So the computers were a very big deal. On the day of the crackdown at the field security office, several inmates at Little Tucker were put into that unit’s hole. Jason and his co-worker were the only two sent away to the oblivion of Varner Supermax Unit. “They were using punitive isolation as leverage,” Jason said, “to try to make me give them information on staff members.” An officer from internal affairs visited Jason regularly. “He’d say, ‘Baldwin, I’m not mad at you. Shoot. If I was an inmate and somebody offered me a computer, I’d take it too. So I don’t blame you a bit. I’m mad at the officers who let all this go on.’ And, of course, he wants me to name them. But I’m, like, ‘Shit. I can’t help you with that.’ I’m like, ‘I know I was breaking the rules, so go ahead and punish me. Do what you need to do so we can move forward.’ I didn’t fight them; I was guilty. But I wasn’t going to give them information. So I was just sitting. I was going to be hardheaded as long as they were going to be hardheaded. I thought they were going to keep me back there for the remainder of my time.”
Three days after Jason was moved, a reporter who’d emailed the prison department to inquire was informed that, while Jason had been transferred to the Supermax, he had not been charged with a rule violation, nor had he been busted in class. “All that has happened is that some sort of investigation has been started,” the spokesperson said, adding that Jason was being held on “investigative status.” Later, Jason denied that report. He said that, in fact, he was never assigned to investigative status but, rather, was held under circumstances that fit none of the department’s requirements. “They should have assigned me to investigative status,” he said, “because then I would have been allowed to have my property, like Damien was allowed to have his. ” 165 But that’s not what they did.
Before the shakedown at the field security office, the Arkansas Times reported that Jason planned to be married on Jan. 24, 2007, to a woman from Georgia. But, needless to say, prisoners in the hole aren’t allowed to hold weddings. His intended was allowed occasional visits with him at the Supermax, however. The first of those, a bare week after his arrival, was especially remarkable because it brought together, not just Jason and his fiancée for the first time since his bust, but Damien and Lorri, as well.
Visits to men housed in the Supermax are held in a tightly controlled area walled with bars through which visitors and inmates can see who’s visiting whom. Under certain circumstances, particularly when visitors are members of an inmate’s family, they are allowed into the locked visitation cell with their loved one for what is called a “contact” visit.
Jason was allowed a contact visit with his girlfriend, and when they looked around, they saw Lorri there visiting Damien. All four were stunned. “We were like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s going on?’” Jason recalled. He estimated that he and Damien got to talk for ten to twenty minutes. It was enough time for Jason to explain that he was now at the Supermax too, that he and his girlfriend were going to be married, but that, “Obviously, I’m in trouble, so the wedding’s been postponed.” Damien laughed. “I think we’d been repressed for so long,” Jason said, “Damien thought it was funny.” At first, the woman visited Jason “quite often,” he said, but as his weeks in solitary confinement turned into months, she “just drifted away.”
According to regulations, Jason should have had a hearing at the end of his first thirty days in the hole, before that time could be extended. But as his sojourn in punitive isolation had never gone according to policy anyway, that date in mid-February came and went without a hearing or anything else to mark Jason’s ambiguous status. Officers investigating the computer affair told him point blank that he could be released if he talked. Because he wouldn’t, he remained without television, books, natural light, or the simple comfort of a mat on his concrete slab during the daytime, with no end in sight. Yet, because all inmates are required to be allowed contact with their attorneys, Jason was kept informed about the activity in Memphis.
Another drama—this one at the heart of Jason’s case—was unfolding across the Mississippi River, one hundred fifty miles away in Memphis. By the end of January 2007, the DNA testing was almost complete. Analysts continued to review some data, and some non-DNA evidence still remained to be evaluated, but the results already in hand provided information that Damien’s attorney, Dennis Riordan, publicly predicted would “shed significant light on the case.” The tests, he said, had revealed the profile of an “unknown” person associated with the murders. As the attorneys arranged to meet with prosecutor Brent Davis to discuss the new scientific evidence in advance of planned court action, Ron Lax turned his attention to Terry Hobbs.
On Saturday, February 24th, Lax and one of his investigators, Rachael Geiser, drove unannounced to Hobbs’s house. According to the six-page report Geiser dictated two days later, “Terry was sleeping when we arrived, as he told us he had returned from the casinos in Tunica, Mississippi, at approximately 5:00 A.M. We arrived a little after 9:00 A.M. He did invite us into his home, where we spoke in the living room. When we arrived, Terry asked us to wait for a minute while he disappeared to put in his false teeth. He did joke that his false teeth “have nothing to do with the bite marks.”
Geiser continued, “While Terry was putting in his false teeth, I did notice a very large cigarette ashtray lying on the table in front of me, at which time I confiscated two cigarette butts.” She wrote that the butts would be forwarded to attorneys. So too would be a tape-recording of the “conversation with Terry” that she and Lax conducted. She noted that Hobbs had “seemed more than willing” to answer their questions.166
By the time Lax and Geiser visited with Hobbs, the prison department reported that at least nineteen inmates had been punished as a result of the computer-smuggling probe at Tucker, and that eleven employees had either resigned or been fired.167 The department did not report the extent or irregular circumstances of Jason’s confinement. He occupied a cell in a “limbo that seemed to stretch out forever.” Still, he saw his punishment plainly: it was the price he had to pay, first, for knowingly violating rules and taking risks back at the field security office, and second, for refusing to help the state in its investigation, which seemed to be ongoing.
