Heather Lane called police worried about her twin sister.
Katlyn Harp, Lane told a police officer, never went a day without checking in with her, but by that June 20 afternoon she hadn’t. An app that allowed Lane to track her sister’s whereabouts no longer updated.
By 4 p.m., she knew something was wrong and called police in Columbia County.
Lane asked Hemlock Twp. Patrolman Bradley Sharrow to check on her sister and relayed a conversation with her sister’s husband, Vincent Harp.
Harp told Lane he argued with his wife after dinner the night before but didn’t know where she was.
State police, who searched for Katlyn Harp for more than a week, think he knew exactly where his wife was the whole time.
Harp, 37, knew because he killed Katlyn Marie Harp, 33, stuffed her body into a large, green metal box, padlocked it and dumped the box on land he once owned in Montour Twp., according to an arrest affidavit.
On Sunday about 12:30 p.m., after a week of wondering where her sister was, Heather Lane and a search party found the box containing her sister’s body 180 feet from a cliff, according to the affidavit.
“The box had a strong odor of decomposition emitting from it,” state Trooper Ryan Golla wrote in the affidavit.
A tattoo confirmed the identity: Katlyn Harp.
Golla and Cpl. Brian Noll charged Vincent Harp with criminal homicide, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence. Harp is in the Columbia County Prison, held without bail.
His preliminary hearing is set for July 14.
In a statement, Columbia County Coroner Jeremy Reese said an autopsy Monday confirmed Katlyn Harp's badly decomposed body was in the "military type storage container" for more than a week.
The body showed "no evidence of gunshot wounds or of penetrating trauma and no fractures to the extremity bones," according to the statement.
"Given the condition of the body, additional testing and additional review of today’s examination findings, including toxicology testing will be performed," Reese said. "There is no estimate on the time to complete the additional testing and analysis at this time."
Harp denied knowing what happened to his wife in an interview with The Bloomsburg Press-Enterprise newspaper published June 25.
In a public Facebook post Monday, Lane outlined her group's efforts to find her sister.
"It was a good group of about 15 or so family/best friends between reading comments/messages; out in the trenches searching; marking maps; following the signs; determining what leads/tips are true or false; doing OUR own investigation because WE were supposed to find her!" she wrote. "There is a bigger picture to this; Katlyn has made a HUGE impact all over the World more than any of us could have imagined! It's a shame WE had to lose her but God had a plan & this had to mean something!"
The affidavit offers no motive, but says Vincent Harp tried to hide what he did. He told investigators he texted her and provided screenshots of the messages right up until she disappeared. He said he had no contact with her since between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on June 19.
Katlyn Harp’s cell phone shows her last at their Hemlock Twp. home at 9:25 p.m. that day, the day before her sister reported her missing, according to the affidavit.
Police put out a notice asking the public to report information on her whereabouts, but by three minutes into June 23 they were interviewing Vincent Harp at state police barracks at Bloomsburg.
The affidavit says his story kept changing. He said he talked to a counselor and had his cellphone with him on June 19, but then said he spoke to the counselor on June 20 and left his phone at his office.
He said he texted and called his wife numerous times after she disappeared, but her records for her cell phone show no calls or texts.
Police used other means to figure out what happened.
At 5:40 p.m. June 20, less than two hours after his sister-in-law called police, a video camera at a gas station in Danville recorded Harp’s silver Chevrolet Silverado parked at a pump.
Harp went inside and asked the clerk if the station sold gloves. Told no, he asked “if he could have a pair from the store,” the affidavit says. He left with a pair of gloves and drove away.
The gas station lies on the way to Shade Mountain Road, a light-traveled 15-mile road that police say was “a location of interest” in the disappearance.
At that location, on the morning before her sister reported her missing, Vincent Harp’s 2007 GMC Yukon SUV got stuck in mud. Cell phone tower records show Harp returned there between 6:20 p.m. and 6:50 p.m.
Police found “drag marks” leading into and out of the woods there.
Another video shows Harp’s Silverado passing the Middleburg police station at 6:50 p.m.
“The video clearly depicts a large box in the bed of the vehicle,” Golla wrote.
The next day, tracking of Vincent Harp’s cell phone, shows he drove by where the body was found. Eight hours later, his cell phone was near the site again on a different road.
Three days later, Harp sold his 2022 Kawasaki UTV. A day after that, tests determined the nature of stains on its driver and passenger seats.
The stains were human blood.
