Investigators described it as a one-in-a-million chance. A tiny manufacturing flaw on an envelope exposed a murderer who was willing to kill innocent victims to get at the one person he wanted dead. It was a typical Monday morning at the Transamerica Title Insurance Company in Tempe, Arizona. There were only four employees, all friends, who spent their workdays processing paperwork. 46-year-old Julie Williams had been working at Transamerica for two months. She had gotten this new job. Things were going really well for her. She was happy. When I talked to her on the phone, she always expressed how well things were going and how she was really starting to feel a sense of peace and joy in her life. On a Monday morning around 9 a.m., Julie got a drink from the water cooler. After taking a sip, she said that her lips and tongue were burning and warned her co-workers not to drink the water. she walks down to the bathroom she goes into the bathroom the people are kind of worried about her the other employees were baffled they got some water out of the water cooler and tasted it and it burned their mouths and they had to spit it out meanwhile julie never returned from the bathroom she's in the stall they can't open the door because her basically her body is against the door, somebody has to crawl up over the stall or underneath the stall. They found Julie unconscious, completely unresponsive. Paramedics arrived minutes later and rushed her to the hospital. She was in a coma and by that time we knew that that was pretty serious and that the doctors were telling us we needed to get there quickly because they really weren't sure how bad this was. at first doctors thought julie had suffered a massive stroke but it was even worse mri tests and the cat scans and things like that were showing basically a flat line which meant that she was brain dead and we couldn't understand doctors told julie's three grown daughters she probably wouldn't survive her heart was fine her liver was fine her kidneys were fine and she could basically go on like this for who knows how long, but she was never going to wake up. The hospital asked police to check on Transamerica's water supply. When I went to the break room, there was an obvious odor that I could smell. To toxicologists, this meant only one thing, cyanide. People say, those who can smell it, and it is genetically controlled, that it smells like bitter almonds. about 40 percent of the population can't smell it as a precaution everything inside the water cooler room was sent for testing on examining all the items that were in the coffee cups the coffee maker itself the coffee creamer you know just everything in there there appeared to be a crystalline crystalline substance in all of these investigators tested the substance with a chemical strip, and it turned blue. What you're producing is Prussian blue, which is one of the forms of cyanide. A gas chromatograph test confirmed the findings. Scientists also found a massive amount of cyanide in the office coffee pot. Well, five grams of pure cyanide, given as it is in total, is enough to kill probably about 25 people. The water cooler alone had 32 grams of pure cyanide, enough to kill 150 people. But who wanted to kill the employees of Transamerica Title Company? And why? 48 hours after Julie Williams ingested a massive amount of cyanide, her three daughters made the difficult decision to take her off life support. There was nothing medical science could do. That's a difficult decision. You're not ready to say goodbye as it is, you know, and now suddenly you have to make the decision to end someone's life. Investigators found the source of the cyanide Julie had ingested. It was in the office coffee pot and water cooler It would not have been difficult for all four people in that office to have been killed because cyanide is really a strong poison I mean, you know, they could have died before anyone figured out what happened. Police questioned the three remaining employees in the Transamerica office. One of them, Diane Harry, made a startling admission. She said that she may have been the intended target. Diane said that a few nights earlier, she was drinking some scotch whiskey at home with her husband, and it made her ill. She also told him that there was something wrong with the tea kettle. She tried to make coffee, and when she put the creamer in it, it curdled. Investigators tested the bottle of scotch from the Harrys' home and confirmed their suspicions. The bottle contained lethal amounts of cyanide. Diane's husband, Louis Harry, said he thought he knew who was responsible. He said it was Roy Fitzpatrick, a 43-year-old delivery man. Roy Fitzpatrick was an ex-boyfriend of a girl that Mr. Harry was now befriended, is the way he described it. Fitzpatrick's ex-girlfriend was 33-year-old Sharon Jones. Well, I had dated Mr. Fitzpatrick briefly, and he would never accept no. He would stalk me, he would choke me, and he threatened to kill me if I started dating anyone else. Mr. Harry was very, very persistent that I go to get a restraining order against Mr. Fitzpatrick. He even went with me to the courthouse to get it done. Sharon Jones and Lewis Harry then realized that the restraining order