On the night of September 28, 1879, around 8 to 8:30 p.m. Esther and Charles Morris were going to bed in their home in Decatur, Michigan. Their maid of 5 years was upstairs sleeping at the time. During the night possibly between 9 to 10 p.m., someone knocked on the back door of their home.
Charles was the one to answer the door. He didn't answer the door with his gun and his family believed that he may have known the person. Soon Charles was shot twice. He was shot once in the neck and once in the Chest. Charles laid dead on the back porch.
Esther was in the sitting room and may have witnessed the murder. She was holding Charles Revolver at the time. She had dropped it when the murderer shot towards her and missed. She ran and tried to hide in the closet. Inside the closet, they shot her three times. Twice in the chest and once in the arm.
A woman who worked for the Morris's, Jennie Bull, was sleeping upstairs and knew nothing until the next morning. A more recent article from 1987 stated Jennie heard Charles arguing with a man, it scared her, but she didn't hear anything else. Older articles that came out at the time contradicted this and state that even though Jennie's room was directly above where Esther was murdered she heard nothing.
The next morning either Jennie or the farmhand who was coming to the house to work found Charles first. Some articles stated that Jennie found the bodies when she woke up that morning and waited for the farmhand and told him of what had happened. As the closest neighbors weren't actually that close.
Robbery wasn't a motive for the murder as nothing was stolen except for a horse the killer road off with. There were expensive things out in the open in the house that wasn't touched. The horse was found a few days later in South Bend, Indiana. The horse seemed to be jaded and exhausted. It was bearing an unrecognizable branding on the left rear flank.
Around 9:30 to 10 p.m., a young man returning home who lived close to the Morris's saw a man riding a horse very fast. He didn't think anything of it at the time till he heard of the murders the next day. He said the man riding the horse was wearing a strange hat.
The police tried to beat a former handyman of the Morris's into a confession. He never confessed and left the town due to the accusations and the way people treated him. There was no evidence of him killing the couple other than people's suspicions.
The crime was left unsolved and never will be.
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