On, August 22, 2018 in Ardmore, PA, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, a man named Alex called the police for a welfare check on his girlfriend, Christina Carlin-Kraft because she wasn’t answering her phone and the interior door was locked on her apartment.
Police forced entry into her apartment and found 36-year-old Christina in her bed with a fabric over her body. She had been beaten and strangled to death.
Christina was a Playboy cyber girl and model and had been with her boyfriend Alex Ciccotelli for 15 years.
While digging in her background, investigators found that in 2016, Christina had been charged with assault after she got in a physical fight with a NYC bartender. Her charges were eventually dropped.
Christina had recently moved to Ardmore at the advice of her boyfriend Alex because they believed she would be safer there. Alex still lived in NYC, though, and would travel back and forth to see her.
According to Alex, he returned to NYC to work on August 21, 2018. He said that he called her early in the morning August 22, 2023 to say goodnight. At 5 a.m. he checked Christina’s security cameras and saw some unusual things.
That’s when he decided to return to Ardmore, where he found he couldn’t get into the apartment because it was locked from the inside.
A few days earlier, Christina had been robbed in her apartment, on August 18, 2018. They had taken a credit card, designer handbags, and jewelry.
Before the robbery, she had had some drinks at a hotel. She says she woke up in her apartment in a daze, and feels like she may have been drugged.
Surveillance footage shows that the man who drove her home that night took her keys and went into her apartment because she was passed out in the back of his car.
He spent about thirty minutes in her apartment, and came out with a box of her things. Then, he took Christina up to her apartment after he had robbed her.
He used her credit card at a local convenience store and detectives were able to find footage of the man to identify him as Andre Melton. They were unable to find Andre Melton to arrest him for the robbery, however.
Since Christina was murdered just a few days later, Andre was considered to be a suspect in her murder.
Surveillance footage from Christina’s building offered more clues. She was seen leaving her building the night of her death, and then returning with a man. They walked in to the apartment at 3 a.m., and the man isn’t seen again.
A little after 5 a.m., however, the slider for her balcony door opened. There was a footprint in the dirt right under Christina’s balcony.
Christina had been to Philadelphia that night, and police pieced together her entire night and found that the man she was with that night was not Andre Milton.
On August 23, 2023, Andre Milton called the police to confess to the robbery but to deny that he murdered Christina.
Eventually a ride-share driver revealed that he remembers driving Christina and a man the night of her murder. Christina had flagged him down instead of using an app and asked for a ride because she feared for her safety.
The driver said that Christina and the man were very affectionate on the ride over. By the time they got home, Christina didn’t have any cash to pay him. The man, however, gave him $100 and asked him to wait for him.
They exchanged phone numbers and he waited for a while. The man didn’t come back out in a timely manner, so the driver simply left.
At 4 a.m., Christina called her cousin. She didn’t speak to her, but the cousin heard a man in the background telling Christina to not call the police.
August 26, a man said that he knew the man in the surveillance footage because he had been his roommate at a psychiatric facility. The man had been put on a psychiatric hold because he followed a woman into a court building and had screamed and kicked.
He was admitted as a “John Doe” so he was anonymous. While in the facility, he bragged to his roommate that he had strangled a woman.
Meanwhile, a family member of the suspect identified him as Jonathan Harris, a man who had just been released from prison five weeks before her murder for drug and robbery convictions.
That night, Jonathan had messaged a friend “I just met this sexy a** white b****, at her house in Ardmore now.”
How they caught Jonathan Harris
Detectives found out from Jonathan’s sister that he was on a bus to Pittsburgh, PA. Police waited in Pittsburgh for the bus to arrive and cut off all avenues of escape. Once he got off the bus, Jonathan was arrested.
He tried to give a fake name, but police were aware what he looked like and wouldn’t let him go.
In the interrogation room Jonathan told police that he’d been high on cocaine, marijuana, a drug called “K2” and alcohol on the night of Christina’s murder.
His story is that he met Christina, and went back to her apartment where he was going to sell her an ounce of cocaine. He says that when he got there, Christina didn’t have money to pay him after she took the cocaine so they got into an altercation.
He says she hit him with a wine bottle and he left. He claimed that Christina was perfectly fine when he left her apartment.
Christina had no cocaine in her system at her time of death, with poked a hole in Jonathan’s story. When police confront him about this and other inconsistencies, he admitted that he had lied about a lot of things, including the cocaine.
Eventually, he admitted to having strangled her. He still maintained that she was “breathing” when he left. He did say that he changed into Christina’s clothes because he was covered in blood, and that he covered her body with clothing and an area rug.
In August 19, Jonathan Harris was sentenced to life in prison, plus an addition 22 1/2 to 45 years for other charges including robbery and theft.
