Morgue

by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

  At the time, I didn’t know that a single hair found in one of the shoelace knots matched the DNA of Stevie Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs (plus about 1.5 percent of all humans). It generated an intriguing question: How could such a hair be tangled inside a knot that trussed up a little boy moments before he was murdered if his killer hadn’t tied the knot?

  Hobbs, who had a history of domestic violence, has steadfastly denied all implications and accusations—and there have been many—that he killed the boys. He claims Stevie could have transported the hair on his clothing and it was caught up in the vicious assault. No charges have ever been brought against him, although the angry debate rages among the West Memphis Three partisans to this day.

  John Douglas, the famed former FBI profiler, examined the evidence and interviewed witnesses, too. He concluded the three boys died in a “personal-cause killing,” motivated by emotional conflicts, not personal gain or sex. He thinks at least one of the victims knew their assailant—a lone killer who probably knew the boys and had a violent past.

  Maybe more important for the West Memphis Three, Douglas saw nothing to suggest it was a ritualistic murder, the prosecution’s primary theory.

  Douglas also saw evidence that the murders were not planned and the killer lost control.

  “There was another rational and logical criminal reason why the offender hid the victims, their clothing, and bicycles in the drainage ditch and bayou,” Douglas has said. “The offender did not want the victims to be immediately found; he needed time in order to establish an alibi for himself.”

  So back in 2007, armed with new evidence and observations from me and my forensic friends such as the eminent Drs. Werner Spitz and Michael Baden, lawyers for the West Memphis Three asked for a new trial but were denied by the state court. They appealed.

  In November 2010, amid a growing doubt that the West Memphis Three were guilty of murder, the Arkansas Supreme Court was convinced that the evidence, new and old, should be reviewed. It ordered a new evidentiary hearing.

  Now, amid a swelling outcry that the West Memphis Three were innocent, the State of Arkansas was in a legal, financial, and public relations pickle. New trials would be expensive and potentially embarrassing. Prosecutors might also lose a new trial, given the widespread public outcry. Restitution for three wrongfully convicted kids could amount to tens of millions of dollars the state couldn’t afford.

  Ironically, the state dodged this speeding bullet when one of Damien Echols’s lawyers offered a win-win compromise: What if Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin pleaded no contest under a so-called Alford plea, are declared guilty by a judge, and then are released with time served? The three would go free and the state would keep its convictions with little expense, embarrassment, or restitution.

  The Alford plea, a rare legal maneuver, has existed since 1970. It allows the defendant to admit prosecutors could likely convict him, but he needn’t admit the crime. Under an Alford plea, a judge usually declares the defendant guilty, but the defendant maintains his innocence in case any further related charges or lawsuits arise.

  If the deal sounded like a no-brainer, it wasn’t. Jason Baldwin, who had been offered a reduced sentence to plead guilty and testify against Echols back in 1983 when he was only sixteen, didn’t want to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. His former cellmate had publicly apologized for his graphic allegation about a confession, casting further doubt on whether it had happened at all. And Baldwin had grown strangely comfortable in prison. Instead, he wanted a new trial to prove his innocence. But if he didn’t take the no-contest offer, then the deal was off, and his old friend Echols faced an impending execution.

  On August 11, 2011, after eighteen years and seventy-eight days in prison, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin pleaded no contest to killing three young boys in 1983. A judge accepted their pleas, gave them ten-year suspended sentences, and freed them with time already served.

  Convicted killer Jason Baldwin captured the legal bedlam succinctly: “When we told prosecutors we were innocent, they put us in prison for life. Now when we plead guilty, they set us free.”

  That day, three young ex-convicts walked out of the courthouse twice as old as when they went in. They were not exonerated. The boys were not magically resurrected. The case wasn’t solved. No mistakes were admitted.

  But the West Memphis Three were free.

  * * *

  Twenty years after the crime, a memorial stands in the playground of the boys’ elementary school in West Memphis. Last I heard, two of their homes have been abandoned and boarded up. The Robin Hood woods were cleared and the land bulldozed, as if to erase an invisible stain. Now it’s just an empty field beside a superhighway.

  These three best friends who died together now lie in three different graves in three different states. Chris is buried in Memphis; Michael is in Marion, Arkansas; and Stevie in Steele, Missouri.

  The convicted killers, now free, have resumed their lives. Echols married in prison, wrote a memoir after his release from death row, and now lives with his wife in New York City, where he teaches tarot reading. Baldwin went to Seattle, where he works in construction and hopes to someday study for a law degree. Misskelley moved back to West Memphis, got engaged, and is attending community college.

  Trying to slog through the rest of the West Memphis Three case is like wading in the filthy ditch of the Robin Hood woods. It’s murky and impossible to gain a secure foothold. Collecting facts is made especially treacherous by misinformation and disinformation, recantations, conjecture, bad journalism, Internet trolling, “new evidence” submitted by partisans, armchair sleuthing from a thousand mothers’ basements, and the usual Internet noise. Every account is sliced and diced, parsed into oblivion by zealous fans and foes seeking only the pieces that fit a puzzle they’ve already solved. This case stands now as both an example of everything that’s right and wrong with our system of crime and punishment. Confusion reigns.

