Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (30 page)

Jason had gone into the trial believing that, as he explained, “I didn’t think there was no possible way they could find us guilty when we didn’t do it. Not in America. It’s not what I was raised up to believe would happen in America.” But now, having fended off two deals, while watching the vigor of the prosecution against him, some long-held beliefs were crumbling. He’d seen his lawyers “fighting hard,” but now he also saw, as he put it, that “it was hard to fight against Judge Burnett and the prosecutors too.” It looked to Jason like “everything we tried to do, Judge Burnett wouldn’t allow it. He’d find some reason to turn us down. Even I could see that, and I didn’t know anything about it.”

Jason said he’d told his attorneys that he wanted to testify. He wanted to tell the jury that he’d been cutting his uncle’s grass on the afternoon the boys disappeared, and he wanted them to call his uncle to verify that claim. He wanted to say that he had no recollection of ever seeing Michael Carson at the juvenile detention facility, and that if he had encountered him, he never would have said what the other teenager claimed he did. Mostly, he wanted the jurors to hear him speak in his own behalf, before they adjourned to judge him. But, he would later recall, his lawyers “kept giving me the runaround, telling me I was sixteen and saying, ‘You don’t need to testify.’ They told me, ‘Anything you say, the prosecutor is going to twist it and use it against you.’”

Now, Jason reflected, it looked like they’d been right. He felt that any defense was futile and that under Burnett he and his lawyers faced “a no-win situation.” “All that mattered,” he concluded, “was that Damien was weird and I had black T-shirts.”

The three weeks of testimony had produced some remarkable twists and turns. Now, even with the testimony concluded, the trial’s peculiarities did not end. Two more oddities developed before the lawyers could make their closing arguments.

Ordinarily, when a defendant is tried on a charge of capital murder, he will ask that the jury be instructed to consider lesser charges, such as first-or second-degree murder, since lesser charges carry lighter sentences. Often, though not always, prosecutors oppose that request. In this case, however, the situation was reversed. The prosecutors wanted the jury to be able to consider alternatives to capital murder. After consulting with Damien and Jason in front of Burnett, the defense attorneys announced that their clients were taking an all-or-nothing stance. They wanted the jurors to consider only the most severe charges—or find them innocent.
²⁹⁵
But Burnett decided against them, ruling that the jury would be instructed to consider the range of charges. That was one of what the local paper later described as the day’s “startling developments.”

The second odd event occurred when Fogleman announced that the West Memphis police had suddenly discovered blood on a necklace they’d taken from Damien. The necklace had been in their possession since the night of the three arrests, ten months before. Upon noticing what appeared to be blood, they’d sent the pendant, which was in the shape of a hatchet, to the state crime lab for analysis. But the amount of blood had been so small that the crime lab had forwarded the pendant to a laboratory in North Carolina for more elaborate tests. As Damien and Jason’s trial was drawing to a close, the North Carolina lab had reported finding two types of blood on the pendant. One of these DQ Alpha types, as they were called, was a match for Damien. The other was reported to be consistent with the blood type of Jason Baldwin, Stevie Branch, and approximately 11 percent of what the laboratory identified as “the Caucasian population.”
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Despite the ambiguity of the findings, Fogleman wanted to get the necklace before the jury. Although both sides had already formally rested their cases, he took the extraordinary step of asking Burnett to allow the introduction of new evidence.

The effort led to another heated
in camera
session. Again the jury heard nothing of what transpired, as Damien’s lawyer reported that the defendants had shared the pendant. “If that is indeed Jason Baldwin’s blood on this pendant, and not Stevie Branch’s,” Val Price said, “then the evidence is of no value at all, and not relevant.” Jason’s lawyer complained that the attempt to introduce new evidence at this stage of the trial was outrageous. “This is not newly discovered evidence,” he said. “They’ve had it in their possession the entire time. They just didn’t do anything with it.”

Judge Burnett deemed the situation serious enough that he postponed the trial for a day while he wrestled with the problem. If he granted Fogleman’s request, the trial would have to be continued, at the very least. At worst, introduction of the new evidence would result in a mistrial for Jason, who stood to be harmed by evidence for which his lawyers had not been prepared. Finally, Judge Burnett told the prosecutors that if they wanted to introduce the pendant, he would grant Jason’s attorneys’ repeated requests to sever his trial from Damien’s.

Now the prosecutors faced a dilemma. They had fought every effort to prohibit Jason from being tried on his own. Now they were being warned by Judge Burnett that if they kept trying to introduce the blood-specked necklace, a severance would be ordered. Fogleman and Davis backed down. The matter of the pendant was dropped.

The bailiff notified the jurors to return to the courthouse on Thursday, March 17, for the conclusion of the trial. The
Jonesboro Sun
reported “rumors” that the unexplained delay had been caused “by results from DNA testing for traces of blood on Echols’ necklace.”