On March 14, as the end of Jason’s second thirty-day stint in punitive approached, the Times contacted the prison spokesman again to ask about Jason’s status. It had not changed, the official reported; he had not been charged with a rule violation and he had not been reduced in class. This time, however, his time in the hole was not arbitrarily extended. On March 16, Jason was taken from his cell-within-a-cell and placed into another one at the Supermax— one that resembled those on death row, in that it had a shower and TV, and he got back his books and possessions. Now, he was told, he was being held in “administrative confinement.” Three weeks later, Jason observed his thirtieth birthday—his fourteenth birthday behind bars.
Though “administrative confinement” is still isolation, Jason’s condition certainly eased. He received the birthday cards that committed supporters sent, grateful, as always, for the encouragement. A few of his correspondents reported the interesting news that was percolating out of Marion and Jonesboro: Burnett was making it widely known that he would not run for re-election as judge, but planned instead to campaign for a seat in the Arkansas Senate; and Brent Davis, the longtime prosecuting attorney, had announced his intention to campaign for Burnett’s vacated seat on the bench.
“nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
~ Edmund Burke
As interest in the West Memphis case continued to spread, people around the world were now turning regularly to sites such as WM3.org, jivepuppi.com, and Callahan.8k.com to learn more. Of those sites, WM3.org and jivepuppi.com both pronounced their beliefs in the men’s innocence. Only Callahan.8k.com remained a neutral archive. But, while Christian Hansen had started that site believing the men to be guilty, the material he’d gathered on his own
website had by now convinced him otherwise.
Since 2001, when Hansen began putting West Memphis case-related documents online from his apartment in Denmark, he had received help in the forms of legwork, posting work and donations from a few committed fans. One of those, who asked to be identified only as Greg, was a computer programmer in Arkansas who’d grown up near West Memphis. When Hansen notified supporters in 2004 that he was no longer interested in keeping up his site, Greg took it over, paying for it and adding to the archive with the help of other supporters. Eventually, Hansen resumed his duties as the site’s webmaster, though Greg remained involved. When asked how he viewed the site’s importance, he responded modestly, “I consider it somewhat important, in that both sides of the controversy have complimented it;” then added, “Callahan is more fair than the trials the WM3 received.”
In 2007, the year Jason went to the Supermax, another important contributor joined the Callahan effort. Monte Walker was a thirty-seven year old single dad living in Flintville, Tennessee. He had a business degree in marketing, and worked in transportation and agriculture. He was also, he said, “one of those people that recorded and watched the entire O.J. Simpson trial” and became “interested in true crime and the justice system” from that point on.
By the spring of 2007, Walker had seen the West Memphis documentaries, read the books, and finished reading the entire Callahan website, except the pleadings section. “I had been under the impression that all of the evidence files were on the site,” he said. He emailed Hansen to let him know how much he appreciated Callahan and to ask if there was any way he could help. Walker said, “That started a chain of correspondence from which I learned that only a fraction—maybe fifty percent—of the case file was online. With as much fulfillment as I had received from Callahan, it was an easy decision to get involved and ‘complete’ the case documents section.”
That summer, Walker put together a team of a half-dozen people to help him copy the entire file on the case at the West Memphis Police Department. It took about a year for the team to copy thousands of documents. Years later, Walker said he believed, “The real story behind Callahan’s is two-fold. First, Christian lives in Denmark, and from there has worked hard to provide us all with case information. And second, that so many people volunteered to acquire documents or contribute to Callahan in some way (as noted in the site’s Credits section).
Simultaneously to Walker’s work, momentum in the case was beginning to build in Arkansas. Stidham was invited to speak about it at the state’s largest school, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, near the same time that plans were announced to hold a rally called “Standing for Justice: A Show of Solidarity among WM3 Supporters” in Marion, on the lawn of the Crittenden County Courthouse. The event, scheduled for June 2, 2007, would coincide with the fifth Worldwide Awareness Day on behalf of the West Memphis Three.
Arkansas supporters approached the date with some apprehension. The county judge, who was informed in advance, told organizers that he was “notifying the local law enforcement agencies . . . just in case any incidents were to get out of hand.” A discreet police presence was evident, but the event proceeded peacefully. Approximately sixty people attended. They came from more than a dozen Arkansas cities and towns, from states as near as Tennessee and Mississippi and as far away as Delaware, Arizona, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and California.