  I don’t know who killed Chris Byers, Michael Moore, and Stevie Branch. It might very well have been Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. It might have been someone else whose name we know, or someone whose name we have never heard. It might have been Terry Hobbs. They were certainly slain by someone, and their killer(s) were sadistic, savage, and psychopathic. And maybe the killers are still among us. I just don’t know, and no existing evidence provides a smoking gun against anyone.

  The State of Arkansas, however, has no doubt. Prosecutors and cops are certain they got the right killers. The case is closed. Without an overlooked piece of irrefutable evidence and/or an unquestionable confession—unlikely after twenty years in one of America’s most scrutinized murders—it will never be reconsidered.

  Here’s what I can say without doubt: After examining more than 25,000 deaths in my career and reading about many more, I haven’t heard of, much less seen, a single ritual murder by a Satanic cult. They exist only in the movies, on the Internet, and in paranoid dreams.

  “Beyond reasonable doubt” is the highest burden of proof in American law. It doesn’t necessarily mean that no doubt exists, but it means a reasonable person must look at all the evidence and see very little chance that the defendant is innocent.

  All I know is that in those grim photos, I saw reasonable doubt. It isn’t that I believe, as some do passionately, that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley didn’t kill those children. They are good suspects. But when I look closely at the evidence with almost forty years of forensic experience, I believe the police and prosecutors didn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

  In matters of death and life, that’s our only moral standard.

  ‹ TEN ›

  The Curious Death Of Vincent van Gogh

  Death is part of our lore.

  It is the realm of mythmakers and poets as much as gravediggers and medical examiners. We humans invest death with a certain romance, a meaning that sometimes transcends its grim reality. Does life give death m
eaning, or vice versa? We’ve had it both ways since we began telling stories, whether it was Achilles, Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, the Spartans at Thermopylae, Czar Nicholas II, John F. Kennedy … or Trayvon Martin.

  For me, death is more mundane. Nowadays, how many people truly die with style, with meaning, with purpose? Most of us die alone in a hospital bed in a tangle of IVs and dirty sheets. We might wish our deaths to be profound, but they typically are not. For a thousand selfish reasons, the living assign importance to death that speaks more to our own fears than to the reality.

  It becomes our mythology.

  And so it is with the troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.

  * * *

  The last Sunday of July 1890 dawned hot in Auvers.

  For weeks, the strange Dutchman with a mangled ear and shabby clothes had kept to himself and to his usual routine of painting in the gardens and fields around the quiet French village, drinking alone in the café, dodging the teenagers who teased the fou—crazy—tramp in the street. They judged him to be mad because of his ragged appearance and his social clumsiness, for they couldn’t possibly know anything of his demons, his spells, or his year in the asylum.

  This sweltering morning started no differently than any other. All morning, he painted madly in the fields, then returned for his usual midday meal at the cheap inn where he lived in a suffocating upstairs room, No. 5, and was known only as Monsieur Vincent. He ate more quickly than usual, barely saying a word. Then he gathered his easel, brushes, knapsack, and an awkwardly large canvas to venture back out, as he did every day, rain or shine, to paint until sundown.

  It was after dark when the innkeeper’s family, eating supper on their veranda, spied the Dutchman staggering down the street, clutching his belly. He carried nothing and his jacket was buttoned tight, although the night was sultry. Without a word, he stumbled past them and climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

  When the innkeeper heard moaning, he went to the dark little room where his boarder lay hunched on his bed, obviously in pain. The innkeeper asked what was wrong.

  Aching, Monsieur Vincent rolled over and lifted his blouse to expose a tiny hole in his side. It oozed a little blood.

  “Je me suis blessé,” he said. “I hurt myself.”

  * * *

  The feverish life and curious death of Vincent van Gogh have become a kind of myth, partly true and partly what we wish to be true. His disappointments, his genius, his demons, and even his birth have been inflated to metaphoric proportions. Legend colors his biography as vividly as any paint he ever applied to canvas.

  Vincent was born in the Netherlands on March 30, 1853, the eldest son of an austere Dutch Reformed minister and a bookseller’s daughter—precisely one year to the day after his mother gave birth to a stillborn child whom she also named Vincent. Having a dead brother with the same name and same birth date didn’t seem to damage Vincent the way later armchair psychologists would speculate, but it nevertheless provides an ominous start to a tragic life.

  In fact, Vincent’s birth might have been physically difficult, damaging his head and brain in fateful ways.

  As a child, the red-haired Vincent was bright and perpetually in motion, but also moody, unruly, and often cloying. He read obsessively and learned to sketch when very young. Still, visitors described him as “a strange boy” who was uneasy around people and unusually anxious.

  Early schooling, both traditional and at home, failed the rebellious, defiant Vincent. At age eleven, his parents sent him to boarding school, where he was profoundly homesick and lonely. Two years later, they moved him to a new school, even farther from home, and the dispirited Vincent grew more resentful. At age fourteen, already a disappointment to his father, he literally walked away from the school and never returned.

