← Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Accused Killer Dad Joins Search for Baby Emmanuel’s Body? | Matt Murphy Breaks It Down
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Foreign hey, everyone. I'm Ashley Banfield and this is Drop dead serious. When last we spoke of Jake and Rebecca Harrow, the San Bernardino couple who went on TV begging us to help them find their baby, Emmanuel, after Rebecca was attacked in a parking lot, hit on the back of the head, only to emerge from unconsciousness to find her baby was missing. Yeah. No. They were arrested and charged with murder. And now comes the news. Pretty surprising, actually, that cameras caught this, that the deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff's Office escorted Jake in cuffs and his reddish orange jail jumpsuit to the side of Highway 60 in San Bernardino County. I suppose to help them look for a body, to help them look for evidence of what we sort of all now think may be the truth, which is that nobody stole that baby, right? It wasn't a kidnapping. It was potentially allegedly something. So much more. Two parents killing their baby, discarding their baby, and then concocting some bullshit story to try to clear themselves, right? No. No matter that you wind up the entire nation with the terror and the fear the little baby was stolen and the. And the sympathy that these parents had lost their baby. Never mind any of that kind of criminal behavior, right? Alleged. No. The police think they did it. And it looks on first sight from this video that they want Jake to help them find the baby's remains. Why else would you take a guy out of county, right, Put him in a cruiser, drive him out into a place adjacent to the desert and have him walking around amid a bunch of stories, search party members, if not to ask him to help in finding that baby, maybe, just maybe, to get a little bit of, you know, time shaved off, whatever's coming to him. Or is it a ploy? Is it a tactic? Is it a way when you have a mom and a dad, a husband and a wife, to try to pit one against the other? Think about it. If you're the homicide detectives and neither one of these people is talking, because remember, they told us even before being arrested that they had stopped cooperating or at least that Rebecca had. Jake's lawyer said, oh, he's offering himself up. And the cops said, no, he's not. Is it possible that this is a ploy by the homicide detectives to march publicly the dad out there in his jail garb and make it look like he's giving up the goods? Meaning are they pressuring Rebecca to say, hey, look, your husband's out there, he's getting to the trough first. You want to try to offset that. You want to try and head him off at the past, Maybe cough up the info, cough up the confession, and maybe you'll get a better deal and he'll go down for the murder because he's pinning it on you. This is all conjecture, but it is strategy. And folks, you should know this, it is not illegal. Detectives are allowed to lie in the process of trying to, to extract information from the subjects that they're interviewing. They can make up any story they want. They can say, hey, you know your friend in the next room? Yeah, he's already told us you did it. Sure you don't want to maybe come up with the truth and make sure that he doesn't get off scot free? Well, that may never have happened, but they can say that it is all part of the investigative process and it is legal, it is allowed. So I'm wondering if that's what they're doing with Jake or if Jake's lawyer maybe said to him, dude, they got you dead to rights. You better start doing something in order to get a deal that's better than what you're about to get, which is toe tag parole. You're never coming out of prison. You beat a 10 week baby into a situation where she now needs care for the rest of her life. She's blind, she's got 4% brain activity. According to some reports, she can't even swallow on her own because of the abuse that she received from you at 10 weeks. Don't even get me started. Why? He was only six months in jail for that lifetime sentence for this little 7 year old girl who was only 10 weeks. Have you ever seen a 10 week old baby? They're just like, they're like pudding. They're so helpless and tiny, they can't even lift their own heads sometimes, right? And this was the abuse, the damage, the cruelty, legal term for it, child cruelty was what he was charged and convicted of. So the lawyer might be looking at him and saying, with your background, you were already convicted of, you're already a convicted felon of this kind of Crime right adjacent. They're going to put you away forever. Your only hope now to save your effing soul and maybe get a few years out at the tail end of your life is to lead them to the body. Solve this crime. Do not cost the taxpayers of this county and this state one more penny in investigation or in prosecution. Do not. And maybe you'll have a chance in hell of not ending up on death row. Right? At this point, we have no idea what he's actually saying. What is Jake actually saying? We have no idea what Rebecca is saying. We have no idea what her lawyer is telling her. Don't forget, a lot of you out there saw this woman and as. As reprehensible as it is if she's lying. I got hit in the back head, my baby was stolen and help me find him. Right? Still all alleged, even though a lot of the red flags are there, right? That bruise is old. What if she's an abused woman? What if he did this? What if he killed this baby, beat the hell out of her and beat her into submission and beat her into saying these things, Right? I've seen it before. I have seen it so, so many times before. What if that's the actual story? And now is he going to make her go down for it? Oh, she beat the baby, she threw the baby out. I'm just here for moral support. You never know. And that could have been the story. We have no idea who did what, if anything. But me thinks the investigators have a hell of a lot more than we know. They've been through that house. Okay. Couple reports I should tell you about. And these are unverified, so I can't tell you that these are true. I just know that