Until proven innocent — Part 3: The Aftermath
By ANDREW McLEMORE
Both families cried the day Michael Morton was sentenced to life in prison, if for different reasons.
After a Williamson County jury convicted Morton of murdering his wife, Rita Kirkpatrick left the Georgetown courtroom in tears. She’d seen justice done when they convicted her son-in-law of killing her daughter — the beautiful, blue-eyed Christine Morton.
“It’s over, it’s finally over,” she said. “They didn’t bring my daughter back, but it’s over. Now I can let her die.”
Christine’s father Jack Kirkpatrick told a newspaper before the trial that his entire family was convinced of Michael’s guilt. As bailiffs led Michael out of the courtroom, he turned to his father-in-law and said in a soft voice, “I swear to God, Jack, I didn’t do it.”
Michael’s mother sobbed quietly. His father was in shock. Michael said his family had been “financially wiped out” paying for his defense attorneys.
They still believed their son was innocent, but now the trial was over. Pat and Billy Morton’s son would be sent off to a Texas prison, likely for the rest of his life.
“I just hope whoever did it doesn’t get into somebody else’s family and ruin it the way they did ours,” Billy Morton said.
That’s exactly what may have happened.
Less than a year after the trial, 34-year-old Debra Baker was found murdered 12 miles from the Morton home. Both women had been beaten to death in their bedrooms, Christine by eight blows to the head and Baker by six.
But Austin police never made an arrest in the Baker murder. Decades went by and they reported no new leads.
Not, that is, until DNA evidence this year proved Michael innocent and linked another man to his wife’s murder. Further DNA testing tied that man to the Baker case.
There has been no arrest yet. The investigation is ongoing and police have not released the suspect’s name. But even as Michael continued to protest his innocence in the days after his trial, he issued a warning that now sounds like a prophecy:
“People out there should know that there’s a very brutal killer still out there.”
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A month after his conviction, Michael’s defense attorneys filed a motion demanding a new trial.
They claimed Williamson County prosecutors violated Michael’s basic rights by withholding evidence that suggested someone else could have killed his wife. Attorneys never received any of the evidence collected by Sgt. Don Wood, who initially called himself the chief investigator of the Morton murder but didn’t testify at trial.
Michael’s attorneys based their motion on a comment that Assistant District Attorney Mike Davis, who prosecuted Michael under District Attorney Ken Anderson, allegedly made to the jury immediately after the verdict.
“Mr. Mike Davis… told the jury that Sgt. Wood’s reports were sizeable (he held up his hand and indicated about one inch between his fingers) and that if the defense had gotten them, we would have been able ‘to raise even more doubt than we did,’” defense attorney Bill Allison said in the court document.
Jury foreman Mark Landrum said he remembers his surprise at Davis’ comment. He asked about the other evidence, but the prosecutors “didn’t really go into more detail.”
The motion didn’t make a difference, anyway. Michael never got a new trial.
His attorneys had complained before his conviction that prosecutors hadn’t turned over all the evidence.
To assure them their client was being fairly prosecuted, Judge William Lott ruled that all documents from the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office investigation be handed over to him in a sealed file and he’d decide if there was anything else defense attorneys had the legal right to see.
The judge didn’t find any. The trial moved forward and the sealed file remained off limits to Morton’s attorneys.
It wasn’t until 2008 that Michael’s new set of defense attorneys finally gained access through an open records request to evidence that his trial lawyers had never seen — evidence that did, in fact, cast doubt on his guilt.
That still wasn’t enough to free him.
But in August of this year, after DNA testing decisively proved Michael’s innocence, attorneys once again pointed to that evidence and asked the same disturbing questions.
Davis told the Sun on August 23 that he and Anderson had handed everything over to Judge Lott, including an interview of Rita Kirkpatrick, who said the Mortons’ 3-year-old son Eric had witnessed a “monster” who wasn’t “Daddy” murdering his mother.
The judge had already determined that evidence wasn’t exculpatory, or relevant to the defense, Davis said.
“That [interview] was after Mr. Morton had his son in custody for several weeks. How would you get that into evidence? That’s hearsay,” Davis said. “If Ken Anderson had any exculpatory evidence, he would have turned it over. He is a man of absolute honor and integrity, in my opinion.”
After 24 years, the sealed file was finally opened last month — and the interview of Christine’s mother wasn’t inside. Neither was any of the other evidence discovered in files at the sheriff’s office.
