Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (42 page)

The only physical evidence Fogleman presented were fibers found at the crime scene: two green fibers taken from a Cub Scout cap and a single red fiber taken from a white shirt.
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According to Lisa Sakevicius, an employee of the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, the green fibers were “microscopically similar” to fibers from a size six Garanimals T-shirt that belonged to Echols’s stepbrother, and the red fibers were likewise “microscopically similar” to fibers from a robe that belonged to Baldwin’s mother.
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As Leveritt commented, “In light of the bloodiness of the crime, its hands-on physicality, and the number of victims and defendants, the discovery of a few mass-produced fibers from items available in Wal-Marts and other clothiers all over the country” constituted “an infinitesimal amount of evidence.”
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Sakevicius acknowledged that many fibers are microscopically similar and that the similarity “proved nothing.” She further said she was not contending that the fibers came from the garments in question.
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The fact that the shirt and robe did not belong to Echols or Baldwin made the suggestion that the clothing linked them to the crime even more tenuous. Essentially, the State was arguing that the only evidence the killers left behind at the scene of this grisly murder were three fibers from garments owned and worn by other members of their families.
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Despite this lack of convincing physical evidence, on February 4, 1994, Misskelley was convicted and sentenced to life plus forty years. After the trial was over, juror Lloyd Champion told the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
that he believed Misskelley’s confession was not coerced. He added—with, as Leveritt has noted, “irony that was apparently not intentional”—that he wasn’t surprised that Stidham didn’t have Misskelley testify on his own behalf because, if he had, “I think that prosecuting attorney could have tore him apart and made him say anything.”
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The Second Trial

T
he trial of Echols and Baldwin began on February 28, 1994, and was held at the Craighead County Courthouse in Jonesboro. As with the first trial, the defendants were represented by court-appointed public defenders with minimal budgets for forensic experts and tests. Echols was represented by Val Price and Scott Davidson, and Baldwin by Paul Ford and George Robin Wadley. Again, the prosecutors were Fogleman and Davis, and the judge was Burnett.

