Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [182]
9. According to police accounts, Allen slipped on the muddy bank while trying to retrieve the shoe with a stick, and ended up waist deep in the water. However, Gitchell told the local paper, theWest Memphis Evening Times, that Allen’s plunge had been deliberate. “Being inquisitive,” Gitchell told a reporter, “he jumped in the water and started feeling around.”
10. From a six-page unsigned police report dated May 6, 1993, labeled only “Crime Scene Notes.”
11. There is some disagreement about the location of the bodies. The unsigned “Crime Scene Notes” indicate that the first and third bodies were found thirty feet apart. However, theWest Memphis Evening Times reported that Gitchell said the bodies were found “about ten feet apart.” An undated police summary of the recovery effort said that all three of the bodies were found within five feet of one another.
12. Crittenden County’s coroner was Kent Hale, the manager of a funeral home. Under Arkansas’s system, each county has a coroner. Coroners are not required to be medically trained. There is one medical examiner for the state. The medical examiner and his assistants are required to be pathologists.
13. The paper quoted the report as saying: “This department has a case of three male juveniles being abducted. They were found with their hands tied behind their backs and their genitals had been removed with a sharp instrument. Their bodies had been dropped in a remote area. Any department with a case similar to this, please advise this department, attention Inspector Gitchell. All information appreciated.”
14. The boys attended Weaver Elementary School, whose playgrounds bordered on the lot where Michael Moore and his family lived.
15. Some state police investigators said privately that they found Gitchell’s position surprising, especially in light of the pressure that Gitchell was under to solve the crime. It had attracted national attention; there were apparently no clear suspects; and the help of trained investigators, especially in the first several days, seemed only to make sense. But others in the police community sympathized with Gitchell’s position. They noted that detectives pride themselves on being able to solve crimes in their own jurisdictions, and that what made even more sense was Gitchell’s official explanation, that “we’ve got fifteen people on this now, and if we get too many, we’ll be tripping over each other.”
16. On January 15, 1993, relatives of Deputy Clark White, an undercover member of the county’s drug task force, found him dead in his trailer home. The county’s sheriff, Richard Busby, contacted the state police. Investigators found the deputy’s partially decomposed body lying on a couch in the living room. In the kitchen, they found a package of liquid poison. An autopsy report concluded that White had died from drinking the poison. White’s parents, who lived nearby, reported that shortly after White was last seen alive, they had seen two men driving White’s black Pontiac Firebird without White in the car. The Firebird was registered to the sheriff’s office, which used it in undercover narcotics work. Four days after the discovery of White’s body, police across the river in Memphis located the Firebird, and a few hours after that, they also located a person who witnesses said had been driving it. Law enforcement from both sides of the Mississippi River swarmed on the neighborhood. A few hours later, officers of the Memphis Police Department’s Organized Crime Unit captured two suspects, both of whom were arraigned in Clark White’s murder. The two suspects told police that White had hocked many items, including various guns and his service revolver, to purchase drugs. A few days before White’s death, they said, he had offered the Firebird as collateral to a drug dealer in Memphis for an advance of $300 worth of crack. One of the suspects was subsequently tried and found guilty of the deputy’s murder.
17. Ironically, just as that investigation was beginning, the