Dark Spell

by Mara Leveritt

  Gail was protective—but fragile. It wasn’t unusual for her to freak out when an accident happened. Jason recalled one time in 1992, when his mom, his brothers, and some other kids were fishing from the dock, and Terry, who was seven or eight at the time, was rummaging through the tackle box. Inside the box was a knife that some cousins in Mississippi had given to Jason a few years before. Terry began whacking the dock with the knife and cut himself in the process. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but when Gail saw the blood, Jason said, “She got real upset. She grabbed that knife and threw it into the lake.”17

  “Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? to the lonely themselves it wears a mask. the most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

  ~ Joseph Conrad

  Months passed before Jason saw Damien again. “He was gone that whole summer between ninth and tenth grades,” Jason said. “He was in jail, the training school, mental institutions—he went through all types of hell, all this crazy stuff. And then his family moved to Portland, Oregon.” Damien went with them. But Oregon didn’t work out.

  Damien returned to Marion at the end of the summer of 1992, about when Jason started tenth grade. Jason learned that Damien had tried to enroll in school, that school officials had rejected him, and that he was on probation now too, though not assigned to Steve Jones. Instead, Damien was being supervised by Jones’s boss, Jerry Driver.

  Jason had experience with Driver. “He was a funny cat, very strange,” he said. “He was large, with a full beard. Upon first glance, he reminded me of Santa Claus or Grizzly Adams, but upon talking to him, you knew that this man could not be either one of those noble men because he was too untrusting and very devious.”

  A couple of unsettling encounters had given Jason that impression. “I don’t remember when I first met him,” he said, “but I remember him coming to my house one time to ask me some questions about a BB gun and the railroad tracks. He pulled up in my drive and told me who he was and that he was investigating an incident that had occurred at the railroad tracks. Someone had shot something with a BB gun, and a person gave a description that supposedly matched me. He asked if I had a BB gun, and I said yes, but I had not shot anything up with it, besides the occasional water moccasin that crawled unwanted into our back yard from the lake. He still asked to see it, so I went inside and got it for him. He waited in his car. He looked at it and opened the place where the BBs go and dropped a few into his hand. He asked me if I ever used gold BBs. No, I always used the silver ones. ‘Why is that,’ he asked, and my answer was just because they came in a bigger pack than the gold ones and lasted longer. He then asked me about a laser that I knew nothing about. He said that was all and left.”

  Another time, when Jason was with Damien and Domini, the three ran into Driver at the local Walmart. “We were coming out of the store when we saw him,” Jason said, “and he made some smart remark about us being a coven of witches or Damien being a vampire. I looked at him like he was crazy for saying such a thing, and Damien just laughed at his judgmental ignorance and stupidity, the way he laughs at everyone who picks on him for no true reason. Damien always laughed when people tried to hurt him.” Jason admired his friend’s ability “to shrug off things of that nature.”

  Besides placing Damien on probation, the court had ordered him to earn his GED, which he did. Damien had moved in with his adoptive stepfather, Jack Echols, in Lakeshore, intending to join his stepfather in the roofing trade. But the two did not get along, and when Damien started drawing Social Security Disability benefits—a result of having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder—he quit doing physical labor. A few months later, when Damien’s mother and sister moved back from Oregon, Damien moved in with them.

  Jason was glad to have him back. Damien said that the only reason he’d returned to Arkansas was that he’d had no friends in Oregon and that here, at least, he had Jason. “He didn’t want to talk about all he’d been through,” Jason said. “He just said it was BS and it sucked. I sensed it was a hard time for him. I didn’t ask him a lot of questions. I definitely wasn’t going to make him relive it.”18

  But Driver proved a constant reminder. “Driver just harassed him,” Jason said. “Damien felt helpless and powerless, like they controlled his life. I was still on probation myself, but Steve Jones was okay. Damien had a totally different experience with Driver.”

