Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [169]
Chapter Twenty-Four
A Decade Behind Bars
THE HORROR THAT UNFOLDED ONMAY5, 1993, ended life forever for Christopher, Michael, and Stevie. The trials ended life in the free world for Damien, Jason, and Jessie—and put Damien on a list of men awaiting execution. But outside the stillness of the cemeteries and beyond the walls of prisons, participants in the drama surrounding the murders carried on with their lives.
Within weeks of his dual victories in the sensational West Memphis trials, deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman was running hard for circuit judge. Though some voters considered his campaign ad—on a billboard near the Blue Beacon—tasteless, Fogleman’s claim on it, that he could “make tough decisions in tough cases,” proved powerful at the polls. As the three convicted teenagers were being introduced to prison life, John Fogleman was stepping up to the bench, where he’d serve with Judge David Burnett.
During the next several years, Judge Fogleman had little to say publicly about the most sensational trial of his career. But in 2001, when contacted for this book, he hesitantly agreed to discuss it.391Seated in his plain and sparsely furnished office in Marion, around the corner from the Crittenden County Courthouse, Fogleman said he was concerned that his statements “might be taken out of context.” The interviewer observed that if Jessie Misskelley had been a bit more wary, he might have harbored similar qualms when he was questioned by the police, but the remark elicited no comment. The former prosecutor addressed most questions, however, with an air of polite, if formal, cooperation.
John Fogleman
He said that though he and Inspector Gary Gitchell were “good friends,” he’d “cringed” when Gitchell bragged that on a scale of one to ten, the department’s case against the accused was an eleven. He acknowledged that at the time of the arrests, “basically, the only thing we had was Jessie’s statement,” which was why the police investigation had continued almost until the start of the trials. Fogleman noted that elements of the case, such as the detectives’ failure to investigate the bloody man at Bojangles, “could have been handled better, much better,” and that their loss of the blood evidence taken from the restaurant was “very unfortunate.” He also acknowledged that he had not been “comfortable” with the roles Vicki Hutcheson and her son Aaron had played. Those considerations aside, however, Fogleman expressed confidence in the conclusions, reached by the police and two juries, that the three accused teens had been guilty.392
He cited his reasons for believing that the children had been murdered where they were found: chiefly, police reports that no sign of vehicle tracks or a bloody trail had been found leading into the woods. That, coupled with police observations “that one bank had that unnatural appearance,” had convinced him, Fogleman said, “that the murders had to have happened there.” He felt equally sure that the killer had not been the man who’d cleaned up in the Bojangles rest room. “Keeping in mind that whoever did this crime took the time to hide every piece of evidence, put the bicycles in the water, the bodies in the water, the clothes all crammed down in the mud…to take that same person and say that immediately after he’d done all this, he goes into a public place all covered in blood and leaves blood laying around—to me that’s a complete absurdity.”
Fogleman said that he and the police had tried to consider “every possibility” they could think of—and that included the possibility that John Mark Byers was the killer. Recalling the terroristic threatening charge brought by Byers’s first wife, which Fogleman had handled as a young prosecutor for the city of Marion, he said, “Quite frankly, as soon as I’d heard