A
T LAST
,
AFTER SEVENTEEN DAYS OF TRIAL
, Fogleman rose to face the jury with his closing argument. Ignoring Peretti’s testimony, he said the murders had taken place sometime between 9:30 and 10:00
P.M
. on the evening of May 5, at the site where the bodies were found. He described as “highly credible” Narlene Hollingsworth’s contention that she’d seen Damien on the service road near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash at about that time. As for Hollingsworth’s testimony that Damien was with his girlfriend, Domini, and not Jason, Fogleman simply told the jurors to draw their “own conclusions.”
²⁹⁷
He cited the two girls at the softball field who’d said they’d heard Damien brag about the murders. “Those were two scared kids up here,” he said. “They had no motivation to do anything other than come up here and tell you the truth.”

He looked confidingly at the jury.

Fogleman emphasized how the knife had been found in the lake close to Jason’s house. He recalled the testimony of Michael Carson, Damien’s responses to Detective Ridge’s questions, and the fibers found at the scene. “Ask yourself,” he said, “if they aren’t significant.” He acknowledged that all of the evidence in the case had been circumstantial, and that not one piece of it, “in and of itself,” pointed to anyone as having been the killer. “But,” he advised, “you don’t look at it like that.” Using the example of a house, he argued, “If you look at one small part and say, ‘Well, that’s not a house.’ The foundation? Is that a house? No. Is the door a house? No. You don’t look at it that way. You look at it as a whole. And we submit when you look at all of the evidence as a whole, that you’ll find that this circumstantial evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that these defendants committed this murder.”

Then Fogleman raised the issue he’d introduced midway through the trial. “Now I want to talk to you about motive,” he said.

Then Fogleman read one of Damien’s poems to the jury, one that he said described Damien’s internal conflict. It was a conflict that Fogleman said was between “Wicca, which is the good, and the upside-down cross, which is satanic.” The poem read:

“That right there,” Fogleman proclaimed, “tells you Damien Echols. He don’t want to be in the white. He doesn’t want to be good. He wants to be both where he can go to the good side or the bad side, however it suits his purpose. If he wants to do bad, let’s go to the satanic side. If he wants to be good, then go to the Wiccan side. That poem right there tells you about Damien Echols.”

Returning to the circumstantial evidence, Fogleman continued: “No, ladies and gentlemen, each item of this, in and of itself, doesn’t mean somebody would be motivated to murder—not in and of itself.
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But you look at it together, and you get—you begin to see inside Damien Echols. You see inside that person, and you look inside there, and there’s not a soul in there…. Scary. That’s what he is—scary.”

The deputy prosecuting attorney mocked the defense attorneys’ decision to implicate John Mark Byers “by innuendo.” To the charges of police ineptitude, he said, “Were there mistakes made? Sure…[But] in the overall scheme of things, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Then Fogleman picked up a grapefruit. “Now, I want to talk to you about these knives,” he said. Jason’s lawyer jumped up to object. In a discussion in front of Burnett, Ford argued that Fogleman was preparing to perform an unscientific experiment with an item—the grapefruit—which had not been placed into evidence. “I’m just going to show the types of marks that this knife makes and that knife makes,” Fogleman countered. “That’s all, Your Honor.” Burnett told him he could proceed.

Fogleman whacked the grapefruit dramatically with each of the two knives—the one from the lake and the one that had belonged to Byers. Holding the grapefruit up where the jury could see the marks, he said that the pattern left by the lake knife matched the wounds on Christopher Byers. With that knife in one hand, he pointed to the autopsy photo showing the stab wounds to Christopher’s groin. “I submit the proof shows this knife caused this,” Fogleman said. “Well, true, it could be another knife like this, but I submit to you the proof—the circumstantial evidence—show that this knife, State’s exhibit seventy-seven, caused those injuries right there.”

Then Fogleman sat down. His closing argument had taken an hour and a half.

For the first time since the trial began, Damien’s infant son was in the courtroom with Domini, his mother. Val Price, Damien’s lead defense lawyer, rose to deliver his closing arguments. He focused on the jurors’ responsibility to consider reasonable doubts. Reminding them that “circumstantial evidence must be consistent with the guilt of the defendant and inconsistent with any other reasonable conclusion,” he recalled the testimony relating to John Mark Byers. Specifically, he asked them to remember Byers’s acknowledgment that he’d beaten Christopher with a belt just before he disappeared; Byers’s claim that he went to the woods in the dark, at 8:30
P.M
., “still wearing shorts, still wearing flip-flops, still without a flashlight”; Peretti’s statement that some of Christopher’s injuries “were consistent” with those that might have been caused by the knife Byers had given the film crew; the lab report indicating that DNA found on the knife was “consistent” with that of both Christopher and his stepfather; and the conflicting answers Byers gave when questioned about the blood on the knife. “I think,” Price told the jurors, “this evidence—and the possibility of John Mark Byers as a suspect—is certainly an aspect of reasonable doubt.”

