A Promise to Carolyn Movie (true story)

Later, much later, the handful of people who had seen her would insist that she had been a beautiful child. "Oh, Lord, honey, simply beautiful," her aunt Willie Jo said. "She had light blond hair like a crop of straw." Her name was Carolyn McMorris - baby Carolyn, she was sometimes called.

Even those who laid eyes on her only a time or two never forgot her round little cheeks and blue eyes. "She'd furrow those eyebrows like she was curious about everything," her aunt Pat said. "You'd just wonder what she was thinking about."

Someone was able to recall that Carolyn shared a doll with her two older sisters. She played with a plastic china set, someone else said. "But, oh, our memories are slipping," the relatives would finally say, shaking their graying heads. "It was all so long ago."

They did remember that Baby Carolyn lived at the Ace Motel, a converted army barracks on Lubbock's southeast side, with her father, Bull McMorris, her two sisters - five-year-old Kay and three-year-old Debra - and her father's girlfriend, Colleen Stubblefield, whom he would later marry. The motel was not the best place to raise children; no one ever denied that. Cotton trucks barrel-assed down the adjacent roads, while bootleggers sold their whiskey in shabby homes nearby. But Bull had found a good job repairing trailers for a freight company. As soon as he saved some money, he'd find his family a better place. And what did children that age care about possessions? Carolyn liked rolling a ball on the concrete outside their motel room. Although she slept on the foldout couch between her two sisters, she had to climb on Bull and Colleen's bed and jump up and down.

In fact, according to the story most everyone told, it was Carolyn's jumping on the bed that led to the terrible accident. On December 5, 1955, around nine o'clock in the morning, Colleen burst into the emergency room of downtown Lubbock's West Texas Hospital with Carolyn in her arms. "She hit her head," Colleen said. "She hit her head falling off the bed." Baby Carolyn, then just two months shy of her second birthday, was already comatose. Each of her breaths was accompanied by a moan. Her pupils were dilated and her skin was pale blue. Dr. Allen T. Stewart, the physician called to the emergency room, used a suction tube to remove the blood and mucus from her lungs. A nurse inserted an intravenous tube in the little girl's forearm, holding her hand to keep it from wiggling. A heated blanket was draped over her when her body temperature dropped. X-rays of her skull were taken.

The silver-haired Stewart was well known in Lubbock's medical circles, a former head of the hospital's surgery and obstetrics and gynecology divisions and a past president of the Texas Medical Association. In those days, however, there was not much that even a doctor of his caliber could do for a patient with a skull fracture. There was no neurosurgeon in the city and no special surgical equipment; the CAT scanner hadn't even been invented. To make matters worse, West Texas Hospital didn't even have a respirator small enough for Carolyn. The Lubbock fire department brought over the city's one iron lung in case she needed help breathing.

After examining Carolyn, Stewart scribbled a tentative diagnosis on her hospital report: "Brain injury." But in the years to come, as one person after another tried to make out his hurried handwriting on that faded document, what would stand out was another notation he had made. Carolyn, he wrote, had a dark abrasion over her right eyelid. Another bruise, two inches long, was on the left side of her neck. On the front of her thighs were two more bruises, each measuring three inches by three inches.

On a child that small, such bruises must have looked huge. If the doctor reached any conclusion about them, though, he did not put it in his report. Back then, few doctors had heard the term "child abuse," and even if they had, they were not required by law to report it. The Journal of the American Medical Association's famous article on battered-child syndrome, which claimed doctors were not recognizing serious physical abuse of children, would not be written for almost seven years. Nor had research begun to emerge indicating how much force was required to cause a skull fracture in a child. "It was a very different, very naive time," a Lubbock doctor said recently. "When parents told us the baby had been hurt by falling off the bed, we tended to believe them."

And so, at 7:50 p.m., when the little girl drew her last breath, Stewart filled out the death certificate, listing the cause of death as accidental.

Carolyn McMorris' funeral was attended by maybe a dozen mourners at a Lubbock funeral home. Bull and Colleen, whom relatives said were sick with grief, did not come. Carolyn was buried in an unfrequented corner of the city cemetery. When her tombstone was erected, the monument company chiseled in the wrong year of her death - 1956 instead of 1955 - but it's doubtful that many people noticed the mistake. Carolyn's family moved from Lubbock and never again visited her grave. Those who once knew her began to die off. Memories faded. Evidence got lost. Old records were thrown away.

Indeed, if a biographer had been asked to trace the brief life of Carolyn McMorris, he very likely would have concluded that she had simply disappeared.

"I was calling to ask about a murder of a baby," said the woman on the phone.

Lubbock police sergeant Randy McGuire studied the pink telephone message in his hand. He was returning the call of Kay Clarke from Oklahoma City. McGuire, who supervised all of the city's homicide investigations - about eighteen a year - knew there was no case on his books involving a baby. "What murder?" he asked.

"My baby sister, Carolyn McMorris." The woman's voice was raw, unpolished. She sounded a little frightened. "I don't mean to take up your time. I just wanted to find out what had happened to the investigation." She paused and then said, "My stepmother killed her."

On occasion, every police detective must deal with a crank caller who claims to have information about an unsolved murder. Invariably, the tip leads nowhere. McGuire, then forty years old and a sixteen-year veteran of the police force, glanced impatiently at his watch. It was late on a Friday afternoon; he was getting ready to home. Just to be polite, he asked "When was this murder?"

Another pause. "December 5, 1955."

The plastic calendar on McGuire's metal desk read "August 16, 1991." "Ma'am," he said, "you're asking about something that happened thirty-six years go."

"Well," the woman replied, "I know there are those statutes of limitations and whatnot, but me and my sister Debra have always wondered what records you had." She added that she thought photographs had been taken of Carolyn by the police or the district attorney right after she died. "We'd like to see them," she said.

"Why do you want to know about this now?" McGuire asked.

"Well, this is hard to explain, but throughout all these years, me and Debra have known what's happened. We've tried to forget the whole thing, but we can't. We just want to put our minds to rest."

Perhaps, McGuire would later say, it was that comment that got him. He figured he could take five minutes to hunt through the file of three-by-five index cards that listed every criminal case in the department's history.

Unknowingly, the sergeant was about to open a long-shut window into another era. His five-minute search for an old record would turn into a year-long investigation by his staff and the Lubbock County district attorney's office, culminating in the prosecution of Colleen McMorris for the murder of Baby Carolyn. Never in Texas history, it was said, had a murder case so old been brought to court. The trial, held last year in a small Lubbock courtroom, raised hard questions about the dependability of childhood memories - for to believe that Colleen McMorris had committed murder, it was necessary to believe Kay and Debra's claim that she grabbed Baby Carolyn by the thighs on that fateful morning, raised her high in the air, and then slammed her down on the floor of the Ace Motel, cracking the back of her head.

