Like most of the other spectators, I had imagined we would see a smooth, experienced prosecutor-turned-judge, a witness who would be difficult to pin down—a man who knew very well the ins and outs of making a good impression on the stand. I was worried it wasn’t going to be possible, even for a pro like Rusty Hardin, to get him to reveal anything of who he was or how he had made decisions in my case.
Instead, we saw the complete collapse of the façade that Ken Anderson had carefully maintained for so many years. He was not accustomed to answering hard questions, only asking them. He did not come off as a fair-minded or focused public servant, nor did he seem to comprehend how his actions had affected innocent people. He revealed that he still did not understand the agony his actions had caused in my life or the lives of others—like the Baker family.
He was indignant, frustrated, angry, and he made it clear from the beginning that he believed he shouldn’t have to be there, saying he was the victim of an all-out “media frenzy.” He described himself as a paragon of public service, recounted his years as a Boy Scout leader and Sunday School teacher. He bragged about his office’s tough stance against child molesters in the 1980s, when not many prosecutors focused on trying these awful criminals.
When he said his office had “a lot to be proud of and we still do,” his voice cracked with emotion. He also got teary as he laid out how hard the past eighteen months had been on him and his family. “I had to spend money to hire lawyers. And I worked my entire life and now they have it,” he told the judge.
One of his attorneys, recognizing the danger of Anderson’s self-pitying description of what he had gone through—versus my decades in prison—asked him to speak directly to me about how he felt after having been hit with “false accusations” about his actions.
He turned toward me, his mouth twisted with emotion, and said, “I know what me and my family have been through in the last eighteen months, and it’s hell. And it doesn’t even register in the same ballpark with what you went through, Mr. Morton. So I don’t know that I can say I feel your pain, but I have a pretty darned good idea how horrible what we’ve gone through for eighteen months has been, with false accusations and everything else, and what happened to you is so much worse than that. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling.”
I had been sitting there, ready to accept an apology, but that’s not what he offered. It was as if his situation and mine were not connected, as if he had nothing to do with my charges, my trial, or my imprisonment—he was just another man who felt bad that it had happened. He went on to say—again—that the system had “screwed up,” adding that “I’ve beaten myself up on what could have been done different and I frankly don’t know.”
He just didn’t get it—still.
Anderson insulted virtually everyone participating in the court of inquiry by saying it would be a “blessed day” if a court of inquiry were never again used in Texas. He snorted and called the charges against him “so bogus it’s unreal.” He admitted that he hadn’t even troubled himself to go over the details of the murder case that had upended my life. Even at the urging of his legal team, he had not deigned to sit down, read the trial transcript, and see for himself what evidence had and had not been presented. He left the impression that it was all somehow beneath him.
For the next several hours, Anderson offered defiant, meandering answers to every question about why he had not turned over the transcript recounting what Eric said he had seen in our home when Chris was killed. He shrugged off questions about why my attorneys never saw the neighbors’ reports of a strange van behind our house.
He was a terrible witness—belligerent, haughty, put-upon, and self-pitying. His appearance that day was a kind of professional and personal self-immolation. At several points his attorneys tried to indicate to him that he should stop making things worse—but he didn’t listen. His attorneys pleaded with Judge Sturns to let Anderson take a bathroom break—a transparent attempt to get him off the stand so they could talk some sense into him. The judge’s decision projected the first real clue of how he felt about the case. He did not let the former prosecutor leave the stand to get what would have been the most basic legal advice possible—for God’s sake, when you are this deep in a hole, stop digging.
Anderson’s attitude on the witness stand was destroying his reputation more effectively than anything I had said or claimed in court. He was burying his long career with his own braying self-regard.
And Hardin, a master at getting witnesses to reveal themselves, was working his lethal, legal magic on Ken Anderson.
Hardin zeroed in, using my former prosecutor’s own words to challenge his choices in my case. “How could a prosecutor who cares so deeply about children not remember anything about a child seeing his mother killed in a case that he prosecuted? How could that be? How could you forget it?”
Anderson answered flatly, “I have no recollection of a particular piece of evidence of that nature or in that detail.” He explained that he would not have put trust in Eric’s assertion that I had not been there when Chris was killed. He said that Eric was a “traumatized three-year-old child. You can’t attach any significance to anything he said at that point.”
Hardin countered, “He was right, wasn’t he? He was right!” He pointed out that Eric had independently come up with details about the crime scene that no one else knew. “Why in the world wouldn’t you want to investigate based on what that little boy said?”
Anderson responded, “You’d have to ask Boutwell that.” Of course, the sheriff had been dead for almost two decades.
Anderson went on to complain that his real problem was that he had simply been “too good” as a prosecutor. He said he wasn’t sure he could even prosecute cases successfully with all these new laws requiring full disclosure to the defense.
He insisted he had shared all of the exculpatory evidence with my attorneys and claimed they had just not followed up on the information.
