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Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 7 Murder is so personal.

Speaker 7 She knew who was in the room with her. She trusted that person.

Speaker 7 And the saddest thing is that the last person you look at in this world is not your loved one.

Speaker 7 It's your killer.

Speaker 8 She was just driven. She loved defending those clients.
She loved law.

Speaker 7 She would walk into a courtroom and she looked like she owned the place.

Speaker 9 She's representing some really hardened criminals. Maybe somebody had a beef with her.

Speaker 10 It was personal.

Speaker 7 Her left hand was opened.

Speaker 7 There was a piece of hair in it.

Speaker 11 It suggested that a female had maybe killed her and she had pulled the hair out.

Speaker 12 Somebody wanted her out of the way.

Speaker 11 Somebody planned this murder.

Speaker 7 Who done it? Who came up here and did it?

Speaker 7 I told her, I will make this right. I will make this right for you.

Speaker 5 Here's Dennis Murphy with Shining Star.

Speaker 14 Cajun Country is where the dreadful thing happened.

Speaker 19 Baton Rouge, the Louisiana state capital perched on the banks of the Mississippi.

Speaker 22 Three blocks off the river on a chilly Thursday night, a criminal defense lawyer was working late, drafting a writ for the big murder trial starting Monday.

Speaker 14 When did the killer take her? Sometime after 8 o'clock was the best guess.

Speaker 21 The news led next morning's early drive.

Speaker 7 I hear on a local news station they interrupt to say that there is a downtown murder in a law office.

Speaker 16 Attorney Prem Burns was on her way into work.

Speaker 7 Which, of course, alerts me. Initially, my gosh isn't an attorney.

Speaker 28 The office, now strung with yellow crime scene tape, belonged to an up-and-comer named Shakita Tate, a local woman just a few years out of law school, but already making a name for herself in the competitive Pads and Helmets arena of litigation and criminal defense.

Speaker 7 She had recently won a half million dollar jury verdict. That's pretty awfully good for somebody out such a short time.

Speaker 26 Shiquita was one of seven, her father absent, raised by her grandma in a tired neighborhood of boarded-up houses.

Speaker 33 Smart and determined, she rose above her impoverished early years, and once her fuse was lit, she became a rocket.

Speaker 7 She was talented. She had overcome so very much in a short time period.
She was the star of her family.

Speaker 14 Shakita was the first in her family to go to college.

Speaker 16 Then she enrolled in hometown Southern Law School, got grabbed up by a law firm where she started clerking while studying for the bar.

Speaker 32 That's when she met legal assistant Leslie Hookfinn.

Speaker 8 She was just driven, wanting to

Speaker 8 get that next,

Speaker 8 I'll call it that next high.

Speaker 8 And law school was at, being a lawyer was at, and she achieved it.

Speaker 37 She passed the bar on her first shot.

Speaker 8 On her first shot.

Speaker 1 She eagerly lapped up the hard cases, the kind that made news, accused killers, druggies, gangbangers.

Speaker 18 She seemed at ease in the spotlight, happily talking to reporters.

Speaker 30 Shiquita was enjoying such success, she opened her own firm in a nice building a few blocks from the courts complex.

Speaker 1 Leslie Hookvin went with her.

Speaker 9 What areas did she start to stake out for herself?

Speaker 8 Criminals. She wanted to do criminals so bad.

Speaker 42 Prem Burns watched her in action.

Speaker 30 Chiquita was one to speak her mind and dress how she wanted, in conservative pantsuits one day and stilettos and spiky hair the next.

Speaker 7 And we always joked because Chiquita would wear four-inch heels and just strut in and you knew Chiquita Tate was in the courtroom.

Speaker 22 Another thing, Chiquita was all about family.

Speaker 47 She hired her sister Danita to help in the office.

Speaker 33 And Danita knew better than anyone that hard-driving Chiquita could be sunny one minute and a Gulf Coast storm the next.

Speaker 12 She fired me like every week. She fired you? Yeah, every week.

Speaker 31 And her office assistant. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And at night, she'll call me and say, we'll talk. And then she'll say, see you in the morning.
I'm like, I thought I was fired.

Speaker 22 In fact, it was a skirmish with Chiquita that sparked the interest of a young man named Greg Harris, who almost literally bumped into her while they were both cruising around town.

Speaker 23 Greg's brother Mike says it started when Greg cut Chiquita off.

Speaker 3 She's in a Corvette, he's in a Mercedes.

Speaker 48 She's blowing the horn at him and, you know,

Speaker 3 oh, you, you, you don't cut me off. And so they pull up to the red light and

Speaker 3 I heard a few smiles went from him, a few smiles went from her, and after that, it's all she wrote.

Speaker 30 Greg Harris was doing well as a contractor.

Speaker 29 The romance blossomed, and Chiquita moved into Greg's home.

Speaker 39 They got married in a small wedding with family in 2008.

