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Index
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One The Murders AT7:41P.M. ON MAY5, 1993, a full moon rose behind the Memphis skyline. Its light glinted across the Mississippi River and fell onto the midsized Arkansas town aspiringly named West Memphis. Sometime between the rising of that moon and its setting the next morning, something diabolical would happen in West Memphis. Three eight-year-old boys would vanish, plucked off the streets of their neighborhood by an unseen, murderous hand. Under the glare of the next day’s sun, police would discover three young bodies. They would be pulled—naked, pale, bound, and beaten—from a watery ditch in a patch of woods alongside two of America’s busiest highways. But the investigation would unfold in shadow. Why had one of the boys been castrated? How to account for the absence of blood? Why did the banks of the stream look swept clean? The police would stumble for weeks without clues—until the moon itself became one. John Mark Byers, an unemployed jeweler, was the first parent to re
Chapter One
Chapter Two The West Memphis Police WITHIN HOURS AFTER THE BODIES WERE FOUND, Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, a former prosecuting attorney, contacted Gitchell to offer the assistance of the Arkansas State Police. The larger state police agency could have sent detectives from its Criminal Investigation Division into West Memphis to aid in what promised to be a difficult investigation. But Gitchell declined the offer, and though one state police officer did help conduct some interviews, the role of the state police in West Memphis was minimal.15 Gitchell’s reluctance to involve the state police might have been sparked in part by the misinformation the agency had broadcast in the first hours of the case—information that had been picked up by the paper. Gitchell’s strategy, from the moment the three bodies had floated up from the muck, had been to keep a tight control on information. The less the public knew, he reasoned, the better he and his detectives could work. If no one but the ki
Chapter Two
Chapter Three The Police Investigation: Part 1 WITHIN HOURS OF THE BODIES BEING DISCOVERED, the investigation divided roughly along three lines. These were, essentially, that the children were killed by someone close to them; that they were killed by one or more strangers; or that they were killed, as Gitchell had already hinted, by members of a gang or cult. This unusual third prong of the investigation arose early and was the most sharply focused from the start, while detectives’ efforts in the other two directions often appeared chaotic. Bumbling exacerbated the problem. Though the bodies were found at about 1:30P.M ., the coroner was not called until nearly two hours later. By the time he arrived, fly larvae were starting to appear in the victims’ eyes and nostrils. By 3:58P.M ., when the coroner pronounced the first of the three boys dead, the bodies had been lying in the open air for more than two and a half hours, covered for part of that time with plastic, in temperatures that
Chapter Three
The Police Investigation: Part 1
Chapter Four The Police Investigation: Part 2 Holy men tell us life is a mystery. They embrace that concept happily. But some mysteries bite and bark, And come to get you in the dark. A rain of shadows, a storm, a squall, Daylight retreats, night swallows all. If Good is bright, if Evil’s gloom, High evil walls the World entombs. Now comes the end, the drear darkfall.49 WHILEGITCHELL WAS FEELING BLINDFOLDEDand standard approaches to the case, including investigation of the families and pursuit of tips and leads, had not produced a suspect, interest in Gitchell’s suggestion regarding a “gang or cult” was expanding to fill the void. Adherents to that theory focused their attention on a teenager from Marion who’d written the lines above. While some who read those lines might see in them Gothic influences, such as those that inspired Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King, and others might detect psychological depression or despair, law enforcement officials in Marion and West Memphis concluded
Chapter Four
The Police Investigation: Part 2
Chapter Five The Prime Suspects WHILE A THERAPIST MIGHT HAVEviewed some of Damien’s views as unhealthy, most people in the region, had they known of them, would also have considered them unholy. Here, as throughout the Mississippi delta, the spiritual landscape was rigorously Christian and rigorously literal. Here, to a greater extent than almost anywhere else in the country, angels were regarded as God’s emissaries, hovering invisibly close at hand, and children were warned to be on guard against Satan, whose evils were just as near. A belief in possession by demons was common. It was, as one scholar noted, “an extension of the general Southern view that the devil is very real, the devil has great power and is vibrantly at work in the world.”70 While not everyone in the Mississippi delta viewed the cosmos in such stark terms, most residents of east Arkansas did. Most attended a Christian church, and the churches most of them attended belonged to the conservative Southern Baptist Conve
Chapter Five
Chapter Six The Volunteer Detective ONMAY13, 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.”92Hutcheson 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.93Bray 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 automobil
