Until proven innocent — Part 2: The Trial
By ANDREW McLEMORE
Things got hard when Eric was born.
He was delivered through a C-section and just hours later doctors had to perform surgery because his esophagus didn’t go all the way to his stomach.
The newborn spent three weeks at Seton Hospital. He was later diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. He had to have medication every six hours.
As he grew, Michael and Christine Morton noticed he didn’t have the energy of the other kids. He would turn blue unexpectedly, alarming his parents.
Michael and Christine did everything they could to keep Eric alive until he was three years old, when doctors said his chances of survival would be much greater.
The stress took its toll on them, and they argued more frequently.
“We were very verbal,” Michael said in 1987. “If something disturbed her, she would just tell me straight out, and I would do the same. We discussed, argued, bickered, and went over everything like that. Nothing stayed below the surface for very long.”
The only time he hit her in seven years of marriage was shortly after their newborn was released from the hospital.
The couple was arguing and she picked up Eric from the crib so quickly that “he quivered” and Michael, fearful for him, slapped her.
“It shocked me as much as it did her,” he said.
They immediately sat down and talked about it. He never struck her again, he said.
But there were still problems. He nagged Christine about her weight and complained about their lagging sex life, which began after Eric was born.
Christine was having trouble, too. She’d wanted so badly to have a baby and now Eric was in danger a year after a miscarriage.
In June of 1986, Eric turned three years old while in the Heart Institute in Houston.
Michael used all his vacation leave from Safeway to spend three weeks with Christine and his son before Eric went under the knife for potentially life-changing heart surgery.
“We obviously spent all of our time we could with him,” Michael said.
Christine’s best friend Holly Gersky still remembers the moment she visited the hospital after Eric’s surgery. It’s her favorite memory of Christine. She walked in and saw her holding him.
“I looked at her and she was just beaming. He was so healthy looking. She loved that little boy so much. The love that she had for him was incredible.”
Eric came home in the fourth week of June. Almost immediately, he was running around. Michael and Christine noticed he wasn’t turning blue anymore.
Their little boy was going to be okay. For the first time in Michael and Christine’s life, their son was healthy and strong.
But the long-awaited end to the family’s struggle was short-lived.
Less than two months later, Christine was murdered in bed. Police arrested Michael and charged him with the crime.
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On February 10, 1987, Michael sat next to his lawyers in the Williamson County Courthouse listening to District Attorney Ken Anderson tell his version of how Christine ended up dead in the Mortons’ marriage bed.
Michael claimed he’d left her alive and well when he drove to work at 5:30 a.m., just like he did every other morning.
 That’s not the story Anderson told the seven women and five men of the jury in his opening statements.
He told a story of sensational violence and perversity, a story based on his interpretation of circumstantial evidence that would be almost entirely debunked years later.
He told a story about how Christine refused to have sex with Michael on the night of his birthday and went to bed. He solicited her again and she refused him a second time. He returned to the living room, watched a pornographic movie by himself, and got “madder and madder,” Anderson said.
Then Michael found some sort of blunt object and beat her to death.
He put a comforter over her body and stacked a suitcase and laundry hamper on top of her head.
Then, inspired by a burglary scene from the adult movie he’d just seen, Michael cleaned himself up and made a “poor attempt to ransack” the room by pulling drawers of clothes onto the floor. He grabbed his .45 pistol and put it in his wife’s purse, along with the murder weapon. Michael disposed of all three on his way to work the next morning, leaving his son alone at home with his dead wife. Then he left a note in the bathroom telling Christine he felt “hurt” because she wouldn’t have sex with him — the alibi of a sex-crazed killer trying to cover his tracks, Anderson argued.
When he tries to pick Eric up from daycare that afternoon, he “professes some sort of surprise” that his son isn’t there. When he finally went home, police were waiting for him.
That’s the way it happened, Anderson told the jury. It could be a story from a “romance novel,” but it was still true, he said.
“We are going to bring you all of the facts and all the things that happened that we know about,” Anderson said.
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It’s hard to say how many times Lou Bryan drove by the house on 9114 Hazelhurst Drive over the last 25 years.