Prosecutors are required by law to hand over any exculpatory evidence to the defense, regardless of whether or not they believe in its veracity. If the additional evidence wasn’t in that file, that means Lott never had the chance to rule on it, defense attorneys never had the chance to review it and jurors never had the chance to consider it.
Michael’s attorneys will wrap up an investigation into the actions of Anderson and Davis next month. During a brief legal dispute this month over the attorneys’ right to continue scrutinizing the case, Michael said he’d be willing to go back to prison just to make sure the investigation is completed.
He’d already been wrongfully imprisoned for 25 years.
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Yes, Michael chopped down his dead wife’s marigolds.
As the Mortons’ neighbor Elizabeth Gee had testified during trial, Michael and Christine had previously fought about whether to plant the flowers in their garden. At some point in the weeks after her murder, Michael cut them down.
But that wasn’t because he had brutally murdered her and was now trying to erase all trace of her memory, as prosecutors hinted at trial.
He was a single father trying to sell the house, get the most money possible and move into a new home with his son. A real estate broker suggested he mow down the flowerbed for a better price.
“They were already brown and dying anyway, or already dead, so I cut them down and put plastic and bark chips out there to get the house presentable,” Michael said. “The marigolds were not anything I connected with Chris.”
Gee’s account of the mowed-down marigolds was just one of the pieces of character evidence that Michael never had the chance to explain during trial. So when newspaper reporters came to interview him in the Williamson County Jail, he was only too willing to finally tell his side of the story.
He continued to maintain his innocence and insisted that the jury’s guilty verdict was the result of an emotionally charged trial. It “bowled him over” when all but one member of the jury were willing to find him guilty in the first five minutes of deliberation, as the jury foreman said after trial.
He’d seen in the news that Williamson County juries were tough, that the county had higher conviction rates and longer sentences. But he still thought his trial would be different. After all, it was a “straightforward” trial with no hard evidence.
“I’ve always had a basic faith in the system and I was really surprised by those people,” he told the Sun days after his 1987 conviction. “If I had to base a case on gruesome pictures and pointed fingers and questionable medical testimony, I would think long and hard before I made a five-minute decision.”
He was surprised the jury could believe he would brutally murder his wife, leave his son alone without anyone to give him his medication, which he needed after the open-heart surgery from six weeks before, and then act perfectly normal all day.
“You’d have to be out to lunch,” he said.
And then there was the evidence never presented during trial.
Michael said his son Eric had told family members that he’d seen the murderer, a “bad man with a big tummy” and “the guy in the shower with his clothes on.”
Attorneys called that hearsay and it wasn’t brought up at his trial, Michael said. Neither was the bloody bandanna found by a family member 100 yards from the Mortons’ home.
The evidence Anderson showed at trial shocked jurors into their decision by manipulating their emotions, not by presenting convincing evidence, Michael told the Hill Country News.
He pointed to the pubic hairs found in Christine’s hand and the blood-curdling insinuations that went with them, as an example of the circumstantial evidence that was blown out of proportion.
“If there’s not pubic hairs in a bed where your wife and you are, I don’t know where else they would more likely be,” he said.
And although investigators had told Michael the killer had to be someone who knew the family because of “the way the scene looked,” he couldn’t imagine anyone with a grudge against Christine.
“I can’t tie this in to any of our friends or acquaintances at all. I’ve got to think it was somebody that we don’t know,” he said.
Anderson talked to the newspapers, too. Once again, he countered Michael’s pleas of innocence with his version of events — the version jurors believed.
Despite Michael’s claims that Eric may have seen the murder, he couldn’t have testified anyway because children younger than 5 years old “aren’t considered competent witnesses.”
Besides, Michael was found guilty based on “overwhelming evidence.” A life sentence, Anderson said, was “better than he deserved.”
“His wife wouldn’t do exactly what he wanted when he wanted, so he killed her — he’s probably still mad at her for making him kill her. That’s why he chopped down the marigolds she had planted.”
In the end, Michael’s unwavering protests didn’t make a difference. He acknowledged that he no longer had a choice. Dreading a life spent in a Texas prison, he was asked by the Sun what made him want to go on.
Michael couldn’t find an answer. He missed his wife “terribly.” He was worried about what would happen to his little boy.
