Devil's Knot, page 11
Ridge tried again: “You said that they had their hands tied up, tied down. Were their hands tied in a fashion that they couldn’t have run? You tell me.”
But Jessie didn’t get it. “They could run,” he said.
Gitchell took another tack, asking: “Did you ever use—did anyone use—a stick and hit the boys?” Jessie volunteered that Damien had hit one boy with a “kind of a big old stick.” He also said he’d seen Jason cut one of the boys on the face, using a “fold-up knife.” And he said he’d been involved in the “cult” for about three months. Asked by Gitchell what the cult’s members did “typically in the woods,” Jessie replied, “We go out, kill dogs and stuff, and then carry girls out there…. Wescrew them and stuff…. We have an orgy and stuff like that.”
Jessie had provided the detectives with a few details they could use. But they still lacked the crucial one. Ridge made a delicate move. “Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you something. Now this is real serious, and I want you to be real truthful, and I want you to think about it before you answer it. Don’t just say yes or no real quick. I want you to think about it. Did you actually hit any of these boys?”
Jessie: “No.”
Gitchell: “Now, tell us the truth.”
Jessie: “No.”
Ridge: “Did you actually rape any of these boys?”
Jessie: “No.”
Ridge: “Did you actually kill any of these boys?”
Jessie: “No.”
Ridge: “Did you see any of the boys actually killed?”
Jessie: “Yes.”
Ridge: “Okay. Which one did you see killed?”
Jessie: “That one right there.”
Gitchell: “Now, you’re pointing to the Byers boy again?”
Jessie: “Yes.”
Ridge: “How was he actually killed?”
Jessie: “He choked him real bad and all.”
The police had not seen—and the medical examiner had not mentioned—any indication that the boys had been choked, much less that that’s how they died. But Ridge carried on. “Choking him? Okay, what was he choking him with?”
Jessie: “His hands, like a stick. He had a big old stick, kinda holding it over his neck.”
Ridge: “Okay, so he was choking him to the point where he actually went unconscious, so at that point, you felt like he was dead?”
Jessie: “Yeah.”
Jessie had claimed to have witnessed at least one of the murders. But again there was a problem, and not a minor one. Christopher Byers clearly had sustained a profound injury—one severe enough to have killed him—yet Jessie was not mentioning that. Instead, he was attributing the boy’s death to strangulation with a stick. The trouble was that Christopher’s neck was one of the few parts of his body that had shown no signs of trauma. Aside from a few scattered scratches, his neck appeared to have been untouched.116
Ridge and Gitchell did not press the point. They had an eyewitness to the murders. They opted not to be picky. But there was still the nagging problem of Jessie’s times to be addressed. Ridge approached it once again. “Okay. They killed the boys,” he said.
Jessie had not said he’d seen the other two boys killed, but Ridge glossed over that point. He continued. “They killed the boys. You decided to go. You went home. How long after you got home before you received the phone call? Thirty minutes or an hour?”
In an interview full of misrepresentations of what Jessie had said, this was one of the greatest. Jessie had repeatedly stated that he’d arrived at the woods at about 9 A.M. and that he had left there at “about noon.” He said the phone call from Jason had come at about nine o’clock that night. Yet now Ridge was giving him a choice. How long after he’d left the woods had the phone call from Jason come? Thirty minutes, or an hour?
Jessie was silent for a moment. Then he said, “An hour.”
The police decided to end the interview there. Ridge noted the time, 3:18 P.M., and the tape recorder was turned off. By now, Jessie had been at the police station for almost six hours. He had been questioned, polygraphed, questioned, and then questioned once again. Of all that questioning, only the past thirty-four minutes had been recorded.
“Discrepancies”
But Jessie’s interrogation was not over yet.117 Police took a twenty-minute break, during which Jessie smoked two cigarettes. Then Gitchell began another interview—and this one he also recorded. The time of this second interview is disputed, but a police report listing the chronology of the day’s events noted it was conducted “to clear up some discrepancies concerning time and events in the first interview.”118
This time, only Gitchell was in the room with Jessie, and for reasons that are not explained, the interview began with Jessie offering a dramatically different account of the time at which he, Damien, and Jason allegedly arrived in the Robin Hood woods. Throughout the first interview, he had maintained that they were there in the morning and that he had left by noon. Now, after a twenty-seven-minute break, during which the tape recorder was off, all of that had changed.
Gitchell: “Jessie…when you three were in the woods and the little boys come up, about what time was it?”
Jessie: “I would say it was about five or so. Five or six.”
Gitchell: “Did you have your watch on at the time?”
Jessie: (Shakes his head no.)
Gitchell: “All right, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time was it?”
Jessie: “It was seven or eight.”
Gitchell: “Are you…”
Jessie: “It was starting to get dark.”
