User:Intelligencer Librarian/Constance Harman

Constance Harman, a Northampton Township civic activist, was charged with the August 27, 1978 murder of Yves Bordes (pronounced “eev bor-DES”), her 30-year-old Haitian lover.

Ms. Harman — who, immediately following the trial, legally changed her name to Tracy Davis — shot Bordes in the Bensalem Mall Motel on Old Lincoln Highway. Bordes died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head. He was shot three times at close range and his body, wrapped in a shower curtain, was dumped in the parking lot of the Southwark Housing Project, Fourth Street and Salter Place, South Philadelphia.

Harman, 45, of 444 Bridgetown Pike, had worked on the congressional campaign staff of Republican candidate G. Roger Bowers at the time of her arrest, and was separated from her husband John Harman, a detective on the Bristol Township police force.

Her attorney, John M. McClure, maintained that the killing was justified because of the “endless torture” and beatings Harman had suffered at the hands of her lover.

On Friday, April 13 1979 (much to the outrage of many Bucks County residents, judging by subsequent letters to the editor) she was acquitted of charges of first and third-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter.

In August 1979, Constance Harman became Tracy Davis. Since the trial, she said, she had been unable to obtain a job or “to function as a part of the community and to carry on a normal existence.”

Apparently the name change wasn’t enough. On the morning of June 14, 1990, Davis sneaked into the home of her daughter, Camela, cut the phone lines, and kidnapped Camela’s 9-year-old son John.

It wasn’t the first time, either. In June 1988 Davis had absconded with John — then 7 — for nine months and was caught only when family members were tipped off that she had returned to Bensalem to see her parents. Davis was punished with loss John’s custody, which she shared with Camela. Brazenly, she tried two more times to kidnap John but “met with resistance.”

This time, Camela didn’t see John again for two years. It took a December 1992 segment of the television program “Unsolved Mysteries” featuring the missing pair to convince Davis to surrender.

And surrender she did: By calling the New York offices of “Inside Edition,” and asking them to accompany her to the FBI. The show did just that, after reporter Nancy Glass conducted an hour-long interview with Davis and her grandson in a Princeton hotel room.

Davis was sentenced to 11 and-a-half to 23 months in prison.