backfired. It infuriated Fitzpatrick, who responded by sending threatening letters to Lewis Harry and his wife, Diane. Mr. Harry, describing the content of the letter, said that basically wife Fitzpatrick was threatening him and his wife, and that they were getting increasingly more sinister. The letters were laced with racial epithets. This one was sent to Diane Harris. I am having a hard time overlooking your husband. I think I will take you away from him so that he can see how it feels. And he wrote this to Lewis. You won't have to hurt for long, because your ass is mine. Investigators asked Roy Fitzpatrick if he sent the threatening letters. Initially, he denied it. A day later, he recontacted me and came in and decided he wanted to tell me the truth. Admitted that he had sent letters to Mr. Harry. But Fitzpatrick claimed he was angry with Lewis Harry not because of the restraining order, but because he was sexually involved with his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Jones. I met Lewis Harry in a club. I was in love with Mr. Harry. He had asked me to marry him. As soon as the divorce was through, he had said that we would get married. Roy Fitzpatrick discovered this was all a lie. Mr. Fitzpatrick followed Lewis Harry home one night from my condo. And he called me within minutes of Mr. Harry leaving, stating that he was still married, the wife was still in the home, and that he wasn't going through any divorce. When police confronted Lewis Harry about the affair, he denied it. And Roy Fitzpatrick gave police one last piece of information. He admitted sending Lewis and Diane Harry four threatening letters, but claimed that the three typewritten letters, the most incriminating, were forgeries. investigators noticed that one of the typewritten letters was in an envelope with a distinctive flaw the spot where the flaps met was offset they didn't match up the way they were supposed to apparently this was a manufacturing flaw when you've been in the business for any length of time you know that this is a very significant fund and that uh and especially in a murder case this is going to be a very important piece of physical evidence. On an envelope assembly line, blades slice through reams of paper, creating a form with four flaps. When the flaps are glued, the left and right ones are supposed to meet in the center of the envelope. In this case, the right flap overlapped the left. These were coming down the assembly line. and they were moving further and further out of whack the way they should be. Investigators believed if they could find out who bought the flawed envelope they would find the killer Police were investigating the Sinai death, the 46-year-old Julie Williams, and the attempted poisoning of her co-worker, Diane Harry. The prime suspect in the case, Roy Fitzpatrick, admitted sending Diane Harry and her husband, Louis, four threatening letters. But Fitzpatrick denied sending the three most incriminating ones. He'd given me something, but now he was just, you know, taking away the last three letters. But if Fitzpatrick didn't send these three typewritten letters, who did? On a hunch, investigators got a warrant to search Lewis Harry's office. He worked in the physical education department of a local community college. It was interesting that they went to Mr. Harry's workplace and they took this big shelf that was in his office. It's like five or six feet long. That ended up going out to their expert out at ASU Arizona State University. Also in Lewis Harry's waste paper basket, they found a receipt from Chemonics, a local chemical company. The label had warning information with regard to the use of cyanide. But the receipt was signed by someone who identified himself as Charles Hawley. He told the clerk he needed the cyanide for a college chemistry class. Forensic document examiner Bill Flynn was asked to compare this signature to Lewis Harry's known signature. The second letter, the name Holly, is an ovate round letter. It is also an ovate round letter in Harry. And there's a very distinctive style that he used to move from the H into the next ovate letter. Both last names ended with a Y, and Flynn discovered that they were virtually identical, as were the H's at the beginning of each name. For instance, the right side of the H in Holly is made with that rightward curving, clockwise rotation, circular movement on the H, which we saw is the characteristic that's replicated in Harry's own name. Investigators went to the Chemonics company and showed the sales clerk a photo lineup. The clerk identified Lewis Harry as the man who purchased the cyanide. In Lewis Harry's office, investigators found an open box of envelopes. When they looked at the ones left in the box, they found that three of them had the same defect as the one with the threatening letter. In fact, it was a progressive and linear defect, meaning that you could see the progression, how the defect had enlarged as the envelopes had moved down the manufacturing line. Normally, the people in post-production, in the quality control, would have culled those out rather than put them into the box. I was actually just amazed that something like that would occur. It was probably one in a million