September 23, 2002

John Harrison, the New York City executive who committed a double murder and suicide in his office on Sept. 16, had been traumatized by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorism attacks, which occurred one day after started his job in the north tower of the World Trade Center, according to his family.

Both the family and authorities are now discounting an initial theory that the killings resulted from a love triangle.

Rather, they now say, Harrison’s affair with one of his victims, Isabel Munoz, may have existed only in his head. Authorities say the evidence of that centers on an email that Munoz sent him just days before the bloodbath.

"While I have enjoyed the time we spent time together it is not enough to sustain a relationship. All the talk in the world can’t change that," Munoz, 36, wrote to Harrison, 56, her boss at Empire BlueCross BlueShield, in an email obtained by the New York Post.

Harrison had a printout of the Sept. 12 email in a bag at his side when he called Munoz into his Times Square office Monday morning. Another co-worker, Vincent LaBianca, joined her. All were killed by gunfire.

In the email, Munoz also expressed anger at Harrison, who had left his wife just weeks earlier, for refusing to back off.

"When we first started this friendship, you said you did not want to do anything that would make me uncomfortable," the mother of two wrote. "I am feeling very uncomfortable. And it really does not matter to you."

The Post reports that investigators initially thought Harrison had called his two colleagues into his office because he was romantically involved with Munoz and believed she was two-timing him with LaBianca.

But LaBianca’s friends and co-workers said he was happily married; investigators now believe Munoz might simply have asked him to go into Harrison’s office with her because she didn’t want to be alone with him, sources told the newspaper.

Harrison, a former FBI agent, used two handguns to murder LaBianca, 33, and Munoz before turning one of the weapons on himself, shooting himself in he mouth.

Co-workers said Harrison had started acting oddly in the weeks before the killings, going on a crash diet and moving out of the Mount Holly, N.J., home he shared with his wife of 21 years.