Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  After the celebrations and the first tastes of freedom, Damien, Jason and Jessie set about the task of getting on with their lives. Never having lived outside of prison walls as adults, this was bound to be a strange and unpredictable process.

  Jessie went back to the comfort and familiarity of his family in West Memphis.

  The day after he was released, Jason flew to Seattle—his first time on an airplane, and his first time out of Arkansas—to visit a friend, who was living there. He liked it so much that he decided to stay. After a round of traveling to talk about the case and the various media projects associated with it, he settled down in his first apartment to enroll in community college. He hopes to go to law school, work with the falsely accused and eventually become a law professor. He and his girlfriend, Holly Ballard, an Arkansas native whom he met in 2008 after she’d been writing to him in prison for four years, are serving as executive producers of Devil’s Knot, a movie about the case based on the book of the same name by reporter Mara Leveritt.

  Damien and Lorri are also in the movie business now, among other creative endeavors. While still in prison, they worked with director Amy Berg to coproduce West of Memphis, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s revealing and insightful, full-length documentary, which has been distributed theatrically around the globe.

  For most of eighteen years, Damien sat and stared at four concrete walls to the point where he said he couldn’t even exercise his distance vision. Now, with Lorri by his side and the help of loyal and supportive friends, he was free to explore a whole new world.

  CHAPTER 27

  MEETING MR. ECHOLS

  Though I had worked closely with Lorri, Fran and Peter and the rest of the defense team, it wasn’t until January 2012, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, for the screening of West of Memphis that I met Damien and Jason for the first time. I had not wanted to talk to any of the defendants in prison lest it affect my objectivity so this was the first opportunity. Being now so familiar with the evidence and photographs, the trial footage and all of the news interviews, in my mind Damien and Jason were a strange composite of their 1993 teenage selves all the way up to videos of their release from prison as men in their thirties.

  As it happened, it was in the parking lot as my wife Pam and I were going into the theater for the screening that I saw Damien with Lorri. She came over to greet us and introduced Damien. He threw his arms around me and thanked me for my part in his case. At that moment, I felt I had known him as long and as well as I had known Lorri. Seeing him in person for the first time, looking healthy, happy and trim, I immediately projected back to the horror of his nearly two decades on death row.

  The film was very well received by the Sundance audience. In the lobby I spotted Mark and Jackie Byers and waved to them. They came over and Mark hugged me and thanked me. Then I saw Pam Hobbs, who did the same. It seemed a long time ago that they hadn’t even wanted to hear what I had to say, and that Mark practically threatened to throw me off his property. But that “long time” was only about a quarter of the time the West Memphis Three were wrongfully imprisoned.

  After the screening, Fran and Peter held a dinner for the defense team at their hotel. Jason and Holly were there and it was good finally to meet them. Peter placed me at one end of the table and Dennis Riordan at the other. This was more than just a movie after-party. The first thing Peter said after we sat down was, “All right, what are we going to do next?”

  Steve Braga, who had had the most recent “close encounter” with the Arkansas legal process, said he thought the logical move was to get back in touch with Scott Ellington. Now that the three were safely out of prison, he was the one who would have to be convinced that justice demanded a large final step of removing the murder conviction.

  I said this would not be easy, because elected prosecutors are political animals and an overriding consideration for them is going to be: What will the constituents think?

  “We think John should be the one to talk to him,” Steve suggested. “He’ll have the credibility because in his career he’s worked with both prosecution and defense.”

  He told me that Ellington was going to receive a private showing tomorrow—Sunday, January 22. “He probably won’t like it,” Steve commented.

  “You’re probably right,” I agreed. He said he’d let me know the next step after they heard back from Ellington.

  Pam and I flew home on Sunday and that night Steve called to say that Ellington did want to talk and would call me the next morning at 9:00.

  My conversation with the district attorney lasted about an hour and a half. I can’t relate all of the specifics, because some issues and investigative points remain highly sensitive until the entire case is finally resolved. Knowing how he felt about the film, I figured he was going to jump down my throat, but he was polite, measured and attentive.

  I was surprised he did not know more about the facts and record than he did. Steve had predicted this and figured it would make Ellington more open and objective.

  “I don’t know if they’re guilty or not,” I recall him telling me early in the conversation.

  I interrupted him to say, “Scott, I can tell you: They’re not guilty. They had nothing to do with this crime.”

  So I took him through the entire case, just as I had with Peter and Fran, Jackie and Mark Byers, and Pam Hobbs and her family. He continued to be highly attentive and seemed to take it all in.

  When I finished up, he asked, “So what does the defense want? I gave them an Alford plea.”

  “They want to be exonerated,” I said. “They’re out of prison, but they’ve been convicted of three murders with sexual overtones that they didn’t do.”

  We went back and forth on this for a while, with Ellington remaining noncommittal until finally he said something to the effect, “The timing is not good.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but thought it probably had something to do with his being fairly new in the office and him wanting to establish his credibility with the public. Many of his constituents might already be unhappy with him because of the plea deal, I reasoned, so pushing for exoneration could be political suicide.

