What She Buried | 7. A Fly in the Soup

"Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana."

“"Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it."”

"So there's no... No, no buyers remorse. More like buyers rejoice." "I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it." "Bier's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may have like. See her Saturday return policy at Carvana.com." "Listen to every episode of what she buried, add free right now when you subscribe to the

binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else get exclusive bonus episodes and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to the binge channel on Apple podcasts and tap subscribe or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The binge feed your true crime obsession. "Come on in the funnel! Be quiet, wait! They're telling me that somebody's getting ready to tear gas. Oh god!"

There's an old adage. A journalist has never met a guilty prisoner.

It refers to the fact that most prisoners go to great lengths to convince reporters of their wrongful incarceration. But it also refers to the fact that most journalists are trying to make an

“argument about our crooked criminal legal system. And the only way we can think to do it is by”

talking about entirely innocent people. But why do you need to tell the stories of the innocent to show that the system is corrupt? What does someone like Quinnetta deserve? What do the women around her deserve? I would argue. Nothing like what I heard on this last call with Quinnetta. Nothing like what the state of Texas does in the dark corners of its prisons were behind the scenes in its courtrooms. Quinnetta's personal feelings don't negate the larger

truths at play here. Truth that expose our system for being murky, cruel, punitive, and full of people who have had so much bad done to them, and who, for the most part, then also did bad. Quinnetta was being held in a place where the windows were nailed shut, where there was no air conditioning, where temperatures hit 127 degrees and people died of the heat. Everything smelled like raw sewage. People were breaking down. One woman spent all day singing,

another screaming, another cutting herself. During this particular call, a woman was being extracted from a nearby cell, with the help of some sort of spray. All the egg on the wall. Oh, they're going to do her dirty. They're outside the door. They all have masks on, at her cell door. Sometimes, at the top of the door, it's becoming cut to door, while somebody else goes around for the window, and the double gas.

Can I hear her? Is that her screaming? Quinnetta didn't know who the woman was. She called out to a friend down the wing to ask what was going on. You could hear the frenetic energy. Like the concrete walls were vibrating.

I thought of Quinnetta's first letter to me. Everyone called women in prison monsters,

but she wrote, "I've yet to encounter monsters. Although I've met plenty of women with mental illness, untreated, and unviagnosed." The woman who was screaming, she'd apparently been in solitary for a short stint. Now, the guards were telling her it was time to leave, but the woman wouldn't budge. They're taking off the helmet now.

What does that mean? It means that they're not going to get her as she's down to your temporal rear, probably as a result of a fight, or if they had here, but I don't know she's a population, and she's yelling how she's scared. She's no one to leave. So they've got all of them in here to try to force her to self-extraction.

“Oh, she's young! Why did she not even go? Why did that name?”

There's one thing to use for five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve people going on, and I don't have no doubt for it to take showers, but they get that far off it. So they're just taking her back to general population?

She's twisting her body around, trying to resist, but she's outnumbered.

“A dozen guards with gear versus one girl. The guards hoister up and march her away.”

Of course, from herself, Connecticut only peered down the hallway, just a bit. Because of her failing eyesight, she couldn't see anything too clearly. In a very different way, neither could I. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is what she buried. I'm Justin Banderland. Episode seven. A fly in the suit.

Quinnado was in the opposite position of that young woman who was carried away by the guards. At the time of our last phone call in February, 2024, she was desperate to get out of solitary, back to general population. The reason she couldn't, I'd learn, was due to yet another maneuver

“that showed the length to which Quinnado was prepared to go to get free.”

The length to which Texas would go, to punish her. It was 2015. Quinnado was employed at the Braille facility. It's an elite gig. Prisoners transcribe and embossed textbooks. Which means that, unlike almost everyone else in prison, the Braille facility workers have access to computers and printing materials.

During the time that Quinnado was working at the Braille facility, two documents arrived at the headquarters of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the TDCJ. They were signed orders from a judge. A judge who had recently taken over the courtroom in Dallas, where Quinnado's murder case had been tried back in 2009. These documents stated that the prison sentence of Quinnado Yatrice Harris had been reduced.

On 50 years, to eight years, which is exactly how long Quinnado had at the time been incarcerated. In other words, the document stated that Quinnado had served her time and should be released immediately. In administrative assistant, a TDCJ flagged the document and called the judges courtroom in Dallas for confirmation. The clerk who answered the phone said

the judge had never issued the order. Sounded like a forgery. TDCJ promptly put Quinnado in solitary.

Deformer assistant, district attorney, Josh Healy, who had prosecuted Quinnado. This was all just further evidence of her depravity. She would have been out in society and she's the type that would have either gone into hiding or done something bad again. She's kind of creative. Okay, wow, that's pretty good. Forge judges orders are in the eye of the holder, I guess. That's Richard Franklin, one of Quinnado's defense attorneys.

