Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  The courtroom was packed with familiar faces. Barry Scheck, Nina Morrison, John Raley, and all the other attorneys who’d pitched in on my case were there to greet me—and each other—with bear hugs. They huddled in small pin-striped clumps all over the courtroom to talk about the incredible turnaround this day represented.

  There were representatives from the State Bar of Texas, waiting eagerly for evidence that would help them decide whether Ken Anderson should lose his law license.

  A few Texas state lawmakers were on hand to witness the goings-on. State Senator Rodney Ellis, who was helping push through legislation designed to keep my nightmare from being repeated, sat a few rows to the rear of me. I knew he was there before I even saw him. His distinctive raspy laugh and buoyant voice let me know that here in the courthouse—just like in the state capitol—Senator Ellis had my back.

  Directly behind me sat Caitlin Baker, whose mother had also been killed by the man who killed Chris. Debra Baker’s husband, Phillip, and her sister, Lisa, were also there. I noticed Caitlin had recently had the name Debra tattooed on her upper arm to mark the twenty-fifth year since she’d lost her mom.

  All of us carried Kleenex. All of us would need it.

  Beverly Reeves, an attorney friend who was putting all of us up at her Austin home for the duration of the court of inquiry, sat behind me, on the same packed courthouse bench as the Baker family.

  There were two video cameras inside and a phalanx of TV cameras waiting in the hall.

  The room was stacked with local defense lawyers who’d previously faced off against Ken Anderson or argued cases before him, or just wanted to see legal history in the making. The place had become a magnet for attorneys who wanted a rare peek at a prosecutor being forced to explain and defend his actions. The legal community knew that too many prosecutors did what Anderson had done in my case.

  On one of the benches near the back of the room, Anderson’s son sat quietly—looking angry. I didn’t approach him, but I felt bad for him and the entire family. Still, I knew that this hearing had to go forward. It wasn’t about me and it wasn’t about his dad. It was about justice.

  Judge Sturns, a tall, elegant man who looked like he’d been born to wear a black robe, swept in through a door behind his bench. A hush swept over the room as he began the hearing.

  Rusty Hardin stood up. “We call our first witness, Michael Morton, to the stand.” I was sworn in and took a seat in the witness chair next to the judge.

  Rusty asked me to recount the day of Chris’s killing, to share details about how Sheriff Boutwell had treated me, to remind the courtroom of the way three-year-old Eric had reacted to the tragedy.

  I should have seen my emotions coming, but I didn’t. Suddenly, it was terribly difficult to speak. Talking about that day—about what Eric had seen—always seemed to summon up such raw feelings. I plunged on, but on occasion, I had to stop midsentence, regain control, and then begin again.

  Hardin asked me what my twenty-five years in prison had been like. “Brutal,” I told him, trying to be upbeat. “But after a couple of decades I got used to it.”

  He wanted to know more about what I’d had to adapt to. “I got used to the lack of privacy, the restriction of movement, the forced associations, the lack of seeing my son. The million and one little things that you take for granted that you can’t even imagine—clothes that are comfortable, people who are honest, food that tastes good, a comfortable bed to sleep in.”

  I didn’t mention the more brutal aspects of prison life: the bloody fights, the crude behavior, the sense of shame that accompanies every sunrise and is reinforced again and again all day long—the negative assumptions every world-weary guard or warden, prison bus driver, or parole board member made about me for so long.

  He asked about my reaction when I first read the transcript of that long-ago phone call between my mother-in-law and Sergeant Wood, where Chris’s mother told the investigator that Eric had given her a graphic description of Chris’s death.

  I told Rusty I had been stunned, simply stunned.

  He asked me how I kept bitterness at bay.

  “The grace of God,” I said—and I meant it. I couldn’t have done it on my own.

  I went on to tell him, “I don’t want revenge. I don’t want anything ill for Judge Anderson. But I also realize that there are consequences for our actions and there needs to be accountability. Without that everything falls apart.”

  I looked at Ken Anderson and saw that he wasn’t looking at me. He had his head bent down and was staring—into the table, into his notes, into the abyss. He certainly appeared less sure of himself than he had twenty-six years earlier. Back then he had dominated the courtroom—pacing about, pounding on tables, shedding theatrical tears in front of the jury, and making up wild, disgusting stories about what I had done sexually with my wife’s dead body.

  In 1987 Anderson had been a young man with his whole future ahead of him—but then so had I. He’d been thinner—and had more hair and more energy. Just like me. Now, sitting beside his high-priced team of attorneys, Anderson looked much older, puffier and paler. He was clearly tired and stressed. He felt unfairly pursued. He felt he didn’t deserve this treatment. And he looked like he couldn’t quite understand how all of this had happened to him.

  I knew what that felt like, too.

  Hardin asked me what I hoped the court of inquiry could accomplish.

  I felt my face redden and my eyes fill with tears. I couldn’t control it. This meant a great deal to me. I very much wanted this process to be fair. I didn’t want any more pain for anyone—I simply wanted our lopsided practice of criminal justice to reach a better balance. I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I had—and I knew firsthand that there were other people behind bars who, like me, didn’t belong there.