  After more than a year in the sanctuary and solitude of his parents’ home, Vincent became an apprentice art salesman at sixteen. As he would do through his life, he threw himself into the job, reading every art book he could find and studying the great Dutch artists. But a new kind of art began trickling into the shop where he worked, loosely detailed, imaginative, impressionistic work that pleased a small but passionate clientele.

  He was modestly successful at selling art and was posted to galleries in London and Paris over the next seven years. During this time, his younger brother Theo also became an art dealer, and Vincent experienced his first great disappointment in love.

  In 1876, when Vincent was just twenty-three, he left his job. He returned to England, where he had immersed himself in London’s galleries and museums and fell in love with the writing of George Eliot and Charles Dickens. He became a teacher at a church school and plunged again into Bible studies, which inspired him to become a clergyman like his father.

  At first he only conducted simple prayer meetings, but he became obsessed about preaching from the pulpit. So in October 1876, Vincent delivered his first Sunday sermon, in which he quoted Psalm 119:19, “I am a stranger on the earth.…”

  He also hinted at the relationship between God and the vibrant colors that swirled in his mind:

  I once saw a very beautiful picture: it was a landscape at evening. In the distance on the right-hand side a row of hills appeared blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendor of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple. The landscape is a plain or heath covered with grass and its yellow leaves, for it was in autumn. Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain far, far away, on the top of that mountain is a city wherein the setting sun casts a glory. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman … The pilgrim asks her: “Does the road go uphill then all the way?”

  And the answer is: “Yes, to the very end.”

  Vincent briefly attended a Dutch university to study theology but left after his first year. When he failed to get into a mission school, he volunteered to preach to Belgian coal miners and their families in dreadful mining villages, where he tended to give away all his food, money, and clothing to the poverty-stricken families. While he didn’t especially lift them spiritually—Vincent wasn’t a very good preacher—he began to sketch them.

  Suddenly, at age twenty-seven, he discovered his life’s next path: art.

  Vincent took some formal art education, but mostly, with his characteristic obsession, he was self-taught. At first he sketched, then later painted at a frenzied pace that never let up.

  In 1882, Vincent began to experiment with oil paints. At the same time, he began a tumultuous love affair with a prostitute, with whom he lived for almost two impoverished years as he honed his drawing and painting skills.

  When the relationship crumbled, Vincent hit the road. He became a nomadic artist, capturing the sights and people he encountered on the road.

  In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris, where his palette was suddenly suffused with vivid reds, blues, yellows, greens, and oranges. More important, his technique evolved into the short, broken strokes favored by the impressionist painters he admired.

  Vincent became more and more dependent upon the financial support of his younger brother Theo, with whom he kept up a prolific lifelong correspondence. But even Theo found his beloved brother to be increasingly unstable and quarrelsome.

  In Paris, odd things started happening. Vincent began to suffer from minor seizures and panic attacks, often followed by periods when he was confused or couldn’t remember what had happened. It was noted that Vincent had also begun drinking absinthe, a strong alcoholic beverage popular among French artists, even though a lot of it might cause convulsions.

  In 1888, Vincent moved from Paris to Arles with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, producing bold, bright canvases and drawings at a prodigious clip, refining the unique brushwork for which he would eventually—but had not yet—become known. Here, Vincent’s paintings turn slightly surreal and bizarre; his lines ripple, his colors intensify, and his paint is sometimes sque
ezed from the tube directly onto the canvas. His subjects become so dreamlike that Vincent himself wrote that “some of my pictures certainly show traces of having been painted by a sick man.”

  And here are painted some of his most transcendent masterpieces, including Bedroom in Arles and Sunflowers.

  But Vincent’s demons reared up at this time, too. He began suffering seizures, rages, dysphoria, and bouts of insanity, deeper and darker than the ordinary depression he’d known for so long.

  Vincent and Gauguin painted together like brothers for months, but the two strong-willed artists were constantly at odds. Just before Christmas, they had a fight over, of all things, newspaper accounts of a condemned slasher’s night terrors. Gauguin stormed out, once again leaving Vincent alone. Crushed and enraged, Vincent sliced off part of his left ear with a razor and carried it to a nearby brothel, where he gave his carefully packaged ear to a startled prostitute with a short note: “Remember me.”

  After his psychotic break, Vincent was hospitalized. A young doctor diagnosed him with epilepsy and prescribed potassium bromide. Within days, van Gogh recovered, and within three weeks, he had painted his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe. He had no memory of the argument with Gauguin, his self-mutilation, or the circumstances of his hospitalization.

  In letters to Theo, he reported his “intolerable hallucinations have ceased, in fact have diminished to a simple nightmare … I am rather well just now, except for a certain undercurrent of vague sadness difficult to explain.”

  In the coming weeks, Vincent was hospitalized three more times after suffering psychotic episodes—always after drinking absinthe. Worried that his demons were bigger than he, Vincent voluntarily entered the insane asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889. Doctors there didn’t continue his treatments of potassium bromide, so more psychotic episodes of terrifying hallucinations and uncontrollable agitation followed, usually after he’d left the hospital grounds to drink with friends in town. The worst of these episodes lasted three months.