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( narrator ) Mary Beth Harshbarger had an unusual talent.
She had this otherworldly capability
to pick up a rifle and shoot it straight.
Though the wife and mother struggled
outside the shooting range.
She was diagnosed with a bipolar condition.
She would be absolutely fine for awhile.
Then, "Boom," suddenly it's like someone turned a switch.
Still, with medication and the help of her husband Mark,
her condition seemed under control.
He thought he could handle it.
As long as she took her medication, she was okay.
Then a hunting trip turned to tragedy.
The shooting appeared to be an accident.
She told authorities that it was a bear.
But what happened afterwards made his family suspicious.
He apparently moved in with her.
And had many wondering if Mary Beth had hit her target.
He says, "I think she's gonna shoot me and she won't miss."
Captioning made possible by OXYGEN MEDIA, L.L.C.
September 14, 2006.
Buchans Junction, Newfoundland.
It was a little before 8 p.m. and daylight was fading fast
as Mary Beth Harshbarger waited in a pickup truck
parked in the Canadian wilderness.
The 41-year-old was alone,
except for her two small children.
( man ) They're sitting in the cab of the truck.
She's standing in the back of the truck in the bed.
In her arms, she held a high-powered rifle.
She had her .30-caliber Hart rifle,
which is her competition rifle.
She put a shell in the chamber.
Then the experienced hunter scanned the tree line
at the edge of the clearing.
Moments earlier, her husband, 42-year-old Mark Harshbarger,
had disappeared into the woods with their hunting guide,
hoping to flush out a bear.
They were gonna go back a ways and make a loop around
and try to push a bear out to her.
It was supposed to be the culmination of a weeklong trip
that had brought the Pennsylvania couple to this
remote, wooded area 900 miles north of the U.S. border.
( man ) Game there was plentiful.
There is a lot of game.
Excellent hunting.
So far, the trip had been a success.
The couple had not only bagged several caribou;
the day before, Mark had even shot a bear.
This was just a really good hunting trip.
And now Mary Beth was determined to get one, too.
Because Mark had got his the previous day,
she was darn well gonna get one, too,
and maybe even a bigger one.
She had to be number one in everything.
But time was running out.
They were scheduled to return to Pennsylvania the next day.
Even as the sun went down,
Mark and the guide had gone into the woods,
hoping to line up one last kill.
They were trying desperately to get her a bear.
She was told by the guide that if something came out,
don't be hesitant to shoot.
And there was little chance she would miss.
She was really active as a hunter.
She liked to hunt everything from turkey, deer, bear,
anything.
A really good shot, too.
She was quite accurate.
She had what is called a light-gathering Leupold Scope,
which acts kind of like an owl's eye and gathers up the light
so it can see even in semi or perhaps even complete darkness.
Finally, after several tense minutes of watching
the tree line, it appeared that the moment she'd been
waiting for had come.
She saw movement.
She looked in the scope.
Taking careful aim at the dark shape bobbing in her crosshairs,
Mary Beth squeezed the trigger.
Then, the echoes from the ear-splitting crack faded.
She heard a scream, a horrible scream.
Instantly, everybody's world was turned upside down.
Because that horrible scream wasn't the cry
of a wounded animal.
She heard the guide yelling that her husband had been shot.
Born in 1965, Mary Beth Kintner grew up on a sprawling farm
in Meshoppen, Pennsylvania, a tiny rural community
30 miles north of Scranton.
She was a kid who also really loved the woods
and the birds and the mammals and the landscape.
She was a farm girl, she did like the outdoors.
She lived in a beautiful farm up in Meshoppen,
her and her parents.
But Mary Beth's idyllic childhood had a darker side.
She'd have manic and...
depressive violent outbursts, uncontrolled outbursts.
She would go two to three days without sleeping,
be in that real high, manic state.
It was really visible you could see.
Then she'd hit that wall
and just drop into the depressed state
and she would get really violent.
Eventually, Mary Beth's outbursts
led to a diagnosis and treatment.
She was diagnosed with a bipolar condition
and she had to take special medication for that condition.
Her illness under control, Mary Beth took up a new hobby,
one that got her into her beloved wilderness--
with a gun.
She liked to hunt.
And she was good at it, too.
She was a very good shot.
She has great hand-to-eye, obviously, great concentration.
And with the medication keeping her bipolar disorder
under control,
Mary Beth's life appeared to be on target, too.
