Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [188]
78. Jason said he’d often been told that he was going to hell because he liked a type of music that some local ministers denounced. By sticking together, he and Damien were able to absorb the barbs. “After a while,” Jason said, “it was water off a duck’s back.” He dismissed their critics. “You know how kids are,” he’d say. “They probably got it from their families and their church.”
79. After that incident, Jason said, “Steve Jones would hound me for wearing rock and roll T-shirts and the like. He was always around messing with me. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t until he started hounding Damien that I began to care. He absolutely hated Damien. He told all the kids in the neighborhood that Damien was a Satan-worshiping faggot. That caused all types of trouble for Damien. Someone always wanted to kick him down, but he was smarter than that. He thought it was humorous, all the rumors about him. He didn’t realize how a lot of people took what was said, along with his name and how he looked, serious.”
80. Jason did not like Deanna. He said, “When her parents forbade her to see Damien, it was her idea for them to run away to California. As I look back on it now, I should have been a better friend and talked him out of it. I tried, but not as hard as I could have. He wanted me to go with him, but I couldn’t. I had responsibilities to my family. I told him that I did not want him to go, but she put herself on him and got her way. I wished him the best and we collected money up for his trip. I don’t remember how much he ended up with, but it wasn’t much. That was a sad dark day. Especially when the police picked him up. After that, the police had a ‘legitimate’ reason to keep Damien out of Marion. Because of his love for Deanna, Damien went to juvenile hall and afterward lived in Portland for a while. He tried coming back to Marion a couple of times and even tried to return to Marion High School. The police escorted him out. All because of a girl who really did not care for him, who was just rebelling from her parents and looking for the first person she could manipulate into taking her away.”
81. Interview notes of Don Bray taken by investigator Ron Lax, October 7, 1993.
82. The pastor was Dennis Ingall, of Lakeshore Baptist Church.
83. When Lax interviewed Bray in October 1993, the police officer still carried the piece of paper in his shirt pocket. Lax wrote in his notes of that interview, “I asked if he knew Damien Echols personally and he admitted he had never met him, nor had he ever had any connection with him. He stated there was a case in Marion in which a teenage girl was raped and he felt Damien Echols was involved; however, under further questioning, he stated a young man had been arrested for the rape and Echols had never been charged or questioned.”
84. Pam Echols later recalled the interview as having taken place on May 6. Damien said he remembered a helicopter circling the city while he was being questioned.
85. Handwritten notes of Detective Bill Durham.
86. This appears to be a reference to the interview on Friday, May 7, when Sudbury and Jones questioned Echols.
87. On matters relating to the occult, however, Ridge’s report was extensive. “When asked if the water had any type of meaning in the Wicca or black magic, Damien stated that water was a demon type symbolism and that all people have a demonic force,” Ridge wrote. “He further stated that people have control over the demonic force in them…. Damien went further to explain that in his Wicca religion, he knew that evil done comes back three times. He stated that meant that any evil done by a person would be rewarded by the person doing the deed having three times the evil done to him in revenge. Damien stated that his favorite book of