What She Buried | 7. A Fly in the Soup

0:00Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb in Mississauga, Canada. It's not a coincidence. One after the other, in the same house. Is this bad luck or something more sinister? The worst investigative mess I've ever encountered. Long simmering what took you so fucking long to get here. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrison's. I'm Amy Dempsey-Raven. What happened to the Harrison's is available now on the binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to the binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, add free. Listen to every episode of what she buried, add free right now when you subscribe to the binge.

1:05You'll hear the entire series before anyone else, get exclusive bonus episodes, and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to the Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap subscribe, or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The binge, feed your true crime obsession. The binge. Camp site media. There's an old adage. A journalist has never met a guilty prisoner. It refers to the fact that most prisoners go to great lengths to convince reporters of their wrongful incarceration. But it also refers to the fact that most journalists are trying to make an argument about our crooked criminal legal system.

2:06And the only way we can think to do it is by talking about entirely innocent people. But why do you need to tell the stories of the innocent to show that the system is corrupt? What does someone like Quenetta deserve? What do the women around her deserve? I would argue. Nothing like what I heard on this last call with Quenetta. Nothing like what the state of Texas does in the dark corners of its prisons or behind the scenes in its courtrooms. Quenetta's personal failings don't negate the larger truths that play here. Truth that expose our system for being murky, cruel, punitive, and full of people who have had so much bad done to them, and who, for the most part, then also did bad. Quenetta was being held in a place where the windows were nailed shut, where there was no air conditioning, where temperatures hit 127 degrees and people died of the heat.

3:07Everything smelled like raw sewage. People were breaking down. One woman spent all day singing, another screaming, another cutting herself. During this particular call, a woman was being extracted from a nearby cell with the help of some sort of spray. Oh, they're going to do her dirty. They're outside the door. They all have masks on. At her cell door, sometimes they'll talk to girls, it's becoming to the door while somebody else goes around to the window and they'll double-gather. Oh, they're going to outside and they'll gather from the inside. Can I hear her? Is that her screaming? Quenetta didn't know who the woman was. She called out to a friend down the wing to ask what was going on. Monica! What's going on? She's wet!

4:07She was refusing to return to population! You could hear the frenetic energy, like the concrete walls were vibrating. I thought of Quenetta's first letter to me. Everyone called women in prison monsters. But she wrote, I've yet to encounter monsters. Although I've met plenty of women with mental illness, untreated and un-vagnosed. The woman who was screaming, she'd apparently been in solitary for a short stint. Now, the guards were telling her it was time to leave. But the woman wouldn't budge. They're taking off the helmet now. What does that mean? It means that they're not going to gather. She's down here trying to get rid of her. Probably as a result of a fight or a bad haircut. I don't know. She's for population. She's yelling how she's scared. She don't want to leave. So they brought all of them in here to try to pull her or to sell extraction.

5:12Oh, she's young! What's the name? There's one two three four five six seven eight nine seven twelve twelve people going out. I don't have enough time for us to take showers, but they get staff audits. So they're just taking her back to general population? Yes, and she, her face red like she's been crying. She's scared. She's twisting her body around, trying to resist. But she's outnumbered. A dozen guards with gear versus one girl. The guards hoist her up and march her away. Of course, from herself, Queneta could only peer down the hallway, just a bit. Because of her failing eyesight, she couldn't see anything too clearly. And in a very different way, neither could I. Oh, come on!

6:12From Sony Music Entertainment and Camside Media, this is Whatchy Berry. I'm Justine Vanderloon. Episode 7. A fly in the suit. Queneta was in the opposite position of that young woman who was carried away by the guards. At the time of our last phone call in February 2024, she was desperate to get out of solitary, back to general population. The reason she couldn't, I'd learn, was due to yet another maneuver that showed the lengths to which Queneta was prepared to go to get free. And the lengths to which Texas would go to punish her. It was 2015. Queneta was employed at the Braille Facility. It's an elite gig, prisoners transcribe and emboss textbooks.

