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The defense attorneys struggled to make sense of what appeared to be Judge Burnett’s stream of consciousness. What had begun with Morgan’s unwillingness to testify due to unspecified federal drug charges in Memphis had suddenly shifted to confidential sources and from there to “Mr. Byers’s cooperation” with drug task forces and police departments on both sides of the Mississippi River. What did any of that have to do, the defense lawyers were left to wonder, with the murder trial at hand? And was Byers’s “cooperation” with the police somehow connected to the judge’s gag order with regard to this hearing?

Without addressing any of those matters, Burnett settled the immediate question. Noting vaguely that Morgan “seemed to be a young man who admitted that he lied and that those lies could possibly, in some way, incriminate him if he were forced to testify,” he ruled that he would not require Morgan to testify.284Then, reminding the lawyers of his gag order, Judge Burnett added, “I’m going to make a ruling that anybody that mentions to the press, the jury, or anyone else” what had just transpired “will be held in contempt, and I mean it.”

Jason’s lawyer Robin Wadley was outraged. “Judge,” he said, “so we pick and choose the things we are going to be held in contempt for and not—”

But Burnett cut him off short. “I think I made it real clear,” he said. “I haven’t put any kind of gag on you on anything at all, but this I’m going to.”

As Burnett had demanded, no one who was present in the hearing ever spoke of it. The media never reported a word about the secret discussion of Morgan’s quickly retracted confession, or his intention to plead the Fifth Amendment, or the drug charges he faced in Memphis, or Judge Burnett’s unexplained reference to John Mark Byers in the midst of a hearing about Christopher Morgan. Nor did the public learn that while Judge Burnett had been disinclined to believe that officers at the West Memphis Police Department had refused the three requests Damien said he’d made for an attorney, Burnett himself had ignored repeated requests in his own court from Christopher Morgan.285

“Darker Thoughts and Darker Actions”

Deflated, the defense attorneys returned to the courtroom. As his final witness, Damien’s lawyer called Robert Hicks, a police training officer with the Commonwealth of Virginia.286The officer said his job there was to “assist law enforcement agencies to develop good, sound written policy and to train and supervise their people accordingly.” He testified that he had a master’s degree in applied anthropology as it related to law enforcement, and that he had written a book and several articles on “so-called occult or satanic crime and the involvement of law enforcement with that topic.”287

Price asked Hicks how he had become interested in the unusual field. Hicks explained that, during the 1980s, many law enforcement agencies had become interested, as he put it, “in this broad topic of satanic crime, occult crime, cult related crime.” Since part of Hicks’s job had been to monitor trends in law enforcement, he’d begun to attend seminars on the subject. “I began to form a suspicion that some of the information presented was not accurate enough for police practice,” he said.288

Price questioned Hicks about the testimony of Dale Griffis, the cult expert. Price asked Griffis if the date of the murders—near May 1, the pagan feast of Beltane—indicated what Griffis had called “the trappings of occultism.” At first, Hicks seemed to be at a loss as to how to respond. He finally said that he’d heard of dates being linked to satanic crimes but that “for Virginia—and at least a few inquiries I’ve made about this nationally—we see no influence of these dates on the prevalence or absence of violent crime, one way or the other.” When Damien’s attorney asked about the position of the bodies, which Griffis had said suggested cult involvement, Hicks responded that, “simply finding a body bound in that fashion, in and of itself, is no clue to a religious ideology that I know of.”

Price