ARIZONA 1988 Cold Case Solved After 33 Years — Justice for Pam Pitts & Ray Clerx
On the night of September 16th, 1988, Pamela Pitts left a party at Gordo’s Pit, a clearing in the national forest outside Prescott, Arizona.
She was 19 years old.
Friends called her Dark Angel, the CB radio handle she chose for herself.
She worked as a bookkeeper at a small sandwich shop, a job she loved.
A few days earlier, she had called her father and said she wanted to move back home because of a rent dispute with her roommate.
>> >> Pam never made it home.
That same night, her roommate, Shelly Norgard, 22, drove around Prescott telling anyone who would listen that she would kill Pam if she found her.
13 days later, a charred body was found among the trash at Gordo’s Pit itself.
It was unrecognizable by sight.
Only a bracelet remained, melted into the bones of the wrist, still bearing a few readable letters.
Dark and Angel.
Dental records confirmed the identity.
Pamela Pitts, 19 years old.
Police had witnesses who heard the death threats.
Police had a woman who had accurately described how to dispose of a body by burning it, and the body was found exactly that way.
But the autopsy was inconclusive.
There was no direct evidence.
Rumors swirled, satanic cults, drug dealers, and the case went cold.
Shelly was never charged.
Three years later, she shot and killed her boyfriend Raymond Clark, drove around with his body in the trunk for 2 weeks, then threw him down a 12-meter mine shaft.
She received 20 years in prison for the Clark’s killing, but Pam’s case stayed in the drawer.
It took 33 years, a cold case detective who refused to give up, and a highly controversial plea deal before Shelly finally confessed to killing Pam.
She did not serve a single extra day in prison.
Two victims, zero additional days behind bars.
This is the story of a 33-year cold case in Arizona.
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Pamela Pitts was born on June 25th, 1969 in Marquette County, Michigan.
She was the oldest of four children of Paul and Carol Pitts.
The family later moved to Prescott, Arizona, a quiet tourist town about 160 km north of Phoenix, surrounded by national forest and granite hills.
Prescott was the kind of town people came to for a break, where the air was cooler than the Phoenix desert, and the pace was so slow that people forgot violence could happen there.
Pam grew up in Prescott and became a young woman that those who knew her described with two seemingly contradictory words, stubborn and compassionate.
She belonged to a group of friends who loved CB radio, Citizens Band, >> >> the kind of two-way radios popular in rural America at the time.
Everyone in the group had their own handle, and Pam chose Dark Angel for herself.
The Dark Angel.
That name would follow her all the way to her death in a way no one could have foreseen.
In 1988, Pam was 19 and working as a bookkeeper at McCabe Sandwiches in Prescott Valley.
Friends and family said she loved the job.
She lived a simple life, going to work, hanging out with her CB radio friends, and sharing a house in Prescott with two roommates.
One of them was Shelly Marie Noorgard, 22.
The other was Melinda Perry, 19.
On the surface, it was three young women living together to split the rent.
Beneath the surface, everything was cracking.
The conflict between Pam and Shelley centered on money.
Pam paid the rent late.
They had a joint bank account, and Pam had overdrawn it.
For Shelley, that was not a small matter.
But, there was something else.
According to investigative documents, Pam had told others that Shelley was pregnant, something Shelley did not want anyone to know.
The combination of the money owed and the exposed secret created a level of anger that people around them could feel.
Pam knew it.
She called her father, Paul Pitts, and said she wanted to move back home.
She said she and Shelley were having problems.
Paul later told investigators that his daughter sounded worried, but not panicked.
She just wanted to leave.
She never got the chance.
September 16th, 1988.
That was the night Pam went to a party at Gordo’s Pit, sometimes also called Alto Pit, a clearing in the national forest outside Prescott.
Gordo’s Pit was a well-known spot for local young people, an open space in the woods where teenagers gathered to drink, build fires, and do the things small-town teenagers do when there is nowhere else to go.
No cameras, no security, no streetlights, just the forest, the darkness, and young people drinking more than they should.
Pam was there that night, and then she disappeared.
No one saw her leave.
No one heard her cry for help.
She was simply no longer there.
But, someone was looking for her.
That same night, multiple witnesses in Prescott later recounted that Shelley Norgard drove around town asking everyone if they knew where Pam was.
