MANDEL: Murder conviction overturned for mom at centre of house of horrors mystery
Breadcrumb Trail Links Provincial In 2014, Melissa Merritt and her partner Christopher Fattore were charged in the death of a Mississauga family. Photo from FILES / YOUTUBE Content of the article
In the span of just over four years, three members of the Harrison family died under mysterious circumstances in a Mississauga home later dubbed the House of Secrets.
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First, it was 64-year-old Bill Harrison, a man in good health who played basketball most Thursday nights. Found dead in the home’s powder room on April 16, 2009, a cursory autopsy concluded the executive died of cardiac arrhythmias.
Almost exactly a year later, the body of his beloved wife Bridget, 63, was discovered at the foot of the stairs by her eight-year-old grandson as he was returning home from school. The popular educator died of neck injuries.
Then the coincidences were too hard to ignore when three years later a cleaning lady found the couple’s son Caleb, 40, dead in his bed.
In January 2019, a jury convicted Caleb’s ex-wife Melissa Merritt of first-degree murder in his death, but was acquitted of killing Bridget when the jury deadlocked. Her partner Christopher Fattore was found guilty of killing both Caleb and Bridget, but not Bill.
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Now the Court of Appeal has reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial of the woman the Crown alleges pulled Fattore’s strings and orchestrated the killings.
The Ontario Supreme Court found that the trial made serious errors in instructing the jury to begin their deliberations.
Prosecutors had argued that despite the mistakes of Supreme Court Justice Fletcher Dawson, the case against her was overwhelming — Merritt shared two children with Caleb and had fought bitterly with him and his parents for custody for years.
Merritt and Caleb married in 2002 and separated in 2005 after he assaulted her. A year later he was charged with drunk driving and killing a taxi driver. The court heard she was annoyed that he was given joint custody and his parents were heavily involved.
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In the meantime, she lived with Fattore and had four children with him until 2012.
In early 2009, while Caleb was serving 18 months for drunk driving, his parents went to court and took his joint custody with Merritt. She didn’t like it and there were plans to break the custody agreement and take the children to Nova Scotia.
Prosecutors alleged that Bill Harrison was murdered after he confronted Fattore about taking his grandchildren away.
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On the day Bill’s body was discovered by his horrified wife, Merritt and Fattore disappeared with the children. Seven months later, Merritt was charged with parental kidnapping in Nova Scotia. The children were brought back to Pitch Pine Cres. where Bridget, now a widow, had been granted temporary sole custody.
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On April 21, 2010, 11 days after Bridget reported that Merritt had breached her bail over the kidnapping allegations and a day before Merritt was due to appear in court, the children’s grandmother was found dead at the bottom of the stairs. Caleb was awarded sole custody.
For three years, the feuding parents agreed on a visitation arrangement, but in the summer of 2013 they argued again about access. On August 23, Merritt was scheduled to return the two children to their father after a week. Instead, Caleb’s body was found that day, hidden in his bed, a night mask over his eyes.
‘They will be arrested’: Mother to children over father’s killers Custody battle led to gruesome decimation of Mississauga family: Crown MANDEL: Double killer searches for love online 6
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Questioned by police, Merritt, whose father was a police officer, told investigators that she and Fattore had attended the children’s softball game the night before and then gone to the mall, but did not mention that Fattore stopped by Walmart to buy shoes – Shoes later forensically linked to Caleb’s murder.
The Crown argued this was evidence of her guilt, as well as wiretapped testimony following her January 28, 2014, arrest in Nova Scotia, where Merritt said, “(unintelligible) the tapes would have killed us anyway.”
Fattore confessed to killing Bridget and Caleb but insisted he did it without Merritt’s involvement – a confession he later recanted.
He lost his calling, but the woman he loved — who married another woman while in prison — will get another chance to argue that she had nothing to do with the House of Deadlock.
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