Kevin Flynn - Relentless Pursuit: A True Story of Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldnt Quit

O NE S EPTEMBER DAY , I took a trip to a cemetery with my baby girl.

Megan had been born in the spring, and Id spent less time with her than I should have. The day after my wife and I brought her home from the hospital, I was in court starting a grueling gang-murder trial. It had been the same way when my son, Connor, was born two years earlier: two murder trials the month before and another a month after, the ceremonies of birth sadly surrounded by those of death. But at the end of my daughters first summer, I took a two-month break to be with her and my son while both were still fresh and new in the world. It was a time that would prove to be the most treasured of my life.

Still, for any man whos ever had it in him to want to be a homicide prosecutor, every day falls in a bittersweet autumn, and death is never that far away, nor is work. It was an afternoon in Indian summer 1995, with all the brightness and ominous portent of the season. My son was with my wife, Patrice; my daughter with me. It was time to go someplace.

As I write this, my daughter is eleven years old, still in childhood but leaning over the edge to see whats next. To drive her anywhere in a car is to be treated to a movie glimpsed on the letterbox screen of a rearview mirror, with the characters of school and softball and family and Girl Scouts and everything else in her life playing across the features of a young lady flush with the potential of creative observation. I have to force myself to remember her as she was on that day not all that long ago: sleeping in the backseat, strapped and mute in a baby seat turned away from me for safetys sake, when all I could see of her was a pink-blue hand that jerked occasionally with a bump or a turn. Right now, I couldnt get her in a car without a full accounting: Where are we going and when are we going there, and when are we coming back, and do I really have to go? Back then, she didnt ask, didnt care; the concept of going was still far beyond her. She was three years from knowing what her father did for a living (Put bad men in jail), another three years from knowing why he sometimes didnt come home at night (Hes in a court, and the judge is making him stay late), a few more from sitting with her mom and her brother in a courtroom ringed by U.S. marshals, watching a jury convict three young men charged by her dad with many murders. And, God willing, many years from knowing from her own experience the feeling in the gut that would compel a person to get into a car and drive to a cemetery on a lovely day better suited to a long walk by a lake.

She didnt know, doesnt know, about Katrina Harris, a girl whod crossed over that edge of childhood but never got the chance to go much farther. She didnt know, doesnt know, about Katrinas mother, Diane. And she didnt know, doesnt know, about how the special grace of these two lives was extinguished in a few minutes of unfathomable brutality.

Our destination that day was a graveyard in Maryland, farther away from us than it appeared on a map. I was born and raised in northern Virginia and knew that area well. I could navigate in and out of many of Washingtons neighborhoods, particularly those that had spawned my violent crime cases; Maryland was a different story. To many lifelong Virginians it might as well be Mississippi, and the Potomac River dividing the two states looms wider in the mind than it does in real life. After forty-five minutes of meandering on roads Id never seen before, I came to what I was looking for: a brick structure with a white sign that read HARMONY MEMORIAL PARK . It was the first time Id been in a cemetery since Id buried my father nine months before, on a mild December day in a park much like this one. That desolate scene rushed back to me as I surveyed this place: rolling hills of spotty sod, hundreds of bronze markers sunk into the soil, acres of empty expanse awaiting more arrivals.

I went to the cemetery office. Here worked the postmaster for this small, silent town, and she gave me the address I needed for the people I was visiting: Diane Hawkins and her daughter, Katrina Harris. No more 3461 Eads Street, NE, Washington, D.C., of course; now their home was Section 16, Parcels A-39 and A-42.

I drove to where the graves were. Megan had roused herself earlier in the ride but now was asleep again. I didnt want to wake her and take her from the car. Not then, not there. There were no other cars on the winding road, no visitors walking about on the hills. I could hear landscapers toiling around the bend, but the whine of their machinery sounded distant. The weather was warm but not oppressive. If the graves were close to the road, I could lock Megan in the car and walk a short distance, as long as I was able to keep her in view. But I knew I wouldnt have much time.

I bounded a small bluff to find the plots. Suddenly a marker appeared beneath my feet: Katrina Harris. In Loving Memory. July 15, 1979May 26, 1993. Like my fathers, it was mint-condition bronze, Olympic-medal bronze, marred only by grass shavings tossed from a mower. But where was Diane? In an unmarked plot, as it turned out. A rectangle of fresh turf outlined her place, catty-corner from her daughters. The family, it seemed, couldnt afford to pay for both plaques at once. One of Dianes sisters would have made the arrangements, and I knew them, and I knew enough about Diane, to know that her voice had been in their ears. Girl, do Trinas first, she would have said with a soft chuckle. Not like Im going anywhere.