After Meghan heard the story from her mother and it began to sink in, she became terrified that the killer might have seen her telephone number in Shelby’s room and somehow would come after her.
Ron Daily, one of Tony Harris’s old friends in Syracuse, received a phone call while he was washing his wife’s hair. She still had trouble using her amis as a result of a near-fatal car accident that she and her daughter had been in six months before. It was Steve Seleway on the line. Steve was another pal of Tony’s from Mattydale.
“I’m afraid I have very bad news about the Harrises,” he said. Ron’s first thought was that the family had been in a terrible car crash. Steve took a deep breath and continued. “The Harrises were all shot and killed in their home last night.”
Ron put the phone down in a daze, wondering if this could be a bad dream. Dodie Harris had called the Dailys the day before to invite them to Tony’s fortieth birthday the following week, asking them to bring something that was popular forty years ago as a gag type of gift. Ron considered Tony to be a close friend, and although they didn’t see each other frequently, they’d spent their formative years together in high school.
Marc and Melanie Walker, who lived two blocks away from the Harrises, had made plans to attend a party that Saturday night. Their neighbors’ daughter, Meghan Long, was scheduled to sit with their two boys. Kathy Long phoned the Walkers to say that Meghan could not sit that night because she was too upset. “I hope it isn’t anything serious,” Melanie said. That was when she learned about the Harrises. Melanie felt sick from the shock. She remembered how much her son, Joshua, looked up to Marc Harris. Marc was three years older than Joshua, and he had often sat and kidded with him on the school bus the year before when he was still in Caroline Elementary School.
Don Lake, Dodie Harris’s brother, was drinking a mug of coffee at the kitchen table Saturday morning when the doorbell rang. He and his family lived in Manlius, a suburb on the east side of Syracuse. His wife, Pat, went to the door and found two men standing outside. The older, gray-haired man began, “We’re state police investigators.” Both men pulled out their badges. Immediately, Pat wondered if their daughter had had a problem the previous night while taking out the family car for the first time.
As soon as Pat escorted the police officers back to her husband, the younger, brown-haired officer said soberly, “Could we speak with you privately?” Don nodded, and Pat walked back to the kitchen. The older man stepped forward. “There’s been a terrible tragedy in Ithaca, sir.” From then on the story emerged as Lake, close to tears, asked question after question about his sister and her family’s deaths.
News that the Harris family had been murdered descended on Ellis Hollow that December morning like a snowball going downhill—slowly at first, gathering momentum, and then out of control as rumors passed from house to house. It was two days before Christmas, a Saturday, when folks woke up to thoughts of last-minute shopping or cutting down a Christmas tree.
Suddenly the people of Ithaca were confronted with their worst nightmare: their neighbors, a family of four, had been murdered sometime Friday evening inside their home on Ellis Hollow Road and their house had been set on fire.
The freezing air of that Saturday—the temperature dropped to fifteen degrees below zero before dawn and rose to ten degrees during the day—only intensified the bone-chilling terror and disbelief. How could this vicious crime happen here in this safe haven from the real world? Who was the killer—or killers? And of all people, Tony and Dodie Harris, the nicest, kindest people you could ever meet, and their two popular children, Shelby and Marc. Were the Harrises intentionally sought out, and if so, why? Or was this a random killing, a tragic lottery that could just as easily have chosen them? A madman might still be out there, ready to strike again. It made no sense. People felt helpless.
Although burglaries were common in certain parts of the city, there were rarely serious crimes in Tompkins County. The well-entrenched illusion continued: Ithaca was a kind of country paradise where bad things just didn’t happen. The small-town atmosphere and the cultural and intellectual tone set by Cornell University and Ithaca College gives the place an untouchable quality. The “ivory tower” appeals to many, because it seems detached and protected from the world in a cocoon fashioned by man and nature. Locals were proud of a recent study that named Ithaca the top small city in the East based on quality of life and the well-educated population of some thirty-five thousand people.
The town is located at the southern tip of the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where past geology sets the landscape apart, giving the area a grandiose beauty. Some twenty thousand years ago ice sheets moved down from Canada, leaving behind deep lakes and rocky gorges. A hilly terrain and the valleys below offer a pastoral contrast to the more rugged scenery. The eleven Finger Lakes (so-called because they look like slender, blue fingers on the map), are scattered over the western arm of the state below Lake Ontario between Livingston and Onondaga counties. They are intimately tied to the region’s history. As far back as the Thirteenth Century the Iroquois peoples built their villages along the banks, fished in its waters, and hunted in the surrounding dense forests. Names of lakes and counties today, such as Owasco, Keuka. and Seneca are a reminder of the Iroquois tribes who were the first inhabitants of the land.
In 1779 during the American Revolutionary War General John Sullivan marched into central New York with over two thousand men to attack the Iroquois, who had sided with the Tories. His intention was to force the tribes to move westward and disrupt the Tory offense. Sullivan found most of the villages deserted (the Iroquois knew they were outnumbered), but by the end of the march he claimed his men had burned forty villages, 160,000 bushels of com, well-established orchards, and quantities of vegetables. The Iroquois paid heavily for supporting the British.
The men in Sullivan’s army saw great potential in these lands of forests and lakes that were “bluer than indigo” where acres of crops and fruit orchards flourished in Indian villages. Eventually tracts of land were awarded to war veterans by the Land Commission in Albany, the amount of land each was given was based on military rank. So began the white man’s settlement of upstate New York.
Members of the Land Commission set about naming towns (twenty-six of them) for ancient military and classical heroes and empires, believing the rhetoric of the Revolution that compared American aspirations to ancient Greek democracy and Roman Republicanism. So we have, among others, Carthage, Fabius, Cicero, Romulus, Ovid, Virgil, Ulysses, and Ithaca.
Peleg Ellis, a war veteran, came in 1799 to settle on his tract of wilderness in what is now Ellis Hollow to the east of Ithaca. Most of the first settlers were of northern European stock. The next century brought Italians, Greeks, and Jews to populate the growing cities, to build the Erie Canal, and then the railroads. Immigrant groups in town formed enclaves for support. First on Ithaca’s flats were the Irish, who then moved uphill to Irish Nob. There were 104 blacks living as freemen on the south side of town by 1830; they had the lowest paying jobs as domestics, janitors, or seasonal workers. A slave burial ground was discovered on Ellis Hollow Road on the J.D. Schutt Farm in 1928, settling the question about whether there had ever been slaveholders in Tompkins County.
The region’s hopes of being a big commercial depot for northern and western markets in the 1800s were dashed twice; first when canals weren’t built to connect Cayuga Lake to the Erie Canal and second when major railroads bypassed the town. In both cases the area’s topography made the projects too costly. With an abundance of water power, mills of all sorts flourished, keeping Ithaca a small manufacturing center.
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