Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  As much as I once prayed for acceptance, I now asked for the power of restraint. I had to keep myself from getting ahead of events, from letting my hurt and rage explode. I had to behave as if nothing had happened, and that was hardest of all.

  To get through, I focused on the fact that, somewhere out there, a computer was searching through a massive database of convicted criminals, looking for a match with the DNA profile found on the bandanna. Thinking about that kept me sane. It made the tedium and torment of daily life unimportant.

  About six weeks after I got the initial good news, it was my fifty-seventh birthday—another birthday in prison. But this time was different.

  Work went well, and when the guards began one of their many counts for the day, the men in my squad sang “Happy Birthday” to me. In a little while, one of the inmates produced a masterpiece of a prison “cake” he’d made for the occasion. It was a wild concoction of crushed cookies, peanut butter, and God knew what else. Then the whole thing was slathered with melted chocolate. Our entire group almost went into diabetic shock. On my way out of work, the plant manager discreetly wished me a happy birthday, and the plant accountant bellowed birthday greetings from her office.

  When I reached my dorm, I was told to report immediately to the law library. This time, I felt certain about the news.

  John and Nina were waiting for me on the phone—along with someone else. Barry Scheck, head of the Innocence Project, introduced himself. Then John told me straight out: “Michael, we have a birthday present for you.” He said the DNA database had found a match, a man in California. We didn’t yet know his name, but we knew he had killed Chris. We would have his name—and location—within days.

  I grew quiet. John told me later he thought I had fainted, and he wasn’t far from wrong. I remember hearing him asking—with just a hint of concern in his voice—“Michael, are you there? Michael?” I told him not to worry, that I was just letting all of this wash over me.

  The next day was going to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Chris’s murder, a quarter century since her life was lost—and mine was turned upside down. After all that time, I was finally getting the answers I had sought for so long. I felt as though I were lit from within, like I’d swallowed a big, glowing candle.

  Then Barry asked me an unusual question. He wanted to know what, if anything, Eric had told the therapist I had taken him to right after the murder.

  The therapist had said she felt sure Eric hadn’t witnessed the killing but was simply experiencing the very understandable ill effects of suddenly being separated from his mother.

  Then Barry read aloud from a transcript of a telephone conversation between my mother-in-law and the head investigator on the case. I had no idea this talk had ever happened, much less that it had been transcribed and saved all these years. My legal team had just gotten their hands on it, along with some other documents from the prosecutor’s and sheriff’s department files. This was the material that had been withheld from my trial attorneys in 1987, the file notes that assistant Williamson County prosecutor Mike Davis must have been referencing when he told the jury there had been much more evidence that would have created doubt about my guilt.

  Shortly after Chris’s funeral, her mother had called the investigator to tell him about something Eric had said. He had shared with her what he saw that day, saying a “monster” had been in the house and had hit his mother. He detailed how the man had placed baskets and a suitcase on Chris’s body as she lay in bed. It broke my heart to learn that he had witnessed everything. I prayed he was too young to remember it. I feared that, somewhere deep inside him, those memories lived on. Eric had told his grandmother that I hadn’t been there—just “Mommy and Eric.”

  To her credit, Rita Kirkpatrick had called the head investigator and told him what Eric had said—she also told him to “get off the domestic thing” and find the “monster who had killed my daughter.” Why hadn’t she told me? Or informed my lawyers? Why hadn’t anyone in Chris’s family shared with me what Eric said he had seen?

  While I was left reeling by the personal repercussions of this new information, the trio of lawyers on the phone focused solely on its legal significance. This was a clean, irrefutable case of the state suppressing exculpatory evidence. It was a violation of the Brady rule—and it was illegal. Someone in Williamson County was in big trouble.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  With this information, the full travesty of my prosecution and all my years in prison became exceedingly clear. But then so did my future—I was getting out. Not right now but soon. Not today but in the not too distant days ahead—it was finally happening.

  I sprawled on my bunk at night and read each and every document that had been produced by the Innocence Project’s open records request in Williamson County. It was hard for me to fully grasp, but the pile of records they’d pried loose proved that the investigation and prosecution in my case was much more incompetent, more corrupt, and more malicious than I had thought.

  The sheriff—with the full cooperation of the prosecutor’s office—­had hidden my neighbors’ reports of an old green van lurking for days just outside the wooded area behind our house. They had buried witness accounts of people living nearby who saw the van’s driver walk into the woods. Other neighbors reported odd noises, a man standing at one home’s front door in the days before Chris’s murder, footprints in flower beds, and the failed burglary of a house close to ours.

  I learned that, just days after Chris’s murder, San Antonio police had contacted the sheriff’s office and reported that her credit card had been used in a jewelry store there. It was a lead that the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department didn’t follow up at all—even though San Antonio police offered to drive the card and accompanying evidence up to them!

  As the case against me came undone, as it became clear I was not long for prison life—I found everything inside more tolerable. It was late summer and well over a hundred degrees every day, but suddenly I didn’t find the heat so oppressive. True, the small fan I had placed by my bunk did nothing more than blow hot air on me—it actually felt like a tiny hairdresser was standing 24/7 with a hair dryer pointed at my face. But I knew my days were numbered.

  The judge in Williamson County who was supposed to handle my case recused himself. Apparently, presiding over a rout of the current district attorney and the former district attorney—now a fellow judge—did not appeal to him. A judge by the name of Sid Harle, who held court in San Antonio, would be coming in to oversee what happened next in my case.

  The current Williamson County district attorney, John Bradley, had spent the weeks since the public announcement that another man’s DNA had been found on the bandanna telling the media that none of this mattered. He said it didn’t compromise in any way the state’s case against me.

  We had wanted him off the case long ago, and every day that he remained, Bradley was proving that he had no business being on the job—or making decisions about my guilt or innocence. It was like watching an antique tapestry unravel. Thread by thread—lie by lie—the twenty-five-year-old case against me was coming apart. Everyone watching could see how this was going to end. Except, of course, the people in charge of the Williamson County system of justice.

  In late September, even as Bradley was still telling the media and anyone who would listen that I was guilty and belonged in prison, the other shoe dropped. I got a call from John Raley and Nina Morrison saying that they now had the identity of the man whose DNA was on the bandanna.

  His name was Mark Alan Norwood, and he had a long criminal history, including burglary and assault. Now police in Austin had matched Norwood’s DNA to yet another murder—a killing that was heartbreakingly similar to what had happened to Chris.

  Debra Masters Baker was killed on January 13, 1988. She had been about Chris’s age, they both had long dark hair—and both of them left behind three-year-old chil
dren. Ms. Baker had been murdered in her bed, like Chris, and both had died as a result of crushing blows to their faces and heads. The similarities were eerie. I shivered when I realized they had both been killed on the thirteenth of the month.

  I knew this was probably good news for me legally—but for me as a human being, it was heartbreaking. The worst thing about my being convicted of Chris’s murder wasn’t my long sentence, it was the fact that the real killer had been free to take another life. Debra Baker would be with her children today if the Williamson County sheriff and prosecutor had simply done their jobs.

  The unsolved Baker case had been discovered by Kay Kanaby and Cynthia Hepner, two people working in John Raley’s law office. They started looking for similar crimes in the Austin area and hit the jackpot quickly. Even before the DNA match was made, they were certain they had found a connected killing—Mark Norwood lived only a few blocks away from Ms. Baker at the time of the murder.

  John Raley’s wife, Kelly, pitched in to find an even more important connection for me. She set about seeking Eric, more difficult than it might sound because of his name change. Apparently there were a number of Eric Olsons living in the country. She finally tracked him down when she was able to find his wedding pictures online. The accompanying article mentioned that Eric worked at the Jesuit high school he had once attended. It turned out that Eric had been hiding in plain sight.

  Incredibly, Kay Kanaby had once played tennis with Eric’s mother-in-law. And through that woman, Kay knew her daughter Maggie—and had at least been introduced to Maggie’s new husband, Eric.

  Maggie was very important in moving my relationship with Eric forward. Luckily for me—and Eric—Maggie turned out to be a person who firmly believes in the healing power of truth. I was eager to meet her and to see Eric again—so eager that I didn’t really focus on or understand how world changing the news of my innocence had been for my son.

  Since he was a toddler, I had been the bad guy—the man who killed his mother, the creep who broke the hearts of Chris’s family, the man who was so dangerous he had to be kept away from decent people. Now, in the blink of an eye, a round of obscure, difficult-to-decipher DNA testing had turned Eric’s life upside down. The truths he had been raised to believe were not true at all. A dirty bandanna found decades ago now spoke with more authority, more clarity, and more proof than the people who had raised him—the people he loved.

  It was going to take a while—a long while—for him to absorb everything. I regret that I didn’t understand this important truth from the start. But the fact is I no longer knew Eric at all. I knew a little boy who didn’t exist anymore. To me, he was more of an idea than an individual—and I knew as little about his life or his experience or his psyche as he did about mine.

  In retrospect, I can see that the better the news was for me, the more painful it became for Eric. Without meaning to, I was hurting him again. I didn’t know it at the time, but rebuilding my relationship with my son meant embarking on another very long, very difficult journey.

  On October 1, 2011, I was told I had a call in the law library. Since I knew the Innocence Project and John Raley were involved in heated hearings over the next steps in my case, I expected an update of some kind. I was wrong.

  John and Barry Scheck told me that John Bradley, the Williamson County district attorney—the man who had fought us tooth and nail every day in every way—wanted to cut a deal.

  Bradley offered to let me out of prison on Tuesday, October 4, if I agreed to a list of demands—most of them meant to spare Williamson County officials any fallout. He wanted me to agree not to sue anyone, to agree I would never call anyone to testify, and to sign documents affirming that I would never require anyone to admit any wrongdoing. For good measure, he wanted me to agree I would never contact my son or my former in-laws without their written consent. He wanted me to promise that I would take my state-offered compensation and simply disappear.

