Dad wanted to ‘get rid of’ wife to prevent losing California home to divorce, son testifies
Googie Rene Harris Jr. testified this week that his father asked him to help kill the dad’s wife — the son’s stepmother.
The motive, the son said, was his dad feared that she was having an affair and going to file for divorce and take his “dream house” in Jurupa Valley.
“He wanted to get rid of her … to kill her,” Harris Jr., 45, testified in Riverside County Superior Court. “And he wanted me to help him.”
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Harris Jr. testified that his cousin, Joaquin Latee Leal III — Googie Rene Harris Sr.’s nephew — was to be in on the plot to kill 32-year-old Terry Cheek, a plan that included framing Cheek’s lover, Horace Roberts of Temecula, for the murder.
That’s exactly what happened on April 13, 1998, prosecutors assert:
As Cheek left for work in San Juan Capistrano from the Glen Avon neighborhood of what would become Jurupa Valley, they said, Harris Sr. guided Cheek into the garage, where he and Leal strangled her as Harris Jr. looked away. Harris Jr. and Leal then drove Cheek’s body to Lee Lake near Corona and dumped it on rocks, they said, with them using Roberts’ Nissan truck, which Cheek sometimes drove, and leaving it nearby.
Cheek’s body was found five days later.
Roberts was convicted of second-degree murder and served 20 years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated him in 2018 and, officials said, pointed authorities toward the Harrises and Leal.
“I felt I didn’t want to, but I was helping my dad,” Harris Jr. testified, telling Managing Deputy District Attorney Will Robinson that he felt obligated to help his father. “He wanted to keep the house, because it was his dream house.”
Harris Jr., wiping away tears, added: “It should never be asked of a son to do anything like that.”
Harris Sr., 67, and Leal, 58, showed no visible reaction to the testimony. They both wore dark suits. Harris Jr. wore dark slacks, a white shirt and a blue tie. All three have tightly bound ponytails.
Roberts, paid $11 million by the county for his apparent wrongful conviction, has a plane to catch this week and so in a bit of scheduling gymnastics he is scheduled to testify on Tuesday and Wednesday. The case takes a break next week, with Harris Jr. scheduled to be cross-examined starting Aug. 5.
Harris Jr., originally charged with murder in the death-penalty case, agreed to testify for the District Attorney’s Office in a deal that allowed him to plead guilty to accessory after the fact, which carries a potential sentence of one year in prison.
Leal and Harris Sr. have pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
Defense attorneys suggested in opening statements that Harris Jr. — or perhaps even Roberts — was the real killer, and that Harris Jr. is weaving a tall tale.
Harris Jr. testified that he twice inappropriately touched one of his younger sisters, once while in junior high and once in high school: The second time both were naked in their home when Cheek walked in on them and ordered Harris Jr. to his room.
That apparently was the extent of the punishment, except that, he testified, Cheek stopped talking to him for a while afterward.
“I felt I was nervous but as I got older I felt really bad,” Harris Jr. said.
He added that he felt guilt about assaulting his sister — he was never charged — and held no animosity toward Cheek.
The defense was counting on a Harris Jr. sister to testify to what she apparently had previously told investigators: She saw Cheek drive away to her work at Quest Diagnostics in her white Volkswagen the night she vanished.
But Tynisha Weaver said she was about 13 years old at the time. That day, she said, Harris Sr. was home except for a few minutes when he went to a Circle K to buy candy for his children. At about 10:30 p.m., Weaver testified, she saw a car drive away, seeing only its headlights. She told prosecutor Robinson that 26 years later, she was no longer confident in her original account.
Weaver told Robinson that she assumed at the time that she saw Cheek drive the VW away because she had seen Cheek arrive in that car earlier that day.
“As a child, maybe you see things you didn’t see,” Weaver said. “Now as an adult you see the world for what it is and people as they really are.”
She did not back away, however, from her assertion that the day of Cheek’s disappearance, her mom had her black purse that the teenager had accidentally broken a zipper on. That purse, she said, was among her mother’s possessions that family members recovered from Roberts’ home after Cheek’s death. Sometimes Roberts and Cheek rode in to work together.