But, she did not just ask.
She told different people that if she found Pam, she would kill her.
That is not speculation.
It is the sworn testimony of multiple witnesses, recorded in the investigative files.
And there was another detail that people who knew Shelly remembered clearly.
She had talked about how to dispose of a body.
Burn it or throw it down a mine shaft.
She said it not once, she said it many times to many people as if it were a normal topic of conversation.
13 days passed.
On September 29th, 1988, Yavapai County deputies were called to Gordo’s Pit.
A body was found among a pile of trash, charred, unrecognizable by sight.
The burns were so severe they had nearly erased every identifying feature.
But one thing remained.
Melted into the bones of the victim’s wrist was a bracelet.
And on that deformed bracelet, investigators could still read a few letters, dark and angel.
Dental records confirmed what everyone had feared.
The victim was Pamela Pitts, 19 years old.
When police searched the house Pam shared with Shelly and Melinda, they discovered a detail that made the hair on the back of their necks stand up.
In the wood burning stove of the house, a photograph of Pam had been burned.
Someone had taken her picture and burned it in the very house where she had lived.
The photograph did not jump into the stove by itself.
Someone put it there.
And that someone lived under the same roof as Pam.
Prescott was not a town used to murder.
This was a place people came to hike, ride horses, and drink coffee on the porch.
News of the burned body at Gordo’s Pit spread through town like a wildfire.
Fear began to creep in.
A killer was loose out there on the familiar streets.
Maybe even someone you saw every morning at the coffee shop.
The Pitts family received the news in horror.
Paul and Carol Pitts had lost their oldest daughter.
>> >> The daughter who had called just days earlier saying she wanted to come home.
The daughter they never got to bring home.
The investigation into the murder of Pamela Pitts began immediately.
Leads poured into the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, and none of them led anywhere.
In the weeks after Pam’s body was found, investigators received dozens of calls, each offering a different theory, each sounding plausible until it no longer did.
One group insisted it was the work of a satanic cult.
Prescott and the surrounding area had long had rumors of Satan-worshipping groups operating in the national forest, >> >> and the way the body was burned among trash at a remote clearing in the woods seemed to fit the image people associated with occult rituals.
Investigators later admitted that the unusual method of killing and the way the body was discovered fueled the Satan rumors that spread strongly through the community.
But there was no evidence, no ritual signs, no symbols, no witnesses to support that theory.
Then there was a lead about a local drug dealer.
Then a man with the nickname Half-track, whose real identity no one could pin down.
Then the theory that Pam had overdosed at the party and someone burned the body to cover it up.
Every theory was investigated.
Every theory led to a dead end.
>> >> The core problem lay with the body.
The autopsy results were completely inconclusive as to the exact cause of death.
The burns were too severe, burned to the point that almost remained for forensic analysis.
The medical examiners could not determine how Pam had died before she was set on fire, beaten, strangled, stabbed, or some other cause.
The autopsy report stated probable homicide, but it could not say for certain.
That was a phrase that sounded small, yet in the justice system it carried enormous weight.
Probable homicide is not definite homicide, and the gap between those two phrases would haunt the case for the next 33 years.
Meanwhile, investigators focused on two main suspects.
Both lived in the same house as Pam.
Shelly Marie Norgaard, 22.
She had motive, the rent dispute and the exposed secret.
She had suspicious behavior, driving around town the night Pam disappeared, saying she would kill Pam.
She had knowledge of body disposal methods that she had openly shared with many people.
But there was no direct physical evidence tying her to the murder scene.
No DNA, no fingerprints, no murder weapon.
The second suspect was Melinda Perry, 19, the third roommate.
Witnesses said Perry had gotten into a violent fight with Pam the night before she disappeared.
A fight in which witnesses said Pam was beaten unconscious.
Perry also had conflicts with Pam, and the violence in that fight was serious enough that investigators considered her a potential suspect.
But what made the case more complicated than anyone wanted was Shelly’s story.
It kept changing.
Every time she was questioned, she gave a different version.
First version, Shelly said her boyfriend, Raymond Clerks, could confirm where she was that night.
Clerks was her alibi.
Second version, Shelly said she had never set foot at Gordo’s Pit that night.
She was not at the party.
Third version, Shelly said another roommate, implying Perry, had strangled Pam.
She did not do it.
