Kill the Ones You Love (10 page)

Moving out back, the officers found a red GMC pickup with Idaho plates. This was behind a hill in back of the garage area, hidden from view of the house. The pickup truck most likely got there by using a small spur road that ran off from the main driveway. The pickup truck was registered to William Pope, of Blackfoot, Idaho.

Sergeant Looney related later, “When I walked up from the bottom of the driveway, it's a steep driveway, and people who drive up from the bottom can cause spinout marks. That's from trying to get traction. But I found spinout marks that weren't going uphill—they were going downhill. A spinout on the way down is a dangerous and silly thing to do. I thought it might have something to do with the crime. It appeared like someone trying to leave the scene in a hurry.”

The tire spinout marks were sheltered from the rain for later analyzing. There were also spinout marks that went down through a grassy area. In fact, at one section on the driveway, a vehicle had lost control and actually slid into the bank of a hillside before continuing on down the hill. Once again, it looked like someone had left the scene in a great hurry.

 

 

Besides the Coos County Major Crimes Team being involved, the Oregon State Police (OSP) Crime Laboratory and its agents became involved too, along with the police departments of Coquille and Bandon. One thing the officers discovered was that Robert Kennelly had owned a .40-caliber handgun, which was now missing. Both he and Robin had been killed with .40-caliber bullets, and it appeared that they were probably murdered by the gun that Kennelly had owned.

Sergeant Looney entered the information about the gun into the national crime information computer system. Within a short period of time, the gun in question came back with some very interesting information. It had been picked up on a street in San Diego, California, and was now in the possession of the San Diego Police Department.

A San Diego police officer had found the gun on Genesee Avenue, near April Court, in some bushes. This was an area where there was substantial crime. It was absolutely Robert Kennelly's gun—serial numbers proved that. How it got to San Diego was still a mystery at that point.

At first, it was not apparent who had murdered Robin Anstey and Robert Kennelly. Then the contact from the CPD to CCSO revealed all of Gabriel Morris's actions at Fred Eschler's home on February 8. Also the information that investigators got from Jessica's parents in Idaho was factored in. Because of this, and other questioning of individuals who knew Gabriel Morris, and his increasingly erratic behavior over the past few weeks, an arrest warrant was drawn up by DA Paul Frasier. Gabe was the main focus in this warrant; Jessica was listed as a material witness.

The warrant stated that Gabriel Christian Morris was wanted for the murders of Robert Kennelly and Robin Anstey, and that the murders were aggravated. This was a class 1 felony.

CHAPTER 18

The news of two murders near the quiet seaside town of Bandon absolutely rocked the community. A local newspaper,
The World,
ran the headline
POLICE SEEK DOUBLE HOMICIDE SUSPECT.
The article began:
Police are asking for the public's help in tracking a murder suspect and his wife, tied to a double homicide, near Bandon.

The article went on to show the location of the crime on the Coquille River between Bandon and the hamlet of Riverton. A photo of Gabe and one of Jessica was next to the map. The article gave out the license plate number of Fred Eschler's silver Ford Taurus and reported that the couple's four-year-old daughter, Kalea, was with them. In addition were the lines:
Gabriel Morris is reported to be armed with two handguns. The couple has friends and family in Idaho, Portland, Salem, Seattle and San Diego.

A reporter talked to DA Paul Frasier about where the couple might have gone. His answer was “Your guess is as good as mine as to which way they went.” Then he added that he was seeking Jessica Morris as a material witness to the murders. And already he let out that evidence at the scene pointed to Gabriel Morris as the shooter. Just what evidence this was, Frasier would not say.

Frasier did say that Jessica, until recently, had been helping with a fund-raiser for the Women's Safety & Resource Center. And Mary Ann Donaldson told a reporter that Jessica was “vivacious, outgoing, intelligent and a really sweet person who also appeared to be a great mother. We were worried about her. She just disappeared. She was really a great, reliable worker and we really liked her.” Donaldson added that they were all concerned for Jessica's safety and that of her daughter.

