Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (8 page)

Her account was almost identical to the one Damien had provided two days before. The friends verified that they’d found the note. Pharmacy records established that a prescription had been filled for Damien that afternoon, although records did not show when it had been picked up. And the two girls in Memphis confirmed that they had telephoned Damien that night. But Driver’s reports about Damien, together with Sudbury’s interviews, had offered some hope that Gitchell and his weary detectives would solve the case. Their pursuit of the satanic theory intensified, even though they had not a shred of evidence on which to base an arrest.
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13, one week after the murders, Detective Bray in Marion interviewed Vicki Hutcheson again. As before, Hutcheson brought her son Aaron with her. Since Bray had already concluded that the murders in West Memphis were probably “cult-related,” he asked her if she knew anything about “an occult or devil worshipers.”
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Hutcheson said she did not, but a few days later she called Bray to report that kids in her neighborhood knew something about a local cult. She said she was going to “play detective” and try to find out more.
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Bray did not object.

Hutcheson’s personal investigation began with Jessie Misskelley Jr., a scrappy seventeen-year-old neighbor who frequently baby-sat for her children. Jessie lived near Hutcheson in a Marion trailer park. Hutcheson never explained how her interest came to focus on Jessie, but it may have been no coincidence that his name was on the list of suspects that Driver had given to Bray. Misskelley’s father, an automobile mechanic, shared the same name as his son. He was known around Marion as Big Jessie, primarily for his strength, because he was barely of average height. Jessie Jr., or Little Jessie as he was called, stood maybe an inch over five feet tall. Perhaps to compensate for his size, he wore his hair spiked at the top of his head, adding another two inches. Jason Baldwin had known Jessie since the two were in elementary school. “He was all right,” Jason would later recall. “He just didn’t learn quick, and he didn’t have much common sense, either. He could be funny, but maybe we were all laughing more at him than with him.”

Within a week after the murders, Hutcheson knew, as many in Marion and West Memphis did, that the police were extremely interested in Damien and his reputed involvement with cults. She saw Jessie as a way to meet Damien, in furtherance of her self-assigned role as a detective in the murder case. As she later told the West Memphis police, “Little Jessie, Jessie Misskelley, lives down the street from me, and you know, I was really close to him because he was always around. He doesn’t go to school or anything. He, like, helps you mow the lawn and stuff. I’d gotten really close with him.” Hutcheson said that after the bodies of Aaron’s friends were found, Misskelley had mentioned to her that on the morning the boys disappeared, he had seen some boys who’d fit their description walking near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. It was an irrelevant and erroneous statement because, as Hutcheson and everyone else knew by then, all three of the murdered boys had attended school on the day they were killed. Hutcheson glossed over the remark.

Nevertheless, she told police, she had tried to ascertain whether Misskelley knew anything about the crime. “So, you know, I just kept talking with Jessie,” she said, “’cause, ah, Jessie’s—I mean, he’s not a bad kid, but you know, you don’t know who people know. So I just kept talking with Jessie about stuff, and Jessie told me about a friend of his named Damien and that this friend drank blood and stuff.”

For a little guy, Jessie had already developed a big reputation as a fighter. He’d been in trouble since kindergarten, and teachers had consistently recommended that he be seen by a psychologist. He was seen by several, most of whom attributed the boy’s pugnacity, at least in part, to the fact that his mother had abandoned him and the family shortly after his birth. Jessie’s father had created a sizable family through a series of marriages, presenting Jessie with nine siblings, all but three of whom were older than he. Psychologists reported that the family was loving but very rough. Jessie’s main memory of childhood was one of “fighting all the time.”
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“I had to take up for myself, to let people know they couldn’t run over me just because I was small,” he said. “I was walking around always looking for fights, because I knew they would come. I took up for a lot of people because I had a quick temper and I knew what it was like to be picked on. I’d been picked on since I was about four or five. My brothers always picked on me, and my stepsisters always picked on me. They tried to tell me what to do.” Another memory was of his father drinking beer, “like a fish, every day since I was born.” The habit, Jessie said, resulted in “some bad times—but that’s how it is when people drink.” Despite the “bad times,” Jessie was devoted to his father. He considered him “a sweet guy,” a man “who would do anything for anybody,” and his “role model” in life.

Almost as soon as Jessie entered school, his teachers identified him as “slow.” At seven, he still could not say his ABCs past the letter
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He could not count past fifteen. When Jessie scored 67 on an intelligence test, an examiner reported that he was mildly mentally retarded.
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He was placed in special education classes, but his behavior was also a concern. Teachers described Jessie as sulky, disrespectful, impulsive, indifferent, stubborn, uncooperative, and prone to rage. They complained that he would “periodically lash out physically at fellow classmates” and at them. A psychologist who saw him at the age of seven recommended that Jessie’s behavioral problems were so severe that he should be treated in a hospital. But as the family didn’t have money, such treatment was never given serious consideration. The psychologist advised Big Jessie and Little Jessie’s stepmother to take him for regular counseling sessions at the county mental health center—the same one where Damien would go. The Misskelleys went for a few sessions.
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But Jessie’s fighting did not abate, and the next year, after having been suspended from school, the eight-year-old was taken to a psychologist in Memphis.
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That examiner wrote that Jessie appeared to be a boy “who is non-psychotic, not retarded, [but] who feels bad about himself and his world. He sees himself as vulnerable, unable to handle the pressures which surround him and in danger of being overwhelmed.” The psychologist added, “He pulls his own hair and bites himself when agitated. He is reported to have abused animals when he rages, and has shredded his clothes while out of control. His stepmother indicates that he will ‘tear up anything at hand’ when he is angry, though both parents agree that there is little way to predict when Jessie will rage.”

The psychologist’s notes offered other glimpses into the child’s home.

