Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (49 page)

300. Jack Echols, Damien’s adoptive father, recalled how kids in the schools Damien had attended were always “picking on him, hitting on him, fighting him on the bus.” Joe Hutchison, Damien’s biological father, told the court, “I didn’t do what I should have done, and as far as his raising goes, if anybody’s to blame for that, it’s me.”

301. The pages are stored, along with items of evidence and artifacts from the investigation, at the West Memphis Police Department.

302. Descriptions of Jason’s first year in prison are drawn from a letter written by him to the author, dated December 10, 2001.

303. Back in the jail, he said, he “cried it all out” and then he made up his mind “to never cry again.” He prayed “for all things to come out good”; that his mother and brothers “would hold up”; and that the God he felt had deserted him would, indeed, “bring the truth to light.” The warden at the jail where he was being held, along with other female staffers, joined him to pray that he would be protected in prison. One of the jailers tried to help the new convict by bringing a former prison inmate to visit. “He told me what to expect,” Jason later recalled, “and how I should not trust anyone there, no matter how friendly they acted toward me. He informed me that prison is a violent place, full of hateful people, and that I, especially being as young and small as I was, would always have to be on guard. ‘Great,’ I thought. He then told me that I would be okay, and he gave me $10 out of his own pocket to carry with me.” When Jason’s family came for their last visit with him before his removal to the penitentiary, Jason did his best to act unafraid. He told his mother and two younger brothers not to worry about him, that they were to stick together as a family, and that they should never lose hope. “Our love will get us through,” he said. But privately, he worried about what lay ahead for them. Rough as the future might be for him, he knew that he would be locked away in a cell, but they would have to “live out there” amid “all the lies and rumors.”

304. Jason was placed on a sixty-day suicide watch, but he never thought of taking his life. To the contrary, he worked at adapting to the prison routine. He played basketball with the chaplain, studied Bible booklets, which were plentiful in the prison, and forced himself to eat food that he thought his mother wouldn’t have served to their dog and cat at home. When officials moved him to the nearby unit at Varner, Arkansas, Jason told a few inmates that he was innocent, but he soon gave that up, as hardly anyone believed him. He worked long days in the Arkansas sun on one of the infamous prison hoe squads. As the months passed, he got used to just about everything except the occasional visits from his mother. Her sorrow and his inability to help her he found nearly impossible to bear.

305. The letter writer was Danny Williams.

306. From a letter from Williams to Jason dated January 7, 1995.

307. Ford argued that on the last day of the trial, after Fogleman sought to introduce Damien’s blood-speckled pendant after the state had already rested its case, Burnett met privately with Davis and Fogleman to discuss the unusual request. Ford claimed that during a recess called by Burnett, the judge and the prosecutors “convened in the office of Judge Templeton, at which time an
ex parte
conversation occurred.” In a sworn affidavit, Ford stated his beliefs “that during said
ex parte
conversation, the court [Burnett] advised the prosecuting attorneys that in the event they proceeded to offer the evidence of the test results on the necklace…that the court would have no alternative but to grant a severance and/or mistrial to…Baldwin” and “that based upon said information…, the prosecuting attorneys elected not to offer the evidence…and thus avoided having the court grant a severance and/or mistrial to the defendant, Charles Jason Baldwin.”

308. Ex parte communications are those that involve one side only.

309. From author interview in February 2001.

310. Damien would later maintain that getting off the antidepressant drugs was the best thing that happened to him during his first year at the prison. He said later that once he had gotten over the shock of withdrawal, he had been able to think more clearly.

311. The inmate, Mark Edward Gardner, had been sentenced to death for the murder of three members of a family in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

312. Gardner also told the author that he was responsible for planting the knife. One time when she visited him, he demonstrated a similar access to drugs by having a guard deliver to her, on the other side of the glass that divided them, a hand-made greeting card, which bulged where a joint of marijuana had been (not very well) hidden. The episode illustrated both the availability of marijuana at the state’s maximum security unit and the willingness of certain officials to participate in what was obviously a suspicious transaction.

313. Damien’s friends on death row came to include Frankie Parker, Gene Perry, Mark Gardner, Don Davis, and Daryl Hill. During the period when Damien arrived on death row, this author was reporting on prison conditions for the weekly
Arkansas Times.
She corresponded with Gardner and spoke with him frequently. Elements of the plot reported here are based on statements made by Gardner and information provided by Department of Correction officials. By the time this book was written, Parker, Perry, and Gardner had been executed.

314. In another expression of distress, Damien notified the Arkansas Supreme Court on June 27, 1995, that he wanted to waive all challenges to his death sentence and to concentrate only on efforts to overturn the guilty verdict. If that could not be done, he said he was willing to die. The state Supreme Court sent the issue back to Judge Burnett, asking that he make the determination whether Damien had “the capacity to understand the choice of life or death and to knowingly and intelligently waive any and all rights to appeal the death sentence.” Before the matter had to be resolved by Judge Burnett, however, Damien’s lawyers prevailed on him to pursue all avenues of appeal.

315. Though prison officials later confirmed that a block in the wall between the cells had been removed, serious questions were raised about whether the opening was large enough for Damien or Gardner to have passed through. A state police report concluded that, though items could have been passed between cells, the opening was not large enough for a man.

316. In addition to publicizing his situation, Damien filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against prison officials, alleging emotional, mental, and physical torment. A hearing was held at the prison, during which Damien told a U.S. magistrate, “The reason for this lawsuit, basically, is that I just want to be left alone. I was sent here to die. I would just like to be left alone until that time comes.” In 1996, a settlement was reached in the lawsuit. Its terms assured Damien that he would not be punished for calling attention to conditions in the prison and that he would be treated like any other inmate. Damien had appeals of his death sentence pending at the time this book was written. Upon the advice of his attorneys, he declined to discuss this and other aspects of his life in prison. Gardner was executed by lethal injection in 1999. He maintained to the end that he had concocted the rape allegation, that Damien had cooperated in it, and that he and Damien remained friends.

317. The opinion, No. CR94-848, was written by Chief Justice Bradley D. Jesson. It was delivered on February 19, 1996.

318. The opinion cited an earlier case in which it had held that “a fifteen-year-old with an IQ of 74 and a second-grade reading level was capable of comprehending his Miranda rights and of waiving those rights.” Justice Jesson wrote, “The appellant’s situation is similar. In fact, he was two years older than [the other boy] and had a slightly higher reading level.”

319. The Arkansas legislature eliminated that requirement the following year.

320. Stidham knew of the earlier decision. He’d argued that it was absurd to require parental involvement when a juvenile was charged with a minor crime, but not when a juvenile was charged as an adult, with a crime that might result in a sentence of life in prison or even the death penalty. The court recognized the problem, but ruled against the juveniles, in favor of the state. “The appellant urges us to overrule [that earlier decision] and its progeny,” the opinion in Jessie’s case noted, “but it would be the height of unfairness for us to tell the prosecutors and law enforcement officials of this state that a parental signature was not necessary, then declare nearly three years later that lack of such a signature was fatal to an accused’s confession…. We therefore decline the invitation to overrule this line of cases.”

321. While Arkansas law requires that interrogations of police officers must be taped in their entirety, the state has no law affording that special protection to children—or to adults who are not police officers.

322. “The question regarding Dr. Peretti’s opinion is whether it would have impacted the outcome of the trial,” the justices wrote. “We think it would not have.” As Justice Jesson wrote, “The appellant’s statements were already filled with mistakes, inconsistencies and gross inaccuracies regarding the time that the murders took place. It is obvious that the jury disregarded the appellant’s time estimates, as it was their right to do. Dr. Peretti’s opinion could only have served to reinforce what the jury already knew: the appellant was either mistaken or not telling the truth regarding the timing of events on May fifth.”

323. This opinion was written by Associate Justice Robert H. Dudley.

324. The only argument that the court deemed significant with regard to severance concerned the different ways that Damien’s and Jason’s lawyers wanted to treat allegations relating to the occult. “Echols contends that his strategy would have been to openly admit all evidence of Satanic worship in order to show its absurdity,” Dudley noted, “while Baldwin contends that he wanted to exclude all of the evidence.” Despite the diametric opposition of those positions, the court found that “the jury obviously did not think the proof of occultism was absurd, and it is doubtful that Echols would have freely admitted Satanic worship as a matter of strategy, even if he had a real choice in the matter.”

