Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [193]
125. Officers who booked Jason noted that he did have a tattoo, but not theE-V-IL that Vicki Hutcheson claimed to have seen. According to a police intake form, he had small ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life, in the web between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.
126. Author interview with Fogleman, April 2001.
127. One of the young people who’d accused Damien was William Winfred Jones, a teenager who lived in the Lakeshore trailer park near Jason. As was common in the investigation, Ridge had questioned William, then questioned him again on tape. In the portion of the interview that was taped, William stated that he and Damien had been friends for the past five years. He said that Damien had not been “weird” at first, but that he’d started acting strange after he’d gotten into “that satanic cult stuff.” William said that one night when Damien was drunk, he’d asked Damien if he’d murdered the boys. William said Damien admitted that he had. William told Ridge that Damien loudly proclaimed that he’d had sex with the boys, and then killed them with a “little,” eight-to-ten-inch knife. William added that “everyone” in the Lakeshore trailer park had heard the drunken claim. However, when Ridge asked William for the names of others who’d heard the alleged confession, William modified his statement. On second thought, he said, only he, Damien, and Domini had been present.
128. Ridge listened as Gail Grinnell recited some of what she’d heard. She told him of one instance when some girls had told a neighbor “that the police had been telling them to stay away from that boy named Damien—that he was a member of a gang.” But Ridge was not interested in hearing complaints about police conduct. Without addressing her remarks, he told Grinnell, “It’s really not complicated—the position we’re in and the position that Jason is in. If he’ll tell us a story, if he’ll tell us where he was that day, what time he got places, and we’ll check with those people that say he went to those places. If we prove that his story is true and correct, then Jason is a free person. But we can’t even start until Jason tells us what happened and where he was…. If we can prove that that’s where he was, I’m more than willing to see him be a free man. I mean, that’s the truth. But I can’t even start until Jason tells me something.”
129. Normally, arrest and search warrants, along with the affidavits submitted to support them, are open to public review. The practice, which has existed for centuries, is intended to safeguard citizens against unfounded arrests. But now Rainey was announcing that that normal level of openness would not be allowed in this case. He justified his order to seal the records, saying that the “high level of publicity” the case had attracted threatened “the defendants’ right to a fair trial.”
130. Bruce Whittaeker, of WMC-TV, channel 5, in Memphis, said he had turned down the offer because “we don’t buy news.”
131. This article was written by Bartholomew Sullivan, theCommercial Appeal ’s lead reporter on the case. Another of the paper’s reporters who wrote extensively about the case was Marc Perrusquia. Sullivan and Perrusquia teamed up with Guy Reel to write a book about the case,The Blood of Innocents, which was published by Pinnacle Books in 1995.
132. When Gitchell was asked if parents in West Memphis could now allow their kids to “go out and play normally,” he answered obliquely. “I think all parents need to always know where their children are at,” he said. He added that “kids should stay away from” Robin Hood, which he described as “dangerous.”
133. An editorial