Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  But from the time I moved to the Michael Unit, my imprisonment was always buffered by the possibility of my exoneration—an up-and-down belief that the seemingly impossible might just happen, that my team might just pull this off.

  I knew that my attorneys had reached out to John Bradley, the man who was now district attorney for Williamson County. By then my old nemesis Ken Anderson had become State District Judge Anderson, a singularly unsettling thought. Still, in the DA’s office Anderson left behind, little had changed. Bradley was cut from the same win-at-all-costs cloth. He had worked under Anderson for several years and, in the process, seemed to have absorbed a powerful dose of the self-importance and arrogance that Ken Anderson brought to my original trial.

  When the attorneys on my side asked for a meeting with Bradley to explain their case for DNA testing and fingerprint analysis—and offered to pay every penny of the costs—they were turned down flat. Bradley made it clear that there would be no support from his office for anything of the kind. A court would have to order it done—and he was not going to make it easy for us.

  In February 2005, eighteen years after my conviction, I got a copy of the rough draft my legal team was working on, and it was a revelation. I sat for hours in my cell, reading and rereading the motion requesting DNA tests. It was an incredibly powerful document that left me exultant and—for the first time in many, many years—truly hopeful. The motion painstakingly laid out the legal reasoning for testing to go forward.

  The Innocence Project team had even found an unsolved murder that happened just blocks from our home and was eerily similar to Chris’s killing. Six years before our tragedy, it appeared another family in Williamson County had gone through nearly the same thing.

  Mildred McKinney was an older woman who lived alone, with a doting daughter and son-in-law who kept tabs on her and visited often. On Election Day 1980, the couple voted in their precinct and then made the short drive to Mom’s house to check in. When they knocked, there was no answer.

  Walking into the backyard, they found a sliding glass door to the house unlocked. In the back bedroom, they found Mildred McKinney’s body. She had been savagely beaten to death, like Chris. Furniture and items from the house were found stacked on the body, just as they were piled onto Chris’s body in our bedroom.

  The case had never been solved.

  For a time the murder had been suspected to be the work of Henry Lee Lucas and/or his horrible cohort Ottis Toole. Incompetent investigation by the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office had already pointed the finger at the pair for dozens of killings around the country. The sheriff’s office appeared to have added the McKinney case as an afterthought. Ottis Toole helpfully regurgitated a terribly contrived and inadequate confession in exchange for jailhouse privileges.

  Most of those cases fell apart due to lack of evidence, contradictory information, and revelations about how shabbily and unfairly the confessions were obtained. In fact, the police work had been so inept—if not corrupt—that Lucas won a rare-as-hen’s-teeth commutation from the Texas governor.

  The brutal murder of Mildred McKinney got tossed back into the files as a cold case. Her family had to live without answers. Whoever had killed the much-loved, gentle mother in her bed had gotten away with it.

  Noting the uncanny similarities in the case, the attorneys helping me wanted to test the evidence in the McKinney murder against any evidence found on Chris to see if there might be a connection. It seemed like something that should have been considered standard, thorough investigative work.

  But John Bradley and Williamson County fought the request for months—first by putting off a hearing for procedural reasons, then through a series of legal delaying tactics. Finally, nearly eight months after our motion for testing was filed—most of another year in prison for me—John Bradley’s office got around to responding with their best case against testing. It was staggering in its irrationality and unfairness. The DA’s response offered up a healthy heaping of legal boilerplate—along with shallow arguments that showed complete disregard for the search for the truth that all prosecutors are supposed to carry out.

  Bradley wrote that we couldn’t do the testing now—because we hadn’t proved it wasn’t my fault that DNA testing hadn’t been done years ago. He said we couldn’t test now because we should have done it earlier. He said we couldn’t test now because Sheriff Boutwell had died. He said we couldn’t test now because it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.

  Bradley went on to say that even if the bandanna was found to contain Chris’s DNA and that of an unknown suspect, there were simple explanations for how that might have happened. The response went on to list a number of inventive ways that the bandanna bearing Chris’s DNA might have gotten there. Bradley argued it was possible I had taken someone else’s bandanna and worn it while killing Chris. After the murder, he claimed, I could have ingeniously placed it behind our house to throw investigators off the trail.

  He said that I could have conveniently stumbled upon the bandanna after the murder, then coldly carried it into the house and carefully dipped it in Chris’s blood before returning it to the construction site behind our home.

  Bradley wildly theorized that the bandanna might show evidence of Chris’s blood because she had somehow injured herself—long before her murder—perhaps while working in the yard, then inexplicably chosen to stanch her wounds with a filthy bandanna she found in the street, and thrown it back over the fence.

  The bizarre response reminded me of what I had always been up against in Williamson County.

  Our motion to test the DNA also examined anew the record of Dr. Roberto Bayardo, the Travis County medical examiner who had testified at my trial that Chris’s stomach contents could indicate that she had died before I left the house. He had initially said that Chris had probably died after 6:00 A.M. After conferring with the sheriff and Prosecutor Ken Anderson, he rolled the time of death back to 1:15 A.M., testifying that he couldn’t be “scientifically” certain, but indicating that this was his best judgment.