Gitchell: “Oh. Well, that clears it up…”
With that troublesome matter now quickly and neatly “cleared up,” Gitchell turned to another of the problems with the earlier confession, the part in which Jessie’d said that the boys had been tied with ropes. The correct answer would have been shoestrings, some white, others black, that had been removed from the children’s own shoes.
Gitchell: “All right. Who tied the boys up?”
Jessie: “Damien.”
Gitchell: “Did Damien just tie them all up, or did anyone help Damien?”
Jessie: “Jason helped him.”
Gitchell: “Okay. And what did they use to tie them up?”
Jessie: “A rope.”
Gitchell: “Okay, what color was the rope?”
Jessie: “Brown.”
Quickly abandoning that line of questioning, Gitchell moved on to the question of rape. Because the boys were naked and tied the way they were, police had suspected that sexual violation might have been part of their murders. Jessie said he saw Damien and Jason rape two of the boys, whom he identified oddly—and incorrectly—as “the Myers” and “the Branch.”119 Gitchell asked about several forms of sex. Jessie said that, in addition to raping them, Damien and Jason had had oral sex with two of the boys or, as he put it, “They stuck their thang in their mouth.”
At one point, Gitchell rose from his seat, apologizing to Jessie. “Okay. All right,” he said. “Hold on just a minute.” There was a pause, during which Gitchell left the room. When the chief detective returned he explained, “I’m sorry I keep coming back and forth, but I got people that want me to ask you some other questions…” When the questioning resumed, he asked, “Did anyone go down on the boys and maybe sucked theirs or something?”
Jessie said, “Not that. I didn’t see neither one of them do that.”
Probable Cause
Whether anything had been “clarified” or not, that concluded the second session. Though the time was not mentioned on the tape, a police time chart noted that at 5:05 P.M., Jessie was offered food, and that an hour later he was brought a “burger and Coke.” But while Jessie was getting to relax, detectives Ridge and Gitchell—along with deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman and municipal court judge William “Pal” Rainey—were busy preparing an affidavit.120 At 9:06 P.M. they appeared in municipal court, this time in front of Judge Rainey, for a hearing to explain why they had probable cause to arrest Jessie, Damien, and Jason and to search their houses. By then, Jessie had been at the police station for more than eleven hours.
Years later, Jessie would recall that his questioning by police had seemed to him like a game. He said that when the detectives refused to accept his answers to their questions, he didn’t know what to do. Then he figured out that they were giving him clues, and that when he provided answers that conformed to the clues, things went better for him. Though the questioning had seemed serious, it had also struck him as silly. “I figured they knew I was lying from the git-go,” he said, “because the police, they knew me. They knew me for a long time. They knew I wasn’t that type of person, to go killing little kids. I figured they knew I was lying ’cause they was lying, too.”
There was an easy way to test the accuracy of Jessie’s statements. Gitchell himself had told the West Memphis Evening Times just a few weeks earlier that “in the initial stages [of the investigation], people were calling and confessing. But by what they said, they were eliminated quickly.” Gitchell told the paper that his officers had “escorted some potential witnesses or suspects into the area” to test their statements against elements of the crime the police knew to be true. It would have been easy to have subjected Jessie to a similar test, to have brought him to Robin Hood and had him point out to officers where the events he described had transpired. During the first recorded interview, Detective Ridge had, in fact, suggested doing just that.
“Are you willing to go down there with us,” Ridge had asked Jessie, “and us having a camcorder, and show us where these things took place? Would you do that?”
Jessie’s response was inaudible, but the boy apparently nodded his head.
Ridge wanted to get his answer on tape. He asked, “Wouldn’t have any problem with that?”
Jessie: “Not that I know of, I wouldn’t.”
Ridge: “But you would be able to point out where these things took place?”
Jessie: “Yes.”
But Jessie was never taken to the woods. Despite the numerous inconsistencies and flat-out errors in his statement, Gitchell and his detectives decided not to put it to the simple test of questioning Jessie at the site while someone videotaped the excursion. The detectives were satisfied with Jessie’s account. That, or they were unwilling to expose it to the risks that a trip to the woods would entail. Ridge adopted a stance of certainty, writing in his final report, “Jessie Junior, during the course of the interview, gave specific information that only a person with firsthand knowledge could have had. Jessie Misskelley Junior stated that he did take part in the apprehension of the victims and that he was an eyewitness to the murders by Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols.”
When the detectives were through with their questions, they took Jessie to a holding cell. Later, he recalled, “After they turned the tape recorder off, I was too tired to talk. I just wanted to lie down. I figured I was just supposed to wait there until my dad come to get me.” No one had explained to Jessie that he had implicated himself in the triple murder by saying that he’d caught and held one of the boys, or that he was about to be arrested. “I figured they knew I needed a ride home,” he said. “But my dad never did show up.”
