Suburban Madness
Why would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It's quite simple, really. He was having an affair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose ex-husband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping scheme designed to catch the two in the act and cover up his own infidelities with her former Lamaze-class buddy. Any questions?
LOVE CONNECTION: Clockwise from top row: Clara Harris, David Harris; Chuck Knight, Julie Knight; Steve Wells, Laurie Wells; Steve Bridges, Gail Bridges
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON OF July 24, Clara Harris, a pretty and personable 44-year-old dentist from the Houston suburbs, put on a silky blue blouse and cream-colored slacks. She brushed her hair and tied it in place with a little bow. She then took Lindsey, her husband's sixteen-year-old daughter from a brief first marriage, for a drive in her silver S-Class 430 Mercedes-Benz.
Clara loved her Mercedes-Benz. She had once told her husband, David Harris, a spectacularly successful orthodontist who had as many as 120 crooked-teethed adolescents a day coming through his office, that the only extravagance in life she cared about was owning a Mercedes. For her, the car was a shining symbol of all that she had been able to accomplish. She had been born in Bogotá, Colombia, and raised by her widowed mother. Determined to make a living for herself, she had studied dentistry there before coming to the United States for more training in the late eighties. With her thick red hair and perfect smile and little mole on her left cheek, she looked like a beauty queen. In fact, she had been. She was crowned Miss Colombia Houston in a local contest soon after completing her residency at the University of Texas-Houston Dental Branch. "I remember David calling soon after he had met Clara and telling me he was completely smitten," his father, Gerald, would later tell me.
Clara felt no differently about David. They had met in 1991, when they were both in their early thirties and working at the Castle Dental Center in Houston. David was not only brilliant when it came to teeth—he had graduated second in his class (also from the Houston Dental Branch)—but he had a charming, folksy nature, his favorite word being "golly." They married on Valentine's Day, 1992, less than a year after their first date, and held the reception at the Nassau Bay Hilton hotel, about thirty miles south of downtown Houston, across the highway from the looming Johnson Space Center and not far from where David would eventually open his first practice, Space Center Orthodontics. "I found the best," Clara once told a reporter from a Brazoria County newspaper serving Lake Jackson, a nearby community where she had opened her own dental practice in 1993. "I found the one God had reserved for me." She put photographs of the two of them in her office, replacing them with new ones every few months, and she talked to David two or three times a day on the phone, never hanging up before saying, "I love you." In 1998 she gave birth to healthy twin sons, and she enjoyed a splendid relationship with David's daughter, Lindsey, a talented violinist who lived with them in the summers after spending the school year with her mother, who had moved to Ohio. No matter how many patients Clara had to see, she always got home in time to cook dinner for her family in their palatial white-brick home, worth more than half a million dollars, in the cheerily named suburb of Friendswood. She had the perfect life, she often told her patients. "For Clara, it was always 'David, David, David,'" one of her co-workers said. "I used to tell people that I wished I could be able to love my husband in the same way that Clara loved David."
But on that July evening, David Harris had decided not to be with his wife. He was meeting a receptionist who worked at his office, a petite, stylish 39-year-old mother of three named Gail Bridges. Less than two years earlier, Gail had divorced Steven Bridges, a popular State Farm agent who had clients all over the suburbs south of Houston. They too seemingly had the perfect life. They had lived in an exclusive gated subdivision called South Shore Harbor, in League City, a suburb just across Interstate 45 from Friendswood. After carpooling her kids to school, Gail, a former high school cheerleader, could be found at a La Madeleine, sipping coffee and chatting with other beautiful mothers. She had flawless alabaster skin, eyes as brown as almonds, and a pixieish Dorothy Hamill-like hair cut. Compared with other neighborhood wives, her breast implants were not overly large. But after her divorce in November 2000, she moved to a smaller home in an ungated neighborhood, and she eventually started looking for work. When she was hired by Space Center Orthodontics in August 2001, she was making only about $1,800 a month—hardly the kind of money she was used to. But she did like the job, in part because she got along famously with the orthodontist. Dr. Harris started lingering at the front desk to talk to her. In late February 2002 he quietly asked her if she would like to have lunch at Perry's Restaurant. By April or May, they were intimate. They began meeting at the Nassau Bay Hilton, the site of his wedding reception, where the rooms had views overlooking the water.
