Read Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three Online
Authors: Mara Leveritt
“I have grown up in prison,” he wrote at the end of 2001. “Even with all that I have suffered, I have not allowed myself to become hateful, spiteful or resentful of either those who put me here unjustly, or of those who allowed it to happen. I know you’ve got to love life, enjoy it, embrace it while you’ve got it. I love this country we have. I love America and her people. And I hope that someday I will be able to live here as a free man again, with my reputation intact.”
Jessie, Damien, and Jason all had different visions of what life would be like if they were freed. Jessie dreamed of a “big party.” Damien said he wanted to “disappear” with his wife. Jason foresaw a life of activism relating somehow to law.
“Being in here has made me stronger,” he said. “It’s made me more reflective on things I should be proud of and enjoy, things like freedom. I don’t take things for granted. And I’m not as naive as I was. The reason I’m here—the real reason—is that someone had to pay the price.” Jason said that the police and prosecutors had been “content just to say we did it” and that that had been “enough” for the public. But he added that he understood the public reaction. “I used to think that way too,” he said. “To me, a suspect meant, ‘That’s who done it.’ But I didn’t do it, and that’s the main matter.”
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HIS STORY IS A CHILDREN’S TRAGEDY
. The victims—and there were many—were all minors.
The lives of Michael Moore, Stevie Branch, and Christopher Byers ended not just too soon, but in horror. We know that hours before Christopher suffered the savage attack on his genitals, he was beaten with a belt—a not uncommon punishment dealt to far too many children. As a teenager, Christopher’s brother, Ryan, had to cope not only with Christopher’s murder but with his mother’s unexplained death less than three years later.
The witnesses were all children, and they were victims as well, especially young Aaron Hutcheson. Encouraged to tell and retell his story, with no guidance or restraint from adults, he embellished his account from a man with yellow teeth to scenes of orgies in the woods, and finally to lurid visions of buckets of blood. The teenagers who testified at the trials were but bit players in a drama that could not have unfolded without the exploited utterings of children. Other teenagers recanted their accusations, admitting later that they’d said only what they believed police wanted to hear.
Jessie himself had begun by saying he knew nothing about the crime. Told he’d failed a polygraph, he also tried to accommodate the police—only Jessie was so unwitting that he also implicated himself.
When he, Damien, and Jason were arrested, none of them was old enough to buy a beer, a cigarette, or a
Playboy
magazine, much less execute a contract. Nevertheless, all three could be interrogated repeatedly and for hours by armed police officers, with neither parent nor lawyer present, and all three could be charged as adults and face possible execution.
Children don’t write their own tragedies. That is the work of adults. The vulnerabilities of children in this story were evident before the murders occurred. Poverty and instability weakened homes; intolerance, violence, and official corruption weakened the community. The serious mental health problems that some of this story’s children exhibited—Christopher, Jessie, and Damien, in particular—were tragedies in the making.
Sentimental nostrums about “babies” and “little lambs” could not muffle the harshness that cracked through this story like a belt. Who was protecting Aaron Hutcheson from his galloping fantasies—or from the effect that the detectives’ voracious attention would have on him in later years? Who was looking out for Ryan? What kind of concern for children allowed police to question them without even a parent around? If the tactics that led to Jessie’s confession were acceptable, as the state Supreme Court ruled, whose interests were being protected? Certainly not Jessie’s.
Not any child’s
.
A terrible disingenuousness wields the corrective belt. This is for the child’s good. This is to send a message. This is for society. This is to teach respect. This is for law and order.
“I think it’s important that we all be held accountable,” Judge John Fogleman told me in an interview eight years after the murders, “whether it be me or the police officers or the people who commit crimes.” But police officers in this story were not sanctioned after they stole from their evidence locker, and John Mark Byers committed multiple crimes without being “held accountable.” Judge Burnett committed a serious error when he ordered a witness to testify under oath without an attorney, although the witness had twice requested one. Burnett then avoided accountability by imposing a gag order on everyone who’d witnessed his action. Holding people accountable—or not—is the privilege of those in authority.
So the question becomes: how should children deal with that authority?
I asked Fogleman if he would feel comfortable if one of his own children was questioned by police without him or another lawyer present. His immediate response was, “Well, I wouldn’t be comfortable myself being questioned without a lawyer.” Then he added, more deliberately, “But this was not Jessie’s first exposure to being questioned and to being advised of his rights. And really, comfort’s not really an issue.”
