[Joe Kenda]It's Saturday morning, March 11th, 2017,
in Georgetown, South Carolina.
A local resident is plying his hobby of fishing
on the Black River.
He notices something in the water
that doesn't look right to him.
And he looks more closely...
and he is incredibly alarmed.
This is a body floating in the Black River.
I spent my career closing murder cases.
But I'm not the only one who answered the call.
It takes a rare breed to solve the unsolvable,
to catch a ruthless killer,
to find justice for the dead.
That's what it takes to be an American detective.
Uh, I guess because we're general investigators.
I work everything from, you know, fraud cases,
uh, burglaries, bank robberies,
pretty much anything and everything.
We might get a callout. You just never know.
It could be a normal day.
But a normal day can turn into a busy day,
um, really quick.
[phone ringing]
Uh-huh.
Really and truly, this job is life.
A body was actually discovered in the county jurisdiction.
And because of that,
the Sheriff's Office responded for law enforcement
to go out there.
I'm on my way.
We got the call about 1:30 that day.
[sirens wailing]
When I got there,
they were in the process of bringing the body to shore.
Law enforcement officers had to actually physically
grab hold of the individual by clothing
and just ease him back to shore.
Was this somebody that had perhaps fallen in the water
or out of a boat?
You just don't know.
But when they brought him to shore,
it was immediately evident to me
that he had not fallen in the water accidentally.
His wrists and his ankles were bound with speaker wire.
That, to me, was a clear indication
that he had been the victim of a homicide.
When your victim is found floating in the water,
it enormously complicates the case.
Water does terrible things to human bodies.
They can't tell the cause of death
looking at the remains
'cause they're in such poor condition.
Here, the elements in the South can be tricky.
Even in February and March,
the water plays a factor
in the decomposition and the speed.
The face is unrecognizable.
Positive identification was not made at that point.
But I was thinking back just because
we had already been investigating a missing person.
I remember Miss Brittani Green
came in to report a missing person.
She says his name is Leon Harrison, Jr.,
but everybody calls him JR.
And he is the father of her two children.
They no longer live together.
But he routinely calls her every night
to speak to the children.
He hasn't called in two weeks.
[Allen] A guy that has family, that has loved ones,
that has children,
they're not just gonna vanish off this Earth.
[Joe]Brittani explains to police
that Mr. Harrison is 32 years old,
he is an African-American male,
that he has a rose tattooed on his inner right forearm.
An identifying tattoo.
Now Morris is trying to determine
if this body that was found in the river
is in fact his missing person.
Investigator Morris generally works property crimes.
If this is in fact a homicide,
it'll be his very first.
The body was sent for autopsy.
[Allen]It was my first autopsy.
So, yeah, I mean, it was a nerve-racking thing.
[Joe] I recall my first autopsy very well.
After you've been to several hundred of them,
you tend not to pay attention.
But the first one
is a shock.
[Allen]That had been the first time that I had actually seen him.
'Cause I wasn't there during the retrieval.
It was gruesome.
He was bounded by hand and foot.
That's the most uncivilized way
that I could ever see a person going out of this world.
[Joe] The medical examiner explains to Morris
that, although he cannot determine the cause of death
because the decomposition level is so great,
he can rule it as a homicide based on the bindings.
The lacerations to the belly are not deep.
They're not enough to cause exsanguination,
in other words, bleeding to death.
They're not enough to cause internal damage either.
It's hard to say what those were
with the condition of the body
due to the presence of animals
and that sort of thing in the water.
[Joe] There are also alligators in this river.
But they prefer living things.
Normally, they like a live target
that they can kill and then eat.
The medical examiner offers an opinion
that perhaps a beating was involved
that caused the death. Blunt force trauma.
But he can't even really say that.
He just doesn't know.
When your victim has obviously been in the water
for an extended period of time,
there is no way DNA trace is gonna survive
or fingerprints survive.
So you're not gonna find something that identifies somebody
responsible for this.
The findings of the autopsy were relatively useless,
with one major exception.
The presence of a rose tattoo on the right arm...
identifies this body
as that of Leon Harrison, Jr.,
also known as JR.
The case of missing person is now retitled homicide.
There's an expression in homicide.
You going from being a new guy to an old guy
in about 30 minutes.
Morris is nervous. He's worried.
He's all the right things.
So he begins by inquiring about the victim.
Miss Brittani Green was brought it
to give us some information about him
and what he was like as a father.
Leon, he was a funny outgoing person,
big personality.
