Except perhaps in San Saba.
Just after midnight, Carl Presley responded.

Speaker 14 He was in Normanje, Texas, he told the sheriff, where he and his girlfriend lived in a trailer at an RV campground.

Speaker 14 Though Normanjie is more than three hours from San Saba, Carl promised the sheriff he would be back by daybreak.

Speaker 23 I think maybe about the time my eyeballs closed,

Speaker 6 about 7 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 23 And Dispatch told me that Carl Presley had showed up to the sheriff's office and Sheriff Brown needed me up there at ASAP.

Speaker 14 And so, with little or no sleep, Deputy Wilkerson says he headed back to the office and a face-to-face encounter with the man most likely to know where Bonnie Harkey was.

Speaker 3 Coming up, another life in danger.

Speaker 9 He had three knives on him, so I had to do what he said.

Speaker 3 And a dark secret down by the creek.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 7 Right there.

Speaker 12 All right.

Speaker 14 Here's the thing about lawmen in rural Texas. They don't have all the gadgets and gizmos that come with working in a big city.

Speaker 23 It's a different world. You're working with limited budgets.

Speaker 5 So you have to improvise.

Speaker 23 Yes, yes, you have to improvise.

Speaker 14 And that's what Sansaba deputy John Wilkerson did. When Carl Presley, the chief suspect in the disappearance of Bonnie Harkey and the death of her caretaker, came in for questioning.

Speaker 14 Wilkerson used the video recorder embedded in his car.

Speaker 5 And that's your interrogation.

Speaker 23 And that's my interrogation. You're out there in the Sallyport.
My name is John Wilkins. I'm Sergeant Shot.

Speaker 14 He was not under arrest, but Carl Presley wore prison stripes for his interview because investigators had taken his clothes so they could run tests on them.

Speaker 23 I'm not making any actual

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Speaker 23 Says at this point, I'm just trying to get him locked down into his original story.

Speaker 14 From the beginning, Carl Presley admitted he and his girlfriend Lillian King had gone out to his grandmother's house for a visit that Sunday.

Speaker 24 Do you remember how long you stayed there?

Speaker 24 I'm sure I really don't.

Speaker 23 During the interview he started to you know try to pretend like he couldn't remember certain things.

Speaker 14 Eventually Carl's memory improved. He remembered how he took his grandmother out of the house to protect her from some tough guys he owed money to.

Speaker 23 The story is,

Speaker 23 to protect his grandmother, he picks her up in the evening and drives her to Rainey Crossing Rainey's Crossing and drops her off in the in the bushes.

Speaker 7 An 85-year-old woman? Correct. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Wilkerson wasn't buying, but officers did search that location. Then Carl told another story.
He said he'd taken Bonnie back to his trailer home in Normandy.

Speaker 23 He misses his grandmother and he wanted to see her, which again didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Speaker 14 That was because investigators knew nothing to suggest that Carl Presley had ever missed anyone during during his 28 years on planet Earth.

Speaker 7 In Hilltop Lakes

Speaker 14 In short order, Texas Rangers and local lawmen near Normandy were combing Carl's trailer and the surrounding campground for clues.

Speaker 14 But they found nothing until Carl was flown to Normanjie.

Speaker 14 I told her I wanted to show her a fishing hole

Speaker 14 down by the creek and we went down there and

Speaker 19 stuff happened.

Speaker 7 Tell me what kind of stuff happened, Carl.

Speaker 7 It's a card, sir.

Speaker 7 That's going to be her.

Speaker 12 Right there.

Speaker 7 Right there. All right, all right, all right, all right.
All right, Carl.

Speaker 12 It's all right.

Speaker 7 All right, Carl.

Speaker 12 It's all right, Carl. Hey.

Speaker 7 I want Carl. I didn't mean to.

Speaker 28 I didn't mean to.

Speaker 7 Hang on, I didn't mean to.

Speaker 7 I didn't mean to.

Speaker 14 Bonnie Harky was dead. Her body lying in a creek bed near Carl's trailer, buried beneath a pile of sticks and leaves.

Speaker 23 So Carl admits that he pushed her on the back of her head,

Speaker 23 holding her face underwater until she no longer moved.

