Anthropologists were brought in to dissect information from tissue and bones. Within a week, the public would serve to be more aid in helping police solve identity mysteries. The media was running stories about the ‘madman on the loose,’ as Harrison was still at large. A husband came forward to inquire about his wife, who had been missing for over two years. The roommate of another victim told authorities that she believed Sandra Garvin had gone to buy drugs from Harrison. She had not returned. Further, debris from the crime scene filled in missing pieces: jewelry, including a heart-shaped necklace, and three earrings were newsworthy. Photos brought in answers from the public when relatives stepped forward to help identify another two victims.

Harrison Graham was still nowhere to be found. August ___,  The sought after suspect had four younger siblings and his mother, Lilly, all living in the Philadelphia area. The family put out a public plea for Harrison to come home. He’d been seen at local shelters, even on a city bus, but he’d somehow continued to elude investigators.

Investigators continued to search the condemned building, atop, beneath, and adjacent. Some bones were exhumed from the grounds surrounding the apartment, but after a closer examination by the coroner, these were animal remains, not human.

On August 15, however, another body was found – the search had expanded to surrounding buildings, and in the basement of a complex down the street from Graham’s residence, a similarly preserved (wrapped in a blanket and bound with electrical cord) human being was discovered under a what appeared to be a burn-pile.  Upon scrutiny, it appeared only the torso and the skull remained – leading investigators to question if this was an eighth victim, or if this would be the connection to previously found leg bones.

While the search for Harrison Graham intensified, the Medical Examiner was attempting to attach names to bodies. One female had been identified, a mother of five, Mary Jeter Mathis. While the office personnel worked feverishly to piece the puzzle together, Lillian Graham was receiving the phone call that could provide investigators with a plethora of answers: Harrison.

On August 17 the phone rang at Lillian Graham’s Philadelphia residence. It was her eldest son, hungry and tired. He wondered if she might meet with him and bring him something to eat. According to Harrison, his mother was able to talk some sense into him. “Stop running, son. Whatever happened, we can work this out. Just come on home. We love you. Your family loves you.” Harrison waited at a street corner for the police to pick him up.

“At first, I couldn’t say it. God help me, I couldn’t tell them. But the Lord hath helped me. I know how sin is…it overtook me, lest it wasn’t me…”

It was getting late, but the persistent officers continued to press the detained suspect until finally he admitted that he had played a role in the murders of the seven women. He had tried for hours to convince the men that the bodies had been there when he’d moved in to the complex. Reluctantly, he would admit to one killing, than finally relented and told the whole truth – with a twist. It may have been his hands, but it was not his mind. “It was Marty,” he explained.

“My mamma tol’ me to read my Bible; and Hell hath no place for sin…but he done these things…I love my bible ‘an I hath no place for these things…he done these things…” Harrison Graham, 1998 from Harrisburg Penitentiary

When Harrison was a small boy, according to both his own version of his life and more evidentiary, the research of investigators, his familial situation was not always sound. At an early age, he was both the lover to and employee of a male pimp. Troubles at home led him to the streets, where, for the first time, Harrison claims to have felt “deeply loved.” He was introduced to homosexual relationships and prostitution and also to drugs. In his early teens, his mother’s own “spiritual revelation” was imposed upon him; she dragged him from the streets he’d come to know as home, and began to preach the immoralities of his lifestyle – one she’d been utterly uninvolved in for a very long time.

Not even the most seasoned psychologist could explain for certain why Harrison Graham became a serial murderer; however, even a layperson could point to specific incidences in his childhood and adolescence that were surely significant in the “splitting” of his person – that of the loving and rehabilitated Christian son, and oppositely the homosexual addict with an insidious passion for the underbelly of street living. It would only be a matter of time until he would develop a name for his altered state. Once established, all guilt could be carried by one entity, leaving the other “person” to live a life, free of the responsibility of both his perverse sexual needs and drug habits and ultimately, his serial crimes.

It is both tragic and unsurprising that among his victim’s was his former girlfriend, Robin DeShazor. Graham stated in an interview, “I wanted so badly to love her…but I could not stop my need to do the other things…I never liked the sex and it got so much easier when I didn’t have to see her…” To explain, Harrison somehow felt more at ease having sex with his girlfriend once he had strangled her. In a sense, he has said, his secrets were safer with her, dead. “She knew ‘bout Marty, ‘an his desires…I didn’t want her looking at me that way and I seen God being angry through her eyes…” Harrison Graham lured all of his victims, whether he knew them previously or met them on the street, with drugs. Consensual sex led to strangulation, which, Harrison explains, always shocked him in the morning, when he’d awake to find a woman lying next to him, dead.

Harrison confessed to the police that with his first victim, DeShazor, he was so shaken by what he had done, and so afraid as to what to do next, that he simply left her body in his apartment. It was not until he brought a different woman to his apartment that he attempted to conceal her, by hoisting the corpse unto his roof through a bedroom window.

During interrogation, Graham wrote a ten-paged confession; however during his arraignment, the question of mental illness was topic. Joel S. Moldovsky was appointed his public defender, and immediately, the point of whether Graham had been capable of signing his own confession aka death certificate was argued.  While detectives claimed that the confession had been procedurally sound, with the suspect’s mother present, Moldovsky was able to successfully point to due process conflict: Harrison, he claimed, was never told he had a right to have an attorney present. In spite of the heated, emotionally charged facts surrounding the murderer’s case, his rights were still to be protected.