  I looked straight at Judge Sturns and spoke directly to him. “I ask that you do what needs to be done, but at the same time—to be gentle with Judge Anderson.”

  Ken Anderson didn’t even look up.

  Back when I had been released, I’d seen him hold a press conference, telling reporters how sorry he was that “the system” had screwed up. It was astonishing that he still wouldn’t admit what had happened to me—or his role in it. His beliefs and his attitude were going to make everything much harder for him.

  Everyone in court had to sit through hours of Anderson’s videotaped deposition, long bouts of questioning that produced no real answers. It was like a replay of Nixon’s version of Watergate. Anderson described how he didn’t remember in about seventeen different ways. He said he knew he turned over any exculpatory evidence to my attorneys—then said he didn’t actually recall doing so, again and again.

  Much of the back-and-forth in the video deposition focused on what came to be known as the “monster transcript”—the recorded phone call between my mother-in-law and Sergeant Don Wood.

  Chris’s mother said she had been home alone with Eric when he suddenly began talking about what he had seen. She said he had started by telling her that “Mommy was asleep under the flowers,” the explanation I had given him at the cemetery when he asked where his mother was.

  She told Sergeant Wood that Eric had spread a blanket on the floor of her bedroom and begun kicking it, saying, “Mommy, get up.” Chris’s mother said she had started to take notes and ask Eric questions. Over the phone, she read her notes to the investigator. The first time I’d seen this conversation, found in the police file and pried out through legal action, I had been incredulous. Eric, though he was only three years old at the time, had given investigators a detailed description of what had happened inside our home—and who had killed Chris.

  Eric: Mommy’s crying. She’s— Stop it. Go away.

  Grandmother: Why is she crying?

  Eric: Cause the monster’s there.

  Grandmother: What’s he doing?

&n
bsp; Eric: He hit Mommy. He broke the bed.

  Grandmother: Is Mommy still crying?

  Eric: No, Mommy stopped.

  Grandmother: Then what happened?

  Eric: The monster threw a blue suitcase on the bed, he’s mad . . .

  Grandmother: Was he big?

  Eric: Yeah.

  Grandmother: Did he have gloves?

  Eric: Yeah, red.

  Grandmother: What did he carry in his red gloves?

  Eric: Basket.

  Grandmother: What was in the basket?

  Eric: Wood.

  Eric’s story contained details that only the police knew, including the blue suitcase the killer had piled on Chris’s body. He said that the “monster” had carried wood, which was what had been used to bludgeon Chris. Eric’s grandmother told Sergeant Wood she then asked the question she was most afraid to hear answered.

  Grandmother: Where was Daddy, Eric? . . . Was Daddy there?

  Eric: No, Mommy and Eric was there.

  Rita Kirkpatrick then told Sergeant Wood to “get off the . . . domestic thing now and look for the monster and I have no more suspicions in my mind that Mike did it.” Rita referred to the killer as “the big monster with the big mustache,” apparently repeating a description Eric had given her.

  Sergeant Wood asked no further questions and did not appear interested in speaking with Eric himself. Instead, he pushed back, trying to convince her that the “big monster” was simply me in disguise. He said I was probably wearing my scuba suit.

  This combination of ignorance and incompetence was no surprise to me. What shocked me was what Ken Anderson had done with this information—he had hidden it, from me and from my attorneys. He’d buried it deep in a file and kept it there for a quarter century. He had not taken it into consideration when deciding whether to file charges against me. It had not tweaked his conscience when he stood before the jury and tearfully pleaded with them to find me guilty and send me to prison.

  The question that I wanted an answer to was Why? For what purpose had he kept this information from becoming public during my trial—or my appeals—or my requests for DNA testing?

  There were no answers forthcoming from Ken Anderson.

  In the video deposition, he said memorably, “There’s no way on God’s green earth, if that was in my file, I wouldn’t have told them that Eric said that a monster had killed his mother.”

  If Anderson thought he was going to get backup from the assistant attorneys working in his office at the time, he was wrong.

  Former Prosecutor Kimberly Dufour Gardner testified she had been stricken when she learned in 2011 that I was innocent. She said she’d truly believed I had killed my wife based on what Anderson had shared with the other attorneys. She said she had heard Anderson discussing my mother-in-law’s phone call about the “monster” with Mike Davis, the assistant prosecutor who had helped Anderson try my case. She said she recalled listening to Anderson lay out the details of the phone call. “I remember him leaning up against a door-jamb with his arms crossed, saying ‘The kid thinks a monster killed his mother.’”

  Later, she told the court that Anderson had gone on to say he—like Sergeant Wood—believed that the “monster” was me wearing my scuba suit. They had apparently touted that theory internally as a way to explain why there weren’t any bloody clothes found at our home. Gardner said much of the discussion had focused on Eric being too young to testify and Anderson’s belief that Rita’s comments could be classified as “hearsay.”

  Gardner described Anderson as a “mentor” and told the court, “I don’t want to be here, but I know what I heard.”

