From a Chamber of Horrors to Death Row

The Harris family was especially handsome, headed by a strapping, well-spoken hero of World War II. And like many before them, they came to California from the East in search of a better life.

But within weeks of the Harrises’ arrival in this Central Valley farming town in 1962, authorities found that the man of the family had broken all parental taboos. Kenneth Harris Sr., an alcoholic, beat his children and molested his two oldest daughters.

Sometimes, he would load his rifle, tell the children to run, then go “hunting” for them. The older ones struggled to hush the babies, for fear their hiding places would be uncovered. Harris’ wife, Evelyn, an alcoholic who bore nine children, was too frail and battered to step in.

It was “probably the worst (family) we ever dealt with,” said Francis Beck, at the time a Tulare County probation officer. Although the elder Harris seemed proper and dignified, when he spoke “the emotional part wasn’t there,” recalled William Brazil, Beck’s partner.

A quarter of a century later, Beck can still picture 10-year-old Robert, the fifth-oldest. He was particularly “bright looking.” But Beck was shocked by what he remembered as Robert’s initial run-in with the local law: killing neighborhood cats.

Today, Robert Alton Harris, a convicted killer, sits on San Quentin’s Death Row, passing what may be the last hours of his life. The state attorney general is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a stay of Harris’ scheduled execution that was granted by a federal appellate judge on Friday, thereby sending him to his death at 3 a.m. Tuesday.

Top death penalty defense lawyers are fighting to win Harris a new day in court. The lawyers argue that the crimes that landed Harris on Death Row may be the result of brain damage--his mother is said to have abused alcohol when she was pregnant with him; his father beat him into unconsciousness more than once. Therefore, the lawyers contend, he should not be executed.

In a case that shocked San Diego and the rest of California, Harris shot and killed John Mayeski and Michael Baker, both 16 and best friends, near Miramar Reservoir outside San Diego on the morning of July 5, 1978. He laughed about the murders, ate remnants of the boys’ lunches, and noticed a piece of flesh clinging to the barrel of his gun. Commenting how he “really blew (one of the boy’s) brains out,” he “flicked the flesh out into the street.” That recollection came from Daniel Harris, his brother and accuser, whose testimony at Robert’s 1979 trial caused an alternate juror to faint.

With Daniel in tow, Robert Harris had kidnaped the boys from a shopping center parking lot because he wanted Mayeski’s car for a getaway from what a prosecutor called a “lousy” bank robbery. He forced them to drive to the reservoir, promising no harm would come to them. But as they walked away, shooting began. Mayeski fell first. Then Robert Harris chased Baker. The boy tried to hide, and pleaded for his life, Daniel Harris testified.

“God can’t help you now, boy. You’re going to die,” one witness quoted Robert Harris as saying.

The Harris brothers were arrested minutes after the robbery. By nightfall, Robert had confessed to the murders. In past statements, he has said he does not know why he killed the boys. Raymond Cameron, a San Diego County district attorney’s investigator on the case, says there is no mystery. A witness testified that Harris confided he “couldn’t have no punks walking around” to identify him.

Harris has refused recent interview requests. But based on interviews with his siblings, friends and accusers, together with a review of thousands of pages of court transcripts and reports, it is apparent that Harris’ path to the brink of California’s gas chamber began with life in a childhood chamber of horrors.

Sitting in a park in Visalia, Barbara Mason, Harris’ oldest sister and a twice-divorced mother of four, recalled her father and her childhood, and clutched herself against the sudden chills that ran up her spine.

Her paternal grandmother was a Sunday school teacher with such Victorian attitudes toward sex that she would sniff his hands when he returned from the outhouse to make certain he had not masturbated, Barbara said, relating stories that he told. In his twisted mind, Barbara said, he believed he could teach his children not to be ashamed of their bodies if he exposed himself.

When World War II broke out, he enlisted. He survived combat in Europe, won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart and spent three months recovering from a shrapnel wound to the chest. He attained the rank of warrant officer, and made the Army his career.

