CHAPTER 20
STATE V. DAMIEN WAYNE ECHOLS AND CHARLES JASON BALDWIN
On Friday, February 25, 1994, after several days of selection, a jury of eight women and four men was seated in the Craighead County Courthouse in Jonesboro for the Echols-Baldwin murder trial. Outside the 132-year-old redbrick building, the curious lined up for a chance to sit in on what promised to be the biggest spectacle the town had ever seen. Despite the change of venue, Judge Burnett was still presiding, as he did in the Jessie Misskelley Jr. trial.
Like Grundy, Virginia, when Roger Keith Coleman went on trial, someone had put a placard on the courthouse lawn with a picture of a Grim Reaper in a black hood. The sign read: HE WANTS YOU, DAMIEN.
Other than some questionable fibers, the prosecution had no physical evidence and no eyewitnesses to tie the defendants to the murders. Therefore, John Fogleman and his team had to rely on inferential elements and reasoning and statements attributed to either Damien or Jason. He said as much in his opening statement, while defense attorney Scott Davidson admitted in his opening statement, “You are also going to see that our client, Damien Echols . . . well, I’ll be honest with you. He’s not the all-American boy. In fact, he’s kind of weird. He’s not the same as maybe you and I might be.”
The public’s fascination was further stoked when Domini brought her young son by Damien to court. The baby, Damien Seth Azariah Teer, had been born in September, when Damien was already locked up.
After watching a portion of the trial, an Arkansas State University freshman commented, “Damien Echols—he was just turning around, staring at everybody. He was, like, evil. I mean, I just got the creeps really bad.”
The opening portion of the trial primarily established the facts surrounding the murders and the individuals who played a part. Dana Moore, Pam Hobbs and Melissa Byers each testified as to the last time they had seen their sons alive. As someone who has spent much of his career advising on prosecutorial strategy, I think this is a good way to start. It personalizes the victims, their families and the loss, which can often be forgotten in a trial that focuses on the defendants. So if I were Fogleman, I would have done exactly the same.
The only significant evidentiary element that came out of this for those studying the case was that Pam Hobbs’s account of the day did not square with what her husband, Terry, had told investigators. But since Terry was not called to testify, there was no impact on the jury.
Officer Regina Meek testified about responding to the call from John Mark Byers about his missing stepson, and became defensive when describing the incomplete Bojangles’ investigation. Detective Sergeant Mike Allen described finding the bodies.
The atmosphere in court grew grim as Dr. Frank Peretti described the autopsies he performed on the three boys: the multiple head injuries on Michael Moore and Stevie Branch; Michael’s water-filled lungs; the gouging wounds to Chris Byers’s thigh, the removal of his scrotum, testicles and the head of his penis, and the missing skin on the organ’s shaft. Peretti said it would be difficult to determine time of death, but when pressed, he reluctantly speculated that it could have been between 1:00 and 7:00 A.M. on May 6.
He mentioned scratches and contusions of various sorts on all three bodies, but contrary to the Misskelley confession, he found no evidence of sexual assault.
Perhaps the most significant and grisly part of Peretti’s testimony came in response to questions about the damage to Chris’s genital area. He stated his opinion that it would take considerable time and considerable surgical skill with a scalpel or a very sharp knife to perform this mutilation under the best of circumstances, such as a well-lit lab. In the dark, in the water, with the locally notorious mosquitoes present, it would be considerably more difficult. Also, since Chris had bled to death, it would be almost impossible to remove all the blood from the creek bank or any other solid ground. The only situation in which there would not be a great residue of blood would be if the body was in water at the time. Yet, he could not see how such a delicate procedure could be performed in water. He didn’t think it could be done. That comment left its own tantalizing mystery. If Dr. Peretti himself couldn’t have accomplished such a task, how could Damien or Jason have done so?
After testimony from detectives on searching the crime scene and finding the knife in the lake—no evidence was presented tying it to either defendant—the prosecution put Michael Ray Carson on the stand. Michael was a sixteen-year-old ninth grader who spent a week in the county juvenile detention center in August for burglary—breaking into a house to steal guns—during the same time Jason Baldwin had been held there. He testified that on his third day there, he met Jason when they were both involved in a game of spades with two other boys. He said he asked Jason if he was involved with the murders and Jason denied it.
