As Jason was being driven to police headquarters, he did not know that what was unfolding around him was the result of events that finally had come together that morning, when detectives went to talk to Jessie. Jessie had no idea why the detectives wanted to talk to him, but he was not the kind of kid who would say ‘no’ to the police.
For hours, cramped in a small room at the station, Jessie told the detectives all kinds of things, most of which they themselves dismissed, knowing that they were inaccurate. With guided questioning, however, Jessie began giving answers in which the officers heard hints of plausibility—and possibility. Maybe the detectives believed the special-ed kid when he said that he had witnessed the murders and that he’d even participated in them. Maybe they excused everything he’d said that was mixed-up or contrary to their theory as the talk of someone too stupid—or too cunning—to tell a straight story. Or maybe they’d just heard what they wanted—and needed—to hear: a few disjointed fragments from an expendable kid who offered the police an escape from the onus of three unsolved murders. Detectives turned on their tape recorder twice while they had Jessie in the room. In total, they recorded forty-six minutes—about a tenth—of his interrogation. Even those forty-six minutes, however, made for a sloppy story. Jessie jumbled facts that were widely known, together with claims that the police themselves knew to be utter fiction. He contradicted himself so often police can be heard on the recordings attempting to straighten him out.
In contrast, parts of Jessie’s disorganized utterances were treated with meticulous care. While junking much of what Jessie said, the officers accorded some of his statements the weight of solid evidence. Prompted by one of his questioners, Jessie had spoken the words, “when we had that cult,” lending support to the theory that Sudbury and Jones had developed within twenty-four hours of finding the bodies. Jessie had witnessed Damien and Jason abusing and murdering the children. He had even said he’d assisted the killers, irrationally implicating himself.23 Against a backdrop of nothing, the police saw these selected statements within selected recordings as more than sufficient. They presented them to the prosecutor as a legitimate confession to a heinous crime. In turn, Fogleman agreed that the police had built their case. And so did a judge, who immediately issued warrants for three arrests and for searches of the arrested boys’ homes.
The police who grabbed Jason weren’t rough. They simply read him his rights, put him into a police car, and drove him away from Damien’s home. Dread—and night—enveloped him. At the police station, officers hustled him into a bright blue room. There, for what seemed like hours, they demanded: “Tell us what happened.” When he’d start to respond that he didn’t know, they’d interrupt him.
“I was trying to tell them I’m innocent. They said, ‘Well, we’ve got your friend who says you aren’t.’ I thought, ‘What friend? That can’t be right.’ I just thought they were lying to me. I had no idea they’d talked to Jessie or what he’d said. There I was, just put in this situation that was completely insane, untrue, and no one would listen to me. They just absolutely refused to listen to anything I had to say.”24 He did not ask for an attorney. Nobody called one for him.25 Only later would it occur to him that something basic seemed to be missing. From movies and television he’d gotten the notion that, in America, people who were arrested were allowed to make a phone call. No one had offered him such an opportunity. He hadn’t asked. How to demand your rights when you’re arrested and in shock, he said later, “isn’t something they teach you in civics.”
Jason soon realized the strength of the police grip. “You can’t say, ‘You all got it wrong. I just want to go home,’” he recalled. “They’re standing there. They’ve got guns. There’s no way to escape it. It’s not like being on the playground with a bully. You can’t run from them.” Utterly alone, he felt he knew nothing but the truth and that no one wanted to hear it.
When Jason would not confess, police officers took him to the county hospital, where technicians took samples of his blood, hair, and saliva, as well as prints of his hands and feet. He saw the activity as a good sign. If officials were taking samples from him, it must have meant that they had other evidence with which to compare it. “Whoever did this crime must have left a handprint or a footprint or a hair,” he thought. “They’ll see that mine doesn’t match, and that will prove my innocence, and I’ll be able to go home.”26
At one point, officers took away Jason’s watch and clothes and put him in a concrete hallway with bars on two sides. He sat there “freaking naked” for two or three hours. Finally, officers returned with a blue policeman’s uniform for Jason to put on. Before handing him the shirt, they ceremoniously removed the uniform’s patches. The shirt hung off Jason’s one hundred and twelve pound frame. When he had it buttoned, an officer took his mug shot.
The time in the hospital corridor seemed to stretch out all night, so Jason was surprised to see that it was still dark when officers hustled him into a squad car again, to return him to the West Memphis police station. Now he was getting hopeful. Maybe they’d already tested the samples and were about to send him home. But, no. After a huddled consultation, the officers moved Jason again—this time to the jail in Marion. “They weren’t being very hospitable,” Jason recalled. “They weren’t explaining anything to me.” He stayed in a cell in Marion’s small jail, awake, for the rest of night.
