Harrison Graham: The Corpse Collector

Two days later, Mary Hogan also testified to having lived with him and survived.  She said they'd have sex four or five times a day.  He tried to strangle her as well, and she saw the body of Robin DeShazor on the roof.  (That meant the corpse had been there since before October 1986.)  In order to get out with her belongings, she had to seek assistance from the police, because Graham had threatened to kill her with a machete and had shut her inside the apartment.  She did tell an officer about the corpse on the roof, but he didn't believe her.

The prosecutor seemed to want to force her to see the error of her ways by subjecting her to one graphic slide after another of what had been found in the apartment.  Even worse, Moldovsky requested that she pull the Cookie Monster puppet out of a bag of items that Graham had taken with him from the apartment.  She did not want to touch it, although she said that he'd chatted with it every day.

There was drama in the humid courtroom when Hogan said she'd never loved Graham and had not been pregnant as he'd thought she was.  At this testimony, he grabbed the witness table, jumped up and shoved aside two deputies.  He wanted them to leave him alone.  Apparently he disliked the idea that he'd been duped, or so his attorney said to reporters.

When a drug-addict companion of Graham's took the stand, he described watching Graham try to choke two women during altercations.  Both were among the dead and one was killed shortly after the man had seen the argument.  He also said that Graham had admitted to murdering the other women, and he'd even seen Mary Mathis lying on the bed when Graham had invited him in to see the source of the terrible odor coming from his apartment.  (This witness's statements were set aside when it was learned he'd been found incompetent to be sentenced for his own crime and that he'd been paid for his testimony.)

After four weeks, the ADA rested his case.  Then it was Moldovsky's turn.