Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [135]
He looked confidingly at the jury.
But you might ask yourself, “Well, now, wait a minute. We’ve got a crime scene that’s clean. The killers were very meticulous about removing any evidence, hiding the bicycles, hiding their clothes, hiding their bodies. Why would he stand out there and tell everybody?” Well, number one, who is he telling? He is telling a group of six or seven of his little groupies that follow him around. Remember, he says he dresses that way and everything to keep people away from him? But everywhere you look, you’ve got these little groupies hanging around him. Now, then, you say, “Well, still, why would he say that?” Well, remember when Mr. Davis was examining him about this manic-depressive situation? In the manic phase you feel invincible—nobody can touch you.
Fogleman emphasized how the knife had been found in the lake close to Jason’s house. He recalled the testimony of Michael Carson, Damien’s responses to Detective Ridge’s questions, and the fibers found at the scene. “Ask yourself,” he said, “if they aren’t significant.” He acknowledged that all of the evidence in the case had been circumstantial, and that not one piece of it, “in and of itself,” pointed to anyone as having been the killer. “But,” he advised, “you don’t look at it like that.” Using the example of a house, he argued, “If you look at one small part and say, ‘Well, that’s not a house.’ The foundation? Is that a house? No. Is the door a house? No. You don’t look at it that way. You look at it as a whole. And we submit when you look at all of the evidence as a whole, that you’ll find that this circumstantial evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that these defendants committed this murder.”
Then Fogleman raised the issue he’d introduced midway through the trial. “Now I want to talk to you about motive,” he said.
This motive here is something that’s inconceivable. And it’s, it’s something that—it’s not something that you anxiously look forward to putting on—that kind of evidence relating to motive—in this particular case, especially. And why is that? This satanic stuff…It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or the defense attorney believes it, or you even believe in these concepts. The only thing that matters is what these defendants believe. That’s the only thing that matters in relation to motive…. Look at history. Look at hundreds of years of religious history. There have been hundreds of people killed in the name of religion. It is a motivating force. It gives people who want to do evil, want to commit murders, a reason to do what they’re doing. For themselves, it gives them a reason—a justification for what they do.
Then Fogleman read one of Damien’s poems to the jury, one that he said described Damien’s internal conflict. It was a conflict that Fogleman said was between “Wicca, which is the good, and the upside-down cross, which is satanic.” The poem read:
I want to be in the middle,
in neither the black nor the white,
in neither the wrong nor the right,
to stand right on the line,
to be able to go to either side with a moment’s notice.
I’ve always been in the black, in the wrong.
I tried to get into the white,
but I almost destroyed it
because the black tried to follow me.
This time I won’t let it.
I will be in the middle.
“That right there,” Fogleman proclaimed, “tells you Damien Echols. He don’t want to be in the white. He doesn’t want to be good. He wants to be both where he can go to the good side or the bad side, however it suits his purpose. If he wants to do bad, let’s go to the satanic side. If he wants to be good, then go to the Wiccan side. That poem right there tells you about Damien Echols.”
Returning to the circumstantial evidence, Fogleman continued: “No, ladies and gentlemen, each item of this, in and of itself, doesn’t mean somebody