Morgue

by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

  In coming weeks and months, investigators collected evidence they felt was related to the murders. In Jason Baldwin’s home they found a red robe that belonged to his mother, fifteen black T-shirts, and a white T-shirt. In Damien Echols’s home they found two notebooks that to them appeared to have Satanic or occult writing, and more clothing. Divers searching the silty bottom of a lake behind Baldwin’s house found a knife with a serrated edge.

  Police seized a pendant from Damien’s neck because it appeared to have blood spots on it. They later learned that Damien and Jason both wore the necklace occasionally.

  And detectives also found several witnesses who claimed that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley had all confessed in some way to the murders.

  A crime lab technician declared fibers on the victims’ clothing to be similar to four fibers found in Jason’s and Damien’s homes. A green polyester fiber on Michael’s Cub Scout cap was similar in structure to fibers found in Damien’s home. And one red fiber from Baldwin’s mom’s robe was microscopically similar to fibers collected from Michael Moore’s shirt. Not unequivocally the same, but similar.

  The knife couldn’t be positively included or excluded, although its serrated edge recalled medical examiner Dr. Peretti’s conclusion that a knife with a serrated blade had been used in the slayings.

  Very little useful testing material came from the necklace. Technicians could say only that the blood specks were two different blood types, one matching Damien Echols and one matching Jason Baldwin, victim Stevie Branch, and 11 percent of all humans.

  The three accused teenagers all pleaded not guilty and were appointed two lawyers each. All would be tried as adults, and Misskelley’s confession—although his lawyer argued it had been coerced—would be allowed. But because of Misskelley’s confessions, which he allegedly recanted within days, he would be tried separately from Echols and Baldwin so he could testify against them (although he eventually refused to do it).

  Less than ten months after the nude, broken bodies of those three little boys were pulled from a foul creek in West Memphis, their accused killers were going to trial. If convicted, they all faced the death penalty.

  The case was purely circumstantial, but two juries would have a hard time overlooking the graphic confession of one of the accused killers, as muddled and inconsistent as it was.

  * * *

  On January 18, 1994, jury selection in the Jessie Misskelley trial began in the tiny farm village of Corning, Arkansas. A jury of seven women and five men was seated in a day, and the prosecutor opened with a warning: They’d see errors and wild inconsistencies in Misskelley’s confession—the cornerstone of the state’s case—but they could all be attributed to a frantic effort to minimize his own role in the murders.

  But the defense quickly countered that Misskelley was a borderline retarded man who was a victim of public pressure on the cops to solve northeast Arkansas’s most heinous murder in decades. Detectives fixated on Damien Echols early on and never truly considered other suspects or scenarios, then scared a kid with a pitifully low IQ into confessing.

  The dead boys’ mothers led off the grim parade of witnesses. They told the jury and the world about their last moments with their sons. Then came graphic testimony from searchers and cops about the hunt for the missing boys and the discovery of their corpses, while jurors glanced at their bikes, propped up against a courtroom wall.

  The hardest part of such trials is always when the crime scene and autopsy photos are introduced into evidence. In this case, prosecutors showed more than thirty images of these dead boys—bound, bloodless, slashed, frozen in distorted poses. Then came the medical examiner with more ghastly photos from his autopsy table, close-ups of little white corpses on bloodied sheets, necrotic gashes, disfigured parts nobody wanted to see. The jurors blanched.

  Then the jury listened silently as prosecutors played thirty-four minutes of Misskelley’s taped confession. They heard Jessie, in his own words, tell how the boys died.

  The state’s case wrapped up with wrangling over the fiber evidence, and some talk about Satanism and cult killings. The defense, as it had at every step, fought back.

  Misskelley’s team mounted a reasonable-doubt defense.

  On the list of the defense witnesses was a well-known detective and polygraph examiner who believed Misskelley had actually been telling the truth when West Memphis police tested him with a lie detector—but when he heard he’d failed, he gave up and made a false confession. The same detective criticized investigators for not taking Misskelley to the crime scene.

  But jurors never heard most of that testimony. It was ruled inadmissible by the judge.

  A social psychologist testified that Misskelley had probably given police a false statement when he could “no longer stand the strain of the interrogation,” but he was not allowed to express his opinion that the West Memphis investigators overwhelmed Misskelley’s will and coerced a confession that was false.

  In the end, Misskelley didn’t take the stand in his own defense because his lawyers feared the poor kid would be slaughtered by prosecutors.

  “If this defendant didn’t chase down Michael Moore, he would have gotten to go home and be with his parents,” the prosecution said in its closing argument. “Jessie Misskelley Jr. didn’t let Michael Moore get away. He chased him down like an animal.”

  “The killing of one human being by another is only exceeded by the state killing an innocent man,” the defense said in closing.

  After more than a week of grisly photos, graphic testimony, and legal wrangling, the jury convicted Jessie Miskelley of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. Asked if he had anything to say, Misskelley said, “No.” He was quickly sentenced to life without parole plus forty years in prison and carted away.

  A few days later, the jurors told a reporter that the vivid image of a frightened eight-year-old boy running for his life but being dragged to his eventual death by the teenager in front of them weighed heavily in their verdict.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin faced their own jury in Jonesboro.

