• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

424. Chief Bob Paudert came to the West Memphis department from a small police force in Missouri. Before that, he had served as a narcotics detective in Memphis. In an author interview in January 2002, Paudert said that, upon his hiring, the mayor of West Memphis told him, “You’ve got a department that needs help.” Soon after his arrival, he said, members of the department reported that certain officers were helping themselves to money and other evidence that was seized during arrests and taking kickbacks from prostitutes and their pimps. Much of the alleged malfeasance centered on the interstate highways, roads that Paudert called “hot corridors” for contraband. According to official records, in the twelve months before the firings, city and county narcotics officers had seized an average of $5,000 a day in drug-related traffic stops on I-40 and I-55. Paudert said that not all of that money, however, was showing up on the books. To address the problems, Paudert said, he had created an internal affairs office—a first for the department—and drafted a procedures manual, which was another first.

425. In the interview in January 2002, Paudert said that none of the allegations of misconduct that had been reported to him related to the department’s investigation of the 1993 murders. Sergeant Lawrence Vaughn, head of the department’s new internal affairs office, agreed. Vaughn said that he had been working as a uniformed patrol officer in 1993 and had participated in the search for the children. “I was there on the scene at the discovery,” he said. “I was there when they were bringing the bodies out of the woods. There were so many people there, we had to set up a perimeter. We were sitting by the hearse. We assisted in putting the bodies into the vehicle.” (Inspector Gary Gitchell had begged the crime lab for information about the “Negroid hair” found in the sheet around Christopher’s body, but no explanation had surfaced. Yet, during the trials, when defense attorneys had asked the crime lab’s trace evidence expert, Lisa Sakevicius, if she had ever received “any Negro type hairs from any West Memphis police officers to compare with the questioned hair,” Sakevicius testified that she had not.) Vaughn also reported that Sudbury’s role in the murder investigation had been unique within the department. According to Vaughn, after the boys’ bodies were found, Gitchell had assigned all of his regular criminal detectives to work the murder investigation, and he’d temporarily reassigned the department’s narcotics unit, where Sudbury was second in command, ordering them take over the regular detectives’ duties. Vaughn said that Sudbury—who’d been the first West Memphis detective to question Damien, the first to report Jerry Driver’s suspicions, and present during key interviews with John Mark Byers and Vicki Hutcheson—was the only narcotics detective whom Gitchell had allowed to participate in the murder investigation. Sudbury, Vaughn recalled, “was the only one who worked both.”

426. Damien’s son, Seth, born six months before his father’s trial, turned eight in 2001. Seth and his mother, Domini, had left Arkansas after the trials, and their contact with Damien in the years that followed had been slim.

427. The wedding, which was approved by Warden Greg Harmon, took place on December 6, 1999.

428. She’d moved to Little Rock, and two years later the couple asked the warden for permission to marry. The wedding ceremony, held in a visitation room at the maximum security unit, began and ended with the sound of a bell. Damien wore his white prison uniform and shackles. His head was shaved in the manner of a Buddhist monk. A Buddhist priest from Little Rock, who also worked as a volunteer chaplain at the prison, performed the ceremony, which was attended by a half dozen of the couple’s friends, including some of the supporters from California. Officials at the prison stressed that while inmates generally had a right to marry, they