Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  The next witness was intended to explain the motive for this horrible crime and ended up giving perhaps the most controversial testimony of the trial.

  Dale W. Griffis, Ph.D., was a self-proclaimed expert on Satanism and cults. A former police officer in Tiffin, Ohio, he said he had served as a consultant to victims, law enforcement, educators and mental-health specialists. Under questioning, he conceded that his master’s and Ph.D. degrees were awarded by Columbia Pacific University, which had no national certification and did not require him to take a single class. The school was closed by California court order in 2000. Griffis had been on the campus five times before his graduation. He said the street was his classroom. The title of his dissertation was Mind Control Cults and Their Effects on the Objectives of Law Enforcement.

  He admitted that he had never talked with either Damien or Jason and couldn’t even pick Jason out in the courtroom. He said he had reviewed the crime scene and autopsy photos and had spoken with John Fogleman between ten and twelve times. What he had done, about a year before the murder, was consult with Jerry Driver and receive copies of some of Damien’s drawings to determine if West Memphis had a satanic or occult problem in the person of Damien Echols. Griffis said he considered this very good and responsible law enforcement work. This previous exchange would help explain why Damien was on the top of Driver’s list as a possible suspect when the three boys were murdered.

  “On behalf of my client,” Damien’s attorney Val Price objected, “it’s our position that the mail-order Ph.D. in which a person doesn’t have to take classes . . . from a nonaccredited school doesn’t qualify as an expert in Arkansas.”

  “I disagree,” Judge Burnett responded. “I’m going to allow him to testify in the area of the occult.”

  The defense attorneys challenged this ruling, saying there was no scientific basis to Griffis’s assertion about the murders being related to satanic ritual. But once again, Burnett seemed to be making inconsistent distinctions between the qualifications of defense experts, like Dr. Ofshe in the Misskelley trial, and prosecution witnesses, like Griffis, who qualified “based upon his knowledge, experience and training in the area of occultism or Satanism.”

  Once Griffis was allowed to get into the substance of his testimony, Jason’s attorney Paul Ford asked him whether these crimes were “motivated by occult beliefs.”

  “Yes,” Griffis replied. He explained that the murders had taken place under a full moon and that there was an absence of blood at the scene because Satanists would save it to drink or bathe in for its “life force.” The black hair, fingernails and T-shirts all had occult overtones or suggested occult involvement. So did the staging of the crime near water. The overkill and genital mutilation—check. The pentagram on the front of Damien’s seized notebook was certainly indicative of satanic activity. Inside, the pentagram surrounded by upside-down crosses symbolized the merging of white and black witchcraft—Wicca and Satanism.

  Does this remind you of the tattoos and heavy metal posters from the Cameron Todd Willingham arson trial?

  Griffis said he had never seen victims of a sex crime that wasn’t occult tied this way, and that there would be no other reason than occult to tie them in this fashion.

  When pressed, Griffis admitted that he had only investigated two other sex crimes in which victims had been tied, and neither of them was tied in this manner. So basically, he had never seen this type of bondage, but he knew it had to be occult related. He also acknowledged that as far as he knew, there was no evidence of blood having been stored at either of the defendants’ residences. Both defense teams pointed out that there were no pentagrams or any other specific evidence of Satanism or the occult present at the crime scene.

  It went on from there. Griffis did not know if the murderers knew the ages of the boys, but there is an occult belief that if you do not have sex with a boy before he turns nine, he loses his magical powers.

  When both defendants’ attorneys protested the use of evidence taken from Damien’s house by the juvenile system before the murders even took place, the judge ruled that facts or data do not need to be admissible in court to be used to form an expert opinion. Since it is necessary for the prosecution to prove motive if they can, his reasoning went, proving motive outweighs all other negative effects.

  Though Griffis conceded to the defense that many of the indicators in the crime could be interpreted in various ways, they “showed trappings, not just of vague occultism, but of satanic worship in particular.”

  The prosecution closed its case with the testimony of two young girls, one eleven and the other fifteen. They each testified they had seen Damien, dressed all in black, at the J.W. Rich Girls Club softball fields and had overheard him telling a group of friends that he had killed the three boys, and that he planned to kill two more—“I already have one of them picked out”—before he turned himself in. In one of the witness’s accounts, Jason was with him when he made this statement.

  They said they were about fifteen or twenty feet away, and neither young lady could recall what he had said before or after, nor identify any of the friends to whom he had been talking. There was a police officer on the field, but neither went to tell him. One of the girls said she told her mother afterward, but none of this was reported until after Damien was arrested. And one girl put the date of the game after Damien’s arrest. Between Jessie’s confession and this account, was it possible West Memphis parents didn’t teach their children how to tell time or read a calendar?

  Damien Echols’s defense team allowed him to take the stand. Jason Baldwin’s team kept their client off. Both decisions can be second-guessed and were, though I have always felt that innocent defendants—and it is a credit to the general efficacy of the criminal justice system that they are in the minority—make pretty good witnesses.

