Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (10 page)

The taped part of Jessie’s interrogation began at 2:44. For thirty-four minutes, while tape fed through the recorder, Jessie answered questions for Gitchell, Ridge, and Allen. Most of his answers were vague. Many were contradictory. Almost all began with a prompt by one of the detectives.

“Okay, Jessie,” Ridge said. “Let’s go straight to that date, May 5,1993. Wednesday. Early in the morning. You received a phone call. Is that correct?”

Jessie: “Yes, I did.”

Ridge: “And who made that phone call?”

Jessie: “Jason Baldwin.”

Ridge: “All right, what occurred, what did he talk about?”

Jessie: “He called me and asked me if I could go to West Memphis with him, and I told him, no, I had to go to work and stuff. He told me that he had to go to West Memphis so him and Damien went and then I went with them.”

Ridge: “All right, when did you go with them?”

Jessie: “That morning.”

Jessie said that he, Damien, and Jason had walked the three or four miles from Marion to West Memphis, and into the Robin Hood woods. Ridge asked what happened there.

Jessie answered: “When I was there, I saw Damien hit this one boy real bad, and then he started screwing them and stuff…”

Ridge showed him a newspaper clipping of the three victims and asked him which boy Damien had attacked. Jessie pointed to one of the pictures and said, “Michael Moore.” But the boy Jessie pointed to was not Michael Moore. Gitchell, pointing to one of the photos, interjected, “This boy right here?” When Jessie answered, “Yeah,” Gitchell said, “All right, that’s the Byers boy. That’s who you’re pointing at?” Jessie said that it was.

Ridge continued: “Okay, so you saw Damien strike Chris Byers in the head?”

Jessie had not said he’d seen Damien strike Chris in the head. Nonetheless, he answered, “Right.”

Ridge: “What did he hit him with?”

Jessie: “He hit him with his fist and bruised him all up real bad, and then Jason turned around and hit Steve Branch…and started doing the same thing. Then the other one took off. Michael Moore took off running. So I chased him and grabbed hold of him, until they got there, and then I left.”

The statement marked a turning point, both in the questioning of Jessie and in the case. Jessie was saying that he had witnessed at least part of the crime. Not only that; Jessie was admitting his own participation. But like so much about this case, the statement was riddled with problems. The most serious centered on the crucial factor of time. Jessie said the incident he described had occurred in the morning. Yet the police knew that Chris, Michael, and Stevie had been in school then—and that they had remained there until school let out at 2:45
P.M
. Another problem was that even in this self-incriminating version, Jessie was saying that he’d left the scene without having witnessed the murders. Ridge tried again, taking Jessie back to the moment when he’d said Michael had “took off running.”

“Which way does he go?” Ridge asked. “I mean, does he go back toward where the houses are? Is he going to the Blue Beacon? Is he going out toward the fields? Where’s he running to?”

Jessie: “Toward the houses.”

Ridge: “Toward the houses?”

Gitchell: “Where the pipe is that goes across the yards?”

Jessie: “Yes, he run out there and I caught him and brought him back, and I took off.”

It happened repeatedly: Jessie saying he’d left the scene without witnessing the murders.

Ridge tried again. “Okay,” he prompted. “And when you came back a little later, now all three boys are tied?”

Jessie had said nothing about returning to the scene. But he answered, “Yes.”

Ridge: “Is that right?”

Jessie: “Yes, and I took off and run home.”

Ridge: “All right, have they got their clothes on when you saw them tied?”

Jessie: “No, they had them off.”

Ridge: “They had already gotten them off? When he first hit the boy—when Damien first hit the first boy—did they have their clothes on then?”

Jessie: “Yes.”

Ridge: “All right, when did they take their clothes off?”

Jessie: “Right after they beat up all three of them, beat them up real bad.”

Ridge: “Beat them up real bad, and then they took their clothes off?”

Jessie: “Yes.”

Ridge: “And then they tied them?”

Jessie: “Then they tied them up, tied their hands up, they started screwing them and stuff, cutting them and stuff, and I saw it and turned around and looked, and then I took off running. I went home. Then they called me and asked me, ‘How come I didn’t stay?’ I told them, ‘I just couldn’t.’”

Ridge: “Just couldn’t stay?”

