It was the day after Thanksgiving of 1987, and seven-year-old Alexander Harris of Mountain View, California had been spending the holiday in Las Vegas, Nevada with his mother Roxanne, and his grandparents. On Friday, November 27th, the family was driving back home but decided to stop at the popular Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Primm, near the Nevada-California border.
Roxanne set her son up in the casino’s video game arcade, and then she and her parents went to gamble nearby. After about twenty minutes, Roxanne went to the arcade to check on Alexander, but to her horror, she found he had completely disappeared. A search for him yielded nothing, but after reporting his disappearance to casino employees, it was discovered via grainy surveillance footage that a boy appearing to be Alexander was seen walking down a hallway at the resort, hand in hand with a man in his thirties.
Because the tape was of such low quality, it was difficult to determine exactly what the suspect looked like, and although there were witness descriptions of him, they differed slightly. According to one witness, the man stood about five-foot-eight and weighed approximately one hundred seventy pounds. He had straight blond hair that was about collar-length, wore silver, wire-rimmed glasses, and was clad in a brown Member’s Only style jacket and dark-colored pants. The second witness’s account was similar, but described the suspect as taller, more like six feet, and specified that the frames of the glasses were round. Apparently, the man resembled Alexander to such a degree that the witnesses had assumed they were father and son. Two sketches were produced and released to the public.
There was no sign of the child for more than a month, but eventually, the boy’s remains were uncovered beneath an off-property trailer, one of ten trailers near Whiskey Pete’s that housed off-duty casino executives. Alexander’s body showed no signs of trauma, and he was dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing on the day he vanished. His glasses were found nearby. Authorities believed he had likely been strangled.
Soon after the body was found, police arrested a computer programmer named Howard Lee Haupt, who somewhat resembled the man in the sketches. Haupt had been spending the Thanksgiving weekend at Whiskey Pete’s while he was attending a land-sailing tournament being held in the desert nearby. Haupt had no prior criminal record and easily passed two polygraph tests. In addition, none of the witnesses could pick Haupt out of a lineup, and several people came forward to confirm that Haupt had indeed been at the tournament at the time Alexander Harris went missing. Despite this, he was nevertheless arrested and charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder.
Haupt was placed on trial in 1989, and after five weeks of testimony, a jury acquitted Haupt after only a few hours of deliberation. Haupt later sued for damages, though the case was eventually settled out of court.
No further arrests were ever made, and the identity of the man who lured Alexander Harris to his death remains unknown.
Crime Immemorial 