Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [108]
Michael Carson
Another question concerned what evidence the state planned to present against Jason. Lax knew that Lisa Sakevicius, the crime lab analyst, would testify, as she had at Jessie’s trial, that fibers found with the victims bodies were “microscopically similar” to fibers from a shirt foundin Damien’s house and from a bathrobe found at Jason’s. But Lax anticipated that the fibers would be easy to discount. They were too common, for one thing. For another, Lax found it a stretch to think that the only evidence Jason had left behind at the crime scene was a fiber from a garment that did not even belong to him. Lax figured that even the prosecutors probably realized that this argument for secondary transfer of fibers was a skimpy one, at best.
As evidence, the knife from the lake didn’t look much better. Lax figured that Fogleman would tell the jury that that was the knife used on Christopher Byers, and that its location, in the lake behind the trailer where Jason lived, connected him to the crime. But again, if Jessie testified, the knife would present new problems, since it bore no resemblance to the folding knife that Jessie had described to police. To try to connect Jason to the murders with nothing more than the lake knife and a fiber from his mother’s bathrobe looked to Lax like a long shot. But then, less than a month before the start of Damien and Jason’s trial, in a turn of events almost as remarkable as the discovery of the knife, a new witness suddenly emerged. Like the knife, the witness would link Jason to the crime.
Sixteen-year-old Michael Roy Carson was a kid in serious trouble. He was on probation for earlier crimes when police in Jonesboro picked him up in November 1993, on suspicion of burglary. At the time, Michael seemed to have no connection to the West Memphis murders, and Val Price, the city’s chief public defender—and Damien’s court-appointed lawyer—was appointed to represent Michael. But in January 1994, at the start of Jessie’s trial, Michael abruptly informed authorities that he did know something about the murders—and that, in fact, his information might be crucial. He said that three months after the murders, in August 1993, he’d been in the same jail where police were holding Jason and that Jason had bragged to him about the murders. The boy told police that Jason had given him “gory details” of the murders. He also said that Jason had told him he’d like to “whip Misskelley’s ass” for divulging the trio’s involvement.
Everything about this newly arrived witness struck the defense lawyers as suspicious. They found it hard to believe that Jason, who had steadfastly maintained his innocence, would confide the “gory details” to Michael, whom he’d known for less than twenty-four hours. Michael had a long record of drug abuse, in addition to his burglary charges, and the defense teams noted that he had not reported Jason’s extraordinary boast until five months after it had allegedly occurred—five months during which Michael’s own troubles with the law had deepened.
Another new name on Fogleman’s list was that of a Dr. D. W. Griffis. Apparently Griffis was going to appear as the prosecutors’ expert on cult-related murders. It seemed that in preparing for his appearance, Griffis had asked the West Memphis police to describe the evidence of cult involvement they’d found with the bodies. Fogleman provided the defense attorneys with a copy of Detective Ridge’s responses, but they showed that Ridge had had little to offer Griffis beyond the wild statements of Aaron Hutcheson.248
It had become clear in Jessie’s trial that the police had found almost no blood at what they regarded as the murder site. Lax noted that in his letter to Griffis: