Jury Gets Case of Jilted Woman Who Killed Spouse With Auto

When Clara Harris slammed her car into her husband after catching him with another woman, was it murder, an accident, or an impulse born of fury?

A Texas jury began considering the question Wednesday after lawyers delivered closing arguments in the trial of the 45-year-old suburban dentist accused of murdering David Harris last July.

Because there is little doubt that Harris hit her husband with her Mercedes-Benz, the case turns on whether she intended to kill him, lawyers for both sides told the jury.

Prosecutor Mia Magness offered a straightforward analysis: “When you run over a person again and again and again, your intent is to kill him. There is no doubt she was sorry when she was done, but she knew what she was doing.”

Defense attorney George Parnham painted Harris as an emotionally fragile woman devastated by her husband’s betrayal. When she caught him at a hotel with his girlfriend, she “spiraled down from dignity and self respect.... What does that do to your state of mind?”

Magness argued that Harris had a right to be angry but “she didn’t have the right to kill.”

“The solution is to get a divorce,” she said. “You do what every other wife would do, you take him to the cleaners. You take his car, his children, his respect in the community. You can make him wish he were dead but you don’t get to kill him.”

During the 13-day trial, six eyewitnesses said they saw Harris strike David Harris with her car, then run over him repeatedly. But in testimony this week, Clara Harris insisted it was an accident. She aimed the car not at her husband, she said, but at the parked vehicle belonging to his mistress, Gail Bridges. “I wanted to destroy her car,” Harris testified. “I was so hurt.”

Harris lurched toward a grassy median, she said, but doesn’t remember what happened next.

“I think I closed my eyes. After that, I didn’t know who was driving. Everything seemed like a dream,” she testified.

Parnham reminded jurors Wednesday that only the side of the Mercedes was damaged. “Don’t you know if you wanted to hit him and kill him, you’d do it head-on?” he asked. Parnham also reviewed the conclusions of an accident reconstruction expert who said that David Harris was hit just once and that Clara Harris circled the car three times without hitting him again.

During testimony last week, Harris described how she fought to save her marriage. She arranged to have her breasts enlarged. She joined a gym and read books on relationships.

She even took notes on a cocktail napkin as her husband held forth on the pros and cons of his wife and his mistress: Bridges was a good communicator and let him do what he wanted. Harris had prettier feet and hands. Under the heading “General Gail,” Clara Harris wrote: “has big bubs [sic].” Under “General Clara” she wrote: “will have big bubs.”

Parnham recalled the incident today to underscore his client’s increasingly frantic mental state -- and point to her husband’s callous behavior.

Until Bridges came on the scene, David Harris was an attentive husband, said Parnham, half of a “marriage made in heaven.”

His parents thought so highly of Clara Harris that they support her to this day.

“They were ideal for each other,” Mildred Harris, David’s mother, said in testimony this week. She said Clara Harris is “more like my own daughter. I love her very much.”

Magness acknowledged Wednesday that Harris has been described as a “good mother and a loving spouse.” But at this point, she said, “it’s time to call her what she is, and that’s a murderer.”

If convicted of murder, Harris faces a possible life sentence. Jurors could find her guilty of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. If, while deciding punishment, jurors determine Harris acted in the “heat of passion,” her punishment could range from two to 20 years in prison.