Eric Christensen

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Speaker 4 Shrouded in the mist of the Pacific Northwest, a beautiful young woman goes missing.

Speaker 11 She had this abundant energy and was always smiling. Min really loved Sherry, and there was never a point where she wasn't in a relationship.

Speaker 4 But her apartment reveals a harrowing tale.

Speaker 14 They find the carpet torn up and the linoleum and the smell of bleach.

Speaker 14 What they don't find is Sherry.

Speaker 15 There was a lot of evidence in that bedroom that a serious assault took place.

Speaker 4 The investigation leads detectives somewhere they weren't expecting.

Speaker 16 Witches try to live in harmony with the earth, but witchcraft draws people who want to have power over others.

Speaker 18 He tried to use that as a tool to control her.

Speaker 4 But they soon discover a terrifying truth. Black magic does exist.

Speaker 20 He wanted to break off and start his own cabin.

Speaker 21 It was his sick-dimented, twisted ideology to cut up people and discard their parts like garbage.

Speaker 15 It's not common that people go to that extreme.

Speaker 24 So you broke your oath.

Speaker 20 Her blood is garbage.

Speaker 7 Oathbreaker, Freaker, enemy, and that's what she can.

Speaker 4 New Year's Day, 2010.

Speaker 4 It's a misty day in the town of Everett, Washington. And Julie Roberts is waiting for her friend Sherry Harlan to meet her after work.

Speaker 25 I was going on Tenures Clean and Sober, and Sherry and I had made plans to go to my meeting so I could get my tenure chip.

Speaker 26 I was so happy.

Speaker 11 She was happy for me.

Speaker 21 But she didn't show up.

Speaker 26 She just didn't show up, and that wasn't like Sherry.

Speaker 26 I called, I must have called 13, 14 times and left messages.

Speaker 25 Call me.

Speaker 21 And there was nothing.

Speaker 25 There was just no return, and I started getting worried about it.

Speaker 4 Julie isn't the only one who's concerned.

Speaker 15 A co-worker of hers was worried because Sherry had missed several shifts. She didn't show up Saturday, and she didn't show up again on Tuesday.

Speaker 14 On Tuesday, January 5th, One of Sherry's coworkers called 911. She was really worried about if something was going on with Sherry.
Sherry, her dog, and her car are missing.

Speaker 14 And so the police prepared to go to Sherry's apartment.

Speaker 15 The deputies that were working, they went to the location and they were able to get in touch with a maintenance man who had a key to the apartment.

Speaker 15 And they went into the apartment, which is normal. They do a welfare check.

Speaker 12 You know, they're looking for her.

Speaker 4 The moment officers step inside, they know something's wrong.

Speaker 28 There was an obvious odor of bleach.

Speaker 30 Someone had made some efforts to clean the interior of the apartment.

Speaker 29 But as they went in further, there were portions of both tile from the flooring and carpet that had been cut out.

Speaker 29 And then, in the back bedroom, on all four walls, there was blood spatter.

Speaker 31 So it was pretty evident that violence had occurred in the bedroom.

Speaker 14 What they don't find is Sherry and her dog.

Speaker 4 Sherry Harlan was born on January 21st, 1974, in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon.

Speaker 14 Sherry lived with her brother and mother and father outside of Hillsboro. They were there until she was a teenager.

Speaker 14 And then her parents divorced and she moved with her mother and stepfather and brother to Washington State. A lot of her friends described her as sweet and very kind and caring, a little naive.

Speaker 11 I met Sherry when we went to Rose Hill Junior High. Throughout her entire life, she never walked into a room.
She liked bounced into a room.

Speaker 11 She had this abundant energy and was always smiling and trying to make other people happy.

Speaker 14 Sherry finished high school in Washington State and then she went to the community college for a couple of years but she wasn't really into academics.

Speaker 11 She mostly pursued relationships. Most of them were not great choices so

Speaker 11 she had somebody that she was engaged to in Oregon who had kids that were older than she was.

Speaker 11 We were

Speaker 21 17 at that time, I think.

Speaker 4 The engagement fell apart, but Sherry kept looking for Mr. Wright.

Speaker 4 Unfortunately, her bad luck with relationships would continue into her 30s.

Speaker 11 Min really loved Sherry, and there was never a point where she wasn't in a relationship. There was always somebody there waiting to catch her if a relationship didn't work out.

Speaker 12 I met Sherry about nine and a half months before.

Speaker 21 We just clicked.

Speaker 12 She'd just gotten back from Hawaii.

Speaker 25 She was there thinking things would work out with somebody and it didn't. So she was kind of in a low-life spot and she just wanted to get her life back.

Speaker 4 By 2009, Sherry was struggling to get by,

Speaker 4 living out of her car and looking for work.

Speaker 4 Instead, she found two more chances at love.

Speaker 14 In the spring spring of 2009, she met Ari Christensen.

Speaker 14 They were both doing some online dating and going to some dating sites and they must have liked what they heard from the other in a conversation or a first meeting because they got together fairly quickly.

Speaker 11 Sherry is always positive. So she came in and like any other relationship, she was excited about it

Speaker 11 and at the time she wasn't working she was just kind of involved in the relationship

Speaker 4 sherry had only been dating eric for a few months when another man came into her life

Speaker 14 she met a man named dan young who was going through a divorce he had a motorcycle and he and sherry enjoyed taking off on that and doing some trips and she was having a really good time.

Speaker 29 He was a general contractor and he was working on a project locally and that he and Sherry had met on some sort of dating platform.

Speaker 34 He had money and he wasn't shy about spending it on Sherry.

Speaker 15 He was a little bit older than her. He knew that she was seeing Eric so he was aware of Eric.

Speaker 14 He bought her a laptop and eventually he helped with the down payment on a new apartment so she could have a new start again.

Speaker 25 We'd had a lot of talks about him. I hadn't met him yet.
He helped get the furniture for her, things that she couldn't get right away, and she was so happy.

Speaker 4 Sherry's new romantic prospects weren't the only changes in her life.

Speaker 4 That fall, while dating both men, she also landed a job at a department store.

Speaker 14 Sherry really liked her job at JCPenney. She loved the customers, she loved the friends she made, and she was very well liked.

Speaker 4 With a steady income, Sherry adopted a dog she named Roscoe.

Speaker 25 Just a little, a little mutt, just a manging mutt.

Speaker 21 Tom is a box of rocks, but she loved that dog.

Speaker 4 2010 was shaping up to be the best year of Sherry's life,

Speaker 4 which is why her friends and coworkers have grown increasingly concerned when no one has seen or heard from her in four days.

Speaker 4 After finding evidence of an attack inside Sherry's apartment, officers immediately call for backup. Snohomish County detectives quickly respond to the scene.

Speaker 15 When we did the walkthrough, there was blood visible on a master bedroom, in the bedroom, on a wall by the closet. There was blood on a glove.

Speaker 15 There was blood on a shirt. There were knife marks in the mattress with tissue at the bottom.
There was a lot of evidence in that bedroom that this serious assault took place.

Speaker 7 There was spatter,

Speaker 12 you know, on all four walls up high,

Speaker 6 indicating some velocity of the various blows.

Speaker 27 And the working assumption at that point was that a knife had been used.

Speaker 4 One thing is clear. Whoever attacked Sherry tried to get rid of the evidence.

Speaker 15 One of the things inside the apartment that we found was a box of these white trash bags with red ties on them. And

Speaker 15 there was some blood on the box.

Speaker 18 You see this kind of evidence reeking of bleach. We know bleach is used to clean and to cover, sometimes destroy DNA.

Speaker 4 But one important clue survives the cleaning.

Speaker 15 There was a bloody footprint actually found on a t-shirt inside of the apartment.

