Morgue (31 page)

This time, the three young victims arrived near dark, he said. (Official sunset would have been close to eight p.m.)

This time, Misskelley went into more excruciating details about the sexual assault. Both the Byers boy and the Branch boy had been raped, he said, and at least one of them had been held by the head and ears while being violated.

All of the boys, Misskelley said, were bound with pieces of a brown rope before he fled the scene, but he believed Chris Byers was already dead when he left.

“You said that they had their hands tied up, tied down,” an interrogator said. “Were their hands tied in a fashion to where they couldn't have run?”

“They could run,” Misskelley answered. “They just had them tied, when they knocked them down and stuff. They could hold their arms and stuff, and just hold them down like, where he couldn't raise up and the other one picked his legs up.”

After he got home, Misskelley said Baldwin phoned, saying, “We done it!” and “What are we going to do if somebody saw us?” He heard Echols jabbering in the background.

Had he ever been involved in a cult?
an interrogator asked.

Yeah, Misskelley admitted. For the past few months, he'd been meeting with other people in the woods, where they had sexual orgies and bloody initiation rites that included killing and eating stray dogs. At one such meeting, he said, he saw a picture that Echols had taken of the three boys. Echols had been watching them, he said.

What were Echols and Baldwin wearing that day?
a cop asked.

Baldwin wore blue jeans, black lace-up boots, and a Metallica T-shirt with a skull on it, Misskelley recalled. As was his habit, Echols wore black pants, a black T-shirt, and boots.

Misskelley's story was a confusing mess. Times and events doubled back on themselves, and stark inconsistencies abounded. For one, Jason Baldwin had been in school all day. Had the crime happened at nine a.m. or noon, or closer to eight p.m.? Had Baldwin called that morning or the night before? Why was he certain the boys had skipped school when clearly they hadn't?

But some of Misskelley's weird confession was actually supported by evidence.

The boys had ridden their bikes to the Robin Hood woods. They had been severely beaten. Two of them had injuries consistent with bludgeoning by a heavy object like a baseball bat or tree limb. One had facial cuts. Chris Byers's genitals were grotesquely mutilated. All had injuries the medical examiner found consistent with forcible rape and oral sex. Michael and Stevie were alive when they went into the water, but not Chris, consistent with Misskelley's observation that Chris was already dead when Misskelley fled the woods. And the boys were in fact tied up, although with shoelaces, not a brown rope.

And a witness later told detectives that he'd seen Damien Echols near the crime scene that same night, wearing black pants and a black shirt—both muddy.

But during his interview, Misskelley was given a lie detector test and told he'd failed. Later, some would dispute whether he'd failed the polygraph. Some believe the alleged “failure” confused Misskelley, who grew frustrated and tried to please the cops even more by telling a wild story; others say it merely caused him to tell the truth.

Either way, the focus was now entirely on three social outcasts named Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. All three were arrested and charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Police had a few other leads on possible killers, but they were convinced they had the right guys.

In coming weeks and months, investigators collected evidence they felt was related to the murders. In Jason Baldwin's home they found a red robe that belonged to his mother, fifteen black T-shirts, and a white T-shirt. In Damien Echols's home they found two notebooks that to them appeared to have Satanic or occult writing, and more clothing. Divers searching the silty bottom of a lake behind Baldwin's house found a knife with a serrated edge.

Police seized a pendant from Damien's neck because it appeared to have blood spots on it. They later learned that Damien and Jason both wore the necklace occasionally.

And detectives also found several witnesses who claimed that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley had all confessed in some way to the murders.

A crime lab technician declared fibers on the victims' clothing to be similar to four fibers found in Jason's and Damien's homes. A green polyester fiber on Michael's Cub Scout cap was similar in structure to fibers found in Damien's home. And one red fiber from Baldwin's mom's robe was microscopically similar to fibers collected from Michael Moore's shirt. Not unequivocally the same, but similar.

The knife couldn't be positively included or excluded, although its serrated edge recalled medical examiner Dr. Peretti's conclusion that a knife with a serrated blade had been used in the slayings.

Very little useful testing material came from the necklace. Technicians could say only that the blood specks were two different blood types, one matching Damien Echols and one matching Jason Baldwin, victim Stevie Branch, and 11 percent of all humans.

The three accused teenagers all pleaded not guilty and were appointed two lawyers each. All would be tried as adults, and Misskelley's confession—although his lawyer argued it had been coerced—would be allowed. But because of Misskelley's confessions, which he allegedly recanted within days, he would be tried separately from Echols and Baldwin so he could testify against them (although he eventually refused to do it).

Less than ten months after the nude, broken bodies of those three little boys were pulled from a foul creek in West Memphis, their accused killers were going to trial. If convicted, they all faced the death penalty.

The case was purely circumstantial, but two juries would have a hard time overlooking the graphic confession of one of the accused killers, as muddled and inconsistent as it was.

*   *   *

On January 18, 1994, jury selection in the Jessie Misskelley trial began in the tiny farm village of Corning, Arkansas. A jury of seven women and five men was seated in a day, and the prosecutor opened with a warning: They'd see errors and wild inconsistencies in Misskelley's confession—the cornerstone of the state's case—but they could all be attributed to a frantic effort to minimize his own role in the murders.

But the defense quickly countered that Misskelley was a borderline retarded man who was a victim of public pressure on the cops to solve northeast Arkansas's most heinous murder in decades. Detectives fixated on Damien Echols early on and never truly considered other suspects or scenarios, then scared a kid with a pitifully low IQ into confessing.

The dead boys' mothers led off the grim parade of witnesses. They told the jury and the world about their last moments with their sons. Then came graphic testimony from searchers and cops about the hunt for the missing boys and the discovery of their corpses, while jurors glanced at their bikes, propped up against a courtroom wall.