  Misskelley refused to testify against them, leaving prosecutors with the same circumstantial case in which no single piece of evidence absolutely connected the three teenagers to the crime. But in Echols, they also had an unsympathetic defendant who would make jurors vaguely uncomfortable, and who had already made statements to investigators like “Everybody has demonic forces inside,” and that the number three was “a sacred number in the Wicca religion”—when it also happened to be the number of eight-year-old boys he was accused of murdering. At other times, he’d threatened to eat his father, slit his own mother’s throat, and kill his ex-girlfriend’s parents. Everything about Damien Echols screamed bad seed.

  In opening arguments, the prosecution promised to prove Echols’s and Baldwin’s guilt forensically and by their own statements; the defense claimed the state had twisted the facts to fit its own surreal puzzle. No, they admitted, Damien Echols isn’t an all-American boy, in fact, he’s kind of weird, but no shred of physical evidence suggests he killed those boys.

  Again, the state’s first witnesses were the mothers of the three victims. A police detective recounted Echols’s interrogation, in which he made strange remarks about mysticism and demons. An ex-girlfriend told how Echols often carried knives in his overcoat. A cult expert talked about the “trappings of occultism” that marked the crime, from the shedding of “life force” blood to the full moon on the night of the killings to the potent “life energy” that can be stolen from young victims.

  Medical examiner Dr. Peretti testified that the knife found in the lake behind Echols’s house was consistent with the wounds he saw on Chris Byers’s corpse, although he admitted on cross-examination that other knives might also have made the same marks. He also said Chris’s penis was skinned and his scrotum sliced off while he was still alive; both Stevie and Michael were bludgeoned b
y a heavy object; and that Michael’s lungs were filled with water, indicating that “when he was in the water, he was breathing.” But on cross-examination, he admitted that the forensic evidence didn’t completely match Misskelley’s account, namely that he found no hard evidence that any of the boys were strangled, raped, or hog-tied with a brown rope.

  A few prosecution witnesses testified that either Echols or Baldwin had confessed privately. One of them, Baldwin’s teenage cellmate, claimed Baldwin admitted to “dismembering” the boys and that he had “sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.” Startling fact or self-serving fiction? A jury would have to decide.

  In the end, the only physical evidence that the state offered to tie either Echols or Baldwin to the crime scene was literally scant: a trace of blue wax found on one of the boys’ shirts and a polyester fiber on Michael’s Cub Scout cap that were “microscopically similar” to items found in Echols’s home.

  The defense started strong. After Damien’s mother testified that he’d been home with her on the night of the murder, and that he’d been talking to two girlfriends on the phone, the accused teenager took the stand for a few hours and coolly answered dozens of questions from both sides.

  What interests you? his lawyer asked.

  Skateboarding, books, movies, talking on the phone, Echols answered.

  Who are your favorite authors?

  “I will read about anything, but my favorites are Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Anne Rice.”

  What is a Wiccan?

  “It’s basically a close involvement with nature,” he explained. “I’m not a Satanist. I don’t believe in human sacrifices or anything like that.”

  Are you a manic depressive?

  “Yes, I am.

  What happens when you don’t take your medication?

  “I cry.”

  Why do you keep a dog skull in your room?

  “I just thought it was kind of cool.”

  Why did you tattoo “EVIL” across your knuckles?

  “I just kinda thought it was cool, so I did that.”

  Why do you always wear black?

  “I was told that I look good in black. And I’m real self-conscious, uh, about the way I dress.”

  Did you know those little boys?

  “I’d never even heard of them before ’til I saw it on the news.”

  Have you ever been to the Robin Hood woods?

  “No, I have not.”

  How do you feel about being accused of killing them?

  “Sometimes angry. Sometimes sad. Sometimes scared.”

  It was a valiant effort to rehabilitate an accused murderer who looked slightly menacing, had mental issues, and deliberately tried to shock his Bible Belt neighbors. But Echols’s courtroom behavior didn’t help: He sometimes blew kisses to the victims’ families and licked his lips lewdly at the defense table. He occasionally glared at the gallery, snarled at photographers, or preened himself in a little mirror. As his lawyers tried to portray him as a kid going through an awkward stage, he sent strong signals that he was a manipulator and a creepy little narcissist who relished making people’s skin crawl. And he reveled in all the attention.

  The defense wrapped up its case with a cadre of more witnesses who rebutted some earlier claims about occultism, suggested other scenarios and other possible killers (including Chris Byers’s father and a mysterious, blood-spattered man who stumbled into a West Memphis restaurant that night), and painted the police investigation as inept, overreaching, and desperate. Jason Baldwin never took the stand.

  In closing, prosecutors invited the jurors to look into Damien, where they’d see “there’s not a soul there.” The defense lawyers for Echols and Baldwin begged them to see doubt.

  The eight-woman, four-man jury deliberated for eleven hours: Both were guilty in all three murders.

  Jason Baldwin was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

  Damien Echols was sent to Death Row.

