{"id":1010,"date":"2013-04-02T14:21:42","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T14:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T19:08:18","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:08:18","slug":"annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n Pamela Colloff’s annotated \u201cThe Innocent Man\u201d<\/a>\u00a0continues today, with the second and final part. (To read Part 1, go here<\/a>.) The timing couldn’t be better. On Monday,\u00a0the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) named Colloff\u2019s finely reported\u00a0Texas Monthly<\/em>\u00a0narrative, about the wrongful 25-year imprisonment of a man believed to have murdered his wife, a National Magazine Award finalist in the \u201cFeature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing\u201d<\/a> category. Because Part 1 was so query intensive, we asked slightly fewer questions for Part 2. You’ll find Storyboard’s comments in blue<\/span>, Colloff’s in red<\/span>.

“The Innocent Man<\/a>,” Part 2
By\u00a0Pamela Colloff
Texas Monthly\u00a0<\/em>
December 2012

I.<\/span><\/em>

\"Colloff\"<\/a>

\u201cEven though I asked to be transferred here for the master\u2019s program, coming here was a shock,\u201d Michael Morton wrote on January 22, 2002, from his cell in the Ramsey I prison unit, south of Houston. He was replying<\/a>Did Garcia provide you the letter? How did you get access?<\/span>Yes, Mario gave me a stack of letters. I was so thrilled when I sat down and read them.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0to a letter he had recently received from Mario Garcia, a former co-worker at the Safeway in Austin where he had worked before being sent to prison fifteen years earlier. Besides his parents and his younger sister\u2014who made the five-hundred-mile round-trip from East Texas to visit when they could\u2014Garcia was the only person from Michael\u2019s previous life who had stayed in contact with him. Virtually everyone else believed that he was guilty. Throughout the fall and winter of 1986, his case had been splashed across the front pages of Central Texas newspapers, earning him a grisly notoriety. \u201cVictim\u2019s Husband Held in Murder Investigation,\u201d the Hill Country News announced in the fall of 1986. \u201cKilling Linked to Sexual Rage,\u201d trumpeted an Austin American-Statesman headline just before he was sentenced to life in prison, in February 1987. The Williamson County Sun announced, \u201cHe\u2019s Guilty.\u201d Michael had become a pariah\u2014a \u201cmurderous pervert,\u201d as he would ironically refer to himself.

\u201cWhen I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,\u201d Michael<\/a>One thing I meant to ask in Part 1: How did you decide to refer to him as \u201cMichael\u201d and not Morton?<\/span>Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his\/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him \u201cMorton\u201d and her \u201cChristine\u201d seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone\u2019s first name, when it\u2019s appropriate.<\/span><\/span>wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. \u201cTry to imagine twenty to forty men,\u201d he continued, \u201cshoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth<\/a>Hey, not bad, the writing.<\/span>I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this.<\/span><\/span>and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It\u2019s long, hard, backbreaking work. Sometimes guys pass out and have to be carried to the hospital. (Fakers are found out by being dragged onto a fire ant mound. Either way, the consequences suck.) During all this, armed, hard-ass guards are riding around on horseback, shouting Christian-hearted encouragement. Added to the natural camaraderie and high spirits of working outdoors are more snakes, rats, poison ivy, and biting, stinging, and pinching insects than I like to remember. The first few weeks damn near killed me.\u201d

During his fifteen years in prison,<\/a>Structurally you\u2019ve zoomed us forward in time. Why was it important to pick up Part 2 here?<\/span>I telescoped down the information about his time in prison because there was still so much more information left to convey. I wanted to keep the story moving. Had Michael gone into as much detail in our interviews as he did in these letters, that would have been a much more difficult decision. But his time in prison was not something he liked to dwell on. So much had happened during those 25 years\u2014he lived in three different prisons, had dozens of different cell mates, and so on\u2014so it seemed easier to compress the information I did have. As I mentioned previously, I have second-guessed that decision. Michael is writing a book and my hope is that he will tell us more about what those years were like.<\/span><\/span>Michael had already survived sweltering summers with no air-conditioning, when temperatures inside the old red-brick penitentiary reached into the triple digits for weeks on end. He had fought off the unwanted attention of a hulking inmate, an enforcer for a prison gang who later died of AIDS, by inviting him into his cell and slamming a makeshift tabletop against his throat. He had been kept awake by inmates who cried at night and by his own longing for his son, Eric, and his wife, Christine, whose absences he felt only more acutely as the years wore on. But in his letters to Garcia, Michael tried to strike an upbeat note. \u201cI have fallen in with a tolerable collection of half-witted misfits,\u201d he wrote in one letter. \u201cDespite it all, I am okay,\u201d he assured Garcia in another. \u201cHonest.\u201d

When he did allude to the indignities of his daily life, he added a heavy dose of gallows humor, as when he dubbed a stomach flu that swept through the prison population one winter \u201cthe Brown Storm.\u201d (\u201cI live on a dorm with 56 guys and four toilets,\u201d he wrote. \u201cDo the math. It wasn\u2019t pretty.\u201d) He proudly described working toward his master\u2019s degree in literature\u2014he had already earned his bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology during the early years of his incarceration\u2014and he expressed how much he enjoyed reading Homer and Dante. He casually mentioned that he was at work on a novel.\u00a0<\/a>Has anything come of this? Did he let you read it?<\/span>I did not read it. I was asking him for so much other material\u2014letters, journal entries, access to people, etc.\u2014that I tried not to make requests that weren\u2019t absolutely essential. I was always scared that he was going to be overwhelmed by my requests, which were often overwhelming! I knew that the novel was entirely a work of fiction and did not pertain to his case or prison or anything I was writing about.<\/span><\/span>

Eric was a recurrent subject in his letters to Garcia. The boy was being raised by Christine\u2019s sister, Marylee, who, along with the rest of her family, had come to believe he was guilty. \u201cIt seems hard to believe, but he\u2019s eighteen years old,\u201d Michael wrote that January. \u201cThis spring, he\u2019ll graduate from a private Catholic high school in Houston. The Jesuits are supposed to be good at cramming info into the heads of teenagers, so I hope he\u2019s ready for college. I say \u2018I hope he\u2019s ready\u2019 because I don\u2019t know. We\u2019ve drifted apart. A few years ago, he reached the age where coming to visit his old man wasn\u2019t at the top of his to-do list.\u201d In fact, Eric\u2014when he was fifteen\u2014had cut off all contact with his father.

Michael never failed to express his gratitude to Garcia for taking the time to correspond with him. \u201cNo matter how my train wreck of a life ends up, I will always think of you as one of the best,\u201d Michael signed off one letter. \u201cAdi\u00f3s for now, my friend.\u201d<\/a>I love that you used the Garcia correspondence as the hook for this section, rather than simply summarizing his prison time to date. We get to hear his voice, and we understand that everyone else has abandoned him. How did you decide to do it this way?<\/span>I really felt that this was the best way to telescope down all of this information. Because this material is presented in his voice\u2014to a friend on the outside\u2014readers know that they are only getting a truncated and selective version of reality.<\/span><\/span>

Amid the jumble of holiday<\/b> mail that arrived at Bill Allison\u2019s house every December, there was always one envelope that stood out, distinguished by the return address from prison and Michael\u2019s familiar handwriting. The Christmas card inside\u2014in which Michael thanked Allison for defending him so forcefully during his trial\u2014left him flooded with emotion. He had always felt certain that Michael was innocent, and he was filled with regret that he had not been able to convince the jury of this. \u201cI\u2019ve practiced law for forty-one years,\u201d he told me. \u201cIn terms of the psychological toll that cases have taken on me, Michael\u2019s was the worst.\u201d In the aftermath of the guilty verdict, he said, \u201cI couldn\u2019t get over it. I went into a three-year tailspin.\u201d

In Allison\u2019s opinion, something had gone very wrong during the six-day trial at the Williamson County courthouse in Georgetown. On the afternoon that Michael was convicted, Allison and one of the prosecutors in the case, Mike Davis, had lingered after the trial to talk with jurors. As they discussed the case, Allison overheard what he believed to be a shocking admission. According to Allison, Davis told several jurors that if Michael\u2019s attorneys had been able to obtain the reports of the case\u2019s lead investigator, Sergeant Don Wood, they could have raised more doubt than they did. (Davis has said under oath that he has no recollection of making such a statement.)

Allison had immediately hurried back to his office in Austin to write down Davis\u2019s comments. While he puzzled over what the prosecutor might have meant, he thought back to an argument he\u2019d had with Davis\u2019s boss, Williamson County district attorney Ken Anderson, who had led the prosecution\u2019s effort. During two pretrial hearings, the lawyers had clashed over what evidence the state should, or should not, have to turn over. As Allison remembered it, state district judge William Lott had ordered Anderson to provide him with all of Wood\u2019s reports and notes before the trial so he could determine whether they contained any \u201cBrady material.\u201d (The term refers to the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland, which holds that prosecutors are required to turn over any evidence that is favorable to the accused. Failure to do so is considered to be a \u201cBrady violation,\u201d or a breach of a defendant\u2019s constitutional right to due process.)

Judge Lott had examined everything Anderson had given him and ruled that no Brady material was present. Afterward, as is the protocol in such a situation, the judge had placed the papers in a sealed file that could be opened only by the appellate courts to review at a later date. Thinking back on that series of events, Allison had a terrible thought: What if Anderson had not, in fact, given Lott all of Wood\u2019s reports and notes?

It was this idea that prompted Allison\u2019s motion for new trial, which was denied, and his first appeal, which he filed in 1988, one year after Michael was found guilty. That December, the Third Court of Appeals upheld Michael\u2019s conviction and denied Allison\u2019s claim that Brady material had been withheld from the defense. The language of the decision also made it clear that the court believed that Lott\u2019s sealed file\u2014which its justices had taken the time to open and examine themselves\u2014contained the entirety of Wood\u2019s notes.<\/a>Could Wood not be compelled to answer questions about what was or wasn\u2019t in the file? Where was he during all of this, and where is he now?<\/span>I think all the judges involved in this case felt sure that they had the entirety of the file, since that is reflected in their rulings. Arguably Judge Lott should have held a hearing about this and put Wood on the stand, but judges rarely want to start monkeying around with cases of theirs that have already been adjudicated. Wood was still working for the Williamson County Sheriff\u2019s Department at that time, and he has since retired.<\/span><\/span>Still, Allison remained convinced that something was amiss. He appealed the ruling to the Court of Criminal Appeals, but the following year, its justices declined to reconsider the lower court\u2019s decision. This was a major blow to Allison\u2019s efforts. \u201cI can\u2019t say that I ever completely gave up,\u201d Allison told me, \u201cbut I was pretty close.\u201d Despairing, he called an old friend, noted criminal defense attorney Barry Scheck.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cBill told me that he was haunted by this case,\u201d Scheck recalled. \u201cHe felt that Michael was innocent and that Anderson was hiding something. He smelled a rat from the very, very beginning.\u201d

Scheck was an early proponent of DNA testing, a new forensic technology that was just emerging in the late eighties. Though the science was first used to match perpetrators to their crimes, Scheck and his law partner, Peter Neufeld, had become convinced that DNA testing could be used for another purpose: to exonerate the falsely accused. In 1992 the two attorneys founded a nonprofit legal organization in New York called the Innocence Project and began to take on cases in which biological material from the crime scenes could still be tested. In time this practice would transform the landscape for the wrongfully convicted, but litigating these cases was difficult at first. The technology was still in its infancy and required large quantities of DNA material, which were often unavailable. Despite these hurdles, Scheck and Neufeld managed to win numerous exonerations, and as news of their success spread, they were inundated with requests for help from across the country. \u201cI badgered Barry and the people who worked for him for years to take on Michael\u2019s case, but they were swamped,\u201d Allison told me. \u201cBarry would say, \u2018We\u2019ll get to it,\u2019 but it took a long time.\u201d

