Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [55]
Finally, on one visit near the end of the summer, Stidham recalled,
I went back to the jail and said, “You’ve got to level with me. Were you there or were you not?” And he said he was not. And I said, “Why would you have told me all this time that you were there?” He said, “Well, because I didn’t want to die in that electric chair.” I explained to him that Greg [Crow] and I were on his side. And that’s when I began to realize that he didn’t understand what a lawyer was. He had no idea what a defense attorney was. He didn’t understand the concept. To him, a lawyer was just a person who was part of the justice system. He thought we were detectives. He didn’t understand that we were on his team. That’s when I began to see Jessie Misskelley in a different light. At that time, he had a weird haircut and tattoos. He looked like an ordinary, everyday street thug. But the kid was handicapped. Bill Clinton had just been elected president of the United States, and everybody in the state of Arkansas knew who Bill Clinton was, but Jessie Misskelley didn’t.
Stidham would eventually conclude that Jessie had had nothing to do with the crime, and that his confession had been coerced. But by the time Stidham reached this “epiphany,” Jessie had been in jail for two months. Stidham abruptly altered his strategy. He began to study the phenomenon known as false confessions. After what he called his epiphany, Stidham told a reporter, “We don’t believe the state has any evidence except this wild story Jessie made up.” And he added, “The world has a right to know what kind of investigation these cops pulled.”
If Stidham had any lingering doubts about his revised view of his client, they were allayed during a visit when Jessie asked him who “Satin” was. Stidham didn’t understand. “He handed me a pamphlet a preacher had given him that was all about Satan,” Stidham would recall, “but Jessie could barely read it. And what he could read he thought was about somebody named ‘Satin.’” Now, with a jolt, Stidham got it. Jessie was referring to Satan, but never having read the unfamiliar name before, he was mispronouncing it as “Satin,” like the fabric. Stidham was dumbfounded. As he discussed the pamphlet with Jessie, Stidham realized that the boy had heard of the devil, but never that he was called Satan. “It was one of the most ironic moments of the entire ordeal,” the lawyer later said. “There I was, sitting in a jail cell with this confessed satanic killer, and he’s asking me who ‘Satin’ is.”
Damien
After discussions among the attorneys, it was decided that private investigator Ron Lax would work with Val Price and Scott Davidson, who were representing Damien. In the beginning, Lax, like Stidham, assumed that all three defendants were guilty. He also assumed that any investigation he and his assistant, Glori Shettles, did on behalf of Damien would likely benefit all three. His approach, as always, would be organized and methodical. It would begin with an interview of Damien in the jail where he was being held in the town of Clarendon, Arkansas. But that interview almost never occurred. On Tuesday, June 8, four days after his arrest, Damien took an overdose of Elavil, his antidepressant medication.146His mother had brought the medicine and left it with the jailers. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the jailers had dispensed Damien’s pills to him, and by Tuesday, without their knowledge, he had saved up twelve of them. He swallowed them en masse and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where his stomach was pumped.
Lax met with Damien several times as Damien’s lawyers prepared for trial. But most of the work with Damien would fall to Glori Shettles, a former parole officer and prosecutor’s assistant who held a master’s degree in counseling. For the next nine months, Shettles visited Damien almost once a week. In the beginning, she and Lax were uncertain about Damien’s name. The