Law & Disorder

On the surface, Charles Jason Baldwin, known by his middle name, was nothing like Damien. Two years younger, with a slight build and curly blond hair he wore long, Jason was a diligent student with a recognized talent in art. Some of his teachers had encouraged him to pursue it as a career. But the two boys hit it off, talking big ideas, swapping information about the latest counterculture bands, sensing a kinship they felt was absent from the rest of the narrow-minded rural community. Jason, whom most people described as quiet and polite, liked to hunt and fish and kept pet snakes. His mother, Angela Gail Grinnell, had a history of mental illness and drug abuse. At one point, she had been involuntarily committed to the East Arkansas Regional Mental Health Center.

Jason came from a similar background to Damien’s and so many others in this poor, semi-rural community, including two of the slain boys. His parents had divorced and remarried several times, so it became a challenge to keep all the last names straight. Jason’s father, Larry, lived in central Arkansas. He and Gail were second cousins.

By his middle teen years, Damien was getting into minor scrapes with the law. He and a girlfriend ran away together one night and went into an abandoned house to sleep. Police arrested him and turned him over to juvenile authorities for evaluation. He was sent to Charter Hospital, near Little Rock, where he was diagnosed as manic-depressive and put on the antidepressant drug Trofanil. When he was released and sent back to West Memphis, he was placed under the supervision of juvenile probation officer Jerry Driver.

This was not his first encounter with Jerry Driver. “Jerry Driver harassed and tormented me for years. He’s the one who had me put in those mental institutions,” Damien said, adding that Driver cruised near his trailer home frequently, looking for kids in some kind of trouble. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, Driver was a figure of fear and loathing in the poorer neighborhoods he patrolled.

“What brought me to his attention in the very first place,” Damien recalled, “I have a teenaged girlfriend, her parents find out we’re having sex, and say, ‘You’re not allowed to see each other anymore.’

“So we come up with the ingenious plan—‘Well, let’s just run away, then.’ So we run away. Her parents call the cops to come and find us. They find us, they take us in. That’s when we encounter Jerry Driver. We’re juveniles, so they bring Jerry Driver in. It’s the first time he sees me. That’s when he targets me, zeroes in on me.

“Immediately, the first night, he starts asking me all these satanic questions: ‘Well, have you heard anything? Do you know anything about a satanic cult in the area? What have you heard? Have you seen anything strange going on? You know, we really need some help with this.’ This was years before the murders. I was, like, sixteen, seventeen, something like that.”

The instability that had characterized Damien’s life continued. His mother, Pamela, finally divorced Jack Echols and remarried Joe Hutchison, moving with him to Portland, Oregon, and securing the parole office’s permission to bring Damien with her. Damien’s mental condition worsened; he took to drinking heavily, and his parents were afraid several times he was going to commit suicide.

Damien decided to go back to West Memphis. Staying with a friend, he applied for readmission to high school, but he was told he would need a letter from his parents. As soon as he left the school campus, Jerry Driver arrested him on the grounds that he had violated his parole by leaving his parents’ custody in Oregon.

“I went to the high school to register and they said, ‘You can’t register without a parent or guardian because you’re under eighteen.’

“So I go back to my friend’s house. Next thing you know, I hear a knock on the door. It’s Jerry Driver. He says, ‘I’m gonna have to arrest you.’

“I say, ‘For what?’

“He says, ‘Because you’re not living with your parents. Therefore, you’re violating the law.’ He arrests me and has me put in the mental institution for a month.”

Damien was sent back to Charter Hospital; but in the weeks he was there, he seemed to feel better, possibly because of a doctor’s insistence that he focus outside of himself and interact with other patients. When he returned to West Memphis, he took his high-school GED exam and passed. He moved in with his girlfriend, Domini Teer, a cute, slender, freckle-faced redhead. She soon became pregnant. When his parents moved back to West Memphis, he lived part-time with them.

