Starr Harris: The Brutal Murder and Trial of Rickey Bell

Starr Lynn Harris, a 36-year-old wife and mother of a blended family of eight, was beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death behind her home in Drummonds, Tennessee, on June 1, 2010. The killer in the Starr Harris murder was Rickey Alvis Bell Jr., a laborer employed by her husband’s landscaping business, who attacked her after a dispute over $50 in wages. A Lauderdale County jury convicted Bell of first-degree felony murder, especially aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated sexual battery, and sentenced him to death. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentence on September 10, 2015.¹

What Happened on June 1, 2010

Starr Harris lived with her husband, Thomas R. “Rick” Harris Jr., and their children at 57 Richardson Landing Lane in Drummonds, a rural community in Tipton County. Rick Harris ran a landscaping and property preservation business, and Starr handled the office side. Laborers were paid weekly in cash. Bell, then 30, was one of them.

That morning, Rick Harris’s son Ricky paid Bell $300 for the week. Bell had expected $350. Around 1:00 p.m., he returned to the Harris home to argue about the shortage. A neighbor, Andrew Michael Redditt, watched Bell knock and go inside. Starr called her husband on the landline, and Bell got on the phone. Rick Harris told him the pay was short because he had missed a day for a doctor’s appointment.¹

Between 1:22 and 1:28 p.m., Starr texted a friend, Alexia Block, about a flat tire and mentioned that “workers” had tried to fix it. At 1:30 p.m., Johnnie Phelps had a brief, ordinary phone call with her. By 2:16 p.m., a FedEx driver knocked at the house and got no answer. After that, no one could reach her. Investigators later placed the attack between roughly 1:30 and 2:16 p.m.²

How Her Body Was Found

Around 8:00 p.m., Nathan McKell, a son of Rick Harris’s ex-wife who lived at the home, came back to find the office in disarray, a computer knocked over, the back door open, and Starr and the family dogs gone. Friends looking for her had already noticed the same scene. McKell took a four-wheeler into the wooded hills behind the house.³

About 100 yards in, the four-wheeler overturned on a hill. When it came to rest, the headlights lit up Starr’s body. She was barefoot, her shirt torn open, her bra pulled to her waist. A forensic pathologist later described extensive trauma to the neck and upper torso: a fractured hyoid bone, a basilar skull fracture, and a large open laceration on the right side of her head. Her left thumbnail had been ripped off. The cause of death was strangulation associated with blunt force injuries.¹ Because of the terrain, her body was not recovered until roughly 5:00 a.m. on June 2.

The Evidence Against Bell

Witnesses had placed Bell at the house, and no one else was seen there during the attack window. On the night of June 1, Lieutenant Richard Nessly of the Tipton County Sheriff’s Office went to Bell’s home and noticed wet clothes in the washing machine and an open condom wrapper on his bed. Bell said he had gone to collect his pay, spoken with Rick Harris by phone, and left. He said he had changed into shorts because of the heat. In two follow-up interviews on June 2 and June 8, Bell denied going inside the Harris house, denied being in the woods behind it, and denied ever seeing or touching a novelty handgun-shaped cigarette lighter that had been recovered from the scene.¹

The physical evidence pointed the other way. About 100 feet from Starr’s body, investigators identified what they called an “assault scene,” connected to the body by a trail of disturbed leaves. At that spot they found a used condom containing Bell’s semen and the handgun-shaped lighter, which produced a partial DNA profile matching Bell. Two of Bell’s own brothers, Michael and Kevin, told investigators they had seen him with the lighter before the killing.⁴ Three hairs on a broken branch near the assault scene were consistent with Starr’s, and dirt on her feet and the back of her shorts suggested she had been dragged.

Bell was arrested on June 9, 2010. Afterward, his brothers Michael and Kevin Bell and a third associate, Pierre Marta Richardson, were charged with witness coercion. Prosecutors said the three blocked a road, stopped a witness’s vehicle, and struck him while asking why he was “snitching” on Rickey Bell.⁴

Bell’s Prior Record

Bell had a violent history before the killing. At 15, he was arrested in Tipton County for violating a court order; the details were sealed because he was a juvenile. In February 1997, at 17, he was charged in Pennsylvania with carjacking, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment, and sentenced to up to 10 years. In prison, he assaulted a female correctional officer in 2002 and received an added one to two years, then attempted to escape in 2004 and drew another one to two. He served 13 years in Pennsylvania and was released in February 2010 when he hit his maximum sentence, four months before Starr Harris was killed.⁵

