Town note
The town is named for the Tillamook people, the Native American tribe that lived there until the early 1800s.
about 0:07:31The story
The house had three bedrooms and 896 square feet, and the family had owned it since 1995, when Morris inherited it from his mother. Renee Lynn Morris was 31 and seven months pregnant. Their children were Bryant, 10, Alexis, 8, and Jonathan, 4. Neighbours described the family as quiet and devout churchgoers. Morris ran a home repair and construction business called Cornerstone Total Maintenance with a partner, Paul Gasparetti Jr., after an earlier roofing business, Sunrise Roofing, had failed and the couple had filed for bankruptcy in 1993. The family attended St John's Wesleyan Church in North Portland, where Renee was to co-direct the Christmas play and two of the children had speaking parts. Neighbours such as Pearl Borg, 85, and Ruth Meske described Morris as a helpful handyman who mowed lawns and changed light bulbs for elderly people on the street. Nobody who knew them saw a warning.
Behind that, the episode says, Morris had been losing money. He told detectives later that he had spent nearly $40,000 in six months trying to get the new business going, that he felt like half a person and was terrified of failing as a provider. On 17 December 2002 he drove to a gun shop on 82nd Drive in southeast Portland and spent $1,172.87 on a .38 revolver, a .22 semi-automatic pistol and a gun safe, telling the clerk the guns were to protect his family. The next day he bought a blonde wig. On 19 December he told Renee he had rented a house on the Oregon coast for the night, and after dark the family left in a grey 1993 Dodge Caravan, Oregon plate WSH-171, with several Christian bumper stickers on the back.
Morris drove east into the Tillamook State Forest, about 30 miles from Tillamook, and turned onto a logging spur road off Drift Creek Road north of Oregon Highway 6. He said it was about 10.30 p.m. Renee was in the passenger seat and the three children were asleep in the back. He stopped, told Renee to close her eyes because he had a surprise, took a .22 pistol and a pellet gun from the back of the van, and considered driving home. He decided he could not explain himself to his wife, so he shot her in the eye with the pellet gun. It did not kill her. He then shot her with the .22, which also did not kill her, and the shots woke the children. He shot both boys. Renee remained alive for about 45 minutes, drifting in and out of consciousness, telling him that she loved him and that Jesus loved him and that they forgave him. Afraid that more gunshots would be heard, he stabbed her in the chest. He drove a short distance and stabbed Alexis 18 times on the other side of the road. He dragged Renee, Bryant and Jonathan into the bushes on one side of the road and left Alexis on the other. He drove back to Portland, collected the wig, and headed east on I-84 with about $3,000 in cash.
During the Christmas week a father and son hunting in the forest followed drops of blood in the snow and found a human hand sticking out from under blankets. State police found Renee's body and then three more bodies nearby. The family was identified quickly. The family had told people they were going away, so nobody had reported them missing at first. A statewide alert described Morris as six feet tall, 200 pounds, with short brown hair, driving the Caravan with plate WSH-171.
Morris, meanwhile, had checked into a Super 8 motel in The Dalles on 20 December under the name Jim Elliott, paying cash and claiming he had been mugged in Albuquerque and had no identification. Jim Elliott was the name of a Christian missionary from Portland who was killed in Ecuador in 1956, a detail investigators found significant. The van was seen at the motel at 1 a.m. and was gone by 6 a.m. On 21 December an attendant at a filling station in Edmonds, Washington, wrote down the plate. Morris drove on through Idaho and Utah to Las Vegas and then to Arizona. He arrived in Phoenix on 23 December and bought a welder and a drill press at the Sears at Metro Center, intending to make a silencer. He spent about a week in the desert west of the city, sleeping in the van, and on New Year's Day 2003 drove into Phoenix intending to begin killing strangers for their money. He gave a drunk man named Sean a lift home instead, then found he could not get out of the car to attack anyone. He decided to return to Oregon and turn himself in, but first drove to the Grand Canyon to watch the sunrise.
The investigation produced 615 tips and sightings from Seattle, Bellingham and British Columbia, and on 28 December a woman in Abbotsford, British Columbia, reported the van; the FBI called the sighting credible. On 4 January 2003 Linda Martin and her brother Tom Martin, driving home to Rochester, Washington, from Idaho, passed a grey Caravan near Baker City in eastern Oregon at about 11.30 a.m. Martin's grandson had played soccer with Bryant Morris and she had memorised the plate. They called police, followed the van, lost it, found it again and called 911 from the Safeway beside the Rite Aid. At about 12.25 p.m. Baker City officer Doug Schrade and off-duty detective John Shepard, in plain clothes, confronted Morris as he came out of the Rite Aid. He complied at once and gave his name, then asked whether they had found his family. He had shaved his head, grown a moustache and put on wire-rimmed glasses, but the van still had its plates and stickers.
Oregon State Police sergeant Randy Crutcher, who had a broken leg from a horse kick, conducted the interview at the Baker County drug task force office. Morris was read his rights and agreed to talk. The recorded interview began at 2.34 p.m. and lasted two hours and eighteen minutes. Morris ate part of a Subway sandwich and called it absolutely wonderful. He described wanting to become a hitman for the mob, buying guns, planning to hit a wealthy man with a hammer in downtown Portland, planning to buy a farm to bury bodies, and planning to build a dirt house in the desert. He said he killed his family because he had not been a good provider and could not face their opinion of him. Crutcher let him talk and did not interrupt. The tape ended at 4.52 p.m. Morris's father, Paul Morris, said he was numb and found it incomprehensible, and later said he hoped his son would get the death penalty. Renee's mother, Pat, spoke at a 90-minute memorial service that weekend about Alexis singing like an angel and Jonathan's new soccer shoes.