He loved to smile, tell jokes.
Loving caring father.
[Ji'Kiera Harrison]My dad was goofy,
funny,
joyful
and active.
We always used to watch Dallas Cowboys.
He was a very great dad.
[Tyquise Harrison]My first day playing football,
and I remember running my first touchdown.
He was running down the sideline like,
"Oh! Go, Quise! Go, Quise! Go, boy! Go, boy!"
He met me in the end zone.
He was going crazy.
[Joe] Brittani Green said he always was connected
to those two kids.
And he called them every night.
He would always come and check on his children.
[Joe] The investigators talked to Green.
"Were there any issues?
Does he have any enemies?"
The only thing she says is that he has an estranged wife,
and her name is Tiesh Rhue.
I learned of Tiesh probably like...
July of 2015.
They got married, I believe, September.
[Joe] She says he'd been married for a while,
but they recently broke up and he moved out.
[Brittani] He used to call me
and talk to me about things that was going on
in their relationship.
He wasn't happy.
[Joe] So we suddenly appear to have a dead man
with recent marital troubles of some kind.
That could be interesting.
It could mean nothing.
We've gotta find out.
So JR's estranged wife is of great interest to Morris.
However, they find some difficulty in locating her.
Morris decides to return to Tiesh Rhue later
and move on to JR's phone records.
We got any kind of phone records that we can get.
[Joe] The evening of February 25th,
he did have two phone calls
from a man named Samuel Pillman,
who could be the last person to see JR alive.
So Morris wants to talk to this guy.
[Allen] We did go to his job.
But he was not there that day.
His boss tells him he lives at the Quality Inn.
So Morris goes there
thinking he'll reach Pillman.
He knocks on the door.
No one answers.
He calls Pillman's cell phone.
Pillman answers the phone.
When Morris says who he is,
Pillman hangs up.
Now that raises an eyebrow.
Pillman has just informed Morris
he's a potential suspect.
Hanging up on a detective
ensures that you are about to meet the detective.
[Joe] Well, let's review, Mr. Pillman.
Now you get a phone call from a policeman
and you don't wanna talk to him.
What do you have to do with the death of JR?
When Morris calls him back, he takes a different approach.
He says, "Look, I'm investigating the death
of Leon Harrison, Jr.
And that's the only reason I wanna talk to you."
Mr. Pillman, why were you calling him?
[Allen] He said they were gonna meet up.
He was gonna but some drugs from Leon Harrison, Jr.
[Joe] "Well, my roommate and I wanted to celebrate a birthday
and so we thought we'd get a little high
and JR could help us out.
JR's got this side hustle.
He sells a little bit of grass now and again."
[Allen] Truly, to me, it didn't matter.
Regardless of what his situation was,
he was still... he was still murdered,
and it didn't really matter
whether he was a drug dealer or not.
[Joe] So Pillman says also that the first call he made with JR,
JR said, "All right. I'll come by your room
and we'll make the deal there."
And then he never shows up.
So he calls him back.
Only this time, there's no answer.
Is Pillman lying?
Did JR show up at the Quality Inn
and Pillman overcame him,
robbed him of his drugs
and his money
and then killed him?
[Allen] When we were looking at his phone...
So we got it analyzed, the data.
[Joe] His conversation jives with the phone records
because the second Pillman made
only lasted like 15, 20 seconds
'cause there was no answer,
like he said.
So Pillman is dropped as a suspect.
[Allen] Everything was a challenge.
I mean, 'cause at this point,
we're already two weeks behind anyway.
Because he had already been gone for two weeks.
But I'm gonna make sure I do everything I was supposed to do.
That's gathering evidence, talking to everybody I can.
I have to keep moving.
So he returns to the effort to find Tiesh Rhue,
the estranged wife of the victim,
to see what she can say about his life.
This time, Morris' luck changes
and finally he finds Tiesh Rhue.
[Allen] And at the time, she was working at the steel mill
as a security guard.
So we went over there.
And we spoke to her about Mr. Leon Harrison, Jr.
[Joe] They break the news to Tiesh Rhue
that her husband is in fact deceased.
[Allen] We spoke to her very briefly at the steel mill
and we got her to come to the police department.
[Joe] Tiesh works as a security guard
at a steel mill in the area.
JR worked there also.
They ask her about his narcotics sales,
and she immediately says,
"Oh, that was a very minor, very occasional thing."
And then they asked Tiesh to explain about their marriage.
At first, she made is seem like everything was good.
And then it wasn't so great.