The next day he and Jason were alone cleaning up the cards before returning to their cells for lunch. Michael again asked Jason the same question.
This time, according to Michael, Jason gave it up. “I said, ‘Just between you and me, did you do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Michael described Jason talking about how he had dismembered Chris Byers, sucked blood from his penis and scrotum, then put his testicles in his mouth. He added that he was going to kick Jessie’s ass for messing everything up, but that he still expected to walk free. The entire conversation, Michael said, did not last more than two or three minutes.
You have to deal with a witness like this the same way you’d deal with a suspect: you need to profile him. You have to evaluate the background of the subject, the situation in which the confession was allegedly made, and whether there are extenuating circumstances, such as whether the witness has anything to gain.
This encounter was supposed to have happened in August; yet Michael didn’t come forward until February 1, the final day of Jessie Misskelley Jr.’s trial. Why? prosecutor Brent Davis wanted to know.
“My father told me that I should tell somebody. But I just really didn’t want to get involved. I’d just gotten out of jail, and I didn’t want to get involved with the court system,” the witness answered.
But then he and his father were watching television when a segment came on showing the still-grieving parents. “I saw how brokenhearted they were about their missing children. I got a soft heart,” he allowed. “I couldn’t take it.” He was not offered a reward, he said, and wouldn’t have taken it, even if it were offered.
Give me a break! I wish all teens that break into houses to steal guns had this much integrity.
The idea that even a guilty person would confide in this kid he hardly knew, and who was bound to talk, is so absurd that it is difficult to conceive of any jury buying it. At some point after the trial, Michael admitted he had made up the whole thing, but that’s getting ahead of our story. I only mention it here because it should have been obvious to the prosecution—whose first job is to see justice done and only secondarily to seek conviction—that there was a pattern to all of this weak and attenuated evidence. The only logic I can come up with is that they needed a witness like this to make the case. But that doesn’t make it right. Combined with a supposed participant who had to be led into the basic facts of the case by the police, you have to wonder why they didn’t just admit that there wasn’t a solid case.
Judge Burnett wouldn’t allow into the record evidence that Michael Ray Carson was a habitual substance abuser because that fact wasn’t sufficient grounds to challenge a witness’s veracity. Huh? And he further disallowed a communication to both prosecution and defense from Danny Williams, a counselor who worked at the juvenile detention facility, saying that he had told Michael the details of the murder supposedly obtained from Jason and that he knew Michael was going to lie at the trial. The judge knocked this one out because of patient-counselor confidentiality.
All in all, the deck seemed to be stacked against the defense.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this attitude over and over again, going all the way back to William Heirens in Chicago and before. When it becomes more important to close a case than to make sure the state has the right suspects, the system falls apart and no one is served. Perhaps worst of all, a killer remains free and unpunished.
The issue of the knife in the lake got even more complicated when Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the HBO filmmakers, turned in to police a flip-blade knife John Mark Byers had given to Douglas Cooper, one of their camera operators, as a gift. When HBO officials found out about it, they told Sinofsky to turn it over to the police. Gary Gitchell testified that he sent the knife to a genetic analysis lab in North Carolina, which found traces of human blood near the base of the blade that matched both Byers and his stepson, Chris, but not Damien or Jason. This was of interest because prior to the analysis Byers had previously stated under questioning by Gitchell that the knife had never been used. Confronted with the lab report, he remembered cutting his thumb while dressing some venison.
Known by his middle name of Mark, Byers was thirty-six years of age and kind of an outsize character. He was about six-feet-five, with long stringy blondish hair, often sporting a beard, and given to public eruptions of biblically oriented vengeance against the killers of the “three babies,” at least when the cameras were rolling. He had been married previously and had a son named Ryan from his prior marriage. He was a jeweler by trade, but he had held a variety of other jobs. In a community in which corporal punishment of children was the norm, he had often been rough with Chris, but he seemed devoted to him. Chris had ongoing problems with hyperactivity, often acting disruptive in class and elsewhere, and Mark and Melissa were trying to manage the condition with doctors and prescription medication. Damien publicly professed belief that John Mark Byers was the real killer; and of the three fathers, Mark Byers was the only one Gary Gitchell had investigated in depth before he became convinced that the three teens had done it.