that this would have happened. This proved that Lewis Harry sent himself at least one of the threatening letters, perhaps more. And on the shelf in his office, scientists found trace amounts of cyanide. But how did Lewis Harry gain access to his wife's office building to poison the water? A keycard system is used to gain access on weekends. You have to use a card to scan in to get into the door. The office security system reveals someone entered the Transamerica office on the weekend before the poisoning. The card that had been used was Diane Harry's. And it had been used at 1018 on that Saturday. But Diane insisted she hadn't gone into the office that weekend. The information raised the question is, number one, who used the card? and it obviously made sense that if someone used the car that knew her, that person would also have access to the keys to the office. No one reported seeing a woman enter the building that weekend, but a workman recalled seeing a man enter. A subject who had been there as a workman, an outside contractor, they were waiting to get inside the building because it was locked. And he said it was sometime between 10 and 10.30 that an African-American subject pulled up in a blue sports car got out, was not very congenial, opened the door for him. He wasn't able to actually identify him or pick him out of the lineup, but he remembered that the car had a tennis racket in the back seat. Mr Harry had a tennis racket He played tennis all the time Lewis Harry was arrested and charged with the murder of Julie Williams and the attempted murder of his wife Diane But why did he do it? About a year after Julie Williams' murder, 32-year-old Lewis Harry went on trial for murder and the attempted murder of his wife, Diane. Prosecutors believe Lewis was unhappy in his marriage to Diane, whom he had been married to for less than three years Then one night in a bar he met Sharon Jones, a student at the community college where he worked Initially he misled Sharon by telling her he was separated It became serious very quickly, within three to four weeks Lewis proposed marriage to Sharon while still living with his wife, Diane. Sharon's ex-boyfriend, Roy Fitzpatrick, learned about a relationship with Lewis Harry, grew angry, then mailed the threatening letters to Lewis and his wife. These letters gave Lewis what he believed to be the perfect alibi. He'd kill his wife with cyanide, pin the murder on Roy Fitzpatrick, then he'd be free to marry Sharon. He typed three more letters, even more incriminating than the originals, and mailed them to himself. But Lewis used an envelope with a significant manufacturing flaw that tied him to those letters. Lewis bought the cyanide in a local supply store using an alias. But forensic handwriting analysis concluded that Lewis signed the receipt. Lewis tried killing his wife by putting cyanide in her alcoholic beverage, but she stopped drinking it because of its foul odor. He also put cyanide in her tea kettle. This, too, was unsuccessful. So that's when Lewis decided to use his wife's security pass to put cyanide in the office water cooler and coffee pot. On Monday morning, Julie Williams was the first one to drink from the water cooler, and she ingested a massive dose of cyanide. She was an innocent victim of a marriage gone horribly wrong. At the trial, Lewis's wife and his girlfriend sat together. Neither one thought he was capable of murder. Two girls would sit back there, the two ladies, look at me, give me dirty looks, and they were supporters of Lewis Harry. Prosecutors presented what they believed to be a possible financial motive as well. Diane Harry had the life insurance policy for $75,000, and he was the beneficiary. If she died, he was the beneficiary. He would have gotten that money. Lewis Harry was tried and convicted of first-degree murder and four counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. After almost two decades, his girlfriend is finally convinced of his guilt. Mr. Harry did a very horrendous thing. I tried to forgive him, and I can't. I still can't forgive him. Diane Harry's brother went into her attic, found more cyanide. I think it was only at that time that she realized that he had been trying to kill her. Lewis Harry is now in the Arizona State Prison Complex. During a recent telephone interview, he still maintains his innocence. I'm very sorry for Julie Williams' family. for them to have to have gone through this. As far as the actual crime itself, I didn't commit to crime, so it's kind of hard to have remorse for something that I didn't do. Investigators believe the evidence proves the exact opposite. The handwriting, the flawed envelopes, the eyewitness, and cyanide particles in his office all indicate that Lewis Harry was prepared to do anything to end his marriage, even if it meant killing others to do it. It would have been much more difficult to obtain a conviction without the evidence of the matching envelopes and without the handwriting comparison. It was like, you know, a work of art. It started, it grew, and then it came to a completion, and it was all there. There was nothing they could dispute. I don't care what defense they brought up, we defeated all of them. We'll be right back.