Speaker 31 It was in detail enough that if they ever found a shoe that they thought might have made it, they would be able to compare the tread on the shoe to the bloody shoe print.

Speaker 15 Upon looking at the apartment and what we were finding in there, I didn't have a good feeling about it at all. I felt like she was either assaulted and hurt or that she was a homicide victim.

Speaker 4 Coming up, investigators dig into Sherry's complicated love life.

Speaker 19 One of the last text messages was, this is what being with two men at the same time will do to you.

Speaker 4 But the truth is more bizarre than anyone can imagine.

Speaker 1 She become a warlock.

Speaker 4 Police in Everett, Washington are investigating the disappearance of 35-year-old Sherry Harlan.

Speaker 4 From the evidence in her apartment, it appears she was the victim of a violent attack.

Speaker 18 When somebody has taken the time to tear up the flooring, that's very concerning. Which means that we need to start doing the victimology on the person who's missing.

Speaker 36 Who are the people closest to her?

Speaker 4 Sherry's neighbors tell detectives she was usually quiet and kept to herself.

Speaker 4 The only time they saw her was when she was walking her dog.

Speaker 4 But several days ago, there was a disturbance.

Speaker 15 One of them reported that the Saturday prior, she had heard arguing. A male voice using expletives, shut up, things being thrown around in what she believed was coming from Sherry's apartment.

Speaker 4 A few minutes later, the witness saw a strange man lurking near Sherry's car.

Speaker 15 It was parked by the dumpsters. The trunk was ajar.
Her dog was tied to the inside on the driver's side, and she saw a male crouching down in front of the vehicle.

Speaker 18 This neighbor saw him in the front of the car dry heaving and then he sneezed. And I'm thinking, what causes a person to dry heave?

Speaker 18 I'm thinking, well, we have an apartment where heavy bleach smell, floors are torn up, all these things are kind of adding up. And, you know, my concern was, had he killed her and dismembered her?

Speaker 18 Because that can be a very gruesome process.

Speaker 4 Investigators prioritize identifying the suspicious male and finding Sherry's missing car. To find out more, they ask the building manager for Sherry's apartment records.

Speaker 14 While the police are looking at the crime scene and looking for Sherry, they learn from the manager of the apartment house that Dan Young had helped Sherry with the down payment.

Speaker 14 So he's also somebody they need to check into.

Speaker 4 Sherry's friends and co-workers confirm that Dan is one of her boyfriends.

Speaker 4 She loved him so much.

Speaker 25 But he was married

Speaker 25 and he was leaving her and was going to be with Sherry.

Speaker 21 But she was worried about the husband-wife thing and when he was going to leave his wife.

Speaker 4 To seasoned detectives, it's an immediate red flag.

Speaker 4 Sherry seemed convinced Dan loved her. But could he have been having second thoughts about about leaving his wife and looking for a way out?

Speaker 15 We discovered some text messages on her cell phone that coincided with the same weekend that she disappeared.

Speaker 15 She had texted Dan Young and she said, hey, I'm not feeling well.

Speaker 31 They were going back and forth and one of the last text messages that Mr.

Speaker 27 Young sent her was,

Speaker 12 LOL,

Speaker 34 this is what, you know, being with two men at the same time will do to you.

Speaker 4 Sherry's friends say Dan was probably referring to her other boyfriend, Eric Christensen.

Speaker 4 Before Sherry moved into her new apartment, she was living with Eric 30 miles away.

Speaker 29 Christensen lived out at a home out in Gold Bar, which is a very rural area in East County.

Speaker 29 It was small, but it was owned by the parents of a friend of Christensen's, and he gave it to him for nominal rent.

Speaker 27 It was fairly apparent that Sherry was seeing both Dan Young and Christensen at the same time.

Speaker 4 Both men are a few years older than Sherry, but the similarities end there.

Speaker 4 Dan acted like Sherry's benefactor, while she and Eric shared a more spiritual connection.

