Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised
Teenage sweethearts. A crumbling marriage. A shed full of horrors.
Just days before Christmas, 34-year-old Tiffany Morrison vanished from the home she shared with her husband and children. What followed was a terrifying discovery in the backyard shed — and a confession that shocked even the detectives on the case.
december 2023
just before christmas. it’s a time of friendship and giving.
a time to be with your family.
but for one couple in east liverpool, Ohio, this would be the christmas of nightmares.
34 year old tiffany morrison was last seen on december 18
by her mother in law who doted on her.
tifffany was a real part of the family,
but her initially dreamlike marriage , and her relationship with her husband himself was crumbling with devastating consequences.
he said tiffany hadn”t been seen for days and the house in which she, her husband ,and his family had built a life together was now a crime scene.
what happened to tiffany?
how had this tight-knit fallen apart, and why?
teenage sweetharts, multiple affairs and a shed full of horrors.
east liverpool , ohio is a small city . mostly suburban .once famed for its pottery industry ,more recently it’s been subject of environmental controversy due a local toxic waste incinerator.
this is the kind of problem that can unite a community, murder , on the other hand ,can fracture a community apart.
the morrison were long -standing members of this community, christopher morrison was 33. tiffany was 34 .
they ‘d been toghether since they were both 18,both of their social media pages were full happy photos of each other .
they ran a business together, essential needs , which was a massage parlor in neighboring kennedy, pensylvvania.
they were both licensed massage therapists and they’d trained together, they ‘d envision their whole future together.
they had three children ,aged 14,13 and 10.
they got married when tiffany was pregnant with the youngest child their son landon.
21st march 2013
on march 21 st, tiffany’s parents were seperated and her mom lived in mississippi.
as a result she was much closer to christopher’s family and to her own.
2 years earler , in 2021 ,maybe feeling the efinancial pressures of running a small business together,she and christopher had moved in with christopher’s parents.
they helped with child care and generally tried to ease any stresses that came with being parents and entrepreneurs at the same time.
a year earlier ,however , in 2022 christopher’s father died.
this left kay alone,managing an increasingly unruly household with three kids and two working parents.
she and tiffany were very cloes. she last saw tiffany on the evening of monday ,december 18th.
tiffany went into her room, she and christpher shared to take a shower and kay never saw her beloved daughter in law again.
two days later, early in the morning on december 20th the colombia county sheriff’s office revelead a chilling 911 call.
telling them that there was a dead body in a house on shady side road, that house was case’s house.the house where christopher and tiffany lived with their children in a hectic househould.
tiffany’s absence had gone unremarked on . it was the christmas period.the kids were busy with school,their friends and their hobbies.
and kay had multiple grandchildren to get gifts for so no one had notice that tiffany wasn’t around.
but someone knew that something awful had happened in that house on that night of december 18th.
that someone was randy slager , a lifelong friend of christophers
he came to the police station with his father,who’d urged him to take what he knew to the police.
randy said that christopher had picked him up and brought him to his house on the eveneing 17th december.
he later corrected this and said he’d got the date wrong . it was actually december 18th.
the same night that tiffany was last seen . he said that night christopher took him down into the basement of the house.
kat and the kids were all upstairs at the time.
christopher showed randy a bullet hole in the chower area clean of blood.
he said he’d shot tiffany, and he showed randy a photo of tiffany on his phone in it, tiffany had been shot in the face.
chrisopher wanted help with disposing of her body ,which he had covered in a tarp and rolled up in a carpet.
initially randy refused, but christopher had a gun.
christopher told him he’d kill everyone in the house including his three juvenile children, if randy called the police.
so , randy helped him take tiffany’s body up the stairs and out into christopher’s jeep , then into the shed.
at this point, it was around 3:00 am ,the police then looked into tiffany’s cell records.
they showed that the last text messages she’d sent had been at 6:50 pm on december 18th.
since then , she’d received 13 further texts and not responded to any of them.
randy ‘s story wasn’t some hoax.
whatever the circumstances, it seemed clear that something had happened to tiffany that night.
so, thay got a search warrant for the house ,they had randy called christopher to pick him up to make sure he would’t be in the house at the time .
armed and dangerous.
his threats to kill his childrend and his mother were at forefront of their minds.
so the police detained him in a traffic stop first at 6:10 pm on the december 20th.
he had a handgun and a switchblad on him when they stopped him – again this matched randy’s story.
they decided to take him back to the police station.
they sat christopher down and interviewed him at first,he didn’t seem to know what this was all about.
he dd , however ,sspect it was abput tiffany.
he said they’d been having problems.
they were on the brink of divorce , it seemed , and tiffany had been seeing someone else.
christopher was jealous and refused to give her the car to drive to see her boygfriend, they argued and he kicked her out of the jeep.
keeping her phone, or so he said.