  Jason, in particular, gave the impression of being so guileless, straightforward and unsophisticated that I think he would have done himself some good. It came out afterward that he very much wanted to testify in his own defense, as well as have his attorneys call character and alibi witnesses. On the other hand, with the atmosphere of satanic ritual so heavily in the air, the mere fact that eleven black T-shirts were found in his home might have negated all other impressions. As Jason later commented, “All that mattered was that Damien was weird and I had black T-shirts.” You can never fault a defense attorney for trying to protect his client.

  The consensus was that Damien did himself no favors by testifying over the course of two days in his own defense. Reading the transcripts and watching the film of his testimony, I think it had a mixed result. The prosecution certainly made points tying him to an interest in the occult through his seized notebooks, which was damaging.

  On the other hand, I thought he came across as candid and unguarded, trying to answer questions as honestly as he could. As a prosecution strategist, I always wanted defendants to take the stand, because I felt a skilled prosecutor, pressing the right buttons, could get the witness to let down his guard and make the jury see him as he actually was.

  In the prosecution of Wayne B. Williams for the early 1980s Atlanta Child Murders, that is exactly what we did. I coached Jack Mallard, an extremely skilled prosecutor, to get up close and personal with Williams, who had been smug and controlled on the stand up until then. With his methodical, south Georgia drawl, Mallard bore in on him, violating his personal space, and pressed, “What was it like, Wayne? What was it like when you wrapped your fingers around the victim’s throat? Did you panic? Did you panic?”

  And in a weak voice, Williams responded, “No,” before suddenly catching himself. He flew into a rage, pointed his finger at me and screamed, “You’re trying your best to make me fit that FBI profile, and I’m not going to help you do it!”

  The defense went ballistic as Williams went nuts on the stand, ranting about “FBI goons” and calling the prosecution team “fools.” But the damage was done. For the first time, the jury saw a man capabl
e of murder.

  That never happened with Damien Echols. There was no such drama here. Nothing the prosecution did got under his skin. It was as if there was no boiling point. Damien answered the questions with a certain air of weariness, as though he was just waiting to finish up so he could leave.

  He said he was into skateboarding, music, movies, watching TV and talking on the phone. He would read any book he got his hands on. He admitted telling Bryn Ridge the things the detective testified to—that everyone had a good side and a bad side. He said, “I have read about all different types of religions, because I’ve always wondered, like, how do we know we’ve got the right one, how do we know we are not messing up.” After exploring Catholicism, he focused on Wicca.

  When Price asked him his opinion on Dale Griffis’s testimony, he replied, “Some of it was okay, but he didn’t stop to differentiate between different groups. He just lumped them all together into one big group that he called ‘cults.’ ”

  He was matter-of-fact rather than defensive on issues the prosecution had considered damning. On the knife found in the lake, he observed, “I had one sort of like that, but mine didn’t have a black handle. The handle on mine was camouflaged, and it had the camouflage case and everything. The blade on mine was black. It wasn’t silver like that.”

  When asked if he had ever read books by Aleister Crowley, a pretty hard-core writer on black witchcraft whose name Damien had written in code in his notebook, he replied no, but “I would have read them if I had saw [sic] them.”

  As to whether a killer would feel good about the crimes, he thought that if that person committed the crimes voluntarily, he probably would feel good about it. As far as Damien was concerned, that was just common sense and showed no particular insight into the mind of the killer.

  He also said about Detective Ridge, “If he didn’t get the answer, he’d try to make me go back and say something else.”

  “Tell the judge the manner in which they were questioning you during this period of time,” Price instructed him.

  “During these questions right here [initial standard questions], they were pretty nice. After that, God! After I’d been there awhile, they started cussing me, telling me they knew I did it. They were going to fry my ass. I might as well go ahead and confess now.”

  A little later, Price asked, “During that time, did you ask for an attorney?”

  “Three times,” Damien replied, elaborating that Ridge “told me I didn’t need to bring him back there, because he was just going to cost us a lot of money, and that in the end he was going to quit, anyway.”

  Later, Damien said he didn’t take the trial all that seriously, because he didn’t believe anyone could prove he had committed murder when he knew he hadn’t killed anyone. His reasoning was like a more sophisticated yet equally naive version of Jessie’s.

  After Damien’s testimony, the defense tried to call Christopher Morgan to the stand. He was a twenty-year-old from Memphis with a string of drug problems who had told police in California that he might have killed the three boys during a drug blackout. During a hearing away from the jury, he explained that he had been in the area during the murders, but now he denied any part and had recanted his confession to the police. He described a situation similar to what Jessie Misskelley Jr. had gone through, with seventeen hours of questioning and a confession made in desperation. Prosecutors Brent Davis and John Fogleman claimed West Memphis PD had considered him unreliable and had ruled him out as a suspect. Paul Ford replied that Jessie had also recanted right away and was similarly unreliable, and Christopher’s testimony would certainly cast reasonable doubt.

  Ultimately, Christopher’s court-appointed attorney said that his client would not testify; and if he was compelled to do so, he would invoke the Fifth Amendment on each question because of various charges that were pending against him. Judge Burnett bought into this and not only excused him from taking the stand, but placed a gag order on all the attorneys so that they could not even mention Christopher Morgan’s existence to the jury and give them another highly questionable confession to consider.

