Kill the Ones You Love

by Robert Scott

  The key now was whether Judge Stone agreed with the defense about Gabe being too mentally ill at the time of the shootings to understand what he was doing was wrong. Stone said that he’d read the Oregon statute on that factor, over and over and over again. He read it out loud now to make sure everyone knew what he was talking about: “‘At the time of the criminal conduct, that the individual suffered mental disease or defect and that he lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct, or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.’” Judge Stone added that the burden of proof on that rested with the defense.

  The judge continued that the key language that jumped out at him was the requirements of the law for Gabriel Morris had to be in effect at the time of the shootings and not days or weeks beforehand. Stone noted that he’d listened to the testimony of one psychologist and two psychiatrists concerning whether Gabe had a delusional disorder. All three of these men were experts in their field; yet, they all disagreed to some extent with each other.

  Stone noted that the defense attorneys had been very critical of Dr. Sasser’s methods and opinions. However, Stone said that in his opinion, Sasser just had a different style than the others. One thing they all agreed upon was that the DSM-IV had to be used cautiously in a forensic setting. It wasn’t a cookbook, where you could just take one ingredient and another ingredient and create a recipe.

  Then the judge added something that did not bode well for the defense: “It is most significant to me, while a person may be diagnosed with having a delusional disorder, that does not mean he meets the legal definition of insanity. Even assuming in this case, that the defendant has some form of mental disease or defect, I am not satisfied from the evidence in this particular record that on the date in question the defendant lacked the capacity to understand or appreciate the criminality of his act.”

  He continued that it was clear to him that Gabriel Morris did many things to try and cover up the fact that he’d just killed two people. Statements that had come from Gabe and Jessica made that clear to Stone, and so did the statements of Fred and Laura Eschler. Also, the mere fact that Gabe had gone on the run, clear across the United States, was proof that he knew what he did was legally wrong.

  Judge Stone said, “Mr. Morris is no dummy. He is intelligent. He’s articulate. He has training as a police officer. I think, quite frankly, his actions speak volumes. His actions were not those of a person who is delusional. The bottom line is this, did the defendant intentionally cause the death of Robert Kennelly and Robin Anstey in Coos County, Oregon, on February 8, 2010? The answer is yes. Has the insanity defense been proven by the greater weight of evidence? The answer is no.”

  Judge Stone then pronounced Gabe guilty of aggravated murder on Counts One and Two. There was a very short break between that point and the sentencing phase.

  When the judge came back into the courtroom after only five minutes, DA Frasier said he wouldn’t be calling any more witnesses in the sentencing phase. Then he added that the district attorney’s office had phoned Bob Kennelly’s two daughters the previous day and told them that they could speak during the sentencing phase. Neither one had responded.

  Peter Fahy said he didn’t need any more time as well. He added, “It would be redundant to call any further witnesses.”

  With that said, Judge Stone stated that he’d noted as far as mitigation or aggravating circumstances went, Gabe had robbed Bob Kennelly as he lay dead on the ground.

  “He then made a series of choices, where he fled from the scene and committed at least one additional robbery. All of these facts are significant to me. They support the decision I’m going to make in this particular case,” the judge stated.

  Judge Stone had Gabriel Morris stand, along with his defense attorneys. Then in a clear voice, Stone pronounced, “As to Count One, the aggravated murder of Robert Kennelly, I sentence Gabriel Christian Morris to life in prison without the possibility of parole. As to Count Two, the aggravated murder of Robin Anstey, I sentence Gabriel Christian Morris to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”

  Judge Stone then remanded Gabe over to the Oregon prison system. By 2:50 P.M., on August 16, 2011, it was all over.

  CHAPTER 55

  Jessica Morris was eventually reunited with her parents and her daughter. She shunned the limelight after the case. As far as Jessica was concerned, the events that had occurred leading up to and beyond February 8, 2010, had been nothing but a nightmare.

  As for Gabe, he remained as much a mystery as ever to those who had known him. Perhaps journalist Winston Ross of the Register Guard summed it up as well as anybody: People who know Gabe describe him with wildly varying terms: He’s a con artist; a genius; a gifted salesman; a video game junkie; a pothead; a religious fanatic; a devoted husband, father and son; affectionate; manipulative; an attention-seeker; a braggart; a man of volatile emotions, as capable of weeping as he is of screaming. To call Gabe complicated is to call Everest a big hill.

  Not even the experts could agree about Gabe Morris. On the evening of February 8, 2010, he was either so delusional that he could not control his actions, or he was just a pothead loser fueled by anger and alcohol. Whatever the circumstances, when Gabriel Morris stood on the balcony that evening, gun in hand—once he pressed down on the trigger, he destroyed his own life and the lives of so many others around him. He had indeed killed the ones he loved in more ways than one.

