Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (6 page)

With what might have been some trepidation, the Oregon counselor paid a call on the Echols family. He later wrote that Damien’s parents, Pam and Joe, said they were having no problems with the boy. Damien was not enrolled in school, the counselor noted, but was working full-time at his father’s gas station, earning $5 an hour. “Damien can express no hobbies or interests,” the counselor wrote, “and, when asked about what he does for fun, he says he never has fun.” For the record, he noted that amid other instabilities, even Damien’s name seemed to be in flux. The boy was named Michael Wayne Hutchison at birth, but had changed his name entirely when Jack Echols adopted him. The counselor reported, “Damien indicated that he changed his name from Michael to Damien because, at the time, he was involved in a conversion to Catholicism, and that Damien was the name of a saint he respected. At this time, Damien indicates he is in the process of having his name legally changed from Damien back to Michael Damien Wayne Hutchison. Damien is currently going by the name of Michael at his work place.”

The juvenile counselor also checked on Driver’s concerns. “Damien denies any involvement in a Satanic cult or beliefs in Satanism,” he wrote.

The meeting was uneventful, and after it the officer recommended that Damien be supervised at “a minimum level” for the next four months—until December 11, 1992—when he would turn eighteen.

But Driver was far from satisfied. Two days later, Oregon officials received another letter from him, this one reporting that Damien had been “trying to get in touch with the young lady that was arrested with him.” Driver added that Damien’s attempt to contact his former girlfriend was “in violation of the terms of his probation,” although no records supported that contention. The Oregon authorities did not respond.

Damien could not escape Driver. He could not escape the turmoil in his family. And he could not escape the destructive forces at work in himself. Within two months of his parents’ reunion in Oregon, they were calling the local police, reporting that they were afraid Damien might be about to hurt someone—either himself or them. Officers took Damien into custody, and after discussing “his options” with him, they took him to a local hospital.
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An examining doctor reported that Damien was responsive, coherent, and calm; denied having experienced hallucinations or delusions; denied his parents’ statements that he was “into Satanism or devil worship”; and denied having threatened “to cut the throat of his mother.” The physician also noted, however, that even since arriving at the hospital, Damien had “also apparently made some verbal threats to his father.” The doctor had Damien admitted to a psychiatric ward under a suicide watch.

When the members of the medical staff questioned him the next morning about events the night before, Damien insisted that he had not intended to kill himself, though he admitted that he had been depressed for a long time, mostly due to problems relating to his family. He said he missed his girlfriend, Deanna, and that he also missed Jason Baldwin, his best friend. After a family counseling session, therapists recorded the same assessment that mental health workers in Arkansas had reached a half year earlier: that the Echols/Hutchisons were a severely troubled family. Joe Hutchison had volunteered that he barely knew his son. Pam had said that as a result of Damien’s threats, she and Joe did not want him around. But Damien’s assessment was not entirely bleak. One examiner reported that although his math skills were weak, he read at a high level, and his language skills were outstanding, even though he’d hardly attended school for the past three years. After reviewing a poem he’d written, she noted, that his “use of language is very high level and beautiful in quality, although it has a morbid appeal to it.”

In the end, the question became what to do with this troubled, perhaps gifted, adolescent, whose family had no money. After two days at the hospital, the staff no longer considered Damien a threat, either to himself or others. But his family did not want him, and Damien himself wanted to return to Arkansas. In light of the fact that he would turn eighteen in just three months, Damien’s physician wrote: “Plans for emancipation and return to Arkansas seem reasonable to me.” The hospital notified Oregon juvenile officials. They, in turn, notified Driver that Damien would be returning by bus to Arkansas, where he planned to live again with Jack Echols, and that he would contact Driver upon his arrival.