She only knew about it.
Three different stories from the same person about the same night.
In any investigation, that is a giant red flag.
But a red flag is not evidence.
And there was no forensic evidence to choose among the versions.
Investigators took the case to an investigative grand jury.
The result? Melinda Perry was charged with perjury because her testimony before the grand jury was inconsistent.
But that was a perjury charge, not a murder charge.
And even the perjury charge was dismissed the following year for lack of sufficient grounds to proceed.
The grand jury got no closer to determining who killed Pam.
As for Shelley, she said a line she would repeat many times over the years.
“I never killed my roommate.
I never wanted to kill anyone.
>> >> I loved her dearly”.
The case officially went cold.
There was not enough evidence to charge anyone.
The file was closed, not because the investigators believed no one had committed a crime, but because they could not prove who had.
The Pitts family entered the phase that thousands of victims’ families across America know all too well.
Waiting.
Waiting for a call that never came.
Waiting for a break that never appeared.
>> >> Waiting while knowing that the person who killed their daughter was still breathing.
Still living.
Still free.
Possibly right there in the same town.
Paul and Carol Pitts had no answers.
They only had a coffin containing the ashes of their 19-year-old daughter.
And a question that would haunt them for 33 years.
Who killed Pam? Prescott gradually forgot.
The town kept moving.
Tourists still came.
Restaurants still opened.
Gordo’s Pit remained a gathering place for young people, though now everyone called it Alto Pit.
The name changed, but the clearing was still there.
Still silent.
Still keeping its secret.
>> >> And then, 3 years after Pam Pitts died, Shelley Norgard killed again.
Raymond Francis Clerks was 24 when he died.
He was Shelley Norgard’s boyfriend.
The same Shelley Norgard who had driven around Prescott the night Pam Pitts disappeared saying she would kill her.
The same Shelley Norgard who had changed her story three times.
The same Shelly Norgard who had used Clerks himself as her alibi that night.
Clerks lived with Shelly in Prescott.
They shared dogs.
From the outside, it was a young couple like any other in a small town, sharing an apartment, sharing a life, arguing about the things young couples argue about.
But inside that relationship, something was boiling.
And when it exploded, it exploded in a way that only someone who had already killed before could carry out.
Though at the time, no one knew that.
Around May 10, 1991, less than 3 years after Pam Pitzer’s death, Raymond Clerks told Shelly he wanted to end the relationship.
He was leaving, and he was taking the dogs with him.
That detail, the dogs, sounds small.
But for Shelly, it apparently was the last straw.
She reacted in the way she would later repeat in her statements years afterward.
She lost control.
According to Shelly’s own statements and the investigative documents that were released, Clerks was lying on the roof of a car watching airplanes in the sky.
It was a moment of complete peace.
A young man lying on his back looking up at the sky.
Shelly shot him.
One shot to the upper body.
Clerks died.
>> >> And then, Shelly did something most people cannot imagine.
She did not call the police.
She did not call an ambulance.
She did not panic and run for help.
She put Raymond Clerks’ body into the trunk of her car.
And she drove.
Not to the hospital, not to the police station.
She drove around with her boyfriend’s body in the trunk.
Day after day, night after night, for two full weeks.
Think about that.
14 days.
She went shopping, she got gas, she lived her daily life while the body of the man she had shared a to with was decomposing in the trunk less than 2 m away from her.
The stench grew heavier.
The body decomposed in the Arizona heat.
And when the smell became unbearable, not because of conscience, but because of the smell, Shelly asked for help.
She found another vehicle, transferred the body, and took Clerks’s remains to an abandoned mine shaft near Granite Basin outside Prescott.
The shaft was about 12 m deep, 40 ft.
She threw the body down.
Exactly the method she had once described to acquaintances when talking about how to dispose of a body.
Burn it or throw it down a mine shaft.
With Pam, the method was burning.
With Clerks, the method was the mine shaft.
Two victims, two different disposal methods.
Both matched exactly what Shelly had said out loud to many people, as if she already had a catalog of options in her head.
On May 24th, 1991, spelunkers discovered Clerks’s body at the bottom of the mine shaft near Granite Basin.
They found it by the smell.
The autopsy determined Clerks died from a single gunshot to the upper body.
Detectives estimated he had been killed around May 10, meaning the body had been in the trunk and then the mine shaft for nearly 2 weeks before it was found.
