[2] The investigation into her disappearance was hampered since many of the state troopers who would normally have been involved had been bused to New York City the previous day in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The lead defense investigator has written a book alleging his theory of how Cal Harris was framed, and focuses on one of the men Michele had reportedly dated at the time as a more likely suspect given some evidence found at his former house.

Cal Harris, a Vestal High School graduate[5] who later became a star attackman and four-year letterman[6] for the Hobart College men's lacrosse NCAA Division III champion teams[7] in the early 1980s,[8][9] met Michele Anne Taylor, who had earned an associate's degree from the State University of New York at Morrisville,[10] later in the decade when she worked on the lot of one of the car dealerships his family owned in Tioga County, on the Southern Tier of upstate New York, between Binghamton and Elmira and south of Ithaca.

She also informed some of her friends about the trip, but said her goal was to sell or pawn some of her jewelry, including her engagement ring, in order to make her half of the down payment on the home she and Earley had agreed to buy in Owego, the county seat, near where the children went to school.

[10] The state police in Tioga County had much more limited resources available to them that morning than they normally would for a missing-persons case, since the majority of troopers and investigators in the area had been bused down to New York City to provide additional security and manpower in the wake of the attacks.

[10] Police also searched the Harris property with helicopters and dogs,[10] including divers and sonar in both the small pond near the driveway and 29-acre (12 ha) Empire Lake,[15] which borders it on the east.

Suspicions were raised about the former pair when a background check revealed that Kasper had a history of cocaine use and a conviction for assaulting a former girlfriend,[10] and the other man had served a 10-year prison sentence in Arizona for rape.

[11] There was no evidence connecting him to Michele's disappearance, and after he, Earley[a] (who had also allowed the police to search both his apartment and his family's hunting cabin in neighboring Bradford County, Pennsylvania,) and Kasper all passed lie detector tests they were cleared as suspects.

Three days after Michele disappeared, Joseph Andersen, a state police forensics investigator entered the house's open garage, where he saw what appeared to be red blood spatter on the wall.

A Tioga County grand jury indicted Cal on one count of second-degree murder on September 30, after which state troopers went to his Ford dealership outside Owego and arrested him in front of his employees, not only handcuffing him but putting his legs in irons.

At the end of June Vincent Sgueglia,[c] Tioga County Court's only judge, denied the motion and set the trial date for September 11, the fifth anniversary of Michele's disappearance.

[22] Keene came in early on December 18, the next Monday, with a motion requesting Sgueglia recuse himself, alleging in a sworn affidavit the appearance of impropriety on the judge's part,[d] saying that he had often shown favoritism in other cases to both Cal and Cawley's clients.

Thayer recounted finding her car on the road on the morning of September 12, and how Cal had not checked whether the keys were in the ignition before he asked her to take it back to the house, then gone to work without making a single inquiry all day as to whether his wife had reappeared anywhere.

Thayer had worked for Cal for an additional year after Michele's disappearance, and also recalled how in the weeks afterward he had talked of having a garage sale to sell her clothes and other possessions, offering to split the proceeds with her.

[19] Andersen's testimony was bolstered by Henry Lee, a nationally recognized blood spatter expert who formerly ran the Connecticut State Police laboratory and had been a key defense witness in that area at the O.J.

In addition to the absence of a body or weapon despite extensive searches of the surrounding countryside, and Cal's full cooperation with the police, they noted that the first troopers to enter the house had not seen any blood nor smelled anything that suggested a recent cleanup effort.

The proposed garage sale Thayer had talked about had actually resulted from Cal's cleaning up the house after the police searches; he had put Michele's belongings in boxes and stored them in the basement.

For several months the prosecution, while its appeal of the order to set aside the verdict was pending, attempted to learn Steele's identity on the grounds it was needed for the ongoing police investigation.

The defense sought to have the letters admitted into evidence, but Hayden ruled them hearsay;[29] at the hearing the prosecution also called Steele's son, who said that not only was his late father not always truthful, he had stated his belief that while Cal was guilty Michele had deserved it due to her extramarital relationships.

"[19] By doing so, the majority had allowed to stand a verdict which Malone argued had relied as much on unsupported assumptions as the facts in evidence, noting as well that the prosecution theory required that Cal kill Michele, with at least some struggle, in the middle of the night without rousing either the couple's four children or their large dog.

He found the threats "too attenuated in time to support a reasonable inference" that Cal intended to kill Michele that night, and noted that more than one prosecution witness testified that the couple were getting along better in the months before her disappearance.

Robert Bierenbaum had failed to disclose to police that he was a licensed private pilot who, on the afternoon of the day he claimed his wife had left him, flew his plane 165 miles (266 km) to a point over the Atlantic Ocean and then returned.

He did not find the differences between the two accounts significant enough to cast doubt on Steele's reliability, and given his expressed concerns over the negative effect coming forward would have on him, his statement was a declaration against interest.

He had not only mischaracterized the evidence, exaggerating how much Michele could have gotten from the divorce and representing the threats her sisters testified to as matters of undisputed fact, he had very frequently in the course of his argument shifted the burden of proof to the defense.

Since law enforcement and the prosecutor had been focused only on Cal's guilt in the case, ideally he believed that not only should the verdict be reversed but the indictment again dismissed, this time as factually and legally insufficient, but he settled for merely recommending a new trial.

[34] Since Keene had resigned in order to assume Tioga County's judgeship after Sgueglia retired at the end of 2012,[35] his replacement, a former assistant DA, Kirk Martin, took over the case for the prosecution.

[41] Stewart had left in such haste that he never even made the first mortgage payment on the house he had recently bought in the hamlet of Lockwood, and the defense was able to contact the later owner and search the property.

Cal told a local newspaper he was confident of an outcome in his favor even though he knew it might take years; he regretted that any damages would largely be paid by taxpayers rather than the individual defendants.

[46] He has established a website, Tioga County Woodchucks, restating many of these allegations, as well as others about the individual defendants, and referencing the 1990s evidence-fabrication scandal involving several state police investigators in the area,[47] and promoting it from his Twitter feed.

[48] At the end of 2017 Cal was arrested again after a driver on Interstate 81 in northern Cortland County called police to report that a white pickup truck had struck their vehicle and driven away.