“I’ve had a wonderful time, but this wasn’t it.”
~ Groucho Marx
Jason’s life at Little Tucker revolved around the inmates under his care. The man convicted of murdering three children was now responsible for tending to grown men who were cognitively, emotionally, and physically challenged. His days began with breakfast at 4 a.m., followed by a check to make sure that his “guys” had combed their hair, brushed their teeth, and washed their faces. A few men had suffered traumatic brain injuries. One, who’d had a stroke, had no short-term memory. Jason saw it as his job “to make their prison experience as easy on them as possible.”
As for himself? He hadn’t tasted a banana since his arrest twelve years before, but his Hacky Sack kick record had risen to four hundred and fifty. Jason carried on, trying to model the mantra he preached to his men: “Do what you can with what you’ve got where you’re at.”
In 2006, living by that mantra became easier. Life itself took on a glow. The “great girl” who’d entered Jason’s life the year before wanted to marry him. Jason was—cautiously—thrilled. Even as he walked in his white uniform down the gray-painted halls of his prison, he felt different. He was twenty-nine, in love, and—almost as if he were living a normal, free-world life—he imagined himself a married man. Even though he was in prison, he wouldn’t be alone. He’d have a wife who loved him and whom he could cherish. And, with all that was happening in his case—all the work of the lawyers and supporters—it seemed tantalizingly possible that he would one day actually get out—even if, at the time, he could not imagine how. He could fall asleep at night imagining freedom with a blissful twist: walking into the arms of his “great girl” to begin a new life together.
But day-to-day life left little room for dreams of any sort. Being a habilitation counselor proved to be more demanding than any clerk job he’d ever had; he was a twenty four-hour-a-day caregiver, who never got a day off. After more than a year of that, Jason was burned-out. “It was a great experience,” he said, “but I was looking for a vacation, so when somebody said there was an opening for a clerk in the field security office, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Field security!’”
Jason’s old friend Mojo was already a clerk at Tucker’s field security office. Late in the summer, when a job maintaining the office’s database came open, Mojo recommended Jason for it. As Jason later reflected, “It was a weird job for an inmate.” Since Tucker, like most Arkansas prisons, was also a massive farm, a sizeable part of its staff worked in the fields, overseeing a much larger number of inmate laborers who worked on the prison’s hoe squads. The white-suited prisoners were usually guarded by armed sergeants on horseback. The sergeants’ supervisors—the lieutenants, captains and majors— got to ride around in trucks. Except for the models of the trucks, the scene on any day could have come from an earlier century. Jason was told that his job at the field security office would be to keep track of work hours and payroll for all the staff. That would include tracking their sick leave and overtime, when they were in the fields or assigned to other duties due to weather, and whether they’d gotten the required training.
Jason knew he could handle the database work. He took the job. But he was almost knocked off his feet the first day he showed up for it. The field security office at Tucker was not attached to either his unit or the nearby maximum-security unit. Rather, it was a freestanding, house-sized building on the penitentiary grounds. “So, when I first get over there, I knock on the door. It’s just like going up to somebody’s house. Some guy inside says, ‘Come in.’ He sounds like my Uncle Hubert. I step in and there’s a couch, a coffee table, a coffeemaker, and a big-screen TV. There’s a ceiling fan and I see pictures on the walls! I’m coming in from the outside, so my eyes are adjusting to it. I look down and there are hardwood floors, polished a dark brown. It’s surreal. I’ve been walking on nothing but concrete floors for years!”
To Jason, it was an alien environment. “It looked like it was picked up from outside the prison walls and put down inside the prison walls. It looked like home.” But his intuition sounded a warning. “Right then, at that moment, when I first looked at it, I thought, ‘This right here is not going to last long.’” The perception traced back to other losses—the guitar, his father, and even the opportunity to speak for himself at his trial. Instinct born of experience told Jason, “If it’s too good to be true, something’s going to derail it.” Nevertheless, standing there in the doorway, facing a better form of imprisonment than he’d known since his arrest, Jason said: “I make the decision to accept it, and enjoy it, and experience it for as long as it will last— hoping maybe it will last until I’m released.”