This time, the forensic evidence was so clear it could not be denied.
Blood matching Clerks’s type was found on the outside of Shelly’s car, inside the car, and in the trunk.
Blood was also found on a pillowcase in the apartment Shelly and Clerks shared.
Lori Bera, spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, confirmed to the press that detectives believed someone else had been involved in moving the body and possibly in the murder itself.
Shelly Marie Norgard was arrested and taken to the Yavapai County Jail on murder charges.
Unlike the Pam Pitts case, where the evidence had been consumed by fire, where the autopsy was inconclusive, where nothing directly tied anyone to the crime.
The Clerks case was textbook.
The bullet, the blood, the body.
The perpetrator admitted it.
Shelly pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Raymond Clerks.
She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
When handing down the sentence, Yavapai County Superior Court Judge James Salt called the killing despicable and said outright that Shelly had treated her boyfriend like garbage.
She shot him.
She drove around with his body for two weeks.
She threw him down a hole in the ground, like garbage.
Shelly went to prison.
The door closed behind her.
And the question that anyone following both cases had to ask hung in the air.
If she could do this to Clerks, shoot him, drive around with the body for two weeks, throw him down a mine shaft, then what had she done to Pam Pitts three years earlier? Pam was burned.
Clerks was thrown down a mine shaft.
Burning and throwing down a mine shaft.
The two disposal methods Shelly had described to friends before any murders occurred.
She did not just know how to do it.
She had done both, one after the other, with two different people within three years.
But knowing and proving are two completely different things in the justice system.
The Clerks case had evidence.
The Pam case did not.
And because the Pam case had no direct physical evidence, no DNA, no weapon, no clear autopsy findings, no one charged Shelly for that death.
She was sitting in prison for killing Clerks, but for Pam’s death, she remained only a woman with red flags who had never been formally charged.
The Pitts family watched the Clerks trial with a bitterness that is hard to put into words.
The woman they believed had killed their daughter was being sentenced, but for a different murder, for a different victim, their daughter, Pam, Dark Angel, the 19-year-old girl with the bracelet melted into her bones, still had no justice.
Pam’s case remained in the file drawer, cold, covered in dust, and Shelley counted down the days of her 20-year sentence, knowing that when she walked out, no one would be able to touch her for the death she had possibly caused first.
Shelly Norgard walked out of prison around May 2011 after serving 20 years for the death of Raymond Clark’s.
She was 42 years old when she went in.
She got out at nearly 45.
In that time, the outside world had changed completely.
The internet, smartphones, social media, but one thing had not changed.
The Pamela Pitts case remained unsolved.
Shelly got out and started rebuilding her life.
She got married and became Shelly Harmon.
She moved outside Carson City, Nevada.
She found work as an accountant and managing rental properties.
From the outside, she was a middle-aged woman who had paid for her mistake, finished her sentence, and was trying to live a normal life.
But there was one person who did not see her that way, and that person would change everything.
In 2011, the same year Shelly was released, the Pamela Pitts file landed on the desk of a detective named Victor Dart.
Dart was not an eager rookie.
He was a seasoned investigator who understood that cold cases are not about the eureka moments movies love to portray.
Cold cases are about patience, about re-reading thousands of pages of files, about asking the old questions again and hoping for new answers, about not giving up when everyone around you says you’re wasting your time.
In May 2013, Dart officially started working for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office as a cold case investigator.
The Pam Pitts file was among the cases he took on, and as he read through the file, witness statements, autopsy reports, interrogation transcripts, one name kept appearing over and over like a steady drumbeat.
Shelly Norgard.
Dart looked at the case with fresh eyes and saw what the original investigators had also seen but could not prove.
Shelly had motive, rent disputes, an overdrawn account, a pregnancy secret Pam had revealed.
Shelly had behavior, driving around town the night Pam disappeared saying she would kill her.
Shelly had knowledge, accurately describing two methods of disposing of a body before both of those methods actually happened.
>> >> And now, Shelly had a proven history of deadly violence.
She had been convicted of killing Clerks.
Dart believed Shelly had killed Pam, but believing and proving, as every cold case detective knows, are two things separated by an ocean.
He needed new evidence, and there was one factor that had changed since the original investigation.
