What little news Jason heard about the victims’ families was tragic. On November 6, 1994, about six months after Jason entered Varner, Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of victim Stevie Branch, assaulted his wife, Pam. When Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks, intervened, Terry Hobbs shot Hicks in the abdomen. In June 1995, Dana Moore, the mother of victim Michael Moore, struck and killed a pedestrian on a rural road in Crittenden County. The victim happened to be a relative of Jason’s from his mother’s side of the family. Dana Moore pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated. And on March 29, 1996, Melissa Byers, the mother of victim Christopher Byers, died under mysterious circumstances, after she was found unconscious at the new home in north-central Arkansas she shared with her husband, John Mark Byers.83
Yet that news, sad and interesting as it was, had no impact on Jason’s life. He was nineteen years old, in prison for life, aware that many now believed him to be innocent, but locked into the unrelenting reality of life in a dangerous prison. Day after day, he survived by standing up for himself, working hard, and treating everyone—staff and inmates alike—with respect. By the time he was taken off the hoe squad and reassigned to the kitchen, he’d learned the basics of life behind bars. “You get to prison, you’re a slave,” he said. “If you work in the kitchen, you work twelve-hour days, seven days a week. Then, when you get in and you’re waiting on shower call, you might wait an hour. You can’t lie down on your rack because you’re nasty. The whole time is working and waiting and crashing from being tired. Or it’s fighting— trying to figure out who stole your stuff while you were gone and things like that.”
Everyone assigned to the kitchen starts out in the dish room. Many quit and go back to hoe squad because, while the outdoor work is hard, men who work on the hoe squad get rainy days, weekends and holidays off. They also get a lunch break. By contrast, kitchen duty is longer and there are no days off. On top of that, a kitchen worker is constantly around food but not allowed to eat except at chow time, like everybody else. There was “a lot more food” at Varner than he’d had in the juvenile jail, Jason said, “but it was not as good.”
On Jason’s second kitchen assignment, he again started in the dish room, then moved to the serving line. “But that didn’t last long,” he said. “I got into a bunch of fights. When I got there, before I got glasses, I couldn’t see people. I think people coming through the line took advantage of that.” From the serving line, he went to sweeping, then, once again, back to the bakery. “I baked bread and dessert,” he said. “Ten runs of bread of fifty loaves each, and cakes, cobblers, and crisps. We had giant mixing pots, bigger than I am, and a certain recipe you had to follow. It was scorching hot. Our one oven was probably bigger than a Hummer.” He stayed in the kitchen and worked hard, he said, because, “I never wanted to incur any disrespect or loss of respect.”
He brought the same philosophy to fights, which came his way often due to the nature of his conviction. “For example, they called me ‘Baby Raper,’” he explained. “I’d say, ‘That’s a lie.’ Then they’d say, ‘You calling me a liar?’ and the next thing you know, they’re swinging at me, and I’m swinging back. I’ve never swung at anybody first. Never have in my life. I’ve never spoken disrespectful to anybody in my life. But I always stood up. I might not win—that one on the toilet was the only one I ever really won—but eventually that’s how people started respecting me. It was just for my attitude. Even in the middle of fights, I wouldn’t call people names. I couldn’t take it personally, even though it was personal to me.”
Jason’s steadiness began to pay off. He was moved up to Class 1-C status, the highest classification possible for him. Two and a half years after his arrival at Varner, around Christmas 1996, the warden gave Jason his first job as a clerk, the equivalent of a white-collar job in prison. Jason got the job because of his class and because he knew how to type. Thanks to a typing class he’d taken back at Marion High School, Jason became the nighttime count-room clerk. Each night he would call the guards and ask, ‘How many guys you got in the barracks?’ If the number didn’t match the number the roster said were supposed to be there, Jason would ask, ‘Who’s out?’ If the guard couldn’t say, he’d tell the guard, ‘You’d better go count your barracks again.’”
