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a postconviction plea bargain. Four days after Jessie arrived at the prison in Pine Bluff, attorney Stidham, Inspector Gitchell, and prosecutors Davis and Fogleman drove there to talk with Jessie. Before anything else happened, Stidham wanted to meet with Jessie alone. Fogleman later recalled: “Well, Stidham stays in there forever. He finally comes out, all white-faced, wanting a Bible. Dan just could not believe what Jessie was telling him, and he wouldn’t let us talk to him. He kept saying, ‘If only there were some more corroboration. And he did tell us some of the details of what Jessie told him, including that he had been drinking, and the brand of whiskey, and the particular person who’d given him the whiskey.”

Jessie had also reported that, on his way home, after witnessing the murders, he’d thrown the bottle of whiskey away, near a highway overpass. “And so, we went back there,” Fogleman said,

practically in the middle of the night, searching this overpass Jessie described. We found this neck of a whiskey bottle. It was the largest piece of whiskey bottle that we could find, that you could identify, and it’s the brand that Jessie has described. Of course, we’re talking about what—a year later? And so we say to Stidham, “Dan, is that enough corroboration? Here’s the kind of whiskey.” And he said, no, that wasn’t enough. So we go back to the police department, and Gitchell calls the person who allegedly gave Jessie this whiskey, and she’s on a speakerphone. Gitchell says, “So and-So, I’ve got a real important question to ask you. Did you ever give Jessie any alcohol?” And there’s this long pause and she says, “Well, yes, I did.” And he says, “What kind was it?” And she says, “Well, it was whiskey.” And he says, “What kind?” And she goes through three or four and then she says, “No, that wasn’t it.” Then she says the brand of what Jessie told Dan it was. Of course, that still wasn’t enough to convince Dan.

Stidham attributed Jessie’s sudden willingness to talk to the prosecutor to his fear of being in prison and to his corresponding desire to please authorities. While Stidham was chagrined by Jessie’s decision, he was less than impressed by the fact that prosecutors had found a broken Evan Williams bottle alongside an overpass near one of the nation’s busiest highways. Stidham decided to meet with Jessie again at the prison, and now it was the prosecutors’ turn to be dismayed. On February 15, eleven days after Jessie’s conviction, Stidham informed the state that Jessie would not testify against Damien and Jason.

Tensions were palpable the next morning. All the lawyers met in Judge Burnett’s courtroom in Jonesboro for a pretrial hearing. The prosecutors were not convinced that Jessie was going to stay silent. Jason’s lawyer was pressing again to have Jason’s trial severed from Damien’s. And now Damien’s attorneys wanted Judge Burnett to order the HBO filmmakers to surrender footage they’d heard had been shot of John Mark Byers. The lawyers told the judge that in the segment they wanted, Byers was reportedly shown standing at the site where the boys’ bodies were found, “talking about being accosted when he was eighteen or nineteen years old, tied up, sodomized, and thrown into a ditch.” Burnett rejected the request.237

After the hearing, Fogleman called Jessie’s father, asking that he speak to his son and persuade him to testify. Big Jessie told Fogleman bluntly that Little Jessie had no interest in the deal. Davis then asked Jessie’s lawyer to let the prosecutors put the question to Jessie themselves. Stidham refused. But the prosecutors were not thwarted.

Incident at Rector

They went to Burnett. Without notifying either Stidham or Jessie’s father, they asked the judge to issue an order for Jessie to be taken out of prison and brought to Jonesboro. Information was leaked to the media that Jessie was moved so that he could be available to testify at the Echols-Baldwin trial, which was still a week away. Stidham learned that his client had been moved while watching the television news. He was furious. He later