09:17 AM PST on Saturday, January 1, 2005

By JASON JACOBY, Baker City Herald

BAKER CITY, Ore. -- When Randy Crutcher awoke Jan. 4, 2003, his leg was in a cast, a gift of sorts from the horse that kicked him. The Oregon State Police sergeant figured he'd take it easy.

Instead, he spent the afternoon listening to the bone-chilling confession of Edward Morris who had murdered his pregnant wife and three children in Oregon's Coast Range east of Tillamook two weeks earlier.

KGW File

Edward Morris in court.

Two years later, with Morris in prison for life, Crutcher recalled the two hour-plus confession in which Morris laid bare the details of one of Oregon's most horrific crimes.

Crutcher, a trained interrogator, said he kept a poker face through it all. "If you show shock, horror, anger, he may decide that you no longer are a good audience," Crutcher told the Baker City Herald.

Morris swung from politeness to clinical detail to sobs of remorse in the taped confession.

He presented himself as someone who wanted to be a professional hit man but realized he could not kill again and decided to give himself up, and as a man who was unworthy because he could not do better by his family.

Tillamook County District Attorney William Porter said the case thrust on the small county was handled perfectly.

"They didn't make a single mistake," he said.

Prosecutors said that in the taped confession Morris said he was aware that what he did was wrong, removing an important point that could have been used in an insanity plea.

Morris pleaded guilty Nov. 15 and is serving four consecutive life terms without parole. He has agreed not to appeal.

Morris was far and away Oregon's most-wanted fugitive when motorists spotted his van east of Baker City and called police that day. He was arrested in a Baker City parking lot.

While he was being handcuffed, Morris asked officers, "Did you find my family?"

Morris told them he hoped to retrieve the bodies and have them with him when he surrendered.

They had been found the day after the killings by hunters.

Crutcher knew time was short.

"As time goes on, the more likely it is a person won't cooperate, will have second thoughts and decide not to talk." he said.

"The minute they say, `Hey, I want to talk to an attorney,' then we're done."

Crutcher said Morris had been read his rights but said he wanted to talk. "I basically just made small talk, building some rapport with him," Crutcher said.

Tillamook County officials provided unreleased details to help Crutcher determine whether Morris was lying.

Within hours a Tillamook County judge appointed an attorney for Morris. The attorney told Morris to stop talking.

But by then the interview was over and the case was iced.

The first few minutes sounds like a chat between friends.

Was the Subway sandwich the police provided OK? "Absolutely wonderful," Morris replied.

Crutcher said that's how it's done. Otherwise, confessions could be thrown out as forced.

Two years on, Morris' politeness still stands out to Crutcher.

"Morris is a man who, if you ran into him on the street and talked to him, I don't think you'd have a clue that, one, he did this and, two, that he was capable of doing it." he said.

Morris said he had been to Phoenix, Ariz., and hoped to stay there and become a professional killer.

Crutcher asked whether Morris planned to kill his family.

"Unfortunately, yes," Morris answered.

Morris then explained what he did and why, and where he was before he was caught.

"I try to never interrupt," Crutcher said. "That takes a tremendous amount of discipline."

It became clear, Crutcher said, that not only did he murder his family, but hoped to get away with it.

At one point Morris told Crutcher he knew he left footprints, so he threw his shoes out the car window.

"He's just hanging himself, and I just let him talk," Crutcher said.

At issue, Morris said, was money.

"I haven't been a very good provider lately," he said. "I felt like half of a person. Miserable. Terrified." He said his wife was worthy of more than he could provide.

"All my life I wanted to be a hit man for the mob," he said. "I even tried to kill people in Portland before I killed my family."

He told of hiding a hammer in his coat, planning to attack someone and steal a wallet.

"I couldn't do it," Morris told Crutcher. He decided on a pistol with a silencer but realized he couldn't build a silencer without his wife knowing.

"So I had to get rid of my family," he said.

He checked newspaper ads for handguns but found them more expensive than he expected.

"I should have known God was against me from the start," Morris said with a chuckle.

He bought three handguns two days before the Dec. 19 murders along with a gun safe so the clerk would think his motive was protecting his family.

Morris then told his wife that he had rented a home at the coast for the night.

In chilling detail, Morris recounted the murders of his wife Renee, 37, and their children Bryant, 10, Alexis, 8, and Jonathan, 4.

The kids were asleep in the family minivan.

As he brought it to a halt just off Oregon 6 he told Renee to close her eyes because he had a surprise.

Morris said he walked to the rear of the minivan, opened the hatch and tucked one of his two .22 pistols into his waistband. In one hand he held a pellet gun.

Morris said he considered just driving home but thought he couldn't explain to his wife that he had intended to kill her but then changed his mind.

"I was chickening out but I didn't give myself any back door," he said. "I loved (Renee) so much I didn't want her to think I was a horrible person."

Morris said he walked to the passenger side door. He told his wife to keep her eyes closed and shot into her eye.

He said Renee cried out in pain, and his words on the tape become harder to follow.

"For some reason I thought (Renee) would just die," he said. "But she didn't. It wasn't like in the movies."

Morris admitted an ignorance about guns. He said he then shot Renee with a .22-caliber pistol. Medical examiners found four bullets and two pellets in her body.

The shots awoke his sons, and Morris said he shot them both.

He said he drove up a logging road off of Highway 6 and that his wife stayed alive for about 45 minutes, in and out of consciousness.

While awake, he said, Renee told him that she loved him, that Jesus loved him, and that they both forgave him.

Morris says he was afraid to shoot again so he stabbed his wife in the lungs.

An autopsy found he had stabbed his daughter 18 times.

He hauled Renee's body to one side of the logging road, and the children's' bodies to the other and drove back to Portland.

He went home, got a blond rock-star wig and other disguises and headed east on Interstate-84.

He had about $3,000 in cash, enough, he thought, to begin life anew as a hit man. He said he hoped to buy a farm where he could bury his victims.

Morris said he didn't worry about returning to Oregon because he didn't think police had found the bodies.

Morris then says he planned to build "a dirt house" in the desert and live in it.

He would do most of his killing in the winter, he said, because it would be harder to conceal a weapon while wearing shorts in the summer.

In Phoenix be bought a welder and a drill press to build a silencer.

He said he hoped the homemade device would explode and kill him.

He then reverted to the night of the murders.

He said he spent hours trying to clean his wife's blood from between the minivan's front seats that night.

"I did such a bad job of killing her, and she bled a lot," he said.

He said he tried pre-moistened baby-wipes. "They are wonderful for things of that nature," Morris related.

On the night of Jan. 1, 2003, Morris said he drove to Phoenix to start a murderous new career.

"I intended to kill that night," he said.

Morris says he met a man named Sean, apparently drunk, who had driven off the road. He says he thought about killing him but instead drove him home.

Morris then drove around a tough neighborhood looking for people to kill without robbing them so killing would come more easily.

But he realized he couldn't kill again, he said, and headed back to Oregon to turn himself in.

First, he said, he wanted to see the Grand Canyon.

"God gave me a beautiful family and I destroyed it. I wanted to see something beautiful that I couldn't ruin."

He hiked along the canyon rim. "It was pretty, but I really needed to have my wife there," he told Crutcher. "Renee and I had always wanted to go" to the Grand Canyon.