For more than a decade, she held down a regular job.
Then, in her 30s, Mary Beth started taking college courses
and by the summer of 2000, was close to graduating.
She had gone to Kings College in Wilkes-Barre
and was just finishing up in a business degree.
College did little to dampen her rugged demeanor, though.
That summer, in between classes,
Mary Beth took a job with a demolition crew.
It was a very dirty job.
And it was a job where you have to have
a certain degree of strength.
The avid hunter fit right in, though.
And her male coworkers were impressed.
I never saw a woman do what she was doing.
One member of the crew was so impressed with Mary Beth
that he even asked her out.
He was totally blown away by her.
His name was Mark Harshbarger.
36 years old when he met Mary Beth,
Mark Harshbarger came from a long line of
Pennsylvania outdoorsmen.
( Charlie ) Lee Harshbarger, Mark's dad,
has worked with hunters all his life
as a senior administrator of the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
They are, so to speak, gods among the hunters.
( Sharon ) We grew up playing in the woods
and enjoying nature and learning a lot about wildlife.
And when he met 35-year-old Mary Beth,
Mark figured he'd found the perfect match.
They both loved to hunt and shoot competitively and fish,
and that was the kind of woman he was looking for.
Mary Beth was equally impressed with Mark.
He was very adventuresome and didn't get weighted down
by a lot of worry or planning.
He was kind of fun and exciting to be around.
Soon, they were a couple--
although their typical date didn't exactly involve
dinner and a movie.
Much of their early time together was spent in pursuits
just such as this, fishing and hunting.
When they married in June of 2001 after a year of dating,
the couple even made their love of the outdoors
an integral part of the ceremony.
They shot clays at their wedding.
Soon after their "shotgun wedding,"
Mary Beth became pregnant.
And that, coupled with her bipolar condition,
presented a problem.
They were afraid that the medication would have an effect
on the baby.
Mary Beth stopped taking her medication--
and the mood swings started.
( Dean ) She would be absolutely fine for awhile.
Then, "Boom," suddenly it's like someone turned a switch.
And according to his family, when Mary Beth turned violent,
Mark was typically the target.
( Charlie ) Dean described to me once seeing her slapping his face over
and over to the point where his blood was coming out
the corners of his mouth.
Mark toughed it out, turning to his family for support.
In particular, he leaned on his older brother Barry,
who had often relied on Mark in the past.
Any type of help I needed or a problem,
I'd make a phone call and as quick as he could,
he would be there.
Once their daughter was born in 2002,
Mary Beth went back on her medication
and things returned to normal.
As long as she took her medication, she was okay.
The couple went back to their favorite pastimes of hunting
and shooting.
Mark was really working on teaching her to shoot.
( Lee ) They would set up little plastic pill bottles 250 yards away
and she could hit that with the rifle,
which is some very fine shooting.
In fact, Mary Beth's accuracy improved so much that she began
shooting competitively, earning a spot in Pennsylvania's
coveted 1,000-yard club.
To belong to that club of people or that crowd of people
that can shoot that distance, it's very tough.
It's a select group that can do it with any consistency
and she had that consistency.
She had this otherworldly capability to pick up a rifle
and shoot it straight.
Away from the firing range, things appeared to be
going well, too.
The couple had built a new home.
It looked like something out of a catalog.
It was gorgeous.
And Mary Beth had settled into life as a stay-at-home mom.
She was tinkering around with the idea of a ceramic shop.
She bought a kiln and so on and was setting that up.
But then, in the spring of 2005, four years into their marriage,
Mary Beth became pregnant again--
and trouble soon followed.
She had gone off of her medication.
Once again, Mark was determined to ride it out
until the baby was born.
He just thought he could handle it and fix things.
But he was wrong.
In August of 2005,
when Mary Beth was three months pregnant,
Mark's family says she had a violent outburst.
( Sharon ) She was just violently out of control, screaming, yelling,
hitting, just couldn't reason with her, couldn't talk to her,
just totally out of control.
( Dean ) He took her down to CMC,
which is a medical center in Scranton,
and the people in the emergency room
tried and tried to get her to calm down.
But they had no better luck than Mark.
( Sharon ) They really couldn't do anything with her
and they told him to take her to Carbondale.
Carbondale was a psychiatric hospital.
She didn't wanna go in there, wouldn't, voluntarily.
And Mark was hesitant to sign the papers to commit her for
evaluation against her will.
