Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [69]
But Burnett stood firm. The police would not be questioned under oath before the start of the trials.
Glori Shettles sat through the hearing with Damien and his lawyer Val Price. She was troubled by the behavior of John Mark Byers, who, she said, sat nearby, “glaring” at Damien, except when he occasionally “nodded off.” She wrote in her notes that she suspected that he was “under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.”
At one point, while Price was at the bench consulting with Fogleman, the other lawyers, and Burnett, Damien leaned over to her and whispered that members of the victims’ families had yelled and cursed him again as he’d entered the courthouse. They’d called him a “faggot murderer,” he said. He told Shettles that despite her cautions, he had not been able to control himself. He’d turned to them and said, “Fuck you.” But at least, he noted, he had not yelled the words. Shettles wrote afterward that Damien had “appeared frustrated and angry at himself.” When Damien reported the jeering to his lawyers, one of them, Scott Davidson, decided to accompany Damien as he walked out of the courthouse after the hearing. Shettles wrote in her report, “Scott returned shocked at the verbal assaults he’d witnessed.”
After the hearing, the courtroom was empty except for Inspector Gary Gitchell, the judge, the lawyers, and her. Shettles later reported to Lax that in that more informal atmosphere, Burnett asked Damien’s lawyers if their client had decided to testify against his codefendants. She said Judge Burnett had observed that such a turn of events would make the case “more interesting.” Damien’s lawyers replied he had no such intentions. Shettles told Lax that Fogleman then commented that something would have to be done about Damien’s eyes for him to be credible. “As comments such as these are made,” Shettles wrote in her report, “I continue to have great concerns regarding any possibility of Michael Echols receiving any semblance of a fair trial.”
Fogleman’s Idea
The defense attorneys had many concerns, but Fogleman harbored some too. Six months had passed since the murders, and though much of the public believed that the teenagers were guilty as charged, other than Jessie’s confession, all of his evidence was circumstantial, and there was not much even of that. Jessie had retracted his confession and vowed not to repeat any part of it. The crime lab had reported a similarity between some fibers found with the bodies and fibers taken from the defendants’ homes, but similar fibers could have been found in almost any house in Arkansas. The police had found two young girls and a couple of teenage boys who said they’d heard Damien brag that he’d committed the murders, but that wasn’t much of a foundation from which to argue for the death penalty. The prosecutor faced going into court with only Jessie’s retracted confession to present against him, with only Damien’s weirdness to present against him, and with virtually nothing to present against Jason. Then Fogleman had an idea.182
He decided to search the lake behind the trailer where Jason lived. He said that as he drove around the trailer park, “I said to the officers I was with, ‘What better place to dispose of evidence than in a lake?’”
Fogleman contacted the Arkansas State Police, which dispatched a team of professional divers. On November 17, one of the divers entered the littered water of what was known as Lakeshore Lake at a point between the trailers where Damien and Jason had lived.183A short time later, he emerged holding a nine-inch survival knife, with a distinctly jagged blade. It was exactly the type of knife that Deanna Holcomb, Damien’s former girlfriend, had told police he sometimes carried. The diver said he’d found the knife, buried up to its hilt in mud, at a point forty-seven feet behind Jason’s house.
Fogleman later described the find as “quite a coincidence.”184He said he considered the possibility