After five tense hours on the witness stand Monday answering questions about the death of her son and her failed marriage, Leanna Taylor finally broke down.
“As soon as she walked into the room where we were sitting, she completely fell apart,” Angie Bond, Taylor’s best friend, testified Tuesday in the hot car murder trial. “We had to sit in there for 30 minutes before we could leave because she couldn’t stop crying. She doesn’t show it very often, but when she does it’s very hard to watch.”
On Tuesday that pent-up emotion erupted in the courtroom after a tough cross-examination by lead prosecutor Chuck Boring. Rage displaced sorrow this time, and Taylor directed that anger toward the man she had come to defend — her former husband Ross Harris. Harris is accused of intentionally leaving their 22-month-old son, Cooper, inside his sweltering SUV to die.
“He destroyed my life. I’m humiliated,” said Taylor, who on Monday testified she didn’t believe Harris intended to kill their only child. “I may never trust anybody again, the way that I did. If I never see him again after this day, that’s fine.”
Boring, aiming to prove she didn’t know her ex-husband as well as she thought, had peppered Taylor with a series of probing questions about her marriage and Harris’ extramarital pursuits.
He asked, for example, whether she was aware Harris was using Craigslist to set up sexual rendezvous with men and women.
“I would agree that’s a part of his personality that he did not share with me,” she said.
It was a line of questioning Boring revisited when cross examining Harris’ half-brother, Michael Baygents, who had testified that Harris “loved Cooper more than life itself. I’ll never believe anything other than he loved his son more than anything.”
The prosecution’s goal was to show that Harris’ brother, like Harris’ then-wife, did not know the real Ross Harris.
Boring eventually got Baygents, a veteran police officer from Tuscaloosa, to admit that when a child is violated it’s usually the last person you’d suspect.
The defense accomplished some of its objectives as well. Both Taylor and Bond testified they chose not to talk with Cobb County police because they did not trust them. Harris’ lawyers have chipped away at the credibility of the investigators, who they say rushed to judgment in charging their client.
Bond’s testimony navigated a clear divide between her feelings about Harris the husband and Harris the father, one the defense can only hope jurors will follow. She never much cared for Harris, calling him “obnoxious.”
“He had a bad habit of saying things at the wrong time,” Bond testified.
But she insisted that Harris was a good father.
“He always did funny things to make (Cooper) laugh,” he said. “He loved that little boy very much.”
Defense attorney Maddox Kilgore later asked Bond whether she was aware of the extent of Harris’ sexual promiscuity. She said she had learned about it as the revelations came one after the other in the weeks after Cooper’s death.
“Does that change your belief that Ross loved his son?” the defense attorney said.
“No,” Bond replied.
Meanwhile, her best friend is trying to move on with her life. Leanna Taylor testified that she recently moved to northern Alabama to be closer to her new boyfriend.
The past two days have taken their toll on Taylor, said her attorney, Lawrence Zimmerman.
“She’s been frustrated, accused, despised,” Zimmerman said. “God have mercy on the souls of those who judge someone’s behavior on the worst day of their life.”
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