What She Buried | 7. A Fly in the Soup
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What sparked the investigation into Quinetta Harris’s prison case?
Some evil thing happened here.
Three people die in a quiet suburb in Mississauga, Canada.
It's not a coincidence.
One after the other in the same house. Is this bad luck or something more sinister?
The worst investigative mess I've ever encountered. A long simmering, what took you so fucking long to get here?
From Sony Music Entertainment, this is What Happened to the Harrisons. I'm Amy Dempsey Raven. What Happened to the Harrisons is available now on The Binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free.
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There's
an old adage, a journalist has never met a guilty prisoner. It refers to the fact that most prisoners go to great lengths to convince reporters of their wrongful incarceration. But it also refers to the fact that most journalists are trying to make an argument about our crooked criminal legal system. And the only way we can think to do it is by talking about entirely innocent people. But why do you need to tell the stories of the innocent to show that the system is corrupt? What does someone like Quinetta deserve? What do the women around her deserve? I would argue, nothing like what I heard on this last call with Quinetta. Nothing like what the state of Texas does in the dark corners of its prisons or behind the scenes in its courtrooms.
Quinetta's personal failings don't negate the larger truths at play here. Truths that expose our system for being murky, cruel, punitive, and full of people who have had so much bad done to them, and who, for the most part, then also did bad. Quinetta was being held in a place where the windows were nailed shut, where there was no air conditioning, where temperatures hit 127 degrees and people died of the heat. Everything smelled like raw sewage. People were breaking down. One woman spent all day singing, another screaming, another cutting herself. During this particular call, a woman was being extracted from a nearby cell with the help of some sort of spray.
Can I hear her? Is that
her screaming? Quenetta didn't know who the woman was. She called out to a friend down the wing to ask what was going on.
Monica! What's going on? She's what? She was refusing to return the population?
You could hear the frenetic energy. Like the concrete walls were vibrating. I thought of Quenetta's first letter to me. Everyone called women in prison monsters. But, she wrote, I've yet to encounter monsters, although I've met plenty of women with mental illness, untreated and undiagnosed. The woman who was screaming, she'd apparently been in solitary for a short stint. Now, the guards were telling her it was time to leave. But the woman wouldn't budge.
They're taking off the helmets now.
And what does that mean?
That means that they're not going to gas her. She's down here temporarily, probably as a result of a fight or a bad haircut. I don't know. She's for population. And she was yelling how she's scared. She don't want to leave. So they brought all them in here to try to force her like a cell extraction. Oh, she's young. Who is she, Monica? What's her name? That's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 12 people going out. Now, they don't have no staff for us to take showers, but they get staff for all this.
So they're just taking her back to general population?
Yes, and her face red like she's been crying. She looks scared.
She's twisting her body around, trying to resist. But she's outnumbered. A dozen guards with gear versus one girl. The guards hoist her up and march her away. Of course, from her cell, Quenetta could only peer down the hallway, just a bit. Because of her failing eyesight, she couldn't see anything too clearly.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What sparked the investigation into Quinetta Harris’s prison case?
0:02–8:53
2
How did the forged judge’s order lead to Quinetta’s solitary confinement?
8:53–17:39
3
What were the living conditions like for women in Texas solitary confinement?
17:39–22:09
4
How did Quinetta become an indispensable resource for other inmates?
22:09–25:55
5
What happened after Quinetta was released back to the general population?
25:55–28:59
6
Why did Quinetta write a true‑crime piece criticizing the genre?
28:59–31:24
7
How did the final prison visit with her children affect Quinetta’s decisions?
31:24–33:17
8
What lingering questions remain about Quinetta’s story and its impact?
33:17–33:30