  By now, Jason had known Jones for five years. He was used to having Jones “hound” him, as he put it, for wearing rock and roll t-shirts. Jason accepted this as Jones “messing around” with him and didn’t care. But once Driver took charge of Damien, it was clear to Jason that both men “absolutely hated Damien.” Jason wrote that Driver “told all the kids in the neighborhood that Damien was a Satan-worshipping faggot and that he hated blacks. This caused all types of trouble for Damien. Someone always wanted to kick him down, but he was smarter than that. He thought it was humorous, all the rumors about him. He didn’t realize how seriously a lot of people took his name and what was said and how he looked. From then on, Steve Jones would lead the ‘anti-Damien’ campaign across Marion and West Memphis—he and Jerry Driver. They were not the only people in authority that hated Damien, either.”

  While Jason sympathized with the troubles clouding life for Damien, he was dealing with storms of his own. Life by the lake had its idyllic—and sometimes hysterical—moments, but mostly, inside the trailer, it had gotten rough again. And Jason, now fifteen, got into trouble again. In November 1992, he stole a six-ounce bag of potato chips and a thirty-two ounce bag of M&Ms from a Walgreen’s store in West Memphis, and the manager called the cops. This was nothing like the shed incident. Jason knew when he lifted the candy and chips that what he was doing was wrong. As he was being arrested, the officer gave him a stern talking-to, “sort of man-to-man,” Jason recalled, about how this wasn’t the way to go. Officers took him to the jail and released him to his mother’s custody.19 Jason considers the shoplifting his first—and only—crime.

  But it was more than that. By shoplifting, Jason had jeopardized the vision he’d embraced since childhood. He’d seen life as a kind of deal, believing that if he held up his end, the other side—whatever that was—would hold up its end as well. If he worked in school, he would graduate. If he helped his mom, she’d be able to take care of the family. If he kept his life on track, despite what he saw around him, it would lead him to something better beyond the trailer park. A shoplifting charge could have derailed that. Jason regarded the incident as serious—a warning he would heed. He remained on probation. He remained dedicated to his family. He remained serious about school. And he rededicated himself to his vision. He would not let down his end again.

  But life was getting crazy. Shortly before Christmas, Charles Baldwin, Jason and Matt’s biological father, reappeared again. This time, he took Jason and Matt away with him, to visit to his home in central Arkansas. There, Jason met his paternal grandparents for only the second time in his life—the first having been when he was four. The boys found themselves in a bigger house than they had ever known before, and they heard stories of a side of their family they’d barely known existed. Jason’s dad told him he was going to buy him a truck and teach him to drive. The prospect tantalized, but the visit was short.

  When Jason and Matt returned to Marion, they asked their mom if they could go back to live with their dad for a while—maybe spend the next school year with him. Gail went to pieces. “She had a nervous breakdown,” Jason said. “She told us we didn’t love her anymore. She tried to commit suicide. She slit her wrists and neck and stuff.” (Jason paused a long time with that memory.) “Yeah, I found her,” he said. “In the bathroom. Yeah, I called 911.” After that, neither boy mentioned the idea of going to live with their father again.

  Yet their resignation could not alleviate other tensions seething at home. Terry’s abuse was becoming unbearable. About a month before the end of school, just after he’d turn
ed sixteen, Jason threw Terry, Sr. out of the house. “It wasn’t pretty,” he recalled. In truth, it had been awful.

  “Oh, man, it was bad. It was bad,” Jason said. “He was beating my mom. I told him to stop. There was a big scene. I grabbed a baseball bat. I was telling him to stop and that this was unacceptable when he turned around and grabbed the bat and punched me with it. I went flying and landed in the hallway. Little Terry was in a bedroom right where I landed. He was about nine. He looked out and held out a little bat to help pull me up. I took that little bat, and this time I hit Terry with it. He hit the ground. I opened the door and said, ‘Leave!’