Chapter Eight
The Arrests
IT IS RARE THAT JUDGES ISSUE WARRANTS for 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 had Jessie’s confession, they did not want to wait.
While Jessie waited for his father, deputy prosecutor Fogleman was appearing before municipal judge Rainey to explain why it was essential that the homes of Damien, Jason, Jessie, and Domini be searched that very night. Fogleman’s reason, as he’d written in the sworn affidavit he handed to Rainey, was that the suspects were “close friends” and “members of a close-knit cult group.” Rainey signed the search warrants, as well as the warrants authorizing the arrests of Damien and Jason. At 10:28 P.M., with a full moon high above them, dozens of police cars from several agencies pulled into three trailer parks. Officers burst out and their urgent searches began.
It was a Thursday night. Usually, on weeknights, Jason had to stay at home with his younger brothers, while their mother worked the evening shift at a trucking firm in Memphis.121 But today had been the last day of classes at Marion High. Jason had finished his exams and completed the tenth grade. To congratulate him, and to thank him for the work he’d done, both at school and taking care of his brothers, his mom had made arrangements for him to be off that night. He was at Damien’s house, celebrating with his friends.
Damien’s parents, meanwhile, had planned a night out for themselves at the new Splash Casino, which had recently opened in Mississippi, about fifty miles south of Memphis. Pam Echols and Joe Hutchison were headed there for some fun. They’d rented a television and a VCR for Damien and Michelle while they were away. Jason had come to the house, and so had Domini. The four teenagers were watching a video called Leprechaun, a recent horror movie, when Michelle heard sounds outside. Pulling aside the curtain, she yelled at her brother and his friends, “Go hide!”
“We thought it was a game,” Jason would later recall. “But it was the police.”
Jason ran to Damien’s room, while Michelle went to the door. When Jason returned to the living room, the officers had Damien in handcuffs. “I was, like, ‘What’s going on?’” he recalled. “I told them, ‘I know Damien. He doesn’t do drugs. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.’ But they just told me and Michelle and Domini to sit on the couch. When we asked why, they told us to shut up. Then a cop came in and asked me if I was Jason Baldwin. I said I was. He said, ‘Well, you’re under arrest too.’ I asked, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘For murder.’ I said, ‘No. You’ve got the wrong people!’”122
Damien later said that he was not surprised. In the weeks between the murders and this night, he said, “The cops camped in our driveway. They had spotlights on the house. I could not sleep at night.” Now, surrounded by police, he was led away without resistance.
Police charged Damien and Jason with three counts each of capital murder. Damien was listed on the arrest record as an eighteen-year-old roofer without a driver’s license. On a line for “peculiarities,” someone had written: “earrings, two left, one right.” Jason was listed as a sixteen-year-old student, five feet eight inches tall, weighing 112 pounds. No “peculiarities” were noted for him. According to the arrest reports, police read both boys their rights but the suspects “made no statements about the charge.”
Jason later said that though he remembers having been read his Miranda rights, they’d “meant nothing at the time.”123 He soon sat handcuffed to a chair at the police station battling shock, anger, and fear. “I didn’t know what to do, what to say, where to go,” he recalled. “I was in there trying to tell them where I was at that day, and they said, ‘No. We know you’re lying.’ I said I was at school that day. They said, ‘You mean, if we get your school records, they’ll show you were there?’ I said, ‘Yes. Get them.’”124
The police booked Charles Jason Baldwin on suspicion of murder and took him to a cell. They told him to get out of his clothes and handed him a set of police-issue clothes that were so large they almost fell off him. He was driven to a local hospital, where technicians took dental X rays and samples of his hair, blood, and saliva.125 From there, West Memphis police drove him to the county jail and put him into a cell. By now it was well past midnight. Sixteen-year-old Jason had not been allowed to place a telephone call. His mother had not been informed of his arrest. He had no attorney. And his questioning by police had not been recorded.
On a Scale of One to Ten
As soon as Jessie, Damien, and Jason all were behind bars, the department notified the media that the killers had been caught. The next morning—June 4, 1993—people on both sides of the Mississippi River awakened to the news. At 9 A.M., Inspector Gitchell held a press conference to announce his department’s success. Television stations throughout the delta broke into their regular schedules to carry Gitchell’s statement live. Cameras showed the balding inspector sitting alone behind an array of microphones, his detectives in a line behind him. Gitchell announced the names of the three teenagers who’d been arrested during the night. He said they’d been regarded as suspects since early in the investigation. “It was like a big puzzle,” he said. “The pieces started falling in place to make a clear picture.” He reassured viewers that the suspects were securely in custody. And he praised his officers for the work they’d done on what he said had been the most difficult case of his career.