It would be a problem for her to obtain firearms
or use firearms.
He had to talk to her and tell her, "Listen, if you don't
"sign the papers, you're gonna lose the right to carry
a handgun or to buy any firearms."
Then she signed.
Seeing no other choice, Mary Beth spent several days
in the psych ward under observation.
And when she was released,
the doctors decided to put her back on her medication.
They have to take that chance on what effects it would have
on the baby.
The baby, a boy born in January of 2006,
appeared to be healthy
and free of side effects from the drugs.
But for his mother, the trauma of being forced to spend time
in the psych ward lingered.
When she came home, she said,
"Nobody'll ever send me to that facility again."
To take her mind off the experience,
Mark started making plans for a big hunting trip.
She was happiest and so was he
when they were out in the woods.
That September, as soon as their infant son was old enough
to travel, the family made the 1,800-mile journey
to a hunting lodge in Newfoundland, Canada.
They stayed in their camper outside of the lodge.
Mark's brother, Barry, came along for the hunt.
He made me a deal.
He said, "I'll tell you what,"
he said, "next year I'll go west with you if you go with me."
But as the sun went down on the evening of September 14th,
Barry wasn't with his brother or Mary Beth as they made a last,
desperate attempt to flush out a bear.
He was in another clearing, trying to bag his own bear.
I was in a tree stand,
I guess, a few miles from there.
And with the dreary daylight fading fast,
he'd all but given up hope that any of the hunters
would make a kill that night--
their last in Newfoundland.
It was dreary, foggy.
It was kind of a nasty evening.
But then, from off in the distance,
he heard a faint shot.
Coming up...
Mary Beth makes a precision shot.
A heart shot is game over quickly.
But is it the one she meant to make ?
I just don't see how you could mistake a person for a bear.
( narrator ) Buchans Junction, Newfoundland.
September 14, 2006.
It was just before 8 p.m. when Mary Beth Harshbarger stood
in the back of a pickup truck in the gathering dusk,
waiting for her husband and a hunting guide
to flush out a black bear from the woods.
Her children were in the vehicle with her.
She was about 200 to 250 feet away from where they had
entered the woods.
Seeing movement in the tall grass at the edge of the woods,
Mary Beth took aim.
And she hit her mark.
But the dark shape she'd seen coming out of the woods
wasn't a bear--
it was her husband, Mark Harshbarger.
She shot him right next to the OshKosh B'gosh label
on his coveralls, killing him instantly.
( Charlie ) She put a bullet right through the middle of his sternum,
you know.
And, she knew what constituted, as they say in hunting,
like a heart shot, you know,
and, which is game over quickly.
Mary Beth was stunned.
She broke down when she saw what had happened.
She's just not only seen her husband killed
but did the killing.
Within minutes, the hunting guide had loaded Mary Beth
and her two children into the truck.
Then, leaving the body where it had fallen,
the guide drove to a nearby clearing to pick up
Mark's brother, Barry.
Perched in a tree stand on the lookout for bear,
he hadn't witnessed the shooting.
They said, "You need to come with us."
And I was, like, didn't know what they were,
what the problem was
and they were in a state of panic at that time.
Once Barry was in the truck,
the hunting party returned to the lodge
and called the authorities--
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The RCMP didn't get there 'til after dark and, you know,
put some tape around the site and floodlit it.
Not that there appeared to be much to investigate.
To the Mounties, what little evidence there was suggested
that the shooting was a simple case of mistaken identity.
The victim was not wearing any orange or any type of
reflective clothing.
He was wearing blue jeans and it was dark clothing.
She saw something rustling in the tall grass and aimed
and shot and-- and it turned out to be her husband.
That's what it looked like at first glance.
But since a more thorough examination of the scene would
have to wait until daylight,
the investigators returned to the lodge
to question Mary Beth.
One other person stayed out there overnight with the body,
which had been left where it fell.
It was 2:00 in the morning, more than six hours
after the shooting, when Mary Beth finally
sat down with investigators for her formal statement.
She had cooled out and was quite rational
and able to talk to them.
Once they parked the truck, according to Mary Beth,
Mark and the guide had gone into the woods,
hoping to flush out a bear.
Mary Beth said the bear had ducked back into the woods
before she could take her shot.
But then, scanning the woods through her scope,
she thought she had spotted him again,
moving through the trees.
She told authorities that it was a bear.