She still has trouble explaining why, exactly, her car seemed to steer itself to the place where Christine Morton was murdered. This was the same house where Michael Morton lived until arrested, tried and sent to life in prison by 12 other residents of Williamson County.
Bryan was one of the jurors. After DNA tests this summer shook her confidence in the verdict, she said from home last month that she wants to know how this could have happened, no matter who is responsible.
“You would not believe, but just a year ago I drove by there again,” Bryan said in the weeks before Michael was released from prison an innocent man. “My 15-year-old granddaughter even knows where it is. She wasn’t even born yet, but I’ve taken her by there. She tells me not to go there.”
Bryan, 66, was a teacher at Round Rock High School when called to judge Michael Morton. She never doubted her verdict, she says, never questioned that the man she helped convict of murder and send to prison was actually innocent.
She describes Michael’s trial as “uncomfortable,” as a “haunting, creepy” experience. The whole thing felt dirty, made her want to take a bath. It wasn’t easy to look at those photos of Christine’s body or hear Ken Anderson describe his narrative of the murder, of the gruesome, sadistic things he told the jury Michael did to his wife that night in August 1986.
After Michael’s attorneys presented DNA evidence this summer that linked another man to the crime, Bryan said 25 years of time and distance hadn’t diminished the disquiet the trial brought into her life.
“When you have to decide a person’s fate, it just stays with you,” she said. “Not that I’ve changed my mind. If they find the guy, that might make me change my mind.”
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With significant financial help from his family, Michael had been able to hire two attorneys: Bill Allison and Bill White.
They were considered two of the best criminal defense attorneys in the area, but they weren’t given much to work with in Michael’s case.
Before the trial, Allison and White complained of not receiving all of the state’s investigative files. Or if they did receive a file, it would come late in the process, when they had less time to review the document before trial.
The attorneys filed a slew of motions requesting production of evidence or copies of forensic tests conducted by prosecutors. They tried to prevent the introduction of evidence they argued was irrelevant or blatantly prejudicial.
By the time of the February 6, 1987 pre-trial — days before the jury trial began — Allison said they’d only received a stack of photographs of the crime scene taken by sheriff’s office deputies. They’d received none of the original police reports, handwritten field notes, transcripts of police interviews with family members, or any other evidence at all, Allison said.
“We have not received any of the tangible evidence so that we can run our own independent tests on them,” he said.
At the same pre-trial hearing, White complained about not receiving any of the documentation of the investigation by Sheriff Jim Boutwell and Sergeant Don Wood.
“I’m not trying to delay the trial. I’m saying there’s a due process issue here,” White said. “This particular case is a case in which each issue is hotly contested. It is a circumstantial evidence case in which the act has not been admitted.”
Anderson said he’d forgotten to ask Sgt. Wood for his field notes. “I haven’t seen them myself and have no idea what they say,” he said. However, he had no intention of voluntarily handing them over to the defense.
And they never were.
Judge William Lott presided over the trial. He denied the motion from Allison and White requesting access to all the statements and reports made by investigators. The judge asked Anderson to provide him with all those materials and he’d review them for any evidence that should, by law, be provided to the defense.
He was given a sealed file that supposedly contained those documents and ruled that Michael’s attorneys didn’t have a right to anything inside it.
What exactly Sgt. Wood learned while investigating the case wouldn’t be known until nearly a quarter century after Michael had been sent to prison. At a pre-trial hearing in November, Sgt. Wood called himself the chief investigator of Christine Morton’s murder.
By the time of trial, however, his role was downplayed. Sheriff Boutwell took the stand and called himself the chief investigator, not Sgt. Wood. It was a contradiction that Allison and White were never able to reconcile.
It would take more than 20 years before Michael’s attorneys learned the specifics of Sgt. Wood’s investigation and, more importantly, the leads that no one at the sheriff’s office seemed to pursue.
They include:
• Sgt. Wood’s interview of Michael’s mother-in-law Rita Kirkpatrick. She tells him that Eric gave her an eyewitness description of a “monster” who was not “Daddy” murdering his mother.
• A message to Sgt. Wood that Christine Morton’s missing credit card was used in San Antonio two days after her murder by a woman previously convicted of fraud.