That's where David had asked Gail to meet him on July 24. He used cash to purchase a room under an assumed name, and together they walked into an elevator and headed upstairs. When they came back down, about an hour and a half later, Clara and Lindsey were standing in the lobby.
It is not known if David got a chance to say something to his daughter or to Clara. What witnesses remember is Clara lunging at Gail and screaming, "You bitch, he's my husband!" Then she slapped at Gail, grabbed her shirt, and tore it off. She also shouted, "This is Dr. David Harris and he's f—ing this woman right here!" At the same time, Lindsey began hitting her father with her purse, screaming, "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!"
Hotel employees tried to intervene, but Clara, her rage building, kept grabbing at Gail. At one point, she and Gail were pulling on opposite ends of Gail's shirt as if they were in a tug-of-war contest. Finally, according to one witness, David put his hand on his wife's head, pushed her to the floor, and along with a hotel employee, quickly escorted Gail out the lobby doors to her car, a Lincoln Navigator, in one of the hotel's parking lots.
The confrontation seemed to have ended. Hotel employees walked Clara and Lindsey back to the Mercedes in another parking lot and asked them to leave. Clara started the car. Suddenly, she gunned the engine and raced toward the parking area where her husband was standing with Gail. The Mercedes glanced off the Navigator and then hit David before he could get out of the way, propelling him 25 feet across the lot.
Witnesses heard Lindsey screaming. They saw her open the door and stick her feet on the ground, attempting either to escape or stop the car. But Clara again aimed her car at her husband's crumpled body and pressed the accelerator. The Mercedes bounced twice as the front tires and then the back tires rolled over him. She whipped the car around, hit the accelerator again, and drove over her husband a second time. Then she did another one-eighty and ran over him a third time before coming to a stop.
According to witnesses, Lindsey then got out of the car, rushed around to the driver's side, and punched Clara in the face. Then she collapsed on the ground and sobbed. When Clara got out of the car, she didn't seem to know what to do, the witnesses said. She finally walked over to her husband. She stared at him. And then, she too began to sob. Before the police arrived to arrest her for murder, the witnesses added, she cradled him in her arms, and begged him to breathe. "I'm so sorry," she was heard saying over and over. "David, I'm so sorry. I love you."
THE MURDER MADE HEADLINES ALL over the world. One of the English tabloids nicknamed Clara the Driller Killer. The New York Post's headline tagged her "Mad Wife at Wheel." On network television, the morning talk shows interviewed just about anyone they could find who knew something about her, and even the late-night comedians used her as fodder for jokes in their opening monologues. When Clara emerged from seclusion for her court appearance after her release from jail on $30,000 bail, nearly a dozen photographers were there to capture her every move. Perhaps because she didn't want to be recognized in public, she had changed the color of her hair from reddish blond to dark brown. She sat in the courtroom between two friends, wearing an elegant teal pantsuit, staring straight ahead, blinking back tears. Her wedding ring was still on her left hand.
It was rare to find Clara not weeping, said her lawyer, George Parnham, who gained national attention last year for his sympathetic defense of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children. Parnham told reporters that Clara was still having difficulty believing that David would never again walk through the front door of their home. A couple of her close friends told me they had spent nights at her home because they were afraid she would become suicidal if she was left alone for too long. The only thing that kept Clara going, they said, was her love for her sons, who were just about to reach their fourth birthdays.
For weeks, people could not stop talking about her. The scene of a vengeful suburban wife tearing off the blouse of her husband's mistress, then furiously mowing down her husband, then having an abrupt change of heart and crying out for him to live, was so horrific, and so outlandishly dramatic, that it could have been lifted straight out of a classic film noir. Local radio talk shows were jammed with callers saying that Clara should not be severely punished for what she had done. More than one caller suggested that David had signed his own death warrant the moment he left the Hilton with Gail instead of with his wife and daughter. In the letters to the editor section of the Houston Chronicle, one writer blamed the entire fiasco on the other woman, Gail Bridges, for wanting to carry on an extramarital affair with David. Another blamed David for choosing to stray. Clara Harris, one woman wrote, had simply "acted out" the fantasy of every woman who learns her husband is having an affair.
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