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TwitThisA Gruesome Killing
Gayle Bergstrand bolted upright in bed, terrified. Her modest duplex in Olathe, Kansas, had thin walls. Gayle and her husband, Richard, had gotten used to tuning out the lives of their friendly next-door neighbors, but at 2:30 a.m. on February 28, 1982, Gayle heard sounds from Melinda and David Harmon's bedroom that she couldn't ignore. On the other side of the wall, inches from her pillow, came a series of "jarring thuds," she recalls vividly more than 24 years later. "I couldn't imagine what it was, but I knew it was probably not right." Gayle put her ear to the wall. After the banging stopped, there was the sound of a creaking floor. More than an hour later, Melinda Harmon, then 24, showed up at the Bergstrands' door with a bruise on her cheek and spots of blood on her nightgown. Two men had broken into their home, she told Gayle, and killed her bank manager husband in bed, then demanded the keys to the bank before knocking her unconscious.Police rushed to the Harmon bedroom and found an unspeakable crime scene. David, 25, had been attacked with a heavy blunt object while asleep and defenseless. His face was so badly beaten that he was unrecognizable. "It was my first murder scene," recalls Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison, then a young prosecutor, "and to this day it is the most gruesome I have ever seen. There was blood everywhere -- on the ceiling, walls, down the hall." One police photograph reveals an eyeball on the floor.
Within hours, detective Joe Pruett drove over to interview Melinda, who was secretary to the dean of students at MidAmerica Nazarene College, a prominent Christian school in Olathe. Sitting on the sofa next to Melinda, a striking, coiffed blonde, was the Harmons' best friend, Mark Mangelsdorf, a handsome senior and student body president at MidAmerica.
Mark, then 21, had befriended Melinda in the dean's office a few years earlier and became an extended family member to the couple. He played racquetball with David, had dinners at their home, even did his laundry there, using his own key. He was so close to the Harmons that he rented an apartment a few blocks away, though the neighborhood was on the other side of town from school.
With Mark listening, Melinda re-told the story of the attack by two men for the detective. But the more Pruett heard, the more suspicious he became. "This was a brutal crime of rage," he says, "but she's got this little bruise on her cheek. And Mark's hair is wet like he just took a shower." Why didn't Gayle Bergstrand hear screams of horror from Melinda, or the voices of those violent intruders demanding keys? Why was there no sign of forced entry? And the plot itself seemed crazy: a vicious murder to get bank keys, based on the absurd idea that a bank would leave money lying around overnight. And, in the end, no one actually robbed the bank.
After 20 minutes, Pruett concluded that he was, in fact, interviewing the murderers. But why did they do it?
One obvious possibility was a love affair. Suspicion toward Mark and Melinda intensified when a bloodhound tracked a scent from the crime scene to a Dumpster behind Mark's apartment. No murder weapon was found, but investigators did obtain minute blood samples from Mark's apartment carpet. A downstairs neighbor said he heard what sounded like a vacuum early that morning. When police arrived later in the day, the place reeked of household cleaners. The gap between the murder and Melinda's arrival at the Bergstrands' would have given Mark time to walk home and clean up. Still, with no DNA testing available in 1982, the physical evidence was weak. Back at the crime scene, analysts found no footprints or fingerprints that would implicate a killer.
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