Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (18 page)

Lax and the attorneys wondered, could the DNA of two people who were not biologically related be utterly indistinguishable? Or—the thought arose—was John Mark Byers actually Christopher’s biological father? Was that why he’d always claimed to have “adopted” the boy, but not Christopher’s half brother, Ryan? Those questions would hang over the case, unresolved, for years to come.

But with Jessie’s trial under way and another trial soon to start, there was no time for speculation. And soon after Gitchell received the ambiguous lab results, Fogleman notified the defense teams that upon reflection, and despite his earlier statements to the contrary, Byers now recalled that he had, after all, cut himself with the knife.

This knife, with its uncanny traces of blood and Byers’s self-contradictory statements, related more closely to the crime than any piece of evidence the police had recovered so far. Yet without further question, Gitchell and Fogleman accepted Byers’s final statement. Lax viewed the decision as another example of the investigators picking and choosing which statements to believe. They’d done it with Aaron—ignoring his contradictions while accepting his claims of having witnessed wild satanic activities in the woods. They’d done it with Jessie—ignoring his contradictions while accepting any statements he made that implicated Damien, Jason, and himself. And now, with the blood evidence rendered inconclusive, they were doing it with Byers—ignoring his contradictions while accepting only his statements that made the knife appear less suspicious. Rather than reopening their investigation, they seemed relieved to believe that Byers had, as he now remembered, cut himself with the Kershaw knife.

Lax hurried to consult with experts in DNA evidence. He contacted a forensic science lab and tried to explain what had happened.
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As he later noted, “I also explained we had been informed a DQ Alpha test had been conducted on the victim’s (Chris Byers’s) blood and the blood of the owner of the knife (John Mark Byers) and they were consistent with each other. I asked if there was any other test which could be conducted to further that identification.” The scientist

To the defense teams, the situation was maddening. The quickness with which the police and Fogleman had been willing to dismiss not only the knife but Byers’s peculiar interview about it renewed long-simmering frustrations. If Byers had, in fact, owned the knife for a couple of years, and kept it in his bedroom, that meant that, in May 1993, when the West Memphis police had searched his home, they had failed to find a weapon marked with blood matching that of one of the victims. On the other hand, if the knife had not been in the bedroom, as Byers claimed, the questions raised were even more serious.

As Lax and the defense attorneys discussed Byers, Damien’s lawyer Val Price mentioned having heard that Byers had once been convicted of terroristic threatening after taking a stun gun to his ex-wife and threatening her life. This was the first Lax knew of the incident, and the news left him deeply disturbed. Only later would he learn that Fogleman had prosecuted the case against Byers and that Burnett had been the judge who’d ordered Byers’s conviction expunged.

If Lax had known more at the time about officials’ handling of the Rolex case involving John Mark Byers, his concerns would have multiplied. That investigation had been handled quietly. No word of it had reached the media. The only mention of it that was included in the murder case file was Gitchell’s note that Byers had called to say he regretted the incident. The state police reports about their investigation of Byers were never made part of the file.
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If reports on the Rolex case had been included, Lax and the defense teams would have learned that Byers had confessed to the crime—and that Fogleman’s boss, prosecuting attorney Brent Davis, had suggested that he not be prosecuted.
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Among the records relating to Byers that the defense teams never saw was a memo dated June 24, 1993—seven weeks after the murders—in which a state police investigator outlined a plan proposed by prosecutor Davis that would allow Byers to pay $7,400 in restitution in lieu of facing prosecution.
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How Byers was expected to repay the money was a question. Davis had proposed the plan just a couple of weeks after Byers, who was bankrupt and years behind on his child support payments, had publicly appealed for money to help pay for Christopher’s funeral.

