Lisa Tanner held it up for John and asked him to identify it, which he did without hesitation. He recounted the story of trying to “channel” the thoughts of the killer because he was impatient with the lack of police involvement in the case. He recounted finding it lying in the street, saying, “It was just there by itself, waiting for me to find it.”
He told the jury about the moment he had learned of Chris’s death in a phone call from his father. He said he answered his home phone that day and heard his late father say, “I’m going to tell you the worst news you’re ever going to hear in your life.”
I was told later that John had choked up on the stand and that portions of his testimony were terribly hard for him to get through. But his recall of events and his recounting of his role in finally solving her murder had been riveting. The details had all stayed with him—buried deep inside, waiting for him to finally share them with the world.
While John was testifying, I talked with his wife, Dianne. Much of what she shared could have passed for banter at a cocktail party—information about their lives and their jobs, their kids and their faraway home. As we talked, I couldn’t help thinking about all the time that had passed, all the experiences we would have shared if Chris had lived. She was our link, and when she was gone—so were they. It was good to see them again.
Also waiting in the witness room were the two forensic specialists from the Orchid Cellmark lab who had extracted Norwood’s DNA from the bandanna—and eliminated me as a suspect. They seemed thrilled to meet me. To them, I was a DNA celebrity.
They told me this was the first time they’d shaken the hand of someone they had helped exonerate. Their daily work was anonymous, clinical—sterile in every sense. My standing there in the flesh turned their impersonal work into something tangible; it put a face on what their scientific skills meant for real people. They asked if I would pose for a picture with them that they could take back to the lab. I told them the pleasure was all mine—and I meant it.
They took their turns in court, in addition to a slew of former Williamson County sheriff’s investigators. The cops who had botched my case all took the same basic tack—they had done the best they could with the technology they had at the time. Seeing some of them was a reminder of how ill prepared and poorly trained they were, particularly considering the power they had once had over my life and the lives of all the trusting residents of Williamson County.
The shadow of Sheriff Jim Boutwell hung over the proceedings. He had set the tone, he had led the team, he had determined me to be guilty on the day he walked in our front door. It was the job of the deputies and investigators, the jail guards hoping for a promotion, and the truck drivers dubbed detectives simply to bring in the evidence they needed to prove my guilt in the eyes of a jury.
They did that and absolutely nothing more. If they had looked harder, they might have found Sonny Wann.
In videotaped testimony—he was too ill to travel to San Angelo and terrified of flying—Wann told how he had purchased my old gun from Mark Norwood. He described Norwood as a “big ole boy” and said he was a hard worker. Still, the distrust with which he viewed Norwood, the hardscrabble world in which they both had lived, and the animosity between the two men overshadowed his words. Wann claimed he’d had a sexual relationship with Norwood’s first wife once they moved out of state. He said Norwood was always broke and asking for money. He mentioned that he had never seen him act violently, but Wann’s words hung in the air—leaving the sense that Norwood may well have been violent outside of Wann’s company.
The next steps were crucial. Mark Norwood’s ex-wife was going to take the stand.
Judy Norwood was a petite brunette who seemed terrified at the prospect of even being in the same room as her former husband. Her story was sad. She and Norwood had met in Tennessee when she had been fourteen. He had insisted that she sue her parents to win the right to marry him, even though she was underage. They had married in 1983, when she was only sixteen—then had a son together and moved to Austin the following year. They lived about twelve miles from our house.
She described a sad life, marked by financial failure and a fast-deteriorating relationship with her then husband. She said Norwood stayed out late at night, telling her he was working but warning her not to ask him any questions. She described how she had taken multiple jobs to keep the family going financially but quit after she came home one night from work to find that Norwood had left their very young son alone.
The most jarring element of her testimony was her mere presence. Judy Norwood looked too much like Chris and Debra Baker for it to be a coincidence. Like Norwood’s victims, she had long dark hair and was tiny in comparison to her tall, once powerful ex-husband. Judy Norwood had been raising a young child at the time, just as Chris and Debra had been.
Her nervousness at being near Norwood, her fear at testifying in front of him, told the jury everything they needed to know about his capacity for violence and his long pattern of bullying and cruelty to women. She visibly trembled and cried when prosecutors put up on the screen a large picture of Mark Norwood and their son, Thomas. The little boy boasted a broad, innocent smile. His glowering father stood behind him—with a bandanna dangling loosely from his right front pocket.
Reporters covering the trial told me she broke down when she left the courthouse and was followed by cameras to her car. She clearly wanted to drive as fast and as far as she could from this case—and this killer.
Later that day jurors were kept out of the courtroom while prosecutors tried to convince Judge Carnes that he should allow testimony on the murder of Debra Baker. Their reasoning was that the Baker murder—a nearly identical brutal bludgeoning that took place a year and a half after Chris’s death—constituted a “signature crime.”
