Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (19 page)

As jurors were handed another batch of photos, these showing the boys’ bodies on the autopsy table, Peretti explained that there’d been limits to what his examination could reveal. Citing the length of time that the bodies had lain exposed to the warm air, for example, he said he had not been able to estimate the time of the boys’ deaths. The matter of time was important, in light of Jessie’s widely varying statements regarding time.

But when Stidham cross-examined Peretti, time was only one of the discrepancies the lawyer wanted to explore. Had Peretti found evidence that the boys had been choked, as Jessie had told the police? No, the doctor said. Was there evidence that they’d been sodomized, as Jessie had described? Again Peretti said no.
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Fogleman then called Gitchell to explain the circumstances that had led to Misskelley’s confession. Gitchell testified that during the interview, Jessie was “very relaxed” and was under no pressure from officers.
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The chief inspector described how he had played a tape recording for Jessie to see how the boy would react. Fogleman asked Gitchell to play the tape, exactly as he’d played it that day. Gitchell clicked on a tiny tape recorder and held it to the microphone. The voice of a child filled the courtroom, saying, “Nobody knows what happened but me.” That was all. Gitchell clicked the tape recorder off. Nobody asked him to explain whose voice was on the tape or how it had come to be made, or to put the words in any context. All the jury learned was that the tape had shocked Jessie and that shortly after hearing it, he had confessed. With that, Fogleman asked Gitchell to play the tape recording of what Jessie had said. For the next thirty-four minutes, as another tape recorder played in the hushed courtroom, the jury listened to Jessie confess.

When Stidham cross-examined Inspector Gitchell, the detective admitted that, yes, Jessie’s statement did contain several errors. The victims had not skipped school, as Jessie had reported, and they could not have been killed at noon.

“And you knew that that was incorrect when Jessie told you that?” Stidham demanded.

“Yes sir,” Gitchell responded.

Stidham recalled that Jessie had said he’d seen the boys tied up with brown rope. That was inaccurate too, Gitchell acknowledged.

“These seem to be pretty important issues,” Stidham said. He asked if it ever occurred to Gitchell, while he and Ridge were questioning Jessie, “that his entire story was false?”

Gitchell repeated Fogleman’s explanation that Jessie had merely smudged the facts to minimize his involvement. But these were major errors, Stidham pressed. Calmly, the detective deflected any suggestion that the errors presented a problem. “Jessie simply got confused,” Gitchell said. “That’s all.”
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Now Fogleman tackled the delicate question of how the boys were tied. Jessie’s insistence that the ligatures were ropes posed a major problem for the prosecution. “Was there,” Fogleman asked Gitchell, “any evidence that would indicate that there had been some sort of binding other than the shoestrings?” Gitchell, to Stidham’s amazement, answered yes. The police department’s chief detective then testified that he had personally seen a wound on one of the boys that had “indicated” to him that, at some point, the boys could have been tied with a rope.

It was a stunning statement—one that was utterly unsupported by the police notes of the case or by any of the medical examiner’s findings. Stidham jumped to object. “I think that calls for pure, unadulterated speculation on the part of a witness, who is not qualified to render such an opinion,” he told the judge. But Burnett overruled Stidham and allowed the testimony. And despite Stidham’s further objections, Burnett also allowed Gitchell to draw a picture for the jury of the injury he remembered thinking might have been made by a rope.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Jessie’s confession was that it contained no explanation of why he had helped Damien and Jason kill the three little boys. In case any juror was wondering what might have motivated Jessie, Fogleman was ready with an answer. He called Vicki Hutcheson to the stand.