The next day's newspaper ran a headline that stated:
POLICE SAY FUGITIVE IS DANGEROUS.
At a press conference, DA Frasier confirmed that the victims were Robert Kennelly and Robin Anstey. A photo was shown of Gabe, Jessica and Kalea in happier days. About the dangerousness of Gabe, Frasier said, “If he, Jessica Morris, their child or automobile is located, citizens are strongly cautioned that they should not approach them or the car and should immediately call nine-one-one.”

To another reporter, Judy Moody, the director of the Women's Safety & Resource Center, said, “Jessica was very enthusiastic and engaged in the process of creating a fund-raiser.” But the Soup Bowl luncheon fund-raiser, which was meant to be held a day before the Super Bowl, never happened. Jessica had not collected donations for the fund-raiser and had not purchased bowls and spoons from her own money, as she had promised. As far as being involved in the crime, Moody said, “I don't think she's involved. That just doesn't fit.”

By now, Oregon State Police detectives from Central Point, Roseburg and Coos Bay joined other officers in searching for the trio. These law enforcement agencies basically covered the southwestern portion of the state. Of course, this area was mountainous and very forested. Gabe and his family could be hiding in any number of places.

 

 

Autopsies were performed on Robert Kennelly and Robin Anstey by Kristine Karcher and Dr. James Olson. Karcher was the chief medical examiner (ME) for Coos County. She had a master's degree in forensic nursing from the University of Colorado. By 2010, she had been chief medical examiner for Coos County for twelve years.

As she explained later, “I deal with victims of violence, and half of those are usually victims who have died. In dealing with my job, I have forensic training in homicides and autopsies, and sometimes I would be assigned to the major crimes team in Coos County.”

That is what happened for Karcher on the Kennelly/Anstey case. On February 10, she was contacted and told to respond to a residence on Highway 42 South, outside of Bandon. When she got there, she observed the bodies in place, and drew diagrams of their locations and positioning. She also supervised their removal from the scene.

When the autopsies occurred, it was in conjunction with Dr. James Olson from Jackson County, who contracted with Coos County. As Olson performed the actual autopsies, Karcher took notes and made trauma diagrams. On a front-view diagram of Robert Kennelly, she noted a wound to the abdomen that crossed his chest and went all the way to the left armpit. There was another wound in his left side, which went in a straight direction, and the bullet embedded in a hip bone. There was a third wound in the right leg, near the knee.

In a back view, Karcher related what she called “a very impressive gutter wound that crossed the back of his head and neck and grazed the shoulder. It entered left to right, traveled downward and ended up underneath the skin.” There was another wound on Kennelly that went through his leg and exited the calf area. The fatal wound was the one that entered his chest and perforated his right lung and liver.

As for Robin Anstey, she had suffered a gunshot wound that entered near the left ear and exited the right cheek. There was also a wound to her upper left arm, which entered the back of the arm and exited the front. It shattered the humerus bone of her upper arm. There was a graze wound on her shin and a gunshot wound to her buttocks, which exited near her knee. The fatal wound was one to her left temple, through her brain, which exited her cheek and knocked one of her teeth out. This was the tooth found on the deck near her body by investigators. The fatal wound had been delivered at fairly close range.

Karcher had been at the scene and noted bullet holes in plant leaves there. The wounds on Robert Kennelly made sense in light of those bullet holes in the leaves. Karcher believed some of the bullets that entered Kennelly's body had been fired from a steep angle downward. This was especially true of the wound to his lower leg. The gunshot wound to his neck was also in a downward angle. She surmised someone had started shooting at Kennelly from the balcony as he tried running out the door. When Bob was already on the floor, the abdomen wound occurred when he was lying prone.

For that wound, the shooter had to have been standing over Kennelly and firing at a downward angle. All of this pointed to the fact that the shooter meant to kill his victims and was not content on just wounding them. It had taken at least thirteen shots to accomplish this. Not only that, he had time to think about what he was doing, since he had to reload a clip into his gun to accomplish the task.