  * * *

  In 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld all three convictions, satisfied that justice had been done. Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin—now known as the West Memphis Three—were submerged in prison, out of view, the last home they’d ever know.

  But not everyone was so satisfied.

  That same year, HBO aired a documentary called Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. It made a vivid case that the three oddball teenagers had been wrongly convicted by shoddy police work in a small town gripped by “Satanic panic,” in farcical trials by country-bumpkin jurors. The film convinced many people, especially some vocal celebrities. Soon a website was launched, then sequels, and more celebrity voices. Some pointed at a different possible killer.

  Then a 2003 book, Devils Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, by Mara Leveritt, also argued that the 1994 trials were gravely flawed. (Later, a 2012 documentary financed by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson and directed by Amy Berg, West of Memphis, added new fuel to the long-smoldering fire.)

  Things got worse for the authorities when, in 2003, the waitress who claimed she’d attended an esbat with Misskelley and Echols admitted she lied.

  What began as an indie-film exploration of a sensational murder case blossomed into a full-fledged movement to free the West Memphis Three. Celebrities such as actor Johnny Depp, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, pop philosopher Henry Rollins, and the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines, among others, lent their voices, money, and moral support. High-dollar defense lawyers and legal experts galore also came to the party.

  In time, even Chris Byers’s father and Stevie Branch’s mother were convinced the West Memphis Three had been wrongly accused.

  Then in 2007, a bombshell revelation: Preliminary tests indicated DNA found at the crime scene didn’t match Echols, Baldwin, or Misskelley—but a hair found in a knot that bound one of the boys was declared “not inconsistent with” hair from Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather.

  A hair found tangled in a knot tied by the killer that didn’t belong to one of the teenagers. At the very least, that single hair posed a huge obstacle for the prosecution.

  While Damien Echols’s lawyers awaited final results, they contacted me. They wanted me to examine the boys’ wounds and Dr. Peretti’s autopsy for any details the forensic pathologists, cops, lawyers, and judges might have missed. I agreed.

  I was familiar with the case. As I’ve said before, the forensic community is small, and the news media is pervasive. I had recently retired after twenty-five years as the Bexar County medical examiner and now was consulting on a variety of forensic cases that needed a “second look.” I knew what a lot of people knew about this particular grisly crime, and I’d had a few casual conversations with other medical examiners about it. I knew Dr. Peretti well and thought he was a good pathologist. In one of the most scrutinized cases in modern history, I doubted that I’d find anything new, much less evidence that would change everything.

  Within days, a package arrived at my house. It contained hundreds of pages of autopsy reports, testimony, other experts’ conclusions, and legal opinions. Most important, it contained a binder and compact disc with nearly two thousand high-resolution, full-color crime scene and autopsy photos.

  Very quickly, just as in the Wyoming case, I saw a problem.

  The horrific genital mutilation on Chris Byers was not in fact done by a human. It was caused by animals gnawing on the soft tissues after he died. Bruises and gashes in the boys’ mouths—first interpreted as evidence of forced oral sex—were also caused by animals. Those strange punctures on the skin that looked like knife-inflicted torture? Animals nibbling and chewing. The huge bloodied patch on the left side of Stevie Branch’s face? Also animal damage.

  Similarly, the knife wounds and scrapes Dr. Peretti saw on the bodies were not inflicted by a blade but were the tooth and claw marks of feeding animals.

  What animals? Snapping turtles, possums, feral cats, foxes, raccoons, squirrel
s, stray dogs, and the occasional coyote inhabited the Robin Hood woods. Any or all of these predators could have been attracted by the scent of fresh blood, found the bodies very quickly, and nibbled on the softest parts, which were most easily chewed off. To me, they looked like turtle bites.

  The makers of the 2012 documentary, West of Memphis, tested the theory. They released several snapping turtles, like those found in the West Memphis area, near a pig carcass. The wounds they inflicted in a very short time looked nearly identical to the wounds I saw in the autopsy photos, wounds that investigators and prosecutors attributed to a serrated-blade knife and occult rituals.

  It’s an unsavory reality: At the moment of death, a human body becomes food. Bacteria, insects, and animals begin to recycle dead muscle, fat, fluids, and other tissues into their own life-sustaining nourishment. They don’t allow a proper interval for grief, meditation, or cooling. The bacteria are already inside, mostly in the intestines, and they don’t die when their host dies; insects and wild animals might take a little longer to find a dead body left in the open, but usually not more than a few minutes.

  But there was more to suggest that the evidence jurors heard was not what it seemed.

  The boys’ dilated anuses were interpreted by the original medical examiner as possible evidence of forcible sodomy, either by a penis or another object. In fact, a dilated anus is a normal postmortem artifact. After death, the body’s normal muscle tension relaxes. Sphincter muscles loosen, too, and if submerged in water for a time, can look misshapen and stretched. I saw no evidence of any anal trauma, and I don’t believe any of the boys was sodomized.

  And Stevie Branch’s halfway discolored penis, which was interpreted as evidence of forcible oral sex, was simply caused by the positioning of his body after death, not by a sexual trauma.

  These boys were obviously murdered, but the evidence didn’t necessarily add up the way cops and prosecutors said.