Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  Meanwhile, Gary Gitchell, chief inspector of the West Memphis PD detective division, had requested a search-and-rescue team from the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office. The Memphis, Tennessee, PD sent its own helicopter to join the search, but the foliage in the Robin Hood area was too dense for any kind of ground visualization.

  By 1:30 P.M. the next day, most of the searchers had abandoned Robin Hood Hills. But that was when Steve Jones, a county juvenile officer, glanced down the steep sides of the creek near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash and saw a black tennis shoe. He radioed for backup before he tried to retrieve it. Police Sergeant Mike Allen was on the other side of the woods, in the neighborhood. He made his way across the sewage drainpipe over the overflow ditch and rushed to meet Jones, where he was waiting.

  As soon as Jones pointed to what he had seen, Allen clambered down into the water to retrieve the sneaker. He lost his balance and fell in. As he later described it, “I raised my right foot up and a body floated to the surface.”

  It was a child. He was naked and his back was severely arched. Soon police were all over the site. Gary Gitchell established a crime scene perimeter and his men began looking to see if there were two more bodies nearby.

  Detective Bryn Ridge took on the unpleasant task of climbing down into the stream and searching, foot by foot, on his hands and knees. He was hoping against hope that he would not find anything, but he knew that at any step he might. Instead, he ran into a stick stuck upright in the mud. When he pulled it up, there was a child’s white shirt attached, twisted around the end of the stick as if someone had been trying to hide it by pushing it down into the streambed.

  The police had not wanted to disturb the crime scene, but personnel felt they couldn’t just leave the body in the water. While this was an understandable human and humane response, it was the wrong one. The victim was dead, beyond help. The scene should have been left alone until the medical examiner and crime scene technicians arrived.

  Instead, Ridge waded back and carefully lifted the corpse onto the creek bank. From photos the officers had been given, they identified it as Michael Moore. The unnatural arch of his back was because he had been hog-tied—left wrist to left ankle and right wrist to right ankle—but not with rope or cord. Rather, he had been restrained with shoelaces, presumably his own. Wounds to the head made it look like he had been struck hard, more than once.

  Men and women in the operational end of law enforcement get hardened to seeing horrible things, but almost no one can harden him or herself to something like this.

  Ridge got back in the water. Tracing the bottom with his hands, he found more clothing, including Michael’s Cub Scout cap and shirt and two more pairs of sneakers—both with their laces missing. Soon they had an almost complete collection of what the three boys had been wearing, most of it secured with sticks beneath the bottom of the creek. What was that all about? I wondered. Significantly, much of the clothing was turned inside out, suggesting it had been hurriedly pulled off, either by the boys themselves or their attacker.

  Now there was no hope among the officers, only the waiting horror of where the next body would turn up. Ridge discovered it downstream, adhering to the soft mud. He pulled it loose with a firm tug and guided it to the surface. It was Stevie Branch, naked and hog-tied with shoelaces like Michael.

  Christopher Byers was found a few minutes later, facedown in the muddy water. He was naked and similarly tied, but it was even worse: it seemed he had been castrated. Only skin remained where his genital organs should have been. Puncture marks, such as would be made with a large knife, surrounded the area.

  Detectives found two bicycles in the water, one red and one green, not far from where the large drainpipe allowed access to Robin Hood over the diversion ditch. By that time, county coroner Ken Hale had been called. He examined all three bodies, where the officers had left them on the creek bank, and pronounced death at around four in the afternoon. At that point, no determination was made as to when the boys had actually died.

  Gitchell directed that the entire scene be photographed and videotaped and also ordered sandbagging of the stream above where the bodies and clothing had been found so they could search for more evidence, as well as Chris Byers’s missing body parts.

  I noted in my reading that investigators had not retrieved and catalogued the sticks used to submerge the clothing in the mud.

