Fifty Dollars and a Bus Ticket: The Robert Alton Harris Story
On July 5, 1978, sixteen-year-old best friends John Mayeski and Michael Baker were abducted, murdered, and left in the brush near Miramar Lake in San Diego, California, by Robert Alton Harris and his younger brother Daniel during the planning of a bank robbery. The investigation, the trial, the criminal profile of the suspect, and the fourteen-year appeals process that followed turned this homicide into one of the most consequential capital cases in American legal history.
Robert Alton Harris came into the world already broken. He was born premature because his father kicked his pregnant mother in the stomach. He was abandoned at fourteen, diagnosed with schizophrenia at sixteen, and released from federal custody with fifty dollars and a Greyhound ticket at nineteen. The murders he committed were callous in a way that still leaves people speechless when they read the case files. But the story underneath them is older, stranger, and far more painful than any of the headlines from 1992 ever let on.
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