Devil's Knot, page 13
Part Two
The Trials
Chapter Nine
The Defendants
ALMOST AS SOON AS HE HEARD about 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.141 Lax’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 moved from a position supporting the death penalty to one of opposition. He believed that people who committed terrible crimes should be locked up for life. But he no longer considered the legal process reliable enough to warrant the imposition of such an irrevocable sentence. By 1993, Inquisitor had grown big enough that Lax was able to assign himself a few singularly but personally important investigations of capital murder cases every year. Now, with news of the West Memphis arrests, he asked his assistant, Glori Shettles, to drive across the river and inform the court-appointed defense lawyers that if they wanted him, he was willing to help.
There had never been any question about the boys hiring their own defense. Jessie was the only one who even had a job, and that was intermittent work as a roofer. All lived with their families in rented mobile homes. Though Jason’s mother had told Ridge in desperation that she would “have to hire a lawyer,” there was no way she could have afforded to pay for even a few hours of legal advice, let alone the kind of help needed to mount a legal defense against death.
At a hearing on June 7, 1993, a state judge appointed a pair of lawyers to represent each of the three defendants. The judge appointed Val Price of Jonesboro, chief public defender for Craighead County, and Scott Davidson, also of Jonesboro, to represent Damien. He appointed Paul Ford and George Robin Wadley, both of Jonesboro, to represent Jason. And he appointed Dan Stidham and Greg Crow, law partners from Paragould, to represent Jessie. Most were in their mid-thirties. Stidham was twenty-seven. None had much experience representing clients charged with capital murder.
Jason
Jason, stunned by his arrest, hardly knew where he was, much less where his case was headed. He’d later recall that on the night of his arrest, he was driven first to the jail in Marion, then to the hospital in West Memphis, and finally to the juvenile detention center sixty miles north in Jonesboro.142 At their first meeting, Jason later said, his court-appointed lawyers told him that the state appeared to have little evidence that implicated him. According to Jessie’s confession, Jason had been the most vicious of the killers—the one who’d castrated Christopher Byers. But other than that, there was nothing. And unlike Damien, Jason did not even appear to be weird or mentally unstable. Jason had no history of violence. His entire criminal record consisted of having broken glass on cars stored in the derelict shed and having shoplifted a bag of M&M’s. He was an average-to-good student at Marion High, where he’d received certificates for punctuality and attendance. The police had obtained essays he’d written for an English class shortly before the murders, but they had a humorous, optimistic tone and held no hint that Jason had been harboring murderous impulses.143
When Ford and Wadley read the essays, the men were struck by their mildness. In one assignment, when students had been asked to write about a classmate who had recently killed herself, Jason had written: “I didn’t know the girl very well. I seen her around every now and then. But I know how people that knew her feel, because once my mother tried to commit suicide, and I know how I felt when that happened. It was pretty devastating, since I was the one who found her and called 911 and kept her alive. But I am lucky. My mother is well and happy now, and so am I.”
Ford and Wadley noted that Jason had written those lines on April 5, 1993, a month to the day before the murders. Nothing about the kid seemed to fit the profile of someone who was about to commit a multiple murder. The lawyers knew what Jason had been accused of doing in Jessie’s confession, but so far, if the police had any corroborating evidence, no one had mentioned it.
Jessie
If Jason felt bewildered, Jessie was in a panic. While Jason was taken north to Jonesboro, Jessie was removed to a jail west of West Memphis, in the small town of Wynne. Within hours after being locked in the jail there, he’d sent a desperate letter to his parents.144 In the letter, Jessie repudiated the statement he’d made to the police. “I hope that y’all don’t hate me because I did not do it,” he wrote. He added, “I can not stand [it] in here much longer. I will go crazy.” He begged, “Please try to get me out. I will die in here.”
Jessie’s father showed the letter to reporters, and the Commercial Appeal printed portions of it. When reporters asked Gitchell about Jessie’s attempt to recant, the detective would not comment. Now, when reporters once again asked Gitchell to assess the strength of his case, he dismissed the question. “We just have to keep on working,” he said.145
Jessie’s lawyer did not believe what the boy had written to his father. Dan Stidham believed Jessie was guilty and doubted his attempt to recant. “Of course, initially, my take on the situation was that anybody who would confess to such a crime obviously did it,” Stidham later recalled. “It was unfathomable to me that anybody would confess to a crime who had not committed it. I figured my client was obviously guilty, and so my initial thought was that my only goal was to prepare him to testify against his codefendants and, hopefully, to work the best possible plea bargain I could for him. That was the only thing I figured we had going for us. We were hoping simply to avoid the death penalty.”