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven The Confession JESSIE HAD NO IDEA, as May 1993 slipped into June, that his neighbor Vicki Hutcheson was discussing him with the West Memphis police in relation to the murders. He would later say he was surprised when told the extent of what she’d said, particularly the part about Damien driving Hutcheson and him to the orgy.108He said no such trip had taken place and that, besides, “everyone knew Damien didn’t drive.” But Jessie’s version of events during that last week of May agreed with Hutcheson’s on a few points. Here’s what he said happened: “When I first heard about the kids come up missing, it was early in the morning, about nine o’clock. I was going to work with a friend of mine.” Jessie said he heard the news on the radio as he and a friend drove east on I-40 toward Memphis, where they’d gotten a roofing job. When he returned from Memphis that afternoon, another friend told him that the bodies had been found.109 A few weeks later, Jessie said, Hutcheson asked him
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight The Arrests IT IS RARE THAT JUDGES ISSUE WARRANTSfor nighttime searches. Arkansas law requires police to show that extraordinary circumstances necessitate invading a home after dark. These circumstances are well defined and narrow: the home to be searched must be difficult for police to approach by day, or there must be a threat that officers will be harmed or evidence destroyed if a daytime search is attempted. None of the trailer homes where the three suspects lived were difficult to approach, day or night. And police had questioned all three of the teenagers without a hint of threat. As for the likelihood that evidence would be destroyed, thirty days had already passed since the murders. If evidence remained at the suspects’ homes, the chance that it would be destroyed within the next twelve hours might have struck oddsmakers as slim. But June 5, when the town would mark the passage of a month since the murders, was only a day and a few hours away, and now that police
Chapter Eight
Part Two
Chapter Nine The Defendants ALMOST AS SOON AS HE HEARDabout the arrests, Ron Lax, a Memphis private investigator, decided to get involved in the case. A meticulous dresser, a self-described “anal-retentive” organizer, a collector of French antiques and books on art, Lax was not a stereotypical private eye. He headed his own investigations company, Inquisitor, Inc., with offices in Memphis and Nashville. Most of Inquisitor’s work focused on insurance and financial fraud. But in the past five years, Lax had widened the scope of his work. Defense lawyers had sought his help on cases where clients faced charges of capital murder. Lax had agreed, though he considered the death penalty an appropriate punishment for persons found guilty of some kinds of murder.141Lax’s investigative work helped get some defendants acquitted. His experiences also convinced him that bad police work often resulted in charges against innocent people. By the time of the sensational West Memphis murders, Lax had mo
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten Release of the Police Files AS FURTHER PROOFof Damien’s unstable mental state, while he was contemplating his death, he was also planning his marriage. Domini was pregnant and was expecting to deliver the baby in the fall of 1993. If Damien was coming apart, as he feared, the parts were greatly at odds. His writings, which the private investigators did not see, verged on madness and despair. When Shettles and Lax visited, they saw a severely troubled teenager who they feared might be suicidal. But Damien’s letters to Domini and his family were, by contrast, almost sunny. He wrote to Domini, “I told my mom to buy you an engagement ring with my next check. Remind her. Tell your mom I said hi, and I may be out by Christmas.” Reflecting on Domini’s pregnancy, he wrote, “I hope I get out in time to see our baby be born!” Whether he realized it or not, the wish was preposterous. The defendants’ trial dates had yet to be set, and the prosecutor had barely begun to release informat
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven The Pretrial Motions THE WORDS“OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW IS LIBERTY” are etched in stone above the entrance to the Crittenden County Courthouse at Marion. On August 4, 1993, two police officers led Damien, Jason, and Jessie, all wearing handcuffs and shackles, into the heavily guarded building for their first pretrial hearing. The courtroom was called to order, and Judge David Burnett, with black robes flowing and cornsilk-colored hair curling slightly at his collar, climbed to his seat at the bench.161Burnett told a reporter he’d read a book about satanism “for information purposes,” in preparation for the case. Now, in his official capacity, he told the defendants that they were each charged with three counts of capital felony murder. He asked them, how did they plead? Each replied, “Not guilty.” Burnett cut a familiar and genial figure at the two-story courthouse. Earlier in the summer, he and the three other judges in Arkansas’s Second Judicial District had met to discuss
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve The Private Investigation WHILE THE LAWYERS WRANGLED, private investigator Ron Lax delved deeper into “the discovery mess.” At the end of November 1993, despite Fogleman’s repeated assurances to Judge Burnett that the defense would have the entire police file by the end of August, the prosecutor suddenly released another large batch of material. One item in the batch, in particular, had sparked the defense lawyers’ interest: a transcript of the interview that detectives Ridge and Sudbury had conducted with John Mark Byers on May 19, more than six months earlier. This was the first the defense had seen of it. This lengthy interview, which was conductedbefore the arrests, had inexplicably been withheld, not just past August but for more than three months after that. Until now—three weeks before the Christmas holidays and with Jessie’s trial just six weeks away—the three defense teams had known nothing about the John Mark Byers element of the investigation. As with all the