A number of witnesses claimed to have seen one or more of the defendants in compromising situations. Jerry Driver testified he had seen Damien, Jason and Jessie walking along in long black robes and carrying staffs at least three times, though no one else ever claimed to have seen them attired this way. Narlene Hollingsworth was in her 1982 red Ford Escort wagon on her way back from picking up her mother from her job in a Laundromat, about nine-thirty on the evening of May 5, when she spotted Damien and Domini walking on the South Service Road near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. She said that Damien’s dark clothing seemed dirty and disheveled. Her husband, Ricky, was in the front seat with her; her mother, son Anthony and daughter Tabitha were in the second seat; and daughter Mary, son “Little Rick” and his girlfriend, Sombra, were in the back. “Big Ricky” said it was dark and the spotting was so brief that he couldn’t identify anyone. Anthony said the spotting had actually taken place around 10:30 P.M. The prosecution suggested that maybe it wasn’t Domini they had seen with Damien, but rather Jason, whose hair was long and blond.
The trial got down to specifics on Damien Echols when Detective Bryn Ridge testified about a conversation he had with Damien on the morning of May 10. Remember, Damien and Jason would not be arrested until almost a month later, but police were already focusing on them based on Jerry Driver’s suspicions.
It is clear when you read the trial transcript that Ridge and Damien were operating on two completely different levels. Damien perceived that he was being asked to speculate about the crime based on his personal knowledge and what he had heard about it. Ridge perceived that he was revealing information and motivation that no one but the killer would possess.
Ridge stated that Damien had told him the boys might have drowned and that the bodies would have been cut up, perhaps to scare someone. Eight-year-olds are not big or smart, so they would be easy to control. The one who did this probably knew the kids and was able to convince them to come with him. It may have been intended as a single murder, but the other two had to be killed to keep them from squealing.
The detective also said Damien told him his favorite book of the Bible was Revelations, his favorite writers were Stephen King and Anton LaVey, author of The Satanic Bible and other writings on the occult. From this, Damien knew that young children are the most innocent, so they would give more power to the person who did the killing. All people have demonic forces in them over which they have no control, he said, and speculated that the person who did this probably felt good about it. If this were a satanic killing, Damien would expect to find candles, stones, crystals and a knife at the crime scene. Damien also said that whenever a person does something either good or bad, it will come back to that person three times over.
Ridge asked Damien why his fingerprints would be at the scene. This is a common police questioning technique. Damien said he had never been in the woods, so he would have no idea. Ridge did not tell him that no fingerprints from anyone were found.
The prosecution asked Ridge if there was evidence that the murder was a cult activity. He answered in the affirmative, citing the secluded wooded setting, overkill and torture elements; the mutilation and blood ritual involving Chris Byers’s penis and other stab wounds; the way the boys were bound and the fact that they were eight, the “witch’s number”; and the meticulous cleaning of the site afterward so that no blood or implements remained.
How did he know all this about cult practices? From books and police handouts not available to the public, as well as notes he had taken from his own research, he replied.
Throughout the questioning, Ridge conceded, Damien had steadfastly denied he had anything to do with the murders.
Remember the sticks that Ridge retrieved from the crime scene on July 4? Damien’s lawyer Val Price questioned him about why they had waited two months and how valid such evidence could be. “You all did not take that stick into evidence at the time you recovered the bodies?”
“No, sir,” Ridge replied. “I didn’t take this stick into evidence until the statement of Jessie Misskelley.”
Whoa! Jessie was not testifying, so nothing about his statement was supposed to be introduced. Price immediately moved for a mistrial. “The question I asked the officer did not call for him blurting out the fact that Jessie Misskelley gave a confession. The whole purpose for our trial being separated from Mr. Misskelley’s trial in the first place was the confession of Jessie Misskelley.”