Speaker 14 It was the same story Lillian King had already given to lawmen back in Sansaba. She'd been there, she said, when the caretaker was killed, and she'd stood idly by while Carl killed his grandmother.

Speaker 14 But in Lillian's telling of the story, she could very well have been Carl Presley's third murder victim that day.

Speaker 9 He had three knives on him.

Speaker 19 Three.

Speaker 9 You know, so I had to do what he said.

Speaker 14 What had driven Carl Presley to kill one of the few people on earth who had ever loved him?

Speaker 14 That was a question to which no one could supply an answer.

Speaker 5 She doted on Carl.

Speaker 4 She did dote on him.

Speaker 4 No one could quite understand why.

Speaker 5 And I'll bet she couldn't in the last four or five hours of her life. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Investigators didn't know why Carl Presley killed his grandmother, but they were pretty sure there was more to this murder than met the eye, and that there could be clues in the Harky family history.

Speaker 3 Coming up, a million-dollar inheritance, a neighbor from Hollywood, and a Harkey with a handful of ex-wives.

Speaker 24 He's just a solid jerk.

Speaker 4 Just constant drama.

Speaker 3 Police were about to get to the heart of the Bonnie Harkey murder.

Speaker 14 The matriarch of a prominent pecan-growing family had been brutally murdered by a member of that family. But why?

Speaker 14 The more investigators pondered that, the more they came to believe the answer might be found in a long-running family feud.

Speaker 23 The first time I met the Harky family, I was bailiff in court because we were shorthanded, and I got to sit through a little hearing where the Harkeys were trying to gain control of the property.

Speaker 23 And you could tell it was a very heated situation, very heated.

Speaker 14 That pot had been at a slow boil ever since that day in 1963 when Bonnie Harkey became stepmother to her husband Riley's two boys, Bruce and John.

Speaker 4 Bruce and Johnny just didn't like Bonnie. They didn't like her at all.
And so almost from the beginning, he was acrimonious.

Speaker 5 What form did that acrimony take?

Speaker 4 Bruce and Johnny were just rude to Bonnie, openly insulting her.

Speaker 5 And Riley put up with that? He let it go.

Speaker 4 He just let it go.

Speaker 14 A lot of blended families have rough starts, but this newly grafted branch of the Harkey family tree never had a chance.

Speaker 4 And I don't think Riley made a real effort with his boys to say,

Speaker 4 this is a wonderful woman. I want you to grow to love her like I love her.
I think he just said, here you go.

Speaker 5 Riley seems to have been better with pecans than people.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Soon enough, John was off to college, and Bruce was shuttled off to live with his mother in Nevada for a while. That left only Bonnie's teenage daughter, Connie, at home.

Speaker 4 Riley never adopted Connie. She was an afterthought.
She was just never brought into the family.

Speaker 5 This is sounding less like the Brady Bunch and more like the Ewings every day.

Speaker 4 You know, just the Ewings without the culture, you know, it was really

Speaker 4 just constant drama.

Speaker 14 The boys took different career paths. John became a businessman.
Bruce had a number of different jobs. At various times, he was a cop in Reno.

Speaker 14 a Medicaid fraud investigator for the Texas Attorney General's Office,

Speaker 14 and a nursing home administrator. Along the way, he married and divorced eight, count him eight, women.

Speaker 14 Still, as the years rolled by, the brothers' feelings for Bonnie seemed to fester.

Speaker 14 There were a lot of reasons for that, but maybe the biggest one was a will their father, Riley, had drawn up shortly before he died in 1997.

Speaker 4 Riley's will specifically said that

Speaker 4 Bonnie could live on that property as long as she was alive. And then when she died, the land would go to the boys.
And then there was a small inheritance for Connie.

Speaker 4 And if Connie died, then there would be a trust for Carl. But the majority of the inheritance went to Bruce and Johnny.

Speaker 14 Though the property alone was worth more than a million dollars, for the Harkey brothers, it wasn't worth a dime because they could neither farm it nor sell it until Bonnie died.

Speaker 14 Bruce especially seemed to chafe at the thought of that.

Speaker 22 He said he was the poorest millionaire in San Saba County.

Speaker 14 Local pecan merchant Sean Oliver says Bruce Harkey was down and out in late 2007 when he resettled in San Saba after being away for many years.

