Read Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three Online
Authors: Mara Leveritt
By the very next day, May 8, the sense that the murders might be linked to satanism was gaining strength within the department. When a detective reported that an interview subject claimed to have seen two black men and a white man coming out of the woods, Gitchell read the report, then scribbled across the bottom: “Has been mentioned that during cult activities, some members blacken their faces.”
On day three of the investigation, Driver gave Sudbury the list of names that he had already given to Bray. Sudbury passed the information to a fellow narcotics detective, Investigator Shane Griffin. Griffin then teamed up with Detective Bill Durham, the department’s polygraph expert, and the two drove to Marion to question Jason.
The rented trailer where Jason lived with his mother, stepfather, and two younger brothers sat on a lot that backed up to a two-acre lake. Griffin and Durham knocked at the door at about 5
P.M
. Jason opened the door wearing a Metallica concert T-shirt. He stepped into the yard, followed by Damien and Domini. What followed would mark the second time that Damien had been interviewed. The detectives asked the kids where they had been the night of the murders. “They said that on Wednesday, May 5, 1993, they had gone to Jason’s uncle’s house and Jason had cut the lawn,” Griffin later wrote. “Damien phoned his father to pick them up at the laundrymat [
sic
] at Missouri and N. Worthington. They said they were picked up at 6:00
P.M
. and Damien’s father took Jason and Domini home and Damien went home.”
85
Next, Griffin and Durham took out a list of questions that Sudbury had prepared for them. Griffin questioned Damien first. The teenagers were questioned in the yard. They were not told they were suspects. They were not read their Miranda rights or told they could have a lawyer present. None of their parents were there.
Damien told Griffin that he had been in a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed manic-depressive and schizophrenic; he gave them the names of his therapist and psychiatrist, and he told them that he was taking antidepressive medication. Griffin later wrote that Damien “used to be involved in Wiccan religion—Covenant of Divine Light, which practices white witchcraft,” and that his girlfriend, Domini, “is four months pregnant with his child.” Griffin asked Sudbury’s questions and noted Damien’s answers on a sheet of notebook paper.
Asked if he knew the boys, Damien said he’d “never heard of them.” He said anyone who would commit such a crime was “sick.” When Griffin asked how Damien thought the boys had died, the detective wrote that Damien said, “Mutilation—cut up all three / heard they were in water drowning—cut up one more than others.”
Then Griffin asked the question that had led police to Damien in the first place: “Do you believe in God, or the devil?” Damien answered, according to Griffin’s notes, “I believe in a god, but a female god. Evil force not a devil.”
“How does being questioned make you feel?” Griffin asked.
“Scared,” Damien replied.
“Would you take a polygraph?”
“No reason I would fail.”
“Why would your prints be in the area of or at the crime scene?”
“They won’t be,” Damien said.
Griffin then ran down the same list with Jason. But the younger boy was more cautious—or more intimidated—than Damien had been. At least, he offered shorter answers. Like Damien, Jason said he did not know the victims. He agreed that the killer or killers should receive the death penalty. He said he did not know why someone would commit such a crime. To the questions “How do you think they died?” and “How do you think the killer felt?” Jason answered curtly, “I don’t know.”
Jason said he did believe in God. He said that killing or watching someone die would make him feel “disgusted.” And he told Griffin that being questioned made him feel “like a suspect.” The detective was nearing the end of his list when Baldwin’s mother, Gail Grinnell, drove up and flew out of the car in a fury. As Durham wrote in his notes, she “was very upset and accused us of picking on her son and said she did not want us talking to him.” He added, “I attempted to reason with her, but to no avail. We then left.”
Damien’s responses to Sudbury’s questions inflamed the lieutenant’s interest. The following day, Monday, May 10, Sudbury asked Damien to come to the police station for more questioning. Damien went and again, unaccompanied by his parents or an attorney, answered the questions that were put to him. This time, Lieutenant Sudbury and Detective Bryn Ridge conducted the interview.
