Dark Spell

by Mara Leveritt

  19 Arrest report, Nov. 15, 1992. http://callahan.8k.com/images/ jasonb/baldwin_prior_arrest.JPG

  20 Statement signed by Lt. James Sudbury, date unknown. In the statement, Sudbury wrote that: “On the day after the bodies of the three boys were found I had a conversation with Steve Jones, a Juvenile Officer for Crittenden County, Arkansas. In our conversation, I found that Steve and I shared the same opinion that the murders appeared to have overtones of a cult sacrifice.” The statement described a visit Jones and Sudbury paid to Damien’s house, the Polaroid photo taken of him and the officer’s observation of “a tattoo on his chest of a five pointed star or pentagram…”

  21 Jason’s mother, recalled that, “When they came to my house that night, they brought Jessie’s so-called confession and a search warrant listing what kind of items they were looking for;” that the warrant mentioned “different colored fabrics,” specifically red, blue and green; that they also searched for “waxy material” and “some kind of cult-related items”; that they “took a blue rug out of my bathroom”; that “they took all of Jason’s rock t-shirts that were black, even though they weren’t supposed to be looking for black”; that police said the shirts were taken because they were “cult-related”; and that they stayed “for a good hour and a half, going through things.” Jason’s brother Matt wrote that he was staying at a friend’s house the night Jason was arrested, sleeping in the back yard in a makeshift tent. “We decided to go for a walk. We noticed a lot of police cars go by. By the time we reached Domini’s home, we noticed a swat-like team with automatic weaponry all over her property, even on top of their home. I began to fear the worst. They had been badgering my friend Damien for a month, and I had heard all the rumors the cops, probation officers, and prosecutor had been spreading.” Matt said he asked his friend’s father to escort him home. “Upon arrival I see all these cops with guns. One cop in particular says to me, ‘We arrested your brother for those kids’ murders.’ And I told him my brother didn’t do it. I cried. I went in and saw my brother’s room being ransacked. That night was one of the worst nights of my life.”

  22 Before questioning Jessie, police had taken a confusing statement from members of a family known as the Hollingsworths, part of which included the claim that on the night the boys disappeared they’d seen Damien and his girlfriend walking near the site where the bodies were later discovered. Police also had a statement from William Jones, an eighteen year-old who lived in Lakeshore Trailer Park, in which Jones said Damien had confessed committing the murders to him. Jones later recanted that statement.

  23 Jessie’s questioning began at ten in the morning and ended after 5 p.m. Many of Jessie’s statements contradicted each other. The contents of the two recorded parts of the interview illuminate the start of the case and what would become its trajectory. At one point a detective told Jessie, “You mentioned earlier … this cult thing…” The word “cult” would be mentioned fifteen times in the course of those two recordings, but the first time it is mentioned, it is spoken by a detective. Jessie referred twice to “when we had that cult,” each time in exactly those words. The other twelve times the word is heard on the tapes, it is spoken by a detective. As evidence, the recorded snippets of Jessie’s interview were far from perfect. But compared to anything else the police had developed so far, they stood out as monumental. The detectives held a hurried conference with Fogleman outside the room where Jessie sat waiting to be sent home. The prosecutor decided that Jessie’s statements constituted sufficient cause to arrest him and to find and arrest Damien and Jason. In an unusual move, the judge who signed arrest warrants for all three teenagers ordered that the warrants remain sealed. As a result, when detectives announced at a press conference the next morning that the killers had been apprehended, the public had no idea how thin the police case was. Several issues relating to Jessie’s confession were raised in his direct appeal. The Arkansas Supreme Court dismissed them all, though it noted that playing the tape recording of a child’s voice saying, “Nobody knows what happened but me,” came “perilously close” to overbearing the teenager’s free will. http://opinions.aoc.arkansas.gov/weblink8/0/doc/167688/ Electronic.aspx

  24 Det. Ridge later told Jason’s mother that Jason had refused to talk to the police.

  25 In Arkansas, juveniles in police custody must initiate any request for a lawyer. Even a parent present at the station cannot insist that an attorney be allowed in with a juvenile who’s being questioned if the juvenile himself has not exercised his right to an attorney.