Speaker 4 According to Sherry's friends, they bonded over an interest in the pagan religion known as Wicca.

Speaker 4 Its practitioners sometimes refer to themselves as witches.

Speaker 34 Eric Christensen had been a fairly steady goer to the Wicca church. He had introduced Sherry to that.

Speaker 30 Some of their mutual friends were also involved involved in Wicca.

Speaker 34 And this was something that he had some interest in.

Speaker 25 When I lived in Snohomish, I was going to the Wiccan church. It was a mindset community, easygoing, friendly, no hostilities.

Speaker 25 It was just a place to meet up and find other people that were interested in the same beliefs.

Speaker 4 The Wiccan church Eric and Sherry belonged to is in the neighboring town of Index, Washington, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

Speaker 16 I am the Most Reverend Bella Donna Laveau at the Aquarian Tabernacle Church. I replaced the archpriest who was in charge of the church at that time.

Speaker 16 The religion of Wicca is an earth-based religion. We see Mother Nature as a deity of force.
We see the different aspects of nature as spiritual. And we believe that all things are in balance.

Speaker 16 People tie Halloween to Wicca and witchcraft because it's our most sacred day. We honor our ancestors.
We put an extra plate at the table.

Speaker 16 So it's evolved over the years. And Halloween and trick-or-treat and all of that kind of stuff the children's side of it.

Speaker 16 You dress up like the dead and you go around and you ask for alms. That's the lore behind it.

Speaker 4 While Sherry embraced the religion's tenets of harmony and non-violence, friends say Eric was more interested in its occult side.

Speaker 16 She was a very beloved member of the church. She was there all the time.
She worked on the gardens and the property.

Speaker 20 I knew Eric for like a year.

Speaker 8 Eric was very strange, had a lot of weird ideas. Being like a lot of people at the church wanted to break off and start his own Coven.

Speaker 16 He was trying to recruit people into that. He had these other ideas that aren't not really Wiccan, that he wanted to incorporate into that Coven culture.

Speaker 4 And And law enforcement learned from church members many of those ideas involved rituals to control others, including Sherry.

Speaker 16 You know, witches try to live in harmony with the earth, but witchcraft draws people who want to have power over others.

Speaker 16 Just like in any kind of group, you have to figure out where the predators are, what the red flags are.

Speaker 25 There was something odd about him. him.

Speaker 26 He was quick to anger.

Speaker 33 He was always just right on that edge of dangerous type, and I didn't like it.

Speaker 7 He scared me.

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Speaker 4 After learning about the two men Sherry Harlan was dating at the time of her disappearance, investigators take a closer look at their histories.

Speaker 4 Of the two, Eric Christensen's record and reputation draws investigators' suspicions. And police records show that isn't the only unsettling thing about him.

Speaker 36 Christensen had to register as a sex offender because he had a conviction for a statutory rape out of Oregon some 15, 20 years previous.

Speaker 4 A few years later, Eric was imprisoned for another offense.

Speaker 32 An ex-girlfriend had broken up with him and he had got his rifle and had attempted to snipe her.

Speaker 27 And it indicated to law enforcement when they arrested him that the only reason that we were alive because his sights were off on the rifle.

Speaker 37 There is a certain portion of the population that's not mentally ill, but is driven towards more psychopathic behavior. They don't empathize like the rest of us do.

Speaker 37 They can only see it from the perspective of what does that mean for me

Speaker 37 and how have I been wronged?

Speaker 4 Detectives learn Sherry met Eric not long after his release,

Speaker 4 but she didn't know about his violent past.

Speaker 21 She seemed happy with Eric at first, but within maybe six weeks, weeks, she could see what she was involved with.

Speaker 26 His whole face would change when he was angry.

Speaker 25 They found a place to live, but she was miserable. She wanted nothing more than to get the hell away from him.

Speaker 4 Sherry got her chance in November 2009.

Speaker 18 Their relationship started to get strained. And then when he was picked up in November for warrants, while he was in jail, she took that opportunity to leave.

Speaker 15 She was going on with her life for that month and Dan Young helped her get an apartment and helped her buying things to set up the apartment. She had gotten a job.

Speaker 4 But according to Sherry's friends, she knew Eric wouldn't let her go that easily.

Speaker 37 There's research that shows people that engage in acts of domestic violence, if they engage in one, they're much more likely to engage in multiple.

Speaker 11 I ran into her in JCPenney's, and she tells me that her boyfriend was in jail.

Speaker 11 I asked her what she's going to do next, and she's like, Well, I have to go back to him.

Speaker 11 I'm like, okay, well, you know, there's places you can go, there's things we can do to help you.

Speaker 21 You don't have to go back.

Speaker 25 And she just very nonchalantly said, No, he'll kill me if I leave.

Speaker 15 Eric wasn't aware of Dan until he got out of jail. When he got home, he realized Sherry had left.
All her stuff was gone. And he started asking friends of hers, where is she?

Speaker 15 And one of her friends made the mistake of giving him the address of where she had moved to.

Speaker 4 Sherry's phone records show Eric was the last person to call her before she disappeared.

Speaker 4 A fact which makes police even more interested in tracking him down.

Speaker 4 They find him less than 24 hours after Sherry was reported missing.

Speaker 14 They find him at a nearby medical center where he's been treated for a wound to one hand, and they can tell he's been roughed up a bit. He has scratches and some bruises and some cuts.

Speaker 18 I figured I'm going to just record a statement with him. It's just standing here.
And that turned out to be gold.

Speaker 18 We're here at the medical clinic today because you have some injuries to your hand.

Speaker 18 Tell me how that happened.

Speaker 24 I got jumped by three Mexican gangfangers because they wanted to rob me.

Speaker 34 How did you fight the three of them off?

Speaker 15 With my fists.

Speaker 4 Detectives believe there's a simpler explanation.

Speaker 18 When a person is stabbing another person, it's a bloody affair. It is a messy, slippery event, and it's very consistent to see injuries on the stabbing hand.

Speaker 18 Eric did not present himself as a sophisticated liar. We talk about in our circle, in the police circle, as somebody who's thinking about one layer deep.

Speaker 18 They have that initial lie, and if you try to go any deeper than that, they stumble. And that's the way Eric was.

Speaker 4 When they ask about Sherry, Eric admits that he became enraged when he learned she was seeing another man.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I was mad. I was really mad at her.

Speaker 18 Why are you mad?

Speaker 24 Because of her sugar daddy.

Speaker 4 On December 18th, 2009, he went to her apartment to purify their relationship.

Speaker 4 That involved what Eric refers to as a Wiccan blood oath.

Speaker 18 Okay, and then what happened?

Speaker 17 I asked her, why are you here?

Speaker 24 She told me that she was there because she wanted to

Speaker 19 say

Speaker 24 no to

Speaker 34 Sugar Daddy. Okay,

Speaker 24 I also asked her, who does she want?

Speaker 24 She says she wanted me.

Speaker 20 And so she put three drops of her own blood in

Speaker 7 this mixture?

Speaker 20 Yes, and mixed it up. Oh, and it got burned.

Speaker 24 According to Eric, the penalty for breaking such an oath is severe if we were in the ancient times uh you'd get stoned beaten blungeon cast out and in some cases from what i understand death

Speaker 4 two weeks after their december blood oath on january 2nd Eric found out Sherry was lying.

Speaker 18 He said that he ends up going through her phone and he saw that she had been texting Daniel Young. And this infuriated him.

Speaker 24 That's when I confronted her. What'd you tell her? I said, you broke your oath.

Speaker 28 She was, what do you mean? What do you mean?

Speaker 2 I'm gonna grab the phone.

Speaker 24 You broke your oath.

Speaker 34 So, what does that mean?

