Dark Spell

by Mara Leveritt

  On March 7, five days after the testimony by Carson and the diver, Detective Bryn Ridge was called to the stand for his fourth appearance, and now, despite Ford’s vigorous protests, Burnett allowed a line of questioning that opened the prosecutors’ door. Fogleman asked Ridge if, during his interviews with Damien, he’d noted any tattoos. Ridge responded that Damien had his girlfriend’s name tattooed on his right arm. He continued, “A cross between his thumb and first finger. An Egyptian ankh, he called it. And a pentagram on his chest.”

  All the defense attorneys objected. In a conference at the bench, they argued that the prosecutors’ line of questioning violated Burnett’s order bearing on the occult. But Burnett ruled that Fogleman and Davis were not out of line in “asking the witness to describe what physical features were on the defendant Echols’s body.” He added, “Nor have they violated the rule to ask the witness to describe what the defendant Echols said to them.” Nevertheless, the judge asked Fogleman, “Do you anticipate any proof in the case to directly or indirectly link the defendant Jason Baldwin to occult activities?”

  Fogleman waded full-in. “Your Honor,” he responded, “that’s something that will have to be talked about with the expert. It’s my understanding that part of the involvement of somebody deal with obsession with heavy metal music, change in forms of dress, wearing all black and that kind of thing. And, your Honor, I believe the proof would show that he had, I wanna say, fifteen black t-shirts with the heavy metal thing . . . in his possession.”52

  Ultimately, Burnett ruled that he would instruct the jurors that they should consider “testimony relative to Wicca religion” only for Damien. Ford said, “That’ll be fine, your Honor.”

  Ford was not sharing the content of these bench conferences with Jason. But when Fogleman’s questioning of Ridge resumed, Jason could tell that the prosecutor was pursuing something new. Referring to Ridge’s questioning of Damien, Fogleman asked the detective:

  “What, if anything, did he tell you about the fact that water [was] present?”

  “He said water was a demon type symbolism,” Ridge answered.

  “And, did he tell you anything about demonic forces?”

  “Yes sir, he said that all people have a demonic force in them and that the person would have no control over that demonic force.”

  “All right. Did he say anything about the fact that the children were young?”

  “Yes sir, he said that the younger the children, the more innocent they would be, and in turn the more innocent that person would be, the more power that would be derived by that killing.”

  Jason recognized the words as likely having come from Damien, but he felt he was hearing his friend’s words perverted. Angrily, he thought, “They took what he said in innocence and twisted it on him, and they did it because he was Damien.”

  “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

  ~ Mark Twain

  The following day, Fogleman called Dale Griffis to the stand. Griffis described himself as a captain from a small Ohio police department, now retired, who had developed an expertise “in the area of cults and nontraditional groups, occult groups.” He also claimed to have earned a doctorate degree in the subject. However, under questioning by Ford, Griffis was forced to admit that his Ph.D. had been granted by a now defunct diploma mill.53 The defense teams objected to allowing Griffis to testify as an expert witness, but Burnett ruled that Griffis was qualified—helping to buttress the prosecutors’ claim that Satanism was behind the murders.

  Jason could only listen helplessly as Fogleman struggled to formulate his question for Griffis. In essence, Fogleman asked: “If you assume that the testimony showed that the defendant, Jason Baldwin, sucked the blood from the penis of one of the victims, that... this crime occurred on May 5th or 6th of 1993, that there was a full moon and that there was the absence of evidence of blood at... the scene : based on those factors and the information that you reviewed, do you have an opinion as to whether or not the murder of Michael Moore, Stevie Branch and Chris Byers is occult inspired or the occult is involved?... What is your opinion?”

  Griffis responded that, “they were using the trappings of occultism during this event.”

  Later, Fogleman asked, “Now, while we’re talking about it, can you define what we mean when we say ‘the occult’?”

  “Sure,” Griffis responded. “’Occult’ is like an esoteric secret science religion. And there are different types to it. There’s paganism, which is white witchcraft, and there’s Satanism, which is black witchcraft. Some shamanism has been put in there which is Indian folklore occultism. They go back in the area of paganism prior to Christianity.”

  Jason had lived in the area around Memphis, West Memphis, and Marion long enough to understand how such talk would sound to a jury. His trial had turned into the opposite of what he had hoped. Instead of a focus on science, “secret science religion”—whatever that meant—had become the centerpiece.

  Now Griffis was explaining that there was a difference between “traditional occult groups” and what he called “occult cult groups.” With Fogleman’s encouragement, he told the court that “traditional occultists follow rules set out by various prescribed manuals for services and so forth,” whereas “an occult cult group usually follows that of the leader, and—it could be anything.” Questioned further, he explained that “an occult cult would start out with an experimenter, usually one who practices alone in an unorganized manner, a self-styled occultist—and we are talking here only in the field of Satanism. And this person has some kind of problems in life, and they use the trappings of occultism to get along. Then we have an occult cult group, and this has a little charismatic leader and some followers.”

