Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [121]
Damien’s mother, Pam, testified that at about 5:45P.M ., while police were still questioning Damien, she’d called an attorney from a nearby town who happened also to be a state senator, and asked that he come to West Memphis and represent her son.270Later in the hearing, the senator testified that after receiving the call, he drove to the West Memphis police station, where he’d asked to see Damien, but that his request had been “refused.” The state senator said that he’d repeated his request a short time later, and that this time he was told that the “building was closed” and that he “could not go upstairs” where Damien was being questioned.
Detectives Ridge and Durham swore, however, that Damien had never asked for an attorney. Davis argued that the senator’s role was irrelevant anyway, because no statements from the part of the interview conducted after he’d arrived would be presented as evidence.
“It’s relevant to the way they harassed this kid,” Damien’s lawyer responded. He argued that the jurors needed to know that Damien had been denied access to a lawyer.
But Judge Burnett was not impressed. He noted that if the police investigation itself was challenged, literally hundreds of people could be called to testify, and that that would, as he’d said before, be “absurd.” Based on the “credibility of the witnesses”—Ridge and Durham—Burnett ruled that the statements Damien made during his nearly eight-hour interrogation would be admitted at trial. The trial moved back to open court, where, in the presence of the jury, Fogleman was now allowed to ask Ridge about what Damien had told the police. Ridge related Damien’s comments about the mystical significance of water, about three being “a sacred number in the Wicca religion,” and about the “demonic forces” that, Ridge reported, Damien said all people have “inside them.”
Then it was Price’s turn to cross-examine Ridge. “When you asked him about what his favorite book of the Bible was,” Price asked, “that’s when he told you it was Revelations?”
Ridge agreed.
“Was that a question that you asked other suspects in this case?”
“I don’t remember asking that of anybody else. No sir.”
“When Mr. Echols—you asked him what type of books did he enjoy reading?”
“Yes sir.”
“And he told you, I think it was Anton LaVey and Stephen King?”
“Yes sir.”
“In your opinion, is there anything unusual about those being the type of books Mr. Echols likes to read?”
“Anton LaVey is a book of Satanic rules and involvement. Stephen King seems to be horror movies, horror books, and if you’re asking if I felt that was strange, yes sir, I did.”
To further explore how Damien was “strange,” Fogleman called to the stand Deanna Holcomb, Damien’s former girlfriend. “During the time y’all went together,” Fogleman asked the seventeen-year-old girl, “how did Damien dress?”
“He wore all black,” Deanna said.
Fogleman asked, “During the time that you went with him, did Damien carry any type of weapon?” Deanna said he carried “knives.”
Fogleman showed her the knife from the lake, asking if she had ever seen one like it before. “Yes sir,” Deanna replied. She said that once when she’d given Damien a hug, she’d seen a knife like it in his trench coat pocket.
The defense lawyers tried to discredit the police by showing that their investigation had been unreliable in several ways. Again, in a hearing away from the jury, they told Judge Burnett that detectives had compiled a ten-picture photo lineup, which they had shown to several people, including Aaron Hutcheson, but that the detectives had kept no records of whose photos were included. Fogleman said