The hardest part of such trials is always when the crime scene and autopsy photos are introduced into evidence. In this case, prosecutors showed more than thirty images of these dead boys—bound, bloodless, slashed, frozen in distorted poses. Then came the medical examiner with more ghastly photos from his autopsy table, close-ups of little white corpses on bloodied sheets, necrotic gashes, disfigured parts nobody wanted to see. The jurors blanched.

Then the jury listened silently as prosecutors played thirty-four minutes of Misskelley's taped confession. They heard Jessie, in his own words, tell how the boys died.

The state's case wrapped up with wrangling over the fiber evidence, and some talk about Satanism and cult killings. The defense, as it had at every step, fought back.

Misskelley's team mounted a reasonable-doubt defense.

On the list of the defense witnesses was a well-known detective and polygraph examiner who believed Misskelley had actually been telling the truth when West Memphis police tested him with a lie detector—but when he heard he'd failed, he gave up and made a false confession. The same detective criticized investigators for not taking Misskelley to the crime scene.

But jurors never heard most of that testimony. It was ruled inadmissible by the judge.

A social psychologist testified that Misskelley had probably given police a false statement when he could “no longer stand the strain of the interrogation,” but he was not allowed to express his opinion that the West Memphis investigators overwhelmed Misskelley's will and coerced a confession that was false.

In the end, Misskelley didn't take the stand in his own defense because his lawyers feared the poor kid would be slaughtered by prosecutors.

“If this defendant didn't chase down Michael Moore, he would have gotten to go home and be with his parents,” the prosecution said in its closing argument. “Jessie Misskelley Jr. didn't let Michael Moore get away. He chased him down like an animal.”

“The killing of one human being by another is only exceeded by the state killing an innocent man,” the defense said in closing.

After more than a week of grisly photos, graphic testimony, and legal wrangling, the jury convicted Jessie Miskelley of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. Asked if he had anything to say, Misskelley said, “No.” He was quickly sentenced to life without parole plus forty years in prison and carted away.

A few days later, the jurors told a reporter that the vivid image of a frightened eight-year-old boy running for his life but being dragged to his eventual death by the teenager in front of them weighed heavily in their verdict.

*   *   *

Two weeks later, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin faced their own jury in Jonesboro.

Misskelley refused to testify against them, leaving prosecutors with the same circumstantial case in which no single piece of evidence absolutely connected the three teenagers to the crime. But in Echols, they also had an unsympathetic defendant who would make jurors vaguely uncomfortable, and who had already made statements to investigators like “Everybody has demonic forces inside,” and that the number three was “a sacred number in the Wicca religion”—when it also happened to be the number of eight-year-old boys he was accused of murdering. At other times, he'd threatened to eat his father, slit his own mother's throat, and kill his ex-girlfriend's parents. Everything about Damien Echols screamed bad seed.

In opening arguments, the prosecution promised to prove Echols's and Baldwin's guilt forensically and by their own statements; the defense claimed the state had twisted the facts to fit its own surreal puzzle.
No,
they admitted,
Damien Echols isn't an all-American boy, in fact, he's kind of weird, but no shred of physical evidence suggests he killed those boys.

Again, the state's first witnesses were the mothers of the three victims. A police detective recounted Echols's interrogation, in which he made strange remarks about mysticism and demons. An ex-girlfriend told how Echols often carried knives in his overcoat. A cult expert talked about the “trappings of occultism” that marked the crime, from the shedding of “life force” blood to the full moon on the night of the killings to the potent “life energy” that can be stolen from young victims.

Medical examiner Dr. Peretti testified that the knife found in the lake behind Echols's house was consistent with the wounds he saw on Chris Byers's corpse, although he admitted on cross-examination that other knives might also have made the same marks. He also said Chris's penis was skinned and his scrotum sliced off while he was still alive; both Stevie and Michael were bludgeoned by a heavy object; and that Michael's lungs were filled with water, indicating that “when he was in the water, he was breathing.” But on cross-examination, he admitted that the forensic evidence didn't completely match Misskelley's account, namely that he found no hard evidence that any of the boys were strangled, raped, or hog-tied with a brown rope.

A few prosecution witnesses testified that either Echols or Baldwin had confessed privately. One of them, Baldwin's teenage cellmate, claimed Baldwin admitted to “dismembering” the boys and that he had “sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.” Startling fact or self-serving fiction? A jury would have to decide.

In the end, the only physical evidence that the state offered to tie either Echols or Baldwin to the crime scene was literally scant: a trace of blue wax found on one of the boys' shirts and a polyester fiber on Michael's Cub Scout cap that were “microscopically similar” to items found in Echols's home.

The defense started strong. After Damien's mother testified that he'd been home with her on the night of the murder, and that he'd been talking to two girlfriends on the phone, the accused teenager took the stand for a few hours and coolly answered dozens of questions from both sides.

What interests you?
his lawyer asked.

Skateboarding, books, movies, talking on the phone, Echols answered.

Who are your favorite authors?

“I will read about anything, but my favorites are Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Anne Rice.”

What is a Wiccan?

“It's basically a close involvement with nature,” he explained. “I'm not a Satanist. I don't believe in human sacrifices or anything like that.”

Are you a manic depressive?

“Yes, I am.

What happens when you don't take your medication?

“I cry.”

Why do you keep a dog skull in your room?

“I just thought it was kind of cool.”

Why did you tattoo “EVIL” across your knuckles?

“I just kinda thought it was cool, so I did that.”

Why do you always wear black?

“I was told that I look good in black. And I'm real self-conscious, uh, about the way I dress.”