“What would you advise your children to do if they were brought in by police for questioning?” I pressed.
Again, Fogleman evaded. “In a vacuum,” he said, “it would be, ‘You be extremely polite to the police and answer whatever questions they’ve got. Be truthful.’ That’s in a vacuum. But I don’t expect my kids to be in that kind of trouble.”
But children do get picked up and questioned by police, I said. And the world is not a vacuum. “So if you were speaking to the Rotarians, and someone asked you what they should tell their kids, what would your answer be?”
“I honestly don’t know,” the judge said. “I don’t know.”
If John Fogleman doesn’t know, who does? If even a judge cannot advise parents on how to advise their children, how in heaven’s name are children who are suddenly picked up for questioning by police supposed to figure out for themselves what to do? Fogleman, who’d had years as a prosecutor and judge, could not come up with an answer, yet high school dropout Jessie Misskelley was expected to understand because, after all, his interrogation by Gitchell and Ridge hadn’t been his “first exposure” to being questioned by police.
But the tragedy plummets deeper. The cornerstone of justice in the United States of America is that persons accused of crimes are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Children, supposedly, are presumed to be even more innocent. But here, all of that was swept aside. There were no special protections. There were no juvenile courts. There was not even a basic presumption of innocence. Damien, Jason, and Jessie were not proven guilty. They were presumed guilty. And that, as Jason noted, was “enough.”
1. Unless otherwise noted, accounts of the search for the missing boys cited in this chapter were drawn from police logs and other records of the West Memphis Police Department.
2. The officer was Regenia Meek. The subdivision where Byers lived was known as Holiday Garden.
3. The manager’s name was Marty King.
4. In some written reports, Dana Moore, as she was usually called, is identified as Diana. In later statements, Moore said that she reported her son, Michael, missing while Meek was at the Byerses’ house, but apparently Meek did not fill out a written report on Michael at that time. According to Meek’s records, she responded to the call at Bojangles, then returned to the Moores’ residence at 9:25
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., at which time she filled out the report that Michael was missing.
5. These were the Mayfair Apartments.
6. Climatological data for Memphis in May 1993 from the National Climatic Data Center.
7. The West Memphis Police Department claimed in a summary of the night’s events that “the victims were reported missing by their parents at approximately 8.10
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. 05-05-93, at which time a search was initiated,” but the department’s logbook for that date contains no mention of a search other than the walk through the woods by Officer Moore, from 9:42 to 10:10
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8. Gitchell credited Sergeant Allen with making the crucial discovery, but subsequent testimony revealed that Jerry Driver’s assistant, Steve Jones, of the county juvenile office, was the first to report the sighting.
9. According to police accounts, Allen slipped on the muddy bank while trying to retrieve the shoe with a stick, and ended up waist deep in the water. However, Gitchell told the local paper, the
West Memphis Evening Times,
that Allen’s plunge had been deliberate. “Being inquisitive,” Gitchell told a reporter, “he jumped in the water and started feeling around.”
10. From a six-page unsigned police report dated May 6, 1993, labeled only “Crime Scene Notes.”
11. There is some disagreement about the location of the bodies. The unsigned “Crime Scene Notes” indicate that the first and third bodies were found thirty feet apart. However, the
West Memphis Evening Times
reported that Gitchell said the bodies were found “about ten feet apart.” An undated police summary of the recovery effort said that all three of the bodies were found within five feet of one another.
12. Crittenden County’s coroner was Kent Hale, the manager of a funeral home. Under Arkansas’s system, each county has a coroner. Coroners are not required to be medically trained. There is one medical examiner for the state. The medical examiner and his assistants are required to be pathologists.
13. The paper quoted the report as saying: “This department has a case of three male juveniles being abducted. They were found with their hands tied behind their backs and their genitals had been removed with a sharp instrument. Their bodies had been dropped in a remote area. Any department with a case similar to this, please advise this department, attention Inspector Gitchell. All information appreciated.”
14. The boys attended Weaver Elementary School, whose playgrounds bordered on the lot where Michael Moore and his family lived.
15. Some state police investigators said privately that they found Gitchell’s position surprising, especially in light of the pressure that Gitchell was under to solve the crime. It had attracted national attention; there were apparently no clear suspects; and the help of trained investigators, especially in the first several days, seemed only to make sense. But others in the police community sympathized with Gitchell’s position. They noted that detectives pride themselves on being able to solve crimes in their own jurisdictions, and that what made even more sense was Gitchell’s official explanation, that “we’ve got fifteen people on this now, and if we get too many, we’ll be tripping over each other.”