Again, Stidham objected. Judge Burnett told the lawyers to approach his bench for a discussion that the jury could not hear. The short
in camera
hearing would be one of dozens that would punctuate the trial.
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Reporters listened in, as was allowed, although the jury did not, as Fogleman explained to the judge his intentions in calling Hutcheson. He said he planned to have her describe the trip she’d reportedly taken with Damien and Jessie to the orgiastic “esbat.” Stidham countered that if the trip had occurred at all, it had, according to Hutcheson’s testimony, taken place
after
the boys were killed. More important, he argued, testimony about an alleged cult meeting was not relevant in any event, since nothing at the site where the bodies were found had indicated that the murders were the result of satanic or cult activity. Fogleman shot back that in Jessie’s confession he had referred to meetings “when we had that cult,” at which a photograph of the victims had been shown. No such photograph had ever been found, but based on that statement, Judge Burnett allowed Fogleman to put Hutcheson on the stand.

Looking demure, her red hair in a bun, she related how Damien had invited her to go with him to an esbat. She said that she looked the term up in “one of the witch books,” whereupon she’d learned that it meant “an occult satanic meeting.” Fighting back tears, Hutcheson explained that she began to “play detective” because the victims were friends of her son. “I loved those boys, and I wanted to see their killers caught,” she said. But like so much of the case, Hutcheson’s testimony was problematic. Not wanting Stidham to bring up the most damaging question, the prosecutor raised it himself. He let Hutcheson tell the jury that despite her suspicions about Damien and her claim that Jessie had accompanied Damien and her to the esbat, she had never suspected that Jessie might have been involved in the murders. In fact, she said, she’d felt “very close” to him. She’d felt so comfortable with Jessie, she admitted, that the night before his arrest she had asked him to spend the night in her trailer, to protect her and her children from prowlers.

Under Stidham’s cross-examination, Hutcheson admitted that she’d been convicted of writing hot checks, and that her involvement in this case had begun because Detective Bray had called her in for questioning about another alleged fraud, the one that had resulted in her being fired from her truck stop job. But Hutcheson dismissed the incident as just “a credit-card mess-up.” And anyway, she added, “all the charges” had been dropped. Was it true, Stidham asked, that part of her motivation for getting involved in the case was the $35,000 reward? No, Hutcheson said. “The reward money never entered my mind.”
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Aaron Hutcheson, the alleged eyewitness on whom the police had relied so heavily, was never called to testify. Later, Fogleman explained his reason. “I had some police officers that were absolutely convinced of his story,” he said, “and I talked to him a couple of times. The first time, I was a little bit believing him. The last time, I guess when he started talking about draining the blood into a bucket, or whatever it was he said, it was so inconsistent and stuff that I got real concerned.”
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Stidham had his own reasons for not calling Aaron. The boy was wildly unpredictable. He’d already given Fogleman and the police a number of escalating accounts of what he claimed to have seen in the woods. Recently, since the start of the trial, he’d elaborated even further. Now the boy was telling Detective Bray that he had personally dismembered Christopher, having been forced to do it by a black man who’d stood over him, holding a gun to his head. Stidham did not want the jury to hear even one of Aaron’s stories, however fantastic it might be. He did not want a nine-year-old boy to point to Jessie, saying he was one of the killers. And just as important, Stidham did not want to place himself in the position of appearing to pressure, embarrass, or bully a child who’d been a playmate of the victims.

So the jury never heard from Aaron, the boy who some of the detectives were “absolutely convinced” had witnessed the murders. Given the child’s role in the development of the case, his absence from the trial was remarkable. Aaron’s friendship with the victims was what had first caught Bray’s attention. Bray, Gitchell, and Fogleman had questioned Aaron about events in the woods almost a dozen times. Aaron’s accounts of things he’d allegedly seen there, coupled with his mother’s reports, had prompted police to question Jessie. His enigmatic taped statement, played during Jessie’s questioning, had led Jessie to confess.

In one way or another, Aaron had been present at every critical juncture in the police investigation—from the moment his friends’ bodies were discovered until the day of the three arrests. He’d been a catalyst for key events, yet now that those events had culminated in a trial, Aaron’s potential testimony was being dismissed as too unreliable. In some respects, Aaron was, along with his friends, one of the crime’s young victims. He could not have witnessed or participated in all the bloody things he’d described, but somehow, the more investigators had listened, the more he’d imagined that he had. And too many adults, with agendas of their own, had been willing—even anxious—to believe him.

