Paula Harris Left for Work That Tuesday. A Truck Surfaced with Her Inside.

Every Tuesday at seven fifteen, Paula Harris took the corner table by the window at the Sunrise Diner and never looked at the menu; the staff knew her order. She was twenty-six, and eight weeks from having saved enough for a ceramics course she had refused to let her brother pay for. On the morning of May fifteenth, 2012, she walked twelve minutes toward that table and did not arrive. Three months later a drought lowered a reservoir far enough for someone to read four words behind a windshield.

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Paula Harris, 26, was an admissions coordinator at the Dillard County Community Health Clinic. A hardware store camera on Granville Avenue recorded her at 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, walking her usual route to work; she never reached the diner or the clinic. On August 29, 2012, a receding Nolan Reservoir exposed a 1989 Ford Ranger with her body inside. The medical examiner, Dr. Carl Odom, found injuries consistent with fatal compression of the neck.

Craig Hunt, 38, a delivery driver at the warehouse on her route, was arrested in December 2012 and charged with first-degree murder. He denied ever seeing Paula, and reported his own pickup stolen the day after she vanished. On the fifth morning of his trial, in September 2013, he submitted a written statement admitting that he pulled her off the sidewalk and killed her. The jury convicted him in November 2013 and he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. He was asked in court why he had left the note inside the windshield, and gave no reason.

A DNA sample taken after his arrest linked him to the March 2009 death of Angela Morse, 29, near Teller, a case the original inquiry had recorded as undetermined. A second trial in 2015 convicted him of her murder and added a second life sentence, to run concurrently with the first.

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This episode is an original fiction written for True Crime 24 Hours. Dillard County, Nolan Reservoir and every person named here are invented; the case is not based on any real investigation, and no detail in it is drawn from a real person.