Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (24 page)

Sixteen-year-old Michael Roy Carson was a kid in serious trouble. He was on probation for earlier crimes when police in Jonesboro picked him up in November 1993, on suspicion of burglary. At the time, Michael seemed to have no connection to the West Memphis murders, and Val Price, the city’s chief public defender—and Damien’s court-appointed lawyer—was appointed to represent Michael. But in January 1994, at the start of Jessie’s trial, Michael abruptly informed authorities that he did know something about the murders—and that, in fact, his information might be crucial. He said that three months after the murders, in August 1993, he’d been in the same jail where police were holding Jason and that Jason had bragged to him about the murders. The boy told police that Jason had given him “gory details” of the murders. He also said that Jason had told him he’d like to “whip Misskelley’s ass” for divulging the trio’s involvement.

Everything about this newly arrived witness struck the defense lawyers as suspicious. They found it hard to believe that Jason, who had steadfastly maintained his innocence, would confide the “gory details” to Michael, whom he’d known for less than twenty-four hours. Michael had a long record of drug abuse, in addition to his burglary charges, and the defense teams noted that he had not reported Jason’s extraordinary boast until five months after it had allegedly occurred—five months during which Michael’s own troubles with the law had deepened.

Another new name on Fogleman’s list was that of a Dr. D. W. Griffis. Apparently Griffis was going to appear as the prosecutors’ expert on cult-related murders. It seemed that in preparing for his appearance, Griffis had asked the West Memphis police to describe the evidence of cult involvement they’d found with the bodies. Fogleman provided the defense attorneys with a copy of Detective Ridge’s responses, but they showed that Ridge had had little to offer Griffis beyond the wild statements of Aaron Hutcheson.
²⁴⁸

It had become clear in Jessie’s trial that the police had found almost no blood at what they regarded as the murder site. Lax noted that in his letter to Griffis: “Ridge stated the victim who was cut in the area of his penis was known to have died from bleeding to death; however, they had found no blood at the crime scene. He attempted to explain this by stating the cutting could have been done in the water, or if it was done on the bank, it was cleaned off with water before the murderers left the area. He also stated he had testified in court about the absence of blood and that the friend of the victims [Aaron] reported that a bucket was used to catch the blood.”

More than speculation about buckets of blood, certain writings gave Lax cause for concern. He and the defense lawyers knew that Fogleman had dozens of pages of Damien’s personal writings—many that had been confiscated by Driver—and that he would use what writings he could to portray Damien as a killer. Shettles reviewed the writings for content in an effort to anticipate what Fogleman might introduce. “In my opinion,” she wrote, “there is very little material in the text of these writings that is damaging…. The major themes noted are despair, loneliness, and thoughts of death and suicide.”

But it was not only Damien’s personal writings that now appeared to be aimed against him, but his reading choices as well. While Jessie’s trial was under way, West Memphis police served a search warrant on the Crittenden County Library, looking for all books that had been checked out by Damien, Jason, Jessie, or Domini. The two books that had apparently interested police had both been checked out by Damien. They were
Magic,
by Maurice Bouisson, and
Cotton Mather on Witchcraft,
by the colonial minister Cotton Mather. Lax advised the defense teams, “Along with our attack on the inept police investigation, I feel that every opportunity should be taken to show correlation between the Salem witch-hunts in the seventeenth century and the persecution of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley.”
²⁴⁹

J
UST AS ICE HAD GRIPPED NORTHEAST
Arkansas at the start of Jessie’s trial, another unusual blast of cold heralded the start of Damien and Jason’s. Television crews encircled the Craighead County Courthouse, a building that reminded a reporter from Little Rock of “a Reconstruction mausoleum, smack in Jonesboro’s busy business district.” Inside, in Judge Burnett’s courtroom, prosecutors Davis and Fogleman and the defendants’ four attorneys were still questioning prospective jurors. The courtroom crawled with armed policemen, the Little Rock reporter noted: “three state troopers, five sheriff’s deputies on a normal day—surveilling us spectators as if seventy-five percent were convinced of an imminent attempt at a lynch.”
²⁵⁰

Outside the courthouse, Jessie’s lawyer stood talking to reporters on the building’s icy steps. “Mr. Misskelley made a decision last night that he is not going to testify against his codefendants,” Stidham announced.
²⁵¹
Reporters hollered questions. Had Jessie been offered a reduced sentence if he testified—one that would give him an opportunity for parole, as Damien’s lawyers claimed? Or had no such deal been offered, as Fogleman contended? Stidham declined to answer but did say, tellingly, that the decision Jessie had reached the night before had been “the most difficult decision he will ever make.” Stidham said that as he spoke, Jessie was being driven back to the prison at Pine Bluff.
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Years later, in an interview in the prison, Jessie described the pressures he’d been under.
²⁵³
He said that when he was brought back to northeast Arkansas after his own conviction, he was told that if he did not testify against Damien and Jason, they would not be convicted, and that while he rotted in prison, they’d go after his girlfriend. “They told me that if I didn’t testify, Damien and Jason would walk free,” he recalled, “and they was going to go see Susie; they was going to get to her. That’s when they told me: talk or Damien and Jason was going to walk free and I was going to be locked up.” Jessie credited his father and stepmother with helping him to understand his situation. They told him that if he lied at Damien and Jason’s trial, “That’s something I’d have to live with the rest of my life.” That, he said, was when he decided not to testify. “This way, if I ever do get out,” he explained, “my name will be clear, and I can live pretty much a decent life.”
²⁵⁴