The romantic dreams and new work assignment weren’t the only promising changes to occur that summer. Through his extensive grapevine, Jason had heard reports that Pam Hobbs, the mother of victim Stevie Branch, had found some knives in a box that belonged to her now ex-husband, Terry Hobbs, and that among the knives was one she believed had been in Stevie’s pocket on the night he disappeared. By now, Pam Hobbs shared many of the doubts that had been cast on the convictions in her son’s murder case. She no longer trusted the police investigation or the results of the trials. Instead of bringing the knives and the rest of the box’s contents to police or prosecutors, she’d asked her sister to bring them to Jessie’s lawyer, Dan Stidham.
Philipsborn regarded news of Pam’s discovery with caution, if not skepticism. After all, it had occurred years after the murders and after the Hobbs’ divorce. “It was a little hard to get to the bottom of her motives,” he said. He told Jason that, instead of redirecting attention to the knives turned over to Stidham, he and the other attorneys preferred to stay focused on the ongoing forensic tests.158 Jason agreed, partly because he trusted the work being done, and partly because he understood the risks of rushing to judge someone.
While Stidham held onto the knives, Elizabeth Fowler, in Hollywood, was turning her attention to Pam and Terry Hobbs. In early 2006, Dimension Films bought rights to the movie based on Devil’s Knot. The studio hired screenwriters Scott Derrickson and Paul Boardman to write the screenplay. “There is already a dark tone to the material, but we are absolutely committed to only telling the truth, and not exaggerating to entertain,” they told Variety in May. “We all understand the gravity, the high stakes of the situation.”159
Hoping to ground the film on the family of one of the victims, Fowler offered Pam and Terry Hobbs $12,500 each for the rights to their respective accounts of the murders and trials. She also spoke with Ron Lax, the central figure in Devil’s Knot, seeking his help in fleshing out what was known of the couple’s background. Lax explained that the West Memphis police had scarcely investigated any of the victims’ parents and that, regrettably, he had not investigated them either.160
In June 2006, shortly before Jason was assigned to the field security office, Lax had assigned an investigator from his company, Inquisitor, Inc., in Memphis, to conduct a background check on Stevie Branch’s stepfather. The investigator turned up a history of encounters with police, including some domestic violence, but nothing that had put him in jail.161 On Aug. 16, about two weeks after Jason got the field security job, screenwriters Derrickson and Boardman flew into Memphis from Los Angeles to review files at the West Memphis Police Department, and to get to know Lax in order to understand his personality, how he worked and how to portray him. The next day, Lax showed them around the neighborhood where the victim’s families lived and the trailer parks that were home to the accused, and brought them to the ditch where the boys’ bodies were found.
On Aug. 18, they met with and interviewed Pam and Terry Hobbs, who had accepted the deal with Dimension, at Terry’s house in Memphis. The following morning, before flying back to LA, they had breakfast with Jerry Driver. For the next few months, the screenwriters maintained contact with Lax by phone and email. Lax told them he was preparing to interview Terry Hobbs but asked them not to inform either Pam or Terry of that, as
investigators usually got better information if they showed up unannounced. The screenwriters told Lax where they’d located Hobbs.
Thus, by the end of 2006, the trials of the West Memphis Three were being scrutinized by professional investigators, academics, Hollywood writers, New York and New Zealand filmmakers and countless lay people online—from several angles, for many purposes. High school teachers were having students in advanced English classes compare Arthur Miller’s account of the Salem witch trials in his play, The Crucible, with the account of the West Memphis trials detailed in Devil’s Knot. Criminal justice teachers were using the case to illustrate investigative errors. A number of college graduates who’d learned of the case during the past decade went on to study law because of it.162 A journalism graduate student who analyzed pretrial reporting on the case by the region’s two biggest newspapers gave them generally high marks for fairness—except when it came to their reporting on what she called “occult rumors.”
