Cory Deonn Morris was convicted in July 2005 of murdering five women in Phoenix, Arizona, between September 2002 and April 2003. A Maricopa County jury found him guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and decided that he should be put to death for each one. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the convictions and the death sentences in 2007, and his later challenges in the state courts failed. A federal challenge to the convictions and sentences was filed in 2018.
The five women were Barbara Codman, Shanteria Davis, Jade Velasquez, Sharon Noah and Julie Castillo. Morris told police he knew every one of them. He gave detectives two different explanations for their deaths, and both were rejected by the jury.
Little is known about Morris's early life. He was 24 when he was arrested in April 2003, according to the Associated Press. At the time he lived in Phoenix in a camper parked behind the house of an aunt and uncle, a federal court later summarized. The AP reported that he worked as a karaoke disc jockey at a bar, and that police arrested him there.
What is known of his background comes from the mitigation case his lawyers presented when the jury was deciding his sentence. According to a 2019 federal court order, that evidence dealt with the responsibilities he had been given as a young person, his difficulties with his appearance and personal hygiene, his wish to improve himself and his record as a worker. The jury found that this evidence was not substantial enough to call for leniency.
Barbara Codman was the first of the five women whose deaths came to light. The Associated Press gave her age as 46. She was found dead in Phoenix on September 11, 2002.
Shanteria Davis, 32, was found about a month later, the AP reported. Jade Velasquez was 34. Sharon Noah was found on March 29, 2003; the AP gave her first name as Sherry and her age as 37. Julie Castillo was the last; she was found on April 12, 2003. Her age has not been reported.
Beyond their names and, for four of them, their ages, little has been made public about the women, their families, their work or their lives before their deaths. Each of them was an adult, and each was known to Morris.
On April 12, 2003, Julie Castillo was found dead in Phoenix, and police were called. Over the previous six months, four other women had been found dead in the city, and detectives questioned Morris about all five.
The Arizona Supreme Court's staff summary of the case, prepared for the 2007 oral argument, says that the bodies of Codman, Davis, Velasquez and Noah were found between September 2002 and March 2003. Morris was arrested the day Castillo was found. The AP, reporting three days later, said he was being held on a bond of 1.3 million dollars, had no lawyer yet, and had declined an interview request.
Morris admitted knowing each of the five women, the federal court summarized in 2019. His first account was that each of them had died of a drug overdose while he was away. When the detective told him he did not believe this, he gave a second account, that each death had been an accident.
The Associated Press, citing court documents released on April 14, 2003, reported that Morris had described some of the deaths to police and had said he strangled the women. He told police he had strangled Codman, Davis, Velasquez, Noah and Castillo.
The same AP report said Morris had been arrested in connection with the deaths of six women. According to the documents, he told police about a sixth woman, Janice Irvin, 43. He did not say how she had died, the AP reported. The charges and the 2005 convictions covered only the five women named in the court records; Irvin was not one of them.
The physical evidence tied Morris to the women in several ways, according to the Arizona Supreme Court's 2007 case summary. Items belonging to the victims were found in his camper, and DNA evidence linked him to Davis, to Velasquez and to Noah.
The cases of Barbara Codman and Shanteria Davis raised a legal question that the defense pressed at trial and on appeal. Relying on the corpus delicti rule, Morris's lawyers moved to dismiss the Codman and Davis counts and to keep his statements about those two deaths away from the jury. The trial court denied the motion.
Morris was charged with five counts of first-degree murder and tried in Maricopa County Superior Court. Douglas Rayes, then a Superior Court judge, presided over the trial and over the later post-conviction proceedings, according to a 2019 federal court order. Rayes later became a federal district judge in Arizona.
The defense presented no evidence in the guilt phase. In July 2005 the jury found Morris guilty of all five counts of first-degree murder.
Before the trial, a jury commissioner had screened prospective jurors outside the presence of Morris and his lawyers. The defense later argued that this violated his right to be present at every critical stage of the case.
The same jury then heard an aggravation phase and a penalty phase. In the aggravation phase, the jury found two aggravating circumstances: that Morris had been convicted of other serious offenses, which were the five murders themselves, and that each of the murders was committed in an especially cruel manner and in a manner the statute treats as especially depraved, the federal court summarized.
In the penalty phase, the defense presented the mitigation evidence about his upbringing, his hygiene and appearance, his wish to better himself and his work record. The jury found that the mitigation was not sufficiently substantial to call for leniency, and that death was the appropriate sentence for each of the five murders.
The jury instructions on what a life sentence would mean were later found to be wrong. In the aggravation phase, a federal court noted in 2023, jurors were told that the court would impose either life without the possibility of parole or a life sentence with no release until at least 25 years had been served. In the penalty phase, they were told that a life sentence meant release only after 25 calendar years, or natural life, meaning the defendant would never be released. The federal court found that these instructions misstated the law; Morris was not eligible for parole. That error became the basis of his longest-running federal claim.
The case then went to the Arizona Supreme Court on direct appeal. Morris was represented on appeal by lawyers from the Maricopa County Legal Advocate's office; the State was represented by the Capital Litigation Section of the Arizona Attorney General's office. The court heard oral argument in April 2007, according to its staff summary.
The appeal raised four issues specific to the case: whether the trial court should have dismissed the Codman and Davis counts and excluded his statements about them under the corpus delicti rule; whether letting a jury commissioner prescreen jurors without Morris and his counsel present violated his right to be present; whether the prosecutor had committed misconduct that, taken together, affected the verdicts; and whether the trial court had abused its discretion by admitting photographs that the defense said were too graphic to show the jury. He also raised 14 challenges to Arizona's death penalty system, which the court rejected.