  After giving his orders, Gitchell came back out of the woods, where an anxious crowd had gathered behind the yellow police tape. The first person he talked to was Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather, who crumpled to the ground and began weeping. As soon as she heard, Pam—his wife and Stevie’s mother—fainted. Gitchell spoke briefly to some reporters; then he went over to Christopher’s stepfather, John Mark Byers. Byers said he had been out searching the area most of the night and thought he must have come within ten or fifteen feet of where Gitchell said the bodies were found.

  The community went into mourning. Grief counselors were brought into the boys’ elementary school. A sizable reward was established for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the killer or killers. Neighbors and church groups took up collections to help pay for the funerals and burials. Gary Gitchell said his detectives were looking into a wide range of possibilities, including that the murders might have resulted from “gang or cult activity”—though he didn’t say if there was any evidence to support this hypothesis.

  News of the horrendous crime spread quickly. Governor James “Jim” Guy Tucker contacted Gitchell and offered the services of the Arkansas State Police to help in the investigation. But as would happen three years later with the JonBenét Ramsey case in Colorado, Gitchell turned down the state police. It is possible, like the Boulder PD, he was confident his department could close the case itself. But there might have been another reason. At the time, WMPD was under investigation by the state police for corruption, resulting from allegations that one or more of the officers had taken confiscated drugs from the evidence room and had sold them for his own illegal purposes. If that was what was going through Gitchell’s mind, working with the state police could have been extremely awkward.

  When I read the initial reports, my first thought was a mixed sexual homicide: that is, a crime committed for sexual gratification with elements of both organization and preplanning and disorganization, or reacting to the scene. It was unclear whether murder was the initial intention, but it seemed likely that the crime got out of hand, since there were three victims, resulting in the killing of all of them. When we see a homicide in which the genitals, buttocks, anus and/or female breasts are primarily involved, we further classify it as a lust murder. Since there appeared to be a castration and all three boys were stripped and suggestively bound, that designation seemed likely here. But I wanted to withhold judgment until I had immersed myself completely in the case.

  The autopsies were performed by Dr. Frank J. Peretti, a pathologist with the Arkansas State Crime Lab. Chris Byers, he reported, had died of multiple injuries, while Stevie Branch and Michael Moore had drowned in about two feet of water after receiving less intensive wounds. Unlike Chris, neither one of them appeared to have any defensive wounds, suggesting they had not struggled.

  As details of the murders spread throughout the community, residents began to speak of the undertones of evil and darkness attending the case. Lieutenant James Sudbury, of the West Memphis PD, contacted Steve Jones, the juvenile probation officer who had made the first horrible discovery in Robin Hood Hills. Both men thought this looked like a cult-type crime, and Sudbury wanted to know if any of Jones’s young charges was capable of this kind of atrocity.

  Jones’s boss, Jerry Driver, was the senior juvenile probation officer. He was a former airline pilot who had retired and opened a housecleaning service, but it didn’t last long. Afterward, he went into probation work. The bearded, bearlike Driver had become deeply concerned about satanic cult activity and saw signs everywhere that it was coming to east-central
Arkansas. When the three boys were murdered, he realized his worst fears had come true. He made up a list of the eight young men he considered most capable of committing a crime like this. On the top of that list were Damien Wayne Echols and another boy known to be his close friend, Charles Jason Baldwin. I wondered why he had put them on this list. He shared his list with the local police agencies.

  Damien Echols, eighteen years of age, was what was commonly identified as a troubled kid. He had been born Michael Wayne Hutchison, and as long as his parents Eddie Joe and Pamela Hutchison were married, he was constantly being moved around due to Joe’s work. By the age of twelve or thirteen, he wrote in his memoir Almost Home, I had already decided life was hopeless. Because of all this, he developed into a loner, turning inward to reading, music and an apparently long-term quest for spiritual meaning, which involved moving from his Pentecostal background into Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and eventually Catholicism. Along the way he looked into Wicca.

  At one point homeless, the family moved in with Pamela’s mother, Francis, and her new husband, Ivan, in West Memphis, while Joe looked for a permanent place for them. But the strain between Joe and Pamela had been building for years, and the marriage fell apart. Michael had grown very attached to Ivan and was devastated when the man died a few years later.