  “My mom freaked out on me for hitting him. Yeah, it was bad. I was like, ‘Dang. How are you going to defend this guy?’ He’d been beating on her for years and years, and beating on us, and now she’s going to get mad at me for hitting him one time? After all this? I didn’t want to hit him with the bat, but this had been going on ever since I was eight years old and had to go running down the street, getting neighbors to call the cops on him. It was crazy.”

  The present was grim, but Jason still nurtured hopes for his future. He had a girlfriend named Heather, whom he knew from school. Heather didn’t live in the trailer park, but her folks liked Jason, and Gail liked Heather, so the parents helped the kids spend time together, skating at the rink or having dinners at each other’s homes. “Between her mom and my mom,” Jason said, “they always made sure they knew where we were at and what we were doing.”

  Mrs. Littleton next door liked him and wanted to repay him for his help over the years. When she’d return from shopping, he’d carry in her groceries and help put them away, and when she wanted to visit relatives in Tennessee, he would go with her so she wouldn’t be on the road alone. When he told Mrs. Littleton that he’d landed a summer job at a grocery store, she promised she would match, “dollar-for-dollar,” whatever money he earned.

  Jason was to start the job on June 7, 1993, the Monday after school let out. With his pay and Mrs. Littleton’s help, he planned to buy a car and some new clothes, and to put away some money. He felt hewas on his way.

  “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

  ~ Mike Tyson

  1993 was a big year in Arkansas. On January 20, Bill Clinton, the state’s former governor, became President of the United States. Arkansans felt a sense of greatness at hand. But less than four months later, on May 6, 1993, fear gripped the eastern half of the state. It reached across the river, to Tennessee and Mississippi. It reached into Jason’s school, where he heard the news in the halls: “They found some kids murdered in West Memphis!” Jason could only think of his brother Terry—just a year older than the victims. When he got home, his mom fretted about having to leave for work. She told Jason to stay inside and watch out for his brothers because a killer was on the loose. “The whole town went into an uproar of panic and hurt and frenzy,” he said. “It was real serious and it hit close to home for everybody.”

  Even so, by the next day, he had other things on his mind. Just the week before, he had won an armload of prizes at the high school’s art show, including a plaque for “Most Creative.” The recognition felt good, and Jason thought he might find his way into a career in art. But those dreams still seemed far off. For now—killer or no killer—his thoughts were focused on his girlfriend, finishing the eleventh grade, starting his job, having some fun, and ultimately, buying a car.

  But the vortex Jason didn’t know existed—the unseen tornado— was drawing near. Within twenty-four hours of the murders, a West Memphis narcotics detective had already concluded that the killings bore “overtones of a cult sacrifice.” The detective, Lt. James Sudbury, had already discussed his theory with Steve Jones, Jason’s probation officer, and the two had agreed, as Sudbury later wrote, that of all the people they knew “to be involved in cult type activities,” Damien “stood out” to them both as “capable of being involved in this type of crime.” If Jason had known any of that, he might have been alarmed when Damien told him that Jones and Sudbury had come by his house on the day after the murders to talk to him. As it was, Jason wasn’t even particularly concerned when two other West Memphis police officers came to his house on Sunday, May 9, three days after the murders, asking if Damien was there. “I put two and two together,” he said. “By then, we’d seen the news and heard all the rumors about what had happened to the boys.” He figured the police were talking to everyone, trying to solve the murders, and that struck him as reasonable.

  In fact, Damien was at Jason’s house. “They asked him if he’d heard anything,” Jason recalled. “When he said, ‘Yeah,’ they asked, ‘What have you heard?’ Then: ‘What do you think happened?’ and ‘Do you think it’s possible that…?’ Damien would say, ‘Well, I guess…’, and then they wrote it down as ‘Damien said…’ They asked, ‘Do you think it’s possible that Satanists would have done this?’ I remember them asking that point-blank. And, of course, Damien, being open, and almost seeing himself as an expert, he wanted to offer what he knew to help.”20

  Damien was willing to imagine, to speculate. Not Jason. When the officers turned their attention to him, repeating similar questions, Jason told them, “I don’t play no guessing games.” Then Jason’s mom showed up. “She came back home early that day,” he said, “and she pretty much just ran them off.”

