Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [32]
Sudbury was proceeding on nothing more than suspicions, but Damien was doing nothing to allay them.
Ridge and Durham
Detective Ridge also wrote notes on the interview. Like Sudbury’s, his began with a subjective assessment: “Damien was very calm and even cold as he answered the questions.” Ridge’s report was the first to record Damien’s full statement of his whereabouts on the day of the boys’ disappearance. “Damien stated that on Wednesday he was with Jason Baldwin and Domini Teer and that they had gone to Jason’s uncle’s house on Center Street in West Memphis. He couldn’t give a specific address, but said that it was near Alexander’s Laundromat, where he stated that he called his mother to pick him up. He stated that his mother picked him up along with Domini Teer and took Domini home.” Echols said that he then went with his mother, father, and sister to a friend’s house, where they stayed until about 5P.M ., at which point the family returned home. That evening, he said, he called a friend in Tennessee and talked to her until about eleven-thirty that night. He told the police that he remained at home the rest of that Wednesday night.
On Thursday, Ridge wrote, Damien said that he went to Lakeshore,
where he stayed the night with Domini. He stated that he heard the boys were missing from Jason Baldwin while he was at Lakeshore that day. He then stated that he heard the news that the boys were missing from Jason’s mother.
Damien stated that Steve Jones from the Juvenile Authority had been by to see him a day or two before,86and that Steve had told him about how the boys’ testicles had been cut off and that someone had urinated in their mouths. He stated that Steve stated that could have been the reason that the bodies were placed in the water, so that the urine could have been washed out.
This was an interesting note. Here Damien was telling the West Memphis detectives that Jones, who was neither a police officer nor part of their department, had already revealed to Damien some highly unusual—and very specific—information pertaining to the case; specifically, “that someone had urinated in their mouths.” The unusual report about the urine had been relayed to Gitchell verbally by Dr. Frank Peretti, the state pathologist who’d performed the autopsies, and it was one of the few details that supposedly was known only to investigators. Yet here, just three days after the autopsies, a teenager, who might also be a suspect, was telling West Memphis detectives that when he was questioned by Jones two days earlier, Jones had divulged this peculiar information to him. If the detectives suspected that Damien might have known about the urine firsthand and was lying when he said he heard it from Jones, there was no indication of that in the record, and Damien was never questioned further on the point. Likewise, if the officers were at all distressed about this significant breach of the secrecy Gitchell had tried so hard to impose—and what it might suggest about what other details may have been released—no report of follow-up discussions with Jones were included in the record either.87
Ridge continued:
At this time, Damien was asked if he would submit to having hair samples taken and blood samples. He stated that he did not object to the samples being taken. It was further asked if he would be willing to take a polygraph examination if one could be scheduled, and again he stated that he would take the test. Lt. Sudbury then left the room and attempted to set up a polygraph examination to determine if he was being truthful in his statements…At this time Damien was turned over to Detective Durham for a polygraph examination.
Detective Durham did not record the polygraph interview. He inserted no record of his machine’s electronic responses