Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (13 page)

Ron Lax found the story peculiar. The prosecutor’s office had just begun to provide documents from the police investigation to the defense attorneys, through the legal process known as discovery. To Lax’s and the lawyers’ frustration, the flow of records throughout the summer amounted to only a trickle. But at least the trickle had included copies of the autopsy reports, which the West Memphis police had finally received after the arrests. Lax scoured the reports, but they contained no mention of urine having been found in the stomachs of any of the bodies.
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Since Lax and the lawyers had so far been provided with but a fraction of the police department’s file, the private investigator had no way of knowing that the file contained two documents, both from early in the investigation, in which Gitchell and an unidentified West Memphis Police Department official had, in fact, referred to Peretti’s reported statement about finding urine in the victims’ stomachs.

Meanwhile, it became clear to Shettles that until the night of their arrests, Damien and Jason had never fully appreciated the seriousness of their situation.
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To the irritation of the police, Damien had maintained an attitude of arrogance. He told Shettles that he’d felt safe; that he’d believed the police would never find evidence against him, since he had not committed the crime; and that eventually they would be forced to realize how stupid they’d been to hound him. With evident satisfaction, Damien told Shettles how, during one interrogation, he’d finally said that if officers would let him speak with his mother, he’d tell them everything he knew about the murders. Detectives had gotten excited and brought Pam to the station, and while Damien was speaking with her, they’d hastily set up a video camera to tape his expected confession. Damien had then smugly announced that everything he knew about the murders was “nothing.” Damien thought it was funny. The officers had been furious.

But Shettles suspected that Damien’s haughtiness had always been a facade. She noticed that his hands shook when he talked. Sometimes he cried. He told her he had little hope of being believed by a jury. She wrote, “He stated many times he prays that if there is a God, he will not allow him to live another day. He further stated he feels that he is going insane, but is not certain of what will happen to him mentally should this process occur.”

For the investigators, Damien’s psychiatric background was legally important, as well. At the time, Arkansas was one of five states that held bifurcated trials; that is, one part dealt with the question of guilt or innocence, and if a defendant were found guilty, the second part of the trial was held to determine his sentence. If Damien’s trial went that far, his mental health history might be used as a mitigating factor; evidence of mental defect might be presented to persuade a jury to spare his life or to reduce his time in prison. Part of Shettles’s assignment was to closely explore Damien’s mental health history.

He told her that he had suffered severe headaches as a child, some so intense that he would pull clumps of hair out of his head in an effort to ease the pain. Pam Echols reported that Damien had suffered several blackouts but that they’d never been diagnosed. There’d been his stays, as a teenager, in psychiatric facilities, and the outpatient counseling in West Memphis. Pam reported that after Damien’s last hospitalization, he’d been declared totally disabled by the Social Security Administration. Three months before the murders, he had begun receiving Social Security disability checks of $289 per month. These were stopped after his arrest.

As the summer intensified, so did Shettles’s concern for Damien’s mental state. By mid-July he told her that he was sleeping as little as two hours a night. Noting that he was “noticeably shaky,” she wrote, “He can quote many songs and relates lyrics of songs to his feelings. He quoted lyrics from a Pink Floyd song called ‘Comfortably Numb’ and an Ozzy Osbourne song called ‘Road to Nowhere.’”

The titles were sounding increasingly apt. By August Damien was hallucinating. Soon he was showing signs of full-blown paranoia. He wrote in a letter to Shettles, “I think the police are up to something. They are doing something to the food and putting some kind of gas in the vents. I think they are doing something to my medicine.” When Shettles visited the jail in mid-August, the sheriff informed her that Damien had begun a hunger strike. When she went to Damien’s cell, he told her that “the reason he had gone on the hunger strike was he had no desire to go to trial and he did not feel he would receive a fair trial.” She wrote, “As I left, one of the older jailers asked when Michael might be moved to the state mental hospital for an evaluation. He stated he did not understand why the attorneys had not already moved him, as it was inevitable that he would need to be transferred for an evaluation. There are several jailers there that apparently take Michael’s condition very seriously and they appear to be sympathetic and concerned for his welfare.”