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen The Bloodstained Knife BY THE SECOND WEEK OFJANUARY1994, reporters were gathering in Corning, Arkansas, where Jessie’s trial was about to begin. One of them asked prosecutor Fogleman about some of the questions that had been raised at the pretrial hearings. Citing professional ethics, he said he could not discuss the police investigation, the rumored lack of physical evidence, or attorney Stidham’s contention that Jessie’s statement had been coerced. “I can’t comment on specifics,” Fogleman said, “because I sincerely want these defendants to receive a fair trial.” He added, however, that he had “never seen a police department work any harder on a case” than the West Memphis police had worked on this one.198 On January 17, the day before jury selection was scheduled to begin, Fogleman released more documents to the defense attorneys. Most of them showed how the police had been working to bolster their case as the two trials drew near. Among other activities, the records
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen The First Trial WHILE THE FUROR OVER THE BLOODSTAINED KNIFEplayed out behind the scenes in the Clay County Courthouse, the life-and-death drama of Jessie’s trial was unfolding in the courtroom. Heat in the building was cranked up high as the region coped with a rare winter storm. Outside the one-story cinder-block courthouse, the streets of Corning sparkled under a coating of ice. Usually, this corner of northeast Arkansas, nestled into the Missouri boot heel, didn’t experience severe winter weather. But this January of 1994 was an exception. Just before the trial began, bitter cold had swept through the Mississippi River valley, cracking trees and making travel hazardous. Even now, on January 18, as heavily armed sheriff’s deputies led Jessie, hunched and handcuffed, from a squad car into the building, broken tree limbs still littered the lawn. Stidham expected a fight as intense as the weather. He’d battled unsuccessfully to keep Jessie’s confession out of the trial.
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen Thein Camera Hearings STIDHAM WAS FAR LESS CONFIDENTthan his client. He recognized, as he began his defense, that he faced several hurdles. Some, like the trouble he expected with Jessie’s alibi, he’d seen coming for several months. Others that lay ahead would take him by surprise. The problem with Jessie’s alibi had arisen the previous summer, when Stidham was first appointed to the case and believed that Jessie was guilty. At the time, Stidham was communicating with Fogleman, hoping to work out a plea bargain in which Jessie would get a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony that would convict Damien and Jason. “It was about that time,” Stidham later recalled, when Mr. Misskelley Sr. began to raise issues about Jessie being in a different county on the night of the murders.222Jessie Sr. began to hold almost nightly news conferences on the front porch of his mobile home, and basically, laying out his [son’s] alibi. That was making the prosecuting attorney very
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen The Allegations of Official Misconduct TODD ANDDANAMOOREwere characteristically reserved as they left the courthouse. They did not speak to reporters. Pam Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s mother, expressed her hope that Jessie’s life in prison would be a long and tormented one. The Byerses, as usual, were unrestrained. Expecting that Jessie would end up at the infamous Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction, they described in rough and suggestive detail the future they wished for him there. “I hope he never sees sunlight again,” John Mark Byers said. “Life plus forty—that’s fine with me. That means Cummins keeps his dead ass forty years after he dies.”233Melissa Byers, with dark circles under her eyes, ranted in front of the cameras. “This doesn’t change anything,” she said. “Christopher’s dead. And he was tortured to death by three murdering bastards on a ditch bank. He was eight years old, and guilty is guilty, and I hope the little sucker, when he hits Cummins,
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen The Witness List AFEW DAYS BEFORE the start of Damien and Jason’s trial, theMemphis Commercial Appeal reported that a “club” with what appeared to be blood and hair on it had been found in the mobile home where Damien lived at the time of the murders. The trailer’s new renter had found the club and notified police. But though the report created another sensation, it was quietly proven untrue. The stick turned out to be an old axe handle that had been used to stir red paint. The hair was from a dog. To Damien’s private investigator, the story typified what the defense had been dealing with throughout the case: wild suspicions, false claims, and convenient leaks from police to the press. Ron Lax had been trying since the beginning to find a consistent theory of the crime, a clear motive—something the defense could attack. But the state’s version of the crime had kept changing. Too much about this case was vague, contradictory, confusing. It was hard to find a clear path
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen The Second Trial JUST AS ICE HAD GRIPPED NORTHEASTArkansas at the start of Jessie’s trial, another unusual blast of cold heralded the start of Damien and Jason’s. Television crews encircled the Craighead County Courthouse, a building that reminded a reporter from Little Rock of “a Reconstruction mausoleum, smack in Jonesboro’s busy business district.” Inside, in Judge Burnett’s courtroom, prosecutors Davis and Fogleman and the defendants’ four attorneys were still questioning prospective jurors. The courtroom crawled with armed policemen, the Little Rock reporter noted: “three state troopers, five sheriff’s deputies on a normal day—surveilling us spectators as if seventy-five percent were convinced of an imminent attempt at a lynch.”250 Outside the courthouse, Jessie’s lawyer stood talking to reporters on the building’s icy steps. “Mr. Misskelley made a decision last night that he is not going to testify against his codefendants,” Stidham announced.251Reporters hollere
