Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (28 page)

“Did you kill any of these three boys?” the lawyer asked.

“No,” Damien answered, “I did not.”

The front-page headline in the next morning’s
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
announced:
ECHOLS DENIES KILLING THREE BOYS
. The next line read:
ADMITS ON STAND AN INTEREST IN OCCULT
. A photograph that ran above the story showed Jason smiling during the trial. The front page of the Jonesboro paper featured a photo of Damien smiling as he was led from the courthouse.

But there was less to smile about the next day, after Davis’s cross-examination. The prosecutor handed Damien a sheet of paper with several names written on it in an unusual alphabet. Damien acknowledged that he’d written the names. In response to questions from Davis, he said that one of the names was Aleister Crowley, a well-known writer on witchcraft. Davis identified Crowley as “a noted author in the field of satanic worship” and a writer who “believes in human sacrifice.” Damien did not disagree. He said he’d never read any of Crowley’s books, though, he added, “I would have read them if I had saw them.”

Asking about the incident in Oregon that had resulted in Damien’s hospitalization, Prosecutor Davis asked, “Did you threaten to eat your father alive?” Damien said the police were called because he’d been threatening to kill himself. Davis asked him about a reference he had made the day before to a medication he’d been prescribed. “Are you on that today?” Davis asked. Damien said he was—that he had been taking the antidepressant drug Imipramine for the past couple of years, and that it made him sleepy.

“Okay,” Davis continued. “Are you a manic-depressive?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Okay. Describe for us what happens when you don’t take your medication….”

“I cry. I stay by myself most of the time, closed up. If I don’t take the medicine, I get headaches. I get nauseous, just generally depressed.”

“And when you are in a manic phase…is that where you feel nearly invincible?”

“Yes.”

Davis started to ask about the incident when Damien threatened to claw the eyes out of Deanna’s boyfriend, but Damien’s lawyer objected. Davis countered, “Your Honor, they put on evidence yesterday about him being a quiet, passive, peace-loving Wiccan.” Davis said he wanted to show that Damien had another side. Burnett sided with Davis, whereupon the prosecutor asked, “Mr. Echols, when you have these mood swings and your medication is out of balance, do you have, do you get violent sometimes?”

“Only toward myself.”

Damien would be the only one of the three defendants who would take the stand in his own behalf. Many observers in the courtroom considered his lawyers’ decision to let him testify to be an extremely risky one. And now, as Damien stepped down from the stand, most agreed that he had not helped his case—and that he may have seriously harmed it. But Damien did not seem to realize that. As he returned to his seat, he seemed satisfied, as though, in the confrontation with the veteran prosecutor, he felt he’d held his own.

To the reporter for the
Arkansas Times,
it looked like the prosecutors were trying to portray Damien “as a devil-driven monster who was capable of the crime and therefore must have done it.”
²⁷⁸
But that was not how Damien appeared to the reporter. “He’s sardonic and remorseless,” he wrote, “but what he conveys isn’t cold-hearted menace; it’s a disturbed boy lost in a theatrical posture that he’s tried to fashion into an identity. More pitiful than scary.”

As the next piece of their defense, Damien’s lawyers tried again to question Christopher Morgan, the twenty-year-old from Memphis who’d told police in California that he may have “blacked out” and killed the three boys in West Memphis. Though Morgan had quickly recanted that statement, the defense attorneys wanted the jury to hear Morgan, so that his account might at least raise reasonable doubt. But the prosecutors tried to block the appearance. They told Burnett that he ought to hold another
in camera
session to hear what Morgan had to say before he let Morgan say it in open court. Burnett agreed, and with the jury out of the room, the strangest, most secretive—and perhaps most revealing—part of the trial began obliquely to unfold.

At the start of the
in camera
hearing that followed, Morgan refused to answer questions about anything he’d said to the police. He asked for an attorney. Ignoring his request, Judge Burnett had Morgan sworn in. Morgan answered a few questions, then requested an attorney again. Judge Burnett again refused, and ordered Morgan to respond. Finally, with no attorney, Morgan testified at length under oath. He said he’d once had a job selling ice cream in the victims’ neighborhood but that he’d lied when he told police in California that he may have killed them. He said he’d spent the day of the murders either working at a car wash or jumping off sand cliffs into the Mississippi River, and that he’d spent that evening at a Memphis nightclub. Morgan said he’d gone to California a few days after the murders to pick up a car for a friend. He said he went to the police station voluntarily, when he learned he was wanted for questioning, and that he’d confessed in exasperation after seventeen hours of questioning by the Oceanside police. Morgan said he currently faced a federal drug charge in Memphis for possession of LSD.

Judge Burnett asked Morgan about a portion of his statement in which he’d told police that his confession had been false. “From what I recall, I may have told them, ‘Are you happy?’ They said, ‘Is that the truth?’ I said, ‘No.’” Morgan said that the police had kept him locked in a small room and that he’d finally blurted out the words “Maybe I could have,” so that they would leave him alone. Oceanside police did eventually let Morgan go without pressing charges. Fogleman interjected that the West Memphis police had “ruled out” Morgan as a suspect.

Prosecutor Davis then argued that Morgan’s testimony was “unreliable.” He said defense attorneys wanted “to throw it in a hopper to create a smoke screen,” but that the testimony was “absolutely” not relevant. Paul Ford disputed that claim, arguing that police had questioned Jessie under similar circumstances.

“Jessie Misskelley denied that he did it, denied that he did it, admitted that he did it, then denied it and denied it, and he’s in prison,” Ford said. “This may be the same thing.”

At this point, Judge Burnett decided to appoint an attorney for Morgan. The judge ordered Morgan to return to court with his attorney in two days.

Back in open court, the defense lawyers shifted their focus to the quality of the police investigation. With Chief Inspector Gitchell on the stand, Damien’s lawyer Scott Davidson asked what kind of manual his police department had that outlined investigative procedures. Gitchell said that no such manual existed. Davidson then asked if the department owned tape recorders and a video camera. Gitchell acknowledged that it did. Davidson asked, “Now, did you ever videotape any interviews with my client, Damien Echols?” Gitchell said that the police had not. Nor had detectives made any audio tape recordings of interviews with their prime suspect.
²⁷⁹

Damien’s lawyer next questioned Gitchell about his department’s written procedures for the handling of evidence. Gitchell said none existed. Davidson asked if the blood evidence that was taken from the Bojangles restaurant had been forwarded to the crime lab. Gitchell answered, “No sir. It was, as the term is, lost.”

Davidson asked about the recording device that Vicki Hutcheson said police had hooked up under her bed. Gitchell said that Lieutenant Sudbury had handled that attempted surveillance, but that no record of the installation had been kept, and no transcription had been made of the recording because it was inaudible. At this point, Judge Burnett interrupted. “Mr. Davidson,” he asked, “are you getting somewhere with something that is relevant?”

Davidson found the comment so objectionable—as a sign of the judge’s contempt for the defense—that he immediately called for a mistrial. Turning to Burnett, Davidson said, “We have objected in this case about him losing evidence, about photographic lineups not done properly, and absent records about surveillance. We have never seen the documentation on surveillance. And I think it is certainly relevant to this case.”

But the judge would hear none of it. “None of that is relevant now,” he said.

On Friday, at the end of the trial’s second week, Damien’s primary lawyer, Val Price, questioned John Mark Byers about the knife he’d given to the HBO film crew. “Where did y’all keep the knife in your house?” Price asked.

Byers offered the answer that Ridge had earlier suggested. “When I first received the knife,” Byers answered slowly, “which was for Christmas, for a few weeks it was in the living room on a little end table by my recliner, and after that it was put in my bedroom on a dresser.”

Price grilled Byers about his repeated statements to Gitchell and Ridge that he’d never used the knife. But Byers claimed to only vaguely recall what he’d told the detectives six weeks earlier. He appeared dull on the witness stand, as though he was finding it hard to understand Price’s questions. Finally, in exasperation, Price asked Byers if he had ever used the knife on venison. “I did,” Byers answered, “and, matter of fact, as I was trying to use the knife in cutting some venison to make beef jerky with it, I cut my thumb with it.”

“Oh, you cut your thumb,” Price said. “Is it true that you never told Inspector Gitchell on January 26 that you ever cut your thumb with that particular knife?”

It was an imprecise question, to which Byers responded dully, “Yes sir, it seems like during the course of the day I did tell him that.”

Asking Byers again and again, “Did you tell Inspector Gitchell…,” Price made sure that the jury heard how many times Byers had told Gitchell and Ridge that he had “no idea” how human blood could have gotten onto his knife. Then the lawyer moved back in time to question Byers about some statements he’d made to police on May 19, two weeks after the murders. By asking about that interview, Price got Byers to acknowledge that his last encounter with Christopher had been when he’d “whipped” the boy with his belt. Byers also acknowledged that while other searchers were in the woods, he’d gone home to change clothes, and that even though it was dark when he’d returned to the woods, he’d gone without a flashlight. But there was no elaboration, and when Price had concluded his questioning, the prosecutors declined to question Byers and let him be excused. As Byers passed the prosecutors’ table, Fogleman patted him on the back. “Don’t worry about it,” Fogleman told him. “You did fine.”
²⁸⁰

Later Fogleman noted that the defense attorneys had not dared to ask Byers directly if he had killed the boys, and he ridiculed the more cautious attempt to cast suspicion on Byers by implication. Fogleman said the move made the defense teams look desperate.

Indeed, as testimony wound toward a close, with only two witnesses remaining, the defense was clearly stymied. Burnett had allowed the highly disputed weapons—the lake knife and the sticks—to be introduced as evidence. He had allowed the prosecutors to explore Damien’s interest in the occult as a motive for the murders. He had qualified Griffis as a cult expert and allowed him to testify that the murders showed “trappings” of satanism. And now, as the trial entered its final week, Burnett issued another ruling, this one affirming the fairness of Jessie Misskelley’s trial. Without comment, Burnett rejected Stidham’s argument that Peretti’s change of testimony about the time of death constituted newly discovered evidence that cast additional doubt on the validity of Jessie’s confession to the police. The doctor’s change of testimony notwithstanding, Burnett ruled that Jessie would not be granted a new trial.

The ruling did not surprise Damien and Jason’s attorneys. It had been hard to imagine that Judge Burnett would have scheduled a retrial for Jessie in the middle of—or even after—the trial of the other two. But the lawyers still had a couple of hopes. One was that the jury would get to hear about Christopher’s confession to police in California. But when Morgan showed up with his court-appointed attorney, as Burnett had ordered, the already unusual trial took its most remarkable turn. Until now, all of the
in camera
hearings had been conducted in public; that is, even though the jury had been taken from the courtroom, reporters and other observers had been allowed to stay, since the hearings formed part of the trial. But for reasons that were never stated but that appeared to be related to drugs, Judge Burnett decided that this hearing would be an exception. Judge Burnett barred the media and spectators from the hearing, and he issued a gag order, forbidding the attorneys involved from discussing what transpired. What followed was to become the most secretive part of an already secretive case.

Burnett called Morgan and all the lawyers into his chambers. There, Jason’s lawyer Paul Ford gave voice to his exasperation. “Your Honor,” Ford protested,