Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [180]
Jessie, Damien, and Jason all had different visions of what life would be like if they were freed. Jessie dreamed of a “big party.” Damien said he wanted to “disappear” with his wife. Jason foresaw a life of activism relating somehow to law.
“Being in here has made me stronger,” he said. “It’s made me more reflective on things I should be proud of and enjoy, things like freedom. I don’t take things for granted. And I’m not as naive as I was. The reason I’m here—the real reason—is that someone had to pay the price.” Jason said that the police and prosecutors had been “content just to say we did it” and that that had been “enough” for the public. But he added that he understood the public reaction. “I used to think that way too,” he said. “To me, a suspect meant, ‘That’s who done it.’ But I didn’t do it, and that’s the main matter.”
Epilogue
THIS STORY IS A CHILDREN’S TRAGEDY. The victims—and there were many—were all minors.
The lives of Michael Moore, Stevie Branch, and Christopher Byers ended not just too soon, but in horror. We know that hours before Christopher suffered the savage attack on his genitals, he was beaten with a belt—a not uncommon punishment dealt to far too many children. As a teenager, Christopher’s brother, Ryan, had to cope not only with Christopher’s murder but with his mother’s unexplained death less than three years later.
The witnesses were all children, and they were victims as well, especially young Aaron Hutcheson. Encouraged to tell and retell his story, with no guidance or restraint from adults, he embellished his account from a man with yellow teeth to scenes of orgies in the woods, and finally to lurid visions of buckets of blood. The teenagers who testified at the trials were but bit players in a drama that could not have unfolded without the exploited utterings of children. Other teenagers recanted their accusations, admitting later that they’d said only what they believed police wanted to hear.
Jessie himself had begun by saying he knew nothing about the crime. Told he’d failed a polygraph, he also tried to accommodate the police—only Jessie was so unwitting that he also implicated himself.
When he, Damien, and Jason were arrested, none of them was old enough to buy a beer, a cigarette, or aPlayboy magazine, much less execute a contract. Nevertheless, all three could be interrogated repeatedly and for hours by armed police officers, with neither parent nor lawyer present, and all three could be charged as adults and face possible execution.
Children don’t write their own tragedies. That is the work of adults. The vulnerabilities of children in this story were evident before the murders occurred. Poverty and instability weakened homes; intolerance, violence, and official corruption weakened the community. The serious mental health problems that some of this story’s children exhibited—Christopher, Jessie, and Damien, in particular—were tragedies in the making.
Sentimental nostrums about “babies” and “little lambs” could not muffle the harshness that cracked through this story like a belt. Who was protecting Aaron Hutcheson from his galloping fantasies—or from the effect that the detectives’ voracious attention would have on him in later years? Who was looking out for Ryan? What kind of concern for children allowed police to question them without even a parent around? If the tactics that led to Jessie’s confession were acceptable, as the state Supreme Court ruled, whose interests were being protected? Certainly not Jessie’s.Not any child’s .
A terrible disingenuousness wields the corrective belt. This is for the child’s good. This is to send a message. This is for society. This is to teach respect. This is for law and order.
“I think it’s important that we all be held accountable,” Judge John Fogleman told me in an interview eight years after the murders, “whether it be me or the police officers or the people who commit