An intimate, gripping portrayal of a grievous miscarriage of justice.
A man falsely convicted of murdering his wife shares his story.
Already the subject of several articles, TV segments and a documentary, Morton chronicles his remarkable 25-year ordeal in a sweeping autobiography. The author’s family relocated from California to Texas when Morton was a teenager in the early 1980s, and while in college, he fell in love with and married Christine Kirkpatrick, a kindhearted, gregarious girl with whom he would conceive a son. The day after his 32nd birthday in 1986, the author arrived home to discover his wife bludgeoned to death. Compounding his grief was an investigator who soon positioned Morton as a suspect, even though his brother-in-law found some “overlooked” bloodstained evidence and his son provided an eyewitness confession about seeing the real murderer. The author ably demonstrates the heinous result of a bungled investigation by police detectives desperate to collar a perpetrator and aggressively angling to tie Morton to his wife’s grisly murder. With few leads to go on, Morton became the lead suspect, and his personal depiction of the prosecution and ensuing laborious trial proceedings is riveting. More than a month after the crime, he was arrested, convicted by jury trial and sentenced to serve a life sentence in prison. As unsettling as his jail time was, Morton’s chronicle of his time there is a vicarious penitentiary tour for inquisitive readers. The author kept a diary during this time and remained surprisingly free of anger and acrimony, one day sure he would exonerate himself. His plight for freedom was bolstered by DNA evidence presented by a pair of humanitarian attorneys, including one from the Innocence Project. The conviction of both a misguided prosecutor who suppressed evidence and the real murderer, Mark Alan Norwood, allowed Morton, now almost 60, the freedom to remarry and live as a liberated man.
An intimate, gripping portrayal of a grievous miscarriage of justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5682-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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