W
HILE THE FUROR OVER THE BLOODSTAINED KNIFE
played out behind the scenes in the Clay County Courthouse, the life-and-death drama of Jessie’s trial was unfolding in the courtroom. Heat in the building was cranked up high as the region coped with a rare winter storm. Outside the one-story cinder-block courthouse, the streets of Corning sparkled under a coating of ice. Usually, this corner of northeast Arkansas, nestled into the Missouri boot heel, didn’t experience severe winter weather. But this January of 1994 was an exception. Just before the trial began, bitter cold had swept through the Mississippi River valley, cracking trees and making travel hazardous. Even now, on January 18, as heavily armed sheriff’s deputies led Jessie, hunched and handcuffed, from a squad car into the building, broken tree limbs still littered the lawn.

Stidham expected a fight as intense as the weather. He’d battled unsuccessfully to keep Jessie’s confession out of the trial. Now, with the confession in, he looked ahead to a difficult defense. While he doubted that Fogleman had much evidence other than the confession, that alone was formidable. For Jessie to be acquitted, the confession had to be discredited. Everything Stidham did—both as he cross-examined Fogleman’s witnesses in the first part of the trial, and then as he presented Jessie’s defense—would have to chip away at the jury’s confidence in the truth of what his client had said.

Despite the hazardous roads, more than ninety of the one hundred prospective jurors who’d been called had made their way to the courthouse. They were men and women accustomed to stern conditions, including the demands of distance. Of Clay County’s seventeen thousand residents, seven thousand clustered in its two biggest towns, one of which was Corning, with a population of about three thousand. One in four of the county’s children lived below the federal poverty level; fewer than seven hundred Clay County residents had graduated from college. The religious attitudes that kept the sale of liquor banned in the county were a point of pride for many residents, as was the county’s claim to a population that was almost totally white. When Judge Burnett welcomed the potential jurors to his court, he began by asking if any of them would hesitate, due to moral or religious scruples, to impose the death penalty. No one raised a hand.

Only thirty-six people had to be questioned to impanel a jury of seven women and five men, plus two male alternates. One man was dismissed when he said he had discussed the case with a close friend who lived in the West Memphis area. When Burnett asked if he could set aside what he had heard, the man answered straightforwardly, “It would be hard for me to.” Corning’s postmaster was one of the jurors chosen. Others included a housewife, a clerk at the local Wal-Mart store, a loan officer from the bank, a factory worker, and a plant manager. The youngest juror was twenty-three years old. That made him five years older than Jessie, who’d spent his eighteenth birthday in jail a month after his arrest.

The thirty-year-old courthouse had never hosted such a high-tech drama. There were television trucks with satellite hookups, a mobile telephone bank, a room full of closed-circuit television monitors for the dozens of reporters. Inside the courtroom, two television cameras, one for the New York film crew, the other for the local news pool, stood near the jury box, though Judge Burnett had issued a warning that no one was to photograph the jurors. Amid all the hubbub, members of the victims’ families sat quietly in the first few rows of spectators’ seats, just behind the table where Stidham sat with Jessie. During a break, Stevie Branch’s mother told a reporter that she was “still enraged” and would like to “jump at” all the defendants. “Sometimes,” Pam Hobbs said, “I just have to hold myself back.” Another spectator commented that Jessie’s trial struck her as a waste of time. “We all know he’s guilty,” the woman said. “They ought to just fry him and get it over with.”

Inside the courtroom, Jessie seldom raised his eyes. He seldom cast so much as a glance in the direction of the jury. Most of the time he sat bent over, chewing gum, head near the edge of the table, eyes directed at the floor. A reporter from Little Rock described Jessie as “a strange-looking little character, small and frail, giving the impression of being deformed in some elusive Dickensian way, his manner that of some furtive rodential creature—a tranquilized squirrel perhaps.” The writer went on to note that there was “a passivity about him so profound it strains credulity; he sits all day facing away from the judge and jury, staring at his feet; slumping farther and farther forward in his chair, as if he might ooze down and become a puddle between his shoes.”
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Stidham had advised the posture; he didn’t want anyone to think Jessie looked cocky, but some observers thought it reflected the defendant’s shame and guilt. Jessie also wore a more conventional haircut than when he was arrested. A front-page article in the
Jonesboro Sun
called attention to the change. The paper ran photos of all three defendants, taken at their arrests, along with more recent photos, from when they’d appeared in court for pretrial hearings. An article describing the “metamorphosis” noted that when Jessie was arrested, he’d had “the look of a late 1950s Bohemian, more often known as a beatnik,” though now that he was on trial, he presented “more of a schoolboy look.”