  Even more damning was the testimony of Doug Arnold, another former assistant prosecutor who was now a Williamson County judge. Judge Arnold had contacted my attorneys after my release, telling them what he knew about Ken Anderson’s trial practices—and what he knew about my case. He said, “I felt horrible for Mr. Morton and I felt I owed it to him.”

  He went on to testify that he “felt terrible about what was going on here at the time, with people trying to quash subpoenas.” He recalled for the court a conversation he had had years ago in which Anderson told him that he would simply decide not to call the lead investigator to the witness stand, thereby avoiding his obligation to turn over the investigator’s full file and notes.

  That was exactly what had happened during my trial. Only Sheriff Boutwell had taken the stand. The only notes my team got to see were those assembled on the first day of the investigation. Everything else—the phone call transcript, the neighbors’ reports of a mysterious green van, the man who left that van and walked into the wooded area behind our home, and more—remained hidden from the defense. We didn’t know what police had learned, we didn’t see evidence that raised doubts about my guilt, we didn’t know what to investigate because we didn’t know what existed.

  It was unfair.

  It was morally wrong.

  And it was illegal.

  And at least one other woman died because police and prosecutors went after the wrong man. I felt sick for the family of Debra Baker as they pressed close to each other, hearing exactly how Williamson County police and prosecutors’ mind-boggling ineptitude and arrogance had set the stage for the murder of someone they loved.

  My original defense team—“the two Bills”—testified as well, making it clear that they had received nothing of consequence from Ken Anderson’s office.

  “Did you ever know anything about . . . a conversation between Rita Kirkpatrick and Don Wood about her grandson witnessing the murder?” Rusty Hardin asked Bill Allison.

  “No,” he responded.

  “How certain are you of that?” Hardin pushed.

  “One hundred percent,” he said, nodding for emphasis.

  It was sadly ironic to see how the evidence Anderson had hidden meshed so completely with the argument my attorneys had made at my trial—that an intruder was responsible for Chris’s murder. Bill Allison and Bill White had figured out what happened the day Chris died but could not put their hands on the evidence to prove it.

  I could see, too, that my case and its outcome had taken an emotional toll on Bill Allison. Anyone who believes lawyers always maintain a “healthy” emotional separation from their clients didn’t see his face that day in court. When Rusty Hardin asked him what he had believed about my case for the past twenty-six years, he answered honestly and with great pain. He said he felt “that an innocent man had been convicted and [had] his son taken away from him by the state.” He paused and added that it was “hard to explain how I feel. I have felt for a long time that I had really let Michael down somehow.”

  The truth is, of course, that Bill Allison was the reason my case was investigated by the Innocence Project. He never stopped advocating for me.

  It was easy to see which witnesses were most controversial—they drew the biggest crowds. That was certainly the case for John Bradley, the man who had taken over as Williamson County district attorney when Ken Anderson was elevated to the bench. Bradley was known for doing whatever he could to win, an attribute he shared with his mentor.

  It was Bradley who’d fought hardest—and longest—against DNA testing that could shed light on Chris’s killer’s identity. There had already been testimony about how they’d met privately to discuss strategy for delaying my requests for testing. Bradley and Anderson appeared to have worked together to brainstorm legal arguments that would slow-walk my case through the courts. They’d both spoken dismissively about my case to the media.

  Bradley, who seemed to be perpetually tanned—believe me, that’s the kind of thing someone who’s spent twenty-five years in prison notices—was up next on the stand. He’d lost his seat in a bitter primary fight to another Republican, a woman who came in vowing to clean house, not knowing exactly what kind of mess was waiting there. One of my lawyer
s had heard that, when she moved into her new office, she opened one of the drawers of the desk John Bradley had used. Lying inside was a dead snake someone had placed there for her to find. Welcome to the Williamson County Courthouse.

  John Bradley was called to the stand by Anderson’s defense team in an effort to aid his besieged friend. He took the oath while seemingly oozing contempt for the whole process. He obviously didn’t believe he or Ken Anderson should be questioned about their behavior as district attorneys. He acknowledged that he was “not the most neutral person in this case.”

  No kidding.

  He was defensive throughout his testimony, saying Anderson had provided every bit of evidence he had been asked to produce. He painted Anderson as a victim of overzealous second-guessing. He claimed that he had delayed DNA testing because there simply was no protocol for handling requests like mine.

  I couldn’t help remembering one of Bradley’s other efforts regarding DNA testing. He had participated in an online discussion among Texas district attorneys, advocating for simply destroying DNA evidence after trials. He’d lamented that “innocence . . . has proven to trump most anything.” He thought a better approach “might be to get a written agreement that all the evidence can be destroyed after the conviction and sentence. Then, there is nothing to test or retest.”

  I shudder to think how that kind of agreement would have affected my life.

  Finally, after four days of testimony and questioning, and countless increasingly nasty arguments between Rusty Hardin and Ken Anderson’s team of legal eagles, the man on the hot seat was called to testify.

  This was it. Ken Anderson was finally going to answer questions about my case—in front of God and everybody. The courtroom fell silent as he approached the stand, took the oath, and sat in the chair where he had put so many other people on the spot.