Fifty Dollars and a Bus Ticket: The Robert Alton Harris Story

0:00 Two sixteen year old best friends sat in a parking lot eating cheeseburgers and planning a fishing trip. But an hour later they were dead and the man who killed them drove back to his house and finished their food. He ate their cheeseburgers. Fourteen years later the state of California would build a legal storm around him that ended in the gas chamber. This is the story of Robert Alton Harris. [Music] Robert Alton Harris came into the world on January 15th, 1953, two months early because his father had kicked his pregnant mother in the stomach. He went straight into intensive care with fetal alcohol syndrome from his mom's heavy drinking throughout the pregnancy. Before this baby had ever even opened his eyes his brain was already wired wrong and the man waiting to raise him already hated him.

1:13 That is the starting line of this story and we're not even at the crib yet. Robert's father Kenneth Harris was a World War II veteran who had earned a silver star and a purple heart. He came home from combat with what we would now diagnose as severe PTSD. Back in the 40s and the 50s a returning soldier with night terrors and a drinking problem was told you know get over it. Go have some beers with the fellas. There was no therapy and no support group. Nobody sitting him down and saying hey you watched your friends die. That is going to live in your nervous system forever. Kenneth turned every bit of that pain outward onto his wife and his children. His mom Evelyn was half Cherokee one of 11 kids from a dirt poor Oklahoma family. She was picking cotton to buy alcohol when she was still a teenager. She described herself in her own words as wild and vicious when she drank. The cycle was already spinning before Robert was even conceived.

2:14 Kenneth had a particular hatred for Robert. He believed with by the way zero actual evidence that the boy was the product of an affair so Robert got the worst of it. At 18 months old his father beat him with a bamboo cane. Later on Kenneth would load a gun and tell his toddler son to run away from him for fun. A grown man in his 30s terrorizing a child who could barely walk and talk. When Robert was nine the family landed in a migrant labor camp in California's San Joaquin Valley. Within weeks his oldest sister Barbara got arrested for theft and while she was in juvenile hall she told the authorities that their father had been sexually abusing her and her sisters for years. Kenneth got shipped off to a state hospital and became a registered sex offender. A year later police walked in on him raping one of his daughters and sent him right back to prison. By age 10 Robert was already on police reports for killing neighborhood cats but he insisted he only watched while the other kids did the actual killing which became his whole pattern in life. He always was at the scene but he was always pointing the finger at someone else. At 12 he got arrested for sniffing glue. At 13 he did four months in a Santa Rosa juvenile facility for stealing a car. While he was locked in that place the place that was supposed to fix him he was repeatedly being raped by older kids older inmates. 13 years old and the

3:46 system meant to correct him was actively helping him be brutalized not protecting him from the other inmates. Then in May of 1967 his mom did something Robert never really recovered from. She packed up his four youngest siblings and drove out of their Sacramento apartment and never came back. Robert was 14. He had been abandoned by the only parents however terrible she was that had never been incarcerated for child rape. From 14 to 19 he was award of the federal reformatory system. The records from those years eventually filled around 950 pages and reading what the counselors wrote sounds like a clinical study of a young mind coming apart. There were repeated suicide attempts, self-mutilation and documented diagnosis of schizophrenia. One counselor summed up Robert's future in a single word gloomy. When he turned 19 the federal government no longer had the legal authority to hold him so they handed him 50 bucks and a Greyhound ticket to Chula Vista, California and wished him well. That was the state's entire investment in reintegrating a young man with a documented case of schizophrenia brain damage and severe trauma. Against every odd stacked against him Robert tried to have a normal life. He got a welding job. He got married. He and his wife had a baby boy named him Robert Jr. in October of 1974. For a minute his life looked

5:17 like the kind of life that he might have had if he'd been built somewhere else. It's different parents. The marriage lasted less than three years. By 1975 he'd lost that welding job. He was drinking around the clock and he was living on welfare in a trailer park out in Imperial County. That same year Robert and his younger brother Kenneth decided that their neighbor James Wheeler needed a lesson in how to fight. Both brothers were drunk and what followed went way past anything resembling a fight. Robert beat Wheeler poured flammable liquid on him and threw lit matches at him. He shared off some of his hair. Wheeler died because of that. Robert pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served about two and a half years. Right before his parole the Imperial County Sheriff's Department sent a written warning to the parole board saying Robert was in serious need of psychiatric care. Nobody acted on it. Five months and 26 days after walking out of prison on parole Robert Alton Harris would kill two children. It was July 5th 1978.

