A Target All Along?: Amber Carter opens up about the frightening moment she realized her ex-boyfriend’s all3ged k!lling spr3e could have included her
A new episode of ‘People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer’ explores the story of Amber Carter, whose ex-boyfriend killed four people, including her father
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Amber Carter, Texas, May 2025.Credit : Investigation Discovery/Radley Studios
On Halloween night in 2020, 29-year-old mother Amber Carter, after putting her young daughter to bed, picked up the phone on a sudden whim to call the girl’s father, her former boyfriend Jeremy Harris. She soon regretted it.
Harris, who was physically abusive during their relationship, had recently been released from prison, where he was serving time for domestic violence assault.
One of the first things he asked Carter, who was hiding from her ex at her father’s house, was, “Where are you?” When Carter refused to answer, Harris hung up the phone.
“I definitely knew this was a bad idea,” recalls Carter, who feared she hadn’t heard the last of her volatile ex.
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Hours later, Harris, 31, drove his then-girlfriend’s car to a downtown Dallas nightlife district and, at 3:00 a.m., fatally shot 19-year-old Robert Urrea, a college student still in his Halloween costume.
It was the first of a string of seemingly random shootings of ordinary citizens that prompted Dallas police to warn that a serial killer was on the loose in the streets of the city for nearly three weeks in the fall of 2020.
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The sudden spasm of violence would lead to widespread fear and ultimately end up on Amber Carter’s own doorstep on Nov. 18 of that year, when Harris, who had discovered where she was living, arrived there and shot and killed her father, Blair Carter, 60, setting the home on fire in a final act of rage.
Arrested the next day, Harris pleaded guilty to four murders in 2023 and is serving a life sentence without parole.
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Now Carter’s story of fear, loss and healing — from the crimes of her ex-boyfriend is told in “Surviving the Thrill Killer,” the new episode of People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer, on Investigation Discovery July 7 and streaming on HBO Max.
“I definitely have survivor’s guilt,” says Carter. “Obviously I was the link. He sought me out, and he was on a mission.”
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Carter, whose parents split when she was a baby, grew up in Frisco, Texas, spending her days with her mom and nights with her dad until she was 12, when she moved in with her father full-time.
When she became pregnant at 16, he supported her through the journey, making sure all of her and the baby’s needs were met.
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In 2013, after moving out while attending college, Carter met Harris, then a father of two, through a friend. “I was intrigued by how intellectual he was,” she recalls. “He made me feel noticed, like my opinion mattered.”
But it didn’t take long for him to reveal his violent side, Carter says. Although the couple would go on to have a child together, he assaulted her often and, on one occasion, threatened to kill her. After a brutal attack in 2017, Carter’s father called the police, and Harris went into hiding.
“But I felt like he was always lurking,” she says. Harris eventually turned himself in and was sent to prison for domestic violence until his release in 2019.
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The following Halloween, when she was overcome with emotions, Carter called Harris, asking, “Why does it have to be like this?”
His bitter response to her refusal to give him her address resulted in the roadside killings of three men whom Harris spotted while driving through Dallas neighborhoods and the murder at the Carters’ house in Celina, Texas, north of the city.
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Investigators used identical bullet casings, phone records and surveillance video of Harris’s black Chevy Tahoe to link the four crimes and identify him as the single shooter.
Carter, who returned to her dad’s house from seeing a friend shortly after he was killed, can be seen in body cam footage sobbing as she is told by police that somebody in the house was dead.
An officer asks, “Do you have any disgruntled relationships?” She replies, “Like my baby daddy?”
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These days Carter, who had another son in 2021, works as a mental-health-care crisis responder and continues her own healing journey.
A year after Harris was convicted, she recalls, her ex-boyfriend sent their daughter a birthday card from prison. “It was emotional. We cried together and talked about how it’s okay to be angry [at your father] and sad and to love your grandpa,” Carter says.
“I’m doing the best that we can to move forward with the life that could’ve very easily been taken. I try to do my best to live the way my dad would’ve wanted me to.”
Carter’s story is featured in the upcoming episode of People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer. Titled “Surviving the Thrill Killer,” the episode airs July 7 on Investigation Discovery and streams on HBO Max.