CHAPTER 19

While law enforcement was trying to figure out what had occurred at Bob Kennelly's residence, Gabe, Jessica and Kalea were on the run. In another mad dash to San Diego, they drove more than eight hundred miles down the highways. Most likely, they cut across to I-5, which ran down through Oregon and Central California. Taking Highway 101 out of Bandon and down the coast took a much longer period of time, since it was not freeway all the way. For anyone trying to cover a great deal of distance in a hurry, I-5 would have been the way to go.

Jessica did not go into great detail about the initial route they took, but later she did say, “We didn't have our IDs, our driver's licenses, so we had to be very careful. We couldn't be pulled over. We drove all the way back to the same hotel in Oceanside, because no one will let you rent a room unless you have an ID. And so we went back to the same one, and I asked the woman there if she remembered me and if we could have a room, and she gave us one. I thought we would stay there for a couple of days, but the next morning Gabe said no.”

While they were in that area, they went to Escondido, where Gabe had lived with his dad. Jessica recalled, “We stopped at a pet store. Kalea had been through a lot. Gabe took her in there so she could hold a couple of animals. He thought about getting her a turtle. She cried when we left because they didn't have any turtles. And it was in Escondido that we pawned our rings.” By that, she meant their wedding rings.

A rational person would have kept a low profile at this point, but Gabe was anything but rational. With gun in hand, he robbed a convenience store to obtain more cash. In this robbery, he had the car away from any surveillance cameras and it could not be connected to him. Jessica did not go into the store while he was robbing the place. She recalled later, “Gabe said wait, and Kalea and I stayed in the car. And he left and returned and gave me a bunch of money. They were mostly in ones, but there was [a] fifty.”

In another irrational move, Gabe was about to lose that gun. Jessica recalled, “We had gone to a friend he used to know in the area and knocked on the door to see if he still lived there. He didn't, so we were driving around looking for a hotel. I couldn't find it and flipped a U. Gabe was drinking gin and got really drunk. He must have had the gun in the bag with the bottle, because he threw the bottle out the window, and the gun was gone after that.”

Actually, the gun that Gabe had tossed out the window was soon found by a San Diego policeman, even before the bodies of Robin and Bob were discovered in Oregon. The policeman took the gun into his department and it was kept in storage to see what might turn up about it. For a handgun just lying on the street like that in a rough neighborhood suggested it had been used in a crime scene somewhere.

 

 

Gabe, Jessica and Kalea could have made their way into Mexico at that point, since the bodies of Bob and Robin had not yet been found. But in their haste to flee the scene in Oregon, neither Gabe nor Jessica had taken their passports with them. Rather than chance a border crossing, they headed east on I-8. In some places along this route, Mexico was only a few miles away. In fact, past El Centro, the route practically skirted the border.

The family crossed the Colorado River and entered Arizona at Yuma. Later, Jessica spoke of going to a mall or a Walmart around there. Her recollection was hazy as to where exactly this occurred. But she did remember, “Kalea and I were still in our pajamas. We didn't have any clothes. We didn't have anything with us at all. We didn't have soap or anything. So we went to a mall and it was about nine-thirty in the morning and Gabe went in and got us clothes. And we got a swimming suit for Kalea, a car seat, hair spray, soap and a brush. And he came back and we got dressed. And from there, we headed for a friend of mine in Mesa, Arizona.”

But before visiting the friend in Mesa, Gabe had other business to take care of first. Jessica recalled, “He was driving around and it was a relatively new little shopping area. And we thought it was kind of ironic because there were a lot of police cars around, like they were on a break together. He drove around several times and circled and then stopped the car and got out. And when he came back, he gave me a whole bunch of cash and told me to count it. And there was like three hundred dollars.” By now, Gabe was so audacious or crazy, he robbed a business in an area where there were police cars in the parking lot.