he claimed this had been only the previous night so december 19th when he’d kicked her out of the car , he drowe around a while with randy.
he had her phone ,but he expected her to contact him anyway , this wasn’t the first time she’d taken off.
apparently, she wanted more financial independence, which was going to be trickt since she and christopher ran a buisness together and lived with christopher’s mom.
this according to christopher was when he started suspect that tiffany was seeing someone else.
he seemed frightened that tiffany would leave without even saying goodbye.
the first time she’d done this , the previous week , he taken the kids to kalahari in the car with them ,he asked them to expresss their feelings about their mom.
it wasn’t only jealousy and financial insecurity driving a wedge between the couple.
there was the division of responsibilities in the house as well.
so, they were serioulsy talking divorce.
they’d beem toghether since they were 18.
it was understandable that they were growing apart after so many years married.
they hardly knew who they were without each other but christopher claimed that he was trying to make the marriage work….
then on december 16th , a man called jake hill message christopher on facebook.
he sent christopher explicit images of the two of them together.
tiffany and jake, that is . he sent the messages and then unsent them , so christopher apparenlty called him.
jake was theman tiffany had been seeing outside of her marriage.
they squared up over the phone and over text.
jake told christopher”go get a job and support your family cown”among christopher’s respondses,he said ” i love this for court though”
presumably , he meant divorce court.
he also said , ” tell me when and where i’ll come to you “
this was a threat. he then called tiffany. he was furious.
but according to christopher, they managed to reconcile enough that they spent the night toghether.
and in the morning, he started looking for new job opportunities in real esate to turn their fortunes around.
but things still weren’t right.
on december 19th, according to christopher,he confronted her again convinced she was still texting jake.
he took to pleading with her not to peave immediately.
when this didn’t work , he resorted to violence.
he was worried he’d hit her head,but he said she seemed fine,just certain that she wanted to leave him.
and he agreed to drive her up to jake’s
this was when they’d had an argument in the jeep and he forced her out into the snow.
according to christopher ,this was the last time he’d seen her.
but given what they’d heard from randy, the cops wanted to know more about the state of their marriage.
he said he’d talked to a divorce lawyer.
divorce was going to be espensive and they were already struggling for their finances.
tiffany had taken a second job in a factory, and christopher was apparently considering this real estate thing.
pressure on the couple had been mounting, and it wasn’t surprising that thay’d they’d reached a breaking point.
but most couples when they reach a breaking point just split up and it can be messey ,but it’s not usually violent.
christopher was pretending he was a different kind of husband.
the kind who’d be upset,not violently furious at his wife’s lack of interest in their life together.
he admitted to hitting her ,but nothing else.
the problem was , back at his house , the cops were executing a search that showed the exact opposite to be true.
inside his house , they found trash bags, a loose piece og shower surrounded with a bullet hole in it.
and matching bullet behind the the shower stall, and a suspiciosly red stain on the floor.
these were all the hallmarks of a murder , just missing the body.
so far , everything matched what randy had told them,not what christopher had claimed .
and in the shed,just like randy said , they found tiffany’s body, or rather they found a rug rolled up around several black trash bags inside a clear tarpolin.
the contents of those trash bags were the stuff of nightmares….
christopher had used a saw to dismember his wife.
there were six seperate trash bags containing her body parts.
she’d been killed by a gunshot wound to the face,just as randy had described it.
the gun hadn’t been more than 3 feet from her at the time.
christopher morrison had killed his wife and now he was sitting in the police station lying about it.
the cops took their findings to him in a second interview that same evening.it was getting late and he was undoubtedly tired under the mental stress from putting up such a facade.
this is when suspects are most likely to slip up, so the investigators first repeated the same questions.
he suggested that if she was with anyone she’d be with jake, her boyfriend . maybe she was trying to throw suspicion on a different suspect.
but it didn’t matter.
they used the classicainterview strategy, telling him that this was his chance to get his perspective out there , to tell his side of the story, but he refused.
he said he just wanted to talk to his kids .
the same kids, according to randy, he threatened to kill only two nights earlier.
but the cops didn’t need him to tell them what had happened.
the crime scene spole for itself .they continued to search it for more evidence over the next few days.
on december 29th, after christmas been and gone.
with chrisopher in jail..
they came back ans spoke to his mom , kay.
many killer momms believe in their children’s innocence.
they feel compelled to.
but kay who’d been just as close to tiffany as she was to christopher , if not more so, had no question about her son’s guilt.
she was upset less with the constant interviews and warrants being served on her hoouse , and more that her son had done this in the first place.
after all , she’d taken him and his family into her house to help them save money.
and he’d committed a heinous crime in her own four walls, tearing that family apart forever.
she wasn’t trying to destroy evidence . she was trying to move on from what her son had done as fast as possible.
christopher had been calling her from jail,but she didn’t want to talk to him.
kay clearly had no interest in covering up for her son.