A factor few people recognized the importance of until Dart pointed it out.
Raymond Clerks was dead.
>> >> Clerks, the man Shelly had used as her alibi the night Pam disappeared, was no longer alive to confirm or deny anything.
When Shelly said, “Clerks can prove where I was that night,” that claim could no longer be verified or refuted because the only person who could testify for her was lying at the bottom of a mine shaft where she herself had thrown him.
Shelly had killed her own alibi.
That detail was not evidence in the legal sense, but it said a great deal.
Dart tracked Shelly patiently.
He interviewed her while she was still serving her sentence before she was released.
Shelly continued to deny any involvement in Pam’s death.
“I never killed my roommate,” she said, the familiar line, the familiar tone.
But Dart did not stop at the interview.
He knew Shelly would never confess in front of a detective.
She had lived with that secret for more than 20 years.
She would not give it up in an interrogation room.
He needed her to talk to someone she trusted, someone she would let her guard down with.
And that was when Dart turned to a source of evidence many cold case investigators have used successfully, phone calls from prison.
As Shelly’s sentence in the Clark’s case was approaching its final stage, police reopened the Pitts case and began monitoring her phone calls from prison.
In the United States, prison phone calls are routinely recorded.
Inmates are notified of this, but many still say things they should not because people need to talk, need to confide, need to unburden themselves, especially when they are about to get out and emotions are running high.
Dart and his team collected about 20 hours of recorded calls, according to court records obtained by the AP.
20 hours, thousands of minutes of conversation.
And in that mountain of thousands of minutes, Dart found one call, one single call between Shelly and her father.
The call took place after detectives had first come to see Shelly to ask about the Pam case.
Shelly called her father.
In the call, her father said she had never told him what really happened.
Shelly answered.
And what she said was recorded on tape, clear and unmistakable.
“I had a moment, a huge moment,” Shelly told her father.
Her father replied, “Like a sudden argument with a roommate.
She didn’t plan it, but she did it”.
Dart listened to that recording and knew he was holding what he needed.
>> >> Not a direct confession, but a statement from Shelly’s own mouth to her father in a private conversation she believed no one else was hearing.
A huge moment.
And her father, the person who knew his daughter better than anyone, interpreted it immediately.
A sudden argument with a roommate.
Not with a boyfriend, with a roommate.
But the story was not that simple.
Dwayne Kates, Shelly’s attorney, immediately pushed back.
He argued that when Shelly said, “I had a huge moment,” she could have been talking about Clerk’s death, not Pam’s.
She had shot her boyfriend to death.
That was certainly a huge moment.
And the phrase “roommate,” coming from her father’s mouth? Kates argued it was vague language that could refer to many things.
Kates’ argument was not unreasonable, but Dart did not buy it.
He had spent hundreds of hours with the case file, had listened to the recording over and over, had followed every thread.
And he believed, as he would later tell reporters, “that Shelly is the only one I can keep verifying”.
Every other lead had died.
Every other suspect had been eliminated.
Only Shelly remained.
In June 2017, Shelly Marie Harmon, her married name, 46 years old, was arrested in Nevada.
Not in a dramatic raid, not with a SWAT team kicking in the door at dawn.
She was arrested for an administrative violation, failing to register as a convicted felon under Nevada law, something every person released after a felony conviction is required to do.
Shelly had either forgotten or simply did not care.
When she arrived at the sheriff’s office, she was informed of the real charge.
First-degree premeditated murder in the death of Pamela Pitts, which had occurred nearly 29 years earlier.
Detective Victor Dart had spent six years building the case to this point.
The prison phone call.
20 hours of recordings.
The original 1988 investigation file, witness statements about the night Shelly drove around Prescott saying she would kill Pam.
The connection between the two body disposal methods, burning and a mine shaft, matching what Shelly had once described.
All of it was packaged into a first-degree murder charge.
But between charge and conviction lies a vast gulf.
And that gulf is filled by the law, by evidence or the lack of it, and by court decisions the prosecutors cannot control.
And it was right here that the Pamela Pitts case ran into the wall it would never fully climb over.
The first blow came from the court.
The judge ruled that no evidence related to Raymond Clark’s death could be introduced at the trial for Pam Pitts.
The reason? The risk of unfair prejudice against the defendant was too great.
