Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (40 page)

The day dawned cold and overcast. The chamber was packed to standing room only as Mallett and a lawyer for the Arkansas attorney general’s office made their brief presentations.
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Standing before the seven robed justices, Mallett reiterated many of the points he’d argued in his petition to Judge Burnett. Again, he stressed the conflict of interest he asserted Damien’s lawyers had created by involving Damien in the documentary. Then Mallett added another complaint, this one aimed specifically at Judge Burnett. Mallett told the justices that in Judge Burnett’s cursory ruling denying Damien’s petition, he had failed to address each point the defense attorneys had raised, and so he had not offered his “findings of fact and conclusions of law” as Arkansas’s Rule 37 required. Instead, Burnett had addressed only a few of the defense lawyer’s points. He had ignored others entirely. And the rest he had simply dismissed with a few broad strokes. An attorney for the state argued that Burnett’s responses were sufficient and that to now send the issue back to the judge for a more detailed order would do “gross injustice to the issue of finality.”

It was over in less than an hour. Outside, as reporters gathered around Mallett, the West Memphis Three supporters began to unfurl a banner across the front of the Justice Building. While television cameras panned the colorful 160-foot display, one of the Web site’s founders explained that it had been created from some three thousand postcards sent by the inmates’ supporters from around the world.

Reporters asked what the supporters thought they could accomplish with their demonstration. Did they expect to influence the justices? An answer appeared that night on the Web site. “Instead of becoming discouraged, and feeling powerless against the justice system,” the site’s cofounder wrote, “it seems that a good number of people are still hopeful enough to believe that their support and their efforts can really bring about a change for the better.” Mallett offered a more lawyerly reaction. “A naivete runs through American culture that assumes ‘if I make a lot of noise, judicial behavior will be affected,’” he later told a reporter.
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However, he added, “I don’t think judges are favorably affected by young people’s groups and websites.”

A month after the oral arguments, the justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court issued their ruling. Without addressing most of Mallett’s arguments, they agreed with him on one: that Judge Burnett’s broad-brush denial of Damien’s Rule 37 petition had not met the requirements of law, particularly as it concerned an inmate who’d been sentenced to death.
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The justices sent the petition back to Burnett, ordering him to specifically address each issue Damien’s lawyers had raised.

The high court’s ruling merely tossed the case back to Burnett. Still, Mallett noted, it did mark the first time in the history of the trials that the appellate court had found even the slightest error. No one expected that when Burnett reissued his order addressing the defense lawyer’s points, the ruling’s effect would be any different. And a few months later, when Burnett finally issued his revised response, that assumption was proven correct. Even so, Mallett and the other lawyers were astounded when they read the new document. Instead of delineating his findings of fact and conclusions of law, as the court had demanded, Burnett had, on point after point, simply copied the attorney general’s brief verbatim and issued that as his ruling.

“This is very unusual in a criminal case,” Mallett complained. “The court didn’t make independent findings. We think this violates the principle of an independent review of the evidence.”
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Again, Damien’s lawyers appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court to consider for itself whether or not Damien’s representation at trial had met the standards required by law.
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While Damien’s lawyers focused on the issues before the state Supreme Court, Stidham found himself stymied with regard to his motion to retest certain physical evidence for DNA. In May 2001, Stidham reminded Judge Burnett of the motion he had filed six months earlier. “Your Honor,” Stidham wrote in a letter, “we still have no hearing date on our motion to retest the physical evidence in this matter.” Stidham pointed out that Jessie’s Rule 37 petition had been pending for nearly four years and that Jessie was “eager” to have the new tests conducted.

