Over 75 years of life, the arteries leading to her heart had thickened. One was 90 percent blocked. Harmless and frail, she used a walker to navigate the tiny northwest Oklahoma City apartment she shared with her common-law husband, Loyd Balentine.

She was a small woman who had led a modest life. If the world was fair and the universe balanced, her death would’ve been equally unremarkable.

But that was not to be.

March 22, 1989, a killer snuck into her apartment in cheap Wal-Mart athletic shoes and a dark cap that read: “Gillette Coal Mine Rescue Team.” He sliced Harris open, tearing at her insides with his hands. Gore dripped from the walls, and blood pooled on the floor.

“This would’ve been a very long and excruciating death,” said Oklahoma City police Inspector Kyle Eastridge, who investigates cold cases. “You basically bleed to death.”

Audrey Harris was dying.

The end couldn’t come soon enough.

Violence in the dark

For more than 18 years, Harris’ killer has remained anonymous. One of the most terrifying, cruel and grisly slayings in state history is still unsolved.

“I don’t know of a worse one than this,” Eastridge said. “I don’t think I’ve heard of another one this bad.”

It’s hard to imagine anything worse.

According to court transcripts, Harris and Balentine, 49, argued briefly the morning of March 22. Balentine left for a job raking leaves, earning $14 for four hours of work, then walked home.

At 1 p.m., he went to a liquor store with his landlord. Balentine drank more than a pint of wine in the rear courtyard of the brick apartment house at 2804 N Robinson Ave. The neighborhood wasn’t the safest in town, but residents often sat outside there, conversing over cigarettes and booze.

He was in bed by 3:30 p.m.

Harris was last seen alive sometime between 8 and 11 p.m., Eastridge said. She was sitting in a chair next to her walker. It is not known if she fell asleep there or in her small bed set up in the dining area.

Then the killer arrived.

He climbed through a window into the apartment, leaving a size 10 ½ or 11 footprint in dirt on his way in. He smashed Balentine over the head with a hard object, knocking out one of his teeth and leaving him bloody and unconscious.

About 11:50 p.m., Balentine awoke with a headache, transcripts show. He saw Harris lying on the floor beside her bed and checked for a heartbeat. Finding none, he got dressed and staggered out into the hallway, telling the landlord that Harris was covered in blood and that someone had attacked him.

He re-entered the apartment and sat on the couch, then searched unsuccessfully for the murder weapon.

Emergency workers showed up not long after that.

‘Like an animal attack’

Apartment No. 2 had become a charnel house.

“There is blood and tissue and internal organs all around this tiny apartment. It’s as if they’ve just been thrown around,” Eastridge said, waving his arms. “She (Harris) has been disemboweled. Her entire intestinal tract is lying out all over the place. Her uterus has been removed.”

Her bladder and part of her stomach had been torn out, and she’d been stabbed in the diaphragm and lower left lung. Her face was battered; her dentures had been knocked out, and there was evidence to suggest she’d been gagged. At some point, she was sexually assaulted with a foreign object.

From the state of the apartment, it appeared Harris had been dragged or carried to different locations as the attack continued.

“This crime scene suggests that this person was in a frenzy, almost animalistic,” Eastridge said. “The organs were removed and thrown against the wall. There wasn’t any systematic attack. It was just like an animal attack.”

Police launched an extensive canvass of the neighborhood, which turned up little.

Suspicion fell upon Balentine, who’d been “married” to Harris for several years. He was arrested on a murder complaint on March 23 and charged several days later.

He would remain in jail for 13 months.

The wrong man

Police knew early on that someone else had been in the apartment.

He’d left plenty of clues.

Two footprints — one in dirt, the other in blood. Police matched the sole to a particular brand and type: Winner’s Choice high-top athletic shoes, which were sold mainly in Wal-Mart stores.

A palm print in blood.

The dark cap with the coal mine rescue logo.

Enough genetic material for police to obtain a complete DNA profile.

The operating assumption, though, was that Balentine had conspired with the other person to kill Harris. From the beginning, Balentine protested his innocence, saying that he was unconscious and didn’t know what happened that night.

He wasn’t exactly a good witness. He’d been drinking and had suffered a head wound, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

“He had a brain defect that caused seizures,” Eastridge said, “so he’d had a lobotomy.”

As a result, Balentine had trouble remembering things and probably couldn’t function in society on his own, Eastridge said. He certainly couldn’t help his own case.

Perhaps the most damning evidence came from a police blood spatter expert who said that the pattern of blood on Balentine’s skin and clothes indicated that he’d been an active participant in Harris’ death.

Months later, an FBI report stated that Balentine’s fingerprints had been found on the bottom of an apartment door sill — a detail that suggests he had indeed been attacked and knocked to the floor. Spurred by that, the blood expert re-evaluated the evidence and decided he’d been wrong: Balentine had not been involved in the slaying.

On April 30, 1990, Balentine was released from jail.

“I don’t know who done it,” he said then. “I don’t know why they’d want to kill a little, sick old lady like she was, anyway. ... I don’t even know where she’s buried.”

Balentine moved to Indiana. Police no longer consider him a suspect.

He could not be located for this story.

Never to be found

So who killed Harris?

With all the evidence left at the apartment, it’s amazing police don’t know.

The killer’s DNA profile has been entered into a national database, but to date, it has turned up no matches. The palm print belongs to a phantom — no connections have been found so far.

The cap, left on Harris’ couch, seemed a solid lead, but it has taken police nowhere.

“We’ve been unsuccessful in finding anyone with information about that hat,” Eastridge said. “We’ve teletyped Gillette, WY. We’ve called any place we could that has coal mining rescue operations. We’ve just had no luck.”

The killer does not appear to have struck again in the Oklahoma City area, Eastridge said.

“We’ve entered this case in ViCAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) through the FBI to see if there are any similar cases,” he said. “We’ve had no luck with that. There are cases that are horrendous all over the country, dismemberments and things like that, but none that are particular to a disembowelment like this.”

Shawna Cleary, a criminologist and professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, is an expert on violent offenders. She thinks the killer was a psychotic stranger, perhaps an escaped or recently released mental patient, who chose Harris because she obviously could not defend herself.

She also thinks the killer holed up somewhere near the crime scene.

“They didn’t find a whole lot of blood in the trap of the sink,” Cleary said. “There was some, but not a whole lot. So when this person left, this person probably had blood and bits of body parts on him. It’s interesting that he wasn’t seen.

“Nobody who was ever interviewed saw this person, so I would think that he ... went to somewhere pretty close by.”

He would not have stopped killing on his own, she said. Something must have happened — he was arrested for a different crime, left the area or died.

“It’s just like this person did this attack,” Eastridge said, “and then just disappeared.”

Can you help find him?

CONTRIBUTING: Staff Writer Jay Marks