Lisa Tanner was persuasive as she ticked off the similarities. Both women were beaten to death as they lay sleeping. In both cases, the blows were focused on their heads. They had both been beaten with an unidentified blunt object, and both victims’ purses had been rifled through. In each case, something of value had been stolen from the house—at our house, my .45 pistol was taken, and at the Baker home, the killer had stolen a VCR. Particularly telling was the way the women’s bodies had been left—bloodied and covered with pillows and other items.
Eerily, Chris and Debra Baker were close in age, similar in appearance, and raising young children. The killer had not raped either of the women. But in each case, Mark Norwood had left behind damning evidence—his DNA. Both killings had also taken place early on a Wednesday morning, on the thirteenth of the month. At the time Debra Baker died, Judy Norwood and her husband and son had lived only two-tenths of a mile from her home.
The judge ruled that the Baker case could be shared with the jury, a decision that left the prosecutors—and my family—exultant.
The first witness to share Debra Baker’s story with the jury was her eighty-nine-year-old mother. She was pushed to the front of the courtroom in a wheelchair and recounted how she had come looking for her daughter after concerned co-workers called to say Debra had not shown up for work that day. She described entering her daughter’s home calling to her, only to find Debra bloody and lifeless in her bed, her crushed face covered with pillows.
She didn’t have to tell the jury how heartbreaking the past decades had been for her—not knowing who had killed her daughter, not knowing if he was out there, free to kill again. Years of agony underscored her every word.
Debra Baker’s bright and fiery daughter, Caitlin, was front and center to see her long-lost mother remembered—and to watch as the man who’d savaged her family’s lives when she was just a toddler was forced to sit silently and listen to the pain of the innocent people he’d hurt so profoundly. Her brother Jesse sat beside her, finally receiving a small measure of justice for her death.
Phillip Baker, Debra’s husband, was there, too—supporting his daughte
r, his son, and his murdered wife’s sister, Lisa. Together, the Bakers’ presence and the facts of their case, along with ours, painted a damning and disturbing portrait of the accused murderer who sat before us. The difference between this trial and my own twenty-six years earlier? Actual, physical, undeniable evidence of guilt.
There was little for Mark Norwood’s attorneys to offer in his defense. His elderly mother, Dorothy, long suffering and drenched in denial about her son’s violent life, told the jury that her son had grown up in a tight-knit Air Force family. She said they had moved around the world, often having only each other as close and permanent companions.
Norwood’s brother Dale watched with his daughter at his side. His sister Connie listened to it all in silence and despair. They had done nothing to deserve this.
The defense relied on building doubt rather than laying out an alternate series of events. “Maybe” the bandanna had been contaminated, “maybe” one of us had tracked Chris’s blood onto it, “maybe” Sonny Wann had lied about buying the gun from Norwood—“maybe” Wann had the gun because he was the killer.
They put Wann’s ex-wife on the stand to testify that her former husband was a liar. Their daughter, estranged from her father for years, took the stand to agree with her.
His attorneys also brought up the fact that, in one of the crime scene photos, a bandanna was visible on the floor of our bedroom—having been tossed there when our dresser drawers were dumped. It looked different from the one found behind our home containing Chris’s blood and Norwood’s DNA. I was recalled to the stand to tell jurors I remembered it as a long-abandoned style artifact of the 1980s. Way back then, Chris’s sister Mary Lee had worn that bandanna as a belt. Everyone in the courtroom who’d lived through the fashion-challenged eighties nodded in recognition—they remembered the look, too.
The jury got the case before lunch. I had a feeling deliberations would not be lengthy. I’d seen the judge leaving the hotel for court that morning, carrying his packed bags.
Within a few hours, we were told there was a verdict.
As the courtroom filled with spectators, attorneys, reporters, and family members still hurting from Mark Norwood’s brief and brutal appearance in their lives, I couldn’t help thinking about the day when I had been convicted. I was profoundly grateful that the death penalty was not asked for in my case. And that was part of the reason that Chris’s family and I had not asked for it in Norwood’s trial.
There had been enough death. There had been too many tortured families. If Mark Norwood were found guilty, he would automatically be given a life sentence. His mother and his family would not have to suffer further by being dragged to the execution of someone who long ago began breaking their hearts. They, too, were due some decent treatment.
The disheveled shell of a man who sat at the front—scratching his head, fidgeting with his listening device, swallowing, smirking, and staring into space—was not the man who killed Chris. He was all that was left of that man. He was a person whose ugliness of character and guilt had already exacted their toll.
He had already been convicted—in his own heart and his own head—long ago. He knew he was guilty. He had known all along.
When the jury foreman read the verdict, I did not feel joy or revenge or power or closure. I felt relief for all the people who still loved Chris so much and the strong family who still loved Debra Baker. I felt we could finally exhale.
I hoped that, in the days ahead, there would be a trial for Norwood in the murder of Debra Baker. I hoped that for her family and for her memory.
I hoped that trial would someday lead former prosecutor Ken Anderson to accept in his heart that his actions—whatever drove them—had unintentionally led to the murder of yet another innocent, much-loved woman.
The two families hugged. There were tears, but no triumph.
