Chris and I liked to laugh, and we were, at times, a bit bawdy. The “Bitch, go get me a beer” line was an example. That was a direct quote from a singularly unimpressive friend of a friend who actually spoke that way to his girlfriend. We said that to each other because it was so ignorant and so awful—it had become a running gag. Chris never got me a beer—or anything else—when I said that. It was, to us, a reminder of our long history, our shared belief that no one should ever be treated that way, a secret laugh that had started when we heard that jerk say it the first time.
As for our late collie—I wished for nothing more desperately than that the old girl was still alive, still prowling our backyard, still protecting Chris and Eric the way she had for years. If Leisha had been at her post on the morning of August 13, no one would have dared enter the yard. She was ferociously loyal to Chris. If I had been as rotten to her as Elizabeth was now claiming, that beautiful old collie would have chewed my leg off a long time ago. And I would have deserved it.
On cross-examination by my team, Elizabeth had to concede that she had never heard me “yell” at Chris, never heard me threaten her, saying only, “Around me, he never threatened his wife.”
She admitted that she had never seen physical violence between us. But I could feel that the damage had been done.
Ken Anderson put a parade of uniformed officers on the stand, sometimes very briefly, just to confirm that they had escorted me to the lab for a blood draw or that they had been present when a hair was plucked from my head. The whole point was to get as many authority figures as possible—in uniform—lined up against me.
It was working like a charm.
There was a great deal of tedious testimony about what we had eaten at dinner the night before and how long it would take a person to digest it, all part of a buildup the prosecution was constructing to turn Chris’s stomach contents into a smoking gun that proved me to be the killer.
Listening to the wrangling over the exact recipes for our dinner entrees, seeing the receipts waved around the courtroom gave my memories of that night a surreal air. Now what we talked about as we ate that meal, how stunning Chris looked, beaming at me across the table, the toast we made to Eric’s burgeoning good health—that last night we shared as a family—it all seemed like it had happened to someone else.
The two teams of attorneys clashed constantly over police notes, reports, and other written materials that had not been turned over to the defense, as the law requires. Ken Anderson would put a witness on the stand and then whip out a document my attorneys and I had never seen. Their exchanges would degenerate into sputtering, extremely personal shouting matches, often ending with my team objecting under the U.S. Constitution, the Texas state constitution and rule 614, and the laws of simple decency and fair play.
I recall Mike Davis petulantly announcing that if my team got a document, then “we’re going to be entitled to see all the things that their little investigators and everybody else has done.” Every discussion of sharing evidence was colored by the prosecution’s clear distaste for me, my attorneys, and the whole notion of cooperating on even the smallest issues.
Once, the judge had to admonish the two teams of lawyers to stop shouting at each other and speak only to him.
Dr. Roberto Bayardo, the chief medical examiner for nearby Travis County, was a devastating witness against me. He was an elegant man with a graceful accent who claimed he had done close to seven thousand autopsies.
His graphic description of Chris’s injuries was the stuff of nightmares. I had seen Chris after she was cleaned up. He had seen her as the killer left her. He told the jury that, on her forehead, there was a “six-inch-long, two-and-a-half-inch-wide cut through which brain, blood, and particles of bone were exuding.” He said her face was so battered, “the color of her eyes could not be made out.” That elicited a whimper from Chris’s mother. He recounted her fractured nose and upper jaw, the way one of her teeth had been knocked out.
He said he had counted eight different blows to her head.
I felt her loss and the horror of her death all over again. The jury would not look at me—or if one of them accidentally caught my eye, they would quickly glance away.
The coup de grâce came when Anderson asked him whether he had an opinion on the time of Chris’s death. He said he did, that “Mrs. Morton died up to four hours from the time of her meal. That would be 1:15 A.M.,” that “based on my experience, I would say no later than 1:15.”
That estimate was a complete turnaround from his earlier opinion, that Chris had probably been killed closer to 6:00 A.M.
This new claim in front of the jury meant her murder had taken place while I was still in the house. My attorneys would skillfully show that his opinion on time of death, his technique for gauging it, his assertion that stomach digestion rate was related to the time of the crime—all of it was completely bogus, pseudo-science hocus-pocus. But it didn’t matter.
I felt the noose tightening around my neck.
Sheriff Boutwell followed soon after, approaching the stand in full mournful cowboy costume and character. He sat down, a lanky, lean lawman with three decades’ experience. And he came off exactly as he hoped—the jury saw him as a serious, dark-eyed soul who carried the awful burden of dealing with the county’s tragedies, protecting the victims from the villains, the good guys from the bad. Boutwell acted as though he was all that stood between the good folks of Williamson County and the kind of horrible fate that Chris had met.
It was up to him to seal the deal in my case. He did not disappoint.
He told the jury that he had met me in the front yard of our home and that I had asked whether Eric was okay, then, as an afterthought, asked about Chris.
“I told him that she was dead,” he intoned. As for my response to the awful news—“there was no particular reaction at all.”