Speaker 24 That means that she is no good.

Speaker 7 Her blood is garbage.

Speaker 24 The ancient texts and ways.

Speaker 7 She'd become a warlock what's a warlock that's what she became it's a scottish word it means oathbreaker traitor enemy

Speaker 14 eric admits to police that they had a fight

Speaker 36 she fell on she tripped over her bed she told me get out of her apartment i'm like fine okay does she seem to be hurt or anything

Speaker 28 so i left slammed the door i started walking

Speaker 10 Where do you think she went?

Speaker 24 I have no clue, and I personally don't care.

Speaker 8 I hope Karma gives her what she deserves.

Speaker 18 The more he shared, the more I believed this man's definitely involved.

Speaker 4 Investigators officially rule out Sherry's other boyfriend, Dan, as a suspect.

Speaker 4 But now, they still need evidence tying Eric to the crime scene.

Speaker 4 Two days after Sherry was reported missing, they take Eric into custody and conduct a search warrant at his home.

Speaker 29 When they're going through where Eric lived, they found some blue jeans that had some blood spatter on it.

Speaker 27 They found what appeared to be a bloody sock that efforts had been made to burn it.

Speaker 19 And they found a flat screen TV that matched in all measurables the flat screen that had been at Sherry's apartment.

Speaker 15 And in the house is where we recovered the shoe that matched the print on the t-shirt that we found in Sherry's home.

Speaker 14 Everything points to the fact this was a homicide that took place, but there is no body and they don't know where she is.

Speaker 5 We live in a smaller community out there, and you know, it's definitely the talk of the town. There is no question in my mind

Speaker 26 what had happened.

Speaker 12 coming up?

Speaker 4 Detectives make a disturbing discovery.

Speaker 4 We found a skull on the front seat of the vehicle, and Sherry's friends question her killer's motives.

Speaker 1 This had nothing to do with the blood oath, that's all he wanted: control.

Speaker 4 After finding incriminating evidence in Eric Christensen's home in Gold Bar, Washington, Snohomish County Police arrest him for the murder of his girlfriend, Sherry Harlan.

Speaker 4 But they still face a problem.

Speaker 28 They certainly had suspicions about what had occurred, but no body had been located yet.

Speaker 4 Later that night, on January 7th, 2010, investigators catch a lucky break.

Speaker 14 Police were tipped that somebody'd come across an abandoned vehicle out in the middle of nowhere on a gravel road.

Speaker 14 It is indeed Sherry's niece on Centra.

Speaker 15 The car had been burnt out. We're always going to match it to the Vin.
Even if a vehicle is burnt, we can still figure out what the Vin is. We realized it was her car.

Speaker 15 And in the car, we found a skull

Speaker 15 on the front seat.

Speaker 15 And there were also knives found in the vehicle front compartment as well as the vehicle trunk.

Speaker 14 It was as if, you know, somebody had posed the head and the knife in the front seat.

Speaker 15 The medical examiner came out and recovered the skull, and it later was found to be Sherry's skull.

Speaker 15 There was a knife tip that they found embedded in the skull and we were later able to determine that the knife set had come from Sherry's apartment.

Speaker 14 The case is now a homicide and no longer a missing person's case.

Speaker 4 Four days after finding her skull, police get a tip about where to find the rest of Sherry's remains.

Speaker 14 On January 11th, a man named Ryan comes forward to share some information about his friend Eric with the police.

Speaker 15 There was something bothering him, and basically, Ryan couldn't live with himself. He was involved to a certain degree.

Speaker 25 Ryan is very, very gullible and very easily to be manipulated.

Speaker 16 Ryan would come and help around the church, and he was always there to help if you needed him.

Speaker 28 He had indicated to law enforcement he had been part of the blood oath via telephone.

Speaker 4 Ryan tells detectives Eric used him as a witness for Sherry's blood oath.

Speaker 4 Then on January 3rd, Eric called him again.

