Until proven innocent — Part 1: The investigation
By ANDREW McLEMORE
In April 1987, less than two months after a jury sentenced him to life in prison, 32-year-old Michael Morton wrote a letter begging for the right to see his son.
 His wife had been murdered nine months before and nearly everyone believed him guilty — possibly even the sister-in-law who would raise his parentless 3-year-old.
Judge William Lott presided over Morton’s murder trial and would now pass judgment on whether the father convicted of beating his wife to death would ever get to see Eric again.
Morton couldn’t write from his home in southwest Williamson County. He had to use his new address and the prisoner identification number provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice: Michael Morton, #445394, Wynne Unit, Huntsville.
When the jury read the guilty verdict, his knees buckled and there was little sound in the courtroom but his sobbing and protests of innocence before Judge Lott.
He’d lost faith in “a lot of things,” he said after the conviction. He’d already lost his wife. Now everything else would be taken from him. “I’m about to lose my son, our house, her car, my job, all of our money… my freedom.”
With so little hope left, he made a last-ditch effort to convince the judge he was an innocent man who deserved time with his son. He hadn’t seen Eric since the conclusion of the trial and the beginning of his life sentence.
“Sooner or later, the truth will come out,” Morton wrote. “The killer will be caught and this nightmare will be over. I pray that the Sheriff’s Office keeps an open mind. It is no sin to admit a mistake… I don’t know what else to say except, ‘I swear to God, that I did NOT kill my wife. Please, don’t take my son from me, too.’”
The truth — that another man killed Morton’s wife — would come out, but not until Morton spent nearly 25 years in prison fighting to prove his innocence.
----------------
It was after 9 a.m. on a Texas summer day and already warm. August 13, 1986 found Elizabeth Gee with her hands dirty from pulling weeds as her 4-year-old son rode his bicycle in the driveway.
Throughout the morning, she would look up and see 3-year-old Eric Morton in the front yard next door. She didn’t think that was unusual at first. Around noon she noticed his heavy diaper and realized his mother wasn’t outside with him.
A good friend of Michael and Christine Morton, Gee walked to their home and picked up Eric from the front door stoop. She went inside and called out for Christine. Not hearing a response, Gee took Eric home and changed his diaper, and left him to play with her son.
She wrote a note to Christine, taped it to the front door and searched every room in the house. Gee ignored the disarray in the bedroom — sometimes her house was a mess, too. She went home and called Christine’s work, but didn’t find her. She tried to reach Mike, but couldn’t. Gee said to herself: “This is ridiculous, Chris has got to be around here somewhere.’”
She began to think something was wrong. This time when she left, she locked her front door. She went back to the Mortons’ place a third time. When she looked in the bedroom, she finally realized something wasn’t right. There was a laundry hamper and a blue suitcase on the bed. She saw two pillows covered in what she had thought was vomit.
“No,” she said.
Gee patted the bed until she found two ankles. She went to the other side and pulled up the comforter. She found a forearm, a hand, a hip. Her instincts as a trained emergency medic kicked in and she held the wrist for 30 seconds. It seemed like forever — no pulse. She didn’t try to do CPR. The suitcase was where the head should be.
This was a crime scene.
Gee ran home, wondering if the killer was still in the house. She called the police and when they arrived, she took the two boys to another neighbor while she told investigators what she knew.
Deputies from the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office soon filled the front yard of 9114 Hazelhurst, entering without a search warrant. They arrived at the home in southwest Williamson County around 1 p.m., and soon forensic experts from the Texas Department of Public Safety were there as well.
Investigators took hundreds of photos.
In the bedroom, they took photos of the blood spatters on the sheets, the headboard, the walls, on family photographs on the bedside table, on books on the floor. There was blood on a framed poster of calla lilies. There was blood on the overturned dresser with drawers of clothes spilled onto the floor.
They took photos of the bloodstained pillows, and of the wicker laundry basket and suitcase stacked on top of Christine’s body.
They took photos of the valuables in plain sight throughout the house: the wedding ring and watch on the nightstand, the camera with a telephoto lens in the living room, another camera, the stereo and VCR, the television. They took a photo of an unopened condom lying on the living room floor by the rocking chair and a note in the bathroom written by Michael to his wife.
And they took many, many photos of 31-year-old Christine Morton — terrifying photographs of a brutal murder, of the repeated blunt force strikes to her head, of the defense wounds on her hands from trying to ward off blows.