16. On January 15, 1993, relatives of Deputy Clark White, an undercover member of the county’s drug task force, found him dead in his trailer home. The county’s sheriff, Richard Busby, contacted the state police. Investigators found the deputy’s partially decomposed body lying on a couch in the living room. In the kitchen, they found a package of liquid poison. An autopsy report concluded that White had died from drinking the poison. White’s parents, who lived nearby, reported that shortly after White was last seen alive, they had seen two men driving White’s black Pontiac Firebird without White in the car. The Firebird was registered to the sheriff’s office, which used it in undercover narcotics work. Four days after the discovery of White’s body, police across the river in Memphis located the Firebird, and a few hours after that, they also located a person who witnesses said had been driving it. Law enforcement from both sides of the Mississippi River swarmed on the neighborhood. A few hours later, officers of the Memphis Police Department’s Organized Crime Unit captured two suspects, both of whom were arraigned in Clark White’s murder. The two suspects told police that White had hocked many items, including various guns and his service revolver, to purchase drugs. A few days before White’s death, they said, he had offered the Firebird as collateral to a drug dealer in Memphis for an advance of $300 worth of crack. One of the suspects was subsequently tried and found guilty of the deputy’s murder.
17. Ironically, just as that investigation was beginning, the U.S. Department of Justice named the West Memphis–Crittenden County Drug Task Force the best in Arkansas, and one of the top rural drug task forces in the nation. The honor was awarded, in part, because of where West Memphis was located—at the juncture of Interstates 40 and 55. With a level of truck traffic at least twice that of its nearest competitor, West Memphis liked to boast of being the truck stop capital of the world. For the police that offered the opportunities—for both enforcement and corruption—of a huge flow of drugs through the county. The location of Memphis, the eighteenth largest city in the United States, directly across the river, contributed to the illegal milieu. With the federal Drug Enforcement Administration estimating that one in every eighty-five vehicles on the interstates carried illegal drugs or drug money, property seized from vehicles had become a major source of income for rural Crittenden County. In 1992, the county drug task force seized, in addition to a wealth of drugs, more than a million dollars in cash, seventy-four vehicles, thirty-seven guns, and assorted other property. The seizures bulged the coffers—as well as the evidence locker—of a county with just fifty thousand residents, one-fourth of whom lived at or below the federal poverty level.
18. Details of the drug task force investigation from Arkansas State Police files.
19. While information about the state police investigation of the Crittenden County Drug Task Force did not make it into the West Memphis paper, the
Evening News
that spring did report information from another state agency that the rate of child abuse in the county was one of the highest in the state.
20. Byers’s first wife’s name was Sandra; their children were John Andrew and Natalie Jane.
21. Accounts of the arrest and conviction for terroristic threatening were found in the records of the Crittenden County clerk’s office that were apparently overlooked when Byers’s conviction was expunged.
22. Records of the request for a restraining order are from Crittenden County Court. In an author interview in April 2001, Fogleman acknowledged that he’d heard the tape but said he did not know where it ended up.
23. Author interview with Melissa’s parents, Dorris and Kilburn DeFir, April 2001.
24. In an author interview in 2001, Byers said he’d volunteered to work as a drug informant out of a sense of “a civic responsibility.” He said, “I did what America needs a lot of citizens to do.” But if he was reporting on drug activity strictly for altruistic reasons, he was an exception to the rule. Most drug informants agree to assume that dangerous role only after having been arrested, in a plea bargain arranged with prosecutors.
25. Usually, records are expunged for people who were young at the time of their offenses. Byers was thirty when he was charged and convicted, and thirty-five when the record was expunged.
26. The arrest was made and recorded by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.
27. For example, detectives said they placed the clothes taken from the water into paper grocery sacks, and the clothes were brought back to the police station to dry. These items were then said to have been repackaged—reportedly in the original sacks—and sent to the state crime lab. But the sacks received by the crime lab showed no water marks or other signs of having been wet. Other concerns focused on the quality and completeness of the investigative record. Later reviews of the file would show that officers took notes but left many undated and unsigned. In some instances they added names and addresses to the case file without indicating the significance of the names or why they had been filed. They filed copies of fingerprints, sometimes without attaching a name. They conducted interviews in a variety of fashions with no apparent policy or consistency of approach. Notes were taken of some interviews and not of others; some interviews were tape-recorded, some were videotaped, and others were recorded only in part. Officers showed people photo lineups in their search for suspects but failed to record whose photographs were shown and which, if any, had been recognized.
