Harris set to get out of prison
Friendswood dentist served 15 years for notorious homicide
Clara Harris, the Friendswood dentist who made national headlines more than a decade ago after she ran over and killed her cheating husband, is expected to get out of prison on May 11, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Harris, who has served 15 years of her 20-year sentence for the July 24, 2002, manslaughter of 44-year-old dentist David Harris, is scheduled to be released from the Crain unit in Gatesville, a woman’s prison complex near Waco. The gruesome killing became a sensational case, with the Houston trial generating international media coverage and the crime spawning true-crime books and a made-for-television movie.
In 2002, Clara Harris, who is originally from Colombia, and her orthodontist husband were a successful couple with a string of dental offices and lived in an upscale home in Friendswood. She became suspicious of her husband’s philandering and hired a private investigator to keep an eye on him.
When Harris was notified that her husband and his former receptionist, Gail Bridges, were at the Hilton in Nassau Bay, she confronted the woman in the hotel lobby, pulling her hair and biting her. The couple left the hotel and went to Bridges’ car, while the private investigator was in the hotel parking lot with a camera and videotaped the crime.
Clara Harris hit Bridges with her car before she ran over her husband, then wheeled her silver Mercedes-Benz sedan
around and ran the car over him repeatedly.
David Harris’ then-17year-old daughter from another marriage was a passenger in the car with Clara Harris when her father was run over and killed. At the trial, the teen testified her stepmother had driven the car over her father three times.
When Harris’ parole was announced in November, it was condemned by victims advocates who wanted her to serve at least 17 years.
Her supporters argued the 60-year-old has been rehabilitated.
“It’s about time,” Emily Detoto, Harris’ former attorney and now close friend, said in November when the parole was announced. “It’s been long enough.”