The summer of 1998 was devastating for residents of a New Philadelphia, Ohio, apartment complex, as two young community members were suddenly ripped from their lives.
As locals reeled over the tragic and violent death of an innocent young girl, authorities were faced with mounting pressure to take her killer off the streets.
But rather than chasing those leads, detectives turned their focus to Devan’s 12-year-old neighbor, a boy named Anthony Harris.
Harris was coerced into confessing to her murder during a hostile interrogation, and subsequently convicted and put behind bars — despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the murder scene and repeated cries that he was pressured to make a false confession.
“The investigator, he had basically told me that, ‘If you confess to this murder you can go home,'” Harris recalls in this week’s episode of20/20. “It’s like, ‘Okay. Well, I’m over here scared, so I want to go home.'”
Harris spent two years in juvenile detention before he won an appeal and got his conviction overturned, but the longstanding damage of being wrongfully accused — and knowing that Devan’s killer still walks free — makes it hard to move on.
ABC News anchor John Quiñones catches up with a now-grown Harris after 20 years in an exclusive and emotional interview airing on20/20this week. PEOPLE got a sneak peek at their conversation, shown below.
Despite the suffering Harris has experienced, he has worked to overcome his past.
“There’s no sense to be bitter,” Harris tells20/20. “Even though it hurt a lot, it didn’t destroy my core as a person, the things I believe in, the things I grew up to become. That’s why I don’t hold resentment in my voice when I speak.”
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Harris does, however, want Devan’s killer brought to justice. “This guy, this individual’s still free right now,” he tells Quiñones. “We’re going to figure this out [and] give her some kind of closure.”
In addition to featuring Harris’ first interview in two decades, Friday’s20/20special — titled “Gone Before the Storm” — includes new interviews with Harris’ public defender; Harris' lawyers for his appeal and civil lawsuit; the police officer who took the call from Devan’s mother reporting her daughter missing; journalists who covered the case extensively; and legal experts.
The episode also features archival ABC News footage of Quiñones' 1999 interview with Harris, and previous conversations with Devan’s mother, Lori Duniver, and Harris' mother, Cynthia Harris.
“Gone Before the Storm” airs Friday, May 6, at 9 p.m. ET. on ABC, and will be available for next-day streaming on Hulu.
source: people.com