“Despite reporting the rumors of Satanic activity, and despite reporting confirmations that the police were pursuing the occult angle in their investigation,” Holly Ballard wrote, “these newspapers never reported on evidence, or lack thereof, of a cult in the area where the boys’ bodies were found. This missing element reflects an overall reluctance on the part of the police throughout the investigation to reveal information to the media.” Though she noted that “no such evidence was ever reported by the police, the prosecution or the press any time before, during or since the trials,” the papers had “clearly paint[ed] a picture of the triple-murder as a Satanic ritual slaying.”163
Jason knew of Ballard’s paper because she had first contacted him after reading Devil’s Knot. He also knew that Jackson and Walsh were now involved in the case, not because they were working specifically for him, but because Philipsborn and Damien’s lawyer, Dennis Riordan, had, as Jackson put it, “a good relationship.” But, as with everything else Jason learned from his attorney, he told no one. Though he’d long ago outgrown the policy adopted at his arrest of not speaking unless spoken to, replacing it with savvy discretion, when it came to discussing his case—Jason simply didn’t. He kept up with it and let his attorneys speak for him. Absolutism made the policy easy. And it freed Jason to focus on what had become, to his surprise, a remarkable time in prison.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I was living life right then. A lot of good things were going on.” His “two-year work week” as a habilitation counselor was behind him. Compared to that, his new job at the field security office seemed like a vacation. As soon as he’d transferred here, Jason’s workload had lightened significantly. And now, with summer and the growing season over, work was even slower. The administrators there were an easy-going bunch; someone had even borrowed an electric guitar from the prison chapel that Jason could practice on when he’d finished his work on the computer. His legal hopes were higher than they’d been at any point since his conviction. And, to top off his happy outlook, he and his “great girl” had set a date to get married in January. For a guy serving life in prison, Jason, at twenty-nine, felt pretty darn good.
Chapter EIGHT
SUPERMAX
January 20, 2007 - June 25, 2007
The blow, when it came, landed a knockout. In a flash, the guitar, the field security job, the wedding, Jason’s life at Little Tucker itself—all were gone. One minute, he was “living life.” The next, he sat in a double-locked cell in Varner’s Supermax Unit. For the umpteenth time in his young life, Jason was back in the hole, in “punitive isolation.” This time, however, he was in something deeper—and darker—than even the terms “hole” and “punitive isolation” would suggest.
In Jason’s last days at Little Tucker, while he was blissfully unaware, prison officials had gotten word that someone within the system was selling contraband computers. Internal affairs officers zeroed in on Little Tucker, particularly the field security office. On Jan. 19, 2007, officers burst in on the little building. In a scene reminiscent of the night of his arrest, almost fourteen years before, they ordered Jason and his co-worker to sit on a couch while they searched the place. Officers confiscated the guitar and several computers, including some on which illegal video games had been installed. They ordered Jason and the other inmates back to their barracks. They put Jason and one other man into a van headed to Varner.
But this time, Jason wasn’t brought to the Varner Maximum Security Unit where he’d been twice before. From the sally port, guards led him to the Supermax Unit, where they confiscated everything Jason had except the clothes he was wearing. They took his books, radio, and Hacky Sack. They then led him to Isolation Block Four, where the guards placed him in Cell twelve. Jason knew these isolation cells here were harsher than those nearby on death row because there, at least, prisoners were allowed some possessions. This cell block was called “punitive” for a reason.
“Oh, yeah,” Jason said. “It’s super-restricted. Those cells don’t have TVs. They don’t have a shower, so you have to be taken out for that. You don’t get deodorant. You don’t get books. You can’t have any of your property. They’re like a cell with bars all around that’s inside a bigger cell. You can’t even reach the doorway. There’s no window that looks outside. At ‘lights-out,’ at night, they pass out mattresses and they collect them in the morning, so during the day, you don’t even have a mattress, just a concrete slab and a stainless steel toilet. It’s like, if the prison was Dante’s Inferno, punitive isolation is at the bottom. It’s punitive and it is punishment. So you’re just sitting in there all day. You can’t even lay down in there and sleep your time away.”
