By Mc Nelly Torres/staff writer

Lawton Constitution 2001

Marlene Smith thinks frequently about what happened in the early hours of Aug. 17, 1995, when a 25-year-old woman was dumped in front of her house in downtown Lawton.

"I'll never forget it," the 53-year-old woman said.

"When the weather gets cold, it reminds me of that night because the weather was cold."

Smith and her family had moved to 414 NW Bell eight months before Sherrie Lynn Harrison's body was left on the street in front of her house.

Of the 73 reported homicides that fell under the Lawton Police Department's jurisdiction in the 1990s, only six - including Harrison's - remain unsolved.

Smith was sleeping in her bedroom at the back of the house when her 27-year-old son woke her and told Smith a dead woman was in the street.

Reports at the time showed that Harrison was found about 5 a.m. She had been stabbed several times in her upper body.

"I asked him, 'Is it your sister?' And he said 'No,'" Smith said.

Smith told her son to call the police, but he had already done so, he told her.

"I asked him 'How do you know she is dead?'" the woman said.

Smith's son said he had heard two women screaming and banging on their front door and his window. His bedroom at the time was in the front part of the house next to the living room. A window in his bedroom faced the front yard and the street.

He went outside to investigate after he heard the two women screaming for help, Smith said.

"He told me he went outside, touched her (Harrison) and felt the woman was cold," she said.

By the time he went inside to tell his mother and called police, the two women who were begging for help were gone.

Smith said she didn't hear anything.

As Smith went outside and police arrived at the scene, the woman admitted that she couldn't look at the slain woman, a person she had known.

But Smith remembers that there was little blood in the street. It appeared that Harrison was killed somewhere else and dumped there, she said.

Retired Lawton police officer Larry Salmon said homicide detectives had several witnesses who saw a vehicle with three people inside leaving the scene.

Detectives were never able to find such a car.

"Someone in the neighborhood saw a car that stopped and a door opened," Salmon said.

Police believed Harrison was killed inside the car, but they were never able to find the vehicle, reports indicate.

During the investigation, leads pointed to more than 30 people but there was not enough evidence to make an arrest.

Some of those leads took homicide detectives to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, where they talked to a convicted felon who allegedly had information about the stabbing.

Nothing panned out, but detectives kept looking.

"We conducted a thorough investigation, but never found the right link," Salmon said.

Investigators also talked to a young woman who was in Comanche County Jail at the time. She gave detectives different stories every time they spoke to her.

"People told us all they could tell us," the retired detective said.

Salmon said one of the stories at the time was that Harrison had ripped off a local drug dealer.

The retired detective said at one point detectives had several suspects but all of them had good alibis.

Salmon retired in 1996 after 25 years in law enforcement. He said he misses the job and the good rapport between officers.

But he remembers the level of frustration when there is a dead person and nobody behind bars.

"We had a few unsolved homicides. The Lawton Police Department has a good team," he said.

The following weeks were pretty terrifying for Smith and her family. She said she was agitated all the time, thinking about Harrison.

She moved two weeks after the homicide.

"I couldn't hardly sleep. ... I was scared," Smith said slowly, as if lost in her thoughts.

After her husband found another house, Smith said she never slept in the house on Bell again.

"I was such a nervous wreck; I didn't care about the place he found," she said.

Six months later, Smith moved out of the city.

Smith and her son never talk about what took place that night.

Her son never talks about it, but Smith said she knows that he wishes he'd never seen the slain woman, someone he knew.

"He knew her since he was a little boy," she said.

The memories still haunt Smith today, she said, adding that there's not a day when she doesn't think about Harrison's death.

Next Article on the unsolved murders