A D.C. man was sentenced Friday to 35 years in prison and five years of supervised release for the murder of a woman whose body has never been found, according to the Department of Justice.
Isaac Moye, 46, was convicted of second degree murder on June 23 for killing Unique Harris, who was 24 years old when she disappeared from her home in October of 2010. She was never found.
Moye was arrested in December 2020, after D.C. police employed multiple methods to look for leads in the case. The department even produced a YouTube video on the case in 2018, urging anyone with information on Harris’ whereabouts to contact authorities.
Harris was hosting a sleepover for her two young children and their 9-year-old cousin at her home in Southeast D.C. when she disappeared on Oct. 9, 2010, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She put the children to bed an hour before Moye arrived at her home at 10:39 p.m., calling her on her cellphone before entering her building. Harris had only known Moye for about two months, according to officials.
Moye was wearing a monitoring device at the time of Harris’ disappearance, after being released from prison for previously assaulting a woman. GPS records place Moye at Harris’ home for the entire night, according to officials.
Harris was gone the next morning when the children woke up and her cellphone and keys were also missing, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Her purse, including her ID, credit cards and eyeglasses were left behind. There was no sign of a struggle, but a section of her sofa had been cut out and police identified Moye’s semen on the mutilated sofa cushion years later.
Moye was interviewed by police multiple times over the next 10 years and continuously changed his story, according to a news release. He both denied and admitted during different interviews that he and Harris had ever been intimate. Moye also denied seeing Harris the night that she went missing.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Moye’s former cellmate testified that Moye said there was a missing girl, but police were “never going to find her” because he “did it, but did it the right way.”
U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves praised D.C. police officers and the prosecutors who were able to put together enough evidence for a jury to convict Moye on June 23.
“Thanks to dogged police work by the Metropolitan Police Department detectives who worked this case, and the dedicated, tireless efforts of the prosecution team, a jury held this defendant accountable for this heinous murder,” Graves said in a statement.
