Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [107]
The boy said the officers had not hit him, but that they had “kept on and kept on” yelling, “like I was fixing to get arrested or something.” In his statement after the polygraph, the boy told Ridge and Durham that he’d heard Damien say he’d been present “when the little boys got killed.” Lax asked if he’d been frightened, and the boy nodded yes. He said he was afraid “that they was going to try and say I was there and…that I knew them. Then I thought I was going to, like, get involved and have to go to court, you know, like they are.”
The list of prospective witnesses that Fogleman had given the defense contained more than two hundred names. More than a tenth were police officers; a few more worked at the state crime lab. One of those would deal another blow to the case Fogleman was trying to make.
Dr. Peretti
From the first day of the investigation, police had acted on the assumption that the victims had been sodomized. One reason for that was that the crime looked sexual. The boys’ nakedness suggested that, as did the way they were tied: bound behind their backs, with their genitals prominently exposed and their backsides accessible. Of course, Christopher’s castration was a violent sexual assault. The other factor that led police to believe that the boys had been sodomized was that their anuses had appeared dilated, or unnaturally open, when the bodies were removed from the water.
Though the autopsies were performed the next day, the medical examiner’s inexplicable delay in releasing the autopsy reports forced Gitchell and his detectives to proceed on their suppositions. Weeks passed without a definitive answer on the question of rape, which was why, in his letter to the medical examiner almost a month after the murders, Gitchell still had had to ask, “Were the kids sodomized?” He did not have an answer when Jessie was interrogated. But the strength of the detectives’ assumption that the boys had been sodomized was reflected in Detective Ridge’s questions. Jessie told the police he’d seen Damien and Jason “screwing” the boys, and that aspect of his statement had contributed to the loathsomeness of the crime. Yet after the arrests, when the belated autopsy reports finally arrived, all three of them stated that “no injury” had been found to the boys’ anuses.
At Jessie’s trial, Dr. Peretti, the associate medical examiner who’d performed the autopsies, testified that while he could not rule out that the boys had been raped in the attacks, there was no physical evidence to support the contention. When Stidham asked Peretti if he would expect to find injuries to the children’s anuses if an eyewitness had reported seeing them raped, the pathologist said he would. “If it were forcible, I would expect to find injuries,” Peretti said. “If the penis enters the anal canal, I would expect to find bruises and abrasions to the opening. I couldn’t find any physical evidence of that.”
Because of Peretti’s testimony, the defense lawyers had asked Judge Burnett to bar the prosecutors from claiming that the boys had been raped—an allegation that, the defense lawyers knew, carried intense emotional weight with the jury. But Peretti’s testimony posed no problem for the prosecutors because, despite the lack of evidence to support the claim, Judge Burnett allowed them to say that the boys had been sodomized.
The sodomy question remained one of the case’s numerous ambiguities. Jessie’s most recent statement had made it even murkier. In Jessie’s confession to the West Memphis police, given at a time when the police believed the boys had been sodomized, Jessie’s story had conformed to that belief. He said he’d seen Jason and Damien “screwing” the victims “in the ass” and “in the mouth.” But a few nights before, in Rector—after Jessie’d heard Peretti testify at his trial that he’d found no evidence of sodomy—Jessie’s story