Around noon on Friday, May 7, 1993, Lieutenant James Sudbury and Steve Jones came over to the Hutchisons’ house in the Broadway Trailer Park and secured their permission to talk to Damien. Sudbury snapped a Polaroid photo of Damien showing a pentagram tattoo on his chest and another arm tattoo they couldn’t identify. They asked him if he was involved in cult activities. He said he wasn’t.

“They start asking me and telling me things,” Damien recounted. “They take me into a bedroom at my house and they say, ‘What if the bodies were found in the water? Why do you think they would be in the water?’

“I say, ‘I guess to hide them.’

“ ‘Well, what do you think if maybe somebody urinated in the mouths and they pushed the bodies into the water to wash the urine out of them? Do you think maybe that’s a possibility?’ ”

Damien recollected that he was surprised by the conversation: “ ‘Okay,’ I’m thinking, ‘that’s some freaky stuff that you would even think to ask me that, but ‘Okay.’

“The next thing I know, we get to trial and they’re saying, ‘He told us they were pushed in the water to wash the urine out of them.’ ”

The following day, Inspector Gitchell interviewed John Mark Byers, which would be standard practice in any murder case involving children. You always investigate those closest and with the most ready access to the young victim first. Interestingly, although they were interviewed for routine information, there was no organized investigation of his wife, Melissa, or of the other parents, Pam and Terry Hobbs, or Dana and Todd Moore.

The day after the Byers interview, the officers requested an official interview with Damien. They also talked to Jason Baldwin, knowing he was a close friend. Despite an absence of any kind of direct or inferential evidence, they were convinced the boys had something to do with the child murders and put them under even closer surveillance.

Police followed up on various tips, though some were mishandled from the beginning. One such was the unidentified person of interest who came to be referred to as “Mr. Bojangles.” According to police reports, around eight-forty on the night of the murders, Marty King, manager of a Bojangles’ restaurant about a mile from the crime scene across Ten Mile Bayou, called West Memphis PD to report that someone had seen a black male “dazed and covered with blood and mud” inside the ladies’ room. It was unclear whether all of the blood was his or not, but he left some on the restroom wall when his arm brushed against it. He had also defecated on the floor.

About forty-five minutes later, Officer Regina Meek arrived at the scene and drove her scout car into the drive-through lane to inquire. By this time, the man was long gone, so she just took the report and left without going inside.

When news of the murders came out the next day, Marty King very responsibly thought there could be a connection and called the police twice. Crime scene investigators came over after finishing at the Robin Hood Hills site and gathered evidence from the Bojangles’ ladies’ room. They had not changed their clothing or shoes, which means there was now no way to determine if the two scenes had been cross-contaminated. Also, not knowing his ladies’ room might be an accessory site to a murder investigation, King had routinely ordered the restroom cleaned. Dried blood was still visible on the wall and floor tiles and scrapings were taken. By the time anyone was brought to trial, no one knew what had happened to them, though.

A Negroid hair was found on the sheet in which Chris Byers’s body had been wrapped when it was transported to the pathology lab. This made the connection to the strange man in the ladies’ room all the more tantalizing.

At such an early stage of the investigation before any dots had been connected, it would be impossible to know if Mr. Bojangles was a possible killer, a panicked drifter, who might have stumbled upon the scene at the wrong time, or a totally unrelated red herring. But without physical evidence and not even a contemporaneous visual inspection by the responding officer, an important person of interest was lost.

The police didn’t seem that worked up about it, though. Mainly, they were fixated on Damien Echols and his pal Jason Baldwin. As Jerry Driver had noted almost immediately after the discovery of the crime, Damien seemed to fit their image of what a killer of three young boys would be. With nothing but this hunch, they began closely following Damien, parking in front of his house, harassing him, watching his every move. Damien thought they would eventually tire of this and move on. But they didn’t. Because they were pretty sure they had their motive:

Satanic-ritual murder.