Judge Burnett allowed as how Ridge “shouldn’t have volunteered” that information. But in denying Price’s motion for mistrial, he commented, “I suggest, gentlemen, that there isn’t a soul up on that jury or in this courtroom that doesn’t know Mr. Misskelley gave a statement.”
In other words, the defense would have to deal with the worst of both worlds: Jessie’s confession hanging in the air and the inability to challenge it! If the jurors believed it, but didn’t understand how it was obtained, then Damien and Jason’s involvement would be a sure thing. And if Jessie was sent to the slammer for life and he didn’t even kill any of the kids, it would have to be worse for the two who he said actually did the killing.
The next witness was intended to explain the motive for this horrible crime and ended up giving perhaps the most controversial testimony of the trial.
Dale W. Griffis, Ph.D., was a self-proclaimed expert on Satanism and cults. A former police officer in Tiffin, Ohio, he said he had served as a consultant to victims, law enforcement, educators and mental-health specialists. Under questioning, he conceded that his master’s and Ph.D. degrees were awarded by Columbia Pacific University, which had no national certification and did not require him to take a single class. The school was closed by California court order in 2000. Griffis had been on the campus five times before his graduation. He said the street was his classroom. The title of his dissertation was Mind Control Cults and Their Effects on the Objectives of Law Enforcement.
He admitted that he had never talked with either Damien or Jason and couldn’t even pick Jason out in the courtroom. He said he had reviewed the crime scene and autopsy photos and had spoken with John Fogleman between ten and twelve times. What he had done, about a year before the murder, was consult with Jerry Driver and receive copies of some of Damien’s drawings to determine if West Memphis had a satanic or occult problem in the person of Damien Echols. Griffis said he considered this very good and responsible law enforcement work. This previous exchange would help explain why Damien was on the top of Driver’s list as a possible suspect when the three boys were murdered.
“On behalf of my client,” Damien’s attorney Val Price objected, “it’s our position that the mail-order Ph.D. in which a person doesn’t have to take classes . . . from a nonaccredited school doesn’t qualify as an expert in Arkansas.”
“I disagree,” Judge Burnett responded. “I’m going to allow him to testify in the area of the occult.”
The defense attorneys challenged this ruling, saying there was no scientific basis to Griffis’s assertion about the murders being related to satanic ritual. But once again, Burnett seemed to be making inconsistent distinctions between the qualifications of defense experts, like Dr. Ofshe in the Misskelley trial, and prosecution witnesses, like Griffis, who qualified “based upon his knowledge, experience and training in the area of occultism or Satanism.”
Once Griffis was allowed to get into the substance of his testimony, Jason’s attorney Paul Ford asked him whether these crimes were “motivated by occult beliefs.”
“Yes,” Griffis replied. He explained that the murders had taken place under a full moon and that there was an absence of blood at the scene because Satanists would save it to drink or bathe in for its “life force.” The black hair, fingernails and T-shirts all had occult overtones or suggested occult involvement. So did the staging of the crime near water. The overkill and genital mutilation—check. The pentagram on the front of Damien’s seized notebook was certainly indicative of satanic activity. Inside, the pentagram surrounded by upside-down crosses symbolized the merging of white and black witchcraft—Wicca and Satanism.
Does this remind you of the tattoos and heavy metal posters from the Cameron Todd Willingham arson trial?
Griffis said he had never seen victims of a sex crime that wasn’t occult tied this way, and that there would be no other reason than occult to tie them in this fashion.
When pressed, Griffis admitted that he had only investigated two other sex crimes in which victims had been tied, and neither of them was tied in this manner. So basically, he had never seen this type of bondage, but he knew it had to be occult related. He also acknowledged that as far as he knew, there was no evidence of blood having been stored at either of the defendants’ residences. Both defense teams pointed out that there were no pentagrams or any other specific evidence of Satanism or the occult present at the crime scene.
It went on from there. Griffis did not know if the murderers knew the ages of the boys, but there is an occult belief that if you do not have sex with a boy before he turns nine, he loses his magical powers.
When both defendants’ attorneys protested the use of evidence taken from Damien’s house by the juvenile system before the murders even took place, the judge ruled that facts or data do not need to be admissible in court to be used to form an expert opinion. Since it is necessary for the prosecution to prove motive if they can, his reasoning went, proving motive outweighs all other negative effects.