On August 27, 1986, a detective read through the gruesome account of findings during a six-hour hearing. Harrison was reportedly agitated, rocking back and forth as the detective read that the defendant had described maggots in his apartment as “fur ball bugs” to a visitor. He “had to stay high all the time to [ignore the birds eating a body outside his window.”  Drugged and in a paranoid state to begin with, Harrison was panicked when the police arrived, literally throwing bodies into the back bedroom. Until this point, he had staged the corpses of his most recent murders in the front room. In a chaotic flurry, he hurried and boarded up the door and ran.

This, according to Joel Moldovsky, among other characteristically bizarre behaviors, were paramount in determining his client’s competency. Further, Dr. Robert Stanton, a psychiatrist, evaluated Graham, citing an I.Q. of 63, which is considered to be less than mentally competent. This, coupled with his substance abuse and addictions, resulted in a man who, according to the laws of the state of Philadelphia, was incapable. Harrison was suffering from chemically induced auditory hallucinations, psychosis, black outs and chronic paranoia. More over, a psychologist by the name of Albert Levitt testified that aside from the defendant’s chemical and physiological issues, Harrison was incompetent in fundamental academic skill: reading, writing, math, and telling time.

In a rather shocking turn, with the evidence to the contrary, Judge Edward Mekel still declared Graham competent for trial. He based his opinion in part on the DA’s counselor, Robert Sardoff, who had told reporters that he felt Harrison had been utterly “able” during the initial confession.

Contrary to the prosecution’s stance, Moldovsky was arguing insanity, specifically a multiple personality disorder. During an interview with Philadelphia’s “Daily News,” the attorney commented that Harrison Graham often spoke in a second and third personality. “Marty” was an easy-going handyman. He liked his mother, he was heterosexual and a religious zealot. At times, “Junior” would show himself – this personality was most familiar as the child-like male whose neighbors purportedly remembered hanging on to his Cookie Monster stuffed animal. It was “Frank” who was responsible for the heinous crimes of both murder and necrophilia. It was Frank who could not stand to be with a woman, in brutal contrast with Marty, who hated the sinful nature of homosexuality. Who felt it was a condemnation to eternal death. Frank, however, was streetwise, with a desire for drugs and harder core, homosexual relations including his own prostitution. Again, something he had been introduced to in his own adolescence.

Ms. Graham was her son’s greatest ally: She did not believe, she stated, that “Harrison would be capable of such horrible crimes.” She reasoned that he was too simple, and too non-violent. Even had he ever gone off due to the alcohol or drugs he’d been accused of abusing, he would not have had the where with all to plan such crimes, or hide bodies. As adamant as she was, she guided her son away from a jury trial, explaining to him that while he was innocent, she knew that the jury would be prejudice, once the prosecutors revealed their crime scene photos.

Then, just before the judge’s ruling, the prosecution entered a “surprise” witness: “Paula” – a woman who claimed to have lived with Harrison. She accused Harrison of strangling her during sex – causing her to pass out at times. She also said that during the three years that she lived with the man, off and on, he had bragged about strangling Robin Deshazor, and then having sex with her dead body.  Paula had been frightened that he would do the same thing to her, if she broke off their relationship. His excuse for strangling the woman to death was simply that she’d tried to leave him. Paula didn’t dare.

According to her testimony, the woman had endured rape, beatings and torture at the hands of Harrison Graham.

What was supposed to be a queue for the state, turned out to be an accomplishment for the defense. First, Robin had been beaten not strangled, leading to the conclusion that the witness had lied about her former boyfriend’s testimony. Further, Harrison had no history of long-term relationships; in fact, he had killed his only so-called girlfriend. It did not fit the pattern of Graham’s murders or “personality” to have maintained a three year relationship with any woman, much less one that would live. If anything, Paula’s statements that Harrison kept her in drug-induced stupors and was often “using” himself only added to the stability of the defense’s claims that the defendant was not in control of his facalities.

On March 8, Harrison Graham told the judge that he was not responsible for the murders, and that “someone else had done [it].” Harrison put his fate in Judge Latrone’s hands, waiving his right to a jury. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse on all counts. His attorney told reporters that he doubted Graham knew that he’d been found guilty, or what the ramifications of that would mean; he then directed his own attention toward keeping Graham from execution. The large, black man listened to his conviction, barely making a wince. Afterward, he told reporters that “everything would work out just fine…” He requested his Cookie Monster be given back to him, now that it was no longer needed as evidence.

King also felt that the conviction was in “all interests” and protected everyone involved; the victims, the victims families, and Harrison Graham, from Harrison Graham himself.

Until 1994, Harrison Graham was a prisoner at Harrisburg Penitentiary in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. But then the Supreme Court, after a routine review, deemed his sentence unethical and illegal. The Court ruled that Graham’s life sentence be overturned, and that the death sentence be implemented. He was then scheduled to die on December 7, 1988. Judge Latrone was again in the position of making a decision to let Graham live or die. He stayed the execution. The murderer’s case seemed to spend much of its time in appeals, and in and out of higher courts, until in 2002 the US Supreme Court banned the executions of all mentally retarded criminals. Harrison did not meet the initial requirements of the ban. As stated by a psychiatrist involved in his case, “he tested lower than he functioned, so even if his IQ was below 70, he was not mentally retarded.” But because, according to the criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association that an onset of mental illness occurring before the age of eighteen years mandated the same relief from execution, Harrison Graham was permanently off of death row.

Today, Harrison resides in a medium security facility in Pennsylvania. His case manager described him as “mild and non-violent.” He has received a minister’s certificate, and continues to practice his faith – religiously.

It is often said of substance abusers that once the drug is removed, sanity returns. This may be the case for Harrison Graham. And faced with the haunting of childhood demons, and his ability to deal with them alone, perhaps the security of his routine, and his cell walls provides the structure and predictability he never knew. And yet, when I called to interview him, he still told me that he “could only do the interview if I promised to call him Marty…”

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