‘Daddy hurt her’: nobody believed three-year-old Aaron Fraser, until he dug up mother Bonnie Haim’s skull in backyard 20 years later
- Victim’s husband Michael Haim is now facing trial in Florida for the 1993 murder
- Remains were found when Fraser was doing renovations after winning house and US$26 million from father in previous court case
It was a single-story, three-bedroom ranch house on a quiet residential street in a northern stretch of Jacksonville, Florida. Aaron Fraser had not lived inside since he was four years old, and the four walls held plenty of ugly memories and unresolved questions. But in December 2014, after the 24-year-old took possession of the house, he and his brother-in-law rolled up their sleeves for a renovation.
According to the Florida Times-Union, the two men began by smashing apart a swimming pool in the back with a rented excavator. At one point, the machine cracked a large concrete slab near an outdoor shower. Aaron began hacking at the pieces with a sledgehammer. Below in the dirt, he found a plastic bag, and from inside he pulled something out. It was a coconut, he thought.
“Why would someone bury a coconut in a bag?” Aaron asked his brother-in-law, according to News4Jax.
Then, the men noticed the teeth and eye sockets. It was a skull.
The discovery alone was a shock. But for Aaron, the human remains sunk below a layer of concrete in his boyhood home snapped the jumbled pieces of a family mystery into place. In January 1993, his mother, Bonnie Haim, had vanished. Police suspected her husband, Aaron’s father, Michael Haim, of murdering his wife. Those suspicions started with what Aaron, who was then three, had told authorities.