In prison, Michael had become well versed in the science of DNA analysis from the many magazine articles he had read on the subject. While he waited for Scheck to get to his case, he secured a court order, with the help of Allison and another lawyer, to permit DNA testing of a semen stain found on the sheet of the bed where Christine had been murdered. Michael still knew next to nothing about what had happened to his wife. He had returned home from work on the day she was killed to find their house overrun with law enforcement. The walls and ceiling of their bedroom were spattered with blood. Because she had been in bed at the time of the killing, in her nightgown, with the blinds closed, Michael believed that she had been attacked shortly after he left for work early that morning. But who had broken into his house and savagely beaten her was still a mystery, one he was determined to solve.\u00a0<\/a>Deft summary of the crime.<\/span>Thank you. I think Jake<\/a> wrote that last sentence.<\/span><\/span>

The technology proved to be too primitive to yield a result on such a small sample, however, and two rounds of testing\u2014first in 1991 and then in 1994\u2014were inconclusive. Over the next few years, the process grew more sophisticated as it became possible to \u201camplify\u201d DNA, or duplicate even minute amounts of genetic material so there would be a large enough sample to analyze. Michael obtained another court order to have the sheet retested. The results, which he received in 2000, did not identify Christine\u2019s killer, but they did directly contradict a sinister theory of the prosecution\u2019s\u2014that, after murdering Christine, Michael had masturbated over her dead body. It was a sadistic image that district attorney Anderson had repeatedly asserted during the trial, and it had helped turn jurors\u2019 opinions against Michael. But the stain, it turned out, was not composed of semen alone; it was a combination of Michael\u2019s semen and Christine\u2019s vaginal fluid, indicating that something much more mundane had taken place: in the days or weeks leading up to the murder, the Mortons had had sex.\u00a0<\/a>I\u2019m trying to ask fewer questions in Part 2 because I fear we overloaded you in Part 1, but is there anything you\u2019d like to say at this point about challenges particular to the second half of the story?<\/span>You\u2019re not overloading me; I\u2019m hugely flattered that anyone cares enough to read my writing this carefully. I think my big concern, when writing this part of the story, was that I not bog readers down in so much information that they would get lost. There was a lot of very dense legal material that I had to telescope down and make easily digestible. This part of the story, more than any other, was the place where I was worried about losing readers.<\/span><\/span>

In 2002 the Innocence Project was ready to take on Michael\u2019s case. Staff attorney Nina Morrison\u2014who, to date, has secured no fewer than twenty DNA exonerations\u2014headed up the effort in New York; she tapped a Houston attorney named John Raley to serve pro bono as her co-counsel. At first glance, Raley was an unusual choice: he was a civil attorney\u2014his specialty had long been medical malpractice defense\u2014and he had never practiced criminal law before. But he came highly recommended by a former colleague at Fulbright & Jaworski, in part for his facility with scientific testimony. He and Morrison would push for DNA testing on a wide range of evidence that had been gathered during the investigation: fingernail clippings; vaginal, anal, and oral swabs taken at Christine\u2019s autopsy; her nightgown; stray hairs found on her hand; and a bloody bandana that had been discovered approximately one hundred yards behind the Morton home.<\/a>The case seems so jaundiced at this point I\u2019m surprised the physical evidence didn\u2019t go missing. Were you able to review any of this evidence? How important is it to you as a reporter\/writer to see every available piece of the story?<\/span>There was a wonderful story that I did not feel I had the room for about how Michael\u2019s lawyers ensured that the evidence did not go missing. In a nutshell, when the Innocence Project took on the case, they sent a young law student to Georgetown and she made sure to dress casually in jeans. She arrived unannounced at the courthouse and somehow talked her way into the evidence room. She didn\u2019t identify herself as being with the Innocence Project; I think she just said that she was a law student. She then wrote an affidavit about everything she had seen in the evidence room and then\u2014and only then\u2014did the Innocence Project notify Williamson County that they knew what evidence was there. To really tell the story properly and set the scene would have taken a few paragraphs and the story was a dead-end because the bandana was not stored at the courthouse but in the sheriff\u2019s department \u2026\u00a0<\/span>and oh, I could go on and on. But there were so many interesting stories like that which I simply could not include because they would slow the story down or take readers a little off track. As for seeing the evidence myself, that was never a possibility. By the time I started reporting, Mark Alan Norwood had been indicted for Christine\u2019s murder, so the evidence was in the possession of the Texas Attorney General\u2019s office, because it was going to be used at trial, and it not available to the media.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/i>Raley, a six-foot-three former University of Oklahoma offensive guard, had an optimistic, almost wide-eyed view of how Williamson County would respond to the request for DNA testing. \u201cHad the murder happened in the present day, there\u2019s no doubt that law enforcement would have tested the evidence to try and find Christine\u2019s killer, so initially I didn\u2019t think they would oppose us,\u201d Raley told me.

By then Anderson had left the district attorney\u2019s office\u2014in 2001 Governor Rick Perry named him district judge\u2014but he kept in close communication with his successor, district attorney John Bradley. For eleven years, Bradley had been Anderson\u2019s loyal first assistant, and when Anderson was appointed to the bench, Bradley became his replacement. The Houston native was well suited to carry on Anderson\u2019s tough-on-crime legacy. A brash and sometimes polarizing figure who had cut his teeth as a young prosecutor in the Harris County DA\u2019s office, Bradley had honed his hard-boiled approach under the legendary Johnny Holmes, who had won more death sentences than any district attorney in Texas history. After becoming Williamson County DA, Bradley issued press releases he drafted himself that publicized the numerous convictions and often draconian sentences that his prosecutors won. He was notorious for bullying defense attorneys into taking pre-indictment plea bargains for their clients, which often required people who had been accused of crimes to enter guilty pleas before knowing how strong or weak the state\u2019s evidence was against them. His unusually combative stance toward defendants was an easy fit in an office molded by Anderson. \u201cJohn was Ken\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9,\u201d Allison told me. \u201cEvery policy, every strategy, got handed down from Ken to John. The only difference between them is that John\u2019s louder. He likes to be onstage more. That was never really Ken\u2019s forte.\u201d

While Raley hoped for cooperation, Morrison cautioned that they would probably meet resistance on their motion for DNA testing. Lawyers from outside Williamson County had never been made to feel particularly welcome in Georgetown, and a request for DNA testing\u2014which by its very nature implied that Bradley\u2019s mentor may have made a grievous error in prosecuting Michael\u2014was certain to get a chilly reception. Though Anderson was no longer DA, his presence in the courthouse was still keenly felt. The motion would have to be filed with the original trial court where Michael had been sentenced, just down the hall from the courtroom where Anderson, now a judge, presided.

Before filing the motion, Raley called the DA to introduce himself. He let Bradley know that he came from a law enforcement family\u2014his father, John Wesley Raley Jr., served as U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Oklahoma under two presidents, and his brother, Robert, is a federal prosecutor in Tulsa. \u201cI said that I hoped he would agree to the motion or, at a minimum, not oppose it,\u201d Raley told me, explaining that his overtures were rebuffed. \u201cHe was polite at first, but after we filed the motion, he made it clear that he would fight us. I couldn\u2019t understand why he was opposing testing that we were paying for, that would cost the county nothing, especially if he was so certain that Michael was guilty.\u201d

In fact, Bradley was generally skeptical of post-conviction testing, in part because it could undermine the finality of the legal process. One telling indication of his view on the matter came years later, in 2007, in a now-redacted thread on an online forum for prosecutors that was discovered by Scott Henson, of the criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast.<\/a>Wow. How did this come to your attention and how did you get access to the redacted material?<\/span>I can\u2019t take any credit for this; Scott Henson took screen shots of the thread before it was redacted and reproduced them on his blog.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Posting on the forum, Bradley had advocated a troubling strategy: that when obtaining guilty pleas, prosecutors should also secure agreements that would ensure that all physical evidence could be subsequently destroyed, so as to preclude the possibility of endless appeals. \u201cThen there is nothing to test or retest,\u201d Bradley wrote. (Bradley declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Unsurprisingly, when Morrison and Raley filed their motion in 2005, Bradley opposed it. As the DA stonewalled, Raley\u2019s conversations with him became increasingly antagonistic. \u201cAt one point I asked him, \u2018Why won\u2019t you just agree to this? What harm can it cause?\u2019\u200a\u201d Raley said. \u201cAnd he told me, \u2018It would muddy the waters.\u2019\u200a\u201d (This phrase had previously been used in a 2002 Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that denied DNA testing to a death row inmate, holding that such testing could not definitively prove the defendant\u2019s innocence and would \u201cmerely muddy the waters.\u201d) Bradley\u2019s response left Raley stupefied. \u201cI said, \u2018Mr. Bradley, truth clarifies,\u2019\u200a\u201d Raley recalled.<\/a>Best line of the whole piece.<\/span><\/span> <\/i>

Yet despite Bradley\u2019s resistance, a decision handed down by district court judge Billy Ray Stubblefield in 2006 gave Morrison and Raley a partial victory. The judge agreed to allow DNA testing to go forward on the evidence collected from the Morton home, but he denied the request to test the bandana. Bradley had made the case that the bandana\u2019s connection to the murder could not be proved because it had been found too far from the crime scene. \u201cThey fought us the hardest on the bandana,\u201d Raley told me, adding that Bradley had been willing to have only the hair sample that was found on Christine\u2019s hand tested and nothing else. \u201cWe argued that the fingerprints on the sliding-glass door and the footprint in the backyard established that the bandana had dropped along the killer\u2019s escape route. I could picture it\u2014him wiping the blood from his hands and face on the bandana, sticking it in his back pocket, and running.\u201d But Stubblefield did not see it the same way.<\/a>A procedural question that relates to organization: Do you work from timelines? Also, how much of the case was already laid out in court documents and other source materials, and how much did you have to go beyond what was already known, to fill in blanks? Did you do any investigating of your own?<\/span>Piecing together what had happened in this case after the trial was a nightmare. There were so many hearings and motions and letters back and forth between the lawyers, and all the lawyers involved remembered the sequence of events differently, and they described everything to me in very complex legal jargon. I basically pieced together a timeline after months of reporting and then tried to whittle that timeline down to include only the most important things that happened. I tried to understand them as best I could\u2014I don\u2019t have a law degree\u2014and then I tried to write this in the clearest language possible. And then it went through fact-checking.<\/span><\/span>

When DNA testing on the fingernail clippings, swabs, nightgown, and hair was completed, the results were discouraging. Only Christine\u2019s DNA was detected, and Michael could not be excluded as the donor of one of the hairs.

Bradley would later scoff to reporters that Michael and his attorneys were \u201cgrasping at straws\u201d in their search for a \u201cmystery killer.\u201d He used a similarly contemptuous tone when Michael came up for parole in 2007, having served the first third of his sixty-year sentence. \u201cI am writing to protest parole and request that you put off reconsideration of parole for as long as the law permits,\u201d Bradley wrote to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. \u201cMichael Morton has never accepted responsibility for murdering his wife.\u201d (In an aside Bradley added, \u201cHis nickname for Christine was \u2018Bitch.\u2019\u200a\u201d) The district attorney was correct that Michael appeared to be unrepentant; Michael had been told by other inmates that he would be eligible for early release only if he showed remorse for his crime, but he emphatically refused to do so. He would not lie to get out, he told his parents. His innocence, he said, was all he had.

When the DA\u2019s office received notice that Michael had been denied parole, someone\u2014it\u2019s unclear who\u2014scrawled a note on the letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In small, blocky letters, it read, \u201cVictory.\u201d

Six years earlier,<\/b> Michael had hit rock bottom. In 2001 a letter had arrived for him at the Ramsey I Unit informing him that his son had decided to change his name.<\/i> Eric was eighteen at the time. He had recently been adopted by his aunt, Marylee, and her husband, whom she married when Eric was twelve. That the boy had rejected his own name was too much for Michael to bear. Before Eric was born, Christine had wanted to name him Michael Morton Jr., but Michael had balked, telling her that he would rather their son have his own distinct identity. And so they had compromised on Eric Michael Morton. Now Eric Michael Morton no longer existed.

\u201cThat\u2019s when I finally broke,\u201d Michael told me. \u201cNothing before then did it\u2014not Chris\u2019s murder, not my arrest, not my trial, not my conviction. Not getting a life sentence. Not the failed appeals, not the lab results that led nowhere. Eric was what I had been holding on to. He was the reason I was trying to prove my innocence. Once I found out that he had changed his name, I knew that reconciliation was not a possibility anymore. We weren\u2019t going to be able to put this back together. That was a hollow, empty feeling, because getting out had never been the goal. It was getting out so that I could tell Eric, \u2018Look, see? I didn\u2019t do this.\u2019

\u201cI can\u2019t remember if it was Marylee or Eric who wrote to tell me, but I remember being nearly catatonic for at least a week. It was like the bottom fell out. This wasn\u2019t just another difficult thing to overcome, this was the end. This was a death. I literally cried out to God, \u2018Are you there? Show me something. Give me a sign.\u2019 I had nothing. I was spent, I was bankrupt. It was the most sincere plea I have ever made in my life. And I got nothing. A couple weeks went by and . . . nothing. No response.<\/a>We\u2019re entering a long-running quoted passage from Morton, the first passage of its kind in the piece. Can you talk a bit about how you decided to use this material in this way?<\/span>Yes, I did this once before in a story I wrote about lottery winners. Instead of describing the excitement of winning the lottery myself, I had one of the lottery winners describe the day he won his millions, and it worked much better. I used this long-running quote here to the same effect. I could try all day long to write, in my own words, about how Michael felt that he was in the presence of God \u2026 but it wouldn\u2019t work as well as Michael\u2019s own words. I also felt that this was the right place and time in the story to introduce Michael\u2019s present-day voice\u2014not his voice in letters or testimony, but the words he spoke directly to me. I knew that I would need him to be able to comment, in his voice, on the events that took place in the last quarter of the story.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cI was lying in my bunk one night listening to the radio on my headphones, and I ran across a classical station. I heard something you rarely ever hear: a harp. There was no slow buildup, no preamble to what happened next. I was just engulfed in this very warm, very comforting blinding light. I don\u2019t know what to call it\u2014an ecstatic experience? a revelation?\u2014because it was indescribable. Any words I use to explain it will fall short. I had this incredible feeling of joy. There was an overwhelming sense of this unlimited compassion aimed right at me. Then I heard my alarm go off and it was over, and I sat up in bed. Outwardly, everything was still the same. But I knew that I had been in the presence of God.

\u201cMy life didn\u2019t change right away. Everything didn\u2019t instantly fall into place. I was in prison for another decade, so it wasn\u2019t like God knocked open the doors for me. Becoming a believer was a slow, organic process that I had to grow into. But I was different after that. You can\u2019t buy inner peace, but I had it.\u201d

II.<\/b>

During the five years that Michael and his attorneys sought to have the bandana tested and Bradley tried mightily to resist their efforts, the bandana itself sat within the Williamson County Sheriff\u2019s Office. It didn\u2019t look like anything extraordinary. The deep-blue Western-themed handkerchief was bordered by a white lariat pattern that repeatedly spelled, in loopy script, the word \u201cWrangler.\u201d Scattered across the fabric, which was deeply creased, were a number of small brown bloodstains.

Whose blood was it? On January 8, 2010, the Third Court of Appeals reversed Stubblefield\u2019s decision and allowed testing on the bandana to go forward. Justice G. Alan Waldrop noted in his decision that the unidentified fingerprints on the sliding-glass door of the Morton home and the footprint in the backyard did, in fact, suggest that there was a trail of evidence connecting the bandana to the crime scene. Further, he suggested that DNA testing could definitively determine whether or not there was a link. \u201cIf the bandana contains Christine\u2019s blood, it is sufficient by itself to establish a trail.\u201d

Still, the bandana was seen as a long shot. \u201cI did not have high hopes,\u201d Morrison told me.<\/a>When speaking to each of the key legal players in the case, did you ask them targeted questions or have them recount his\/her experience\/perspective and then <\/i>get more specific with the questions? <\/span>I did multiple, lengthy interviews with Raley and Morrison, then returned with a zillion follow-up questions in the months that followed. What you see in the story are the most important moments and quotes, which I have cherry-picked from a very long and complex legal battle.<\/span><\/span>She and Raley had requested that the bandana be shipped from Williamson County to a private lab in Dallas that could amplify small amounts of DNA using the most cutting-edge technology available. But Bradley insisted that the bandana instead be submitted to the Department of Public Safety crime lab for analysis, even though the lab was not equipped to amplify DNA. In a letter to Stubblefield, Raley, who had grown increasingly impatient, wondered if Bradley\u2019s insistence on using the DPS crime lab stemmed from \u201ca desire to cause additional delays, or to minimize the odds that interpretable DNA results will be obtained.\u201d Finally, after five months, Stubblefield ruled that the bandana, as well as a single strand of hair that was found on it, be shipped to the lab that the Innocence Project had initially requested. By then the dried blood on the bandana was nearly 24 years old.

Testing small quantities of degraded evidence takes time, and private firms that specialize in the process are in high demand. For a full year, the blue bandana sat in the lab in Dallas. It was stored carefully, folded into a neat square, its secrets held within. In May 2011, it was submitted for testing, which was completed the following month. The results, which Morrison was informed of by a phone call from the lab, were breathtaking. Both the blood and the strand of hair matched Christine\u2019s DNA profile. The DNA profile of an unknown man was also recovered,\u00a0intermingled with Christine\u2019s blood and hair. Michael\u2019s DNA was absent.

Morrison, who already<\/b> had plans to be in Dallas that week to work on another wrongful conviction case, met Raley at DFW Airport so they could tell Michael the news together. The mood in Morrison\u2019s rental car that morning was \u201ceuphoric,\u201d Raley told me. \u201cI don\u2019t think the wheels ever actually touched the ground.\u201d It was the first time during the eight years they had worked together that Raley had seen Morrison allow herself to be confident about their chances of getting Michael out. The dauntless Yale graduate had always met Raley\u2019s enthusiasm with the cautious pragmatism she had developed after years of dealing with lost evidence, recalcitrant prosecutors, and a slow-moving justice system. That morning, she beamed as they headed east into the Piney Woods, toward Palestine, where Michael had been transferred to another prison\u2014the Michael Unit\u2014after earning his master\u2019s degree.

Michael suspected that the news was good when he learned that Morrison was coming. Although he had spoken on the phone with her for years, he had never actually met her in person before. \u201cI knew this wasn\u2019t just a grip and grin,\u201d Michael told me. When Morrison and Raley were escorted into the cramped visitation booth where he sat waiting for them, he could see that they were elated. He pressed his hand against the glass that separated them in greeting<\/a>Great detail \u2013 source? Did you ask certain questions to get this kind of acute detail?<\/span>I know that\u2019s usually how an inmate greets the person on the other side of the glass because I have been a visitor to prison many times before, so I specifically asked each of the attorneys about this.<\/span><\/span>and picked up the phone on his side of the partition. His attorneys talked animatedly, passing the phone receiver back and forth between them. \u201cI don\u2019t remember the exact words they said, but we were all bouncing off the walls,\u201d he told me. \u201cAfter a while Nina said, \u2018Okay, sit down and take a deep breath. They\u2019ve fought us all this way, and they\u2019re going to keep fighting. This isn\u2019t over.\u2019\u200a\u201d

Proving a DNA-based innocence claim requires showing that a jury would not have found the defendant guilty had the DNA results been known at the time of trial. Doing so, however, can take years. Michael\u2019s lawyers understood that Bradley would almost certainly oppose any innocence claim and that years of appeals could follow. Even if Michael\u2019s conviction were eventually overturned by a higher court, the DA\u2019s office could still choose to retry him. The quickest way to clear his name would be to learn if the unknown man\u2019s DNA profile matched any one of the millions of individuals with prior convictions that are stored in the FBI\u2019s national DNA database, CODIS.

\u201cThen there would be no question of Michael\u2019s innocence,\u201d Morrison told me. \u201cWhen you have a name and a face to put to the DNA, it usually removes any possible hypotheses about contamination or tampering or accomplices.\u201d Initially, though, it was unknown whether the DNA profile, which had been extracted from bloodstains that were old and fragile, was detailed enough to be compared with those in CODIS. \u201cAmong the many miracles in this case is that had the DNA profile on the bandana been missing just one more marker it would not have been eligible for a national search,\u201d \u2028Morrison said.

The DNA profile was entered into CODIS, and on August 9 Morrison was informed that there had been a match. His name was Mark Alan Norwood, a drifter with a long criminal record, including arrests in Texas, California, and Tennessee for aggravated assault with intent to kill, arson, breaking and entering residences, drug possession, and resisting arrest. Old mug shots<\/a>Terrific \u2013 part of the case file or sourced elsewhere?<\/span>This was probably the easiest thing to find in the whole case. Once Norwood was arrested, his old mug shots ran in the Austin American-Statesman<\/em> and on the local news here quite regularly.<\/span><\/span>revealed a man with a large, drooping mustache, his chin tilted upward, looking down at the camera with a cold-eyed stare.

Almost 25 years to the day after Christine was murdered, Morrison and Raley called Michael to tell him that the man whose DNA was found on the bandana had been identified. \u201cI remember Michael was quiet for a while after we told him,\u201d Raley said. \u201cThere was just silence on the other end of the line. And I said, \u2018Michael, are you there?\u2019 I thought he might have fainted or something. And he said, \u2018Yes, I\u2019m here. I\u2019m just letting this all wash over me.\u2019\u200a\u201d

As dramatic as <\/b>the DNA results were, the Williamson County district attorney\u2019s office was not ready to admit that Michael had been wrongly convicted. No sooner did the news break that another man\u2019s DNA had been identified than Bradley began to discount the significance of the bandana, pointing out that it had been found roughly one hundred yards from the crime scene, not in the Morton home. \u201cI don\u2019t think, on its face, that a DNA result [on] . . . a piece of evidence away from the crime scene immediately proves innocence,\u201d he told the Austin American-Statesman. \u201cIt does raise some good issues that are worthy of investigation, and we will do that.\u201d As Morrison had predicted, Michael was in for a fight.

By then, he was accustomed to the stubbornness of the system that had put him away, and he knew better than to expect it to yield. He understood that the district attorney\u2019s office was deeply invested in maintaining that he was guilty. Yet he did not fully fathom how singularly obsessed Williamson County had been in its pursuit of him until he was able to see portions of Sergeant Wood\u2019s reports and notes. This material, which the Innocence Project had, after years of litigation with the DA\u2019s office, acquired through a public records request, was nothing short of astounding.

