Court upholds man’s conviction in Columbus mother, son deaths once ruled murder-suicide
Vince Harris long maintained he did not kill his estranged girlfriend Tina Green Hall and her 6-year-old son Jeremy back in 2012, in a case Columbus police initially ruled a murder-suicide, before re-examining the evidence and charging Harris with murder.
A jury convicted him in November 2016. When he was sentenced to life in prison a month later, Harris protested that despite the verdict, he did not shoot Hall and her son in the Oakland Park home he was sharing with them on Feb. 24, 2012.
Now the Georgia Supreme Court has upheld that verdict, finding the evidence was sufficient for jurors to convict Harris on two counts of murder, and for Judge Ron Mullins to give him two consecutive life sentences.
Now 63 years old, Harris is serving life without parole in the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.
The evidence
Harris told police he found the bodies when he arrived home from work about 1 p.m. that day, discovering two deadbolts on the Howe Avenue home’s door were locked and a lockbox in which Hall kept a revolver was empty. She kept the key to the box in another container of keys that had been emptied onto a bed.
Harris told police Hall had been depressed and under financial strain, and likely killed her child and shot herself so they wouldn’t be a burden on him. Though Hall’s relatives didn’t believe that, police closed the case as a murder-suicide in August 2012.
After cold-case investigators asked a medical examiner to reassess the autopsy report in April 2013, Hall’s manner of death was changed from suicide to “undetermined,” because of the odd angle at which she would have had to shoot herself. She was right-handed, yet the bullet had come from her left, at a downward angle.
Other evidence showed the .38-caliber revolver was at the foot of the bed where she and her son lay, not next to her body. Her hands had no gunshot residue. Though she would have shot her son first, in a murder-suicide, her body slid partially off the bed and displaced a fitted sheet, so the hole from the bullet that killed Jeremy was on the sheet’s edge, indicating he was shot last.
Cold-case investigator Randy Long decided the more likely scenario was that Harris, who did not know which key fit Hall’s gun box, first had to sift through her keys to find the right one. Taking the revolver into the bedroom, he shot Hall first, causing her to slide off the bed, and then killed her terrified son, who would have been awakened by the first gunshot.
Long also uncovered a motive: Hall had told her family that she was going to make Harris move out of her home, where he had been living since October 2011. He moved there after another girlfriend had gained title to a house he owned in Harris County, and kicked him out of that residence.
Harris, who owed alimony to two ex-wives and was having sex with another woman he’d met at a New Year’s Eve party, had told a friend he would never let another woman put him out of his home: He would kill her first.
Though Harris claimed to be supporting Hall and her son financially, prosecutor George Lipscomb suspected he had provided little assistance, in light of his other debts. Just two days before the murders, Harris had been told he faced jail time if he didn’t pay an ex-wife $471 in alimony.
The jury deliberated 4½ hours before finding Harris guilty, a verdict that finally cleared the name of the 47-year-old single mother four years after she was thought to have killed the son to whom friends and family said she was devoted, and would never have harmed.