Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  The phone rang several times and then a man whose voice he did not recognize picked up. For a moment, Michael thought it might be Christine’s brother, who was in town. “Can I help you?” the man asked.

  “Yeah, I’m calling my house,” Michael said.

  “Say, where are you?” the man asked.

  “I’m over at the Reddens’,” Michael replied.

  “Over where? This is the sheriff.”

  “What’s going on?” Michael said. “I live there.”

  “Well, we need to talk to you, Mike.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said, sounding panicky.

  “Okay,” the sheriff said. “Just take it easy though, okay?”

  Michael bolted for the door so quickly that Redden, who had turned for a moment to place a baby in a swing, never saw him leave.

  III.

  To his admirers, Williamson County sheriff Jim Boutwell was larger than life; to his detractors, he was a walking cliché. The amiable, slow-talking former Texas Ranger wore a white Stetson, and he took his coffee black and his Lucky Strikes unfiltered. As a young pilot for the Department of Public Safety, he was famous for having flown a single-engine airplane around the University of Texas Tower in 1966 while sniper Charles Whitman took aim at bystanders below. (Boutwell succeeded in distracting Whitman and drawing his fire as police officers moved in, though he narrowly missed being shot himself.) Law enforcement was in his blood—his great-grandfather John Champion had briefly served as the Williamson County sheriff after the Civil War—and stories were often repeated about Boutwell’s ability to win over almost anyone, even people he was about to lock up. More than once, he had defused a tense situation by simply walking up to a man wielding a gun and lifting the weapon right out of his hands. At election time, Boutwell always ran unopposed.

  But Boutwell also played by his own rules, a tendency that had, in one notorious case, resulted in a botched investigation whose flawed conclusions reverberated through the cold-case files of police departments across the country. In 1983, three years before Christine’s murder, Boutwell coaxed a confession from Henry Lee Lucas, a one-eyed drifter who would, within a year’s time, be considered the most prolific serial killer in American history. Earlier that summer, Lucas had pleaded guilty to two murders—in Montague and Denton counties—and then boasted of committing at least a hundred more. At the invitation of the sheriff of Montague County, his old friend W. F. “Hound Dog” Conway, Boutwell had driven to Montague to question Lucas about an unsolved Williamson County case known as the Orange Socks murder. (The victim, who was never identified, was wearing only orange socks when her body was found in a culvert off Interstate 35 on Halloween in 1979.) After a productive initial interrogation, Boutwell brought Lucas back to Williamson County and elicited further details from him about the killing, but his methods were unethical at best. “He led Henry to the crime scene, showed him photos of the victim, and fed him information,” reporter Hugh Aynesworth, whose 1985 exposé on Lucas for the Dallas Times Herald was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, told me. “Henry didn’t even get the way he killed her right on the first try: he said Orange Socks must have been stabbed, instead of strangled. His ‘confession’ was recorded four times so it could be refined.”

  Lucas, who was held at the Williamson County jail, seemed to like the attention. In subsequent interviews with Boutwell, the number of murders he claimed to have committed climbed to a staggering 360. Despite signs that Lucas was taking everyone for a ride, the Williamson County DA’s office—which had nothing but his confession to connect him to the Orange Socks killing—charged him with capital murder. Among the many problems with the state’s case was the fact that Lucas had cashed a paycheck in Jacksonville, Florida, nearly one thousand miles away, a day after the killing. When the case went to trial, in 1984, his job foreman testified that he had seen Lucas at least three times on the day the murder occurred. (Prosecutors countered by laying out a time line that allowed Lucas to kill his victim and return to Jacksonville without a second to spare.) During a break in the trial, Boutwell speculated that jurors would see past the case’s myriad contradictions. “Even if they don’t believe Henry did this one, they know he done a lot of them, and they’ll want to see him put away for good,” Boutwell observed. Lucas was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  After his conviction, Lucas remained in the Williamson County jail, where he would eventually confess to committing more than 600 murders. He soon became a kind of macabre celebrity. Investigators from across the country traveled to Georgetown to interview him about their unsolved cases, but the integrity of Lucas’s confessions was dubious. A task force manned by Boutwell and several Texas Rangers often briefed him before detectives arrived; one Ranger memo stated that in order to “refresh” Lucas’s memory, he was furnished with crime-scene photos and information about his supposed victims. Provided with milk shakes, color TV, and assurances that he would not be transferred to death row as long as he kept talking, Lucas obliged. He gave visiting investigators enough lurid details that he was eventually indicted for 189 homicides. Not a single fingerprint, weapon, or eyewitness ever corroborated his claims. Even as his stories grew more and more outlandish—he declared that he had killed Jimmy Hoffa and delivered the poison for the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana—Boutwell never washed his hands of him. The sheriff, who was interviewed by reporters from as far away as Japan, appeared to enjoy the limelight.