The jailers had reason for concern. Damien told Shettles he felt like “a walking razor blade.” He knew that, mentally and legally, his situation was dire. He knew he was perceived as “a devil worshiper or a nut case or something.” In his fitful journal he wrote, “I might lose my mind and I might lose my head.” Despair was taking its toll. He alternated between utter delusion and acute awareness. In a desperate letter to his family he wrote: “I need a doctor. I think I’m having a nervous breakdown, and I’m afraid to tell the people here. They wouldn’t care anyway. Don’t worry about me. I’m okay. Just tell Val Price [Damien’s lawyer] or Glori [Shettles] I need a doctor.
Don’t forget!”
At the bottom of the page, he pleaded again, “Don’t forget the
doctor!”

But no doctor ever came. Damien later wrote, “I am walking the borderline of insanity…. I don’t like it. I am helpless to stop it.” Later: “Help me. They have invaded and destroyed my world. It seemed harmless enough. Now it’s a contest: who can destroy me first? Them or myself.” Later still: “Mother Night, wrap your dark arms around me. Protect me. Lord of Chaos, guide me. Father Death, embrace me. I am the half man who dwells in both worlds. I walk in shadow and light and am cursed by both.”

A
S FURTHER PROOF
of Damien’s unstable mental state, while he was contemplating his death, he was also planning his marriage. Domini was pregnant and was expecting to deliver the baby in the fall of 1993. If Damien was coming apart, as he feared, the parts were greatly at odds. His writings, which the private investigators did not see, verged on madness and despair. When Shettles and Lax visited, they saw a severely troubled teenager who they feared might be suicidal. But Damien’s letters to Domini and his family were, by contrast, almost sunny. He wrote to Domini, “I told my mom to buy you an engagement ring with my next check. Remind her. Tell your mom I said hi, and I may be out by Christmas.” Reflecting on Domini’s pregnancy, he wrote, “I hope I get out in time to see our baby be born!”

Whether he realized it or not, the wish was preposterous. The defendants’ trial dates had yet to be set, and the prosecutor had barely begun to release information about the case to the defense lawyers.
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As none of the defendants had even finished high school (though Damien had obtained his GED), their understanding of the legal process gearing up around them was severely limited. Their lawyers had to explain that a defendant has a right, through the process of discovery, to know what evidence the prosecution intends to present against him. He also has a right to any evidence the prosecution might have that would point toward his innocence. Sitting in their cells, Damien, Jason, and Jessie could not imagine the scale of the job their lawyers faced.

As a private investigator working for Damien, most of Lax’s time, from June to the end of 1993, was spent compiling information for the attorneys and trying to understand the police files that Fogleman was gradually releasing. Lax scrutinized Jessie’s confession and identified several parts he considered “questionable.” Jessie’s belief that the victims had skipped school, his report of rope ligatures, his confusion about the times, and his claim that the boys had been choked to death all suggested to Lax that Jessie had been clumsily making up answers based on misinformation and faulty assumptions. The investigator concluded that the entire statement appeared to be “a ‘leading type’ interview.” In letters to the attorneys, he pointed out a half dozen points at which, he said, the officers seemed to provide Jessie with answers. Moreover, Lax observed, “The statement does not appear to follow any logical progression.” Lax noted that though Jessie said Damien had “bruised” one of the boys “real bad,” he found it “difficult to conceive of this incident lasting long enough for bruises to become visible to Misskelley.” Lax wondered “if the police allowed him to look at the crime scene photographs, or the autopsy photographs.” Elsewhere he noted that Jessie “first stated Michael Moore began running toward the service road, which would be north of the ditch; however later, on the same page, he stated Moore ran toward the houses (this would be south).” Lax pointed out that “Misskelley sounds real confused regarding when he was present and when he was not.” Finally, noting that “Misskelley said he returned to the crime scene two or three days after the bodies were found,” Lax wrote, “I find this very difficult to believe since the area should have been sealed off and was probably being guarded, or at least closely watched, during this time.”

