The very same day, Friday, May 7, I saw the first news coverage is when the police began to sniff around my door, although they later denied it and said they never considered me a suspect until several weeks down the road. Not long after the coverage began, a cop named James Sudbury and Jerry Driver’s sidekick, Jones, came knocking. I found it interesting that Driver himself didn’t show up. They came into the house and said they wanted to talk to me privately. Evidently they did not want my family to hear what they had to say. My mother, sister, and paternal grandmother watched as I led Sudbury and Jones into Michelle’s bedroom and closed the door. They sat on the edge of the bed, one on either side of me.
This was the first time I’d ever seen Sudbury. He was potbellied, with a horrible comb-over and weak, watery eyes. He also sported the same seventies porn mustache so popular among his colleagues. He didn’t say much, and just sat quietly while Driver’s cohort asked the questions. Jones was all saccharine and lying eyes as he said things like “Something bad has happened, and we really need your help.” Instead of questioning me about the murders, he stayed on topics such as “What’s your favorite book of the Bible, and why? Have you ever read anything by Anton LaVey? Who is your favorite author?” It seemed they couldn’t decide between conducting a murder investigation and filing a book report. Of course eventually came the inevitable “Have you heard anything about devil-worshippers in the area, or any plans to sacrifice children?” I found it sickening. Instead of attempting to find out who had murdered three children, they indulged in these childish fairy tales and grab-ass games. A fine example of your tax dollars at work.
Before leaving, they took a Polaroid picture of me. Later, I found out they showed it to nearly everyone in town, using it to plant ideas in the minds of an already frightened public. In court they denied taking the picture or ever even coming to see me that day. They had to, because Jones and Driver were from a different office and weren’t supposed to be involved in the investigation in any way. By that point in the courtroom, the blatant lies would no longer shock me because I’d seen them do it too many times.
This visit was the first of many. They were soon coming at me every single day. They came to my parents’ house, to Domini’s trailer, and to Jason’s house. It wasn’t always the same two; there was a rotating crew of about six of them. It was the same questions, day after day. It became pretty apparent that these clowns weren’t looking for a murderer. Jerry Driver and his two cohorts, Jones and Murray, put a bug in the ear of the West Memphis police department, and they couldn’t shake it. Instead of conducting a real murder investigation and checking the forensic evidence, the police started immediately chasing stories of black-robed figures that danced around bonfires and chanted demonic incantations.
Beginning that day, that’s all anyone talked about. The entire town was petrified because they were convinced hell had broken loose in Arkansas. Every redneck preacher in the area was preaching sermons about how we were in the “end times,” so you better get right with God or else the devil would come for you, too. You must keep in mind that this is a state in which one out of every four people can’t read above a fifth-grade level. Ignorance breeds superstition. People believed these stories and helped them grow. After being shown my picture, one man swore to the police that I had caused him to levitate. Another swore that the police told him they had found body parts under my bed. These sorts of stories passed for investigation.
The constant harassment continued to escalate. Within days, instead of coming to my house they were taking me to the police station. It was easier for them to play good cop, bad cop there. One of them (usually Sudbury, whose breath smelled as if he ate onions morning, noon, and night) would get in my face and scream, “You’re going to fry! You may as well tell us you did it now!” The other cop would then pretend to be my friend and act as if he were rescuing me from Sudbury’s “wrath.” I was only a teenager, and the whole thing looked pretty pathetic even to me.
This continued day after day for a month. My grandmother grew worried and sold her rings to hire an attorney to come to the police station with me, but the police refused to let him in. They lied and said I never asked for him, even though I did so several times. My grandmother lost her engagement and wedding rings for nothing.
I didn’t think there was anything wrong with answering their questions, because I had nothing to hide. I had done nothing wrong, and figured they would sooner or later get this insanity out of their system. It didn’t work that way. The more I cooperated, the more abusive and belligerent they became.
In spite of their abusive behavior, the threat didn’t feel any more escalated than the tone of the harassment we’d been through for nearly two years where Driver was concerned. That changed permanently the last time I was picked up and brought into the police station before the arrest. I was kept there for eight hours. I was not allowed a drink of water, a bite of food, or even to use the restroom. They screamed and threatened me the entire time, trying to force me to make a confession. The psychological pressure was enormous. They would have kept me all night if I hadn’t finally demanded they either charge me with a crime or let me go home. I suffered from extreme exhaustion, my head was pounding, and my body kept trying to vomit, although there was nothing in my stomach. I felt like I’d been run over. If you’ve never been through anything like that, there’s no way you can understand. There’s no word that describes what they did to me other than “torture.”
On the evening of June 3, my mother, father, and Nanny left to go to a casino for a night of gambling. My grandmother loved playing blackjack more than just about anything else in the world, and my parents were more than happy to keep her company at the table. They would be gone all night. Michelle, Jason, Domini, and I had all settled down for an evening of watching horror videos. We were making fun of a movie that seemed to have been put together with more imagination than money when someone started beating on the door. Not knocking, beating. You could feel the vibration through your feet on the floor. Outside someone screamed, “This is Sudbury. Open the door!”
