Today's Austin American-Statesman reports, "Could 1988 cold case in Austin help exonerate man imprisoned nearly 25 years?" It's by Chuck Lindell.
Austin police are investigating potential links between an unsolved 1988 murder and the strikingly similar killing of Christine Morton two years earlier in Williamson County, raising the possibility that a serial killer is to blame and bolstering claims that Morton's husband has been wrongly imprisoned for almost 25 years.
Like Morton, Debra Jan Baker of Austin was beaten to death with a blunt object while lying in her bed. The Baker and Morton homes were about 12 miles apart.
What's more, lawyers for Michael Morton — serving a life term for his wife's murder — have tried without success to get court-ordered DNA testing to determine if there are links to another unsolved but similar crime, the 1980 bludgeoning death of Mildred McKinney. McKinney also was attacked in bed in her home, about a half-mile from the Morton house in southwestern Williamson County.
Morton has consistently proclaimed his innocence, blaming his wife's murder on an unknown intruder, and attempts to link that crime to the McKinney case have been central to his lawyers' efforts to overturn his sentence.
The link to the Baker case — established in interviews with Baker family members and from information revealed in a Monday hearing in the Morton case — is new.
About two weeks ago, cold case investigators from the Austin Police Department began re-interviewing Baker's relatives based on a tip from Morton's lawyers with the Innocence Project of New York.
The tip included the name and DNA profile of a man whose DNA was discovered on a recently tested piece of evidence from the Morton case: a bandanna that also contained Christine Morton's blood and one of her hairs.
The payoff for the Innocence Project came on Monday, when a routine hearing on Michael Morton's exoneration efforts took a dramatic turn after the judge handed out a two-page document provided by the Travis County district attorney's office.
The document, reviewed in private and discussed in a closed hearing to avoid compromising the cold case investigation, is now known to have included recent developments in the Baker case.
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Monday, October 3.
Earlier coverage of the Michael Morton case begins at the link.
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