They met a few years ago. They got married.
But money was always a problem.
So they became forced to move in with her father
and her brother
as a married couple.
She had told us they both had issues with infidelity.
My understanding was she was doing what she wanted to do
and he was doing what he wanted to do.
Tiesh explains that JR cheated on her.
She discovered this and she kicked him out.
But they had this on-again, off-again relationship
for the last few months.
They ask her, "When's the last time you saw your husband?"
She said February 25th.
She said he came by around ten o'clock in the evening
to pick up some of his clothes.
She then says
he was on the phone with the other woman
that she identifies as Rosario.
Why would I do it?
And they have a heated argument on the phone.
Very heated.
She says she could hear her through his phone.
We have Tiesh saying
that Rosario is a maniacal crazy woman,
who's insanely jealous of her.
And if you're out of control, angry and jealous,
what are you capable of?
Just about anything.
Including murder.
[Ji'Kiera] When my dad passed,
I didn't want it to be true.
But I had to believe it.
[Tyquise] Everybody around me was crying.
It was like an out-of-body experience basically.
But we just gotta sit here
and let the police do their job.
[siren wailing]
[Joe] Investigators have learned about
an enormously out-of-control argument
between the victim and his girlfriend.
So Morris is now extremely interested in Rosario.
When somebody at the front desk says,
"There's a woman here named Rosario
who wants to talk to you."
[Allen] We did talk with Rosario.
She kind of gave us the insight
of what their relationship was.
They were in some kind of romantic relationship.
[Joe] She proceeds to tell them
how she loves him desperately
and she's found out through other means
that he's now dead.
Why did you not report him missing?
So they ask Rosario, "Do you know Tiesh?"
Rosario told us they had a marriage
that may not have been going so well.
[Joe] Tiesh was saying that this other woman
was the source of the rage and a potential threat to JR.
Now the other woman
is telling a totally opposite tale from Tiesh.
One of these two is lying.
Which one is?
Either or both.
They asked Rosario when's the last time she saw JR.
She said February 25th.
3:30 in the afternoon, she picks him up from work.
And later that evening, apparently,
JR made his way to the home of his estranged wife, Tiesh.
So they confront Rosario about the angry phone call
that supposedly was made by her
to JR the night of the 25th.
She said, "I've never had an angry phone call with JR.
However, I got one from Tiesh."
She said, "She called me ranting and raving
and screaming at me
about being the 'other woman.'
And it was horrible."
Tiesh is cussing at her and threatening her.
I guess she had learned about the relationship
and she was mad.
She hands her phone over to the detectives.
They review her text history and calls.
This exactly confirms her story.
Rosario's not a killer.
She's just a heart-broken woman
who lost her boyfriend.
Now Morris understands Tiesh is the jealous rage factor.
Not Rosario.
She also goes on to say
that Tiesh's father, Alex Rhue, Sr., hates JR.
And her brother,
Alex Rhue, Jr., also hates JR
because JR is a bad influence on his sister.
And Alex, Jr. sees himself as his sister's bodyguard.
So, now, we've eliminated Rosario.
So we're left with Tiesh and her family.
Morris is buried up to his neck
in emotion, lies, finger-pointing,
an extremely complicated web.
[Allen] I lost a lot of sleep trying to figure it out.
And just making sure that you cover every aspect of it.
[Joe] But he knows he has one thing
that is the only physical evidence recovered
is the wire used to bind the victim.
That could be the answer to this case.
Where did that come from?
[Allen] But we believed that it could have been speaker wire.
Ain't a lot of places in Georgetown
that sell speaker wire.
So I went to Walmart,
looking to see if there was any kind of wiring
that looked like that wiring.
The idea would have been that they bought it from there,
we could have maybe pulled surveillance footage
and seen if we could see them buying it.
[Joe] They contact the people that work in those departments
and they strike out.
Nobody's bought any recently.
Nobody sells the kind that they have in their hand.
So Morris decides to go see Alex Rhue, Jr.
He works at a garage.
[Allen] We had gotten some information
that he'd have worked on cars
and he may have done some audio stuff in the past.
[Joe] And a bell goes off in Morris' brain.
He works with speaker wire.
The very thing that JR is tied up with.
He's not there, but the manager is there.
Morris says, "Do you employ Alex Rhue, Jr.?"
"Well, I do. But he only comes in
a couple of days a week.
He installs radios in people's cars."
"Do you have any of the wire here that he uses?"
It's examined and compared
to the wire found around the victim
and they're different.