Investigators found no blood outside of the bedroom. There were no signs of forced entry, but the sliding glass door that led to the Morton’s bedroom was unlocked. The fingerprint expert found about 15 fingerprints that would never be identified, including two on the outside of the sliding glass door frame, one from the bedroom door frame, and another on the suitcase.
There was a photograph of a footprint in the backyard by the gate. The Mortons had homes on either side, but behind them was an undeveloped, wooded area that led to a home construction site.
The lawmen and crime scene experts spent several hours at the house and never attempted to contact Michael Morton. He didn’t learn of Christine’s death until three hours after police arrived at his home.
----------------
The story Michael Morton would later tell investigators that afternoon was not extraordinary. Evidence and witnesses substantiated every detail of his account. The only thing that couldn’t be proven was whether Christine was already dead when he left for work at 5:30 a.m.
Michael, a manager at a Safeway grocery store in north Austin, did the morning of August 13 what he did every day. He got up at 5 a.m., showered, ate breakfast, shaved, dressed and drove to work.
His supervisor Steven Heinsohn greeted him at the door about 6 a.m. He spent much of the day building a large display for a new promotion. He chatted with coworkers.
Michael had learned recently that he and another employee, Mario Garcia, enjoyed scuba diving. They both had the following day off and the two men chatted repeatedly about diving together at Lake Travis. Michael would call later that day and they’d cement their plans.
He left, as usual, about 2:10 p.m. and headed to Zale’s Jewelry in the Highland Mall to drop off his scuba diving watch for repair. He walked to Foley’s, bought a shirt and left. He arrived at Mildred Redden’s daycare at the usual time — around 4 p.m.
Eric wasn’t there. Redden told Michael she’d been worried all day because Christine had never brought the boy in or called.
Michael used her phone and called home.
It was Sheriff Jim Boutwell, the legendary Texas lawman who arrested serial killer Henry Lee Lucas in 1983, who answered.
The conversation was recorded on the Mortons’ answering machine and replayed for the jury later. To them, it would seem a strange conversation given that Michael was calling his own house.
SHERIFF: Hello.
MICHAEL: Hello, hello.
SHERIFF: Who’s speaking, please?
MICHAEL: This is Mike.
SHERIFF: Mike, what’s your last name, Mike?
MICHAEL: Morton.
SHERIFF: Morton.
MICHAEL: Yes.
SHERIFF: Okay. Can I help you?
MICHAEL: Yeah, I’m calling my house.
SHERIFF: Say where are you.
MICHAEL: I’m over at the Reddens.
SHERIFF: Over where? This is the sheriff.
MICHAEL: What’s going on, I live there.
SHERIFF: Okay, well we need to talk to you, Mike.
MICHAEL: I’ll be there in 10 minutes.
SHERIFF: Okay, just take it easy though, okay.
MICHAEL: Okay.
When the daycare owner turned back around after showing Michael to the telephone, he was already gone.
He drove up to find his home surrounded with yellow crime scene tape and police cars. Five officers, four crime lab technicians, a justice of the peace and the sheriff were on scene.
Officer Mike Lock testified at trial that Michael walked up and said, without any emotion in his voice, “Are they both dead or what?” Michael didn’t remember saying that. He remembered meeting the sheriff in the front yard and asking him if Eric was okay. Then he asked about Christine, and the sheriff told him she was dead.
Boutwell later said in court that he saw “no particular reaction at all” from Michael.
The sheriff brought Michael into the kitchen and read him his rights. He interviewed Michael about his day and the previous evening. The sheriff did not allow him to go into the bedroom. He told Michael his wife had been murdered.
Surrounded by lawmen in his own home, Michael answered every question. He consented to a search of his home and his truck. He voluntarily gave samples of his blood, hair and saliva. Investigators described him as calm and cooperative.
Michael told them about the seven guns in his house, including several pistols, rifles and a .12-gauge shotgun. At some point, Eric walked into the kitchen and Michael picked him and put his arms around his neck.
The sheriff said in court eight months later that the widowed husband displayed no emotion in the interview. He said that Michael, who still hadn’t seen his wife’s body and claimed innocence, asked, “Was she shot or was she beaten to death?”
Upon cross-examination, Morton’s attorneys forced the sheriff to acknowledge he’d never written down that statement in his notes of the interview.
“You just remember that now, do you not, sir?” the attorney asked him. “I’ll always remember that,” Boutwell said.
