Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (21 page)

It’s no great wonder to me how the cops could make Jessie say the things they wanted him to say. If they treated him anything like they did me, then it’s quite amazing that he didn’t have a nervous breakdown. They used both physical and psychological torture to break me down. One minute they’d threaten to kill you, and the next they’d behave as if they were your best friends in the world, and that everything they were doing was for your own good. They shoved me into walls, spit at me, and never let up for a moment. When one of them got tired, another came in to take his place. By the time I’d been allowed to go home after previous interrogations I’d had a migraine headache, and I’d been through periods of dry heaving and vomiting. I survived because when pushed hard enough I acted like an asshole, just like the cops themselves. My point is that we were just kids. Teenagers. And they tortured us. How could someone like Jessie, with the intellect of a child, be expected to go through that and come out whole?

It makes me sick and fills me with disgust to think about how the public trusts these people, who are in charge of upholding the law yet torture kids and the mentally handicapped. People in this country believe the corrupted are the exception. They’re not. Anyone who has had in-depth dealings with them knows it’s the rule. I’ve been asked many times if I’m angry with Jessie for accusing me. The answer is no, because it’s not Jessie’s fault. It’s the fault of the weak and lazy “civil servants” who abuse the authority placed in their hands by people who trust them. I’m angry with police who would rather torture a retarded kid than look for a murderer. I’m angry with corrupt judges and prosecutors who would ruin the lives of three innocent people in order to protect their jobs and further their own political ambitions. We were nothing but poor trailer trash to them, and they thought no one would even miss us. They thought they could take our lives and the matter would end there, all swept under the rug. And it would have ended there, if the world hadn’t taken notice. No, I’m not angry at Jessie Misskelley.

*  *  *

F
rom everything I’d seen on TV and read in books, I came to believe the cops were the good guys, and that dirty cops were few and far between. So why was no one stepping up to expose this for the bullshit it was? Why were they all going along with something so fraudulent? The answer: to save their asses. The police assigned to my case were members of the West Memphis drug task force—cops who normally would not be investigating these murders; they were also offered additional help from the Arkansas State Police and they turned it down. It seems quite a few of the cops on the drug task force were being investigated by the FBI for drug dealing, money laundering, and tampering with confiscated evidence, and the last thing they needed was the entire world watching them as they bumbled around ineptly, pretending to conduct an investigation. They needed to solve this case quickly, and we were the easy solution. As one of the cops told Jason, “You’re just white trash. We could kill you and dump your body in the Mississippi, and no one would care.” We were disposable, subhuman. Feed us into the meat grinder, and the problem goes away. It’s not like we were ever going to amount to anything anyway.

After I read the script/confession, I was taken back into the courtroom. The judge was rambling again, and I was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly everyone sprang to life as an overweight man with bad skin jumped from his seat and tried to run down the aisle. He was screaming something incoherently as the cops tackled him and I was hustled from the room. I later found out that he was the father of one of the murdered children. I couldn’t really blame him. I have a son of my own now, and I might have done the same thing if I thought I was looking at the man who had harmed him. He just needed someone to blame, to take his grief out on. He wasn’t interested in facts or evidence.

Once I was back in the dark and dingy part of the building, they began putting chains on me—around my waist, my hands, my feet, and anywhere else they could think to attach them. I saw Jason a few feet ahead of me, and they were doing the same to him. He was also wearing one of the old, ragged police uniforms. In front of him was Jessie Misskelley. He, too, was shackled, but he wore his own clothes. Perhaps this was another small way of punishing Jason and me for not giving them the confession they wanted.

They rushed Jessie through a door, and outside I saw sunlight and heard the roar of a crowd. It sounded like a referee had made a really bad call at the Super Bowl. Next they walked Jason and me out the doors at the same time. There was a circle of cops around me, all trying to drag me. I would have had to run to keep up with them, but there were chains on my legs and I had no shoes on. They dragged me across the concrete, ripping off two of my toenails and a fair amount of skin. The crowd went into a frenzy at the sight of us. It looked as though the entire city had turned out to see us, and they were all screaming, yelling, and throwing things. They wanted to crucify us right then and there. I imagine that was the closest a modern man could come to knowing what it was like in the Roman Colosseum.

I was tossed into the back of a car and told to stay down. There were two cops in the front seat, both fat and wearing the standard mustaches. They could have passed for brothers. The one behind the wheel quickly started driving at a high rate of speed. I was curled into the fetal position on the backseat, vomiting and dry-heaving. One cop looked back at me, cursing and swearing. In disgust, he spit, “That’s just fucking great.” No one said another word to me for the rest of the trip. I had no idea where I was being taken.

When we finally came to a stop sometime later in the afternoon, it was at a small white building with several cop cars parked outside. A few old, crusty-looking men with a hose were halfheartedly spraying the cop cars. As I was being escorted inside, I heard the cops tell them to wash out the backseat where I had gotten sick.

Once inside the Monroe County jail, the chains were removed and I was told to strip. I stood naked while one cop sprayed my entire body with some sort of lice repellent. Four or five other cops looked on while conversing nonchalantly. This was nothing new to them. Soon enough I myself would begin to view such events as nothing out of the ordinary. After my flea dip, I was given a pair of white pants and a white shirt to put on. One of the old car-washers from out front handed me a towel, a blanket, and a mat like preschoolers sleep on. The induction ceremony being complete, I was pushed into a cell that would be my home for most of the next year.

Twenty

T
he cell I was confined to on June 4 had four concrete slabs that served as beds. There was a small metal table bolted to the floor, a shower stall, and a television suspended high in one corner that picked up two channels. For the first week or so there was only one other person in the cell with me. His name was Chad, a white guy with a terrible case of acne and unwashed curly hair. He was there on a capital murder charge. He’d killed someone with a sawed-off shotgun while burglarizing their house. His back had already started to curve into a hump, like an old man, even though he was only sixteen.

Chad seemed a bit slow in the thinking department, if you catch my drift. He claimed he had been there for years and was quite excited that he now had company. He couldn’t answer a single one of my questions: he didn’t know where we were, or how far we were from West Memphis, or how to make a phone call, or anything else I could think to ask him. He’d just smile really big, throw his hands up in the air as if to say, “Who knows? Only the gods can say,” then rock back and forth for a while. Not so encouraging.

I didn’t find out where I was for a week. My thinking was that perhaps my whereabouts were being kept secret from everyone, including Domini and my family. I was worried about how Domini was taking it. My family and I weren’t on the greatest of terms, but when you’re drowning like I was, you’ll reach for anything. I was lost and alone and empty. Floating deep in outer space would have been no more frightening. I had done nothing to deserve this, and I was goddamned if these assholes were going to make me the sacrificial lamb.

I was still taking antidepressants, which the guards gave me every night. That very first week, I had the ingenious idea of saving them up and taking them all at once. That was the only way out I could see at that point. The situation was getting worse. There was no Sherlock Holmes coming to solve the case and let me out. Besides, what did I really have to live for, anyway? I would regret not being there for the baby. It would have been nice to stick around for that.

When I was in one of the hospitals, I had heard that 800 milligrams of the particular antidepressant I was on was enough to put you into a coma you’d never come out of. I wanted to be certain I did it right, so I took 1,200 milligrams. I swallowed the pills and sat down to write a quick note to Domini and my family. It was only a few lines scratched out quickly with a pencil. I don’t recall what they were and I don’t want to. That being taken care of, I stretched out on my concrete slab and flipped through one of Chad’s magazines. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he loved those pictures. He wasn’t too fond of losing the only company he had, either. I hadn’t bothered to hide what I was doing from him, thinking there was no need.

The main sensation I had was of being so tired it was physically painful. I wanted to sleep more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I closed my eyes and just let go. That’s when all hell broke loose. About ten guards came for me. Chad had told them what I’d done, because he didn’t want to be left all alone again, especially with a dead body. I could hear them talking but couldn’t make my eyes open. Someone opened them for me and shone a flashlight in them. Someone else poured a vile-tasting liquid in my mouth and told me to swallow it. It was some sort of vomit-inducing syrup. They put me in the backseat of a car and drove about 150 miles an hour to get me to a hospital. By that point I was so confused I kept asking myself if the drugs were taking effect yet, or if I was already dead. I tried to tell the cop behind the wheel that we would have been there by now if we’d all ridden on the back of a giant spider. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to.

I don’t remember much about the hospital that night. I know it was somewhere in Monroe County. I woke up for a moment when someone put a tube up my nose and down my throat. Two cops were sitting before me, watching, while all the doctors and nurses were moving double-time. Can’t let the star of the show die, can we?

Strangely enough, all the doctors and nurses looked like therapists from the mental institution. I was so discombobulated that I hardly knew what was happening to me, much less could think about where I was at that point. I was awakened a couple of times during the night by someone shining a light in my eyes and asking if I remembered my name, but I slept through the entire stomach pumping procedure. When I finally woke up sometime the next day, I found myself in the intensive care unit.

My court-appointed lawyer, Scott Davidson, first came to see me while I was in the hospital. He stayed for maybe ten minutes, just long enough to introduce himself and tell me my family knew where I was being held. He looked incredulous when I told him I was innocent. I would see him about three more times over the course of the next year, and never for longer than thirty minutes at a time. You would think that if a guy were going on trial, and could very well be sentenced to death, that his lawyers would spend a lot of time preparing him for court. Mine did not. He didn’t tell me what he would be doing to prepare for the trial or give me any idea of what to expect or to do in the meantime. Perhaps this is how capital cases are handled, I thought. After all, this guy is a lawyer, so he must know what he’s doing, right? Surely they wouldn’t appoint me a lawyer who was ineffectual or uncaring. I had a lot to learn.

The same court that was putting me on trial was also paying my lawyer. Look at it this way—are you going to employ someone who makes you look stupid and rubs your face in your own mistakes? No. You’re going to pay the guy who knows his place and sticks with the program. These guys get paid the same amount whether they win or lose, so why try too hard? Later, during the trial, when I asked why they didn’t push a point or challenge a ruling, they answered, “We have to work with the judge on a daily basis and don’t want to piss him off.”

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” disappeared, and “Innocent until proven guilty” had left the building. Once they go through all that trouble to accuse and arrest you, you’re going down unless you’ve got a couple million dollars on hand to hire some real gunslingers to come to your aid. I was a fool back then, though. Still wet behind the ears. I thought the purpose of the justice system was to see that justice is done. That’s the way it works on TV. While I was counting on divine intervention, they were plotting my demise.

The court system does not have the sane man’s mentality, even though it’s built on his back. It’s an insane snake of mammoth proportions, all tangled up in itself. It’s vicious and demented, biting any flesh it can reach. It’s so entangled and drunken that it will eventually strangle itself to death. There’s no way to convey its madness to anyone who hasn’t come into contact with its sluggish embrace. The people who operate within it have become as deranged as the lunatic snake itself, and justice is a foreign concept. They accept pointless and drawn-out procedures as religion. Nothing outrages them more than an idea that makes sense, and there’s nothing they’ll fight harder against. It’s no wonder there are so many jokes about lawyers. It’s only growing worse since the time of Kafka. There’s no way to understand it. It is a world without logic.

*  *  *

O
nce I was released from the hospital and taken back to the jail, I was put in a padded cell with no clothes. I lived in only my underwear for days.
I’d heard of padded rooms all my life and imagined them to be like a giant pillow. It’s nothing of the sort. Everything is coated in a thick, greasy substance similar to rubber. More like a bicycle tire filled with cement than a pillow. Since I had no clothes, it was pretty chilly. One of the guys passing by slid some copies of
National Enquirer
under the door. I read them during the day and covered up with them at night. There was nothing else to do in there. It was just an empty room.

There was a small opening in the door, and sometimes one of the other prisoners on the block would sit by the door and talk for a while. Everyone on the block, with one exception, was a young black guy who had already been to prison at least once in the past. The only exception was an old man in his fifties. His hair was as white as his skin was black, and all the other guys would abuse and take advantage of him. He was given absolutely no respect. He would sit by my door and cry for a half-hour straight at times, like I could help him somehow. He was there for having two children with his own daughter. He was their father and grandfather at the same time. He tried to stay quiet and out of everyone’s way, but it didn’t always work.

I spent a week in the padded cell, talking to people through the opening in the door and freezing. Contrary to what I had been led to believe by movies and TV, none of the other prisoners seemed like hardened criminals who would kill their mothers for a nickel. Some of them were pretty funny. Every night after lockdown, someone would call to the guy in the next cell, “Hey, man, come here a minute, I need to show you something.” There would be laughter, then, “Shut up, fool, I’m trying to sleep.” Several times a day someone would beat on my door and ask, “You all right in there?” Their constant antics kept me from feeling quite so sad, at least until the lights went out. Once the lights went out and everyone was in bed, the despair came back full force. I cried myself to sleep many nights.