these are some of the things that are floating out there. And until they're verified, that's all they are. They are just innuendo and reporting from the Internet. So it's not. It's not to be taken, you know, must be taken with a grain of salt. Some reports said there was blood found in the house when they executed multiple warrants. And I should say multiple warrants because when you get one warrant, you go in and you list out the things you're looking for in advance. You get approval from a judge and then you go in and you see a whole lot more stuff. You usually have to go get another warrant and it can be very, very fast, but you usually need another warrant to seize all those other things as well. And a very detailed manifest has to be made when authorities execute these warrants. And take evidence out of a home or a business or a, you know, any kind of structure. So there are. There are some reports that blood was found in the house. There's another report, and it's hard to determine this, that there wasn't much evidence of Emanuel in the house, meaning his clothes weren't even. They may have been thrown away. And who has a missing child and decides within a week to just, well, better get rid of all these? Not going to need these anymore. Nobody. It's a huge red flag for investigators if any of the belongings of a missing person or baby or child are done away with real early in the case. That is a huge flag that in your mind, you don't need these anymore. In the mind of an innocent person, you absolutely need these. Because you're going to find my effing baby, and I'm going to do everything to help you find my baby. Right. So that's a flag for investigators. Okay. Then there's another report out there. Again, it's not confirmed that Rebecca may have deleted all of the pictures off of her phone of baby Emanuel and her other children as well. Unusual behavior. You absolutely would not do that if you were looking for your missing baby, right? You might. I doubt it, but you might do it. Couple years out, you might say, I can't live with this anymore. I need a fresh start. Most people would hang on to every one of those pictures and stare at them all day. They'd call the voicemail of their missing, you know, teenager to hear the outgoing message every single day, just to hear the voice of their missing, presumed dead teenager. But there is this report. Again, it's unverified, but if that is a report that will be very, very high in the prosecutor's list of all the reasons a jury should assume beyond a reasonable doubt that. That she's involved in some way in. In the. In the death of her son. So I should tell you as well that the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said that cadaver dogs were being used. And that's important because, again, when they went to search the house, there were reports of cadaver dogs. Well, now we're hearing that there were cadaver dogs used. And so it's fair to put two and two, that they may have brought cadaver dogs to the home to see if maybe there's some evidence of decomposition in the house. Because if they killed the baby in the house and then tried to figure out what to do. Decomposition. Decomposition starts right away. And there can be evidence of that. Just look up Wikipedia Casey Anthony. The evidence of decomposition in her trunk, the belief was, is that she drove around for days with the body of Kaylee in her trunk, trying to figure out what to do. And the decomposition was so horrendous that her mother called 911 and said, There's a dead. There's a smell of a dead body bin in the trunk of the car. So decomposition is something that cadaver dogs can determine right away. They can see it right away. Maybe that was one of the things that led to the arrest. Within a week, right? A week. Ish. Maybe they got the evidence of decomp. Maybe they saw. Hey, none of Baby Emanuel's clothes are here. That's horseshit. Lock her up. Hook her up. Put the cuffs on. Let's go. Him too. You know, maybe never know. Maybe they found blood evidence. In a house with kids, you're gonna probably find blood evidence. Everybody skins their knee. Everybody has an injury and holds onto the side of door frame when they're walking by. It's a little hard to say there's some blood evidence in the house when people live there, you know? Now, Baby Emanuel, it's only seven months, right? He's not walking around. He's not casting his blood all over. He's not getting a skin knee. So they would have to determine that it was Baby Emanuel's blood. Again, there are ways that a baby can get a cut and then there's transfer evidence. You use the Kleenex and then it falls on the floor, you throw it out in the garbage, and your hand is pulling the garbage door open and you put it in, and this will blood ends up on the handle of the garbage. There are transfer possibilities, but we're talking beyond a reasonable doubt here, right? Reasonable. So you'd have to make a hell of a case as to why there are pools or droplets of baby's blood, if there is such a thing found in that house. But that's something to consider. There were also dozens of people seen roadside off of Highway 60 when the Riverside County Sheriff's officers brought Jake Harrow to the roadside in his cuffs and his prison garb to help have a peak. See, I was so fascinated with all the possibilities of these developments. I called Matt Murphy right away. He's like my go to guy. He's one of the most skilled homicide investigators out there. He literally wrote the book of murder, right? About his incredible body of work in his. In his, you know, career in American jurisprudence. And I asked him all the questions, especially since he's California prosecutor. I asked him all of these questions about the most recent developments in the case. Taking Jake Harrow in cuffs out to the highway to start helping to look if that's in fact what they were doing. And then everything since that we now know needs to be questioned given the fact they were arrested. Matt, tell me your first thoughts upon hearing the headlines in this case. Missing baby, mom telling a sob story, dad telling a bit of a sob story. And then the Internet going wild.
