Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [70]
He regarded the knife as a coup. The crime lab had reported that the wounds on Christopher Byers had been inflicted by a knife with at least one serrated edge, and this knife had a serrated edge. The knife resembled the one Deanna had described. And there was the “coincidence” of where it was found—almost directly behind Jason’s trailer. With one inspired move, Fogleman had directed police to evidence that would become the centerpiece of his case—evidence that had eluded police, evidence he could link to Jason.
But there was more than “coincidence” in Fogleman’s account of the knife’s discovery. For one thing, it was contradicted in part by Gitchell. Despite the court order prohibiting release of information about the case, the day after the dive, theWest Memphis Evening Times ran a front-page story about the sensational find. Gitchell even talked about it with reporters. But he did not say that the search of the lake had been Fogleman’s idea. To the contrary, he said, his department had wanted to search the lake for several months but had not previously had an opportunity.
The matter of who would get credit for the discovery—the police or the prosecutor—amounted to a minor difference. What was not minor, in light of Fogleman’s claim that no one but the police knew “that we were going to look” and “when we were going to do it,” was the photo that ran with the page-one article. It showed a diver, still neck-deep in the water and wearing his diving mask, holding up a large serrated knife. The article offered no explanation as to how the reporter who’d taken the photograph had known about the search.185The photo’s caption simply read: “Knife found near suspect home.”
Chapter Twelve
The Private Investigation
WHILE THE LAWYERS WRANGLED, private investigator Ron Lax delved deeper into “the discovery mess.” At the end of November 1993, despite Fogleman’s repeated assurances to Judge Burnett that the defense would have the entire police file by the end of August, the prosecutor suddenly released another large batch of material. One item in the batch, in particular, had sparked the defense lawyers’ interest: a transcript of the interview that detectives Ridge and Sudbury had conducted with John Mark Byers on May 19, more than six months earlier. This was the first the defense had seen of it. This lengthy interview, which was conductedbefore the arrests, had inexplicably been withheld, not just past August but for more than three months after that. Until now—three weeks before the Christmas holidays and with Jessie’s trial just six weeks away—the three defense teams had known nothing about the John Mark Byers element of the investigation.
As with all the documents received, Lax summarized the transcript for the attorneys. He outlined Byers’s account of his whereabouts on May 5, beginning early in the evening, when he began searching for Chris and reporting the boy’s disappearance. Lax noted, “It was not clarified why Byers became worried so quickly.” But coming late as it did, with the trials looming, the transcript did not receive the scrutiny it otherwise might have. Neither Lax nor the defense lawyers caught the points on which Byers’s account had differed from the statements given by Melissa and Ryan to police, partly because those reports had been released months earlier. Byers may have looked like a shady character, but so far as the defense teams knew, he had not been a suspect in the murders. So Lax focused on what the transcript implied about the conduct of the investigation