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Detective Allen was eventually promoted to captain. In one of his rare public comments, he told a reporter for theAtlanta Journal-Constitution, “If I just watched those documentaries and knew nothing else about the case, I would have questions too. I would say to myself, ‘Those boys might not have done it. There are a thousand and one questions. This is a crying shame.’ But the reality is HBO did a one-sided, biased job. They did the case a real injustice. If this country gets to the point where, instead of a trial, we say, ‘Let’s have HBO do what they do and have people e-mail the courts, well…” At that point, the article noted, Allen’s voiced trailed off. Then, it said, he added, “As I know the case, I can sleep at night in peace, knowing who killed those kids.”420

Bryn Ridge also remained with the West Memphis police. Like Allen, he criticized the documentary and the “stupidity” of the people who were supporting Damien, Jason, and Jessie. “I looked at the entire case,” he said in 2002, “and I am convinced that those are the three.” But Ridge, like the other investigators, was short on specifics as to why. “I’m not going to talk about that,” he said.

Detective Don Bray, of the Marion Police Department, who’d introduced Vicki Hutcheson and her son Aaron into the investigation, suffered a debilitating stroke shortly after the trials.

Steve Jones, the juvenile officer who’d made the first crucial find in the case—the child’s tennis shoe floating in the water—resigned as a juvenile officer a year after the trials. He moved away from West Memphis.

Jones’s boss, Jerry Driver, who’d been the first to suggest that Damien, Jason, and Jessie should all be considered suspects, was placed on administrative leave in February 1997, after an audit of his department found a shortage of nearly $30,000. He resigned from the Crittenden County Juvenile Probation Office the following month.421Three years later, on January 21, 2000, Driver appeared in court before Judge Burnett to face a charge of theft. When Driver pleaded no contest, Burnett placed him on probation for ten years and ordered him to repay the missing funds at a rate of $241 per month.422

Lieutenant James Sudbury, like Gitchell, Allen, and Ridge, had little to say about the case in the decade after the trials, though he made his opinions clear. When a reporter visited the department in 2001 to examine evidence held in storage, Sudbury escorted her to the vault, where he told the officer in charge, “She wants to see the garbage.”423

But Sudbury’s career was clouded. When the three eight-year-olds were found murdered, Sudbury and other West Memphis narcotics detectives were under investigation by the Arkansas State Police. Soon after the murders, that investigation was quietly set aside. During the investigation and trials that followed, few people knew anything about the investigation of the police. But word of them did leak out, and by the end of the trials, a Memphis reporter had begun making inquiries into the results of that state police investigation of the narcotics unit that Sudbury headed.

Ron Lax had no idea that some of the officers involved in the murder investigation had been under investigation themselves until two months after the trials, when he spoke with the reporter. “These officers worked with the drug enforcement division of the West Memphis Police Department,” Lax noted after that conversation, “and there were allegations that they had appropriated drugs and/or stolen merchandise for their own use. The only name [the reporter] mentioned was that of Detective James Sudbury. What was truly amazing was the fact that [Prosecutor] Brent Davis signed a consent order to terminate this investigation sometime during mid-to late June 1993.” Lax did not know it at the time, but Sudbury had been the highest-ranking officer implicated in the corrupt enterprise. At the time of the murders, state police investigators were still looking into allegations that, as one state police report noted, Sudbury was