in january , she agreed to be interviewed to establish more of a timeline for the murder.
she recalled seeing tiffany for the last time in the evening on monday , december 18th and christopher behaving strangely.
he seemed even worse on tuesday, the day after he’d killed tiffany.
had she come across him trying to destroy the evidence of what he’d done,it seemed likely.
kay also offered some more background on their marriage.
she suggested that the interaction with jake hill had driven christopher over the edge, and he wasn’t blameless in the marriage either.
the affair was with a women called kayla ligouri, it happened around 2 years across 2019 and 2020.
so 3 years earlier , a long time ago. and she had ong since quit working with christopher and tiffany.
but this was an old wound that had never fully closed…
maybe tifanny’s own affair was partly her own way of getting back at him and he responded to it rashly and unhealthily.
totally inappropriately, he sent the explicit images to their teenage son, perhaps trying to drive a wedge between the kids and their mom.
kay also revealed that christopher had a violent past.
when he was 14, he and his friends tied up a dog and shot it.
kay later found the corpse on her property.
around the same time , he stabbed another kid in the arm.
she ended up sending him to a treatment center to deal with his issues with anger andviolence,but apparently that didn’t work.
and tiffany , who’d been with him since they were 18, still couldn’t have known how violently her affair would end.
to really understand the relantionship dynamics at play here , there was one last person to talk to, jake hill himself.
he was working at a factory in pennsylvania in the summer of 2023 when he met tiffany, who’d taken a second job there to top up her family’s income.
they hit it off immediately, but tiffany was hesitant,despite her evident fear of how christopher would react.
she became close to jake.
in november, only a months before her death,she began a romantic relationship with him , for those first few weeks , tiffany felt like she’d escaped the stresses of her fracturing marriage until just a week before her killing.
when her daughter found her text messages to jake.
in these messages, they were discussing the way christopher treated her.
that her daughter had seen these messages created an urgency in their relationship that hadn’t been there before.
tiffany had to chose. christopher,the man she oved f0r 16 years.
or jake, who offered her something new and exciting and escape from her controlling husband.
when she left the house for 5 days the week before the murder, she stayed with jake.
she told him she wanted to leave christopher and live with him instead.
on december 16th , she was driving back to jacke’s after work when she received a call from her daughter.
who wanted to have a movie night with her .
this was enough to sway her decision,m ayby she felt like she was betraying her family .
maybe the stress of keeping the affair from christopher was to much .she agread to come home and sent jake a video to break up with him.
jack didn’t respnd well to tiffany’s choice.
he started drinking and that night he sent christopher the explicit images over facebook.
the ensuing fight upset tiffany deepley.
she didn’t want to be with either of them and she started talking about leaving christopher and getting her own apartment.
but both of them , tiffany and jake ,were scared .christopher had threatened jake and hit tiffany
jake’s last contact with tiffany was on sunday, december 17 th they fought again over text , and he would never hear from her again ,she didn’t come into work on december 19th ,
and when he contacted her father , he hadn’t heard from her either.
little did any of them know….that she was already dead and if christopher had his way, he would have killed jake ,too.
in the days around tiffany’s death ,jake bought a gun for his own protection .
christopher had made a facebook post asking his friends for help finding jake.
jake might have been lucky that christopher didn’t find him .
tiffany, who tried her best to assert her independence in jher marriage and when that didn’t work, escape it ,wasn’t so lucky at all….
christopher was charged with her murder and during the legal proceedings, including a suppression hearing his defense council wanted to use…
to throw out the recordings of his arrest.
he took the stand and incriminated himself.
christopher ,making a fatal error for his case, sait that it was a stressor.
during his interview with the police, he’d kept on saying that he didn’t know were tiffany was.
but this suggested he did know, and the prosecutor zoned in on it .
he said ” so you knew where she was . you shot her , shopped her up and left her in the shed .”
christopher’s response, “yes”.
following this catastrophic mistake ,he had a little choice but to plead guilty.
so on december 17th,2024, he was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole for a minimum of 25 years.
at the sentence hearing ,the judge had cold words for him .
you called her a ‘bad mom’ how dare you? and then you stand up here today and read as someone who was in love wtih this person .is that how you treat people you love? i think the state nailed it. you’re a narcississt . it’s only about you”
today ,he remains in prison in ohio while his and tiffany’s kids are being raised by their grandparents.
deprived of both mother and father by a brutal , senseless crime.
christopher, when pleading guilty , admitted that he’d killed her to stop her from divorcing him .
he couldn’t stand the idea of her with jake or her with anyone.
he didn’t see her as her own person .
if he couldn’t have her , he believed that no one could.
mr morrison ,your’e charged with murder and unclassified misdemeanor .this has different penalties than what i’ve stated to the group . the penalties with this charge has an indefinite prison term of 15 years to life , maximum fine of $15, 000…..