Desperate Housewife
A lonely woman looking for love, a handsome Army sniper, and a husband murdered in cold blood
Just hours before, around 5 o'clock, Marty Theer drove his 1999 Ford Explorer into that same parking lot. Michelle was in the passenger's seat. They picked up Heidi Mougey, the office manager at Harbin & Associates, and her boyfriend, Dominique Peterson. They headed up the road 70 miles to the Raleigh area for a Christmas dinner hosted by Thomas Harbin and his wife, Marian, at the Fox and Hound Restaurant. Harbin hadn't planned to invite Marty, but Michelle said she wouldn't go unless her husband could come along. Everyone had a great time--there was no tension, no indication of trouble afoot.
Around 9:30 or so, they wrapped things up, and Marty, Michelle, Heidi, and Dominique headed back to Fayetteville. The Theers dropped Heidi and Dominique off in the parking lot at Harbin & Associates and headed out Raeford Road for the 20-minute trip back home. Heidi and Dominique had a smoke, waiting for their car to warm up, and drove off after a few minutes.
Marty stopped for gas at 10:42, about 2.3 miles from the office. According to Michelle, she suddenly remembered that she needed a book, back at the office, to complete a report she was working on. She asked Marty to drive back to her office, she says, and he dropped her off in the back parking lot at Harbin & Associates. The area directly behind the office building, dark and deserted, was not easily visible from Raeford Road, but it wasn't unusual for Michelle and others who worked there to enter through the second-floor back door, even at night. Marty stayed in the car as Michelle walked up the stairs to the second-floor landing, opened the outside door, and went inside. After a few minutes, Marty apparently grew impatient--he was scheduled to fly at 4 a.m. and would get only a few hours' sleep. He climbed out of his SUV and headed up the back stairs.
Seconds later a neighbor, Ramsey Lewis, watching a rap video while sitting in his house behind the office building, heard a series of shots. "Damn," he later remembered thinking, "somebody is getting killed." Michelle says she heard the loud bangs, walked to the back door, pushed it open, and saw Marty sprawled at the bottom of the stairs. She ran down the stairs. "He was breathing, but it sounded very ragged," she says in the prison interview. "It sounded like he had a lot of phlegm in his throat." She kept wiping the blood off his forehead, she says: "And for some reason, which I still don't understand, because it seems illogical if somebody's breathing. But I put my head down on his chest to check his heartbeat or something, I guess--I don't know--but of course I couldn't hear anything because my own heart was pounding in my ear. And I remember telling him, telling him, 'It's going to be OK, it's going to be OK, I'm going to go get help.' "
Gaffes. She was hysterical, she says, but couldn't get back into her office because she had left her keys inside and the outside door was locked. She ran to Raeford Road, tried to flag down a motorist, without any luck. Then she ran some 200 yards up the road to a Video Hut in a strip mall and asked the clerks to call 911. After a brief, and confusing, discussion with a 911 officer, she ran back to the parking lot. When a uniformed police officer arrived several minutes after 11, Michelle was kneeling over her husband. The officer pulled her away, and another officer placed her in a squad car.
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