Opposite where Jessie sat with his lawyers, Dan Stidham and Greg Crow, Fogleman sat with the district’s main prosecutor, thirty-six-year-old Brent Davis. Though Davis would play a significant role at both Jessie’s trial and the one to follow, Fogleman was the lead prosecutor. Fogleman was well known in Crittenden County, the scion of a family that was one of the oldest in the region. Near the courthouse in Marion, a monument commemorated the role the deputy prosecutor’s great-great-grandfather had played in what remains to this day the greatest maritime disaster in American history. At the end of the Civil War, in 1865, pioneer John Fogleman was operating a ferry on the Mississippi River between the Arkansas side and Memphis. In April of that year, the steamship
Sultana
was traveling upstream, loaded with newly released Union prisoners of war. The ship exploded in the middle of the night, near Fogleman’s Landing. Though the ferryman rescued those he could, more than eighteen hundred men burned to death in the explosion or drowned in the freezing water. More lives were lost than in the sinking of the
Titanic,
but the catastrophe was overshadowed by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, only a few days before. The monument near the Crittenden County Courthouse reflected the Foglemans’ place in local history from that early day to the present. The deputy prosecutor’s relatives had been prominent in the region’s commercial, civic, and legal affairs. They had worked as grocers, farmers, lawyers, bankers, deputy sheriffs, and circuit clerks. Fogleman’s father had served on the Marion school board for forty-five years; one of his uncles had served on the Arkansas Supreme Court, and his father had once been president of the Arkansas Bar Association. The John Fogleman who now faced the jury had been a deputy prosecutor for the past ten years. A respected and strait-laced teetotaler, he was seen as a rather formal fellow.

Fogleman rose to present his opening argument to the jury. In a slow, emotionless drawl, he recounted the nightmare of the previous May—how the little boys had disappeared, and the horror the next day. He reported the medical examiner’s findings that Michael and Stevie had died from drowning, while Christopher had died from “multiple wounds,” which included his brutal castration. Fogleman told the jury that a young woman who had a son the same age as the victims had been so disturbed by the murders that she’d decided to “play detective” to help police solve the crime. “Ultimately,” he reported, “Victoria Hutcheson would lead police to Misskelley, and Misskelley would confess.”

What the deputy prosecutor did not tell the jury was that Jessie Misskelley’s confession was virtually the only piece of direct evidence that he had. It was a compelling piece, to be sure, but it was also seriously flawed. Fogleman’s next task, if the jury was to believe the confession, had to be a preemptive one: to address the numerous weaknesses—and the outright errors—in Jessie’s statement to the police. Fogleman acknowledged to the jury that not everything Jessie had said in his confession was true. There were discrepancies, he admitted, between some of Jessie’s statements and the facts of the crime. But Fogleman said these were easily explained. They were the results of Jessie’s bungled attempts to minimize his involvement. Fogleman urged the jury to focus instead on things Misskelley had said that “only the true killer” would have known: that one of the boys had been cut in the face, that another had been sexually mutilated, and that all three of the boys had been beaten. These incriminating details, combined with Misskelley’s own admission of personal involvement, would prove more than enough, Fogleman predicted, for the jury to find him guilty of three counts of capital murder.

