Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [103]
All hell broke loose, legally, during the next three days. On February 17, five days before Damien and Jason’s trial was to start, Jessie was driven from the prison at Pine Bluff to Rector, a town of about three thousand, some forty miles northeast of Jonesboro. At about 5P.M ., a sheriff’s deputy drove Jessie to the law office of one of Davis’s assistant prosecuting attorneys.238Davis was already there waiting. At about six-fifteen, the local deputy prosecutor called attorney Stidham at home to report that Jessie was now in Rector—and that he was prepared to make a statement.239Stidham could not believe what was happening. He told the deputy prosecutor that neither he nor Davis were to take any statement from Jessie. Then Stidham picked up his partner, Greg Crow, and the two men sped through the dark to Rector, in the far northeast corner of the state. Forty-five minutes later, they pulled up in front of the office where Jessie was being held.
Stidham and Crow demanded to speak with their client in private. When the prosecutors left the room, Jessie happily told his attorneys that the deputy who’d driven him to Rector had promised to bring Jessie’s girlfriend to see him in the local jail. Stidham had never encountered a situation anything like this. As he later recalled the night, he and Crow had had fifteen minutes in the conference room alone with Jessie when Davis opened the door, insisting the session must end. He said that Jessie had agreed to make a statement and it was time for him to make it. Stidham and Crow objected strenuously to having their meeting with their client interrupted. Davis left the room but returned a few minutes later. This time, in front of Jessie, he and the deputy prosecutor expressed their concern that Jessie’s two defense lawyers would convince him not to talk. As the argument ensued, Jessie stood up. He announced that hedid want to make a statement, then, turning his back on his own lawyers, he walked out of the conference room with the prosecutors.
Stidham rushed to a phone to call Judge Burnett at home. He complained that the prosecutors were violating his client’s constitutional rights. He told the judge that Jessie had requested psychiatric help upon his arrival in prison, and asked that Judge Burnett delay any questioning until a psychiatric evaluation could be performed. Burnett refused. Then prosecutor Davis took the phone. Burnett told him that he could inform Jessie that anything he told the prosecutors would not be used against him in court. And that was that. At 8:02P.M ., with Jessie’s lawyers in the room, Davis turned on a tape recorder and placed Jessie under oath.
This time Jessie said that he went to the woods with Damien and Jason after he got off work, which was around “dinnertime.” He’d been drinking whiskey Vicki Hutcheson had bought him. It was “still daylight” when he arrived at the woods “by a bridge…on the service road.” He, Damien, and Jason heard “some noise.” All three of the teenagers hid. “Then three little boys come up and we jumped ’em.” In this recounting, Jessie did not identify any of the victims by name, but he did recall some dialogue. He said that as the younger boys were being attacked they’d yelled, “Stop! Stop!” but that Damien had yelled to Jessie and Jason, “No! No! Don’t stop!”240
Jessie also supplied another detail of the attack, but this one posed a problem for Davis, as it contradicted Fogleman’s theory that the knife taken from the lake behind Jason’s trailer had been the murder weapon. When Jessie told Davis that Jason had been “swinging” a knife at the boys, sending blood “flying,” Davis asked what the knife looked like. “I can’t remember,” Jessie said. Then he added, “All I know is it’s a lock blade.” The knife from the lake was not a folding type, but a fixed-blade survival