Though Griffis conceded to the defense that many of the indicators in the crime could be interpreted in various ways, they “showed trappings, not just of vague occultism, but of satanic worship in particular.”
The prosecution closed its case with the testimony of two young girls, one eleven and the other fifteen. They each testified they had seen Damien, dressed all in black, at the J.W. Rich Girls Club softball fields and had overheard him telling a group of friends that he had killed the three boys, and that he planned to kill two more—“I already have one of them picked out”—before he turned himself in. In one of the witness’s accounts, Jason was with him when he made this statement.
They said they were about fifteen or twenty feet away, and neither young lady could recall what he had said before or after, nor identify any of the friends to whom he had been talking. There was a police officer on the field, but neither went to tell him. One of the girls said she told her mother afterward, but none of this was reported until after Damien was arrested. And one girl put the date of the game after Damien’s arrest. Between Jessie’s confession and this account, was it possible West Memphis parents didn’t teach their children how to tell time or read a calendar?
Damien Echols’s defense team allowed him to take the stand. Jason Baldwin’s team kept their client off. Both decisions can be second-guessed and were, though I have always felt that innocent defendants—and it is a credit to the general efficacy of the criminal justice system that they are in the minority—make pretty good witnesses.
Jason, in particular, gave the impression of being so guileless, straightforward and unsophisticated that I think he would have done himself some good. It came out afterward that he very much wanted to testify in his own defense, as well as have his attorneys call character and alibi witnesses. On the other hand, with the atmosphere of satanic ritual so heavily in the air, the mere fact that eleven black T-shirts were found in his home might have negated all other impressions. As Jason later commented, “All that mattered was that Damien was weird and I had black T-shirts.” You can never fault a defense attorney for trying to protect his client.
The consensus was that Damien did himself no favors by testifying over the course of two days in his own defense. Reading the transcripts and watching the film of his testimony, I think it had a mixed result. The prosecution certainly made points tying him to an interest in the occult through his seized notebooks, which was damaging.
On the other hand, I thought he came across as candid and unguarded, trying to answer questions as honestly as he could. As a prosecution strategist, I always wanted defendants to take the stand, because I felt a skilled prosecutor, pressing the right buttons, could get the witness to let down his guard and make the jury see him as he actually was.
In the prosecution of Wayne B. Williams for the early 1980s Atlanta Child Murders, that is exactly what we did. I coached Jack Mallard, an extremely skilled prosecutor, to get up close and personal with Williams, who had been smug and controlled on the stand up until then. With his methodical, south Georgia drawl, Mallard bore in on him, violating his personal space, and pressed, “What was it like, Wayne? What was it like when you wrapped your fingers around the victim’s throat? Did you panic? Did you panic?”
And in a weak voice, Williams responded, “No,” before suddenly catching himself. He flew into a rage, pointed his finger at me and screamed, “You’re trying your best to make me fit that FBI profile, and I’m not going to help you do it!”
The defense went ballistic as Williams went nuts on the stand, ranting about “FBI goons” and calling the prosecution team “fools.” But the damage was done. For the first time, the jury saw a man capable of murder.
That never happened with Damien Echols. There was no such drama here. Nothing the prosecution did got under his skin. It was as if there was no boiling point. Damien answered the questions with a certain air of weariness, as though he was just waiting to finish up so he could leave.
He said he was into skateboarding, music, movies, watching TV and talking on the phone. He would read any book he got his hands on. He admitted telling Bryn Ridge the things the detective testified to—that everyone had a good side and a bad side. He said, “I have read about all different types of religions, because I’ve always wondered, like, how do we know we’ve got the right one, how do we know we are not messing up.” After exploring Catholicism, he focused on Wicca.
When Price asked him his opinion on Dale Griffis’s testimony, he replied, “Some of it was okay, but he didn’t stop to differentiate between different groups. He just lumped them all together into one big group that he called ‘cults.’ ”
He was matter-of-fact rather than defensive on issues the prosecution had considered damning. On the knife found in the lake, he observed, “I had one sort of like that, but mine didn’t have a black handle. The handle on mine was camouflaged, and it had the camouflage case and everything. The blade on mine was black. It wasn’t silver like that.”