This time, the prosecutors would have a more difficult burden of proof. Because Misskelley had informed the State that he would not testify against Echols and Baldwin, his confession was, in theory at least, inadmissible evidence, for to admit it would deny the defendants their Sixth Amendment right to confront their accuser. (I say “in theory at least” because Ridge did mention it during the trial, and there is evidence that the jurors discussed it during their deliberations.) Misskelley had made the decision not to testify despite the fact that he had been strongly pressured to do so. Shortly after his conviction, he was taken, without the permission or knowledge of either his attorney or his father, to a small town near Jonesboro, where Davis tried to persuade him to testify.
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Misskelley said he was told that if he didn’t testify, Echols and Baldwin would walk free and then they’d “go after” his girlfriend. Misskelley’s father and stepmother helped talk him out of perjuring himself, saying that if he lied he would have to live with that fact for the rest of his life. Because he refused to lie, he said, “if I ever do get out, my name will be clear, and I can live pretty much a decent life.”
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Because Misskelley’s confession was inadmissible evidence, the prosecution had to rely on dubious physical and hearsay evidence to secure a conviction. Again they submitted as evidence the three fibers introduced at the first trial. Fogleman said he believed this evidence was strong, but admitted, “We can’t say it came from that particular garment to the exclusion of all others.”
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The prosecution also introduced two sticks that the police took from the crime scene nearly two months after the murders,
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but as Peretti testified, there were no wood fragments or splinters or anything else in the boys’ wounds to connect these sticks to either the murdered boys or the defendants.
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In addition, Sakevicius testified that blue wax was found on one of the victims’ shirts and one of Echols’s books, Frank Donovan’s
Never on a Broomstick: The True Story of the Faith, Mystery, and Magic of Witchcraft, Classical and Contemporary
. In a bench conference held out of the presence of the jury, the defense asked why they hadn’t received a crime lab report about the wax, and Fogleman stated that Sakevicius “said that what she puts in her report is when there are matches. She claimed that [the wax] didn’t match anything.” The jury never heard this statement. What it did hear was Fogleman’s claim, in his closing argument, that the waxes could be matches and that candle wax was evidence of a satanic ritual. According to notes taken by jurors, the wax was cited as one of the reasons for Echols’s conviction.
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Most important, the prosecution also introduced as evidence a knife that was found in Lakeshore Lake, near Baldwin’s home, under suspicious circumstances. According to Fogleman, he had a hunch—six months after the arrests—that the killers had disposed of the murder weapon in the lake, and he contacted the Arkansas State Police, which sent a dive team there on November 17. Fogleman described the discovery of the knife that day as “quite a coincidence” and dismissed any suggestion that the knife had been planted by saying that no one but the investigators knew they were going to search the lake, much less “when we were going to do it.” But if no one but the police knew when they were going to search the lake, how was it that a reporter for the
West Memphis Evening Times
happened to be on the scene to take a photo of the diver surfacing with a knife in his hand? Was that, too, “quite a coincidence”?
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To make this “coincidence” seem even more suspicious, a member of the dive team has since stated that the divers “were given precise directions on where to find the knife.”
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The “Lake Knife,” as it came to be called, was a nine-inch non-folding Rambo-style survival knife that did not match the description of the six-inch folding knife that Misskelley had claimed was the murder weapon.
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It did, however, roughly resemble a knife Echols was reported to have once owned, and that fact was evidently good enough for the prosecution.
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Still, no testimony was introduced in court to connect the knife in any way to the crime scene, for Peretti had said (wrongly, as we shall see later) that the boys’ wounds could have been inflicted by any serrated knife.
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The absence of testimony linking the knife to the crime did not prevent Fogleman from performing an experiment during his closing argument that strongly implied that the Lake Knife was the murder weapon. He held up a grapefruit and whacked it with the knife, then showed the jury the marks and claimed that they matched an autopsy photo of the wounds to Chris Byers’s groin. “I submit the proof shows this knife caused this,” Fogleman said, then corrected himself—but not until after he’d already given the impression that he was holding the murder weapon in his hand—“Well, true, it could be another knife like this, but I submit to you the proof—the circumstantial evidence—show [
sic
] that this knife, State’s exhibit seventy-seven, caused those injuries.”
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One of Echols’s later attorneys, Dennis Riordan, has said that this was “a classic instance of prosecutorial misconduct.”
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In an October 29, 2007, filing, he and fellow attorney Donald Horgan wrote: “No evidence in the record permitted the conclusion that the Lake Knife was used in the crime, yet Fogleman informed the jury in closing that he was able to reduplicate the marks on Byers’s body by cutting into a grapefruit with the knife in question. The prosecutor’s unsworn testimony in this regard violated petitioner’s Sixth Amendment right to confrontation.”
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Dr. Richard Souviron, a prominent forensic odontologist who examined the autopsy records, also expressed outrage at Fogleman’s claim that the knife marks on the grapefruit matched those on Byers’s skin. “That is the most ridiculous statement that I’ve ever heard anybody make. And to sell that to a jury is unconscionable, in my opinion.”
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The absence of physical evidence tying Echols and Baldwin to the crime was not due to any lack of effort on the part of the investigators. They took samples of hair, blood, and saliva as well as fingerprints and shoeprints from all three suspects and found nothing that matched the evidence at the crime scene. Nothing.
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As Dr. Peretti had testified at the first trial, and would testify again at this trial, there was also no physical evidence that the boys had been sodomized by anyone, much less by these two particular defendants. Because of Peretti’s testimony, the defense lawyers asked Burnett to bar the prosecutors from claiming the boys had been sodomized, but he ruled that they could continue to make this claim despite the lack of any supporting evidence.
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The prosecution’s hearsay evidence was every bit as dubious as the fiber evidence (and Misskelley’s confession). In addition to the now admittedly false testimony of Vicki Hutcheson, there was the equally false testimony of a sixteen-year-old jailhouse informant named Michael Carson. On the witness stand, Carson claimed that, in August 1993, Baldwin, whom he’d met less than twenty-four hours before, had confessed the crime to him. “He told me how he dismembered the kids,” Carson testified. “He sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.”
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Leaving aside the fact that only one “kid” had been “dismembered,” and the fact that over the course of several interviews with the police Carson named five different days as the day Baldwin confessed to him (one of them a day after Carson was released from the detention center),
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his statement is hard to accept. First, Baldwin had maintained his innocence from the very beginning, so it seems highly unlikely that he would confide his guilt to someone he had known for less than twenty-four hours; second, Carson waited five months to mention this conversation to anyone; third, he had a long history of drug abuse and lying; and fourth, given the criminal charges against him at the time, he might have been hoping that his testimony would win him some leniency.
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The prosecution was clearly aware that Carson’s story was difficult to swallow, for when Fogleman and Davis met with the victims’ families before the trial, they warned them that the jury might not believe him.
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What they didn’t tell the families—or the jury—was that Danny Williams, a former counselor at the juvenile detention center where Baldwin and Carson had been held, told Davis on February 14 that Carson’s claims were false and that they were based on rumors he had himself told Carson during a therapy session. Williams offered to testify in the trial, but Burnett ruled that his testimony could not be admitted because it would “violate the therapist/client privilege of a minor.”
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It is perplexing how testimony that did not include a single word that Carson had said in confidence could be construed as violating his right to confidentiality. The court inexplicably chose to protect a minor from losing his right to confidentiality (even though nothing confidential would be revealed) rather than protect another minor from being wrongly sentenced to death or imprisoned for life.