The stack of old documents contained critical clues that might have helped identify Christine\u2019s killer had they ever been followed up on. Michael learned from a 1986 sheriff\u2019s deputy\u2019s report that several of his neighbors had seen a green van parked by the vacant, wooded lot behind his home around the time of the murder and had observed its driver walking into the overgrown area that extended up to his privacy fence. He read an internal memo to Wood about a call received from one of Christine\u2019s relatives in Phoenix who reported that a check his father-in-law had made out to her had been cashed after her death with what appeared to be a forged signature. (On later inspection, Michael would realize the signature was actually his own.) The internal memo, which was unsigned, included a telling note to Wood: \u201cThey seem to think that Chris\u2019 purse was stolen, course, we know better than that.\u201d Though Christine\u2019s purse was missing from the crime scene, Anderson had brushed aside this detail by telling the jury that Michael had staged a burglary to deflect attention away from himself.

It was this sense of certainty that appeared to have blinded investigators to what was surely the most incredible missed clue in the entire case: a handwritten phone message for Wood reporting that Christine\u2019s credit card had apparently been used at a store in San Antonio two days after her murder. \u201cLarry Miller can ID the woman,\u201d stated the message, which included a number to call. Wood did not appear to have ever investigated the lead.

As he sifted through the papers, Michael felt \u201cno anger, just bewilderment,\u201d he told me. \u201cBy that time, I had been pummeled with so much, for so long, that I recall just staring at the pages, stunned.\u201d For the first time in almost 25 years, he began to have a sense of clarity about what had happened. Michael carefully turned the pages and came across an eight-page transcript of a phone call that had taken place between Wood and Michael\u2019s mother-in-law, Rita Kirkpatrick, less than two weeks after Christine\u2019s murder. As he studied each typewritten word, Michael could feel his throat tightening.

\u201cEric and I were alone at my house . . . , which was the first time he and I had been alone since his mother\u2019s death,\u201d Rita told Wood. \u201cI was putting on makeup in the bathroom. Eric layed [sic] his blanket on the floor of my bedroom. He said, \u2018Mommie is sleeping in the flowers.\u2019 His dad had told him that last week at the cemetery. Then he kicked the blanket and said, \u2018Mommie, get up.\u2019\u200a\u201dRita explained to Wood that at Marylee\u2019s suggestion she had written down everything her grandson had then said. She read her exchange with the boy back to the investigator:

Eric: Mommie\u2019s crying. She\u2019s\u2014stop it. Go away.

Grandmother: Why is she crying?

Eric: \u2019Cause, the monster\u2019s there.

Grandmother: What\u2019s he doing?

Eric: He hit Mommie. He broke the bed.

Grandmother: Is Mommie still crying?

Eric: No, Mommie stopped.

[Grandmother:] Then what happened? . . .

Eric: The monster throw a blue suitcase on the bed. He\u2019s mad . . .

Was he big?

Yeah.

Did he have on gloves?

Yeah, red.

What did he carry in his red gloves?

Basket.

What was in the basket?

Wood.

The boy\u2019s account perfectly matched the crime scene. Christine had been bludgeoned in her bed. Wood chips had been found in her hair, suggesting that she had been beaten with a log or a piece of lumber. A blue suitcase and a wicker basket had been stacked on top of her body. But it was the last part of Rita\u2019s conversation with Eric that Michael found the most astonishing:

Where was Daddy, Eric? . . . Was Daddy there?

No. Mommie and Eric was there.<\/a>Just, wow.<\/span>Right? I mean, there it is. There\u2019s the whole case in a nutshell. Was Daddy there? \u201cNo.\u201d I really wrestled with when to introduce this information. Chronologically, it should have come in Part 1. This was known to investigators within 10 days of Christine\u2019s death, all the way back in 1986. There were other, earlier places in the story where I could have revealed this information, as when his attorneys discover the transcript. But I wanted the reader to discover the transcript along with Michael so that it would have the full emotional impact.<\/span><\/span><\/i>

Rita had then added, \u201cSo, Sgt. Wood, I\u2019d get off the . . . domestic thing now and look for the monster and I have no more suspicions in my mind that Mike did it.\u201d

Just as Allison had suspected more than two decades earlier, there had been critical evidence in Wood\u2019s reports\u2014evidence that would have changed the outcome of Michael\u2019s trial had the jury ever learned of it. But the transcript did not end there. Michael read along with disbelief as, over the course of the next six pages, Wood failed to ask a single pertinent question or inquire about a time when he could question Eric. Wood sought instead to convince Rita of a bizarre theory that the \u201cbig monster with the big mustache,\u201d as she referred to the killer\u2014a reference, presumably, to a description that Eric had given her\u2014had actually been Michael wearing his scuba-diving gear.

When I asked Michael to describe what he had felt after reading the transcript, he bowed his head and searched for the right words for a long time. \u201cThe magnitude of the tragedy felt more profound,\u201d he said finally. \u201cI had no idea that Eric had seen anything as catastrophic as his mother\u2019s murder.\u201d After reading the transcript, he told me, \u201cI was doubled over.\u201d He was incredulous that his wife\u2019s family had known that Eric had said that a stranger killed Christine. \u201cThe betrayal by my in-laws became magnified,\u201d he said. Why did he think the Kirkpatricks never told him of Eric\u2019s account? \u201cThe police said I did it, so I did it,\u201d Michael told me.\u00a0<\/a>It does seem incredibly odd that they wouldn\u2019t have pushed for some clarity about Eric\u2019s account. What do you make of it, and what do they say about that?<\/span>The Kirkpatricks have still not spoken publicly about this case, so I can\u2019t answer that. But as Eric explains later in the piece, his family came to believe that he was simply repeating things he had overheard family members saying.<\/span><\/span>

Soon after the results of the DNA testing became front-page news, Michael received a letter from Margaret Permenter, a friend of Christine\u2019s. Permenter apologized for having believed the worst about him and asked for his forgiveness. (Her mistaken assumption that Michael was guilty, she told me, was based on a single conversation she\u2019d had with a woman at the Williamson County courthouse in 1987. \u201cI called the court to order a transcript, because I hadn\u2019t been able to attend the trial,\u201d she told me. \u201cThe woman I spoke with told me that the medical examiner testified that Chrissy had died at a time when she could only have been with Mike. And that was enough for me.\u201d) Michael sent a gracious letter back, absolving her of blame. He reserved his anger for the Williamson County authorities who he believed were responsible for his wrongful conviction. \u201cTo this day, I wrestle with what might have been\u2014and what continues to be\u2014their motivations,\u201d Michael wrote. \u201cI still wonder, why? Careerism? Peer pressure? Hubris? Misplaced duty? A warped longing to \u2018get\u2019 the bad guys? I don\u2019t know. I only know what they did.\u201d<\/a>Great details\/insights; how\u2019d you get the letter exchange? <\/span>When I interviewed Margaret, she told me that Michael had sent her a letter and asked if I wanted to see it. She sent it to me and I was so happy when I read it, because Michael sums up everything so nicely here.<\/span><\/span>

III.\u00a0<\/b>

At first the whereabouts of Mark Alan Norwood\u2014the convicted felon whose DNA had been detected on the bandana\u2014were unknown. To prevent his name from being publicized, he was referred to only as John Doe in court documents. \u201cWe were very concerned about what he might do if he saw his name in print, because we felt he was a flight risk,\u201d Raley told me. Locating him was of paramount importance to Michael\u2019s attorneys, but they did not believe that the district attorney\u2019s office felt the same sense of urgency. Even after Williamson County opened an investigation on Norwood in August 2011, Bradley and his staff continued to question the importance of the DNA results, casting doubt on the bandana\u2019s \u201cchain of evidence.\u201d (Strict protocols now dictate how law enforcement collects and transports evidence; in Michael\u2019s case, the bandana had been recovered not by a police officer but by Christine\u2019s brother, John Kirkpatrick, who had picked it up, placed it in a plastic bag, and driven it to the sheriff\u2019s office.) \u201cThere could be many innocent explanations for why DNA is on that bandana,\u201d assistant DA Kristen Jernigan asserted during a hearing late last summer.

To debunk that hypothesis, Morrison launched her own parallel investigation. The first step would be determining whether Norwood could have committed the murder; if he had been living out of state at the time or if he had been in jail on an unrelated charge, then Morrison would have to pursue other possibilities. (\u201cSometimes a CODIS hit leads you right to the killer,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd sometimes it leads you there indirectly, by identifying someone who is closely connected to the killer, like a crime partner or a roommate.\u201d) Though she lacked the resources law enforcement has to conduct a nationwide search, she was able to draw on a network of volunteers who had worked with the Innocence Project on other wrongful conviction cases. \u201cWe don\u2019t have much money, but we do have a lot of people who want to help us for free, so we had private investigators and lawyers across the country\u2014everywhere that Norwood had a criminal record\u2014volunteering to go to the nearest courthouse and pull his files for us,\u201d she said. Based on information culled from these sources, she was able to assemble a detailed time line that plotted out where Norwood had previously resided. \u201cWe figured out pretty quickly that he had been living in the Austin area at the time of the murder, and that he was out of custody\u201d\u2014not behind bars\u2014\u201con the day that Christine was killed,\u201d she said.

It was while looking over this time line that Raley\u2019s longtime paralegal, Kay Kanaby, made a revelatory discovery. Like everyone who worked at Raley\u2019s close-knit, six-attorney law firm, Raley & Bowick, Kanaby had become preoccupied with Michael\u2019s case. A former oncology nurse who had spent the early part of her career caring for leukemia patients at M.D. Anderson, Kanaby had seen her share of tragedy, but she was particularly struck by the injustice of Michael\u2019s odyssey through the criminal justice system. As she studied the time line and Norwood\u2019s lengthy rap sheet, she noticed that the serial criminal had never been charged with murder\u2014a curious omission, she thought, if he actually was the man who had killed Christine. \u201cI didn\u2019t think someone would commit a crime like that once,\u201d she told me. She searched the Internet for any mention of unsolved murders in the places where Norwood had passed through\u2014Davidson County, Tennessee; Broward County, Florida; Riverside County, California\u2014but little information was available online. She was relieved when she found that the Austin Police Department maintained a web page devoted to cold cases. As she scrolled through photographs of the victims in those cases, one photo, of a woman named Debra Baker, gave her pause. \u201cShe looked like Christine Morton\u2014dark hair, early thirties, attractive,\u201d Kanaby said. \u201cThe resemblance was striking.\u201d

Kanaby read the case summary beside the photo. It stated, \u201cDebra 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.\u201d

Kanaby was floored. Whoever had murdered Baker had used the same M.O.\u2014bludgeoning her in her bed\u2014as Christine\u2019s killer, just seventeen months after Christine\u2019s death.