In prison, just as outside, there are rules to be followed before someone can be punished. Like police in the free world, prison officers are required to follow defined procedures. A person cannot be held indefinitely for questioning or on suspicion that they’ve done wrong. Policies require that an inmate be granted a hearing where evidence can be presented and his guilt or innocence judged before any form of punishment, such as isolation or loss of class, can be imposed.
But in January 2007, none of that happened to Jason. He was not charged with any rule violation. He was not granted a hearing. Officers simply questioned him about the computers, and when he did not tell them what they wanted to know, they put him in isolation in the hope of breaking his will.
This time, unlike when he was arrested and offered the deal by the prosecutors, Jason could have accommodated his interrogators without having to lie. Jason had known the moment he’d stepped into the field office that life there was too good to be true. The sofa, coffee table and big-screen TV—all those had been okay. But other amenities the office staff allowed, such as the guitar, were not. The guitar Jason was learning to play had been donated to the chapel, where it was surplus and not being used. Nevertheless, it was supposed to have stayed in the chapel. Being out of place made it contraband. But, while the guitar would have been problem enough, it was the computers with video games that had brought in internal affairs.
Jason saw quickly enough that the office staff was allowing things that weren’t by-the-book. But that wasn’t necessarily new. He’d encountered some form of laxity in every job he’d been given, going back to when staff at the school had left food to fatten him up. That had been illegal too, a violation of rules. But practically every supervisor in Jason’s experience had offered some similar kindness. “It’s just a human thing,” he said, “when you’re working close to people.”
Jason put the guitar into that category—against the rules but causing no harm. He didn’t learn about the more serious issues at the office until he’d been at the job for a while. He explained, “I get assigned to my state computer, and then I find out that my work partner also has this souped-up computer of his own. It has video games on it, and he says, ‘Do you want one? I can make sure it happens.’ He said he’d already had a few of these, over a span of many years. He’d gotten them, used them, and then, when he’d got a chance to up
grade, he’d sold his used one to some other inmate.”
Jason was quick on the computers he used at work, but he’d been yearning to see what he could do with one that wasn’t tied to a job. He was curious about the Internet, where he knew that minute details of his case were being discussed, but Internet access was out of the question. Games, however . . . It was 2007. Jason, closing in on thirty, hadn’t played a computer game since 1993—eons ago in terms of technology. “Sure,” he told his co-worker. Later, he would recall: “I had a bunch of video games and a program to help me learn the guitar and tune it.”
All that was cool. Then, another line was crossed. Every now and then, his co-worker showed him they could get on the Internet. That was dangerous. “He’d get on and do something and then log off real fast,” Jason said. “The server was, like, super-slow, so it wasn’t like we were sitting there surfing. All I wanted to do was go to WM3.org and see all this stuff I’d been hearing about.”
The fun lasted for about five months. Then, an inmate who had purchased a cast-off computer from Jason’s co-worker got caught with it. “That’s how the whole domino thing tipped over,” Jason said. A few questions, a few answers, and a few hours later, the department’s internal affairs officers were searching the field security office.
Contraband is a plague in prisons. Some forms are tolerated, like prescription eyeglasses provided for prisoners by family members and friends. Alcohol, or cell-made hooch, while not tolerated, is common. Marijuana is so prevalent that an inmate once smuggled a joint out of a prison to a reporter, just to prove he could. Periodic shakedowns in prisons almost always turn up drugs. Those kinds of things are par for the course. Weapons top the list, as the most serious contraband. But just under weapons on the list are devices for electronic communication—cell phones and computers. Prison administrators don’t want inmates communicating with victims, with homeboys back in the gang, with soft-hearted dupes they can rip off, or, especially, with other inmates. To administrators, control of communication inside a prison is as important as physical control. Yet, despite constant efforts to control black markets, they exist in all forms in most prisons.164
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