Like the psychologist the year before, this one also recommended “a residential facility or hospital” for Jessie and family therapy for his parents. Again, the suggestion of hospitalization was rejected, and counseling sessions, while started, were not continued.
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Jessie was kept in kindergarten for two years and in second grade for two more, but the maturity his teachers had hoped to see did not develop. Instead, the boy’s reputation as a troublemaker grew. He daydreamed in class, often seemed confused, and bullied other kids. Despite the special education classes, he fell further behind, academically and emotionally. When the psychologist examined Jessie at age ten, he reported an IQ of 75. The score placed Jessie at the low end of normal, though the boy’s verbal abilities fell into the mildly retarded range.
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By the age of eleven, Jessie had made it only to the third grade. His teacher reported that he did not have an adequate vocabulary and that when reading, he could not understand a passage or draw conclusions from what he’d read. By then he was also regarded as dangerous. He’d hit a girl in the head, stabbed a boy with a pencil, and severely cut his own hand by punching windows out of cars. When the school suspended Jessie for splattering ketchup around the lunchroom, a juvenile judge sent him for yet another psychological examination. Both his parents were supposed to accompany him, but this time only his stepmother could attend. Big Jessie had been arrested for selling marijuana and was serving time in prison. Little Jessie told the court that he wanted to drop out of school, but the judge ordered him to continue. Five troubled years later, by the age of sixteen, Jessie’d been promoted to the ninth grade, but his skills were barely at a fourth-grade level. On IQ tests he ranked among the lowest 4 percent of students his age. His last psychological evaluation was administered when he was sixteen, just before he dropped out of school. A report at that time said Jessie showed deficits in his “general information, abstract and concrete reasoning, numerical reasoning, language development, word knowledge, verbal comprehension, and spatial visualization.”
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Jessie’s own explanation for dropping out was that he “just didn’t care about it no more.” He would later recall that by that point, he “didn’t care about nothing.” He figured he’d probably become a mechanic like his father, who was now out of prison on parole and working in a garage in West Memphis. Other times, Jessie would dream of becoming a professional wrestler. But mostly, he later recalled, he was living “just one day at a time.” That was the state he was in when Vicki Hutcheson and her two sons moved into a rented trailer not far from the Misskelleys’.

When Hutcheson asked Jessie if he knew of a kid named Damien Echols, Jessie said yes, but that he didn’t know him well. “She asked me, was he into witchcraft,” Jessie would later recall. “I told her, I didn’t really know. I just knowed he was a weird person.” Next, Hutcheson asked Jessie about Jason Baldwin—another of the boys whose name was on Driver’s list. “Yeah,” Jessie told her, “I’ve known Jason since the sixth grade. He’s a nice person. Me and him, we’ve always gotten along.”
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The fact that Jessie said he wasn’t close to Damien or Jason didn’t thwart Hutcheson’s investigation. She told Bray, and later the West Memphis police, that she had a hunch about the killings and wanted to check it out by talking with Damien alone.
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Hutcheson, a thirty-two-year-old waitress and mother of two, told Jessie that she wanted to go out with Damien. When Jessie promised to introduce her to Damien, Hutcheson reported the news to Bray, who relayed it to Jerry Driver. The two men thought it would be a good idea if Hutcheson could carry her undercover act further by making it appear that she was interested in the occult. Driver suggested that Hutcheson get some library books relating to the occult and place them around her house. Bray even provided a list of books from the Marion library that would fit the bill. When Hutcheson told Bray that she didn’t have a library card, he allowed her to use his.

Jessie did as he was asked. The next time Jason and Damien were in the neighborhood, Jessie brought them to Hutcheson’s house, made the introductions, and left. He walked to his own trailer, he said, and within fifteen minutes saw Damien’s mother arrive in her car to pick up the two boys. Jessie assumed that Damien had called for his mother to come, since it was well known that Damien did not drive. As far as Jessie knew, that was the only contact Vicki Hutcheson ever had with Damien and Jason.

But Hutcheson would tell Bray—and later the West Memphis police—that a relationship had developed between her and Damien after that meeting and that it was the start of an eight-day romance—one that she said was entirely calculated on her part, passionate on Damien’s, but sexless from beginning to end. She said the relationship had been strictly part of her “private detective” work.
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“We talked about lots of different stuff,” Hutcheson reported.

Far from being frightened by her association with someone who allegedly had proclaimed himself evil—and who was suspected by police of having committed a triple homicide—Hutcheson said she’d told Damien that she wanted to see him again to learn more about satanism. She reported to Bray that she expected to get that opportunity soon, as Damien had invited her to attend something that he called an “esbat.” Hutcheson said that she’d looked the word up in a dictionary, learning that it referred to a gathering of witches.
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Later, Bray said that when he heard of this plan, he warned Hutcheson that it would be too dangerous for her to attend such an event. But, he said, she told him that she didn’t care about the danger, if it would help catch the killers. If Bray instituted any protections for the young mother as she prepared to enter a realm that police suspected might harbor vicious murderers, neither he nor she ever mentioned them.

Hutcheson later reported to Bray that on the night of Wednesday, May 19—two weeks after the night the children disappeared—Damien picked her up at her house in a red Ford Escort. Beyond the description of the car, her details of the experience were thin. Jessie was in the car, she said. Damien drove them to a field north of Marion. They’d approached it by a dirt road, and she’d heard water running in the distance. When she climbed out of the car, she saw about ten young people, with faces and arms painted black, taking off their clothes and “touching each other.” Offended, she asked Damien to take her home, and he agreed. Damien drove the car, leaving Jessie behind at the orgy. Hutcheson said she could not identify anyone she’d seen at the esbat because of the paint on their faces. She could not provide any names, because attendees had only used nicknames, such as Lucifer, Spider, and Snake.