Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (41 page)

2. P
LACE OF
D
EATH

Although Ridge stated, both in the trial and in Exhibit B of the search warrant, that Misskelley had a knowledge of the crime scene that only the killer could possess, in fact, as Hill has said, “Misskelley demonstrated no substantive knowledge of the interior of the woods where the bodies were found.”
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Indeed, he referred to the woods as a “park.”
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Hill has further noted that “the police provided a nearly complete description of the crime scene,” but “the only details that Misskelley presented regarding the inside of the woods were that the path (brought up by the interrogators) is little, and the tall bank (brought up by the interrogators) has a top and bottom.”
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Furthermore, Misskelley’s statements about where the murders took place contradict the evidence,
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and he wrongly claimed that a path that leads away from the crime scene goes “close to the interstate.” (There were paths that led in every direction except toward the interstate.
⁷³
) He also described one location as south of the principal crime scene when it is north of it.
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Other suspects, including some who had also confessed to the crime, were taken to the crime scene and then released when it was clear that they could not identify where, exactly, the murders took place. Misskelley, however, was never taken to the crime scene.
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3. S
EQUENCE OF
E
VENTS

Misskelley stated that the boys were beaten while still wearing their clothes. Since the autopsy reports state that their clothes had “no rips, tears, blood stains or skin scrapings,” the victims were presumably naked when they were beaten.
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4. L
IGATURES

Misskelley stated that the boys’ hands were tied with brown rope but their feet were not tied and they could have run away. In fact, both the boys’ hands and the boys’ feet were tied, and they were tied with black and white shoelaces (five of the laces came from the boys’ shoes; the source of the sixth lace was never determined), not brown rope. The actual killer would certainly have remembered these details, especially since the boys’ hands and feet were bound in such an unusual way: their left wrists tied behind their backs to their left ankles and their right wrists tied behind their backs to their right ankles. Also, until the police brought up the possibility that the boys were tied, Misskelley had said they were restrained simply by being held. After the police suggested that tying the boys’ hands wouldn’t have prevented them from running away, Misskelley offered four explanations for their inability to escape—they were beaten too badly to move, they were sat upon, their legs were held up in the air, and they were knocked down.
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At no time did he mention that their feet were tied, much less tied to their hands. Indeed, he even said that one of the boys was “kicking . . . his legs up in the air.”
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The fact that the boys were tied with shoelaces was one of the few inside details that hadn’t been leaked to the press, and of all the suspects the police interviewed, only one identified their ligatures correctly: James Martin, a thirty-three-year-old man who had been previously convicted of sexually molesting his stepdaughter and stepson. According to Durham’s reading of Martin’s polygraph test, Martin failed two questions: “Do you know what was used to tie up those three boys?” and “Do you know who killed those three boys?” Nevertheless, Durham believed Martin had passed the test, since his belief that shoelaces were used as ligatures was based on “logic.” The police also either overlooked or ignored the facts that Martin drove an eighteen-year-old Toyota Corolla and that the manager of the Blue Beacon truck wash, which was very near the crime scene, reported that a man who drove a “small car, Toyota older model” had been at the truck wash around ten p.m. the night of the murder.
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Martin is only one of several plausible suspects the police stopped investigating after receiving Misskelley’s confession.
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5. S
EXUAL
M
OLESTATION

Misskelley claimed that two of the boys were sodomized both before and after they were killed and also that they were forced to perform oral sex.
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At various times Misskelley said that only Echols raped Chris Byers, that only Baldwin did, and that neither of them did.
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Asked if the autopsy revealed any evidence that the boys had been sodomized, Dr. Peretti said, “If the penis enters the anal canal, I would expect to find bruises and abrasions to the opening. I couldn’t find any physical evidence of that.”
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Furthermore, microscopic analysis of the boys’ anuses failed to reveal even broken capillaries, much less bruises and abrasions. There was also no bruising to the backs of any of the boys’ mouths, as Peretti said would be expected with forced oral sex, nor was there any semen found in the boys’ mouths or rectums.
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Additional forensic tests conducted later confirmed Peretti’s conclusions.
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6. C
AUSE OF
D
EATH

Misskelley stated that one boy was hit and choked with “a big old stick.” In fact, there was no evidence that anyone was choked, with a stick or otherwise, and “no splinters or trace evidence [was] found to confirm the victims were struck with sticks.” Misskelley brought up the stick only after the police asked him if sticks were used in the attack. He likewise mentioned knives and belts as possible causes of the boys’ wounds only after the police had suggested them.
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Led by the detectives’ prompts, he stated that Baldwin had cut two of the boys with a knife. As will be discussed in detail later, six nationally renowned forensic experts, each working independently, concluded unanimously that the cuts, lacerations, gouges, and scratches on the victims’ bodies were caused by postmortem animal predation, not by a knife. Only bruises and fractures could be attributed to human causes.

Hill has noted that of the thirteen statements made by police about Misskelley’s “inside knowledge” of the murder in Exhibit B of their request for a search warrant, the only one supported by the evidence is that all three boys were severely beaten, and that was a matter of public record well before Misskelley’s statement. Hill concludes: “The other statements were provided by the police during the interrogation, were unsubstantiated, contradicted the evidence or were simply invented when composing the search warrant.”
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According to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which upheld Misskelley’s conviction in 1996, his confession was “virtually the only evidence” against him, “all other testimony and exhibits serving primarily as corroboration.”
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As I hope this summary of the implausibility of the confession reveals, there actually was no legitimate evidence—none—that Misskelley, Echols, or Baldwin were guilty of the crimes.