If you try to escape a prison, you go to a wall, or you hurt somebody, or you kidnaps somebody. That's one thing, but this is this is kind of Mickey Mouse to me.

“If that's why she's an egg saying, and that's the only reason, I don't like it at all. I think that's”

bad on their part. I've read the 232 page offense report produced by TDCJ's Office of the Inspector General. It raises some questions. Like, if Quinnado forged the document, how did she get it out of the prison so that it could be sent to TDCJ headquarters? Who had she convinced to mail it off? How would she even communicate it her plans to that person? As far as I could see, investigators

never were able to get any definitive answers. Quinnado maintained her innocence.

And she had a theory for how a judge's order drastically reducing her sentence, ended up getting written, signed, and mailed to the proper authorities. The theory went like this. Another woman who worked at the Braille Workshop, she did it. This woman was a member of the Aryan sisterhood. In this Aryan sister had tried to freak Quinnado as a test case. If it had worked, if Quinnado had gotten out, the Aryan sister would have forged other

to the forgery offense. She maintained to me that she only did so because she hoped it would get her

“out of solitary. There it was again, a pattern. Quinnado got desperate, so Quinnado came up with a”

scheme, which she then denied. At the same time, TDCJ was not treating Quinnado properly.

Quinnado had been placed in solitary for an offense that TDCJ could never quite prove,

and a nonviolent one at that. The United Nations has defined more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement as torture. Quinnado was left in solitary confinement for more than 3000 consecutive days. So Quinnado had bad done to her. She did bad. She had more bad done to her. And on it went, a vicious circle. For as long as I've been working on this project, I've been trying to come to terms with what it all meant.

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“Connecticut told me that the only way prisoners in solitary can experience touch is in the exercise”

cages. There are a couple pens next to each other, and sometimes you get an hour to move around in them,

alone. If you climb about 20 feet up, they're at the top. There's a little gap in the fencing. If you balance precariously, and someone else in the next cage does the exact same thing, then you can press your fingertips to another person's. But when it added, that's for the younger prisoners. She wasn't climbing anywhere. So, no physical touch. But she was also separated from information. She had no internet, no way to get reliable daily news. Her radio signal was shaky.

She could only read books that people sent in, and magazines approved by the state. I knew that when Koneto was told something inside prison, she wasn't really able to verify it. She couldn't call out without being monitored, or talk, without being overheard. She had to go with her instincts. When Koneto sent me that email telling me she was withdrawing cooperation, I wasn't sure what to think.

“Had someone scared her? Was she having regrets about the things she'd said?”

And then, concocting yet another elaborate play, rather than just, say, communicating her trepidation to me? While I was trying to get my bearings, I started reaching out to women who had been incarcerated with Koneto. I wanted an inside perspective on what Koneto was like in prison, and how TDCJ treated her. Joy brand-ve lives in Houston now, but she spent a decade in prison and gatesville, much of it in solitary confinement alongside Koneto. On a scale of 1 to 10,

Joy told me, she knows Koneto at a 10. "Do you think Koneto, her being knowledgeable, is more dangerous, than somebody who calls her?" "Of course." Dangerous, because Koneto has knowledge about how the levers of power work at TDCJ. The majority of people in prison, some estimates

It's not easy for them to advocate for themselves, and a disempowered population benefits TDCJ.

“Then, someone like Koneto comes along. She helps people prepare legal documents. She offers”

her first to read over their paperwork. So inside the prison, even her solitary, Koneto became kind

of indispensable. "We called her Detroit. It's your kind. What if she's like a mother? She's loving. She's a mentor. Everybody likes her." Joy told me that she had a business, body butter, and hair grease, and Koneto had made it all possible. Had hooked her up with an accountant, and had got her all set up so that when Joy walked free, she had a way to make money. Koneto didn't benefit from this at all. She just did it. "For real?" "Yes, I found one in that company here."

"And see how you set that up?" "Yes, one in that frame, and her friend helped me set it up." Joy wasn't the only woman with a story like this. Others told me how mist Detroit comforted

“them when they were in crisis. Provided clothing or sanitary pads or food. She tied the items”

onto floss and fished them out between the bars, down the halls. Koneto couldn't have expected anything from these women. She knew they had nothing to give her.

Nobody was watching. Koneto never mentioned any of this to me. She just helped.