Kanaby saw that the address of Baker\u2019s 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. \u201cI got chills,\u201d Kanaby said. \u201cI didn\u2019t 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.\u201d

She hastily wrote an email to Morrison asking if her investigators could pinpoint Norwood\u2019s 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\u2019s daughter, Caitlin, had written several long posts. \u201cThere were pleas from her from 2005 begging for any information that anyone might have about who had killed her mother,\u201d Kanaby said. \u201cShe had clearly done this out of desperation. She said that the police had not adequately\u00a0investigated the murder and that detectives had told the family they were working on it, but she didn\u2019t believe they were.\u201d Kanaby read on as Caitlin explained that she had barely known her mother because the murder had happened when she was three. \u201cIt was heart-wrenching,\u201d Kanaby said. So too was the realization that Caitlin and Eric had been the same age when they lost their mothers.<\/a>Reading this passage about Kanaby, I\u2019m all the more grateful for publications that allow for \u2013 encourage, even \u2013 the detailed unfolding of a story. Nothing is wasted in this piece \u2013 everything matters. <\/span> Thank you so much. I really, really wanted to tell this part of the story in the detail it deserved. It made me so happy that we were able to tell the story of the incredible contribution that a paralegal made to this case. So often it\u2019s only the lead attorneys who get the attention.<\/span><\/span>

Were the Morton and Baker cases linked? she wondered. As she studied the map, she had the \u201csteadily escalating sense,\u201d she told me, that they were. \u201cI couldn\u2019t stop thinking that if Norwood had been arrested and convicted of Christine\u2019s murder, Debra might still be here, and Caitlin\u2019s story, like Eric\u2019s, would have been so different,\u201d she said.

Morrison was not able to obtain the information until five days later. On August 23 she emailed Kanaby, telling her that investigators had verified which house Norwood had lived in on Justin Lane. Kanaby typed his address, and then Baker\u2019s, into GoogleMaps and looked at the image that appeared on her screen. \u201cHe basically lived around the corner from her,\u201d she told me. \u201cI kept staring at the blue line that traced the path from his house to hers.\u201d

Morrison was already<\/b> in Texas when she learned of Kanaby\u2019s 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\u2014who had consistently sided with the state since the battle over DNA testing had begun\u2014was not swayed. \u201cIt would be truly an extraordinary act for this court to disqualify or recuse Mr. Bradley,\u201d he observed, expressing his confidence that the two prosecutors who were present\u2014Jernigan and first assistant DA Lindsey Roberts\u2014would 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\u2019s public records request, Raley had made a strenuous case for Judge Lott\u2019s sealed file to be unsealed. He argued that the transcript of Wood\u2019s phone conversation with Rita Kirkpatrick was so plainly favorable to Michael\u2014it conveyed an eyewitness account of the murder in which an unknown intruder, not Michael, was identified as the killer\u2014that Lott would have undoubtedly disclosed it to the defense had he known of its existence. That he hadn\u2019t, Raley insisted, proved that Anderson had never produced the transcript to the judge. \u201cThe way to find that out is to unseal the file,\u201d Raley argued. Confident that everything had been above board, Jernigan did not object. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to suggest that this transcript wasn\u2019t in that Court of Appeals\u2019 file,\u201d she said.

Stubblefield ordered that the file be retrieved from the appellate court in Austin\u2014a process that would take a few days\u2014so he could open it and review it with attorneys from both sides. \u201cI personally am curious and would like to see it,\u201d the judge added. He paused for a moment before concluding the hearing, which was taking place just down the hall from Anderson\u2019s courtroom. \u201cWe must all have the courage to learn the facts and to let them lead us where they may, regardless where that might be,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/a>How did you reconstruct this court scene? Transcripts?<\/span>Yes, I was lucky enough to have a transcript of this, as well as Raley and Morrison\u2019s memories.<\/span><\/span>

The following morning, as the heat wave that gripped Texas broke all records, marking the seventieth consecutive day when the temperature soared over 100 degrees,<\/a>Love this heat-wave detail for its subtle metaphorical power. How did that bit of dovetailing come to you? <\/span>Thank you! I was hugely pregnant that summer so it was easy for me to remember just how hot it was. Raley had mentioned to me that he and Morrison had arrived at the police department drenched in sweat because they had had to park several blocks away. When I was writing, I looked back at news reports to figure out exactly how hot it had been on that day and realized that it was that day, in particular, when all the records were broken. I was so happy to have stumbled across that fact.<\/span><\/span>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\u2019s office, who listened intently as Morrison and Raley laid out the pieces of their case, from Norwood\u2019s DNA on the bandana to Kanaby\u2019s findings. The warm reception stood in contrast to the way they had been greeted over the years in Georgetown. \u201cEveryone was very interested in what we had to say,\u201d Raley recalled. \u201cThey told us they would look into the possibility of comparing the DNA from the Baker crime scene to the recent Norwood evidence.\u201d 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\u2014a link that would erase any doubts about Michael\u2019s innocence. Raley\u2019s excitement was tempered by his frustration. \u201cWe were having to conduct our own investigation,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were doing the work of law enforcement. I kept thinking, \u2018Why isn\u2019t anyone in Georgetown trying to figure this out?\u2019\u200a\u201d

Two days later, on August 26, Jeffrey Kyle\u2014the clerk for the Third Court of Appeals\u2014drove from Austin to Georgetown to hand-deliver Lott\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s file.

\u201cI think the expectation, at least from the DA\u2019s office, was that there was going to be a lot of material in there,\u201d Cummings told me. \u201cBut we could all see that the envelope was very thin.\u201d 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\u2019s, written on the day that Christine was killed, and a one-page form that Michael had signed, allowing deputies to search his pickup. \u201cNo one said much afterward, but it was very, very awkward,\u201d Cummings said. After Stubblefield had copies of the file\u2019s contents made for everyone, Cummings excused herself, then raced to her car and pulled out her cellphone to call Morrison. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing there,\u201d she said.

Stubblefield recused himself from the case the following week when Morrison and Raley stated in court filings that the absence of Wood\u2019s reports and notes from Lott\u2019s file raised the \u201cspecter of official misconduct.\u201d (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\u2014who was in the midst of a capital murder trial in his home district\u2014elected 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 in 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\u2019s bed in 1988 did, in fact, match Norwood\u2019s DNA profile.

\u201cI remember screaming a lot as we read that transcript,\u201d Morrison told me. \u201cI said to John, \u2018The case is over! We are done! This is it!\u2019\u200a\u201d Why, I asked her, was she so certain? \u201cThere was no argument that could be made with a straight face that it was a coincidence that Norwood\u2019s DNA was found at the scene of both crimes,\u201d she said.<\/a>Can you briefly walk us through how you concretely started this project \u2013 what was your first act and who was your first phone call? Where did you go from there?<\/span>I began with John Raley, because he was the gatekeeper to Michael. But Michael had signed an exclusivity agreement with 60 Minutes<\/em>, so for months, I had no access to him, only the promise that we would get to talk when he could talk to me. During that time, I read the trial transcript, case file, old newspaper clippings from the ’80s, Ken Anderson\u2019s book, and any other documents I could find. I interviewed as many ancillary people as I could. When I finally got access to Michael, I was well-prepared.<\/span><\/span>

The Williamson County DA\u2019s 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\u2014still shaking his head in amazement\u2014stated what by then seemed obvious. \u201cI would imagine that in light of this new information, the state should be prepared to agree to relief for Michael Morton immediately,\u201d he said firmly. \u201cRight now.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/a>Can you say how you got the details of the conversations that happened in chambers? <\/span>Luckily, that was transcribed and by the time I came along, it was public record.<\/span><\/span>

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\u2019s murder, that seemed to cast doubt on the importance of the bandana. The report had been written by a sheriff\u2019s 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\u2019s office put forth a far-fetched theory: that Christine\u2019s 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\u2014nor was it explained how a hair of Christine\u2019s had come to be found on the bandana.) In other words, even if Norwood had dropped the bandana, that did not make him Christine\u2019s killer.

But the position that the DA\u2019s office had taken was untenable. By then both Morrison\u2019s investigators and Williamson County sheriff\u2019s deputies had managed to locate Norwood\u2014he was found living with his mother thirty miles east of Austin in the town of Bastrop\u2014lending 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.

\u201cI didn\u2019t just want to get out,\u201d Michael told me. \u201cI wanted to know exactly how this had happened to me.\u201d

Monday, October 3, 2011,<\/b> was Michael\u2019s 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\u2014a radio, an oscillating fan, a pair of sneakers\u2014and 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\u2014the 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\u2019s deputies arrived to bring him back to Georgetown. The protocol for transporting an inmate\u2014even a man who was about to be freed on grounds of actual innocence\u2014required that he be handcuffed and put in leg irons, but one of the deputies hesitated before reaching for his cuffs. \u201cNow, Mr. Morton,\u201d he said, \u201cif you start having bad thoughts, I want you to remember that when all of this happened to you, I was only twelve years old.\u201d 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\u2019s 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 cellphone 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\u2019s second term.\u00a0<\/a>This, to me, is just the right kind and amount of detail to convey how much the world had changed while Morton was incarcerated\u2014it hews to the tight narrative of his experience. We don\u2019t need to know what else had happened in the world, only what he can see of it. Did you feel compelled to reveal more or did this focused POV always seem right to you?<\/span>It always seemed right to me. I think if you provide the reader with a few details like this, they can be more evocative\u2014sometimes\u2014than a few paragraphs. I wanted the simple, awful fact of that statement to really strike the reader: He hadn\u2019t driven a car since midway through Reagan\u2019s second term.<\/span><\/span>

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\u2014the 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,<\/a>Such a lovely detail. How\u2019d you get?<\/span>He talked in a number of interviews with reporters about how wonderful it had been to put on real clothes again, so I pressed him on this. What was it about wearing regular clothes that was so different than prison whites\u2014was it the fit? That he looked more like a \u201cnormal\u201d person in them? He told me, \u201cThey were so soft,\u201d and he rubbed his fingers together like he still couldn\u2019t believe it.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/a>*sniffle*<\/span><\/span> His mother, Patricia, and his father, Billy\u2014who had asked the members of their church to pray for their son\u2019s release for nearly 25 years<\/a>Another beautiful detail; source?<\/span>I interviewed Michael\u2019s mother for two hours and then never used any of the interview in my story, which I felt terrible about. This is one of the few vestiges of that interview. Again, there were so many paths to go down with this story, and the way in which his family had suffered during his incarceration was a story unto itself.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u2014<\/i>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\u2019s daughter. She sat quietly by herself, observing the proceedings.<\/a>*sniffle*<\/span><\/span> He spotted Mario Garcia at the back of the courtroom and motioned to his friend to step forward, enveloping him in a long, silent bear hug.<\/a>*SNIFFLE*<\/span>These sniffles are making me so happy. I\u2019m so glad that the story is resonating\u2014that was my hope.<\/span><\/span>

The hearing lasted just a few minutes, during which Harle apologized to Michael from the bench. \u201cWe do not have a perfect system of justice, but we have the best system of justice in the world,\u201d 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. \u201cI thank God this wasn\u2019t a capital case,\u201d 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\u2019 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. \u201cI\u2019m\u2014I\u2019m so sorry,\u201d she managed to say as she stared at Michael in disbelief.

He reached out to squeeze her hand. \u201cI understand,\u201d he said.

IV.\u00a0<\/b>

By the time Michael walked out of prison a free man, Ken Anderson<\/a>This may be inappropriate but I\u2019m silently calling this section HAMMER TIME.<\/span>Thank you for making me laugh out loud. This case is so sad that you have to find ways to laugh or else it\u2019s just too dark and depressing.<\/span><\/span>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 59-year-old jurist held a regular mock trial for fifth graders that he called \u201cThe Great Stolen Peanut Butter and Jelly Caper,\u201d 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\u2019s Mansion. Like Moody\u2019s, Anderson\u2019s 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\u2019s highest court for criminal cases.

So it was a sudden reversal of fortune for Anderson when, eight days after Michael\u2019s release, the CCA overturned Michael\u2019s conviction on grounds of actual innocence. The ruling meant that Anderson had secured a guilty verdict against an indisputably innocent man. Yet whether he, or anyone else involved in the case, would ever be held accountable for the wrongful conviction remained an open question.