The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the five death sentences in 2007, in State v. Morris, 215 Ariz. 324.
Morris then sought post-conviction relief in the Maricopa County Superior Court. His petition argued that his trial and appellate lawyers had been ineffective, raised a claim based on a change in the law, and repeated eleven claims from the direct appeal, the federal court later summarized.
The court granted an evidentiary hearing on one question: whether his trial lawyers should have retained additional experts to answer a prosecution theory, offered in the aggravation case, about the circumstances of the deaths. After a six-day hearing, the court dismissed the petition. It found that trial counsel had not performed deficiently by failing to obtain such expert testimony, and that Morris had not been prejudiced. The Arizona Supreme Court denied review without comment on March 14, 2017.
On May 30, 2017, Morris gave notice in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona that he would seek a writ of habeas corpus. His petition, filed on February 20, 2018, raised 49 claims. The State answered on May 22, 2018, and Morris replied on August 13, 2018.
Because Judge Rayes, by then a colleague on the federal bench, had presided over the trial and the post-conviction case, the court gave notice of the connection. Morris asked the assigned judge to step aside, arguing that a reasonable person would doubt the judge's ability to review a colleague's rulings. On February 27, 2019, the court refused, finding that reviewing a colleague's state-court rulings was common and that the motion rested on speculation.
Morris then sought to add five claims about his mental competence: that he had been tried and sentenced while incompetent, that his trial, appellate and post-conviction lawyers had failed to raise the issue, and that he was incompetent to pursue the federal case itself. On April 25, 2019, the court denied the request as futile. It held that the new claims did not relate back to the original petition, which had given no notice of a competence issue. The court observed that mental illness, including delusions, does not necessarily mean a person is incompetent, that there is no constitutional right to counsel in state post-conviction proceedings, and that a claim about competence during the federal case did not challenge the lawfulness of his detention. In the same order it refused to strike six declarations from trial jurors filed by the defense, but said it would disregard the parts that described the jurors' own reactions to the evidence, the prosecutor and defense counsel, since those matters are shielded from inquiry.
The longest strand of the federal case concerned the jury's instructions on parole. Claim 13 of the petition argued that Morris had been sentenced by a jury that was not correctly told he would never be eligible for parole, contrary to the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Simmons v. South Carolina (1994) and Lynch v. Arizona (2016).
In September 2022 the parties asked the court to pause the case while the Supreme Court decided Cruz v. Arizona, which concerned whether Arizona prisoners could raise such claims in the state courts. On September 15, 2022, the court granted the unopposed stay. The Supreme Court decided Cruz on February 22, 2023.
On May 8, 2023, Morris asked the federal court to hold his petition while he returned to state court to pursue the parole claims, and to appoint his federal lawyers for that purpose. On June 28, 2023, the court denied the request. It found that the parole part of Claim 13 was plainly meritless under the Arizona Supreme Court's 2018 decision in State v. Bush, because Morris had not asked for a parole-ineligibility instruction and had not been prevented from telling the jury about it. It found that the related claims against his trial and appellate lawyers could no longer be raised in the state courts and were procedurally defaulted. The court lifted the stay and took the petition under advisement.
Morris asked the court to reconsider after the Arizona Supreme Court decided State v. Anderson on May 2, 2024. On June 20, 2024, the court denied that motion. It accepted that Morris had acted promptly and that the Anderson decision changed Arizona's rules on precluded claims, but found that the change did not help him, because his lawyers in the state post-conviction case should have recognized the parole issue by 2015, and no later than the Lynch decision in 2016. In that order the court described Morris as an Arizona death row prisoner and substituted Ryan Thornell, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, as the respondent.
Morris's two accounts to the police, that the women died of overdoses and then that each death was an accident, were placed before the jury, which convicted him of first-degree murder on all five counts.
The number of women involved has been reported differently. The AP reported in April 2003 that he was arrested in connection with six deaths and had spoken to police about a sixth woman, Janice Irvin. He was charged with and convicted of five murders; Irvin's death was not among the counts.
The fourth victim's first name appears as Sharon in the court records and as Sherry in the 2003 AP report.
The motive was never the subject of a finding beyond the aggravating circumstances.
September 11, 2002: Barbara Codman, 46, is found dead in Phoenix.
About October 2002: Shanteria Davis, 32, is found dead in Phoenix, about a month after Codman (AP).
Between October 2002 and March 2003: Jade Velasquez, 34, is found dead in Phoenix.
March 29, 2003: Sharon Noah is found dead in Phoenix.
April 12, 2003: Julie Castillo is found dead; Morris is arrested at the bar where he worked.
April 14, 2003: Court documents describing his statements to police are released (AP).
July 2005: A Maricopa County jury convicts Morris of five counts of first-degree murder and sentences him to death on each.
April 2007: The Arizona Supreme Court hears oral argument on his automatic appeal.
2007: The Arizona Supreme Court affirms the convictions and death sentences.
March 14, 2017: After a six-day evidentiary hearing and dismissal of his post-conviction petition, the Arizona Supreme Court denies review.
May 30, 2017: He gives notice of a federal habeas petition.
February 20, 2018: The federal petition, with 49 claims, is filed.
February 27, 2019: The federal court denies his motion for recusal.
April 25, 2019: The court denies his request to add competence claims.
September 15, 2022: The court stays the case pending Cruz v. Arizona.
February 22, 2023: The Supreme Court decides Cruz v. Arizona.
June 28, 2023: The federal court denies a stay to return to state court and rejects the parole part of Claim 13.
June 20, 2024: The court denies reconsideration; the habeas petition remains under advisement.