“I don’t want him to be used as a pawn between the in-laws and my family. I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen to him. I’m scared and worried. I want him to stay close to both grandparents and live with my parents because they have the traditional family environment both parents at home.”
It didn’t happen.
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After nearly a year-long legal battle, Michael Morton’s sister-in-law Mary Lee Kirkpatrick gained custody of Eric.
Judge Lott, who’d presided over Michael’s trial, made the ruling. And Davis, who left the DA’s office for private practice within days of the trial, represented Mary Lee.
Michael had wanted his parents, Billy Morton, 54, and Patricia Morton, 51, to take care of Eric after his conviction, but Lott granted temporary custody to Mary Lee within three weeks of the trial. The judge also ruled that Michael would not be allowed to see his son until it was settled who would get full custody.
One day later, Michael was transferred from the Williamson County Jail to his new home in Huntsville.
Aware of the custody battle over his son, Michael wrote two letters to Judge Lott from his cell, pleading for visitation rights with Eric. He wrote the second letter on April 29, 1987:
Your honor,
I will make this brief. I know you are a busy man. On October 5, I will be standing before you again. This time my sister-in-law, Mary Lee Kirkpatrick, will be trying to prevent me from ever seeing my son again. You have signed an order requiring me NOT to see my son until I appear before you — at which time the final decision will be made.
I am asking you to let my son and I see each other one time, for the following reasons:
1) the “innocent until proven guilty” concept
2) my son has lost his mother also
3) the length of time between your order and the trial date
4) the psychological good can come from this one surviving parent
5) I am innocent of the crime of murder!
Please, Judge, I beg this one request.
Thank You Very Much
I await your reply,
Michael Morton
#445394
Wynne Unit
Huntsville, TX 77349
It worked.
Whether it was the letters or something else, Judge Lott ultimately granted Michael two visits with his son each year. His parents didn’t get full custody of the boy, but were given one weekend a month with him as well as four weeks during the summer. They also got some time with him at Christmas and on spring break.
At the time, Mary Lee Kirkpatrick was an unmarried 26-year-old living in Houston with her mother. Rita and Jack Kirkpatrick were still married, but Jack lived in Pasadena, where he ran his real estate business.
Davis said at the time that Mary Lee and Rita would take care of Eric.
Judge Lott said the initial custody decision was hard to make because both the Kirkpatricks and the Mortons were “good and sincere people.”
For about 10 years, Christine’s family escorted Eric on visits to see his father. Mary Lee eventually got married and had children of her own.
At some point, maybe 10 years after the trial, Mary Lee called up juror Mark Landrum.
She was calling jurors to thank them for the job they did, Landrum said. They talked about the trial and they talked about Eric.
“We had about a 30-minute conversation,” the juror recalls. “I got the feeling she didn’t feel there was any question about our decision.”
As Eric grew older, Michael began to sense that his son was uncomfortable visiting him at prison. He noticed that Eric appeared torn between his father in prison and the new family that brought him there.
Then, when Eric was a young teenager, he wrote Michael a letter asking if he could discontinue the visits. Michael had the legal right to keep seeing his son until he turned 18. He could have refused.
But he didn’t.
“Although it was extremely difficult for me to lose contact with my son, on our next visit, I told him that I would respect his wishes,” Michael said in a 2004 court affidavit. “I have not had contact with my son since that time.”
When Eric turned 18, the mother he had known for most of his life, now Mary Lee Olson, officially adopted him.
He changed his name from Eric Michael Morton to Eric John Olson.
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In Huntsville, as in most Texas prisons, each cell houses two inmates.
The average cell is about 70 square feet, including a bunk bed, toilet, sink and writing table.
The inmates must rise each day at 3:30 a.m. and eat breakfast an hour later. Work assignments begin at 6 a.m. and continue until lunch at 10 a.m. Then they report back to their jobs, which can be cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry or general maintenance.
Dinner is at 4 p.m. Afterward, the prisoners can take classes, watch some television, play basketball, a few other things. Rack-up time is about 10 p.m. The cell doors close. The inmates sleep. They wake up and start again.
Michael would stay in this prison and others like it from March of 1987 until early this month, when he was released from a Williamson County courtroom.
For the nearly 25 years from his first day in a Texas prison until that moment, Michael seized every opportunity to fight for a chance at freedom.
He knew he would be inside for at least a year. It would take at least that long for the Third Court of Appeals to make a decision on his case.