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Well, number one, I've prosecuted more baby deaths or child abuse cases that I care to even remember in a murder context. And just a generic child abuse case. And it immediately breaks your heart. Every child is innocent. And that photo of that poor little boy immediately broke my heart. That was my first thought. And then my second thought was, he's dead and they've gotten rid of the body. And I've done five no body homicide prosecutions over the course of my career. And I just hope that they have the experience to put that one together in the right way. And it appears that they're, they're doing everything so far. You know, they charge both parents with murder. That's exactly what they should be doing. And so, you know, this is, we're still very early days on this case.
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Matt, last time we talked, we were discussing the ethics of how sad it is that I feel angry and sad at the same time because I didn't know whether to believe they were lying or whether they were victims. And now we're starting to get closer.
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Well, this is a, initially, it appears to be a very good police investigation. They, the story made no sense from the very beginning. The black eye that this woman said, she clearly in the later stages of healing. And there's a whole forensic science to that. We've all experienced that in our, in our lives as we bruise. But there is, it has been forensically studied and everybody's a little bit different. But that was an old injury. So she came in. People getting knocked out is something that happens on TV when somebody gets punched. And I just watched an old movie from the 80s where everybody. That was, that was what they did. It was that old Robert De Niro movie with the, you know, where he plays the bounty hunter. And every scene somebody's getting punched. Knock. Getting knocked out. Losing your conscious, losing consciousness as a result of a traumatic injury like that is a huge medical event. And that's why most of us have been knocked out. Maybe most people never knocked out. But that comes with a whole host of neurological complications and concussions and things that can be tested. And of course none of that was true. And the police immediately seized on that. And when you've got a missing child and a mother who's clearly lying, that is a, that's a recipe for tragedy because it means that this child is probably dead. Okay, so now they've charged them with murder, which is exactly what they should have done. I've prosecuted five nobody cases during the course of my career, and I, my very first thought was, I hope they, I hope they hook them and do this right. And then of course, when you get into the background of, of this man, it is, it's chilling. You know, he's got a history of abusing children, and the injuries on the, in the previous case were what you typically see in very severe child abuse cases. And so so far, the authorities involved in this are making, in my opinion, all the right steps. They're, they, they charge them, and they don't seem to be shying away from the idea that they may never find this body.
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B
Let, let's talk about never finding the body because this video has emerged of Jake Harrow in an orange jumpsuit saying Riverside county on the back with county deputies taking him to the side of a highway and where it appears he's assisting in the search for something. Two questions. Your thoughts, first of all, about that happening. And secondly, as a prosecutor, this is the image in everyone's mind now, right? A guy in a jail jumpsuit out looking for potentially a body, which could be very poisonous. Defining a jury.
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C
Yeah. So, you know, one of the, one of the sort of common misconceptions out there is that somebody's entitled to a jury that has not heard of the case. And that's not true. Number one, Riverside is a very large county and It's a professional DA's office, the Riverside County District attorney, and a lot of the deputies are very, very good. And this isn't their first rodeo in cases like this. They deal with plenty of child abuse cases and they prosecute nobody cases as well, so they know what they're doing. What you're entitled to as a criminal defendant is a jury that can be fair. And you'd be amazed, actually, I think everybody would. I can't tell you how many times I've been in there. And that high profile case with the cameras in the courtroom and you think that every juror in the whole world is hanging on every development in the case and you pass out questionnaires and you might get like 1 in 10 and it'll be like, I heard something about a little boy, but I don't remember anything. So Riverside county, especially the bench there, a lot of good judges, they're perfectly capable of empaneling a fair jury despite what, what may pop up in the media. And that's not in Orange county, for example, Ashley. So 3 million people were right adjacent to Riverside. A little bit bigger population wise, but no strangers to each other office, office wise. There's never been a single case sent out of Orange county for a change of any motion due to prepopulation, pretrial publicity, if it gives you any idea. Yeah, very rare.
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Listen, I had another question about strategy. Is it possible, and this is my spidey mind just going, you know, out there, but is it possible that deputies would take a husband or a wife in a very high profile way in an orange jumpsuit out on the side of a highway in order to pressure the other spouse by showing them the video saying, hey look, your husband's about to flip on you. Are you sure you don't want to flip first and get a better deal? Like is it possible this is a strategy of theirs as opposed to some information they heard and they're taking him out to see if he can help them find the body?
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C
Well, it's a great question. The answer is 100% yes, it's possible. We just don't know enough behind the scenes. I kind of doubt it is, but absolutely. Experienced investigators, experienced prosecutors do stuff like that all the time. If you are, you want to put pressure on somebody to reveal the location of a body, that is, that's, that's one of the many tools available in the arsenal of investigating detectives and prosecutors to do that. And I guarantee there are prosecutors involved in this case behind the scenes who are involved in some of these decisions.
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How about the issue of people piling on to Rebecca as opposed to piling on to Jake until Jake's background came along and it was clear he had beaten up a 10 week old baby in the past. Do you think that moms may get a tougher go in the criminal justice system than dads when this could be very much they are both in on it or they are both innocent or one is guilty or the other is guilty?
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C
Well, I think that there's just a, there's an emotional reaction like the Susan Smith case. Right. To a mother who has anything to do with the, with the death of their child. There's a visceral emotional reaction to that. I think most jurors can put that aside. What, what you typ typically see in cases like this, Ashley, is you will See, it's called the, it's, it's this defense. It's where they, they're, they will be tried separately.
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The other guy did each. I've heard it. That guy did it. No, that guy did it.
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C
That's right. That's right. And, and it happens all the time. That's very, very common in, in situations like this. And look, it's, this is, these are second degree murders, okay. Typically, unless there's evidence to show that it was somehow planned. These are very impulsive. It's anger based. I, I cannot tell you how many times. It's like diapers get changed and a kid poops and that's what sets off the boyfriend. And it's, and it's oftentimes the boyfriend, the dad, it's often a male in the house, but sometimes it's mom too, and they flip out and they shake the child, they throw the child down and they accidentally kill them. Those are second degree murders in the state of California. Currently in the, in the state you get a parole hearing in about 12 years after that. So it'll be interesting to see what happens here. This is very, very early days on this case. It is absolutely horrific. But you got a lot of professionals involved and I have every confidence that so far, everything I've seen without reading any of the discovery yet, because of course it hasn't been released. They're making all the right steps, the prosecution and the detectives.
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B
Do you think there's anything to it though, that, that people. And maybe the jury pool is different, but the Internet certainly holds Rebecca more culpable. And maybe it's because Rebecca was the one who told the story.
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C
Well, she clearly lied, you know, and that's something that I think that a lot of people immediately get offended by because either if she's completely innocent in the sense that she, let's say she had no idea about his history, she had no idea that he was capable of something like this. And then he does it. She's clearly covering for him. So there's not going to be a lot of love lost, especially on the Internet, for a woman who would do that when you're talking about her biological son. And then pretty much that's kind of best case scenario for her. Right. That she's an accessory after the fact. That'll be her defense that she helped afterwards. Accessory after the fact. And this is very interesting. We're talking about the Donna Adelson case lately, right? In the state of Florida, you can do 30 years for accessory after the fact.
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B
Wow.
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C
In the state of Cal. Yeah. In the state of California, the maximum amount of actual jail time you will do for accessory after the fact for murder is 18 months in California State Prison. That's a maximum. It's 36 months sentence at 50% good time, work time. So nobody can do more than 18 months for accessory after the fact, even for a murder case. Yeah. Which is something in my opinion, like I've long advocated for that to change. Most states link the excessive after the fact charge to whatever the underlying crime is, which makes a lot of sense. In Florida you can do 30 years, in California you do a max of 18 months.
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B
Let's talk a little bit about the other charges though. I mean, clearly if there's a second degree murder charge that's filed against these two, there have to be other charges like, you know, misdirecting authorities, telling lies, lying to authorities. But then I also wondered, is there some charge out there about winding up the public and having the public believing that they somehow might be able to help find this, this, this kidnapper in this child? Like, what's the array of charges they should be facing?