But Stidham’s hopes of negotiating a plea bargain would be jeopardized if Jessie persisted in claiming that his confession had not been the truth. “It kind of made me angry,” the lawyer later said. “I demanded that Jessie take a look at this. I reminded him that he was facing the death penalty, and that he needed to tell me what happened.” But Jessie vacillated. “When his father was there,” Stidham said, “Jessie’d insist that he didn’t do it. And when his father was gone—when it was just Jessie and me—he’d try to recite what he’d told the police. But every time he’d tell the story, there’d be major inconsistencies.” Stidham could not figure out what he was dealing with.
Finally, on one visit near the end of the summer, Stidham recalled,
I went back to the jail and said, “You’ve got to level with me. Were you there or were you not?” And he said he was not. And I said, “Why would you have told me all this time that you were there?” He said, “Well, because I didn’t want to die in that electric chair.” I explained to him that Greg [Crow] and I were on his side. And that’s when I began to realize that he didn’t understand what a lawyer was. He had no idea what a defense attorney was. He didn’t understand the concept. To him, a lawyer was just a person who was part of the justice system. He thought we were detectives. He didn’t understand that we were on his team. That’s when I began to see Jessie Misskelley in a different light. At that time, he had a weird haircut and tattoos. He looked like an ordinary, everyday street thug. But the kid was handicapped. Bill Clinton had just been elected president of the United States, and everybody in the state of Arkansas knew who Bill Clinton was, but Jessie Misskelley didn’t.
Stidham would eventually conclude that Jessie had had nothing to do with the crime, and that his confession had been coerced. But by the time Stidham reached this “epiphany,” Jessie had been in jail for two months. Stidham abruptly altered his strategy. He began to study the phenomenon known as false confessions. After what he called his epiphany, Stidham told a reporter, “We don’t believe the state has any evidence except this wild story Jessie made up.” And he added, “The world has a right to know what kind of investigation these cops pulled.”
If Stidham had any lingering doubts about his revised view of his client, they were allayed during a visit when Jessie asked him who “Satin” was. Stidham didn’t understand. “He handed me a pamphlet a preacher had given him that was all about Satan,” Stidham would recall, “but Jessie could barely read it. And what he could read he thought was about somebody named ‘Satin.’” Now, with a jolt, Stidham got it. Jessie was referring to Satan, but never having read the unfamiliar name before, he was mispronouncing it as “Satin,” like the fabric. Stidham was dumbfounded. As he discussed the pamphlet with Jessie, Stidham realized that the boy had heard of the devil, but never that he was called Satan. “It was one of the most ironic moments of the entire ordeal,” the lawyer later said. “There I was, sitting in a jail cell with this confessed satanic killer, and he’s asking me who ‘Satin’ is.”
Damien
After discussions among the attorneys, it was decided that private investigator Ron Lax would work with Val Price and Scott Davidson, who were representing Damien. In the beginning, Lax, like Stidham, assumed that all three defendants were guilty. He also assumed that any investigation he and his assistant, Glori Shettles, did on behalf of Damien would likely benefit all three. His approach, as always, would be organized and methodical. It would begin with an interview of Damien in the jail where he was being held in the town of Clarendon, Arkansas. But that interview almost never occurred. On Tuesday, June 8, four days after his arrest, Damien took an overdose of Elavil, his antidepressant medication.146 His mother had brought the medicine and left it with the jailers. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the jailers had dispensed Damien’s pills to him, and by Tuesday, without their knowledge, he had saved up twelve of them. He swallowed them en masse and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where his stomach was pumped.
Lax met with Damien several times as Damien’s lawyers prepared for trial. But most of the work with Damien would fall to Glori Shettles, a former parole officer and prosecutor’s assistant who held a master’s degree in counseling. For the next nine months, Shettles visited Damien almost once a week. In the beginning, she and Lax were uncertain about Damien’s name. The media seemed to love “Damien,” but the investigators opted for “Michael,” which they’d been told was his legal name.147
Damien told Shettles that his family had moved frequently when he was young.148 Though he was unaware of it at first, Damien said, his family had been desperately poor, living at times in shacks with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. He said he’d grown used to being picked on at school, and that once he’d made it to high school, he’d begun carrying a dog’s skull he’d found because kids tended not to bother him when he did. He discovered that being ridiculed for being strange—something he could choose for himself—was better than being ridiculed for things he could not control.
