CREEDMOOR, N.C, - After a 14-month hunt that sent searchers trudging through pastures and peering into open wells, sheriff's deputies found the skeletal remains of Kelly Morris inside a 900-acre tract where dogs chase coyotes and foxes for sport.
Relief filled the hearts of Morris' family, who spent an anguished year chasing fruitless tips, knowing deep down that the 28-year-old mother of two was gone. They turned their attention this week to her husband, William Scott Morris, 35, now charged with her murder and possibly facing the death penalty. They thought of the two children the crime left motherless.
"I knew that this day would come eventually," said her mother, Wanda Hollis. "It's like a brick lifted off your chest. I'm glad I didn't have to wait five years, or 10 years."
Raleigh retiree Al Mignacci, who never met Morris, organized the search for her almost from the day deputies found her car in September 2008, her purse and cellular phone still inside, not far from her burned house. Even early this week, when deputies found Morris' bones, Mignacci was scouting new land to pore over with a core group of searchers, all determined to give the family some finality.
"It's been a long, tough struggle," he said, standing outside the sheriff's office, not long after Morris' husband exited in an orange jail jumpsuit. "A lot of kind searchers put in a lot of time."
Morris vanished after her stepmother hugged her goodbye the night of Sept. 3, 2008.
The next morning, firefighters were called to her house to subdue a raging fire, later determined to be arson. Morris had not shown up for work that day, but firefighters found no trace of her in the charred house. Scott Morris was also charged with that arson this week.
Morris' father, Pat Currin, began searching for his daughter, hollering at first, hoping his daughter would answer back. After three months, the hollering turned to a hunt for bones and tattered clothes as he roamed through cemeteries and pastures, looking into lakes. Early this week he was fixing a corn silo at his construction businesses. A sign that read "Praying for Kelly" was planted out front. He spoke through a year's worth of grief.
"Fourteen months," he said. "I really don't have much to say right now."
Mignacci, a retired IBM engineer, took the search's lead within a month of her disappearance. It wasn't his first missing-person chase. Two years before, he helped look for a woman thought to be abducted. A week earlier he was helping to find a 5-year-old girl killed and hidden under thick kudzu.
For Morris, Mignacci set up inside the workshop of Currin's construction company, plotting a 15-mile radius from her house, divvying up roads to other volunteers, highlighting all the combed-over territory in yellow.
When he heard the news that Morris' remains had been found, he recalled passing maybe a few hundred feet from where she was found. Inside, he said, sportsmen bring dogs to chase the foxes and coyotes that wander over roughly 900 acres. A 4-foot fence surrounds the property, and dogs can be heard howling inside from the road.
This week at least a dozen North Carolina Bureau of Investigation agents and sheriff's deputies were again walking that fence line, this time inside and lined up abreast with wooden staffs to poke through the leaves and underbrush.
Mignacci might not have looked inside, but Bobby Proctor did.
Kelly Morris had two children: Taylor, 8, by a previous relationship, and Haley, now 6 and in custody of Currin. Proctor is Taylor's uncle, and he recalled riding through the fox pen on a four-wheeler, hoping for a trace of her.
Proctor recalled suspicions about Scott Morris that have lasted since deputies named him a "person of interest" last year.
"He had his wife's car up for sale two weeks later," Proctor said. "Now if she was missing, what would he do that for?"
Family members guessed at motives, describing the couple as both-strong willed and hotheaded.
"You get two individuals who think they're right, and they're going to defend their right to keep thinking they're right," said Mark Currin, Kelly Morris' uncle.
But other than the knowledge that Scott Morris is charged with his wife's murder, speculation about exactly what happened that day is still all they have.
Sheriff Brindell Wilkins offered little information and refused to answer questions at a press conference.
Scott Morris hardly spoke at his first court appearance. His arrest report described the joker tattoo on his stomach and the scar on his right foot. As he was leaving, he looked directly at Hollis, the victim's mother. She said she wondered whether he was thinking that everything could have happened differently.
Outside the sheriff's department, Mignacci tried to comfort Morris' family members, and they thanked him for his time and kind words. For the seeker, as well as the mourners, the search was finally over.
(josh.Shaffer(at)newsobserver.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
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