Immediately after his release, Michael\u2019s legal team began digging for answers. Thanks to Scheck\u2019s negotiations with Bradley, the lawyers\u2014who now numbered six, including Morrison, Raley, and Scheck\u2014were able to depose Anderson, Mike Davis (the former assistant DA who helped prosecute the case), and Wood and take affidavits from many others. The testimony was revealing. During his deposition, Anderson said that he had likely informed Allison and his co-counsel, Bill White, of the transcript in which Rita Kirkpatrick told Wood what Eric had seen but admitted that he had no recollection of what he had actually done.

\u201cThere\u2019s no way on God\u2019s green earth, if that was in my file, I wouldn\u2019t have told them that Eric said that the monster killed his mother,\u201d Anderson testified. Allison and White are both emphatic that he never did so. \u201cIf we had known what Eric told his grandmother, we would have fought hard to have the jury hear that evidence,\u201d Allison told me. \u201cEric\u2019s account would have been critical, because it supported the theory we presented at trial that an unknown intruder killed Christine.\u201d

Shortly after the investigation concluded in November, Anderson made what still remains his only public statement about the case. Standing outside the old courthouse on the town square in Georgetown, the white-haired judge looked down at his prepared remarks as he told reporters that he had behaved ethically\u2014\u201cIn my heart, I know there was no misconduct whatsoever\u201d\u2014and that he had no plans to step down from the bench. Caitlin Baker, who stood in attendance, was unimpressed, telling reporters afterward that Anderson should resign. She held Anderson partially responsible for her mother\u2019s murder, she said, because his single-minded pursuit of Michael had allowed the real killer to go unpunished. \u201cShe could be alive right now,\u201d she said. Her outrage was fueled by what was widely seen as Anderson\u2019s failure to take any personal responsibility for his role in a conviction that he had long trumpeted as one of the pinnacles of his prosecutorial career. \u201cAs district attorney at the time, and as woefully inadequate as I realize it is, I want to formally apologize for the system\u2019s failure to Mr. Morton and every other person who was affected by the verdict,\u201d he had said before fielding a few questions and walking away.

Many observers in Williamson County wondered if the matter would end there. Rarely have Texas prosecutors had to answer tough questions about their conduct, even in the wake of wrongful convictions. But in February, Judge Harle ruled that the investigation conducted by Michael\u2019s lawyers suggested that there was probable cause to believe Anderson had broken the law in failing to turn over evidence that was \u201chighly favorable\u201d to the defense. Harle recommended that the Texas Supreme Court launch a court of inquiry to look into the matter. A week later, the Supreme Court concurred with Harle\u2019s findings and ruled that an inquiry should proceed. Anderson would have to answer for his alleged misconduct.

There was no precedent for this decision. A court of inquiry is an arcane and extremely rare legal procedure, unique to Texas,<\/a>Texas is so notorious for its criminal justice problems and procedures but the court of inquiry provision seems<\/em> like a good idea. But is it? Why does Texas have it and why don\u2019t other states?<\/span>I honestly don\u2019t know why Texas has this and other states don\u2019t, but I will say that I\u2019m not sure I think it\u2019s a good idea. I think it can be very easily misused. That said, I covered the court of inquiry in this case for our web site\u00a0and it was fascinating.<\/span><\/span>that can be used to investigate wrongdoing, most often on the part of state officials. But as far as anyone can remember, it has never before been used to probe allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, much less when the subject of the investigation was a sitting district judge. Nevertheless, the decision was well received. \u201cThe pursuit of justice shouldn\u2019t end with an innocent person\u2019s release from prison,\u201d the Austin American-Statesman concluded in an editorial extolling Harle\u2019s recommendation.

By then the tide of public opinion had turned against Anderson and Bradley. As the face of the Williamson County DA\u2019s office, Bradley\u2014who had devoted untold time and taxpayer money to opposing Michael\u2019s requests for DNA testing\u2014was excoriated in the local press. \u201cAdjust the facts as needed, feign respectability, stick to the talking points, and, above all else, protect your friends and associates,\u201d wrote local legal blogger Lou Ann Anderson, suggesting that Williamson County was less tough on crime than \u201clight on justice.\u201d Though Bradley had long been considered bulletproof politically in Williamson County, he soon found himself in a hard-fought race against a primary challenger. Despite support from Governor Perry, who sent letters to the county\u2019s registered Republicans exhorting them to vote for Bradley, the DA was defeated by a stunning ten-point margin. The race had become a referendum on his handling of the Morton case; in the months leading up to primary day, his critics had tied bandanas to his political signs.<\/a>Wow. Were they blue?<\/span>Funny you should ask. The bandanas I saw were all red. No one knew what the bandana in the Morton case looked like.<\/span><\/span>

This fall, attention turned back to Anderson. On October 4, the one-year anniversary of Michael\u2019s release, the state bar issued a withering report on Anderson\u2019s conduct. Sixteen years earlier, the agency had named him \u201cProsecutor of the Year\u201d; now it filed disciplinary charges against the judge. After a ten-month investigation, it had concluded that Anderson had deliberately withheld evidence. A judge appointed by the Texas Supreme Court will hear evidence at an upcoming disciplinary hearing, which has not yet been scheduled. If the judge determines that Anderson withheld evidence, he could be reprimanded, have his law license suspended, or be disbarred.\u00a0<\/a>How did you and the magazine decide to run this story prior to the proceedings against Anderson? <\/span>I didn\u2019t want to hold the story any longer. I knew the court of inquiry would take on a life of its own, and in fact, I think I wrote 5,000 words or so on it just during the week that it took place.<\/span><\/span>

As devastating as these penalties would be to a sitting judge, Anderson is no doubt far more concerned about the possible outcome of the court of inquiry, which is slated to begin on December 10. Fort Worth district judge Louis Sturns will preside over the inquiry, with legendary Houston criminal defense attorney Rusty Hardin\u2014once a top prosecutor in the Harris County DA\u2019s office\u2014serving as special prosecutor. The unusual legal proceeding will be held in Georgetown, at the Williamson County Justice Center, just down the hall from Anderson\u2019s courtroom. The irony of the situation will not be lost on anyone; the former DA\u2014who subjected Michael to a ruthless cross-examination in 1987\u2014could himself be called to testify while Michael looks on. If Sturns finds that Anderson violated the law, he could refer the case to the Texas attorney general\u2019s office, even though Anderson\u2019s attorneys have argued that the statute of limitations has long since expired on any offenses that he might be charged with. Michael\u2019s lawyers, however, argue that the four-year window during which a prosecutor can be charged for violations such as suppression of evidence has not yet closed because Anderson committed an ongoing act of \u201cfraudulent concealment\u201d that did not end until August 2011, when Judge Lott\u2019s file was unsealed.

Anderson is also expected to put on a vigorous defense that will draw on a narrow reading of what his legal obligations were to turn over evidence. He did not provide Wood\u2019s reports and notes to Lott, explained Anderson\u2019s attorney, Eric Nichols, \u201cbecause it should be abundantly clear to any objective reader of the record that what the state agreed to produce was only a report from the day on which Christine Morton\u2019s body was found.\u201d The strategy of Anderson\u2019s legal team will presumably involve trying to shift blame onto the late Sheriff Boutwell, whose mishandling of the investigation into Christine\u2019s murder cast a long shadow on the case. They have pointed to the fact that several pieces of evidence, such as the phone message about Christine\u2019s credit card, were found only in the sheriff\u2019s office\u2019s files, not the former prosecutor\u2019s. Regardless, Allison told me he believed it was implausible that Anderson had not seen all the documents in the case, irrespective of where they were stored. \u201cAs the DA, Ken would have had complete access to the sheriff\u2019s office\u2019s records,\u201d he said. \u201cQuite frankly, I can\u2019t imagine him stepping anywhere near the courtroom before going through every piece of paper first. He\u2019s very meticulous.\u201d No one knows exactly how long the court of inquiry will last; it could well be concluded before Christmas.

The denouement of the Morton case will come in January when Mark Alan Norwood, who was arrested last fall in Bastrop, will stand trial for Christine\u2019s murder. Given Williamson County\u2019s obvious conflict of interest\u2014its own prosecutors, while fighting Michael\u2019s efforts to prove his innocence, discounted the very same DNA evidence that implicated Norwood\u2014the case will be tried by special prosecutor Lisa Tanner of the attorney general\u2019s office. Because there is a gag order in the case,<\/a>When did the gag order come into play and how did it affect your reporting?<\/span>The gag order came down very early in my reporting. Luckily it did not preclude me from talking to Michael, thank goodness, so it really did not have a big impact. Usually I will put a story on hold when I hear that a gag order has been put in place, but there was surprisingly little overlap between what I was writing and what was happening in the Norwood case.<\/span><\/span>it is unknown if state investigators have been able to connect Norwood back to the green van, the contents of Christine\u2019s purse, or Michael\u2019s .45 automatic, which was also stolen from the Morton home. It also remains to be seen whether the DNA hit in the Baker case will be admissible.

For Michael, the experience will be surreal. He will essentially be watching his original trial replayed, featuring evidence that his jury never heard, with another man sitting behind the defense table. In recent court appearances, Norwood has appeared unkempt, his dark, greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail, his expression blas\u00e9 as he surveys the bank of TV cameras in the courtroom. (Because of publicity surrounding the case, the trial has been moved to San Angelo on a change of venue.) \u201cI won\u2019t do anything to jeopardize the trial, of course,\u201d Michael told me, \u201cbut I\u2019ve wondered if I will be able to control myself when I see him face-to-face.\u201d Yet Michael has already shown Norwood mercy. At his request, as well as that of the entire Kirkpatrick family, Tanner will not seek a death sentence.<\/a>Can you update us on the cases against both Anderson and Norwood?<\/span>A weeklong\u00a0court of inquiry was held in early February, which I chronicled for our web site<\/a>. The judge who presided over the inquiry will likely issue a decision this spring about whether Anderson should face criminal charges. Norwood went to trial on March 18.\u00a0(The dates of both the court of inquiry and the murder trial were delayed after my story went to press.)<\/span>[Ed. note: Norwood was found guilty<\/a>.]<\/em><\/span><\/span>

Eric\u2019s memories of <\/b>childhood begin with playing T-ball in the suburbs of Houston.<\/a>Here we come back full circle, to the opening of Part 1, featuring Eric. Can you tell us a little about the decision making behind this structural move? Also, you answer a question that\u2019s been hanging indelibly over this whole story\u2014what does he remember? <\/span>Setting aside this case for a second, I\u2019ve always thought how strange it is that parents and kids remember the first five years of life so completely differently. The parents remember every last detail while the kid remembers \u2026 \u00a0<\/span>absolutely nothing! That\u2019s a weird situation to begin with. Then you add a crime into the mix, and it gets a lot stranger. I was so blown away with the fact that Eric remembered nothing, and I wanted that fact to really have an impact on readers. At this point in the narrative, you know what Michael remembers of him and how fiercely he loved Eric. So to learn that Eric remembers nothing is both heartening (he doesn\u2019t remember seeing his mother killed) and deeply tragic, because he and Michael are coming at this from such completely different perspectives.<\/span><\/span>He is five years old, a cheerful kid with blond hair and a wide, unclouded smile. Try as he might, he is incapable of drawing any earlier images to the surface; everything that took place before he was five is a blank. A photograph he has seen of himself with his mother, which was taken shortly after he underwent open-heart surgery when he was three, has evoked only a few unsatisfying details; he can recall the Hot Wheels set that he is playing with in the picture, but he has never been able to summon up an actual memory of the smiling woman with dark hair who is looking at him adoringly. His mother is lost to him.

