Amber Harris of Omaha: Hummel Park, Roy Ellis Jr., and Appeals

Amber Harris was a 12-year-old girl from North Omaha, Nebraska, who vanished after stepping off her school bus on November 29, 2005. Her remains were found nearly six months later in a shallow grave in Hummel Park. Roy Ellis Jr., a registered sex offender who lived near the bus stop, was convicted of her murder in 2008 and sentenced to death. He remains on Nebraska’s death row, with a federal habeas petition still pending in early 2026.

The Day Amber Disappeared

Amber was a student at Beveridge Magnet Center on the south side of Omaha. On the afternoon of November 29, 2005, she rode the bus home but asked the driver to let her off at 20th and Pinkney Streets, about four blocks from her house, rather than at her regular stop at 24th and Pratt.¹ Bus surveillance video timestamped 5:41 p.m. captured her final known moments. In the footage, she wiped makeup off her face, which her family later said meant she was heading home rather than meeting friends. A boy who got off at the same stop told police he walked in the opposite direction and did not see what happened next.

When Amber did not come home that evening, her family reported her missing. Some in the community assumed at first that she had run away, a reaction that stayed with her mother, Melissa Harris, for years.² Omaha police searched Miller Park and areas near the family’s home. There were no confirmed sightings of Amber after she stepped off the bus. By December 19, 2005, the FBI had formally joined the investigation, and Amber was listed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Nebraska State Patrol’s missing persons clearinghouse.³

The Discovery in Hummel Park

On May 11, 2006, two men exploring a wooded area off a blocked road in Hummel Park, in far northeast Omaha, found a human skull at the base of a tree.⁴ The rest of the remains were skeletal and decomposing, in a shallow grave. Investigators noted a large hole in the top of the skull. Remnants of a red sweater and a cross necklace were still with the bones. An autopsy determined that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.⁵

How Investigators Identified Roy Ellis Jr.

Roy Ellis Jr. was a registered sex offender with a 1999 Douglas County conviction on two counts of first-degree sexual assault involving minors.⁶ At the time Amber was killed, he was classified by authorities as a sex offender most likely to reoffend. He lived near the stop where Amber got off the bus.

Amber’s bookbag was found in a trash bin behind a boarding house where Ellis had previously lived, less than a block from his home.⁷ Inside were Amber’s jeans, stained with her blood. DNA testing detected a mixture from at least two contributors on the jeans, in a pattern resembling a handprint. Ellis could not be excluded as a contributor, and the State’s expert testified that only one in 2.3 billion people would match the profile found in the mixture.⁸

While Ellis was in jail on unrelated charges between Amber’s disappearance and the discovery of her body, he made a series of damaging statements. He asked corrections officers and other inmates about forensic DNA testing, fingerprint identification, decomposition of buried bodies, and how long semen could be detected in a deceased person. Multiple inmates reported that Ellis admitted sexually assaulting Amber and hitting her in the head with a hammer. One inmate testified that when the subject of the missing girl came up, Ellis said, “that’s why I got to get out and cover my tracks.”⁸ Ellis also asked former neighbors about activity at the boarding house, and those questions stopped once Amber’s belongings were found. A former girlfriend told investigators that Ellis had previously driven her to Hummel Park, dug a grave, and threatened to put her in it.⁹

Omaha police booked Ellis for Amber’s murder on February 5, 2007.⁷

Conviction and Death Sentence

Ellis was charged with first-degree murder under two theories: premeditated murder and felony murder, with sexual assault as the predicate felony. His 2008 trial rested on the DNA evidence, the inmate and corrections officer testimony, and testimony from Ellis’s two former stepdaughters, who told the jury he had repeatedly raped them when they were 12 and 14 and fathered a child with each of them.¹⁰

Defense attorney William Patrick Dunn tried to undercut the DNA evidence. Before trial, he moved to exclude the results by challenging the PCR-STR testing method. At trial, he cross-examined the State’s experts about “common alleles” in the mixture, arguing the shared genetic markers made it impossible to determine exactly who contributed to the sample.⁸

The jury convicted Ellis of first-degree murder. A three-judge panel then handled sentencing and found two aggravating circumstances: that Ellis had a substantial history of violence, and that the murder was particularly heinous. The defense argued that Ellis might be mentally impaired, but the panel was not persuaded.¹¹ Ellis was sentenced to death in 2009.⁷