We all think we know how we would react to devastating news. Some of us believe we would cry, others might reason that they would feel faint. Still others believe they would scream and collapse if they were told they’d lost someone they love.
When I learned of Chris’s death, I had collapsed, but not spectacularly there on the lawn. I had fallen apart quickly and quietly, completely on the inside—and that was apparently something the sheriff didn’t accept as a normal reaction.
It was downhill from there. He told the jury about finding two pornographic movies in the living room. He said he had found an almost microscopic amount of very old marijuana, something Chris and I had kept for the past four years but hadn’t gotten around to using.
He told my attorneys that he was the chief investigator on the case, not as we’d been told earlier, Sergeant Don Wood. We would learn years later that he said this to keep Wood’s notes hidden—because they contained information that would have helped my case and hurt the prosecution.
He told the jury that he had wanted to arrest me “within a week” of the murder. When my team objected and said that was irrelevant, the jury was sent out and Ken Anderson spoke to the judge about why they had held off, in the process revealing the inappropriate power equation in Williamson County.
Anderson told the judge and anyone within earshot that he “held off because I wanted to make sure, dadgum sure, everything was right on this case before we went out and arrested this guy. The problem was I didn’t see the pictures to understand what all happened there,” he groveled aloud. “I was being too careful and I hadn’t been at the scene myself, which isn’t going to happen on another murder because I am going to get my rear end out there.”
Suddenly, it became clear why I’d been arrested while Ken Anderson was out of town—Boutwell had made a unilateral decision. He wasn’t going to let this novice prosecutor delay the march of justice—his justice—any longer. And Anderson, an officer of the court, a man who had sworn to head the “search for the truth” in the Williamson County s
ystem of justice, had instead decided to search for approval from the sheriff. The prosecutor simply could not run the risk of pushing back on Boutwell—not if he wanted to keep his powerful job.
I was a pawn in an intramural local law enforcement power play.
Okay, God, I thought, you can stop now. But the universe was not done with me yet.
When Judge Lott ruled that Ken Anderson could show portions of the sex tape I had rented to watch with Chris on my birthday in open court, I felt like I was standing there with my pants down. I felt as though my privates were being examined by a heartless clinician while images of the entire gruesome and unflattering process were projected onto a huge screen in front of everyone. In front of my parents, who sat there through it all—in front of my friends.
The notion of abject humiliation doesn’t begin to capture the moment. In fact, it remains so far beyond anything I have ever experienced or imagined that it still feels impossible for me to relate adequately.
Ken Anderson walked over and popped a tape into a VCR at the front of the courtroom. He hit play, and in a heartbeat my pride, my privacy, my life, my honor, my sense of self all dissolved.
As this minutes-long portion of the tape played, not a word was spoken. No trucks or car horns were heard on the street below. The doors outside the courtroom did not slam as they had throughout the rest of my trial. No phones in the entire courthouse rang. It seemed utterly silent—except for the grunts and groans, the practiced ecstasy of the actors’ cries on the video. Those sounds blocked out everything else.
I sat there hoping for an explosion, a thunderstorm, a masked gunman—anything—to break the moment.
It was like having the way you dance or the way you kiss—or the way you make love—replayed in slow motion and critiqued by a gathering of disgusted and disappointed viewers.
It was excruciating.
There was a l-o-n-g, wordless pause afterward—a threshold had been crossed, a taboo had been broken. We were in uncharted territory. It felt like anything could happen now.
Chris’s murder had rocked me. My arrest was equally unexpected. The media attention was so far out of my sphere of experience that I didn’t know how to handle it. Nothing in my life made sense. There were no longer any rules.
I had just watched part of a porn movie with my mother and father. I had just seen myself reflected in the flickering images that bounced off the stunned jury members’ eyes. And now I heard my attorney calling me to the stand.
I had known this moment was coming. I had looked forward to it and dreaded it, and finally, it was here.
Ken Anderson looked at me with disgust for breathing the same air as the good people of Williamson County.
I walked to the witness stand and took my place. This was it.
It began easily enough, with my lawyers leading me through my life with Chris and the difficult years when Eric was so sick. My team had told me to answer only what I was asked, to speak in short, declarative sentences. I was to be straightforward—I was not to overshare. But most important, I was to hide nothing.
I was to tell the whole truth. I sat there, struggling to find my truth.
Out of necessity, I had compartmentalized my life—part of me focused on caring for Eric, part of me did my very best at work, part of me budgeted our money, making allowances for our new legal bills. Part of me was still deeply grieving the loss of my wife. Part of me wondered if Chris was watching all this, if she wanted to help.
I had erected walls between all these different parts of my life in order to handle them. One or two at a time, it was almost manageable. Taking it all together, though, I was consumed by a tsunami of despair and disappointment, fear and tragedy, disaster and betrayal.