  Sometime after her divorce from Joe, Pamela married Jack Echols and moved into his house in West Memphis. In 1990, Jack adopted Michael, who reluctantly took his stepfather’s last name. Since he was changing his surname, he decided to change his first name to Damien, having been inspired by reading the story of Father Damien de Veuster, the Belgian Catholic priest who dedicated his life to the lepers of Molokai, Hawaii. Ironically, once Damien was associated with the Robin Hood Hills murders, the story spread that the new name came from The Omen movie series about the earthly appearance of the Antichrist.

  The life Damien describes with Jack, his mother and his sister, Michelle, was bleak. Jack joined a succession of small Pentecostal churches and moved the family into smaller shacks, each sending them further down the poverty ladder. When his grandmother had a heart attack and needed care, they moved into her trailer park house.

  I’ve heard many jokes about poor people living in trailer parks, Damien wrote, but I no longer considered myself poor. I was now in the lap of luxury—I could take a shower whenever I wanted, there was central heat for the winter, and a window unit air conditioner for the summer. The toilet flushed, there were no crop dusters, and we had neighbors. It was heaven.

  In junior high school, Damien developed the persona that ultimately brought him to the attention of the authorities. He later conceded he was suffering from depression, which was certainly understandable, given his circumstances. His grades slipped and he became disruptive in class. He developed a passion for heavy metal, especially the bands Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax. He also liked the popular Irish rock band U2. He dressed all in black, wearing a secondhand black trench coat even in the humid Arkansas summer. He shaved one side of his head and let the hair on the other side grow long. In his ongoing spiritual quest, he embraced paganism, mysticism and the occult. He became a Wiccan, following a path that he equated with nature and the creative force of life.

  And he found his new best friend.

  CHAPTER 18

  DAMIEN AND JASON

  On the surface, Charles Jason Baldwin, known by his middle name, was nothing like Damien. Two years younger, with a slight build and curly blond hair he wore long, Jason was a diligent student with a recognized talent in art. Some of his teachers had encouraged him to pursue it as a career. But the two boys hit it off, talking big ideas, swapping information about the latest counterculture bands, sensing a kinship they felt was absent from the rest of the narrow-minded rural community. Jason, whom most people described as quiet and polite, liked to hunt and fish and kept pet snakes. His mother, Angela Gail Grinnell, had a history of mental illness and drug abuse. At one point, she had been involuntarily committed to the East Arkansas Regional Mental Health Center.

  Jason came from a similar background to Damien’s and so many others in this poor, semi-rural community, including two of the slain boys. His parents had divorced and remarried several times, so it became a challenge to keep all the last names straight. Jason’s father, Larry, lived in central Arkansas. He and Gail were second cousins.

  By his middle teen years, Damien was getting into minor scrapes with the law. He and a girlfriend ran away together one night and went into an abandoned house to sleep. Police arrested him and turned him over to juvenile authorities for evaluation. He was sent to Charter Hospital, near Little Rock, where he was diagnosed as manic-depressive and put on the antidepressant drug Trofanil. When he was released and sent back to West Memphis, he was placed under the supervision of juvenile probation officer Jerry Driver.

  This was not his first encounter with Jerry Driver. “Jerry Driver harassed and tormented me for years. He’s the one who had me put in those mental institutions,” Damien said, adding that Driver cruised near his trailer home frequently, looking for kids in some kind of trouble. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, Driver was a figure of fear and loathing in the poorer neighborhoods he patrolled.

  “What brought me to his attention in the very first place,” Damien recalled, “I have a teenaged girlfriend, her parents find out we’re having sex, and say, ‘You’re not allowed to see each other anymore.’

  “So we come up with the ingenious plan—‘Well, let’s just run away, then.’ So we run away. Her parents call the cops to come and find us. They find us, they take us in. That’s when we encounter Jerry Driver. We’re juveniles, so they bring Jerry Driver in. It’s the first time he sees me. That’s when he targets me, zeroes in on me.