Speaker 15 Christensen wanted Ryan to meet him at a parking ride where he supposedly locked his keys in his vehicle. So Ryan goes there and he realizes it's Sherry's vehicle.

Speaker 15 Ryan sees this rolled up carpet and rolled up vinyl.

Speaker 18 And as they were driving in the car, Eric said he had Sherry's body in the truck.

Speaker 34 Christensen indicated that he had in fact killed Sherry and that he needed help in getting rid of the various portions of her body.

Speaker 31 And for two days, that's what Ryan did.

Speaker 15 He had driven to these locations around East County up off Reeder Road and Eric would tell him, okay, stop here.

Speaker 15 Eric would throw something and Ryan could hear it hitting the water or hitting the ground.

Speaker 15 Or Eric would get a bag from the back of the trunk and would head into the woods with a shovel. So he knew exactly what was going on.

Speaker 4 Ryan agrees to show investigators where Eric dumped the body parts.

Speaker 15 We drove to all of these locations. That way we could document the exact locations via GPS where items were and where we needed to bring cadaver dogs so that we could find them.

Speaker 15 There were some parts that were never found,

Speaker 15 but her torso was found in one location just laying out in the open.

Speaker 15 I know we found a thigh and we found arms and I believe the medical examiner did find evidence that they were cut with a knife.

Speaker 16 There's not anything that you could do that would justify you killing somebody.

Speaker 16 He was trying to say these things about Wicca that just were not true. We just don't, for the most part, believe in violence dominating other people, making people do things they don't want to do.

Speaker 17 This is not what Wiccan practices.

Speaker 18 This leads towards the satanic end of things.

Speaker 4 An autopsy confirms police suspicions about the ritualistic attack.

Speaker 27 What the doctor was able to tell us is that she had several stab wounds to her torso and a stab wound to her head.

Speaker 32 The stab wounds to her body, assuming that she'd been alive when those had occurred, could have been fatal, but he was not able to determine with certainty that those in fact were the cause of death.

Speaker 14 This is a really ugly, heinous, heinous crime. Eric has cut off her limbs.
He's also cut out her sexual organs and really decimated the body.

Speaker 14 They thought he even tried to cut out her heart, but didn't manage to do it. But it says a lot about this crime and about him and about how the rage that he must have had towards her.

Speaker 29 You have to be able to overcome a certain psychological barrier

Speaker 37 to go through the process of dismemberment.

Speaker 37 But to be able to develop a plan and then act on that plan

Speaker 29 creates a significant amount of, call it emotional repression in being able to do that.

Speaker 4 Two weeks after Sherry's disappearance, news spreads quickly about Eric's hand in her gruesome death, leaving the residents of Everett desperate for justice.

Speaker 25 I caught the news in there, Sherry's picture.

Speaker 21 I said, oh my God, he did it. Oh my God, he did.

Speaker 1 He killed Sherry.

Speaker 15 He was already in the Snohomish County Jail.

Speaker 15 And that's when I went ahead and added the murder charge.

Speaker 19 The defense in this particular case made the strategic decision to try to get this to trial as quickly as possible.

Speaker 27 We didn't have all of our forensic results in yet.

Speaker 34 We still needed to prove all the elements of the crime.

Speaker 4 After a week-long investigation, 40-year-old Eric Christensen has been charged with the first-degree murder of Sherry Harlan.

Speaker 4 But police suspect there is another victim.

Speaker 15 I know that Sherry really loved her dog, and I did make attempts, you know, to try to locate him. But unfortunately, he was never found.

Speaker 4 After learning of Eric's actions, the Wiccan church distances itself from his twisted beliefs.

Speaker 5 The idea that you would have a blood oath is,

Speaker 5 it's just not heard of.

Speaker 12 Any

Speaker 16 relationship in Wicca.

Speaker 33 Eric Christensen was an evil, demented, manipulative man that wanted to control.

Speaker 1 That's all he wanted.