As for Michael, he remembered a flurry of activity around him as he was questioned. Cameras flashing, sheriff’s deputies examining firewood in the backyard. Someone Michael didn’t know came in and filled the kitchen sink with ice to cool sodas for the investigators. When everyone finally left late that afternoon, he said the house was filled with cigarette butts and Coke cans.
The sheriff already considered Michael a likely suspect.
----------------
The previous day had been Michael’s birthday, and it didn’t go the way he wanted.
He’d been frustrated with his wife after they returned home from a celebratory dinner because when he wanted to have sex, she fell asleep. Before he left for work the next morning, Michael scribbled a note to her expressing his irritation.
That small act would reverberate through Michael’s trial, when prosecutors presented the letter as the deranged alibi of a sex-crazed husband trying to cover his tracks.
For Michael, it was simply the result of a disappointing day.
It began with promise. He took time off from work and spent the morning alone. After dropping Eric off at daycare, he worked out in the garage with his weight set and then went scuba diving at Lake Travis. He identified a new place on the underwater map to show friends at work. He picked up Eric and spent the rest of the afternoon socializing with neighbors and friends while his son played with the other children in the driveway of the Gees’ house.
Michael had found a bracelet while scuba diving that day and tried to show it to Christine, or “Chris,” as he always called her. She was busy with Eric and not paying attention to him, so he tossed it at Elizabeth Gee and walked back to his house. Christine told Elizabeth she felt a little guilty for not baking cookies for Michael on his birthday.
The Morton family got dressed and went out to eat at City Grill Restaurant. At trial, Michael spoke positively about the dinner.
“We just talked among ourselves about our friends and what we were going to do and how things were going. It was pleasant.”
Michael drank a beer and a gin and tonic. Christine had two glasses of wine. After a meal of fish and vegetables, they finished with coffee and a shot of Bailey’s. They drove home.
After putting Eric to bed, Michael brought out “A Handful of Diamonds,” one of two adult movies he had rented for the occasion. He put it in the VCR and grabbed a condom from the bedroom. While Christine lay on the floor watching the movie, he began rubbing her right hand where she’d lost the tip of a finger in a childhood accident. She was self-conscious about it, usually keeping her fist balled up to hide the injury. Rubbing it felt good to her, Michael said later.
Around midnight, she fell asleep. Michael wasn’t happy about it, he told the court during trial.
“I felt a little — I felt hurt and unwanted and I felt just leaving her there was kind of payback. She would wake up on the floor and realize. If you want to say I was upset, yes. I wasn’t mad.”
This is where Michael’s story diverges from the one prosecutors would successfully sell to the jury. According to Michael, when Christine finally came to bed, she apologized, kissed his face and whispered, “tomorrow night.”
When he left in the morning, she was alive and well, and he left her a note on the bathroom vanity:
Chris, I know you didn’t mean to, but you made me feel really unwanted last night. After a good meal, we came home, you binged on the rest of the cookies, then with your nightgown around your waist and while I was rubbing your hands and arms — you farted and fell asleep. I’m not mad or expecting a big production. I just wanted you to know how I feel without us getting into another fight about sex. Just think how you might have felt if you were left hanging on your birthday.
ILY —
M
----------------
The mood in Elizabeth Gee’s living room was palpable. No one sure what to do or how to feel. Michael had bought a toy for Eric and played with him on the living room floor. Jack Kirkpatrick Christine’s dad, didn’t say much. He was visibly shaken, and sitting on the couch with a mixed drink in his hand.
“I don’t believe this, you know,” he said.
Michael didn’t speak to either Elizabeth or Christopher Gee during the half hour he was at their house. He just kept playing with Eric on the floor. “He never seemed anything,” Elizabeth said. “He just played with his son.”
Mark Gregory, another neighbor, came over to the Gees’ living room and saw the shock on Michael’s face and in his red, watery eyes. He was “dumbfounded” and “blank,” Gregory said.
That first night, Michael slept with Eric in his son’s bed. Elizabeth Gee remembered that the lights in the Morton home never went off that night.
The next morning, Michael saw his friend David Marshall for the first time since the murder. They didn’t speak at first. Just grabbed for each other, hugging tight and crying.
“Mike is not the person to show emotion to people he doesn’t know,” Marshall said.
Later, Marshall helped repaint the Mortons’ bedroom. Christine’s dad brought over a case of beer.
Everybody drank. Everybody was in pain, Marshall said.