  Years later, after Boutwell died of lymphatic cancer, Governor George W. Bush took the unusual step of commuting Lucas’s death sentence to life in prison. “While Henry Lee Lucas is guilty of committing a number of horrible crimes, serious concerns have been raised about his guilt in this case,” Bush announced in 1998, on the eve of Lucas’s execution for the Orange Socks murder. By then, it was no secret that the investigation Boutwell had kick-started was a fiasco. Aynesworth’s exhaustive Times Herald series had used work records, receipts, and a trail of documents to show that Lucas was likely responsible for no more than three of the slayings credited to him. In the spring of 1986 Texas attorney general Jim Mattox had issued a scathing report about the Lucas “hoax” and the investigators who had perpetuated it.

  This was just a few months before the murder of Christine Morton, but when Boutwell arrived at the crime scene that day, Mattox’s report probably wasn’t weighing too heavily on his mind. It might have hurt his reputation in Austin, twenty-eight miles south, but in Georgetown he remained untarnished. “He’d go around town, boy, and everyone would clap him on the back,” Aynesworth told me. “He was a hero.”

  The house on Hazelhurst was blocked off with crime-scene tape when Michael returned home. Despite the oppressive heat that August afternoon, many of his neighbors were standing outside in their yards; they stopped talking when they saw him pull up. Michael sprinted across the lawn and tried to push his way inside, past the sheriff’s deputies and technicians from the DPS crime lab who were already on the scene, but several officers converged on him. “He’s the husband,” Boutwell called out, once Michael had identified himself.

  Michael was breathing hard. “Is my son okay?” he asked.

  “He’s fine,” Boutwell said. “He’s at the neighbors’.”

  “How about my wife?”

  The sheriff was matter-of-fact. “She’s dead,” he replied.

  Boutwell led Michael into the kitchen and introduced him to Sergeant Don Wood, the case’s lead investigator. “We have to ask you a few questions before we can get your son,” Boutwell told him. Dazed, Michael took a seat at the kitchen table. He had shown no reaction to the news of Christine’s death, and as he sat across from the two lawmen, he tried to make sense of what was happening around him. Sheriff’s deputies brushed past him, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets. He could see the light of a camera flash exploding again and again in the master bedroom as a police photographer documented what Michael realized must have been the place where Christine was killed. He could
hear officers entering and exiting his house, exchanging small talk. Someone dumped a bag of ice into the kitchen sink and stuck Cokes in it. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.

  Bewildered, Michael looked to the two law enforcement officers for answers. “She was murdered?” he asked, incredulous. “Where was my son?” Boutwell was not forthcoming. The sheriff said only that Christine had been killed but that they did not yet know what had happened to her.

  By then, Boutwell had been in the house for two and a half hours. Sheriff’s deputies had arrived earlier that afternoon, responding to a panicked phone call from the Mortons’ next-door neighbor Elizabeth Gee, who had spotted Eric wandering around the Mortons’ front yard by himself, wearing only a shirt and a diaper. Alarmed, she let herself in to the Morton home and called out for her friend. Hearing nothing, she looked around the house. After searching the home several times, she finally discovered Christine’s body lying on the water bed, with a comforter pulled up over her face. A blue suitcase and a wicker basket had been stacked on top of her. The wall and the ceiling were splattered with blood. Her head had been bludgeoned repeatedly with a blunt object.