You might think that the discrepancies between the facts and Misskelley’s confession, coupled with the lack of any physical evidence tying Echols, Baldwin, or Misskelley to the murder scene, would have made those who investigated and prosecuted the West Memphis Three at least a little cautious about claiming they’d arrested the right people. But you would be wrong. When a reporter asked Gitchell the day after the confession to rate on a scale of one to ten how solid his case was, he said, “Eleven.”
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There is good reason to believe, however, that Gitchell knew just how little evidence he actually had, or at least that the prosecutors did, for after the arrests the prosecution took the unusual step of asking the court to seal the documents supporting the search and arrest warrants. Because the court complied, the public was unable to discover just how meager the evidence was. An editorial in the
West Memphis Evening Times
criticizing the decision concluded: “The case remains shrouded in secrecy, and the public’s questions remain unanswered. We hope, above all else, that our faith in the law enforcement and judicial system is justified. We just wish we knew for sure.”
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Now—too late—I believe we do know for sure that the people’s faith was not justified. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the case against Gitchell and the others responsible for coercing Misskelley’s false confession, then hyping the so-called “evidence” of the three teenagers’ guilt, is an eleven.

The First Trial

B
ecause Misskelley retracted his confession and refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, two trials were required—one in which the confession could legally be used, to determine Misskelley’s guilt or innocence, and another in which the confession was not admissible, to determine Echols’s and Baldwin’s. The confession was not admissible in the second trial because Misskelley’s refusal to testify would have deprived Echols and Baldwin of their Sixth Amendment rights to confront and cross-examine their accuser. The prosecutors had offered Misskelley a deal to testify, but he refused. Although the details of the offer were never divulged, his attorney described Misskelley’s decision as “the most difficult . . . he will ever make,” a statement that implies that testifying would have significantly reduced his sentence.
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The first trial began in January 1994 and took place at the Clay County Courthouse in Corning, Arkansas. The presiding judge was David Burnett, and the prosecutors were John Fogleman and Brent Davis. Misskelley was represented by two court-appointed public defenders, Dan Stidham and Greg Crow, neither of whom had served as the lead lawyer in a capital case. Stidham, the lead attorney, was only twenty-seven.
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The defense had virtually no budget to pay for experts to testify on behalf of their clients. In fact, the total budget for investigations and expert witnesses for the three accused teenagers was a mere $7,500.
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Stidham paid for the few experts he was able to bring in by using his own credit card.
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Misskelley’s trial was lost even before it began. In repeated pretrial motions, Stidham argued that Misskelley’s case should be tried in juvenile court since he was a minor, and that his confession should not be admitted into evidence because he was mentally challenged and the confession had been coerced. Burnett rejected all of these motions. As a result, Stidham was faced with the difficult task of convincing a jury that his client’s confession was false. This task was difficult not because he lacked evidence of its falsity; it was difficult because most people simply cannot imagine confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. But, as counterintuitive as it may seem, false confessions are far from uncommon. According to The Innocence Project, more than half of the eighty people convicted of murder and later exonerated through DNA evidence had given false confessions.
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Stidham made a valiant effort to convince the jurors that Misskelley’s confession was false and coerced. He brought in Warren Holmes, a nationally recognized polygraph expert who had conducted polygraph tests in such high-profile cases as the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations and the Watergate break-in. Holmes, who received no payment for his appearance, was prepared to testify that Misskelley had passed the polygraph test, showing deception on only one question, the question of whether he had ever used an illegal drug. However, Burnett refused to allow Holmes to express an opinion on the validity of the polygraph examination.
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Consequently, the jury never learned that Misskelley had in fact passed the polygraph, and they were left to believe that he had failed it.

Similarly, Burnett ruled that Dr. Richard Ofshe, an acknowledged expert on false and coerced confessions who received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, could not testify before the jury that he believed Misskelley’s confession was involuntary. “I’ve already ruled it was voluntary,” Burnett said. “Now, am I going to let a witness get up here and contradict my ruling?” In several bench conferences, Burnett also stated that he would not allow Ofshe to express an opinion on the validity of Misskelley’s statement, but after the prosecution referred to coercion while cross-examining Ofshe, Stidham asked the judge if he could “use the word
coercive
like the prosecutor used,” and Burnett gave him permission to ask Ofshe about possible evidence of coercion. However, Ofshe was not allowed to express his opinion that police coercion rendered the confession involuntary or invalid, and Burnett allowed Ofshe to testify for only a few minutes on the subject of coercion, ostensibly because it was late in the day (approximately three p.m.) and the court reporter was getting tired.
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It was left to Stidham, then, to attempt to convince the jury that Misskelley’s confession was false. The fact that Ridge misrepresented the confession, both in Exhibit B of the search warrant and in his testimony during the trial, was a significant obstacle. For example, Ridge said that Misskelley “told us that it was Steven Branch that received the cuts to the face.” Misskelley did say “one of the little boys” was cut in the face, but in neither the taped statements nor Ridge’s notes of the unrecorded parts of the interrogation does he say which one.
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The fact that a child’s face had been cut was already common knowledge, and Ridge had shown Misskelley a photograph of Michael Moore, who also had a laceration on his face, so Misskelley could have been thinking of Michael.
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Similarly, Ridge stated that “Misskelley also described the area where the murders occurred very specifically,” when in fact, as the recording makes clear, Ridge himself was the one who described the crime scene.
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Stidham pointed out that details of the crime that the police claimed “only the killer would have known” had in fact been leaked by the investigators and been widely reported,
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and he further pointed out the numerous discrepancies between the facts and the confession. When Gitchell was questioned by Stidham, he shrugged off these discrepancies by saying, “Jessie simply got confused. That’s all.”
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This response was evidently enough for the jury, especially after Vicki Hutcheson took the stand and, in testimony reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials, falsely claimed that she had gone to a witches’ esbat with Echols and Misskelley, thus “proving” to the jurors’ satisfaction that the murders were part of a satanic ritual.