A Texas Journalist Tells the Story of a Man Imprisoned for a Quarter of a Century for a Crime He Didn’t Commit
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The newsroom in Georgetown, Texas, was grim, lonely and sparsely populated on Friday nights in October 2011.
But reporter Andrew McLemore, kept company by the occasional beer and his editor at the Williamson County Sun, Ben Trollinger, worked until the early hours of Saturday mornings editing and revising, determined to answer the overriding question for Williamson County: How could such a serious miscarriage of justice have occurred?
How could an innocent man spend 25 years in prison, wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife?
“The idea of getting to work on a story like this was thrilling from the get-go,” says the 25-year-old McLemore of the chance to cover the story of Christine Morton’s murder, a crime that left her husband Michael Morton languishing in jail for a quarter of a century.
The Williamson County Sun is a 10,000-circulation, biweekly newspaper in a county north of Austin often referred to as Wilco. McLemore had been a reporter at the paper for about a year when he began working on this story. He says having the chance to report on the case “was as great of an opportunity as I could have possibly asked for.”