Getting Life Read online

  Shortly after my in-laws had arrived at our home in Austin, clamoring for any information they could get about what had happened to Chris, Boutwell began setting one side against the other. Her family understandably wanted information. They wanted to see crime scene photos. They wanted to know what the neighbors had seen or heard. Were there fingerprints? They wanted to know what the police had found when they first walked in.

  Like me, they wanted to see something tangible, something that would help explain what had happened. We were all standing together, along with a few of my friends, when Boutwell told everyone he had crime scene photos he would share with her family, but only if I was not there. If they insisted on standing with me, they would have no opportunity to learn more about how Chris had died. It was a cruel and manipulative way to treat people who were wild with grief, but his ugly plan worked beautifully. I didn’t know what else he had said to Chris’s parents or siblings when I wasn’t around, but I could feel myself being pushed farther and farther away. He divided us when we needed each other the most. He forced them to choose between learning more about what had happened to Chris and standing beside me—someone whose family membership came only through marriage.

  They made the obvious choice, the only choice.

  By the day of the funeral, we were thoroughly divided. Chris’s burial would be our last act as a family.

  The morning of my wife’s funeral, the powerful bells of St. Christopher Catholic Church tolled deep and solemn as we filed into the massive sanctuary. It felt like a citywide announcement of the unspeakable nightmare that had befallen our families. No one in Houston could hear the tone and cadence of those bells and not know that something terrible had happened. Our private tragedy was now a public pageant of grief and pain.

  Chris’s family worked in real estate in Houston, and they had many, many friends at the funeral. I had friends and family there, too. Couples we had known in Austin, our co-workers and college buddies filled the pews.

  The service was beautiful and heartbreaking. If love and tears and regret could have brought Chris back, she would have been in our midst that morning. There were remembrances of her too-brief life, stories of her courage and humor and strength, and words of profound sympathy for her family, her broken husband, and her beloved little boy.

  For me, most of it was a blur. Through all the handshakes, sobs, and embraces, no one knew what to say to me. There was nothing that could be said. I felt like I had died, too—as though this had been a funeral service for my life as well.

  At the cemetery, standing beside her casket before it was lowered into the ground, I felt that it was holding not only my wife’s body but also my heart and my hope for the future—that those were being buried with her.

  The only reason I had to keep pushing on was our boy. Eric needed me now more than he ever had. Chris’s sudden absence had yanked away the most foundational pillar of his life. She was gone and no one could tell him why. His three-year-old mind did not and could not understand it.

  Not long after the funeral, Eric and I visited her grave together. He knelt down next to the mountain of beautiful flowers on the fresh soil—and asked the hardest question I’ve ever had to answer.

  “Where is Mommy?” he wanted to know.

  I told him the first thing that came to mind. “Mommy’s asleep under the flowers. She’s asleep under the flowers.”

  Miraculously, he accepted it. A shadow of understanding crossed his face. And in the weeks, even months ahead, he would repeat those words like a mantra—to me, to his grandmother, to himself as he played alone.

  “Mommy’s asleep under the flowers.” It was the only thing he had been told that made sense, the only thing he heard that he seemed to believe as we set out on our new lives.

  I didn’t know much about Catholic teaching until I met Chris. I knew that she loved it all—the imagery and the ideas, the stories and the saints, the power of centuries of tradition and belief. And St. Christopher’s church in Houston—her childhood church—along with its revered namesake, played a haunting and poignant role in our lives together. Saint Christopher is seen as the patron saint of travelers, the figure who accompanies us and watches over us on our journeys. And it was in beautiful St. Christopher’s church that we had been married and begun our lives together.

  It was fitting that here at St. Christopher’s we marked the end of our journey. It was where, with broken hearts, everyone who loved Chris told her good-bye.

  Five weeks later, I was arrested for her murder.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eric and I were back in Austin and slowly finding a new kind of normal. I went back to work. My mother stayed with us for several weeks, filling in as best she could for Chris. She spent time with Eric, and while she was no substitute for his mother, my mom was a powerful, generous, and loving maternal presence. She knew how to comfort both of us. And she kept our house and our lives from falling apart—cleaning up constantly, making sure the refrigerator was stocked, keeping Eric’s toys where they needed to be. She cooked our meals, did the laundry, held us close, and kept us moving forward—one long, sad day at a time.

  My going back to work was an imperative. Chris’s salary had been vital in keeping us financially comfortable, and at this point, I faced the added burden of attorneys’ fees. Sheriff Boutwell was still treating me as his number one suspect and showed no signs of moving on to find the real killer.

  Between my job and our home, I spent time planning and working with the Bills, my devoted defense team. They tried mightily to keep me upbeat and believing the best about my future. It wasn’t easy. The sheriff and his band of deputies were always circling, always intruding—going neighbor by neighbor, house by house—pecking away at my reputation and any remaining shreds of belief in my innocence.