After that, Jessica continued, “We called my friend's house from a grocery store, once we were in Mesa. Gabe told me to tell them we were coming from Louisiana and going to California. Going to San Diego. And that was our story. We were just traveling through and needed a place to stay for the night. And so we did, and Kalea was able to play with their daughter.”

Once again, Gabe should have kept his mouth shut. Instead, he rambled on about secret ops missions and working for the government. Jessica did nothing to keep him from talking about those kinds of things.

Jessica related, “The next morning, we got up and drove again, and there were lots of border patrols around, so we decided to head a little bit north.” This took them up I-17 to Flagstaff, Arizona. From there, they headed east on I-40, through Winslow by the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest.

“We were driving all day and into the night, and Gabe talked about heading up to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.” Just why he wanted to go there remained a mystery. “And we were heading toward Colorado, but then I realized a friend of mine I talked about was out of the way in Grand Junction, Colorado. That was back west. So we decided to head east. We drove all day and night, heading across New Mexico to Albuquerque.”

They drove past Gallup, the Malpais Badlands and through Grants. With a journey to Mount Rushmore now out of Gabe's plans, he next thought of a girl he knew from the Internet, with whom he played Perfect World. She lived in Michigan. With that in mind, it became their next destination, even though it was more than one thousand miles away.

 

 

During this time period, law enforcement was trying to figure out exactly where Gabe, Jessica and Kalea were, and where they were headed. What they didn't know was that Gabe and his family were now heading due east on I-40. This took them across the Pecos River and into the Panhandle of Texas. It was a bleak wintry landscape out on the plains, and the family lived on fast food and little sleep. In fact, Jessica remembered, “I was dragging at that time, and I fell asleep at the wheel. So I kept pulling over so that we wouldn't crash and die.”

The one thing that kept pushing them onward on this marathon trek was the knowledge of what was being left behind in Oregon. The road took them onward to Amarillo, Texas, and Oklahoma City. From there, they began to veer northeast on the Will Rogers Turnpike across Oklahoma. Then it was on I-44 to St. Louis, Missouri.

 

 

The murders made front-page news in Blackfoot, Idaho, where Jessica's parents lived. The
Blackfoot Morning News
initially reported a few details of the murders and described Gabriel Morris as a “dangerous double-homicide suspect.” It showed a photo of Gabe and Jessica and related that Jessica was a “material witness” in the case. The article stated that Gabe might have two handguns with him and should be considered armed and dangerous. Then it gave out phone numbers to call, including one to an Oregon State Police tip line.

What the
Morning News
didn't know yet was that law enforcement was so concerned that Gabe might be headed to Blackfoot, Idaho, to harm Bill and Rita Pope, they had that couple leave town. Only later would Bill relate, “When we got to our daughter's house in Boise, we ended up outside with officers around us with guns drawn because they had the home under surveillance and saw our car pull up with Blackfoot plates.” Gabe, of course, had borrowed one of Bill Pope's pickups and it had Blackfoot, Idaho, plates on it as well. After the cold-blooded murders of Robin Anstey and Bob Kennelly, the police were taking no chances.

The article went on to say that the Morrises might be heading to Seattle, Salem, Portland or San Diego, where they were known to have friends. Readers were cautioned not to try and confront this couple directly, but to call police immediately if the silver Ford Taurus they were known to be driving was spotted. And then it gave out the Oregon license plate number.

The next day's edition of the
Morning News
had little in the way of new information, except to state that Jessica had suddenly disappeared from her job at Bandon Bookkeeping. And DA Paul Frasier was quoted as saying,
“The Morrises were up to their eyebrows in credit card debt. They had returned to Oregon to declare bankruptcy.”

In a later local edition, Jessica's parents had given the newspaper a more recent photo of Jessica and Kalea. Rita Pope stated that she wanted people to know that Jessica looked different than the older photos being shown around the country.

