Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [105]
To Damien’s private investigator, the story typified what the defense had been dealing with throughout the case: wild suspicions, false claims, and convenient leaks from police to the press. Ron Lax had been trying since the beginning to find a consistent theory of the crime, a clear motive—something the defense could attack. But the state’s version of the crime had kept changing. Too much about this case was vague, contradictory, confusing. It was hard to find a clear path through it. To Lax, nothing about it seemed fixed. Stories and testimony had kept changing. Documents, such as the first police interview of Byers, had been inexplicably withheld, while possible weapons, such as sticks and the lake knife, had popped up long after the arrests. Amid so much uncertainty, it had been hard for the defense to prepare.
But however crazy the case appeared, Damien and Jason’s lives were now on the line, and with the trial about to start, Lax dove for one last time into the discovery records. Lax had arranged them chronologically and by subject, and added his and Shettles’s notes. While jurors were being selected to judge Damien and Jason, Lax methodically reviewed the now organized police file. In the process, he noted references to several documents that he had never seen, records that should have been part of the file but that had not been turned over to the defense. Among the items Lax would have expected to find but did not were notes from the patrol officer who’d searched the woods with John Mark Byers on the night the boys disappeared; a behavioral profile of the killer that Inspector Gitchell had requested and that had apparently been prepared by the FBI; Don Bray’s notes from his interviews with Vickie and Aaron Hutcheson; any notes, reports, or photographs of the place where Vicki Hutcheson told police she’d attended the alleged esbat, the tape recordings made when detectives had wired Vicki Hutcheson’s trailer; and follow-up notes to the report from Memphis police that both Mark and Melissa Byers had been confidential drug informants. Working with what they had, Lax and Shettles assessed, visited, and in some cases revisited the witnesses whose testimony might prove most damaging.
The Hutchesons
Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson topped the list—not because Lax found their statements compelling but because the police and prosecution had placed so much stock in them. As recently as the last week of Jessie’s trial, Bray had tape-recorded yet another statement from Aaron, and it had turned out to be the most elaborate yet. This time, Aaron stated that his friends had been beaten with long sticks that had a dragon carved on them, and that Damien and Jessie had poured blood into a glass and made him drink it. The inconsistencies in Aaron’s numerous statements were so many and so profound that Lax could not imagine that Prosecutor Fogleman would call the child to testify, no matter how sympathetic an eight-year-old friend of the victims might appear. But on the other hand, Lax reminded himself, the prosecutors were working feverishly to get Jessie to testify—and his statements had been profoundly inconsistent too.
Aaron’s mother was a different matter. Vicki Hutcheson had already testified at Jessie’s trial, and she would probably be called again. Lax urged Damien’s and Jason’s attorneys to press Hutcheson about her past and about her own inconsistencies, especially with regard to her reports of the esbat. At one point she’d said that she, Damien, and Jessie had arrived at approximately 6P.M . In another, she’d said that it was “really dark” when they arrived. Lax also wanted someone to zero in on her claim that Damien had driven the car. The investigator noted that in the police interviews, “there was no discussion regarding the fact that Damien is not capable of driving any type of vehicle.” Recalling Bray’s report that Hutcheson told him in advance that she was going to attend the esbat, Lax wrote,