Like Hutcheson, Carson has since retracted his testimony. Their retractions and further evidence of their perjury will be discussed in more detail later.

The final hearsay evidence came from two girls, one twelve and the other thirteen, who claimed they had overheard Echols tell a group of people at a softball game that he’d killed the three boys. The older girl, Jodee Medford, also said that Echols had said “he was going to kill two more and he already had one of them picked out.”
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There were discrepancies in the girls’ testimony that cast doubt on their accounts, however. In a June 7, 1993, statement, Jodee Medford said that her sister Jackie and her friend Christy Van Vickle, the younger girl who testified at the trial, were with her at the time Echols supposedly confessed and that Baldwin was not present. Four days later, however, she changed her story to say that Baldwin
was
present, and in her testimony in court she repeated that claim but this time said her sister Jackie and Van Vickle were
not
with her. Van Vickle testified, on the other hand, that Jackie Medford was there when she overheard Echols but Jodee Medford was not. Also, Van Vickle’s testimony was nothing if not vague. She said she could not remember anything Echols had said before or after his “confession.”
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Both girls said they’d reported this incident to their mothers, but no one had alerted police about it until after the arrests.
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Donna Medford, Jodee’s mother, also testified, confirming that Jodee had told her what Damien had said. She has since signed a sworn affidavit indicating that “Echols’s statement was not serious and that neither she nor her daughter believes he committed the crime.”
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The State’s case was not limited to physical evidence and hearsay, however. It also relied on inaccurate testimony from investigators, particularly Detective Ridge, and unsubstantiated statements by the prosecutors. Whether by mistake or design, Ridge said under oath that Echols told him that “all people have a demonic force in them and that the person [who committed the murders] would have no control over that demonic force.” According to Ridge’s notes of his interview with Echols, however, Echols had stated the exact opposite, that people
do
have control over the demonic force in them. Ridge also said that Echols told him Anton LaVey was his favorite author. There is no reference to LaVey in Ridge’s notes, and Echols testified that he told Ridge that “I haven’t read anything by him, but I am familiar with him.” Similarly, Davis tried to suggest that Echols had told Ridge that he had read works by Aleister Crowley, but again, there is no evidence of that in Ridge’s notes. The fact that Echols testified that he would have read Crowley’s books if he’d had the opportunity suggests that he was not trying to hide his interest in occult writers and would have admitted to reading LaVey and Crowley if he had done so.
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