Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (11 page)

Gitchell: “Jessie…when you three were in the woods and the little boys come up, about what time was it?”

Jessie: “I would say it was about five or so. Five or six.”

Gitchell: “Did you have your watch on at the time?”

Jessie: (Shakes his head no.)

Gitchell: “All right, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time was it?”

Jessie: “It was seven or eight.”

Gitchell: “Are you…”

Jessie: “It was starting to get dark.”

Gitchell: “Oh. Well, that clears it up…”

With that troublesome matter now quickly and neatly “cleared up,” Gitchell turned to another of the problems with the earlier confession, the part in which Jessie’d said that the boys had been tied with ropes. The correct answer would have been shoestrings, some white, others black, that had been removed from the children’s own shoes.

Gitchell: “All right. Who tied the boys up?”

Jessie: “Damien.”

Gitchell: “Did Damien just tie them all up, or did anyone help Damien?”

Jessie: “Jason helped him.”

Gitchell: “Okay. And what did they use to tie them up?”

Jessie: “A rope.”

Gitchell: “Okay, what color was the rope?”

Jessie: “Brown.”

Quickly abandoning that line of questioning, Gitchell moved on to the question of rape. Because the boys were naked and tied the way they were, police had suspected that sexual violation might have been part of their murders. Jessie said he saw Damien and Jason rape two of the boys, whom he identified oddly—and incorrectly—as “the Myers” and “the Branch.”
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Gitchell asked about several forms of sex. Jessie said that, in addition to raping them, Damien and Jason had had oral sex with two of the boys or, as he put it, “They stuck their thang in their mouth.”

At one point, Gitchell rose from his seat, apologizing to Jessie. “Okay. All right,” he said. “Hold on just a minute.” There was a pause, during which Gitchell left the room. When the chief detective returned he explained, “I’m sorry I keep coming back and forth, but I got people that want me to ask you some other questions…” When the questioning resumed, he asked, “Did anyone go down on the boys and maybe sucked theirs or something?”

Jessie said, “Not that. I didn’t see neither one of them do that.”

Whether anything had been “clarified” or not, that concluded the second session. Though the time was not mentioned on the tape, a police time chart noted that at 5:05
P.M
., Jessie was offered food, and that an hour later he was brought a “burger and Coke.” But while Jessie was getting to relax, detectives Ridge and Gitchell—along with deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman and municipal court judge William “Pal” Rainey—were busy preparing an affidavit.
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At 9:06
P.M
. they appeared in municipal court, this time in front of Judge Rainey, for a hearing to explain why they had probable cause to arrest Jessie, Damien, and Jason and to search their houses. By then, Jessie had been at the police station for more than eleven hours.

Years later, Jessie would recall that his questioning by police had seemed to him like a game. He said that when the detectives refused to accept his answers to their questions, he didn’t know what to do. Then he figured out that they were giving him clues, and that when he provided answers that conformed to the clues, things went better for him. Though the questioning had seemed serious, it had also struck him as silly. “I figured they knew I was lying from the git-go,” he said, “because the police, they knew me. They knew me for a long time. They knew I wasn’t that type of person, to go killing little kids. I figured they knew I was lying ’cause they was lying, too.”

There was an easy way to test the accuracy of Jessie’s statements. Gitchell himself had told the
West Memphis Evening Times
just a few weeks earlier that “in the initial stages [of the investigation], people were calling and confessing. But by what they said, they were eliminated quickly.” Gitchell told the paper that his officers had “escorted some potential witnesses or suspects into the area” to test their statements against elements of the crime the police knew to be true. It would have been easy to have subjected Jessie to a similar test, to have brought him to Robin Hood and had him point out to officers where the events he described had transpired. During the first recorded interview, Detective Ridge had, in fact, suggested doing just that.

“Are you willing to go down there with us,” Ridge had asked Jessie, “and us having a camcorder, and show us where these things took place? Would you do that?”

Jessie’s response was inaudible, but the boy apparently nodded his head.

Ridge wanted to get his answer on tape. He asked, “Wouldn’t have any problem with that?”

Jessie: “Not that I know of, I wouldn’t.”

Ridge: “But you would be able to point out where these things took place?”

Jessie: “Yes.”

