Hey, girlfriend, it's Anna here giving you a quick heads up on what to expect in this episode.

We're going to talk about the night of the murder a lot and in detail, and I want to warn you that there's going to be some mentions of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and suicide.

But we'll also get the chance to dive into the weeds of the police investigation to learn more about the case against Kelly and the holes in it.

If you feel impacted by some of the themes in this show, you can reach out to No More.

There are domestic violence charity with a lot of great resources to help.

You or your loved ones.

You can search No More dot org and we've also put a link to their website in the episode description.

Plus, as always, there'll be more than a few swear words for Kelly Harnett's brother, Ronnie.

July seventh, twenty ten, was a totally normal day.

I was on my way back from work and I had are you know how they in a union square and things like that they have the village Voice or whatever, so their newspaper.

He picks it up and sits down, leaving through like he would any other time, and there printed in black and white is a headline that reads something like, please arrest two individuals after a murder.

In a story of Queens.

I was looking at people next to me.

I said, you believe this in our neighborhood?

And I showed them and they looked at it and they just shook their heads.

They were like, what's this world coming to?

Ronnie doesn't think any more of it other than what a shame it is that the place he once knew as a safe family neighborhood seems to be going to the dogs.

So I go home.

My mother's like, yeah, you might want to sit down.

I was like, am I just telling me what's going on?

And I never a billion years did crossed my mind what I read?

You know.

So she's like, Kelly, she got arrested, and I said, for what she said, for murder, shocking is an understatement.

I started getting dizzy.

I started seeing stars and I was like, WHOA.

But I knew, I said, I know my sister, she didn't do this.

I know she didn't do it.

I'm Annisonfield and from the teams at novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the girlfriend's jailhouse lawyer.

Yes, episode three, he said she said.

It's around four am on July seventh, twenty ten, when Kelly Hannette first arrives at the one hundred and fourteenth Precinct.

She's immediately processed as a suspect in the murder of Reuben Angel Vargas.

They took all of my clothes from me, including my bride under her.

They put me in a white paper suit.

Kelly can't believe what's happening to her.

She's just witnessed her boyfriend Tommy Donovan kill a man right in front of her before threatening that she would be next, but no one seems to be treating her like the victim.

She is.

Sitting in her cell.

Feeling like the world is against her.

Kelly decides to do something reckless, something that will warp and color every memory she tells me from this time.

Somehow she's managed to smuggle in a huge amount of xanax, and she knows she needs to get rid of them.

Before they're discovered by the police.

But she also just wants to escape this situation somehow, And right there in the palm of her hand, she sees a solution.

Down the hair they go and there was a lot and I didn't care if it was a suicide attempt.

Or what the hell it was.

Whatever happens happens, because it sounds like my life just got ripped from under me because of something that I didn't even do.

I was like, look if I die, I die.

From there, things just get worse for Kelly.

Not only is she now really high in police custody, but she's also withdrawing.

She tells the police she needs her methodone.

She's on that huge one hundred and seventy milligram daily dose, but she's been without it for days because Tommy wouldn't let her go to the clinic.

Kelly's hoping now she's in official police custody that they'll give her what she needs, but they refuse.

On top of this, Kelly suffers from what's called grand mal seizures, she says.

She asks repeatedly for her seizure medication, which is in police possession, but they say they'll only give it to her if she writes a statement.

She has multiple seizures while in custody.

She also gets her period.

She asks the cops for some sanitary but they refuse those two They leave her bleeding into her white paper suit it soaks right through and is visible to anyone who sees her.

And because she hasn't got anything on underneath, every time she goes to the bathroom, she has to strip down completely naked.

Kelly says.

Male staff gather around to watch, making comments about her body.

I'm bleeding everywhere, but you're talking about my breasts and calling your friends in because it's a free show.

Discusting pigs.

I have absolutely no no respect for them.

I'm sorry, but they were disgusting to me.

I didn't even fucking commit this crime.

How dare you?

How fucking dare you?

It should be clear to anyone that Kelly is in no fit state to give a reliable account of what's happened, and yet four hours after her arrest, cops take down an oral statement.

Here's a quick reminder of how Kelly described the knight of the murder.

Back in episode one.

Kelly and Tommy met Angel and they decided to drink together while Tommy went off to buy the three of them beers.

Kelly says Angels sexually assaulted her.

When Tommy returned, Kelly told him what happened.

Tommy then attacked and choked Angel.

Kelly tried to get him to stop, but Tommy pushed her away and threatened that she would be next.

After that, Tommy forced Kelly to hand over her shoelace.

He then attempted to use it to strangle Angel, but it snapped.

Next, Kelly witnessed Tommy put his belt around Angel's neck and finally kill him.

That's what Kelly said to me in twenty twenty four, but it's not what she told the police back in twenty ten.

I was woken up frantically by my boyfriend Tommy Danovan, stating we got to get out of here now, and then they put in.

Kelly is reading from her original oral statement, which was taken at around eight am on July seventh.

In it, Kelly says that she didn't witness the crime at all.

Instead, she's woken up by Tommy, who tells her that he'd seen a guy who'd stolen his shoes the previous day and choked him unconscious.

He then tells her start packing your crap up.

Kelly starts gathering her things, and while she's doing that, Kelly says, Tommy takes her shoelace out of her sneaker and takes it over to the guy who's on the ground.

A male Hispanic wearing a dark collared shirt was lying down moving in that Tommy grabbed him from behind around the neck and choked him again for proximately ten seconds.

Kelly states that Tommy told her to kick said mail Hispanic and that she didn't.

Kelly states that Tommy let said male Hispanic go and he fell to the ground lifeless.

You're doing okay, Yeah, it was just the part that started because you know, the beginning is what I told the detectives, because I was just afraid, you know, there was no truth to it.

But the part that got me was when it became truthful that he had the mail and that he fell lifeless.

That that gets me.

Yeah, of course, you know, because no matter what he tried, meaning the sexual assault.

That's still a life.

At the end of the day, he's still someone's brother, he's someone's son, possibly father.

You know, so.

Terrible.

In a written statement she gives about an hour or so later, at about nine thirty am, Kelly sounds like she's really grappling with the horrors of the previous night.

It honestly does read like she's high in a disjointed stream of consciousness, where she veers from talking about her mum's back injury, to her college scholarships to how religious she is.

Kelly writes about how putrid she feels about all of this, and how going down for Tommy's stupidity is such an awful feeling.

I take all of that into account, and I really do feel for the Kelly of twenty ten.

But I can't pretend that all the inconsistencies between the story Kelly told me and the story in these statements don't give me pause, especially this one detail she's never told me before that Tommy ordered her to kick Angel.

In the statements from twenty ten, she says she didn't do it, so I don't really understand why she left it out when she told me her version years later.

For the first time, I'm grappling with the possibility that Kelly isn't being fully open with me.

We both have stories to tell here, but I do have this fear that they're not the same one.

Before I can go.

Any further, I need to understand more about what happened that night, this time from Tommy's perspective.

Can I just read you this statement from Tommy?

There's some stuff that's really horrible.

I'm sack with my producer Jake in our midtown airbnb.

Tommy Donovan's statement in front of us.

It's one of a few that he gave that day.

One is an oral statement taken according to the police documents, at around four thirty pm on July seventh, the day of the murder.

It looks like it was typed up the next day on the eighth.

With all of this confusion swirling around in my mind, I want to look at what Tommy had to say about what happened in the part that night.

Believe me when I say that I am not predisposed to trust this man, but I'm working with what I've got, and what immediately stands out to me is the weird and colorful context Tommy seems to add to that night in the park.

So this is obviously written from the perspective of the cop noting it down.

Mister Donovan informed me that over the past few nights they had had problems with perverse trying to watch them having sex, and that they had even named them nightcrawlers.

Yeah, mister Donovan.

It goes on to talk about how Tommy and Kelly were attempting to fall around on a makeshift bed under health skatebridge.

When Kelly noticed one of these night crawlers, she stormed up and slapped him around the face, which then prompted Tommy to chase him seventy feet across the park.

On the way back, he spotted a Hispanic man sitting on a park bench, who said, that's not right that they try to watch you sit and have a beer.

So can we just stop there for a minute because it feels very made up.

Yeah, that's like somebody trying to write like a bad script of what this kind of moment could be like.

And I'm like really trying to keep in mind that this is what he's saying, hours after all this just happened.

Yeah, I think Kelly also told me about how she had to translate between Tommy and Angel, who spoke Spanish, but there's no language barrier problem in this retellinger.

Mister Donovan states that he accepted the man's offer and took a Morello beer.

Kelly then walked over and the man offered her a beer as well, which he accepted.

Mister Donovan informed me that the three of them had a beer or two each while discussing different types of beers and agreeing on how Morello is much better than Corona.

I don't have a lot to say about that, but it's weird.

The only other thing I was thinking is like, it's really hard for me to wrap my mind around whether the fact that there is so much detail makes it more or less plausible.

