Benny Sieu
Tracy Harrington gives her father, Harley Harrington, a kiss after they leave Sheboygan North High School, where they gave a scholarship in honor of Kelly Harrington, who died of a drug overdose in Pewaukee nearly two years ago. The family wants answers about the circumstances of Kelly’s death. At right is Tracy and Kelly’s mother Dorie Harrington.
Woman died from drug overdose
By Gina Barton of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: May 30, 2010 |(4) Comments
Kelly Harrington, the wife of a reclusive millionaire, died almost two years ago.
The Waukesha County medical examiner's office worked for five months but couldn't reach a conclusion about whether the drug overdose that killed her was an accident, a homicide or a suicide.
The Pewaukee Police Department labeled Harrington's death suspicious, but its investigation stalled after investigators encountered only dead ends after 11 months.
When the Pewaukee department disbanded in December, the case fell through the cracks. The Waukesha County Sheriff's Department took over Pewaukee's open cases, but no one alerted it to Harrington's file.
Harrington's relatives are frustrated. They want an explanation for the strange circumstances surrounding her death. And they want someone held accountable, even if it's only for providing Harrington, 45, with the drugs that killed her.
"I would like to see a real investigation," said Harrington's brother-in-law, Rick Halverson.
Otherwise, said her sister, Tracy Harrington, "It's an injustice that will just be forever."
The call to police
At 9:34 a.m. July 16, 2008, Pewaukee police responded to a 911 call from the Five Fields apartment complex. The caller, David W. Mead, said his wife was not breathing and had no pulse, according to a police report. The medical examiner would later determine Harrington had been dead for several hours. Oxycodone, a painkiller; methadone, a liquid used to help wean heroin addicts; cocaine; marijuana; alcohol; and a prescribed seizure medication were found in her system.
Mead, then 56, told police he had last seen his wife around midnight when she went into the bedroom. The couple had been staying at the apartment temporarily while their Muskego home was being repaired after an electrical fire.
Harrington had spent the evening drinking white wine while Mead watched the baseball All-Star Game, he told police the next morning. Although he said the empty wine bottle should be on the kitchen counter, it was never found.
Mead told police he slept on the couch. Around 7 a.m., he woke up and went to Muskego to feed their horses. He said he returned around 9:30 a.m. and checked on Harrington, whom he found on her knees on the floor with her head in her hands. The 911 dispatcher told Mead to turn her over and attempt CPR, which he did, although her body was already cold.
The question
Outside the apartment, a woman approached one of the officers on the scene.
"What's going on?" she asked. "Is everything all right?"
"Everything is fine," Officer J.L. Bertonas answered. "There is no reason to be alarmed."
The woman lived directly below Mead and Harrington in an apartment that was laid out exactly the same way as theirs. She told the officer she often heard the couple talking loudly and slamming doors. That morning around 7:15 a.m. she heard thumping, as well as loud male and female voices, the neighbor said. The thumping was directly above her head as she stood near her bedroom closet - the same area where Harrington's body was found in the bedroom above.
The neighbor said she saw Mead leave the apartment around 7:45 a.m.
But according to Mead's statements, he had left without talking to his wife, and no one else was at the apartment.
Later that day, a friend of the couple, John R. Brown, showed up at the apartment. He told police he had been there the night before Harrington died. She was fine when he left around 10:30 p.m., Brown said.
Only months later, in September, did Mead tell police his wife and Brown had been alone in the bedroom together. Mead suspected the two had been using drugs. In a follow-up interview with police, Brown denied that.
"Based upon the inconsistency in Mead's statements," a Pewaukee detective later wrote in a search warrant affidavit, "this appears to be a suspicious death."
Numerous attempts by the Journal Sentinel to reach Mead were unsuccessful, including mail, telephone calls and a visit to his Muskego home. Brown also could not be reached.
Husband's claims
According to a police report, Mead said Harrington had a history of hearing voices that told her to harm herself. Harrington's mental health issues, her husband suspected, "got the best of her and she purposely took too many drugs," according to a police report.
Mead said the same thing at Harrington's funeral, Halverson said.
Halverson didn't believe it. Nether did Harrington's parents, Harley and Dorie Harrington.
In fact, when the police showed up at their Sheboygan home to tell them of their daughter's death, Dorie Harrington immediately suspected Mead, according to a police report.
"He's responsible for this," she told the officer.
The Sunday before her death, Kelly Harrington went to brunch with her parents and brother, they said. She seemed in good spirits.
The day her body was found, Harrington was scheduled to show up at her brother's office with lunch for him.
"I waited for her, but I had the police instead of my sister," he said.
How they met
Harrington's sister, Tracy, introduced Mead and Harrington at a wedding in the mid-1980s.
"David came up to me and said something like, 'If I could meet someone as wonderful as your sister, I would turn my life around.' " Tracy Harrington recalled.
Kelly Harrington was always popular. She was voted prettiest girl in the class of 1981 at Sheboygan North High School, where she was on the cross country team, her family said. She played the violin, flute, guitar and mandolin. Her love of animals extended beyond her family's dogs and cats. When baby birds fell out of their nests, Harrington would hand-feed them mashed-up worms and oatmeal, her mother said.
Although Harrington was never all that into money, she seemed impressed with the freedom and excitement Mead's $6 million inheritance could buy.
Harrington had been working as a legal secretary when she met Mead, her brother and sister said. After Harrington married Mead in Las Vegas in 1989, she became a professional student, taking classes in everything from American Sign Language to photography.
Mead worked part-time at Alpine Valley and Summerfest. He introduced Harrington to many musicians and celebrities, including the Violent Femmes and Bruce Willis, who told her she was cute, Tracy Harrington said.
Mead also was involved with drugs. In 1996 he was convicted of possessing drugs without a prescription, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to 15 days in jail, according to online court records. In 2001, he was convicted of delivery of cocaine, a felony, and served five years on probation. In a related case, Brown was convicted of possession with intent to deliver cocaine, a felony, and of misdemeanor marijuana possession.
At the time of his wife's death, Mead told police he had been clean since 2001. Brown said he had used drugs only one more time after that arrest, according to a police report.
Harrington used marijuana and possibly cocaine with Mead, but not heroin or methadone, her relatives said.
Mead told police he had been sleeping on the couch for five years. For two years, Harrington lived alone in an apartment while Mead stayed at their home in Muskego, her parents and siblings said. She eventually moved back in with him. At times, she went for long stretches without contacting her family members.
Her brother, Harley Harrington, said he accompanied his sister to an appointment with a divorce attorney, but the lawyer said he could not represent Kelly Harrington because he had done work for Mead's family.
A car crash
About five years before she died, Harrington was involved in a serious car accident in Illinois. Mead believed she plowed her car into a concrete freeway barrier in an attempt to kill herself, according to a Pewaukee police report.
Her family believes it was an accident that occurred as she tried to wrest herself from her husband's control, they said in interviews with the Journal Sentinel. She ended up in a mental hospital.
"They thought she was bipolar," her mother said.
After that, Harrington was plagued by seizures, her family said. She became paranoid that toxic mold growing in her house would kill her, and once told her parents her house was surrounded by men with guns. She heard voices coming from her computer and begged her brother to come over and silence them.
"She would yell at the voices," her brother said. "She would throw stuff out the window at them - objects, money; everything went out the window, telling them to shut up."
Harrington denied using drugs but sometimes called her parents or siblings while under the influence. In desperation, they called the police, hoping that if Harrington were arrested, at least she would be safe. But it didn't happen.
"It was horrifying," her sister said.
Death certificate delay
Although Kelly Harrington died in July 2008, the medical examiner's office did not issue a death certificate until December, according to Deputy Medical Examiner Kristine Klenz.
Although Klenz is certain a combination of drugs and alcohol caused Harrington's death, she can't be sure if it was an accident, a homicide or a suicide.
The witness statements all pointed in different directions, she said in an interview, and none of the accounts can be confirmed by physical evidence.
In January 2009, shortly after Klenz listed the manner of Harrington's death as "undetermined," Pewaukee police officer Brian Fredericks was assigned to do a follow-up investigation.
He realized no one had requested the tape of Mead's 911 call reporting his wife's death. By then, though, the tape had been destroyed.
Fredericks sent a rolled-up $10 bill from the apartment where Harrington died to the State Crime Laboratory. It contained traces of cocaine, one of the drugs found in Harrington's body, which wasn't a surprise.
The officer subpoenaed phone records for the land line in the apartment where Harrington died as well as for her cell phone and those of her husband and of Brown. But there was no useful evidence among the lists of calls.
Fredericks talked with Harrington's family again. He re-interviewed Mead and Brown but learned nothing new.
"At this point, there is no further information available and this case shall thus remain dormant pending new information," Fredericks wrote in a report dated June 22, 2009.
Legal avenues
The family hired an attorney. But the potential civil case - which has a lower standard of proof than a criminal case would - stalled because of the money it would take for a thorough private investigation.
The statute of limitations for filing a civil suit is two years; it will lapse in July.
There is precedent in southeastern Wisconsin for criminal charges against people who provide drugs that cause an overdose.
For example, a charge of delivering non-narcotic drugs, a felony, is pending against Brittany Blue, 19, of Glendale, accused of being the source of pills that contributed to the death of Whitefish Bay teen Madison Kiefer. The statutes of limitations for such crimes vary. There is no time limit for filing homicide charges.
Pewaukee did not flag Harrington's case when it was handed over to the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department, said Karen Ruff, captain of detectives for the Sheriff's Department. It was not on her radar screen until she was contacted by the Journal Sentinel earlier this month, she said.
"I will assign it to one of my detectives," she said. "We will review all the reports, all the work the city did, and see if there's anything else we can do."
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