Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Kanaby read the case summary beside the photo. It stated, “Debra Baker was last seen the night of January 12, 1988. She failed to report for work at Elliot Systems on January 13. She was found deceased in bed by a family member who went to the residence to check on her. She had been beaten multiple times with a blunt object and there was evidence of possible forced entry into the residence.”

  Kanaby was floored. Whoever had murdered Baker had used the same MO—bludgeoning her in her bed—as Christine’s killer, just seventeen months after Christine’s death.

  Kanaby saw that the address of Baker’s home was listed, and she plugged it into GoogleMaps. As the satellite image of the North Austin neighborhood materialized before her on her computer screen, she noticed that the street where Baker had lived, Dwyce Drive, ran parallel to Justin Lane, where Norwood had lived at the time. “I got chills,” Kanaby said. “I didn’t have his exact address yet, but I could see that Justin Lane and Dwyce Drive were about two hundred feet apart. The homes on Justin Lane backed up to the homes on Dwyce. Their proximity seemed like more than just a coincidence.”

  She hastily wrote an e-mail to Morrison asking if her investigators could pinpoint Norwood’s old residence on Justin Lane. As she waited for a reply, she continued looking online for information about Baker. She soon stumbled across a criminal-justice blog on which Baker’s daughter, Caitlin, had written several long posts. “There were pleas from her from 2005 begging for any information that anyone might have about who had killed her mother,” Kanaby said. “She had clearly done this out of desperation. She said that the police had not adequately investigated the murder and that detectives had told the family they were working on it, but she didn’t believe they were.” Kanaby read on as Caitlin explained that she had barely known her mother because the murder had happened when she was three. “It was heart-wrenching,” Kanaby said. So too was the realization that Caitlin and Eric had been the same age when they lost their mothers.

  Were the Morton and Baker cases linked? she wondered. As she studied the map, she had the “steadily escalating sense,” she told me, that they were. “I couldn’t stop thinking that if Norwood had been arrested and convicted of Christine’s murder, Debra might still be here, and Caitlin’s story, like Eric’s, would have been so different,” she said.

  Morrison was not able to obtain the information until five days later. On August 23 she e-mailed Kanaby, telling her that investigators had verified which house Norwood had lived in on Justin Lane. Kanaby typed his address, and then Baker’s, into GoogleMaps and looked at the image that appeared on her screen. “He basically lived around the corner from her,” she told me. “I kept staring at the blue line that traced the path from his house to hers.”

  Morrison was already in Texas when she learned of Kanaby’s findings, having flown in from New York to attend a hearing in Georgetown that afternoon. The hearing would take up a request made by the defense that was almost certainly doomed: that Judge Stubblefield recuse Bradley from the case and appoint a special prosecutor to review the evidence with fresh eyes. Stubblefield—who had consistently sided with the state since the battle over DNA testing had begun—was not swayed. “It would be truly an extraordinary act for this court to disqualify or recuse Mr. Bradley,” he observed, expressing his confidence that the two prosecutors who were present—Jernigan and first assistant DA Lindsey Roberts—would handle the case in an unbiased manner.

  Stubblefield then turned his attention to another request from the defense. Citing the materials uncovered by the Innocence Project’s public records request, Raley had made a strenuous case for Judge Lott’s sealed file to be unsealed. He argued that the transcript of Wood’s phone conversation with Rita Kirkpatrick was so plainly favorable to Michael—it conveyed an eyewitness account of the murder in which an unknown intruder, not Michael, was identified as the killer—that Lott would have undoubtedly disclosed it to the defense had he known of its existence. That he hadn’t, Raley insisted, proved that Anderson had never produced the transcript to the judge. “The way to find that out is to unseal the file,” Raley argued. Confident that everything had been above board, Jernigan did not object. “There’s nothing to suggest that this transcript wasn’t in that Court of Appeals’ file,” she said.