Speaker 29 And a year later, Chiquita was moving into that nice new office, varnishing the bookshelves, proudly hanging out her shingle.

Speaker 9 Did anybody ever worry about her and her clients?

Speaker 8 I don't think that

Speaker 8 it was to the point where either she had to worry or anyone else had to worry.

Speaker 20 On February 19th, 2009, Chiquita was working hard, prepping her defense in a double homicide case.

Speaker 49 She told Lessey she had to work late, just a couple of hours.

Speaker 14 But Chiquita never returned home that night.

Speaker 40 Her husband, Greg, called her office repeatedly, but got no answer.

Speaker 14 Around dawn, he drove down to the office, troubled, he'd say later, to see his wife's hummer parked where she'd left it.

Speaker 23 He couldn't get in the locked building, so he called 911.

Speaker 27 My wife, she'd been working late last night, but I can't get inside the building. I need to cop over here quick.

Speaker 26 Greg suddenly spotted a patrol car and flagged it down.

Speaker 30 An office worker let the policeman in the building while Greg called his sister-in-law, Danita, sounding frantic.

Speaker 12 It's like, Dee, the hum is still parked here, and they won't let me in the office.

Speaker 20 Once upstairs, it took only a glance for the patrol officer to declare Chiquita's office a crime scene.

Speaker 53 A bad one.

Speaker 16 The shining starlight of Chiquita Tate had been cruelly extinguished.

Speaker 31 By whom?

Speaker 33 And for what reason?

Speaker 2 When we come back, the first clues.

Speaker 7 No blood in the elevator, no blood on the lobby. Her left hand was opened.
There was a piece of hair in it. I was like, oh my Lord.

Speaker 25 As the sun was coming up over the Mississippi that cold February morning,

Speaker 25 the family and friends of Chiquita Tate were converging on the street below her office.

Speaker 12 So I tried to run in the office and the police grabbed me. They was like, ma'am, you can't go in there.
I say, that's my sister in there.

Speaker 47 Just like Denita, Chiquita's legal assistant, Leslie Hookfinn, was stopped on the the street outside by an officer.

Speaker 8 And he saw me coming, so he came toward me and grabbed me,

Speaker 8 pretty much to hold me up because I was going down.

Speaker 31 And

Speaker 8 that's when he told me she was dead.

Speaker 51 Shaquita's loved ones were huddled together when veteran homicide detectives Chris Johnson and Elvin Howard rolled up to the scene.

Speaker 9 So the responding officers told you that's the husband over there, but he's on the edge of of things for you. You haven't approached him yet.

Speaker 10 That's correct. He was upset to the point where Uniform Patrol had to put him in the back of the unit.

Speaker 47 So do you go up at that point?

Speaker 10 No, at that time, we try to gather as much information as possible.

Speaker 29 The police wanted to create a timeline of Chiquita's last day.

Speaker 35 At one point, she'd gone to court, even talked to reporters about a recent case.

Speaker 58 The statute is the question that I would like the appellate board to review.

Speaker 49 After a quick chat, she headed back to her office where workers were refinishing a bookcase.

Speaker 21 Leslie left at her regular time, about 5.30, and she remembers being concerned about the smell of varnish.

Speaker 8 I said, Kita, don't stay in here too late because the smell was just overpowering.

Speaker 8 She says, Les, I'm not going to stay in here late. I'm just going to read this.

Speaker 59 But she did stay late.

Speaker 23 Shiquita's husband Greg told police his wife called him around seven or so and asked him to please bring her something to eat.

Speaker 35 So he set out from their home in Baker about 25 minutes away.

Speaker 60 Then he said he went to McDonald's in Baker and got some hamburgers and fries and brought it to Shiquita in her office.

Speaker 25 Greg told the cops he encountered a number of tenants in the building working late that night.

Speaker 21 He remembered running downstairs on a small errand for his wife.

Speaker 10 Shiquita had a client that was coming over to pick up some money. So he went downstairs to pay this client and pick up some paperwork from his person for Shaquita.

Speaker 14 Greg said Shiquita had more work to do and yet another client to see.

Speaker 49 So he said he took off for home.

Speaker 19 It was sometime around 8.30.

Speaker 1 What happened next was a bloody mystery.

Speaker 27 It would be up to the detectives and also Prem Burns to figure out.

Speaker 42 The attorney hearing the awful news on her car radio that morning, the one who got such a kick out of Chiquita in court, was in fact a legendary Baton Rouge prosecutor.

Speaker 7 My boss, the district attorney, was out there. There were so many police officers there.
The crime scene van was there. And so I went into that and immediately said to my boss, I want this.

Speaker 7 I want this case.

Speaker 25 Prem insisted, as she always does, on viewing the crime scene.

Speaker 29 As she entered the office, she noticed Jiquita had been fixing things up.

Speaker 7 But then when you proceeded into the next room where her body was, I was like, oh my Lord.

Speaker 7 She was butchered.

Speaker 7 She was butchered. She was laying on the floor.
She had little slipper socks on her feet, the way all of us would be if we stay after work. We're not going to keep our heels on.

Speaker 7 She basically had a law book that I think she had been reading that was in her hands at the time the attack began.

Speaker 21 Shiquita had been stabbed 43 times.

Speaker 14 The attack was brutal and messy.

Speaker 23 The blood-stained wall suggesting a fight to the death.

Speaker 35 Did you have a murder weapon?

Speaker 28 No, sir.

Speaker 37 Did you get lucky with a footprint or a partial print or anything in blood?

Speaker 9 Anything like that?

Speaker 60 No, we did not get lucky with a footprint.

Speaker 7 No blood in the elevator, no blood on the lobby, no blood on the buttons.

Speaker 51 The killer had improbably vanished without leaving a trail.

Speaker 14 And at first glance, hadn't taken anything either.

Speaker 10 She had expensive jury still on her hands. She had earrings in her ear.

Speaker 9 So it didn't. But this is starting to tell you some stuff about the nature of this killing, huh?

Speaker 31 That's correct.

Speaker 43 It didn't look like a robbery.

Speaker 29 However, as crime scene techs processed the scene, the investigators realized Shaquita's wallet was missing from her purse.

Speaker 28 And there, in the victim's hand, what looked like a major clue.

Speaker 7 And her left hand was opened. There was a piece of hair in it,

Speaker 7 actually 91 strands of hair in it. And her right arm was

Speaker 7 over her head, and

Speaker 7 she just died like that.

Speaker 42 Had she pulled it from her killer's head? The hair was long, had the killer been a woman?

Speaker 29 What were your theories? What do you think had happened?

Speaker 8 I actually, I did not come to any conclusions because I couldn't think of a soul who would have wanted her dead.

Speaker 39 Shaquita's father-in-law, Silver Ray Harris, admired her courage, but wondered about the kind of clients who came with her line of work.

Speaker 50 Being a criminal lawyer, that's what you deal with criminals. So you have to accept the degree of...
bad people. They come to me.

Speaker 9 She's some of the toughest to the tough.

Speaker 50 That's what I hear, that she would,

Speaker 50 if you went to her, she'd try to help you.

Speaker 29 The list of potential suspects could be as long as her client list.

Speaker 23 Yet, Shiquita's brother-in-law says he can't understand how anyone could do such a thing.

Speaker 31 Heartless.

Speaker 31 Completely

Speaker 61 to do her that way.

Speaker 3 When I get on my knees at night,

Speaker 29 I pray he'll get justice.

Speaker 47 Police were confident they would get their man or woman, and something up a street poll gave them hope.

Speaker 42 Outside Shiquita's office were city surveillance cameras and traffic cams.

Speaker 43 Did one of several cameras see someone enter after Greg left?

Speaker 30 There may not have been a trail of blood, but with a little luck, those cameras just might give them a portrait of their killer or killers, suitable for framing.

Speaker 62 Coming up.

Speaker 6 She seized a wallet on the side of the road, the missing wallet, and that mystery clump of hair.

Speaker 34 What might it reveal?

Speaker 7 If you're in a fight and pull someone's hair out, you're gonna find root hairs.

Speaker 9 So, the scenario that occurs to me is this is a woman that's in this society. Exactly.

Speaker 6 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 35 Shakita Tate's vicious killing, stabbed and slashed dozens of times, had shaken her friends and family to their very roots.

Speaker 35 And as an officer of the courts, it was also an attack on Baton Rouge's criminal justice system family.

Speaker 52 The heat was on detectives Johnson and Howard to find the killer.

Speaker 14 You're looking at the polls around here.

Speaker 37 What was that, Chris?

Speaker 60 Yes, but crime cameras. We know that most of Ben Rurst have crime cameras down here at several locations.
And across from the office is a crime camera right there on the pole.

Speaker 10 We also have traffic cameras that are on each signal light.

Speaker 31 Oh, yeah. There are some right here.
Yeah, that's correct.

Speaker 56 So you could get really lucky, maybe.

Speaker 5 Hopefully, we thought we would be getting the perpetrator.

Speaker 10 That's correct.

Speaker 59 This camera about a block away from Chiquita's office was working fine.

Speaker 27 It showed a quiet street the night of the killing, normal activity.

Speaker 29 What they really wanted was the shot from this camera, which swept right past Chiquita's office door.

Speaker 24 But bad luck, a recent storm had knocked it out.

Speaker 60 The camera in front of the office was not working properly that particular night.

Speaker 26 So no picture of a suspect.

Speaker 38 This wasn't going to be an open-shut solve, but there was evidence to work with.

Speaker 59 The crime scene technicians had taken scrapings from under Chiquita's fingernails and sent them off for lab analysis.

Speaker 21 Had she scratched DNA material from her killer?

Speaker 35 They'd have to wait on findings.

Speaker 18 And likewise, the clump of hair found in Shaquita's hand, did it contain DNA identifying the killer?

Speaker 7 If you're in a fight and pull someone's hair out, you're going to find root hairs, hair balls.

Speaker 16 But the lab work was back on the hair sample.

Speaker 20 There were no roots on those strands, but the hair had come from a woman's hair extension or weave.

Speaker 9 So the scenario that occurs to me is this is a woman that's in this association. Exactly.

Speaker 56 Two women are fighting and she's gotten a bit of this weave and

Speaker 42 the theory of two women in a death struggle didn't make sense to the cops.

Speaker 51 The attacks seemed too violent, too overwhelming.

Speaker 29 But with homicides you never know. In the early hours of the investigation though, they did catch a major break.

Speaker 25 A report had come into dispatch.

Speaker 27 A woman driving through a high crime area known as Guardier Lane called police to say she'd found a wallet and it belonged to Chiquita Tate.

Speaker 10 She's driving down Guardia Lane and she sees the wallet on the side of the road.

Speaker 16 Amazingly enough, the finder of the wallet knew Chiquita.

Speaker 29 The young attorney had given a speech at her daughter's school and made quite an impression.

Speaker 10 That prompted her to call the police and advise us that she located this wallet.

Speaker 36 And unexpectedly, for a wallet taken from a victim's purse and then tossed, Chiquita's ID and her credit cards were all inside, which got investigators thinking, maybe the killer planted the wallet there, hoping some street person would find it and stumble right into a homicide investigation.

Speaker 7 When you take a nice Gucci wallet loaded with credit cards to Guardier Lane and leave it in the streets, somebody's going to pick it up and start going to the mall.

Speaker 7 spending some of those credit cards, and the first thing that's going to happen is that the police are going to have a film of the transaction and go to that person and say

Speaker 7 you killed Chiquita Tate. There's our suspect.
Absolutely.

Speaker 29 So this killer unknown started taking on some traits in the detectives' minds.

Speaker 1 The person was good or lucky enough to get out of the office building without leaving a trail of blood and after what had to have been a frenzied attack still had the composure to think up the red herring of the tossed wallet.

Speaker 17 The killer looked like a cool customer, perhaps a professional.

Speaker 33 As the cops went down the list of of dubious characters on our client roster, they looked closely at two men who had been accused of killing a man and his 17-year-old son.

Speaker 37 Possible suspects?

Speaker 10 One of them actually was in jail at the time of the homicide. It just was very unlikely that someone

Speaker 56 who she worked so hard for would kill her.

Speaker 35 A few of the people on Shiquita's client list were incarcerated at the time of her killing.

Speaker 23 Others had alibis, but she also had clients who were free to come and go.

Speaker 39 Did one of them have an appointment?

Speaker 55 Was there anybody due to come in that evening?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 31 Not after, not after hours. After hours.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 8 That would have been very unusual, and I would have known.

Speaker 22 A mystery client with the worst of grudges?

Speaker 16 A woman unknown.

Speaker 43 Only theories until the cops play poker with a witness and hit the jackpot when they're only holding a pair of deuces.

Speaker 62 Coming up,

Speaker 6 two new clues: a revealing recording.

Speaker 6 And a revealing phone call with a jaw-dropping tip for police.

Speaker 7 This is a voice saying, I think I know who may have killed Chiquita.

Speaker 31 There's a concept in police work called victimology.

Speaker 30 The detectives probe the backstory of someone's life to understand what made them tick.

Speaker 25 In Shaquita's case, they found for sure a woman loved, respected, and admired.

Speaker 42 But they also learned she had a capital T temper.

Speaker 58 She was extremely aggressive, to the point of being irritating, or

Speaker 8 to some and to some

Speaker 8 extent.

Speaker 15 Had she pushed someone too hard or too far?

Speaker 36 As detectives ran through the evidence, they'd of course been talking to the husband, Greg Harris, right from the start.

Speaker 9 Greg, meanwhile, was being very helpful with investigators. He hadn't lawyered up.
He was telling them the story of his night. Here's the keys to my vehicle.
Take a look.

Speaker 9 If you want to go to the house, check it out.

Speaker 7 Yes, absolutely. I'm with you.

Speaker 18 And they conducted those searches because spouses, no matter how cooperative, are always suspects.

Speaker 30 And what crime scene investigators found when they poured over Greg and Shiquita's house was, well, at first glance, not much.

Speaker 34 No weapons, certainly, no blood-soaked clothes.

Speaker 30 They took DNA swabs and bagged various items for lab analysis.

Speaker 26 And then in a closet, they found a really oddball souvenir.

Speaker 47 An audio recording made by Greg of him and Chiquita engaged in a screaming match.

Speaker 59 This sounded like a couple splitting the sheets, divvying up the household goods.