  26 Jason was making a common mistake, thinking the tests were meant to exclude him if he was innocent. In fact, the samples were ordered as part of the state’s attempt to build its case.

  27 Jason, Damien and Jessie appeared before William P. Rainey, a West Memphis municipal judge. Hours earlier, Rainey had authorized the arrests of the three and issued search warrants for their homes. When questioned later about the unusual nighttime searches, Rainey testified that he’d been told by Chief Detective Gary Gitchell and Det. Bryn Ridge of the city’s police department that there existed a “close relationship between the alleged perpetrators;” that there was evidence that “possibly could be removed or destroyed” if not gathered immediately; “that you had three parties who had been in close contact with each other and would be very available to converse with each other, and the overall circumstances of the type of crime that this was, the obvious violent nature of it.” Rainey said he had found “the totality” of the information Gitchell and Ridge reported to him about what Jessie had said during questioning “very credible.”

  28 Newspapers did not report where Jason, Damien and Jessie were being held. I doubt many reporters knew; I certainly didn’t. But I was intrigued by how much remained unknown about this case, especially since no one even knew what the arrest warrants contained. Three weeks after the three teens were jailed, I wrote my first column about the case in the weekly Arkansas Times. Like other reporters, I recounted rumors about the accused. They’d been noticed at the local skating rink, I wrote, “not because of any trouble they caused, but because of Echols’ distinctive style of dress, black with a long overcoat.” I’d interviewed several West Memphis residents soon after the arrests, when The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published excerpts from Jessie’s statements to police on its front page. “Now,” I wrote, “only a few speak of the defendants as human…. Instead, the killings’ Satanic overtones, the victims’ age, and the reported brutalities drive the crimes to a deeper place in the psyche, a place resistant to natural explanations, where religion and emotion converge.”

  29 The length of time Jason was held without contacting his family is uncertain. His mother recollected that she was not told Jason’s whereabouts for about four days. “Paul Ford kept telling me he was in Jonesboro, and I kept going to Jonesboro,” she said, “And they would tell me he wasn’t there. They kept lying to me. Finally, Paul Ford called me and told me they were setting up a phone call or visit for me.” Matt Baldwin recalled: “I brought his iguana Ozzy there on one occasion.” Matt said, that when his mom “ended up having a nervous breakdown” and being hospitalized, it was “one of the saddest things [he’d] ever seen anyone go through;” that when he returned to school after the arrests, “I had friends that would ask me if my brother had murdered those children;” that “I was in constant defense of my brother and friends;” that “I stopped doing my work in school” and “started listening to music during class, and “the teachers wouldn’t even pass out work to me,”; and that he was in school with Fogleman’s son. “I sat right next to him in science class. I never talked to him, though. I thought of talking to him to send messages to his dad, like, ‘Hey, lay off my brother, you know he’s innocent. Drop the case. What’s the matter with you?’”

  30 Davis and Fogleman, both now judges, declined to be interviewed for this book.

  31 In a tape-recorded author interview with Fogleman on April 23, 2001, when he was asked if he had concerns that so
meone might have planted the knife, Fogleman said that, as far as he was aware, no one knew that the search was to be conducted but the police: “It crossed my mind that there was a possibility that if the word got out that we were going to do this search, that somebody, say the ‘real murderer’ could have gone out and planted it, but then it occurred to me, they would have had to know, not just that we were going to look, but when we were going to do it.” It is clear, however, that many people knew of the search in advance, as reporters from several media were at the lake, recording images of the diver emerging with a knife.