The few recollections he has of his father start after Michael was already incarcerated. He can remember the lemon drops that Michael used to give him during their twice-a-year court-mandated visits at the Wynne Unit, in Huntsville. And he can remember the hand-drawn mazes that would arrive in the mail every so often, which his dad had carefully penciled onto graph paper before finishing in ink, each one more intricate than the last.

Those innocent details were overwhelmed, as Eric grew older, by the anguish of understanding why his father was in prison. That his father had been convicted of murdering his mother was a closely held family secret. Marylee had warned him not to tell his friends at school for fear that the stigma would rub off on him. \u201cShe and my grandmother wanted to protect me,\u201d Eric told me.<\/a>Was he reluctant to speak with you? Was he forthcoming? How much time did you spend with him and in what circumstances?<\/span>It took a long time to get this interview; it was the last one I did before I started writing. But once we sat down together, he was pretty candid. We did one sit-down interview in his house and we corresponded a little bit by email afterward. I was so nervous during the interview because it was a really important interview and we had limited time, and I was afraid that he was going to cut the interview off at any second. So I think I raced through my questions. But he really was very open with me.<\/span><\/span>\u201cEverything they did was to shield me from what had happened. Obviously I was told my dad had been found guilty, but it wasn\u2019t something we talked about.\u201d When they did have to confront the past by making the two-hour drive to see Michael, Marylee attempted to make each visit as positive an experience as possible; the day would begin with a stop at McDonald\u2019s and a coloring book for Eric to fill in on the way to the prison. \u201cI\u2019m sure those visits were torture for her,\u201d he told me, \u201cbut she always put on a good face for me.\u201d Marylee was intent on moving forward, past the tragedy that had engulfed them, and Eric helped her, in his own way, by revising the family history. When friends asked about his mother, he said that she had died of cancer or that she had been killed in a car accident. He told people that his father had taken off not long after he was born and now lived in California.

And so for Eric, life moved on. He had a doting aunt and grandmother, a top education at a private Catholic school, friends from the many sports teams he played on, and a beloved mixed-breed collie named Shelby. \u201cEverything was picture-perfect,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was Leave It to Beaver, only with a single mom.\u201d When he was twelve, Marylee married a friend of hers from junior high school, and her new husband would play a large and positive role in Eric\u2019s life; Eric would later take his name\u2014Olson<\/a>Nice; here it is.<\/span><\/span> \u2014when he was preparing to apply to college. His decision had less to do with cutting ties to Michael, he explained, than with wanting to become part of the Olson family, which by then included not only Marylee and her husband but the son they\u2019d had three years earlier, whom Eric thought of as his little brother.

Eric went on to attend Texas State University, where he became the president of a small Catholic fraternity. When he returned home to Houston, he went to work in the campus ministry at his old high school. He met his future wife, Maggie, while volunteering at a local church. A year before they married, he told her on a drive through the Hill Country, as he stared straight ahead at the two-lane highway, that his father had killed his mother. He asked her not to tell anyone. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t something that ate away at me or that I really dwelled on,\u201d Eric told me. \u201cI put it out of my mind so I didn\u2019t have to deal with it. I just wanted to live a normal life.\u201d

In June 2011, three months after he and Maggie married, Eric received an email from John Raley. After trying fruitlessly for weeks to track Eric down, Raley\u2019s wife, Kelly, who is also an attorney at Raley & Bowick, had finally come across his wedding announcement on the website of a small local newspaper; using the details that were provided, she had figured out where Eric worked, and she passed along his contact information to her husband. \u201cI have called you a couple of times recently, and I want you to know who I am and why I called,\u201d John Raley\u2019s email<\/a>Great; how\u2019d you get the email?<\/span>I asked Raley for it and he was nice enough to give me an archived copy.<\/span><\/span>explained. \u201cI am part of a team of lawyers who, for many years, have been volunteering our time on behalf of your biological father.\u201d Raley then laid out what had not yet been disclosed to the public: DNA testing had provided \u201cpowerful new evidence\u201d of Michael\u2019s innocence.

Eric did not respond for seven weeks. He was 28 years old and had lived almost his entire life believing that his father had killed his mother. The email rattled him so much that two days went by before he even mentioned it to his wife. \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure if it was real at first,\u201d Eric told me. \u201cThere had never been any question that he did it, so this came totally out of the blue.\u201d When Eric failed to answer, the Raleys enlisted their pastor<\/a>Wow.<\/span>I love this part of the story. Again, there was a long, fascinating story here about the pastor and the priest \u2026\u00a0<\/span>but I was not writing a book.<\/span><\/span>to help, asking him to contact the priest who oversees the private school where Eric works. Only after he received a visit from the priest did Eric answer Raley\u2019s email, sending a curt note acknowledging that he had received it. By then the hit to Norwood had been made, and Raley replied with a more detailed accounting of the facts surrounding the case. \u201cThe most important thing I can tell you,\u201d he wrote in conclusion, \u201cis that your father loves you.\u201d

The following day, Eric wrote back: \u201cMy family does not have any desire to reenter this discussion or to relive what happened 25 years ago. Please do not contact my place of work or my family again.\u201d

Eric\u2019s first instinct, he told me, was not to shut his father out but to protect the woman who had raised him and prevent her from ever having to dredge up her grief over her sister\u2019s murder. He did not tell Marylee about his exchange with Raley until weeks later. When he did, he found that she remained extremely skeptical that Michael could be innocent, even though she had, by then, read media coverage of recent developments in the case. Based on her communications with the Williamson County DA\u2019s office, which was still trying to discount the relevance of the bandana, she continued to trust that Michael was guilty. Still, Eric kept educating himself about his father\u2019s case, of which he knew little. He had never even been aware of Michael\u2019s long fight to have the bandana tested. Encouraged by Maggie, Eric began to form a different view of his father.

Marylee, however, did not do the same. As she had always done, she accepted the DA\u2019s office\u2019s view of the case\u2014that the DNA results did not exonerate Michael. No one at the DA\u2019s office informed her of the deal that Bradley had brokered with Scheck, so she was blindsided when she learned of Michael\u2019s impending release. She found out when Austin American-Statesman reporter Chuck Lindell emailed her to ask for comment on the afternoon before Michael walked free.

Eric had, by then, come to accept that his father was likely innocent, but he felt fiercely protective of Marylee, who was struggling to understand how everything she had been told was rapidly unraveling. And so, on October 4, the day of Michael\u2019s release, Eric kept his distance. He was not present at the courthouse to hear Judge Harle\u2019s apology or the crowd\u2019s applause. When classes let out that afternoon, Eric closed the door to his office and sat down in front of his computer. On the website of an Austin TV news station, he was able to find a live-streaming video of the press conference that was being held nearly two hundred miles away in Georgetown. He leaned in closer, looking on in wonder as his father\u2014older and grayer, wearing an exuberant grin\u2014spoke to reporters. Eric did not have the urge to be there with him, but neither did he have the impulse to turn away.

Two days later, he wrote to Raley. \u201cI want to begin by sharing my appreciation for your hard work,\u201d he typed. \u201cI hope that you continue the work you have done by pursuing the true murderer.\u201d His family, he went on, was having \u201cdifficulty processing this new information.\u201d He described the preceding weeks as \u201ca bit uncomfortable.\u201d Despite that tension, he wrote, \u201cI feel the need to begin to reconcile the situation. I cannot imagine the pain everyone has felt, and I know that I was blessed with a childhood in which I was sheltered from most of that suffering. However, I would like to slowly establish contact again with my father.\u201d

Immediately after his release,<\/b> Michael returned to East Texas with his parents and settled into their spare bedroom. In time he would assume a high profile\u2014speaking at universities about the lack of oversight for prosecutors, meeting with lawmakers to discuss legislative reforms\u2014but in those early days, he was intensely private. He was unaccustomed to the everyday things he had once taken for granted: using metal silverware, or carrying a wallet, or being able to push open a door. The tactile experience of being touched by another human being was foreign to him, and he was taken aback whenever his mother or his sister threw their arms around him. Though the Innocence Project made sure that a social worker who had previously worked with exonerees was present on the day he was freed and available to help him in the months that followed, he did not seek out her counsel. \u201cIt was a blessed, easy transition,\u201d he told me. \u201cI had my family to help me and a roof over my head. Honestly, my return to the free world was not overwhelming compared to everything I\u2019d been through up until then.\u201d He delighted in mundane indulgences like taking off his shoes and walking barefoot across the carpet. Even doing the laundry, he told me, was its own pleasure. \u201cSorting socks and folding underwear may be work for some folks,\u201d he said, \u201cbut you approach it from a radically different perspective if you haven\u2019t been able to wear your own clothes for twenty-five years.\u201d

The process of reconnecting with Eric was less straightforward. Michael tried to be patient as days and then weeks went by with no further word from him. It would take until shortly before Thanksgiving for Eric to agree to meet, and he did so without telling Marylee, who was still coming to grips with the revelations of the previous few months. John and Kelly Raley had offered their home in West Houston as a neutral location for the meeting. So one Saturday afternoon in November 2011, Eric and Michael set out to meet again.\u00a0<\/a>What strikes me above all with this piece is its straightforwardness. You don’t resort to cheap or heavy-handed emotional tricks; therefore, it\u2019s more powerful. Do you have a strategy for calibrating the delivery?<\/span>That\u2019s the nicest thing you could say to me. A journalism professor recently told me, in a complimentary way, that he thought my story was \u201cunderwritten,\u201d and I was thrilled. When I first started writing, I was really enamored with Tom Wolfe\u2019s baroque style and I wrote my undergraduate thesis about him. As I\u2019ve gotten older, I\u2019ve really come to appreciate more plain, stripped-down\u00a0writing. When you\u2019re working with material this good, your job is just to get out of the way\u2014tell the story and don\u2019t do anything too fancy.<\/span><\/span>

Michael paced the floor as he waited for Eric, who was running late. After a while, Kelly began to worry that Eric might not come after all, and so she was relieved when she finally saw a car pull up outside. Eric and Maggie got out and approached the house, where Michael waited in the foyer with Raley. \u201cThis grown man was standing there,\u201d Michael told me of his surprise when Eric appeared at the door. \u201cThat was him, that was my little boy. I would have walked right past him if I had seen him on the street.\u201d

They shook hands. Then Michael reached out for Eric, and they embraced for a long time. \u201cHe was emotional, more than I was,\u201d Eric remembered. \u201cI didn\u2019t know how to react, because I didn\u2019t know him. I kept thinking, \u2018Should I be crying? What should I be feeling?\u2019 I was just kind of stunned.\u201d

Eric was quiet for most of the evening as he took everything in. But his father, who had yearned in the solitude of his cell for this moment, could not hide his eagerness for them to be close again. \u201cMichael was so excited that he was almost manic,\u201d Raley told me. \u201cIt was the fastest I\u2019d ever seen him talk. I think he wanted to cram everything they had missed into that first hour together. Eric was respectful and courteous, but he did not engage.\u201d Raley and his wife watched with growing concern through dinner as Eric said little, and when the conversation stalled, Kelly talked to Maggie about the baby that she and Eric were expecting.<\/a>Lovely, subtle way of handling this bit of exposition. <\/span>Thank you! I wish I could figure out how to introduce more information in this indirect sort of way.<\/span><\/span> Finally, Raley steered Michael and Eric outside to the back patio with mugs of coffee, where they could talk by themselves. It was the first time they had been alone together in 25 years.

