Wife admits murder in polygamy case

Quietly in a Norristown courtroom yesterday, Myra Morton admitted for the first time that she shot her handyman-turned-millionaire husband in his sleep.

Jereleigh "Seddik" Morton, 47, died in his Whitpain Township mansion with two bullets in his face Aug. 5, the morning he was to fly to Morocco and into the arms of Zahra Toural, the 35-year-old other wife he had met online and planned to impregnate. Myra Morton, 47 at the time, could no longer bear children.

In 27 years of marriage she had gone from being a handyman's wife to a millionairess scorned, and she now faces decades in prison for her soft-spoken admission of guilt to third-degree murder. The plea reversed her previous claims to investigators that her husband had been slain by an intruder.

No explanation for her changed story came in yesterday morning's court appearance.

"We had said all along that this was a murder committed by her," Assistant District Attorney Steven Latzer said after the hearing. "By entering her plea, she confirmed it."

In exchange for the guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to ask that her minimum prison sentence be no more than 10 years.

She entered an open plea, leaving Montgomery County Court Judge William R. Carpenter with a range of sentencing possibilities up to 40 years when he sends Morton to a state prison this summer.

She had no previous criminal history, though investigators said she had consented to her husband's second marriage in March 2007. Polygamy is illegal in the United States, but it is practiced by some Muslims in other countries under a doctrine requiring the first wife's approval.

Court documents portray the currently jailed Myra Morton as uneasy with her place in her husband's life and future plans after becoming a co-wife, as well as with the prospect of sharing the family's wealth with the new spouse.

The Mortons' millions, which had enabled Jereleigh Morton to become a land developer instead of a fix-it man, originated in a malpractice settlement after their teenage daughter died of a misdiagnosed intestinal disease.

According to what Toural told investigators, Jereleigh Morton had answered his first wife's complaints with a curt rejoinder:

"If you don't like polygamy, get a divorce."

She demurred that request, but she bought a $2,200 motor-vehicle tracking device and wrote to the U.S. State Department asking that Toural be barred from coming to America.

Then, hours before her husband was to cross the Atlantic Ocean to see the new wife, the original one picked up his .40-caliber Glock pistol and trained it on him as he slept.

Last month, the second wife, Toural, filed a defamation lawsuit against Myra Morton for ruining her reputation in Morocco. That case is pending in a Philadelphia federal court.