• Another message to Sgt. Wood that a check made out to Christine Morton was cashed nine days after her murder with a forged signature on the back.
• A report by another WilCo deputy that a neighbor had repeatedly seen a man park a green van behind the Morton home and walk into the wooded area behind the house.
Both the check and credit card would have been in Christine Morton’s purse, which was missing from the crime scene and never recovered.
When jurors learned about those leads, they’d want to know why Sgt. Wood never testified. They still do.
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They were good jurors.
They took it seriously. They paid attention.
But looking back at the trial a few weeks ago — before Michael was exonerated — Elizabeth Hamilton wondered if they weren’t all pretty naïve, too.
She’s read every article she could find on Michael’s claims of innocence. She began to feel fear that they’d made a mistake, and then guilt if Michael really was innocent.
There was no DNA testing back then. She realized the scientific evidence wasn’t as unimpeachable as she’d believed and that prosecutors’ arguments were based more on speculation than hard proof, she said.
When faced with ripping away a man’s freedom, she asks herself why she and her fellow jurors didn’t ask more questions. Why didn’t they hear from Sgt. Don Wood, who may actually have headed the investigation? Why didn’t they discuss the lack of character witnesses for Michael? Why didn’t his parents take the stand?
Many things about the trial nagged at her.
“It bothered me that [Michael] never said he loved his wife or anything like that,” Hamilton said.
However, she recalls Anderson doing a masterful job of rebutting the defense. Michael’s attorneys confused her more than anything else and she didn’t feel like they were even convinced of his innocence.
Maybe they were a little naïve, but Hamilton still feels like they made the right decision with what they were given. But now there’s all this evidence coming out they never saw back then, that prosecutors Ken Anderson and his Assistant District Attorney Mike Davis supposedly never shared with them.
That’s what scares her, she said.
“I trusted Mike and Ken, especially Ken, to present the evidence. Is it about winning cases or is it about finding out the truth? To me, it would be about finding out the truth, but now I wonder. I understand their reputations are on the line. What really bothers me is that everybody is dragging their feet to find out the truth.”
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Anderson made it clear where Michael got the inspiration for his cover-up of the murder: “A Handful of Diamonds,” the 1973 adult movie he’d watched that night about a British jewel thief who robs wealthy women before having sex with them.
Near the end of that first day of trial, Anderson played the first two minutes of the pornographic movie after successfully convincing Judge Lott that it served to reveal Michael’s motive, his “state of mind at the time of the killing.”
Defense attorneys had objected, arguing that such an “inflammatory” piece of evidence would prejudice the jury against Michael from the get-go.
“To suggest that a man will beat a woman to death because he is turned down by a woman is not a fact,” Allison argued. “They’re going to build a mountain out of a molehill on this thing, and this film is going to — it’s going to upset that jury… We don’t want those diversions way off into the ozone that just inflame jurors and keep their mind off the job at hand. That’s what this is.”
Judge Lott ruled with Anderson.
“Now, I think that the fact that this does involve a burglary, that that’s pretty thin on that face of it, but it’s something,” Lott said. “It is some evidence.”
The portion of the movie played in trial shows a thief’s gloved hands stealing diamond jewelry while a naked woman gets out of bed and then walks down the stairs in a sheer nightgown. The scene is interspersed with opening credits that include the profiles of other naked women.
The movie’s plot didn’t include a murder, but juror Lou Bryan recalls how uncomfortable she felt in the courtroom watching just the beginning. In her memory, “it was bizarre how similar it was to what had happened.”
It was a shocking way to end the first day of a weeklong trial, she said.
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There are many things she’s forgotten in the 24 years since Michael’s trial, but Nancy Guenter remembers the bloody pillow.
When prosecutors presented the evidence taken from the crime scene, the white pillow stained with dark crimson splotches was passed around the jury box so everyone could take a good, long look.
Guenter saw it more than any of them. Once done with it, a prosecutor sat it right in front of her chair. She couldn’t help but stare. It was difficult to concentrate on the arguments and testimony with the pillow staring back.
Finally, Judge Lott noticed her condition and had prosecutors move it away.