And convinced it was the bear she'd been desperate to bag,
Mary Beth said she had taken the shot.
In the interview, Mary Beth didn't deny
shooting her husband.
In fact, she clearly blamed herself for Mark's death.
She was apparently dismayed by what had happened.
But then, when the investigators turned to routine questions
about the couple's insurance,
Mary Beth said something that startled the investigators.
And if the fact that Mary Beth's husband was dead
just four months after taking out a half-million dollar
insurance policy wasn't enough
to get the investigators' attention,
what she said next certainly did.
She knew that telephone number right on the spot.
And under those circumstances,
I have had a State Farm agent for 38 years,
and to this day I still don't know his telephone number.
Was it possible Mark's death was
more than just a simple hunting accident ?
Not according to Mary Beth.
That's what Mary Beth said while the tape was rolling.
But once the recorder was turned off, Mary Beth supposedly
expressed concern for something other than her husband.
She was concerned about how they were going to get...
the meat, the caribou and so forth, back to Pennsylvania.
The following morning,
the investigators returned to the scene of the shooting to
retrieve Mark's body and take a closer look at the site.
Although despite their lingering questions
over Mary Beth's statement,
what they found seemed to back up her version of events.
There was very high grass there,
which obstructed most of the body.
In addition, the terrain was rough and uneven,
causing the officers, and probably Mark,
to walk awkwardly.
He was swaying back and forth trying to avoid pitfalls
and rocks, so his gait was not a natural human gait.
Therefore, the Mounties saw little reason
to write the shooting up as anything other
than an accident.
( Paul ) They did not arrest her.
They did not see a criminal conduct there.
Her version of events, that she thought she saw a bear,
was plausible.
The next day, September 16th, Mary Beth, Barry
and the two children began the long drive back to Pennsylvania,
where Mark's family was still reeling
from the news of his death.
I said, "How could that happen ?"
I mean, they were both outdoors people
and experienced hunters.
I still don't see how you could mistake a person for a bear
that way, even at that distance and at night in the evening
as it's getting dark.
But if the Harshbargers were hoping Mary Beth would be able
to answer some of those questions,
they would be disappointed.
We had no explanation from her.
No, "I'm sorry," you know, "this was a terrible accident."
She didn't speak to any of us.
Instead, it was Mark's brother who did all the talking.
Barry approached us and said,
"Don't confront her about anything.
"If you want to know about anything that happened
in Newfoundland, talk to me."
And I thought that was rather odd.
Mark's sister wasn't the only one confused by Mary Beth
and Barry's behavior.
When one family friend called offering condolences and asking
if there was anything he could do to help,
he received a puzzling response.
She said, "Well, you could watch the kids
while we cut up the meat."
And I thought that was the strangest thing
under those circumstances, to be concerned about cutting up
the meat that they were bringing back.
It just struck me very, very hard.
According to Mark's family, they were also struck by
Mary Beth's behavior at Mark's memorial service
on September 23rd.
There we were mourning the loss of a brother and son
and she was like it was a cocktail party, you know.
It was just crazy.
She was dressed up and showed no remorse.
And soon, the family would learn that Mary Beth and Barry were
moving in together.
He had promised Mark that if anything happened to him
that Barry would take care of the kids.
Coming up...
The family grows suspicious.
This was not an accident.
But can they convince the Canadian authorities
that Mary Beth committed *** ?
They said that they had investigated
and they would not further investigate it.
( narrator ) By October of 2006, it had been almost a month
since Mary Beth Harshbarger shot and killed her husband Mark
during a hunting trip to Canada.
Mary Beth said the shooting was an accident
and the Canadian authorities had agreed.
But back home in Pennsylvania, Mark's family wasn't so sure.
She knew Mark was coming out there.
She knew what he was wearing.
That there were so many, so many details there
that don't fit together, either.
And it wasn't just the details of the shooting
that made the family suspicious.
There was also the fact that Mark's brother Barry had been
living with Mary Beth since their return from Canada.
From the time we got back and taken care of all the equipment
and everything and I did everything possible
to help them out.
He apparently moved in with her and assisted with
the caring of the kids and we don't know, you know,
what exactly else.
I thought it was ridiculous.
I didn't buy that he was there just for the kids.
Then there was the insurance--
in particular, the $500,000 policy that Mary Beth
had taken out on Mark,
four months before their hunting trip.