Jessie: “I couldn’t stand it to see what they were doing to them.”

Still, Jessie was not saying that he’d witnessed a murder.

Ridge asked, “Okay. Now when this is going on, when this is taking place, you saw somebody with a knife. Who had a knife?”

“Jason,” Jessie said.

In answers to a half dozen more questions, Jessie said he saw Jason cut one of the boys in the face and another boy “at the bottom,” in what Gitchell established was “his groin area.” Then Ridge asked, in a rare acknowledgment of Jessie’s limitations: “Do you know what a penis is?”

“Yeah,” Jessie answered. “That’s where he was cut.”

The officers established that the boy in question was “the Byers boy again.” When Jessie confirmed, “That’s the one I seen them cutting on,” Ridge asked again: “All right. You know what a penis is?”

Again, Jessie said yes, and that that was where he’d seen Jason cutting, “right there real close to his penis and stuff, and I saw some blood, and that’s when I took off.”

The officers asked a few questions about where Jessie was standing as this bloody scene unfolded. He told them that he was on one of the banks overlooking the drainage ditch. “I was looking down, and after I seen all of that, I took off.”

Ridge acknowledged Jessie’s claim to have left the scene. “All right,” he said, “you went home, and about what time was it that all of this took place? I’m not saying when they called you. I’m saying what time was it that you were actually there in the park?”

“About twelve,” Jessie said.

Ridge: “About noon?”

Jessie: “Yes.”

But the police knew that noon was no good. So Ridge’s next question was: “Okay, was it after school had let out?”

Jessie: “I didn’t go to school.”

Ridge: “These little boys…”

Jessie: “They skipped school.”

Every detective in the room knew, even if Jessie did not, that the statement was absurd. But the detectives persisted. And Jessie said it again: the boys had skipped school. In this version, he had met Jason and Damien in the woods “early in the morning,” at about 9
A.M
., and the victims, who had skipped school, had been murdered by noon.

Exasperated, Ridge asked Jessie if he wore a watch. When Jessie said that it was at home, Ridge suggested: “So your time period may not be exactly right is what you’re saying.”

“Right,” Jessie answered.

As the interview progressed, Jessie’s version of events grew more convoluted. At one point he told the detectives that “after all of this stuff happened, that night that they done it, I went home about noon, then they called me at nine o’clock that night.” He said Jason placed the call, but that Damien was at Jason’s house with him at the time. “They asked me how come I left so early and stuff, and I told them that I couldn’t stay there and watch that stuff no more…And Damien was hollering in the background saying, ‘We done it. We done it. What are we going to do if somebody saw us? What are we going to do?’”

But now Gitchell was growing impatient. He told Jessie, “I’ve got a feeling here you’re not quite telling me everything. Now you know that we’re recording everything, so this is very, very important to tell us the entire truth. If you were there the whole time, then tell us that you were there the whole time. Don’t leave anything out. This is very, very important. Now just tell us the truth.”

Jessie responded, “I was there until they tied them up and then that’s when I left. After they tied them up, I left.”

Gitchell: “But you saw them cutting on the boys.”

Jessie: “I saw them cutting on them…”

Gitchell: “So what else is there, after that?”

Jessie: “They laid the knife down beside them, and I saw them tying them up, and that’s when I left.”

Ridge: “Were the boys conscious or were they…?”

Jessie: “They were unconscious then.”

Ridge: “Unconscious.”

Jessie: “And after I left they done more.”

Ridge: “They done more?”

Jessie: “They started screwing them again.”

Jessie went on to describe a scene that, again, did not conform to the facts. The detectives knew that all of the bodies had been found in a highly unusual posture, backs arched and hands tied to ankles. Yet just as Jessie had failed to mention the removal of their clothes, he now ignored the peculiarity of how the boys were bound. He repeatedly mentioned only that their hands were tied. He even said that “one little boy” was “kicking” his legs “up in the air.” When Ridge asked, if “just their hands are tied, what’s to keep them from running off?” Jessie still did not say anything about the feet having been tied. The only reason he could offer for why the boys had not run off was that the assailants had “beat them up so bad so they can’t hardly move.”

Ridge tried again: “You said that they had their hands tied up, tied down. Were their hands tied in a fashion that they couldn’t have run? You tell me.”

