A local college graduate who has served in the U.S. Army and worked for the FBI has been named director of Savannah-Chatham CrimeStoppers.
Sherry Gellatly Harriss was appointed as the director by interim Savannah-Chatham Police Chief Julie Tolbert and started work Monday.
Harriss replaces interim director Gianna Nelson, an analyst in the Savannah Area Regional Intelligence Center, a unit of the metro police department. She has led CrimeStoppers since former director Demery Bishop retired last November. Nelson has resumed her responsibilities as an analyst.
Harriss graduated from then Armstrong State College with a degree in criminal justice. While at Armstrong, she was a member of the ROTC program and its first female ROTC graduate, said Julian Miller, metro police spokesman. Selected as a the distinguished military graduate, she received a Regular Army commission as a Signal Corps officer and, after attending Airborne training, served in the Army for three years.
Subsequently appointed as special agent with the FBI and assigned to the Denver and Washington field offices, she conducted investigations in such areas as violent crime, money laundering, narcotics, counter terrorism and white collar crime. Among the investigations she helped conduct were the murder of a Savannah city alderman killed by a letter bomb in the 1980s and the raid in Waco, Texas, in which four agents and six Branch Davidian members were killed in 1993, Miller said.
Harriss is a certified federal polygraph examiner and is a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy. She retired from the FBI in 2010, after which she conducted polygraph examinations for private and federal entities. She also worked as a contractor for the State Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security. She is a licensed private investigator.
CrimeStoppers is an independent organization that confidentially solicits and distributes tips on crimes for area law enforcement agencies. Cash rewards are paid for information leading to the solution of crimes although tipsters remain completely anonymous to even the CrimeStoppers staff. Funds for the rewards are collected by CrimeStoppers independent of any governmental agency.