“Damien was very cold and unemotional,” Sudbury later wrote in his report.
Damien stated that the person who did the crime was sick or the act was part of a thrill kill. Damien stated that the penis is a strong symbol of power. Damien stated that the killer was not worried about the boys screaming due to there [
sic
] being in the woods. Also, he stated that the killer wanted to hear the screaming. Damien thinks that the killer thinks it’s funny that he hasn’t been caught and really doesn’t care if he is caught. Damien stated that there would probably be stones, candles, a knife, and/or crystals in the area where the bodies were found. Damien states that the killer is probably someone local and that he won’t run. Damien likes to read books by the author Anton LaVey/Satanist. Also by Steven [
sic
] King. Damien feels that sex is boring. Damien has EVIL across his left knuckles, just like his best friend Jason Baldwin. Damien considers himself to be very intelligent. Damien wants to be a writer of scary books or poems at some time.
Sudbury was proceeding on nothing more than suspicions, but Damien was doing nothing to allay them.
Detective Ridge also wrote notes on the interview. Like Sudbury’s, his began with a subjective assessment: “Damien was very calm and even cold as he answered the questions.” Ridge’s report was the first to record Damien’s full statement of his whereabouts on the day of the boys’ disappearance. “Damien stated that on Wednesday he was with Jason Baldwin and Domini Teer and that they had gone to Jason’s uncle’s house on Center Street in West Memphis. He couldn’t give a specific address, but said that it was near Alexander’s Laundromat, where he stated that he called his mother to pick him up. He stated that his mother picked him up along with Domini Teer and took Domini home.” Echols said that he then went with his mother, father, and sister to a friend’s house, where they stayed until about 5
P.M
., at which point the family returned home. That evening, he said, he called a friend in Tennessee and talked to her until about eleven-thirty that night. He told the police that he remained at home the rest of that Wednesday night.
On Thursday, Ridge wrote, Damien said that he went to Lakeshore,
where he stayed the night with Domini. He stated that he heard the boys were missing from Jason Baldwin while he was at Lakeshore that day. He then stated that he heard the news that the boys were missing from Jason’s mother.
Damien stated that Steve Jones from the Juvenile Authority had been by to see him a day or two before,
86
and that Steve had told him about how the boys’ testicles had been cut off and that someone had urinated in their mouths. He stated that Steve stated that could have been the reason that the bodies were placed in the water, so that the urine could have been washed out.
This was an interesting note. Here Damien was telling the West Memphis detectives that Jones, who was neither a police officer nor part of their department, had already revealed to Damien some highly unusual—and very specific—information pertaining to the case; specifically, “that someone had urinated in their mouths.” The unusual report about the urine had been relayed to Gitchell verbally by Dr. Frank Peretti, the state pathologist who’d performed the autopsies, and it was one of the few details that supposedly was known only to investigators. Yet here, just three days after the autopsies, a teenager, who might also be a suspect, was telling West Memphis detectives that when he was questioned by Jones two days earlier, Jones had divulged this peculiar information to him. If the detectives suspected that Damien might have known about the urine firsthand and was lying when he said he heard it from Jones, there was no indication of that in the record, and Damien was never questioned further on the point. Likewise, if the officers were at all distressed about this significant breach of the secrecy Gitchell had tried so hard to impose—and what it might suggest about what other details may have been released—no report of follow-up discussions with Jones were included in the record either.
87
Ridge continued:
At this time, Damien was asked if he would submit to having hair samples taken and blood samples. He stated that he did not object to the samples being taken. It was further asked if he would be willing to take a polygraph examination if one could be scheduled, and again he stated that he would take the test. Lt. Sudbury then left the room and attempted to set up a polygraph examination to determine if he was being truthful in his statements…At this time Damien was turned over to Detective Durham for a polygraph examination.