But eight more months passed without a response from Judge Burnett. In February 2002, Stidham wrote again: “Dear Judge Burnett: It has been almost a year since I requested that my Motion to Preserve and Retest Evidence in this case be set for a hearing…. May I request that it be set infront of a different judge?” Stidham added, “This case is almost nine years old and I would really like to move it along.” For Stidham, who was now a municipal judge in his hometown of Paragould, Arkansas, the fight had been a long one—and promised to be longer still. “There’s been times when I’ve wished they were guilty, so I could get on with it and put this to bed,” he said. “But they’re not.” Burnett finally responded. A tentative hearing date on the DNA evidence was set for November 2002.

After nearly nine years, frustration with the legal processes was demoralizing almost everyone involved with the inmates’ appeal. Since their convictions, the hopes of all three had hung largely on the outcome of Damien’s appeals, since a new trial for him, if one were granted, would indirectly impact the appeals of the other two as well. But by the spring of 2002, with the ninth anniversary of the murders approaching, Damien’s Rule 37 appeal and his petition for a writ of
error coram nobis
still awaited rulings from the Arkansas Supreme Court.
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“We’re going to try to win the case in state court,” Mallett said. Somewhat wearily, he added, “There is a federal process available, if we do not succeed.”
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Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell resigned from the West Memphis Police Department two months after Damien and Jason’s convictions. The forty-one-year-old detective announced that he was moving across the river to Memphis, to work for Pinkerton Investigation Services.
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In August 2000, he told a reporter for the Internet magazine Salon.com, that he still “adamantly” believed in the guilt of the three accused killers. “You’ve got a lot of circumstantial evidence is what you’ve got,” Salon quoted Gitchell as saying. “There’s no smoking gun. This is not a smoking-gun-type case.”
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Detective Allen was eventually promoted to captain. In one of his rare public comments, he told a reporter for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
“If I just watched those documentaries and knew nothing else about the case, I would have questions too. I would say to myself, ‘Those boys might not have done it. There are a thousand and one questions. This is a crying shame.’ But the reality is HBO did a one-sided, biased job. They did the case a real injustice. If this country gets to the point where, instead of a trial, we say, ‘Let’s have HBO do what they do and have people e-mail the courts, well…” At that point, the article noted, Allen’s voiced trailed off. Then, it said, he added, “As I know the case, I can sleep at night in peace, knowing who killed those kids.”
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Bryn Ridge also remained with the West Memphis police. Like Allen, he criticized the documentary and the “stupidity” of the people who were supporting Damien, Jason, and Jessie. “I looked at the entire case,” he said in 2002, “and I am convinced that those are the three.” But Ridge, like the other investigators, was short on specifics as to why. “I’m not going to talk about that,” he said.

Detective Don Bray, of the Marion Police Department, who’d introduced Vicki Hutcheson and her son Aaron into the investigation, suffered a debilitating stroke shortly after the trials.

Steve Jones, the juvenile officer who’d made the first crucial find in the case—the child’s tennis shoe floating in the water—resigned as a juvenile officer a year after the trials. He moved away from West Memphis.

Jones’s boss, Jerry Driver, who’d been the first to suggest that Damien, Jason, and Jessie should all be considered suspects, was placed on administrative leave in February 1997, after an audit of his department found a shortage of nearly $30,000. He resigned from the Crittenden County Juvenile Probation Office the following month.
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Three years later, on January 21, 2000, Driver appeared in court before Judge Burnett to face a charge of theft. When Driver pleaded no contest, Burnett placed him on probation for ten years and ordered him to repay the missing funds at a rate of $241 per month.
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Lieutenant James Sudbury, like Gitchell, Allen, and Ridge, had little to say about the case in the decade after the trials, though he made his opinions clear. When a reporter visited the department in 2001 to examine evidence held in storage, Sudbury escorted her to the vault, where he told the officer in charge, “She wants to see the garbage.”
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But Sudbury’s career was clouded. When the three eight-year-olds were found murdered, Sudbury and other West Memphis narcotics detectives were under investigation by the Arkansas State Police. Soon after the murders, that investigation was quietly set aside. During the investigation and trials that followed, few people knew anything about the investigation of the police. But word of them did leak out, and by the end of the trials, a Memphis reporter had begun making inquiries into the results of that state police investigation of the narcotics unit that Sudbury headed.