You can charge a lot in prison for helping, particularly for providing highly skilled help, like vetting legal paperwork. But everyone told me. Koneto did it all for free. And something about all this. It seems to have made the TDCJ higher-ups very upset with Koneto Harris. "They be one of herself very frequently and stand in effort like ours. It's like combing through all her information. They even got her mail. Like babysitting. They watched everybody

mail CDC just delayed whatever come in. But like in the mail room, they'll send them a list of names that are hot." "Hot," meaning "read everything this person sends out and gets in." "The orders to do this," Joy says, "came from up high." "Whenever I say they, I mean, eight ministries and anybody who ever does anything to her as well as like casewives and investigations,

it's always in administration, administration, comms, and rates or sale,

administration is the ones that be tying up her money when it comes in. All of a sudden I'm saying, all happens to administration." Joy's depiction of Koneto and her treatment by TDCJ matched up with what Koneto herself said, again and again. They had it out for her. And I do think TDCJ views Koneto as a threat. She's savvy, she's informed, and she writes and speaks out about what's happening in there.

So the idea that they would force her to drop out of this podcast to my mind and in my experience, that was a real possibility. My producer Eric emailed the TDCJ press office and asked them about Koneto's claims. Had Koneto been directed to withdraw from the podcast, had she been told it would be better for her if I destroyed all my interviews and notes? The press office wrote, "These statements were not made to Koneto Harris." I was expecting that answer. Because on the one hand,

if TDCJ did exactly what Koneto claimed they did, it's quite likely that they would deny everything. And on the other hand, if Koneto made the whole thing up, TDCJ would also deny everything.

“I think that Koneto knew how this would all play out.”

If I had to guess, I guess that she decided on her own to cut me off. Why? Maybe, after five years of corresponding, she worried she'd said too much. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was just being strategic, now that she was a leading prison journalist. With the media people who gave her awards and published her work, be so eager to work with her if they knew the more convoluted version of her life. She'd encouraged me to report,

told me to find her ghosts to talk to them. And I had. And while I suspect that this submerged part of Koneto was desperate to come clean, another part of her was desperate to keep up

couldn't go like we'd hoped.

“A month after all of this, in April 2024, Koneto was finally released back to general population.”

There, she started writing about a new topic. True crime. For her first piece,

the headline read. True crime shows exploit and lie about women like me. The genre was racist and sexist, she argued. Then, Koneto and her lawyer co-authored a law review article called "The True Harms of True Crime." The abstract mentioned podcasts first. Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb in Mississauga, Canada. It's not a coincidence. One after the other, in the same house.

Is this bad luck or something more sinister? The worst investigative mess I've ever ever encountered. The long simmering, what took you so fucking long to get here. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrison's. I'm Amy Dempsey Raven. What happened to the Harrison's is available now on the bench. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to the binge can listen to all episodes,

all at once, ad-free.

Koneto said that killing Michael Giles was a mistake. She wished it had never happened.

She told me that if his family thought she deserved 50 years, she'd take it. But she never sounded terribly sorry about actually killing him. She once wrote to me,

“"I didn't travel 3,000 miles planning to shoot him. He had put me through so much and I believe”

he would have killed us both." Even though Koneto still resented Michael Giles, she seemed genuinely sorry for his mother. She told me no mother should have to bury their child. I don't wish that on nobody. Michael Giles' mother was named Jany Smith.

Jany never recovered from learning that her son, her favorite child, had been killed.

About a time the child came around, the mom had stopped eating and had lost so much weight that her doctors had us put her in a rehab center and they had to put the tube in a stomach to feed her and stuff. Gwen Haney, Michael sister, said that even before Michael's disappearance, Jany was fragile. She was exhibiting signs of dementia. Gwen says she'd also had a mental breakdown. Once Michael's body was discovered, Jany refused to really face what had happened.

“She never would talk about Mike. I think in her mind, she just pretended like he was still in the”

military. You know what I mean? Because he was there for so long. To Gwen, the most painful part wasn't just that Koneto had killed Michael. It's that she'd desecrated his memory. In covering her tracks in the cleanup, Koneto had destroyed everything. Even things that held only sentimental value. His family was left with nothing. I don't know what she did with all his military

medals he had. She just threw him away. Just he's like just trashed everything. We didn't get anything. He had my family reunion video tapes, VHSs. He was transferring to make copies for all the family members, you know, and just all of it gone. Just gone. Michael's money was gone too. Money he used to help his mom and other relatives. Art allure to do a civil suit. She gave him a $5,000 retainer and nothing ever came of it.

I found out that he had passed away and the new law you knew nothing about it. So nothing ever came back to my mom. Nothing whatsoever. Over the years, Jany deteriorated further. She may not have spoken about her son's death, but it haunted her. And I'll tell you, nobody knows this, really, and truly except for immediate family for the most part, maybe some of my neighbors and all. My mom screamed. I got

until she goes to bed at night, I can't breathe. She did that for at least 13455 years straight.

“And I think that she believed that Mike was buried alive of something, you know?”