Detective Durham did not record the polygraph interview. He inserted no record of his machine’s electronic responses into the police record. All that remains of that episode is a one-page investigative report written by Durham that day. The full text of that report reads:
On May 10, 1993, I interviewed Damien Wayne Echols, W/M 18, of 2706 South Grove, West Memphis, Arkansas. He denied any involvement in the crime. After approximately forty-five minutes, I asked this subject what he was afraid of. He replied, “The electric chair.” He then said that he liked the hospital in Little Rock. He said he had been treated there for manic depression. After a short period of time, he ceased to deny his involvement. (Admission through absence of denial.) He then said: “I will tell you all about it, if you will let me talk to my mother.” Detective Ridge brought his mother in to my office to talk to him. After talking to his mother, he again denied being involved in the murders. After approximately twenty minutes, I asked: “You’re never going to tell anyone about this but your doctor, are you?” He replied, “No.”
Ridge wrote in his notes that after the polygraph examination, “Detective Durham came and met with me and other officers and reported that Damien had been untruthful, and according to the polygraph, was involved in the murders.”
Officially, few people outside of the county’s law enforcement establishment knew that within four days of finding the bodies, Damien and his friend Jason were already considered suspects. But unofficially, within a day or two after the murders, talk of specific suspects, specific details of the crime, and the department’s specific interest in cults already was rampant. As rumors linking the murders to satanists spread, the police began to receive reports that, whether true or not, reinforced their theory. Two aspects of the investigation—the focus on cults and the occult and on suspects outside the families—subtly began to merge.
News reports added to the speculation. As early as one week after the murders, an article in
USA Today
focused on what it called the “monstrous evil” behind the crimes. The words, quoted from a sermon the Sunday after the murders, seemed to capture the region’s horror. The same words appeared the following week in
People
magazine, in an article reporting that some townspeople already suspected that a “Satanic cult” was responsible for the crimes. Ministers preaching about the crime’s incomprehensible “evil” fueled the atmosphere. One clergyman expressed the views of many in the town when he described the attack on the children as the “incarnation and manifestation of evil.” He told his congregation, “We’re not dealing with the garden variety of sin here. Anyone who would do something like this is not like you or me. They’ve reached the point that they refuse to recognize that anything wrong was done.”
88
Citizens in West Memphis were scared. Donations to a reward fund created by the police swelled it to $35,000. The volume of tips increased. One tip led them to L. G. Hollingsworth Jr., a seventeen-year-old cousin of Domini Teer. A caller had reported that L.G. knew something about the murders, that he may have been involved in them, and that his aunt Narlene Virginia Hollingsworth intended to cover up for him. Durham polygraphed L.G. the next day. He reported that the teenager appeared to be lying when he said he didn’t know who’d killed the boys. When police confronted L.G. with Durham’s results, L.G. said he suspected that Damien was the killer.
Police also questioned Narlene Hollingsworth. She told them that on the evening of Wednesday, May 5, when she was driving just west of the Blue Beacon between 9:30 and 10
P.M
., she’d seen Damien with her niece Domini, walking west against the traffic. She said she noticed that the pants on both were muddy. Now, even officers who’d tended to doubt the cult theory began to give it more credence.
Detectives turned to Driver for help. Working on his information, they contacted Damien’s former girlfriend, Deanna Holcomb, who was now sixteen years old. Durham polygraphed Deanna too, and reported that—like L.G.—she’d lied when she said she didn’t know who’d killed the boys. When police questioned Deanna after the exam, she—like L.G.—had changed her answer. Like L.G., she’d told police that she believed Damien had been involved.
89
On Wednesday, May 12, a week after the boys disappeared, police questioned Pam Echols. When they asked her about Damien’s whereabouts on the afternoon of May 5, she told the officers that at about 3
P.M
., she, Joe, Damien, and Michelle drove to visit some friends.
90
The friends were not home, Pam said, so she spoke briefly with their daughter and left a note for the parents. Pam said that on their way home the family stopped by a pharmacy, where a prescription for Damien was filled. After that, she said, the family stayed home, and Damien talked on the telephone with two girls who lived in Memphis.