The Silent Hour

1

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He’d sharpened his knife just an hour before the killing. The police, prosecutor, and media would all later make great use of this fact. Premeditation, they said. Proof of intent, they said. Cold-blooded murder, they said.

All Parker Harrison had to say was that he often sharpened his knife in the evening.

It wasn’t much of a defense.

Harrison, an unemployed groundskeeper at the time of his arrest for murder, took a guilty plea that gave him a term of life in prison but allowed the possibility of parole, the sort of sentence that seems absurd to normal people but apparently makes sense to lawyers.

The guilty plea prevented a trial, and that meant Harrison’s tenure as the media’s villain of the moment was short-lived. Some editors and TV anchors around the state no doubt grumbled when they saw he was going to disappear quietly behind bars, taking a good bloody story with him. On the day of his arrest, he’d offered something special. Something none of them had seen before.

The victim was a man named John Maxwell, who was the new boyfriend of Harrison’s former lover, Molly Nelson. The killing occurred in Nelson’s rental house in the hills south of Xenia, Ohio, a town made infamous for a devastating tornado that occurred the same year Harrison went to high school, destroying homes, schools, and churches while killing thirty-four people and leaving nearly ten thousand—including the Harrison family—homeless. It wasn’t the first storm of breathtaking malevolence to pass through the little town: The Shawnee had named the area “place of the devil winds” more than a century earlier. The winds certainly touched Harrison’s life, and a few decades later the locals would claim the devil clearly had, too. A Xenia native who was half Shawnee, Harrison had been separated from Nelson for more than a year before he returned to town and they reunited for one night together. It was passionate and borderline violent, beginning in a shouting match and culminating in intercourse on the floor. Evidence technicians later agreed that the abrasions found on Harrison’s knees were rug burns from that night and had no relevance to the killing that took place two days later.

After the night of sex and shouting, Nelson told Harrison she was done with him, that it was time to move on. Time to move away. Get out of town, she said; find something else to occupy your attention.

Apparently she didn’t convince him. Harrison returned to her house two nights later, hoping, he would say, for more conversation. The police would insist he returned with murder on his mind and a recently sharpened knife in his truck. Harrison’s story, of an argument that the new boyfriend turned into a physical contest, was never proved or disproved because there was no trial. What went undisputed was the result of the night: Harrison punched Nelson once in the jaw as she went for the phone, interrupting her as she hit the last of those three digits needed to summon help, and then turned on Maxwell and killed him with the knife. Harrison disconnected the phone, but a police car had already been dispatched, and a single sheriff’s deputy entered the house through an open side door to find Nelson unconscious and Harrison sitting on the kitchen floor beside Maxwell’s body, his cupped hands cradling a pool of blood. He was attempting, he said, to put the blood back into the corpse. To return it to Maxwell, to restore him to life. He was, he said, probably in shock.

That detail, of the attempt to return the blood, added a new twist on a classic small-town horror story, and the crime received significant media coverage. Front-page articles in the papers, precious minutes on the TV news. The murder was well documented, but I don’t remember it. I was an infant when Harrison was arrested, and his name meant nothing to me until almost three decades later, when the letters started.