Slain girls' mom: Stepfather practiced spells

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) -- The mother of two girls who were killed allegedly at the hands of their stepfather said he described himself as a pagan and practiced spells to keep those around him healthy and happy, The Des Moines Register reported Wednesday in a copyright story.

The last thing Marla Harris, 32, said her husband, Lawrence Douglas Harris Sr., told her in the interview room at the police department was "he was doing it to protect my son."

"He said he was trying to help us," Marla Harris told the newspaper on Tuesday.

Lawrence Harris, 25, is accused of stabbing and strangling his stepdaughters, Kendra Suing, 10, and her 8-year-old sister, Alysha, on Sunday, then setting their house on fire to cover up the crime.

Police said it was part of an unexplained ritual linked to Lawrence Harris' unconventional religious beliefs.

Harris is charged with two counts of first-degree murder. He is being held in the Woodbury County jail under $2 million bond. A telephone message left for his attorney, public defender Mike Williams, Wednesday morning was not immediately returned.

He told police he "had been casting a spell that had gone bad, and that the spell could have had severe consequences," according to court documents.

Marla Harris was at work at a home for the disabled at the time.

She said her husband had drug problems but had overcome them.

She said Lawrence Harris told her about his religious beliefs, but that she told him to "keep it out of the house."

"What he was doing is against my religion," Marla Harris said. "I told him, 'You take it elsewhere."'

She said that her husband did not introduce her to anyone else who shared his beliefs and that he kept his religion to himself.

She knew about a spell book he kept in their bedroom, but she said he kept it on a high shelf, out of reach of the children. She said that one day she noticed an addition of a Church of Satan listing in a shared e-mail address book.

"I asked him about it, and he said he was just writing back and forth with them," she said.

Marla Harris said that when she left for work Sunday morning, her husband was home with Kendra and Alysha.

Police have released few details of what happened next, but at 4:19 p.m., firefighters arrived at the house and found a small fire in the basement.

Firefighters found the girls, stabbed and strangled, in a second-floor bedroom.

"He said something went wrong," Marla Harris said. "He said he must've said the wrong thing. After the ritual, he didn't remember anything that happened.

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said he blacked out."

Larry and Marla married on July 8, 2006, in Hinton. She had three children from a previous marriage: Kendra, Alysha and Triton Suing, 13. Larry had custody of Larry Jr., 4.

"Larry was a great dad," Marla Harris said. "He loved the kids."

Paganism is a nature-based religion involving multiple deities, both masculine and feminine, and includes such subgroups as Wicca, commonly referred to as witchcraft.

Followers don't normally practice violence, said Professor Helen A. Berger, a sociology professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

"There's nothing in this that I can imagine resulting in a death," said Berger, who has written three books on the subject.