( Lee ) The evening that that happened,
the police ask her if there was any life insurance involved
and she said, "Yes, there was a $500,000 policy."
And she said, "State Farm agent's
"a personal friend of mine.
Would you like his telephone number ?"
Shortly after returning from Canada,
Mary Beth had filed a claim
against that half-million dollar policy.
She made a request on some insurance money kind of early
in the-- what I would have considered the grieving process.
So the more information that we got, the worse and more
convinced I was that it was no longer an accident,
that it was definitely intentional.
According to his family, it soon became apparent
that Mark himself had harbored suspicions about Mary Beth.
I got a phone call from a secretary who had known Mark
in a professional context.
And she says, "You aren't gonna believe this, Dean, but,
"just a couple weeks ago, Mark and I had a conversation
"about this and how Mark said that he was
"actually afraid that she was gonna kill him
for the insurance money."
And that secretary wasn't the only person
contacting the family, either.
Later, a second call come in from Mark's crew chief.
He says, "Dude," he said, "you aren't gonna believe this,
"but two weeks ago your brother and I were talking and he says,
'I think she's gonna shoot me.'"
And he said he hesitated and said, "And she won't miss."
Certainly in the messages that he gave out to his friends,
he believed that she was going to plug him one day.
All but convinced that Mary Beth had
intentionally killed his brother,
Dean Harshbarger decided to do something about it.
I had made a call to the constable that was in charge of
the investigation and told him,
"There's some things that aren't adding up down here."
But the Canadian authorities declined to reopen the case.
They said that they had investigated and they would not
further investigate it.
( Sharon ) It just seemed like the Canadian authorities
didn't want to deal with it.
They just wanted to brush it off as a terrible accident.
But the family didn't give up.
Over the next year, they continued to pressure
the Canadian authorities to reopen the case.
The Harshbarger family was calling up there,
was very persistent in seeing that a criminal prosecution
be brought.
Finally, in September of 2007, the Mounties relented.
They made a decision that they probably should be looking
a little more deeply into the matter.
Not only did the Canadian investigators reopen the case,
they even flew down to Mark and Mary Beth's hometown of
Meshoppen, Pennsylvania.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police came to Pennsylvania,
came to this area and actually did some interviews.
During those interviews, the Mounties learned about Mark's
concerns and about Mary Beth's history of violence
from the Harshbarger family.
They started finding out that there was other evidence from
her past that suggests that she may well have plugged him.
The Harshbargers also told the Mounties about Mary Beth's time
in the psychiatric hospital a year before the shooting
and her anger with Mark over being committed.
Mary Beth was extremely upset with the fact that
Mark put her in there.
The different comments that she had made to other members
of the family led me to think that she was carrying a grudge.
She made the statement,
"Nobody would ever do that to me again.
Nobody would ever put me in a place like that again."
Had Mary Beth's anger played a role in Mark's death ?
That's what the family led the Mounties to believe.
I kinda had this gut feeling, like, "Well, she got even.
She got even for him putting her in Carbondale."
Maybe she had had this plan in mind for some time.
And then there was Mary Beth's relationship with Barry.
By the time the Mounties came to Pennsylvania,
he had been living with Mary Beth for a year--
although he maintained that he was merely helping look after
his brother's kids and the farm.
I moved there and helped feed his beef cows
and did different-- everything possible for them.
But while Barry denied he was romantically involved with his
brother's widow, that didn't mean the family believed him.
You'd see things going on that, one time I actually looked
at video footage from a bar that they were in
and they were all cozy together and...
you could tell kissing and so on.
I knew it wasn't just for the kids.
And the Mounties soon discovered that outside of his family,
Barry hadn't tried very hard to conceal his relationship with
his late brother's wife.
He bragged about their sex life.
What kind of a guy, 55 years old, goes out in the streets
of his little town and brags about his sex life
with this woman who has betrayed his family ?
Mary Beth's close relationship with Barry left the Mounties
wondering if he was more than an innocent bystander.
Maybe Barry was involved.
Maybe they were having this affair.
And maybe, if he was in on the *** plot,
the investigators could get him to talk.
They thought that Barry might be the weak link.
That's what the Mounties hoped,
but when they spoke to Barry, he stood by Mary Beth.
( Barry ) It was hard for me to believe that could be anything
but an accident.
It was just hard to picture any other way.
With Barry supporting Mary Beth, and no hard evidence
that Mary Beth had intended to shoot her husband,
the investigators were running out of options.
