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Police in West Memphis, meanwhile, were receiving some unusual calls. An anonymous informant reported that the pastor of a local Baptist church was concerned about some teenagers at Lakeshore trailer park, who allegedly worshiped the devil.82When police contacted the pastor, he said that a kid named Damien was suspected of being involved in cults. The minister said he’d heard that the cult held its meetings somewhere near the Mississippi River; that he had seen Damien wearing boots with the number 666 on them; and that Damien had a girlfriend by the name of Domini Alia Teer.

By now, Driver had also related to Bray the suspicions he and Steve Jones harbored about Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin. Bray regarded Driver as “the most knowledgeable man in the county when it came to Satanic worship.” During their discussions of the murders, Driver had written the names of eight teenagers on a piece of paper. He handed the paper to Bray and told him confidently that when the investigation was over, one or more of the kids whose names appeared on that paper would probably be charged with the murders. Damien’s and Jason’s names were there; so was Domini’s. Bray folded the piece of paper and put it in his shirt pocket, where he would carry it for the next several months.83The reports of devil worship in Robin Hood, the pastor’s concerns about cults, and Driver’s interest in Damien and Jason were enough to prompt Lieutenant Sudbury and juvenile officer Jones to pay a call on the teenagers.

Sudbury, Jones, and Griffin

Although Jones was not a police officer and Sudbury normally worked exclusively on drug cases, the two teamed up. Together they conducted the first interviews in the case that focused on the murders as the work of a satanic cult. For many who learned of it, the leap from the murders to satanism was not much of a leap at all. Everything about the crime—the ghastliness of the murders themselves, the age of the victims, the castration, and the tied-up, naked bodies—struck the psyche as horrific. The murders seemed the very essence of evil. And hadn’t Driver been warning about people courting the devil—about worship directed not to God but to the very prince of evil? While Gitchell and other detectives employed more standard investigative techniques, Sudbury and Jones reviewed Driver’s literature on crimes related to the occult. At around noon on Friday, May 7, less than twenty-four hours after the first of the bodies had been lifted out of the creek, Sudbury and Jones went to the trailer park in West Memphis where Damien was living. His mother, Pam, was there now too, having moved back from Oregon with Damien’s father, Joe Hutchison. Sudbury and Jones questioned Damien on the steps of the trailer but made no notes of the interview.84

By the very next day, May 8, the sense that the murders might be linked to satanism was gaining strength within the department. When a detective reported that an interview subject claimed to have seen two black men and a white man coming out of the woods, Gitchell read the report, then scribbled across the bottom: “Has been mentioned that during cult activities, some members blacken their faces.”

On day three of the investigation, Driver gave Sudbury the list of names that he had already given to Bray. Sudbury passed the information to a fellow narcotics detective, Investigator Shane Griffin. Griffin then teamed up with Detective Bill Durham, the department’s polygraph expert, and the two drove to Marion to question Jason.

The rented trailer where Jason lived with his mother, stepfather, and two younger brothers sat on a lot that backed up to a two-acre lake. Griffin and Durham knocked at the door at about 5P.M . Jason opened the door wearing a Metallica concert T-shirt. He stepped into the yard, followed by Damien and Domini. What followed would mark the second time that Damien had been interviewed. The detectives asked the kids where they had been the night of the murders. “They said that on Wednesday, May 5, 1993,