In September 1993, the life of Mary Lee Harris, a 28-year-old mother of two young girls, was tragically cut short in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For nearly two decades, her death remained a painful mystery for her family, a cold case in the files of the Milwaukee Police Department. Her killer, a man with a history of violence, was already behind bars for another murder, his connection to Mary’s death yet to be uncovered.
The eventual resolution of her case would be a testament to the persistence of cold case detectives and the power of forensic science.
On a September day that year, sanitation workers in Milwaukee made a horrifying discovery. While emptying a garbage cart in the 2400 block of North 10th Street, they found the body of a woman in the back of their truck. An autopsy would later reveal that the woman, identified as Mary Lee Harris, had been strangled. Investigators collected evidence from the scene, including clippings from Mary’s fingernails, which were carefully preserved in police inventory, holding a secret that would take years to unlock.
The investigation into Mary's murder yielded no immediate suspects, and the case gradually went cold. Mary's two daughters, who were just 11 and 5 years old at the time of her death, were left without their mother. Their family was torn apart, with the sisters going to live with their different fathers, their childhoods forever shadowed by the unsolved murder and the fear that the person responsible might one day return for them.
Years passed without any answers. The man responsible for Mary's death, George Lamar Jones, was a serial killer known on the street as "Mule." Jones had a violent past, including a manslaughter conviction for stabbing a woman in Mississippi in the early 1970s, for which he served about five years in prison. In 1998, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1997 strangulation of another Milwaukee woman, Shameika Carter. At the time, he was a person of interest in Mary's death, but there was not enough evidence to charge him.
The break in Mary's case finally came in March 2009, when a detective from the Milwaukee Police Department's cold case unit resubmitted the fingernail clippings to the State Crime Laboratory. Advances in DNA technology allowed for a profile to be developed, and it matched George Lamar Jones. When detectives interviewed the already-incarcerated Jones in March 2010, he confessed to killing Mary.
According to his confession, he and Mary were smoking crack cocaine at his home when he became angry, telling her she was smoking too fast. An argument escalated into a physical fight, and Jones admitted to choking her for approximately 15 minutes. After realizing she was dead, he panicked. He rolled a garbage cart into his house, placed Mary’s body inside, and then wheeled it to a nearby apartment building, where it was later collected by the sanitation truck.
In 2010, George Lamar Jones, then 65, pleaded guilty to first-degree reckless homicide for the murder of Mary Lee Harris. At his sentencing, Mary’s two daughters spoke of the profound and lasting pain his actions had caused their family. In a symbolic but important gesture of accountability, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Dennis Cimpl sentenced Jones to 30 years in prison, to be served consecutively to the life sentence he was already serving for Shameika Carter's murder. The judge stated that a consecutive sentence was necessary so that Mary's life would have meaning in the eyes of the law. Upon hearing the sentence, one of Mary's daughters cried out, "Yes, Lord." George Lamar Jones died of natural causes in prison on April 30, 2012.