325. Specifically, the court wrote that “Dr. Griffis had much more than ordinary knowledge of nontraditional groups, the occult and Satanism”; that testimony about the “trappings of occultism” was proper because it “admitted the evidence as proof of the motive for committing the murders”; that the dog’s skull, posters, and books had been “relevant to show motive”; and that Driver’s testimony was relevant because “the trial court ruled that the murders could have been committed with staffs and that they could have been occult murders.”

326. The justices explained that the lawyers had not demonstrated in their appeals that the defendants had been “prejudiced in any matter by the state’s failure to pay.”

327. Janet Maslin wrote in the
New York Times
that the filmmakers captured “the orgy of emotion and prejudice” the case stirred in West Memphis, and the town’s “tattered social fabric.” A reviewer for
Entertainment Weekly
noted that the case’s “shivery ambiguities” inspired “a gripping sense of moral vertigo.” Gene Siskel described
Paradise Lost
as “an aching portrait of a small town with small minds and broken hearts.” Other reviewers thought the film portrayed mass hysteria or “satanic panic.” In a review in the
Los Angeles Times,
writer Howard Rosenberg quoted Berlinger’s recollection of his first sight of the defendants. “The portrait of them was so black, so monstrous, that we bought into the stereotype,” Berlinger told the reviewer. “And when we first saw Damien turn to us and the rest of the press in the courtroom, there was a chill, as if he was Hannibal Lecter. While we were down there, there was never a voice in the dark saying these kids didn’t do it.” Rosenberg said the film explored “the impact of deadly stereotypes.” By the end of 1997,
Paradise Lost
had won a dozen awards, including an Emmy, a Best Documentary award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, and a Silver Gavel Certificate of Merit from the American Bar Association.

328. Lisa Fancher, one of the Web site’s early supporters, said she hated the documentary. “I can almost demarcate my life into “before PL” and “after PL,” she wrote. “Before, I had my eyes closed, and I guess I was happy that way.” She considered the film’s account of the trials to be “the most sickening, outrageous, scurrilous, cruel thing ever to be perpetrated on three goofy teens.” Like hundreds of others who contacted the site, she said she wanted to right the wrong.

329. Max Schaefer, a college student who had also become intrigued by the case, designed and maintained the site in its early days.

330. “We’re not about raising money,” Pashley said in a 1998 interview that was published on the site. “We’re about raising awareness. But it takes money to raise awareness.”

331. By 1998, that archive had become the most extensive resource of its kind on the Internet relating to a single case. It was all the more unique for having been created and funded entirely through the efforts of lay volunteers. Visitors were advised that the site was maintained by three individuals who had “no involvement with law enforcement or the justice system.” Sauls, Bakken, and Pashley asked readers to regard it as “a storage space” for information and opinions. Never claiming that the site was neutral, they announced their belief that the three young men in prison were innocent and their purpose of mobilizing whatever public action might lead to them being freed. They declared, “Our primary goal is justice, and our method of reaching this goal is publicity. We want the state of Arkansas to know that the world is watching.” Visitors to the site could read large chunks of the trial transcripts. They could peruse a lengthy examination of the Arkansas Medical Examiner’s Office, which, at the time of the West Memphis investigation, had lost its accreditation by the National Association of Medical Examiners. There was a site in German. A calendar announced legal activities in Arkansas and fund-raisers throughout the country. Links offered connections to a wide range of materials including numerous police interviews, partial transcripts of court testimony, a poem written by Pam Hobbs, essays from a Canadian group on religious toleration, an apology from Geraldo Rivera for his exaggerated reporting about alleged satanic crimes, information about the Innocence Project founded by Barry Scheck and other attorneys, and a report by two Web site supporters who’d examined boxes of evidence held in storage by the West Memphis police. The site became a vehicle by which visitors could scrutinize the case. For example, one overview of the case reported: “A scrap of what appears to be dark cloth is seen in the photographs taken at the site where the bodies were found, held tightly in the hand of one of the young victims. This scrap does not appear in later photographs. We can only guess what happened to it.” By 1999, the Web site reported averaging 150 hits a day.