Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [112]
Motion for Mistrial
The state began calling its witnesses. Again, as in Jessie’s trial, Dana Moore and Pam Hobbs described the last times they saw their sons, and Melissa Byers went into detail about how, shortly before Christopher disappeared, her husband had found him riding his skateboard on a busy street. “He brought Christopher home and gave him three swats with a belt,” Melissa said, “because he could have been run over by a car.”
But now reporters who’d covered Jessie’s trial noticed something different. Ron Lax and the defense lawyers noted the change too. In one of the prosecutors’ opening moves, they called a witness who testified that on the evening of May 5, he had seen not three, but “four kids” enter Robin Hood woods.264Lax and the defense teams understood what was going on. One of the few consistencies that had run through Jessie’s many statements was that he, Damien, and Jason had seenthree boys in the woods. And that was the account the prosecutors had presented at Jessie’s trial. But here—since Jessie would not be testifying, and all the evidence was circumstantial, and there was no apparent motive or eyewitness to the crime—the prosecutors seemed to be altering their version of what had happened. It looked like they were laying groundwork for testimony from Aaron Hutcheson.265
As in the first trial, Detective Allen recounted how he had almost literally stumbled upon the first body, and then how he had recovered the others. Allen cited the absence of blood on the ground, but testified that the water around where Christopher’s body was found “had a lot of blood in it.” This struck Lax as preposterous. None of the police reports had noted “a lot of blood” in the water, and one would have thought that Detective Ridge might not have had to search the ditch on his hands and knees if the water around the bodies had been so noticeably bloody. Once again, pictures of the victims, naked, pale, and bound, were shown to the jury, as Ridge described how the boys were tied and what he’d seen of Christopher’s mutilation.
On the second day of testimony, Jason’s attorney asked Ridge to describe how police had handled the evidence found with the bodies. Ridge explained that since the clothing and shoes were wet, they’d “had to be dried before they could be sent to the crime lab.” He said the articles were placed in used paper grocery sacks and taken to the police station. There, he said, the articles were removed from the sacks and “air-dried” overnight on the floor of Inspector Gitchell’s office. Ridge said they were “resacked” and delivered to the crime lab in Little Rock the next day.
When Damien’s attorney cross-examined Ridge, he asked about two sticks that were marked as evidence but that police had not taken from the crime scene until nearly two months after the murders. Handing Ridge one of the sticks, Price asked, “You did not take that stick into evidence at the time that y’all recovered the bodies?”
“No sir,” Ridge replied. “I didn’t take this stick into evidence until the statement of Jessie Misskelley, in which he said—”
Price swirled toward the judge, interrupting the detective to object. He demanded, “I move for a mistrial, Your Honor.”
In a conference before the bench, which the jury could not hear, Price complained that the question he’d asked the officer “did not call for him blurting out the fact that Jessie Misskelley gave a confession.” He said the judge should declare a mistrial because “the whole purpose for our trial being severed from Mr. Misskelley’s trial in the first place was the confession that Jessie Misskelley gave. That’s the entire reason for the severance.”
The discussion at the bench was brief. “He shouldn’t have