His attorneys told him he had a good chance of winning, and in his first appeal, Michael’s lawyers argued that the trial evidence used to convict him was insufficient to prove his guilt, other evidence was obtained illegally without a search warrant, and the inflammatory evidence — like the X-rated adult movie — was just for shock value, sowing prejudice against him from the start.
In the brief Anderson filed with the appeals court, he calls the evidence against Michael “overwhelming.”
Even without the time-of-death estimate that put Michael at home when his wife was murdered, Anderson argued the other circumstantial evidence was enough to convict him: the pubic hair found in Christine’s hand, the semen stain on the bedsheet, the nightgown pulled up around her waist, the unopened condom left on the floor and Michael’s note suggesting they’d fought about sex.
In December 1988, the appeals court agreed, affirming the conviction. The court also ignored Michael’s complaint that Sgt. Don Wood hadn’t turned over all his notes on the investigation.
“Because we have nothing more to consider than a mere possibility raised by Morton, we reject this complaint,” the court said in its opinion.
Michael stayed in prison.
He then petitioned the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state, to ask for another review of his case. Michael was denied in 1989. Less than a year later, he filed his first writ of habeas corpus, a legal petition to free someone from prison based on claims of innocence.
In that brief, he requested DNA testing of the semen found on the bedsheet, hoping to find evidence of another man, another killer. The request was approved in 1991, but the new test showed Michael was the source of the semen.
It also proved something else. A forensic expert had testified at trial that the semen stain was likely the result of male ejaculation, but the test showed she’d been wrong.
The stain included traces of vaginal fluid, meaning the stain was the result of consensual intercourse — not masturbation.
That capsized Anderson’s implication at trial that Michael had masturbated over his wife’s body after beating her to death — a keystone of his theory that sexual frustration motivated Michael to kill Christine.
It still wasn’t enough. District Judge Billy Ray Stubblefield ruled the tests inconclusive on Michael’s claims of innocence.
Not giving up, Michael filed two more petitions in 1992 for further DNA testing of other evidence from the crime scene. He was twice denied.
He’d run out of options. He stayed in prison.
It was another eight years before the Innocence Project of New York, already famous for finding wrongfully convicted inmates and winning their freedom, began looking into Michael’s case at the request of his trial lawyer Bill Allison in 2000.
It took a further five years for the Innocence Project to find a pro bono attorney, John Raley of Houston law firm Raley and Bowick, and file a motion requesting DNA testing of all the remaining physical evidence taken from the 1986 crime scene.
After DNA testing became available in the early 90s, Texas saw seven men exonerated by the start of the new century. The legislature took action in 2001, passing a law that eased the process for inmates seeking to prove their innocence. Including Michael, there have now been 45 DNA-based exonerations.
In 2005, Michael’s new lawyers asked for testing of everything: hair from the marriage bed and Michael’s truck bed, vaginal, oral and rectal swabs from Christine as well as scrapings taken from her fingernails, her nightgown, the bloody bandanna and hair from the bandanna.
They also asked to test evidence from the unsolved 1980 murder of Mildred McKinney for comparison. McKinney was found beaten to death a mile from the Mortons’ home at a strikingly similar crime scene.
By the time of this latest attempt to win Michael’s freedom, John Bradley had become the district attorney for Williamson County after the governor appointed Ken Anderson a district court judge in 2002.
Bradley argued against releasing any of the Morton evidence for testing, but Judge Stubblefield agreed in 2006 to the DNA tests requested by Michael’s attorneys — excluding the bandanna and anything from the McKinney crime scene.
In March 2008, the finished tests provided little new information about the Morton murder with one exception: Michael was still a possible source of the hairs found in Christine Morton’s right hand.
Stubblefield ruled the tests inconclusive.
Michael would stay in prison.
Months after Stubblefield’s ruling, Michael and his attorneys appealed to a higher court for tests of the bandanna and McKinney evidence. Again, Bradley’s office tried to deny testing, arguing that the bandanna was unrelated to the Morton case because it wasn’t found by investigators and largely ignored during trial.
It took nearly two years for Michael to get a decision, but this time — more than two decades after it affirmed his original conviction — the Third Court of Appeals came down on his side, overturning Judge Stubblefield’s denial of testing.
The appeals court still didn’t allow access to the McKinney evidence, but the bandanna was finally within Michael’s grasp.