We were not able to locate anything that connected
the wire that Mr. Leon Harrison, Jr. was bounded with.
It could have practically came from anywhere.
[Joe] So Morris understands
he has no crime scene of occurrence.
We only have a crime scene of discovery
floating down the Black River toward the Atlantic.
But where was he killed?
The likeliest scenario is he died in the Rhue household.
Something bad happened in that house.
[siren wails]
We had developed enough probable cause,
circumstantial evidence,
to get a search warrant for the house.
[doorbell rings]
We went to her house
on Highmarket Street.
Alex, Jr. and Sr. are seated right next to Tiesh.
We of course give them the search warrant
and they have to come out of the house
while we are conducting a search of the house.
We're taking photographs.
We're searching rooms.
We were looking for cutting objects.
Speaker wire, any kind of other DNA.
[Joe] They walk into Tiesh's bedroom
that's got wall to wall carpeting.
We noticed that there was missing pieces of carpet.
A cut piece of carpet has been replaced.
Odd corners, odd angles.
A terrible patch job.
Now why would you do that?
[indistinct police radio chatter]
They pull up that insert of carpet.
We remove the carpet padding
and then, under there on the subfloor,
there was what appeared to be a stain of some sort.
We did a presumptive test
that come back positive for blood.
Blood is discovered in Tiesh's bedroom.
There's so much blood,
it's not just the carpet pad that's soaked.
It's the subflooring.
And it looked like there was an attempt
to clean up the blood.
We spent hours in that room.
We found several locations of blood.
There was some high-velocity spatter on the walls.
[Joe] Blood spatter comes from blunt-trauma
cast-off blood
from striking or beating someone
and probably an instrument or maybe fists.
[Allen] Something bad happened in that room. We know that.
We can tell by that amount of blood.
[William] And so we process the house,
collected forensic evidence
and sent it off to the lab.
They wanna be absolutely certain
this is JR's blood,
so they're running a lab test.
And they determine that is in fact the case.
So JR meets his end
in Tiesh's bedroom.
There's an enormous amount of blood.
We have binding of a male victim.
This is not something that any reasonable person
would believe
was done by one person.
But two people can do that rather easily.
This is all a family affair.
[Allen] Tiesh, we brought her in again
to speak to us.
[Joe] There is blood in that house.
They have circumstantial evidence only
and it's insufficient to proceed to an arrest.
[Allen] And I showed her a picture of the subfloor
with the saturation on the subfloor of blood.
She claimed it was a nosebleed.
And my response was
there's just so much blood.
I didn't know how it could be a nosebleed.
Tiesh, you could have had a fire hose up your nose
and you wouldn't produce that much blood.
She said that she would never hurt her husband.
And then I said, "Well, somebody did.
He was killed in that room."
The theory is quite simple.
Tiesh, can you physically overcome JR?
Can you bind him with speaker wire?
Can you assault him to the point of death?
Can you pick up and remove a dead body
and throw it in a river?
Not by yourself you can't.
She needs help.
The family that kills together stays together.
We didn't feel like we were getting honest answers from her.
That's good 'cause you're gonna need one.
[Allen] Once she said she wanted a lawyer,
she was free to go at that point.
This investigation has not yet produced probable cause
to arrest anybody.
Knowing and proving are two different things.
For now, it seems unclear who committed what parts
of this vicious crime.
[Allen] At that point, we just have to, like I said,
just continue looking for evidence.
We wanna know everything that happened.
We wanna know why.
You're following the evidence.
[Joe] During this entire case thus far,
Morris has nothing you can explain to a jury
or a judge.
However, they are fortunate
that a fellow named Andrew Johnson comes forward.
Okay, Mr. Johnson, what do you know about this?
Andrew Johnson says
that after Mr. Harrison had been missing
for a couple of weeks,
he asked Alex Rhue, Jr. to drive to Myrtle Beach
to help a friend move some furniture.
So Alex, Jr. agreed.
Now Andrew Johnson feels it's important
to come in and tell the police this.
Investigators need to confirm Andrew Johnson's story.
[Allen]We got phone records.
They give us analysis and that's what we went off of.
[Joe] They do a GPS location check
on Alex Rhue, Jr.'s cell phone
and it shows that ride taking place
to Myrtle Beach on the day when Johnson said it was.
So it confirms the fact that that trip did occur.
And Johnson says that's what Rhue told him
during that conversation.
