Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [34]
On Wednesday, May 12, a week after the boys disappeared, police questioned Pam Echols. When they asked her about Damien’s whereabouts on the afternoon of May 5, she told the officers that at about 3P.M ., she, Joe, Damien, and Michelle drove to visit some friends.90The friends were not home, Pam said, so she spoke briefly with their daughter and left a note for the parents. Pam said that on their way home the family stopped by a pharmacy, where a prescription for Damien was filled. After that, she said, the family stayed home, and Damien talked on the telephone with two girls who lived in Memphis.
Her account was almost identical to the one Damien had provided two days before. The friends verified that they’d found the note. Pharmacy records established that a prescription had been filled for Damien that afternoon, although records did not show when it had been picked up. And the two girls in Memphis confirmed that they had telephoned Damien that night. But Driver’s reports about Damien, together with Sudbury’s interviews, had offered some hope that Gitchell and his weary detectives would solve the case. Their pursuit of the satanic theory intensified, even though they had not a shred of evidence on which to base an arrest.91
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 automobile mechanic, shared the same name as his son. He was known around Marion as Big Jessie, primarily for his strength, because he was barely of average height. Jessie Jr., or Little Jessie as he was called, stood maybe an inch over five feet tall. Perhaps to compensate for his size, he wore his hair spiked at the top of his head, adding another two inches. Jason Baldwin had known Jessie since the two were in elementary school. “He was all right,” Jason would later recall. “He just didn’t learn quick, and he didn’t have much common sense, either. He could be funny, but maybe we were all laughing more at him than with him.”
Within a week after the murders, Hutcheson knew, as many in Marion and West Memphis did, that the police were extremely interested in Damien and his reputed involvement with cults. She saw Jessie as a way to meet Damien, in furtherance of her self-assigned role as a detective in the murder case. As she later told the West Memphis police, “Little Jessie, Jessie Misskelley, lives down the street from me, and you know, I was really close to him because he was always around. He doesn’t go to school or anything. He, like, helps you mow the lawn and stuff. I’d gotten really close with him.” Hutcheson said that after the bodies of Aaron’s friends were found, Misskelley had mentioned to her that on the morning the boys disappeared, he had seen some boys who’d fit their description walking near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. It was an irrelevant and erroneous statement because, as Hutcheson and everyone else knew by then, all three of the murdered boys had attended school on the day they were