Jany Smith died in 2017. These days for Gwen, there's just silence and absence. I remember a victim impact statement. I remember talking about, okay, I used to make a German chocolate cake from scratch every Christmas.

And nobody ate coconut except for me and Mike. So Mike would come over. It was always Christmas.

He'd come over. He'd get half to cake. Two, three days later, he'd call me. You got any more cake. So ever since he disappeared, I hadn't made that cake because nobody else ate it except me and him. And I remember to just tell him he should make the cake. So it took me, at least 10 years. And now I make it every Christmas again. And when I take that first bite, I say how good it is to win. Which he was here to share with me. Gwen has a generally calm

demeanor. But beneath it, there's rage. I will tell you though, I know prisons ain't got

air conditions. When it's hot out in the summer and it's 110 degrees, I know her as it's

sitting down there. She's probably smaller than Lord knows what now. But I hope they bring her out in a black bag. I really and truly do. Nothing's going to bring him back. And she's still got another judge to face when she leaves this world. That's between her and God. And I really hope that before she leaves this world, that she feels the pain that my mother had to deal with. I hope she feels the pain that my mother had to deal with.

On my final call with Queneta, we spoke about her three children. It had been nearly a decade since you'd seen them in person. Do you remember your last visit with your kids? Yep, God's a 15. And what was that like? It was nice what I peel me because they didn't recognize me. Not look like all of my goodness. So yeah, that was shocking. Before that, they hadn't visited for four years. It was hard to get everyone from Michigan

to Texas. An expensive. Queneta held her kids hands. I remember they were so hungry and I felt so bad because they were thinking that they were providing them with something because they can't go out and get anything to eat and they just gave them like cookies and like touch

“or anything. And that's how I should come back. There's a working out of doing to see me.”

I couldn't help but make a connection between the timing of that last visit and the forgery incident that landed Queneta in solitary. Less than six weeks. She'd been a model prisoner for years. Then, she walked into the room and her kids didn't recognize her. They were hungry and she couldn't feed them. Of course, Queneta wouldn't fully admit that she'd even done the forgery.

It was among the many things she denied. Things she just wouldn't deal with. And those denials, those lies, that was why we were in this hall of mirrors,

where we could never tell what was real and what was a reflection.

In that last call, I was trying to find a way out. This story, you start trying to do it and then you're inside of it. Like you know because you're like and you're all busy in it. But what I think is like sort of happened is that all the truths and all the lies and all the real things that happened in all the fake things that happened, got and got and like

tangled together. There's reasons people do things. But if you have a like lies in there or

“in after season things, then you can't even work out the reasons. So that's what I'm trying to”

like figure out, like how to unravel it into a close to like what really was. Because otherwise any truth you say is not you, but it's corrupted. Like the old people say if you

You know, if I'll stay used to teach our stories of children, you just can't take the fly out

“the suit and eat the suit. The whole thing corrupted. Who is Kwaneta Harris?”

I asked that question to almost everyone I interviewed, including Kwaneta herself. I got a different answer each time. But now I think the question itself was misguided

because she was always being defined by someone else, asked to conform to other's ideas about who she

should be and she didn't conform. Instead, she performed. She put on a mask. Once, in a long letter, she told me about her family history, but her childhood. About all the expectations weighing upon her, to rise above stereotypes and circumstances. She wrote, "With longing, I thought, how lucky people are to only be themselves."

I suppose that's something Kwaneta never managed to only be herself.

But now, being herself could also mean facing herself. It would mean making an honest assessment what she had done, who she had become and where she wanted to go next. I didn't realize this would be our last call. The clock was running out. Texas prison phones turned off at exactly 8pm. What's your phone time tomorrow? It might be about five, I'll try five, my time.

I had a whole list of questions for Kwaneta for when we talked again. I can't believe Labor Day is almost here. I'm not ready to let Summer go just yet. We've got the picnic menu planned, friends are coming

over, and my one stop before everyone arrives is always total wine and more.

I'll grab a couple bottles of wine, some tropical can cocktails, plus a few hard

“shelters like mango, lime, and pineapple. That's why I keep coming back to total wine.”

The selection is incredible, and with the lowest prices, it's easy to prep for the long weekend. This Labor Day shop total wine and more, spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21. What she buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and campside media. This show was reported and hosted by me, Justin Vanderland. Eric Benson is the Executive Producer.

Ashley and Krigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose,

“Josie Duffy Rice, Mozi Secret, Emily Martinez, Shiba Joseph, and Michael Meyer.”

The story editor is Matthew Share. The series was mixed in sound design by Garrett Tiedeman, a support from UN-Li Trimulin. Backjacket by Matthew Giiles. A special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dinkle. From Sony Music Entertainment, the Executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Campside media's Executive producers are Josh Dean Vanessa Grigoriades and Matthew Share.

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