So when Ken Anderson began questioning me, when he began launching an onslaught of verbal abuse and accusations, when he had me pinned down by his power and experience and animosity—I didn’t always stick to the game plan or give perfect answers.
My attorneys’ advice had been good, but it didn’t take into account my inexperience, my stress, my grief, or my growing hopelessness. Anderson backed me into rhetorical corners, and I sometimes acknowledged things that didn’t sound too good, I sometimes said things I shouldn’t have—relying on the faith that my attorneys would be able to clean up after me.
I admitted nothing terrible. I had done nothing terrible. But I acknowledged that Chris and I often disagreed, that we occasionally spoke harshly to each other. Anderson told the court that I resented her higher income when, in reality, I was thrilled about it—her success at work was something I was so proud of.
Anderson roared that I had beaten her in a rage—again and again and again—twisting and contorting his entire body to show the force he imagined I had used. He accused me of masturbating with Chris’s dead hand—once more, employing his technique of offering something so repugnant, so morbid, so ugly that the exercise of normal human intellect became almost impossible.
I really had no response. I was dumbfounded, horrified—helpless.
He held all the cards. I was just the latest joker.
The jury got the case before lunch.
I sat alone in the courtroom waiting for a verdict. I had not gone to lunch through the entire trial. I couldn’t eat and I didn’t want to be out and about in a world that saw me as a monster. I craved the solitude and spent my lunch hours pacing the courtroom, looking out the windows, flabbergasted that life outside was going on while this catastrophic mockery of justice was unfolding inside.
It was the last privacy I would have for more than two decades. It didn’t last long.
The jury was out for only two hours.
When they filed back in, they wouldn’t look at me. They appeared to be struggling to be stoic and unemotional, despite the fact that their humanity—their collective conscience—had been played like a piano by the prosecutor.
“We, the jury, find the defendant, Michael W. Morton, guilty of the offense of murder, as alleged in the indictment.”
The spectators gasped. My mother cried out.
I faced Chris’s mom and looked pleadingly into her eyes. I told her again and again, “I did not do this. I did not do this.”
Her mouth formed a thin, straight line. She looked hard at me and turned coldly away. It would be the last time we were face-to-face for twenty-five years.
I saw Sheriff Boutwell and his team moving in and heard their handcuffs and keys, their gun belts and boots jangling and scuffling as they took their position at my back.
I heard the whizzing snap of the handcuffs opening wide.
My knees buckled, and my attorneys struggled to hold me up.
It was over.
I was lost.
It seemed as if the word guilty was still ringing through the courtroom when I felt the cold steel of the cuffs close on my wrists—a sensation that in the next quarter century became as familiar as wearing a wristwatch.
My mother reached out to me, holding me as close as she could. She was crying, her face distorted in despair. My father was rattled, too—a rarity for my stoic old man. I had seen him cry only once, at Chris’s funeral.
Her family just watched me wordlessly. They offered nothing in their stony expressions except icy anger and an almost palpable disgust. Why had I expected more?
It had become clear to me months ago that they believed I had killed Chris. They had been talking with Ken Anderson, with the sheriff, with reporters. Everybody was reinforcing everybody else’s opinions. No one talked to me. No one wanted to.
Now the people who had suspected me all along had the triumph of a jury’s considered judgment to banish any lingering doubts. Chris’s family watched me with righteous rage as I was being handcuffed, then turned their backs and walked away from me.
Sheriff Boutwell and Sergeant Wood led me out of the courtroom and down a series of ech
oing stairwells. They flanked me as we stepped into the glare of the winter sun and marched past the crowd that had gathered. The onlookers outside the courthouse gaped as though I were Hannibal Lecter, a man too dangerous to be in public without armed guards, handcuffs, and a phalanx of deputies. We didn’t stop for a second, but I sensed they were parading me around, playing to the crowd.
Television cameras were jammed into my face, and the accompanying helmet-haired reporters waved microphones and fired off the kinds of questions that felt more like thinly veiled taunts. “How do you feel about going to prison?” “Why did you do it?”
I didn’t answer any of the shouted questions from what felt like an angry mob, but I had come upon a single statement that summed up what I wanted the world to know. I repeated it again and again.
“I did not do this. I did not do this.”
I was still saying it as a deputy put his hand on my head and pushed it down—shoving me into an idling squad car. I couldn’t see anything through the car windows, but I imagined my in-laws’ outrage, my neighbors’ faces twisted with disgust, my attorneys’ defeated looks, my family’s anguish and despair.
I felt the weight of my crushing new reality. It could not be ignored. For the foreseeable future, somebody or something else would be in charge of every decision in my life. I would no longer have any input on where I lived, what I wore, what I ate, where I laid my head at night.
I had nothing.
I was nothing.
And the world thought I deserved nothing.
It was the first day of the next twenty-five years of my life.
PART II
PRISON
The one overriding emotion I experience these days is simple fatigue. I am tired and just want to go home. What a long, strange trip it’s been. God, please get me out of here.
Getting Life Page 9