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By Root 673 0

he was driven first to the jail in Marion, then to the hospital in West Memphis, and finally to the juvenile detention center sixty miles north in Jonesboro.142At their first meeting, Jason later said, his court-appointed lawyers told him that the state appeared to have little evidence that implicated him. According to Jessie’s confession, Jason had been the most vicious of the killers—the one who’d castrated Christopher Byers. But other than that, there was nothing. And unlike Damien, Jason did not even appear to be weird or mentally unstable. Jason had no history of violence. His entire criminal record consisted of having broken glass on cars stored in the derelict shed and having shoplifted a bag of M&M’s. He was an average-to-good student at Marion High, where he’d received certificates for punctuality and attendance. The police had obtained essays he’d written for an English class shortly before the murders, but they had a humorous, optimistic tone and held no hint that Jason had been harboring murderous impulses.143

When Ford and Wadley read the essays, the men were struck by their mildness. In one assignment, when students had been asked to write about a classmate who had recently killed herself, Jason had written: “I didn’t know the girl very well. I seen her around every now and then. But I know how people that knew her feel, because once my mother tried to commit suicide, and I know how I felt when that happened. It was pretty devastating, since I was the one who found her and called 911 and kept her alive. But I am lucky. My mother is well and happy now, and so am I.”

Ford and Wadley noted that Jason had written those lines on April 5, 1993, a month to the day before the murders. Nothing about the kid seemed to fit the profile of someone who was about to commit a multiple murder. The lawyers knew what Jason had been accused of doing in Jessie’s confession, but so far, if the police had any corroborating evidence, no one had mentioned it.

Jessie

If Jason felt bewildered, Jessie was in a panic. While Jason was taken north to Jonesboro, Jessie was removed to a jail west of West Memphis, in the small town of Wynne. Within hours after being locked in the jail there, he’d sent a desperate letter to his parents.144In the letter, Jessie repudiated the statement he’d made to the police. “I hope that y’all don’t hate me because I did not do it,” he wrote. He added, “I can not stand [it] in here much longer. I will go crazy.” He begged, “Please try to get me out. I will die in here.”

Jessie’s father showed the letter to reporters, and theCommercial Appeal printed portions of it. When reporters asked Gitchell about Jessie’s attempt to recant, the detective would not comment. Now, when reporters once again asked Gitchell to assess the strength of his case, he dismissed the question. “We just have to keep on working,” he said.145

Jessie’s lawyer did not believe what the boy had written to his father. Dan Stidham believed Jessie was guilty and doubted his attempt to recant. “Of course, initially, my take on the situation was that anybody who would confess to such a crime obviously did it,” Stidham later recalled. “It was unfathomable to me that anybody would confess to a crime who had not committed it. I figured my client was obviously guilty, and so my initial thought was that my only goal was to prepare him to testify against his codefendants and, hopefully, to work the best possible plea bargain I could for him. That was the only thing I figured we had going for us. We were hoping simply to avoid the death penalty.”

But Stidham’s hopes of negotiating a plea bargain would be jeopardized if Jessie persisted in claiming that his confession had not been the truth. “It kind of made me angry,” the lawyer later said. “I demanded that Jessie take a look at this. I reminded him that he was facing the death penalty, and that he needed to tell me what happened.” But Jessie vacillated. “When his father was there,” Stidham said, “Jessie’d insist that he didn’t do it. And when his father was gone—when it was just Jessie and me