But Jessie didn’t get it. “They could run,” he said.

Gitchell took another tack, asking: “Did you ever use—did anyone use—a stick and hit the boys?” Jessie volunteered that Damien had hit one boy with a “kind of a big old stick.” He also said he’d seen Jason cut one of the boys on the face, using a “fold-up knife.” And he said he’d been involved in the “cult” for about three months. Asked by Gitchell what the cult’s members did “typically in the woods,” Jessie replied, “We go out, kill dogs and stuff, and then carry girls out there…. Wescrew them and stuff…. We have an orgy and stuff like that.”

Jessie had provided the detectives with a few details they could use. But they still lacked the crucial one. Ridge made a delicate move. “Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you something. Now this is real serious, and I want you to be real truthful, and I want you to think about it before you answer it. Don’t just say yes or no real quick. I want you to think about it. Did you actually hit any of these boys?”

Jessie: “No.”

Gitchell: “Now, tell us the truth.”

Jessie: “No.”

Ridge: “Did you actually rape any of these boys?”

Jessie: “No.”

Ridge: “Did you actually kill any of these boys?”

Jessie: “No.”

Ridge: “Did you see any of the boys actually killed?”

Jessie: “Yes.”

Ridge: “Okay. Which one did you see killed?”

Jessie: “That one right there.”

Gitchell: “Now, you’re pointing to the Byers boy again?”

Jessie: “Yes.”

Ridge: “How was he actually killed?”

Jessie: “He choked him real bad and all.”

The police had not seen—and the medical examiner had not mentioned—any indication that the boys had been choked, much less that that’s how they died. But Ridge carried on. “Choking him? Okay, what was he choking him with?”

Jessie: “His hands, like a stick. He had a big old stick, kinda holding it over his neck.”

Ridge: “Okay, so he was choking him to the point where he actually went unconscious, so at that point, you felt like he was dead?”

Jessie: “Yeah.”

Jessie had claimed to have witnessed at least one of the murders. But again there was a problem, and not a minor one. Christopher Byers clearly had sustained a profound injury—one severe enough to have killed him—yet Jessie was not mentioning that. Instead, he was attributing the boy’s death to strangulation with a stick. The trouble was that Christopher’s neck was one of the few parts of his body that had shown no signs of trauma. Aside from a few scattered scratches, his neck appeared to have been untouched.
¹¹⁶

Ridge and Gitchell did not press the point. They had an eyewitness to the murders. They opted not to be picky. But there was still the nagging problem of Jessie’s times to be addressed. Ridge approached it once again. “Okay. They killed the boys,” he said.

Jessie had not said he’d seen the other two boys killed, but Ridge glossed over that point. He continued. “They killed the boys. You decided to go. You went home. How long after you got home before you received the phone call? Thirty minutes or an hour?”

In an interview full of misrepresentations of what Jessie had said, this was one of the greatest. Jessie had repeatedly stated that he’d arrived at the woods at about 9
A.M
. and that he had left there at “about noon.” He said the phone call from Jason had come at about nine o’clock that night. Yet now Ridge was giving him a choice. How long after he’d left the woods had the phone call from Jason come? Thirty minutes, or an hour?

Jessie was silent for a moment. Then he said, “An hour.”

The police decided to end the interview there. Ridge noted the time, 3:18
P.M
., and the tape recorder was turned off. By now, Jessie had been at the police station for almost six hours. He had been questioned, polygraphed, questioned, and then questioned once again. Of all that questioning, only the past thirty-four minutes had been recorded.

But Jessie’s interrogation was not over yet.
¹¹⁷
Police took a twenty-minute break, during which Jessie smoked two cigarettes. Then Gitchell began another interview—and this one he also recorded. The time of this second interview is disputed, but a police report listing the chronology of the day’s events noted it was conducted “to clear up some discrepancies concerning time and events in the first interview.”
¹¹⁸

This time, only Gitchell was in the room with Jessie, and for reasons that are not explained, the interview began with Jessie offering a dramatically different account of the time at which he, Damien, and Jason allegedly arrived in the Robin Hood woods. Throughout the first interview, he had maintained that they were there in the morning and that he had left by noon. Now, after a twenty-seven-minute break, during which the tape recorder was off, all of that had changed.