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who one of the [murdered] kids was, I called the police and told them they ought to consider him.” He said his concern was based on the tape recording Byers’s first wife had made of the attack, which she’d played for Fogleman. “Because of the way he [Byers] sounded on the tape, I just thought he was somebody they [the police] should consider. Not that I thought he did it. It’s hard to consider parents or step-parents as suspects in a child’s murder. But the tape sounded bizarre enough—the nature of his voice and the way he sounded—that I thought he should be considered, and he was.”

Fogleman described Byers as “a guy who’s not an upstanding citizen of the community.” But when asked about Byers’s record, the judge was vague. He said Byers’s terroristic threatening conviction had been expunged after he “completed his probation” but seemed unaware that Byers had not met the terms of that probation; he expressed surprise at hearing that Byers was not prosecuted in the Rolex watch scam (“I thought he was. Was he not?”), and he spoke vaguely about what he and the West Memphis police had known about Byers’s involvement with drugs. “I don’t know if my memory is correct,” he said, “but I do know that we weren’t able to confirm what his status was, one way or another…. I do seem to recall that the police talked to somebody, either with the Shelby County Drug Task Force [in Memphis] or the U.S. attorney’s office, or the DEA or FBI over there, and that they confirmed he was working with them.” But he said no actual information developed. And when asked if police in Memphis and West Memphis did not cooperate, Fogleman replied obliquely, “I would say metro narcotics in Tennessee were coordinated pretty well with here, but maybe not as well as you might think.”

Fogleman’s recollections about the three defendants were more clear. He cited the fibers found with the bodies (“They’re little bitty but they’re important”), the knife taken from the lake (“I still believe it’s more significant than even Dr. Peretti would say”), and particularly Jessie’s confession. Fogleman said he’d been uncomfortable about the discrepancies in Jessie’s various statements. As to why Jessie had given so many different accounts of what he said had happened, Fogleman seemed mystified. Pointing out that Jessie at one point said he’d been drinking, he observed, “If you want to look at it from a prosecutor’s perspective, you could say that that clouded his judgment and that’s why he got all these details wrong.” But when pressed as to why he thought Jessie had offered so many differing accounts, Fogleman said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. They were generally consistent, but specifically they weren’t. I don’t know.”

He then added, “You’ve got the situation where there are a couple of things—the time involvement and also the thing about how the boys were tied—that were obviously wrong. But at the same time, you’ve got him telling things that only somebody would know who was there.” These included, he said, “the injuries to the left side of one of the boys’ face, the mutilation of the Byers boy, and [ Jessie’s] picking out photographs of which one had which injuries. The way I looked at it—and I even asked the officers to make sure that they hadn’t somehow leaked that information to him, and they assured me that nothing like that had happened—the way I looked at it, these were things only someone who’d been there could know.”

At another point, he said, “If you look at each individual piece of evidence throughout the case, no matter which one it is, you’d say, ‘I won’t convict on that.’ But when you put everything in combination, that’s the way you have to look at circumstantial evidence. It’s like looking at the spokes of a wheel, and pulling out a spoke and saying, ‘Well, that’s not a wheel,’ but you put it all together and it is a wheel.”

Motive is an important part of the wheel that explains a crime. But motive had been elusive in this case. None of the usual motives for murder—anger, revenge, robbery—had seemed to fit the defendants. Beyond little Aaron’s wild