Drew Carey heard from former fiancée Amie Harwick out of the blue just two days before her untimely death

Amie Harwick led a sophisticated and colourful life that sparked a collection of headlines after she was discovered struggling to breathe on the patio beneath the balcony of her Hollywood Hills house in the early morning hours after Valentine’s Day in 2020. She would die a couple of hours later — an obvious sufferer of homicide.

When Harwick’s ex-fiancé, comic Drew Carey, acquired the news, it was particularly painful. “I just started crying … I just — I couldn’t even stand up,” Carey advised “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty in his first in-depth tv interview about his relationship with Harwick, her life and loss.

Carey’s interview is an element of this week’s “48 Hours” broadcast, “The Final Hours of Amie Harwick,” reairing Saturday, September 3 at 8/7c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

The couple had known as off their engagement in late 2018 and their mates described the breakup as amicable. The two had fallen out of contact till just two days before Harwick’s death, when Carey says he acquired a textual content from Harwick wanting to speak.

“Valentine’s Day was a Friday,” Carey stated, remembering that day nearly two years earlier. “I got a text from her on Thursday. [She] said, ‘Hey, I know we haven’t talked in a while, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about, you know, forgiveness, and I would love to get together with you and talk.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I would love to do that. I love you.'”

“I say that to a lot of people,” Carey advised Moriarty, “but, I mean it. And I was really happy, like, ‘Oh, it’d be great to see her again.'”

Carey, host of “The Price Is Right” sport present on CBS since 2007, says he was in one other severe relationship when he acquired Harwick’s textual content. He believes Harwick was searching for to forge a brand new future as mates. But the former couple would by no means get the likelihood to speak once more.

Harwick died at 3:26 a.m. on February 15, 2020. An post-mortem later decided the trigger of death as blunt drive trauma. The medical expert discovered obvious defensive wounds on her palms and arms, bruising on her neck, and there have been indicators of a wrestle in her house. Police charged Harwick’s ex-boyfriend, Gareth Pursehouse, with her homicide later that very same day. He has pleaded not responsible. 

The horror of Amie Harwick’s death continues to be troublesome for Carey. He was 58 when he first met Harwick, then 35, at a Hollywood occasion the place she was moonlighting as a bartender, Carey says. It was 2017 and Harwick was a working towards therapist with a grasp’s and a Ph.D., however had paid her manner by way of faculty bartending and nonetheless took facet jobs from time to time.

Carey remembers seeing her every week later at one other occasion, and says she advised him, “‘It’s my birthday, and my boyfriend stood me up.’ And I said, ‘Boy, you should get a better class of boyfriend.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, maybe I should.’ That was my first flirty line with her,” Carey stated. “And then, by the end of the night, I got her number.”

The pair fell into a quick romance. “Our first date we went to Disneyland,” Carey stated. He says inside weeks he was telling individuals at work about how smitten he was.

“I said, ‘Wow, I met this great girl. Her name’s Amie. She’s a Ph.D. and she’s a therapist,'” he stated. “And I said, ‘If this keeps going the way it’s going, I’m going to marry her.’ I just said it right out, and I’d only known her for, like, a couple weeks,” Carey stated. “I just knew that she was special.”

Indeed, Carey and Harwick, a minimum of for a time, appeared headed for a happily-ever-after ending. Two years before her death, Amie made a visitor look on the 2018 Valentine’s Day version of “The Price Is Right,” the place Carey launched her to thousands and thousands of TV viewers as his fiancée. But the relationship was not destined to final.

Reflecting now on their breakup, Carey admits the pressures of Hollywood performed a component — he says Harwick suspected her outdated ex, Gareth Pursehouse, was turning into triggered each time there was a headline about her romance with Carey.

“It would only happen if we were in the paper or something,” Carey advised Moriarty. Frequently, after a news story got here out, he stated, Harwick would inform him she seen somebody attempting to sully her popularity on-line.

“That would be a fight sometimes,” Carey stated. He says Harwick would say, “‘I wish you weren’t famous. You know? This is all because I’m dating you.'”

Carey says the pair hung out in remedy attempting to make issues work before they lastly known as it quits. Carey known as the break up “really painful” and “like a death” to him. It was 16 months after that parting when Carey acquired that sudden textual content from Harwick — to plan a dialog she wouldn’t stay lengthy sufficient to have.

“I feel like a widower, you know, in a lot of ways, because I wanted to marry her, and then we had this horrible breakup,” Carey stated. “And then before I could talk to her again, somebody killed her.”

Moriarty, who has spoken to many of Harwick’s mates for “48 Hours,” advised Carey how she’d heard of Harwick’s fondness for Carey from so many of her surviving mates. “And she did love you,” Moriarty stated. “Because that’s what I’ve heard.”

“That’s the big solace I get from it,” Carey stated. “Is that she loved me and held me in a dear place in her heart.” And he is glad he acquired to say “I love you” that one final time. “I’m glad I could get that message to her before she died.”