If the jury knew Shelly had killed another man, had driven around with his body for 2 weeks, and had thrown him down a mine shaft, they would almost certainly convict her for Pam’s death, but based on dislike, not on the specific evidence of the Pam case.
The court was protecting the right to a fair trial.
And in the American justice system, even a convicted murderer has the right to a fair trial on a different charge.
That is the principle.
But for the Pitts family, it was an insult.
The second blow was even heavier.
The court ruled that no one could suggest to the jury that Pam’s death was a homicide or might have been a homicide.
The autopsy results, because of the severity of the burns, could not definitively determine the cause of death.
The report listed probable homicide, possibly a homicide, but possible is not certain.
And the court decided that phrase was not strong enough to be presented as evidence.
Think about that.
In a murder trial, the prosecutors were not allowed to tell the jury that this was a murder.
The third blow was time.
29 years had passed since the night Pam disappeared.
Witnesses had aged, memories had faded, details had become confused.
People who might have seen something at Gordo’s pit on the night of September 16th, 1988, were now trying to remember what they saw nearly three decades earlier.
Through how many other parties? How many other nights? How many other lives? Human memory is not a computer hard drive.
In her words, “The prosecutors looked at what they had and what they did not have and made the most clear-eyed assessment they could”.
They publicly acknowledged that they faced a trial short on evidence and short on the sharp witness memories they had once hoped for.
No clerk’s evidence, no definitive autopsy conclusion, no sharp witnesses after 29 years.
They had the phone call, but attorney Cates was ready to argue it was about clerk’s, not Pam.
They had witnesses about the threats that night.
But threats are not proof of murder.
Risking a trial with that little, the prosecutors could lose.
And if they lost, double jeopardy, the principle of not being tried twice for the same crime, could slam the door shut forever.
Shelly would never be prosecuted again.
Never.
That was when they began considering a plea deal.
A deputy prosecutor named McGrain told the press, “It weighed on us.
Securing a certain outcome or risking it at trial”.
The Pitts family was consulted and they agreed.
Not because they were happy, not because they thought it was fair, but because after 33 years, they wanted to know what had happened to their daughter more than they wanted punishment.
They wanted to hear Shelly speak.
They wanted answers.
On March 1st, 2021, Shelly Harmon, 50 years old, stood before the court and accepted the plea agreement.
She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Pamela Pitts.
In exchange, she had to describe in detail how she killed Pam, >> >> and she was barred from talking about the case afterward.
The sentence? 20 years in prison.
But, and this is the part that shocked the country, >> >> she was credited with the entire time she had already served for the Clerk’s case, plus the time she spent in custody awaiting the Pitts trial.
20 years minus 20 years.
Result? Zero.
Shelly Harmon did not serve a single additional day.
In court, Shelly recounted the night of September 16th, 1988.
She said she was angry because Pam was late with the rent and had overdrawn their joint bank account.
She went looking for Pam.
She found Pam at the party at Gordo’s Pit.
They argued.
And then, Shelly said the four words she would repeat in every legal document from then on.
“I lost control”.
She said she hit Pam and knocked her to the ground.
She smashed Pam’s head into the ground again and again until Pam stopped moving.
Then, she heard people approaching, others at the party, and she panicked.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s dead.
She’s dead, and I killed her.
‘” Shelly said in court.
She said she was alone when it happened.
No one helped her.
No one saw.
The Pitts family sat in the courtroom and listened to the woman who had killed their daughter, their sister, describe how she died.
After 33 years of waiting, they finally had answers.
But those answers came at a price none of the family considered fair.
Paul Pitts Jr.
, Pam’s brother, told the Associated Press what he thought of the plea deal in a sentence that needed no further explanation.
She got a golden ticket, and she got away with murder.
He added, “It was just to get out of prison”.
In Paul’s eyes, Shelly’s confession was not about conscience, not about remorse, not about wanting the Pitts family to have closure.
It was a cold calculation.
Plead guilty, tell a story, and walk free without losing another day.
Two victims, zero additional days in prison.
Carol Pitts, Pam’s mother, looked at the case from a different angle.
She did not talk about the law or the deal.
She talked about karma.
She said Shelly would have to live with killing her daughter for the rest of her miserable life.
That was not a curse.
It was the prophecy of a mother who believed there are kinds of prison sentences courts do not hand down, but conscience must serve.