Orchid Cellmark, a Dallas laboratory, released the results of the test in June of this year. Christine’s blood and hair were found on the bandanna. So was the blood of another man who had felony convictions in at least four states who had lived near the Morton home at the time of the murder.
The tests found no trace of Michael.
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The bandanna had always been a subject of debate.
At trial, it was discussed only once. Attorneys argued over its admissibility outside the hearing of the jury.
Morton’s lawyers said they would try to establish the bandanna’s authenticity before entering it as evidence, but that never happened. Prosecutors dismissed it as most likely irrelevant to the case.
Of the many extraordinary events surrounding this strange piece of evidence, one leaps out: it seems unlikely, if not outright impossible, that Michael would ever have been freed from prison if not for Christine’s older brother.
For reasons that remain unclear, John Kirkpatrick explored the area around Christine’s home the day after her murder. At a home construction site on Amanda Street, separated from the back of the house by about 100 yards of wooded land, he found a bloody blue bandanna on the curb and a paper napkin in the garage.
Both had bloodstains. The next day, Kirkpatrick contacted the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office and gave investigators a plastic bag containing the items.
There were already several problems with this.
First, investigators must maintain a “chain of custody” for all evidence in order to avoid tampering and ensure admissibility in a courtroom. The fact that a family member, and not an investigator, had found and turned over the items was an issue.
And bizarrely, an investigator had searched the same area before Kirkpatrick with very different results.
According to a police report dated the same day as Christine’s murder, a sheriff’s deputy picked up a bandanna in the same place, but discarded it because it “appeared to have been there for an extended period of time” and “was completely free” of blood. He found nothing else at the construction site.
The napkin was never discussed during trial. Though DNA testing wasn’t available in 1987 to determine whose blood was on the bandanna, it might have helped Michael’s defense if his attorneys had been able to introduce it to jurors.
After all, the bandanna fit perfectly with their theory of how Christine could have been murdered by an intruder, even though the crime scene showed no signs of forced entry.
Michael’s original attorneys, Allison and Bill White, insisted that the murderer had likely approached the house from the wooded area, entered through an unlocked sliding glass door in the bedroom, and left the same way.
Kirkpatrick discovered the bandanna on the exact route the attorneys argued a killer could have used to escape unnoticed. The same route that private investigator Ken Bates described at trial.
A nine-year veteran of the Austin Police Department, Bates was hired by the defense to investigate the area surrounding the Morton home. He testified in court that he could easily climb over the six-foot-tall wooden privacy fence around the Morton home and into their backyard.
The wooded area behind the fence was littered with beer bottles, Coke cans, piles of wood and construction materials, an abandoned couch and a camper shell off the back of a pickup truck. It was possible to walk a path through the debris that led directly to the construction site on Amanda Street.
Of course, jurors never heard anything about the bandanna. Even with Bates’ testimony, they thought the attorneys’ story sounded improbable at best. It would be nearly 25 years before the bandanna was unearthed from the county’s evidence lockers and reexamined by modern forensic experts.
To this day, Bates remembers the oddity of the Morton murder and his instinct told him Michael wasn’t the killer.
He still runs his private investigation business in Austin. Reached by phone last month, he said the culprit in a given homicide case is usually obvious from the start. Someone gets mad at someone else and commits murder. Afterwards, it’s easy to tell what happened.
Christine Morton’s case wasn’t like that. She was found in bed under a comforter, suitcase and laundry hamper. He’d never heard of a case where things were stacked on a body like that.
There was virtually nothing stolen. Michael led a normal day at work. His coworkers noticed nothing unusual about his behavior.
When he met Michael in person, he grew more certain.
“When I was working on that case, I believed Michael was innocent. I don’t think I could have worked on it if I didn’t believe that,” he said. “I don’t think you can use intuition during a criminal trial, but that was my perception of it.”
Bates’ intuition — and the guesswork of defense attorneys — turned out to be well-founded.
DNA from the bandanna didn’t only lead investigators on a new trail for the Morton case.
It’s possible the families of two other murdered women may finally see justice because John Kirkpatrick decided to go for a walk the day after his sister was found dead.
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The resemblance to Christine’s murder was striking.
In November 1980, 73-year-old Mildred McKinney was found bludgeoned to death in her bedroom. The brutal killing had left blood spatters across the bed headboard and up to the ceiling.
McKinney was on the floor. A recliner and end table had been stacked on her head and chest, her nightclothes had been pulled up to her neck and there were no signs of forced entry. Police didn’t find a murder weapon and the home had been ransacked.