Inside the courthouse, the process of seating a jury was not proceeding quickly. When Burnett asked if anyone on the jury panel had not heard about the case, not a hand was raised. By the second day, several prospective jurors had already been dismissed because they’d admitted they could not hear the case impartially.
²⁵⁶
On the first day, only one juror, a Jonesboro housewife, had been seated.

The
Jonesboro Sun
reported that the demeanor of the defendants in this second trial was as different as “night and day” from that of Jessie at his. Whereas Jessie had appeared meek, the paper noted, Damien was “furtively staring at the ceiling one moment, the next guffawing” at comments by the judge. The article noted that the defendant “tosses his long black locks around in search of the next prospective juror approaching the jury box,” “often looks at those in the press box out of the corner of his eye,” and “holds his head high, almost proudly, as he walks by the media.” The Little Rock reporter, meanwhile, was focusing on Judge Burnett, who, he wrote, struck “an occasional John Barrymore profile” for the cameras recording the event.

By the third day, as Damien and Jason were led into court, wearing the standard bulletproof vests, nine jurors had been selected. As Damien passed, a reporter shouted, “Who did it?” Damien answered, “Byers.” Though questions were shouted at Jason too, the younger boy did not respond. Inside, Burnett told a reporter that it was proving “almost impossible” to find citizens who could say they were impartial.
²⁵⁷
Then, noting that some prospective jurors had said that they were afraid, Burnett introduced another unusual element into the already remarkable proceedings. He told reporters that as jurors were selected, their names would be made public, but he asked that they not be published. “Because of the magnitude of this case,” he said, “some are fearful that it could affect their business. One or two have asked to remain anonymous.” Partly because of the prospective jurors’ concerns, Burnett explained that he was taking the further unusual step of having prospective jurors questioned privately in his chambers, rather than in open court.

The move represented yet another layer of secrecy imposed upon the proceedings, and as it had in the past, the
Commercial Appeal
protested. Lawyers for the Tennessee newspaper cited Arkansas law, which, they argued, provided for all trial and hearings to be held in public.
²⁵⁸
But the prosecutors, as well as Jason’s attorney Paul Ford, argued for keeping the process secret. “The potential jurors are not the people on trial,” Ford said during a hearing on the request. “We’re far more likely to get a fair jury, which is what we’re after, in private.” The judge agreed.
²⁵⁹
The
Commercial Appeal
appealed the issue to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which scheduled an emergency session for the following Monday morning. But by then, a jury of eight women and four men had been impaneled. The jury included a nurse, three housewives, a building contractor, two factory workers, an air force airman, a bookkeeper, a speech pathologist, a state highway department worker, and a self-employed businessman.

Now that Jessie had been convicted, the
Commercial Appeal
also filed a freedom of information request, seeking access to the investigative file police had compiled on him. Arkansas’s freedom of information law required release of police investigative files when a case was closed, a point that is clearly marked when a defendant is sentenced. But Burnett denied that request too. He said that the files of all three defendants were combined and that “the right of a fair trial supersedes the right for the press to have access.”

Days later, the Arkansas Supreme Court finally ruled that Burnett’s questioning of prospective jurors in private had been in error.
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But coming when it did, the decision had no impact on the trial that was already under way in Jonesboro. The improperly impaneled jury remained seated and the trial continued.

At 5
A.M
. on the Sunday morning before testimony was to begin, a reporter driving by the courthouse noticed a crude sign stuck into the courthouse lawn. It featured a picture of the Grim Reaper, below which someone had written,
HE WANTS YOU DAMIEN
. The reporter notified police, but the sign’s maker was never found.
²⁶¹
Later that morning, subscribers to the
Commercial Appeal
found several articles about the case in their Sunday papers. One, datelined Marion, Arkansas, began: “The legend of Damien Echols blows through the trailer parks and flatlands around this Delta town like a brisk winter wind, chilling listeners with tales of vampires, Satanism and ritual murder.”
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The next morning, Damien and Jason’s trial opened much as Jessie’s had, with Fogleman describing the crime scene to the jury. Pointing to a map of Robin Hood, he described an area along one bank that appeared to have been “slicked off.” He said police found “lots of scuff marks, unnatural marks,” in the spot. But, he added, “There’s no blood. No blood at all.