28. The summary read like a press release, but since much of the information it contained was being guarded, it may have been prepared for dissemination to other law enforcement agencies. The West Memphis police would not elaborate on the summary’s purpose. When asked for interviews during preparation of this book, detectives Gitchell, Sudbury, Ridge, and Allen all refused comment.
29. Later tests of Aaron’s vision, conducted by a private investigator, would indicate he was color-blind.
30. Ridge noted that blood found on the side of one bank “may have been the result of the perpetrator standing in the area with an amount of blood on him or one of the bodies may have been placed there prior to being placed in the water.” He surmised that other spatters “may have been the result of blood transfer from the crime scene either on the feet or clothing of someone leaving the area.” This could have been the killer or killers. Or it could have been the police.
31. This was especially true in light of the victims’ ages. By 1993, law enforcement agencies in the United States were becoming increasingly aware of the grim statistical link between child abuse and child homicide. By then, murder had been identified as the third leading cause of death of children between the ages of five and fourteen. Police departments dealing with child murders were advised to respect the grief of parents but also to weigh the possibility that a family member may have been the killer. Because children usually stay close to home and are taught to be wary of strangers, police agencies around the country were being advised to look carefully at the people around them.
32. Dawn’s friend, Kim Williams, was a fourth-grader who lived near the woods.
33. No records indicate that Gitchell ever sought court records to confirm whether or not Christopher had been adopted, and the matter apparently went unquestioned throughout the investigation. Byers told the author in an interview that a local attorney named Jan Thomas had handled the adoption. But when Thomas was asked how Byers had been allowed to adopt the child while he was on probation for a felony, was not complying with the terms of that probation, and claimed to be unable to pay child support for his two biological children, Thomas said he was unaware of the felony conviction and no longer had records of the adoption. Adoption records in Arkansas are confidential; but R. L. Murray, Christopher’s biological father, said he never relinquished his parental rights, which would have been necessary for Byers to have adopted Christopher.
34. Melissa Byers worked at Fargenstein’s Jewelry Store, at Poplar and Highland streets in Memphis. At rush hour, a round trip from municipal court in West Memphis, across the Mississippi River, to the store in the heart of Memphis, and back again to the Byerses’ house would have taken at least an hour.
35. The detectives who interviewed Taylor were Diane Hester and Mary Margaret Kesterson.
36. Ryan had been called to testify in a reckless driving case.
37. Patrol Officer John Moore reported to his dispatcher that he was searching the woods between 9:42 and 10:10
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38. The following day, May 20, Sergeant Allen and another detective did interview Ryan again, but the question of what happened at midnight was not brought up. Still, in this interview, another statement Ryan made disagreed with that of his stepfather. Ryan told the detectives that until the day or two before the murders, he had never seen Christopher play with Stevie Branch. Moreover, Ryan reported some disturbing aspects of his brother’s friendship with Michael. Once, near the beginning of the school year, Ryan said, he had caught Christopher and Michael playing “nasty” behind the school. “They had poo-pooed in the field,” Ryan said, “and were throwing it at each other.” More recently, he said, “Chris has not played with Michael a lot since they got in trouble for breaking into Weaver school.”
39. Byers said he threw the party for Dallas Brogdon, sheriff of St. Francis County, which adjoins Crittenden County on the west. The occasion was reportedly Brogdon’s fiftieth birthday.
40. Without suggesting a link to violence, detectives did ask Byers about the brain tumor he was reported to have. Byers told them he’d been aware of it for the past two years. “I’ve been having blackouts,” he explained, “and even though it’s cool in here, at times, I just break out in a sweat. A bad migraine headache starts. I start getting like, tunnel vision, and then it’s like somebody flashes a camera in front of you, and it’s just like spots in front of me.” At first, he said, “They thought I had epilepsy and then they thought maybe I had a brain aneurism. They found out at one time that I had meningitis, and they thought maybe that’s what caused it.” He said doctors had put him on Dilantin, “but it causes your gums to bleed, and it’s real bad on your teeth,” so he’d been unable to take it. Doctors then prescribed Tegretol instead. Byers said he had been hospitalized five times in one year because of the tumor, and that the problem had caused the loss of the jewelry store.