With morning came another move. By now the sun was up. Still wearing the over-sized police uniform, he was driven back to the jail in West Memphis, where he was brought before a judge and charged with three counts of capital murder.27 Had he been presumed innocent, someone might have considered the plight of a sixteen-year-old taken in the middle of the night and run through such an ordeal, without explanation or the benefit of a parent or advisor. But Jason was not presumed innocent. He was seen—and treated—as a kid who’d mutilated and murdered children. In fact, having been charged as an adult, he was not treated as a kid at all. He could do only what he was told: “Stand here.” “Walk over there.” And now, again, “Get in.” Once again, without explanation, Jason was being moved. This time, he was in a van, being driven he knew not where. Looking out the window, he figured he was headed north when he saw that the van was passing by Lakeshore Trailer Park. Seeing that Jason had noticed, an officer remarked, “Take a good look. This is the last time you’ll ever see it.”
Jason knew his mom must be beside herself. Had anyone told her where he was? He knew she wouldn’t be able to cope with hearing that he’d been arrested, much less charged with murder. But there was nothing he could do. He was shackled and cuffed inside an armed van. He was barely coping himself.
Though Jason had never traveled this far north, he noted that the fields he saw passing outside the van looked much like those around Marion. Yet everything about this ride felt threatening. After traveling in silence for an hour, Jason saw a compound surrounded by barbed wire. The van pulled to a stop outside a bland brick facility. Jostling him out of his seat, guards directed Jason into the building and then into a cell. Taking the blue shirt, they handed him an orange uniform and told him to put it on. Now he at least had a clue—but only that—about where he was being held. On the back of the shirt he was given were stamped the words, “Craighead County.”
Saying little, a jailer removed Jason’s shackles, then left him alone in the cell. It held nothing but a metal toilet, a concrete bunk, a mattress, and a small blanket. Jason sat on the bunk, trying to think. Eventually, silently, someone on the jail’s staff brought him a tray of food and a plastic spoon with which to eat. That became the routine. No conversation. No access to TV, radio, or newspapers. No contact with other prisoners. No information. No one familiar. No one willing to tell him anything.
He understood that he was in shock. When days passed without word from his mom, he knew she didn’t know where he was. He hurt at the thought of what she and his brothers must be enduring. He could only wait and hope for them to find him. Beyond that, he said
, “I was waiting for somebody to tell me that things had been figured out and I could go home.”
He did not cry. Rather, he said, “My primary emotion was one of disbelief and shock and expectancy—for this to be figured out and fixed. I kept thinking, ‘They’ve got my blood and my hair and my footprint and fingerprints. They’re going to figure this out any minute.’”
But no “any minute” came. For two weeks, Jason sat in his sterile cell—alone and without human contact, except for the guards who silently brought him meals. No one explained to him why he’d been charged with the murders or what might happen next. Gradually, he became unsure what day of the week it was. “Really, I was just put in a room and forgotten,” he said. “All they did was feed me. Everyone was instructed not to speak to me, so I took on the practice of not speaking unless I was spoken to.”
Then came a day when, without explanation, a guard opened the door to Jason’s cell and told him he could make a phone call home. His mom frantically asked where he was. “I said all I knew was that the back of my shirt said ‘Craighead County.’ She said, ‘I’ve been there twice and they told me you weren’t there. They lied to me.’ She had a million questions: How was I doing? How was I being treated? I said, ‘I guess I’m being treated all right.’”
That wasn’t true. Jason—sixteen and growing—was not getting enough to eat. “The food was all right,” he said. “It tasted good. But there wasn’t nothing to it. I think, at the time, I was going through my growth stage. It seemed like I was always hungry. Even right after eating, I’d still be hungry.” But he didn’t mention that to his mom.
As soon as she could, Gail made the one-hour drive to the juvenile detention center in Jonesboro, where she and Jason were allowed a fifteen-minute visit. They stood, separated by glass, in a special visitation cell. Jason could see that his mother was “disintegrating,” but he could not reach out to touch her. “I couldn’t cling onto anybody,” he said, “and she couldn’t either.” Until officials allowed him that call, no one had told Gail where Jason was. She said she’d visited every jail in the area, including this one, but no one would tell her anything.28
Jason had suffered the past few weeks, but compared to his own experience, he felt his mother had endured “nine kinds of hell.” She told Jason she’d fought with the police in West Memphis, explaining that Jason had been in school on the day of the murders, that he’d gone to school the day after, and that witnesses could vouch for his whereabouts every minute when he wasn’t in school. But, she told Jason, nothing she said had mattered. A detective had even promised her that, if what she said checked out, Jason would be released. That promise had been a lie.
After Jason’s first visit from his mom, he was allowed to see her weekly, but many times Gail could not afford the money for gas or the time off work. When she did come, she brought Matt and Terry. “It was great to see them,” Jason said, “but it was sad too, knowing my mom was going through a breakdown.” By the fall, Gail’s boss had fired her. Neighbors and townspeople shunned her and her children. Everywhere Matt and Terry went, they were marked as a murderer’s brothers. School quickly became unendurable, and even with nowhere else to go, they quit attending.