“It was long enough for me to feel uncomfortable about it,” Guenter said. “I wouldn’t say that that swayed my decision, but it was difficult to see. I remember that.”
Just weeks ago, the now 58-year-old Guenter was packing up her things to move to a new home in Round Rock when she found the Austin American-Statesman article she’d kept for nearly a quarter century.
The front-page photo shows Michael flanked by officers as he’s led out of the courthouse after the jury — Guenter included — convicted him of murder.
She rediscovers the article every few years, and each time the memories boil back to the surface: the photos of Christine Morton lying lifeless in bed, the medical examiner’s time-of-death estimate that proved to her Michael was home when she died, the household items Michael must have stacked neatly on her body so his son wouldn’t see.
She remembers 3-year-old Eric. Guenter’s own son was about the same age when she sat in judgment of Michael.
She’s never had a doubt. Even after Michael’s exoneration last week, Guenter stood by the jury’s decision.
“I would today say that our finding him guilty — I would stand by that decision 100 percent based on the information we were given,” she said. “I can’t regret my decision because it was my job to go into the trial and make a decision based on everything they gave us.”
But now it’s the memories she doesn’t have that trouble her. As Michael’s attorneys unearthed powerful evidence of his innocence this summer, she wonders why she doesn’t remember any of it being presented during trial.
She doesn’t think prosecutors withheld evidence, though. As demanding as the trial was, she left feeling impressed with the whole process and proud that she made an impartial decision.
“Ken Anderson comes across as very professional,” she said. “He does his job well. He doesn’t come across as — he’s not acting or anything like that. He’s doing what needs to be done.”
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To convince the jury that Michael, who’d never committed a crime, was capable of murdering his wife, Anderson needed to show behavior that suggested the potential for violence had already been there, simmering just beneath the surface.
He needed a monster.
The witnesses called to testify about the couple’s relationship gave mixed reviews, but no one ever suggested Michael had been physically rough with Christine. They had their disagreements, but friends and neighbors usually described them as a couple struggling with marital difficulties, not unlike many others.
But there were also a handful of memories of Michael acting strange or standoffish or rude. Anderson weaved those conflicts together to present Michael to the jury as a cold, remorseless killer who resented Christine for making more money and withholding sex.
Michael’s attorneys called it “character assassination.” Anderson said it was based on his interviews.
“The best I’ve heard this marriage characterized is loud, and I really don’t expect they’re going to try to convince the jury or anybody else that they sat around kissing and hugging on each other all day long,” Anderson said.
When he called the Mortons’ next-door neighbor Elizabeth Gee as one of his first witnesses, she told the courtroom that Michael and Christine argued with each other at least a couple of times every week, often about what to do with their house and yards.
She believed that Michael didn’t like the flowers his wife had planted. Two days after the funeral, she saw Michael weed-eating down the front-yard marigolds and the bushes his wife had planted in the back.
And at the funeral, when Michael leaned in to embrace Gee, he said one word in her ear: “S—t.”
Gee described the other curse words Michael would use around Christine and in front of children from the neighborhood. When Michael cursed at her, calling her a “b—h,” Christine would say, “Oh, don’t mind him.”
The neighbor also related a story from Eric’s third birthday, when Christine hired a performer to entertain the children as Big Bird from Sesame Street. But it upset Eric. As Michael held his crying son, he turned to Christine and said, “Pay the b—h and get her the f—k out of here.”
Anderson also attempted to ask her about a time when she’d seen Michael kick Christine’s dog.
It was relevant to the trial because “it makes him more likely to kill his wife,” Anderson said. Judge Lott sustained an objection from Michael’s attorneys against introducing that story to jurors.
Christine’s boss Susan Dayhuff also spoke in court. The two had worked together at an Austin branch of Allstate Life Insurance. Susan and her husband William Dayhuff had eaten dinner with the Mortons a couple times.
“There were times when we had real good times, there were times they were getting along and I was getting along with my husband, there was times I was fighting with mine and they were fighting, but not anything abnormal,” Susan said.
And when Michael’s attorneys called his friend David Marshall to the stand, Anderson forced him to acknowledge that he’d also heard Michael call his wife a “b—h.”