Without exception, every other member of the McMorris family said the story was absurd. After all, the sisters had been curiously silent about the matter for nearly four decades. "Who are those damn girls trying to fool, saying they remember every last damn detail of something that happened when they were five and three years old?" demanded their 70-year-old father, Bull, who has remained loyal to 62-year-old Colleen. If the two women truly saw such a gruesome murder, other relatives asked, why didn't they go to the police years ago? Why would Debra have kept visiting Colleen and sending her cards on her birthday?

When the allegations were made, Colleen was living with Bull in Nicoma Park, just outside of Oklahoma City, where she had spent thirteen years running the junior high school cafeteria. Besides her two stepdaughters, she and Bull had two children of their own, a boy and a girl, who insisted that their mother had reared them fairly and only spanked them with her hand when they had really misbehaved. Colleen's neighbors said she was simply a gentle grandmotherly lady, her personality as buttery as a biscuit. They would be happy, they added, to have Colleen baby-sit their own kids. Even the police had to admit that Colleen displayed no criminal personality. Except for a couple of traffic tickets, she had no record at all.

On the other hand, Kay Clarke, who is now 43, and Debra Callarman, who is 41, were not what anyone would call ideal witnesses. Known among their kinfolk as chain-smoking, unschooled rural women, the sisters had experienced their share of boozing men, broken marriages, suicide attempts, and scrapes with the law. Kay had once been arrested for drug possession, Debra for being an accessory to a burglary. During especially desperate periods of their lives, Kay slept in a car with a .38-caliber handgun and Debra slept in the tunnel of a drainage ditch. At the time they made their charges against Colleen, Kay was living with her third husband, a technician at a beer-can manufacturing plant, in a small frame home near the Oklahoma City airport, while Debra lived with her fourth husband, a maintenance man for a natural gas plant, in a trailer in Hobbs, New Mexico. There was no doubt, McMorris relatives said, that Debra and Kay had invented the murder story so they could become famous and make money appearing on those daytime TV talk shows they liked to watch.

But sitting around the kitchen table one evening, grinding their generic-brand cigarettes in circles around their ashtrays, Debra and Kay portrayed Colleen as a vicious murderer who had hidden for years behind a veil of kindness. "We knew they'd call us white trash if we brought this all up," said nervous, unsmiling Debra. "Well, I've spent my life praying to God to take away my nightmares about Colleen ..."

"And it's not like we set out to get Colleen arrested," interrupted short, feisty Kay, who is obviously the leader of the two. "We ain't no detectives. But you know how it is: Sometimes one damn thing just leads to another.

In the West Texas town of Seymour in the forties, young women were known to swoon over W. T. "Bull" McMorris. His eyes were blue, his hair was dark and swept back, and his muscles bulged through his secondhand T-shirts. "He'd go to a rodeo dance and pop you in the face if you made him mad," recalled his younger brother J. R. McMorris. "Then he'd pick you up from the floor, drag you over to the bar, and buy you a beer. You had to love him even if you did know he'd whup your ass."

One of eight children born to a grocer, Bull was accustomed to perpetual hard times. At night, he and his four brothers slept in the same bed. To help support his family, he dropped out of high school and took a job patching fence on the vast spreads owned by wealthy cattlemen. At age twenty he hit the road, looking for work. Like many blue-collar workers of that time, he was always searching for his next paycheck: He roughnecked, he cowboyed, he poured concrete, he shoveled cow dung on a dairy farm.

In 1949 Bull moved to Snyder to drive a truck in the oil fields. There, he met a flirtatious teenage carhop named Mildred Jackson. Mildred liked drinking and dancing in the honky-tonks as much as he did, and within months they married and had their first child, Kay. Debra was born two years later, and Carolyn two years after that. By all accounts, though, Bull and Mildred's relationship was doomed from the start. Depending on whose story you believe, either Bull was stepping out on Mildred or Mildred was stepping out on Bull, but one of them was always packing up a suitcase and leaving the other. Mildred, a spirited, gabby woman now living alone in New Mexico, said Bull was "always a-drinkin' and a-fightin' and a-screwin' and a-whuppin' up on me and the little children"'

Although Bull is slowly dying - he has cancer and has undergone triple bypass surgery - he still retains his rocklike build and rambunctious nature. In an interview, he cheerfully recounted that he once socked Mildred's mother in the face "after she pointed a butcher's knife at me." But something else happened during those days that he doesn't like being asked about - an episode that indicated what kind of father he could be. In June 1954, Bull was arrested for the aggravated assault of his three daughters. At the time, he said the whole episode was a misunderstanding; out of fright, he said, he spanked Kay too hard when he saw her pushing her two sisters' heads underwater in a metal tub. Mildred, however, said Bull "took off his belt and whupped them from their shoulders past their little heinies" simply because they were making too much noise. Whatever the truth, the judge in Snyder was apparently so alarmed by what he saw at the McMorris place that he kept Bull in jail for thirty days.

After Bull's arrest, Mildred moved away with the three girls and tried to raise them on her own. But unable to find a good job - "The only thing I could do was go back to carhopping for five dollars a shift" - she asked Bull to take the children until she had enough money to get on her feet. Before long Carolyn, Debra, and Kay were being shuttled back and forth between homes, a pattern that would recur throughout their childhoods. Mildred would retrieve them after a few months, then send them back again to Bull, saying she was too sick or too poor to care for them. "Mildred never wanted them little girls," Bull said bluntly. "They was just in her way when she tried to run around with other men. When I would get those girls, they'd be starved half to death, their clothes all dirty, and sores on their bodies. They'd tell me Mildred had served them oatmeal three times a day."

Just how much abuse or neglect the three McMorris girls suffered in their two homes is not clear. Few if any child welfare workers kept tabs on families in small-town West Texas in the fifties. But in late 1954, soon after separating from Mildred, Bull purported to fix things: He presented his three daughters with a new mother. Her name was Colleen Stubblefield, 23 years old and recently divorced because of her first husband's "overdrinking." Bull, then 32, had met her at a dance hall outside of Dallas. Although Colleen had no experience with children, Bull told his relatives that she didn't mind raising Debra, Kay, and Carolyn while he was out working.

According to people who knew buxom, brunette Colleen, she seemed pleasant enough. She had come from a prominent Hill Country ranching family and had even inherited a little money from her parents, both of whom died when she was three. A story had circulated regarding some sort of scandal involving her parents' deaths, but Colleen never really talked about it. Apparently, she had been raised well by kindly relatives - and now she was returning the favor by taking care of Bull's three daughters. It wasn't long before Colleen and Bull were, to use the vernacular of the time, shacking up.

They split up only once, when Bull and Mildred got together one last time in Big Spring to try to make their marriage work for what they said was the children's sake. If Colleen resented Bull's move - or resented the girls for coming between her and Bull - she never let it be known. Indeed, when a contrite Bull wrote Colleen in May 1955, she agreed to join him and the three girls; in October they moved to Lubbock to start a new life. This time, Bull was so willing to forget Mildred that he didn't even let her know where he had gone with the children. Over the next few weeks, Mildred made some attempts to find the girls, but lacking money to hire a lawyer, she finally gave up and went to live with a sister in Dallas.

She didn't find out where her children were until December 5, when she received a phone call informing her of Carolyn's fall from the bed at the Ace Motel.

In 1955 the Lubbock county district attorney's office consisted of 32-year-old Travis Shelton and three assistants. Not only were they required to handle all the felony cases in Lubbock - then a city of 72,000 residents - but they were in charge of those in three neighboring counties as well. At the time, there was no pathologist in the city to do autopsies, and there was only a $600 annual budget for expenses. As a result, prosecutors were forced to give certain cases priority, and compared with old-fashioned gunshot murders, child abuse sat low on the list.

But many years later, when people began to sift back through their memories of those days, a few did vaguely recall that some sort of DA's investigation had been conducted into Carolyn's death. In fact, they said, minutes before her funeral was to begin at Rix Funeral Home, mourners were asked to get up from their pews and leave the chapel. The funeral, an employee announced, was being delayed.

Mildred, who had just arrived in Lubbock that day, said a couple of plainclothes investigators with cameras had suddenly showed up at the funeral, demanding to take photographs of the bruised body of the dead baby. Her story was disputed by Bull's brothers - they would swear under oath that they never saw photographers - but they did acknowledge that an attorney from the DA's office had been curious about Carolyn's death. After the funeral, they said, Colleen and Bull, along with three of Bull's brothers and one of his brothers-in-law, were ordered to come to the courthouse, where they were asked if Carolyn's death might have involved foul play. They replied that Mildred was no doubt spreading false accusations, trying to take revenge on Colleen for stealing her husband. Colleen, they said, would never have hurt the baby.

Mildred also went to the courthouse right after the funeral, bringing Debra and Kay with her. They were ushered in to see the same attorney just as the McMorris family was being ushered out. "Girls," Mildred said, "tell this man what you saw Colleen do." But Debra and Kay were frozen, seemingly too frightened to speak. "Tell them!" Mildred demanded, but the girls still didn't say a word. Finally, an exasperated Mildred informed the attorney that her daughters had told her they had seen Colleen slam Carolyn to the floor. The attorney promised to get back to her.

And that, as far as can be determined, is where the investigation ended. Those who initially had been asked questions about Carolyn at the DA's office were never contacted a second time. Bull and Colleen moved to Oklahoma City, where they could again start a new life. Mildred returned with Debra and Kay to her home in Big Spring and filed for divorce from Bull.

As time passed, the tragedy of Carolyn McMorris began to slip into the back of people's minds. Even Mildred was finally ready to let bygones be bygones. A year after Carolyn's death, she contacted Bull and Colleen and asked if they would again take care of Debra and Kay. While some might have found her request shocking - considering that she had previously accused Colleen of murder - Mildred later would say that she figured Colleen and Bull had reformed. Besides, she said, she had been terribly ill during that time and couldn't care for the girls properly. And she had a new husband - an oil-field driller who, she said, thought her kids shouldn't stay with her full-time.

Suddenly, Debra and Kay were back with their stepmother. If there was any tension in their reunion, the neighbors in Oklahoma didn't notice it. The little girls were always so polite and well behaved around her, the neighbors said. One neighbor described Colleen as "the perfect mother," adding, "I never heard her speak badly of Debra and Kay." Others remembered Colleen's sewing the girls clothes, giving them permanents, cooking them magnificent Southern meals, and taking them to the Baptist Church. In fact, it was difficult for anyone to think there was something peculiar about the McMorris family the fifties and sixties. Nobody ever heard Bull or Colleen say anything about a baby who had died. Nobody ever heard Debra or Kay mention a younger sister. Come to think of it, nobody ever saw so much as a photograph of the child they would come to know as Baby Carolyn. Obviously, the McMorrises were simply a good-hearted working-class family who didn't want to burden their neighbors with their problems.

In August 1991 Kay Clarke and Debra Callarman stepped timidly into Sergeant Randy McGuire's office at the Lubbock Police Department. Their faces were pale, their eyes red-tinged from too much smoking and too little sleep. "We want to talk about Baby Carolyn," Kay said.

For a moment, Randy McGuire was not sure what to say. Since his initial phone conversation with Kay a few days before their visit, he had done some checking. There was no record in the Lubbock police files of a Carolyn McMorris investigation in 1955. There was nothing in the old police photograph files or in the records division of the Lubbock County DA's office. When he did a standard background check on Colleen McMorris, he learned she had an unassailable record. What, he wondered, did these two middle-aged women hope to find out?

Kay and Debra pulled some old family photographs from their purses and swapped long, rambling stories about their family. McGuire suppressed a smile: The women had a kind of country charm to them. "To be real honest with you," Kay told McGuire, "we figured we'd never be able to get one of you police officers to sit down and listen to us." But she and Debra were so determined to get to the bottom of Carolyn's death, she said, that they pooled what money they had to pay for the trip to Lubbock from their homes in New Mexico and Oklahoma. Kay had gone so far as to sell most of the furniture in her house, including her nice sectional pit group, in case she "needed to buy some official records or something to help out with the investigation."

According to the story the sisters told McGuire, Kay had called Debra the previous year to announce that she was going to add astrology to her list of hobbies (she also crocheted sweaters and painted mountain scenes inside empty vodka bottles). As a kind of memorial to Carolyn, Kay thought it would be nice to do her astrological chart - but she needed to know her exact time of birth. "We got to find a birth certificate," she had said to Debra during one of their daily phone calls. "Oh, Kay," Debra replied. "What good is it going to do to bring all this up again?"