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen The Motive THE TRIAL WAS ENTERING ITS THIRD WEEK. Prosecutors Davis and Fogleman had welcomed the judge’s decision to bar evidence about other suspects. Still, their case was thin. In Jessie’s trial, they’d had a confession. Here they did not. Unable to call Jessie and unwilling to call young Aaron Hutcheson, the prosecutors had no eyewitness to the crime. And for physical evidence all they had were a few ordinary sticks from the woods, a couple of “similar” fibers, and the knife that was taken from the lake—nothing that directly linked the defendants to the murders. To some observers, their case was looking tenuous. Then, abruptly, Fogleman announced a motive.PROSECUTION SAYS KILLINGS CULT RELATED , theJonesboro Sun proclaimed. The prosecutors had not suggested a motive in their opening statement to the jury. But now, the paper reported that Fogleman was expected to call “an expert in cult-related crimes” to testify. The decision triggered anotherin camera hearing, as
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty The Verdicts AT 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 10:00P.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.”297He 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. But you might ask yourself, “Well, now, wait a minute. We’ve got a crime scene that’s clean. The killers were v
Chapter Twenty
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-One The Appeals WHENJASON HEARD HIS GUILTY VERDICT, he didn’t care if his sentence was going to be life or death.302Either way was the same to him. He later explained that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been sentenced to a single day in prison, because “the truth was not found out and proclaimed to everyone.” He could not believe the verdict. The word “guilty” rang in his ears. He’d told himself that the trial would finally bring the truth to light. He believed that God had supreme control, and thus that everything would turn out right. That faith had carried him—and now it was dashed. He recalls that he entered a state of shock and found it difficult to breathe or speak. When Judge Burnett asked if there was any reason the sentence should not be imposed, he had wanted to answer with a scream. Instead, he had felt powerless, crushed, as though a vise was being tightened around him. He’d had to force out his tiny statement: “Because I’m innocent.”303 Jason: Sixteen and
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two The Drug Informant LIFE AFTER THE TRIALSremained hard for the families of the victims, including little Aaron Hutcheson. Though he was not a direct victim, in that he had not been killed, his involvement in the investigation had certainly exposed him to the crime’s horrors. Even after the trials, his mother’s interest in the case continued, and thus so, to an extent, did his own. After the trials concluded and the defendants had been locked away, Vicki Hutcheson contacted Ron Lax, the Memphis private investigator, several times to report that she was “bothered” about parts of the investigation. In April 1994, a few weeks after Damien and Jason were taken to prison, Lax paid a call on Hutcheson in the apartment where she now lived. During the visit, Lax later wrote in his notes, “Vicki turned to me and asked who had received the reward money. I told her I did not think anyone had and she stated she felt she should have since her son’s voice is what ‘broke the case.’ S
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three The Public IN1997, PAMHOBBS, the mother of Stevie Branch, filed a $10 million lawsuit against the documentary filmmakers, alleging that they had breached an agreement not to show graphic material in the film.371The lawsuit was decided in favor of the filmmakers. Two years later, in September 2000, Hobbs again protested the commercial use of images from the police file, this time after someone offered crime scene and autopsy photos for sale on the Internet auction site eBay.372 One young supporter e-mailed Arkansas’s governor, Mike Huckabee, who is a Republican and a Baptist minister. An aide who identified herself as the governor’s “criminal justice liaison” replied. After noting that the governor could not reopen a case or have any investigation done, the aide continued: “I do want to assure you that DNA testing was done, and that a match was found among the men convicted.” The statement was flagrantly misleading. It could only have referred to the DNA test conduc
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four A Decade Behind Bars THE HORROR THAT UNFOLDED ONMAY5, 1993, ended life forever for Christopher, Michael, and Stevie. The trials ended life in the free world for Damien, Jason, and Jessie—and put Damien on a list of men awaiting execution. But outside the stillness of the cemeteries and beyond the walls of prisons, participants in the drama surrounding the murders carried on with their lives. Within weeks of his dual victories in the sensational West Memphis trials, deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman was running hard for circuit judge. Though some voters considered his campaign ad—on a billboard near the Blue Beacon—tasteless, Fogleman’s claim on it, that he could “make tough decisions in tough cases,” proved powerful at the polls. As the three convicted teenagers were being introduced to prison life, John Fogleman was stepping up to the bench, where he’d serve with Judge David Burnett. During the next several years, Judge Fogleman had little to say publicly a
Chapter Twenty-Four
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