Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (12 page)

The leak of Jessie’s confession created a sensation, but Rainey’s order sealing the affidavits prevented reporters from discovering how little the police had to back it up. The effect was that news outlets focused on the three defendants and on what Jessie had said about them. For days, a blizzard of news broadcasts and articles blanketed the area. Even someone who did not buy a paper could read headlines such as these, just in passing a newsstand:

ONE SUSPECT WAS
“
SCARY
,”

TALKED OF WORSHIPING THE DEVIL

OUTBURST IN COURT BY VICTIM
’
S DAD REFLECTS

COMMUNITY
’
S SHOCK
,
RAGE

WORSHIP OF EVIL DEBATED AS MOTIVE IN KILLINGS

ARK
.
YOUTHS COULD FACE THE DEATH PENALTY

The articles that accompanied the headlines told a public hungry for information that Damien “carried a cat’s skull around with him at school and routinely dressed in black”; that Jason was said to be “shy and artistic” but “into that devil stuff”; and that Jessie was “tough” and “a bit troubled” but had been considered “kind to kids.” Gitchell maintained his position that he could not comment on the case.
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But Rainey’s order sealing the records did not sit well with newspaper editors on either side of the Mississippi River. The battle for information suddenly became part of the story. In response to the official clamp on information, the
Commercial Appeal
of Memphis filed a formal request for the records, citing Arkansas’s freedom of information law. The paper’s managing editor said that the records were needed “to help sort out facts alleged in the case from a growing supply of rumors.” The smaller
West Memphis Evening Times
echoed the complaint.
¹³³

But editors’ cautions changed nothing, and shortly after Rainey sealed the records, a state judge affirmed the unusual order.
¹³⁴
Like Rainey, the state judge said that the information contained in the records was “sensitive and inflammatory” and that “it would be prejudicial to the defendants to have those documents released to the public prior to the trial.” In fact, the records contained nothing more inflammatory than the statements of Jessie Misskelley, which had already been reported. But the public did not know that.
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But by and large, for most of the media, reporting on satanism beat skepticism, hands down. The West Memphis paper reported that Damien wore the number 666 and “a sign of the devil” inside his boots. It quoted two boys who claimed to have heard of ghosts in Jason’s house. It quoted an unnamed girl who claimed that she had seen Damien drink Jason and “Dominique’s” blood, and another who said Damien had once “threatened to cut a boy’s head off and put it on a doorstep.” It quoted a woman who lived in the Lakeshore area who’d noticed that “last year, there were some dogs that turned up missing out here,” adding that “the Echols boy always wore black.” In editions on three consecutive days, the
Jonesboro Sun,
in northeast Arkansas’s largest city, quoted a local Baptist minister who said that Damien had made a pact with the devil and would be going to hell.
¹³⁶
“I’ve never witnessed to anyone any harder,” the minister was quoted as saying. “He didn’t reject me. He rejected Christ.” An article in
USA Today
began: “Michael Echols, who calls himself ‘Damien,’ once told a pastor he couldn’t go to heaven because he’s already committed—to going to hell.” The
USA Today
piece did, however, also quote a few of the suspects’ defenders. Joe Hutchison, Damien’s father, said, “I thought the law of this land was that the accused were considered innocent until someone proved them guilty.” A friend of the Misskelley family said that Jessie “wasn’t into Satanic worship, he was into country music.”

With the devil so prominent in news reports, ministers were quoted as experts. Six hundred people turned out two weeks after the arrests when the Missouri Street Church of Christ offered a free lecture on what advertisements said were “the six indicators of Satanic involvement.” They were an obsession with death, possession of “Satanic paraphernalia,” kidnapping, sexual abuse, cannibalism, and cremation. Reporters for the West Memphis paper covered the event. They also contacted “experts” in the occult, such as Driver and a Memphis psychiatrist and writer.
¹³⁷
Based on those interviews, the paper reported that “Echols’ reading habits could help determine the nature of his thinking and possible cult activities. People who knew Echols said he dressed in black, called himself ‘Damien,’ and carried a cat’s skull.” The Memphis psychiatrist reportedly confirmed that those were common signs that teenagers were “delving into Satanism.”
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While preachers railed against Satan and reporters examined library books, police were coming to terms with the reality underlying the arrests. That was, as Fogleman would later delicately acknowledge, that Jessie Misskelley’s statement “had to be investigated further, to see whether or not more evidence could be developed.” The police had suspects, but did Fogleman have a case? With the three teenagers in custody, the West Memphis police entered the second phase of their investigation: a scramble to find evidence against them.