  Jason could have been blind and still seen where this trial was headed. “I was listening to their reasoning,” he said, “but that didn’t make it true.” So he was barely surprised the next day, after the state rested its case, that Damien’s lawyer’s called Damien to the stand. At first, Jason simply listened, as Damien answered questions put to him by his own attorney. What Jason heard his friend saying sounded true and reasonable.

  But then it was Brent Davis’s turn, and Jason heard the prosecutor hammering Damien about “a fellow named Aleister Crowley.” It wasn’t a name Jason knew. On the other hand, Jason wasn’t surprised to hear Damien tell Davis that he knew who Crowley was, though he added that he hadn’t read any of Crowley’s books. When Davis observed that Crowley believed in human sacrifice and that “children were the best type of human sacrifice,” Jason heard Damien agree. With a sense of nausea, he felt hope slip away for those scientific samples he’d counted on for so long. Whatever approach the defense might try, it was clear that the prosecutors’ plan was to link Damien—and himself by association—to the murders via the obscure but scary-sounding words ‘cult,’ ‘occult’ and, worst of all, ‘Satanism’.

  Davis handed Damien what he called “a copy of some documents,” asking Damien if he recognized the three pages.54 Damien said they appeared to be pages on which he’d written “different alphabets or, like, translations where you could write things that nobody could read.” When did Damien write those? Davis wanted to know. “Are you sure you have not done those since you were arrested, while you’ve been staying in the jail?” Damien was not sure. “Whose names are written on that document,” Davis asked. Damien answered: “Mine, Jason’s, my son’s, one that says Aleister Crowley—”

  “Who?” Davis interrupted.

  “Aleister Crowley,” Damien repeated.

  Davis seemed intent on establishing that Damien had written the pages since his arrest, while he was held in jail. Damien acknowledged that he had. But the episode evolved into one of the most disturbing of a trial that was troubling overall. It developed that Damien’s attorneys had never been shown the papers Damien was handed, as is required in criminal cases. Damien’s lawyers objected and,
in a conference at the bench, demanded to know how and when the prosecutors had obtained the documents. Fogleman replied: “It was after the trial started.”

  Jason could not hear what was transpiring. Nor could the HBO film crew. But the prosecutors’ audacity was stunning. Challenged by Damien’s defense attorneys, they admitted they’d acquired “a copy” of the papers from the jail where Damien was being held. Turning to Burnett, Damien’s lead attorney, Val Price, told the judge, “We’d like to know who in the jail has been going through my client’s personal items.” His indignation rising, Price added, “There’s gotta be a chain of evidence.” Turning to the prosecutors, Price demanded, “Does the state have the original?” Davis answered, “No.”

  “Whoa—” Price said, astonished. Finally, Davis acknowledged, “I think we got it from some jail personnel.”

  By now Burnett had decided that the documents lacked the necessary legal basis to be admitted into evidence. But Damien’s lawyer pushed further: “We ask for a mistrial, too.” Burnett said simply, “Denied.” Price moved to strike Damien’s testimony about the papers. Again Burnett said, “Denied.” The judge rationalized, “The witness identified it as being his. He identified the time and place of the authorship and that testimony is before the jury, and it was basically without objection. The only objection that’s been made was to the tender of the documents themselves, which I’m sustaining.”

  Price wanted Burnett to hold a hearing on how the prosecutors had obtained Damien’s papers, but the judge refused that too. In fact, he told the defense attorneys that, if they wanted to know how the state had obtained Damien’s possessions from the jail without a search warrant and had delivered copies of them to the prosecutors, they would have to investigate it themselves. Exasperated, Ford said, “Your Honor, it goes to the area of prosecutorial—”

  “Misconduct,” Price said, finishing the other man’s sentence. Burnett, however, said that he believed jailers had a right “to go through the belongings of a person in a penitentiary or a jail.”

  Nevertheless, in their zeal to associate Damien with the writings of Aleister Crowley, the prosecutors had been caught in a serious violation. And when court reconvened the next day, they were ready to admit that they’d been guilty of an “inadvertent oversight”—one that Davis admitted violated the state’s Rules of Criminal Procedure. However, Burnett, an expert in the Rules of Criminal Procedure, did not deem the “oversight” serious. He decided that, though the prosecutors had “technically violated” the rules, the matter did not constitute prosecutorial misconduct, and that it had not prejudiced Damien’s and Jason’s cases. He ordered that the pages not be shown to the jury. But he also ruled that what Damien had said about them would stay on the record, thus allowing the prosecutors to continue to refer to them. It was a huge win for the prosecutors. Despite their admitted violation of the state’s trial rules, the damning link between Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Aleister Crowley had been established.

  So much of this happened in bench conferences, between the attorneys and Judge Burnett, that Jason barely knew about it. He was focused on his own defense. He was anxious for Ford to begin calling his list of alibi witnesses. And he was anxious to testify himself. Though Ford did call a fiber expert to dispute testimony by a state crime lab technician about fibers that prosecutors claimed could have come from Jason’s house, Jason was mystified that he wasn’t calling anyone else. Every day Jason entered the courtroom expecting that this would be the day that Ford and Wadley would come roaring in with his defense. And every day he left with those expectations unfulfilled. Why was Ford not calling his mom and his brothers? Why wasn’t he calling Ken Watkins, Uncle Hubert, and Adam Philips? How were the jurors going to know that he couldn’t have murdered those children because he’d been in school the day of the murders, and after school, he’d met with Ken, cut his uncle’s grass, gotten paid by his uncle, and then bought a cassette tape from Philips with the money? Who was going to tell them that he’d shown up at school, as usual, the day after the murders? Jason sat in his chair, gripped by a growing bewilderment. “It seemed like the only thing that mattered was that Damien was weird and I had black t-shirts,” he later said. “That was all they talked about through the whole trial.”

  Then suddenly—Fogleman was approaching the jury to deliver his closing argument! It took a few moments for Jason to realize what had happened. The trial was drawing to a close, and Ford had not called a single witness to provide his alibi. Nobody—not his mother, his uncle, his mom’s boyfriend, his friends, the Asian guy at the Walmart, his teachers, or Ms. Cureton from the jail—no one had spoken up for him. Ford hadn’t even let him speak up for himself. “Every time I asked them about testifying, they just put me off,” he said. “They kept giving me the runaround, saying, ‘You don’t need to testify.’ Ford said it wouldn’t matter what I said up there. Whatever I said, the prosecutor was going to twist it and use it against me to the jury. I couldn’t make them let me testify. I trusted that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing—and I had no idea what that was.”55

  On the other hand, he’d understood Ford’s argument that Jason wasn’t required to prove his innocence; that it was the state’s burden to prove his guilt, which the prosecutors had failed to do. Ford pointed out that Fogleman and Davis had produced the lake knife, a jailhouse snitch and testimony about t-shirts—evidence, he assured Jason, the jurors would see as flimsy. Jason figured the argument made sense, but he found no comfort in it. He remembered once believing that “sense” would have gotten him out of jail, when the physical samples from him didn’t match the killer’s. That had not happened; his confidence in logic was waning.

  “Think back,” Fogleman was telling the jurors. “Remember when Mr. Davis was cross-examining Damien Echols? And he said, ‘On the sheet of paper that you wrote in jail, whose names are on there?’” Fogleman reminded them: the names included those of Jason and Aleister Crowley, “the proponent of human sacrifice who says that the younger the victim, the better.”56

  Jason’s stomach turned. Instead of introducing physical evidence at the trial, the opposite had happened! Here was Fogleman telling the jury how strange it was that so little evidence had been recovered. Now he was telling the jurors: “We’ve got a crime scene that’s clean. The killers were very meticulous about removing any evidence, hiding the bicycles, hiding the clothes, hiding the bodies.” Nevertheless, he concluded, when everything known was taken together, “the evidence was that this murder had the trappings of an occult murder. A satanic murder.”

  On March 17, the trial was over. The prosecutors and the defense teams rested. The judge gave the jurors their instructions and sent them off to deliberate. Jason sat still, in disbelief. “I was putting it together—that it was over,” he said. “All I could think was, ‘I didn’t get to testify.’” For weeks, his mom had waited outside the courtroom, barred from entering because she was listed as a witness. But she’d never been called to testify.57 Even as Jason was led back to the jail for the night, knowing that the jurors would return the next morning to decide his fate, the weight of what happened had not sunk in. The full shock of it would not even begin to hit until the afternoon of the following day, Friday, March 18, when the jury returned from its deliberations to pronounce Damien and Jason guilty.

  Ford seemed to have feared it, ever since Burnett had not allowed Jason’s trial to be severed from Damien’s. Now, he explained to Jason that Arkansas trials consist of two phases: guilt and penalty. With the guilt phase over, the jurors would have to decide Damien’s and Jason’s sentences.58 But back in the jail that night, awaiting that decision, Jason didn’t care. He had already spent two hundred eighty-seven nights in the detention center. At this point it made no difference to him whether the jury sentenced him to death or life in prison. Death. Life. Or a single day in prison. All were the same. The only word that mattered now was “guilty.” The judge had repeated it three times to him—once for each of the c
hildren: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Each time, the word exploded part of his world. How could he have been found guilty?

  For nine months in jail, he’d held himself together with faith. He’d hung on to an inner certainty that here—at trial—the mistakes that had sent him to jail would be exposed. His alibi would be established. Everyone would understand that he would not, could not—had not—hurt a soul. God would make things right. The truth would set him free. He would go home with his mother and brothers. “I didn’t think there was any possible way they could find us guilty when we didn’t do it,” he said. “Not in America.”

  “It does not require many words to speak the truth.”

  ~ Chief Joseph

  The next day, Saturday, Judge Burnett read the jury’s sentences. Death for Damien. And for Jason, three sentences of life in prison with no chance of parole. The teenagers were called to stand before Judge Burnett. Jason could not detect the robed man’s expression as he told Damien precisely when and how he was to be executed. When Burnett asked Damien if he could offer any legal reason why his death sentence should not be carried out, Jason heard his friend, standing beside him, respond, “No, Sir.”

  Then Burnett turned to Jason. Now it was Jason’s turn to offer a legal reason why his sentence of life in prison should not be imposed. “Mr. Baldwin?” the judge inquired. Sotto voce, Jason answered, “Because I’m innocent.”