  Stubblefield ordered that the file be retrieved from the appellate court in Austin—a process that would take a few days—so he could open it and review it with attorneys from both sides. “I personally am curious and would like to see it,” the judge added. He paused for a moment before concluding the hearing, which was taking place just down the hall from Anderson’s courtroom. “We must all have the courage to learn the facts and to let them lead us where they may, regardless where that might be,” he said.

  The following morning, as the heat wave that gripped Texas broke all records, marking the seventieth consecutive day when the temperature soared over one hundred degrees, Morrison and Raley made their way to the Austin Police Department for a meeting they had requested with its cold-case unit. The two lawyers were met by detectives and a prosecutor from the Travis County DA’s office, who listened intently as Morrison and Raley laid out the pieces of their case, from Norwood’s DNA on the bandana to Kanaby’s findings. The warm reception stood in contrast to the way they had been greeted over the years in Georgetown. “Everyone was very interested in what we had to say,” Raley recalled. “They told us they would look into the possibility of comparing the DNA from the Baker crime scene to the recent Norwood evidence.” As Morrison and Raley left the police department that morning, they were buoyed by the hope, however remote, that a link might be found between the two cases—a link that would erase any doubts about Michael’s innocence. Raley’s excitement was tempered by his frustration. “We were having to conduct our own investigation,” he said. “We were doing the work of law enforcement. I kept thinking, ‘Why isn’t anyone in Georgetown trying to figure this out?’”

  Two days later, on August 26, Jeffrey Kyle—the clerk for the Third Court of Appeals—drove from Austin to Georgetown to hand-deliver Lott’s sealed file to Stubblefield. By then Morrison and Raley had returned home, and so Patricia Cummings, a local criminal defense attorney who had become a member of Michael’s legal team, served as a witness to the unsealing. As she and the two prosecutors, Jernigan and Roberts, waited for the judge, Kyle stood with them, holding the small brown envelope that contained Lott’s file.

  “I think the expectation, at least from the DA’s office, was that there was going to be a lot of material in there,” Cummings told me. “But we could all see that the envelope was very thin.” Stubblefield finally summoned them into the foyer of his chambers, where they remained standing while he opened the envelope. He pulled out six pages. All that was inside the file was a report of Wood’s, written on the day that Christine was killed, and a one-page form that Michael had signed, allowing deputies to search his pickup. “No one said much afterward, but it was very, very awkward,” Cummings said. After Stubblefield had copies of the file’s contents made for everyone, Cummings excused herself, then raced to her car and pulled out her cell phone to call Morrison. “There’s nothing there,” she said.

  Stubblefield recused himself from the case the following week when Morrison and Raley stated in court filings that the absence of Wood’s reports and notes from Lott’s file raised the “specter of official misconduct.” (Stubblefield did not provide a reason for exiting the case, but he would have likely faced criticism had he not, given that Anderson was a fellow judge and longtime colleague.) In his absence, the Texas Supreme Court named a neutral party from outside Williamson County, state district judge Sid Harle, of San Antonio, to preside over the case.

  Soon after, Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg contacted Harle to request an appointment. The judge—who was in the midst of a capital-murder trial in his home district—elected to speak to her by phone instead, but he had a court reporter transcribe the exchange, which took place on September 16. During a hearing i
n Georgetown ten days later, he provided a sealed transcript of the conversation to Morrison, Raley, Jernigan, and Roberts and called a recess during which the attorneys could read it. The transcript contained an earth-shattering bit of information: a pubic hair that had been recovered from Debra Baker’s bed in 1988 did, in fact, match Norwood’s DNA profile.

  “I remember screaming a lot as we read that transcript,” Morrison told me. “I said to John, ‘The case is over! We are done! This is it!’” Why, I asked her, was she so certain? “There was no argument that could be made with a straight face that it was a coincidence that Norwood’s DNA was found at the scene of both crimes,” she said.

  The Williamson County DA’s office did not see things the same way. When attorneys from both sides of the case reconvened in the courtroom as reporters looked on, Raley—still shaking his head in amazement—stated what by then seemed obvious. “I would imagine that in light of this new information, the state should be prepared to agree to relief for Michael Morton immediately,” he said firmly. “Right now.” But when Harle moved the hearing into chambers so they could speak freely about Norwood, whose name was still being withheld from the public, the two prosecutors dug in their heels.

