Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [50]
Grinnell replied, “Well, I’ll get him a lawyer so that he can tell the lawyer. I want him to have a lawyer with him because I’ve never been involved in anything like this before and I don’t want to see my son go away for my mistake. I know he’s innocent. He is innocent. But I don’t want him being made out not to be innocent because he don’t have a lawyer.”
Ridge was condescending. “Do you understand,” he asked, “that we tape our conversations, we don’t put words into people’s mouths? It’s exactly on tape what is said, and we would welcome the opportunity to talk to Jason and he will not talk because his mother has told him not to talk.”
“One of the reasons I told Jason not to talk to the police,” Grinnell replied, “is because I was told that the police was going around and telling lies about Jason before they came and arrested him. After police questioned Damien, there was rumors started. People were saying that the police told them this and told them that. And I thought in my mind then, the police are trying to make him out to be the guilty one. And I told him not to talk to them, to anybody. And I said, if you hear of anybody else saying something that a policeman said, get his name, ’cause I am going to go to the police station with it, because there has been policemen going out there in the trailer park telling kids lies.”128
Gail Grinnell said again that Jason was innocent, that he had been in school, and that she had obtained a statement to that effect from the principal. Finally, she sighed, “I’m so tired. My whole family has been up all night.”
At that, Ridge defended the midnight arrests. “It’s a situation that couldn’t be avoided,” he said. “We had to look for evidence, and if it’s there, then it’s going to look bad for Jason, and if it’s not, then Jason is cleared because of it. So it’s the only way to get the answers, is to do what we did. We didn’t want to make things hard on you. We don’t want to make things hard on Jason. But these are the only tools we have to get to the truth sometimes.”
Grinnell asked when she could see her son. “I’m worried about him because I know that he is scared,” she told the detective. “I know that he’s real scared. He’s alone.”
Ridge said he did not know when she would be permitted to see Jason. Grinnell asked how he could base Jason’s arrest on nothing more than the statement Jessie had made, with all its discrepancies. “There are so many different stories in that story he gave,” she exclaimed. “I don’t see how anyone could believe it.”
“It’s like this,” Ridge replied. “We’ve got a story that is very, very believable. It is so close to perfect that we have to believe it. So we’re going to believe it until we can break that story, and we cannot even start to break that story apart until Jason tells us something.”
When Grinnell tried to protest again, Ridge silenced her. “You don’t have the point of view that we got,” he said. With that the meeting ended.
“Sensitive and Inflammatory”
Over at municipal court, meanwhile, the case was taking another turn. Municipal judge Rainey, who had signed the warrants for the searches and arrests just the night before, now issued an order denying public review of those documents.129But by the time Rainey issued his order, sensitive information about the investigation had already been leaked—and now Jessie’s confession was too. While refusing to comment about the case, other than to say that it was an “eleven,” police had allowed people outside the department to see transcripts of Jessie’s confession. Gail Grinnell had seen it, and so had many others. A television news director reported that