Rita stated, “Jessica weighs forty pounds less now and her hair is cut about chin length. She doesn't wear makeup. She will probably be wearing glasses and she has a two-inch scar in the middle of her neck from a serious sledding accident when she was thirteen years old.”

The photo provided depicted a smiling Jessica, wearing glasses, and Kalea, who beamed for the camera. It was obviously taken in happier days for the family.

 

 

Authorities were giving out a little bit more information to the newspapers, and
The World
noted,
SHOOTING FUGITIVES HEAD EAST.
The article related that investigators had tracked the missing trio to Mesa, Arizona, via San Diego. DA Frasier added that the pattern of travel indicated that they might be heading for Louisiana or Florida, where Gabe had family.

Because of the nationwide search for Gabe, Jessica and Kalea,
America's Most Wanted
television program agreed to run a segment about them. Part of the reason was a fear of what Gabe might do to Jessica and Kalea if he felt backed into a corner. Rita Pope said, “I pray this will help them be found.”

A film crew from
America's Most Wanted
went out to Coos County, Oregon, and filmed a segment of the show. During the filming, DA Paul Frasier let it be known, “My biggest concern with the case right now is the safety of Jessica Morris and Kalea. I am very much concerned about what might happen if there is some confrontation at gunpoint, if the police should find them.”

And Frasier told a reporter that
America's Most Wanted
gave the case nationwide exposure, which was needed. “We'll take every little bit of help we can get,” he said. And he added about the Morrises' unknown journey that if they were trying to cross into Mexico, customs agents and border patrol agents had been given information about them. Then he related, “If they were trying to cross the border, they could have done so in San Diego.”

Based on perhaps a surveillance video from Mesa, Arizona, where Jessica was just sitting in the car, while Gabe went inside a convenience store, Frasier stated, “I do not believe, based on that, she is being held as a hostage.”

A later issue of the
Morning News
ran the headline
FAMILY ASKS WHERE IS FBI
? It noted that days had passed since the murders in Oregon and the Morrises had gone on the run. Rita Pope told a reporter, “We have never heard from the FBI, so our family contacted them last week and asked them what they were doing to find Kalea. We were really surprised when they told us they weren't involved.”

That news was stunning in light of the fact that law enforcement had proof that the Morrises had headed out of state. The FBI had much greater expertise and resources in cases like these that crossed state lines.

The Popes were also disappointed in the tips that had been generated by the recent segment about the case on
America's Most Wanted.
They worried that the Winter Olympics had drawn many viewers away from that program. By week two of the ordeal, they were no closer to knowing where Gabe, Jessica and Kalea were than when they'd first been told about the incident.

The Popes' contacting the FBI worked, however. Within a short period of time, that agency issued a federal arrest warrant for Gabriel Morris on charges of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. This was on top of the Oregon arrest warrant, already in effect.

Bill Pope told a reporter, “Gabe has succeeded in completely isolating Jess from us. We were very concerned about her and Kalea (before the murders). We had just talked to Robin, Gabe's mom, before all this happened.”

 

 

Rita Pope was sure that the murders had something to do with all of Gabe's financial problems. And she surmised he had talked Jessica into fleeing with him, and taking Kalea along, because he'd convinced Jessica that bad people would “get them” concerning those financial problems. Rita said, “I know that Jessica would do anything to protect her daughter. Kalea is just like Jessica. She is vivacious and fun. She was almost raised here with us. We have to get her back safely. We know that if we can find Kalea, we will find Jessica.”

Rita also let it be known that Jessica had an asthma problem and might be without an inhaler. For that reason, Rita thought that law enforcement agencies should keep tabs on hospitals and medical clinics, where Jessica might show up.

Because of the fear that Gabe might still be heading out to Idaho to harm various members of Jessica's family, all of those individuals were now under police protection. Bingham County sheriff Dave Johnson told a reporter, “At this point, we are going to continue checking the different residences. We will make sure that everything is sound. Our concern is still the same today as it was the first day. The situation hasn't changed.”