Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [132]
“In your study of this phenomenon,” Price asked, “is heavy metal and rock groups, is that something that the cult cops look at when they make their opinion that a particular crime could be a satanic or cult crime?”
“Yes,” Hicks replied. “In fact, cult cops, as we have gotten into the habit of using the term, have recommended at seminars to other officers that they find ways to go into rooms in homes where the teenagers live, find out what music they listen to, and see what books they’re reading.”
“In your studies, are you aware of any particular empirical data or studies that the possession of that type of material leads to some type of criminal activity or satanic crime?”
“This, of course, is much debated,” the officer answered, “and there are many people who will attest that these will lead to darker thoughts and darker actions. But…where the Metallica music is concerned, we do have empirical evidence to suggest that the music does not cause the kind of harm that is imputed to it, that is, that it will lead people to commit crimes.”
Finally, Hicks explained:
In my opinion, that phrase, “the trappings of the occult” is absolutely meaningless in considering any kind of violent crime…. The term “occult” has no fixed meaning, anyway. In most people’s minds, it usually refers to certain kinds of practice, certain symbols and signs, that we don’t observe and practice, but other people do—people who do nasty things, is usually what that word connotes in the popular mind. To say the word “trappings” again is simply to imbue the whole crime with the tint of something evil. For some police officers, that almost gets into a Christian moral fight. Some officers who teach Griffis’s point of view teach that you have to be spiritually armed when you investigate these offenses, which in my view, gets outside of what law enforcement is here to do.
With that, Damien’s lawyers rested their case.
“They Came Back and It Was Twenty”
While most of the prosecutors’ attention was focused on Damien and his alleged involvement with the occult, theArkansas Times reporter who was covering the trial paid some attention to Jason. “I tried without success to imagine him sucking the blood of dying Chris Byers, as a scruffy cellmate testified that he’d bragged of doing,” reporter Bob Lancaster wrote. “No dice,” he concluded. To Lancaster, Jason had “the slightly drained look of a kid who’s been called to the principal’s office and isn’t quite sure how serious his situation is.”289
But the severity of Jason’s situation was about to become clear. Jason’s lawyers had hurled themselves into efforts to sever the two trials and to keep mention of satanism and the occult from tainting Jason, but now that those efforts had failed and it was time for them to present Jason’s defense, they surprised everyone in the court by calling only one witness, an expert in hairs and fibers from a laboratory in Texas.290Ford asked the analyst to discuss the single red fiber found with the bodies that analysts from the Arkansas Crime Laboratory had identified as being “microscopically similar” to fibers from a red bathrobe belonging to Jason’s mother. The Texas analyst said he disagreed with those findings, noting that his examination of the fiber would “exclude the red robe as being a possible source.”291
With nothing more than that, Ford announced, “We rest.”
Later, Ford explained that he and Robin Wadley, Jason’s other lawyer, believed the state’s case against Jason was so weak that the assumption of innocence would prevail.292“We wanted to just disappear on the radar screen and let Damien be the whole focus,” Ford said. “At one point, we went three days of the trial and Jason’s name was not mentioned. We were just trying to disappear. We thought that that was a good strategy: to