Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [36]
Like the psychologist the year before, this one also recommended “a residential facility or hospital” for Jessie and family therapy for his parents. Again, the suggestion of hospitalization was rejected, and counseling sessions, while started, were not continued.98
Jessie was kept in kindergarten for two years and in second grade for two more, but the maturity his teachers had hoped to see did not develop. Instead, the boy’s reputation as a troublemaker grew. He daydreamed in class, often seemed confused, and bullied other kids. Despite the special education classes, he fell further behind, academically and emotionally. When the psychologist examined Jessie at age ten, he reported an IQ of 75. The score placed Jessie at the low end of normal, though the boy’s verbal abilities fell into the mildly retarded range.99
By the age of eleven, Jessie had made it only to the third grade. His teacher reported that he did not have an adequate vocabulary and that when reading, he could not understand a passage or draw conclusions from what he’d read. By then he was also regarded as dangerous. He’d hit a girl in the head, stabbed a boy with a pencil, and severely cut his own hand by punching windows out of cars. When the school suspended Jessie for splattering ketchup around the lunchroom, a juvenile judge sent him for yet another psychological examination. Both his parents were supposed to accompany him, but this time only his stepmother could attend. Big Jessie had been arrested for selling marijuana and was serving time in prison. Little Jessie told the court that he wanted to drop out of school, but the judge ordered him to continue. Five troubled years later, by the age of sixteen, Jessie’d been promoted to the ninth grade, but his skills were barely at a fourth-grade level. On IQ tests he ranked among the lowest 4 percent of students his age. His last psychological evaluation was administered when he was sixteen, just before he dropped out of school. A report at that time said Jessie showed deficits in his “general information, abstract and concrete reasoning, numerical reasoning, language development, word knowledge, verbal comprehension, and spatial visualization.”100
Jessie’s own explanation for dropping out was that he “just didn’t care about it no more.” He would later recall that by that point, he “didn’t care about nothing.” He figured he’d probably become a mechanic like his father, who was now out of prison on parole and working in a garage in West Memphis. Other times, Jessie would dream of becoming a professional wrestler. But mostly, he later recalled, he was living “just one day at a time.” That was the state he was in when Vicki Hutcheson and her two sons moved into a rented trailer not far from the Misskelleys’.
The “Esbat”
When Hutcheson asked Jessie if he knew of a kid named Damien Echols, Jessie said yes, but that he didn’t know him well. “She asked me, was he into witchcraft,” Jessie would later recall. “I told her, I didn’t really know. I just knowed he was a weird person.” Next, Hutcheson asked Jessie about Jason Baldwin—another of the boys whose name was on Driver’s list. “Yeah,” Jessie told her, “I’ve known Jason since the sixth grade. He’s a nice person. Me and him, we’ve always gotten along.”101
The fact that Jessie said he wasn’t close to Damien or Jason didn’t thwart Hutcheson’s investigation. She told Bray, and later the West Memphis police, that she had a hunch about the killings and wanted to check it out by talking with Damien alone.102Hutcheson, a thirty-two-year-old waitress and mother of two, told Jessie that she wanted to go out with Damien. When Jessie promised to introduce her to Damien, Hutcheson reported the news to Bray, who relayed it to Jerry Driver.