The job offered Jason his first opportunity to work on computers. The count-room where he was assigned used only typewriters, but other clerks worked for officials, such as the building major, the field major, and the classification officer, whose offices used computers. And some of those clerks gave Jason their passwords. When work was slow, as it often was at night, Jason could get on their computers. Thus, at night, alone and unmolested, he learned Windows 95, Microsoft Office, Access, and other valuable programs.
For a nearly blind kid living in a place where few had expected him to survive, getting to work on computers was a big step up. It would have been great if the computers had also been linked to the Internet, but in prison, such an incredible link to the outside world was beyond imagining.
“What is art but a way of seeing?”
~ Saul Bellow
It may have been late 1997 or early ’98, close to five years after the murders. One morning at about 2:20 a.m., Jason found himself being shaken awake by Mojo. It was confusing. Mojo didn’t even live in Jason’s barracks. “Get up and get dressed,” Mojo whispered. “What’s going on?” Jason asked. Mojo responded, “You trust me, don’t ya?”
Possibilities flooded Jason’s mind. “This dude has some kind of escape plan or something,” he thought. “I’m not sure I want to.” But it was Mojo, so he got dressed. The two left the barracks and went down the quiet hall to the unit’s visitation area. Mojo was a clerk too, with access to the prison’s visitation area, and his shift covered this time of night. He was relaxed and acting like a host at a grand event. “He’s like, ‘You drink Mountain Dew, don’t you? You want a burrito? Grab a couple of chairs.’”
Mojo worked for a field major, but sometimes he also did paperwork for other officers, in exchange for small privileges. He’d called in some of those favors to arrange this particular night. “So he gets me out and we set down,” Jason said. “He had this TV on a rolling cart. There’s a tape in the VCR. He pushed ‘play.’ And it was Paradise Lost. Jason had met the film’s makers. He’d received letters from people who’d been shocked and moved by the film. But he had never seen it himself. He didn’t know how he’d feel as he sat down to watch a documentary about how his life had been derailed.
Crime scene footage of children’s pale, bent bodies on the muddy bank of a ditch hurled him back to the most horrifying part of his trial. The difference was that he could see the images now, not just hear them described. There was aerial footage of Lakeshore Trailer Park. And there was his mother, insisting, “I know where he was, and I know he’s innocent!” She looked so much younger then.
Jason saw himself too. At sixteen, he had curly hair and a few pimples, his smile showed a crooked front tooth. He wore the orange jump suit from the jail and talked about his pet iguana and his cat. How young he’d been too when he’d told the filmmakers, “I can see where they might think I’m in a cult because I wear Metallica t-shirts and stuff like that, but I’m not into nothing like that. I couldn’t kill an animal or a person.”
And there was Damien, the friend he had not seen in more than three years, just as Jason remembered him. For the first time, Jason could see the half-wink and confident nod that Gitchell gave at the press conference the morning after Jason’s arrest, when he assured the region that, on a scale of one-to-ten, his case against the teenagers rated an “eleven.” Jason had never before seen the rants of John Mark Byers, the father of Christopher Byers, promising to see the three accused in hell; the venom of Christopher’s mother Melissa Byers as she spat, “I hate these three—and the mothers that bore them”; the anguish evident as the parents of Michael Moore wondered about their son’s last moments; or the angry, whacky way Pam Hobbs, the mother of Stevie Branch, told a telev
ision reporter she believed the accused were Satanists because “They look like punks.”
With the start of Jessie’s trial, Jason pulled his chair close to the prison TV. He wanted to get a good look at Burnett. And at Fogleman, finally, too. Even though Jason was well aware by now that he’d been arrested primarily because of what Jessie had said to police, it was eerie to see the point at Jessie’s trial where Gitchell pushed a button on a tape recorder and then to hear the damning words in Jessie’s own voice: “I saw Damien hit this one boy real bad, and then he started screwing him and stuff… and then Jason turned around and hit Stevie Branch and started doing the same thing.”