When asked if he had ever read books by Aleister Crowley, a pretty hard-core writer on black witchcraft whose name Damien had written in code in his notebook, he replied no, but “I would have read them if I had saw [sic] them.”
As to whether a killer would feel good about the crimes, he thought that if that person committed the crimes voluntarily, he probably would feel good about it. As far as Damien was concerned, that was just common sense and showed no particular insight into the mind of the killer.
He also said about Detective Ridge, “If he didn’t get the answer, he’d try to make me go back and say something else.”
“Tell the judge the manner in which they were questioning you during this period of time,” Price instructed him.
“During these questions right here [initial standard questions], they were pretty nice. After that, God! After I’d been there awhile, they started cussing me, telling me they knew I did it. They were going to fry my ass. I might as well go ahead and confess now.”
A little later, Price asked, “During that time, did you ask for an attorney?”
“Three times,” Damien replied, elaborating that Ridge “told me I didn’t need to bring him back there, because he was just going to cost us a lot of money, and that in the end he was going to quit, anyway.”
Later, Damien said he didn’t take the trial all that seriously, because he didn’t believe anyone could prove he had committed murder when he knew he hadn’t killed anyone. His reasoning was like a more sophisticated yet equally naive version of Jessie’s.
After Damien’s testimony, the defense tried to call Christopher Morgan to the stand. He was a twenty-year-old from Memphis with a string of drug problems who had told police in California that he might have killed the three boys during a drug blackout. During a hearing away from the jury, he explained that he had been in the area during the murders, but now he denied any part and had recanted his confession to the police. He described a situation similar to what Jessie Misskelley Jr. had gone through, with seventeen hours of questioning and a confession made in desperation. Prosecutors Brent Davis and John Fogleman claimed West Memphis PD had considered him unreliable and had ruled him out as a suspect. Paul Ford replied that Jessie had also recanted right away and was similarly unreliable, and Christopher’s testimony would certainly cast reasonable doubt.
Ultimately, Christopher’s court-appointed attorney said that his client would not testify; and if he was compelled to do so, he would invoke the Fifth Amendment on each question because of various charges that were pending against him. Judge Burnett bought into this and not only excused him from taking the stand, but placed a gag order on all the attorneys so that they could not even mention Christopher Morgan’s existence to the jury and give them another highly questionable confession to consider.
For their final witness, Damien’s defense team called Robert Hicks, a police training officer from Virginia who had done his own study of satanic cults as they related to violent crime. Like my FBI colleague Ken Lanning, he had found no empirical evidence that such a phenomenon actually existed or that listening to heavy metal or wearing black had anything to do with the propensity to commit ritual violence. Point by point, he refuted Griffis’s ideas and said that even his phrase “ ‘trappings of the occult’ is absolutely meaningless in considering any kind of violent crime.”
Jason’s team firmly believed there was nothing on the record that implicated their client and therefore rested without calling any witnesses. Jason had gone into the trial believing so strongly in the American system of justice that despite his arrest and incarceration, he didn’t believe he could be convicted. When prosecutors came to him before the trial and offered him a lesser charge if he turned against Damien, he refused. He refused again when they cut his sentencing deal in half from forty years to twenty. Jason said that even if they let him walk away scot-free in exchange for testifying against Damien, he wouldn’t do it, because they were both innocent.
In his closing statement, prosecutor Brent Davis pointed to photographs of the three dead eight-year-olds and said, “The normal motives for human conduct don’t apply. There’s something strange going on that causes people to do this.”
Then he went on to cite Damien’s manner in the courtroom: “You can judge him from the witness stand. This guy’s as cool as a cucumber. He’s nearly emotionless, and what he’s done in terms of the satanic stuff is a whole lot more than just dabbling or looking into it for purposes of an intellectual exercise.
“As bizarre as it may seem, and as unfamiliar as it may seem, this occult set of beliefs and the beliefs that Damien had, and his best friend, Jason, was exposed to all the time—those are the set of beliefs that were the motive or the basis for causing this bizarre murder.”
