The case dragged on, the Californians kept traveling to Arkansas, and the partings never got easier. “I think the most difficult times were when we felt so helpless to get these young men out of those prisons,” Sauls said. “Leaving them behind again and again. Walking away from them over and over and still not feeling like enough progress was being made. Watching the years pass and holding those bad thoughts in the backs of our minds . . . what if they NEVER get out? What if Damien is executed? How will we deal with that? What will actually happen if they schedule an execution and we have to watch as they take him and kill him? It was difficult to even bring ourselves to consider that idea, but once in a while it would come up. Psychologically those were the most difficult times for us. Feeling helpless, and then trying to imagine that, if we felt so depressed and helpless, how must our friends in prison feel?”
As the summer of 2001 drew near, the phenomenon of artists and ordinary citizens joining forces to call attention to a perceived injustice in a small state in America’s Mid-South became a story on National Public Radio. That June, Neda Ulaby reported, “Activists around the country are organizing rallies and concerts this weekend to benefit the three young Arkansas inmates known as the West Memphis Three.” With music of the band L7’s Boys in Black in the background, she played a voice-over from Paradise Lost in which Griffis, the self-described occult expert, could be heard testifying about having “personally observed people wearing black fingernails.”115
By the end of that summer, Jason was itching to move again— anywhere. He just wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t Grimes, where he’d lived now for three and a half years. In the summer of 2001, the state decided to end its experiment with private prison management. Control of the Grimes Unit was transferred back to the Arkansas Department of Correction. Jason decided to take that opportunity to request a move.
He could trace most of the reason for his unrest to the officer who’d harassed him since his arrival at Grimes. When the state took over the prison, that officer got a job with the state and stayed on. “I figured I was tired of messing with him,” Jason said. “He’d cut my visitation time short for no reason. He intercepted mail I wrote on the computer, even though I had permission to type it and print it out. And everybody was afraid of him. He was a captain, and the staff was intimidated too. They didn’t want to stand up for me against him, so I decided I was just through with it.”
Chapter SIX
VARNER II
August 1, 1998 - October 7, 2005
Prisoners wanting to relocate are not given a lot of options. On September 11, 2001, Jason was back at Varner, working the morning shift in the staff ’s dining room, when Al Qaeda operatives hijacked four airplanes to attack the United States. “There was all these rumors about what was going to be happening with inmates,” Jason recalled. “A lot of guys had this fantasy that the state was going to give them this opportunity to get out of prison to fight. Others thought that the government was going to declare martial law and execute everybody to make space for prisoners of war. And some of the staff talked up the same rumors. It was a very weird time.”
Jason had returned to Varner, where Jessie already lived, just seven weeks before the terrorist attack. “It was not one of my better decisions,” he later reflected. “I should have stayed at Grimes. But when you’re in there, you want to get out so bad, you think you’ll do anything just for a change. What you’re seeking is release, but once you get to where you’ve been transferred, you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. It’s just another prison.’
The problem was that Varner never had been “just another prison.” It was huge to begin with, packed with young offenders, many violent—and now it was expanding. In response to the nation’s War on Drugs, the federal government had offered states unprecedented amounts of money to build ultra-high-security “supermax” prisons. The deal would cost the states little—at least, on the front end. Arkansas officials, like their counterparts in many other states, jumped at the chance for federal money. They opted to build their new Supermax Unit adjacent to the maximum-security one at Varner. Inmates did much of the construction. Jason was there to watch the isolation cell blocks go up.
When the Supermax Unit was complete, Damien and the other death row prisoners, who until then had been held at another unit under more moderate conditions, were now moved to the Supermax’s more severe isolation. Though the Supermax was a separate brick building, connected to Varner by a tightly barred corridor, the move meant that Jason, Jessie, and Damien were now living on the same prison compound, closer to each other than they’d been at any time since their arrests.
Existence of the Supermax changed conditions at Varner. The sudden availability of hundreds of adjacent isolation cells meant that Varner prisoners could be transferred into them for a wider array of infractions. “With the Supermax, everything got harsher,” Jason said. “More rules were put into effect, which meant there were more opportunities to get in trouble. The police were able to start enforcing all kinds of rules, including those regulating the length of inmates’ hair, how they shaved, and general grooming. When I first went to prison, it was hard to get put in the hole. Even when I got that disciplinary for having the twenty-five cents and the Motrin, I never spent a single day in the hole. If that had happened after the Supermax opened, I’d have done that whole, thirty day punitive in the hole.”116
On the other hand—and maybe because of the tougher administration—life at Varner was not as bad for Jason as when he’d first entered there, six and a half years before. For one thing, he was by now a seasoned inmate. For another, he had the comfort this time of knowing that he was not legally alone. True to his word, Philipsborn was keeping him apprised of everything happening in his case. Through Philipsborn, Jason knew that Barry Scheck, the famous New York lawyer who had founded the Innocence Project, was working “behind the scenes” to examine the possibility of using DNA evidence on the men’s behalf.