Those were the words, Jason thought—the words that had changed his life. It was shocking to hear them from someone he’d considered a friend. Yet Jason could not feel so much as a thimbleful of anger towards Jessie. By now, Jason knew that Jessie kept his head down during the trial because that’s what his attorney had told him to do. Jason understood that Jessie was trying to comply with what someone in charge—in this case, Stidham—wanted, and Jason figured that is what Jessie had done during his police interview. “In his mind,” Jason said, “he was saying what they wanted him to say. He was put into an impossible situation.” Jason reserved his anger for the police. “There was no call for what was done to him.”
Watching Jessie slouched in his chair, his forehead braced against the defense table, Jason thought that any juror would have at least harbored doubts about Jessie’s so-called confession, especially after Stidham pointed out key details—like when the murders occurred and what the boys were bound with—that Jessie had gotten wrong. Yet Jason could also see the easy assurance with which Gitchell had brushed those errors aside, saying, “Jessie simply got confused.” Jason reacted, “Of course, he got confused! You’d been messing with him for hours!” But what futility! One of the other things Jason knew was that he almost certainly would not be sitting here, watching this film in prison, if the jury had chosen to believe the confused kid over the confident cop.
In the film, it looked like the whole trial had played out that simply. Jason knew that the reality had been much the same. The jurors heard Jessie implicate himself, as well as Damien and Jason, in the murders, and that had been enough for them to find Jessie guilty and sentence him to life plus forty years in prison. Jason had never seen the courthouse where Jessie was tried. He watched the sad scene of Jessie being led out of the building, much as he had been, wearing handcuffs and a bulletproof vest. Jessie was strong for such a little guy, Jason thought. The top of Jessie’s head barely reached the shoulders of the deputies escorting him.
It was hard in a different way for Jason to watch footage of the victims’ parents. “You understand how much pain they’re suffering,” he said. “I can understand them wanting to blame who the police told them to blame.” Yet, watching, he knew that even now, “I couldn’t say anything that would console them at all.”
Everything about the film was hard. As Jason watched the meeting between the prosecutors and the victims’ parents, where Davis and Fogleman tried to explain to the parents why, right after getting Jessie convicted, they were offering him a reduced sentence, Jason realized that this meeting had occurred at the same time that Ford and Wadley were conveying the prosecutors’ offers of a reduced sentence to him—if he would just testify against Damien. It was sickening to realize how hard those men grasped for his and Jessie’s testimony, even as they held out their list of weak evidence to the parents. Sickening and pathetic. He wondered, had the prosecutors been counting all along on their ability to get Jessie and him to buckle, to be so scared of a possible death sentence that they would lie about Damien? With so little else to go on, had that always been their plan?
Jason could hardly believe it when he heard Fogleman telling the parents after Jessie’s trial and before his and Damien’s that all would not be lost if Jessie refused to testify, then adding, ‘But the odds are reduced significantly.” It was grimly fascinating to see Fogleman outline for the parents the evidence he and Davis felt they had for the trial ahead: “a couple of fibers,” statements of people he called “the Hollingsworth clan,” remarks made by “some kids” who said they’d overheard Damien admit to the killings at a girls’ softball game, “a guy that was in jail with Jason who says that Jason made some incriminating statements to him,” and “the knife that was found in the lake behind Jason’s house.” Fogleman concluded, “So that’s what we’ve got, but that’s all that we’ve got.” Davis told the parents that the odds of convicting Damien and Jason without Jessie’s testimony were about “fifty-fifty.”
It was incredible for Jason to hear the prosecutors acknowledge that they were willing to seek the death penalty for him and Damien with evidence that, by their own calculation, was no stronger than random luck, unless they could wrangle accusatory testimony from a kid who was known to be mentally challenged. It was beyond him to think that they—that anyone—would seek execution for defendants whose guilt they didn’t feel dead-certain they could prove.