  32 Jason’s mother, Gail Grinnell ,said, “Ford did talk to Hubert. My uncle gave a statement and Ford recorded it.”

  33 In an author interview on July 3, 2012, Joyce Cureton said that she had worked at the detention center since 1988; that Jason was kept in lockdown—“where we can have visual of them, like if they’re on suicide watch”—in the jail’s hospital room for about a week; that Craighead County Sheriff Larry Emisom “said he wanted him in there and to never let him out except for a shower”; that Jason was kept confined “twenty four hours a day, not able to get out into the day room, where tables and TV and everything was”; that “you can’t treat a juvenile the way you do an adult;” that “it would have been illegal for me to keep him in constant lockdown”; that she moved Jason to a cell from which he could at least see the TV; that “Emisom backed down when I moved Jason because he knew I’d been trained in the juvenile;” that she realized soon after Jason’s arrival that he was neither a suicide risk or a threat; that “It didn’t take me but about a week to see that all that was a crop of bull, so I started letting Jason out of his room;” that as she got to know Jason, “What I saw in him was a little boy in a place where he didn’t need to be”; that “You couldn’t keep from caring about him; all of the girls that worked for me cared about Jason because he was one of these kids that never gave you any trouble, never back talked you— everything was ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ ‘May I please?’—he was just so well mannered”; that “He just wasn’t the kid that they had portrayed him to be”; and that after one has run a juvenile jail for years, “it don’t take you long to figure out if a kid is rotten, or if he’s a good kid, or a spoiled kid, or what have you.”

  34 “To Die For,” SMUG Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2000.

  35 Email from Joe Berlinger, Nov. 29, 2012: “When we arrived is an important distinction to me because we spent eight months embedding ourselves in the community and really getting almost unprecedented access to all sides, which is much stronger reporting/documentary filmmaking than just showing up for the trials … The achievement of Paradise Lost is those first eight months, not simply the recording of a trial which anyone could have done, but what we actually achieved during the eight months prior to the trial is to me the real success of the film. And, I think this distinction of when we arrived is also very important for the history [because] it wasn’t just Judge Burnett’s decision… He told us that his decision was going to be based on the approval (of cameras in the courtroom) of ALL parties, so we had to convince ALL SIX defense lawyers, BOTH prosecutors and ALL SIX FAMILIES. That is a very tall order and was only possible because we spent those first eight months prior to the trial in West Memphis building strong relationships with ALL parties.”

  36 This case arose just as Arkansas was changing its system for paying public defenders in capital cases from the counties’ responsibility to the state’s. As a result, none of the defense attorneys was paid for his work on the case until well after the trials, and they had no money for investigations. Attorneys representing the defendants have said that they accepted stipends from the filmmakers on their clients’ behalf, to pay for investigations and expert witnesses.

  37 Years later, in 2005, investigator Thomas Quinn interviewed Jones, who mentioned the visit to Jason. Quinn swore an affidavit stating that Jones said he’d told Jason during the visit that he believed he was innocent and that he’d offered his assistance.

  38 Arkansas’s Second Judicial District is comprised of six counties in the northeast corner of the state. Judge Burnett had the discretion of working from any courthouse in the district. Judicial proceedings in the West Memphis case were held in Marion, the county seat of Crittenden County in the southernmost part of the district, where West Memphis is located; in Jonesboro, the seat of Craighead County, where the district prosecutor’s office is headquartered; and in Corning, home to one of the two courthouses that serve Clay County, the county farthest north.

  39 Merriam-Webster defines “trial” as “a formal meeting in a court in which evidence about crimes, disagreements, etc., is presented to a judge and often a jury so that decisions can be made according to the law.” Dictionary.com defines “trial” as “the determination of a person’s guilt or innocence by due process of law.” And Black’s Law Dictionary defines “trial” as “a judicial examination and determination of issues between parties to action, whether they be issues of law or of fact, before a court that has jurisdiction.” Jason might have been surprised to learn that few definitions of the word “trial” contain the word “truth.”

  40 “Prosecutor realizes he has his hands full,” by Bartholomew Sullivan, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Jan. 16, 1994. http:// westmemphisthreediscussion.yuku.com/topic/2729#. UhvMJhbvwb0

  41 Jessie was convicted on two counts of second-degree murder and one count of first-degree murder. His attorney, Dan Stidham, wrote a synopsis of Misskelley’s case that was posted on the website WM3.org. In that he wrote: “We learned, after the trial, that the first vote the jury took in the jury room was eight for conviction, four for acquittal. Despite the limitation the court imposed on us, we were able to convince four jurors he was innocent. We only needed one strong-willed juror for a hung jury and ultimate mistrial, which would have been the next best thing to an acquittal. The eight wore down the four, however, and they reached a compromise verdict. Although we didn’t get an acquittal, we were fortunate enough to avoid a capital murder conviction, and thus the death penalty.”

