Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [29]
Despite the pressure, Jason could recall only one fight in which Damien was involved. That was the attack on the boy who had begun dating Deanna Holcomb, Damien’s former girlfriend.80“From then on,” Jason said, “Steve Jones would lead the ‘anti-Damien’ campaign across Marion and West Memphis—he and his sidekick, Jerry Driver. And after the murders, they would all go around asking people questions about the murders, but in the same interviews they would ask people if they knew Damien was in a ‘satanic cult.’”
Don Bray
Before the bodies were found, as West Memphis police and county deputies were searching for the missing boys, talk of the disappearances naturally buzzed through the courthouse at Marion. In the police station across the street, Bray was confined to his office, attending to a routine complaint. The owners of a local truck stop had reported a $200 overrun on a customer’s credit card and suspected a new employee, Victoria Malodean Hutcheson, who’d been on duty when the card was used. Bray was supposed to interview Vicki Hutcheson that morning. The thin, red-haired woman arrived at the appointed hour, accompanied by her eight-year-old son, Aaron.
This was the same Aaron Hutcheson who, a few hours later, would tell police in West Memphis about the black man in the maroon car who had supposedly picked up Michael Moore after school. But at this point, with the bodies still undiscovered, Bray was perturbed to see the child in his office. He would have expected a thirty-year-old woman to have had better sense than to bring her child to a police interview.81But Hutcheson explained that Aaron was a close friend of the missing boys. In fact, she added, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers were Aaron’s two best friends. Bray sympathized and his interest in the woman and her son was piqued. It looked like there might be more to the interview than just a suspicious credit card transaction. It placed Bray near the center of what was, at the moment, the most sensational crime in the nation. Bray thought that young Aaron Hutcheson might know something about the boys that would help police search for them. He picked up the phone and called the West Memphis police to suggest the possibility. But by then it was too late. The dispatcher told Bray that the three bodies had just been found.
Bray hung up and related the news to Hutcheson. Suddenly the child with her looked both vulnerable and important. Aaron was the same age as the victims. He had been their friend. Who knew what he had seen or what he’d heard? It occurred to Bray that the boy might possess information that would help solve the murders—and no one had questioned him yet. Bray abandoned his interest in the credit card problem and turned instead to investigating the murders. Later, he told the West Memphis police that during the interview, Vicki Hutcheson reported that Chris Byers and Michael Moore had asked her to let Aaron go with them to the woods the previous afternoon but that she had refused. Bray said Aaron reported that in the past, he had been in Robin Hood with the boys on several occasions, and that Michael had gone swimming in the ditch. As for the truck stop’s owners, Bray eventually told them that he believed they’d made an error in their paperwork and that no money