Devil's Knot, page 12
Reporters fired questions. What could he tell them about the accused? Had they known the victims? How had police cracked the case? Gitchell would not comment. Did he know the motive for the killings? Gitchell said that he did, but would not elaborate. One reporter zeroed in on the rumor that had dogged the case since the first body floated to the surface. Were the defendants members of a cult? Gitchell shook his head. “I can’t comment on that.”
The sensational press conference was drawing to an unsatisfying close. Finally a reporter asked the chief detective, “On a scale of one to ten, how solid do you feel your case is?” This one Gitchell could answer. He smiled and said confidently, “Eleven.”
But Gitchell’s confidence was overstated. At the time of the arrests, he and his detectives had Jessie’s convoluted confession to hold against the three—and little else. Later, Fogleman would acknowledge that “the only thing” police had against Jason “was Jessie’s statement,” and in a trial, “an accomplice’s statement alone is insufficient; there has to be something else connecting a person to a crime.” Although the prosecutor recognized that he could use Jessie’s statement as probable cause for an arrest, he would later admit that “if we had tried the case the day that Jason was arrested, he would have been acquitted. There would have been a directed verdict of acquittal.” As a result of the dearth of evidence against Jason, Fogleman later explained, Jessie’s “statement had to be investigated further, to see whether or not more evidence could have been developed.”126
From a legal point of view, the case against Damien was not much better. As with Jason, Jessie’s statement alone was insufficient. And despite the abundant rumors about Damien, by the time of the arrests, police had found no physical evidence linking him to the crime. They’d taken hair samples, blood samples, and urine samples from him and sent them to the crime lab, but none connected him to the murders. They had a polygraph examination that Bill Durham said Damien had flunked, but polygraphs are considered too unreliable to be admissible in court.
The police had no evidence at the time of the arrests other than an array of statements: Jessie’s statement, Vicki Hutcheson’s statements, and a half dozen statements from young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen saying that Damien had done it.127 Except for Hutcheson’s, all of the statements had been given to the police by minors. And many of those, including Jessie’s, had become incriminating only after police had administered a polygraph test, which Durham said the teenager had failed. Though reporters had no way of knowing it at the time, this was the entire basis of Gitchell’s claim that his department’s case was an “eleven.”
“So Close to Perfect”
Jason’s mother was no lawyer, but she assessed the arrest of her son much the way Fogleman later acknowledged he had. She did not believe there was any evidence that could be used to prosecute Jason. After Gitchell’s press conference, she stormed into Ridge’s office, demanding to know why Jason was being held. Ridge explained that Jessie had accused him of the murders. By then, the family members of the victims, as well as those of the accused, had been shown a copy of Jessie’s statement.
“I’ve got proof that Jessie Misskelley is lying,” Gail Grinnell exclaimed. Focusing on Jessie’s repeated claims that the murders had happened early in the day, she told Ridge that Jason had attended school that day. “If he was in school,” Grinnell said, Jessie’s claim “cannot possibly be true.”
In contrast to Jason’s later recollection that he had talked to the police, Ridge complained to Grinnell that he had not. She replied that if Jason wasn’t talking, it was because she had advised him not to, after the detectives had come to their house. She told Ridge that she’d been “scared, ’cause you all put words in his mouth and make things…make a mountain out of a molehill.”
Ridge countered, “Well, that’s the reason we got tape recorders. And I’m not putting words into your mouth.” Grinnell persisted, until Ridge finally told her, “It’s like this. If you would listen to me for just a second, I’ll try and clear something up for you. We’ve got one person that told us the story that is very believable. If Jason doesn’t tell us the story, a story, if Jason doesn’t tell us what his side of things are, we will never know what he has to say.”
Grinnell replied, “Well, I’ll get him a lawyer so that he can tell the lawyer. I want him to have a lawyer with him because I’ve never been involved in anything like this before and I don’t want to see my son go away for my mistake. I know he’s innocent. He is innocent. But I don’t want him being made out not to be innocent because he don’t have a lawyer.”
Ridge was condescending. “Do you understand,” he asked, “that we tape our conversations, we don’t put words into people’s mouths? It’s exactly on tape what is said, and we would welcome the opportunity to talk to Jason and he will not talk because his mother has told him not to talk.”
“One of the reasons I told Jason not to talk to the police,” Grinnell replied, “is because I was told that the police was going around and telling lies about Jason before they came and arrested him. After police questioned Damien, there was rumors started. People were saying that the police told them this and told them that. And I thought in my mind then, the police are trying to make him out to be the guilty one. And I told him not to talk to them, to anybody. And I said, if you hear of anybody else saying something that a policeman said, get his name, ’cause I am going to go to the police station with it, because there has been policemen going out there in the trailer park telling kids lies.”128
Gail Grinnell said again that Jason was innocent, that he had been in school, and that she had obtained a statement to that effect from the principal. Finally, she sighed, “I’m so tired. My whole family has been up all night.”
