How did a mother-son murder-suicide become a double-murder case?

A bullet hole through a bed covering could be the key to jurors’ deciding whether Vince Harris killed his girlfriend and her 6-year-old son instead of the mother’s committing a murder-suicide.

Harris, 57, is on trial this week in Columbus, accused of fatally shooting girlfriend Tina Green Hall and son Jeremy. But he did not face murder charges until Dec. 22, 2014, more than two years after their deaths.

Authorities initially concluded the single mother’s financial issues drove her to shoot her son in the chest, then kill herself in the same manner.

Harris, who was living with the Halls, told police he left the 2352 Howe Ave. home at 5:30 a.m. Feb. 24, 2012, to go to work at Columbus State University, where he drove a bus. He got off about 12:40 p.m. and got home about 1.

The door to the house at Howe Avenue and Wise Street had two deadbolt locks, to which only Harris and Hall had keys. Harris said he unlocked the door, went in and saw a lock box in which Hall kept a .38-caliber revolver had been emptied.

He went into the son’s room, found the bodies, then went outside and called 911.

“Two people just killed themselves in my house,” he told a dispatcher, later adding, “She was going through financial problems.”

Police at first accepted Harris’ account. The first autopsy report that summer listed Hall’s manner of death as “suicide.” That September a DNA test on the gun yielded three profiles, none of which was Harris’. A ballistics report in January 2013 confirmed the bullets matched Hall’s gun. That March, tests found gunshot residue on Hall’s hands.

The cold-case review

Then in April 2013, cold-case investigator Randy Long re-examined the evidence, and saw incongruity.

In his opening statement to jurors Tuesday, prosecutor George Lipscomb detailed the inconsistencies Long noticed:

Hall’s key to the gun box had been stored among others in a container that had been emptied onto the bed in the master bedroom, where Harris had slept and made the bed before he left that morning. Because Hall presumably would have known which key went to the gun box, it seemed odd she would dump them all out just to find that one.

Harris, on the other hand, later gave an extended interview to TV news, during which he said, “I had no idea which key went to the lock box.” Long theorized Harris emptied the keys and tried them on the box until one fit.

The angle of Hall’s gunshot wound was odd. Though she was right-handed, the bullet came from her left and angled down, and the barrel of the gun had not been against her skin. She would have had to hold the gun up and out to her left to aim down at her chest. And though Hall slid partly off the bed’s right side after she was shot, the gun lay at the foot of the bed.

Most intriguing was the hole left by the bullet that went through Jeremy’s chest.

For their deaths to be a murder-suicide, the mother had to shoot him first and then herself. But when she was shot and slipped toward the bed’s right side, she dragged the bed covers with her, displacing a mattress cover.

At the edge of that dislodged mattress cover was the hole from the bullet that killed Jeremy. That indicated Hall already was partially off the bed when the boy was shot, and must have been shot first, Lipscomb said.

Harris’ personal affairs aroused suspicion, too. Though he portrayed himself as Hall’s benefactor – “Even though I was helping her, it just wasn’t enough,” he told a TV reporter – he was about to lose a house to foreclosure, because a woman he added to the deed had kicked him out, prompting his moving in with Hall.

On his third marriage, he was furious about about the alimony he had to pay. The Wednesday before the Friday deaths, he had planned to go to jail for refusing to pay it. In a later TV interview, he mentioned leaving Hall a check in case she needed money while he was incarcerated: “I had some problems I was going through on Wednesday, and I wasn’t sure I was coming back,” he said.

And he had another girlfriend, whom he called at 5:45 a.m. the day the Halls died, Lipscomb said, adding that Harris later texted the other woman the question, “What am I to you?”

Lipscomb alleged Harris had told acquaintances he vowed never to be kicked out of his home again.

Among the first witnesses to testify Tuesday was Harris’ friend Emma Stokes, who said Harris in a fit of rage told her: “Another woman will never put me out. I will kill her first.”

Friends told police Hall had intended to put Harris out, and that’s what she told her ex-husband Jerry Hall the day before she died: She was going to ask Harris to leave.

That’s what triggered a double-homicide, Lipscomb said: Already furious at paying alimony and losing his house, Harris “snapped” under the threat of losing another home.

Hall, on the other hand, seemed to be holding up under her financial strain, the prosecutor said. While working at Fort Benning’s Burger King, she was studying to be a nurse, and had just passed her nursing test.

The day she died, she had set out her Burger King uniform, ironed it, and set her hair covering and cell phone atop it, so she would be set to go to work.

And she was entirely devoted to her son, said friends and family.

“She loved him with every ounce of her,” a neighbor testified Tuesday. “I did not think in a million years that she would do anything to Jeremy or to herself.”

The defense

Defense attorney Stacey Jackson countered that the prosecution was portraying Harris as “a raging lunatic full of domestic violence issues,” yet he had no criminal history of that.

Jackson tried to shift suspicion to Jerry Hall, the ex-husband, telling jurors Tina Green Hall had told friends, “If you ever find me dead, Jerry did it.”

Harris, an ex-Marine with no prior convictions, fully cooperated with police, submitting to a gunshot-residue test on his hands, supplying a sample for DNA testing, and giving investigators his clothes.

Jerry Hall’s criminal record is not clean, Jackson said: He was implicated in a homicide at age 14 and served an 11-year sentence.

He reiterated that investigators for months accepted Harris’ account and ruled the case a murder-suicide, and he implied Tina Green Hall might have had another motive to kill herself and her son: Jerry Hall had tested positive for the HIV virus that can cause AIDS, and his ex-wife and son were getting tested, too.

Jackson said others gained financially from Tina Green Hall’s death. She had changed her insurance so that a cousin got $50,000 and her mother got $25,000. Jerry Hall later sued the mother to get some of that payout, the attorney said.

For Harris to be found guilty, the prosecution must prove every element of a double-murder beyond a reasonable doubt, Jackson said, and it won’t be able to:

“It’s simply a case where there’s a big question mark.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2016 at 6:36 PM with the headline "How did a mother-son murder-suicide become a double-murder case?."