My family and I took seats near the front. Eric sat down beside us, with his wife on one side and Mary Lee on the other. We were all braced to hear things we didn’t want to hear, to see images so awful that those of us who’d viewed them before hadn’t forgotten the horror—even after more than a quarter century.
The back door opened, and Mark Norwood walked in, his hands cuffed in front of him, a deputy at his side.
The room fell silent.
I had seen photos and video of the man. I knew what he looked like. But we had never been in the same room—we had never breathed the same air. I saw that Eric was staring hard at him as the gangly, tall wreck of a man moved toward his seat at the defense table. He seemed to walk with a defiant swagger—a wordless way of saying that no one and nothing in that courtroom mattered to him.
I was actually surprised to see him walking. That morning he had arrived at the courthouse in a police car and been transferred to a wheelchair for the short trip to the courtroom. Reporters said that Norwood claimed to be too weak to walk because of the ongoing hunger strike he was on to protest the jailhouse food. He seemed to have difficulty discerning between the inconvenience of his own unhappy taste buds and the heartbreaking death of an innocent woman.
At the Nuremberg trials, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described the actions and the architects of the Holocaust with a simple, memorable phrase—saying that the whole lot represented “the banality of evil.” Her long-ago words applied well to the man before us.
Mark Norwood was dull and ordinary, ignorant and ugly—a man who possessed no exceptional qualities except that he had been cruel enough to take the life of a sleeping innocent, at least twice. In the process, he had delivered decades of pain to so many good people.
He wore his ragged gray hair pulled back into a thin ponytail. His sideburns were haphazard, scraggly muttonchops, just as they’d looked in various mug shots over the years. He did not appear healthy. His clothes hung off of him. The skin on his arms was loose and saggy. His massive hands were knobby, scarred, and wrinkled.
Norwood mindlessly walked in front of the large, brightly lit screen prosecutors were still adjusting so they could display pictures and documents during the trial. He cast a fleeting dark profile across the spotless white background as he moved toward the defense table.
Mark Norwood may have been a shadow of the man he’d been twenty-six years earlier—but he was still the man who had broken into our home and broken our hearts. He was the “big monster with the big mustache” Eric had seen, and I could tell that this man’s presence in the courtroom was profoundly shaking to my son. It shook me, too, but not in the way I had expected.
I knew he had murdered Chris. I knew he was the man who had launched my life in an unimaginable direction. If I had been this close to him shortly after Chris’s death, I would have killed him—without a doubt, without hesitation, without an iota of remorse.
Since then, I had learned the hard way that there are worse things than dying—and that was what I wanted for Mark Norwood. I wanted him to go to the netherworld I’d been banished to—for the rest of his life. I wanted him to lose all of his freedoms, large and small. I wanted him to be miserable—for a very long time—and then die behind the cold, uncaring walls of prison, alone.
But it was hard, after all this time, to finally see him sitting there smugly, so close to the people I loved. His dull eyes scanned the room—looking at the crowd, looking my way, looking at Eric—but not really seeing anything. He may not have known who I was. I wondered if he could fathom that the dark-haired man sitting near me was the three-year-old boy he had terrorized so many years earlier.
I wondered if he was even capable of understanding how much pain he had caused.
Jury selection began with an acknowledgment that many of those in the courtroom were younger than this case—they hadn’t been born when Chris died. After intense questioning from both sides revealing that some potential jurors had relatives who’d been victims of violence and others feared wrongfully convicting a person, while a handful simply did not want the responsibility of deciding someone’s fate—a panel was chosen.
The State of Texas versus Mark Alan Norwood was under way.
Norwood took out the listening device he’d held against his ear throughout jury selection, stood up, and said in a loud voice, “Your Honor, I plead not guilty.”
Lisa Tanner began her opening argument. “Twenty-six years, seven months, and five days ago, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States . . . and Christine Morton was living the American dream.” Tanner told the story of how we met and married, how we went out the night before Chris died to celebrate my birthday with our newly healthy son. She described how I had left for work early the next morning and how our neighbor had seen Eric sitting on our front porch whimpering, all alone, around noon. She told the court what the neighbor had found inside and how I had rushed home.
Significantly, Tanner did not say anything about my being a suspect or my arrest, about my trial or my time in prison. She talked about the official investigation and described how Chris’s brother, frustrated by the lackadaisical work of the police, had set out to see if he could find any evidence on his own. She explained how he had found the bandanna behind our home and carefully saved it and handed it over to police. She explained that testing at the time revealed there was blood on it, but technology hadn’t yet evolved enough to reveal whose blood it was.
Tanner then jumped ahead to 2011, when the bandanna was tested again and the blood was finally identified as being Chris’s. She explained that someone else’s DNA was found intermingled with Chris’s blood—and how a computer database search identified that DNA as belonging to Mark Norwood. She described how investigators had determined that, in 1986, Norwood had lived close to our house, working as a carpet layer for the construction company that built the homes in our development—how he might even have worked on our home before we moved in.