  For their final witness, Damien’s defense team called Robert Hicks, a police training officer from Virginia who had done his own study of satanic cults as they related to violent crime. Like my FBI colleague Ken Lanning, he had found no empirical evidence that such a phenomenon actually existed or that listening to heavy metal or wearing black had anything to do with the propensity to commit ritual violence. Point by point, he refuted Griffis’s ideas and said that even his phrase “ ‘trappings of the occult’ is absolutely meaningless in considering any kind of violent crime.”

  Jason’s team firmly believed there was nothing on the record that implicated their client and therefore rested without calling any witnesses. Jason had gone into the trial believing so strongly in the American system of justice that despite his arrest and incarceration, he didn’t believe he could be convicted. When prosecutors came to him before the trial and offered him a lesser charge if he turned against Damien, he refused. He refused again when they cut his sentencing deal in half from forty years to twenty. Jason said that even if they let him walk away scot-free in exchange for testifying against Damien, he wouldn’t do it, because they were both innocent.

  In his closing statement, prosecutor Brent Davis pointed to photographs of the three dead eight-year-olds and said, “The normal motives for human conduct don’t apply. There’s something strange going on that causes people to do this.”

  Then he went on to cite Damien’s manner in the courtroom: “You can judge him from the witness stand. This guy’s as cool as a cucumber. He’s nearly emotionless, and what he’s done in terms of the satanic stuff is a whole lot more than just dabbling or looking into it for purposes of an intellectual exercise.

  “As bizarre as it may seem, and as unfamiliar as it may seem, this occult set of beliefs and the beliefs that Damien had, and his best friend, Jason, was exposed to all the time—those are the set of beliefs that were the motive or the basis for causing this bizarre murder.”

  John Fogleman’s part of the closing argument was both strange and controversial. He began by admitting that nothing specifically tied the defendants to the crime. However, if jurors evaluated the totality of the evidence, it all pointed in one direction, and pointed there beyond a reasonable doubt.

  He held up a grapefruit and, in turn, picked up the two exhibit knives: the one found in the lake and the one that had belonged to Mark Byers. Paul Ford rose to object; this was not a scientific experiment and the subject grapefruit had not been introduced into evidence. As had been his pattern throughout both trials, Judge Burnett sided with the prosecution.

  Fogleman gave the grapefruit a whack with each of the knives. While admitting that this was not conclusive as to the specific knife that was used in the murder, he pointed out that the marks on the grapefruit’s skin left by the lake knife matched wounds on Christopher Byers’s groin. In other words, there were small wounds an approximately even distance from each other, corresponding to the serration on the knife. The Mark Byers knife did not.

  But as I watched the tape of Fogleman’s argument, I sat up with surprise. No criminal in my experience had ever brought a knife down flat against a victim’s skin surface. You use a knife to stab or gouge. So this demonstration didn’t—and still doesn’t—make any sense to me. It had no relationship to a real-life situation—just more of the strange suggestion and innuendo that had characterized this entire trial.

  When it was his turn, Damien’s attorney Val Price picked up a picture that had been seized from Damien’s bedroom of a goat-headed figure holding two torches. He acknowledged that it was “a weird, strange-looking picture, but so what? It’s still all right in America to have weird things in your room, and it doesn’t mean you’re guilty of murder, and it doesn’t give any kind of motivation.

  “It’s not our job to prove what happened May fifth. It’s the state’s job, and they haven’t done it.” />
  The case went to the jury at five on the afternoon of March 17, 1994. They deliberated until 9:40 P.M., then came back the next morning at nine-thirty. They reached their verdicts at three-thirty that afternoon.

  We asked Damien if he expected a guilty or not guilty verdict as he waited.

  “You’re torn,” he replied. “It’s like they always say, ‘You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.’ Well, in my mind, it is impossible, physically impossible, for someone to prove you’ve done something that you haven’t done. In a teenaged mind, that violates the laws of physics. But also, people who’ve never been in a situation like this can’t comprehend the state of shock you’re in, the trauma. It’s like they set a bomb off at every single level of your being. They’ve destroyed you—psychologically, emotionally. I mean, in every way you have just been devastated, had your entire world destroyed. You can’t think the way you normally think.”

  As the jurors filed into the courtroom, all Damien specifically remembers is that they “were staring holes in me.”

  When all were assembled in court, the bailiff handed the jury forms to Judge Burnett, who read them out loud. Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were both found guilty of capital murder.

  As it was later revealed, the jury did take up the Misskelley confession in its deliberations and used it as evidence to convict the two defendants.

  The next day, the jurors returned and, after hearing what lawyers for each side had to say, spent a little over two hours deliberating their punishment recommendation. They found that the crimes had been committed, as the legal expression stated, in “an especially cruel and depraved manner,” which could mitigate any positive considerations for the defendants. For Damien Echols, the perceived ringleader, it was death by lethal injection. For Charles Jason Baldwin, his follower who had no prior history of bad behavior or run-ins with the law, it was life in prison without parole.