It seemed to her that Damien had had a hard time making sense of his life, and that he’d turned to religion for help. When the Protestant influences of his childhood failed to satisfy or comfort him, he’d turned to Catholicism, and then to more earth-based, pagan beliefs.149 As Damien grew more comfortable with Shettles, the investigator tried to explore the behaviors that had attracted Driver’s attention. Shettles noted:
Michael reports his wardrobe of black clothing originated as a result of Deanna telling him that she thought he “looked good” in black clothing. He stated he began purchasing black pieces of clothing to please her and before long, all of his articles of clothing were black. He states he regrets the day he began wearing his trench coat, which he wore every day; however, he thought at the time that it looked “cool”…Michael briefly described a period of time, apparently while he was still in school, that he described as his “vampire look.” He stated during this period of time he put white powder on his skin and wore very dark, small glasses and gave the appearance he was a vampire. He stated schoolmates would ask him if he drank blood and he stated he did drink blood, but only of those persons he knew…Michael also stated that, as time grew, he was earning more and more of the reputation by schoolmates, teachers, and persons in the community as being a devil worshiper. He stated that right before he was sent to Charter Hospital by the juvenile authorities he was brought in and asked by Jerry Driver and Steve Jones if he could read a Latin inscription that was on a gold ring that Michael described as a wedding band that was in a glass pyramid. He stated he could not read Latin and had no idea what the inscription was. He was asked by these men if he could remove the ring by “willing” it or through some ritual, and he told them he could not.
Damien told Shettles that he, Jason, and Domini had been “harassed” by police for almost a year and a half before the murders.150 After one of Lax’s visits with Damien, the private investigator wrote:
Before his arrest, Steve Jones, his probation officer, came by and asked why Echols had not been around. Echols responded he had not been around because his probation was over. He stated Jones acted very suspicious during this visit. Jones gave Echols some information regarding the murders. He told Echols someone urinated in the mouth of one of the boys. Then, when the West Memphis Police Department asked him what he knew about the murder and he stated someone had urinated into one of the victim’s mouth, they denied Steve Jones knew this and stated that only someone at the murder scene would be aware of this information.
Ron Lax found the story peculiar. The prosecutor’s office had just begun to provide documents from the police investigation to the defense attorneys, through the legal process known as discovery. To Lax’s and the lawyers’ frustration, the flow of records throughout the summer amounted to only a trickle. But at least the trickle had included copies of the autopsy reports, which the West Memphis police had finally received after the arrests. Lax scoured the reports, but they contained no mention of urine having been found in the stomachs of any of the bodies.151 Since Lax and the lawyers had so far been provided with but a fraction of the police department’s file, the private investigator had no way of knowing that the file contained two documents, both from early in the investigation, in which Gitchell and an unidentified West Memphis Police Department official had, in fact, referred to Peretti’s reported statement about finding urine in the victims’ stomachs.
Meanwhile, it became clear to Shettles that until the night of their arrests, Damien and Jason had never fully appreciated the seriousness of their situation.152 To the irritation of the police, Damien had maintained an attitude of arrogance. He told Shettles that he’d felt safe; that he’d believed the police would never find evidence against him, since he had not committed the crime; and that eventually they would be forced to realize how stupid they’d been to hound him. With evident satisfaction, Damien told Shettles how, during one interrogation, he’d finally said that if officers would let him speak with his mother, he’d tell them everything he knew about the murders. Detectives had gotten excited and brought Pam to the station, and while Damien was speaking with her, they’d hastily set up a video camera to tape his expected confession. Damien had then smugly announced that everything he knew about the murders was “nothing.” Damien thought it was funny. The officers had been furious.
But Shettles suspected that Damien’s haughtiness had always been a facade. She noticed that his hands shook when he talked. Sometimes he cried. He told her he had little hope of being believed by a jury. She wrote, “He stated many times he prays that if there is a God, he will not allow him to live another day. He further stated he feels that he is going insane, but is not certain of what will happen to him mentally should this process occur.”
For the investigators, Damien’s psychiatric background was legally important, as well. At the time, Arkansas was one of five states that held bifurcated trials; that is, one part dealt with the question of guilt or innocence, and if a defendant were found guilty, the second part of the trial was held to determine his sentence. If Damien’s trial went that far, his mental health history might be used as a mitigating factor; evidence of mental defect might be presented to persuade a jury to spare his life or to reduce his time in prison. Part of Shettles’s assignment was to closely explore Damien’s mental health history.
He told her that he had suffered severe headaches as a child, some so intense that he would pull clumps of hair out of his head in an effort to ease the pain. Pam Echols reported that Damien had suffered several blackouts but that they’d never been diagnosed. There’d been his stays, as a teenager, in psychiatric facilities, and the outpatient counseling in West Memphis. Pam reported that after Damien’s last hospitalization, he’d been declared totally disabled by the Social Security Administration. Three months before the murders, he had begun receiving Social Security disability checks of $289 per month. These were stopped after his arrest.