  In the years since my conviction, Dr. Bayardo’s work had come under increasing scrutiny. Our motion contained the opinion of a nationally recognized pathologist who had examined Bayardo’s work in my case and found serious flaws in his methods, reasoning, conclusions, and testimony. The motion also outlined a number of other cases where Dr. Bayardo had grossly erred—including one case where he came to the jaw-dropping conclusion that a man who had been stabbed in the back had committed suicide. It would almost have been funny if this indifference and incompetence hadn’t cost me two decades of my life, my future with my son, and the answers we all needed about who had murdered my innocent, beautiful wife.

  When I started this process, I paid lip service to the idea that I understood that this could take a while, that I knew the wheels of justice moved slowly. But the truth is, I was unprepared for just how long it takes to right a legal wrong. More than a year after we filed our motion asking to test those autopsy swabs, the judge hadn’t ruled and there was no indication that the decision would be coming soon. Nevertheless—ever the eternal optimist—I began psychologically preparing to leave.

  I wrote letters to friends and former inmates telling them how I was “lightening my load” behind the walls, getting rid of the extra baggage I knew I would not need outside. My plastic penitentiary typewriter had finally died of old age and overuse. I threw the rickety remains away, convinced that I would soon be tap-tap-tapping on a fancy new computer. I sent all my finished and unfinished manuscripts to my family. I persuaded myself that the goings-on inside the prison didn’t bother me anymore because I had one foot already out the door. I began to fantasize regularly about catching that last “chain” home, leaving prison for the last time—on that last bus. I felt certain the ride would be swift and sweet.

  My dreamworld grew as I actually began to consider how very different life was going to be
on the outside. I realized I had never been online, never stepped into a Wal-Mart or walked past—much less into—a Starbucks.

  I had never used a cell phone or owned a CD, a DVD, or an SUV. I told myself that these things were minor inconveniences, small hurdles that I would sail over soon enough.

  But I wondered how much prison life had changed me. I wondered if my “big house” eating habits—wolfing food down like a starving dog—would be hard to shake. So I consciously practiced eating slowly, lifting my prison spork—that ingenious hybrid between a spoon and a fork—to my mouth gradually and casually, trying to remember not to speed or slurp or slop anything on myself. I certainly didn’t want to embarrass anyone who would actually agree to eat in public with me. Nor did I want to embarrass myself. I was not proud of having spent two decades in prison, even if it had all been a terrible misunderstanding.

  I wanted to go back to real life with my head up. I wanted to fit in. I felt as though I was sixteen again and trying to prepare for an all-important prom dinner at a fancy restaurant. This must be what it is like to be a middle-aged citizen of a faraway country desperate to make a decent impression on the people in his new land.

  Finally, in August 2006, we got an answer—and it was at least partly good news. We would be allowed to test all the items taken from Chris’s body. The McKinney evidence and the blue bandanna, however, would remain off-limits. We would have to continue to fight to test those.

  Now began the long wait for test results.

  During this tedious stretch, I had a chance to meet with John Raley, the attorney from Houston who had been working on my case, for years, with absolutely no payoff—financial, emotional, or professional.

  John drove to the Michael Unit with an associate of his, the always-helpful attorney Jackie Cooper. I believe they came to see me because John knew I would soon get a decision from the Parole Board on whether I would be granted release. My chances were slim to none, since I would not “admit” my crime or express remorse, but I’d written John asking whether, on the off chance I did get parole and get out, he would still represent me in attempting to prove my innocence. His participation and the Innocence Project’s belief in me were a big part of what kept me going.

  Our meeting was John’s opportunity to take my measure—­face-to-face—to see whether he trusted me, to see whether he wanted to commit to an even longer haul on this maddening monster of a case.

  John had worked so hard, spending evenings and weekends going over my file—sometimes ignoring his family and his practice to rack his brain over a way to force a decision, to win a chance to get the DNA testing that we all believed might shake loose something new.

  It was a revelation to finally meet him, though.

  John Raley was a collection of wonderful contradictions—a massive former football player at the University of Oklahoma, he now wrote with delicacy and exquisite precision in court documents. He was a kid lucky enough to have been born into privilege but talented enough to win success on his own—and he spoke with unusual passion and eloquent understanding about the burdens and unfairness faced by others less fortunate. He had never handled a criminal case before—his practice focused on medical malpractice and commercial litigation, often representing little guys going up against big guys. John helped level the playing field—he was an excellent “big guy” to have on your side.

  Long before our meeting, John had told me he was a Christian—and that part of the work he was doing for me came from that conviction. Reading his words in the legal briefs, motions, and appeals over the years, I could see he had a touch of the evangelist. Talking with him underscored that. He had a unique combination of righteous rage against the legal system’s flaws and profound reverence for its ability to finally bend toward justice. He recognized the abject failings and inherent good of our courts, our judges, and our police. He knew that I had been a victim of the system’s weaknesses. But John always believed its strengths would set me free.