Ron Lax had no idea that some of the officers involved in the murder investigation had been under investigation themselves until two months after the trials, when he spoke with the reporter. “These officers worked with the drug enforcement division of the West Memphis Police Department,” Lax noted after that conversation, “and there were allegations that they had appropriated drugs and/or stolen merchandise for their own use. The only name [the reporter] mentioned was that of Detective James Sudbury. What was truly amazing was the fact that [Prosecutor] Brent Davis signed a consent order to terminate this investigation sometime during mid-to late June 1993.” Lax did not know it at the time, but Sudbury had been the highest-ranking officer implicated in the corrupt enterprise. At the time of the murders, state police investigators were still looking into allegations that, as one state police report noted, Sudbury was “leading a higher than normal lifestyle” on his police salary.

The state police reported to Prosecutor Brent Davis that in interviews just two months before the murders, Sudbury had admitted that he’d taken guns and other items from the evidence locker and that he’d lied when investigators had first questioned him. But Sudbury was not placed on administrative leave. He was active in the murder investigation. And after Damien, Jason, and Jessie were arrested, Davis declined to prosecute him.

Sudbury remained a narcotics detective for the next several years, but his job security ended abruptly when a new chief of police fired him in 2001. “We were dealing with police corruption, is what it amounts to,” the new chief of police said.
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At a press conference called to announce the dismissal of Sudbury and two other narcotics officers, the chief reported that the FBI had been investigating “indiscretions” within the department, some of which he said traced back “as far as ten years.”
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“It’s crooked,” twenty-five-year-old Jessie Misskelley said, offering his opinion of Crittenden County. By the spring of 2001, Jessie had spent a third of his life in prison. He had seventeen tattoos, including one with his nickname, Midget Biker. He said he was thinking of getting another one. “I want to get a tattoo on my head,” he said. “I want a brain. I want a brain tattoo on the top of my head. Because I ain’t never seen no one that has one.” He described himself as hopeful—and a bit smarter than when he’d been arrested. Now, he realized, “If you didn’t do it, don’t ever admit that you did.”

Damien’s interest in metaphysics—which had so colored his trial—continued on death row.
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He’d read books on Buddhism and come to embrace that philosophy. As a result, many Arkansans were doubly surprised when they read, in December 1999, not only that Damien had married but that the ceremony had been a Buddhist one performed at the prison.
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The woman marrying him was Lorri Davis, the architect from New York with whom he’d been corresponding since the release of the first documentary.
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Captain Allen said he was “stunned and dismayed” to learn that Damien had wed. “I thought to myself, ‘What’s this old world coming to?’” he told the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
. “I know it’s federally mandated, but unless [a prisoner] is getting married to a cellmate, they really need to revamp the system.” Brent Davis said he thought it was “strange” that Damien had so many supporters, and that one would even marry him. “We made him what he was,” the prosecutor said. “We elevated Echols from a psychotic-fringe to being admired by thousands.”
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As the ninth anniversary of the murders approached, Jason was living a life as close to a middle-class life as he could manage inside a prison. Because he was quick to learn computers and maintained an impeccable prison record, he’d been assigned to a series of white-collar jobs in various clerical positions. He’d joined the prison Jaycees and begun to study investments. “I don’t want to get out and be that sixteen-year-old kid I once was,” he said. “I want to keep up.”
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He’d taken college courses in subjects like anthropology, accounting, and American politics—“because I want to see what our government’s built on”—and dreamed of attending law school. And he had a sweetheart. The correspondence that he’d begun in 1997 with young Sara Cadwal lader had grown into a serious romance. She was in high school when they’d met. Now Sara had graduated from college and had herself been accepted into law school. Jason credited Sara, his faith in God, and the support of friends, many of them “total strangers,” for his emotional stability—for his ongoing belief “that right will prevail.”