I had never listened to a man confess to murdering his pregnant wife and their three children.

I doubt I ever will again.

It is an experience I do not care to repeat.

I have written about murderers, but only a few times.

I’ve never interrogated one.

I’m not a detective.

And although I listened to Edward Paul Morris describe how he shot and stabbed his family, speaking at times with all the emotion of an accountant reciting figures from a spreadsheet, I wasn’t interviewing him.

He was not sitting across a desk from me.

He was, during the two hours and 18 minutes that I was listening to his voice, ensconced in a state prison.

Where, as he so richly deserves, he will spend the rest of his life.

Morris’ confession was preserved on a cassette tape.

A detail which, in our almost completely digital era, reveals the historical nature of this account.

That tape was made just a tad more than 20 years ago, on Jan. 4, 2003.

Morris was in Baker City when he confessed.

He was speaking to Sgt. Randy Crutcher of the Oregon State Police.

Just a few hours earlier, Crutcher, then 52 and a 29-year police veteran, could not have imagined that he would soon be immersed in the biggest crime story in Oregon. He was in fact recovering from a broken leg, still clad in a cast after a horse kicked him.

I was similarly shocked at how that winter weekend turned out.

With no healing fractures to worry about, I was walking to oblivion on a stairstep machine in my bedroom when the telephone rang around 1 p.m.

(A landline; I didn’t at the time own a cellphone. But if I had, it almost certainly would have been a flip-style.)

The caller was Linda Nelson, who sold classified ads for the Baker City Herald. Linda told me she had heard on a police scanner that Edward Morris, a 37-year-old fugitive from Portland suspected of killing his family a couple weeks earlier, had been arrested in the parking lot outside Baker City’s Rite Aid store on Campbell Street.

I have, two decades on, no recollection of what I was thinking in that moment as I stopped stepping, my forehead beaded with sweat.

But I drove straight to Rite Aid.

And it was quite quickly apparent that Linda was right.

She and another ad sales representative, Susie McMillen, were there.

Along with several police cars, enough yellow tape to wrap a couple of mummies, and a fair crowd of bystanders.

Morris was gone by then, of course, whisked off in a police car to his meeting with Crutcher.

I knew nothing of that, not then.

I busied myself interviewing Linda and Thom Martin, the siblings from Washington who reported Morris after seeing him driving his gray 1993 Dodge minivan on Interstate 84 near Durkee earlier in the day.

Later I drove to the Herald office, wrote the story and uploaded it to the paper’s website.

(This was the olden days, but not that olden.)

It was a strange day.

It could hardly have been otherwise, as this was an exceedingly rare circumstance when the biggest news story in Oregon happened in Baker City.

I daresay almost everyone in Oregon who was old enough to read knew the name Edward Morris as 2002 gave way to 2003.

Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 21, 2002, police, alerted by hunters who saw a human hand jutting from the snow beside a road in the Coast Range between Portland and Tillamook, had found the bodies of Renee Morris, 31, her two sons, Bryant, 10, and Jonathan, 4, and her daughter, Alexis, 8.

Police didn’t know if Renee’s husband and the children’s father, Edward Morris, was also dead, either a murder victim or a suicide.

He was actually in Nevada and Arizona for most of the time. When the Martins saw Morris driving his minivan he was, or so he told police, returning to Oregon to turn himself in.

But first, Morris told Crutcher during his confession, he intended to collect the bodies of his wife and children and bring them, the most macabre sort of proof imaginable, to the police station where he would surrender.

An inexplicable claim.

But then there’s nothing logical about a man, who by the accounts of his neighbors and friends and relatives was a doting husband and father, deciding to kill his entire family.

Morris’ claim about why he drove back to Oregon, however, wasn’t the strangest thing he said to Crutcher during that interview as the sun slunk toward the Elkhorns, early as it does so near the solstice.

Not even close to the strangest.

I feel qualified to judge because I listened to the whole thing.

It was a unique episode in my career, those few hours I spent with Crutcher, and his cassette tape player, in the OSP office in Baker City

That was nearly two years later, in December 2004.

The previous month, Morris, who pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in September 2004, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

With the legal proceedings concluded, Crutcher agreed to let me listen to the confession tape he obtained. That led to a three-part series the Herald published in late December 2004.

My reaction to what I heard was, of course, influenced by what had happened — most importantly, I knew that Morris was guilty.

But that in no way prepared me for the story that Morris told to Crutcher. I had no frame of reference for the killer’s enigmatic shift from complimenting the Subway sandwich the detective had provided — “absolutely marvelous” was Morris’ phrase, something I did not expect to hear during a description of murder — to him narrating, in what was at times nearly a monotone, how he told his wife, Renee, to close her eyes because he had a surprise for her and then shot her in the eye with a pellet gun.

The moment that I remember most vividly, though — perhaps because I asked Crutcher to pause the tape so I could ask him about what we had just heard — was when he asked Morris whether he was warm enough.

The interview to that point had been informal, even cordial, a discussion of mundane matters such as the sandwich.

Crutcher told me he was trying to build a rapport with Morris.

I was then, and remain, awed by Crutcher’s deft handling of a situation for which he was utterly unprepared.

In response to Crutcher’s question about the room temperature, Morris allowed that it was “a little chilly” and that he could zip up his coat.

“I took the liner out because I was in Phoenix, where I planned to go into town and kill people.”

The transition was almost as jarring as if Morris had suddenly shifted from speaking English to, say, Swahili.

Yet his tone didn’t change, an inoffensive, nondescript voice.

Crutcher acknowledged the dramatic contrast between the man speaking into the microphone, and the man who, 16 days earlier, destroyed his family.

“Morris is a man who, if you ran into him on the street and talked to him, I don’t think you’d have a clue that, one, he did this, and two, that he was capable of doing it,” Crutcher told me.

Later in the interview, when Morris detailed how he killed his wife and children, his demeanor briefly changed. He sobbed. His voice broke as he talked about Renee, how “beautiful” she was, and how wonderful his children were.

Crutcher told me he believed Morris’ remorse was genuine.

This, of course, is the ultimate mystery, the aspect of killers such as Morris that confounds and infuriates. How does a man kill those he loves, those who deserve to believe that he alone would do anything to protect them?

It is a question for a psychiatrist, not a journalist.

I rarely think about Edward Morris, even though listening to his confession was for me a singular event. He is not far away, an inmate at Snake River Correctional Institution near Ontario.

Occasionally, when I drive past the now vacant building on South Bridge Street, where Crutcher’s office was in 2004, I recall that December day.

I never had nightmares. The experience has not, as the saying goes, haunted me.

But unless age interferes and cruelly clears my mind, I suspect I will, to my last day, remember his voice, talking of guns and knives and blood.

And I will wonder why Renee and Bryant and Alexis and Jonathan, who should have had so many more decades to live, love and prosper, came to such a terrible end in a dark winter forest.