In the chaotic hours and days that followed the September 11 attacks, police departments across New York were rapidly redeployed to Manhattan, where the search-and-rescue operation was just beginning.
One of the communities left with fewer officers was Spencer, a small rural town of roughly 800 residents tucked into the upper western corner of the state.
There, in the early hours after the attacks, 35-year-old Michele Harris, a mother of four, disappeared without a trace.
Nearly 25 years later, after four criminal trials and extensive searches, her vanishing remains one of the region’s most unsettling unsolved mysteries.
Her husband, Calvin Harris, was charged with her murder four separate times. Two convictions were later overturned — one because of evidence and another over a jury-selection issue. A third trial ended with a deadlocked jury, and in the fourth, a judge found him not guilty.
Calvin has consistently maintained he was innocent. During one of the trials, his defense team pointed instead to two other men as the people responsible.
Michele’s remains have never been located.
The two men named by the defense have never been arrested, and they have not publicly addressed the case.
Now, two private investigators believe they are the closest anyone has ever been to solving it.
‘If we’re right, this could finally answer what happened to Michele,’ Mike Gould, the former commanding officer of the NYPD’s Canine Training Unit who now runs private investigations, tells Daily Mail ahead of the 25th anniversary of her disappearance.
Michele Harris, a 35-year-old mother of four, disappeared from outside her rural home in Spencer, New York in the early hours of September 12, 2001. She is pictured with her husband Cal and their four children
Gould is working with fellow PI Bill Flanagan to bring an end to the mystery.
Working independently from the police, they are zeroing in on a burn pit on a property near to where Michele was last seen, where they say evidence could include fragments of the waitressing uniform she was last seen in.
The burn pit was the center of evidence highlighted by the defense at one of Calvin’s trials.
After excavating the site, investigators recovered several items, according to the defense, including a 1997 coin, a knife blade, a button, what appeared to be a bra strap, the clasp from a woman’s handbag and fragments of charred fabric.
The property belonged to Stacy Stewart, a Texan native who Michele had recently socialized with in larger groups after meeting him through her job. Both he and Christopher Thomason were named by Calvin’s defense attorneys in court as her potential killers.
Both men were questioned, but no arrests were ever made.
Flanagan, who also worked closely with the defense team, said he has interviewed both men over the years, most recently in February, in conversations he described as ‘convoluted and problematic.’
He would not reveal specific details of those conversations.
Michele and Cal Harris were in the process of getting a divorce but still lived together along with their kids, all under the age of seven, when she mysteriously vanished
He does not accuse either man of killing Harris. Instead, he believes they may have information that could help explain what happened to her – and that their connection to Harris was never fully scrutinized.
He added that the men allegedly made statements to friends and acquaintances over the years that he believes warrant further investigation.
Daily Mail contacted both Thomason and Stewart for comment.
Flanagan also revisited the witness account that helped overturn Cal’s first conviction – a neighbor who claimed he saw a woman resembling Harris arguing with a man next to a black pickup the morning she disappeared.
The truck belonged to Stewart. It was tracked back to Texas, then Louisiana, where it had been sold to a new owner. The new owner agreed to let Calvin’s defense team examine and search it.
Forensic investigators dismantled portions of the vehicle and recovered what appeared to be blood evidence, as well as a diamond stud earring that was similar to jewelry Harris’ husband said he had purchased for her, Flanagan said.
Testing at the time was unable to conclusively identify the DNA, but Flanagan noted the findings reinforced his belief that the truck should be further investigated.
The upcoming search of the property will use specially trained human remains detection dogs, as well as a forensic pathologist and a team of investigators.
The team plans to search about five or six acres. Gould described himself as ‘cautiously optimistic,’ saying the evidence developed by Flanagan’s investigation justifies the search even if the odds of locating recoverable remains remain uncertain.
Harris was last seen standing beside her gold Ford Windstar minivan in the driveway of the home (pictured) she shared with her estranged husband, Cal Harris, and their four young children in the state’s north-west
Flanagan said he is hoping to bring some sort of closure to the family, who recently offered a $250,000 reward for information that would lead to the recovery of her remains.
Harris had lived a charmed life in the picturesque region of Tioga County.
She had been married to Cal, the millionaire son of a prominent local family, for 11 years. Together they had four children.
But in the months before her disappearance, their once-happy marriage fell apart.
Both had engaged in affairs and in January 2001, she filed for divorce.
Despite their looming separation, they continued to live together in a sprawling home set on 250 acres near Empire Lake.
