Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (7 page)

It took only an hour and forty minutes from that point for Misskelley to crack. He was told immediately after the polygraph was administered that he had failed. Detectives drew a circle, with dots on the inside and on the outside. “The people who killed those boys, Damien and Jason, are in here,” Jessie was told. “The police and anyone who is innocent are on the outside. Do you want to be on the inside or the outside?” Jessie knew he didn’t want to be inside the circle, and it is entirely possible that he thought placing himself outside the circle and telling them what they wanted to hear would mean not only an end to the interrogation, but also that he’d be able to go home. Detectives also played a section of their taped interview with Aaron Hutcheson, with Aaron claiming, in a small, remote voice, “Nobody knows what happened except me.” Finally, they showed Jessie a photograph of a much brutalized and very dead Christopher Byers. The effect of this strategy was dramatic, and any reluctance Jessie had felt to talk disappeared.

Jessie talked for forty-six taped minutes—several hours of the interrogation were
not
taped—and told his version of what had happened the night of May 5, 1993, in the darkening woods at Robin Hood Hills.
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During the first thirty-four minutes, Jessie led Gitchell and Ridge through a bizarre, rambling account of the killings, in which many of the details were incorrect and Misskelley’s complicity was minimized. The very wording of the statement made it clear that Misskelley and his questioners had been over this ground before actually turning on the tape recorder. For example, after establishing that Misskelley had been in Robin Hood that day, Gitchell asked, “Okay, what occurred while you were there?”

Misskelley blurted out, “When I was there, I saw Damien hit this one . . . [long pause] . . . hit this one boy real bad, and then, uh, and he started screwing them and stuff . . .” This sounded rehearsed, with Misskelley unsure of where he was supposed to begin his narrative. He also could not reliably identify the boy Echols had allegedly attacked, pointing to the picture of Chris Byers (whom he often referred to as “Myers”), but identifying him as Michael Moore. Jessie went on to claim that Damien had been watching the three victims for some time and had a picture of the three boys together. During the attack, he said, Damien was “screwin’ [Christopher Byers] up the ass.” He stated that Jason stuck “his in one of ’em’s mouth.”

The three had been drinking, Jessie said; he was drinking Evan Williams whiskey, and Jason and Damien were drinking beer. Echols and Baldwin appeared to Jessie to be intoxicated. When they heard the sound of the little boys “hollerin’” in the woods, Damien yelled to them, luring them toward where Damien, Jason, and Jessie were hiding. According to Jessie, Damien “jumped ’em.” Jason, he said, “turned around and hit Steve Branch.” As Michael Moore took off running, Jessie “chased him and grabbed him and hold him [
sic
] until they got there, and then [he] left.”
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Jessie said Jason Baldwin got “real close to [Chris Byers’s] penis and stuff, and [Jessie] saw some blood, and that’s when [he] took off.”

It was a very disjointed and error-laden statement, but Misskelley nonetheless provided police with details that they felt could not be known by someone who wasn’t present during the murders, details such as the presence of a gash on the left side of Steve Branch’s face and the castration of Chris Byers. In his statements, Jessie claimed that he had left the scene at differing points in the attacks, but Gitchell and Ridge were able to pin him down to saying that he had left the crime scene before Jason and Damien did, with Jessie adding, “They did more after I left.” This is in contradiction to his claim elsewhere in his statement that he had seen Jason and Damien place the boys’ bodies in their watery graves, leaving unanswered the question of how much “more” they could have done and how Jessie would have known. Jessie headed back to Highland, he said, throwing up and smashing the whiskey bottle on the way (in a subsequent statement, he claimed that he never threw up). He then headed off to wrestle in Dyess, some forty miles away. The next day, Jessie said, he received a call from Echols and Baldwin. “We did it! We did it!” Jason reportedly said. Jessie said he could hear Echols in the background saying, “What if someone saw us? What are we going to do?”

Jessie now told Gitchell and Ridge that he did know about the “satanic cult”, something he had earlier denied, and that pictures of the three boys had been passed around at one of their meetings. He told them about the animal sacrifices and “orgies” that took place at these meetings. He said that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were also in the cult.

But there were problems with the information Jessie provided. Jessie told the detectives that Jason Baldwin had called him the night before the murders, telling him to come to Robin Hood the next night; they were going to “get some boys and hurt them.”
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After initially telling Baldwin that he had to work Wednesday, Jessie eventually agreed to go with Jason and Damien to Robin Hood, though the timeline he gave was slippery. His whereabouts from early in the morning until around 1:00 p.m. were accounted for by Ricky Deese, his boss on a roofing job, yet Jessie first told police that he had arrived at Robin Hood “around 12:00.” He then inexplicably said the time was 9:00 a.m.
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“So your time period may not be exactly right, is what you’re saying,” Gitchell prompted.

“Right,” Jessie replied. Gitchell would have to interrogate Jessie a second time—extracting what would become known as the “clarification” statement—in order to place him at the crime scene at the time of the murders, and did so using a fair amount of suggestive interrogation. (It was brought out at the January 13, 1994, suppression hearing that prosecutor John Fogleman was outside the interrogation room feeding Gitchell questions to ask Misskelley.)

Gitchell
: Jessie, uh, when you got with the boys and with Jason Baldwin, when you three were in the woods and then [the] little boys come up, about what time was it? When the boys come up to the woods?

