Michael Morton’s Son Eric: Reunion and Prosecutor Accountability

Michael Morton’s son Eric was three years old when his mother Christine was murdered in 1986, and he grew up believing the story he was told: that his father had killed her. Raised by his maternal aunt in Houston after Michael’s wrongful conviction, Eric legally changed his last name at 18 and cut off contact. He did not see his father again for 14 years, until DNA evidence exonerated Michael in 2011 and the two began the slow work of rebuilding a relationship neither of them had ever really had.¹

The Witness the Jury Never Heard

Eric was inside the family’s Williamson County home on August 13, 1986, when Christine Morton was bludgeoned to death in her bed. Michael was at work. Less than two weeks later, a sheriff’s sergeant interviewed the three-year-old. Eric told the officer he had seen a “monster” wearing red gloves who “hurt his mother,” and that his father was not home at the time.² He repeated a version of the account to his grandmother, telling her the killer was a “monster” and that “Daddy was not home.”³

Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson never turned that statement over to the defense or the trial judge. He also withheld reports of a suspicious green van seen near the home, information that Christine’s stolen credit card had been used in San Antonio, and a forged check cashed in her name after her death.⁴ A bloody bandana found roughly 100 yards from the house was collected but never tested, and the defense was never told about it.³ On February 17, 1987, a jury convicted Michael of murder based on a case that included no physical evidence and no eyewitnesses tying him to the crime. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Growing Up Believing His Father Was a Killer

After the conviction, Christine’s sister Marylee Kirkpatrick won custody of Eric and raised him in Houston with her husband, Paul Olson. The custody arrangement required Marylee to bring Eric to visit Michael twice a year at the Wynne prison unit in Huntsville.¹

Eric grew up with one version of what had happened. “The story I was told my whole life was, ‘He killed her, and he’s in prison, and we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,'” he later recalled.¹ He believed his father had “savagely killed his mother and felt no remorse.” Anderson, Eric later said, had “convinced everybody” in his mother’s family that Michael was guilty. “That’s what they thought forever. They didn’t have any other source of truth.”⁵

As a teenager, Eric wrote his father a letter asking to stop the prison visits. He found them embarrassing and felt no connection to the man on the other side of the glass.⁶ When he turned 18, he legally changed his last name to Olson, taking the surname of the aunt and uncle who had raised him. Michael later described that as one of his darkest days in prison, telling filmmakers, “When I lost him, that’s what broke me.”⁷ Father and son would not see each other again for 14 years.

Learning the Truth

When Michael’s legal team first reached out to Eric before the exoneration, he wanted nothing to do with it. “I was almost rude in my response,” he recalled. “There was no room in my life for this.”⁷ He initially assumed the outreach came from a “whacko.” Only after the president of his school confirmed that Michael’s release was imminent and urged him to look into the case did Eric begin investigating on his own.¹

What he found was a case that had collapsed. In 2011, DNA testing on the long-suppressed bandana identified biological material from Christine and an unknown male. A CODIS search matched the unknown profile to Mark Alan Norwood, a Texas felon who was later convicted of Christine’s murder and of a strikingly similar 1988 killing in Austin.³ Michael Morton was released from prison on October 4, 2011, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declared him innocent on December 19, 2011.⁸

The Reunion

Father and son met in the fall of 2011 at the Houston home of John Raley, the civil litigator who had worked Michael’s case pro bono for years. Eric described the moment as feeling like a movie. He felt numb, unable to reconcile a lifetime of belief against the fact of his father’s innocence. “I don’t know if I should feel tears of joy or laughter,” he said.¹

The relationship rebuilt slowly. By mid-2012, the two were meeting about once a month. Eric spoke openly about the strangeness of it. “Fortunately or unfortunately, now I have to get to know him, because I never did. I never knew who he was, or what his favorite food was.”¹ By late 2013, he told CNN that “life has come full circle” and that he loved his father.⁶

Eric’s Role in Holding the Prosecutor Accountable

Eric did not stay quiet about what Anderson had done. He attended the Court of Inquiry that examined the former prosecutor’s conduct and spoke publicly about the damage the concealment had caused. “Part of my life was taken away, first of all, because my mother was killed,” he told the Innocence Project. “Then I don’t understand why somebody would want to continue that chain of events by taking away someone’s father.”⁵

Anderson, by then a Williamson County state district judge, resigned from the bench in September 2013 and pleaded no contest to criminal contempt that November. He served nine days in jail, paid a $500 fine, was ordered to perform 500 hours of community service, and permanently surrendered his law license.⁹ He was reported to be the first American prosecutor jailed for withholding evidence in a murder case.¹⁰

Family Rebuilt

Eric married Maggie Mahoney in 2011. They named their daughter Christine Marie Olson after the grandmother Eric had lost as a toddler.¹ Michael embraced the role of grandfather, and by 2016 he had four grandchildren. Asked to describe what mattered most about his second life, he pointed to his son. He credited much of his post-prison happiness to “getting to be with my boy.”¹¹

1
Texas Tribune. Son Seeks Answers in His Father’s Wrongful Conviction
2
ABC News. Michael Morton Free After 25 Years in Prison, Exonerated in Wife’s Murder
3
Innocence Project. Michael Morton
4
Texas Tribune. Michael Morton Murder Case Reverberates Across Texas
5
Innocence Project. Exoneree’s Son Talks About Prosecutorial Error
6
CNN. Exonerated Prisoner Update: Michael Morton
7
Columbus Monthly. Film: An Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story
8
Texas Tribune. Morton Timeline
9
Texas Tribune. Ken Anderson to Serve Jail Time, Give Up Law License
10
Innocence Project. Ken Anderson Jailed for Prosecutorial Misconduct
11
Austin American-Statesman. Michael Morton on 5 Years of Freedom