Speaker 21 Donita was aware that her sister Chiquita was unhappy, but realistically, she didn't think her strong-willed sister would ever be happy in a marriage.

Speaker 12 You know, in a relationship, you have to compromise.

Speaker 12 I don't think she was willing to do it. It's her way or no way.

Speaker 19 Donita says her tempestuous sister was always threatening to storm out of the marriage.

Speaker 47 right up to her last day.

Speaker 12 And that morning of February the 19th, she called me and she said,

Speaker 12 Dee, I just can't do the marriage thing anymore.

Speaker 30 Greg's parents, Silver Ray Harris and Joyce Henderson, believed the couple had just hit a rough patch.

Speaker 50 I think it had to do with her not being home very often. She would take cases that would take her to New Orleans and

Speaker 50 she'd work on cases late up into the night.

Speaker 35 Too much career going on for her.

Speaker 50 Yeah, and no time for him. And I think he wanted more time.

Speaker 15 But in the early hours of the investigation, detectives learned the fight reported at the couple's home wasn't an isolated incident.

Speaker 26 Their files showed that a 911 domestic call brought police to Greg and Shaquita's house two months before they got married.

Speaker 31 What was that all about?

Speaker 10 Police were called out because Shaquita accused Greg of hitting her. From what we understand, a charge was filed against both of them.

Speaker 17 So.

Speaker 30 With that in mind, when Greg sat down with investigators, the conversation became contentious, even combative.

Speaker 52 I love my wife.

Speaker 60 We was trying to make this relationship happen.

Speaker 10 You were trying to make the relationship happen?

Speaker 31 No, we both were.

Speaker 21 They'd had problems, he admitted, but said he wasn't violent with Shiquita.

Speaker 52 The detectives told Greg what they'd picked up on, that Shiquita was leaving the marriage.

Speaker 31 Wrong, countered the husband.

Speaker 60 She was still living with me. You go to my house, it ain't no clothes packed.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 60 Well, if she was leaving, why she asked me to come over there and help her? When we were still doing, going to the movies, doing everything else.

Speaker 22 They reviewed Greg's timeline the night of the killing, how he brought his wife dinner, and left her still working at the office sometime around 8:30.

Speaker 31 Where did you go? Where did I go? I went home.

Speaker 29 Straight home? I went straight home.

Speaker 31 Which path you took home?

Speaker 59 I got in the interstate.

Speaker 19 That's when police, clearly suspicious of Greg, used a ploy to smoke him out, to catch him in a lie if he were in fact lying.

Speaker 60 According to the cameras, that's not the path which you've taken last night.

Speaker 10 When we convinced him that we had cameras up, which we do have cameras up, we convinced him that we can track his cell phone.

Speaker 37 In fact, did you have anything like that?

Speaker 60 No, we did not. We just bluffing him.

Speaker 31 You know, we do phone records.

Speaker 31 Your phone records, her phone records. It tells every tower that you hit when you're making phone calls.
That's fine.

Speaker 60 That's fine.

Speaker 39 And so, with Greg thinking the cops knew his every move, they confronted him with an important question about the place where Chiquita's wallet had already been found.

Speaker 31 When last time you've been on Guardia Lane? Guardia Lane.

Speaker 60 I went to Guardian Lane last night.

Speaker 31 Really? Yes. What time you went through Guardia Lane?

Speaker 31 I don't know what time it was. Approximately.

Speaker 47 What's he say he's doing there?

Speaker 10 He said he went to buy steroids. He's a big guy, he lifts weights, and he said that's where his steroid dealer lives.

Speaker 9 Will street transaction. Right.

Speaker 27 Whatever the explanation, Greg Harris had put himself in the neighborhood where the wallet had been tossed.

Speaker 30 For the cops, it was a gotcha moment. And while they had no evidence, no DNA, no forensics that connected him to the killing, they did have some leverage, that old domestic dispute call.

Speaker 29 Though she and Greg were charged, only the charge against Chiquita was dropped.

Speaker 31 Why are you going to have a warrant?

Speaker 60 All this was supposed to have been dismissed.

Speaker 5 Now, other than this, I don't know anything about it.

Speaker 60 I never hit this girl a day in my life.

Speaker 59 So, using a year-and-a-half-old warrant, unrelated to the death of Chiquita Tate, the police put Greg in custody for a few days.

Speaker 9 So they could put him on ice, huh?

Speaker 7 Absolutely, while the forensics were being tested from the crime scene.

Speaker 21 But then, seemingly out of the blue, came a strange tip from an anonymous caller.

Speaker 7 Saying, you need to look into this angle because I think I know who may have killed Chiquita.

Speaker 9 This is a voice on the phone.

Speaker 7 This is a voice on the phone.

Speaker 7 And it's like, you need to look into it. She was involved in a lesbian love triangle.

Speaker 43 Did that explain the clump of hair?

Speaker 29 The impassioned intimate killing?