The question is whether Shelly Harmon has that kind of conscience.
This is a woman who killed her 19-year-old roommate over rent money.
Then, 3 years later, shot her 24-year-old boyfriend to death because he wanted to break up and take the dog.
Both times, she killed in a burst of rage.
Both times, she disposed of the bodies exactly the way she had once described to acquaintances.
Burning Pam, throwing Clerks down a mine shaft.
Both times, she went on living as if nothing had happened.
With Pam, she drove around town asking everyone where Pam was.
With Clerks, she drove around with his body in the trunk for 2 weeks while shopping, getting gas, living her daily life.
Shelly Harmon’s dual criminal record paints the portrait of someone not only capable of murder, but capable of killing and then walking past it the way you walk past a puddle on the sidewalk.
Her attorney, Dwayne Cates, when asked by reporters about the case, said only one sentence.
This is a very sad case in every direction, and it needed to end.
Shelly was barred by the plea agreement from talking about the case.
She did not give interviews, she did not write letters, she did not appear on camera.
She returned to Nevada, age 50, and disappeared into the ordinary life she had built after getting out of prison.
Married, working as an accountant, managing rental properties, as if nothing had happened.
As if two people had not died at her hands.
But the Pitts family, despite their outrage over the deal, did something few people expected.
They celebrated.
Not celebrating the deal, not celebrating the sentence, they celebrated the end.
After 33 years of living with the question, who killed Pam? They finally had an answer.
The family gathered around a framed photo of Pam and smiled, grateful for the work Detective Dart and law enforcement had put into the case.
It was not justice, but it was closure.
And for a family that had waited more than three decades, closure, even incomplete, was still better than endless unanswered questions.
The Pamela Pitts case became a television episode on the A&E network.
The program Cold Case Files aired the episode Dark Angel on February 11th, 2022.
The episode title taken from Pam’s CB radio handle, 43 minutes.
In the episode, Detective Victor Dart recounted the nearly decade-long investigation.
Renard Clerks, Raymond Clerks’ relative, appeared to speak about the second victim whose life Shelly had taken.
The Pitts family sat in front of the camera and talked about the 19-year-old girl they lost.
In March 2026, the case was remade as the podcast Reopened: Dark Angel, hosted by Marissa Pinson, bringing the story to a new generation of listeners.
The case was also featured on the Oxygen Network’s Snapped, analyzing Shelly’s psychology and behavior from a criminological perspective.
Every time the story is retold, the name Pamela Pitts is spoken, and she is no longer just a file number in a Yavapai County cold case drawer.
>> >> She becomes a person again.
The girl who loved CB radio, loved her accounting job at the sandwich shop, the girl who called her father saying she wanted to come home.
But the big question the case leaves behind is not about Shelly Harmon, not about Detective Dart, not about the phone call or the plea deal.
The big question is, is this justice or is it merely an ending? The American justice system operates on evidence.
And when the evidence was burned away 33 years earlier, the system can only do so much.
The court barred the clerk’s case from the trial, correct under the law.
The court barred the autopsy conclusion, correct under the law.
The prosecutors chose a plea deal rather than risk losing, reasonable.
Each individual decision had a legitimate reason, but taken together, >> >> the result is a woman who killed two people in three years and did not have to serve a single additional day for the first death.
>> >> That is not a failure of the system.
That is the limit of the system.
And that limit has a price, and the Pitts family is the one who paid it.
Pamela Pitts’ ashes were scattered by the family at Thumb Butte, Prescott, Arizona, a granite hill where Pam liked to hike and visit a stream that ran through the woods below.
That was where she felt most at peace.
That was where the family chose for her to rest.
Not a cemetery, not a headstone, just wind, forest, and the sound of the stream, the things the 19-year-old girl loved while she was alive.
A case cold for 33 years, a detective who would not give up, 20 hours of prison phone recordings, one single call between a daughter and her father, a confession that bought not a single extra day in prison, and a family that finally learned what happened to their dark angel, the girl with the prettiest CB radio handle in Prescott, the girl who died in a trash pile at Gordo’s Pit at 19, the girl for whom, 33 years later, justice came knocking but did not stay long.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories of the forgotten victims and the people who refuse to let them stay forgotten forever.
If this story stays with you, please subscribe and share.
The next case is waiting.