McKinney lived in Williamson County about a mile from the Morton home.
Unlike Christine, she was also choked and raped with her hands and feet bound by nylon hosiery and telephone cord. She’d received a threatening phone call two months before the murder, according to neighbors at the time. A man called and told her he was “watching her every move,” the neighbor said.
She had been “extremely cautious” after that, but somehow she still ended up dead in a house with an opened sliding glass door.
Then there’s Debra Baker.
On a tip from attorneys working with the Innocence Project, Travis County prosecutors matched the DNA profile on the bandanna to a hair taken from her unsolved murder in January 1988.
It’s unclear if Baker’s body was found with household items stacked on top of her or if investigators discovered any signs of forced entry.
But there are already other reasons to be suspicious. She lived 12 miles from Morton in a North Central Austin subdivision and was killed by six blows to the head. At the time, police said they hadn’t found the murder weapon.
Investigators have never charged a suspect with either murder, though family members of both women have kept hope for years that their loved ones’ killer would be brought to justice.
Especially the daughters.
McKinney’s daughter, Pat Stapleton, supported the efforts of Michael Morton’s attorneys to test the case’s evidence in 2008 for a possible connection. If there were any chance DNA could reveal the identity of the killer, she would take it.
“Nobody should be able to get away with something like that,” she told the Sun three years ago. “Also, I thought because he has gotten away with it once or twice, he probably thinks he can do it again. Or he may have… I keep getting reminders in different ways. I see her picture on the bookshelf all the time. It is just not fair to her.”
Bradley fought against DNA testing of evidence from the McKinney case, successfully arguing that Michael’s attorneys couldn’t establish a substantial link. He mocked the suggestion that DNA tests could lead to the discovery of some “mystery killer.”
“It is just a shame that Michael Morton is using that case for his own personal advantage,” Bradley said at the time. “That is another very superficial way to manipulate the case. Other than the fact that two women were killed, there are really not any distinguishing characteristics.”
With DNA now linking the same man to both Baker and Morton, however, it seems increasingly likely that McKinney’s case is next in line for a renewed investigation.
Caitlin Baker is trying not to “give her hopes up” just yet.
The possibility that her mother’s murder will finally be solved is tantalizing, but she’s wanted that for a long time.
Like Eric Morton, she was three years old when a murderer changed her life.
She tried numerous times over the years to revive interest in the case by calling the Austin Police Department and writing in publications like the Austin Chronicle.
Though she’s still cautious about the new investigation, “it’s incredibly positive” what’s already happened to Michael Morton.
“The way I look at it is that Michael Morton still has a life ahead of him and if we can save that, then that’s pretty much a win-win,” she said.
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On August 24, 1986, Rita Kirkpatrick and 3-year-old grandson Eric Morton spent time alone together for the first time since Christine’s murder 11 days earlier.
When Eric began crying and talking about “Mommie,” Rita realized she was hearing his recollection of the murder and proceeded to write down their conversation.
The same day, she called Sgt. Don Wood to read it to him:
Eric laid his blanket on the floor of my bedroom. He said, ‘Mommie is sleeping in the flowers.’ His dad had told him that last week at the cemetery. Then he kicked the blanket and said, ‘Mommie, get up.’
GRANDMOTHER: Don’t kick Mommie, Eric.
ERIC: Mommie’s crying.
GRANDMOTHER: Why is she crying?
ERIC: Cause the monster’s there.
GRANDMOTHER: What’s he doing?
ERIC: He broke the bed.
GRANDMOTHER: Is Mommie still crying?
ERIC: No, Mommie stopped.
GRANDMOTHER: Then what happened?
To Sgt. Wood: (My heart was in my throat, my stomach was in my toes, but I knew I had to do it. Okay.)
ERIC: The monster throw a blue suitcase on the bed. He’s mad.
GRANDMOTHER: Did the monster hurt Mommie?
ERIC: Yes. Mommie go to hospital.
…
GRANDMOTHER: Did he have on gloves?
ERIC: Yeah, red.
GRANDMOTHER: What did he carry in his red gloves?
ERIC: Basket.
GRANDMOTHER: What was in the basket?
ERIC: Wood.
…
GRANDMOTHER: Where was Daddy, Eric?
To Sgt. Wood: (And this is where ‘Grandmother’ almost died.)
