Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every two weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 essential (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
525,600 minutes. How do you measure a year?
How about nearly 25 years — 8,995 days to be exact? 12,952,800 minutes. That’s the amount of time Michael Morton spent in prison for killing his wife, Christine, while his three-year-old son Eric was in the house. Prosecutors at the time said he did it because his wife wouldn’t have sex with him on his birthday and “left him hanging.” On the morning of April 12, 1987, he bashed Christine’s skull in, masturbated over her body, and then went down to the Safeway he managed and worked his shift with no remorse — or at least, that’s the story prosecutors and police told for years.
But it wasn’t true. Morton was branded a “murderous pervert” and spent countless seasons of despair (25 years) in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He was innocent.
Pamela Colloff’s two-part series about Morton’s story, “The Innocent Man,” was originally published in the November and December 2012 issues of Texas Monthly. More than a decade later, it remains a masterclass in long-form journalism, the art form most representative of our state’s literary tradition. When it was published, the story won a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing and inspired the Michael Morton Act, which then-Gov. Rick Perry signed into law in 2013. For literary non-fiction, Texas has a deep well of classics, of both cult and international renown come from novelists and essayists. If you really want to get to know Texas — a land where real life is often stranger than fiction — crack open a magazine or visit a website.
When it comes to long-form journalism in the Lone Star State, the standard has always been Texas Monthly. Significant stories have been published elsewhere — the late Zac Crain’s article on how an ammonium nitrate explosion in his hometown shook a community and Michael J. Mooney’s epic bowling tale from D Magazine immediately spring to mind. Yet, most of our state’s best and brightest writers have acquired at least one byline at Texas Monthly for good reason. Since they opened their doors in 1973, the magazine has published magnificent work, much of it in the true crime genre, at an outsized rate.
Skip Hollandsworth is a giant in the medium, whose greatest hits include stories that inspired two different Richard Linklater films (“Bernie” and “Hit Man”), as well as a piece on the serial killer Charles Albright and a moving portrait of a high school football player paralyzed on the field. Mimi Swartz’s inside look at the fight for women’s reproductive rights was required reading the day it hit newsstands and seems even more necessary as the battle rages on in a new light (the issue’s cover could make George Lois, the real Don Draper, seethe with jealousy). Paul Burka profiled a shadowy figure with excessive political influence. Casey Gerald dug into the soul of Leon Bridges and published something unlike anything ever printed on those pages. And who could forget the inimitable Lawrence Wright or Stephen Harrigan.
We could go on forever extolling the virtues of the fine journalism done at Texas Monthly, but it’s far from a perfect place. For one, practically all its hits are written by people highly at risk of sunburn and the majority of those were penned by men. Diversity has always been an issue in those hallowed halls, preventing the most noteworthy regional magazine in the country from getting the true and full scope of its people, customs, and culture. However, when the stuff’s been good, it’s been good — and Colloff’s stuff is among its best. (Editor’s note: The Barbed Wire’s editor-in-chief is friends with Colloff through the Texas journalism world but neither assigned this column topic nor weighed in on the conclusions Drew reached.)
Colloff, who was once called “the best damn writer in Texas” by the Columbia Journalism Review, has lived up to that title. (After many years at Texas Monthly, she’s currently a reporter for ProPublica and a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, which means that she’s still telling phenomenal stories — they just aren’t all based in Texas these days.) Her work on the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas Tower (also a harrowing film, which won an Emmy and was short-listed for an Academy Award) and the life of a woman who witnessed 278 executions is remarkable. So is “Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found” — another two part series — about Anthony Graves, a Black man thrown behind bars and put on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. A month after that piece was published, Graves was exonerated. All of these stories, especially the two about Graves, have their own merit for an entry in The Texas Voyager collection. However, the thing that strikes me about “The Innocent Man,” which places it a smidge above the rest, are the devastating circumstances Morton faced — and how some of the characters in Colloff’s story serve as a window into the self-serving, larger than life, arrogant authorities in Texas.
A recurring theme in true crime stories like Colloff’s — in which the previously understood narrative is flipped on its head — is that police were either acting negligently, behaving like idiots, or doing crimes themselves. The wrongdoing in “The Innocent Man” by now-deceased former Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell and the county’s prosecutors, Ken Anderson and John Bradley, was staggering. Prior to Christine’s murder, Boutwell himself reportedly coaxed more than 600 confessions from a drifter and paraded him around other law enforcement agencies. The drifter in question, Henry Lee Lucas, proclaimed that he killed Jimmy Hoffa and delivered the poison for the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. Apparently, Boutwell enjoyed the attention. Truth and justice seemingly meant little to him compared to power and spectacle. As the center of a high profile case, Morton stood little chance if Boutwell had anything to do with it.
Years later, thanks to Colloff’s reporting, we know that those at the center of the investigation behind Christine’s murder ignored key evidence and testimony from interviews. But the ultimate smoking gun were the notes written by the case’s lead investigator, Sergeant Don Wood, which prosecutors reportedly concealed from the defense. Those notes had pertinent information that, if taken seriously, would have cast doubt about Morton’s involvement in the crime.
At the core of the story is indecipherable legalese — a notoriously difficult subject to make accessible to readers — and yet Colloff’s deft reporting and sharp pen translated her research into a digestible read.
Anderson, according to the Innocence Project, eventually became the only prosecutor in American history to have been sentenced to jail for misconduct (though only for a measly ten days). Colloff reported that Anderson saw his job as a way to fight “the bad guys.” Allow me to let you in on a little secret revealed inside “The Innocent Man” — sometimes the petty tyrants entrusted with the responsibility of ridding us of the bad guys are actually the bad guys themselves.
(Editor’s note: This column was previously titled The Texas Canon. After learning that Chron has a similar series with the same title — which debuted first — we’ve rebranded. We appreciate our friends at Chron bringing this matter to our attention and encourage readers to check out their column.)