But Jessie was never taken to the woods. Despite the numerous inconsistencies and flat-out errors in his statement, Gitchell and his detectives decided not to put it to the simple test of questioning Jessie at the site while someone videotaped the excursion. The detectives were satisfied with Jessie’s account. That, or they were unwilling to expose it to the risks that a trip to the woods would entail. Ridge adopted a stance of certainty, writing in his final report, “Jessie Junior, during the course of the interview, gave specific information that only a person with firsthand knowledge could have had. Jessie Misskelley Junior stated that he did take part in the apprehension of the victims and that he was an eyewitness to the murders by Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols.”

When the detectives were through with their questions, they took Jessie to a holding cell. Later, he recalled, “After they turned the tape recorder off, I was too tired to talk. I just wanted to lie down. I figured I was just supposed to wait there until my dad come to get me.” No one had explained to Jessie that he had implicated himself in the triple murder by saying that he’d caught and held one of the boys, or that he was about to be arrested. “I figured they knew I needed a ride home,” he said. “But my dad never did show up.”

I
T IS RARE THAT JUDGES ISSUE WARRANTS
for nighttime searches. Arkansas law requires police to show that extraordinary circumstances necessitate invading a home after dark. These circumstances are well defined and narrow: the home to be searched must be difficult for police to approach by day, or there must be a threat that officers will be harmed or evidence destroyed if a daytime search is attempted. None of the trailer homes where the three suspects lived were difficult to approach, day or night. And police had questioned all three of the teenagers without a hint of threat. As for the likelihood that evidence would be destroyed, thirty days had already passed since the murders. If evidence remained at the suspects’ homes, the chance that it would be destroyed within the next twelve hours might have struck oddsmakers as slim. But June 5, when the town would mark the passage of a month since the murders, was only a day and a few hours away, and now that police had Jessie’s confession, they did not want to wait.

While Jessie waited for his father, deputy prosecutor Fogleman was appearing before municipal judge Rainey to explain why it was essential that the homes of Damien, Jason, Jessie, and Domini be searched that very night. Fogleman’s reason, as he’d written in the sworn affidavit he handed to Rainey, was that the suspects were “close friends” and “members of a close-knit cult group.” Rainey signed the search warrants, as well as the warrants authorizing the arrests of Damien and Jason. At 10:28
P.M
., with a full moon high above them, dozens of police cars from several agencies pulled into three trailer parks. Officers burst out and their urgent searches began.

It was a Thursday night. Usually, on weeknights, Jason had to stay at home with his younger brothers, while their mother worked the evening shift at a trucking firm in Memphis.
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But today had been the last day of classes at Marion High. Jason had finished his exams and completed the tenth grade. To congratulate him, and to thank him for the work he’d done, both at school and taking care of his brothers, his mom had made arrangements for him to be off that night. He was at Damien’s house, celebrating with his friends.

Damien’s parents, meanwhile, had planned a night out for themselves at the new Splash Casino, which had recently opened in Mississippi, about fifty miles south of Memphis. Pam Echols and Joe Hutchison were headed there for some fun. They’d rented a television and a VCR for Damien and Michelle while they were away. Jason had come to the house, and so had Domini. The four teenagers were watching a video called
Leprechaun,
a recent horror movie, when Michelle heard sounds outside. Pulling aside the curtain, she yelled at her brother and his friends, “Go hide!”

“We thought it was a game,” Jason would later recall. “But it was the police.”

Jason ran to Damien’s room, while Michelle went to the door. When Jason returned to the living room, the officers had Damien in handcuffs. “I was, like, ‘What’s going on?’” he recalled. “I told them, ‘I know Damien. He doesn’t do drugs. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.’ But they just told me and Michelle and Domini to sit on the couch. When we asked why, they told us to shut up. Then a cop came in and asked me if I was Jason Baldwin. I said I was. He said, ‘Well, you’re under arrest too.’ I asked, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘For murder.’ I said, ‘No. You’ve got the wrong people!’”
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Damien later said that he was not surprised. In the weeks between the murders and this night, he said, “The cops camped in our driveway. They had spotlights on the house. I could not sleep at night.” Now, surrounded by police, he was led away without resistance.

Police charged Damien and Jason with three counts each of capital murder. Damien was listed on the arrest record as an eighteen-year-old roofer without a driver’s license. On a line for “peculiarities,” someone had written: “earrings, two left, one right.” Jason was listed as a sixteen-year-old student, five feet eight inches tall, weighing 112 pounds. No “peculiarities” were noted for him. According to the arrest reports, police read both boys their rights but the suspects “made no statements about the charge.”