To admit that she committed a *** or confess,
she's not the kind of person who's gonna do that.
In fact, when the Mounties headed back to Newfoundland,
it looked as if the entire trip to Pennsylvania had been a bust.
It was our understanding that the Canadians were not going to
bring any charges against her,
that it was gonna be treated as an accident.
No *** charges, at least.
Without witnesses or hard evidence,
they would never stand up in court.
But that didn't mean the Mounties were willing to let
Mary Beth go free.
The RCMP brought charges that they thought they could
make stick, and those charges were criminal negligence.
The charges, filed on April 30, 2008,
drew mixed feelings from the Harshbargers.
The Harshbargers would have been quite pleased if she'd been
charged with *** or manslaughter.
This was not an accident,
and we were just hoping for some type of justice.
However, the Harshbargers could take comfort in one fact:
although criminal negligence was theoretically a lesser charge,
Mary Beth still faced the possibility
of some hefty jail time.
In Canada, where there is a criminally negligent homicide
and a firearm is used,
there is a potential for a life sentence.
Coming up...
Mary Beth stands trial.
( Lee ) There's no way that they can say
that it wasn't criminal negligence.
But will the Canadian authorities
hear her whole story ?
None of her previous history of violence was allowed to be
submitted to the court.
( narrator ) On September 13, 2010, almost four years to the day
since she'd killed her husband with a single rifle shot,
Mary Beth Harshbarger's trial was set to begin
in Newfoundland, Canada.
But the 45-year-old wasn't facing a *** charge.
There was never any allegation
that this was an intentional or willful killing.
Not officially, at least.
Mark's family was convinced that Mary Beth had committed ***,
but the Canadian authorities had ruled his death
to be an accident.
However, that hadn't stopped them from charging Mary Beth
with criminal negligence in his death.
( Charlie ) She was wielding a firearm in the dark.
That seems to be questionable right there
and negligent and ultimately criminally so,
because there's a death weapon involved and it did
certainly lead to death.
Charged in 2008,
Mary Beth had spent most of the past two years
fighting extradition.
( Paul ) The issue was whether or not there was sufficient evidence
from the Canadians to establish that there had been
a crime committed and that the case warranted her being sent
back to Canada for prosecution.
Her attorney just tried to delay the process
as long as he could.
In the end, the attempt had failed,
and now it was up to a Canadian judge to decide if
Mark's death had been due to Mary Beth's negligence.
There was no jury to it.
The judge made the decision in the matter.
But despite the fact that she faced a lesser charge,
she still faced the possibility of a stiff penalty:
life in prison.
She was facing certainly serious time.
Mark's family, most of whom had traveled all the way from
Pennsylvania to witness the trial,
were convinced that she deserved it, too.
If you don't positively identify your target and you kill
somebody through negligence, I didn't know how,
that they would find her not guilty.
One Harshbarger was conspicuously absent, however--
Mark's brother Barry.
After she was extradited, he continued to care for the kids
while she was in Canada.
At that time, I had the responsibility of the children
and, of course, it was hard for everybody.
Although Barry did have help.
They had a babysitter or whatever that came in
and cared for the children, I guess when he was working.
But would the fact that Mary Beth was living with her
dead husband's brother be a factor in her trial ?
To the Harshbargers' disappointment,
the answer was no.
They only allowed testimony of what occurred in Newfoundland,
nothing that had occurred, none of her history,
none of the information from the United States
was allowed to be submitted to the courts.
Since the charge of negligence focused only on her actions
that night, the judge wouldn't hear
anything about Mary Beth's relationship with Barry,
Mark's fears that she might shoot him,
or the history of mental illness that the Mounties had uncovered.
None of that testimony,
none of the information that they gathered,
none of her previous history of violence was allowed
to be submitted to court.
Instead, once the trial got underway,
the prosecution was left with little more than
testimony from those who had witnessed the shooting,
starting with the hunting guide.
The guide said that when the bullet went through,
you could hear the air rush out of Mark Harshbarger.
But while the testimony was certainly dramatic,
the Harshbargers began to wonder
about the prosecution's strategy.
The prosecution tried to describe the area
and how it was dusk and how Mark was dark-haired
and not clean-shaven and even wore dark jeans.
Each witness, when they would get up on the stand and they
would start asking 'em questions and she would ask 'em,
"Did you see a big black thing ?