I hugged Norwood’s brother as well. Outside the courthouse, he tried to apologize. But the words wouldn’t come. He struggled, then collapsed into my arms and sobbed. He cried for what his brother had done. He cried for what I’d been through. And he cried for himself and his family. Their new pain and their prison sentence was just beginning.
The Norwood verdict had come after I’d been out of prison for almost eighteen months. But it was on that day that I felt I was finally free.
EPILOGUE
It was still dark.
Stepping outside into the cool shadows of the early morning, I held my cup of hot coffee close. I could smell the pine trees and see birds beginning to flutter out of the black branches looking for breakfast. Far out on the lake, I could hear the splash of an occasional fish leaping high and then plunging back down into the quiet, deep water.
I’ve been living in this house on a lake in East Texas for only a few months, but it already feels like home.
It’s taken a long time, and the help of one person in particular, to get here.
We met the old-fashioned way—in church. Cynthia was part of the same small-town congregation as my parents. In fact, my family had known her well for years. They liked her. She was about my age, and her three children had grown and gone on to their own successes. She was fun and smart and pretty and—lucky for me—single.
I knew none of this when I was asked to speak at the church, not long after my release. The salt-of-the-earth folks who make up the membership had meant the world to my mother, in particular. They’d helped her tremendously during my imprisonment—letting her vent, supporting her for standing by me. They even remembered me on my birthday and holidays.
My mother’s Sunday School class at this church had bought me the plastic “penitentiary typewriter” for one of my first Christmases behind bars. That typewriter changed my life.
Now, this same church was about to change my life again.
I had only been out of prison for a few months, and my freedom was fresh enough that I still felt lost. I didn’t know how to fit into this new world or whether I would ever really be able to feel at home.
I was still casting about, trying to figure out how I should look. Before I was locked up, I’d had a mustache. Then, I was forced to be clean shaven for twenty-five years. Now I had the liberty to grow a mustache or long sideburns—or heck, even a gigantic lumberjack beard! For me, at least at this point, any facial hair that would have been off-limits in prison was suddenly on the menu.
Which explains why I showed up for my speaking engagement at church wearing what looked like a mustache, both above—and, oddly enough, below my mouth. I thought it was a goatee. In retrospect, it actually looked more “goaty.” In other words, I was not sartorially ready to meet the woman who would eventually agree to spend the rest of her life with me. Meeting someone was the furthest thing from my mind. I was simply worried about speaking publicly for the first time.
I was also painfully aware that I had not entirely shaken my “penitentiary personality.” I knew I didn’t see life the way other people did. I didn’t react to daily ups and downs the way others did. I was very much a work in progress. As the old saying goes, God wasn’t finished with me yet. I had a lot of rough edges that needed smoothing, a lot of pain that needed to be processed, a lot of life I needed to catch up on.
But I owed these people so much, for helping me and for helping my family. I wanted to show them how much it meant to me. I wanted to let them know how their faith in me—and my faith in God—had helped pull me out of prison alive.
I got up to the front and began with a casual comment—that ultimately changed everything in my life. I told them that one of the first things I’d learned after coming out of prison was that people wanted to know what life was like on the inside.
I’d determined that I wasn’t going to talk about it that night. So I offhandedly told the audience that if they wanted to learn about my life in prison, they would have to buy me a cup of coffee. I went on and finished my speech without embarrassi
ng myself—except for the poorly considered facial hair.
That night, I chatted briefly with Cynthia. She was gentle and kind—and had a real spark of intelligence in her eyes.
I filed our meeting away under “maybe someday.” I certainly knew that I wasn’t ready to jump into the dating pool.
A few days later, my parents’ phone rang. It was Cynthia—calling for me. She said she wanted to buy me that cup of coffee.
I was stricken.
Needless to say, a woman had never asked me out. I wasn’t even sure if this counted as being asked out. Where did meeting for coffee fall on the scale that ran from dinner and drinks (clearly a date) to trying to assist some hapless soul who needed help reentering the real world (not a date)?
I realized anew how out of social practice I was. I don’t think Cynthia had a clue that the desperate man on the other end of the line felt like he’d just been handed a lit social firecracker.
But I swallowed hard—and said yes.
That cup of coffee was our beginning. We met and talked for four hours—but not about prison. The next day we did it again—same coffee place, same good conversation, same powerful connection.
Cynthia and I shared a worldview, a system of beliefs, and a set of dreams. It felt as though I’d known her for a long time. I knew instantly I could trust her. I felt safe with her. We laughed easily and liked the same books and movies and music. We began going out to dinner, going to plays, going to church, and going forward—together.
She had a job, but whenever she could, she joined me at public appearances as I worked to bring change to our criminal justice system. She was with me at the state capitol to lobby for a new law that would help keep my nightmare from being visited on someone else. The bill that lawmakers worked hard to push through was somewhat embarrassingly called the Michael Morton Act. It codified exactly how and when prosecutors would share information with citizens who stand accused of a crime.
Getting Life Page 27