Missouri Woman Convicted of Murdering Third Husband to Speak in Snapped: Behind Bars

Tausha Morton was a woman from Columbia, Missouri, a town located about about 125 miles each way between St. Louis and Kansas City. By 30, she’d already been married five times — including twice to Kemp for marriages three and four — before she and her daughter moved to Marianna, Florida, about an hour from the state’s capital.

In 2007, the then-31-year-old worked at a daycare center where she met her future boyfriend, Dewayne Barrentine, and his young son. Tausha Morton and her 4-year-old daughter moved in with the pair within one month, as featured in Charmed to Death.

Months into the relationship, Barrentine and his relatives suspected Tausha Morton of being a pathological liar. He took to the internet to learn more about his live-in girlfriend, piecing together that she was married to Kemp, then listed as a missing person out of Boone County, Missouri.

Barrentine snuck onto Tausha Morton’s MySpace account and discovered several of Kemp’s relatives reached out, inquiring about the ex-husband’s whereabouts. Another one of Tausha Morton’s ex-boyfriends also told Barrentine that Fields drunkenly confessed to having her fifth husband, Gregory Morton, murder Kemp.

Mitch Kemp was a carpet installer from Mexico, Missouri, about 40 miles northeast of Columbia, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune. His parents ran the D and D Décor business out of Mexico, where Kemp picked up the trade, his mother, Carol Owen, told the Missouri outlet.

“He could do anything,” said the mother. “He was just a master of all trades.”

Kemp and Tausha Morton married twice and shared a daughter, Lexie Kemp, born in 2002.

The pair broke things off for good in 2003, and only months after taking Lexie and moving out the home, Tausha Morton met and married 40-year-old Missourian Greg Morton.

According to Boone County Detective Tim O’Sullivan, it had been “numerous months” since relatives last saw then-39-year-old Kemp before they reported him missing at the end of 2004. There was no immediate cause for alarm since the missing man had several outstanding warrants out for his arrest on theft-related charges, and some believed he'd been on the lam, as covered in the Oxygen series.

"About six months after he was missing, when he didn't call me on my birthday and didn't call me on Christmas, I knew something was wrong," Owen continued to the Tribune.

Kemp’s mother and stepfather said the last time they saw Kemp was to drop him off at a rural farm on Deer Park Road near the Three Creeks Conservation Area in Columbia, where Tausha Morton and Greg Morton then lived.

In 2008, after digging into Tausha Morton’s past, Florida boyfriend Dewayne Barrentine contacted Marianna authorities to explain his suspicions that Tausha Morton could be behind Kemp’s 2004 disappearance. By then, 32-year-old Tausha Morton and her daughter were living with a new boyfriend in Alabama, where detectives found her and questioned her.

Tausha Morton initially claimed to know nothing about Kemp’s disappearance, but later admitted that “Greg killed Mitch,” as seen in a taped interrogation published by Charmed to Death. She said Lexie was at school when Kemp and Greg Morton “got in a confrontation,” further accusing Morton of threatening to kill her if she uttered a word.

“If he knows that I told you, he will take me and my baby’s life, you hear me?” she told detectives.

Tausha Morton changed her story several more times. At one point, she said Greg Morton killed Kemp because he learned Tausha Morton and Kemp were having an affair. However, Greg Morton later told authorities that Tausha Morton accused Kemp of sexually abusing her and Lexie, a theory detectives didn’t buy into.

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Eventually, authorities flew Fields from Alabama to Missouri, where she led them to the shallow grave on Greg Morton’s farm four years after Kemp’s disappearance. A postmortem examination revealed the victim had been shot multiple times.

Evidence also showed Tausha Morton had spit on and kicked Kemp shortly before he died, according to NBC Jefferson City affiliate KRCG.

When authorities arrested Fields in late 2008, she was dating and living with a sheriff’s deputy in Galveston County, Texas, according to The Columbia Daily Tribune.

Greg Morton confessed to shooting Kemp to death, and as part of a plea deal with Boone County prosecutors, he testified against Tausha Morton. Detectives and prosecutors stated Tausha Morton wanted Kemp dead because she wanted to have sole custody of their daughter.

As part of his plea deal, Greg Morton pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 years in prison. Prosecutors painted him as a man who believed the lies told by Fields that the victim was sexually abusive.

Greg Morton apologized for his actions, something Kemp’s sister, Chari Batye, said made “the biggest difference in the world.” He continues to serve his sentence at the Moberly Correctional Center in Moberly, Missouri, according to records reviewed by Oxygen.com.

A jury found Tausha Morton guilty of first-degree murder in 2010, and she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. She has since tried and failed to have her sentence reduced, according to The Columbia Daily Tribune.

She continues to serve a life sentence in Chillicothe Correctional Center, from where she’ll speak to producers in an all-new episode of Snapped: Behind Bars, airing Sundays at 7/6c on Oxygen.