Though the plan was approved by Oregon officials, it was not okay with Driver. Four days after Damien walked out of the Oregon hospital, Driver swore out an affidavit stating that he had violated the terms of his probation “by threatening the life of his mother and father and by refusing to obey their lawful orders.”
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At Driver’s request, prosecutor Fogleman filed a petition in chancery court claiming that, in addition to the threats, “Damien Echols has since continued to violate the terms of his probation by moving from the home of his parents and returning to Marion, Arkansas.”
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Nowhere did the petition to have Damien’s probation revoked mention that Oregon juvenile authorities had been notified and approved of his move, or that Driver had been formally notified as well. Upon his return to Arkansas, Damien was adjudicated a delinquent, taken into custody, and sent, once again, to the region’s juvenile detention center.
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He was furious. A few hours after arriving at the detention center, as he was sitting in the recreation area with several other teenagers, he confirmed Driver’s darkest suspicions. As the center’s director reported: “One of the boys had scraped his arm a little, and it was bleeding some. Without warning, Damien grabbed the arm that was bleeding and began to suck the blood from it. The boys all stated he had been saying he had not taken his medication the night before, and he was about to ‘go off’ on them. Damien was asked why he did this, and he stated, ‘I don’t know.’ He also told staff he had threatened to kill his father and eat him.” The director concluded, “It is our opinion that Damien needs mental health treatment.”
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The court ordered Damien to be returned to the psychiatric hospital in Little Rock where he had been treated before. This time, Damien’s hospitalization lasted for two weeks. When he was released, at the end of September 1992, the hospital notified Driver that, as during Damien’s other hospitalizations, his behavior while at the hospital appeared normal, though he “was cautioned about his behavior and how it might appear to others.” He was instructed to continue taking Imipramine for depression and to avail himself of follow-up care at the local mental health center.
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Damien returned to Marion. He still had two and a half months before he would turn eighteen, and until then he would remain under Driver’s supervision. Driver imposed three requirements: first, that Damien was to come to Driver’s office at least once a week; second, that he was to observe a curfew; and third, that he was to enroll in the local vo-tech school and obtain his GED. Damien signed a contract agreeing to all three stipulations, and by the end of December, ten days after his eighteenth birthday, he’d earned his high school equivalency diploma and satisfied the other conditions as well.

But Driver was still not satisfied, and he was far from convinced that Damien was as harmless as his doctors believed. He thought Damien was looking for power. He felt that the teenager’s unusual appearance, his unconventional religious beliefs, and the satanic rituals that Damien denied—but that Driver was convinced he had conducted—were all the attempts of a social outcast to acquire some form of control. “He’d come from a horrendous family background,” Driver would later explain. “He’d grown up in very poor circumstances, and he’d been picked on by other kids. I think he took on this strange persona to keep people away, to keep them from picking on him. And he progressed from that to using his oddness to serve his desire for power.” In Damien, Driver saw a teenager with “a cold look to him.” He believed the boy had become one of those people “who could do things without remorse.” As he later told the West Memphis detectives, “The further I went with him, the more apprehensive I was getting.”

Damien, meanwhile, had begun dating sixteen-year-old Domini Teer, who lived near him in the trailer park. He got a part-time job with a roofing company. And he kept his appointments at the mental health center. On his first visit there, the social worker noted that he came dressed in black, wore a silver cross, and made “intense eye contact.” Damien grew to trust the therapist, and over time, in what he believed was the confidentiality of their sessions, he made several statements, which she recorded in her notes. “Damien reports being told at the hospital that he could be another ‘Charles Manson or Ted Bundy,’” she wrote. Another time: “Describes self as ‘pretty much hate the human race.’” And on another occasion: “Reports being harassed by local authorities, as ‘they think I’m a Satanic leader.’ He admits being caught with Satanic items and with handwritten books about witchcraft. Denies cult involvement. Has been interested in witchcraft for past eight years.”
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When Echols visited the therapist on January 25, 1993, the session focused on death. Afterward, the therapist wrote that Damien had raised the subject with a poem he’d written the week before. “The theme of this poem centered around death and power,” she wrote. “Damien explained that he obtains his power by drinking blood of others. He typically drinks the blood of a sexual partner or of a ruling partner. This is achieved by biting or cutting. He states, ‘It makes me feel like a God…’” At the end of the session, the therapist encouraged Damien to continue writing as a way of communicating his feelings. She wrote, “Damien is agreeable to doing this, though he continues to question the therapist on confidentiality issues and wants to be assured that he will not be misunderstood.”

Damien had reason to worry. As other parts of Gitchell’s investigation, for one reason or another, dried up, the belief that the boys may have been killed by satanists began to take firmer hold. Gitchell’s early remark about a cult was coming to the fore as the main theory of the case. And Damien’s report to his therapist that “they think I’m a Satanic leader” was about to be proven correct.

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HILE A THERAPIST MIGHT HAVE
viewed some of Damien’s views as unhealthy, most people in the region, had they known of them, would also have considered them unholy. Here, as throughout the Mississippi delta, the spiritual landscape was rigorously Christian and rigorously literal. Here, to a greater extent than almost anywhere else in the country, angels were regarded as God’s emissaries, hovering invisibly close at hand, and children were warned to be on guard against Satan, whose evils were just as near. A belief in possession by demons was common. It was, as one scholar noted, “an extension of the general Southern view that the devil is very real, the devil has great power and is vibrantly at work in the world.”
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While not everyone in the Mississippi delta viewed the cosmos in such stark terms, most residents of east Arkansas did. Most attended a Christian church, and the churches most of them attended belonged to the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.
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On Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, in cities and along country roads, believers filed into white-steepled buildings, some grand and many humble, where preachers warned of a fiery hell and taught that redemption could be found only in the blood of the Savior, Jesus Christ. In such an environment, the ideas that Damien Echols was confiding to his therapist were beyond strange—they were blasphemous.
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The fact that Driver had seen Damien’s writings and read some of his psychiatric reports brought what otherwise might have remained privileged therapeutic conversations to the attention of police.