Did you see a big black object ?"
In going over the details of the shooting,
it looked to the Harshbargers as if the Canadian prosecutor
was actually laying out groundwork for the defense.
( Sharon ) I sat there just in disbelief because the whole thing sounded
like she was trying to paint this picture of how it could
have been, almost like it was convincing us
it was an accident.
But then the prosecution presented their strongest piece
of evidence against Mary Beth--
her taped interview with police.
However, despite the fact that her own words were the strongest
evidence against her, Mary Beth chose not to take the stand.
Her defense team had a simple message: that the shooting,
while tragic, was not Mary Beth's fault.
Mary Beth's lawyer was arguing
that it was just a terrible accident.
That, you know, nobody should be to blame
because it was just a terrible accident.
The defense used the very details the prosecution had
pointed out to bolster their argument.
He was coming out of the woods and it was getting dark.
And those concurrence of events led her to believe
that it was a bear.
If anyone was negligent, the defense argued, it was Mark,
not Mary Beth.
They kept reiterating the fact that he didn't have orange on,
that it was dusk,
that it was possible that he actually made
himself look like a bear.
And the one thing Mark was careful about,
according to the defense, only added to the impression
that he was a bear.
It was a very rough terrain,
so her husband was very careful in how he was walking.
To her, it was a weaving kind of large, shadowy figure
coming out of the woods into the clearing,
that she says she perceived to be a bear.
Was the defense argument strong enough to sway the judge ?
Whether or not Mark could have been mistaken for a bear
doesn't address the fact that she was hunting with
a high-powered rifle that she knows can kill people.
I thought there's no way that they can say that it wasn't
criminal negligence.
That's what the family hoped.
But when the judge announced his verdict on October 1st,
the Harshbargers would be disappointed.
( Robert ) Mary Beth was acquitted
and the community here in Wyoming County was--
gasped at the possibility that she would escape
any sort of charges for what she had done to Mark.
When we heard the verdict, we were all just in disbelief.
We couldn't imagine having sat there, having seen the photos,
they could say it was an accident.
I don't see how you can be any more negligent than to kill
somebody and claim that you thought they were a bear.
Coming up...
Mary Beth leaves Canada a free woman.
It could not be proven that she was connected to the death.
But she finds a surprise back home.
Barry began a relationship
with the woman that was babysitting.
( narrator ) On October 1, 2010,
a Canadian judge acquitted Mary Beth Harshbarger
of all charges stemming from the shooting of
her husband, Mark.
She had been charged with negligence after killing Mark
in what had been officially ruled a hunting accident.
She told authorities that it was a bear and she thought
it was a bear and...
then she shed quite a few tears about the fact
that she had killed her husband.
Most of Mark's family was angry over the verdict.
We couldn't believe, you know, that they could find her
not guilty and not responsible in any way.
However, one member of the Harshbarger clan wasn't angry;
he was worried.
After the shooting, Mark's brother Barry had moved in
with Mary Beth.
We all know that they were intimately involved.
That's no secret anymore.
Mary Beth had been in Canada for nearly six months,
but instead of celebrating her impending return,
Barry suddenly moved out of her house.
( Barry ) From the time the word came out that she was acquitted,
I immediately started transporting and moving
every possible thing of mine I could from that premises.
Barry says it was because he'd finally realized the truth
about Mary Beth.
Because of things that I learned
and things through the investigation,
and different things that took place,
I learned of the type of person that she was.
But that wasn't Barry's only reason for leaving.
When she was up in Newfoundland on trial,
Barry began a relationship with the woman
that was babysitting and helping him care for the children.
Mary Beth returned home from Canada and retrieved
her children from Barry,
who had already moved in with the babysitter.
She ended up marrying Barry.
They-- she was expecting a child
and they ended up getting married.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Harshbarger family has
walked away from Mark's death with unanswered questions,
and their belief that Mary Beth got away with ***.
There was just one wrong thing after another.
How could they not hold her accountable ?
As for Mary Beth, she is trying to put the tragic death
of her husband and the Canadian legal battle behind her.
She went through hell and she paid a heavy price.
Even with an acquittal, she paid a heavy price.
She also filed suit to collect Mark's insurance money
and is slowly picking up the pieces and moving on
with her life.
( Paul ) I think she's relieved that this is behind her.
I think she has the wherewithal to start a new life.
I think she's dedicated to do that.
I think she's gonna be okay.