Speaker 33 The investigation was charging off in a wholly new direction.

Speaker 62 Coming up.

Speaker 8 I knew the two ladies.

Speaker 63 Two new suspects?

Speaker 5 Exactly what would police find?

Speaker 63 And Shiquita's husband, Greg. Was he in danger?

Speaker 50 Someone came up to his bedroom window at about 3.40 in the morning. and shoots in the window.

Speaker 6 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 17 Just as investigators were zeroing in on the husband, Greg Harris, they got a tip that brought them back to Chiquita Tate's list of clients.

Speaker 51 But it wasn't about any of the career criminals on her roster.

Speaker 59 The tip concerned two female clients, a same-sex couple that Chiquita had been helping with an adoption case.

Speaker 29 The anonymous caller suggested their lawyer-client relationship was more than that.

Speaker 60 A female said that it was two women that Chiquita had a love triangle. She even gave the two suspects' names as well.
She indicated that one suspect had scratches on their body.

Speaker 9 Well, that would explain the crime of passion, which you think is a signature here.

Speaker 37 And also maybe why there's hair in the palm of her hand. That's some sort of a tussle.

Speaker 31 Yes.

Speaker 21 Police confirmed the names of the two women on Chiquita's Shiquita's client list and then paid each a call.

Speaker 60 We had to investigate and contact both individuals and got statements from them.

Speaker 43 The detectives told the prosecutor that both women insisted Shiquita wasn't their lover, just a good attorney.

Speaker 7 We loved her work. She was a friend, but that's where it ended.

Speaker 49 Still, the detectives took a closer look at the couple.

Speaker 60 We didn't see any scratches on their arms. We also realized one of the suspects had braids and not we finna hair.

Speaker 44 What's more, police say that both women had alibis.

Speaker 29 Legal assistant Leslie Hookfin was sure the secret love triangle was nonsense.

Speaker 8 I knew about the adoption. I knew the clients and everything was going well.

Speaker 9 Is there any way you can see that that's somehow involved with

Speaker 21 Shaquita's being butchered?

Speaker 31 No.

Speaker 8 No, I knew the two ladies

Speaker 8 and I knew the case was going well.

Speaker 9 But you didn't see any difficulty there, any bad luck?

Speaker 31 Not at all.

Speaker 8 Not at all.

Speaker 29 So the investigators put the tip in their back files and proceeded to check out the tip stir.

Speaker 30 They traced her call to a town in Texas.

Speaker 20 They even drove there and, after questioning a few locals, managed to reach a woman by phone with an oddly familiar voice.

Speaker 10 I immediately recognized her as the voice that I heard that had called the office that time. I asked her, how did she know Shaquita Tate?

Speaker 10 And she said, well, Shiquita Tate used to be married to my brother.

Speaker 9 This was Greg Harris's sister.

Speaker 10 That's correct, Greg Harris's sister.

Speaker 33 So the tip that sent detectives off to Texas had led them right back to Greg, the husband.

Speaker 22 Was Greg, or maybe his sister, trying to plant a false lead?

Speaker 51 Frem Burns added that to her list of concerns about Greg Harris.

Speaker 19 She was also discovering that Greg had a bad history with some of the women in his life.

Speaker 27 Her investigators found Greg had control issues and a temper, according to Chiquita's family members and some old girlfriends.

Speaker 7 He just wanted them within his eyesight and within his control.

Speaker 21 She also learned that Chiquita had taken out a lease on an apartment.

Speaker 18 She hadn't yet moved into her new place, but Prem Burns believes Chiquita was indeed going to divorce Greg, which meant he had lost control of her.

Speaker 7 And I believe that's what happened with Chiquita, is that he was not going to let her.

Speaker 21 Nobody leaves me home.

Speaker 7 Nobody leaves Greg Harris unless Greg Harris throws them out of the house onto the front lawn.

Speaker 16 Greg's brother Mike doesn't believe it for a second.

Speaker 30 His brother, he says, wasn't violent.

Speaker 38 And what's more, he says Greg and Chiquita were working it out.

Speaker 3 We all go through bumps. But there's also a phase called reconciliation and healing.

Speaker 29 You know, and that's what they had.

Speaker 47 And as for that tip about the same-sex couple, Greg's father, Silver Ray, says his daughter wasn't trying to throw off the cops.

Speaker 55 The female love triangle was a legitimate concern of his.

Speaker 50 She got that strictly from me, which I got it from another attorney. And we just wanted to look at all the options to make sure that all the bases were covered.
We wanted to look at these two women.

Speaker 35 Did you encourage her to call the cops?

Speaker 50 I still encourage her. She did it on her own.
But it wasn't nothing to throw the cops off. If you're investigating, you got to look at all the angles.

Speaker 44 In fact, Greg's father and mother Joyce and brother Mike say they couldn't believe that police even suspected Greg.

Speaker 43 Not the Greg they knew.