Three or four times a month, throughout the summer and into the fall, the lawyers received batches of records from Fogleman. But there was no continuity to the material, no organization that would have given them a sense of how the investigation had proceeded. Lax spent much of his time sorting through hundreds of names on hundreds of reports, trying to determine the significance—if any—of each. He summarized every document that was received, though he admitted to uncertainty about what many of them meant.
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As records naming Vicki Hutcheson began to filter in, Lax asked Damien about “the girl Misskelley tried to fix him up with.” Lax wrote that Damien “stated he stayed at the trailer for an hour to an hour and a half and the girl named Vicki made a couple of passes at him but nothing occurred.” Lax set out to locate Hutcheson. Neighbors told him that she’d moved, and directed him to an area south of Marion, where he found her living “on a street that has no sign, in a house that has no number.” There was a Pontiac “jacked up in the drive,” a pickup parked in the drive, and another in the yard. After noting the license numbers of each, Lax knocked on the door. When Hutcheson appeared, she “became very nervous and upset,” he later wrote in his notes. She then “informed me she did not want to talk to me and did not want to become involved. I explained she was already involved.” Eventually Hutcheson gave Lax her version of events, which Lax described as “fuzzy.” He wrote, “I then quizzed Vicki as to why she would have been with Misskelley and Damien after her son identified them as being involved in the murders and her answer was never clear. She attempted to avoid that question but finally ended up saying, ‘I would try to get anything from them I could to help the police.’”

Lax would later recall, “We were interviewing everybody we could find, and nobody had detrimental information, with the exception of Vicki and Aaron. We kept wondering what the police had that we still hadn’t seen.”
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For much of the public, the matter was not so complex: three teenagers who worshiped Satan had sacrificed three younger boys.
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Religion permeated the case. Damien told Shettles that due to publicity about the case, Baptist ministers came to the jail to preach to him at least twice a week.
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Now, Lax and Shettles learned, that publicity was about to widen. Damien and Domini’s baby was due at the end of September. In mid-August Pam Echols called Lax to report that a production company from New York, Creative Thinking International, had called seeking permission to film a baby shower that was being planned for Domini. The company’s owners, filmmakers Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, had promised to contribute a high chair, and Domini’s mother, who was hosting the party, had agreed to let them come. Pam reported that Sinofsky and Berlinger said they’d contacted Damien’s lawyers, who’d given their permission.
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As deputy prosecutor Fogleman released more records, Lax found himself working harder to organize and to understand what the police department had produced. To him, much of it looked chaotic. Records from the investigation were being provided in no discernible order. They were not organized by time, names, or place. Different reports on the same individuals came filtering in over several months, and because many were out of sequence, Lax found it difficult, as he processed the material, to get a clear picture of how police had worked the case. He filed the records in the order they were received, providing a caption and summary of each.

Normally, the summaries were brief: “
INFORMATION REGARDING MOORE
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S PARENTS
—05/10/93. The police spoke with the Moores regarding their activities on the evening of May 5, 1993 and May 6,1993.” Or “
INFORMATION REGARDING BYERS
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PARENTS
—05/12/93. Det. Lt. Martello, Memphis P.D. Narcotics, informed the West Memphis Police Department that the Byerses have both been confidential informants for Memphis and Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.” But occasionally Lax commented on items in the file. After reading a magazine article entitled “Satanic Cult Awareness,” Lax wrote that it made him feel like he “was back in the dark ages.” He commented, “With the exception of the castration of the Byers victim and the fact that the bodies were nude and in a wooded area, I have seen no evidence of anything connected with the case which even remotely resembles the discussions in this article.”

