Tracy Harkness ////// Part 4 of 4

0:30Welcome to True Crime Garage, where you are, whatever you're doing, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Nick, and with me, as always, is a man who spent the afternoon trolling his fantasy football leagues, waiver wire. Here is the cap. A turkey for me and a turkey for you. Let's eat turkey in a big brown shoe. It's good to be seen and good to see you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for telling us. Today, we are still sipping on this delicious and tropical India pale ale called eternal autumn. Oh, will it ever stop? I hope not. Garage grade five at a five bottle caps. And here's the cheers to just some of our friends who decided to help out the garage we would like to send a thanks to Heather and Marion Virginia and also a double-fisted

1:31cheers to Brady and Neely Ray from East Philadelphia born and raised. Actually, that's East Philadelphia, New Jersey. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this week's beer fund. And of course, thank you all for listening and subscribing to True Crime Garage. And because all of you out there helping us out this week, we were able to send a nice donation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and also to our friends over at the Charlie Project. Thank you so much for trying to make a difference in this world and making a difference in our world by listening to True Crime Garage, BW, double-R, U, N, Colonel, that's enough of the business. Alright, everybody gather around. Grab a chair. Grab a beer. Let's talk some True Crime. Well, Captain, we have something here that we don't see with a lot of these local small

2:45town types of cases here. And we talked about the police and the detectives doing their due diligence in this case. And this was a very thorough investigation, whether you agree with all aspects of it or not. But there was certainly a lot of work and effort put into this investigation, not just in 1992 and November of 1992 when it happened, but the following year and the years after that there's been a lot of years, a lot of eyes, a lot of boots on the ground working this case, trying to figure out what happened to Tracy Harkness, who is responsible and how can we get justice for her and her family. And one of the things that we don't see in a lot of these cases is the detectives went so far to bring in some experts. So January 12, 1994, the FBI sent a team from Quantico, Virginia in response to a ViCAP

3:46report on Tracy's case. So they reviewed the evidence, they reviewed all the information with detectives and it looks to me, Captain, that detectives came to the theory based off of everything that they found in their investigation, that yes, we have a list of persons of interest, the priority person, the person likely at the top of that list would be David C. Locke. Right. They believe this was a crime of passion that whoever killed Tracy Harkness was somebody known to her and that that person either let themselves into her apartment or she let them into her apartment on that night that she was killed. Interesting to me, it appears that the FBI agreed with the findings of the local police's investigation.

4:46Now they put together a profile on the killer and the events of the crime. I love when local law enforcement does this, bringing the big guns, you don't have to be the smartest guy in the room. You just have to get this correct. Now, police would not give us the entire profile as created by the FBI, but they gave us a little little pieces and parts, a little taste, a little taste that we can share with you here today. So according to the FBI, it is their opinion that the suspect, the killer arrived already angry at Tracy's apartment that night, late that night. They say that the suspect is a Caucasian male, likely in his mid 20s. Sounds familiar. The suspect would have a history of anger issues. Check. The suspect was a local, who knew Tracy, the suspect likely changed his behavior after

5:50the murder. And this person would have problems maintaining long term relationships. Yeah, or headbutting walls. Now I think it's safe to say I'm not going to sound like Sherlock Holmes here when I point out the obvious that this small, the profile that we received certainly fits who might be at the top of the list of persons of interest, David C. Lock, it also certainly fits several other people that are on that list as well. Yeah, there's so many difficult things about this case for me. One, David has a temper. And if it's true that he was abusive with his, not just his girlfriend, but on top of that, she was the mother of his children. So zero respect towards her if he was physically abusive towards her. But also when you're getting an argument, shows such a lack of maturity to then run your

6:51head into a wall to the point where it leaves bruises and marks and cuts on your face. And then some of the other people on the list, you have to look at because of the proximity. When you live the access, we have two people that wanted Tracy out of their lives that lived within a football field. I mean, that is access. That is, that is opportunity. Everybody knows that one of Mick Jagger's favorite moves on stage is finger point and finger point and finger point. And in this case, I feel like when you review the information that was collected by the detectives and the police, there's a lot of reasons to point a finger at person A or person B. And in some situations, we might have a person in particular where there should be a lot of fingers pointing at that end of it. Yeah, or a giant, big, stinky finger. And police, as you were saying, yes, go on.