Investigators hope they are finally close to solving the mystery of what happened to Harris
Michele had taken a job at Lefty’s, a bar in a nearby town, to bring in some money. She wanted to save up for a down payment for a new home.
On the afternoon of September 11, she left the house, where her four young children were being cared for by a babysitter, to go to work.
At 9pm, she finished work and spent an hour in the Lefty’s parking lot speaking with some co-workers about the horrors of the day.
They, like the rest of the world, had watched the news in disbelief as the planes struck the towers.
After leaving the parking lot following her shift, Michele then drove to her boyfriend’s home, leaving at around 11pm. He told police she told him she was returning home.
At around 7.30am on September 12, the family’s housekeeper, Barbara Thayer, arrived at the home and noticed Michele’s van in the driveway with the keys still in the ignition.
Harris was nowhere to be found.
‘This all started when Cal woke up that morning and discovered Michele never came home the night before,’ Flanagan tells Daily Mail, 25 years later, as he works to revive the case.
Also missing was a small bag containing expensive jewelry that Harris had planned to pawn, including a diamond ring, tennis bracelet and pearl earrings valued at an estimated $15,000 to $20,000 to help her pay for a new apartment.
Despite an extensive search in the surrounding areas – including state police, helicopters, divers, sonar equipment and search dogs – there was no trace of her.
There was also no activity on her cellphone or any of her financial accounts.
Years went by without answers. Then in September 2005, Cal was arrested and charged with second degree murder.
Prosecutors claimed he was determined to avoid an expensive divorce that would eat into his $5million fortune.
In the months before her disappearance, Michele had rejected a proposed settlement. They were due to go before a judge in October 2001.
They also pointed to blood evidence found inside the garage of the family home. Experts testified that there had been a pool, but that it had been cleaned.
The burn pit (pictured) discovered on a property near where Harris went missing became one of the leads retired investigator Bill Flanagan focused on when he began conducting his own review of the case more than a decade ago
Over the years, various pieces of evidence were uncovered believed to be tied to Harris’ disappearance, including this button found in a burn pit on a property searched by investigators
What appeared to be a bra strap, the clasp from a woman’s handbag and fragments of charred fabric were also uncovered from the burn pit. Cal Harris’ attorneys used the evidence as part of their defense during his trials
The prosecution’s theory was that Calvin beat Michele to death there, then removed her body and cleaned up the mess.
But before the case could go to trial, a judge threw out the indictment on the grounds of prosecutorial errors. He was arrested and charged for a second time in February 2007 and was convicted in June of that year.
Calvin always protested his innocence, insisting there were myriad scenarios that could have played out in the hours after 9/11 but that none were properly investigated in the midst of the national crisis and chaos.
He was nonetheless found guilty, and sentenced to 25 years to life.
Then, in November 2007, six years after Michele vanished, came the sensational new witness testimony from neighbors that they had seen her arguing with the man in the driveway.
The description of the man that he gave matched that of Stewart.
Cal Harris was arrested and charged with second-degree murder charge in late 2005. He went on trial four times before being acquitted
Harris and the couple’s four children announced a $250,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of Michele’s remains, saying their hope was simply to bring her home
A second witness then testified that not only had he seen the pair in the driveway, but he’d heard the man yelling ‘just get in the car’.
That testimony led to Calvin’s conviction being overturned. He was released on bond and a new trial was ordered.
A second jury then convicted Harris again in 2009, but it was later overturned by New York’s highest court, which ruled there were errors in jury selection and the trial judge’s instructions regarding hearsay evidence.
A third trial ended with a hung jury. Then in 2016, Cal Harris was acquitted at his fourth trial. In that case, he waived his right to a jury. The decision was made by a judge.
He has always maintained that Michele fell into a ‘bad crowd’ through her waitressing job and that her disappearance and presumed death was linked to this new group. He believed she’d been taking cocaine with the group, and was too frequently going out drinking.
Both Stewart and Thomason, the men Calvin’s lawyers claimed in court could be responsible for Michele’s death, had moved from Texas to the Tioga County area in 2001 for steelwork with a local manufacturer.
In December of the same year, just three months after Michele’s disappearance, both men abruptly left the area and returned to Texas.
Our News Outlet contacted Cal Harris about the developments but didn’t hear back.
The family has now launched a $250,000 reward for information.
Flanagan and Gould intend to search the property where the burn pit exists later this fall. They say they will use canine dogs to assess the ground and look for clues. They also plan to examine historic satellite imagery of the property to hone in on any changes.
They are keeping the location of the search private until they know the outcome of it.
