On February 28th, 1982, David Harmon, a 25-year-old banker and a member of the Church of the Nazarene, was found bludgeoned to death in his own home in Olathe, Kansas.
His wife, Melinda, said that two intruders had entered their home in the middle of the night, searching for David’s bank keys.
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Initially, suspicion fell on Melinda and a family friend named Mark Mangelsdorf, but detectives had no evidence to link either of them to the murder. Even though the case went cold, police officers never gave up on finding the killer. And two decades later, they finally solved this horrific crime.
Background
David Jeffrey Harmon was born on January 3rd, 1957, in Rochester, New York, as an only child in a loving family. The Harmons were very religious, and David attended church camps almost every summer.
In 1973, while working as a counselor at a youth camp in Ithaca, New York, he met Melinda Lambert. She was from Columbus, Ohio, and they immediately bonded over their shared interests.
David was absolutely smitten with Melinda and knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
The couple got married in 1977 when Melinda was 19 and David had just turned 20. Both were members of the Church of the Nazarene, and early marriages weren’t uncommon in that community.
Shortly after their wedding, the newlyweds moved to Olathe, Kansas, home to MidAmerica Nazarene University.
Melinda’s father pulled some strings and helped her secure a job at the university as the secretary of the dean of students. Meanwhile, David attended classes and worked at a local bank.
Meeting Mark Mangelsdorf
It didn’t take long for David to make new friends at Olathe, especially because he was an active person who loved playing hockey. At the same time, Melinda was also forming friendships at work, particularly with a young student who frequently visited the dean’s office after meeting the new secretary.
His name was Mark Mangelsdorf, and he served as the president of the student government association. Melinda’s co-workers soon noticed that Mark clearly had a crush on her, but she dismissed it, insisting he was just a friend.
She even introduced Mark to her husband, David, who immediately accepted him as a friend. Mark started hanging out at the Harmon residence all the time, and their neighbors often spotted his car parked outside, even when David was at work.
This situation didn’t go unnoticed by university students, who began to gossip about the dean’s secretary having an affair with the student government president.
The rumors reached Melinda’s co-workers, who told her several times how inappropriate it was for a married woman to spend so much time with a student.
Once again, Melinda denied having an affair, saying that David was the most important man in her life and that she took her marriage vows seriously. She would never jeopardize her marriage because she didn’t believe in divorce.
The awful crime
On February 28th, 1982, Harmons’ next-door neighbors were awakened around 2:30 AM by a series of thumping noises coming from the other side of their bedroom wall.
Gail and Richard Bergstrand shared a duplex with Melinda and David, so whatever was happening at their side of the house could be easily heard.
The sounds were disturbing enough that Gail couldn’t fall asleep again, so she stayed up. After 3:30 AM, she heard someone knocking on their front door.
It was Melinda who was sobbing and asking Gail to make two phone calls: one to the police and another to her friend Mark Mangelsdorf. She said two black guys had attacked her and David and taken the keys to the bank where her husband worked.
The police arrived around 4:00 AM to discover a gruesome scene in the couple’s upstairs bedroom.
Blood was splattered across the walls and ceiling, and David was found lying in the bed with a severe head injury. The officers who were first on the scene initially believed he had been shot in the face with a shotgun.
Mark, who lived just a couple of blocks away, arrived at the Harmon residence shortly after receiving the phone call.
The Harmons had no family in the area, and Melinda considered Mark a close friend. He accompanied her to the local police station, where she recounted the events that had happened just hours earlier.
According to Melinda, she had been fast asleep when someone pulled her out of bed. She saw two black men in the bedroom, and one of them was beating David in the head with an unknown object. The second intruder demanded that Melinda give them the key to the bank where David worked.
After handing over the key, Melinda was struck on the head and lost consciousness. She claimed to have woken up an hour later, run out, and sought help from her neighbors. She indeed had a bruise on her cheek, which corroborated her account.
After hearing Melinda’s story, the local police department quickly dispatched several cars to the bank where David worked. They stayed there for hours, waiting for the killers to arrive and try to rob the bank. However, no one showed up.
The initial investigation
In the morning, news of a brutal murder spread throughout Olathe, leaving the small community in shock. Crime was rare here, especially a home invasion that resulted in death.
Investigators brought in the tracking dogs, hoping they would pick up the scent at the Harmon home and lead them to the killers.
Interestingly, the dogs directed their handlers toward a dumpster located just minutes away from the crime scene. It was located next to the apartment building where Mark Mangelsdorf lived.