By the time his wife was pregnant with their fifth child, he had become a big drinker. Convinced she was having an affair, he kicked her in the stomach and forced her into early labor. The baby, born at Ft. Bragg, N.C., stayed two months in an Army hospital under intensive care.

“Robert was born in pain,” Barbara said, “and lived through pain all of his life.”

At Robert’s trial, his mother said her husband didn’t acknowledge he had fathered Robert until the boy became a teen and began to resemble him. But all through his younger years, Harris suffered for his father’s wrongheaded jealousy. There was the time that the elder Harris knocked him out of his high chair.

“His nose bled so profusely that it bled clear through the pillow,” Evelyn Harris said at Robert’s trial. “Oh, lookie, Evelyn,” his father was quoted as saying, “your baby is bleeding to death.” She waited until her husband left before taking him to the Army infirmary. “Rather than cause trouble and all, I told them down there he fell out of his high chair.”

Robert was especially close to a brother 13 months his senior. Today, the brother, who asked that his name not be used to protect his career in another state, tries to understand why he straightened himself out and Robert failed. They were two of a kind. As children, they explored together, they got into trouble together, and, when they could, they comforted one another.

“When you’re a kid and you see your mother slapped down by your father, you know it’s serious,” the brother said. “I remember me and Robbie, we would huddle up together.”

Perhaps, he said, Robert failed because he was “slower” than the other kids. “Having parents who were so authoritarian, we’d get smacked up-side the head or shouted at. He was slower, so he got it more than the rest of us.”

Perhaps, the brother said, “I was just luckier.”

In the Harris family, luck was relative. Kenneth Harris Sr. retired from the Army on Oct. 31, 1962. Leaving $2,500 behind in debts in South Carolina, he headed West in a 1956 Buick with a wife six months pregnant and eight children, 2 to 16.

On Dec. 7, 1962, they pulled into Linnell Center, a cluster of cabins and outhouses near Visalia used primarily by farm workers and run by the Tulare County Housing Authority.

On Jan. 17, 1963, two days after Robert Harris turned 10, police came for his father. It fell to William Brazil, a 27-year-old probation officer, to investigate the elder Harris.

In stilted official language, Brazil’s reports tell how Barbara, then 15, was detained for shoplifting. Fearing the wrath of her parents, not wanting to go home, she let loose with stories of sexual abuse by her father.

Sister Rheadawn, 12, confirmed it all. She told of the day she stayed home from school to care for her younger brothers. Her father, she said, called her into his room and forced her to masturbate him.

“The victim states that when she or her sister declined their father’s advances he would strike them,” Brazil’s report said.

The elder Harris pleaded guilty to charges filed against him. A judge declared him to be a mentally disordered sex offender and sent him to Atascadero state hospital. Given his military background, he quickly adjusted to institutional life.

“It is considered,” the impressed Atascadero psychologists said when they returned him to Visalia in June, 1964, “this man is unlikely to offend against society again.”

But that December, he went home one evening from the packing plant where he worked, began to drink whiskey and became abusive. Then, sitting at the dinner table, he began to choke and coughed up blood. His wife and Rheadawn helped him to a bedroom.

Evelyn Harris emerged from the bedroom and told a son to call the police. The officers arrived to find the elder Harris drunk, orally copulating Rheadawn. He was hauled away, in view of his crying children. This time, he served five years in prison.

Looking back, Brazil and Beck know the children should have been placed in foster homes. The parents “had no business at that point in their lives rearing kids,” said Beck, now a criminology professor at a junior college in Visalia. But the times and the place worked against the Harris family.

“Thirty years ago in Visalia, we’re talking about 14,000 people. The level of service was minimal at best,” Beck said. “The system didn’t pick up on the red flag. It should have.”

The family’s life continued to spiral downward. They lived on welfare. Evelyn Harris went to bars. She took the kids on the road, and met a man who went by many names. They all followed the crops, sleeping in their car and a tent. Discipline disappeared.

“We were allowed to drink,” said the older brother that Robert was close to. “We were allowed to do whatever we wanted to do.”

The brother left home when he was 14. As Robert told it in his trial, his mother told him to hit the road soon after, when he turned 14. He followed his brother to Oklahoma, where a sister, Barbara, was living.