My first thought was, To hell with that. I was sick of those ass clowns tormenting me day after day. I figured it was more of the same and that they’d eventually get tired of waiting and leave. When the beating continued and grew even more persistent, I knew something wasn’t right. They were being even more aggressive than usual. I went to answer the door to see what they wanted.
When I opened the door, there were three cops standing on the steps, all pointing guns directly at my face. The barrels of their weapons were less than three inches from touching my skin. Another cop stood on the ground pointing a gun at my chest. Sudbury nearly tackled me in his eagerness to handcuff me and get me into a cop car. Looking over my shoulder, I told Domini, “Don’t worry about it.” After all, it’s impossible for them to prove you’ve done something you haven’t done, right? At least that’s what I thought.
It was a scene of utter chaos. I don’t recall whether my rights were read to me amid the noise and police stampede. I didn’t see them arrest Jason; I was rushed out too quickly. I later found out they took him out right after me. After I was put into a car, I was driven straight to the police station and escorted to a small office by a cop who looked disturbingly like a pig that had been taught to walk upright. I never saw a single cop in the station who was even close to being physically fit, but this guy was the worst of the lot. He was so fat he was suffocating under his own weight. He weighed at least 350 pounds. He had no neck, and his nose was turned up like a snout. I’ve learned over the years that sooner or later a person’s physical appearance comes to resemble whatever is in their heart. I shudder to think what this guy’s true nature was. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking of him as “Piggy Little.”
Piggy Little was an old-school asshole. You could tell he’d never succeeded at anything in his life, and he was out for revenge. He seemed to think his personal God-given mission in life was to harass and torment
me in every way possible. He kept his hands on me at all times—he pushed, pulled, and jerked me around continuously.
After ten or fifteen minutes, the chief inspector came into the office and sat behind a desk. His name was Gary Gitchell, and I’d seen him at the station a couple of times before, but I’d never had to deal with him. Gitchell was slightly more intelligent than his coworkers, which is most likely why he was the boss. He was no intellectual giant, but he didn’t have to be when compared with the rest.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.
I stared at him blankly, saying nothing.
“You may as well tell me something now because your friend has already confessed. This is your only chance to make sure you don’t take all the blame.” I felt like I had somehow gotten lost in this conversation, or that I must be missing something, because it wasn’t making sense to me. Friend? Confessed?
“Who are you talking about?” I asked. It was his turn to look at me blankly. I had no idea who he could be talking about, because I knew it couldn’t be Jason.
He continued along the same lines with statements like “You should just tell us something, because your friend is already pointing the finger at you. If you want to make sure he doesn’t put everything on you, this is your only chance.” This went on for at least half an hour, Gitchell talking while Piggy glared. When he finally realized this wasn’t going anywhere, I was put inside a cell that wasn’t much larger than a phone booth. I was left there throughout the night, confined to a space so small I couldn’t even stretch my legs out. There was no water, no restroom, nothing. Every so often Gitchell came in and asked more of the same. At one point he came in and said, “One of the officers told me you wanted to talk to me.” I hadn’t even seen an officer in hours. “He lied,” I informed him. This continued until well after sunrise.
When I wasn’t being questioned, I was trying to solve this mystery. Who could Gitchell be talking about? What had this friend said I had done? None of it made any sense.
A cop came in and demanded my clothes. I’d never experienced anything like this in my life and thought him some sort of pervert, judging by the looks of him. I was given more clothes—an old, ragged police uniform that was at least twelve sizes too large. I had to gather the waist and tie it in a knot to keep the pants from falling down. This is how I made my first court appearance.
At ten in the morning on June 4, I was arraigned. Jason, Jessie, and I were called separately. I was walked down a narrow hallway that suddenly opened up into a courtroom. I was stunned by the contrast. The jail itself was filthy and roach-infested to the point of making you not want to touch anything for fear of contamination. It was a place the general public was never meant to see. I’d grown used to that, so the dazzlingly clean and well-lit courtroom was jarring.
I blinked like an animal pulled from its hole and looked around me. The place was packed from wall to wall, and the only faces I recognized were my mother’s and father’s. Everyone else in the place watched me with hatred in their eyes. Every few seconds someone popped up as though in a Whac-A-Mole game and snapped pictures of me. I hadn’t slept in about thirty-six hours, so everything had an even more surreal quality to it.
The judge—his name was Rainey—began rambling while I leaned against a wall to keep my knees from buckling. Four cops kept their hands on me at all times, as if they expected me to break and run at any second. In the course of maybe ten minutes, I was charged with three counts of capital murder. I didn’t hear the charges outside the panic, fear, and exhaustion in my head. When the judge got to the “How do you plead?” part of the show, I said, “Not guilty.” I was following the instructions of a lawyer temporarily assigned to me, who’d told me minutes before the hearing what to say. My voice sounded flat, dull, and small. I felt a wave of outrage directed toward me from the peanut gallery. The judge’s droning voice sounded strangely like an auctioneer as he began talking about a confession. I was so exhausted and in such shock that I could follow very little of what he was saying. It finally dawned on me that he was asking if I wanted the confession read out loud or just entered into the record. I was starting to feel a little pissed, and my voice was a little more forceful this time as I said, “Read it.” I could tell he didn’t like that idea at all. As a matter of fact he seemed downright uncomfortable as he looked down and started shuffling papers.
