For most of their lives, Laura and Nichole Yunger were rarely apart.
They were two-thirds of a set of triplets in a Naperville family who also had a younger set of triplets, something that made for an unusual childhood and generated plenty of news stories and appearances on national television, including “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Throughout their teenage years, the two sisters were inseparable at Neuqua Valley High School, sharing the same circle of friends and teachers and even driving together to their jobs at a candy store at Fox Valley Mall.
But following graduation, they took separate paths. Nichole went into photography at Columbia College in Chicago and Laura studied finance at North Central College, where she met Anthony Harrison, her future husband and killer.
The red flags were there from the beginning, says Plano resident Nichole Yunger, 40, who recently published a beautifully-written and deeply-personal memoir about the 2016 murder of her sister in McHenry.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, Laura — known as “the good one” for her quiet, discipline and sweet personality — began disappearing from the Yunger family’s lives. There were fewer get-togethers, less communication, but plenty of uneasy feelings, especially after loved ones found out from a 2011 Facebook post that Laura had married Anthony Harrison in a courthouse ceremony.
But it was seeing her sister’s bleach-stained lingerie on a vacation the two women shared a few years later that set off alarm bells for Nichole.
She noticed the damaged clothing while unpacking on a trip to the Bahamas that her sister had won in a radio contest. When she asked about it, Laura admitted Anthony poured chlorine into her underwear drawer after he became angry when she came home 10 minutes late from an after-work gathering.
For the first time Laura opened up about the toxic relationship, and “we even came up with an escape plan,” Nichole tells me.
But like many domestic violence victims, she would break up with her abuser and then go back to him, even after Harrison was arrested and awaiting trial for assaulting Laura in 2015.
At a housewarming the following year, Laura finally told Nichole she’d had enough and was going to kick him out of the McHenry home she’d worked so hard to purchase and had been proudly restoring. She gave him a month to move, admitting to Nichole that tensions were escalating to the point her sister “was sleeping with a knife under her bed.”
Laura had even called the McHenry County crisis line and sheriff’s department, but was told there was little that could be done unless her husband became violent, says Nichole.
The following day, June 4, 2016, Anthony Harrison strangled Laura and stabbed her multiple times. Then, he bought a chocolate milkshake at McDonald’s and went to Home Depot, where he purchased a shovel, bleach, garbage bags and fire-starter.
“He tried to dig a hole in the back yard but it was too big a job for him,” she said, so he took Laura’s body to the basement and placed her atop a pile of firewood. Instead of burning the house down, however, Harrison slit his own throat, then called 911 and told the dispatcher he had killed his wife, authorities said.
Laura’s body was found June 6, 2016.
In her book “The Good One: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Justice,” Nichole Yunger describes what it was like to go into her sister’s home that had turned into a bloody crime scene. Entire sections had been ripped apart and put into heavy-duty biohazard containers.
On a wall in the basement, words written in bold black: “I Did This.”
“I stared at the words,” she wrote in the memoir, “stunned by the audacity.”
Nichole Yunger, a wife and mother of two who is the operations manager at the Sugar Grove Public Library, also describes how difficult it was to go through her sister’s possessions and choose items she wanted to keep.
Everything felt precious, impossible to leave behind, she wrote in the memoir, noting how Laura’s entire world was contained in those walls. They couldn’t possibly take it all.
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In addition to a photo album and some of her sister’s clothes and perfume, Nichole chose a Moai statue given to Laura as a housewarming gift and a “wilted peace lily … barely hanging on” from the funeral of their mother Rhonda Brooks, who had died six months earlier in a car accident.
She and her siblings also took turns “smashing” all the Christmas ornaments Laura had collected that contained the couple’s names.
One of the “hardest parts,” however, was the nearly two-year wait for the trial, which involved plenty of continuances as Harrison, who survived his self-inflicted injury, tried to mount an insanity defense.
He was found guilty of first-degree murder following a two-day bench trial in which Nichole was called to testify.
“The sentencing,” she says, “was supposed to be on our birthdays but we asked the judge to pick another day, which he honored.”
Harrison got 40 years in prison. But Nichole wants to make sure her sister is remembered even longer. In lieu of flowers following her death, the family asked that donations be made to Mutual Ground in Aurora. That October Nichole, wearing one of Laura’s dresses — “like armor, like a second skin of hers wrapped around me,” she wrote in the memoir — spoke alongside surviving triplet Jill at the domestic violence shelter’s Walk for Hope, which raised tens of thousands of dollars in their sister’s name.
Nichole later became an administrative assistant for Mutual Ground for a couple of years, until she realized “seeing so many battered women and children come in” was hindering her grief recovery. Thankfully, then-Executive Director Michelle Meyer convinced her to seek counseling, which she admits “really helped.”
Two years ago Nichole, aware of how fewer people were walking for Laura in the annual fundraiser, decided it was time to pour her memories into “The Good One.” But the book is not just to preserve her beloved sister’s tragic story. It goes into poignant and at times heartbreaking detail about the dysfunction in the Yunger family, which included a bitter divorce, alcoholism, depression and abuse, and how they navigated Laura’s death.
It was also written to expose the devastating reality of domestic violence and, perhaps more importantly, to remind survivors they are not alone. As Norma Peterson, executive director of Document the Abuse, wrote in the foreword: “The Good One” is more than a memoir — it is a call for awareness, justice and change.”
“We should have just packed her up at her housewarming party,” says Nichole Yunger. “But you don’t expect it to happen to you.”
Until it does.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or go to TheHotline.org for confidential support.