Even though Damien had complied with Driver’s requirements that he check in once a week, obtain his GED, and receive counseling at the mental health clinic, and despite the fact that he was now eighteen and no longer the juvenile officer’s responsibility, Driver’s interest in Damien intensified with the start of 1993. The juvenile officer continued to find instances of what he took to be satanic rituals.
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When the bodies of the three eight-year-olds were discovered, one of them mutilated, Driver immediately started “to zero in on Damien and his group.” He viewed Damien as a prime suspect, and he shared his opinion with his assistant Steve Jones and with Detective Donald Bray of the Marion Police Department. Bray’s office stood across the street from the courthouse where Driver’s office was located. “Don Bray was the first person who really listened to what was going on,” Driver later noted. “He was interested in what we saw as the occult portion of the crime. I think the West Memphis police took a little longer to come around.”
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Since Driver viewed Damien as a leader of cult activities in the region, he was also interested in Damien’s friends. Besides Damien’s girlfriend, Domini, the suspected cult leader was known to have only one truly close friend, sixteen-year-old Jason Baldwin, a former neighbor who shared Damien’s interest in skateboarding and heavy metal music. The two had known each other since Jason was in the seventh grade and Damien was in the eighth. They had met in study hall. At the time, both lived in Lakeshore, “a dirty, grungy type place,” as Baldwin would recall, where police were always patrolling.
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“I wanted out of there,” Jason later said. “A lot of people there didn’t know where they was going in life. I guess they was just on autopilot. They didn’t think ahead.” Though Jason would later say he and Damien were both like that, at the time they met, “we thought we was the coolest people in school.” Part of what drew them together was, as Jason later put it,

Jason would later recall,

Jason’s parents had been divorced for years by the time he met Damien. His father had disappeared from the family when Jason was four, and though the father lived in Arkansas, except for a Christmas visit eleven years after he’d left, he’d had virtually no contact with the family. “I don’t care for him,” Jason said. “He don’t care for us.” Jason was close to his mother, and as the oldest child, he felt protective of her. He appreciated how hard she worked to support him and his brothers, despite battling such severe depression that she had once attempted suicide. “It was pretty devastating,” Jason wrote later in a school essay. “I was the one who found her and called 911 and kept her alive. But I am lucky. My mother is well and happy now and so am I.”

While Damien had dropped out of school, Jason still attended and was a good, if unexceptional, student. His best classes were art and English, and with the encouragement of one of his teachers, he was beginning to think of studying to be a graphic artist after high school. By the tenth grade he recognized that he was something of a nonconformist, at least by the lights of Marion High. There was the way he dressed, which was linked to his tastes in music, both of which were outside the prevailing sports and country styles. He wore his hair long, pulled back in a ponytail—another departure from the norm. And if asked, he acknowledged harboring an atypical indifference to religion.

Jason believed in God, he believed firmly in right and wrong, but by high school he considered religion a comfort “for people on their deathbed.” Damien, by contrast, was extremely interested in religious ideas, especially those that traced their roots to the distant past. That’s why he was drawn to Catholicism and, later, to Wicca. But though Jason did not share Damien’s interests, neither did he mind them.
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By the time Jason and Damien were in high school, they had come to the attention of Driver and Jones. Jason had gotten into trouble in 1990, when he was twelve years old and newly arrived at Lakeshore. As he related the incident, there was a tin building adjoining the trailer park, with one wall missing, a rusted roof, and rusted car frames inside. “Giant grass and weeds grew in there. You could just walk in. It was sort of a clubhouse for us kids.” One day, when Jason was there with his brother Matt, who was ten at the time, and two other boys, “the police charged us with breaking in.”

The official account of that episode paints a more serious picture. Police reported that the boys had broken the glass on a front-end loader, a 1969 Cadillac, and a 1959 Ford, all of which were described as “vintage cars and equipment.” Baldwin was charged with breaking and entering and with criminal mischief. Fogleman, now a juvenile judge, placed Jason on probation and ordered him to pay nearly $450 in restitution, a huge sum for him and his mother. “He was going to send us to a training school for two years,” Jason recalled. “But my mom said she wasn’t going to let us go to a training school.” Steve Jones, the probation officer, became Jason’s nemesis. “He told me, ‘I know you’re trying to get a cult started,’” Jason later recalled. “After that, other kids would say, ‘We hear you and Damien have got a cult.’ We’d say, ‘No, we haven’t. Who told you that?’ They’d say, ‘The police.’”
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Despite the pressure, Jason could recall only one fight in which Damien was involved. That was the attack on the boy who had begun dating Deanna Holcomb, Damien’s former girlfriend.
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“From then on,” Jason said, “Steve Jones would lead the ‘anti-Damien’ campaign across Marion and West Memphis—he and his sidekick, Jerry Driver. And after the murders, they would all go around asking people questions about the murders, but in the same interviews they would ask people if they knew Damien was in a ‘satanic cult.’”

