The first in a two-part series deconstructing the case against Michael Morton, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife but has maintained his innocence:

Michael was breathing hard. ‘Is my son okay?’ he asked.

‘He’s fine,’ Boutwell said. ‘He’s at the neighbors’.’

‘How about my wife?’

The sheriff was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied.

Boutwell led Michael into the kitchen and introduced him to Sergeant Don Wood, the case’s lead investigator. ‘We have to ask you a few questions before we can get your son,’ Boutwell told him. Dazed, Michael took a seat at the kitchen table. He had shown no reaction to the news of Christine’s death, and as he sat across from the two lawmen, he tried to make sense of what was happening around him. Sheriff’s deputies brushed past him, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets. He could see the light of a camera flash exploding again and again in the master bedroom as a police photographer documented what Michael realized must have been the place where Christine was killed. He could hear officers entering and exiting his house, exchanging small talk. Someone dumped a bag of ice into the kitchen sink and stuck Cokes in it. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.

“The Innocent Man, Part One.” — Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly

More Texas Monthly

More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss:

In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in their home. Colette’s husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, a 26-year-old doctor and Green Beret at the time of the crime, was convicted of the murders in 1979. MacDonald faces the next of countless court dates on September 17, still seeking exoneration. The MacDonald case has been an object of obsession and controversy for more than four decades and the subject of high-visibility journalistic debate. But respectable opinion has always vastly favored the jury verdict of guilt. Errol Morris is trying to change that.

In one highlight of his career as a documentary filmmaker, Morris’ 1988 investigative documentaryThe Thin Blue Line led to the release of Randall Dale Adams, who had been serving a life sentence in the killing of a Dallas policeman. After many years of reporting, Morris has written a new book, A Wilderness of Error, that argues that Jeffrey MacDonald, too, was wrongly convicted. Morris directly challenges prior accounts by Joe McGinniss and the much-revered Janet Malcolm. Morris’ book, published yesterday, infected me with the virus of his fascination with the case and sent me to consult other sources. Can Morris be right? Is a man who tried and failed to prevent his family from being killed now serving three consecutive life terms for the crime?

“The Murders And The Journalists.” — Evan Hughes, The Awl

More Awl

A murder of a young newlywed went unsolved for 23 years, until a cold case homicide unit picked up the file and found a missing clue.

Sherri’s file perplexed Francis. The crime report stated that a swab had been taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm, but it was not listed in evidence and was not among the forensic samples that had been signed out by Moritt in 1993. It apparently had been misplaced sometime earlier. Where might it be?

Francis knew well the steps in the evidence chain. Evidence recovered from the victim’s body would be held for a time in the coroner’s freezer, while the case was still active, and at some point would be gathered up and stored under the file number. What if the swab hadn’t made it from the freezer to the file? Francis called the coroner’s office. The swab was not on file, so they searched the freezers by hand.

“A Case So Cold It Was Blue.” — Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair

More from Bowden

A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy?

I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few years. I went back for the trial in 1998 because, let’s face it, it’s not often that someone in your family becomes the focus of a sensational murder case, on the local news for weeks at a time, the circumstances of her demise so tawdry and bizarre that the story appeared in People magazine, on ‘Hard Copy’ and, eventually, on the guilty-pleasure pinnacle of true-crime cable-TV programs, ‘City Confidential.’ And there was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate. She’d always been kind of coldhearted. It was not an unfitting end.

“How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze.” — Joe Rhodes, The New York Times

See also: “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist.” — Wired, Dec. 27, 2010

Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:

That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. “Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: ‘You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.’”

“Three Trials for Murder.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker (Nov.14, 2011)

See more #longreads from Nicholas Schmidle