“Now as the proof develops,” Fogleman told the jurors, “I want to tell you in advance, there’s going to be some—there’s going to be a lot of testimony from the Arkansas Crime Laboratory. And some of this evidence is going to be what we call—I guess you call it ‘negative evidence.’ It doesn’t really show a connection to anybody…. For instance, there will be proof, like on the bicycles, there aren’t any fingerprints; on some things in the kids’ pockets, no fingerprints. Things like that. And you may wonder why we’re putting on evidence of a negative, but we’ll explain that to you later.”
²⁶³

In his opening statement, Jason’s lawyer Paul Ford described his client as an average student, “not a troublemaker,” who “comes from a poor background.” He described how, because Jason’s mother worked a night shift, Jason was responsible for getting himself and his two younger brothers up, fed, and dressed in the mornings, and that they caught the bus for school. Ford said Jason was arrested for the murders only because the police had done a sloppy investigation. “As you’ll see from their own testimony,” he told the jurors, “they found nothing. Not even a drop of blood.” He related several of the tangents that police investigated—truckers, veterans, known child abusers—but “there were no answers to their questions. There was no solid evidence pointing to anyone. And the pressure began to build…. The evidence will show that as late as the twentieth day of May, the police admitted they were blindfolded. They had no answers. But suddenly an arrest is made.”

Ford described how police “swarmed” into Jason’s life, taking clothes, shoes, schoolwork, and school records.

Damien’s lawyer also zeroed in on “police ineptitude” in his opening remarks. Val Price echoed the claim Stidham had earlier made, that detectives had developed “Damien Echols’s tunnel vision.” But in addition, Price attempted some damage control regarding Damien’s well-publicized image. Gesturing toward Damien, the lawyer said, “Well, I’ll be honest with you. He’s not the all-American boy. He’s kind of weird. He’s not the same as maybe you and I might be. That’ll be negative. But I think you’ll also see that there’s simply no evidence that he murdered these three kids.”

The state began calling its witnesses. Again, as in Jessie’s trial, Dana Moore and Pam Hobbs described the last times they saw their sons, and Melissa Byers went into detail about how, shortly before Christopher disappeared, her husband had found him riding his skateboard on a busy street. “He brought Christopher home and gave him three swats with a belt,” Melissa said, “because he could have been run over by a car.”

But now reporters who’d covered Jessie’s trial noticed something different. Ron Lax and the defense lawyers noted the change too. In one of the prosecutors’ opening moves, they called a witness who testified that on the evening of May 5, he had seen not three, but “four kids” enter Robin Hood woods.
²⁶⁴
Lax and the defense teams understood what was going on. One of the few consistencies that had run through Jessie’s many statements was that he, Damien, and Jason had seen
three
boys in the woods. And that was the account the prosecutors had presented at Jessie’s trial. But here—since Jessie would not be testifying, and all the evidence was circumstantial, and there was no apparent motive or eyewitness to the crime—the prosecutors seemed to be altering their version of what had happened. It looked like they were laying groundwork for testimony from Aaron Hutcheson.
²⁶⁵

As in the first trial, Detective Allen recounted how he had almost literally stumbled upon the first body, and then how he had recovered the others. Allen cited the absence of blood on the ground, but testified that the water around where Christopher’s body was found “had a lot of blood in it.” This struck Lax as preposterous. None of the police reports had noted “a lot of blood” in the water, and one would have thought that Detective Ridge might not have had to search the ditch on his hands and knees if the water around the bodies had been so noticeably bloody. Once again, pictures of the victims, naked, pale, and bound, were shown to the jury, as Ridge described how the boys were tied and what he’d seen of Christopher’s mutilation.

On the second day of testimony, Jason’s attorney asked Ridge to describe how police had handled the evidence found with the bodies. Ridge explained that since the clothing and shoes were wet, they’d “had to be dried before they could be sent to the crime lab.” He said the articles were placed in used paper grocery sacks and taken to the police station. There, he said, the articles were removed from the sacks and “air-dried” overnight on the floor of Inspector Gitchell’s office. Ridge said they were “resacked” and delivered to the crime lab in Little Rock the next day.

When Damien’s attorney cross-examined Ridge, he asked about two sticks that were marked as evidence but that police had not taken from the crime scene until nearly two months after the murders. Handing Ridge one of the sticks, Price asked, “You did not take that stick into evidence at the time that y’all recovered the bodies?”

“No sir,” Ridge replied. “I didn’t take this stick into evidence until the statement of Jessie Misskelley, in which he said—”

Price swirled toward the judge, interrupting the detective to object. He demanded, “I move for a mistrial, Your Honor.”

In a conference before the bench, which the jury could not hear, Price complained that the question he’d asked the officer “did not call for him blurting out the fact that Jessie Misskelley gave a confession.” He said the judge should declare a mistrial because “the whole purpose for our trial being severed from Mr. Misskelley’s trial in the first place was the confession that Jessie Misskelley gave. That’s the entire reason for the severance.”