  42 The state Supreme Court would later note that the case against Jessie rested almost entirely on his recorded statements to police; there was no other evidence of substance against him. Yet Jessie’s statements alone had been enough to convince the jury. It had not mattered that Jessie’s lawyer, Dan Stidham, had argued that the boy’s mixed-up statements constituted a “false confession.” The term was relatively new at the time, and though Stidham presented a reputable expert to testify that people do sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit, the jury found that hard to believe.

  43 T.J. Williams, interviewed at his home in Corning, Mar. 24, 2012. The population of Corning, about an hour and a half north of West Memphis, is about thirty four hundred and ninety seven percent white. Williams grew up there and did factory work. He described himself as a “sports nut” who, though not religious, believed in his “own little way.” Before the trial, he said he’d seen news of the murders on CNN and heard “gossip” at his factory about “all the boys being sexually abused, Satanic worship and stuff.” The murders occurred on his daughter’s fifth birthday and his two sons were younger. Williams said the fact that the victims were children had “no effect” on him, though he did worry before the arrests, “Could they [the killers] be coming here to Corning?” This was Williams’ third time on a jury and he took the role seriously. “Oh, my gosh,” he said, “you’ve got somebody’s life in your hands. You don’t look forward to doing anything like that, but I wouldn’t try to get out of it, either.” He said the duty was stressful and that he was nervous going into it, “because it’s such a big thing.” As the jury was being selected, he said he realized that he had “an advantage because all I watch is sports.” Most of what he’d heard of the case had come “just from people talking.” He said he knew most of the other jurors. “We all came from the same cut,” he said. “Most of us went to school together.” What follows are other excerpts from the interview, arranged by topic. On
Burnett: “I’d say he was stern, pretty much my-way-or-no-way.” On Jessie’s attorney, Dan Stidham: “He was doing the best he could, but he didn’t have much to work with; it looked like he was new at it.” On Prosecutor Davis: “He kinda scared me because he was really hard and direct. He looked right at you. He wasn’t messing around. He knew his job. He got to the point. He didn’t walk around it.” On Fogleman: “He was very charismatic. You liked him right away. A lot of times when he was talking to the jury, it felt like he was talking to me. He made a lot of eye-contact and I liked that. Between him and Davis, I got the feeling that he was in charge. He did most of the talking to us, and he did most of the questioning.” On Jessie: “Seeing Jessie brought in with his bullet-proof vest, all shackled up, like you see on TV, and here it was in real life, it was a thrill. Jessie’s lawyer kept saying Jessie was mentally challenged . . . but he said he knew the difference between right and wrong. [Jessie’s age] did not really matter. You know right from wrong. You know when you’re doing something wrong when you’re four years old or younger. You’re taught it. Yeah, he was slow, probably not as smart as everybody else, but he did know. To me, the doctor saying he knew right from wrong was what mattered most. I would have liked to see him get up there [to testify]. I’m not saying it would have changed anything, but it might have. [Seeing Jessie at the defense table] keeping his head down made me feel like he was ashamed. He didn’t want to be there no more. There were a few times, when they were talking about specific stuff, he looked like, if he could have, he would have crawled under the table.” On his alibi: “I felt a lot of people were lying about where he was at and stuff. His alibi had him in all these places at the same time, and towards the end of the trial, his side had all these people saying he was wrestling. The last guy the prosecutor brought in was the guy who rented the ring, and it was the week before [that Jessie had been there], and he had the receipt. And, like the next day, he got a call from his company that he was being transferred. That was one reason he remembered the date.” On having the victims’ bikes in the courtroom: “They didn’t matter to me, but it was kind of an eerie thing, seeing them sitting there in the room with us.” On the sticks prosecutors introduced as possible murder weapons: “I didn’t pay them much mind, because they said they didn’t know if this was the murder weapon or not, I thought, ‘Then why are they here?’” On photos of the victims: “Some of us were looking at the photos of the little boys. They bothered me because they’re pretty gruesome. There was a few of the ladies that just didn’t want to look at them.” On the unrecorded parts of Jessie’s police interview: