Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [48]
“We thought it was a game,” Jason would later recall. “But it was the police.”
Jason ran to Damien’s room, while Michelle went to the door. When Jason returned to the living room, the officers had Damien in handcuffs. “I was, like, ‘What’s going on?’” he recalled. “I told them, ‘I know Damien. He doesn’t do drugs. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.’ But they just told me and Michelle and Domini to sit on the couch. When we asked why, they told us to shut up. Then a cop came in and asked me if I was Jason Baldwin. I said I was. He said, ‘Well, you’re under arrest too.’ I asked, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘For murder.’ I said, ‘No. You’ve got the wrong people!’”122
Damien later said that he was not surprised. In the weeks between the murders and this night, he said, “The cops camped in our driveway. They had spotlights on the house. I could not sleep at night.” Now, surrounded by police, he was led away without resistance.
Police charged Damien and Jason with three counts each of capital murder. Damien was listed on the arrest record as an eighteen-year-old roofer without a driver’s license. On a line for “peculiarities,” someone had written: “earrings, two left, one right.” Jason was listed as a sixteen-year-old student, five feet eight inches tall, weighing 112 pounds. No “peculiarities” were noted for him. According to the arrest reports, police read both boys their rights but the suspects “made no statements about the charge.”
Jason later said that though he remembers having been read his Miranda rights, they’d “meant nothing at the time.”123He soon sat handcuffed to a chair at the police station battling shock, anger, and fear. “I didn’t know what to do, what to say, where to go,” he recalled. “I was in there trying to tell them where I was at that day, and they said, ‘No. We know you’re lying.’ I said I was at school that day. They said, ‘You mean, if we get your school records, they’ll show you were there?’ I said, ‘Yes. Get them.’”124
The police booked Charles Jason Baldwin on suspicion of murder and took him to a cell. They told him to get out of his clothes and handed him a set of police-issue clothes that were so large they almost fell off him. He was driven to a local hospital, where technicians took dental X rays and samples of his hair, blood, and saliva.125From there, West Memphis police drove him to the county jail and put him into a cell. By now it was well past midnight. Sixteen-year-old Jason had not been allowed to place a telephone call. His mother had not been informed of his arrest. He had no attorney. And his questioning by police had not been recorded.
On a Scale of One to Ten
As soon as Jessie, Damien, and Jason all were behind bars, the department notified the media that the killers had been caught. The next morning—June 4, 1993—people on both sides of the Mississippi River awakened to the news. At 9A.M ., Inspector Gitchell held a press conference to announce his department’s success. Television stations throughout the delta broke into their regular schedules to carry Gitchell’s statement live. Cameras showed the balding inspector sitting alone behind an array of microphones, his detectives in a line behind him. Gitchell announced the names of the three teenagers who’d been arrested during the night. He said they’d been regarded as suspects since early in the investigation. “It was like a big puzzle,” he said. “The pieces started falling in place to make a clear picture.” He reassured viewers that the suspects were securely in custody. And he praised his officers for the