Jason later said that though he remembers having been read his Miranda rights, they’d “meant nothing at the time.”
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He soon sat handcuffed to a chair at the police station battling shock, anger, and fear. “I didn’t know what to do, what to say, where to go,” he recalled. “I was in there trying to tell them where I was at that day, and they said, ‘No. We know you’re lying.’ I said I was at school that day. They said, ‘You mean, if we get your school records, they’ll show you were there?’ I said, ‘Yes. Get them.’”
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The police booked Charles Jason Baldwin on suspicion of murder and took him to a cell. They told him to get out of his clothes and handed him a set of police-issue clothes that were so large they almost fell off him. He was driven to a local hospital, where technicians took dental X rays and samples of his hair, blood, and saliva.
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From there, West Memphis police drove him to the county jail and put him into a cell. By now it was well past midnight. Sixteen-year-old Jason had not been allowed to place a telephone call. His mother had not been informed of his arrest. He had no attorney. And his questioning by police had not been recorded.

As soon as Jessie, Damien, and Jason all were behind bars, the department notified the media that the killers had been caught. The next morning—June 4, 1993—people on both sides of the Mississippi River awakened to the news. At 9
A.M
., Inspector Gitchell held a press conference to announce his department’s success. Television stations throughout the delta broke into their regular schedules to carry Gitchell’s statement live. Cameras showed the balding inspector sitting alone behind an array of microphones, his detectives in a line behind him. Gitchell announced the names of the three teenagers who’d been arrested during the night. He said they’d been regarded as suspects since early in the investigation. “It was like a big puzzle,” he said. “The pieces started falling in place to make a clear picture.” He reassured viewers that the suspects were securely in custody. And he praised his officers for the work they’d done on what he said had been the most difficult case of his career.

Reporters fired questions. What could he tell them about the accused? Had they known the victims? How had police cracked the case? Gitchell would not comment. Did he know the motive for the killings? Gitchell said that he did, but would not elaborate. One reporter zeroed in on the rumor that had dogged the case since the first body floated to the surface. Were the defendants members of a cult? Gitchell shook his head. “I can’t comment on that.”

The sensational press conference was drawing to an unsatisfying close. Finally a reporter asked the chief detective, “On a scale of one to ten, how solid do you feel your case is?” This one Gitchell could answer. He smiled and said confidently, “Eleven.”

But Gitchell’s confidence was overstated. At the time of the arrests, he and his detectives had Jessie’s convoluted confession to hold against the three—and little else. Later, Fogleman would acknowledge that “the only thing” police had against Jason “was Jessie’s statement,” and in a trial, “an accomplice’s statement alone is insufficient; there has to be something else connecting a person to a crime.” Although the prosecutor recognized that he could use Jessie’s statement as probable cause for an arrest, he would later admit that “if we had tried the case the day that Jason was arrested, he would have been acquitted. There would have been a directed verdict of acquittal.” As a result of the dearth of evidence against Jason, Fogleman later explained, Jessie’s “statement had to be investigated further, to see whether or not more evidence could have been developed.”
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From a legal point of view, the case against Damien was not much better. As with Jason, Jessie’s statement alone was insufficient. And despite the abundant rumors about Damien, by the time of the arrests, police had found no physical evidence linking him to the crime. They’d taken hair samples, blood samples, and urine samples from him and sent them to the crime lab, but none connected him to the murders. They had a polygraph examination that Bill Durham said Damien had flunked, but polygraphs are considered too unreliable to be admissible in court.

The police had no evidence at the time of the arrests other than an array of statements: Jessie’s statement, Vicki Hutcheson’s statements, and a half dozen statements from young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen saying that Damien had done it.
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Except for Hutcheson’s, all of the statements had been given to the police by minors. And many of those, including Jessie’s, had become incriminating only after police had administered a polygraph test, which Durham said the teenager had failed. Though reporters had no way of knowing it at the time, this was the entire basis of Gitchell’s claim that his department’s case was an “eleven.”

Jason’s mother was no lawyer, but she assessed the arrest of her son much the way Fogleman later acknowledged he had. She did not believe there was any evidence that could be used to prosecute Jason. After Gitchell’s press conference, she stormed into Ridge’s office, demanding to know why Jason was being held. Ridge explained that Jessie had accused him of the murders. By then, the family members of the victims, as well as those of the accused, had been shown a copy of Jessie’s statement.