With tears dripping down their faces, the sisters told McGuire that they had spent most of their lives harboring a terrible secret: Colleen McMorris had been a monstrous child abuser who daily struck them with her fists and beat them with a thick razor strap or a rubber garden hose. After Bull would leave for work, they said, Colleen's violent rage would emerge. If they did the slightest thing wrong - slouch at the dinner table, forget to make up their beds, talk too loudly - she would call them pigs and whores and hit them some more. She ferociously stuffed mashed potatoes into Carolyn's mouth until the baby began gagging, then slapped her until she fell out of her high chair. She busted Kay's nose with a metal serving spoon when she wouldn't eat all her green beans. She forced Debra to eat an entire bar of soap. She would burn the girls with an iron if they didn't clean the house to her specifications. She once even forced Kay to eat her own vomit when a beating made her physically ill.

The neighbors never knew about Colleen's sadistic nature, Debra amd Kay said. If they ever went to their father to complain about the beatings, he'd beat them too, telling them they were unappreciative of their stepmother. During the months they lived with Mildred in New Mexico, they begged her to let them stay with her, but she always sent them back. "We dreamed of escape," Debra said. "But we knew no matter where we went, Colleen would find us."

Then, on the morning of December 5, after their father left the Ace Motel for work, Colleen went too far, they said. She started slapping Carolyn - as usual - because the little girl didn't want Colleen to put shoes on her. When Carolyn began to cry, Colleen hit her with her fists and pulled her hair. Suddenly, the sisters said, she picked Carolyn up and slammed her head-first to the floor. The baby slid across the room, coming to a stop against a rocking chair.

Stunned, McGuire asked why they never told anyone what they had seen. "We were just little girls," Kay said. "We thought Colleen was going to do to us what she had done to Carolyn. We were so scared to say Carolyn's name that we pretended we had forgotten about her."

Throughout their childhoods, the sisters said, Carolyn's name was never mentioned in the McMorris household, except for a couple of occasions when Colleen and Bull firmly told them that the baby had fallen off the bed. "Don't let your mother brainwash you with that murder story," Debra recalled Bull's saying. "If Colleen murdered that baby, do you think I'd let her live with us?" Whenever they tried to bring up the subject of Carolyn's killing with Mildred, she'd tell them that they had already been given their chance to tell the DA and that they had blown it. As the years passed, Mildred also told them that the statute of limitations had run out on Carolyn's death. "We realized no one would believe us if we ever tried to tell the truth about Colleen," Kay said.

Over time, the beatings lessened, though they never completely stopped. (In fact, Debra and Kay said, Colleen occasionally beat her own son and daughter.) At age fifteen, finally deciding she could no longer live with her father and stepmother - or with her own mother, for that matter, who never showed her any affection - Kay dropped out of high school and ended up in San Francisco, telling few people where she had gone. Debra, at age fourteen, married a teenage boy she met in New Mexico "just so I could start a good life of my own."

Poor and uneducated - and not supported by any family - Debra and Kay were hardly suited for adult lives. As young women, they carried on recklessly. Debra gave birth to a son but lost custody of him to his paternal grandmother. Kay never had children; one man beat her so badly when she was pregnant that she miscarried. Both women always seemed to fall in love with abusive men. Debra was even shot in the chest by one man. Later, she became involved with a man who, it turned out, not only beat her but also burglarized Western wear stores; after one of his burglaries, Debra was charged with being an accomplice and received a probated sentence. Both Kay and Debra were, on separate occasions, rushed to the hospital after failed suicide attempts: Debra tried to overdose on diet pills, aspirin, and laxatives, while Kay took sleeping pius and drank a Coors tall boy and vodka.

"We knew why we wanted to kill ourselves," Kay said. "We just didn't want to say it. Colleen had made our lives hell. Her beatings had turned us into scared, whipped women - and always in the back of our minds was what she had done to Carolyn." Yet Debra eventually refused to speak with Kay about the events of 1955; she had even begun to say she wasn't sure what she'd seen. "I really thought if we could forget everything that happened in the past," Debra admitted, "we might start being a loving family - which is all I ever wanted." "Deep down," Kay said, "she was still afraid of Colleen. I'd get mad and scream,| Debra, you know Colleen is a murdering bitch!' and she'd break down hysterically."

Psychologists say it's not unusual for abused children to try, throughout their lives, to win the love of the parents who had once beaten them. Though Kay rarely spoke to Colleen and Bull, Debra reconciled with them when she was in her thirties. Then living in New Mexico, she sent Colleen flowers on Mother's Day and visited her at Christmas. She said she even worked up the courage to ask her, during one visit, about her memories of Carolyn. Colleen looked tenderly at her and said, "Debra, honey, you know I didn't touch that baby."

Then came the phone call from Kay about the birth certificate. Although Debra was wary of dredging up ancient history, she finally told Kay, "All right, this one time I'll help you. But then you have to promise me that we will leave Carolyn in peace."

Not sure where to look for a birth certificate, Debra requested Carolyn's old West Texas Hospital records. When they arrived in the mad, Debra couldn't understand all the big medical words and took them to her gynecologist in New Mexico. The doctor stared silently at the records and then turned to Debra. "Who killed this baby?' he asked. "What?" Debra replied. "If you ask me," said the doctor, "it looks like someone beat her to death."

Thinking back to that December day, Debra cried all the way home and pounded her fists against the steering wheel. When she called her sister, she said, "Kay, I'm so sorry. We've stayed silent too long."

After listening to their story, Sergeant McGuire concluded the two women were either brilliant liars or had been unable to forget a single moment of their sister's death. About the only thing the two disagreed on was the color of the dress that Carolyn wore in her casket: Kay said it was lilac; Debra said it was yellow. Was it possible to remember so much from one's preschool years? McGuire could barely think of anything that had happened to him before age six. At Debra's behest, he had one of his detectives hypnotize her while he and Kay watched. As the detective led her back to 1955, she remembered details about the Ace Motel. Then she began trembling and curled herself into a fetal position. "No!" she cried. "No! No!"

Terrified by Debra's reaction, the detective immediately brought her out of the trance. Even more convinced that the sisters were telling the truth, McGuire gathered his notes and went to see Lubbock County's district attorney, Travis Ware, to tell him they had an unsolved 36-year-old murder on their hands.

Forty-four year-old Travis Ware is either loved or hated in Lubbock: His supporters say he's a handsome hard-driving prosecutor; his critics call him an egomaniac. What no one can deny, however, is his ability to find high-profile courtroom cases. Immediately captivated by the story McGuire brought to him - he said he wept while reading Debra's and Kay's affidavits - Ware put his staff to work. "These two women had lived with this memory for so long," he said, "that I felt we owed them some sense of justice."