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  CHAPTER 1

  ROMEO

  El Dorado Hills, California, 2009

  The foothills of California’s Gold Rush country sweep down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and intersect with the great Central Valley. Perched on the edge of that meeting of hills and flatlands, El Dorado Hills is a new community compared to the other towns in the area. Placerville, “Old Hangtown,” had begun along Placerville Creek when gold miners rushed into the area in 1848. In fact, gold had been discovered by James Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, only a few miles away. It was the spark that created the epic Gold Rush of 1849, when as one writer put it, The world rushed in.

  El Dorado Hills was a developer’s dream of the mid-twentieth century, with spacious lots, modern homes and small horse properties for those who wanted them and could afford them. There was even a luxurious neighborhood where people could fly their private planes onto a landing strip and park it right next to their homes. The Town Center was a collection of beautiful buildings that mirrored streets in Europe with their stone facing and wrought iron lampposts.

  Nineteen-year-old Steven Colver was one of the residents of that area in 2009. Steven generally went by the name “Boston,” and he liked to hang out at the Habit coffee shop in El Dorado Hills. Steven was also into the goth lifestyle. He often wore black clothes and was addicted to Japanese anime and manga.

  And like many a young man in his late teens, Steven had a younger girlfriend. In Steven’s case, however, the girlfriend wasn’t just a year or two younger. No, she was five years younger. His girlfriend was fourteen-year-old Tylar Witt, who also lived in the area, and she, too, was into the goth scene. Over time, she began to think of Steven as her Romeo.

  No two people seemed to describe Steven in the same way. To some, he was polite, quiet spoken and intelligent. To others, he was headstrong, opinionated and bombastic. But despite his love of anime with many bloody scenes depicted withn the pages, no one thought of Steven as being violent.

  During the last days of spring 2009, a seven-page story that mirrored his life and that of Tylar in El Dorado County was written. It was written in one of Steven’s notebooks and later either Tylar or Steven was cited as its author. Whatever the truth, the story was fiction that interweaved fact and allegory. It paralleled the actual life Steven and his girlfriend were living that year. The story was titled
, “The Killer and His Raven.”

  The story was set in medieval times. Its protagonist was a nineteen-year-old man who met a smart, beautiful fourteen-year-old girl at a local tavern. It began with the two meeting and becoming good friends, “almost like siblings.” As the young man learned more about the girl’s life, he discovered that she lived with a drunken, abusive mother. He promised to protect her from her mother’s wrath. As the young man and the girl spent more and more time in each other’s company, they realized that they loved each other.

  The young man lived in his father’s home, but the girl was able to convince her mother into letting the young man move in with them. There, within the walls of the girl’s house, they sealed their love by a forbidden, sexual relationship. They were deeply in love with each other; but one day, the girl’s mother caught them being intimate. She immediately kicked the young man out of the house and demanded that her daughter never see him again.

  The girl, however, could not keep away from her lover, and her resentment deepened against her mother. The mother promised not to go to the authorities if the girl kept away from the young man. Secretly, the lovers met, and their hope returned for three weeks. But then the mother, suspicious about her daughter, vowed to go to the authorities with the girl’s diary, which she had discovered. This diary detailed the lovemaking with the young man.

  The story continued: That is when their dreams shattered, that is when their hope vanished, and that is when this man, this 19-year-old man became a killer. Late one night, the mother was drunk as usual. Before she finished her last drink, the girl spiked the mother’s whiskey with herbs from the forest. Herbs that would make her sleep. At around one in the morning, the girl snuck the boy into her house, leading this man, the 19-year-old man, to her mother’s room. He stabbed her in her sleep, killing her, freeing themselves.

  The story continued that the lovers ran away. Knowing that they would be hunted down, they killed themselves in a suicide pact at the town’s inn.

  The story was fanciful, and took great liberties in some areas. Tylar Witt’s mom was no alcoholic who abused her daughter. In fact, she loved Tylar and did everything for her. But in other areas, the story was hauntingly factual. Steven and Tylar’s own path had been very much like what was depicted in the story.

  When it was written, Tylar’s mom lay dead in her house, and no one knew about it except Steven Colver and Tylar Witt. And just like in the story, they were on the run. For the moment, only they knew how much of “The Killer and His Raven” was fact, and how much was fiction.

  CHAPTER 2

  JULIET

  Tylar Witt may have felt she was living a happily-ever-after, fairy-tale existence with Steven Colver, her older lover, but it was soon to turn into something nightmarish that could have been written by the Brothers Grimm. Just as “The Killer and His Raven” had described its heroine, Tylar was beautiful and smart. She was also a troubled young woman who acted out against her single-parent mom. She spent hours on her MySpace page and ignored her mom whenever she could. She even cut herself on occasion and ran away a few times. One thing was very disturbing. She later claimed that she drew her own blood, because the sight of it calmed her.

  Tylar wasn’t some medieval peasant living in a cottage in the forest. In fact, she could have been likened more to a nobleman’s daughter, ensconced as she was in an expensive home in a gated community. Tylar wanted for nothing. She had her own computer, cell phone, literally hundreds of CDs and DVDs and all sorts of electronic devices. Her mother worked hard at a local transportation agency to create a good environment for herself and her daughter. Tylar, however, only seemed to resent everything her mother did.