Jessie
: I would say it was about five or so, five or six.

Gitchell
: [Did you] know . . . did you have your watch on at the time?

Jessie
: Huh-uh [no].

Gitchell
: You didn’t have your watch on?

Jessie
: Huh-uh [no].

Gitchell
: Uh, alright, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time is it?

Jessie
: It was seven or eight.

Gitchell
: Are you . . .

Jessie
: It was starting to get dark.

Gitchell
: Okay, it . . .

Jessie
: I remember it was starting to get dark.

Gitchell
: Okay, well, that clears it up. I didn’t know . . . that’s what I was wondering, was it getting dark or what?

Jessie
: We got up there at six, and the boys come up, and it was starting to get dark.

Gitchell
: Ok, so you and Jason and Baldwin . . . uh, Damien . . . you all got there right at six.

Gitchell managed to guide Jessie from nine in the morning to dusk simply by suggesting what the “right” time should be. The duration of time between this second twelve-minute-long statement and the first is not known, though Misskelley and Gitchell were apparently alone while the second statement was being taken; Ridge had stepped out for a moment. “We were at the verge of getting a good witness,” Ridge said. “And I wanted, I just decided it was time to take a break and I wanted to inform Sgt. Allen of this information.”

Misskelley’s confession was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case against him, and the defense went to great lengths to prevent it from being admitted. Once it was obtained, however, it was enough for the police to place Misskelley under arrest and to petition circuit court justice William P. “Pal” Rainey for a warrant to search the trailers of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Domini Teer.
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(Nothing incriminating was found during the searches, which left an unanswered question: Where was Damien Echols’s signature trench coat, the one he was never seen without? On the witness stand at his trial, Echols said that he figured his parents had it. He said it was “laying [
sic
] in the floor whenever the police came,” but it was not on the list of items seized from Echols’s home.)

Echols and Baldwin were arrested during nighttime raids on Thursday, June 3, and arraigned the following day. Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were charged with capital murder in the deaths of Christopher Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore. Armed with Misskelley’s confession and little else, the Crittenden County District Attorney’s Office began to prepare its case. Subsequently, circuit court judge David Burnett, who would be the trial judge, granted a severance motion for Jessie since he refused to testify against Damien and Jason, who were less fortunate; they were to be tried together. Misskelley would be tried in Corning, Arkansas, some 110 miles north of West Memphis in rural Clay County. Baldwin and Echols would be tried together in Jonesboro, 64 miles to the northwest, in Craighead County. Although neither trial would be held in West Memphis, the publicity surrounding the case was enormous, and leaks of information would make it nearly impossible to seat twenty-four jurors who hadn’t heard about the case. Though Judge Rainey had sealed the records from public access, critical information had already leaked, most notably the confession itself, which, after being shown to the defendants’ families by police, found its way into the local newspapers.
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But Jessie soon recanted his confession and provided alibi witnesses to account for his whereabouts on May 5. Jessie’s neighbor, Stephanie Dollar, told Marion police officer Stan Burch that Jessie and his girlfriend had been at her house babysitting until 5:15 p.m. on May 5. Several witnesses claimed that they had seen Jessie at Highland Trailer Park at 6:30 p.m. Big Jessie insisted that he had seen his son sometime around 7:15 p.m. and that he was going wrestling in Dyess with some friends. He was sure of the time, he said, because he had just come home from DWI (“driving while intoxicated”) school, which had let out early that day. When asked how his son got to the match, Big Jessie had to admit that he had never actually seen him leave.

Many believe that the Misskelley confession was coerced and false. It isn’t known how Jessie’s interview with police began because it wasn’t recorded. Inspector Gitchell, Detective Ridge, and Officer Bill Durham of the WMPD insist that Jessie wasn’t a suspect when he was brought in, but within an hour of arriving at the police station, Jessie was given a polygraph examination, one that, according to Durham, Misskelley failed.
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Prior to that examination, Misskelley presumably gave police some version of the wrestling story. After the exam, and after Jessie was told he had failed, the interrogators surely became more aggressive. Because Gitchell and Ridge knew that the murders had happened well after 5:00 p.m., they focused on Jessie’s timeline. Rather than risk recording the entire interview, police cherry-picked a total of forty-six minutes that made up the “confession” (thirty-four minutes from the first taping and approximately twelve minutes from the clarifying statement). The investigators got what they wanted, and once they cleared the suppression hearing in January 1994, the confession was in.

Some very troubling questions arise regarding the Misskelley confession. For example, did police know they were dealing with a mentally challenged youth? Were they trained in questioning suspects—particularly teens—with developmental handicaps? Considering that at one point they asked Jessie whether he knew what a “penis” was, it is difficult to imagine that they missed the characteristic signs of a significant lack of intelligence. Could they not see by his answers how easily led and eager to please his interrogators he was? He changed the time he arrived at the woods at least three times in order to “get it right.” Given the glaring inconsistencies contained in the confession, it is hard to fathom that Judge Rainey would hand down arrest warrants for the three youths, including nighttime search warrants, reserved for those cases where there is a likelihood of evidence being hidden or destroyed. But Gitchell and Ridge convinced Rainey that once the other “cult members” found out about Jessie’s arrest, word would spread to Damien and Jason. There was no probable cause for the arrests, no physical evidence linking the accused to the crime, and only the most questionable hearsay elicited from young people around town wanting to avoid trouble with the law.
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