At some point in the days afterward, Michael slept at home again — this time in the same marriage bed where Christine had been murdered. Christine’s mother and sister, Rita and Mary Lee Kirkpatrick, became hysterical when Michael told them. He put his arm around his sister-in-law and said, “I have an awful lot of good memories of that bed, too.”
That wouldn’t sound good when prosecutors brought it up in trial.
Neighbors, friends and family members still felt disbelief that the blue-eyed, radiantly beautiful woman they had known was now gone. Murdered. And they didn’t know who had killed her, though some of Christine’s family may have already begun to suspect Michael, based on later statements from her father.
Christine’s best friend, Holly Gersky, was in California at the time. The two met while working together at an insurance company. Michael called to let her know what had happened.
“I was in a complete and total state of shock,” Gersky said last month from her home in California. “I was hysterical. I kept saying you made a mistake, you made a mistake… it was a terrible time in my life.”
Christine was the best friend she ever had, a smiling girl with an infectious laugh. They were both close to their mothers and loved their workplace. They could tell each other everything and she became Christine’s confidante as well as an intimate friend of her family.
The Morton marriage was one of “equals,” Gersky said at the time. Michael and Christine shared parental responsibilities and were accepting of one another.
But investigators were gathering interviews from other friends and family members, who didn’t always paint a rosy picture of the couple’s relationship. No one ever testified about violence or threats, but they talked about name-calling and Michael’s complaints that he didn’t get enough sex, the couple’s arguments about what to plant in the yard and how much money to spend on their deck.
Every family keeps secrets, but the Mortons were about to lose theirs. Private tensions would eventually become the subject of public debate.
----------------
In the days immediately following the murder, Sheriff Boutwell said his entire investigative staff was working on the case. He fed a handful of details to the media — not all of which seemed to support Michael’s guilt.
He said police were investigating blood stains that Christine’s brother John Kirkpatrick found at a house under construction about 100 yards from the Morton home. He said the only thing missing from the house was Christine’s purse.
In newspapers or at trial, those two facts were never brought up again and it remains unclear to this day whether the sheriff’s investigators actually followed through on those leads.
But two days after the murder, Boutwell also said his office had decided on an explanation for the most bizarre piece of the puzzle — the suitcase and laundry hamper stacked on Christine’s body.
“We believe this was done to prevent her little boy from seeing her there,” he told the Sun in 1987.
Michael said Christine must have been murdered in bed before she woke up because of the “little things” that she usually does before leaving for work at 7:30 a.m. — like closing the blinds. The blinds were still open.
Michael talked to the press about an intruder entering through the unlocked sliding glass door and the footprint found along the six-foot-high backyard fence.
But as the weeks went by without an arrest, many people in the community didn’t buy the theory of a random murder and the frictions in the Morton marriage became more significant.
It wasn’t just Christine’s immediate family that felt the impact of her murder. The fear rippled through a terrified community of close-knit neighbors and friends and friends of friends.
To many, Michael’s guilt began to seem certain.
“It just seemed to be something that everybody else could accept. They weren’t struggling with it,” Gersky said. “It’s a frightening thing. People were scared. We were the kind of people that weren’t involved with the police. It wasn’t in any of our lives, so when this happened it was so incredibly horrible. We didn’t come from families like that. It just wasn’t in our world. It was a tough thing. It’s a horrible thing. It still is.”
----------------
In late September, six weeks after Christine was found, police came to the Morton home and arrested Michael for first-degree murder.
The complaint filed with the justice of the peace said Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo listed the time of death for Christine as no later than 1:30 a.m., or four hours after she’d celebrated Michael’s birthday with a dinner at City Grill.
Michael had already told investigators numerous times that he’d left for work at 5:30 a.m. The logic was simple: If Christine died at 1:30 a.m., Michael must have been there and must be the murderer.
It was the third time-of-death estimate that investigators had reported to the media. Immediately after the murder, investigators first thought Christine was attacked in early- to mid-morning. Two days later, Bayardo told them that it was more likely she was killed between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. based on the amount of food left in her stomach. That time was revised again before Michael’s arrest to 1:30 a.m.
Though defense attorneys later grilled Bayardo on his inconsistency, the medical examiner would stand by the estimate in courtroom testimony. It would play a critical role in convincing the jury of Michael’s guilt.
No physical evidence tied Michael to the crime and investigators still didn’t have a murder weapon. There were no eyewitnesses and Michael would never in 25 years confess to any involvement with his wife’s death.