But recovering old evidence to prove a case in court is no easy task. Compared with the dusty post-war years of the files, Lubbock of the nineties had gone through significant changes. The Ace Motel, where the McMorris family lived, had long ago been demolished. West Texas Hospital had also closed. A large new medical center and the expansion of Texas Tech University had given Lubbock (population: 188,000) a far more cultivated atmosphere. Not surprisingly, Ware's investigators found that witnesses' memories of 1955 had blurred. Some gave vague answers to straightforward questions; others were tight-lipped. Almost everyone had different recollections of the Baby Carolyn case - or no recollection at all.

Former DA Travis Shelton, who had gone on to become one of West Texas' most prominent criminal lawyers and president of the State Bar of Texas, was asked over and over if he might have been the one who talked to all the McMorrises back in 1955, but Shelton said he couldn't recall anything about a Carolyn McMorris. Neither could his former assistants. Asked about police photographs of the baby, Shelton said that in all likelihood his files were thrown away after he left office in the sixties.

When investigators went to Rix Funeral Home, they could find no one who would admit to remembering Carolyn's funeral. Dr. Allen Stewart, who supervised Carolyn's treatment in West Texas Hospital's emergency room, had died.

Undeterred, Ware got a court order to exhume Carolyn's body. It seemed a waste of county money: Skeptical cemetery workers said that after so many years, there was little chance anything would still be in the ground except for the brass handles of the baby's coffin. Nevertheless, for two days a Texas Tech anthropology professor and his two assistants carefully dug away the dirt from the grave site.

They were shocked when they hit a tiny coffin - even more so when they opened it and found the perfectly preserved skeleton of a child. Tattered fragments of Carolyn's dress still hung to the bones; the workers could make out a Sears tag on the collar. No one could fathom why the casket hadn't decomposed - perhaps it was because it had been buried on an arid hillside - but for Ware, the discovery was an unbelievable stroke of luck. If there had been no body available for an autopsy, there would have been no prosecutable case.

Moving fast, Ware brought in three forensic pathologists from around the state to examine the skeleton. The pathologists were familiar with medical studies published since 1955 that showed that young children do not get fatal injuries when they fall from beds or sofas, and what they found signified that something truly severe had happened to Carolyn. There was a three-and-a-half-inch fracture in the thick occipital bone in the back of her skull. One pathologist told Ware that the only other time he had seen such a fracture was when a child had been flung back and forth inside a car during a high-speed automobile wreck. A child might get such an injury if she was dropped off a building - or if her head had been slammed against a blunt object.

Meanwhile, Ware's top assistant prosecutor, Rebecca Atchley, spent hours pinning Baby Carolyn's tattered dress back together and then sent it out to be analyzed. The lab reported that the dress originally had been in two colors, lilac and yellow - just as Kay and Debra had remembered. "My God," Atchley told her boss, "they haven't forgotten a thing."

Still, the evidence wasn't particularly strong: a crack in Carolyn's skull and her two sisters' saying decades later that they saw their stepmother cause it. Ware needed to corroborate the claim that Colleen McMorris once possessed a violent rage. Otherwise, how could jurors be sure it wasn't Bull - the one with a criminal record - who had murdered Carolyn?

The buttoned-down Ware, however, wasn't interested in what-ifs: He believed the sisters. In September 1991 he persuaded a grand jury to return a murder indictment against Colleen McMorris. Debra and Kay, dazed at the speed of the investigation, drove to Oklahoma, stood down the street from Colleen's house, and videotaped her being led away in handcuffs. Said a triumphant Kay: "We needed something we could play over and over to prove this was really happening."

The trial would not take place for another year. To defend Colleen, two of Bull's well-to-do brothers hired renowned local attorney Floyd Holder, a balding, bearded retired army colonel who took pride in being Travis Ware's biggest critic. "Travis is just doing this for the publicity," Holder chortled. "Why else would he be wasting our time on an ancient case about a harmless elderly woman when there are plenty of cases right now that could use his attention?"

There was no getting around it: Colleen McMorris did seem harmless. When reporters asked her old neighbors if she might have a dark side, everyone said, "Of course not." One woman remembered how, early one Halloween night, Colleen ran out of candy but, instead of turning off her porch light, stayed outside and gave the neighborhood children hugs and kisses.

Ware's investigators had not been able to find a single witness who could verify the sisters' stories about Colleen's abuse. Mildred herself admitted that the girls told her that their stepmother only shook them by the hair and slapped them. "They never once came to my house with proof," she said. "I never saw a bruise, old or new, on them. Lord knows, I'd have loved to have seen one." The investigators checked with Bull's sister Willie Jo Bibb, who allegedly saw welts on Debra's body after she received a beating from Colleen. But Willie Jo said she didn't believe such an incident took place, though she had once had seen "a few marks" on Debra's legs. "There weren't a lot of marks," Willie Jo told the investigators, "and they weren't real bad."
After Colleen was arrested, she and Bull moved to a small West Texas ranch owned by one of Bull's brothers to get away from the gossip and publicity. One afternoon, hosting a visitor who had stopped by for lunch, Bull offered a prayer and Colleen bustled about, serving roast, fresh corn, green beans, salad, and mashed potatoes. Around her kitchen were framed Bible verses. "Oh, goodness, I was not a person who could ever lay a hand on a little baby," she said sweetly. "Debra and Kay know that. If I had hurt Carolyn, don't you think they would have told somebody before now? They used to tell me all the time that they couldn't remember anything about her death. They said it was their mother, Mildred, who had kept trying to tell them I had killed Carolyn."

For a moment, Colleen stopped speaking, as if to keep herself from losing control of her emotions. "I did my best raising those girls," she said. "I tried to put Christianity into them, to show them love, to show them how to be right. I loved them more than their own mother did. They know I didn't lay a hand on them except for a spanking here and there." Perhaps, Colleen said, her stepdaughters had been carrying a lifelong grudge against her because they thought she had taken away their daddy from Mildred. But a few months before the trial, Ware was faxed a clue suggesting that Colleen herself had been living with a deep-rooted rage. Lubbock County investigators had asked Joe Davis, a longtime Texas Ranger from Kerrville, if he knew anything about a Colleen McMorris who had supposedly grown up in the Hill Country. When he did some research, Davis found a newspaper story titled Ranchman and His Wife Are Shot to Death, which detailed how D. D. "Doc" Parker had shot his wife and himself in the front seat of the family automobile. In the back seat were the couple's three children, including a three-year-old girl named Colleen.

Newly energized, prosecutors began flipping through old interview notes and eventually came upon Debra's and Kay's comments about what Colleen said at the end of their beatings: What they had to endure was nothing like what she went through when she watched her own parents die.