  Three months later, I learned he was planning to run for Congress.

  The effort continued. But as of this writing, the case of the West Memphis Three remains in legal limbo. Damien, Jason and Jessie, though free, are still convicted killers in the eyes of the law. New witnesses have come forward whose sworn affidavits appear to shed additional light on Terry Hobbs and what he allegedly said and did. Scott Ellington promised Steve Braga, who has left Ropes and Gray to open his own firm, that he would follow up. But after nearly two decades, the actual murderer of Michael Moore, Chris Byers and Stevie Branch continues to elude justice.

  Damien and Lorri continued their close association and friendship with Fran and Peter in other ways. While Damien was in prison, he wrote and published the first volume of his autobiography, Almost Home, a book that is now a valuable collectors’ item.

  His startling literary insight and writing talent are self-taught. When Mark and I met with him and Lorri to talk about the case, he reflected, “My mom had me when she was fifteen years old. My dad was sixteen years old. I dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and that’s the most education anyone in my family has. My stepfather could not read or write a single word other than his own name.”

  By the time he had been out a few months, amidst the same kind of hectic travel and appearance schedule Jason had undertaken, he had completed his second volume, a heartbreaking, empowering and beautifully written memoir of his life before the case and while in prison, Life After Death. He and Lorri are coproducing a feature film version with Fran and Peter, starring their supporter and now-close friend Johnny Depp. Amy Berg is directing. Damien completed the book while living in Fran and Peter’s recently purchased American apartment. While Damien wrote, Lorri supervised the finishing work and decorating for Fran. Lorri is anxious to get back
to her landscape architecture and design career, and Damien is exploring various forms of art and expression as he continues to adjust to a new world.

  As Lorri said, “Damien went from living in complete poverty in a trailer court to death row in a prison, to this amazing city and this amazing place we’re staying in. To watch him learn how to move around in this world, my biggest thing was just to stop messing with him and just let him do it.”

  But it wasn’t all easy or charming or an adventure of endless wonder. The most ordinary of tasks that most of us take for granted could completely throw him.

  “One day, I decided to go out and just explore the city. So Lorri asked me, ‘Will you take these checks and put them in the bank?’ And I said okay. So she gives me this check and I go to the bank and I freak out—I don’t know what a deposit slip looks like. And there’s this line of people looking at me like I’m a jackass because I’m holding up progress and I just turned around and got out of there.

  “And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve been beaten almost to death, I’ve been starved, been tortured in just about every way a human being can be tortured. Why am I freaking out because I can’t fill out a bank deposit slip?’ ”

  Lorri said, “While we were on the road so much after the release, Damien’s healing process was on hold. Only now is he really healing, mentally and physically.”

  And he is ready to move on. “This case has eaten up half my life. I don’t want to give it any more.”

  In the six years I spent with this case—far shorter than so many others—I came to realize how much time and effort it took from so many supporters, celebrities and experts to get three clearly innocent young men simply freed. That’s not even talking about getting them exonerated or getting the real killer to trial.

  Of course, some people still cling to the opinion that the West Memphis Three were child killers and that the effort to get them out has been a sham. They may be among the ones who still feel that Stevie, Chris and Michael were killed by satanic cultists.

  After all was said and done, one of the most scurrilous comments came from Jerry Driver, the man who got Damien into this mess in the first place. It was uttered during an interview included in West of Memphis. Sitting complacently in his recliner, he said of Damien, “I think he did. I’ll put it this way—I know he could have. Whether he did or not, I know he could have.”

  Damien, in some ways, is more philosophical than I would be. Several months after he was freed, reflecting on the chain of events and the people who brought him to trial, conviction, prison and a looming lethal injection, he noted, “I don’t even really believe in the word ‘evil.’ Most of the time, what I see that people call evil, I see as stupidity or lack of empathy.”

  Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, published a book in 2011 based on his extensive research, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong. Steve Braga said, “Garrett identifies five common failings leading to wrongful convictions—false confessions, junk science, jailhouse informants, ineffective assistance of counsel and bad judging. They’re all in this case! So this case is the poster child for wrongful conviction.”

  I would like to think that this legal nightmare never would have taken place if there had been better juvenile officers, better investigators, better scientists, better lawyers, a better judge, better jurors and even better media. But there weren’t. So I hope this case will serve as an object lesson and cautionary tale, except we know that similar horrors are still happening all over.

  Damien himself has said that theirs was not an unusual case. They just got lucky that two guys decided to make a film about them. It makes you realize how tenuous was his deliverance and the magnitude of the challenge we face in making our criminal justice system better and more reliable.

  The defendants didn’t originally agree to the film because they thought it would get them out. They agreed because the filmmakers paid them for participating and that money was used to help support their severely underfunded defense. And that decision was what ultimately led to their salvation.