Where the Appeals Stand

The Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed Ellis’s conviction and sentence on direct appeal on May 27, 2011. Among the issues raised were the admission of testimony about the stepdaughter rapes, prosecutorial misconduct claims, jailhouse informant testimony, and constitutional challenges to Nebraska’s death penalty. The court found that admitting the stepdaughter testimony was error but harmless given the weight of the other evidence.¹²

Ellis then sought state postconviction relief, arguing that his trial lawyer had been ineffective for failing to properly challenge the DNA evidence and for not hiring a defense expert to counter the State’s statistics. On June 24, 2022, the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s denial of that motion.¹³ The court called the ineffective-assistance claim “without merit,” reasoning that counsel had pursued a reasonable strategy by attacking the weight of the DNA evidence on cross-examination rather than its admissibility, and noting that Ellis had not identified any expert whose testimony would have helped him. Even with different tactics, the court said, there was no substantial likelihood of a different outcome given the DNA results and Ellis’s admissions to multiple people.¹⁴

Ellis filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska on July 21, 2023. On January 9, 2026, a federal magistrate judge recommended denying the petition in its entirety, along with Ellis’s requests for reconsideration, an evidentiary hearing, and additional discovery. As of early 2026, the district judge had not yet issued a final ruling on that recommendation.¹² Ellis also filed a second successive postconviction motion in Douglas County District Court in October 2023, which remained pending.

Whether Nebraska Can Carry Out the Sentence

Ellis is one of 11 people on Nebraska’s death row. The state’s capital punishment law has been contested in recent years: the legislature voted to repeal it in 2015, and Nebraska voters reversed that repeal in a 2016 referendum by a margin of 61 to 39 percent.¹⁵ Nebraska has carried out only four executions since 1976. The most recent was Carey Dean Moore in 2018. The state cannot currently execute anyone because it lacks the necessary lethal injection drugs.¹⁶ A 2025 legislative resolution proposed putting a constitutional ban on capital punishment before voters on the November 2026 ballot, with a provision that would commute all existing death sentences to life in prison if approved.

How Amber Is Remembered

Melissa Harris became an advocate for families of missing children and for tougher policies on sex offenders. She joined “A Hand to Hold,” a group supporting families dealing with the disappearance or murder of a child.¹⁷ She spoke publicly in favor of keeping Nebraska’s death penalty during the legislative fight over repeal, and she pushed to rename a portion of Pinkney Street, near where Amber was last seen, as “Amber Harris Memorial Boulevard.” An application was filed with the Omaha Planning Department and awaited a vote by the Omaha City Council.²

On the renaming, she said: “It’s not a self-serving thing… they look at it and say, remember what happened before. I don’t want it to happen to my kid.” On the courts and sex offenders, she told reporters: “The pedophiles out here, it’s not going to stop. Unless we get them, lock them up, and be serious about it.”² Family and supporters have continued to hold memorials, including balloon releases, in Amber’s memory.¹⁸

1
Omaha.com. Missing Persons Report – Amber Harris
2
KETV. Remembering Amber Harris
3
ABC News. Search for Missing Omaha Girl
4
FOX 42. Testimony Centers on Discovery of Amber’s Body
5
FOX 42. Amber Harris Parents Consider Death Penalty
6
Nebraska Sex Offender Registry. Roy Lee Ellis – Offender Details
7
WOWT. Today in History: Man Arrested for Murder of Omaha School Student
8
FindLaw. State v. Ellis
9
Omaha Magazine. Seeking Darkness in the Woods
10
Nebraska.tv. Nebraska Supreme Court Denies Appeal of Death Row Inmate Roy Ellis Jr.
11
Drake University. Nebraska Death Sentences 2009
12
GovInfo. Ellis v. State – Federal Habeas Proceedings
13
WOWT. Nebraska Supreme Court Denies Appeal of Death Row Inmate Sentenced for Killing Omaha Girl
14
Nebraska Courts. State v. Ellis, 311 Neb. 862
15
Death Penalty Information Center. Nebraska – Death Penalty Information
16
KSNB Local 4. Senator Presents Death Penalty Ban to Judiciary Committee
17
KETV. A Hand to Hold Offers Solace Through Loss
18
KETV. Two Mothers Brought Together by Their Daughters’ Disappearances