  It was not much of a deal or much of a decision.

  There were hearings coming up that week that would lead to the arrest of Mark Norwood, something that was more important to me than walking out of prison.

  I wanted to know why I had been sent to prison. And I cared about making sure that what happened to me did not happen to anyone else. I had spent years thinking about how my life and my plight could make a difference to others. I wanted to get out and be able to talk about what had happened—and what could be done to prevent it from happening again.

  I told Barry to play hardball, to tell Bradley no. He said he’d get back to me as soon as he had a counteroffer.

  John and Nina were on the phone with me again in less than three hours. Bradley had caved—completely. He agreed to everything we wanted and made no demands of his own. I would be bench-warranted to Williamson County and freed on Tuesday the fourth.

  I simply had no words for how I felt.

  Standing by my bunk, I began deciding what I wanted to take with me when I walked out the front gate. I had very little and needed less. I figured I had two days to sort through my property and give away the things other inmates could use.

  While I was still waiting for word that a bench warrant had been issued to call me back to Williamson County, a guard came and told me to pack up—pronto. He said I was moving to “seg”—segregated housing where inmates were kept for punishment or protection, or simply because they found themselves in a kind of penitentiary no-man’s-land. That’s what happened to me—I didn’t belong anywhere anymore, at least not inside the system. And just as I had been pushed and hurried to get into prison, I was now being rushed out.

  I packed what little I was taking—family photos, toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, a comb, and the Bible my sister Vicky had sent me. Everything else—food from the commissary, some novels, writing supplies, my radio and accompanying headphones, thermal underwear for the winter, a pair of almost-new running shoes, my big dictionary, and extra hygiene items—I wanted to give away. It filled two large commissary bags, and I gave them to the two men on my dorm that I trusted most. My friends Steve Martin and Rick Vi­eira would have to distribute my worldly goods—I had to leave now.

  Guys began congregating near me. A couple of them prayed over me, others hugged me hard—and a few spoke to me with voices cracking. There were tears. Two men pressed letters into my hand. I was touched by the tenderness with which these tough guys said good-bye.

  I heard the guard calling for me. I grabbed my mattress and pulled it onto one shoulder, the way I had when I first carried it up to my first bunk, on my first day in prison. Picking up my small bag of belongings, I headed for the door.

  Before I could cross the threshold, I heard a commotion in the dayroom—whoops of delight, full-throated, all-out, old-fashioned hollering—good wishes and good-natured mayhem. Inmates raised their fists and pumped them. They pounded on tables and stomped their feet. I looked up at the upper tier. It was lined with faces, every one of them looking at me—clapping and cheering, waving and woo-hooing.

  The heartfelt good-bye I got from the men I had lived with and sometimes loathed, the people who drove me crazy and made me mad or made me laugh, the guys with whom I had shared so many holidays and hard times—stunned me.

  I got chills and began to choke up. I waved and kept on walking.

  Prison had given me such a great send-off—I almost wanted to stay.

  Almost.

  PART III

  PEACE

  What I want to do is make sure this doesn’t happen to anybody else.

  —MICHAEL MORTON, APRIL 28, 2012

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  October 3, 2011, was my last night in prison—my last time locked in a cell, my last restless sleep on a plastic mattress and a steel bunk. I had spent 8,980 days of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit.

  Early the next morning, two Williamson County sheriff’s officers cam
e to take me back to the county where I had been wrongly convicted. By that afternoon my legal record and my life would be set right—or at least as right as they could be after so much time and so much loss.

  The cops brought me a set of clothes from the county jail—dark blue scrubs. I looked more like a disheveled male nurse than an inmate, but even that was a step up. Besides, my parents, now in their late seventies, were bringing me new clothes to change into before I would appear in court.

  As I dressed to leave, I got one more reminder of just how incompetent the Williamson County system of justice can be. One of the cops handed me a set of shoes—Crocs, of all things. The kicker was that they were both left feet. “Really?” I asked the county cop. He just shrugged. I didn’t say another word. I simply slipped them on and kept them on, even though my right foot ached all the way to Williamson County.

  Just before I was led to the car, one of the Williamson County cops prepared to shackle me for the drive home. He pulled out the full complement of big-house hardware—handcuffs, belly chain, and a short chain between my ankles. Before he strapped me up, though, he told me, in great seriousness, that when all this happened to me, he had been only twelve years old. He wanted me to know he had nothing to do with my conviction—or the mistakes and offenses the county he served had made in my case. While he told me these things, I noticed that he stayed just outside my reach.

  He seemed worried that I might try to exact some kind of crazy revenge during the drive to court—which was the furthest thing from my mind. These cops were my “freedom ride.” No way was I going to mess that up.

  The trip was uneventful—for the officers. For me, once again the man in the backseat of a police car, it was a sightseeing revelation. I felt torn between constantly looking left and right, drinking in every detail—almost tempted to hang my head out the window like a dog who finally got to ride in the car—and trying to behave with some measure of dignity. I did not want to look like an out-of-touch, institutionalized goober.