Marshall, who’d known the Mortons for four years, said the comments were always made “jokingly, just to get her attention or something like that.”
At Anderson’s urging, he told how Michael joked in front of other guys about wanting more sex from Christine. He would not describe Michael as verbally cruel to his wife, as Anderson implied.
“That was just the way they were,” Marshall said. “It was done in fun. It wasn’t done in abuse as far as I could perceive."
And when Holly Gersky testified about Michael’s “innuendoes,” she told attorneys she’d heard the same expletives, though she’d never believed it could lead to violence. She also said that Christine and Michael had rented adult movies together before Michael’s birthday.
In seven and a half years of knowing Christine and Michael, she never saw any violence between them.
Perhaps the most damning testimony came from the investigators who first met Michael the day his wife was murdered. Officer Mike Lock and Sheriff Boutwell both portrayed Michael as flippant and unemotional when he arrived on the crime scene.
Jurors would recall how “unemotional” Michael was during trial, but it’s clear that Michael cried at least four times: when Anderson read the note he’d left for Christine, when prosecutors showed the photos taken of her face and body, when Anderson accused him of killing her, and when the jury read his conviction for murder.
But when Anderson asked the jury to sentence Michael to life in prison, he told them Michael had never really cried for Christine.
“Those tears were for himself as they have been all the way through this trial,” he said. “That’s the only person he cared about.”
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Mary Pevehouse hadn’t kept up with the news about Michael Morton’s case. She hadn’t thought about it in years.
So the night after the Sun called to ask for an interview last month, she couldn’t fall asleep for hours because of the flashback that came roaring back to consciousness: Christine Morton’s bloody face.
It had been a long time, and until that day she had forgotten all about it.
Maybe for good reason. The trial was especially rough on her. By the time it was over, she was so stressed she had a rash all over her body. She couldn’t watch bloody movies for a long time afterwards.
The prosecutors were so good at their jobs that Pevehouse, now 63, felt like she had been there in the room when it happened, she said.
“He must have really hated her a lot. Nobody deserves to die like that.”
Judge Lott told jurors they would never again experience a trial like this one. Pevehouse already knew she would never want to be in any murder trial ever again.
Like the other jurors, she felt convinced by the medical examiner’s time-of-death estimate that put Michael at home when Christine died. She believed Anderson’s story that he killed her because she refused to have sex with him.
Pevehouse, who couldn’t be reached after Michael’s exoneration, said last month that all of that was proved during trial.
She believed Ken Anderson when he insinuated that Michael’s anger was the result of years of pent-up bitterness that his wife was more successful than him and made more money than he did.
“To me, it did not happen that night. It was building up over time. He felt inferior to her. It probably used to really get to him and he started hating her, I guess. He’s lucky he got life.”
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Christine Morton had died as the result of eight crushing blows to her head, Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo told the courtroom. And she died before 1:15 a.m. the morning of August 13, 1986 — more than four hours before Michael said he left for work.
To jurors, Bayardo was a trusted, competent expert. And now they had evidence putting Michael at the crime scene.
During eight years as the medical examiner, he’d completed 6,800 autopsies for more than 20 Central Texas counties
So when Bayardo testified that Christine died before 1:15 a.m., the jury believed him, even when defense attorneys presented five medical textbooks, two case studies and two other pathologists that all contradicted his opinion.
Christine had died with three ounces of semi-digested mushrooms, olives, squash and tomatoes in her stomach from her celebratory birthday dinner with Michael. They paid for the meal around 9:15 p.m.
Bayardo based his opinion on those facts. When Allison read forensic textbooks stating that the rate of digestion varies too much from person to person to accurately estimate time of death, the medical examiner agreed, yet stood by his estimate, anyway.
ALLISON: Is it important in determining the rate of emptying of the human stomach whether or not the meal eaten was large, medium or small?
BAYARDO: Oh, yes.
ALLISON: Do you know or have any idea how much the meal that Chris Morton ate weighed?
BAYARDO: No, sir.