Still, to get a conviction Ware needed something more definitive - something to show a jury what kind of woman Colleen was in 1955. Weeks before the trial was to begin, he got it. "My name is Hettie Whitfield," said the ancient timid voice over the telephone, "and I was a nurse that morning when the baby was brought into the hospital." Ware grabbed for the old hospital report. There, on the bottom of the page, was the nurse's signature: "H. Whitfield."

Eighty-eight-year-old Whitfield went on to tell Ware that she was with Dr. Stewart when Carolyn was being examined. According to Whitfield, the doctor turned to Colleen and said, "Where did all these bruises come from? This child looks like she's been beaten. Did you beat her?"

Whitfield said that Colleen had replied, "Oh, no. She's always climbing and falling."

Ware asked Whitfield why she was able to remember the events as they took place. For a long time, she did not speak, then she finally said, "My stepfather abused me when I was a child. When I saw that little baby come into the hospital, I knew exactly what had happened to her. I've never been able to forget it."

Again, there was silence. "There's something else I remember," Whitfield said. "That woman's face - she looked as cold and uncaring as anyone I'd ever seen."

So they wouldn't look poor, Debra and Kay bought new clothes for the August 1992 trial. Kay wore a blue pin-striped suit with beige shoes to match her beige blouse, and Debra wore a black suit with a white blouse and black heels. TV crews filmed the sisters and their husbands as they came through one door of the courthouse. Through the other door came Colleen, wearing a dark blue dress with a white lace collar, and Bull, in a pink Western shirt, black pants, and a cowboy belt with a huge buckle. The two sides never spoke. To avoid Bull and Colleen and the rest of the McMorris family, Debra and Kay stayed in the witness room and played dominoes.

The truth was that the sisters had grown anxious about testifying: For the first time in their lives, they were going to have to tell Colleen face to face exactly what they thought of her. In fact, months before the trial, a despondent Debra had gone to prosecutor Rebecca Atchley and indicated that she was contemplating killing herself so she wouldn't have to take the witness stand. "I'm still afraid of Colleen," she said. "Maybe I should leave this in God's hands." Atchley was so convinced of the seriousness of Debra's threat that she arranged for her to enter a psychiatric hospital until she was well enough to testify.

When Kay, the first witness in the trial, told the story of Carolyn's death, jurors sat open-mouthed; a couple of female jurors were on the verge of tears. In his cross-examination, defense attorney Floyd Holder did what he could to belittle Kay, producing hospital admission records that showed how often she had been beaten by men. "Didn't you get that busted nose from one of those beatings?" Holder asked.

Kay turned toward Colleen. "We know who broke my nose, don't we, Colleen?' she said. She kept staring until Colleen lowered her eyes.

After a group of pathologists testified about Carolyn's skull fracture, Debra took the stand. She was so nervous that her knees almost buckled as she walked into the courtroom; many of her sentences were left unfinished as she sobbed into her hands. By testifying, she said, she knew she was forever alienating herself from the only family she had ever known. But when Holder asked if perhaps her mother, Mildred, had brainwashed her, or if she and Kay were bringing the charges in order to gain fame for themselves, Debra's voice suddenly changed. "I'm here because Carolyn was killed," she said firmly. "I know how that happened."

Robert Pynoos, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, testified that adults can have a near-photographic memory of a traumatic event they experienced in childhood. He said he was convinced that the sisters weren't lying when he heard them describe how they kept leaning over Carolyn on the way to the hospital, promising that if she lived they would all run away together. "Those aren't the kinds of things that adults could make up," he said. "Debra and Kay are regressing right back into their childhoods."

Holder, in turn, produced a clinical psychologist and an experimental psychologist, who testified that it was unlikely that Debra and Kay could describe in great detail their lives when they were ages three and five unless they had been coached. He also brought friends and relatives to the stand to describe Colleen's tender nature.

Then, near the end of the trial, Colleen took the stand after giving a soft, courteous smile to the jury and to her lawyer and quietly told the same story she had been telling for nearly four decades. She said that on that morning in December 1955, she heard a noise from the bedroom that sounded like a thud. When she went to investigate, she found Carolyn lying motionless on the floor. She also said, on another matter, that she did not have any memory of her parents' murder-suicide in 1935.

In their cross-examination, Ware and Atchley did not try to intimidate or trip Colleen up; they didn't want to give the jury a chance to feel sorry for her. But some jurors did point to one thing when reflecting on her testimony: By the time she stepped off the stand, Colleen was as composed as when she began. Not once, they said, did she show any remorse over Carolyn's death. She never even shed a tear. Indeed, it seemed as if she could barely remember the little girl.

After five hours of deliberating, the jurors returned with their verdict: guilty of murder without malice (a charge equivalent to voluntary manslaughter). People in the courtroom gasped when it was read. Debra and Kay held hands and cried. Bull, sitting on the front row, was so stunned that he turned to relatives and said, "Guilty? Did they say guilty?" Colleen, looking grim and baffled, just shook her head.

Few people were surprised, though, when the jurors decided to give Colleen only a five-year suspended sentence. It was pointless, they said, to send her to prison at this late date. A free woman, Colleen put on her best face as she walked out of die courthouse on Bull's arm. "I still love Debra and Kay, but they're sick girls," she told the TV cameras. "They need help for the lies they've told." One year after the trial, an unrepentant Colleen would still be repeating that comment. She and Bull had remained on the ranch in West Texas, receiving occasional visits from relatives. Bull spent his days at a fishing hole or touring the ranch on his fourwheeler. "You can't imagine how it feels when your own daughters turn against you," he said. "But they ain't going to ruin me." Colleen still appeared to be the same gracious woman who preferred to spend her afternoons in the kitchen, perfecting her peach cobbler recipe. "I don't know how much more time I have left with Bull," she said, "but I just want to do what I can to make his life as happy as it can be."

Colleen and Bull are clearly a different couple since those days in the fifties, when he was a hard drinking, hotheaded young man and she was a rawboned young woman raising someone else's children. "Well, I guess we've all matured," Colleen said. "We've learned to do things better, to be a little more understanding ..." And then she stopped. That was as much of a confession - if it was a confession - as she planned to give. "Let me ask you a question," Colleen said to her visitor. "What good has this done anyone to bring any of this back up again? Do you really think, sitting here next to me, that I'm a terrible person?" Finally, she seemed to be blinking back tears. "Do you think I'm someone who could get angry and kill a baby?"