7:52What we don't have here is the eliminating of these persons. Who did they actually eliminate? Did they actually eliminate anyone? The only statement that we have on record was, well, if I was going to go out on a limb and eliminate someone, it would be Michael Harkness. That's the only statement in any type of relative relationship we have to the possible eliminating of a person of interest or a suspect. So we have a lot of good suspects here, a lot of good, interesting persons of interest. I will say, my opinion of the case is this, Captain. It appears to me to be still a very solvable case all of these years later. Yeah, absolutely. They have a lot of physical evidence. And we're really sitting here sifting through all this information 30 years later, but still left with some really key questions. Right. And this case, like one, where the hell is the murder weapon?

8:58Very good question. What was the murder weapon? Where did it come from? You have to wonder, crime of passion. We talked a lot about you do not have to have the intent to murder, to murder someone. Was there was this something that somebody grabbed in an affidav anger from Tracy's apartment, a belonging of Tracy's that was an item from inside of her home? Right. And took it with them. When you're moving into a apartment, she's only been there for a few months. I mean, who knows what she was doing? Maybe at some point, it takes you a while to get settled. And then eventually you want to put things on the wall. And so you have a hammer out. And is it possible that that's the murder weapon and that person took them with the murderer took the murder weapon with them? The other thing though is that we have this claw hammer that was found in one of the persons of interest car and we don't know, has no human blood on the hammer.

10:00Right. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't cleaned and put back into the vehicle. Or I mean, think about this, even if the, even if it had nothing, if that claw hammer has nothing to do with Janet, it is possible. That police are coming around and they're interviewing me, David, and they're interviewing my ex-girlfriend, my baby mama. And I take that murder weapon and I put it in her car. Even though it's clean, now it's going to raise a lot more questions and point a lot more fingers towards her. But again, what I said, I think in episode two of this case, the problem with David is going to be that we know that he lived at that residency for a time period. So his DNA is going to be in that house. His fingerprints are going to be in that house. Possible hair samples could be in that house. The issue for David or anyone else that had stayed at that apartment at any time is that

11:07we have nobody saying that they were at the apartment that day. There's no reason for someone else's DNA to be on our victim. And so that's where I think as far as technology goes that we might be able to have a break in this case. But again, back to the questions, the other question I have is this house key, the duplicate house key or key to the apartment. There's been people that say that it was in possession of David C. Lock. David is not trying to hide the fact from police that yes, at one time he did have a key to the apartment. He says he gave it back to Tracy. That key still remains a big part of this mystery. That key could also unlock this mystery because that could be the item that the perpetrator of this crime used to gain access to this apart. Well, look, I know we shouldn't assume, but when you have this murder come up and law

12:11enforcement goes, did you have a key? Yes, I did have a key. Did you return that key? Yes, I did. But the only person that can dispute that, they're not alive and come on, come on, give me a break. All of our possessions, all of Tracy's possessions are in that apartment. So why aren't the keys there? I know we shouldn't assume, but I'm just assuming that David never gave them back. And he just lied about it. The other big question I think here, and I think this is a, a rightful question that this, it's quite, it's correct to ponder this because when we have people giving different and conflicting stories, it really makes you wonder who's covering for who and how many people were involved or at least how many people knew what actually happened. So a big question that I have here is, was this crime perpetrated by one person, a duo or a group of people?

13:11Well, that's really difficult because one, let's say we take the top six people of interest. They're all connected to somebody. All of them have a significant other that is also on the list of POIs or people that you should have on your list of POIs. I'm sorry if you're listening to this and you're going, I shouldn't be looked at. Well, why wouldn't you? You have a reason to not wonder in your life. And then you, you're alibis. The alibis of all these individuals, the alibi is coming by somebody that could be involved in the crime with them. I wish we had more information as far as the evidence because to me, it seems like there was one weapon used. And so unless both attackers are using the same weapon to me, that maybe points more towards one individual and also the timeframe. It hasn't been solved for so many years.

14:12Most of the time it's hard for, if there's a duo, one person is normally a better person than the other person, eventually tells somebody. And then the other question would be, would the person or person's responsible who attacked Tracy, would they have any idea about the little one, Megan, not being home that night? Right. So while we are left with all of these questions here, Captain, the interesting thing to me about this profile while it doesn't really point a direct finger at anyone, it doesn't really eliminate anybody, either other than the fact that the profile states that they believe that the killer was a male. So that would eliminate some of the female suspects or persons of interest here. But again, when reviewing this crime, it's difficult to say that there wasn't more than one person that is responsible.

15:14And even using something like a profile that should never be used to directly implicate somebody's guilt or to eliminate anybody from contention, it's certainly a tool that is used regularly and was used in this investigation. Now what we can say for certain as far as the police go is their statements that they gave to the public. And this was in the form of interviews that they did with news outlets, local news outlets, but also the crime stoppers release information that they've released over the years because they've continually asked the public for help. And in fact, Tracy Harkness's family asked the public for help early on in this investigation by offering a reward for information of their own money from the family. And then in the crime stoppers release information, we have the statements from police that the

16:15singular likely was someone Tracy Harkness knew and that police have ruled out burglary and sexual assault as possible motives in this case. Well, it's sad too because when we started diving in and doing our own investigation into this case, there's little to no information about this case online. And it's sad when you see that, but that's one of the reasons we do this podcast is to try to shine some light and get people talking about cases that don't get enough of the spotlight. And it would be nice if the true crime community would kind of spread it out because there are so many cases that are docu-series or about books or about online forums are all about. And these cases just need one a little bit of pressure from the public.

17:17And that's something that we can do as we can discuss these cases. We can share this information. There is probably somebody out there that knows something. Yes, this happened early 90s. But that means that there's somebody that's sitting on information. Think about it. Cases like Delphine, John Bene Ramsey, and West Memphis 3. A lot of those people have come forward after a couple of years because there is public pressure because they saw a documentary about it on TV. They heard about the case on a podcast. So they decide, hey, people actually still care about this. I should maybe share the information. And law enforcement might be one piece away from solving the puzzle. Now, my question to you, which I don't know, but do they have what they think is DNA from the killer at the crime scene?

18:22Well, what I can't say is that one ray of hope here is that yes, police do have a bunch of physical evidence in this case. They have items that new technology may now or soon be able to offer the final solution to the murder of Tracy Renee Harkness. And we know that they conducted DNA testing in 1993 again in 1994 and in 2009. The most significant pieces of evidence in this case per the files we reviewed include, but are not limited to the following personal items of Tracy's found in the apartment and on her person. A jacket that was worn by one of the persons of interest. That was collected fingernails scrapings, the toilet seat being up in Tracy's apartment.

19:24And it seems like most, if not all of these items are definitely eligible for renewed modern testing. And maybe this case being covered by anybody in the media will give that push to law enforcement to go, hey, maybe it's time to revisit this case and take a look at some of these pieces of evidence and get these tested. We have a lot of Ohio listeners and we say this often, but it's even more important when we're covering in a higher case because the abundance of Ohio listeners that we are so lucky to have. If you have any information or if you know who killed Tracy Renee Harkness, call the Grove City Police Department as 614-277-177. Or to submit a tip and remain anonymous, you can call that tip in at 614-645-TIPS. That's tips. Or you can email our show by going to our website TrueCrimGarage.com.

20:39I want to thank everybody for joining us here in the garage. And like always, this is an important case. So if you can, share it on social media. Somebody knows something out there. Somebody needs to come forward and get some closure for this family. Yes, thank you all for listening. We will be off next week to celebrate the holiday with our families. But that does not mean that you have to take a break from TrueCrim Garage. If you are looking for something to listen to, please check out our other show off the record. It's available on Stitcher Premium. We released an episode this week and we have another great episode coming out on Monday as well. That's TrueCrim Garage. Off the record, check out the entire catalog on Stitcher Premium.

21:42Have a great, safe and wonderful Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey Day. Be good, be kind, and don't litter.