PLOT TWIST

Charges Dropped Against Man Charged in Wife’s 1990 Murder After Friend Confesses: Authorities

Carl Harris Jr. was set to go on trial on Monday for the murder of his wife, whose body was found in a river the week after she disappeared.

Charges were dropped against an Alabama man accused of killing his wife in 1990 after another man confessed to the murder, authorities announced Monday. Dale County District Attorney Kirke Adams said during a press conference that murder charges against Carl Harris Jr., 55, were dropped on the day his trial was scheduled to begin, after Jeff Beasley, 54, admitted to killing Harris’ wife, Tracy Harris. “I think this arrest shows we never give up on getting the truth and serving justice,” Adams said Monday. Tracy’s body was found in the Choctawhatchee River a week after she disappeared from Ozark on March 7, 1990. Medical examiners determined from the bruises on her neck that she may have been strangled and then drowned. Her case was reopened by Ozark police in 2016 and Harris was arrested in South Carolina. When Harris’ lawyers pointed to Beasley—a friend of the couple when Tracy disappeared, according to police—as a potential witness, investigators tracked him down and he confessed.