In December of 1981, Margy Palm was abducted at gunpoint by Stephen Morin. Over the course of eight hours, the Texas mom helped the serial killer find his religious faith, saved her own life, and convinced him to never kill again.
Ted Bundy, I have always wondered whether they were“You evil spirits, go now!” she shouted. She didn’t know it, but she was externalizing Morin’s criminality—separating him from his problem. “You will not keep destroying his life and destroying mine!” she continued. “Now leave my car!”
“He had a major connection to that song,” says Palm, recalling how Morin rewound the tape to play it again.Gunned down tenToday, “Ride Like the Wind” is a sensory time machine for Palm. It transports her back to that traumatic car ride with a murderous sociopath who spent eight hours shifting unpredictably between rage, spiritual curiosity, death threats, apparent religious awakening, and pop-rock-inspired ebullience. “I was so scared when he was singing,” she says.
“I became friends with a serial killer,” she tells me. The statement is incongruous with both our setting—the sunny back garden of Palm’s San Antonio home, where birds chirp and the honeysuckle-like scent of bougainvillea wafts over us—and the woman delivering it. Palm is a striking 72-year-old with a gentle Texas twang. She’s wearing jeans, a crisp button-down shirt, and tasteful gold jewelry.
After Palm had Noelle in 1977 and her son, Mills, in 1979, she became a devoted stay-at-home mother who relished arts and crafts activities with her kids and making clothing for them. She volunteered for the Junior League and fostered her faith. The night before her kidnapping, Palm read about Corrie ten Boom, a Holocaust survivor and activist who found healing in forgiving a Nazi guard stationed at the concentration camp where her sister was killed.
In 1976, after marrying his first wife, Morin was said to have committed a crime so disturbing that a lawyer who worked one of his trials is still haunted by it. Morin lured his sister’s 14-year-old friend back to his apartment under the pretense that his sister needed her help. Once there, Morin gagged the teen and sexually tortured her for six hours while the TV blared.
If he wasn’t assaulting and murdering women, he was recruiting them for other selfish purposes—like a woman in Buffalo whom he convinced, after only knowing her for two months, to liquidate her belongings, buy a van, and join him on a cross-country road trip. During a 1981 pit stop in Denver, Morin, using the alias Rich Clarke, picked up 23-year-old former teacher Sheila Whalen, strangled her to death, checked into a motel, turned on the TV, and deposited her nude body on the bed.
Hours later, after he’d listened to “Ride Like the Wind” in the Suburban a few times, Morin became polite . He was now apologizing for cursing in front of her and volunteering details about his personal life. He told Palm that he hated himself and that he was a fraud—that he had been married and had a son that he loved but abandoned. Before that, the emotion Morin projected most was hatred—a hatred for himself and others so deep, Morin claimed, that no god could ever rid him of it.
Palm had told Morin that ministers preached God’s love to inmates who’d done the same things he had and helped free them of their hatred. She also told Morin about Copeland, the televangelist, who was based in Fort Worth. Morin decided to go there and, in a grand gesture, lay down his gun on Copeland’s desk.with a cross and a green stone, and gave it to her.
Seeing Palm pull into the driveway, seemingly fine, Bart was initially furious with his wife for causing unwarranted worry. He confronted her: “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been thinking you’ve been with this rapist.”She opened her purse to show him, and the officers now huddling with them, Morin’s bullets. The police were shocked to see she had survived the encounter apparently unscathed. They told her and Bart how lucky they were.
Once inside her front door, Palm broke down and told Bart everything. She knew where Morin was: His bus would be in Austin for less than an hour before it left for Fort Worth at 3:30 a.m. It was now roughly 2:45. Bart insisted they call the cops: “If he kills anybody else and you had the opportunity to stop him and didn’t, it’s going to be on your conscience.” He phoned the San Antonio police and explained why Palm had lied. Then he called the local FBI office.
During the sentencing arguments, Reed says, Morin’s “whole defense” was that he had found Jesus. He quoted scripture while addressing the jury from behind a bulletproof barrier—“any man that be in Christ is a new creature and old things are passed away”—and brought his own Bible into the courtroom. One of his lawyers acknowledged that Morin had been “the scum of the earth” and “a murderer, kidnapper, rapist, and thief,” but claimed he had “undergone a transformation and is born-again.
In 1984, Morin was extradited to Golden, Colorado, where he stood trial for the 1981 murder of Sheila Whalen. Though Morin already faced two death sentences, the former Jefferson County deputy district attorney Cary Unkelbach says that Morin was such a clear threat as a repeat murderer-rapist that the state of Colorado decided to prosecute him in the event his sentences in Texas were overturned. “Death penalty cases are a lot of work, a lot of emotion, a lot of cost,” says Unkelbach.
“I hope you don’t die,” she told him. “I hope you live and can help other people the way God has helped you. But at the same time, if you do die, I believe you are going to be with the Lord.” In 1984, Morin floated the idea of trying to sell the book and movie rights to his life story. He fantasized that the project would “not be based on my crimes, but what…contributes on all levels to…an innocent child [going] from parent, school, et cetera, et cetera, to death row.” He went so far as to divide the hypothetical profits—allotting 20 percent for himself, 10 percent for Kenneth Copeland Ministries, and 5 percent “to my son’s trust fund for his education .
The woman who was raped and tortured by Morin when she was 14 doesn’t believe it either. She thinks that the “Christian” Morin was just another alias that Morin used, like “Robert Generoso” or “Robert Andrew Ireland.” “He was just reaching out for an excuse to get off the death penalty,” she says. Though she was a prosecuting witness in Morin’s first murder trial and still bears the emotional scars of Morin’s torture, she admits that she cried when she realized Morin would be put to death.
The imprints of the grislier side of her kidnapping are still evident in her everyday life, however. She drives a car in attention-grabbing fire engine red, and she only parks in well-lit spots near entrances. She rarely goes to big stores unless she has a companion with her. The Christmas season—and Christmas carols in particular, much like “Ride Like the Wind”—are activating, sending her down a terrifying memory spiral.
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