The arrangement didn’t last. The brother caught Robert sniffing paint and glue. When he tried to intervene, the brothers fought. Robert ran off. With two friends, he stole a car, made his way to Florida and was arrested. Since no parent was willing to take him, he remained in custody for five years.

He left jail tough and cold. But he did learn to weld and for a time, it seemed, he was headed for success. He married in 1973 and had a son. But as he later told it, his wife left him when he “beat her up pretty bad one day.” She could not be reached, and has not been in contact with Harris in years. Harris hasn’t seen his son, now about 16, since the boy was a baby.

In 1975, Harris’ troubles turned deadly. He was living in the Imperial County town of Seeley, and one night was drinking with a neighbor named James Wheeler. Harris began slapping Wheeler in play fight. Soon, the play became sadistic. He doused Wheeler with lighter fluid and tossed matches at him. He sheared Wheeler’s hair. By morning, Wheeler was dead.

Harris pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and served 2 1/2 years at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. His parole in January, 1978, was a failure from the start. Imperial Beach police arrested him for drunk driving 12 days after his release. He quit a job as a welder, and moved out of a halfway house.

Then he hit on the idea of robbing a bank and enlisted his brother Daniel, three weeks past his 18th birthday. On the morning of July 5, 1978, Harris saw Baker and Mayeski in the latter’s car, eating lunches of hamburgers, soft drinks, French fries and turnovers. Pistol in hand, he told them to drive.

After the teens had been murdered, the brothers returned to the Mira Mesa home of Robert Harris’ girlfriend. He carried the food bag in from the car, evidently intending to destroy the evidence. First, he took a bite, and offered a lemon turnover to Daniel. Daniel threw up. “He laughed at me and said I didn’t have the stomach to take it because I refused it,” Daniel testified.

Twenty minutes later, the brothers drove a mile and a half to a San Diego Trust & Savings Bank. Robert pulled a gun and Daniel grabbed $3,000. A man who watched them leave tailed them to the girlfriend’s house and called the police, who arrived within minutes. Less than two hours after Mayeski’s car had been stolen, the deadly escapade was over.

As he investigated the murder in 1978, Cameron found Harris’ father living in a trailer in Chula Vista. He wouldn’t discuss his past problems. But he did have an explanation for Robert’s actions. “He never was any good,” the old man said.

Harris’ trial began in January, 1979. It ended fast. On March, 14, 1979, he arrived on Death Row. Daniel served time for the bank robbery and was off parole by 1983. He is married and has three children.

At first, Robert Harris found life on Death Row hard. Other prisoners shunned him. But over time, he formed relationships. Earlier this year, several prisoners and two guards wrote letters to the courts vouching for his generosity and saying he gets along with inmates and staff.

While on Death Row, Harris made one lasting friend, writer Michael Kroll, a lifelong death penalty abolitionist. Kroll met Harris in 1982 as he worked on an article and has visited him weekly since, Thanksgiving and Christmas included.

Harris has given flesh to Kroll’s view that the death penalty is barbaric. In a court filing, Harris said, “I love this man.” Last Christmas, he knitted a scarf for Kroll. Kroll, in turn, has been a link to the outside, delivering to Harris news of court defeats and acting as his defender.

If Harris was a cruel and “laughing killer” in 1978, “there’s genuine humility now,” Kroll said.

“He wishes that he could undo what he did,” Kroll said. “But he knows he can’t. All the wishing in the world won’t undo it.”

Though he made friends in prison, Harris never made peace with his parents. Evelyn Harris died of cancer in 1981. At the time, she was on probation from a bank robbery committed in a drunken stupor in Porterville. Police arrested her outside the bank. She said she wanted to get caught so she might get help for her drinking.

Kenneth Harris Sr., emaciated and suffering from emphysema, turned a shotgun on himself in April, 1989, in the San Bernardino County town of Highland.

Several of Robert’s brothers and sisters, meanwhile, are haunted both by their childhood memories and his crime. “I know their names,” Barbara said of her brother’s victims. “I know what they look like. In my sleep, I see them. I hear screams that don’t exist.”