Before the bodies were found, as West Memphis police and county deputies were searching for the missing boys, talk of the disappearances naturally buzzed through the courthouse at Marion. In the police station across the street, Bray was confined to his office, attending to a routine complaint. The owners of a local truck stop had reported a $200 overrun on a customer’s credit card and suspected a new employee, Victoria Malodean Hutcheson, who’d been on duty when the card was used. Bray was supposed to interview Vicki Hutcheson that morning. The thin, red-haired woman arrived at the appointed hour, accompanied by her eight-year-old son, Aaron.

This was the same Aaron Hutcheson who, a few hours later, would tell police in West Memphis about the black man in the maroon car who had supposedly picked up Michael Moore after school. But at this point, with the bodies still undiscovered, Bray was perturbed to see the child in his office. He would have expected a thirty-year-old woman to have had better sense than to bring her child to a police interview.
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But Hutcheson explained that Aaron was a close friend of the missing boys. In fact, she added, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers were Aaron’s two best friends. Bray sympathized and his interest in the woman and her son was piqued. It looked like there might be more to the interview than just a suspicious credit card transaction. It placed Bray near the center of what was, at the moment, the most sensational crime in the nation. Bray thought that young Aaron Hutcheson might know something about the boys that would help police search for them. He picked up the phone and called the West Memphis police to suggest the possibility. But by then it was too late. The dispatcher told Bray that the three bodies had just been found.

Bray hung up and related the news to Hutcheson. Suddenly the child with her looked both vulnerable and important. Aaron was the same age as the victims. He had been their friend. Who knew what he had seen or what he’d heard? It occurred to Bray that the boy might possess information that would help solve the murders—and no one had questioned him yet. Bray abandoned his interest in the credit card problem and turned instead to investigating the murders. Later, he told the West Memphis police that during the interview, Vicki Hutcheson reported that Chris Byers and Michael Moore had asked her to let Aaron go with them to the woods the previous afternoon but that she had refused. Bray said Aaron reported that in the past, he had been in Robin Hood with the boys on several occasions, and that Michael had gone swimming in the ditch. As for the truck stop’s owners, Bray eventually told them that he believed they’d made an error in their paperwork and that no money was actually missing. Rejecting Bray’s conclusion, they fired Hutcheson.

Police in West Memphis, meanwhile, were receiving some unusual calls. An anonymous informant reported that the pastor of a local Baptist church was concerned about some teenagers at Lakeshore trailer park, who allegedly worshiped the devil.
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When police contacted the pastor, he said that a kid named Damien was suspected of being involved in cults. The minister said he’d heard that the cult held its meetings somewhere near the Mississippi River; that he had seen Damien wearing boots with the number 666 on them; and that Damien had a girlfriend by the name of Domini Alia Teer.

By now, Driver had also related to Bray the suspicions he and Steve Jones harbored about Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin. Bray regarded Driver as “the most knowledgeable man in the county when it came to Satanic worship.” During their discussions of the murders, Driver had written the names of eight teenagers on a piece of paper. He handed the paper to Bray and told him confidently that when the investigation was over, one or more of the kids whose names appeared on that paper would probably be charged with the murders. Damien’s and Jason’s names were there; so was Domini’s. Bray folded the piece of paper and put it in his shirt pocket, where he would carry it for the next several months.
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The reports of devil worship in Robin Hood, the pastor’s concerns about cults, and Driver’s interest in Damien and Jason were enough to prompt Lieutenant Sudbury and juvenile officer Jones to pay a call on the teenagers.

Although Jones was not a police officer and Sudbury normally worked exclusively on drug cases, the two teamed up. Together they conducted the first interviews in the case that focused on the murders as the work of a satanic cult. For many who learned of it, the leap from the murders to satanism was not much of a leap at all. Everything about the crime—the ghastliness of the murders themselves, the age of the victims, the castration, and the tied-up, naked bodies—struck the psyche as horrific. The murders seemed the very essence of evil. And hadn’t Driver been warning about people courting the devil—about worship directed not to God but to the very prince of evil? While Gitchell and other detectives employed more standard investigative techniques, Sudbury and Jones reviewed Driver’s literature on crimes related to the occult. At around noon on Friday, May 7, less than twenty-four hours after the first of the bodies had been lifted out of the creek, Sudbury and Jones went to the trailer park in West Memphis where Damien was living. His mother, Pam, was there now too, having moved back from Oregon with Damien’s father, Joe Hutchison. Sudbury and Jones questioned Damien on the steps of the trailer but made no notes of the interview.
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