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C
Well, look, it, it should be. I couldn't agree with you more. There should be, it's like the Sherry Papini case, right? There should be additional charges and there are, there are some like penal code section 69, obstruction of justice. Maybe in this case they might be able to do a conspiracy. They're almost all going to be lessers to the murder charge. And the murder charge would be second degree murder in this. Unless there's, unless they find a weapon, which you never do in these cases. Okay. The child is defenseless and it's almost always hands bludgeoning, sometimes shaking, smothering. But yeah. So you're not going to get a gun enhancement. A knife only adds one year. A gun adds, can add 15 or life depending on the circumstances. But you're not going to see that here. So what you've got is you got a 12 year, a 12 year parole hearing base and then everything else is, it's called one third the mid. So when you're talking about lesser crimes, it should, you should be able to pile on a bunch of time. They realistically will not be able to. Maybe they can add on a couple more years on those things. And I agree with you 100%. Somebody needs to take a look at that. The California legislature should take a hard look at making a separate crime out of this type of thing where resources and the public and everybody begins looking in one direction because the Actual killer is misdirecting people. But we'll see that does exist in a better way in federal court. But this is Riverside County DA's office. This will be a state court, a state case with state charges.
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B
I bring that up because I was in the courtroom for every single day of Casey Anthony. And the exquisite lying that Casey was capable of was part of her trial and was the only thing that she was found guilty of originally was lying to the police. And it resulted in some time, ultimately time served. But it made me think, well, then it might be a lesser included. It may be so much smaller than the, the murder itself, but if that's all you can get them on and it proves to be that they did lie, God, why doesn't every state want to do that?
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C
Well, and, and you just hit a raw nerve with me. I have wanted to. I, I watched that like we all did the Casey Anthony case. I wanted to cross examine that woman so bad, and, and as did everybody in the homicide unit that I was with at the time. You know, there, there should be greater penalties for that sort of thing. And in the state of California, sad, they might be. Add on a little bit of time, maybe she gets a parole hearing in 15 years instead of 12. But it's nowhere near, in my view, enough time. Second degree murder in the state of California with 85% good time, work time credits, the way it works out is not enough time for a murder. It's just not. Second degree murder is generic murder in the state and used to be 50 into life. Life used to mean life. But right now, current California law, you get a parole hearing in about 12 years.
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B
Matt, quickly tell me, what are the homicide detectives doing right now, separately with Rebecca and with Jake?
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C
Well, they're interviewing them, hopefully multiple times over and over again. I think that's probably already gone down. And I think they're looking for a body. Ashley. I think they're, they're aggressively trying to find cell phone locations and they're going through pings. They're also going through their computers, their friends, looking at that, looking for any clue they can to find that, that, that baby. But I'll tell you what. In Riverside, Riverside is at the edge of the Mojave Desert, which is one of the largest geographical features on the planet Earth. And as a general rule in murder cases, and I almost don't want to tip off bad guys for this, but it's true, if you get a body out on the Pacific Ocean in Southern California or out into the desert, they're never recovered. And juries do not want to give the benefit of successfully getting rid of the victim's body. So they will be, you know, if this boy has disappeared, they and Riverside knows this. The DA out there knows this. They juries don't need a dead body to convict. They really don't. So this will be a very interesting case to see. The way it pans out so far, I see them making all the right moves and I'm going to be following this one closely. And I hope you have me on again.
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B
Oh, my biggest thanks to Matt Murphy. He always thinks of the things I don't think of because I hadn't thought of all the cases that I've covered that actually went to prosecution without a body. Everybody says no body, no murder, horse shit. Plenty of people have been put away for life or gotten the death penalty with no body. They never find the body, but they find plenty of evidence that you caused a body to exist somewhere. So I never thought of that until, you know, Matt brought that up. But it's a really good point. Finding a 10 month old baby's body, if they did in fact discard that body, if they did in fact kill Baby Emanuel and they did in fact discard Baby Emanuel in the wilderness somewhere, that's going to be a hell of a feat. Maybe there'll be some residual evidence, maybe there'll be some forensics out there that the coyote or whatever didn't get to. Maybe. But right now we know there isn't a body of Baby Emanuel. But I do stress right now because they will continue to look. In the meantime, we'll continue to cover this case and bring you updates and just as soon as they happen. I'm Ashley Banfield. Thank you so much for listening and watching. I always love that you're here. I love our true crime community and I could not do this without you. So thank you. And if you remember one thing from today, it's that the truth isn't just serious, it's drop dead serious.