Detective Bray of Marion had introduced Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson to the West Memphis police. The Hutchesons had led them to Jessie Misskelley. And Jessie had handed them their big break in the case. Now, as detectives turned to the task of supporting what Jessie had said, Bray tried again to help. Again he turned to eight-year-old Aaron Hutcheson.

By the time of the arrests, Aaron had made several statements, many of them highly conflicting. But Bray was convinced that Aaron knew more than he’d yet acknowledged. A few hours after Gitchell announced the arrests, Bray interviewed the boy again. And now, Aaron’s account of what he’d seen took another dramatic turn. For the first time, the boy told Bray that he had been in the woods with the victims on the afternoon they disappeared. In fact, he said, he’d witnessed their murders. Suddenly, Aaron was now also clear as to the identities of his friends’ killers. The men he’d seen in the woods, Aaron said—the men he’d seen murdering his friends—were Damien, Jason, and Jessie.

In a long, disjointed statement, Aaron told Bray that on the afternoon the boys disappeared, he’d ridden his bike to Robin Hood. He said he’d seen five men in the woods: the three defendants and two others, whom he could not identify. They all wore black T-shirts with dragons on them and had knives “like Indians in the jungle have.” Jessie was holding Stevie down in the water, telling him, “I don’t want to kill you yet until what my boss says.” Damien was the boss. Michael and Chris found two guns lying on the pipe. They hid behind a tree. They planned, on the count of three, to jump out and shoot all five of the men. They counted to three, but when they began shooting, they discovered that the guns were not loaded. By then, Michael’s neck had been cut and blood was pouring out all over his T-shirt. After Michael was dead, Damien removed the boy’s clothes and raped him. Jessie cut the private parts off all three boys. Aaron began to run. Jessie saw him and started to chase him, but Aaron tripped him and got away.

Bray had long believed that Aaron had witnessed the murders, and now he was sure he’d been right.
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Four days later, on June 8, he questioned Aaron again. This time, Aaron’s details were even more preposterous. This time Aaron said that Jessie had called him the night before the murders. Jessie told Aaron to bring his friends to the woods, and that they would all “do something.” When Aaron arrived, Michael and Chris were behind a tree. (Later he said they were in a tree.) Jessie got hold of Stevie. Damien was standing in front of Stevie, holding a knife. Jessie ran Stevie into Damien’s knife, cutting him in the stomach. Then Jessie caught Aaron and tied him up for about forty seconds, but Aaron was able to kick his way free. After Aaron escaped, the assailants allegedly raped the other boys.

It was a messy, sad account, offered by a child who had been interviewed repeatedly by police and whose mother, with police approval, had appointed herself an unofficial investigator.
¹⁴⁰
But Bray recognized the potential importance of what young Aaron was saying. So far, police had only Jessie’s account of the murders. A second eyewitness account, even if it contradicted the first and was growing more fantastic by the day, might be invaluable, especially since it named the three teenagers who were in custody.

Gitchell apparently agreed, because on June 9, two days after the details of Jessie’s confession were reported by the media, the West Memphis chief inspector questioned Aaron again. Aaron repeated that he’d witnessed Damien, Jason, and Jessie murder his three friends. And now, Aaron added one more important detail: he told Inspector Gitchell that he’d seen all three of the victims tied up with rope.

A
LMOST AS SOON AS HE HEARD
about the arrests, Ron Lax, a Memphis private investigator, decided to get involved in the case. A meticulous dresser, a self-described “anal-retentive” organizer, a collector of French antiques and books on art, Lax was not a stereotypical private eye. He headed his own investigations company, Inquisitor, Inc., with offices in Memphis and Nashville. Most of Inquisitor’s work focused on insurance and financial fraud. But in the past five years, Lax had widened the scope of his work. Defense lawyers had sought his help on cases where clients faced charges of capital murder. Lax had agreed, though he considered the death penalty an appropriate punishment for persons found guilty of some kinds of murder.
¹⁴¹
Lax’s investigative work helped get some defendants acquitted. His experiences also convinced him that bad police work often resulted in charges against innocent people. By the time of the sensational West Memphis murders, Lax had moved from a position supporting the death penalty to one of opposition. He believed that people who committed terrible crimes should be locked up for life. But he no longer considered the legal process reliable enough to warrant the imposition of such an irrevocable sentence. By 1993, Inquisitor had grown big enough that Lax was able to assign himself a few singularly but personally important investigations of capital murder cases every year. Now, with news of the West Memphis arrests, he asked his assistant, Glori Shettles, to drive across the river and inform the court-appointed defense lawyers that if they wanted him, he was willing to help.