  After we met, John told me he believed I was innocent. I knew what a profound acknowledgment that was on his part. For him this was no longer a case of a bad verdict, an unfair trial, or shoddy police work. After all this time, he had realized I wasn’t just not guilty. I was truly innocent. They had gotten the wrong guy.

  Near the end of our visit, John stepped away to use the restroom before the long drive home. He left his things behind, a simple act of trust I had not been expecting, something I had not experienced in decades. I sat with Jackie Cooper at the table, transfixed by the presence of John’s sports jacket. It was all I could do to keep from touching it. It looked soft—impossibly soft, as though it were the finest, smoothest, most well-made article of clothing I’d ever seen. At least it seemed that way to someone who had been wearing ill-fitting, scratchy prison whites for two decades.

  The meeting—and that moment—meant the world to me.

  Not long after, I found out I had been turned down for parole, something I had expected. What I did not anticipate was the board’s decision to set my next try at parole back another three years. It seemed like forever. And I had been a good inmate—no trouble, no violence, no serious problems inside—but I was lumped in with the worst of the worst. I figured it actually didn’t matter that much—I knew I would be living outside by the time my next parole date rolled around.

  I was wrong.

  In October 2007 I received crushing news—the DNA analyses drew a complete blank. None of the samples taken from Chris’s body showed any evidence that she had been sexually assaulted. There was no DNA to test further, no profile to try matching to anyone else, no sign that anyone else had been there at all—at least not on the evidence taken from Chris’s body at the time.

  There had been setbacks before, but this was big. I sat in my cell and stared at the floor—stunned. I felt numb when I sat down to write my parents with the news. I knew my seventy-two-year-old mother would cry her eyes out. She had been making a list of restaurants she wanted to take me to when I came home.

  For me there was some small measure of peace in the result. At least Chris had not been sexually assaulted. The awful possibility that she had been abused by her murderer had haunted me. Now I knew she hadn’t really known what was happening. She had simply been sleeping. She’d died very quickly. Even in death, she was not violated. And that meant something.

  But the news brought an abrupt halt to my fantasies about leaving prison anytime soon. I began to wonder if I would die inside—or if I would be freed as an old man and spend the rest of my life on parole.

  My lawyers soldiered on, pushing for testing of the McKinney material, fighting hard to get permission to test the blue bandanna for DNA. I’m not sure I was much help to them. They were crucial in keeping me from falling into despair. Their belief in me—along with my faith in God—was all I had left. I had exhausted my lifetime supply of optimism. Every day in prison left me tired—tired of the grueling sameness, tired of the coarseness and cruelty, tired of the dehumanization of being locked up like an animal.

  John Raley and Nina Morrison, from the Innocence Project’s New York office, argued eloquently before the state court of appeals. Reading the transcript gave me a lump in my throat. I copied pages from the proceeding and sent them to my mother to try to keep her spirits up.

  Raley thought it went well. “Seriously, Michael—we think we’re finally getting somewhere here,” I heard again and again on the phone.

  His reassurances aside, parole remained as a last-ditch way for me to get out, a possibility that grew nearer and nearer with each bad court decision. As a condition of parole, however, the state required me to express remorse for Chris’s murder. When I told John I would not lie to get out, he was moved.

  “As long as I’m breathing air,” John swore, “I’m trying to get you out.”

  It’s an oath I’ve never forgotten and never will.

  Just as important to
me personally was the help and encouragement of Nina Morrison. Nina had been working on my case for a long time. She had advised other attorneys on avenues to pursue while she handled countless other cases of wrongful convictions all over the country. She told me how long this could take and kept my hope from fading when rulings went against us. She would recount the setbacks and eventual triumphs she’d seen in other cases.

  She sent me long, chatty letters sharing the news of her pregnancy—­“It’s a girl!”—interspersed with detailed analyses of the grisly evidence sexual assaults left behind in murder cases. She always broke bad news in the kindest way possible, saying, “The results were not what we hoped for.” Then she would invariably follow up with “We’re not quitting yet—not by any means.”

  She was part cheerleader, part little sister, and pure, unadulterated brilliant legal tactician—a lawyer who could take apart a bad conviction, find the truth, set the record straight, and be on to the next crisis several times a day. She had to be able to do that. All she did, every single day, was work cases like mine. I knew she must have had thoroughly smitten wrongly convicted inmates all over the United States, all of us feverishly checking our mail for letters with her return address. We had never met, but on the phone, she always sounded happy to be talking to me, glad to be trying something new in my case, eager to share her contagious hope.

  Finally, after almost five years of waiting, the state court deigned to give me an answer on my request for further DNA testing. It was something that I viewed as good news–bad news. Most important, we were going to be allowed to test the bandanna. But we would continue to be denied the opportunity to test any of the evidence taken from the Mildred McKinney murder. I had feared the connection was a reach, but I had prayed for any explanation that could offer insight or help that might make sense of my last twenty-three years.

  By 2009, I had become used to bad news. If the blue bandanna proved useless, there might be nothing else. I knew John and Nina had finite resources. If they had to cut me loose, I told them I’d understand.