News like that helped Jason keep his spirits buoyed. So did the volume of letters he continued to receive. People wrote explaining how they’d learned about his case through “boards” and “chat rooms” on the Internet—meeting places that Jason found hard to comprehend. Some correspondents let Jason know that, while most of those involved with the case on the Internet seemed to believe he was innocent, a few sites did exist to argue for the convicted men’s guilt. People reported that John Mark Byers and Todd Moore, parents of two of the victims, had posted angry messages there.
All the Internet activity—pro and con—was hard to grasp for someone who’d never so much as held a cell phone. Jason had heard, for instance, that one non-supporter, or “non” in the case’s new lingo, had created a website containing dozens of documents from the investigation and trials. At the time, nobody knew—least of all, Jason—that the fledgling archive of West Memphis case documents would become the largest repository of records relating to a criminal case on the Internet. It would be years before Jason would learn that the site was developed by a man his own age, who ran it from his apartment in Denmark.
“there is one question, Inspector Callahan: Why do they call you ‘Dirty harry’?”
~ Harry Julian Fink
Like so many, Christian Hansen had become fascinated with the case when he saw the first Paradise Lost documentary. That was in 1998, while Jason was at Grimes. In the three years that followed, Hansen read everything he could find about the investigation and trials. Hansen understood supporters’ arguments that there was no physical evidence linking Jessie, Damien and Jason to the murders. But he remained troubled by the knowledge that Jessie had confessed to the murders, not once but twice, after his conviction. (The first time was as sheriff ’s deputies were driving Jessie to prison; the second occurred on Feb. 17, 1994, with Davis and Stidham present.) Those confessions made it hard for Hansen—and many others—to accept the notion that the teenagers were innocent.
However, Hansen was unlike many others drawn to the case. He was keenly
interested in facts and willing to separate them from the many layers of emotion that had imbued the case since the murders. He lurked in chat rooms, reading what was said there, but he preferred to look at unbiased source materials. For a number of very rational reasons, for example, he wished that the West Memphis police had recorded Jessie’s entire interrogation.
Hansen was not a lawyer, a college graduate, or what in the U.S. would be called a white-collar worker. Single, he lived in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, where he’d grown up, graduated from high school, and worked in manufacturing. He’d gotten his first computer, a Commodore 64, at the age of thirteen—three years before the West Memphis murders. Having studied English in school and polished it with TV, movies, and the Internet, he had almost mastered the language by the time Jason returned to Varner. By then, Hansen was running the website “Callahan.8k.com,” which was posting an increasing number of documents about the West Memphis case. Supporters of the WM3 and non-supporters alike were beginning to recognize “Callahan” as a vast and neutral online “reference room” for the case, even though few knew who was running the site or why it had that unusual name.
The answer was simple. Hansen had become a fan of American actor Clint Eastwood long before he saw Paradise Lost. Because of that, an Internet friend had nicknamed him “Callahan,” after Eastwood’s character in Dirty Harry. So when Hansen created his own website, he named it “Callahan.8k.” At first, Hansen said, he devoted just some of his posts on the site to “the whodunit and motive aspects” of true crime, including the West Memphis case. But as his interest in law expanded, he realized that no other case intrigued him like the one from Arkansas did. When another non-supporter took down a document archive he’d begun about the case, Hansen thought it was “unfortunate that people no longer had access to the documents,” so he uploaded the material to his own site. Eventually Hansen devoted the entire site to the West Memphis case and Callahan.8k became the most complete online resource for case-related documents.
“There were enough websites expressing opinions,” he said, “so it was only fitting that this would be the ‘Switzerland’ of the West Memphis Three cyberland.” He added that if he’d known that he would soon remove his other content and devote the site exclusively to documents from the West Memphis case, “I might have given it a different name.”
In the United States, the website WM3.org was keeping supporters apprised of the latest case developments, to the extent that those could be known. And by the end of 2001, Jason had settled back into life at Varner, where he saw Jessie every now and then, though briefly. “I’d like to talk to him to see what he sees and hears and where he stands on things,” Jason said at the time. But in their regimented environment, chats like that were not possible.
By November, Jason had served his mandatory kitchen time and again earned a position of responsibility. He became a disciplinary clerk, which put him in charge of keeping records on everyone who’d gotten into trouble. The job didn’t compare to the one as school clerk that he’d left behind at Grimes; on the other hand, Varner offered some benefits that Grimes didn’t. For example, Varner had a chapter of the Jaycees—the American Junior Chamber of Commerce—that prisoners with a good record could join.117 Jason became a proud member. The group was allowed to hold fundraisers and sell sandwiches to raise money to rent movies that inmates wouldn’t otherwise see. Twice a year, the Jaycees got to spend some of their proceeds on a “banquet,” to which they could invite their families. In December 2001, Jason was in charge of the event.
