Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
Lindsey Dubec was sitting in her gray Toyota Camry in a hotel parking lot, chatting with a friend about weddings.
She was 25, a criminal justice student who worked part-time for a private detective agency near Houston. Her job that evening, July 24, 2002, was to watch a car. It belonged to an orthodontist whose wife had hired the agency the day before.
Then she saw him come running out of the hotel doors with a woman.
“Hold on,” she told her friend, and turned on her video camera.
Moments later she heard an engine roar.
The couple who had everything
Clara Harris was 44. She had grown up in Bogotá, Colombia, raised by a widowed mother, and had come to Texas in the 1980s for more dental training. She built a practice of her own in Lake Jackson. She once told a reporter that the only luxury she cared about was a Mercedes-Benz. She got one, a silver S-Class.
David Harris, also 44, was an orthodontist with an office near the Johnson Space Center and a chain of other dental practices. He played drums in the band at their Baptist church. He had a teenage daughter, Lindsey, from a brief first marriage, who lived with her mother in Ohio and came to stay in the summers.
They met in 1991 and married on Valentine’s Day 1992, less than a year after their first date. The reception was at the Nassau Bay Hilton, across the highway from NASA. “I found the one God had reserved for me,” Clara told a local newspaper.
In time they had twin boys. David’s business took off. He was clearing up to $35,000 a month from his main office alone.
In August 2001 he hired a new receptionist, Gail Bridges, 39, a divorced mother of three.
The napkin
On the morning of July 17, 2002, David sat Clara down and told her. For about three months he had been seeing Gail, including at the Nassau Bay Hilton, the hotel where they had celebrated their wedding.
Clara went to his office and fired Gail on the spot. Then she set out to save her marriage.
She stopped eating and lost 10 pounds. She quit her job. She hired a personal trainer, went to a tanning salon, cooked his favorite meals, and put $5,000 down on plastic surgery at the office next door to his.
The two of them went to a bar to talk it through. Clara kept notes on a napkin. David, she said, told her she was overweight, that she dominated conversations and worked too much. Gail was petite. He gave Clara better marks for her eyes, her hands and her feet.
She kept those notes. They would come up in court.
For a few days it seemed to be working. They walked back into his office holding hands after lunch. “We’re going to make it,” David told a friend. They sat down with his parents and Lindsey, told them everything and asked for forgiveness.
But David said he wanted to sit down with Gail one last time and tell her he was sorry. Clara reluctantly agreed. As the date got closer, she started to worry.
She picked up the Yellow Pages and found an ad that said: “Need a Clue? Call Blue.”
“Need a Clue?”
On Tuesday, July 23, Clara walked into Blue Moon Investigations in Webster. She asked for someone to follow her husband the next night. The agency assigned Lindsey Dubec.
On Wednesday evening, David did not go to the restaurant he had named. He went to the Hilton, paid cash and took a room under a false name.
Clara could not stay at home. She took Lindsey, then 16, for a drive in the Mercedes and went looking for him. She tried the restaurants. She tried Gail’s house. Finally she called Blue Moon and demanded to know where her husband was. He was with the other woman, she was told, at a hotel.
She knew which hotel.
In the parking lot she spotted Gail’s black Lincoln Navigator. She smashed its taillights and scratched it with her keys. Then she and Lindsey walked into the lobby and waited.
They both called David from their cell phones and told him one of the twins was sick. He said he was on his way home.
The elevator doors opened. David and Gail stepped out.
Clara lunged at Gail, screamed at her and tore at her shirt. Lindsey hit her father with her purse, shouting that she hated him. Hotel employees pulled them apart. A hotel worker heard David shout “It’s over! It’s over! It’s over!” toward his wife as she was led away.
David walked Gail out to the Navigator. Clara and Lindsey were escorted to the Mercedes, in a different part of the lot, and told to leave.
Clara started the engine.
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