Mister Donovan further states that the man they had just met introduced himself as Angel and was now asking him to run to the bodega and buy some more beer, and had stated, don't worry about it, I have money and you can take my bike.

Mister Donovan states that he jumped on Angel's bike and quickly rode up to the bodega, where he purchased six Loco beers.

So that's where the loko comes in.

He then quickly rode by Tommy Stateman then says that when he returned, Kelly and Angel were in the same spot he had left the men.

He says he asked Kelly if she was okay.

She stated that she was fine, and they went on to drink the beers they bought while chatting about various topics.

Mister Donovan states that after a while, according to Tommy's statement, he and Kelly decided they wanted to get back to falling around under the bridge, but Angel wouldn't leave them alone.

He's begging them not to go and offering to buy more drinks and food, eventually following them to their makeshift bed.

So Tommy told Kelly to pretend she was sleeping while he went to pee on the woodchip pile nearby.

While he was peeing, he heard Kelly's voice and she sounded upset.

He stopped peeing in midstream and walked back over to Kelly.

Once there, Kelly informed him that Angel had just offered her money for sex, and he had stated to her, I want to.

Lick your pussy.

I'm good at it.

Kelly further stated that Angel had said to her, I have money and a job.

I can take care of you.

Kelly informed him that Angel had just grabbed her crotch and was visibly upset, just a warning that.

The next section talks about the murder itself.

Mister Donovan states that he became very angry, walked over to him, and pushed him the two of them.

The statement then goes on to say that tom and Angel started wrestling on the ground throwing and not landing punches.

Eventually, Tommy gets Angel into a chokehold with his right arm, but it wasn't working.

It doesn't specify where Kelly is, but it must be right next to them, as it then says, Tommy tells Kelly to kick Angel, then to kick him harder, which it says she does numerous times in the groin.

This is where it gets kind of crazy.

Mister Donovan further stated that he then told Kelly to give him her shoe string.

He stated that she removed her shoe string from her shoe and wrapped it around his neck, pulling it tight and handing it to him.

He then choked him with it until he became limp Once Angel was unconscious, and again this is coming from Tommy's typed up oral statement, Tommy told Kelly that they needed to get the hell out of there and started gathering up his things.

Then he walked away, and when he looked back, he saw that Kelly was on top of Angel, strangling him to death.

He ran over and yelled at her to go, and on their way out of the park, Donovan.

Says he noticed Kelly took Angel's wallet and cash.

Mister Donovan stated that he did not want to get arrested for robbery.

Really small concern there, so he grabbed the wallet from her, threw it on the rocks, and put the money in his pocket.

They both then crossed the street towards the water, where they were immediately stopped by the police, resulting in them getting arrested.

Wow.

Okay, let's digest all of that properly, because it was a lot.

The inconsistencies between Kelly and Tommy's twenty ten statements ranged from from minor to glaring.

Both Tommy and Kelly's statements mentioned the shoelace, although he says she handed it over and she says he took it from her, and both of them mentioned Tommy telling Kelly to kick Angel, although they again differ on whether Kelly actually did or didn't do it.

Kelly says she was woken by Tommy after he admitted choking out Angel, but Tommy says Kelly was not only awake for the attack, but that she physically put her own shoelace around Angel's neck, pulled it tight, and handed it to Tommy.

Tommy also says that while he choked Angel, it was only to the point of unconsciousness.

Then he walked away, and when he looked back, he saw that Kelly was on top of Angel, strangling him to death.

And then there's the differences in Kelly's accounts, which I understand thinking about the mindset that twenty ten Kelly was in, traumatized, scared, not to mention high, I can tote get why she would lie to the police to protect herself, why she'd want to distance herself from terrible crime.

But I'm also confused about what the truth is, sure, but also why Kelly isn't opening up to me.

Could I ask you some questions about Donovan's statement.

Sure, I've been reading through it.

There are a couple of.

Things that stood out to me that seemed to be kind of parallels.

Some stuff that came up in your original statement that seemed to match and haven't come up in our previous conversations, one of them being he asked you to kick Ruben, Ruben being Reuben Angel Vargas the victim, and then in his original statement you do that.

In your original statement, you also say that he asked you to but you didn't do it.

And then since we've spoken and that hasn't been any mention of the kicking, and so I just want to figure.

Out, Oh, okay, clarification, Yeah, okay.

So I remember the detective kept saying to me now just right, that he told you to kick the victim, and that you did.

