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As deputy prosecutor Fogleman released more records, Lax found himself working harder to organize and to understand what the police department had produced. To him, much of it looked chaotic. Records from the investigation were being provided in no discernible order. They were not organized by time, names, or place. Different reports on the same individuals came filtering in over several months, and because many were out of sequence, Lax found it difficult, as he processed the material, to get a clear picture of how police had worked the case. He filed the records in the order they were received, providing a caption and summary of each.

Normally, the summaries were brief: “INFORMATION REGARDING MOORE’S PARENTS—05/10/93. The police spoke with the Moores regarding their activities on the evening of May 5, 1993 and May 6,1993.” Or “INFORMATION REGARDING BYERS’PARENTS —05/12/93. Det. Lt. Martello, Memphis P.D. Narcotics, informed the West Memphis Police Department that the Byerses have both been confidential informants for Memphis and Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.” But occasionally Lax commented on items in the file. After reading a magazine article entitled “Satanic Cult Awareness,” Lax wrote that it made him feel like he “was back in the dark ages.” He commented, “With the exception of the castration of the Byers victim and the fact that the bodies were nude and in a wooded area, I have seen no evidence of anything connected with the case which even remotely resembles the discussions in this article.”

Lax was particularly interested in a list of forty people who had been fingerprinted by police. But he was frustrated to find that “There are no accompanying sheets discussing these individuals [and] we do not know why these individuals were fingerprinted.” As his review progressed, Lax was even more disconcerted to realize that, aside from Jessie’s confession, he still had not received anything that constituted evidence against the defendants. From June until well into September, the only records the defense attorneys received were those that had been generatedbefore the arrests, and the release of even these was slow. They did not learn of Narlene Hollingsworth’s claim that she had seen Damien and Domini on the service road until August 25, and they received no records of interviews with Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson until the first week of September. Lax found Hollingsworth’s statement confusing, since Domini was never mentioned as a participant in the crime; what was perplexing about the Hutchesons’ statements was that the police had not quickly dismissed them.

Gradually, the defense teams began to receive records showing what the West Memphis police had donesince the June 3 arrests. To his amazement, Lax read that on July 1, nearly a month after Damien, Jason, and Jessie were in custody, Detective Ridge had returned to the site where the bodies were found. Ridge’s purpose, as stated in his report, was “to look for evidence which may have been missed.” To Lax’s greater amazement, Ridge reported that he’d found some evidence. Recalling Jessie’s claim that the victims had been beaten with a stick, Ridge reported that on his visit to the scene in July, he’d found two sticks that had previously gone unnoticed. There was nothing about the sticks that connected them to the crime, other than their location in the woods where the bodies were found. Nonetheless, Ridge took them back to the station and marked them as evidence.

Other records showed that while the police had reportedly polygraphed thirty people before the arrests, since the arrests, they had polygraphed eleven more. Records also revealed that police had sent dozens of items from the defendants’ homes to laboratories, to be tested for genetic material. Realizing how many reports he’d seen about items that had been sent off for testing, Lax prepared a review of the physical evidence the police had collected. The twenty-eight-page memo covered nearly six hundred items. In addition to numerous fingerprints, blood, and urine samples, Lax counted more than one hundred