Speaker 22 He had no income coming in, and every time he drove by that property, all he could see was the millions,

Speaker 22 what he thought was millions that he was missing out on.

Speaker 14 By then, Bonnie Harkey was becoming increasingly frail. Her dementia made her vulnerable to phone scams.
She was unable to manage her daily affairs, so her daughter Connie became her guardian.

Speaker 14 After Connie died in 2011, Bruce Harkey thought Carl Presley should be Bonnie's guardian. When a judge tried to appoint someone else, Bruce and John challenged that in court.

Speaker 4 Bonnie asked the judge if she could speak, and the judge said yes. And she said, I don't want them to be my guardians.
I'm afraid of them.

Speaker 14 Her stepsons. Yeah.

Speaker 5 That had to be about the last thing Bruce and John wanted to hear.

Speaker 4 It delayed any inheritance, certainly.

Speaker 14 A lawyer named Darrell Spinks was chosen to manage her business and financial affairs. Bonnie's longtime friend, Betty Ann Johnson, was asked to make sure Bonnie's daily needs were met.

Speaker 14 It was Betty Ann who'd who'd hired Karen Johnson, no relation, the in-home caretaker who was killed the day Bonnie was kidnapped.

Speaker 5 You felt safe with Karen taking care of Bonnie. I did.

Speaker 26 What Bruce wanted me to do was to put her in the nursing home.

Speaker 5 He told you that? Yes.

Speaker 26 And I said, as long as we can have help 24-7, she's not going anywhere.

Speaker 14 Bonnie's financial guardian Daryl Spinks says he also butted heads with Bruce Harkey.

Speaker 24 The best way I can explain Bruce Harkey is

Speaker 24 greedy and, for lack of a better words, just a jerk.

Speaker 24 He's just a solid jerk.

Speaker 14 According to Spinks, Bruce not only accused him of mismanaging the Harkey estate, but also tried to bully him into accepting the sale of a chunk of land to their neighbor, the actor Tommy Lee Jones, for half a million dollars.

Speaker 14 It was good for Bruce, but Spinks says not for Bonnie. So he killed it.

Speaker 24 He wanted Bonnie to get virtually nothing. I I know it was less than $50,000 is what he wanted her to get.

Speaker 5 And the rest of the money for the sale would have gone to Bruce.

Speaker 24 The rest of it would have gone to Bruce and John, yes.

Speaker 5 And so you said to Bruce, I'm not for this.

Speaker 24 And that sent him in orbit. I mean, he just became irate and cussed me out and said, I'm going to do everything I can to get at you.

Speaker 14 Investigators were getting a pretty good taste of the river of bad blood that ran through the Harkey family.

Speaker 14 Bonnie Harkey's grandson, grandson, Carl Presley, and his girlfriend Lillian King were in the county jail.

Speaker 14 And now, men with badges decided to take a harder look at Bruce Harkey.

Speaker 3 Coming up.

Speaker 3 We had some questions for Bruce Harkey, too.

Speaker 5 You didn't put Carl up to it.

Speaker 29 Would you really hire Forrest Gump to commit murder?

Speaker 10 Forrest Gump?

Speaker 3 Then this jailhouse interview was like a box of chocolates. We didn't know what we were going to get.

Speaker 5 Because you said you wished she were dead, and then later she became dead.

Speaker 14 The final decision to kill Bonnie Harkey was made on a Friday, two days before the murder.

Speaker 14 As Carl Presley laid it out for investigators, his uncle Bruce was broke and couldn't wait any longer for his inheritance.

Speaker 19 He sat me down on the bench.

Speaker 19 We're running out of money.

Speaker 14 Texans are generally thought to be pretty hard-nosed when it comes to business. But Carl Presley?

Speaker 14 Not so much.

Speaker 19 Bruce says, I'll give you $500

Speaker 19 if this happens right now, this weekend.

Speaker 19 And funny guys.

Speaker 19 Bunny does.

Speaker 19 I said, you're broke, man.

Speaker 19 And I threw a number out there like 250.

Speaker 19 No, no, no.

Speaker 23 They argued for a little bit.

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Speaker 23 But according to Carl, they argued about the price. Bruce wanted, he was adamant he was going to pay him $500 and Carl was adamant he only needed to pay him $250.