6:24 John Maysky and Michael Baker were 16 year old best friends. John had just gotten his driver's license and the car was his. The two were eating cheeseburgers in the parking lot of a Miramasa supermarket planning a fishing trip for that afternoon. That was the whole agenda for the day. Two teenage boys on a sunny summer Saturday afternoon. Robert Harris and his younger brother Daniel had spent days planning to rob a bank that happened to be right across the street. They had stolen guns. They'd run their drills and burned eye holes into ski masks but they needed a car. Robert walked up to the boys vehicle, got into the back seat with a pistol, and told John to drive toward Miramar Lake. He promised them nobody would get hurt.

7:09 The boys suggested that they could just walk up that hill, wait for the brothers to leave, and then report the car stolen with a fake description of the thieves. Robert thought it was a good plan. He said so. He agreed to all of that. And then he shot John in the back and then again in the head. He chased Michael who ran who was hiding and screaming in a bush and shot him four times. He then walked back to John, fired into his head again at point blank range. And then that apparently wasn't enough. He picked up as brothers rifle and shot John one final time. What he did afterward is the moment that defined how the public would see this case for the next 14 years. He drove back to his house with Daniel and he finished the boys half eaten cheeseburgers. He laughed while telling Daniel what he had done. When Daniel pointed out there were bits of flesh stuck to the pistol from the contact shot. Robert flicked them off and bragged about it. About an hour later the brothers robbed the bank across the street and got away with around $2,000. A witness saw it, followed them, and then called the police telling them where they were. They were under arrest within the hour. You know the strange way the universe works. One of the officers who arrested Robert that afternoon was named Steve Baker and he was Michael Baker's father. He had no idea his son was dead.

8:34 No idea that the man he was handcuffing had killed him. He would find out later and he would then spend the next 14 years of his life fighting for this man's execution. Robert was convicted in March of 1979. Two counts of first degree murder and sentenced to death at 26 years old. What followed was one of the longest and most contested death penalty cases in American history. 16 habeas appeals over 14 years. A Supreme Court case, pulley versus Harris, that became binding national precedent on how death sentences get reviewed. Defense attorneys eventually paid out of their own pockets for neuropsychological testing and found organic brain damage, fetal alcohol syndrome, and severe PTSD that had never been presented to the original jury. Mother Teresa personally called the governor Pete Wilson twice to ask for clemency and Wilson denied Mother Teresa both times. When actual Mother Teresa calls you and you say no thanks. You've got your mind made up. At 6 o' 1 a.m. on April 21st 1992, Robert was led into San Quitton's pale green gas chamber for the second time that morning because hours earlier he had been strapped in, then unstrapped after a last minute stay, and then walked back in. In the viewing room, Steve Baker stood about six feet away. Robert saw him and mouth the words "I'm sorry." Baker nodded.

10:04 Robert's final words were lifted from the movie Bill and Ted's bogus journey. "You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the grim reaper." He was declared dead at 6.21 a.m. His father Kenneth, the man who started all of this, had killed himself with a shotgun a few years before. Someone once asked him about his son's crimes. He paused for a long time, then asked, "How could that bastard do that?" He was talking about his own boy. Two years after the execution, the gas chamber that killed Robert Alton Harris was declared unconstitutional. The only videotape of an American execution ever recorded was destroyed on January 15th 1994. That was Robert's birthday.

10:52 Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder, binge-able true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email, subject to brand new listeners. Hey Joe, my wife and I drove from Louisville to Cape Cod a couple weeks ago. That's a long drive. And somewhere along the way we ran out of podcasts that we'd been saving for the trip. So I searched, true crime, and found your show. We figured we'd listen to maybe one or two episodes and check it out. By the time we got to New York, there was no telling how many we'd gone through. At the end of each one, it became a running joke that we would say, "Okay, maybe just one more." You've definitely got two new listeners. Ben and Louisville Kentucky.

11:35 Big Ben, I appreciate it man, that's the second most popular way people will find the show. The first one is when you tell your friends and your family about 10-minute murder. That's how most people find the show. But the second way is typing true crime, and along the way, usually depends on what app you're listening on. It'll pop up somewhere in that mix. No matter how you found me, I'm super glad that you and your wife did. Hope your trip to Cape Cod was nice. And I really appreciate you reaching out. Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome. Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now. And go back and listen to some of the older episodes because there are literally hundreds of them for you to listen to. And if you enjoy what you're hearing, you can go to 10minutemurder.com and there are links there that you can follow the show on social media if you want to. And before you move on to another episode or move on with your day, let me let you know that if you want more information about the episode you heard today, the Robert Alton Harris story, I did another episode on my other podcast. It's called True Crime Blueprint. It's much longer. It goes into way more detail than the episode that you heard today here on 10-minute murder. So search True Crime Blueprint or go to the links in the show notes of this episode and you'll find True Crime Blueprint where you can listen to that podcast.

12:53 But I hit it a lot longer. It's a deeper dive into Robert Alton Harris's story and it's very interesting and I encourage you to go check that out. True Crime Blueprint is my other podcast. Now that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Really appreciate you listening and I'll see you next time.