The scene struck Jason especially hard for what it did not contain: any mention of the occult, the strange and disturbing motive that, just two weeks later, assumed such prominence at his and Damien’s trial. Here, in Paradise Lost, was Fogleman saying that the list of evidence he’d recited was “all” he and Davis had. Jason knew that, by the time this was filmed, Fogleman had been working on the case for almost nine months. Until now, seeing the film, Jason would have thought that Fogleman’s speech to the parents would have included the pitch he’d used so effectively at trial; that he might have said, “And, of course, we have the most important evidence of all, which is evidence of the killers’ motive, and that is that they were involved in a Satanic cult.” After being bludgeoned with the occult at trial, Jason was perhaps most upset at hearing no mention of the word in this part of the film.
Then, of course, there was the real evidence that had been collected but that the West Memphis police claimed to have “lost” the samples of blood and mud left by a “disoriented” man in a Bojangles’ restaurant near the crime scene on the night of the murders. Long before seeing the film, Jason had concluded the department’s bungling of the Bojangles’ evidence marked the turning point in the case. He believed that two tragedies occurred as a result: the first was that, in losing that evidence, investigators lost their most critical lead in discovering the killer or killers; the second was that they consequently shifted their attention to Damien and his associates, as Driver had been urging them to do. “After they lost the Bojangles’ evidence, all the rest was intentional,” Jason said. “Damage control.”
But all that was hindsight. He could think whatever he wanted, but the reality was that he and Mojo were watching inside a dark prison. He noted with irony that it would be here, watching his younger self on trial—that he would see the courthouse and the characters who had surrounded him then clearly for the first time. Enduring the actual trial had been difficult enough. But this time was actually harder. Then, he’d had hope. Then, he’d felt sure that the jury would see how contrived the state’s evidence against him was. Now, however, he knew how this movie ended. The evidence against him and Damien was nothing but cobwebs. Nevertheless, here he sat, locked between walls of iron. The contrast between the spectral evidence spun in the film and the grim physicality of prison hit him hard. And the film kept hitting:
• There was the lake knife that Fogleman made out to be so important, and yet, there came the state’s own witness, Detective Mike Allen, responding when asked if he was saying that the knife was the murder weapon: “No, sir. I’m not telling the jury that.”
• There was another state’s witness, Dr. Frank Peretti, of the Arkansas Crime Lab, saying that, though the mutilation of Christopher Byers was supposed to be part of the “occult ritual,” he could not explain how a killer could have so skillfully removed the skin from the boy’s penis in the ditch, where blood would have been washed away—or alternatively, why,
if the mutilation was performed on the banks of the ditch, virtually no trace of blood had been found there.
• There was Michael Carson, from the juvenile detention center, acknowledging that, yes, he had kept quiet for more than six months after hearing Jason confess to killing the boys, but explaining that he’d finally come forward just before the start of Damien and Jason’s trial because he’d seen the victims’ parents on TV and realized “how brokenhearted they were.”
• There was the 12-year-old whose face wasn’t filmed, describing how she’d heard Damien confess to the murders at a softball field, but also admitting that she had not been “close” enough to Damien to have heard anything he’d said before or after that confession.
• There was West Memphis police Officer Bryn Ridge, admitting that he’d “lost” blood scrapings taken from the Bojangles’ restaurant, near where the bodies were found, yet feeling confident enough to testify that Damien had read “horror books” by the likes of Stephen King and, when asked if he found that strange, responding firmly, “Yes, I did.”
• Most disturbing of all, of course, there was “Dr.” Dale Griffis, the state’s “expert” in the occult, talking about the full moon that had risen on the night of the murders, the “symbolic importance” of water, blood and the number three. One word hovered in Jason’s mind as he watched the state’s parade of witnesses: “Crazy.”
The spectacle was familiar—yet not. What he was now seeing Jason had experienced first-hand, but at the age of sixteen, and with his life hanging in the balance. He’d learned a lot since then, and by now he’d read all the state Supreme Court’s reasons why the trial had been, procedurally, just about perfect. But he’d never read a transcript of it. Watching Paradise Lost, Jason remembered the sense he’d had at his trial that Burnett was “calling the shots.” He had the same sense seeing the film.
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