OILFIELD WORKER CONVICTED OF KILLING LIBERTY WOMAN

By Steve Olafson

LIBERTY Led away in shackles after being declared guilty of capital
murder Thursday, Robert Brice Morrow predicted a jury will sentence him to
death.

"This is Liberty County. You can expect it," he said.

Jurors deliberated an hour and 15 minutes before finding the 39yearold
oilfield worker guilty of murdering Myra Elisabeth "Lisa" Allison on April
3, 1996. The 21yearold college student was beaten and slashed after being
abducted from a local car wash.

The jury of six men and six women will hear testimony in the punishment
phase of the case Monday. Prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty.

Morrow, a high school dropout and crack cocaine user with a criminal record
in three states, expected the verdict.

Steve Hebert, one of Morrow's two attorneys, said he told his client to
expect bad news after the jury sent word that it had reached a quick decision.

Morrow showed little reaction at the verdict while Allison family members
wept and hugged.

"We're pleased with the jury's decision. I'll have more to say after the
punishment phase," said Mike Allison, the victim's father.

The murder investigation and subsequent trial dominated much of the public
discourse during the past year in Liberty, a quiet town of 8,000 that
serves as the county seat.

The victim, a University of NevadaLas Vegas student who was studying hotel
management, came from a prominent family that established Liberty's only
funeral home in 1947.

Her father, a certified public accountant, had served on the City Council
and her mother is a schoolteacher.

Morrow's trial, which included seamy details of Liberty County's crack
cocaine subculture, drew packed courtrooms in the final days of the
twoweek proceeding.

Morrow, who briefly served as his own attorney after firing his lawyers but
then asked that they be reinstated, gambled by deciding to testify in the
final two days of his trial.

He was battered during a fourhour cross examination, but insisted he was a
victim of circumstance and never had met the murder victim, whose body was
found in the Trinity River the day after she disappeared.

Morrow claimed his only mistake was taking up with a trio of crack cocaine
users who were using the Allison family's 1988 Oldsmobile that the victim
had taken to a car wash, where she was abducted.

Morrow asserted that he was shot in the leg during a fight over a crack
pipe while he was in the car, but that he never saw Allison the night she
was killed.

His attorneys offered little substantive testimony to support his story.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, presented a witness who told the jury that a man
matching Morrow's description accosted Allison at the car wash.

Other state witnesses said Morrow had spoken of plans to victimize lone
women at the car wash and later talked in jail of the actual murder.

DNA blood evidence, moreover, tied Morrow to the Oldsmobile, which was
partially reconstructed and placed in the courtroom as one of the state's
198 exhibits.

He maintained, however, that his blood was in the car because of his injury
during the fight over the crack pipe, not because of a struggle with Allison.

At one point during deliberations Thursday, the jury went into the
courtroom and spent about 10 minutes examining the car's interior, where
prosecutors had placed tape to mark spots where blood stains were found.

District Attorney Mike Little, during his summation, moved some members of
the jury and the courtroom gallery to tears while he took a handkerchief
from his pocket to wipe his own eyes.

"He turned that beautiful young woman into this," he said, showing the jury
closeup photos of the woman's battered face. "This is his creation."

Little called Morrow a liar and a coward.

But lead defense attorney Gary Bunyard said some of the state's witnesses,
many of them crack cocaine users with criminal records, lacked credibility.

"We're talking about a series of individuals who are just flat in a
different world than John Q. Public," Bunyard said. "We're talking about
individuals who would sell out their mother for the next hit of cocaine."

Morrow remained defiant after the verdict.

As he was led to a van that would take him back to jail, where he has been
in custody since July 1996, he complained that some testimony had been kept
from the jury.

"They covered this case up," he said.

Morrow was referring to testimony from the stepdaughter of presiding state
District Judge W.G. "Dub" Woods and her former husband, Houston lawyer
David S. Prince.

The stepdaughter, Charlotte Haidusek, testified with the jury out of the
courtroom that Prince told her that two hit men he had hired to kill her
had mistakenly killed the wrong woman apparently Lisa Allison.

Haidusek also testified that Prince later told her he was only joking.

Prosecutors objected to the testimony and Judge Woods ruled it inadmissible
in Morrow's trial.

Morrow's aunt, 52yearold Marylou Miles, also complained that the
smalltown judicial system had resulted in an unfair verdict and that her
nephew's lawyers were ineffective. "This should have been a Houston case
something out of town," she said.

A member of the Allison family, meanwhile, expressed relief that those
closest to Lisa Allison would soon see an end to the murder case.

"I think this is the first time in well over a year they'll get some sleep
tonight," said Liberty County Constable Tim Allison, who was the victim's
cousin.