Finally he stuttered that he wasn’t going to do that, but that he would call for a recess until after I had read it. During the recess I was taken into a broom closet filled with cleaning supplies, and was handed a stack of papers while two cops stood staring at me. My brain was so numb I could comprehend only about one-fifth of what I was reading, but at least now I knew who had made the confession. The name written at the top was “Jessie Misskelley.” My first thought was, Did he really do it? Followed quickly by, Why did he say I did it? Even in my shell-shocked state I could tell something about his “confession” wasn’t right. For one thing, every line seemed to contradict the one before it. Any idiot could plainly see he was just agreeing with everything the cops said. That’s when I knew why the judge didn’t want it read out loud. Anyone with even an average IQ could see it was a setup. The whole thing seemed shady.
It’s no great wonder to me how the cops could make Jessie say the things they wanted him to say. If they treated him anything like they did me, then it’s quite amazing that he didn’t have a nervous breakdown. They used both physical and psychological torture to break me down. One minute they’d threaten to kill you, and the next they’d behave as if they were your best friends in the world, and that everything they were doing was for your own good. They shoved me into walls, spit at me, and never let up for a moment. When one of them got tired, another came in to take his place. By the time I’d been allowed to go home after previous interrogations I’d had a migraine headache, and I’d been through periods of dry heaving and vomiting. I survived because when pushed hard enough I acted like an asshole, just like the cops themselves. My point is that we were just kids. Teenagers. And they tortured us. How could someone like Jessie, with the intellect of a child, be expected to go through that and come out whole?
It makes me sick and fills me with disgust to think about how the public trusts these people, who are in charge of upholding the law yet torture kids and the mentally handicapped. People in this country believe the corrupted are the exception. They’re not. Anyone who has had in-depth dealings with them knows it’s the rule. I’ve been asked many times if I’m angry with Jessie for accusing me. The answer is no, because it’s not Jessie’s fault. It’s the fault of the weak and lazy “civil servants” who abuse the authority placed in their hands by people who trust them. I’m angry with police who would rather torture a retarded kid than look for a murderer. I’m angry with corrupt judges and prosecutors who would ruin the lives of three innocent people in order to protect their jobs and further their own political ambitions. We were nothing but poor trailer trash to them, and they thought no one would even miss us. They thought they could take our lives and the matter would end there, all swept under the rug. And it would have ended there, if the world hadn’t taken notice. No, I’m not angry at Jessie Misskelley.
* * *
From everything I’d seen on TV and read in books, I came to believe the cops were the good guys, and that dirty cops were few and far between. So why was no one stepping up to expose this for the bullshit it was? Why were they all going along with something so fraudulent? The answer: to save their asses. The police assigned to my case were members of the West Memphis drug task force—cops who normally would not be investigating these murders; they were also offered additional help from the Arkansas State Police and they turned it down. It seems quite a few of the cops on the drug task force were being investigated by the FBI for drug dealing, money laundering, and tampering with confiscated evidence, and the last thing they needed was the entire world watching them as they bumbled around ineptly, pretending to conduct
an investigation. They needed to solve this case quickly, and we were the easy solution. As one of the cops told Jason, “You’re just white trash. We could kill you and dump your body in the Mississippi, and no one would care.” We were disposable, subhuman. Feed us into the meat grinder, and the problem goes away. It’s not like we were ever going to amount to anything anyway.
After I read the script/confession, I was taken back into the courtroom. The judge was rambling again, and I was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly everyone sprang to life as an overweight man with bad skin jumped from his seat and tried to run down the aisle. He was screaming something incoherently as the cops tackled him and I was hustled from the room. I later found out that he was the father of one of the murdered children. I couldn’t really blame him. I have a son of my own now, and I might have done the same thing if I thought I was looking at the man who had harmed him. He just needed someone to blame, to take his grief out on. He wasn’t interested in facts or evidence.
Once I was back in the dark and dingy part of the building, they began putting chains on me—around my waist, my hands, my feet, and anywhere else they could think to attach them. I saw Jason a few feet ahead of me, and they were doing the same to him. He was also wearing one of the old, ragged police uniforms. In front of him was Jessie Misskelley. He, too, was shackled, but he wore his own clothes. Perhaps this was another small way of punishing Jason and me for not giving them the confession they wanted.
They rushed Jessie through a door, and outside I saw sunlight and heard the roar of a crowd. It sounded like a referee had made a really bad call at the Super Bowl. Next they walked Jason and me out the doors at the same time. There was a circle of cops around me, all trying to drag me. I would have had to run to keep up with them, but there were chains on my legs and I had no shoes on. They dragged me across the concrete, ripping off two of my toenails and a fair amount of skin. The crowd went into a frenzy at the sight of us. It looked as though the entire city had turned out to see us, and they were all screaming, yelling, and throwing things. They wanted to crucify us right then and there. I imagine that was the closest a modern man could come to knowing what it was like in the Roman Colosseum.
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 19