They stood in a circle holding hands in silence while a bell tolled once a minute fourteen times. Each ring of the bell—each minute—represented an entire year that Damien, Jason, and Jessie had already spent in prison. Three white roses represented the murdered children. The circle included the handful of women who’d organized the state’s earliest rallies: the Green Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate, the university instructor who’d been the first to bring the case into her classroom, a Nashville criminal justice teacher and students, the grad student who’d analyzed the case’s pretrial publicity, and other devoted supporters, including Jessie Misskelley’s father. 168
It’s safe to say that no one at that early June event had the slightest notion of how much pressure was now bearing down on Terry Hobbs, across the river in Memphis. On May 18, Lax and Geiser had attempted to interview Hobbs again at his house, but neighbors told them that Hobbs had moved. According to Lax’s report, the women said Hobbs told them that he was “very sad” because of his wife, his children, and “the children in West Memphis.”
Yet Lax was able to locate Hobbs, and the following day, two Saturdays before the rally in Marion, Hobbs met with the investigator at Inquisitor’s office in Memphis. Lax reported, “Since he had just left work (he reports he is working at a lumber company in West Memphis), his dirty clothing was understandable, but he looked tired and ill kempt. He had not shaved in two or three days, and he appeared as a man under a great deal of pressure; however, his conversation was upbeat.”
Hoping to collect additional DNA samples, Lax offered Hobbs coffee, soft drinks and water, all of which he declined. He had also placed an ashtray on the table, in anticipation of Hobbs smoking, but he never did.
Lax wrote, “After Hobbs spoke about his recent downward turn of circumstances, I told him there was additional trouble for him that had recently been discovered. I explained that a hair had been found under the ligatures that bound Michael Moore and that the hair had been sent for testing. He immediately commented that he was aware that additional testing had been done, which he thought was long overdue. I then told him that DNA had been isolated from the hair, and we wanted to collect DNA samples from all of the family members and of others who had access to the crime scene so we could eliminate individuals. At this time I asked him if he would be willing to provide us with DNA samples. He immediately stated that he would want to talk to D.A. Brent Davis first.
“After additional conversation, I told him that the DNA from the hair did not match the DNA profile of Damien, Jason or Jessie, nor did it match the DNA profile of Stevie, Chris or Michael. Hobbs’ immediate response was, ‘Who does it match?’ When I hesitated, he urged me to tell him. I told him that the DNA profile matched his. He did not appear surprised or shocked and commented that it was wrong. I told him the science was not wrong, and he then stated that Michael Moore had been in his house, and the hair could have been transferred. I pointed out that we did not know whose shoelaces had been used to tie up each of the boys, but the hair had been found in the knot of one of the ligatures.”
As this point, Geiser, who participated in the interview, invited Hobbs to smoke. Hobbs laughed and commented that the investigators just wanted his DNA and that they could probably get it from the sweat or skin particles he was leaving on the table. In fact, Geiser did take a swab from the table after Hobbs left, and the sample was forwarded to the attorneys.
Lax’s report continued, “He then asked if we wanted a hair sample. I told him a hair sample, blood, or a cheek swab. He again commented that he wanted to talk to Brent Davis prior to agreeing to provide a DNA sample. At no point did he become angry, antagonistic or even belligerent. He maintained a very cool and calm demeanor throughout our meeting.
“Hobbs informed us that he had spoken to Brent Davis earlier in the week, but when we asked for what purpose, he was vague, stating, ‘Just some things that have come up.’ During this conversation, he said Davis had told him and other family members in the past that ‘they’ were going to be responsible for the reversal of this case if they kept talking. I asked if Davis was aware that we interviewed him in February, and he said that he was and that Davis had told him he should not talk to us.”
But other people were more willing to talk. Within the next several weeks, Geiser spoke to Hobb’s first wife, with whom he’d lived for a time in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and with Mildred French, a woman in Hot Springs who reported being assaulted by Hobbs. The picture that emerged from the interviews was one of a man, in the decade before the West Memphis murders, who had
beaten his first wife bloody and broken into a neighbor’s home, where he’d grabbed her from behind as she’d stepped naked from the shower.169
“A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.”
~ Charles Evans Hughes
The finding of hair traced to Hobbs in the ligatures could not be dismissed. On June 19, 2007, the same day that Geiser interviewed French, an officer at the West Memphis Police Department interviewed Pam Hobbs about her ex-husband. Lt. Ken Mitchell opened the questioning by telling Pam that police understood she might have some new information about the case and that they were there at the request of prosecutor Brent Davis.
Pam Hobbs told Mitchell that she had married Stevie’s father, Steve Branch, and had subsequently gotten divorced. She married Terry Hobbs in 1986, and they had a daughter, Amanda, together. During the recorded interview, Pam matter-of-factly outlined events on the day that Stevie disappeared, and how he was not home at around 4:50 p.m., as he’d been told to be, when she had to leave for work. But she seemed to become upset when describing how she did not know until the end of her shift, at nine that night, that Stevie was still not home. She said that, when Terry came to pick her up at the Catfish Island restaurant where she worked, he’d gone directly to a pay phone inside, and she didn’t know whom he was calling. Instead, it was her four-year-old daughter Amanda, not Terry, who had told her, “Momma, we can’t find him.” When Terry returned, he told Pam that he had gone inside to call the police to report Stevie missing.
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