  Roberts told the judge that the bandana should undergo further DNA testing, and Jernigan brought up a report from the files of the late Williamson County sheriff Jim Boutwell, who had overseen the investigation into Christine’s murder, that seemed to cast doubt on the importance of the bandana. The report had been written by a sheriff’s deputy the day after John Kirkpatrick had turned the bandana over to investigators. In the report, the deputy stated that he too had seen the bandana while earlier canvassing the area, but he justified not gathering it as evidence by explaining that he had not noticed any blood on it. (The stains were small and easy to overlook.) Based on that report, the DA’s office put forth a far-fetched theory: that Christine’s blood had gotten onto the bandana after John picked it up, when he returned to the Morton home. (How, exactly, John had managed to get whatever dried blood remained at the house onto the bandana was not explained—nor was it explained how a hair of Christine’s had come to be found on the bandana.) In other words, even if Norwood had dropped the bandana, that did not make him Christine’s killer.

  But the position that the DA’s office had taken was untenable. By then both Morrison’s investigators and Williamson County sheriff’s deputies had managed to locate Norwood—he was found living with his mother thirty miles east of Austin in the town of Bastrop—lending the reinvestigation of the case a new urgency. With local media reporting that evidence in the Morton killing had been linked to an unnamed suspect in a Travis County murder, Bradley folded. Four days after the hearing, he called Barry Scheck.

  This was a remarkable turn of events; just two years earlier, Bradley and Scheck had famously clashed over the state’s reinvestigation of the troubled case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the deaths of his three daughters in an East Texas house fire. (Bradley, who was appointed by Governor Perry to head the Texas Forensic Science Commission, had openly disparaged Scheck’s efforts to examine whether Willingham had been wrongly convicted using flawed forensic science.) But during an intense weekend of phone calls back and forth, Bradley finally relented to Scheck’s terms. Bradley agreed not only to release Michael on bond while the Court of Criminal Appeals considered his claim of actual innocence but also to allow Michael’s attorneys, during that time, to conduct a court-supervised investigation into possible misconduct in the case. The unusual arrangement would allow them to question Anderson, Wood, and others under oath.

  “I didn’t just want to get out,” Michael told me. “I wanted to know exactly how this had happened to me.”

  Monday, October 3, 2011, was Michael’s 8,995th day in prison. It would be his last. He spent the morning giving away the few items he had that had made life more tolerable—a radio, an oscillating fan, a pair of sneakers—and took his final walk around the yard. That afternoon he was led from his dorm to a holding cell where he would spend the night before being transported back to Georgetown for his release. As a guard walked him through the dorm, he heard the rumble of applause. Over the years, Michael had earned the respect of his fellow inmates. He was known as a generous person who, along with two other prisoners with whom he attended Bible study, had routinely performed small acts of kindness for those who were the worst off—the men who never received any visitors or money in the mail with which to buy creature comforts. During the dog days of summer, Michael had used the commissary money his parents sent him to buy ice cream for some of them, earning himself the nickname the Ice Cream Man. Now, as he walked down the concrete hallway for the last time, he looked up and saw scores of inmates standing on the second tier, clapping and whistling and cheering for him.

  Michael carried a Bible that his sister had given him, a few photos, and a toothbrush. Filled with the anticipation of what was to come the next day, he managed to sleep for just a few hours. Early in the morning, two Williamson County sheriff’s deputies arrived to bring him back to Georgetown. The protocol for transporting an inmate—even a man who was about to be freed on grounds of actual innocence—required that he be handcuffed and put in leg irons, but one of the deputies hesitated before reaching for his cuffs. “Now, Mr. Morton,” he said, “if you start having bad thoughts, I want you to remember that when all of this happened to you, I was only twelve years old.” Michael smiled and assured the deputy that he had nothing to worry about. He held his wrists out to be shackled, eager to get on the road.

