The Binge Cases: My Mother's Lies
Jul 27, 2026 · 2 min · 3 segments
Four years ago, journalist Justine van der Leun received a letter that changed her life. The sender was a woman named Kwaneta Harris, who was incarcerated at a prison in Texas. Kwaneta had an…
[eerie music] I first met Quinnetta when I started reaching out to women in prison.
She was strikingly beautiful, brilliant, and she really had a way with words.
She can look you dead in the eye and lie with the best of them.
She'll win people over, and they be so enamored with her.
It, it's like they on a high.
I have to tell her, "You wrong.
You don't need to scam.
You don't need to trick people."
I'm going to be honest.
He was beating my ass so bad, I would have grabbed the Virgin Mary to help me.
But I know that I'd been to the point where I was just so scared that I was about to die.
She did some things she shouldn't have did.
She made a big mistake.
But the more I dug in, the more people I talked to, the more I realized that nothing was quite so simple.
You know, Quinnetta used men for money.
I had guns in the kitchen, everywhere.
One time she shot at me.
I kept asking myself, how do you make sense of a person's deepest truths when they are all wrapped up in the thorniest lies?
Just something kept pulling at me, going, "Quinnetta did this." We had her, you know, hitting his accounts.
We had her with his car.
So we had a suspect before we even had the murder.
But it wasn't until investigators saw the concrete slab in the backyard that they wondered, who are we really up against?
The minute I see that slab, I think, "Oh, this does not look right."
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[eerie music] I first met Quinnetta when I started reaching out to women in prison.
She was strikingly beautiful, brilliant, and she really had a way with words.
She can look you dead in the eye and lie with the best of them.
She'll win people over, and they be so enamored with her.
It, it's like they on a high.
I have to tell her, "You wrong.
You don't need to scam.
You don't need to trick people."
I'm going to be honest.
He was beating my ass so bad, I would have grabbed the Virgin Mary to help me.
But I know that I'd been to the point where I was just so scared that I was about to die.
She did some things she shouldn't have did.
She made a big mistake.
But the more I dug in, the more people I talked to, the more I realized that nothing was quite so simple.
You know, Quinnetta used men for money.
I had guns in the kitchen, everywhere.
One time she shot at me.
I kept asking myself, how do you make sense of a person's deepest truths when they are all wrapped up in the thorniest lies?
Just something kept pulling at me, going, "Quinnetta did this." We had her, you know, hitting his accounts.
We had her with his car.
So we had a suspect before we even had the murder.
But it wasn't until investigators saw the concrete slab in the backyard that they wondered, who are we really up against?
The minute I see that slab, I think, "Oh, this does not look right."