The winter of 1993 was one of the harshest ever for northeast Arkansas. Gail could barely afford to keep the trailer warm. Her visits to Jason grew fewer. When he did get to see his mom and brothers, the visits brought a grief of their own. He knew that he himself needed comforting, but the glass—and his mother’s frailty—made that impossible. “I couldn’t cling onto anybody,” he said. “Mom was as helpless as I was. And fifteen minutes, there’s not a lot you can really say, besides ‘I love you,’ and ‘I’m doing well.’ You can’t even give each other a hug.” Partings were the worst. “Matt and Terry would be saying, ‘Okay, Mom, it’s time to go,’ and she’d be crying, saying, ‘Why can’t I take you home?’”29
After a few months of isolation, Jason was allowed a pencil and paper, so he could write letters home. “When they gave me the pencil, they told me, ‘If you break the lead, find it, because if we have to come in and find that lead, it won’t be pretty.’”
“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”
~ John Locke
Fogleman faced difficulties too, though of a very different kind. With the arrests and the pressure on the police department lifted, the burden of proving the teenagers’ guilt now rested squarely on him. Some of Jessie’s answers would help. Fogleman felt confident that any jury that heard the recorded parts of the boy’s statements would find him guilty.
But the situation grew more difficult with regard to Jason and Damien. Although police had questioned both boys separately and intensely, neither was low-functioning, and neither had confessed. Fogleman had no evidence that positively connected them—or Jessie, either, for that matter—to any of the victims. Investigators had found a fiber at Jason’s house that they said was “similar” to one found with the bodies, but that was pretty much of a stretch. Police had found no murder weapon. There was no indication that the alleged killers even knew the victims. And, despite all the talk of cults and ritual killings, police had found nothing at the scene— no altar, symbols, candle wax, nothing—that would support their unique theory of the crime.
Fogleman knew he had little of substance. So did his boss, Brent Davis, the district’s chief prosecuting attorney.30 But Davis worked out of an office in Jonesboro, an hour north of Marion. Locally, the job of prosecuting the teenagers would fall primarily to Fogleman. Facing the kind of case that could make or break a career, Fogleman launched an investigation of his own, using his subpoena power in hopes of finding evidence where the police had failed. Fogleman may have expected to have Jessie enter a plea bargain in exchange for a sentence of something less than death if he’d testify against Damien and Jason. Or, failing that, to have Jessie tried first, get him convicted, and then offer Jessie a reduced sentence if he would repeat his accusations against Damien and Jason at their trial. Either way, it would help if the public knew what Jessie had told the police.
Just how it happened remains unknown, but soon after the arrests, while a judge had ordered the arrest warrants sealed, a complete transcript of Jessie’s recorded statements to the police was leaked to the region’s biggest newspaper, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. As a result, news media saturated the region with Jessie’s clumsy account of stabbings, sexual predation, choking, and death, all intertwined with the names of Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, and that mysterious, ungodly word — “cult.”
During the seven months between the arrests and the start of Jessie’s trial in January 1994, The Commercial Appeal ran more than seventy articles that included the words “cult,” “devil,” “Satanism,” “evil,” and “occult”—often in headlines. Television exploited the case’s sensational aspects even more, with several media reporting claims that people had seen Damien dressed all in black even on hot summer days, killing dogs, carrying skulls, his fingernails filed to points, and carrying a staff as he walked. Reporters seemed to have no trouble finding people around Marion and West Memphis who were glad to describe Damien as “weird.”
Jason presented a more singular challenge. As the summer of 1993 turned into fall and Jessie’s January trial loomed nearer, the most damning information Fogleman had been able to develop against Jason—aside from what Jessie’ d said—concerned the vandalism incident when he was eleven, the call about his shoplifting some chips and M&Ms, his preference for heavy metal music, and, of course, his friendship with Damien. Fogleman knew that none of that would support a request for the jury to sentence Jason to death—and death was Fogleman’s goal.
By November, six months after the murders, the case against Jason still looked weak. But then, Fogleman got “a hunch.” He said the idea struck him after a drive through the trailer park where Jason and Damien lived. Though the place was named “L
akeshore,” Fogleman claimed that this was the first time he’d realized that it actually surrounded a lake. He said that’s when it dawned on him: “If there had been a weapon, what better place to dispose of it than in that lake.”
The prosecutor asked Arkansas State Police to search the lake, starting near Jason’s house, and within minutes of entering the water, a diver arose with a knife. Years later, Fogleman said that the dive had been planned and conducted in strict secrecy. But, in fact, it was well publicized. The West Memphis Evening Times carried a front-page photo of the diver, still in the water, holding the knife in profile. An accompanying article explained that the knife was discovered within yards of Jason’s house. A Memphis television station broadcast video of the recovery.31
“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
~ Ray Bradbury
Jason’s only other visitors during his months in the regional jail were the attorneys assigned to represent him, Paul Ford and Robin Wadley. Jason was not much impressed with Wadley. He understood that Ford, the more amiable of the two, was his lead attorney, the one calling the shots. He also understood pretty quickly that Ford believed Damien was guilty. Jason never doubted that Ford believed in his innocence, but the split between Jason’s view of the case and that of his attorney left Jason feeling unsure. It seemed to him that his attorneys and Damien’s ought to be pulling together, but clearly, Ford thought differently.
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