He looked forward to it, relishing the thought of eating catfish again with his mother, as they’d done so often on the dock at Lakeshore. His girlfriend was going to pick up his mom, who no longer had a car, so the two could come together. Jason wanted both of them to “see that even though I am in prison, I am doing as well as can be and I have people who love and support me.” But seeing his mom was crushing; she seemed to be “just hanging on by a thread.” Her mother’s brother—Jason’s Uncle Hubert—had died. And Jason’s brother Matt had been seriously injured in a car wreck, so that he now had a hard time walking. By comparison, it almost looked like Jason, in prison, was living the middle-class life of a young, suburban American. His girlfriend, who’d stuck with him since they both were 16, was entering her last semester of college— and applying to law schools. Jason himself was continuing to take whatever college classes he could. Here he was, heading one of the prison Jaycees’ most important committees, and in his spare time, he was privately studying finance and investments, with books provided by supportive friends.
“I don’t want to get out and be that sixteen-year-old kid I once was,” he said. “I want to keep up.” He knew “to stay away from credit cards,” and how “mutual funds are a safer investment and a higher yield,” and that now was “the best time to buy stocks.” He wished he could “get out right now and just buy a bunch of stocks while it’s low, and just keep buying stocks every month,” because he didn’t want his kids “to live in a trailer park.” Yet, how could he talk about such dreams and ambitions that night at the banquet? Life in the trailer park had come to the prison to visit, reviving his best—and worst—memories.
After everyone left, Jason had time to reflect in his bunk. His downfall had brought on his family’s. After the murder victims and their families, he, Damien and Jessie had become victims— and then there’d been so many more. “We might have lived in a trailer park, but we were moving up,” Jason said. “My mom had gotten her GED. We’d gotten out of the grip of my stepdad. Me and my brothers were all in school. I was about to get my first job. Our trailer was ours because my grandmother had left it to us. We had a lot of belief in America.” Now his family was torn apart, tattered and struggling—and he was just another data point in America’s burgeoning gulag.118
Month after monotonous month passed, and often in such quiet hours, that caustic question why ricocheted through his brain. Jason knew that Paul Ford had fought for him in the pretrial hearings. But then, he’d only called one witness at trial. Why? He wondered if Ford had concluded his case was hopeless. “It was a no-win situation with Burnett,” Jason reflected. “It was hard to fight against Judge Burnett and the prosecutor too.” By now, Jason had come to believe that Burnett “knew from the get-go that he wasn’t going to let us win this case. He didn’t want the publicity to be that his court was the one that let the killers go.”
Yet in the stillness, Jason would also think: “I wonder if he knows that we are innocent. Does he really believe we did it? Or does he wonder?” He wrestled with the same questions with regard to Fogleman and Davis too, because of the way they’d dealt with Michael Carson. Again and again, he asked himself: “Did they really believe what Carson said I did to one of those children?”
Many people could not. This author’s critical book, Devil’s Knot, was published in 2002, the second year of Jason’s second stint at Varner. 119 Soon after, Elizabeth Fowler, a Hollywood producer, optioned it for film. Later Fowler said of that decision, “When I first read Devil’s Knot in 2003, our country was in the middle of a national discussion about the Patriot Act after 9/11. I was struck by the parallels of the manipulation of communal fear resulting in a willingness to rush to judgment and to sacrifice due process. I was also struck by the notion that, after the initial terror had calmed, Devil’s Knot became a story about the power of the people—that when our deliberately designed governmental system of ‘checks and balances’ repeatedly failed with a flat refusal to admit any errors with this case, it was the citizenry who rose up and through websites, documentaries, books and both on-the-ground and virtual movements cried ‘foul.’”
In Arkansas, however, confidence in the courts prevailed—though with a few exceptions. A trio of women who saw no evidence of the men’s guilt printed flyers, staged concerts, and organized rallies in support of the West Memphis Three. A college instructor offered the case to her writing classes as an exercise in critical thinking. A fe
w criminal justice teachers discussed the case in class. But most schools, and especially state institutions, avoided mention of the local case that was drawing international attention.
Jason knew that most Arkansans believed the worst about him, if only because they saw him and Jessie as pawns of the demonic Damien. He sensed that some of the ministers who came to the prisons where he was held regarded him as something of a prize—a bona fide Satanist in need of salvation. Some inmates tried to redeem him too. But Jason rebuffed attempts to convert him and chose not to attend chapel. Though there was much about the world he did not understand, and much about his case in particular, he felt complete in silence and solitude. Others were welcome to believe as they wished. He was glad that chapel was there for them. Personally, though, he said, “I worship God. I don’t need to go down there.”
That did not mean that faith for Jason was easy, especially since there were so many kinds of faith. Take the faith that the families of the murdered children had placed in the police, the prosecutors and the courts. Jason had experienced enough powerlessness himself to understand how powerless those parents must have felt as they buried their children. He had struggled for answers, and he knew that they had struggled too. He knew how comforting faith in official action could be—because he’d held onto such faith too. Lying there, he also thought that, like those parents, he knew what it was like to be torn from people you love.
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