There had never been any question about the boys hiring their own defense. Jessie was the only one who even had a job, and that was intermittent work as a roofer. All lived with their families in rented mobile homes. Though Jason’s mother had told Ridge in desperation that she would “have to hire a lawyer,” there was no way she could have afforded to pay for even a few hours of legal advice, let alone the kind of help needed to mount a legal defense against death.

At a hearing on June 7, 1993, a state judge appointed a pair of lawyers to represent each of the three defendants. The judge appointed Val Price of Jonesboro, chief public defender for Craighead County, and Scott Davidson, also of Jonesboro, to represent Damien. He appointed Paul Ford and George Robin Wadley, both of Jonesboro, to represent Jason. And he appointed Dan Stidham and Greg Crow, law partners from Paragould, to represent Jessie. Most were in their mid-thirties. Stidham was twenty-seven. None had much experience representing clients charged with capital murder.

Jason, stunned by his arrest, hardly knew where he was, much less where his case was headed. He’d later recall that on the night of his arrest, he was driven first to the jail in Marion, then to the hospital in West Memphis, and finally to the juvenile detention center sixty miles north in Jonesboro.
¹⁴²
At their first meeting, Jason later said, his court-appointed lawyers told him that the state appeared to have little evidence that implicated him. According to Jessie’s confession, Jason had been the most vicious of the killers—the one who’d castrated Christopher Byers. But other than that, there was nothing. And unlike Damien, Jason did not even appear to be weird or mentally unstable. Jason had no history of violence. His entire criminal record consisted of having broken glass on cars stored in the derelict shed and having shoplifted a bag of M&M’s. He was an average-to-good student at Marion High, where he’d received certificates for punctuality and attendance. The police had obtained essays he’d written for an English class shortly before the murders, but they had a humorous, optimistic tone and held no hint that Jason had been harboring murderous impulses.
¹⁴³

When Ford and Wadley read the essays, the men were struck by their mildness. In one assignment, when students had been asked to write about a classmate who had recently killed herself, Jason had written: “I didn’t know the girl very well. I seen her around every now and then. But I know how people that knew her feel, because once my mother tried to commit suicide, and I know how I felt when that happened. It was pretty devastating, since 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.”

Ford and Wadley noted that Jason had written those lines on April 5, 1993, a month to the day before the murders. Nothing about the kid seemed to fit the profile of someone who was about to commit a multiple murder. The lawyers knew what Jason had been accused of doing in Jessie’s confession, but so far, if the police had any corroborating evidence, no one had mentioned it.

If Jason felt bewildered, Jessie was in a panic. While Jason was taken north to Jonesboro, Jessie was removed to a jail west of West Memphis, in the small town of Wynne. Within hours after being locked in the jail there, he’d sent a desperate letter to his parents.
¹⁴⁴
In the letter, Jessie repudiated the statement he’d made to the police. “I hope that y’all don’t hate me because I did not do it,” he wrote. He added, “I can not stand [it] in here much longer. I will go crazy.” He begged, “Please try to get me out. I will die in here.”

Jessie’s father showed the letter to reporters, and the
Commercial Appeal
printed portions of it. When reporters asked Gitchell about Jessie’s attempt to recant, the detective would not comment. Now, when reporters once again asked Gitchell to assess the strength of his case, he dismissed the question. “We just have to keep on working,” he said.
¹⁴⁵

Jessie’s lawyer did not believe what the boy had written to his father. Dan Stidham believed Jessie was guilty and doubted his attempt to recant. “Of course, initially, my take on the situation was that anybody who would confess to such a crime obviously did it,” Stidham later recalled. “It was unfathomable to me that anybody would confess to a crime who had not committed it. I figured my client was obviously guilty, and so my initial thought was that my only goal was to prepare him to testify against his codefendants and, hopefully, to work the best possible plea bargain I could for him. That was the only thing I figured we had going for us. We were hoping simply to avoid the death penalty.”