The lawyer then attacked the police department’s handling of the case, as well as the state’s theory of the crime. He recalled the man at the Bojangles and the lost evidence. Noting the lack of blood at the site where the bodies were recovered, he asked, “Was there any evidence at this crime scene area that this is where they were beaten, or stabbed or cut? No. There has been no evidence whatsoever.” In short, he said, “If something fit in with their theory that Damien was involved, the state investigated that. If it didn’t, they chucked it aside. They threw it away. Just like that Bojangles blood.”

Then he addressed the state’s theory of motive. Noting that most trials hinged on the constitutional guarantees enshrined in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments—guaranteeing the rights to a public trial and to a trial by jury—he argued that this case was unusual because it also raised concerns about the First Amendment, the one guaranteeing freedom of religion. Recalling police detectives’ testimony that “Damien wasn’t a suspect until he started talking about his Wiccan beliefs,” he told the jury that those beliefs should never have been at issue. “Part of being a teenager, when you’re growing up in the teen years, is questioning things,” he said. “Questioning your religious beliefs. Questioning your parental values. But just because you do, that is not any kind of evidence of murder…. It’s still all right in America to have weird things in your room. And it doesn’t mean you’re guilty of murder. And it doesn’t give any kind of motivation.”

With that, Price took his seat at the defense table beside Damien.

Jason’s lead attorney, Paul Ford, continued the attack in his closing argument, especially with regard to the police. Recalling a string of gaffes, including the delayed searches of the victims’ homes, the sticks Ridge recovered from the woods more than three months after the murders, and the lack of blood at the scene, Ford derided the investigators. “They’ll stick to their story,” he said, “no matter how preposterous it is to believe.”

Ford also asked the jury to question why Inspector Gitchell had scarcely appeared at the trial. “He’s in charge,” Ford pointed out, “but he was a nonexistent factor in this trial. He didn’t tell you anything.” And yet, Ford noted, just a week before the arrests, Gitchell had written in his letter to the crime lab that he and his detectives were “blind-folded.”

He reminded the jurors of Dr. Peretti’s admission that he himself would have found it difficult to perform the castration done on Christopher Byers quickly, in the dark and in water. “And they want you to think a sixteen-year-old boy did it, when their own medical examiner, who is skilled as a physician, would have found it hard.” As for Michael Carson’s testimony about Jason’s alleged jailhouse confession, Ford asked the jurors to remember that at sixteen, Michael already had two felonies. “He’s a burglar,” Ford argued. “He steals guns. He destroys people’s houses that he breaks into—and in the second conversation he’s ever had in his life with Jason Baldwin, Jason Baldwin spills his guts.”

Turning to the credentials of the state’s expert, Dale Griffis, Ford chided,

Ford pointed to Damien. “That’s what they want right there; guilty by association. Because he’s sitting over there with Damien, they want you to convict him.” He ended by pleading with the jurors. “Take the blindfolds off,” he said, “and look at it the way it really is. And send Jason Baldwin home.”

But Prosecutor Davis had the last word. “What I think is a key in this case is not just who killed these boys,” he began, “although that’s the real issue you all have to decide. But I think also important is what type of person was involved in these murders that could turn these three innocent-looking little eight-year-olds into the mutilated bodies that we’ve seen in these photographs. Because what type of person could do that is at the very center of this case.”

Noting that the defense had made “a big deal” about the absence of blood at the scene, Davis introduced a new scenario—one that had not been mentioned either in any of Jessie’s statements or in testimony at either of the trials. “All that had to have been done,” he suggested, “was for something to have been laid on the ground when the children were placed there. Whether it was a piece of plastic, a piece of Visqueen, and it’s folded up and carried with them when they leave the woods that night. And we don’t get them for thirty more days. So, I mean, they can leave the stuff in the drainage ditch on the way home. A big coat spread on the ground could have served the same purpose.”

He dismissed the charges of police ineptitude as a standard defense lawyer ploy. “They always get up here and say, ‘Well, the police bungled it up, because if they had done a better job, like they do on TV, we’d have all the answers. And so they claim the police messed up.” Nonetheless, Davis admitted that “there’s just a scarcity of evidence.” He explained, “Somebody did a good job of cleaning it up. The same person who made sure they punched the clothes down in the mud so they wouldn’t float up is the same person that cleaned that area, and they did a dang good job of it, and they removed most of the evidence.”

The idea that the defendants had cleaned up the site of a triple murder and castration so well in the dark that police had not been able to find a single definitive clue startled some courtroom observers, as had Davis’s mention of Visqueen. But the prosecutor continued, focusing on the theory that Damien’s beliefs had given rise to the murders. “The satanic or occult motive thing is kind of a foreign concept to me,” he said. “But when you’ve got people that are doing what was done to these three little boys, I mean, you’ve got—the normal motives for human conduct don’t apply. There’s something strange going on that causes people to do this. I mean, you’ve got some weird people.”