At that, Ridge defended the midnight arrests. “It’s a situation that couldn’t be avoided,” he said. “We had to look for evidence, and if it’s there, then it’s going to look bad for Jason, and if it’s not, then Jason is cleared because of it. So it’s the only way to get the answers, is to do what we did. We didn’t want to make things hard on you. We don’t want to make things hard on Jason. But these are the only tools we have to get to the truth sometimes.”
Grinnell asked when she could see her son. “I’m worried about him because I know that he is scared,” she told the detective. “I know that he’s real scared. He’s alone.”
Ridge said he did not know when she would be permitted to see Jason. Grinnell asked how he could base Jason’s arrest on nothing more than the statement Jessie had made, with all its discrepancies. “There are so many different stories in that story he gave,” she exclaimed. “I don’t see how anyone could believe it.”
“It’s like this,” Ridge replied. “We’ve got a story that is very, very believable. It is so close to perfect that we have to believe it. So we’re going to believe it until we can break that story, and we cannot even start to break that story apart until Jason tells us something.”
When Grinnell tried to protest again, Ridge silenced her. “You don’t have the point of view that we got,” he said. With that the meeting ended.
“Sensitive and Inflammatory”
Over at municipal court, meanwhile, the case was taking another turn. Municipal judge Rainey, who had signed the warrants for the searches and arrests just the night before, now issued an order denying public review of those documents.129 But by the time Rainey issued his order, sensitive information about the investigation had already been leaked—and now Jessie’s confession was too. While refusing to comment about the case, other than to say that it was an “eleven,” police had allowed people outside the department to see transcripts of Jessie’s confession. Gail Grinnell had seen it, and so had many others. A television news director reported that a woman called his station the day after the arrests, offering to sell a copy for several hundred dollars.130 The day after Rainey sealed the records, a copy reached the Commercial Appeal. Rainey issued his order on Friday. On Monday, the paper ran a copyrighted front-page article outlining what Jessie had said. The headlines read: TEEN DESCRIBES “CULT” TORTURE OF BOYS and DEFENDANT MISSKELLEY TELLS POLICE OF SEX MUTILATION.131
The leak of Jessie’s confession created a sensation, but Rainey’s order sealing the affidavits prevented reporters from discovering how little the police had to back it up. The effect was that news outlets focused on the three defendants and on what Jessie had said about them. For days, a blizzard of news broadcasts and articles blanketed the area. Even someone who did not buy a paper could read headlines such as these, just in passing a newsstand:
ONE SUSPECT WAS “SCARY,”
TALKED OF WORSHIPING THE DEVIL
OUTBURST IN COURT BY VICTIM’S DAD REFLECTS
COMMUNITY’S SHOCK, RAGE
WORSHIP OF EVIL DEBATED AS MOTIVE IN KILLINGS
ARK. YOUTHS COULD FACE THE DEATH PENALTY
The articles that accompanied the headlines told a public hungry for information that Damien “carried a cat’s skull around with him at school and routinely dressed in black”; that Jason was said to be “shy and artistic” but “into that devil stuff”; and that Jessie was “tough” and “a bit troubled” but had been considered “kind to kids.” Gitchell maintained his position that he could not comment on the case.132
But Rainey’s order sealing the records did not sit well with newspaper editors on either side of the Mississippi River. The battle for information suddenly became part of the story. In response to the official clamp on information, the Commercial Appeal of Memphis filed a formal request for the records, citing Arkansas’s freedom of information law. The paper’s managing editor said that the records were needed “to help sort out facts alleged in the case from a growing supply of rumors.” The smaller West Memphis Evening Times echoed the complaint.133
But editors’ cautions changed nothing, and shortly after Rainey sealed the records, a state judge affirmed the unusual order.134 Like Rainey, the state judge said that the information contained in the records was “sensitive and inflammatory” and that “it would be prejudicial to the defendants to have those documents released to the public prior to the trial.” In fact, the records contained nothing more inflammatory than the statements of Jessie Misskelley, which had already been reported. But the public did not know that.135
Spiritual Warfare
But by and large, for most of the media, reporting on satanism beat skepticism, hands down. The West Memphis paper reported that Damien wore the number 666 and “a sign of the devil” inside his boots. It quoted two boys who claimed to have heard of ghosts in Jason’s house. It quoted an unnamed girl who claimed that she had seen Damien drink Jason and “Dominique’s” blood, and another who said Damien had once “threatened to cut a boy’s head off and put it on a doorstep.” It quoted a woman who lived in the Lakeshore area who’d noticed that “last year, there were some dogs that turned up missing out here,” adding that “the Echols boy always wore black.” In editions on three consecutive days, the Jonesboro Sun, in northeast Arkansas’s largest city, quoted a local Baptist minister who said that Damien had made a pact with the devil and would be going to hell.136 “I’ve never witnessed to anyone any harder,” the minister was quoted as saying. “He didn’t reject me. He rejected Christ.” An article in USA Today began: “Michael Echols, who calls himself ‘Damien,’ once told a pastor he couldn’t go to heaven because he’s already committed—to going to hell.” The USA Today piece did, however, also quote a few of the suspects’ defenders. Joe Hutchison, Damien’s father, said, “I thought the law of this land was that the accused were considered innocent until someone proved them guilty.” A friend of the Misskelley family said that Jessie “wasn’t into Satanic worship, he was into country music.”
