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By Root 675 0

HAVEviewed some of Damien’s views as unhealthy, most people in the region, had they known of them, would also have considered them unholy. Here, as throughout the Mississippi delta, the spiritual landscape was rigorously Christian and rigorously literal. Here, to a greater extent than almost anywhere else in the country, angels were regarded as God’s emissaries, hovering invisibly close at hand, and children were warned to be on guard against Satan, whose evils were just as near. A belief in possession by demons was common. It was, as one scholar noted, “an extension of the general Southern view that the devil is very real, the devil has great power and is vibrantly at work in the world.”70 While not everyone in the Mississippi delta viewed the cosmos in such stark terms, most residents of east Arkansas did. Most attended a Christian church, and the churches most of them attended belonged to the conservative Southern Baptist Conve

Chapter Five

Chapter Six The Volunteer Detective ONMAY13, one week after the murders, Detective Bray in Marion interviewed Vicki Hutcheson again. As before, Hutcheson brought her son Aaron with her. Since Bray had already concluded that the murders in West Memphis were probably “cult-related,” he asked her if she knew anything about “an occult or devil worshipers.”92Hutcheson said she did not, but a few days later she called Bray to report that kids in her neighborhood knew something about a local cult. She said she was going to “play detective” and try to find out more.93Bray did not object. Hutcheson’s personal investigation began with Jessie Misskelley Jr., a scrappy seventeen-year-old neighbor who frequently baby-sat for her children. Jessie lived near Hutcheson in a Marion trailer park. Hutcheson never explained how her interest came to focus on Jessie, but it may have been no coincidence that his name was on the list of suspects that Driver had given to Bray. Misskelley’s father, an automobil

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven The Confession JESSIE HAD NO IDEA, as May 1993 slipped into June, that his neighbor Vicki Hutcheson was discussing him with the West Memphis police in relation to the murders. He would later say he was surprised when told the extent of what she’d said, particularly the part about Damien driving Hutcheson and him to the orgy.108He said no such trip had taken place and that, besides, “everyone knew Damien didn’t drive.” But Jessie’s version of events during that last week of May agreed with Hutcheson’s on a few points. Here’s what he said happened: “When I first heard about the kids come up missing, it was early in the morning, about nine o’clock. I was going to work with a friend of mine.” Jessie said he heard the news on the radio as he and a friend drove east on I-40 toward Memphis, where they’d gotten a roofing job. When he returned from Memphis that afternoon, another friend told him that the bodies had been found.109 A few weeks later, Jessie said, Hutcheson asked him

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight The Arrests IT IS RARE THAT JUDGES ISSUE WARRANTSfor nighttime searches. Arkansas law requires police to show that extraordinary circumstances necessitate invading a home after dark. These circumstances are well defined and narrow: the home to be searched must be difficult for police to approach by day, or there must be a threat that officers will be harmed or evidence destroyed if a daytime search is attempted. None of the trailer homes where the three suspects lived were difficult to approach, day or night. And police had questioned all three of the teenagers without a hint of threat. As for the likelihood that evidence would be destroyed, thirty days had already passed since the murders. If evidence remained at the suspects’ homes, the chance that it would be destroyed within the next twelve hours might have struck oddsmakers as slim. But June 5, when the town would mark the passage of a month since the murders, was only a day and a few hours away, and now that police

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter Nine The Defendants ALMOST AS SOON AS HE HEARDabout the arrests, Ron Lax,