Speaker 4 In May 2010, The story comes under even greater scrutiny when Eric's murder trial begins.

Speaker 28 What was presented to the jury was this is a jealous controlling man was losing control of his his woman and that when he realized that she was going to continue doing these things that he did not want her to do, he took action.

Speaker 15 We believe that he murdered her in her bedroom

Speaker 15 and the dismemberment, I believe, happened in the kitchen,

Speaker 15 which would follow with why he would rip up the linoleum.

Speaker 36 There were nine various portions the body was cut into, and I think ultimately law enforcement located six of them.

Speaker 4 The prosecution's star witness is Eric's friend, Ryan.

Speaker 30 We ultimately gave him immunity if he was willing to testify truthfully at trial.

Speaker 27 in regards to what Christensen had told him and how he had aided Christensen in getting rid of the various body parts.

Speaker 18 I think Ryan is an incredibly important witness in this case.

Speaker 18 There is no eyewitness to the actual murder, but you have a witness to someone saying, Eric had me drive her body around and dispose of it.

Speaker 4 Faced with the evidence, Eric's attorneys try to explain his attack instead of arguing his innocence.

Speaker 27 The defense in this particular case was that they admitted that Christensen killed Sherry Hartland,

Speaker 31 but it wasn't premeditated.

Speaker 17 The argument was that he had come upon the text messages between Sherry and Dan Young and just lost it.

Speaker 4 Although Eric never speaks in his own defense, the jury still gets a chance to hear from him.

Speaker 18 My entire Man on the Street interview that was recorded was played for the jury.

Speaker 24 If we were in the ancient times,

Speaker 24 you get stoned, beaten, blungeon, cast out, and in some cases, from what I understand, death.

Speaker 18 When you look at the jurors and the looks on their faces, they are following, they are tracking, and they are coming up with the same responses I had to what Eric was saying.

Speaker 4 On June 18th, 2010, the jury finds Eric guilty of first-degree murder. He's sentenced to 37 and a half years in prison.

Speaker 15 What sticks out the most is that he just laughed about it. He was being led away and he just smirked and it's like he didn't even care.

Speaker 21 He was allowed to make a statement.

Speaker 11 And his statement was, I don't understand why this is such a big deal. It was an accident.

Speaker 4 He just didn't care.

Speaker 12 He didn't care what happened.

Speaker 15 People get life in prison for killing somebody, and they didn't even go to the extreme of dismembering the person. So I never really understood why he wasn't sentenced to more.

Speaker 11 There's no justice in 37 and a half years, but I don't know that 99 years or the death penalty would be justice either.

Speaker 21 He had zero remorse.

Speaker 11 And if you aren't sorry for what you've done,

Speaker 11 there's nothing to stop you from doing it again.

Speaker 4 In the years since Sherry's death, her friends and those who worked to solve her murder are still haunted by it.

Speaker 18 Eric always tried to paint the picture that either it was her fault,

Speaker 18 that their actions were guided by his view. of the Wiccan faith.
He tried to use that as a tool to control her.

Speaker 26 What he did was not Wicca.

Speaker 33 It was demonic, demented, sick.

Speaker 12 A criminal with criminal mind and criminal pain.

Speaker 12 And she suffered for it, and so did all of us.

Speaker 15 When you have homicide cases, it's not common that people go to that extreme to cut up people and discard their parts like garbage. That's what bothered me most about this case.

Speaker 11 She was just

Speaker 11 a special person that always

Speaker 11 made everybody else around her smile.

Speaker 35 Even after 13 years,

Speaker 12 I still love her.

Speaker 7 She'll always have been my bestest friend.

Speaker 1 She was just Sherry,

Speaker 12 a beautiful, beautiful woman that got caught up with a very, very bad man.

Speaker 1 And she didn't deserve this.

Speaker 22 Eric Christensen is scheduled to be released from Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Washington State in 2047. He will be 78 years old.

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