A book to read as soon as I get the time…

Someone just sent me an email about a book they thought I might want to read – I can’t believe it is about another mother just like me…different story, but also similar in many ways.  I just hope in our case it doesn’t take eleven years, but even if it takes longer, we will never give up.

For eleven years this mother fought to have her daughter’s COD changed – the Coroner went from “undetermined” to “suicide” to “undetermined” to “suicide” when she knew her daughter had not committed suicide, but had been murdered.  On November 9, 2009 there was a precedent-setting hearing that found that the Coroner’s office had been derelict in it’s duty to investigate her daughter’s death…why do these people we trust put parents through the most unspeakable pain of fighting for the truth to come out?

The book by Ann Rule is titled “In the Still of the Night

 

No sign of forced entry? No intruder? Really?

The morning of Morgan’s death, without even asking, I was assured by the lead Detective on her felony stalking case that officers had thoroughly checked the house, and there was no sign of forced entry.  Please remember this was the morning we had just found our youngest daughter dead, and we were in extreme pain, and were not asking many questions because we were crying so hard.  After that day this point was revisited a few times, and the answer became more positive from the sheriffs to the point that they were insisting nobody could have been in the house.  So now I want to visit that point, and share with you some things.  Once again just the truth, and you decide if it was possible for her stalker to have been in the house on the night she was killed, and you see, I didn’t even say murdered, because for that we need someone to be the killer. Or who knows maybe there could be more than one.

Floorplan for Morgan's HouseFirst start with this floorplan of the house, now this is not an exact floor plan, but it is very close.  Just delete the mud room coming in from the garage, and add two more windows to the Master bedroom, along the wall that is shown as a solid wall, and that was pretty much our house.

Morgan’s room is called BEDROOM 2, and, as you can see there, there are five points of entry through doors:

  • The front door.
  • Two sliding glass doors, and another door all opening out onto the covered patio.
  • A door from the garage.

 

All of those doors had key locks in them. And if you read some earlier posts you know that the front door’s lock broke, and was replaced by a dead bolt lock that had both a key, and a numeric key pad.  Steve had one key to the front door, and the other was in a decorative stack of three dishes that sat on the kitchen bar top, and both keys were accounted for on the day we moved.

There were two codes entered into the front keypad.  One was used by Steve and Toni, and one was used by Morgan.  Not that it kept track or anything like that, it was just Morgan had her 4 digit number, and we had ours.  One time during the stalking, after a few overheard attempts to use the keypad, Morgan’s code was changed.

So my first guess of how it might be done hasn’t changed, and is the same today. Watch Morgan, or Steve, or I from a distance, and see what numbers we press to unlock the door  – maybe it takes one try or two or even ten, but eventually you have it.  At night the numbers on the keypad light up as you press them.  We were told a hunting aid called a spotting scope would make an ideal tool to do this.

And to add weight to my theory, a retired federal special agent said the door lock should have had a cowling such as is used on numeric keypads on military bases to prevent someone from having a direct line of sight to the numbers.  He felt someone from a bush across the street could have the code in a few days at most.  The same investigator felt that without regular cleaning the numbers most used would be “smudged” and far easier to detect.  Coincidentally on a  Facebook page of Keenan’s, he claims to have bagged a 5X5 buck at 288 yards, one shot – interesting, huh?  Another investigator calls this a “world class shot”, 3 football fields away.  He feels that a person capable of that could easily watch us enter, maybe only once, and know the code, we of course, would have no idea he had the code.  (Please note the use of Keenan’s name in my posts – if you read the sheriff’s own reports you will see that they considered him their #1 suspect, he was the suspected stalker and Morgan identified him multiple times as her stalker)

Not to imply whatsoever it was a Psychic Medium that figured this out, but more of an eye opener for me, and whether you choose to allow for the possibility or not, it won’t hurt my feelings, but this Intuitive (who works with law enforcement and the FBI on many missing persons and homicide cases had been 100% right on everything she had told us so far), she had never been to our house, and from over a thousand miles away, “saw a male entering our front door code”, and based on this vision was correct on the first three digits, but did not see the fourth number (which by the way was the same as one of the other numbers she had already told us so she did get all the numbers right).

