Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [116]
“Very Difficult”
When court resumed, Jason’s lawyers cross-examined Peretti. Jessie’s confession was not to be mentioned at this trial, but since the arrests and the state’s theory of the crime were based on that critical but unmentioned confession, Ford wanted to explore a few of its central features. “Was there any evidence of strangulation?” he asked Peretti. “There was no evidence of strangulation,” the doctor responded.
Ford next examined the claim that the boys had been sodomized. Peretti answered that he had found no evidence that any of the boys had been raped. Had the boys been tied with rope? “No,” Peretti said, he’d found no evidence of that. As for the wounds to the boys’ heads, the doctor acknowledged that “hundreds of items” could have been used to inflict the injuries, not just the sticks police had retrieved from the site. As the cross-examination continued, Peretti also acknowledged that “any serrated knife” could have caused Christopher’s wounds.
When Ford asked if it would have taken “some skill and precision” to perform Christopher’s castration, Peretti replied, “I would think so.”
Ford then asked Peretti how long it would take a doctor such as himself, with all “the skill and the precision and knowledge” that he had, to do what had been done to the boy.
“That’s a difficult question,” Peretti replied. “It would take me some time. It’s not something I think I could do in five or ten minutes.”
“It would take you longer than five or ten minutes?” Ford asked.
“I would think so.”
“And that is in your lab?”
“I would think so.”
“With a scalpel, is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Now, Doctor,” the defense lawyer persisted, “if we added to the equation that you were in the dark, could you do this in the dark? You, Doctor. Could you do it in the dark?”
“It would be difficult.”
“Could you do this in the water? You, Doctor. Could you do this in the water?”
“It would be very difficult to do.”
“And if you were in the water and it was dark, it would take even longer, is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And if you were doing it in the dark, in the water, with mosquitos all around you, would that make it even much more difficult?”
“I would think so.” In fact, Peretti added, he doubted that he could have performed such a procedure under those circumstances.
As the questioning continued, Dr. Peretti testified that Christopher had bled to death from his injuries; that the blood was gone from his body, his internal organs were pale. Asked if he thought that Damien and Jason, in the dark, could have cleaned up the amount of blood Christopher had lost, Peretti said: “I think it would be quite difficult. It’s not easy to clean up blood. It would soak into the ground.”
“Doctor,” Ford said, “with this homicide we are talking about here today, would you agree with me that this could have happened in one of three ways? These injuries could have happened in the water. These injuries could have happened there on the bank, there by the side of the ditch. Or, they could have happened somewhere else. Would you agree with me, those are the three possibilities of how this could have happened?” Peretti agreed.
“Okay. Now, would you also agree with me that, based upon what you saw that was done to these boys, that it would be highly improbable for it to happen in the water?”
Once more Peretti agreed. It would have been “very difficult,” he admitted.
Time of Death
Now Ford returned to the elusive matter of the time of death. At Jessie’s trial, Dr. Peretti had stated that he could not give an opinion as to the time of death. But now, with Damien and Jason on trial and their lawyers pressing hard for an estimate, Peretti shocked everyone in court.
“Okay,” he said. “Based on what I know, it would be a very broad range: between 1A.M . and, you know, five or seven in the morning.” In contrast to the vague statement he’d given earlier, Peretti was suddenly more specific. He said that in arriving at the estimate, he had taken into account factors such as