Later, Allison and White called two forensic experts to testify against Bayardo — Bexar County Medical Examiner Vincent DiMaio and private sector expert Linda Norton, who’d led the exhumation and identification of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1981.
DiMiao said Bayardo’s estimate was unlikely. Norton said it was incorrect, and added that Christine could have died as late as 9 a.m.
“Great caution is advised in terms of going into a courtroom and being extraordinarily dogmatic about a specific time of death,” she said. “This is probably the least accurate thing that forensic sciences does in the modern time.”
Bayardo had also changed his estimate. When he finished Christine’s autopsy two days after the murder, he said she died between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., which would give a half-hour window for someone else to kill Christine while Michael was at work. Initially, investigators told Bayardo that Christine had eaten her last meal around 10:30 p.m.
When Anderson told Bayardo they finished dinner at 9:15 p.m., he revised the time-of-death.
“I might have made that statement, but when I made that statement, I didn’t know all of the facts,” Bayardo said.
Norton said she couldn’t reconcile the two estimates. They didn’t follow a consistent formula. The first was a five-hour window and the second was a four-hour window. That just didn’t make sense to her, she said.
Yet Anderson swayed jurors by pointing out that Norton and DiMaio were paid by the defense to testify. During cross-examination, he asked Norton to describe in detail how much she was being paid to provide her professional opinion.
On the stand, Bayardo reiterated that his time-of-death estimate wasn’t “a scientific statement,” but derived from his experience. Yet his seemingly contradictory testimony — that the estimate was not scientific but based on science — had Anderson’s convincing support.
During closing arguments, Anderson would tell the jury six times that medical science proved Michael guilty of killing his wife. He said that Norton and DiMaio didn’t act like scientists because they were paid for the work instead of actively seeking out “the truth.”
“The problem the defense has with Dr. Bayardo… they have to go all out because if they lose on that one, their client is going to be convicted,” he said. “They’ve got to go berserk on that because medical science shows this defendant killed his wife.”
Reached at home this week, Bayardo said that was an inflation of his testimony.
“It wasn’t accurate,” he said, adding that stomach contents are just not a reliable way to determine time of death. “It’s not a scientific way of doing things. It’s always been like that. There’s no change. It’s not perceived as reliable by medical examiners.”
If it’s not reliable, then why testify?
Because they asked me to, Bayardo said.
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Pubic hairs in Christine’s hand, a semen stain on the bed sheet, a billy club in Michael’s truck — these were the final pieces of Anderson’s story, the ones that would complete his portrait of a sex-crazed killer.
The district attorney called upon crime scene analysts with the Texas Department of Public Safety to testify about their examination of evidence from the Mortons’ bedroom.
He brought in serologist Donna Stanley about the semen near Christine’s hand. She said forensic testing showed cells from the fluid matched Michael’s blood type and that it could be the result of ejaculation and not intercourse. It’s impossible to say how long the stain had been there, she added.
Then Anderson called Juan Rojas, who worked with trace evidence.
Of the three hairs found in Christine’s hand, microscopic analysis matched one to Michael’s pubic hair. Rojas also testified that hairs found in Michael’s truck bed matched Christine’s head and pubic hairs.
The picture was complete.
Combined with the pornographic movie, the unopened condom found in the living room and the note left by Michael telling Christine he felt “hurt and unwanted” when she turned down sex, the prosecutors had set the stage and it wasn’t pretty.
After beating his wife to death in a rage fueled by sexual frustration, Michael completed his revenge by masturbating over her body, Anderson told the jury.
“And I’m sorry about what the defendant did. I wish I hadn’t had to tell you, but he created the facts. And that sperm stain where it is, and that pubic hair where it was showed what he did. And it’s gross and it’s sickening and I don’t know how to describe it. But that’s what he did.”
Anderson never argued that the case against Michael wasn’t based purely on circumstantial evidence. That was clear.
But at the end of the trial, when the district attorney pieced together all of the evidence for the jury, he placed each one within the context of that blood-curdling story. He told them Bayardo’s testimony amounted to hard, scientific proof.
He radiated absolute confidence it all amounted to certainty beyond a reasonable doubt that Michael had brutally murdered his wife.
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Michael’s attorneys didn’t just sit and watch.
