Ricky Lee Harnish spun around the Southwest in his classic black Corvette as he worked for an oil exploration company.
He was handsome, charming and had lots of money to spend on expensive dates, recalls Sarah Meyer, a former waitress from Hobbs, N.M.
“He took me out to nice places,” said Meyer. During a period in 1988 and 1989, she dated the nomadic Coloradan before he settled down and married her. “He’s good at convincing people whatever he wants them to believe.”
The only hint of trouble was his drinking: Nearly every night Harnish would swill a copious amount of beer.
“I just thought he was an alcoholic,” Meyer said. Now she believes he may have been tormented by his conscience. “I wonder now if it was some kind of escape.”
On Feb. 1, 2007, long after Meyer divorced Harnish, he was arrested for investigation of rape and murder in the stabbing death of 16-year-old Holly Andrews, a Columbine High student who disappeared the day after Christmas in 1976. Nude except for blue, knee-high stockings, Andrews’ body was found 30 feet off Grizzley Gulch Road, about 5 miles west of Georgetown.
Harnish is being held in the Clear Creek County Jail without bond.
By all appearances, Harnish was a multitalented, upstanding citizen who worked as a chef, a car salesman and a high-tech communications employee. His only run-ins with authorities had been for minor traffic offenses and fishing without a license in 1975.
He had no criminal convictions in the 30 years after 1976, according to court records in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, states where he lived during that span of time.
Then a 2006 felony methamphetamine conviction in Adams County triggered a DNA test that connected him to DNA found on Andrews’ body, homicide investigators say. The test was performed in December, after Colorado passed a law requiring state prisoners to give DNA samples for testing.
Met at restaurant
Meyer didn’t meet Harnish until 12 years after Andrews’ slaying.
She was a 27-year-old waitress at The Kettle, a Hobbs, N.M., restaurant, when she served Harnish’s table. He asked her out.
At the time, Harnish was working for an oil company, operating a seismograph machine in search of underground oil deposits in the Southwest. He took her to expensive restaurants.
“There wasn’t anything about him that made me think he was hiding anything,” Meyer said. “I never saw a violent side of him.”
When he moved in with Meyer in 1989, he gave up his oil-exploration job and was hired as a chef at Cattle Baron, a steakhouse in Portales, N.M. Harnish had been divorced from a woman — Katheryn Harnish — in Kansas and had a daughter. Katheryn Harnish did not return phone calls.
Harnish rode a Harley-Davidson and joined a motorcycle club called the Brotherhood of the 74, a reference to the bike’s engine size.
Meyer enrolled at Eastern New Mexico University shortly after they were married in 1990. She went on to seek a master’s degree in English at the same school shortly before she and Harnish divorced in 1995. She later became a journalist and is a staff reporter at the Clovis News Journal.
“We just drifted apart,” she said.
He moved to Colorado following the divorce and got jobs at communications companies, hooking up telephones and computer networks.
By 1998, he had moved into a Castle Rock townhouse.
Meth addiction
Any stability in his life ended when he became addicted to methamphetamine, he told an Aurora detective on Aug. 30, 2005.
By then, Harnish was living in a camper shell in an Aurora trailer park on East Colfax Avenue with girlfriend Teressa Winternheimer, court records say. On the day of his arrest, a confidential informant bought methamphetamine from Harnish inside the camper.
“He said that he lost his truck, his job and his house after he began using methamphetamine,” a detective wrote in the court report.
Harnish was serving a community corrections sentence in an Aurora halfway house when he was linked by DNA to the Andrews murder. She was stabbed six times and slashed.
No formal charges have been brought against Harnish, whose public defender would not comment.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
