• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

—The statements of the “kids at the girls’ softball game,” who said they’d overheard Damien saying that he’d killed the three boys and was going to kill two more.

—“A guy that was in jail with Jason, who says Jason made some incriminating statements.” Fogleman warned, however, that the witness—a teenager named Michael Carson—might not be believed by the jury.

—“Oh, yes,” Fogleman concluded. “And the knife in the lake.”

“So that’s what we’ve got,” he told the victims’ families. “But that’sall that we’ve got.” When someone asked Davis what the odds were of convicting Damien and Jason if Jessie did not testify, the prosecutor did not sound confident. “Fifty-fifty might be good,” he said.

The defense lawyers were well aware of the prosecutors’ dilemma. Without Jessie’s testimony, Davis and Fogleman would be trying to win a death penalty conviction with scant and circumstantial evidence. If Jessie did testify, the defense lawyers would make sure the jury realized how much he stood to gain by talking. Still, both the defense teams ardently hoped that Jessie would not appear. As Jason’s attorney told him, “If that’s their best evidence and they can’t use it against you, then this dog-and-pony show is over.”

Jessie’s Next Statement

With only eighteen days to go until the start of the next trial, the possibility that Jessie might testify frayed nerves on both sides of the case. Jessie vacillated. But everyone knew that the prosecutors held a distinct advantage. Jessie was scared as sheriff’s deputies led him to a car that would take him to prison, three hours away, in south Arkansas. He told his father that he’d “never make it down there.” By the time the sheriff’s car arrived in Pine Bluff, the intake site for the prison, the deputies who’d driven Jessie had good news for Fogleman and Davis. As one of them reported, “Jessie was asked if there was anything he wanted to say, and after being assured we could not use anything he said against him in court, he chose to talk.”

According to one of the deputies, Jessie had admitted once again his involvement in the murders, and he’d renewed his accusations against Damien and Jason.236The details of this statement, as reported by the deputy, were different in several respects from anything Jessie had said before. Still, Fogleman and Davis were excited.

According to the deputy, Jessie did a lot of talking on his long ride to the prison. He told his drivers he’d met Damien and Jason on the “evening” of May 5. Before that, he’d been drinking whiskey that Vicki Hutcheson had bought him. Damien and Jason were drinking beer. Earlier in the afternoon, they all had smoked marijuana. The three teenagers went to the woods, where they were sitting in the water, when they saw the three young boys at a distance. Damien told Jessie and Jason to hide, then Damien grabbed Michael Moore. Michael’s friends started hitting Damien, whereupon Jessie and Jason jumped out and helped Damien “beat them” with sticks. Damien and Jason took turns raping the boys. The boys were not tied at that time. Jessie helped hold the boys and beat them, but had no part in raping or killing them. “Blood flew everywhere” as Jason castrated one of the boys with a “buck-type locking knife.” Jason threw the dismembered part of the unidentified boy’s body into “the weeds.” That boy was then thrown into the water, where he was “still squirming around” when Jessie decided to leave. The other two boys were, at that point, unconscious but not in the water.

The deputy reported that Jessie said that he’d lied when he was questioned by the police about the time the murders took place and about the children being tied with rope. He said he’d wanted “to trick the police and to see if they were lying.” The deputy concluded, “Jessie claims he has felt sorry for what happened and talks as if he wants to testify against the other boys so they will not go free and to help himself.”

Prosecutor Davis later said that when he heard the deputy’s report, he called Jessie’s lawyer to discuss