Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [49]
Reporters fired questions. What could he tell them about the accused? Had they known the victims? How had police cracked the case? Gitchell would not comment. Did he know the motive for the killings? Gitchell said that he did, but would not elaborate. One reporter zeroed in on the rumor that had dogged the case since the first body floated to the surface. Were the defendants members of a cult? Gitchell shook his head. “I can’t comment on that.”
The sensational press conference was drawing to an unsatisfying close. Finally a reporter asked the chief detective, “On a scale of one to ten, how solid do you feel your case is?” This one Gitchell could answer. He smiled and said confidently, “Eleven.”
But Gitchell’s confidence was overstated. At the time of the arrests, he and his detectives had Jessie’s convoluted confession to hold against the three—and little else. Later, Fogleman would acknowledge that “the only thing” police had against Jason “was Jessie’s statement,” and in a trial, “an accomplice’s statement alone is insufficient; there has to be something else connecting a person to a crime.” Although the prosecutor recognized that he could use Jessie’s statement as probable cause for an arrest, he would later admit that “if we had tried the case the day that Jason was arrested, he would have been acquitted. There would have been a directed verdict of acquittal.” As a result of the dearth of evidence against Jason, Fogleman later explained, Jessie’s “statement had to be investigated further, to see whether or not more evidence could have been developed.”126
From a legal point of view, the case against Damien was not much better. As with Jason, Jessie’s statement alone was insufficient. And despite the abundant rumors about Damien, by the time of the arrests, police had found no physical evidence linking him to the crime. They’d taken hair samples, blood samples, and urine samples from him and sent them to the crime lab, but none connected him to the murders. They had a polygraph examination that Bill Durham said Damien had flunked, but polygraphs are considered too unreliable to be admissible in court.
The police had no evidence at the time of the arrests other than an array of statements: Jessie’s statement, Vicki Hutcheson’s statements, and a half dozen statements from young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen saying that Damien had done it.127Except for Hutcheson’s, all of the statements had been given to the police by minors. And many of those, including Jessie’s, had become incriminating only after police had administered a polygraph test, which Durham said the teenager had failed. Though reporters had no way of knowing it at the time, this was the entire basis of Gitchell’s claim that his department’s case was an “eleven.”
“So Close to Perfect”
Jason’s mother was no lawyer, but she assessed the arrest of her son much the way Fogleman later acknowledged he had. She did not believe there was any evidence that could be used to prosecute Jason. After Gitchell’s press conference, she stormed into Ridge’s office, demanding to know why Jason was being held. Ridge explained that Jessie had accused him of the murders. By then, the family members of the victims, as well as those of the accused, had been shown a copy of Jessie’s statement.
“I’ve got proof that Jessie Misskelley is lying,” Gail Grinnell exclaimed. Focusing on Jessie’s repeated claims that the murders had happened early in the day, she told Ridge that Jason had attended school that day. “If he was in school,” Grinnell said, Jessie’s claim “cannot possibly be true.”
In contrast to Jason’s later recollection that he had talked to the police, Ridge complained to Grinnell that he had not. She replied that if Jason wasn’t talking, it was because she had advised him not to, after the detectives had come to their house. She told Ridge that she’d been “scared, ’cause you all put words in his mouth and make things…make a mountain out of a molehill.”
Ridge countered,