They had their own narrative of what happened to Christine. But whenever they successfully cast a shadow of doubt on Michael’s guilt, Anderson effortlessly squashed any remaining uncertainty among the jurors, they said later.
First, Allison and White argued that it shouldn’t be surprising to find Michael’s semen and pubic hair in his own marriage bed.
Then they called botany professor Theodore Delevoryas to confirm that woodchips found in Christine’s hair didn’t match the ones found in Michael’s pickup — an attempt to combat Anderson’s insinuation that Michael had killed his wife with the billy club he kept in his truck.
The attorneys introduced photos of the footprint found in the backyard and pointed to the unidentified prints from the crime scene.
Since they never made an opening argument, it wasn’t until the last day of trial that Morton’s attorneys fully articulated their own theory: an unknown intruder crept up from the wooded area behind the house, entered through the unlocked sliding glass door and killed Christine. Then he’d left the same way, escaping to a nearby home construction site.
Allison understood that was a fantastic thing for jurors to believe.
“What it contemplates is random violence,” he said. “What we want to think, what we’re eager to think, is that must be domestic violence, because you and I both know that if we contemplate what else it could be, it could scare us to death because what that means is that … you and me and the people out here, we aren’t necessarily safe in our own homes.”
In the end, it seemed to make no difference. It just seemed more likely that it would be an angry husband than an arbitrary killing, jurors said. Why would a random murderer stack a comforter, suitcase and laundry hamper on top of Christine’s body? Why wouldn’t he have stolen more valuables? Why weren’t there any blood trails out of the house or even bloodstains found outside the bedroom?
Just too many questions left unanswered.
Why would Michael, a man with no criminal history, suddenly murder his wife of seven years?
“I think it’s as possible as the man who jumped over the fence,” juror Nancy Guenter said. “Either one is possible. I think the prosecutors proved his sexual rage more than the defense proved that somebody jumped over the fence. In my head, there was not one doubt.”
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The silence required of jurors prevented him from talking to anyone about the trial, not even his wife, so Mark Landrum ended each day journaling about what he’d experienced, what he thought was important, what he couldn’t understand.
He was a 26-year-old Round Rock resident working at a computer company in Austin when he received the summons for jury duty.
When he first walked into the courtroom and saw 100 potential jurors, he somehow knew immediately that he’d be picked, that he would serve. But it wouldn’t be easy.
“It was incredibly horrible,” he said. “It engulfed me for that time period.”
He dug up the journal a month ago when new DNA evidence strongly suggested the man he’d sent to prison was actually innocent. Shocked, Landrum wanted to find out what he could have missed. Maybe the journal had a clue.
What he found convinced him that he and the other 11 jurors had made the right decision, even though Michael has now been released from prison an innocent man.
The case hadn’t weighed on Landrum over the years because he’d always felt that way. At trial, Michael seemed so detached and disingenuous and the defense witnesses so unconvincing. The prosecution, on the other hand, methodically stacked each piece of circumstantial evidence together until it seemed a tower of evidence overshadowed Michael’s claims of innocence.
“The only thing the defense could do was try to poke holes and say, ‘there was really nothing concrete here.’ They just couldn’t come up with enough to create that reasonable doubt.”
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The final two days of trial didn’t go well for Michael.
Defense attorneys asked him to recount his childhood in Los Angeles, his teenage years in Kilgore and college life in Nacogdoches, his fidelity to Christine and the difficulty of their marriage once Eric was born.
But it was Anderson’s searing cross-examination that jurors would remember as one of the most incriminating, dramatic moments of the trial. The prosecutor forced Michael to repeat certain behaviors in the days following Christine’s murder: when he slept in his marriage bed with blood still underneath the mattress and when he posed for a newspaper photo two days after her death. He forced Michael to acknowledge that he asked Christine’s boss about how to collect her $132,000 life insurance policy a week after the funeral.
Then he tried to compel a confession with a battery of questions.
ANDERSON: Isn’t it a fact that you did go in there and you did take that club in there?
MICHAEL: No, I didn’t.
ANDERSON: You took that club and you beat her?
MICHAEL: No.
ANDERSON: And you beat her?
MICHAEL: No.
ANDERSON: And you beat her?
MICHAEL: No.
ANDERSON: When you were done beating her, what were you wearing to bed?
MICHAEL: I didn’t beat her.
ANDERSON: What were you wearing to bed?
MICHAEL: Nothing.
ANDERSON: Nothing on? And when you got done beating her, you masturbated?
MICHAEL: No.
ANDERSON: With her dead body there, that’s how your pubic hair ended up on her hand?
MICHAEL: No.
ANDERSON: And you took your dead wife’s blood while you were beating her and splattered it on your little boy’s picture, didn’t you?
MICHAEL: No.
ANDERSON: Pass the witness.
The next day was closing arguments.
Jurors said Allison, the defense attorney who Michael would later praise for always believing in his innocence, sowed a seed of doubt.
Allison asked them to consider the handful of notes that Sheriff Boutwell said comprised his entire investigation and the statements he claimed Michael made but never documented. Allison asked them to consider the unidentified fingerprints in the bedroom and on the sliding glass door.
He asked them to consider how a random killer could have quickly stolen the handgun for protection during his getaway and covered Christine’s body with the comforter and other items to give himself more time before someone found the body. After all, it took Elizabeth Gee three searches to notice something was wrong.
And Allison asked them to consider Michael’s completely normal attitude when he went to work that morning and he asked them to forgive his seemingly callous behavior in the days afterward.
“We don’t convict people because they don’t act the way we think they should act.”
For a moment, several jurors remember being moved by that speech. But Anderson’s rebuttal crushed that seed before it had any time to germinate.
The jury took less than two hours to decide they would convict Michael Morton of first-degree murder. And because they ate lunch before reading the verdict, they actually only discussed Michael’s case for a little over an hour, according to jury foreman Mark Landrum.
There was an immediate consensus, he said. In an initial ballot, 11 of the 12 men and women voted guilty. It didn’t take long before it was unanimous. After another emotional powerhouse of a speech from Anderson, they sentenced Michael to life in prison.
“The defendant took that life, and he splattered blood on the picture of his little boy, and I just don’t know how to argue beyond that,” Anderson had told them. “He is remorseless. He is amoral. He is beyond any hope. He is beyond any understanding. He is beyond comprehension.”
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Of the three most important pieces of forensic evidence used in Michael’s trial — the time-of-death estimate, the pubic hair and the semen stain — only one was accurate.
Subsequent DNA testing proved that the pubic hair in Christine’s hand was Michael’s, but when his attorneys had the semen stain reexamined more than 20 years later, the test found cells from Christine as well, proving conclusively that the stain was the result of intercourse, not masturbation.
As for time of death, Christine couldn’t have died when Bayardo said she did because DNA tests ultimately linked another man to the crime. A man who likely dropped or cast aside the blue bandanna with his blood — and the blood and hair of Christine — along the exact path defense attorneys originally claimed a random murderer could have traveled to escape notice.
Today, Michael is represented by the Innocence Project of New York and a Houston law firm that took up his case at Allison’s request.
They say his wrongful imprisonment wasn’t just a tragic mistake. It was the result of prosecutors who engineered a conviction by withholding evidence.
Sgt. Don Wood had received compelling leads that didn’t leave the closely guarded files of the sheriff’s office until more than 20 years after the trial.
Nancy Guenter, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mark Landrum, Mary Pevehouse and Lou Bryan — they believed in Ken Anderson and Mike Davis. They believed they’d been given all the tools they needed to be just, to be fair.
Now they want answers.
Because if prosecutors really provided all of the evidence, then the jury will feel the burden of the mistake, Landrum said after Michael’s release from prison last week.
“I wish we had known. That’s all I can say. Now we’ll all be weighed with this for the rest of our lives. There just wasn’t anything there other than guilt with what we were presented.”
As for Michael, he never stopped protesting his innocence.
The jury read his verdict. The jury sentenced him to life in prison. The judge asked if he had anything left to say.
“Your honor, I didn’t do this. That’s all I can say. I didn’t do this.”
He’d spent the next 25 years in a Texas prison trying to prove it.
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