A year after the verdict, Debra and Kay were living in frame homes on the edge of town, still struggling to make ends meet. They did get written up in one of those detective magazines they liked to read, and Kay did fly to New York to appear on Maury Povich's talk show (Debra, too nervous about speaking in public, didn't go). But because of what she had revealed about her seamy past on the witness stand, Debra split up with her husband, moved to Oklahoma to be near Kay, and found a job on an assembly line. Kay, needing extra money to pay the bills, looked into ways to market her vodka bottle paintings and her crochet work. At times, when they would get together, they would ask themselves if the investigation was worth all the trouble - all the soul-searching and remembering, all the public humiliation - just to bring to light what their stepmother had done. "She's free as a bird, going to her family reunions, telling everyone we're a bunch of do-nothing sick girls, still calling us crazy," Kay said.

Still, Debra and Kay knew their fight against Colleen had forever changed them. After the trial, shy Debra found herself stopping a woman from spanking her child at a grocery store. Kay, who had been intensely claustrophobic since her childhood days - when Colleen would tightly cover her with a blanket as punishment - was learning to sit quietly in a small room without hyperventilating. "I think we're figuring out how to be happy," she said.

One day last summer, Debra and Kay journeyed back to Lubbock. This time, they had come to bury the exhumed remains of their baby sister. Before arriving at the city cemetery, they stopped to buy two stuffed teddy bears to put in Carolyn's coffin. "We wanted something to keep her company," Debra said. "One teddy bear represents me, and one represents Kay. We don't want Carolyn being lonely no more."

Almost everyone who had been involved in the case was there at the grave site. Randy McGuire came with a couple of his detectives; Travis Ware showed up with Rebecca Atchley and their investigators. Former nurse Hettie Whitfield, barely able to see from behind her thick glasses, carefully stepped forward to shake Debra's and Kay's hands. "Don't you ever feel bad for telling what you remembered," Whitfield said. "You did something nobody else did: You took up for an innocent child."

Under a cloudy sky, one of the investigators stood next to the casket and read some Scripture. Then people began trickling away, leaving Debra and Kay alone. "We did the best we could," Kay said. "We got justice. That's got to mean something, no matter what people say about us."

Sis, it's the most right thing we ever did in our lives," Debra said.

For a while, they stood there, arm in arm - the two unschooled rural women. Finally Debra said, "Carolyn, honey, we've got to let you go. We'll still think about you every day. But we got to let you go."

As they headed to their cars, Carolyn's tombstone was put back on top of her grave. It still had the wrong date of death. Debra and Kay promised-themselves that they would get Carolyn a new one as soon as they could come up with the money.

In 1955, a one year old girl was admitted to the emergency room with a probable concussion; her stepmother reported the child fell out of bed. The child died several hours later, and the death certificate listed the cause of death as a concussion following an accidental head injury.
In 1990, thirty-five years later, the two sisters of the dead baby, now 38 and 41 years of age, respectively, went to the police to report that when they were three and five, they saw their angry stepmother pick up their one-year old sister by the heels, bang her down against the floor, and throw her across the room. When their sister did not move, they said their stepmother took all three of them to the hospital, where their little sister died several hours later.
The sisters explained they had done nothing about this before because they assumed there was a statute that limited the time period a criminal prosecution must commence. They recently learned that this did not apply to murder in Texas. Upon learning this, the elder sister went to the hospital where their sister had died to request the medical records. The hospital did provide the death certificate and cause of death statement, but said they required a subpoena to release the full case records. This latter requirement prompted the visit to the police.
The sisters did not claim they had a recovered memory of their sister’s death: they each remembered it continuously for 35 years. They were haunted by the memory and wanted to know if it was true as they remembered it; had their stepmother really murdered their baby sister.
The policeman first interviewed separately the two (now adult) sisters, and then asked each to provide a separate detailed statement. Each sister described the continuous beatings they regularly received from both their father and stepmother prior to the murder; the beating the father gave the baby the day before her death; the apartment in which they lived at the time (the older sister made a drawing of the layout); the moments leading up to and following the murder; the trip to the emergency service of the local hospital; the visit with their natural mother the next day; and the funeral several days later. The younger sister described the funeral more fully, including a detailed listing of the bruises on the baby’s face, neck, and arms. She also described the new yellow dress in which her baby sister was buried, which had been purchased from Sears the day before the funeral.
The two women also described their subsequent life with their stepmother. In their statements, the sisters reported that their stepmother moved them out of that apartment less than a year after their sister died, and to another state shortly thereafter. They said they never visited the apartment again. Each sister indicated that she had confided in two or three teachers in elementary school whom she had trusted. Each sister wrote in her statement that their stepmother continued to beat them frequently, so that each girl remained in terror of her. When the elder reached 15, they ran away and rarely saw their stepmother again. They had only periodic contact with their natural mother, but both said that the relationship between the natural mother and stepmother was hostile in the extreme. Each sister described an adulthood of fear and impoverished self-esteem, and a failure to adjust well to the demands of careers, marriage and parenthood.
What follows are two verbatim but truncated portions (the originals run to five single spaced pages each) of each woman’s statement of her memory of the murder.

Kay (five year old):
I can remember Colleen (stepmother) dressing Carolyn of a morning and Carolyn turning her toes under because she didn’t want to put her shoes on. Then one morning, while Colleen was dressing Carolyn, she grabbed Carolyn up by the top of the thighs and with a lot of force, threw Carolyn across the floor. Carolyn was crying before she was thrown because Colleen was slapping her. After Carolyn was thrown across the floor she stopped crying. Carolyn slid across the hardwood floor and under a rocking chair that was across the room. Colleen picked Carolyn up and was moving Carolyn’s arms and legs around as if she was trying to wake her. She took her to the bedroom, and then to the bathroom and started throwing water in her face. I followed Colleen to the bedroom and bathroom. About this time Debra (three year old sister) walked up behind me and we stood in the bathroom door and watched Colleen throw water on Carolyn. During this entire time Carolyn was limp. Colleen then rushed past Debra and I out the back door into the yard and began throwing Carolyn up in the air. After she did this a few times she told Debra and I to get in the car.