  That was the last Jason saw of the police. Even when Damien told him that the police had later taken him to the station to be questioned again, Jason still didn’t think much of it. “I just knew something bad had happened to some kids, and that’s all I wanted to know,” he said. “I just didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t want to think about it. I was just trying to live my life and get by with my family and stuff. I didn’t give the cops much of a thought. I figured they’d sort it out in time.”

  All he knew on the last day of school, Thursday, June 3, 1993, was that on the following Monday he’d begin work at his new job and that, in the meantime, he planned to have some fun. That night he joined Damien at his house to watch some rented movies. Damien’s mother and dad were going to the new casino across the river at Tunica, Mississippi. Jason said that, as they planned to stay there overnight, they’d rented a VCR and some movies “to keep us busy for the night.”

  Everyone was looking forward to a good time. But Damien’s mother, Pam Echols, left with a word of caution because “apparently, all this time, Damien had been being harassed by the police,” Jason said. “Pam told us, ‘If cops come to the door, don’t let them in. Act like there’s nobody here.’ She didn’t want any drama. She said, ‘Don’t even let them in if they knock on the door.’”

  When the adults were gone, the kids sat in the living room watching Leprechaun, a grade-B horror film. As usual, Jason sat on the floor, close to the television, to see. Behind him, Damien, his sister Michelle and Damien’s girlfriend Domini sat on the couch. Suddenly, “Michelle jumped up,” Jason said. “She thought somebody was in the front yard. She said, ‘You know what Mom said. Act like nobody’s here.’ So we turned the lights and the TV off and went into the bedroom. But they were banging on the door. They said, ‘We know you’re in there. We saw the lights go out.’ So then we came out and they arrested Damien. They told the rest of us to sit on the couch. Then they came back and arrested me. Michelle said, ‘I want your names and badge numbers,’ but they just told her to sit down and shut up.’”

  Years later, Jason would compare the experience to a scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan, about the Allied troops’ D-Day storming of the beaches in Normandy. At one point, the character played by Tom Hanks is overcome by the ordeal. His vision blurs. Time slows. The sounds of shelling grow muted. “That’s exactly what I was going through right then, when they arrested me,” he said. “Already I couldn’t see, and I could hardly hear. I couldn’t believe this stuff was happening. I was just in shock—a state of disbelief.”21

  Chapter TWO

  JUVENILE DETENTION

 
June 4, 1993 - March 20, 1994

  Jason sat in the back of a squad car, hands cuffed behind his back, struggling to understand. Damien was led off somewhere else. What was happening? He had no idea that Jessie Misskelley already sat bewildered in jail.

  Indeed, Jessie sat in a cell at the West Memphis Police Department, battling his own shock and confusion. When he’d come to the station that morning, he’d thought he would help the police and then return home to his father. He’d cooperated with the detectives for hours, only to be told at the end, late that afternoon, that he would not be going home at all.

  Jessie knew nothing of what Jason and Damien were experiencing at that moment, much less that he was the cause. Jessie’s imagination would have had to reach even further to calculate the relief he’d brought to the police officers who’d arrested him. Before today, they’d had statements pointing to Damien, but nothing substantive enough to warrant his arrest, much less the arrests of Jason and Jessie.22 But now, with all three teenagers in custody thanks to what Jessie had said, the department’s month-long professional impotence was over. The pressure to find the killer or killers of three murdered children had lifted. Citizens could relax, as could the region’s elected officials, who needed arrests to support their image of control. Until Jessie spoke into their tape recorder, the police had turned up nothing: no evidence and therefore, no case to present to the prosecutor. To Jessie’s dismay—and to officials’ relief—sometime on June 3, 1993, Fogleman and a judge decided that Jessie’s recorded words alone provided probable cause to arrest him, Damien, and Jason.