John Fogleman’s part of the closing argument was both strange and controversial. He began by admitting that nothing specifically tied the defendants to the crime. However, if jurors evaluated the totality of the evidence, it all pointed in one direction, and pointed there beyond a reasonable doubt.
He held up a grapefruit and, in turn, picked up the two exhibit knives: the one found in the lake and the one that had belonged to Mark Byers. Paul Ford rose to object; this was not a scientific experiment and the subject grapefruit had not been introduced into evidence. As had been his pattern throughout both trials, Judge Burnett sided with the prosecution.
Fogleman gave the grapefruit a whack with each of the knives. While admitting that this was not conclusive as to the specific knife that was used in the murder, he pointed out that the marks on the grapefruit’s skin left by the lake knife matched wounds on Christopher Byers’s groin. In other words, there were small wounds an approximately even distance from each other, corresponding to the serration on the knife. The Mark Byers knife did not.
But as I watched the tape of Fogleman’s argument, I sat up with surprise. No criminal in my experience had ever brought a knife down flat against a victim’s skin surface. You use a knife to stab or gouge. So this demonstration didn’t—and still doesn’t—make any sense to me. It had no relationship to a real-life situation—just more of the strange suggestion and innuendo that had characterized this entire trial.
When it was his turn, Damien’s attorney Val Price picked up a picture that had been seized from Damien’s bedroom of a goat-headed figure holding two torches. He acknowledged that it was “a weird, strange-looking picture, but so what? 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.
“It’s not our job to prove what happened May fifth. It’s the state’s job, and they haven’t done it.”
The case went to the jury at five on the afternoon of March 17, 1994. They deliberated until 9:40 P.M., then came back the next morning at nine-thirty. They reached their verdicts at three-thirty that afternoon.
We asked Damien if he expected a guilty or not guilty verdict as he waited.
“You’re torn,” he replied. “It’s like they always say, ‘You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.’ Well, in my mind, it is impossible, physically impossible, for someone to prove you’ve done something that you haven’t done. In a teenaged mind, that violates the laws of physics. But also, people who’ve never been in a situation like this can’t comprehend the state of shock you’re in, the trauma. It’s like they set a bomb off at every single level of your being. They’ve destroyed you—psychologically, emotionally. I mean, in every way you have just been devastated, had your entire world destroyed. You can’t think the way you normally think.”
As the jurors filed into the courtroom, all Damien specifically remembers is that they “were staring holes in me.”
When all were assembled in court, the bailiff handed the jury forms to Judge Burnett, who read them out loud. Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were both found guilty of capital murder.
As it was later revealed, the jury did take up the Misskelley confession in its deliberations and used it as evidence to convict the two defendants.
The next day, the jurors returned and, after hearing what lawyers for each side had to say, spent a little over two hours deliberating their punishment recommendation. They found that the crimes had been committed, as the legal expression stated, in “an especially cruel and depraved manner,” which could mitigate any positive considerations for the defendants. For Damien Echols, the perceived ringleader, it was death by lethal injection. For Charles Jason Baldwin, his follower who had no prior history of bad behavior or run-ins with the law, it was life in prison without parole.
When Judge Burnett posed the formality, “Do either of you have any legal reason to show the court or give the court as to why the sentence should not be imposed?” Damien answered no.
Jason, in his typically soft and timid voice, responded, “Because I’m innocent.”
“Well,” the judge declared, “the jury has heard the evidence and concluded otherwise.”
The trial and its outcome confirmed the community’s worst fears. Indicative of this was a headline in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette the same day it reported the sentences that read: MOMS STILL SCARED IN WEST MEMPHIS.
The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper that had done much of the lead reporting on the case, ran a lead editorial that began:
“You better get to know your kids.”
That’s the message that West Memphis Police Inspector Gary W. Gitchell said he had taken from his 10-month immersion in one of the most shocking and grisly murder cases this region has known.
The editorial went on to suggest that satanic involvement had warped the three defendants’ thinking and robbed each of them of a conscience.
So, through this and other similar accounts, perception became reality.