  Sitting with Lorri, Mark Olshaker and me over lunch in a restaurant near where they were living, Damien said, “If you take out one single link in the chain, I’m still in prison or I’m dead. If you take away HBO, nobody would have heard about the case. If you take away Lorri, nobody would have been driven. Take away the WM3-dot-org people, everybody would have seen the movies and said, ‘That’s too bad,’ but there’s nothing they would have done. When I look at the list—Peter and Fran, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines, Henry Rollins, Steve Braga, Dennis Riordan, Don Horgan, John Douglas, Steve Mark, Burk Sauls, Kathy Bakken, Lisa Fancher, Grove Pashley . . . I mean, hell, every single person in this case . . . If you take any of them away, it’s like a house of cards that collapses.”

  CHAPTER 28

  THE DAY OF THE DEAD

  In the fall of 2007, twenty-one-year-old Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher, a Leeds University student from Coulsdon, Surrey, south of London, had just begun a yearlong adventure. She was taking a course in modern history and political theory as an exchange student at the University of Perugia in the beautiful medieval and Renaissance city, about a hundred miles north of Rome. She wanted to follow her father, John, into a career in journalism, and she had worked at Gatwick Airport, near her home, to raise money for the overseas program.

  Called “Mez” by her friends, of which there were many, Meredith shared the four-bedroom upper floor of a tiled-roof, white stone and stucco cottage at Via della Pergola 7 with three other young women: twenty-year-old American exchange student Amanda Marie Knox, of Seattle, Washington, and Italians Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti. Filomena and Laura were just starting out as attorneys in local firms. Amanda, an honors student from the University of Washington, came over around the same time as Meredith. She was studying Italian at the Stranieri, officially the Universita per Stranieri di Perugia—the University for Foreigners of Perugia.

  Meredith and Amanda were both pretty, smart and personable. Amanda was the wholesome outdoorsy type, outgoing and bubbly, a guitar-playing free spirit. She was an honors graduate of Seattle Prep, an elite Jesuit high school to which she’d won an academic scholarship. She had been to Japan as an exchange student, had recently visited German relatives and said she wanted to master at least seven languages. She worked part-time at a bar called Le Chic, operated by Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, an immigrant from Congo, well known and popular in Perugia. Patrick had come to Perugia in the 1980s to study political science at the Universita per Stranieri, where Amanda was studying, and stayed on after graduation. In addition to the bar, he produced concerts at the university. When he met Amanda, Patrick thought her looks and personality would attract patrons.

  Meredith, the youngest of four children, was equally bright and accomplished. Like Amanda, she was a child of divorce. She had an exotic beauty, the product of an English father and a Pakistani mother, whose ethnic characteristics had mixed perfectly in their daughter. She was more reserved and introspective, but with a zany, goofy side that came out when she was in relaxed social situations. In addition to her flatmates, she had a posse of British girls with whom she hung out when they could tear her away from her studies.

  The house they shared had a panoramic view of the city, though some locals considered it situated in a bad neighborhood. Laura and Filomena, in their late twenties, had found the house through a leasing agent and then posted flyers to find the additional tenants they’d need to handle the rent. Their rooms were at the front of the cottage, and Meredith’s and Amanda’s were in the back, in an addition that overlooked a ravine. Four Italian guys—Giacomo Silenzi, Stefano Bonassi, Marco Marzan and Riccardo Luciani—lived on the lower floor.

  Thursday, November 1, 2007, the day after Halloween, was All Saints’ Day, a national holiday in Italy. Meredith was alone in the cottage that evening after having watched a movie at a friend’s house. Amanda was staying over at the flat of
her new Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. A twenty-three-year-old computer science and engineering student from Bari, whose father was a prominent urologist, Raffaele had a mop-topped Harry Potter look. She had met him at a classical music concert on October 25, and they had been pretty hot and heavy ever since. Raffaele’s parents had also divorced; and in his second year of college, his beloved mother had died suddenly of a heart condition. He couldn’t get over not being home when she passed away and was still mourning her.

  On the night and day in question, Filomena was staying with her boyfriend, Marco Zaroli, and the other five Italians were visiting their families for the holiday weekend.

  Amanda returned to the house around ten-thirty on the morning of November 2, according to her account, and found the front door ajar. There was no spring latch, so the door had to be locked with a key. Meredith’s bedroom door was closed; and if she was still sleeping, Amanda didn’t want to disturb her. So Amanda went to shower in the small bathroom the two girls shared.

  As she stepped out and was about to dry herself, she noticed what looked like dried blood droplets on the sink and the floor mat she was standing on. There were no towels, she suddenly realized. Maybe Meredith had had a bad period, but she was always so meticulously neat and clean that it all seemed strange.

  Amanda went to her bedroom to fetch a towel and dry off. She played music on her computer while she got dressed. Then she went into the bigger bathroom off the kitchen, which Laura and Filomena shared, to borrow their hair dryer. As she was drying her hair, she suddenly noticed the toilet was unflushed and the bowl was filled with feces and toilet paper. This was not something any of her roommates would do, and she was sufficiently creeped out to quickly leave the house and rush back over to Raffaele’s flat, where she described to him what she had encountered.