Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [111]
“Negative Evidence”
At 5A.M . on the Sunday morning before testimony was to begin, a reporter driving by the courthouse noticed a crude sign stuck into the courthouse lawn. It featured a picture of the Grim Reaper, below which someone had written,HE WANTS YOU DAMIEN . The reporter notified police, but the sign’s maker was never found.261Later that morning, subscribers to theCommercial Appeal found several articles about the case in their Sunday papers. One, datelined Marion, Arkansas, began: “The legend of Damien Echols blows through the trailer parks and flatlands around this Delta town like a brisk winter wind, chilling listeners with tales of vampires, Satanism and ritual murder.”262
The next morning, Damien and Jason’s trial opened much as Jessie’s had, with Fogleman describing the crime scene to the jury. Pointing to a map of Robin Hood, he described an area along one bank that appeared to have been “slicked off.” He said police found “lots of scuff marks, unnatural marks,” in the spot. But, he added, “There’s no blood. No blood at all.
“Now as the proof develops,” Fogleman told the jurors, “I want to tell you in advance, there’s going to be some—there’s going to be a lot of testimony from the Arkansas Crime Laboratory. And some of this evidence is going to be what we call—I guess you call it ‘negative evidence.’ It doesn’t really show a connection to anybody…. For instance, there will be proof, like on the bicycles, there aren’t any fingerprints; on some things in the kids’ pockets, no fingerprints. Things like that. And you may wonder why we’re putting on evidence of a negative, but we’ll explain that to you later.”263
In his opening statement, Jason’s lawyer Paul Ford described his client as an average student, “not a troublemaker,” who “comes from a poor background.” He described how, because Jason’s mother worked a night shift, Jason was responsible for getting himself and his two younger brothers up, fed, and dressed in the mornings, and that they caught the bus for school. Ford said Jason was arrested for the murders only because the police had done a sloppy investigation. “As you’ll see from their own testimony,” he told the jurors, “they found nothing. Not even a drop of blood.” He related several of the tangents that police investigated—truckers, veterans, known child abusers—but “there were no answers to their questions. There was no solid evidence pointing to anyone. And the pressure began to build…. The evidence will show that as late as the twentieth day of May, the police admitted they were blindfolded. They had no answers. But suddenly an arrest is made.”
Ford described how police “swarmed” into Jason’s life, taking clothes, shoes, schoolwork, and school records.
They obtain samples of his hair. They obtain samples of his blood. They obtained his saliva. They take his fingerprints. They take his handwriting samples. They take footprints, and they made casts of his shoes for shoe prints—all looking for something to link him to this crime. And they begin to take all this evidence and send it out to the experts. Sent it to Little Rock to the crime lab. Sent it to the FBI in Virginia, in Quantico, for them to assess it. Sent it to experts in Alabama for their opinion. And you’ll see, there was no substantiating evidence to link him to the crime. But before that ever occurs, and before that is made public, Inspector Gitchell goes in front of that same press who had once been the source of pressure and said that, on a scale of one to ten, the proof against this young boy is an eleven. And from that point forward, nobody believed him no matter what he said.
Damien’s lawyer also zeroed in on “police ineptitude” in his opening remarks. Val Price echoed the claim Stidham had earlier made, that detectives had developed “Damien Echols’s tunnel vision.” But in addition,