Dan Stidham lacked Fogleman’s polish. More heavyset and more loosely tailored, he looked like a man whose favorite pastimes were hunting ducks or fishing, which is what he was. Stidham liked practicing trial law, and despite the glares he’d received from neighbors who couldn’t understand why he’d represent a murdering satanist, he felt passionately about the case—and Jessie’s innocence.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Stidham said when it was his turn to address the jury, “this whole case is a sad, sad story. But what’s even sadder is the way the West Memphis Police Department decided to investigate this crime.” Recalling the anxious month that had passed between the murders and the arrests, Stidham noted the strain the police had been under. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there was a public outcry. The public was demanding that someone be arrested for this crime, and the police department was trying to respond to this tremendous amount of pressure.” Besides offering a reward, he said, they had developed what he called “Damien Echols tunnel vision.” That meant that “from day one,” the West Memphis police had Echols “picked out as the person responsible.” Jessie, he said, had merely been caught in a net spread to ensnare Echols.

But as he spoke, Stidham knew that the most crucial battles in Jessie’s trial had already been lost. During the months of pretrial motions, he’d argued repeatedly that Jessie’s confession had been coerced and should for that reason be kept out of the trial. But Judge Burnett had rejected that claim, as well as Stidham’s parallel arguments that the confession should not be admitted because Jessie was mentally retarded, and that since Jessie was a minor, his case should be tried in juvenile court. Stidham’s only hope now was to make the jury believe that Jessie would not have said what he did but for the psychological pressure being applied by the police. It would be a hard sell, he knew. Most adults cannot imagine confessing to a crime they did not commit—especially one as horrendous as this. At the start of this case, even Stidham had found it hard to believe that anyone would confess to a murder that he did not commit. But Stidham felt that he had learned a lot since then. His education had taken a while. He wouldn’t have that much time to change the minds of the jurors.

What Jessie told the police was “a false story,” Stidham told them. He argued that Inspector Gitchell and Detective Ridge realized that what Jessie was telling them was “factually incorrect in many, many important areas…but they kept right on interrogating…. They didn’t care that what he was telling them was wrong.” Stidham insisted that details of the crime, including those the police said “only the killer would have known,” were in fact widely known. Instead of acknowledging that crucial information had been repeatedly leaked, Stidham told the jurors, detectives had been willing to terrify Jessie until he’d told them what they’d wanted to hear.

“They broke his will,” he said. “They scared him beyond all measure.”

The trial that followed would last for two weeks. Fogleman called Dana Moore and Melissa Byers to the stand, to give their grief-stricken accounts of the night their sons disappeared.
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Stidham barely questioned Melissa. There were a lot of questions he would have liked to ask her, and still more that he would have liked to put to her husband. What about that beating Christopher had received just before he disappeared? What about the notation in the police report on the night that Christopher disappeared that he had not taken his Ritalin that day? Why not? (The drug, which calms hyperactive children, is known to act as a stimulant when taken by adults.) Had one of Christopher’s parents helped themselves to the drug instead? Had Christopher left home in the past for several hours at a time, as Melissa had told the police? Or had that never happened, as her husband claimed? And what about John Mark’s account of his activities on the night of the murders? Why had he entered the woods after dark on the evening the boys disappeared without a flashlight? And why had he then left to go home and change his clothes?
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Most of all, Stidham would have liked to grill the couple about the mysterious bloodstained knife. But the lawyer held his tongue. Despite Stidham’s mounting concerns that Byers might have been the killer, he considered it far too risky to suggest that possibility in court. Long after the trial was over, he would admit that his decision might have been different had he known more about Byers’s background. Under the circumstances, he concluded that “pointing the finger at a stepparent without blatant proof” would probably “inflame the jury” and “insure the death penalty for Jessie.”
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When Fogleman questioned Ridge about his hands-and-knees search of the ditch, the detective cried on the stand. To emphasize the sadness of that day, and the loss, the prosecutor had the boys’ bicycles wheeled into the courtroom and introduced as evidence. The bikes remained in the front of the courtroom, leaning against a wall, throughout the rest of the trial. Next, Fogleman handed the jury more than three dozen photographs showing the victims’ bodies as they lay, white, bound, and uncovered, on the muddy, shaded bank. Fogleman then called Dr. Frank Peretti of the Arkansas Crime Laboratory to report on his autopsy findings.