Debra (three year old)
I do remember the apartment…I remember there being a hardwood floor in the front room. I don’t know about any of the other rooms. There was a couch in the living room on the lefthand wall. I think it was an ugly green couch. It folded down to make a bed. It made a clicking noise. You had to click it two or three times before it would come down. It was heavy to put it up and down. My sisters and I slept on the couch at night. I slept against the wall, Carolyn slept in the middle of the crease, and Kay slept on the outside. This is the way we always slept. Always. Kay always done that to protect us.
Colleen was sitting in the rocking chair with Carolyn in her lap. Carolyn was dressed excepted for her shoes. Colleen was trying to put on her shoes and Carolyn was scrunching up her toes and Colleen was getting madder and madder and madder, because she couldn’t get the shoes on. And Colleen slapping her. Carolyn was crying.
The next thing I remember Colleen was standing in front of the rocker and she was holding Carolyn. I remember Colleen throwing her away from her. She just flung her away from her. I remember Carolyn sliding across the floor and hitting her head on the rocker of the rocking chair. I never remember hearing her cry no more. And then Colleen had her in the bathroom. She turned both hot and cold water on and threw the water in Carolyn’s face. Colleen threw Carolyn up into the air and she blew into her face, but she never got any thing. She done beat her too long. I don’t remember nothing else until we got into the car.
The policeman proceeded to check their story. The death certificate issued by the hospital confirmed the story on the surface: the baby had been admitted and had died. The policeman discovered that the attending physician had died himself and could not be interviewed. The apartment building was no longer in existence: the entire neighborhood had been razed years earlier for a civic center and park.
The policeman then interviewed the natural mother. She said that in 1955 she was informed by the hospital that her youngest daughter had died, and saw her two other daughters the next day. They told her they saw their stepmother throw their baby sister, who did not move again. The day after the funeral, the natural mother said she took the two young girls with her to the police (or an investigator—she could not remember) and reported what they told her. When the policeman attempted to question the two girls (aged three and five at the time), they would not speak a single word. The mother reported that the policeman indicated that even if the young girls had corroborated her story, there was nothing he could do: he could not use such young girls as witnesses, no one would believe them, and besides they were too young even to understand what they were seeing. Given their mute state, he told her to forget all about it. As her own life was one of continued adversity, she said she never pursued the matter again, she did not discuss it with her daughters on the occasions when they did see each other, and she did not approve of their bringing it up now all these years later.
When the 1955 police records were examined in 1990, no record whatsoever was found of the natural mother’s alleged interview. When the policeman contacted retired members of the police who had been on duty at the relevant time, they were unable to recollect anything of that interview, nor did the natural mother’s description of the policeman to whom she talked match that of anyone who worked there at the time.
The policeman was still sufficiently concerned about the sisters’ story that he was unwilling to let the allegation simply drop. After a search, he found a carpet cleaner who knew the layout of the apartment building prior to its destruction. The carpet cleaner’s drawing of the rooms closely matched that of the older girl. Next, he obtained by subpoena the complete 35 year old medical records from emergency and found that no X-rays survived of the baby’s skull, nor any other tests that might have shed light on a more violent alternative cause of death, although detailed progress notes of medications administered and the baby’s responses to them were given. Astonishingly, in the margin of one page of the medical records in a different handwriting from that of the physician, was penciled "This is a beaten baby" (note the younger sister’s description of the body at the funeral). The policeman consulted with two physicians who told him that from those medical records alone, today they would have called the police when they admitted to emergency a baby in this condition. Suddenly, the policeman had a real case.
On the basis of these findings, he asked for and was given a court order to have the body of the little girl exhumed and examined by a forensic pathologist. The pathologist was told nothing of the stepmother’s statement (the baby fell out of bed), the two sisters’ allegations (the baby was held by the thighs and tossed across the floor), or of the medical records at emergency. The pathologist found a massive and unusual skull fracture at the base of the skull. He said it was unusual because, in its location, it could not have been caused by the baby falling (the most common cause of skull fractures in children). Rather, he said, the baby was either hit by a blunt instrument at the base of the skull, or the skull was forcibly banged against a blunt object.
One further piece of evidence was obtained from the grave. Sufficient remnants of the dress were uncovered to document its original color (yellow), and the store from which it was purchased (Sears).
Investigators located four of the school teachers in whom the two sisters claimed to have confided about the murder when they were children: each confirmed that the sisters were frequently bruised, and had told them of their fear of their stepmother, based in part on their memory that their stepmother had beaten their baby sister and killed her. None of the teachers reported these conversations to the police at the time (this was back in the 1960s, when child abuse issues were not nearly as salient as they are today).
The police also interviewed the natural mother’s sister, who was in the car with her when she picked up the two young girls on the day after the baby’s death. When questioned, this sister reported that as soon as the two girls got in the car, they told their mother what they had seen.
On the basis of the new evidence from the medical records, that from the grave, and from teachers and aunt, the district attorney obtained an indictment against the stepmother for first degree murder and had her arrested, 33 days after the sisters made their first contact with the police, and 35 and a half years after the alleged murder took place.
In the murder trial, the district attorney offered the testimony of the two sisters as their independent memory of what they had observed over three and a half decades earlier. This approach was unusual, since the district attorney focused on the testimony of the very young eyewitnesses as the central evidence that he wanted the jury to hear and believe, and used all of the other evidence to support its accuracy.
The defense claimed that the two sisters’ memory could not possibly be independent or accurate: that the sisters’ detailed descriptions exceeded children’s capacities to remember and describe; that the two sisters, in collusion with their natural mother, made the story up. The defense claimed that their memory was false because they had combined what they knew with what they were told. It was motivated by a wish for revenge, arrived at years latter.
In summary, the testimony in this second case concerns the description of abuse in early childhood reported by now adult witnesses. The testimonies of the two witnesses were not recovered memories: the memories were acquired when the witnesses were very young children, 35 years previously, and had been accessible thereafter. Should the court allow the admission of the testimony of the two eyewitnesses? If so, on what basis?



W.T. 'Bull' McMorris
W.T. "Bull" McMorris, 75, died Monday, February 8, 1999, in Abilene, Texas.
Services were held at 2 p.m. Wednesday, February 10, 1999 at 2:00 p.m. at Calvary Baptist Church in Seymour with the Rev. Grace Wooten officiating. Burial was in Bomarton Cemetery in Bomarton, Texas, under the direction of Archer Funeral Home. Mr. McMorris was born March 31, 1923, in Seymour. He and Colleen Parker were married July 22, 1956. He served in the Army during World War II. He was a mechanic for Time D.C. Trucking and had worked in Lubbock and Oklahoma City. He retired in 1982. He moved to Wingate, Texas, in 1989 and was a member of the Calvary Baptist Church. He was preceded in death by a daughter, Carolyn Yvonne McMorris in 1955; a son, Robert Taylor McMorris in 1987.
Survivors include his wife; three daughters, Kay Clarke and Debra Callarman, both of Oklahoma City, and Janet of Wingate, Texas; a son, Edward of Oklahoma City, and Janet of Wingate, Texas; two sisters, Winnie Wright of McCloud, Oklahoma, and Willie Jo Bibb of Arlington, Texas; three brothers, Tom of Bomarton, Texas, J.R. of Wingate and Cecil of Lubbock, Texas; and six grandchildren.
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