After I was back in jail for a couple of days, I was taken into an interrogation room by a guard. There I was introduced to two visitors: Ron Lax and his associate, Glori Shettles. Ron was a private investigator, he said to me, and had taken a particular interest in the case as soon as he saw the media coverage of our arrests. They started to ask me questions—did I know the children or the families, where had I been the night of the murders—direct and specifically about what had happened. They told me they had a strong interest in the case because they were very much against capital punishment, and could see that my being singled out made me the defendant most likely to receive the death penalty. They had contacted my attorneys immediately and requested to be the court-appointed investigators—a common part of a defense team—on my case. I was too shattered to take in what they were saying or to understand that they might prove helpful to my case.

When I got out of the padded cell a week later, I was taken back to the cell block with Chad. He was as pleased as could be because, counting me, he now had three roommates. While I was gone, two more guys had come in. Both were black teenagers, one named James and one named Nikia (everyone called him Kilo). Kilo turned out to be the second-best friend I’ve ever had in my life. This guy was really smart and extremely funny. We’d often say the same thing at the same time, or when I would try to explain something he would get excited and say, “Yeah! That’s it exactly!” He would slide across the cell-block floor on his knees, doing a flawless Michael Jackson impersonation, and I would laugh until my sides hurt.

We got a chessboard from somewhere, and I taught him the game. I had learned at some point to play by reading the instructions on the box. After playing several games a day for about a month, I could never beat him again. He kicked my ass every time, unless we played speed chess by my rules. This was a variation that I invented, and its purpose was to prevent you from thinking about your next move. Your opponent had until the count of five to move a piece, or you could legally start thumping him in the forehead. It was a very fast five-count, which gave you slightly under two seconds to grab a piece and move it.

Chad’s family brought him some games, too, so the four of us passed the time playing Monopoly, checkers, and dominoes. We all pooled our money, so that even the person with the smallest amount wouldn’t have to play without stakes. If my family left me twenty dollars, I’d buy twenty dollars’ worth of candy and chips, which was considered to belong to all of us. Kilo, Chad, and James did the same. We never had a single fight, which is a very rare thing when you’ve got guys who are forced to be in each other’s faces twenty-four hours a day.

The guards at the Monroe County jail were different from any I’ve ever seen since. They were nice, polite, well groomed—not abusive in any way. I was fooled into thinking all guards were this way. I didn’t realize I was experiencing a miracle. They treated us like human beings, and even let us do things the other prisoners didn’t get to do, like stay up all night. The four of us never were locked up alone; we made small pallets in the common area between our cells, and lived like we were having an eternal slumber party.

Kilo and I both looked with great anticipation to Saturday at midnight, when a television show called
Night Flight
came on. We were so starved for music that we’d listen to anything, and this was our only fix. It wasn’t the music either of us loved, but it was all we had. You never know how much you need music until you don’t have it. I missed it so much my heart hurt.

*  *  *

M
y mother, father, and Domini came to visit me once a week. We were allowed twenty minutes, and had to talk through bulletproof glass. Domini had been almost five months pregnant when I was arrested, but you still couldn’t tell it by looking at her. In the last three or four months of the pregnancy, she grew at an alarming rate. By July, her body was still the same size it had always been, but her stomach had become huge and tight.

On August 4, I was taken to a pretrial hearing with Jason and Jessie, where all three of us pleaded not guilty. Judge David Burnett, who had been assigned to the case after the first hearing with Rainey, presided. He was a Craighead County judge, his demeanor administrative and assuming—in his eyes, we were already convicted. He was just going through the formalities and paperwork of a trial. He did at this point “sever” Jessie’s trial from mine and Jason’s—Jessie’s lawyers were effective in arguing that the publicity surrounding all of us would damage his own case. In the back room, seated just a few feet from Jessie and Jason, it was impossible to speak. The three of us were shell-shocked. Jessie never lifted his head; he sat staring at his feet. Jason appeared angry, and if we managed to make eye contact, he shook his head at me in sheer bewilderment and disbelief.