In the summer of 1987 the neighbors kept complaining to the landlord about the smell from the apartment of the tenant they knew as Marty. He had lived there four years, paid his rent, played basketball with the local kids and lived on a disability pension, and his two rooms in a mostly vacant building in North Philadelphia had become a drug den where friends came to buy and use Ritalin and similar pills. On August 9 the landlord told him to leave. He nailed shut the door to one room, said he would be back for the rest of his things, and went down the fire escape. When the landlord's son and nephew looked through the keyhole, they called the police.
Behind the door, under a layer of garbage more than a foot deep and a pile of filthy mattresses, officers found the naked body of a woman, the partly dressed body of another, and a skeleton. More skeletal remains wrapped in a blanket were in the closet. On the roof was a green duffel bag holding the bones of another woman's hands, feet and legs, and digging in the basement turned up the skull, ribs and pelvis of a seventh. Most of the remains were too decomposed to show a cause of death; the two most recent victims had been strangled about ten days earlier, and the others had been dead six to twelve months.
Harrison Frank Graham was born in Philadelphia on September 9, 1959, by most accounts (one gives October 9, 1958), the eldest of five children. He showed signs of an intellectual disability early, did badly at school, and left Olney High School after the tenth grade. He worked in construction and as a dishwasher, left home in 1979 for North Philadelphia, and began drinking, using drugs and spending time among pimps and prostitutes. Tall and athletic, he was not known as violent and had never been prosecuted for anything. He was attached to a Cookie Monster puppet and liked to talk in its voice.
For a week he was seen on buses and in fast-food restaurants, homeless shelters and a car wash, and slipped away each time. He asked his mother to bring him some food, and she found him and talked him into giving himself up. On August 17 she directed officers to the North Philadelphia corner where he was waiting, ten blocks from the apartment, and he confessed to all seven killings that day. He said he had strangled each woman during sex after they shared drugs, that the first killing came late in 1986, and that he killed one woman only because she had found one of the bodies. He was charged with seven counts of murder and seven of abuse of a corpse.
The women were identified as Cynthia Brooks, twenty-seven; Valerie Jamison, twenty-five; Mary Jeter Mathis, thirty-six; Barbara Mahoney, twenty-two; Robin DeShazor, twenty-nine; Sandra Garvin, thirty-three; and Patricia Franklin, twenty-four. Robin DeShazor had been his girlfriend for years; his mother said she had seen the two of them using drugs together in 1981, and an acquaintance said he had seen Graham beat her in 1984. A mile and a half away, Gary Heidnik was arrested the same year for crimes of the same kind.
His trial opened on March 7, 1988, before Common Pleas Judge Robert A. Latrone, without a jury. His lawyer, Joel Moldovsky, argued that his intellectual disability and heavy drug use left him unable to tell right from wrong or to control himself. After seven weeks Latrone found him guilty of seven counts of first-degree murder, and on May 3, 1988, sentenced him to life in prison followed by six death sentences, to run consecutively, so that he could be executed only if the life term were ever commuted. Moldovsky believed it was the first such sentence in Pennsylvania. After the first death sentence Graham leaned over and told him, "I'll commit suicide; they'll never kill me." At the end he stretched, snapped his fingers, and asked whether he could have his Cookie Monster puppet back.
On December 20, 2003, he was found incompetent to be executed, and the death sentences were vacated, leaving the life sentence. He is serving it at SCI Coal Township, where he has been reported to preach to other prisoners.