Jessie’s confession was powerful evidence. But Fogleman knew that if Stidham could make the jury even consider that it had been coerced, the rest of the state’s case was precariously circumstantial. He bolstered it where he could. For that, Lisa Sakevicius, of the state crime lab, was Fogleman’s most important witness. She testified that a green polyester fiber analysts had lifted from a Cub Scout cap found at the scene was “microscopically similar” to fibers from a polyester and cotton shirt that she and the police had found during their search of Damien’s house. She further testified that fibers from the shirt were microscopically similar to fibers found on a pair of blue pants that had been submerged near the bodies. In addition, Sakevicius told the court, a single red rayon fiber found on a white shirt that had been recovered near the victims’ bodies was “microscopically similar” to fibers from a woman’s red bathrobe found during the search of Jason’s house.

Neither the shirt found at Damien’s house nor the bathrobe from Jason’s were items the teenagers would have worn—a point that Fogleman acknowledged. “Just so the jury understands,” he said, “you’re not suggesting that Damien wore this little shirt or that Jason wore the bathrobe?” Sakevicius said she was not. She explained that fibers can be moved from one place to another by either “primary” or “secondary” transfer. Primary is direct. Secondary transfer, she explained, occurs when a person picks up a fiber from one place and deposits it in another. In other words, Fogleman suggested, Damien and Jason had picked up fibers from items in their homes and inadvertently left them with the bodies.

For three hands-on murders, one of which involved a castration, the fibers amounted to very bare threads of evidence. The claim of secondary transfer made them highly circumstantial, and Sakevicius’s repeated and careful statement that they were “microscopically similar” made them more circumstantial still. The fact that the fibers were similar did not signify with any degree of certainty that they had come from the garments in question, a point which Sakevicius noted. “I should say that they were similar fibers,” she emphasized while on the stand, “not that they came from them.” Later, under questioning by Stidham, Sakevicius acknowledged that many fibers are “microscopically similar,” and that the “discovery proved nothing.”

Sakevicius also described for Fogleman how the boys were tied—Michael with a combination of square knots and half hitches; Stevie with a combination of half hitches, a figure eight, and loops; and Christopher, most consistently, with four double half hitches. Fogleman would later suggest that the different types of knots pointed to multiple killers.

Stidham asked her about other fiber evidence as well; specifically, the mysterious fragment of “Negroid hair” that had been found on the sheet in which Christopher’s body had been wrapped when it arrived at the lab. Sakevicius said that the origin of the hair remained unknown. Whatever else Stidham had accomplished in his cross-examinations, he had demonstrated that none of the state’s evidence—not Jessie’s confession, not Vicki Hutcheson’s testimony, not even the crime lab’s conclusions—was what anyone would call a clincher.

But Fogleman was saving one of his strongest witnesses for last. When the witness’s appearance failed to work out as he’d hoped, the deputy prosecuting attorney was, by one account, “furious.”

Toward the end of Fogleman’s case, he planned to call a teenager named William Jones, who would support Vicki Hutcheson’s testimony. More than that, Fogleman expected William to link Damien to the satanic cult Hutcheson had described, and to the murders as well. Fogleman had a videotape in which William was shown telling West Memphis detectives that once, when Damien was drunk, he had confessed to him that he was a member of a satanic cult and that he had raped the three eight-year-old boys, then killed them with a knife.

While the trial was under way, Lax had located William and asked him about that interview. William said he wanted to consult first with his mother and stepfather. The three had gone into another room of their trailer, while Lax waited for almost a half hour. When they rejoined him, William’s mother asked Lax what would happen to William if he had lied to the police.
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Lax said he was not an attorney and could not be sure, but it was probably a good thing that the boy had not been placed under oath by the police. William then told Lax that he did not like Damien and that he’d falsely boasted to his mother that Damien had confessed to the murders. To his surprise, he said, his mother had believed him and called the police. William, being unwilling to admit to his mother that he’d lied, had expounded on his claim to Detective Ridge, and he’d continued to lie when he gave his videotaped statement.