  By the middle of June 2009, just as “The Killer and His Raven” predicted, the lovers were on the run from the law. But the modern-day Romeo and Juliet didn’t go to the local inn to kill themselves—they had other plans in mind. Instead, they made their way across the Sacramento Valley to San Francisco.

  And then a whirlwind of things began to happen, both for them and for law enforcement, which finally had discovered during a welfare check that Tylar’s mom, forty-seven-year-old Joanne Witt, had been murdered in her own home. Detective work and sheer luck soon collided at an unexpected location—San Bruno, on the San Mateo peninsula below San Francisco, about one hundred miles away from El Dorado Hills. Also, being modern times, it didn’t occur at a tavern. It happened at an AT&T store in a strip mall.

  There was a “be on the lookout” (BOLO) bulletin put out by the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO) for Steven Colver and Tylar Witt. A San Bruno policeman just happened to be going by the AT&T store when he glanced over and couldn’t believe what he saw. It was a young man and a girl who matched the descriptions of the individuals wanted by ECSO. The police officer detained the couple and soon learned the individuals wanted in the BOLO were exactly the two standing in front of him.

  Steven was taken to one room in the police department and Tylar to another. She sat down to an interview with Detective Mike Lensing and Detective Jeff Leikauf. These two detectives were determined to get down to the bottom of what had been transpiring over the last five days.

  As fourteen-year-old Tylar Witt sat there, she began a bravura performance for someone so young. It interweaved guile, half-truths and just plain nerve, matching anything spoken by the heroine in “The Killer and His Raven.”

  Detective Lensing began by asking how Tylar pronounced her first name. She told him to just call her “Ty.” Lensing then read Tylar her Miranda rights, and she waived them, agreeing that she would talk to both of them.

  Lensing said, “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Tylar said, “Thursday night?” (That was June 11.)

  Lensing replied that was correct, so Tylar continued, “We just decided to go down to San Francisco. We were going to kill ourselves. It didn’t work. Then we were going to try and drive somewhere, anywhere. It didn’t matter. But the car got towed. So we walked. That’s it.”

  Lensing said, “Let’s go back further. What happened on Thursday? Start on that day.”

  Tylar responded, “I called Boston, maybe around midnight. He came to the house and I packed up some stuff in my bag. We hopped the back fence to my house and went up to the school parking lot, where he had his car.”

  “Let me get this straight, you called Boston?”

  “Yeah. I called him throughout the day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon and again about three more times.”

  “How did you contact him?”

  “By cell phone.”

  “Was it a text message?”

  “No. I called him.”

  Lensing asked, “Where was your mother that day?”

  “She was at work. She dropped me at summer school.”

  “What time did she pick you up?”

  “Twelve-thirty P.M. That’s when summer school gets out. She took me home and returned to work. She got home again, around six-thirty P.M. She had to stay late at work. Then she and I went to Safeway and a gas station by the Purple Place. I was a little upset because we’d had a fight. We had gotten into a fight when she dropped me off the first time.”

  Lensing asked, “What was that fight about?”

  “She wanted me to talk to a detective about something Boston supposedly had done. And I didn’t want to talk to the detective, because it wasn’t true, and I didn’t want her pressing it. And she kept pressing it. We got into a fight. And then we went to our separate corners. We cool off and come back and talk about it later. She went back to work after that fight. I just kind of sat home.”

  “Did you pick up that conversation in the evening?”

  “No.”

  Lensing asked, “Was all this in reference to a diary?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you refused to speak to Detective Barber?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. So your mom goes back to work and she comes home at six-thirty P.M. What was the rest of your e
vening like?”

  “I was watching a movie and playing on the computer. She had a couple of beers and she was really tired. She went upstairs and went to bed. Probably at seven-thirty. I went into her room and checked. And then I went to my room. When I checked later, she was asleep. She was rolled over on her side.”

  “Was she under the covers or over the covers?”

  “It was dark. I really don’t remember. I think she had one leg out from the covers.”

  “What time did you call Boston?”

  “I called him at around ten. Then I called him about four times, making sure that my mom was deep enough asleep so I could get out of the house without the dog going berserk.”

  “What time did he arrive at the house?”

  “Around midnight.”

  “Did he come to the front door?”

  “No. He went to the back gate. He opened up the gate and he went into the backyard. He waited outside while I got my clothing. My dog knew him because he used to live in the house. He waited outside and then we hopped the fence.”

  Lensing wanted to know why Boston parked in the parking lot of the school behind the house, instead of parking at the front of the house.

  Tylar said, “Because of the gate code. My mom can check that. It tells who’s been at the gate and at what time.”

  “And what did you do from there?”

  “We went back to his house. He took a shower and then I took a shower. We got in his car and went to sleep. We slept at the library parking lot for a couple of hours. The El Dorado Hills Library. Then we went over to Town Center. We parked in front of the Holiday Inn and stayed there and maybe dozed for thirty minutes. We decided we needed some hair dye and some food. So we got that at Safeway in El Dorado Hills. We dyed our hair at his dad’s home.”