The neighbor's door, but it is just like ours

This is the neighbor’s door, but it is identical to our two sliding glass doors

The three doors that lead to the covered patio, two sliding glass doors, and one swinging glass door had locks but, we never had keys for them, and they could only be locked by us from the inside.  The keys for those locks could have been lost a long time ago, or gathering dust at a realtor’s office.  But here’s a sort of long shot possibility.  Steve recalled a time when he was talking to Brooke’s dad, James Harris, who told him that as the HOA President he had an old box of keys to most of the empty houses, makes perfect sense in case something should come up, and access is needed.  This was at a time we saw him in an empty house that he should not have had access to.  So I’ll call it only a small possibility, but that is theory number two since Keenan had moved in with Brooke and James (3 houses down from us) approximately 2 weeks before Morgan’s stalking had started.

To throw in another possibility, we leased our house (for over 6 years), and as houses like to do, at the most inopportune times, things break, ours had a microwave break.  The owner thought there was a match in an empty house that he also owned, and wanted to send us the keys to that house, so we could make the swap.  Only he wasn’t sure which was the right key, so he just sent us all of his keys under the theory that we would use the right one, and send them all back.  Steve feels that the original front door key, which we never had, most likely opened the back door, and the garage door.  We never tried at the time, but that pile of keys all went to one of the eight or ten homes he owned at one time, so I’m sure you’ll agree that this incident counts as possibility number three.  Another interesting aside…this same owner owned not only our house but the house James Harris and Brooke lived in and the house across the street that Elliott and his family lived in.

There was a time following Morgan’s death that Steve and I refused to believe anyone had been in her room, it was simply too painful to allow that thought to exist in our minds.  It also wasn’t necessary when she died of “natural causes.”  But when we finally received the autopsy results and toxicology results and read that she died from a disease she did not have and the only medication showing up she did not take, we started to wonder what was going on.  As more and more doctors reviewed her findings, they became quite convinced, and told us it was a homicide, I very reluctantly crossed that threshold, but still would rather think the possibility of someone being in our house just could not be.  I was very naive at that time about the true nature of stalkers…in most cases they do get in to the victims home and most of the time there is no evidence of a break-in.  Having confessed that feeling, early on in my acceptance of someone in Morgan’s room, I felt it happened like this…all of us were gone from the house the late afternoon of December 1, 2011. The dogs were in the laundry room (locked up because the puppy had just chewed up something in the living room), and would not be able to confront someone in the house.  A person who knew the front door code could enter the house, while we were all gone, and unlock the right hand sliding glass door that we never used, (it had heavy velvet drapes over it now from the inside), and then leave. I never checked that door because we always left it locked and never used it.  Now once we were all asleep the perpetrator could enter, and exit through that door silently. That is possibility number four.

To give a nod to many comments, and tips that have in one way or another asked if someone could have been hiding in the house when we came home, or in Morgan’s closet, or better yet out in the garage, and even in the study closet? Yes, absolutely and from there they would have been easily able to wait for the right time to enter Morgan’s room, and then exit the house silently and without a key, that is a big possibility number five…and it makes me sick to even think that someone was possibly hiding in our house when we arrived home that evening and laid in wait for everyone to go to sleep in order to attack.

So do I understand when I hear that Sheriff Vallario has correctly pointed out that they had officers at our house over 50 times, and never saw any sign of a stalker?  I’m still not sure what he meant by that, guess I should write a letter and ask.  Was this a play on words?  Yes, they had officers out at our house over 50 times, and yes they never saw the stalker…the stalker did not sit out on our lawn and wait till they got there to see him.  But sign of the stalker – that’s another story…of course they saw evidence of the stalker, trail in the berm, footprints, wildlife camera captures, video captures, lots of evidence.  Of course there was a stalker, it was a felony stalking case and his own detective met with Morgan once a week!  The stalker is seen in a picture leaning on Steve’s truck, and watching the sheriff’s drive away, he had no care about leaving  footprints during the period when they did not collect them.  He was captured on the video system more than once.  How about the tress crack in the gutter directly over Morgan’s room?  He left a unique blade on the ground outside the house. Silently presented himself to Morgan one morning, dressed in black from head to toe.  He wore distinct trails into the berm behind our house. They know she was followed and she told them the second time what the car looked like and who was driving the car.

He was definitely here, outside the house, and for the million dollar question, inside?  I can’t prove that, yet.  While they maintain no allowance for the possibility, he could have, and I also know the sheriff’s department will never try to prove it.  Someone was in the house on the night of December 1, 2011.  Things happened that night that required someone else to be in the house.  Was it the stalker?  If so, did he have help?  Was it a different person altogether knowing we would assume it was the stalker?

I am going somewhere with all this, and to recount the Amitriptyline post was the first and this is the second, and the third will be along shortly.  Also, yes I was completely overloaded with suggestions today, not another set of eyes, more like a town full of eyes.  No complaints here, this is just what Morgan’s case needs – people that question, people that care.