  I heard through the grapevine that Sergeant Wood had shown up at a meeting of Neighborhood Watch, a community safety movement that gained momentum after Chris’s murder. Wood told the assembled neighbors that he had serious suspicions about me. Even worse, he called for a show of hands of residents who believed I was guilty. Based on no evidence at all, he had our friends and neighbors “vote” on whether I had killed Chris. I couldn’t imagine what they felt like, knowing that local police clearly thought I was guilty—but still free—in a home just next door, a stone’s throw from their bedrooms, their wives, and their children.

  On a regular basis, I saw patrol cars parked in front of homes up and down the street. I knew the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office had sent deputies and investigators to spread doubts about me, to plant deranged, manufactured notions about why I had murdered Chris, and to generally try turning the people who knew me and believed in me into accusers.

  I knew that some of the neighbors had been convinced.

  My attorneys hoped to convince the prosecutor’s office not to charge me. And discussions had begun between my attorneys and the prosecutor, Ken Anderson, about my case.

  Anderson was new in his job, but he’d built a tough reputation working under the previous district attorney, Ed Walsh. When Walsh went into private practice, Anderson ran for his seat and won handily. He was young—really just about my age—and though I had never met him, I knew from news reports that he had a capacity for showing outrage and disgust that registered far beyond his years. His behavior in court was colorful to say the least—a festival of fist-pounding, seemingly heartfelt pleas, moral sanctimony, and dire warnings against showing mercy.

  And that was just in the small, obscure cases.

  Chris’s murder had made headlines. It would be the biggest case he had ever prosecuted. Frankly, my attorneys and I feared what he might try to do—it would make no difference to him that I was innocent.

  One day as I sat in their office, Bill White got Anderson on the phone. He wanted me there so I could respond immediately to any proposed deal. The cavalier way they talked about my futur
e, my wife’s murder, and my own life wounded me.

  Anderson, his nasal voice squawking through a buzzy speakerphone, announced that he had decided he would “consider” a deal. He said if I confessed and entered a guilty plea, he would offer me the great and generous compromise of twenty-five years in prison.

  There was silence on both sides of the line. I vigorously shook my head in disapproval.

  Bill White told Anderson that a plea deal wasn’t going to work. I was saying flatly that I hadn’t killed Chris and I was refusing any deal that involved me standing in court and taking responsibility in any way for her death. I could hear Anderson sigh deeply. He was quiet for a long time. Eventually, he said he wanted to think about it. He shared that he was going to a legal conference in Waco over the coming weekend and that he and my attorney could talk again when he got back.

  They hung up on good terms. The two Bills and I actually felt hopeful. But we were all prepared to go to the mat if we needed to, and I was beginning to understand the weakness of my position.

  In the days before DNA, there was little science could do to separate the guilty from the innocent. Prosecutors and defense attorneys had to rely on persuasion, characterization, and the circumstances surrounding a crime to convince a jury which person should walk free and which should live behind bars far away from civil society.

  In Chris’s murder, there were no identified fingerprints except mine, Chris’s, and Eric’s, no witnesses, no smoking gun, no motive—­there was nothing. But it was the kind of case where good police work could have made a difference, the kind of case where the experience and empathy of a seasoned, fair-minded prosecutor could have led to a decent solution—a decision not to prosecute me and to expand the hunt for other suspects. I had no previous criminal record, no reason to hurt Chris, no history of hurting anyone.

  We all felt that our best hope and first priority was convincing the novice prosecutor that he shouldn’t go forward with the case. After hearing the phone conversation, I finally felt like that was a real possibility.

  I told my mother I thought it was time for her to go back to her own life. I appreciated her help, but I had to learn to stand on my own two feet, and I knew I would never be able to do that as long as she was there, serving as our loving, effective safety net.

  She reluctantly agreed and began packing for the five-hour drive home. The next morning, she left us—in a sea of tears and a flood of kisses, and with a long list of written reminders and recipes.

  That night I cooked a special dinner—nothing gourmet, but something Eric and I both liked. Eric seemed to be evening out. He danced around the kitchen, doing his best to help me as I rinsed and chopped, simmered and stirred. We laughed, and for the first time in a long time, I finally felt at home.

  As I stood minding the pots on the stove, I heard a knock on the front door and hoisted Eric onto my hip. I didn’t want to leave him in a kitchen with full pans still boiling on the burners. We reached the door, and I opened it wide, still holding Eric at my side. Sheriff Boutwell was standing on our steps. Sergeant Wood and a handful of his deputies stood behind him, apparently as backup.

  “Michael Morton,” he said flatly, “I am here to arrest you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I pleaded with the sheriff to let me turn off the stove, and he allowed me to carry Eric back into the kitchen. I could feel the growing tension in my son’s body as I held him. His legs began to clamp my side. He knew something was very wrong. I know he could feel my fear, my despair, and my building anger, even though I was working mightily to stay calm.

  The sheriff informed me that he had made arrangements for some neighbors to take Eric—and they were not the people I would have chosen to care for him. I had another family in mind, a couple who I thought knew him better and would make him feel more comfortable. But in the end, I had no authority over where he went or with whom.