ERIC: No, Mommie and Eric was there.
Rita Kirkpatrick goes on to tell Sgt. Wood to abandon the already growing suspicion that Michael killed Christine and “look for the monster” described by Eric instead.
“I have no more suspicions in my mind that Mike did it,” Rita told him.
In response, Wood suggested to her that Michael might have committed the murder while wearing a scuba diving suit that made him unrecognizable. The sheriff’s deputy was presumably drawing from his knowledge that Michael had such a suit in the garage.
He also instructed her not to allow anyone else talk to Eric about what he’d seen, “’cause they’ll confuse him if they do.”
Defense attorneys obtained a transcript of the interview in 2008, when they won access through an open records request for all sheriff’s office files on the Morton investigation.
The office refused, with the backing of Bradley. But the Texas Attorney General’s Office overruled their objections, requiring them to hand over most of the documents.
What Michael’s attorneys found in those files astounded them.
The interview was only one of several pieces of critical evidence they’d never seen — and neither had Michael’s original attorneys, Allison and White.
Last month, Morton’s attorneys finally received everything, including the remaining documents withheld by the attorney general’s office three years ago.
They again discovered evidence that not only suggested Michael’s innocence, but also leads to another killer that investigators may have never pursued.
Perhaps the most powerful such leads were two messages sent to Sgt. Wood, one about someone using Christine’s credit card two days after her murder and another about a check made out to her name but cashed nine days after her murder.
Both the credit card and the check had been in Christine’s purse, which was never found.
The evidence was new — to everyone except Williamson County prosecutors and investigators. It had all been sitting in the sheriff’s office and district attorney’s office files for 25 years or more.
“During the six years that Mr. Bradley and his deputies tried to block DNA testing on the bandanna, they asserted that such testing could not possibly substantiate Mr. Morton’s third-party-killer theory, despite having undisclosed information in the State’s own files that indicated otherwise,” Houston lawyer John Raley and Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison said in an August motion.
And it’s even more difficult for Michael’s attorneys to believe that Anderson, Davis, and certainly Sheriff Jim Boutwell and Sgt. Wood couldn’t have known about all that evidence by the time of the 1987 trial.
Kirkpatrick called Wood because she knew he was the chief investigator of Christine Morton’s murder. He’d called himself that on numerous occasions, including to the media.
Yet it was Sheriff Boutwell who introduced himself as the case’s chief investigator at trial. The jury never heard from Sgt. Wood, who has turned down attempts to contact him. And though Raley and Morrison believe his absence from trial was part of a deliberate plot to conceal evidence — it’s still not clear why.
It’s only one of many unanswered questions.
Now Michael’s attorneys are investigating his original prosecutors and investigators. With Judge Lott and Sheriff Boutwell dead, they’ve subpoenaed Anderson, Davis and Wood in an attempt to find some answers.
They want to know why evidence that cast doubt on Michael’s guilt was never handed over to the defense, as prosecutors are required by law to do.
They want to know why investigators never pursued leads suggesting another killer could be responsible for Christine’s murder. But within those answers there may be one more question: Have other men and women been sent to prison after Williamson County prosecutors withheld evidence of their innocence?
An innocent man was freed from prison this month, but he and his attorneys continue to search for justice. As Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck said after Michael’s release: The case is far from over.
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Thanks to extraordinary circumstances — not least of which is the possibility that a serial killer may actually be responsible for his wife’s murder — Michael Morton is finally free and living with his parents in Gregg County.
While in prison, he finished the undergraduate degree he’d begun at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches. He also completed a master’s degree in literature from the University of Houston, according to his attorneys.
Now suddenly back outside prison, he is trying to adapt to having a future.
He spent 25 years of his life locked away in a Texas penitentiary for a murder he didn’t commit. His wife is dead. The 3-year-old son he knew in 1987 is now 28. His parents are both within a few years of their 80th birthdays.
He went to prison when Ronald Reagan was president. The Internet was still eight years away. His fingers forgot how to button a shirt.
At the October 4 press conference after his release, attorney John Raley told the story of Michael’s first parole hearing. He’d become eligible for parole in 2007, after 20 years behind bars.
Michael was told informally that if he would simply show remorse for killing his wife, that he would in all likelihood be paroled.
“This man told them: All I have left is my actual innocence. And if I have to spend the rest of my life in prison, I’m not giving that up.”
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