At the time of Michael’s arrest and until the moment a jury sent him to life in prison, the case was based only on circumstantial evidence.
Despite that, Sheriff Boutwell said during trial he wanted to obtain a warrant for Morton’s arrest within a week of the murder. But Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson had delayed the arrest for further investigation. He implied at trial that he’d been unnecessarily cautious.
“I held off because I wanted to make sure, dadgum sure, everything was right on this case before we went out and arrested the guy. And I, not being at the scene, knowing what — he would have been arrested that day. The problem was I didn’t see those pictures and it took me a while after I saw those pictures to understand what all happened there.”
Bill Allison and Bill White, two of the best criminal defense attorneys in the Austin area, represented Michael. Almost immediately after his arrest, they began to question the methods of investigators — and Ken Anderson.
Allison told the Statesman he’d had an agreement with Anderson: If the district attorney wanted to charge Michael with murder, Michael would be allowed to turn himself in.
That didn’t happen.
In the weeks before the murder, Michael had taken two lie detector tests in Austin and “passed with flying colors,” White said.
Morton had showed up for a police polygraph examination the day after the murder. He had to wait several hours for the test to start, and then it was 9:45 p.m. when the sheriff’s office told him he could take the two-hour test, Morton said. He was tired and rescheduled.
Boutwell remembered things differently. He was “appalled” when Morton showed up for the test “with two buddies laughing and joking like they were going to a party.” Ultimately, Morton’s attorneys advised him against taking the test with the sheriff’s office.
None of the lie detector tests, passed or avoided, were mentioned during trial.
With so little evidence, Allison told the media an unknown person must be responsible.
“It’s a very frightening case. From everything we’ve investigated, he did not kill his wife. If they got the wrong person, there is someone loose who will kill again.”
But that was a hard sell, especially to family members who demanded justice and were close to Christine.
In a blistering interview with the Statesman shortly after Michael’s arrest, Jack Kirkpatrick tore into his son-in-law, describing at length the marital problems that led to his certainty Michael was a killer.
He suggested that Christine probably told Michael she was leaving him and “it all came to a head.”
“The whole family has been convinced that he’s the only one it could have been since Day One. They got along like cats and dogs… He mistreated her pretty bad. He criticized everything she did. She had all the friends and he ran off all the friends they had. And she made twice the money.”
Those with distance from Michael’s personal life were more skeptical.
His friend and coworker Mario Garcia said few people at the Safeway store in Austincould believe that the quiet, hard-working manager was capable of such a brutal crime.
There were suspicious looks from those that didn’t know him well, but his friends kept their doubts about the arrest and eventual conviction, said Garcia, who lives in Liberty Hill.
“I knew that this was a terrible murder to begin with and I knew that Mike didn’t have nothing to do with it… It was scary to see what happened to him. You’re supposed to believe in the justice system, but in this case, it was a scary thought.”
A few days after his arrest, Morton was able to make bail when Precinct 3 Justice of the Peace Bill Hill lowered it from $100,000 to $25,000. The previous bond was “too high,” Hill said.
“It was a pretty gruesome murder,” Hill said at the time. “We didn’t know if we wanted him out on the street until we checked him out. We checked with Safeway and found he had been working there seven years, so that was a good reference.”
----------------
Once back out of police custody, Michael resumed taking care of his son, trying to keep him in “as much of a regular routine as possible.”
After his wife’s death, he’d taken a two-week leave of absence from his job, but returned to work thereafter. He was indicted for murder by a Williamson County grand jury on October 15, 1986.
It’s unclear if Sheriff Boutwell followed through on the leads he mentioned early in the investigation: the bloodstains found at a house under construction or the purse that was stolen and never recovered.
The bloodied, blue bandanna that would ultimately exonerate Michael was entered into evidence, but only discussed once during trial. It was 1986 and DNA testing wouldn’t be available for several more years.
Today, Michael’s defense attorneys say Boutwell and his investigators didn’t pursue other leads that could have exonerated their client well before he was arrested, including a credit card and check from the purse used within days of Christine’s murder.
At the February 1987 trial, Anderson finally revealed the motive, or why Michael Morton, a man who had never committed a crime, would bludgeon to death his wife of seven years: she refused to have sex with him. Enraged, he beat Christine to death and masturbated over her body.
That image stayed with jurors for years. They would never forget it.
county@wilcosun.com |