  Looking at the cops in the yard, I thought about the last time there had been a full police presence at our house. It had been a really bad day. I could see that Eric was remembering that now, too, as the small army of deputies began prying him out of my embrace. He clung to me, shrieking, his little arms outstretched, his whole body trembling.

  He called for me again and again and again. At that moment, Eric had to feel that first he’d lost his mother without warning and now he was losing me, too. I tried my best to be upbeat, to smile and re­assure him. I tried to tell him everything was just fine, but I couldn’t convince him. He knew that what was happening to us was bad—very bad.

  The only thing louder than the metal handcuffs snapping onto my wrists was Eric’s terrified screaming.

  With my hands manacled behind my back, I saw the couple I didn’t want to babysit Eric reaching for him. When they got their hands on him, the volume and intensity of his screams became unbearable. I saw a crowd of neighbors gather, gawking and whispering behind their hands. One neighbor raised his fist to me, as if to tell me to stay strong—or to go to hell. I never did know which. Most of the people I had lived next to for years looked at me as if they had never seen me before.

  I was reeling as a deputy pushed my head down and helped me into the backseat of the police car. I’d never been in the backseat of a police car before. It was totally unfamiliar territory. My senses were blurred, and yet I felt acutely aware of even the smallest details—the sound of the hard-to-decipher radio transmissions, the flash of our familiar neighborhood as we sped past, the disdain of the deputies as they looked at me sitting shackled and beaten.

  It was like being hit in the face in a fight you had not been expecting. I was numb and mad and afraid. I was scared of where I was going and what was waiting there.

  The ride to the sheriff’s office usually took about twenty minutes. This trip though felt like two minutes. I soon learned I wasn’t going to be with Sheriff Boutwell in his office that night. He had ridden to his headquarters in a separate car, and I wouldn’t see him again that day. I was headed to the county jail—an antiquated, uncomfortable collection of concrete cells directly above Boutwell’s office—his law enforcement kingdom.

  Despite my lot, some of the deputies and the jailers were surprisingly courteous, and I was truly thankful for that. They said “please” and “thank you” and every now and then threw in a “sir,” just to make me feel I was still a human being.

  I told myself they were doing that because they knew I was being railroaded and were trying to make my ordeal as painless as possible. In reality, they were probably being decent because they thought I was exactly the kind of crazy inmate who might explode into a dangerous, homicidal rage.

  Getting booked was awful. It was hot and crowded and loud. The sounds of men arguing and shouting, the stuttered stories of the half deaf and the completely drunk, the impatience of the tired deputies—all of it together formed an ugly, inescapable cacophony.

  I did whatever they told me to. I stood where they pointed, waited for them when they ordered it, and answered every question they asked. I posed for my mug shot, not knowing where to look or how to look. Should I try to look trustworthy?

  Innocent?

  Normal?

  I didn’t even know what normal was anymore, much less how to feign it.

  As I stood by the booking desk, a street cop came over. He asked his counterparts why all the cameras and reporters were outside. The cop doing my paperwork jutted his chin toward me in a wordless answer. The street cop looked me over and shrugged. None of this mattered to him one whit. He went on to something else, someone else, one of the other tiny human tragedies that made up a typical day at work for him.

  While I was inside getting a crummy photo and a case number, the sheriff was outside, doing what he did best—making people feel safe, whether they should or not. He regaled reporters with the details of his latest triumphant arrest, the skill he had demonstrated in cracking the case, and the evidenc
e that convinced him I was the bad guy.

  And the reporters believed it.

  Worse, they shared the sheriff’s skewed version of my story with everyone within broadcast range, anyone in the county who read a newspaper, everybody who gossiped about current events. I was hot news.

  Inside, I was mostly just hot. There was apparently no air-­conditioning in the crowded, lousy space that was every Williamson County inmate’s introduction to incarceration. All of that changed dramatically when we got in the elevator to go up to the jail. It felt like we had stepped into a moving meat locker making its way to the Arctic Circle. As we rose higher, the jailers escorting me joked darkly about the bone-chilling cold, saying it was a sure sign that some county official’s incompetent brother-in-law had gotten the contract to handle the building’s heating and cooling.

  Ha ha.

  The whole experience was like checking into the world’s worst hotel. I was handed a well-used mattress, a threadbare blanket, and a new set of clothes. The inmate uniforms had apparently been white at one time. Now, the rest of the “guests” and I were wearing pants and pullover tops that each had its own shade of not-very-white-anymore. After too many washings and too much hard wear, the clothes looked like a lot of the inmates—worn out. But the county jail’s inmates weren’t hard-core criminals; these were guys who got drunk, who started fights in bars, who hit their wives or robbed gas stations. Not the best company, but as I would soon find out the hard way, there are different classes of criminals. Criminal justice is a system that elevates the real pros in the same way the NFL does. The county jail types were more like high school players—­inexperienced, but some of them already showing real potential for moving up the ladder. Some might make it all the way to the state penitentiary.