Unfortunately, the dumpster had been emptied earlier in the morning, so all the potential evidence was lost. But this shifted the investigation in a new direction. Police began interviewing people who worked with Melinda and David, as well as their neighbors.
They learned that David considered Mark his best friend, but everyone found it strange that Melinda was spending so much time with the student when her husband wasn’t around.
The two became prime suspects, and the Olathe Police Department obtained a warrant to search Mark’s apartment.
While they didn’t find the murder weapon or any bloody clothes, officers did notice spots of blood inside the front door. Samples were collected, but there was no way to test them back in 1982 in order to confirm they belonged to David.
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Moreover, it seemed that Mark and Melinda weren’t as close as the investigators were led to believe. The two saw each other only once after that horrible night in February.
They both attended David’s funeral, and Melinda moved back to Ohio just days later. So the theory that the two murdered David to begin a relationship didn’t seem so probable anymore, leaving the investigators without a clear motive.
Mark also left Olathe at the end of the spring semester in 1982. After graduating, he enrolled in Harvard Business School. By spring 1983, David Harmon’s murder had become a cold case, but police officers and detectives who had witnessed the scene of the crime still discussed it frequently.
Reopening of the case
In the summer of 2001, the Olathe Police Department was contacted by the Johnson County Crime Lab, which asked about any unsolved crimes that had DNA samples.
The lab had recently acquired new forensic tools and wanted to test them. Detectives immediately remembered the murder of David Harmon, and so the case was reopened. The blood samples collected from Mark Mangelsdorf’s apartment were sent for analysis.
Nearly 20 years after the murder, both Mark and Melinda had moved on with their lives. Mark lived in New Jersey, where he worked as a marketing executive for several Fortune 500 companies.
Meanwhile, Melinda resided in Delaware, Ohio, with her new husband, Mark Raisch. He was a well-known dentist, and the couple lived in a large suburban house with their two children.
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On December 17th, 2001, two detectives from Kansas traveled to Ohio to speak with Melinda about the case. She welcomed them into her home and was asked if she could remember any significant details regarding the murder of her first husband.
Melinda told them a completely different story from the one given in 1982. This time, she claimed there was only one intruder in the house. Detectives needed to get her new testimony on tape, so they asked her to come to the Sheriff’s Department with them.
There, Melinda also stated that although she was uncertain of the intruder’s identity, she had a feeling it was Mark Mangelsdorf.
She continued to deny her involvement in the murder, but admitted to having an emotional affair with Mark. Detectives tried to interview him in New Jersey, but he declined. The case was once again at a standstill.
The trials
Everything changed in late 2002 when the lab sent back the results of the DNA testing. It revealed that the blood collected from Mark’s apartment very likely belonged to David.
On December 3rd, 2003, Melinda was charged with first-degree murder. Mark was arrested on April 8th, 2005, but he posted bail shortly after.
Melinda’s trial began on April 11th, 2005, and the prosecution presented their theory that Melinda had killed her husband together with Mark, as the two were in a relationship.
The interrogation tape from December 2001 was introduced as evidence. While Melinda could’ve divorced her husband, the Church of Nazarene held strict rules regarding the termination of marriage.
On the other hand, the defense claimed that detectives from Kansas were determined to close the two-decade-long case by any means and were setting Melinda up. According to Melinda’s lawyers, their client was innocent, and Mark Mangelsdorf had acted alone.
Mark himself testified for the defense and denied having any relationship with Melinda. According to him, he was just a family friend. However, the jury wasn’t persuaded by his testimony, and after 12 hours of deliberation, Melinda Raisch was found guilty.
Since life in prison was on the table, Melinda decided to testify against Mark during his trial in exchange for a lighter sentence.
She claimed that Mark had told her he would murder her husband, but that she hadn’t taken him seriously. However, once she saw what he had done to David, Melinda decided to sever all ties with him.
On February 13th, 2006, Mark Mangelsdorf pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. Melinda’s sentence was reduced because she cooperated with the prosecution, resulting in her receiving the same sentence.
David Harmon’s mother passed away in 2004 and didn’t get to see the justice served for her only son. Melinda was released from prison in April 2015, and she moved back to Ohio. One year later, Mark was released on parole.
Sources
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-who-murdered-husband-in-kansas-freed-after-9-years
https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article75212182.html
https://pod.wave.co/podcast/cold-case-files/reopened-a-deadly-affair-cc5c57c0
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