They sat in the darkness, in a white garden swing that overlooked the yard, and it was only then that Eric opened up. \u201cI told him that I was extremely freaked out,\u201d Eric recalled. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m not mad. I don\u2019t hate you. I just feel weird, and I don\u2019t know how to act around you. Part of me feels like I\u2019m betraying the Kirkpatricks right now. I know you\u2019re excited to be out, but this is hard.\u2019\u200a\u201d Michael relaxed and listened as his son explained his mixed emotions. Slowly, the conversation eased into subjects that Eric had always wondered about: his mother, whose adult life he knew little about, and the three years they had all spent together as a family. \u201cThere was an organic, natural cadence we fell into,\u201d Michael told me. \u201cIt just started going so well. We were alone, and it was good.\u201d

Michael would see his son twice more that winter. In January he visited Houston shortly after the birth of Eric and Maggie\u2019s daughter, and in February Eric came to East Texas to visit the extended Morton family. By then Eric had told Marylee about meeting his father, and he had been both surprised and relieved to discover that she was supportive of his desire to reconnect with Michael. But the Kirkpatricks themselves\u2014having been conditioned for more than two decades to trust the sadistic portrayal presented of Michael at his trial\u2014were more hesitant. (The conversation between three-year-old Eric and his grandmother, in which he described the murderer as a \u201cmonster,\u201d had ultimately not persuaded the Kirkpatricks that Michael was above suspicion; encouraged by the sheriff\u2019s office, they had always believed that Eric had simply made up the story after overhearing family members discussing details of the case.) When the entire family convened in April for the christening of Eric and Maggie\u2019s baby girl, Michael received what he felt was a lukewarm reception\u2014first at a dinner with Marylee and in particular at the baptism itself. \u201cWe greeted each other, but there were few words spoken,\u201d Michael said. Even John Kirkpatrick, who was responsible for finding the bloody bandana that helped to free Michael, was cordial but distant. \u201cI sensed that none of them had accepted or internalized my innocence,\u201d Michael told me. \u201cBut I also know that they were lied to, manipulated, and kept in the dark about the most important aspects of the investigation, so in the end, I have to forgive them.\u201d<\/a>How has your story affected the relationship between Michael and these family members?<\/span>Things are still strained. I\u2019ll leave it at that for now.<\/span><\/span>

By then Michael had received compensation for the time he served; in accordance with state law, which requires that exonerees be paid $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, he received just short of $2 million. He contributed some of the funds to a prison ministry that had buoyed him during his time behind bars and bought a piece of lakefront property, where he plans to build a house. He will remain close enough to his elderly parents that he can help them, having already shepherded them through several health crises since his release; not long after he returned home, his father had a stroke and his mother broke her arm. \u201cI feel like I got home right in time,\u201d he told me.

He has toyed with the idea of moving out West someday, but too many ties bind him to East Texas. One is his relationship with a divorc\u00e9e and mother of three grown children who attends the same church as Michael\u2019s parents. \u201cWe\u2019re like an old married couple because we\u2019re in our fifties,\u201d Michael said. \u201cWe have our reading night, when we lie around her living room and read our respective books. Another night is movie night, and we\u2019ll watch something I missed while I was away.\u201d Christine will never be far from his mind, he added. \u201cI think of her, but she is not the overriding influence she used to be,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a bittersweet thing to realize that. But maybe, in the end, healthy.\u201d

Michael tries not to overwhelm Eric by going to Houston too often, though he told me there were few things that made him happier than seeing his son holding his granddaughter. When he does visit, he usually stays with the Raleys and stops by Eric and Maggie\u2019s home to say hello. On a recent visit, he and Eric went to an Astros game. It was the first time they had ever gone to a ball game together. \u201cWe haven\u2019t had much one-on-one time, so I figured the game was the easiest way to do that,\u201d Eric told me. \u201cIt was nice. Of course, it was weird too.\u201d<\/a>Did you feel compelled as a reporter to be present on a day that Michael and Eric hung out together? <\/span>Stupidly, no. That is a great idea. I should have gone to the ballgame with them.<\/span>Nah, was just curious.<\/span><\/span>

It was on the heels of this visit, the night after the ball game, that I met Eric and Maggie for the first time. As we talked in the living room of their small, ranch-style house on the western edge of Houston, Maggie explained that Eric had become much more receptive to welcoming Michael back into his life since the birth of their daughter. She looked at her husband. \u201cWhen you were turned off to the whole thing and you didn\u2019t want to meet Mike, I just said, \u2018You\u2019re going to understand his feelings as soon as this little girl\u2019s born,\u2019\u200a\u201d she reminded him. \u201cI knew you were going to understand what a father\u2019s love was and that it doesn\u2019t just go away.\u201d

Eric nodded. \u201cThat little girl has been my saving grace,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe whole family has come a long way this year, and I think she\u2019s helped with that.\u201d I asked him about Marylee and how she was coping with the situation. He thought for a moment. \u201cI think it\u2019s difficult for her to share how much confusion she\u2019s felt in the process of forgiving my father,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s come a long way from where she was when she seemed so resistant and angry. Now her anger and frustration is focused on the system and on Ken Anderson. She doesn\u2019t believe my father is to blame anymore.\u201d He was hopeful, he said, that there would be greater reconciliation when they all attended the Norwood trial together. Eric told me that he had less interest in the outcome of the court of inquiry than in seeing justice served in the Norwood case. \u201cIf he\u2019s convicted, then life can go on with my father and the Kirkpatricks and we can be normal,\u201d he said.

We heard the baby cry in the next room, and Maggie went to get her. A few minutes later she returned, holding the seven-month-old. The baby was tiny and alert, her expression placid as she stared at us. Her blue eyes were as bright as her late grandmother\u2019s, who would be 57 were she still alive. We all stared back at the baby as she studied us, watchful and serene, unaware of all the pain and suffering that had come before her. Her name, of course, is Christine.<\/a>Lovely. Life goes on. Generations unfold. It\u2019s all connected, etc. When did you know that this would be your kicker?<\/span>I always know how I\u2019m going to end a story when I sit down to write. The end is pretty intuitive for me. Figuring out the beginning is hell. The last interview I did before I started writing was with Eric, and as soon as this moment happened, I knew this was the way to end the piece. Nearly all of the story is about Michael, but I didn\u2019t want to lose sight of Christine. I wanted to bring it back to her. She never got to be a grandmother, she never got to see her son grow up, and I wanted to remind readers of that. But I also wanted to end this dark, depressing story on a somewhat hopeful note, and ending with the next generation allowed that.<\/span><\/span><\/i>

Pamela Colloff<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0has been writing for\u00a0Texas Monthly<\/em>\u00a0since 1997 and is an executive editor at the magazine. She has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and her stories have\u00a0been anthologized in three editions of\u00a0The Best American Crime Reporting.\u00a0<\/em>Her two-part series about the wrongful conviction of death row inmate Anthony Graves has been credited with helping win Graves\u2019 release after 18 years in prison. A New York native, she lives in Austin with her husband and their two children.

To read other installments of Annotation Tuesday!, go here<\/a>.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pamela Colloff’s annotated \u201cThe Innocent Man\u201d\u00a0continues today, with the second and final part. (To read Part 1, go here.) The timing couldn’t be better. On Monday,\u00a0the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) named Colloff\u2019s finely reported\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0narrative, about the wrongful 25-year imprisonment of a man believed to have murdered his wife, a National Magazine Award […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[61],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-paige-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pamela Colloff’s annotated \u201cThe Innocent Man\u201d\u00a0continues today, with the second and final part. (To read Part 1, go here.) The timing couldn’t be better. On Monday,\u00a0the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) named Colloff\u2019s finely reported\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0narrative, about the wrongful 25-year imprisonment of a man believed to have murdered his wife, a National Magazine Award […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-04-02T14:21:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-03-04T19:08:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/colloff-p3.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"175\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"215\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"commonmedia\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"commonmedia\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"97 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"commonmedia\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ad131fac9b2e8136d6171c8575cfc226\"},\"headline\":\"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-04-02T14:21:42+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-03-04T19:08:18+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":19445,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/app\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/03\\\/colloff-p3.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Story Annotations\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/\",\"name\":\"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/app\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/03\\\/colloff-p3.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-04-02T14:21:42+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-03-04T19:08:18+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/app\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/03\\\/colloff-p3.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/app\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/03\\\/colloff-p3.jpg\",\"width\":175,\"height\":215},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/2013\\\/04\\\/02\\\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/\",\"name\":\"Nieman Storyboard\",\"description\":\"\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#organization\",\"name\":\"Nieman Storyboard\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/app\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/02\\\/NiemanKOLogo.svg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/app\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/02\\\/NiemanKOLogo.svg\",\"width\":1,\"height\":1,\"caption\":\"Nieman Storyboard\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\"}},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ad131fac9b2e8136d6171c8575cfc226\",\"name\":\"commonmedia\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/7a67dac1d5145031a5e3f8bcb411f86c4aed5a7ebe4244392196080637ed18af?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/7a67dac1d5145031a5e3f8bcb411f86c4aed5a7ebe4244392196080637ed18af?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/7a67dac1d5145031a5e3f8bcb411f86c4aed5a7ebe4244392196080637ed18af?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"commonmedia\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/wp\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/niemanstoryboard.org\\\/author\\\/commonmedia\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard","og_description":"Pamela Colloff’s annotated \u201cThe Innocent Man\u201d\u00a0continues today, with the second and final part. (To read Part 1, go here.) The timing couldn’t be better. On Monday,\u00a0the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) named Colloff\u2019s finely reported\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0narrative, about the wrongful 25-year imprisonment of a man believed to have murdered his wife, a National Magazine Award […]","og_url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/","og_site_name":"Nieman Storyboard","article_published_time":"2013-04-02T14:21:42+00:00","article_modified_time":"2024-03-04T19:08:18+00:00","og_image":[{"width":175,"height":215,"url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/colloff-p3.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"commonmedia","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"commonmedia","Est. reading time":"97 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/"},"author":{"name":"commonmedia","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#\/schema\/person\/ad131fac9b2e8136d6171c8575cfc226"},"headline":"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2","datePublished":"2013-04-02T14:21:42+00:00","dateModified":"2024-03-04T19:08:18+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/"},"wordCount":19445,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/colloff-p3.jpg","articleSection":["Story Annotations"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/","url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/","name":"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/colloff-p3.jpg","datePublished":"2013-04-02T14:21:42+00:00","dateModified":"2024-03-04T19:08:18+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/colloff-p3.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/colloff-p3.jpg","width":175,"height":215},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/04\/02\/annotation-tuesday-pamela-colloff-and-the-innocent-man-part-2\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 2"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#website","url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/","name":"Nieman Storyboard","description":"","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#organization","name":"Nieman Storyboard","url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/02\/NiemanKOLogo.svg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/02\/NiemanKOLogo.svg","width":1,"height":1,"caption":"Nieman Storyboard"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"}},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#\/schema\/person\/ad131fac9b2e8136d6171c8575cfc226","name":"commonmedia","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7a67dac1d5145031a5e3f8bcb411f86c4aed5a7ebe4244392196080637ed18af?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7a67dac1d5145031a5e3f8bcb411f86c4aed5a7ebe4244392196080637ed18af?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7a67dac1d5145031a5e3f8bcb411f86c4aed5a7ebe4244392196080637ed18af?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"commonmedia"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp"],"url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/author\/commonmedia\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4250,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions\/4250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}