Like nobody kicked him, not even my co defendant.

What really happened.

When I was speaking to the Spanish man.

The decendent, he told both of us that he got thrown out of the house because he was drinking too much and that his brother beat him up and threw him out.

So when you beat.

Someone up, clearly there's going to be bruising.

So they wanted to implicate me, just for me to take the blame on doing something, and he yelled at me to the point where I wrote the words just for them to stop.

I remember thinking, this is how confessions come about.

I think Kelly means false confessions here.

The fact that I'm writing he told me to kick him.

That was a lie.

That was a complete lie.

But I felt like since the word kick is in there, they'll lay off a little bit, and they did.

The reason I ask about the kicking is because to me, if somebody did what is said in Tommy's statement, kicking someone to get them away is not at all a bad things.

And so I'm just saying like, if that had happened, No, no, I would be not share the fuck enough, you.

Know, No, No, I get it.

This is what I'm trying to say.

If I kicked him one hundred percent, I would tell you I kicked him.

But if I didn't kick him, I didn't kick him.

I almost wish I kicked him at this point.

I didn't kick him.

You know why, I was too fucking scared to kick him.

I was not going back there.

You have to think of the domestic violence aspect and not the truth finding aspect.

The domestic violence aspect of the matter is that I was afraid of Tommy.

You think I'm gonna.

Be busy trying to kick him in when I'm trying to figure out how the hell am I going to get out of this one?

Well, I live to see.

The next minute, of course.

No, I'm not gonna worry about going to kick someone.

I adopted what they stated just to write it, so they leave me the fuck alone.

So I'm going to be really honest here about a couple of things.

Number one is that I'm not proud of the take that you just heard, then I nearly didn't include it.

Number two is that I feel so fucking out of my depth right now.

In all the years I've spent making this show, speaking to countless survivors of domestic and gendered violence, I've never upset someone like that.

But then I've never dealt with someone as complicated as Kelly, and I have absolutely no idea where to go from here.

I spend a lot of time running back that conversation between me and Kelly in my head, when she spoke about hoping that the police would leave her the fuck alone.

I can't help but feel like she was also talking to me, which feels like shit.

The last thing I want Kelly to feel is attacked or judged, because for me, so much of this job of interviewing people, of getting them to share their experiences with me, it's a relationship one based around mutual respects and trust, one that I honestly tend to find pretty easy to build.

I'm struggling to build that mutual trust with Kelly.

Sometimes I feel like she's telling me exactly what I want to hear, and in other times I can feel like she's keeping me at arm's length.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I do not in any way believe the part of Tommy's statement where he says Kelly physically strangled Angel.

I think this was nothing more than him trying to shift some of the blame for his crime.

But I can't ignore the fact that it is possible that Kelly could have kicked Angel.

It's mentioned in both statements, so I feel like I have to at least consider it.

But even if she did kick Angel, for me, it would just be another sign of the terrible situation she was in and of the power Tommy had over her, not proof that she killed anyone.

I do think Kelly has a point about the police pushing her to write what they wanted, because when I start looking into things a little deeper, it does feel like there's something funny going on in these statements.

This next section gets into the weeds a little bit, but stay with me.

Remember how I said Tommy gave multiple statements to the police.

Well, one of them is a handwritten statement, which was made at about six pm on July seventh.

In that statement, he isn't as certain about the details.

He says he couldn't remember if Kelly said Angel tried to touch her or did touch her.

But in the officer's typed up.

Version you've just heard me and producer Jake reading, that uncertainty is nowhere to be found.

Also in the typed version, it says Kelly kicked Angel on Tommy's orders and then robbed Angel's dead body for good measure, But in the written version by Tommy himself, there's no mention of the kicking or of the robbery, which seems like a pretty big omission to me.

Two pretty big emissions.

I know these might seem like small detail, but I do think it's worth examining how statements can become, let's just say, refined by police who are trying to build an air tight case.

The more I look into it, the more confused I become.

The awkward truth is, you either believe Kelly's story now or you don't.

For me, it comes down to that trust again.

I can't ignore the possibility, However uncomfortable it is to face that Kelly could be hiding things, things she doesn't want to say because she thinks it makes her look bad, less like a victim, more like a villain.

Maybe, because she doesn't trust that I'm able to understand.

Doesn't think I can extend my compassion to someone who's done a bad thing in the name of survival, even though that's at the heart of what I'm trying to do with this series.

But I can't say I really blame her after the way our last conversation went down, I feel like this story is exposing all of my blind spots.

I don't know how to tell Kelly's story.