Speaker 68 My Greg was a son that helped raise his brothers. He made sure that they were fed when I worked.
He made sure when they came home they did their homework.

Speaker 3 You have people you want to grow up to be like. My motto was my older brother.
I wouldn't be the person I am today if it wasn't for him.

Speaker 41 Even Shaquita's sister could not imagine Greg as the killer.

Speaker 9 Can you see him in that office?

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 9 In a rage slashing your sister? No. Fight that's moving from here to there?

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 12 No, I can't even picture it.

Speaker 15 Greg's parents and his brother believe that whoever killed Shiquita also wanted Greg dead.

Speaker 29 They recount an incident that happened after Greg was released from custody.

Speaker 42 Shots were fired into his home.

Speaker 50 Someone came up to his bedroom window at about 3.40 in the morning and shoots in the bedroom window five times with a 10 millimeter gun.

Speaker 50 Hoping that he was in the bed, but just what happened, Greg fell asleep on the sofa. God saved him.

Speaker 42 He was not in the bed greg's family convinced he was innocent became only more so when they heard this scrapings from under chiquita's nails showed dna not only from greg but from someone else as well an unknown male

Speaker 1 what could that mean

Speaker 11 coming up If Greg Harris had done this, you would have found an enormous amount of blood, and that just wasn't the case.

Speaker 5 Another DNA surprise is coming. And in court, a surprise from the jury, too.

Speaker 7 I just about passed out.

Speaker 59 The case against him.

Speaker 51 Greg Harris was the last person known to have seen Chiquita alive.

Speaker 29 His marriage to Chiquita had been volatile, and he put himself near the street where Chiquita's stolen wallet was tossed.

Speaker 38 But what galvanized this case for the prosecutor was a pair of sunglasses discovered in Greg Harris's car.

Speaker 7 The glasses are under the seal.

Speaker 56 Is there blood evidence on them?

Speaker 7 There absolutely was. There was a combination of his blood and her blood on the left lens.
When I was told that there is their blood mixed on this left lens and the right arm of those glasses, I said,

Speaker 7 I don't need anything more.

Speaker 23 On March 16, 2009, Greg Harris was charged with second-degree murder.

Speaker 29 He went on trial two years after Chiquita's death in March of 2011. The prosecution set out to prove that Greg killed Chiquita because she was going to leave him.

Speaker 30 Former girlfriends testified that Greg had a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

Speaker 23 Sweet when he was courting, volatile and controlling once he won them over.

Speaker 10 He would hit them. He would

Speaker 10 fight with these girls.

Speaker 10 As long as he can control them, he was fine.

Speaker 27 Prosecutors played the 911 tape from that domestic abuse call. While both Chiquita and Greg were charged, the call didn't sound as though they were locked in a fair fight.

Speaker 65 He grabbed my finger and I figured I threw it at him.

Speaker 31 And then

Speaker 31 he shelved me.

Speaker 31 And I couldn't move.

Speaker 22 And the prosecution argued Greg had another motive, money.

Speaker 7 The night the murder happened, he called his boss and said, I need to get an advance or a loan on my 401k.

Speaker 7 And his boss said,

Speaker 7 you know, I can't do it. I'm sorry, Greg.

Speaker 44 But as Prem Burns told the jury, Greg could get about $60,000 in insurance if Chiquita were to die.

Speaker 60 I think money was motivation, but more so, I think Shiquita had planned to leave Greg. And that's one thing Greg

Speaker 60 could not accept.

Speaker 16 The prosecution told the jury Greg may have been angry, but he was also cool and calculating, planning both the crime and a cover-up.

Speaker 18 Case in point, those long hairs that suggested a female killer.

Speaker 14 The state argued Greg brought the hair to the crime scene and then planted it.

Speaker 7 Her hand was not like clenching it as if she died that way. It was actually strewn

Speaker 7 as if somebody had taken it and just weaved it through her hand.

Speaker 16 It was a ploy, said the prosecution, designed to throw off the cops, just like the tossed and found wallet from Guardier Lane, where Greg eventually admitted he went the night of the killing.

Speaker 31 Guardier Lane?

Speaker 60 I went to Guardier Lane last night.

Speaker 21 Misdirection, according to the prosecutor, was Greg's M.O.

Speaker 42 She even suspects he fired those shots into his own bedroom to make it look as though the killer was still at large.

Speaker 7 It was kind of like, gee, let me call and say that there's a lesbian love triangle. Let me plant the hair.
It's like, let me just go one step further.

Speaker 34 And of course, there was the blood evidence.

Speaker 24 evidence.

Speaker 28 Prosecutors presented more than the bloodstained glasses. A lab analysis revealed there were dots of blood throughout Greg and Chiquita's house.

Speaker 20 There was a significant bloodstain on a Clorox bottle.

Speaker 7 The Clorox bottle was out up on the sink, and it had blood visible to the eyes.

