A Dallas sanitation worker is accused of fatally shooting his girlfriend at a cemetery last week before confessing to his coworkers, police say.
Bobby Ray Harris, 67, faces a murder charge in the death of 65-year-old Linda Simmons.
According to police, officers were called at about 4:45 a.m. Oct. 6 to a welfare check at Crown Hill Memorial Park. First responders found Simmons dead with a gunshot wound to her forehead and a spent shell casing and a live round on the ground nearby.
While detectives and crime-scene technicians were at the cemetery a little more than an hour later, two witnesses drove up in a Dallas sanitation truck and told officers that Harris had come to work and confessed to killing his girlfriend at that location, police wrote in an arrest warrant-affidavit first obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
Harris was apprehended at the sanitation services building on Harry Hines Boulevard and taken to police headquarters for an interview, The News reported. He told police that he was driving Simmons to work at Parkland Memorial Hospital about 3 a.m. and that the two got into an argument about Simmons pulling a knife on him at their apartment the previous night, the affidavit says.
Harris drove to the cemetery, where Simmons got out of the vehicle and slammed the door and then he got out with the gun in his hand. He told officers that Simmons kept approaching him and trying to assault him, and he fired one shot at her, the affidavit says.
He then drove to the sanitation services building, where witnesses said he was crying and saying that he’d killed his “old lady,” according to the affidavit.
Harris remained in the Dallas County jail Tuesday facing an unrelated count of accident involving damage in addition to the murder charge.