  “Immediately, the first night, he starts asking me all these satanic questions: ‘Well, have you heard anything? Do you know anything about a satanic cult in the area? What have you heard? Have you seen anything strange going on? You know, we really need some help with this.’ This was years before the murders. I was, like, sixteen, seventeen, something like that.”

  The instability that had characterized Damien’s life continued. His mother, Pamela, finally divorced Jack Echols and remarried Joe Hutchison, moving with him to Portland, Oregon, and securing the parole office’s permission to bring Damien with her. Damien’s mental condition worsened; he took to drinking heavily, and his parents were afraid several times he was going to commit suicide.

  Damien decided to go back to West Memphis. Staying with a friend, he applied for readmission to high school, but he was told he would need a letter from his parents. As soon as he left the school campus, Jerry Driver arrested him on the grounds that he had violated his parole by leaving his parents’ custody in Oregon.

  “I went to the high school to register and they said, ‘You can’t register without a parent or guardian because you’re under eighteen.’

  “So I go back to my friend’s house. Next thing you know, I hear a knock on the door. It’s Jerry Driver. He says, ‘I’m gonna have to arrest you.’

  “I say, ‘For what?’

  “He says, ‘Because you’re not living with your parents. Therefore, you’re violating the law.’ He arrests me and has me put in the mental institution for a month.”

  Damien was sent back to Charter Hospital; but in the weeks he was there, he seemed to feel better, possibly because of a doctor’s insistence that he focus outside of himself and interact with other patients. When he returned to West Memphis, he took his high-school GED exam and passed. He moved in with his girlfriend, Domini Teer, a cute, slender, freckle-faced redhead. She soon became pregnant. When his parents moved back to West Memphis, he lived part-time with them.

  Around noon on Friday, May 7, 1993, Lieutenant James Sudbury and Steve Jones came over to the Hutchisons’ house in the Broadway Trailer Park and secured their permission to talk to Damien. Sudbury snapped a Polaroid photo of Damien showing a pentagram tattoo
on his chest and another arm tattoo they couldn’t identify. They asked him if he was involved in cult activities. He said he wasn’t.

  “They start asking me and telling me things,” Damien recounted. “They take me into a bedroom at my house and they say, ‘What if the bodies were found in the water? Why do you think they would be in the water?’

  “I say, ‘I guess to hide them.’

  “ ‘Well, what do you think if maybe somebody urinated in the mouths and they pushed the bodies into the water to wash the urine out of them? Do you think maybe that’s a possibility?’ ”

  Damien recollected that he was surprised by the conversation: “ ‘Okay,’ I’m thinking, ‘that’s some freaky stuff that you would even think to ask me that, but ‘Okay.’

  “The next thing I know, we get to trial and they’re saying, ‘He told us they were pushed in the water to wash the urine out of them.’ ”

  The following day, Inspector Gitchell interviewed John Mark Byers, which would be standard practice in any murder case involving children. You always investigate those closest and with the most ready access to the young victim first. Interestingly, although they were interviewed for routine information, there was no organized investigation of his wife, Melissa, or of the other parents, Pam and Terry Hobbs, or Dana and Todd Moore.

  The day after the Byers interview, the officers requested an official interview with Damien. They also talked to Jason Baldwin, knowing he was a close friend. Despite an absence of any kind of direct or inferential evidence, they were convinced the boys had something to do with the child murders and put them under even closer surveillance.

  Police followed up on various tips, though some were mishandled from the beginning. One such was the unidentified person of interest who came to be referred to as “Mr. Bojangles.” According to police reports, around eight-forty on the night of the murders, Marty King, manager of a Bojangles’ restaurant about a mile from the crime scene across Ten Mile Bayou, called West Memphis PD to report that someone had seen a black male “dazed and covered with blood and mud” inside the ladies’ room. It was unclear whether all of the blood was his or not, but he left some on the restroom wall when his arm brushed against it. He had also defecated on the floor.