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Nevertheless, by early this summer, the employees were getting worried. Everyone was whispering about David and Gail's lunches at Perry's. And when someone saw the two of them apparently fondle each other in the office when they thought no one was looking, "the cat got out of the bag and started running all over the floor," said one worker. About that time, David's brother, Gerald, Jr., a psychologist who teaches at the University of Houston, had installed a video camera in the office to identify ways to improve patient-staff interactions. One worker kept turning off the camera because she didn't want Gerald to see scenes of David coming up to flirt with Gail.
Over the July 4 weekend, roughly four months into the affair, the Harris family took a vacation to Jamaica. A few of his closest co-workers were hoping that David would come back determined to save his marriage. When David returned, they decided to confront him. He was open with them, but when someone suggested that Gail be fired, he paused. He said he still loved Clara and did not want to end the marriage, but he had gotten emotionally involved with Gail.
Clara still knew nothing and presumably had no suspicions of what David was doing. No one from his office had said anything to her. But perhaps worried that the word would leak out anyway, David sat down with his wife on Wednesday morning, July 17, and confessed. He told her about the lunches at Perry's and the nights at the same Hilton hotel where they had held their wedding reception. Clara became hysterical. The two went to the office, where Clara confronted Gail, telling her that she was fired and that she could never come back. Two days later, on Friday, she allegedly called Gail so many times, ranting about what kind of woman she was, that Julie Knight reported to the police that Clara was making "terroristic threats" on Gail's life. One of Clara's friends, however, says she had only called Gail to thank her for opening her eyes.
Those who saw Clara said she looked ravaged in the days after learning about the affair. She quit eating and lost ten pounds. She walked into the office of the plastic surgeon who was next door to Space Center Orthodontics and made a $5,000 down payment on a liposuction procedure and breast implants. She hired a personal trainer and started going to a tanning salon. And she told people in a fervent voice that she was going to win David back. One day, the two returned to Space Center Orthodontics holding hands after having had lunch. "We're going to make it," David said to a friend.
In fact, by the start of that next week, David and Clara had sat down with his parents and his teenage daughter, Lindsey, and told them about the affair. David asked for their forgiveness. "It really was a time when healing had begun," David's father told me. As part of that healing, David told Clara, he wanted to sit down with Gail at a restaurant and tell her that he was sorry. What happened wasn't her fault, he said. He couldn't just break off all communication with her.
Clara reluctantly agreed. In fact, according to a close friend, she told David that if he stuck by their marriage, he could continue some sort of friendship with Gail. But as the day when David was scheduled to have dinner with Gail came closer, Clara began to worry. She flipped through the Yellow Pages and saw an ad with the headline "Need a Clue? Call Blue." Bobbi Bacha was about to get another case.
BOBBI WAS MEETING WITH SOMEONE else when Clara came in on Tuesday, July 23. Clara told the woman at the front desk that she needed someone to follow her husband the next night. She explained that he was going to meet his mistress at Perry's Restaurant and that she wanted the investigator to get close enough to overhear what he said. As she began to feel more comfortable in the Blue Moon offices, she started chatting about the other woman. She described her as "evil." She said she had been hearing in town that this woman had a lesbian lover and that the two lesbians might have come up with a plot for one of them to seduce David to get at his money.
On a form she filled out for Blue Moon, Clara wrote down the woman's full name: Belinda Gail Thompson Bridges. When Bobbi briefly glanced at the form, she didn't make the connection. She assigned the case to one of her part-time investigators, Lindsey Dubec, a blond, pigtailed 25-year-old criminal justice major at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Dubec jumped into her gray Toyota Camry and drove over to Space Center Orthodontics to tail David. But David didn't go to Perry's. He drove to the Hilton, where he met Gail inside at a restaurant. Dubec couldn't get close enough to hear what they were saying, but according to Gail's friends, David became distraught and told her that he wasn't ready for it to end, that he still loved her, and that he could arrange for them to still see each other. Gail then told him that she wanted no part of the relationship while David was still married. Then she got up and walked out to her car. David followed her. They talked for a few more minutes outside. Obviously, something between them changed, because they then headed upstairs to a room. Dubec returned to her car and positioned herself so that she could watch the front of the hotel and David's car in the parking lot, then pulled out a video camera to capture the couple on tape when they next appeared. Bobbi always instructed her girls to capture their "subjects" on videotape whenever possible. Then, assuming she was in for a long night, Dubec called a girlfriend, who drove over to the Hilton with some soft drinks and fast food to keep her company.
While Dubec and her friend were chatting away about the pros and cons of an elopement versus a big church wedding, Clara Harris and her stepdaughter, Lindsey, were pulling up to the Hilton. Wondering what David might be doing, Clara had been unable to sit at home. She had asked Lindsey to go along with her to search for him. They drove to Perry's, walked inside, and couldn't find him. They went to another restaurant where David said he had sometimes taken Gail and then went to Gail's house. Finally, Clara called Blue Moon and got through to Bobbi's husband, Lucas, who was taking the nighttime emergency calls. She demanded to know where her husband was. Lucas called Dubec, then he called Clara back and said her husband was with the other woman at a hotel. Clara knew exactly what hotel that would be.