And during that GPS search of Alex Rhue, Jr.'s cell phone,
they also determine that at two o'clock in the morning,
he went to the local Walmart the 26th of February.
Probably the night that this homicide occurred.
[Allen] That's one of the only things at that time
that was open.
We had to look at that video
to see if they may have come to Walmart.
We went through that Walmart footage.
That was a lot of footage we had to go through.
And we found them on camera...
purchasing peroxide.
Hydrogen peroxide is a very effective cleaning agent,
particularly when it comes to blood.
You have Alex Rhue, Jr. in that surveillance tape
buying hydrogen peroxide, but who's with him?
Alex Rhue, Sr.,
dear old dad,
the supposed smarter older
and more calm individual in most families.
Not in this family.
He's part of the cleanup effort.
[Joe] Now, are there innocent people buying things
in Walmart at two o'clock in the morning?
Sure there are.
However, they're not buying hydrogen peroxide
to clean up a whole lot of blood
in their sister's bedroom.
So that is the ultimate nail in the Rhue coffin.
[Allen] We look at that video
and we're getting to the point of making an arrest.
It was a good feeling
that I was able to accomplish that.
That was the first step, to me,
in justice.
Homicide investigation
is overwhelmingly filled with pressure.
That's why when you have somebody by the throat,
it is absolutely euphoric.
So now everyone's in custody,
Alex, Jr., Tiesh and her father.
Based on the available evidence,
investigators have a pretty clear idea
of what happened to Leon Harrison, Jr.
on the night of February 25th, 2017.
Tiesh and JR had a failing marriage
with cheating on both sides.
And the rage and the jealousy
filled Tiesh to the maximum.
She plotted her revenge.
And Tiesh decided to text JR.
[Allen] There was some text messages back and forth
and a conversation about a candle light dinner
in the bath tub.
And that's what he was going over there for.
[Joe] When he entered the house,
she invited him into her bedroom,
which I'm sure JR thought was promising.
He thought he was gonna have a reconciliation with Tiesh.
JR had no idea he was walking into a trap
designed to end his life.
[William]There had been no doubt
a history of conflict between the two.
And I feel like
that all came to a head that night in the house.
Mr. Harrison's wife's brother was there.
He got involved.
JR is attacked and subdued
and overwhelmed by these people.
And wire was used to tie his hands and feet,
making him helpless.
Their beating was part of the rage factor,
resulting in JR's demise.
The coroner was unable to determine
what was the fatal blow.
And there's certainly no evidence to say
which of these persons delivered that fatal blow.
[William] There was a concerted effort at that point
to get rid of the body, to clean up the scene
and to...
do what they could to distance themselves
from that situation.
[Joe] Then they remove JR from the premises...
take him to the Black River
and toss him in...
believing that he's gonna float down the river,
wind up in the Atlantic Ocean
and never to be seen or heard from again.
[Allen] We don't know exactly where they dumped him.
So much time had went by,
I don't know if we'll ever know.
In court, the jury determined
the father was only involved in the cleanup,
and not with the homicide.
So they charged him with obstruction of justice.
They believe that Tiesh and her brother,
Alex, Jr.,
were the primary killers in this case.
And they convicted them of murder.
In the end, the judge sentenced Tiesh
and her brother, Alex,
to 37 years in prison each
and sentenced their father to eight years.
You're all done.
[Brittani] I cried when I heard the verdict
'cause I knew that we finally got justice.
Yeah, he was a hands-on father.
Hands-on with everything.
Sometimes, I just wanna like pick up the phone
and talk to him about his kids.
[Tyquise] I haven't had a dad to see like
the teenage years.
So a lot of things that a teenager
would need their dad to show them,
I really didn't have that.
But when I make a touchdown,
he's right there beside me.
[Ji'Kiera] Every year, we celebrate his birthday
and things like that.
We go release balloons
where we found him at.
Or we'll go to his favorite restaurant.
It's not easy, but I know he still is with me.
[Allen] This homicide case,
I mean, that one will always stick out in my mind
because it was my first one.
And, ultimately, we got justice for a family.
[man on radio]Good work, guys.
Homicide investigation is the ultimate test
of the skill of the investigator.
Good police work is the answer to the human condition.
It won't prevent anything,
but it certainly will punish those responsible.
We are the consequences for your behavior.
That's what we do.
Next time on American Detective...
Dismemberment is an incredibly evil thing.
Their arms and legs were scattered around.
This perpetrator is intent on covering his tracks,
but no one can be careful enough to stop a good detective.
We're dealing with one sick individual.