  The drive took three hours. Staring out the window of the squad car, Michael studied the brown, desiccated landscape that stretched westward from the Piney Woods. Leaning forward, he asked the deputies if there had been a fire in the rolling farmland and was told that the devastation was a result of the state’s historic drought. He had read about the drought, but he had not yet seen the toll it had taken and was amazed by the sight of the parched and brittle fields. There were other details that startled him too, like the peculiar metal spires he saw in the distance every now and then, which he soon understood were cell-phone towers. When one of the deputies pulled over at a gas station, he studied the self-service pump with its digital display and credit card reader. The last time he had seen the outside world was seven years earlier, when he had been transferred to the Michael Unit. He had not driven a car since midway through Ronald Reagan’s second term.

  When they arrived in Georgetown late on the morning of October 4, Michael could see that it too had undergone a transformation. Though still a small town, it thrummed with traffic that poured off the interstate, and the subdivisions that ringed it seemed to stretch on forever. No longer a sleepy, rural area, it had been overtaken by the northernmost edge of greater Austin. The century-old Greek Revival courthouse at the center of town where he had been convicted was shuttered. Michael was taken to the new jail, next to the Williamson County Justice Center—the spacious, modern courthouse where his bond hearing was to be held. In his cell, he found a tidy pile of clothes that his mother had hurriedly bought for him the previous day. Having worn only loose-fitting prison whites for as long as he could remember, he stared at them as he was unshackled: a white button-down shirt, khakis, boxers, and a pair of socks. Unaccustomed to buttons, he fumbled them as he dressed himself. As he slid on the khakis, which felt impossibly soft, he began to cry.

  A sea of faces greeted him in the courtroom: Morrison, Raley, and Scheck were there, as was Bill Allison, who embraced him. His mother, Patricia, and his father, Billy—who had asked the members of their church to pray for their son’s release for nearly twenty-five years—sat behind him with his younger sister, Patti, beaming. Reporters crammed into the courtroom, craning for a better view. As Michael scanned the room, he saw a young woman who he would later learn was Caitlin Baker, Debra Baker’s daughter. She sat quietly by herself, observing the proceedings. He spotted Mario Garcia at the back of the courtroom and motion
ed to his friend to step forward, enveloping him in a long, silent bear hug.

  The hearing lasted just a few minutes, during which Harle apologized to Michael from the bench. “We do not have a perfect system of justice, but we have the best system of justice in the world,” the judge observed before agreeing to the terms of his release. For several minutes, everyone stood and applauded as Michael smiled broadly, his face electrified by the joy of the moment. “I thank God this wasn’t a capital case,” he told the crowd of reporters and TV cameramen. They trailed after him as he took his first steps out of the courthouse, his face upturned toward the sun.

  Michael was already in his parents’ SUV, beginning to pull away, when Raley motioned for them to stop. A dark-haired woman in her sixties stood next to him, looking distraught. Raley explained that she was Lou Bryan, one of the jurors from the 1987 trial. She had learned only that morning, when she picked up the newspaper, that DNA tests had proved Michael to be innocent. “I’m—I’m so sorry,” she managed to say as she stared at Michael in disbelief.

  He reached out to squeeze her hand. “I understand,” he said.

  IV.

  By the time Michael walked out of prison a free man, Ken Anderson had long been a respected member of his community. He was a Sunday school teacher and Boy Scout volunteer who cast himself, in his rulings, as a champion of both crime victims and children. A father of two, the fifty-nine-year-old jurist held a regular mock trial for fifth graders that he called “The Great Stolen Peanut Butter and Jelly Caper,” and he frequently made appearances at local schools to talk about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. He was a prolific writer, and of the eight books he had written, his most impressive work was a biography of Dan Moody, a Williamson County DA from the twenties whose prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan helped win him statewide acclaim and put him in the governor’s mansion. Like Moody’s, Anderson’s ambition reached beyond Williamson County. At the courthouse, rumor held that he had his sights set on obtaining an appointment to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases.