Slowly the reality pressed back in on him. His daughter would not be coming back in the house, ever. Kimberly Rae Harbour was dead. The ringing doorbell had been a dream.
"These are the things I experience now," says Harbour, 52, a computer specialist. He sits at his kitchen table gazing at the bronzed baby shoe and framed childhood photographs of Kimberly, who was 26. "Even though I know she's dead, I'm hoping and praying that by some miracle she's going to come back. I know that's impossible, but this is the way I'm dealing with the grief. I just can't accept the way she died."
Even hardened Boston homicide detectives could not recall a murder so vicious. Kimberly—whose naked body was found Nov. 1 on a playing field across from the Franklin Field housing projects in inner-city Dorchester—had been raped, stomped, beaten with a tree limb and stabbed more than 100 times. Observes veteran police detective William Fogerty: "I never saw anything like this done to another human by anyone before."
Yet the crime received scant public attention. There were no daily headlines in the Boston papers, which did not look beyond the police department's terse announcement that a woman had died of multiple stab wounds and multiple trauma, marking the city's 119th homicide of the year. Mayor Raymond Flynn did not launch a massive dragnet in search of the killers, as he had when white, middle-class Carol Stuart had been shot the year before, by an assailant now believed to have been her own husband. The talk shows did not crackle with calls for a death-penalty law in Massachusetts. There was virtual silence.
The police, meanwhile, quietly went about their work. On Nov. 19, just 18 days after her body was found, Boston cops arrested eight Franklin Field area teenagers for the rape and murder of Kimberly Harbour. All have pleaded not guilty and are being held without bail.
When the details of the appalling crime came out at the suspects' arraignments, some black activists accused the police of racism, charging that by not publicizing the crime they had jeopardized the community's safety. "The police should have warned the community of the magnitude of the brutality against this woman," says Sadiki Kambon, director of the Black Information Center in Dorchester. "Who's to say that this pack of dogs wouldn't have gone out the next night or the next week and got more victims?" Kambon contrasts the case of Harbour, a black drug addict and sometime prostitute, with that of Carol Stuart or New York City's Central Park Jogger. "If, in fact, the mutilated body of a white female had been found, there would have been a very, very different response by the Boston police. They would have been into our neighborhoods in force, harassing every black they could get their hands on."
But Russell Harbour, who feared that the police would view Kimberly as "just another black face, another black body," now lauds their work. He in fact criticizes the cops' critics, none of whom have had the courtesy to call him, he says.
The police, for their part, say the investigation was properly conducted and that the arrests prove it. Critical details of a crime should always be withheld, they say, because publicity prompts suspects to flee and undermines the credibility of witnesses by making the facts of a crime common knowledge. Deputy Police Superintendent William Celester, who is black, says critics are blaming the police for the media's mistakes. "I think the press would have probably played it up bigger if it was a white woman," he says, "but the police wouldn't have."
Amid the uproar over the response—or lack of it—to Kimberly Harbour's killing, one point is not in dispute: She gained far more attention dead than she ever did while she was alive.
The doorbell rang at the Back Bay, Boston, home of Russell Harbour and his first wife, Ernestine, one fall night in 1964. At the door were two prostitutes, and in the arms of one was the 3-month-old daughter of a drug-addicted prostitute friend. The baby, Harbour recalls, was severely undernourished and sickly, with burn marks on her body. Harbour had befriended the street people in the neighborhood, and so they came to him for aid. He and his wife, childless themselves, took the baby to the hospital and eventually, with the consent of the mother, adopted her.
Despite the best efforts of her adoptive parents, Kimberly Harbour's life would not be an easy one. Growing up in Dorchester, five blocks from the field where she died, Kimberly early on showed signs of high intelligence but also of hyperactivity. Starting at age 5, she saw psychiatrists for a dozen years, but her disruptiveness at school only increased, though she was an A student, her father says. She apparently took her adoption, and the Harbours' divorce when she was 10, as evidence of rejection. Time at a Catholic boarding school and, briefly, in a foster home did little to arrest her downward spiral. She dropped out of school at 18, and within a few years had become addicted to drugs.
"As hard as she tried to get her life together," recalls Russell Harbour, "I guess there was some other force out there that was stronger, pulling her the other way." Kimberly shunned the middle-class life that her father had earned during his 21 years' work in computer operations for Bull HN Information Systems in Billerica—a job from which he was laid off last March. She gravitated instead to the denizens of the street. "The worse off they were, the better she liked them," says Harbour. "And the more she would go out of her way for them. You couldn't ever meet another person as good as Kim. Kim was never a hard person."
In fact she was hard only on herself, and a poem she wrote for her father 10 years ago poignantly expresses her predicament: "One burden after another that's what I am/ Always getting into a jam/ One disappointment after another that's what I do/ I'm not trying to hurt you."
After Kimberly bore a daughter, Tatiana, out of wedlock seven years ago, she worked a series of office jobs, most recently for the U.S. Census. But she couldn't shake her problems with cocaine and crack, and in the end she would sometimes work the streets. When her father moved to the suburbs two years ago, the move didn't suit her. Finally she sent Tatiana to Virginia to live with Kimberly's adoptive mother (who could not be reached for comment). Her last touchstone gone, Kimberly simply drifted, sleeping at the apartments of friends.
