Get Out, Get Out: The Disappearance and Murder of Unique Harris

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

April 9, 2024

Unique RaQuel-Leona Harris was twenty-four years old in October 2010, living in an apartment at 2400 Hartford Street southeast in Washington D.C., a home she had only moved into five weeks earlier after relocating from Richmond, Virginia to be closer to her mother following high school graduation. She was raising two young sons, ages three and five, and on the night of October 9, her cousin's eight-year-old daughter was staying over as well, making it an ordinary night with three children asleep in the apartment and their mother watching over them. Unique herself was tall, somewhere between five foot seven and five foot ten, slim at around a hundred thirty pounds, with brown eyes and brown hair carrying auburn highlights, a mole above her lip, and tattoos reading Richard and U'Andre on her lower back and Unique on her upper right arm. She was severely nearsighted, dependent enough on her glasses that she could barely function without them, a detail that would end up mattering a great deal once she vanished.

An Ordinary Night, Then Nothing

Unique put the three children to bed around 9:30 that evening. According to what investigators later pieced together, a man named Isaac Moye, whom she had only known for about two months, arrived at her apartment around 10:39 p.m. At three in the morning, Unique was still awake enough to make a phone call, the last confirmed trace of her being alive. When the children woke up around 8:30 that morning, their mother was gone.

What made her absence immediately alarming rather than simply confusing was everything she left behind. Her eyeglasses, without which she could barely see, were sitting on her bedroom pillow. Her purse remained in the apartment. Only her phone and her keys were missing, along with Unique herself. There was no sign of forced entry and no obvious struggle, though the building's intercom system was broken and security was poor enough that almost anyone could have made their way inside without needing to force anything at all.

Unique had no history of substance abuse or drinking, and by every account she was building toward a stable, forward-looking life. She had just been accepted into massage therapy school and had an upcoming court date scheduled to address child support. Days before she disappeared, she had witnessed a murder outside her building, a genuinely traumatic thing to see, yet those who knew her said she hadn't expressed fear or seemed to believe she was in any particular danger herself. Nothing in her circumstances offered investigators an obvious explanation for a woman who could barely see without her glasses somehow leaving her home in the middle of the night and never being seen again.

A Son's Memory, Buried for Years

For years, the case sat as a deeply troubling but largely unsolved disappearance, the kind of file that stays open without moving forward for lack of any hard evidence pointing anywhere specific. That began to change in 2017, when one of Unique's sons, old enough by then to articulate something he had witnessed as a small child, recalled a specific memory from the night his mother vanished. He remembered getting out of bed and opening the bedroom door, and seeing a man he recognized, someone he knew by the nickname Iceberg. He closed the door again, and then he heard his mother yelling, get out, get out, followed by screaming.

That memory, delivered years after the fact through a child who had been only three years old at the time, gave investigators a name to work with for the first time in the case's history. Iceberg was Isaac Moye, the same man who had arrived at Unique's apartment the night she disappeared.

DNA on a Mutilated Cushion

The next major break came in 2020, a full decade after Unique vanished. A jailed informant told police that Moye had discussed the case with him while they were both incarcerated, allegedly telling him that police would never identify the person who took her because he had done it the right way, phrasing that amounted to an admission wrapped inside a boast about having gotten away with it.

That tip pointed investigators back toward physical evidence that had been sitting in Unique's apartment the entire time. Someone had cut fabric out of a cushion on her living room couch, an act that only made sense as an attempt to remove or destroy something incriminating. When forensic analysts examined what remained of that cushion, they found semen, and DNA testing matched it to Isaac Moye. Combined with GPS monitoring data that placed Moye at Unique's apartment complex for the entire overnight window during which she disappeared, and phone records showing the two of them had spoken by phone thirteen separate times on October 9 alone, investigators finally had enough to move.

Prosecutors would later argue that jealousy played a central role in what happened. Moye, according to the case built against him, was interested in dating Unique, but she was involved with someone else, a boyfriend who happened to be out of state on the night she disappeared and who, along with an ex-boyfriend, passed a polygraph examination during the investigation. On the night in question, prosecutors said Unique spent hours on the phone with that boyfriend while Moye was present in her apartment, the kind of scenario that, according to the case investigators built, curdled into violence sometime before dawn.

An Arrest, Thirteen Years Later

Isaac Moye was arrested in December 2020 and charged with murder, more than ten years after Unique disappeared and three years after her son's recovered memory first pointed investigators toward him by name. Even after his arrest, Moye gave inconsistent accounts to police, at various points denying and then admitting to having had intimate contact with Unique, and he continued to maintain his own innocence, going so far as to suggest that Unique had simply abandoned her children rather than being killed, an account investigators and prosecutors did not find credible given everything else they had assembled.

The case finally went to trial in 2023, and on June 23 of that year, nearly thirteen years to the day after Unique vanished from her Southeast D.C. apartment, a jury convicted Isaac Moye of second-degree murder. He faced a maximum possible sentence of forty years. That September, he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, along with five years of supervised release to follow whenever he is eventually freed.

U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, addressing the conviction publicly afterward, credited what he described as dogged police work by Metropolitan Police Department detectives who worked the case across more than a decade, along with what he called the dedicated, tireless efforts of the prosecution team, crediting them together with holding Moye accountable for what he termed a heinous murder.

A Conviction Without a Body

Unique Harris's case belongs to a particular and especially difficult category of homicide prosecution, one built and won entirely without ever recovering the victim's remains. Everything that put Isaac Moye behind bars, the DNA on that cut and mutilated couch cushion, the GPS data placing him at her apartment overnight, the thirteen phone calls the two of them exchanged that day, the boastful admission he made to a fellow inmate, and the fragment of memory her young son carried for seven years before he was old enough to put it into words, came together into a case strong enough to convict a man of murder despite the absence of the single piece of evidence that usually anchors a homicide prosecution more than any other.

What it could not do was bring Unique home. More than thirteen years after she disappeared from an apartment she had lived in for barely five weeks, after building a case detailed enough to send her killer to prison for thirty-five years, investigators still do not know where her body is. Her two sons, who were three and five years old the night they woke up to find their mother gone, grew up carrying a memory of the last moments of her life long before anyone else understood what that memory meant, and even now, with a conviction secured and a sentence served, that same unresolved absence, no burial, no clear final resting place, remains the one part of Unique Harris's story that thirteen years of investigation was never able to close.

Sources