When Clara and Lindsey arrived at the Hilton, they spotted Gail's Navigator in the lot. Clara drove up to the car, got out, and busted the Navigator's taillights and scratched it with her keys (Dubec, who was staring at David's car several parking spaces away, never saw Clara). Clara and Lindsey then parked in another area of the lot before walking to the front desk of the Hilton and asking for the room of David Harris. An employee said that no Harris was listed. Clara came up with an idea: Both she and Lindsey called David from their cell phones and told him that one of the twins was sick and begged him to come home. David told both that he and Gail were at Pappadeaux (a restaurant Clara and Lindsey hadn't visited) and that he was on his way home. A few minutes later, the elevator doors opened and out walked David and Gail.
And just a few minutes after that, Lindsey Dubec of Blue Moon, sitting out in the parking lot, saw a frantic David and Gail rushing out the doors. "So anyway," said her friend, "just think of all the money you would save if you just went to a justice of the peace." "Hold on," said Dubec, turning on her video camera. Moments later she heard the loud roar of an engine. Through her viewfinder, she saw a flash of a Mercedes. Then David Harris was flying in the air. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" the two women screamed.
CONSIDERING THAT A JURY IS no doubt going to watch David Harris' death replayed many times on a television screen in the courtroom (the tape has not yet been made available to the public), George Parnham might have only one defense to make for his client at her trial, which is scheduled to take place in January: that she had gone insane in the heat of the moment. He hinted at such a defense during an interview with CNN's Paula Zahn back in July, when he somberly said, "Who knows what happens to a loving wife, obviously a loving mother, a person who wanted to maintain the sanctity of the union with her husband, when, unexpectedly, she is confronted with the picture and the reality of the very fine man that she loves in an embrace with another female?" It certainly didn't hurt Clara's chances of staying out of prison when David's parents said that they had forgiven her for what she had done to their son. "What David did outside his marriage was a tragic mistake, and what Clara did was a tragic mistake," Gerald Harris, a retired public school administrator, told me. "But these were mistakes made by two of the finest people I know. And if God can forgive us of our sins and our mistakes, then why should we not be able to forgive the sins and mistakes of others? Clara has been a good mother and a good wife and a good person. We hope she'll be able to raise her twin boys in honor of our son, and we will do everything we can to help her."
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine jurors acquitting a woman who kept turning her car around in a parking lot so that she could run over her husband again and again. If she was in such an uncontrollably insane rage, why didn't she keep driving around the parking lot until she found her rival, who was on the other side of the Lincoln Navigator, and plow into her too? If Parnham could not persuade a Houston jury to believe that Andrea Yates was insane, it's doubtful he's going to find a way to persuade a jury that Clara was. What's more, no matter how badly David Harris acted that night, no juror is going to be able to get out of his or her mind the fact that Clara murdered him in front of his own teenage daughter. According to people who have talked to Lindsey since her return to Ohio after her father's funeral, she's still utterly traumatized by that night, haunted by the fact that the last words she said to her father, as he stood with his mistress, were "I hate you"—and haunted too by the thud of the Mercedes slamming into her father's body and knocking him backward while she watched through the windshield. What she says in her testimony could very well decide what kind of prison term her stepmother serves.
As for Gail Bridges, she has tried to get back to a normal life, becoming a room mother at her children's school, but she has trouble looking other mothers in the eye. "People forget that she too is grieving over the death of a man she loved," her attorney told me.
To add to her problems, her still bitter ex-husband, Steve, showed up at a civil court asking that his and Gail's divorce decree be changed to allow him to have full custody of all three of their children. He claimed that as long as Clara Harris was free on bond, she might want to harm Gail and maybe even the children. He then resurrected the lesbian claim, and for good measure, he added that Gail "may not be mentally stable at this time." Chuck Knight quickly followed his friend's lead and filed his own claim trying to get full custody of his and Julie's two children. He theorized that as long as Julie and the children remained close friends with Gail and her children, then they would be in danger if Clara Harris came around. When Gail and Julie were forced to make a court appearance regarding the matter, the media crush was so intense that both of them were nearly knocked to the ground. Steve's motion is still pending; Chuck dropped his but plans to refile. More than two years after their divorces became final, it is hard to believe that these fights are still going on. Love and destruction: two sides of the same coin.
One day I went by Bobbi Bacha's office to find out what she thought about the way all these events had turned out. She was busy as always, with a stack of "domestic investigation" files on her desk. But she stopped what she was doing for a few minutes to philosophize. "Well, the moral to this story is very simple," she said. "If you are going to have an extramarital affair, then you ought to wait until after you are divorced to have one. Does that make sense to you?"
It did, but before I could answer, her intercom buzzed. It was the woman at the front desk: "Bobbi, there's a new client here to see you."