On Halloween night, at about 10:30, she and her friend Laura Peterson went to buy cigarettes. Nearby, according to the police, some youths had been sharing 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. Police say that most, if not all, of these teenagers hung out in a group, calling themselves the Franklin Field Pistons—after the NBA champion Detroit Pistons—and that they aspired to become feared and famous. Wearing dark clothing and Halloween masks, police say, they headed for Franklin Field, looking for women to rob. Along the edge of the park, they came upon Harbour and Peterson.
According to Peterson, the assailants waylaid her first, but she broke away and bolted into the street. Kimberly ran screaming in the opposite direction, onto the playing fields. The pack quickly caught up with her.
Exactly what happened next is known only by the people who killed her. But according to the testimony of Det. Peter J. O'Malley, a number of the youths raped and stabbed Harbour. "At least one of them beat her with a tree limb. He broke it twice hitting her," says O'Malley. "And another one broke a beer bottle over her head. And they kicked and stomped, and one of them was jumping up and down, running up in the air and jumping on her."
Cops say the robbery netted Kimberly Harbour's coat and $1.
Led by Detective O'Malley, 54, police began working the case at 7:00 the next morning, after a man walking his dog came upon the unknown woman's body. "None of those people called us up, the residents there," recalls O'Malley. "And as we understand it, everybody up there knew who did it, But because of fear of retaliation or whatever, they didn't choose to tell us." Ironically, O'Malley had headed the investigation of the Carol Stuart case. A report by Massachusetts Attorney General James Shannon's office criticized O'Malley for allegedly intimidating witnesses in that case into implicating a black man who turned out to be innocent. O'Malley declines to comment on the report.
Russell Harbour, notified by a friend of Kimberly's that she was missing and that a woman had been killed, went to the morgue on the evening of Nov. 1 and identified the body. Meanwhile, Kimberly's attackers apparently couldn't stop talking about what they had done. Patrolman Leonard Shand found sources on the street who led detectives to one of the alleged killers. "[He] told us the whole thing," says O'Malley. On Nov. 19 eight suspects were rounded up. They were Corey James, 19, Carlos Garcia, 18, Che Barnes, now 18, and one 16-year-old and four 15-year-olds whose names were not released because they are juveniles. According to Garcia's attorney, Bernard Grossberg, his client made no statement to police and the other defendants gave conflicting statements. "It's really difficult to decipher who did what," says Grossberg.
"It's hard to fathom that people that age could do something this terrible to another human being," says O'Malley. "It's beyond my comprehension."
Some of the defendants have had prior run-ins with the law, but nothing like this. "I knew they had potential for serious ass whippin'," says high school basketball coach Kenneth Kirby, former executive director of the Franklin Field Task Force. "But as far as wanton, senseless murder, that's another story. These guys who ran around calling themselves the Pistons—I'd never seen them as a gang. I saw it more as teenagers hanging out. But, Lord knows, they've been trying to be identified as a gang, writing on buildings, PISTONS, PISTONS, PISTONS."
If they did commit the crime, they may have done it to gain recognition. "It's a way to make a name for yourself," says Rodney Dailey, executive director of Gang Peace, an organization that combats youth violence. "What [the crime] says is, the gang could do that to you, because they did that to her. Fear is what gets the respect."
There is no shortage of fear in Boston—just one of a dozen big cities to set new records for homicides last year. Harbour's murder prompted the state House of Representatives to pass unanimously a bill making it easier to try 14-to-16-year-olds as adults for murder. Previously such bills had languished for seven years. This one was signed into law by Gov. Michael Dukakis last month. "Kimberly Harbour put it over the top," said one of the bill's proponents.
The law's deterrent effect—if any—of course comes too late to help Kimberly or her father, whose suffering this past year defies imagination. Just 19 days before Kimberly's death, Russell's son, Kurry, 21—also adopted—pleaded guilty to the New Year's Day 1990 stabbing murder of the Harbours' Milton neighbor John E. Quinn. Kurry was sentenced to life in prison. "I thought nothing could hurt me as much as what my son did," says Harbour. "And then this. My mother says some people have more burdens to carry than others, so I must be one of the chosen few."
No other explanation is readily apparent—not even to those who look for clues within the Harbour family. Says Milton Police Lt. Paul Giorgio: "Russell Harbour is certainly one of the nicest gentlemen I've come across in my 20-year career. He moved out to the suburbs to do better for his kids. He thought he'd give them a better life. It just never turned out that way."
"I'm questioning God now," says Harbour. "I know I shouldn't. But why would He let a person like Kimberly suffer so? I know she pleaded with those people to spare her life. And then they go and brag about it. You can't call them people. Webster's doesn't have a word to describe them. They're not animals, because an animal wouldn't do that." He stubs out his cigarette in a silver-rimmed ashtray and stares off somewhere, maybe into the past. "Such a waste," he says quietly.
—James S. Kunen, Stephen Sawicki in Boston
- Contributors:
- Stephen Sawicki.
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