I don't know who she is in the story.

Who's the victim?

I think everybody's the victim, Like they're all the victim.

You could put everybody in a different role, you could like make it whatever you want it to be.

But yeah, everyone's a victim.

Everyone's a villain.

How do you like that?

iHeart end of series?

End of series.

Wraps, and not just yet.

I'm not going to throw in the towel that easy.

So let's go back to July twenty ten.

Kelly's not sure exactly how long she'd been at the one hundred and fourteenth Precinct for things must be hazy as she comes down from the fistful of xanax she swallowed when she first arrived.

But she has a rough idea.

I figured out how long I was there by touching my legs and judging by the length of the hair on my legs, because I shave every single day, and I could tell I was like, I've been here for a little bit over two days now.

Using leg hair as plock hands is honestly ingenious, and Kelly's probably about right because according to New York law, generally, you're only allowed to hold someone for up to seventy two hours before you either charge them or release them.

Unfortunately, for Kelly, it's the former.

Kelly's taken to be formally charged in Queen's cord.

She's still in that bloodstained paper suit.

Paper.

Nothing more than paper, not even shoes, and my own blood coming everywhere.

She's being arraigned alongside Tommy.

The first thing I noticed, which is unbelievable and the one fourteenth persons should be absolutely ashamed of themselves, is that he was wearing his own clothes.

The admitted murderer.

Had his own clothes on while they took me the female's clothes.

How dare they?

Tommy is brought up to the stand next to Kelly.

They're out side by side.

She takes a moment to look him up and down, and that's when she realizes something.

Not only did he get to keep his own clothes, he had his belt on.

The belt that, according to Kelly, Tommy used to strangle Angel to death.

They let him in with the weapon that killed someone, that took someone's life.

Kelly's fuming, and I get it.

The indignity she's suffered for the past few days in the police precinct would be hard for anyone to bear.

And for the record, I find it supremely fucked up how differently Kelly says she and Tommy are being treated.

It isn't right under any circumstances.

Whether or not you believe that Kelly kicked Angel.

I swear on my mother's ashes, I really did not kick that man.

May I go to hell for all of it tearing me.

I did not kick that man.

But even if I did, he admittedly strangled him.

Why wouldn't you take his clothing?

Even if I kicked him?

What if that had to do with my bra and pennies?

It's such a violation of every civil rate, like you treating me less than a human being.

That's what they put me through.

This is the justice system.

In God, we trust.

No, you know you don't trust in God.

If you do that to people, there is no God there.

Once Kelly and Tommy are arraigned, they're taken out of the courtroom and walk towards a jail transfer bus, one that is hauntingly familiar to Kelly.

When Kelly was a little girl, she and her brother Ronnie used to play around at their aunt's house.

She lived the house right there where you turned and went to the bridge to go to Rikers.

As in Rikers Island jail.

And I would be playing in the front.

The Rikers Island buses used to pierced by all the time and then curve right into where Rikers is.

As the buses crept past the two children, the passenger's eyes turned to them.

They would be watching Ronnie and I and I would see those buses pass all.

The time, and I was like, what's those buses?

Why do they have cages?

Now decades on, Kelly's an adult stepping onto one of those buses, it.

Was all men and just me.

And tell me it was on the bus and all the men were calling me a dirty bitch.

Not that I look dirty, because I take showers every day, but because of my female.

Issue, the bloodstained paper suit.

Dirty bitch, smelly bitch, you smell like fish, just and that I'm just waiting for time me to say something he never did.

The bus winds through the city, passing the same garden Kelly and her brother Ronnie played in as children, except now it's Kelly who's looking out through a caged window on her way to Rikers Island jail.

Rikers had seriously dangerous people and it scared the hell out of me.

Next time, on The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer, Kelly fights to prove her innocence and to survive life in Rikers.

Well, this was the survival of the fittest.

Only the strong survive.

Our sisterhood called ourselves.

The showdies.

I'm not guilty.

I plan on taking this to trial.

Don't go to child, Please, don't go to child.

She goes Harnett.

You guys, start finding your case.

If you're king the love of my life?

Oh God, how are n it?

Jelhouse Lawyer.

The Girlfriend's Jelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel Dot Audio.

The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jako Taivich and Michael Jino.

Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.

The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield.

Production management from Shari Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolfe.

Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by me Alis Infield, Lee Meyer and Nicholas Alexander.

Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein.

Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton.

Creative director of Novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers for Novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantor.

Thanks also to Carry Lieberman and the whole team at WME