“I’ve got proof that Jessie Misskelley is lying,” Gail Grinnell exclaimed. Focusing on Jessie’s repeated claims that the murders had happened early in the day, she told Ridge that Jason had attended school that day. “If he was in school,” Grinnell said, Jessie’s claim “cannot possibly be true.”

In contrast to Jason’s later recollection that he had talked to the police, Ridge complained to Grinnell that he had not. She replied that if Jason wasn’t talking, it was because she had advised him not to, after the detectives had come to their house. She told Ridge that she’d been “scared, ’cause you all put words in his mouth and make things…make a mountain out of a molehill.”

Ridge countered, “Well, that’s the reason we got tape recorders. And I’m not putting words into your mouth.” Grinnell persisted, until Ridge finally told her, “It’s like this. If you would listen to me for just a second, I’ll try and clear something up for you. We’ve got one person that told us the story that is very believable. If Jason doesn’t tell us the story, a story, if Jason doesn’t tell us what his side of things are, we will never know what he has to say.”

Grinnell replied, “Well, I’ll get him a lawyer so that he can tell the lawyer. I want him to have a lawyer with him because I’ve never been involved in anything like this before and I don’t want to see my son go away for my mistake. I know he’s innocent. He is innocent. But I don’t want him being made out not to be innocent because he don’t have a lawyer.”

Ridge was condescending. “Do you understand,” he asked, “that we tape our conversations, we don’t put words into people’s mouths? It’s exactly on tape what is said, and we would welcome the opportunity to talk to Jason and he will not talk because his mother has told him not to talk.”

“One of the reasons I told Jason not to talk to the police,” Grinnell replied, “is because I was told that the police was going around and telling lies about Jason before they came and arrested him. After police questioned Damien, there was rumors started. People were saying that the police told them this and told them that. And I thought in my mind then, the police are trying to make him out to be the guilty one. And I told him not to talk to them, to anybody. And I said, if you hear of anybody else saying something that a policeman said, get his name, ’cause I am going to go to the police station with it, because there has been policemen going out there in the trailer park telling kids lies.”
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Gail Grinnell said again that Jason was innocent, that he had been in school, and that she had obtained a statement to that effect from the principal. Finally, she sighed, “I’m so tired. My whole family has been up all night.”

At that, Ridge defended the midnight arrests. “It’s a situation that couldn’t be avoided,” he said. “We had to look for evidence, and if it’s there, then it’s going to look bad for Jason, and if it’s not, then Jason is cleared because of it. So it’s the only way to get the answers, is to do what we did. We didn’t want to make things hard on you. We don’t want to make things hard on Jason. But these are the only tools we have to get to the truth sometimes.”

Grinnell asked when she could see her son. “I’m worried about him because I know that he is scared,” she told the detective. “I know that he’s real scared. He’s alone.”

Ridge said he did not know when she would be permitted to see Jason. Grinnell asked how he could base Jason’s arrest on nothing more than the statement Jessie had made, with all its discrepancies. “There are so many different stories in that story he gave,” she exclaimed. “I don’t see how anyone could believe it.”

“It’s like this,” Ridge replied. “We’ve got a story that is very, very believable. It is so close to perfect that we have to believe it. So we’re going to believe it until we can break that story, and we cannot even start to break that story apart until Jason tells us something.”

When Grinnell tried to protest again, Ridge silenced her. “You don’t have the point of view that we got,” he said. With that the meeting ended.

Over at municipal court, meanwhile, the case was taking another turn. Municipal judge Rainey, who had signed the warrants for the searches and arrests just the night before, now issued an order denying public review of those documents.
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But by the time Rainey issued his order, sensitive information about the investigation had already been leaked—and now Jessie’s confession was too. While refusing to comment about the case, other than to say that it was an “eleven,” police had allowed people outside the department to see transcripts of Jessie’s confession. Gail Grinnell had seen it, and so had many others. A television news director reported that a woman called his station the day after the arrests, offering to sell a copy for several hundred dollars.
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The day after Rainey sealed the records, a copy reached the
Commercial Appeal
. Rainey issued his order on Friday. On Monday, the paper ran a copyrighted front-page article outlining what Jessie had said. The headlines read:
TEEN DESCRIBES
“
CULT
”
TORTURE OF BOYS
and
DEFENDANT MISSKELLEY TELLS POLICE OF SEX MUTILATION
.
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