Speaker 14 In the end, Carl says Bruce agreed to pay him $100 down and another $150 once the job was done.

Speaker 23 We found out he stopped by his bank and made a withdrawal for $200,

Speaker 23 which was great because that's the date and time stamped. And now I got you on video.
Then he leaves there, and about 30 minutes later, he shows back up in front of Lillian King's house.

Speaker 6 And Carl runs out the door to collect the $100

Speaker 6 down

Speaker 7 from Bruce Harkey.

Speaker 14 The idea that Bruce Harkey was in cahoots with Carl Presley seemed odd to some.

Speaker 33 Evidently, Bruce detested the fact that Carl would refer to Bruce as Uncle Bruce, but yet Carl was always seemingly seeking approval and acceptance

Speaker 33 from Bruce.

Speaker 14 Jack Schumacher, one of the investigators on the case, believes Bruce may have used that bit of psychology to his advantage when he decided it was long past time for Bonnie Harkey to meet her maker.

Speaker 14 So when Bruce says, hey, I want you in on my murder plot,

Speaker 14 what, happiest day of Carl's life?

Speaker 33 You know, it could be that Carl thought he was finally going to receive that acceptance he'd been seeking.

Speaker 14 A theory? Perhaps. But then investigators also knew that Bruce Harkey had never made any secret about how he felt about his stepmother, Bonnie.

Speaker 4 Excuse my

Speaker 26 language, but this is exactly what he said. He said that old bitch doesn't have the decency to die.

Speaker 14 Investigators didn't know if Bruce paid Carl or just manipulated him into killing Bonnie Harkey, but they were sure he was involved.

Speaker 14 So two days after Carl led investigators to Bonnie's body, Bruce Harkey was arrested and charged with murder.

Speaker 14 When lawmen came to question Bruce in jail, he did not mince words.

Speaker 14 Bonnie was a poor, miserable, wretched human being. Okay? She didn't have two working brains going through the other anymore.
I didn't go out there and say somebody needs to kill her.

Speaker 14 I said she needs to go. She just needs to go.

Speaker 14 According to Bruce, Carl Presley had his own motives for killing Bonnie Harkey.

Speaker 14 That's because a year earlier, Carl had sold his future interest in the Harkey estate to the Harkey brothers for a fraction of what it was worth.

Speaker 14 But here's the thing. The brothers only gave him a fraction of the money they owed him.
Bruce says he told Carl the brothers would pay him the rest, around $55,000,

Speaker 14 once they inherited the orchards.

Speaker 14 This is how Bruce says Carl responded.

Speaker 14 How long we actually might remember what you got to do for that money?

Speaker 14 Carl.

Speaker 14 It has to go through probate first. Hell, that could take years, I don't know.

Speaker 14 According to Bruce, the money he gave Carl shortly before Bonnie's death was gas money, nothing more.

Speaker 14 Then Bruce Harkey turned the tables on the lawmen and asked them a question that would become central to his defense.

Speaker 14 Why would he want to kill a sick old woman who already seemed to have one foot in the grave?

Speaker 14 Why would I plan on Bonnie's demise or offer patient money to do what Nungucks did when I'm thinking

Speaker 14 this is just around the corner anyway?

Speaker 14 Why, guys?

Speaker 14 When we spoke with Bruce Harkey through a thick pane of glass,

Speaker 14 he insisted

Speaker 14 he was an innocent man.

Speaker 10 I had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 5 You didn't put Carl up to it.

Speaker 10 Absolutely not, sir. No, of course.

Speaker 25 That's exactly like the first question my attorney asked me.

Speaker 29 He said, would you, he said, I have to ask you, would you really hire Forrest Gump to commit murder?

Speaker 10 I said, I wouldn't hire anybody to commit murder.

Speaker 5 So your argument is contrary to what Carl told investigators, he did this all on his own.

Speaker 1 I don't know that he did it all on his own.

Speaker 29 I know there's at least two people involved in it, and that would be Carl and Lily, his girlfriend.

Speaker 10 Other than that,

Speaker 22 I'm not going to attest anything because I don't know.

Speaker 5 How many times in your life did you say you wished Bonnie Harkey were dead?

Speaker 7 I don't know.

Speaker 14 Several?

Speaker 10 I mean... I can't give you a number.

Speaker 5 That's one of the reasons you're in here.

Speaker 10 I understand that.

Speaker 5 Okay. Because you said you wished she were dead, and then later she became dead.

Speaker 29 But I didn't have anything to do with it.

Speaker 29 You can't wish someone dead and have it happen and then get blamed for it. It's not against the law to have wishes.
It's not against the law to make comments.

Speaker 5 Maybe not.

Speaker 14 But when Bruce Harkey's murder trial rolled around, he would have to answer for all of them and more.

Speaker 13 Coming up, I will simply say that that's a devastating bit of evidence.

Speaker 3 The past comes back to haunt Bruce Harkey, and a question haunts Lillian King. Could she have saved Bonnie?

Speaker 9 I can't sleep most of the time. It eats at me.

Speaker 14 In the years after Bonnie Harkey took her place alongside the other Harkies in the San Saba Cemetery, life in the Texas Hill Country got back to normal.

Speaker 14 Most people could only speculate about what really happened on the day Bonnie Harkey and her caretaker Karen Johnson were killed. But Jack Schumacher says he knows.

Speaker 15 This is where Karen Johnson lay and she was murdered right here in his doorway.

Speaker 23 How was she killed?

Speaker 15 Choked, smothered, just bulldogged down by call.

Speaker 14 Jack Schumacher says he knows that because Carl Presley told him how it all went down that weekend. He also knows that Bruce Harkey wanted everyone in San Saba to know that he was going out of town.

Speaker 14 Jack Vaughan, a local businessman, says he had only a nodding acquaintance with Bruce Harkey, and yet...

Speaker 34 Bruce started telling me how that he was going to be out of town all weekend long. Stressed that all weekend long.
I'm leaving town early on Saturday morning.

Speaker 34 I won't be back in till late Sunday night. It might even be Monday before I make it back in because I'm going to be gone all weekend long.

Speaker 14 By the time Bruce Harkey went on trial in April of 2014, His nephew Carl Presley had confessed to his part in killing Bonnie Harkey and her caretaker.

Speaker 14 And Carl's girlfriend Lillian King had admitted her involvement.

Speaker 14 With the two of them set to testify against Bruce Harkey in exchange for lighter sentences, prosecutor Sonny McAfee felt confident that he had a solid case against Bruce.

Speaker 11 The facts of the crime were so horrendous that

Speaker 11 I didn't think once the jury believed that he was a party to the crime that they'd have any difficulty at all finding him guilty.

Speaker 14 Lillian told the jury she had heard Bruce Harkey and Carl Presley talk about killing Bonnie Harkey many times.

Speaker 14 But she told us she didn't learn the plot had actually been set in motion until the Friday before the murder.

Speaker 14 That's when Lillian says she overheard a phone conversation between Bruce Harkey and Carl Presley.

Speaker 9 Because after he got off the phone with Bruce, he looked at me and said that Bruce is going to pay him to kill his grandmother.

Speaker 14 Lillian testified that while Bonnie and her caretaker were in church that Sunday morning, Carl slipped into the house and hid.

Speaker 14 Once Bonnie returned home, Lillian says, Carl sent her a text telling her to come distract Karen Johnson while he smothered his grandmother.

Speaker 9 So I rang the doorbell because the door was open, but the storm door was closed.

Speaker 9 Ms. Johnson came and answered the door.
I was in the process of stepping in and closing the storm door when I see this flash inside the house coming from the den.

Speaker 14 So coming up behind Ms. Johnson.

Speaker 9 Yes.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 9 And I saw that it was Carl and he was yelling at me to close the door, get in here, go in there with his grandmother.

Speaker 14 Once Karen Johnson was dead, Lillian says Carl led Bonnie to her bedroom where she says Carl asked her to pray.

Speaker 9 I see the pillow and then while they're praying, he starts pushing her down onto bed. She fought him and she did.

Speaker 9 But the doorbell rang, and it scared Carl.

Speaker 9 So he jumped up and he told me to go look and see who it was.

Speaker 5 Lillian says that whoever it was left after about five minutes.

Speaker 14 It was then, Lillian told the jury, that Carl decided to drive his grandmother to Normandy.

Speaker 5 In your mind, was it clear that she knew that Carl was trying to kill her then?

Speaker 9 Yes. What'd she say? She looked at him and said, you tried to kill me.

Speaker 9 And Carl's like, no, Grandma, I wasn't doing that.

Speaker 14 Lillian says the last time she saw Bonnie Harkey alive was later that night when she says she saw Carl leading Bonnie to her death.

Speaker 9 I went to the bathroom again and

Speaker 9 when I was coming out, I saw him and her

Speaker 9 walking into the trees.

Speaker 5 You knew what was coming.

Speaker 7 How'd you let that happen?

Speaker 9 It's hard for me.

Speaker 9 But, you know, if he didn't to her, he's going to do it to me, too.

Speaker 14 The prosecutor knew a jury would not vote to convict Bruce Harkey on the testimony of Lillian King and Carl Presley alone.

Speaker 14 So he used Bruce Harkey's own words against him.

Speaker 11 He talked about how he couldn't get his land until she was dead and that she just doesn't have the decency to die. And he said all of these in the weeks leading up to the murder.

Speaker 14 Richard Davis was Bruce Harkey's attorney. He told the jury Carl Presley wanted to kill Bonnie Harkey because he wanted the inheritance and needed no prompting from his uncle.

Speaker 14 Davis reminded jurors how many times Carl had changed his story before telling police Bruce was part of the plot.

Speaker 13 My theory is it's all Carl, and that was essentially our testimony. And

Speaker 13 the testimony of Carl in the trial makes it clear that this guy was

Speaker 13 an erratic personality. He gave

Speaker 13 numerous different descriptions of what the events were, how he did it, why he did it. And it was...

Speaker 5 And originally that he didn't do it.

Speaker 13 Well, right. I didn't do it.
I did do it. And if I did do it, it was because of this.

Speaker 5 And finally, he names Bruce.

Speaker 13 Exactly.

Speaker 5 Sort of at the point where... Prosecutors and police are starting to talk about the death penalty.

Speaker 13 And my question,

Speaker 13 in any case where there's a statement from a witness who has a lot to lose, what's the most likely to be the truth?

Speaker 14 Jurors might question Carl Presley's credibility, but the prosecutor had a bombshell in his arsenal. Turns out, this was not Bruce Harkey's first rodeo.

Speaker 14 McAfee told the jurors that 10 years earlier, Bruce had done prison time. for his role in another murder plot, an unsuccessful one that targeted one of his many ex-wives.

Speaker 11 I think there are a lot of things that are extremely similar in it.

Speaker 11 And the main one is that he gets somebody else to do what he wants done, and he does it through influence.

Speaker 13 I will simply say that that's a devastating bit of evidence.

Speaker 5 Yeah, because that makes me think, well, they probably got the right guy.

Speaker 13 And just hypothetically speaking, let's say the case is purely circumstantial and it looks kind of bad.

Speaker 13 And then there's proof in front of the jury that says, and by the way, he did it before. That makes all the other evidence seem much more important.

Speaker 14 If you're a prosecutor, that's great stuff.

Speaker 13 That's the end of the story, whether it should be or shouldn't.

Speaker 14 It took the jury only one hour to reach a guilty verdict. Bruce Harkey received a life sentence, as did Carl Presley.
Lillian King was sentenced to 45 years for her role in the murders.

Speaker 9 I'm not a violent person.

Speaker 19 I'm not.

Speaker 9 And I love Ms. Harkate like she was my own grandmother.

Speaker 5 And yet,

Speaker 7 I know.

Speaker 9 I keep kicking myself,

Speaker 26 you know,

Speaker 9 hoping I can do something different, but it's not going to change.

Speaker 9 You know, it eats at me.

Speaker 9 I can't sleep most of the time.

Speaker 5 The estate Bruce Harkey had so fervently hoped to inherit is but a memory now.

Speaker 5 In the years since our story first aired, lawyers have divvied it up, parceled it out, or placed it in trust for the next generation.

Speaker 28 Ironically, that means Bonnie Harkey's home could one day pass to her great-grandchildren, the children of Carl Presley, the man who killed her.

Speaker 6 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 3 Thanks for joining us.

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