Lax was particularly interested in a list of forty people who had been fingerprinted by police. But he was frustrated to find that “There are no accompanying sheets discussing these individuals [and] we do not know why these individuals were fingerprinted.” As his review progressed, Lax was even more disconcerted to realize that, aside from Jessie’s confession, he still had not received anything that constituted evidence against the defendants. From June until well into September, the only records the defense attorneys received were those that had been generated
before
the arrests, and the release of even these was slow. They did not learn of Narlene Hollingsworth’s claim that she had seen Damien and Domini on the service road until August 25, and they received no records of interviews with Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson until the first week of September. Lax found Hollingsworth’s statement confusing, since Domini was never mentioned as a participant in the crime; what was perplexing about the Hutchesons’ statements was that the police had not quickly dismissed them.

Gradually, the defense teams began to receive records showing what the West Memphis police had done
since
the June 3 arrests. To his amazement, Lax read that on July 1, nearly a month after Damien, Jason, and Jessie were in custody, Detective Ridge had returned to the site where the bodies were found. Ridge’s purpose, as stated in his report, was “to look for evidence which may have been missed.” To Lax’s greater amazement, Ridge reported that he’d found some evidence. Recalling Jessie’s claim that the victims had been beaten with a stick, Ridge reported that on his visit to the scene in July, he’d found two sticks that had previously gone unnoticed. There was nothing about the sticks that connected them to the crime, other than their location in the woods where the bodies were found. Nonetheless, Ridge took them back to the station and marked them as evidence.

Other records showed that while the police had reportedly polygraphed thirty people before the arrests, since the arrests, they had polygraphed eleven more. Records also revealed that police had sent dozens of items from the defendants’ homes to laboratories, to be tested for genetic material. Realizing how many reports he’d seen about items that had been sent off for testing, Lax prepared a review of the physical evidence the police had collected. The twenty-eight-page memo covered nearly six hundred items. In addition to numerous fingerprints, blood, and urine samples, Lax counted more than one hundred items of clothing, eighty-seven samples of hair, seventeen knives, three sticks, three hammers, three ropes, two razors, an ice axe, a candle, a hook, a mask, and a Mason jar full of water. Out of all that, the crime lab had reported finding only a few fibers that analysts said were “microscopically similar” to fibers found in the homes of two of the defendants. In light of the bloodiness of the crime, its hands-on physicality, and the number of victims and defendants, the discovery of a few mass-produced fibers from items available in Wal-Marts and other clothiers all over the country struck Lax as an infinitesimal amount of evidence, which was also highly circumstantial. But he knew that Fogleman would use it, just as he knew the prosecutor would use the part of Hollingsworth’s testimony that placed Damien near the scene of the crime.

As the outline of the case slowly became more clear, Lax tried to focus on elements that would be essential to Damien’s defense. He interviewed two girls in Memphis with whom Damien said he’d spoken by phone on the night the children disappeared.
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Lax wrote that “both girls stated they did remember this and were positive of the day.” He interviewed Narlene Hollingsworth and noted that despite the apparent problems her account posed for both the prosecution and the defense—placing Damien at the scene, but with Domini rather than Jason—she seemed to be “unshakeable” in her recollections. On October 7, Lax met with Detective Bray in Marion. During their conversation, Lax noted, “Don Bray reached into his shirt pocket and produced a sheet of note paper. He held this up and told me that when he first learned of these murders and what had happened to the victims, he wrote down the names of people he knew to be responsible. I asked him how he came by this knowledge, and he stated he had been in this business a long time and in the area for quite some time and, because of the particulars of what happened to the victims, he knew the ones who were on the sheet and who were responsible.” Bray showed Lax the paper. There were eight names on it, including those of Damien, Jason, Jessie, and Domini. “Further conversation revealed Don Bray compiled this list after he spoke with Jerry Driver,” Lax wrote. “I continued to question Detective Bray as to the reason these individuals would have come to his mind in regard to this murder. He could not be specific, but he referred to rumors which had been circulating throughout the community.”

Lax next met with Gitchell and Ridge.
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