7:12Which means that, unlike all Mr. Brunelles in prison, the Braille Facility workers have access to computers and printing materials. During the time that Queneta was working at the Braille Facility, two documents arrived at the headquarters of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the TDCJ. They were signed orders from a judge, a judge who had recently taken over the courtroom in Dallas, where Queneta's murder case had been tried back in 2009. These documents stated that the prison sentence of Queneta Yatris Harris had been reduced, from 50 years to 8 years. Which is exactly how long Queneta had, at the time, been incarcerated. In other words, the document stated that Queneta had served her time and should be released immediately.

8:12An administrative assistant, a TDCJ, flagged the document and called the judge's courtroom in Dallas for confirmation. The clerk, who answered the phone, said the judge had never issued the order. Sounded like a forgery. TDCJ promptly put Queneta in solitary. To former assistant district attorney, Josh Healy, who had prosecuted Queneta, this was all just further evidence of her depravity. She would have been out in society, and she's the type that would have either gone into hiding or done something bad again. It's kind of creative. I got to go, wow, that's pretty good. Forged judges orders are in the eye of the beholder, I guess. That's Richard Franklin, one of Queneta's defense attorneys. If you try to escape a prison, you go to a wall or you hurt somebody or you kidnap somebody, and that's one day, but this is kind of Mickey Mouse to me.

9:14If that's why she's an axed saying that's the only reason, I don't like it at all. I think that's bad on their part. I've read the 232 page offense report produced by TDCJ's Office of the Inspector General. It raises some questions. Like, if Queneta forged the document, how did she get it out of the prison that it could be sent to TDCJ headquarters? Who had she convinced to mail it off? How had she even communicated her plans to that person? As far as I could see, investigators never were able to get any definitive answers. Queneta maintained her innocence, and she had a theory for how a judges order drastically reducing her sentence ended up getting written, signed, and mailed to the proper authorities. The theory went like this. Another woman who worked at the Braille workshop, she did it.

10:16This woman was a member of the Aryan Sisterhood. And this Aryan sister had tried to free Queneta as a test case. If it had worked, if Queneta had gotten out, the Aryan sister would have forged other papers. Presumably for her white nationalist friends. Queneta did eventually plead guilty to the Forgery offense. She maintained to me that she only did so because she hoped it would get her out of solitary. There it was again, a pattern. Queneta got desperate, so Queneta came up with a scheme, which she then denied. At the same time, TDCJ was not treating Queneta properly. Queneta had been placed in solitary for an offense that TDCJ could never quite prove. In a nonviolent one, at that. The United Nations has defined more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement as torture.

11:19Queneta was left in solitary confinement for more than 3,000 consecutive days. So, Queneta had bad done to her. She did bad. She had more bad done to her. And on it went, a vicious circle. For as long as I'd been working on this project, I've been trying to come to terms with what it all meant. Unlock all episodes of What She Bared, Add Free, right now, by subscribing to the Binge Podcast Channel. And it doesn't stop at What She Bared. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all add free. And between drops, you've got Add Free, Accord, and the Binge Podcast. And it doesn't stop at what she buried. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month. You've got Add Free access to crime scene, The Binge's Weekly Series. Plus, instant access to over 60 true crime podcasts.

12:22Shows like wild boys, blink, and my fugitive dad. So you'll never be short on stories. Search for the binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to subscribe directly. Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb in Mississauga, Canada. It's not a coincidence. One after the other, in the same house. Is this bad luck or something more sinister? The worst investigative mess I've ever encountered. Long simmering what took you so fucking long to get here. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrison's. I'm Amy Dempsey-Raven. What happened to the Harrison's is available now on the Binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today.

13:24Subscribers to the Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, Add Free. Queneta told me that the only way prisoners in solitary can experience touch is in the exercise cages. There are a couple pens next to each other, and sometimes you get an hour to move around in them, alone. If you climb about 20 feet up, there, at the top, there's a little gap in the fencing. If you balance precariously, and someone else in the next cage does the exact same thing, then you can press your fingertips to another person's. But Queneta added, that's for the younger prisoners.

14:24She wasn't climbing anywhere. So, no physical touch. But she was also separated from information. She couldn't know internet. No way to get reliable daily news. Her radio signal was shaky. She could only read books that people sent in, and magazines approved by the state. I knew that when Queneta was told something inside prison, she wasn't really able to verify it. She couldn't call out without being monitored or talked without being overheard. She had to go with her instincts. When Queneta sent me that email telling me she was withdrawing cooperation, I wasn't sure what to think. Had someone scared her? Was she having regrets about the things she'd said? And then concocting yet another elaborate ploy, rather than just, say, communicating her trepidation to me?

15:25While I was trying to get my bearings, I started reaching out to women who had been incarcerated with Queneta. I wanted an inside perspective on what Queneta was like in prison, and how TDCJ treated her. Joy Brunvey lives in Houston now. But she spent a decade in prison in Gatesville, much of it in solitary confinement alongside Queneta. On a scale of 1-10, Joy told me, she knows Queneta at a 10. Do you think to them her being knowledgeable is more dangerous than somebody who could help her? Of course. Dangerous, because Queneta has knowledge about how the levers of power work at TDCJ. And that's a threat, because you know how many inmates are there that are getting messed over up and don't know who to go tell, or the proper thing to command, or just think that they can't go to nobody outside or what's on the unit. She knows. The majority of people in prison, some estimates say around 75%, don't even have a high school diploma.

16:28More than half of the women in Texas prisons have mental illness. It's not easy for them to advocate for themselves, and a disempowered population benefits TDCJ. Then, someone like Queneta comes along. She helps people prepare legal documents. She offers to read over their paperwork. So inside the prison, even from solitary, Queneta became kind of indispensable. We called her Detroit, Ms. Detroit. Is she kind? She's like a mother. She's loving, she's a mentor. Everybody likes her. Joy told me that she had a business, body butter and hair grease. And Queneta had made it all possible. Had hooked her up with an accountant, and had got her all set up so that when Joy walked free, she had a way to make money. Queneta didn't benefit from this at all. She just did it. For real? Yes, I want a tax company here. And see help, you set that up?

17:31Yes, we have for you. And her friend, he'll be set it up. Joy wasn't the only woman with a story like this. Others told me how Ms. Detroit comforted them when they were in crisis. Provided clothing or sanitary pads or food. She tied the items onto floss and fished them out between the bars, down the halls. Queneta couldn't have expected anything from these women. She knew they had nothing to give her. Nobody was watching. Queneta never mentioned any of this to me. She just helped. You can charge a lot in prison for helping, particularly for providing highly skilled help like vetting legal paperwork. But everyone told me, Queneta did it all for free. And something about all this, it seems to have made the TDCJ higher ups very upset with Queneta Harris.

18:33They become herself very frequently and they're standing there for hours. Just like combing through all her information. They even got her mail. Like they be saying that they watching everybody mail TDC just be letting whatever come in. But like in the mail room, they'll send them a list of names that are hot. Hot. Meaning, read everything this person sends out and gets in. The orders to do this, Joyce says, came from a pie. Whenever I say they, I mean a administration. Anybody who ever does anything to her as far as like case wives and investigations. It's always administration. Administration comes and rates herself. Administration is the ones that be tying up her money when it comes in. All that's that I'm saying, all happens through administration. Joyce depiction of Queneta and her treatment by TDCJ matched up with what Queneta herself said again and again. They had it out for her. And I do think TDCJ views Queneta as a threat.

19:35She's savvy. She's informed. And she writes and speaks out about what's happening in there. So the idea that they would force her to drop out of this podcast. To my mind and in my experience, that was a real possibility. My producer Eric emailed the TDCJ press office and asked them about Queneta's claims. Had Queneta been directed to withdraw from the podcast? Had she been told it would be better for her if I destroyed all my interviews and notes? The press office wrote, these statements were not made to Queneta Harris. I was expecting that answer. Because on the one hand, if TDCJ did exactly what Queneta claimed they did, it's quite likely that they would deny everything. And on the other hand, if Queneta made the whole thing up, TDCJ would also deny everything.

20:39I think that Queneta knew how this would all play out. If I had to guess, I guess that she decided on her own to cut me off. Why? Maybe. After five years of corresponding. She worried she'd said too much. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was just being strategic now that she was a leading prison journalist. Would the media people who gave her awards and published her work be so eager to work with her if they knew the more convoluted version of her life? She'd encouraged me to report, told me to find her ghosts, to talk to them. And I had. And while I suspect that this submerged part of Queneta was desperate to come clean, another part of her was desperate to keep up the charade. At a certain point, we both knew that this podcast wouldn't. Couldn't go like we'd hoped.

21:39A month after all of this in April 2024, Queneta was finally released back to general population. There, she started writing about a new topic, True Crime. For her first piece, The Headline Red, True Crime shows exploit and lie about women like me. The genre was racist and sexist, she argued. Then, Queneta and her lawyer co-authored a law review article called, The True Horms of True Crime, The Abstract Mentioned Podcasts First. Queneta said that killing Michael Giles was a mistake. She wished it had never happened. She told me that if his family thought she deserved 50 years, she'd take it. But she never sounded terribly sorry about actually killing him.

22:41She once wrote to me, I didn't travel 3,000 miles planning to shoot him. He had put me through so much, and I believe he would have killed us both. Even though Queneta still resented Michael Giles, she seemed genuinely sorry for his mother. She told me, No mother should have to bury their child. I don't wish that on nobody. Michael Giles' mother was named Janey Smith. Janey never recovered from learning that her son, her favorite child, had been killed. About a time the child came around, my mom had stopped eating and had lost so much weight that her doctors had us put her in a rehab center, and they had to put the tube in her stomach to feed her and stuff. Quen, Haney, Michael's sister, said that even before Michael's disappearance, Janey was fragile. She was exhibiting signs of dementia.

23:42Quen says she'd also had a mental breakdown. Once Michael's body was discovered, Janey refused to really face what had happened. She never would talk about Mike. I think in her mind she just pretended like he was still in the military. You know what I mean? Because he was there for so long. To Quen, the most painful part wasn't just that Queneta had killed Michael. It's that she'd desecrated his memory. In covering her tracks in the cleanup, Queneta had destroyed everything. Even things that held only sentimental value. His family was left with nothing. I don't know what she did with all his military medals he had. She just threw him away. Just, it's like, just trashed everything. We didn't get anything. He had my family reunion, video tapes, BHSs. He was transferring to make copies for all the family members, you know. And just all of it gone.

24:43Just gone. Michael's money was gone too. Money he used to help his mom and other relatives. My mom hired a lawyer to do a civil suit. She gave him a $5,000 retainer and nothing ever came of it. I found out that he had passed away and the new law, you knew nothing about it. So, nothing ever came back to my mom. No, nothing whatsoever. Over the years, Janie deteriorated further. She may not have spoken about her son's death, but it haunted her. And I'll tell you, nobody knows this, really and truly, except for immediate family for the most part, maybe some of my neighbors and all. My mom screamed. I got videos of her screaming to the top of her lawn. From the time she wake up in the morning until she goes to bed at night, I can't breathe. She did that for at least 13, 14, 15, five years straight.

25:48And I think that she believed that Mike was buried alive or something, you know. Janie Smith died in 2017. These days, for Gwen, there's just silence and absence. I remember a victim impact statement. I remember talking about, okay, I used to make a German chocolate cake from scratch every Christmas. And nobody ate coconut except for me and Mike. So Mike would come over. It was always Christmas. He'd come over. He'd get half the cake. Two, three days later, he'd call me. He got in more cake. So ever since he had disappeared, I hadn't made that cake because nobody else ate it except me and him. And I remember the judge telling me I should make the cake. So it took me, at least 10 years.

26:52And now I make it every Christmas again. And when I take that first bite, I say how good it is to him. I wish he was here to share it with me. Gwen has a generally calm demeanor. But beneath it, there's rage. I will tell you though, I know prisons ain't got air conditioners. When it's hot out in the summer, and it's 110 degrees, I know her as to sit down there, she's probably smaller than Lord knows what now. But I hope they bring her out in a black bag. I really don't truly do. Nothing's gonna bring him back. And she's still got another judge to face when she leaves this world. Let's between her and God. And I really hope that before she leaves this world, that she feels the pain that my mother had to deal with,

27:55I hope she feels the pain that my mother had to deal with. On my final call with Queneta, we spoke about her three children. It had been nearly a decade since she'd seen them in person. Do you remember your last visit with your kids? Yep, 2015. And what was that like? It was nice when they killed me because they didn't recognize me. It was like, oh my goodness. So yeah, that was shocking. Before that, they hadn't visited for four years. It was hard to get everyone from Michigan to Texas. And expensive. Queneta held her kids hands. I remember they were so hungry and I felt so bad because they were thinking that they were providing them with something because they can't go out and get anything to eat. They just gave them like cookies and like a bunch of... And I felt like shit. I'm like, this is what you gotta do to see me. I couldn't help but make a connection

28:55between the timing of that last visit and the forgery incident that landed Queneta in solitary. Less than six weeks. She'd been a model prisoner for years. Then, she walked into the room and her kids didn't recognize her. They were hungry and she couldn't feed them. Of course, Queneta wouldn't fully admit that she'd even done the forgery. It was among the many things she denied, things she just wouldn't deal with. And those denials, those lies... That was why we were in this hall of mirrors where we could never tell what was real and what was a reflection. In that last call, I was trying to find a way out. This story, you start trying to do it and then you're inside of it.

29:57And you're not watching in it. But what I think is sort of happened is that all the truths and all the lies and all the real things that happened and all the fake things that happened have gotten tangled together. There's reasons people do things. But if you have lies in there or inaccuracies, then you can't even work out the reason. So that's what I'm trying to figure out how to unravel it into a close to what it really was. Because otherwise any truth you say is not you, but... It's corrupted. I said, old people say if you lie about one thing, everything is corrupt. Everything is a lie. It's a lie in the suit. You know, if they used to teach us when we were children. You just can't take the fly out the suit and eat the suit. The whole suit is corrupted. Who is Kueneta Harris? I asked that question to almost everyone I interviewed, including Kueneta herself.

31:02I got a different answer each time. But now I think the question itself was misguided. Because she was always being defined by someone else, asked to conform to others' ideas about who she should be. And she didn't conform. Instead, she performed. She put on a mask. Once, in a long letter, she told me about her family history, about her childhood, about all the expectations weighing upon her, to rise above stereotypes and circumstances. She wrote, with longing, I thought, how lucky people are to only be themselves. I suppose that's something Kueneta never managed, to only be herself. But now, being herself would also mean facing herself. It would mean making an honest assessment,

32:03what she had done, who she had become, and where she wanted to go next. I'm gonna find out. I mean, it's past time. I didn't realize this would be our last call. The clock was running out. Texas prison phones turned off at exactly 8 p.m. What's your phone time tomorrow? I had to be about, maybe about 5, I'll try 5, my time. I had a whole list of questions for Kueneta, for when we talked again. To the anyways, I'm just gonna ask before it cuts off. So they could be there. What she buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, and Campside Media. This show was reported and hosted by me, Justine Vanderloom. Eric Benson is the executive producer. Ashley Ann Craigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistants from Lane Rose,

33:05Josie Duffy Rice, Moisey Secret, Emily Martinez, Shiba Joseph, and Michael Meyer. The story editor is Matthew Scher. The series was mixed and sound designed by Garrett Teedermann, with support from UNLI from UN. Fact checking by Matthew Giles. A special thanks to our operations team. Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingle. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis, and Jonathan Hirsch. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, and Matthew Scher. If you enjoyed what she buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.