By Ryan Autullo
Austin American-Statesman
AUSTIN, Texas — It seems fitting that a man accused of beating two women to death as they slept on the 13th day of a month will stand trial for one of those murders on the 13th day of this month.
Mark Alan Norwood, who is serving a life sentence for the 1986 slaying of Christine Morton, goes to trial a day after Monday’s jury selection on a capital murder charge for the 1988 killing of Debra Baker. His trial could bring to a close, at last, the second of two North Austin killings in the late 1980s intertwined by striking similarities — young brunette mothers beaten with a wooden object as they lay in bed on the 13th day of a month.
Prosecutors in the Baker case say they will not pursue the death penalty, meaning regardless of the outcome, Norwood’s fate will be unchanged and he will spend the rest of his life in prison for the Morton conviction. In 2014, a state appeals court upheld the lower court’s verdict.
Nevertheless, Norwood is exerting great energy to profess his innocence. Since June, he has mailed 11 handwritten letters to his attorneys and to Judge Julie Kocurek criticizing the effectiveness of his defense team and suggesting exculpatory evidence is being ignored. In one of the letters, Norwood claimed authorities made threats against a man’s dog to coerce him to testify for the prosecution in the Morton trial.
A death sentence is not on the table, prosecutor Gary Cobb said, because the district attorney’s office agreed with a review committee’s recommendation against it. Similarly, prosecutors declined to pursue a death sentence in the Morton trial at the request of the Morton and Norwood families. Texas has put six people to death this year, according to data from an execution database kept by the Death Penalty Information Center.
Michael Morton, who has been subpoenaed to testify at the Baker trial, declined to comment for this story, as did the Baker family.
The trial is scheduled to last two weeks.
Prosecutors will likely draw parallels between the two murders and paint Norwood as a serial killer who targeted a certain type of victim: brunette mothers in their early 30s. This is a reverse, of sorts, to the strategy prosecutors employed in the 2013 Morton trial in which they drew on testimony linking Norwood to the Baker murder.
“Obviously, the similarities between the two of them made it very relevant and very compelling,” said Lisa Tanner, the prosecutor who secured Norwood’s conviction in the Morton case.
The Morton case commanded national attention after Morton’s husband, Michael, was freed from jail in 2011 after almost 25 years when new DNA evidence tied Norwood to a bloody bandana near Morton’s home. The story took on another layer in late 2013,when Williamson County prosecutor Ken Anderson was sentenced to 10 days in jail for withholding exculpatory evidence, including comments made by Morton’s 3-year-old son that a “monster” had hurt his mother and that his father was not home at the time of the killing. Additionally, Anderson forfeited his law license and paid a $500 fine.
DNA evidence is central to both murders — the bloody bandana near Morton’s home and pubic hairs linked to Norwood that were found on Baker’s bed. Thus, last week Norwood’s defense attorney Brad Urrutia said a visiting judge’s denial to suppress DNA evidence was a “pretty crucial” setback to his case.