With the devil so prominent in news reports, ministers were quoted as experts. Six hundred people turned out two weeks after the arrests when the Missouri Street Church of Christ offered a free lecture on what advertisements said were “the six indicators of Satanic involvement.” They were an obsession with death, possession of “Satanic paraphernalia,” kidnapping, sexual abuse, cannibalism, and cremation. Reporters for the West Memphis paper covered the event. They also contacted “experts” in the occult, such as Driver and a Memphis psychiatrist and writer.137 Based on those interviews, the paper reported that “Echols’ reading habits could help determine the nature of his thinking and possible cult activities. People who knew Echols said he dressed in black, called himself ‘Damien,’ and carried a cat’s skull.” The Memphis psychiatrist reportedly confirmed that those were common signs that teenagers were “delving into Satanism.”138
While preachers railed against Satan and reporters examined library books, police were coming to terms with the reality underlying the arrests. That was, as Fogleman would later delicately acknowledge, that Jessie Misskelley’s statement “had to be investigated further, to see whether or not more evidence could be developed.” The police had suspects, but did Fogleman have a case? With the three teenagers in custody, the West Memphis police entered the second phase of their investigation: a scramble to find evidence against them.
Aaron Revisited
Detective Bray of Marion had introduced Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson to the West Memphis police. The Hutchesons had led them to Jessie Misskelley. And Jessie had handed them their big break in the case. Now, as detectives turned to the task of supporting what Jessie had said, Bray tried again to help. Again he turned to eight-year-old Aaron Hutcheson.
By the time of the arrests, Aaron had made several statements, many of them highly conflicting. But Bray was convinced that Aaron knew more than he’d yet acknowledged. A few hours after Gitchell announced the arrests, Bray interviewed the boy again. And now, Aaron’s account of what he’d seen took another dramatic turn. For the first time, the boy told Bray that he had been in the woods with the victims on the afternoon they disappeared. In fact, he said, he’d witnessed their murders. Suddenly, Aaron was now also clear as to the identities of his friends’ killers. The men he’d seen in the woods, Aaron said—the men he’d seen murdering his friends—were Damien, Jason, and Jessie.
In a long, disjointed statement, Aaron told Bray that on the afternoon the boys disappeared, he’d ridden his bike to Robin Hood. He said he’d seen five men in the woods: the three defendants and two others, whom he could not identify. They all wore black T-shirts with dragons on them and had knives “like Indians in the jungle have.” Jessie was holding Stevie down in the water, telling him, “I don’t want to kill you yet until what my boss says.” Damien was the boss. Michael and Chris found two guns lying on the pipe. They hid behind a tree. They planned, on the count of three, to jump out and shoot all five of the men. They counted to three, but when they began shooting, they discovered that the guns were not loaded. By then, Michael’s neck had been cut and blood was pouring out all over his T-shirt. After Michael was dead, Damien removed the boy’s clothes and raped him. Jessie cut the private parts off all three boys. Aaron began to run. Jessie saw him and started to chase him, but Aaron tripped him and got away.
Bray had long believed that Aaron had witnessed the murders, and now he was sure he’d been right.139 Four days later, on June 8, he questioned Aaron again. This time, Aaron’s details were even more preposterous. This time Aaron said that Jessie had called him the night before the murders. Jessie told Aaron to bring his friends to the woods, and that they would all “do something.” When Aaron arrived, Michael and Chris were behind a tree. (Later he said they were in a tree.) Jessie got hold of Stevie. Damien was standing in front of Stevie, holding a knife. Jessie ran Stevie into Damien’s knife, cutting him in the stomach. Then Jessie caught Aaron and tied him up for about forty seconds, but Aaron was able to kick his way free. After Aaron escaped, the assailants allegedly raped the other boys.
It was a messy, sad account, offered by a child who had been interviewed repeatedly by police and whose mother, with police approval, had appointed herself an unofficial investigator.140 But Bray recognized the potential importance of what young Aaron was saying. So far, police had only Jessie’s account of the murders. A second eyewitness account, even if it contradicted the first and was growing more fantastic by the day, might be invaluable, especially since it named the three teenagers who were in custody.
Gitchell apparently agreed, because on June 9, two days after the details of Jessie’s confession were reported by the media, the West Memphis chief inspector questioned Aaron again. Aaron repeated that he’d witnessed Damien, Jason, and Jessie murder his three friends. And now, Aaron added one more important detail: he told Inspector Gitchell that he’d seen all three of the victims tied up with rope.
