No one deserved to die the way Regina Harrison did in 1983. Riding her bicycle along West Lake Park in Hollywood, she was taken, stripped, sexually assaulted and strangled.
Someone had to pay. And when Ronald Henry Stewart took full responsibility for the murder two years later, it seemed justice was served.
But Stewart, prosecutors now say, was no killer.
Now, the Broward State Attorney’s Office is moving to vacate Stewart’s conviction in the Harrison murder because another dead man confessed to the crime.
The real killer, prosecutors now say, was Jack Harold Jones, who was executed in Arkansas in 2017. Arkansas prosecutors accused him of the 1995 murder of Mary Phillips. In that case, the victim’s daughter also was attacked but survived and was able to identify Jones as the killer.
DNA evidence later linked Jones to the 1991 murder of Lorraine “Lori” Anne Barrett, a Pennsylvania tourist whose strangled body was found in a Fort Lauderdale hotel room.
Already sentenced to death in Arkansas, Jones pleaded guilty to Barrett’s murder Broward County, was sentenced to life in prison, and returned to Arkansas.
There, he wrote a letter to his sister with instructions that she not read it until a year after his execution, according to the Broward State Attorney’s Office. In November 2018, the four-page letter was sent to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
In it, Jones said he wanted the victim’s family to know the truth because he was visited by Harrison’s spirit.
“She haunted me for three years, and we made peace,” he wrote. “She moved on. She was really mad at first, missed her parents. But she learned things over there that helped her, and she got to understand who I was and why I’d done such a thing. She forgave me. I never forgave myself.”
DNA testing that was unavailable in the mid-1980s confirmed Jones was the killer, according to Broward prosecutors.
Case closed
The death of Regina Harrison was a mystery from the start. She was last seen alive on May 2, 1983, when she left her parents` home for an evening bike ride to Hollywood`s North Beach, according to news articles from the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“Frantic friends and family found her nude and strangled body the next day in secluded woods of Hollywood`s West Lake Park,” the newspaper reported in January 1985. “An autopsy indicated she had been sexually assaulted.”
Stewart was not exactly an innocent man. He was a habitual rapist who victimized women in Florida and in Mississippi. He pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual battery with the use of a deadly weapon in Broward County, with prosecutors agreeing to drop charges in six other cases.
Prosecutors agreed that he could serve his 50-year sentence in the rape cases at the same time he was serving in prison for his five rape convictions in Mississippi.
When he pleaded no contest to Harrison’s murder, he was again sentenced to 50 years, to be served at the same time as his other prison terms.
Stewart served most of his time in Mississippi. He was transferred to Florida in 2007 and died of cancer the next year. He would have died in prison regardless of what happened in the Harrison murder case.
The other man
Jones came to the attention of Broward law enforcement in 2003, when DNA tests connected him to the death of Lori Barrett.
Barrett’s body was found June 1, 1991, at the Days Inn Lauderdale Surf Motel in the 400 block of Seabreeze Boulevard. Witnesses told police she was seen with a man generally matching Jones’ description at the Elbo Room, a well known bar nearby at the corner of Las Olas Blvd. and A1A.
By then Jones was already in custody in Arkansas. His guilty plea in Broward in 2005 was a formality. He was already waiting to be executed in Arkansas.
In Broward, Jones met Fort Lauderdale Detective John Curcio, now a senior homicide detective with the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Curcio gained Jones’ trust, and the suspect told him that he had killed someone else in Broward County.
He didn’t say who, but he promised he would one day reveal his secret.
The revelation came a year after his death.
“There was a story in the newspaper, a composite picture drawn of me,” he wrote in the letter to his sister. “Someone remembered us riding around by the beach. Didn’t look much like me.”
It looked like Ronald Stewart, who was identified as a suspect and indicted by a grand jury before pleading no contest, though he never admitted committing the murder.
DNA tests confirmed Jones’ confession. He killed Regina Harrison.
“Although Stewart is now deceased, it is appropriate that the record be corrected at this time to reflect the results of the new information and evidence uncovered since November 2018,” Broward State Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Paula McMahon said in a news release. “It is also important to try to determine if Jones killed other victims. … We regret that he pleaded no contest to a murder he did not commit and that this diverted attention from the real killer.”
rolmeda@SunSentinel.com, 954-356-4457, Twitter @SSCourts and @rolmeda