At one point Anderson became so angry at Rusty Hardin, that he began shouting. Hardin was quoting from a vanity book Anderson had written in 1997, called Crime in Texas, which apparently touched briefly on my case. Hardin had been holding the book up and reading aloud what Anderson had written about me. In the process, he mistakenly said that the book contained an entire chapter on my case.
Ken Anderson snatched the book out of Hardin’s grasp and proceeded to read for the court the title of each chapter. He was incensed at Hardin’s error. Seething, he announced to the courtroom that my name had been mentioned only in a short introductory section. Apparently I didn’t merit more than that.
It was a moment that encapsulated everything that had gone wrong in my case, everything that was wrong with the criminal justice system’s failure to hold prosecutors like Anderson accountable. Anderson focused on details—insignificant bits of information that revealed nothing. He missed the big picture entirely.
Afterward, I told reporters that while I had hoped for more from Anderson’s testimony, he was a man who had been in a position of power for almost three decades, and for the first time, he had to answer for his actions—clearly, he was very uncomfortable with that.
I recognized that Ken Anderson was terribly bitter and struggling with denial and anger. Long ago, I had fought those same demons. I prayed that someday—like me—he would find peace.
It would be weeks before we knew how Judge Sturns would rule. I had to prepare for another courtroom drama—the murder trial of the man who had killed my wife.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Windswept San Angelo, Texas, may be in the middle of nowhere, but for one week in March 2013, the arid high-country college town was the center of my universe. It was where the man who killed Chris finally faced justice—long delayed, but no longer denied.
The trial was held there after Mark Norwood’s attorneys won a change of venue because of the overwhelming publicity in the Aust
in area surrounding my release and his arrest. The decision had the effect of turning the entire connected community of family members, attorneys, witnesses, and reporters following the case into something of a gypsy caravan. Our hearty troupe arrived in West Texas dragging boxes of legal files, suitcases, cameras—and a kind of tired hope.
It was not a short trek to San Angelo. The city is more than two hundred miles from Austin and almost four hundred from Houston, entailing long drives past small towns and Texas-size expanses of empty, open space.
Maybe this would mark an end. Maybe this trial would finally set some of us free—emotionally and psychologically, not just physically. I wasn’t the only one who had been a prisoner of Norwood’s terrible deeds.
By the opening morning of the trial, the gang was all in place. Eric and his wife, Maggie, came. My mother and my sister Vicky were there, too. Supporters, lawyers, and friends of mine came in for a day or two at various points in the week—and then left from the city’s tiny airport, a place plagued by a scary combination of high winds, wild temperature changes, and small planes.
I just hoped we’d all survive the week.
Chris’s sister Mary Lee, the woman who had raised and eventually adopted Eric, also came. It was almost unfathomable that we would once again be together in a courtroom reliving the details of Chris’s last days, the description of how she died, the horror of what had happened to our interlocked families. It swept us up and forced us back to the moment we each heard what had happened, back to the days when our tears were fresh.
Mary Lee—like Eric—was still adjusting to the new reality about me and about Chris’s murder. We were cordial but no longer close. Still, I was grateful to her for keeping Eric safe. And Mary Lee had also played an important role in preserving the truth about her sister’s murder. Long ago, when three-year-old Eric started talking to his grandmother about what he’d seen, it had been Mary Lee who insisted that she take notes and keep a detailed transcript of the conversation. That long-hidden account had helped set me free.
Unlike in my trial, this time Mary Lee and I were hoping for the same outcome—a guilty verdict. Finally, I knew we were on the same side.
I had been warned that this would be a tough case to argue and a difficult conviction to win. I wasn’t sure what to believe. The DNA evidence seemed to lend such certainty to the state’s case against Norwood. On the other hand, the unpredictable and sometimes inexplicable decisions of a jury were not unfamiliar to me.
While there was much more hard evidence against Mark Norwood than there had ever been against me, twenty-six years had come and gone since he’d entered our home and set in motion a cataclysmic nightmare that engulfed two families. The strongest evidence we had of the chronic criminal’s involvement in Chris’s murder was his DNA—found intermingled with her blood on the bandanna discovered behind our home.
That evidence was powerful—strong enough to get me released from prison. The DNA profile was complete enough to link Norwood to another tragically similar murder. But would it convince a jury to send him to prison for life? We wouldn’t know until we tried.
My trust fell upon Adrienne MacFarland and Lisa Tanner from the Texas Attorney General’s Office, named as special prosecutors in the case. We met a few times to go over my testimony.
MacFarland was senior at the AG’s office. Tanner was quite accomplished in prosecuting cold cases and had the gift of being able to sound both folksy and completely comfortable explaining the complex forensics of DNA evidence—something that would be very important in San Angelo. Tanner would handle most of the courtroom argument, but both of these women were good lawyers and good people. Along with their excellent staff, the whole team inspired confidence.
The judge had appointed two qualified lawyers to represent Norwood. Both of them were very capable of connecting with a jury and quite experienced in defending people who had done the indefensible. I knew that their job would be to plant seeds of doubt—about the evidence, about the testimony, about how much time had passed and how faulty people’s memories were.
As we walked to the courthouse that first morning, San Angelo’s bright sun was battling a chilling breeze for control of the thermostat—creating a climate that felt oddly hot and cold at the same time. It was like having chills and a fever—an apt metaphor for how I felt. I was relieved and worried, pleased that this was happening but brokenhearted that it meant we would all have to revisit Chris’s murder again.
I was most worried about Eric. Everyone else in our family had been through this before. We knew what had happened to Chris, and we’d had decades to absorb it and try to make our peace with how she died. Eric would be learning the truth, in all its dreadful detail, for the first time. I ached for him, but I knew that he needed to understand how he’d lost his mother. And he needed to hear what his life was like before her death.
We arrived at court early, greeted by our ever-present contingent of reporters and photographers—people I now knew by name. I even knew the names of some of their kids. My mother welcomed many of them with hugs and loud expressions of her glee that this day had finally arrived.
The large pillared courthouse was impressive—all carved concrete, massive steps, and legal majesty. It looked like an important place where important decisions were reached. Inside, it was a bit different than I’d expected. It had been built in the late 1920s, and whoever designed it had captured unique elements of the era’s architectural exuberance.
The original painting style inside appeared to have been restored. It was colorful, to say the least. Most courthouses are pretty dull. Built with an eye for utility first and foremost, they tend to boast a great deal of open, easily cleaned space. Here, columns with carved and painted trees and branches, flourishes and flowers marked the entry. Perhaps the rainbow of color was a reaction to the starkness and austerity of life in West Texas. Maybe it was an attempt to distract the often-bereft people who entered its doors. It was a beautiful place in which we would speak of ugly events.
Judge Burt Carnes, a tall, white-haired Texan whose family had a lengthy law enforcement background, had come in from Williamson County. He wore blue jeans under his black robe. I knew this because he stayed at my hotel and I saw him leave for court every morning, dressed like an elegant cowboy on a weekend getaway. In court, we all got to see his getup again because he whipped his robe off the instant we took a break—he had to. The old courtroom’s heating system seemed to work without regard for the weather outside. The combination of the constant heat, the bright sun streaming in through the large windows, and his heavy, dark robe must have been unbearable.
That sense that all of the trial participants—officers, witnesses, and reporters—were spending our days and evenings jostling up against each other extended to the old, narrow hallways and tiny restrooms, where we were in constant contact. It was possible to stand in line outside the restrooms for long minutes surrounded by witnesses, jurors, a television reporter, and the judge.
Hardest of all may have been the close proximity of the Norwood family. The accused murderer’s mother, brother, and sister were there—all of them physically similar to him. The differences, though, were on the inside. His sister and brother seemed nervous and unsure of how my family and I would react to them. I didn’t blame them. They seemed like good people who were in terrible pain about their brother’s situation.
Mark Norwood’s mother believed with all her heart that her son was innocent. She mourned the trial as the first step in yet another wrongful conviction. She compared her son’s situation to mine—to my face—again and again. I heard her telling reporters, even bystanders, that her son was being railroaded. I understood. I could see my mother’s pain reflected in her eyes. I knew how much my conviction had hurt my mom. Mark Norwood’s mother was wrong, but I knew her heartache was real.
We sat next to each other in the hall, chatted during breaks, and did not talk abo
ut our very different feelings toward her son. What we thought didn’t matter. It would be the job of the legal system to locate the truth that lay buried in decades of lies.
At the old courthouse, everyone had to surrender cell phones upon entry. You would have thought that the reporters, attorneys, and spectators were being asked to give up limbs. Because I had spent so many years without an electronic leash, it didn’t bother me, but I was the exception. There were long protests, requests for special treatment, attempts to talk the lobby guards out of enforcing the rules—all to no avail.
San Angelo was very “old school,” and for me, that was just fine. This was a long-ago case, a crime that took place in a world that no longer existed. For me and for the other people who loved Chris, this was an old, old ache. It made sense that the last chapter of this long-unfinished story would be written in a setting that seemed not to have changed much in the years she’d been gone.
I knew the key to this trial was going to be what the jury would hear about Norwood—and there were strict limits on that. I would not be introduced as someone who had wrongly served decades in prison for Chris’s murder. Prosecutors believed that knowing I had spent so much time in prison could be a factor in how the jurors viewed me—rightly or wrongly. It was decided that I would simply be a grieving husband who finally—after all this time—was hoping for closure.
Further, there was no guarantee the jury would hear that Norwood’s DNA matched evidence found at the Debra Baker murder scene. The admissibility of that fact would be decided as the case was tried. The legal team prosecuting Norwood wanted the jury to know that he had a long criminal record and was linked by DNA to another shockingly similar murder. So did I, and I prayed the judge would rule in our favor.
That first day, the old courtroom benches were nearly full, most of them with prospective jurors. Somewhere in that crowd of San Angelo faces—farmers, teachers, police officers’ in-laws, and salespeople—were the twelve men and women who would decide whether Mark Norwood was guilty of killing Chris.
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