Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (40 page)

Back on May 6, Driver had also given his list of prime suspects to Detective Donald Bray of the Marion Police Department, whose office was across the street from his own. That day, Bray was interviewing a thirty-two-year-old truck stop waitress named Vicki Hutcheson, who was suspected of stealing $200 by overcharging a customer’s credit card. Hutcheson told Bray that her eight-year-old son, Aaron, was a close friend of the murdered boys and that Chris Byers and Michael Moore had asked Aaron to go to Robin Hood Hills with them that fateful day but she had refused to let him. Thinking that Aaron might know something that would help solve the murders, Bray urged the West Memphis police to interview the boy.
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The following day, Aaron told police that Michael Moore had been picked up at school on the afternoon of May 5 by a tall black man with yellow teeth who told Michael that his mother had asked him to take him home. Since Michael lived just two doors down from the school
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and his mother said that he had come home immediately after school, the police dismissed Aaron’s report.
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Unfortunately, they did not entirely dismiss his later reports, even though each time he was interviewed, his account grew more bizarre and contradictory. At first he said he wasn’t in the woods when the three boys were murdered; later he said he was there and witnessed Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley committing the murders. Two other men, one of whom was black, were with them, he said, but he didn’t recognize them. He said Misskelley was holding Stevie in the water, waiting for the order from his “boss,” Echols, to kill him; then Michael and Chris found two guns, hid behind a tree, counted to three, then jumped out to shoot the five men, but the guns weren’t loaded. Then Echols cut Michael’s neck and blood poured all over his T-shirt, and when he was dead, Echols took off his clothes and raped him. Misskelley then cut off the genitals of all three boys. At this point, Misskelley saw Aaron and started to chase him, but Aaron tripped him and escaped.
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At other times, Aaron said that he had been tied up but managed to untie himself and escape by outrunning the five men who chased him
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; that Stevie had been stabbed in the stomach
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; that John Mark Byers, the stepfather of Chris Byers, helped murder the children
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; that Echols and Misskelley had poured his friends’ blood into a glass and made him drink it
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; and even that he had castrated Chris himself.
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During a second interview with Vicki Hutcheson a week later, Bray asked her if she knew anything about “an occult or devil worshippers,” and she said no, but a few days later she called Bray and said she would “play detective”
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and get more information. Hutcheson later told Bray that she had, for investigative purposes, initiated a romantic but sexless relationship with Echols and that, on the night of May 19, Echols had picked her up in a red Ford Escort and driven her and Misskelley, who had often babysat her children, to an esbat in a field outside Marion, where she witnessed approximately ten young people, whose faces and arms were painted black, engaging in an orgy.
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In 2004, overcome with guilt, Hutcheson would confess that “every word” of her testimony “was a lie.”
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But at the time, Bray was convinced of her veracity and again contacted the West Memphis police.

On May 27, Inspector Gitchell and Detectives Ridge and Allen interviewed Hutcheson. They were aware that Echols did not have a driver’s license and had never been known to drive a car, yet they did not question her claim that he drove her to the esbat. Nor did they pursue the claim that he drove a red Escort, a car that did not match the description of any vehicle owned by his family or anyone else he knew. And neither did they ask her how she was able to witness the orgy in the field when there had been no moon that night.
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On May 28, Ridge and Sudbury asked Hutcheson for permission to plant a tape recorder in her house in an attempt to record Echols discussing the murders. According to Hutcheson’s 2004 admission of perjury, she recorded conversations with both Echols and Misskelley that weekend and neither made any incriminating statements. Nonetheless, acting on Hutcheson’s claims, the police picked up seventeen-year-old Misskelley on the morning of June 3 and began interrogating him.

The “Confession”

M
isskelley was held by the police and interrogated over the course of twelve hours without an attorney or parent present. The reason no attorney was present, besides the fact that the interrogators would not have wanted one there, is that Misskelley had signed a form waiving his constitutional right to have one present. According to Arkansas law, a juvenile’s waiver form must be signed by a parent or guardian, but Misskelley’s was not. However, the Arkansas Supreme Court, which heard Misskelley’s appeal of his conviction, ruled that no parental signature was necessary in his case since he was charged as an adult. Misskelley’s attorney at the time, Dan Stidham, argued that this ruling meant that “a minor charged with a relatively light offense, such as throwing a rock through a window, could not sign away his constitutional rights without a parent also signing the form with him—yet a juvenile charged with a serious crime, for which he might receive a sentence of life in prison or even death, did not get that protection.”
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Despite the absurdity of such an interpretation of the law, the court did not alter its ruling.

And not only was Misskelley a juvenile, he was mentally challenged. In 1983 he had scored 67 on an IQ test and was therefore diagnosed as “mildly mentally retarded.”
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At a pretrial hearing, a psychologist testified that Misskelley’s current IQ scores “hovered at around 70” and that, scholastically, he had achieved a “maximum level” of third grade.
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Further expert psychological testimony established that he “tended to think like a six- or seven-year-old child” and that his academic skills had advanced “only to the second- or third-grade level.” Because of his mental impairment, a psychologist testified, he “at times can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality,” especially when under stress.
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He had definitely been under a great deal of stress during his relentless interrogation throughout the day on June 3. Although Allen later testified that he and the other investigators did not know that Misskelley was mentally challenged when they interrogated him, their questioning suggests otherwise, for Ridge asked this almost-adult if he knew what a penis was.
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The interrogation had already gone on for several hours before the police began to tape it at 2:44 p.m. All we know for certain about those first hours of interrogation, beyond the fact that no parent or attorney was present, was that until shortly before the detectives began to tape him, Misskelley denied any knowledge of the crime beyond the rumors he had heard around town.
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However, after Durham administered a polygraph test—and falsely told Misskelley he had failed it
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—he began to tell the police what they wanted to hear. (It’s interesting to note that Durham had excused another early suspect, Quirt Gregory, from taking a polygraph test because he was “mildly retarded” and had “the mental capacity of about a 10-13 yr. old,” but didn’t excuse Misskelley despite his even lesser mental capacity.
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) From 2:44 to 3:18 that afternoon, Misskelley answered the questions that Gitchell, Ridge, and Allen posed. As Leveritt has written, “Most of his answers were vague. Many were contradictory. Almost all began with a prompt by one of the detectives.”
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Armed with Misskelley’s confession, the police attempted to obtain a search warrant, but the judge rejected their request because of significant discrepancies between Misskelley’s statement and the known facts of the case, most particularly Misskelley’s claim that the boys were killed the morning of May 5, when, the police knew, the boys had been in school.
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So the interrogation continued. A second, twelve-minute statement was taped, probably around five p.m., and this time Misskelley said the murders took place at night, not in the morning. After taping this second statement, Gitchell, Ridge, and Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Fogleman prepared an affidavit, and at 9:06 p.m. they appeared in court again to request a search warrant, this time before Judge William “Pal” Rainey.
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This time the warrant was granted, a fact that shouldn’t be too surprising given Ridge’s later testimony that Judge Rainey had come to the police station to advise the police on how to prepare it. Leveritt notes, “This was highly unusual, as it later placed the judge in the position of ruling on the legality of a document that he had helped prepare.”
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Although Misskelley was in police custody for approximately twelve hours, only forty-six minutes of his interrogation were recorded. Misskelley recanted his confession within hours, but it was allowed to be used against him in his trial and was later used illegally, as we shall see, by jurors in the trial of Echols and Baldwin. Misskelley said that he “confessed” because he thought the police would let him go home if he did. He also said that Allen told him he would receive the $35,000 reward if he “help[ed] them out,” and that he wanted the money so his dad could buy a new truck.
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But, as Dr. Hill has observed, it is ultimately both impossible and unnecessary to determine why Misskelley confessed. “For whatever reasons,” the forensic linguist said, “instances of false confession exist. The primary question is: is this one of them?”
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To answer that question, Hill conducted a meticulous linguistic analysis of the confession and concluded that “none of the key, specific, verifiable details were provided by the confessor [Misskelley],”
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that “the police were the source of nearly all of the substantive information regarding the crime,”
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and, further, that the information that Misskelley supplied was “contradictory”
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and “incorrect.”
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Significantly, much of the incorrect information merely repeats the erroneous rumors that were circulating at the time (such as the rumor that the boys had been sodomized). The few facts that Misskelley got correct—for example, that the boys had been severely beaten and that the genitals of one were mutilated—had been reported as early as May 7 in both the Memphis and West Memphis newspapers and were common knowledge in the community.
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At Misskelley’s trial, Dr. Richard Ofshe, a nationally recognized expert on false and coerced confessions, testified that, in his opinion, “the questions were more than leading. The questions were very directly specifying what the answers should be.”
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In private, he was less politic; after first reading the transcript of Misskelley’s confession, he called Dan Stidham and said, “That’s the stupidest fucking confession I’ve ever seen.”
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There are so many errors and contradictions in Misskelley’s statement that it would take many pages to discuss them all. Here are only some of the most prominent:

1. T
IME OF
D
EATH

Initially, Misskelley said that he, Echols, and Baldwin had murdered the three boys shortly after encountering them early that morning while the boys were waiting on their bikes for the school bus. This is false for several reasons. First, the boys did not take the bus—two of them lived virtually next door to the school—nor would they be allowed to bring their bikes onto the bus. Also, although Misskelley claimed the boys skipped school, in fact they were in school all day.
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The detectives knew the boys could not have been killed in the morning, and they returned to the issue of time of death no less than eight times during the recorded part of their interrogation (and who knows how many times when the tape recorder was turned off). After repeated prompting, Misskelley changed the time of the murders from nine in the morning to “about noon” to after school let out that afternoon. Although Misskelley had not once stated that the murders took place at night, Ridge said, “Okay. The night you were in the woods, had you all been in the water?” After this prompt, Misskelley for the first time mentioned night: “Yeah, we’d been in the water. We were in it that night playing around in it.” Later, when Misskelley was again asked what time they were in the woods, he said, “I would say it was about five or so—five or six.” But that was still too early, since the boys had been seen alive later than that. Gitchell said, “All right, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time is it?” But, as Dr. Ofshe testified, “nowhere in the record—including the record of what the detectives say, the notes, the specific statements by Detective Ridge, the transcript of the first interrogation—is there any indication that Jessie ever said” any such thing.
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The confessions show Misskelley offering a wide range of times, from nine a.m. to eight p.m. or later, for the time of death. And although the prosecution proceeded with the assumption that the murders took place between seven p.m. and eight p.m. on May 5,
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a time during which there would have been sufficient light to carry out the murders and clear the crime scene of evidence, Dr. Frank Peretti, the associate state medical examiner who conducted the autopsies, testified that he and two other medical examiners he’d consulted had determined that the murders took place “between 1 a.m. and . . . five or seven in the morning” on May 6. Unfortunately, this testimony wasn’t given until the trial of Echols and Baldwin, after Misskelley had already been convicted. (During Misskelley’s trial, Peretti twice said he was unable to determine a time of death.) Despite the fact that Misskelley had an ironclad alibi for the newly proclaimed time of death, Judge Burnett denied his lawyer’s motion for a new trial.
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