  From the start, Boutwell treated Michael not like a grieving husband but like a suspect. The sheriff had never tried to reach Michael to notify him of Christine’s death, and once he arrived, their conversation at the kitchen table began with Boutwell’s reading Michael his Miranda rights. His opinion of Michael was informed by the note left in the bathroom for Christine, which established that Michael had been angry with her in the hours leading up to her murder. Boutwell had read it shortly after arriving at the house. Michael’s lack of emotion at the news of her death did not help to dispel the sheriff’s suspicion that the murder had been a domestic affair. Odd details about the crime scene only reinforced his hunch. There were no indications of a break-in, a fact that Boutwell would repeat to the media in the weeks to come. (Though it was true that there were no signs of forced entry, the sliding-glass door in the dining area was unlocked.) Robbery did not appear to have been the motive for the crime; Christine’s purse was missing, but her engagement ring and wedding band were lying in plain sight on the nightstand. Other valuables, like a camera with a telephoto lens, had also gone untouched.

  Michael, who did not request an attorney, was cooperative and candid during his conversation with Boutwell and Wood. When he was asked to account for his time, beginning with the previous morning, he described his day in painstaking detail, down to the particular kind of fish Christine had eaten for dinner and the color of socks he had worn to bed. As the afternoon wore on, they pressed him about tensions in his marriage and whether either of them had ever had an affair. Sensing the drift of the conversation, Michael said at one point, “I didn’t do this, whatever it is.” Boutwell, who had not examined Christine’s injuries, had incorrectly surmised that she had been shot in the head at close range, and many of his questions focused on the guns that Michael kept in the house. Michael liked to hunt, and he had seven guns in all. As he spoke, he reeled off their makes and models according to caliber. When he listed his .45 automatic, Boutwell and Wood glanced up from their legal pads. “Is my .45 missing?” Michael asked. The pistol could not be accounted for—they had already searched his cache of firearms and hadn’t seen it—but neither man answered him.

  Growing more and more uneasy with their line of questioning, Michael finally erupted. “I didn’t kill my wife,” he insisted. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  The conversation stretched on for the rest of the afternoon. Afterward, Wood escorted Michael to a neighbor’s home, where Eric had been playing. Relieved to see his father, Eric ran to him. Michael fell to his knees and embraced the boy. For the first time since the ordeal had begun, he broke down and wept.

  People would later remark on how strange it was that Michael did not go to a hotel or a friend’s house that night, but in the fog of shock and grief, he and Eric went home. Michael did not ask what, if anything, the three-year-old had witnessed. (Wood had already tried to question the boy but was unable to get any information from him.) Instead, Michael offered his son assurances that everything would be all right. The house was in disarray; furniture was overturned, clothes were strewn across the bedroom floor, and the kitchen was littered with empty Coke cans and cigarette butts. Intent on reclaiming some sense of normalcy, Michael pulled down the yellow crime-scene tape outside and began to clean up. As it grew dark, he went from room to room, turning on lights. When exhaustion finally overtook him, he crawled into Eric’s bed and lay beside him, holding the boy close. The lights stayed on all night.

  The next morning, Orin Holland, who lived one block north of the Mortons, on Adonis Drive, stopped a sheriff’s deputy who was canvassing the neighborhood to share what he thought might be important information. Holland told the officer that his wife, Mary, and a neighbor, Joni St. Martin, had seen a man park a green van by the vacant, wooded lot behind the Morton home on several occasions. Holland went on to explain that his wife and St. Martin had also seen the man get out of the van and walk into the overgrown area that extended up to the Mortons’ privacy fence. Shortly after Holland talked to the deputy—either that night or the next, Holland told me—a law-enforcement officer visited his home. “His purpose was not to ask us questions about what we had seen but to reassure us,” Holland said. “Everyone was very unnerved at that time, and he came to say that we shouldn’t worry and that we were not in any danger. He didn’t overtly say, ‘We know who did it,’ but he implied that this was not a random event. I can’t remember his exact words, but the suggestion was that the husband did it.”