Trial, Conviction, and Death Sentence

Bell was indicted on four counts: first-degree felony murder during a kidnapping, first-degree felony murder during a rape, especially aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated rape. In September 2010, the State filed notice that it would seek the death penalty. The case was tried before Judge Joe H. Walker III in the Circuit Court for Tipton County, with a jury drawn from Lauderdale County.⁶

The jury convicted Bell on all counts, returning the lesser-included offense of aggravated sexual battery on the rape count. The trial court merged the two felony murder convictions. At sentencing, the jury deliberated about 30 minutes before returning death, finding four aggravating circumstances: that Bell had prior violent felony convictions, that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and that it was committed during a kidnapping and during a rape. The court also imposed two concurrent 20-year sentences for the kidnapping and sexual battery, to run consecutively to the death sentence.¹

The Excluded Evidence of an Affair

One trial ruling drew close scrutiny on appeal. The defense wanted to show the jury that Rick Harris had been having an extramarital affair with his ex-wife, Rebecca Harris, at the time of his wife’s death. The theory was that Harris had a motive to kill Starr or to have her killed, and that the affair undermined the credibility of Harris and his alibi witnesses. In a hearing outside the jury’s presence, Harris admitted he had been unfaithful throughout the marriage. The defense also pointed to blood under Starr’s fingernails and scratches on Rick Harris’s hands and arms, while Bell had no such wounds. Judge Walker sustained the prosecution’s objection and kept the affair out of the trial.⁷

Appeals and Where the Case Stands

The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Bell’s convictions and death sentence on May 30, 2014. That court concluded two of the four aggravating circumstances the jury had found were not supported by the record but held the remaining two were enough to sustain the death sentence.⁸

The Tennessee Supreme Court issued its opinion on September 10, 2015, in State of Tennessee v. Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr., No. W2012-02017-SC-DDT-DD. Justice Jeffrey S. Bivins wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Cornelia A. Clark and Holly Kirby. The court:

Rejected Bell’s intellectual disability claim and upheld the constitutionality of Tennessee’s statute governing execution of intellectually disabled defendants.
Found that brief, unsolicited testimony referring to Bell’s prior incarceration did not require a mistrial in light of the trial court’s curative instructions.
Agreed the trial court had erred in barring the affair evidence, but held the error was harmless given the strength of the State’s case.
Found the evidence sufficient to support all convictions.
Agreed with the Court of Criminal Appeals that two aggravating circumstances were invalid. The 1997 Pennsylvania conviction did not qualify as a violent felony under the applicable standard, and the jury had improperly been allowed to count the kidnapping and rape as aggravating factors when those same offenses served as the predicate felonies for the felony murder charges. The two remaining valid aggravators sustained the death sentence.
Concluded on mandatory proportionality review that the death sentence was not disproportionate compared to similar Tennessee cases.⁹

Chief Justice Sharon G. Lee, joined by Justice Gary R. Wade, agreed with most of the majority but dissented on the affair evidence. Lee wrote that the exclusion was not harmless, that the affair supplied a “plausible motive” for an alternative perpetrator and could have undermined the credibility of the prosecution’s key witnesses, and that the State’s case against Bell was “far from overwhelming.” She said Bell had been deprived of his constitutional right to present a complete defense and would have granted a new trial.¹⁰

Bell remains under a sentence of death following the 2015 affirmance. Starr Harris was 36 when she was killed. She was survived by her husband Rick, her mother Barbara Nelson, her sister Toni Aloia, and eight children.¹¹

1
FindLaw. State of Tennessee v. Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr.
2
Action News 5. Jury Deliberating in Starr Harris Murder Trial
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Action News 5. Tipton County Woman’s Body Found in Woods Behind Her Home
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Action News 5. New Details Outline Case Against Suspect in Murder of Tipton County Woman
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Action News 5. Tipton County Murder Suspect Just Recently Released From Prison
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Justia. State of Tennessee v. Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr.
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Tennessee Courts. State of Tennessee v. Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr., Concurring and Dissenting Opinion
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Tennessee Courts. Supreme Court Upholds Conviction, Death Penalty for Tipton County Man
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Tennessee Courts. State of Tennessee v. Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr.
10
Tennessee Courts. State of Tennessee v. Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr., Concurring in Part and Dissenting in Part
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Legacy.com. Starr Harris Obituary