Then Tanner went deeper into the case, explaining how investigators had found a long-ago friend of Mark Norwood’s who now lived in Nashville—a man by the name of Sonny Wann. Upon hearing Sonny’s name mentioned, Mark Norwood’s mother let out a long, loud moan—an acknowledgment that Sonny’s entry into the story line was going to be bad news for her boy.
She was right.
After my release, when investigators from the Austin police cold case unit went to visit Sonny, they began chatting with him about his gun collection. Tanner said the police asked him if he had a .45. He said he had only one. When he brought it out to show the officers, they were stunned. It was my old pistol. The serial numbers matched. It had been stolen from our closet on the day Chris was killed.
Tanner told the rapt jury that the investigators visiting Sonny never brought up Norwood’s name or told Sonny why they were there. They were just chatting with him. She said Sonny told investigators that he’d gotten the gun when the small construction company he owned was working on a remodeling project at a house in Austin. Sonny said he bought it for fifty dollars from one of the men he’d hired to help out on that renovation. He casually told police the man’s name—Mark Norwood.
Sonny Wann knew Norwood well. They had worked together off and on—not only on various building projects but also at a diner owned by Sonny’s former mother-in-law. In fact, Sonny had dated Norwood’s ex-wife and had moved with her out of state. His was not a fleeting recollection of someone he had known only briefly.
Lisa Tanner said they had tracked down the owner of the home Sonny and Norwood had worked on and gotten a receipt showing when the project began—August 1986, the same month as Chris’s murder.
She told the jury the evidence to convict Norwood had been there all along, and she asked them to finally—at long last—find him guilty.
The defense opened their case by telling the jury that it was their job to force the state to do its job—to
prove the case. They said they were asking the same of the twelve people sitting in judgment. They said it all boiled down to “can you trust the evidence?” They told the jury about the presumption of innocence. They finished by exhorting jurors to keep in mind the possibility of evidence contaminated by sloppy storage techniques or careless collection. They told them to look out for lies by some of the witnesses—a clear reference to Sonny.
Once again, I was called to the stand as the first witness. As Lisa Tanner led me through questions about my life with Chris and her last days, I realized this was the first time I was telling this story in front of Eric. When prosecutors put pictures of our old home up on the big screen, I knew this was the first time Eric had seen images of the house he’d lived in as a little boy.
They showed pictures of the house surrounded by crime scene tape, with Chris’s car still sitting in the driveway. It took me back to what I had seen when I pulled up at home the day she died—police everywhere, neighbors gawking—normalcy forever gone. With each photo they displayed, I could almost hear the shutter of the camera the way I’d heard it in our home that day—and the flashes of light in our hallway as the police photographer took picture after picture of Chris’s battered body still lying in our bed.
Tanner handed me my old pistol, the one Norwood had stolen the day he killed Chris. I hadn’t seen it or touched it in twenty-six years. It was like a ghost to me—a remnant of a long-ago life that seemed familiar, but faded. I recognized it and ruefully acknowledged it was mine. Was this gun the reason Norwood had killed Chris—for the paltry fifty dollars he got for it? Was that all her life had been worth to him?
Prosecutors put up a picture of Chris and Eric, their heads leaned in toward each other, both of them beaming. Eric looked so healthy and Chris looked so happy. I remembered taking the picture—never imagining it would be shown at a trial for the man who murdered my wife.
I saw Eric tear up and run his hands through his hair. I could see he was struggling to stay composed. Maggie took his hand and held him close.
Elizabeth Gee, the next-door neighbor who had delivered such damning testimony at my trial in 1987, took the stand. Lisa Tanner had told me that Elizabeth had continued to believe I was guilty—even after my exoneration and release, after Norwood’s arrest, after all the coverage of this case. Lisa said people from the attorney general’s office had to finally sit her down and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I was truly innocent. They told her that everything she had believed about Chris’s murder and about our marriage was profoundly wrong—and that the testimony she gave in my trial had done great damage.
Apparently, she had come around. This time on the stand, she did not accuse me of ripping out the marigolds Chris had planted, and she did not testify—wrongly—that I referred to my wife as “bitch.” She actually said some kind things about Chris and me as parents, telling the jury we never let Eric out of our sight—that we were with him, everywhere and always. She said that was how she knew something was very wrong at our home on the day Chris died. Our little boy was outside alone, something we would never have let happen.
Her testimony was followed by that of investigators who had worked on the original case.
Then a man from the Austin Police Department Crime Lab took the stand. His testimony would explain the investigation at the crime scene while the prosecution team put up photos showing what police and sheriff’s deputies had found.
Eric pushed close to my mother and Mary Lee. Maggie curled up against him. He was literally surrounded by women who loved him, as if they were forming a force field to protect him. The victims’ advocate from the attorney general’s office also moved closer to Eric as the testimony from the crime scene was introduced.
Anthony Arnold, a longtime crime lab specialist, led the courtroom through photos one by one as Lisa Tanner asked for explanations or additional information about what was being shown. It was a stark lesson in the incredible indignity of death, a reminder that a murder victim is so often reduced to little more than a piece of evidence, her body turned into just another crime scene exhibit. The delicate pink nightgown Chris wore to bed that night was photographed in harsh light, her bare form underneath visible through the thin fabric. I hurt knowing that Eric was seeing his mother like this.
Arnold described how police had step by step exposed Chris’s body, taking pictures at each point. Many of the photos were benign, showing the reading material we had stacked in our bookshelf headboard. There was a picture of the recipe folder that Chris kept there, packed with ideas for dishes she planned to serve at family dinners or neighborhood get-togethers. There was a snapshot of the book I had been reading in bed on the nights before the murder.
Eric was holding his head down as the prosecution’s assistant called up each photo when Lisa Tanner asked for them by exhibit number. He would look up when he was reassured that it was okay, something half of the courtroom was doing as well. Everyone there knew there was a possibility of seeing something too terrible to ever forget.
Arnold was testifying about how the crime lab team had finally uncovered Chris’s head, looking ever closer to see exactly what had happened.
Tanner called for the assistant to put up another photo.
Their system for shuffling through the exhibits and displaying them on the big screen was clumsy and vulnerable to human error—such as mistakenly putting up a photo out of order. Tragically, that is exactly what happened. The assistant accidentally put on screen a close-up picture of Chris’s head taken during the autopsy. All the blood had been washed off and her brain, her crushed face, the damage to one of her eyes, and her shattered teeth were visible to the entire courtroom.
Her face no longer looked like her.
Her face no longer looked human.
Everyone gasped, and a shock wave of truth about how violently and horribly Chris had been killed swept through the jury, the judge, and the spectators.
At first the assistant did not realize that this terrible photograph was up on the big screen. Lisa Tanner, clearly horrified, rushed to the assistant, pleading with her to get that shot off the screen—now. The damage, however, was done. Everyone had seen it.
Eric had seen it.
He dropped his head into his hands as his wife and both families enveloped him. Now he knew the pain of what we all had been living with for so long. He understood why one side of the family hated me, believing I had done this to someone they loved so much. He got a glimpse of the pain I felt, having lost my beloved wife in such a horrific way.
Now, he knew why her death had been so rarely discussed, why it had damaged so many people he loved. He knew how bad it had been. Knowledge may be power, but it can come with a high price.
Arnold continued his testimony, leading the courtroom through what police found in our bedroom that day. Some of the photos were hard to look at—showing blood spray that reached the ceiling, Chris’s blood splashed onto framed family photos, chunks of tissue and bone that had been catapulted across the room by the blows inflicted on her beautiful face. There were close-ups of Chris’s delicate hands, one of them clutching a long dark hair, the other with her little finger broken after she had instinctively raised her hand to protect herself.
When Roberto Bayardo, the medical examiner who’d performed the autopsy, was called to the stand, Eric, his wife, and Chris’s sister left the courtroom. They had seen more than enough.
Bayardo testified that Chris had suffered at least eight blows to her head. He said he believed that she had probably not lived past the second strike—that she would have been unconscious almost instantly and died very quickly. Her lack of suffering was hard to believe when prosecutors put up additional autopsy photos. They were the stuff of nightmares. Bayardo explained how he’d found long, jagged splinters of dark wood embedded in Chris’s head. He believed they were shards of whatever had been used to bludgeon her as she slept.
<
br /> For much of this testimony, I was outside the courtroom. I learned what had happened and what had been said afterward, through others in court—my family, friends, reporters, even spectators sitting in on the trial. Everyone knew how hard it was for me not to be sitting in there. But the defense had told the judge they planned on recalling me and didn’t want me tainted by what other witnesses were saying. I spent most of my time waiting in the small office the prosecution team had set up across the narrow hall from the courtroom.
It was where witnesses about to go on the stand gathered. Waiting there gave me the chance to speak with people I hadn’t seen in years—to see some of them for the first time in over two decades. They were people who’d made a huge difference in my life—both good and bad.
I spoke with John Kirkpatrick, Chris’s brother—the man who’d found the bandanna that set me free and led to Norwood’s arrest. John had always been a quiet, exacting person. I’d never known him to emote much. But on this day, he told me that Chris’s murder had been so painful for him that he hadn’t spoken of it at all in the years since she died—even to his wife. He said that his two children were not aware that Chris had been murdered until he was forced to tell them when I was released in 2011.
As we talked, it became clear that speaking about her death and his discovery of the bandanna was incredibly difficult for John after so many years of repressing what had happened. I knew Chris and John had been especially close, and I ached at the pain he had struggled with all these years. He and his family lived in the Pacific Northwest—as far as they could get from the heartache they’d left behind in Texas.
I could see that he wanted to do a good job of testifying. He still cared so much about Chris. I hoped doing this would help him find peace within himself.
Inside the courtroom that day, when John was on the stand, the blue bandanna was carefully removed from its evidence envelope. It was held up like it was the Shroud of Turin—a piece of material that had the power to change everything.
Getting Life Page 26