Speaker 43 Prosecutors say that stain contained Chiquita's and Greg's DNA.

Speaker 47 What makes sense to you?

Speaker 11 What makes sense to me is that Greg Harris had no reason to want to kill Chiquita Tate. Zero whatsoever.

Speaker 55 Lance Unglesby was on the defense team, and he argued there wasn't nearly enough evidence to convict Greg Harris.

Speaker 27 Nothing put him at the site of the killing.

Speaker 55 The alleged motive was weak, and the blood evidence paltry.

Speaker 11 Our theory was very clear. If Greg Harris had done this, you would have found an enormous amount of blood in that Mercedes and on his clothes and at the house in Baker.
And that just wasn't the case.

Speaker 9 Lance, out at the house, they're very curious about this Clorox bottle, where again they think they see commingled blood.

Speaker 31 What about that? That's a problem for you.

Speaker 11 Well practically it's not a problem. In the normal course of living a little blood on a Clorox bottle is really not that big a deal.
Shakita lived there. Of course her DNA would be on that bottle.

Speaker 30 As for the hair that the prosecution said was planted, the defense argued that was just an unproven theory.

Speaker 17 Those two female clients may not have been involved, but the long strands suggest another woman may have been there.

Speaker 11 It suggested that a female had maybe killed her and that in the middle of the fight she had pulled the hair out.

Speaker 11 Between that and the amount of cleanup that would have been required, we always believe two people were involved in this murder.

Speaker 30 And as for that visit to Guardier Lane, the defense lawyer says Greg was reluctant to admit it, but not because he had tossed the wallet.

Speaker 11 Well, because he was buying steroids. He was discussing buying steroids, which is illegal.

Speaker 29 Kill her for the insurance?

Speaker 21 The defense said no way.

Speaker 11 He had too much going for him. We did not buy into the prosecutor's theory that he would do it because he was in some financial stress.
We didn't believe in buying of that for a minute.

Speaker 16 The defense argued cops didn't look hard enough at the list of scary clients who may have wanted Shiquita dead, and that unknown male DNA under her fingernails, the source, still unknown.

Speaker 11 We believe that there was just more to this than was being presented to that jury.

Speaker 14 The trial lasted 16 days, and then the jurors were given their instructions.

Speaker 22 After listening to the evidence, Donita was torn.

Speaker 19 and she remembers how she felt when, after three and a half hours of deliberation, the jury announced it had a verdict.

Speaker 9 Now take me right through your mind and your stomach as you're walking back into the courtroom.

Speaker 12 Shaking, barely can stand on my feet.

Speaker 12 And we holding hands, walking back in there.

Speaker 21 Did they see Greg as a stone killer capable of premeditated murder or an innocent grieving husband?

Speaker 55 The answer is neither.

Speaker 46 The verdict they reached was something in between.

Speaker 34 Guilty of manslaughter, a lesser charge which the judge allowed them to consider.

Speaker 19 The prosecutor was flabbergasted.

Speaker 7 I just about passed out, and so did the defense attorney. Nobody argued manslaughter.

Speaker 22 She wanted to know why the jury rejected her argument of premeditated murder.

Speaker 7 I went back and talked to the jury, and they said, well, you know what we think? We think something just went on up there that got out of hand.

Speaker 21 The judge had a lot of latitude in imposing the sentence. Manslaughter could carry anywhere from a few months to 40 years in prison.

Speaker 29 A lesser conviction of lesser charge, but the judge threw the metaphorical book at him.

Speaker 26 She did.

Speaker 37 40 years without the possibility of parole. Correct.

Speaker 53 The maximum sentence.

Speaker 19 After that, Greg Harris got a new lawyer who called his trial unfair because the judge knew the victim personally.

Speaker 24 Judge Trudy White did disclose early on that Shiquita had been her law clerk, and the first defense team did not object.

Speaker 9 Should you have gotten her recused?

Speaker 31 She was at a trial here.

Speaker 11 No, she was a very fair judge.

Speaker 21 But Greg's new lawyer, Rick Gallo, said the judge did not disclose everything about their relationship.

Speaker 30 We discovered that Chiquita, the victim, had actually represented Judge White in a civil lawsuit.

Speaker 47 Judge White did not respond to our request for a comment.

Speaker 26 Gallo also argued the real killer is a relative of one of Chiquita's clients.

Speaker 21 He said DNA might prove that. But in 2016, a judge denied his request for for a new trial.

Speaker 35 The cops will tell you that every lead they chased down brought them back to one man who robbed a family of its shining star.

Speaker 9 So it's been years now. Lessie, do you miss her?

Speaker 8 Oh, I miss her so much. Everything, her good moods, her bad moods, her good days, her bad days.
I just miss it all.

Speaker 31 Baton Rouge, the river rolls on.

Speaker 26 But without that fiery young lawyer, who'd come so far so fast.

Speaker 62 That's all for now.

Speaker 5 I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.

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