BELLEVILLE, ILLINOIS — Thirty-five years after a 4-year-old girl died, authorities have charged her stepmother with first-degree murder and say she beat the child to death.
Mary Morgan, 56, was arrested Friday by police in Texas on an Illinois warrant just a day after St. Clair County authorities examined Michele LeAnn Morgan's exhumed remains.
The investigation was reopened after Michele's brother, who was 8 at the time of her death, claimed last year that he saw his sister bounce "like a rag doll" as their stepmother stamped on her stomach Aug. 9, 1961. The girl later threw up blood clots, he said.
Mary Morgan was being held on $1 million bond in the jail of Montgomery County, Texas. She has been living in West Columbia, Texas.
When Michele died in 1961, the family lived in a rural area near Mascoutah, Ill. Her father, Billy Morgan, who was stationed at nearby Scott Air Force Base at the time, has not been charged.
Military physicians originally ruled that Michele had been beaten to death. But medical records show that, in the last year of her life, she had been at the Scott Air Force Base hospital at least two dozen times for injuries and unexplained illnesses.
An autopsy at the time she died found two old rib fractures, a brain hemorrhage and wounds on her head and thigh. For reasons no one has explained, however, the investigation into Michele's death went nowhere.
After a 15-year delay, a civilian coroner ruled in 1976 that she had died of pneumonia.