  The St. Martins had also contacted the sheriff’s office about the van. “Joni remembers me seeing the van early in the morning on the day Christine was killed, when I left to go to work,” her ex-husband, David, told me. “I trust Joni’s memory more than mine, but twenty-six years later, I can’t say exactly when I saw it.” Still, the van made an impression on both of them. “There were only two houses on our street: the Hollands’ and ours,” Joni explained. “People dumped trash in that area, so if we saw a vehicle we didn’t know, we paid attention.” After learning of Christine’s murder, David called the sheriff’s office. “We kept waiting for the police to come talk to us, but they never did,” Joni told me. “Eventually, we figured the evidence led them in another direction.” Like most people in the neighborhood, she and David did not know Michael particularly well. “We’d said hi at the mailbox before, but that was it—he pretty much kept to himself,” Joni told me. “So when he was arrested, we thought, ‘Well, what do we know? They must have something on him.’”

  In fact, what little physical evidence had been recovered from the crime scene pointed away from Michael. Fingerprints lifted from the door frame of the sliding-glass door in the dining area did not match anyone in the Morton household. All told, there were approximately fifteen fingerprints found at the house—including one lifted from the blue suitcase that was left on top of Christine’s body—but they were never identified. A fresh footprint was also discovered just inside the Mortons’ fenced-in backyard. The most compelling piece of evidence was discovered by Christine’s brother, John Kirkpatrick, who searched the property behind the house the day after her murder. Just east of the wooded lot where the man in the green van had been seen by the Mortons’ neighbors, there was an abandoned construction site where work on a new home had come to a halt. John walked around the site, looking for anything that might help illuminate what had happened to his sister. As he examined the ground, he spotted a blue bandana lying by the curb. The bandana was stained with blood.

  John immediately turned the bandana over to the sheriff’s office, but its discovery did not spur law enforcement to comb the area behind the Morton home for additional evidence. Either the significance of the bandana was not understood, perhaps because investigators had failed to follow up on the green van lead, or, worse, it was simply ignored.

  When John handed over the bandana that
afternoon, Boutwell and Wood were already absorbed by another development in the case. Based on an analysis of partially digested food found in Christine’s stomach, the medical examiner had estimated that she had been killed between one and six o’clock in the morning (Michael had, by his own account, been at home with her until five-thirty). The results did not necessarily implicate Michael, but they did not clear him of suspicion either. And neither did the medical examiner’s finding that Christine had not been sexually assaulted. Neither rape nor robbery appeared to have motivated her killer, but the savage nature of the beating—eight crushing blows to the head—seemed to suggest that rage had played a part.

  A few days later, Boutwell met with Michael, Marylee, and Christine’s parents, Jack and Rita Kirkpatrick, to update them on the progress of the investigation. Michael had always enjoyed a cordial relationship with his wife’s family, but the sheriff’s comments that day quickly erased whatever goodwill existed between them. As Boutwell comforted the Kirkpatricks with the assurance that he would find Christine’s killer, he made it clear that Michael had not yet been ruled out as a suspect. “I’d like to show you some photos and update you on the progress of the investigation,” Boutwell said. “But I can’t show you anything if he’s”—the sheriff nodded at Michael—“in the room.” By the time Christine’s funeral was held later that week, in Houston, the uneasiness between Michael and the Kirkpatricks was obvious. “I noticed Mike standing off by himself afterward, and I could tell something wasn’t right,” a friend of the Mortons’ told me. “Chris’s brother, John, told me there were some questions about Mike. He said, ‘I’m heading back to Austin to look into some things.’”