But Stidham’s hopes of negotiating a plea bargain would be jeopardized if Jessie persisted in claiming that his confession had not been the truth. “It kind of made me angry,” the lawyer later said. “I demanded that Jessie take a look at this. I reminded him that he was facing the death penalty, and that he needed to tell me what happened.” But Jessie vacillated. “When his father was there,” Stidham said, “Jessie’d insist that he didn’t do it. And when his father was gone—when it was just Jessie and me—he’d try to recite what he’d told the police. But every time he’d tell the story, there’d be major inconsistencies.” Stidham could not figure out what he was dealing with.

Finally, on one visit near the end of the summer, Stidham recalled,

Stidham would eventually conclude that Jessie had had nothing to do with the crime, and that his confession had been coerced. But by the time Stidham reached this “epiphany,” Jessie had been in jail for two months. Stidham abruptly altered his strategy. He began to study the phenomenon known as false confessions. After what he called his epiphany, Stidham told a reporter, “We don’t believe the state has any evidence except this wild story Jessie made up.” And he added, “The world has a right to know what kind of investigation these cops pulled.”

If Stidham had any lingering doubts about his revised view of his client, they were allayed during a visit when Jessie asked him who “Satin” was. Stidham didn’t understand. “He handed me a pamphlet a preacher had given him that was all about Satan,” Stidham would recall, “but Jessie could barely read it. And what he could read he thought was about somebody named ‘Satin.’” Now, with a jolt, Stidham got it. Jessie was referring to Satan, but never having read the unfamiliar name before, he was mispronouncing it as “Satin,” like the fabric. Stidham was dumbfounded. As he discussed the pamphlet with Jessie, Stidham realized that the boy had heard of the devil, but never that he was called Satan. “It was one of the most ironic moments of the entire ordeal,” the lawyer later said. “There I was, sitting in a jail cell with this confessed satanic killer, and he’s asking me who ‘Satin’ is.”

After discussions among the attorneys, it was decided that private investigator Ron Lax would work with Val Price and Scott Davidson, who were representing Damien. In the beginning, Lax, like Stidham, assumed that all three defendants were guilty. He also assumed that any investigation he and his assistant, Glori Shettles, did on behalf of Damien would likely benefit all three. His approach, as always, would be organized and methodical. It would begin with an interview of Damien in the jail where he was being held in the town of Clarendon, Arkansas. But that interview almost never occurred. On Tuesday, June 8, four days after his arrest, Damien took an overdose of Elavil, his antidepressant medication.
¹⁴⁶
His mother had brought the medicine and left it with the jailers. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the jailers had dispensed Damien’s pills to him, and by Tuesday, without their knowledge, he had saved up twelve of them. He swallowed them en masse and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where his stomach was pumped.

Lax met with Damien several times as Damien’s lawyers prepared for trial. But most of the work with Damien would fall to Glori Shettles, a former parole officer and prosecutor’s assistant who held a master’s degree in counseling. For the next nine months, Shettles visited Damien almost once a week. In the beginning, she and Lax were uncertain about Damien’s name. The media seemed to love “Damien,” but the investigators opted for “Michael,” which they’d been told was his legal name.
¹⁴⁷

Damien told Shettles that his family had moved frequently when he was young.
¹⁴⁸
Though he was unaware of it at first, Damien said, his family had been desperately poor, living at times in shacks with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. He said he’d grown used to being picked on at school, and that once he’d made it to high school, he’d begun carrying a dog’s skull he’d found because kids tended not to bother him when he did. He discovered that being ridiculed for being strange—something he could choose for himself—was better than being ridiculed for things he could not control.

It seemed to her that Damien had had a hard time making sense of his life, and that he’d turned to religion for help. When the Protestant influences of his childhood failed to satisfy or comfort him, he’d turned to Catholicism, and then to more earth-based, pagan beliefs.
¹⁴⁹
As Damien grew more comfortable with Shettles, the investigator tried to explore the behaviors that had attracted Driver’s attention. Shettles noted:

Damien told Shettles that he, Jason, and Domini had been “harassed” by police for almost a year and a half before the murders.
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After one of Lax’s visits with Damien, the private investigator wrote: