GEORGETOWN, Texas -- Had it not been for a murder committed in Travis County, prosecutors said Monday that 57-year-old Michael Morton might have died in prison.
A jury convicted him in the 1986 murder of his wife Christine. Prosecutors argued that he killed her after she refused to have sex with him on his birthday.
Police found her bludgeoned to death at the couple’s home in Round Rock.
Now new DNA test shows that it may have been the work of a serial murderer who later killed in Travis County.
“That’s how the connection eventually got made,” said Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley. “That Travis County piece of information was critical.”
In a Williamson County courtroom Monday, a district court judge listened to arguments from Morton’s defense attorneys. They were from the New York-based Innocence Project. They included Barry Scheck, who once served on OJ Simpson’s defense team.
The defense attorneys argued that a bandanna found 100 yards from Morton’s home should clear him, because it matched an unrelated murder in Travis County. They did not say who that murderer was.
In the meantime, missing from court Monday was Michael Morton himself. An attorney said that he remained at a prison in Tennessee Colony, Texas.
Morton is believed to be en route to Georgetown to appear before a district judge, who will set the terms of his release as soon as Tuesday. A court of appeals must ultimately overturn the conviction.
Morton's attorneys also argue they had evidence beyond the bandanna that would have proven their client’s innocence.
“There was a theft at the time of the murder of [Christine’s] purse, and there was a credit card used by someone two days after the death,” Scheck said
Morton’s attorney was also not aware that the couple’s three-year-old son had told an officer that an “angry monster,” had been at his home at the time of his mother’s death, and not his father.
