Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [72]
Lax next tracked down Marty King, the manager of the Bojangles restaurant. King reported that on the evening after the boys’ bodies were found, an off-duty West Memphis police officer had come into the restaurant to eat. King said he told the officer about the bloody man who’d come in the night before. The officer checked the rest room, found some remaining flecks of blood, and called the police department. A short time later, King said, Detective Allen and Sergeant Ridge arrived. The visit marked the first time since King’s call to the police about the bloody man that detectives had entered the restaurant.
King said that he gave Allen and Ridge a pair of sunglasses he’d pulled out of the commode, and that the detectives then took blood scrapings from the rest room wall. After that, King said, he never heard from them again.
“Has any police officer contacted you since that incident to show you photographs or to discuss this incident any further with you?” Lax asked.
“No sir.” King replied.
Another of Lax’s interviews was with a teenager who’d known Jessie Misskelley. Fogleman had listed the boy as a potential witness. Police reports indicated that they had questioned the eighteen-year-old for close to five hours, during which Durham had administered a polygraph exam. They had then videotaped a statement in which the boy said that Jessie had admitted to him that “he was with Jason and Damien when they sacrificed them little kids.”
On December 30, Lax drove to the teenager’s house. He introduced himself as a private investigator and spoke briefly with the boy and his uncle. After that, with the uncle present, Lax tape-recorded an interview with the boy. In his summary of the taped interview, Lax wrote that the boy had “stated he attempted to tell the police the truth about what he knew regarding the murders of the three boys, which amounted to nothing. He stated the police continued to yell and scream at him until he told them what he thought they wanted to hear. He informed me Jessie Misskelley had never said anything to him about the young boys, nor had anyone else, and he had no knowledge whatsoever of the murders.”190
This was not the only interview Lax conducted with a teenager who described a disturbing experience with police. Christopher Littrell, a neighbor of Damien’s, told Lax that he had been questioned twice.191The first interview, on May 10, five days after the murders, had lasted for three hours. The boy’s mother had been present and, Lax wrote, the boy stated that “everyone treated him cordially.” However, on May 27, police picked up Littrell from school and questioned him for another two hours, this time without his mother present. The boy told Lax that Durham had been “nice” to him throughout the interview but that Inspector Gitchell had become “extremely upset on occasions and would yell and scream at him.” At one point, Lax reported, the boy said Gitchell had “grabbed his chin” and put his face close to the boy’s, threatening that “he would have no reservation about keeping him in the holding tank if he wouldn’t tell the truth.”
Lax also revisited Vicki Hutcheson. On this visit, he was particularly interested in an altercation that had taken place between 5:30 and 6P.M . on the evening of the murders, in the trailer park where Hutcheson and Jessie lived. Because of the apparent importance police had placed on Aaron Hutcheson, his whereabouts at that time were crucial. Marion police had responded after a woman living in Hutcheson’s trailer park had reported that a neighbor had slapped her son. An officer had come to the trailer park, but left a few minutes later. Then the neighbors had argued again, and this time, three squad cars had responded.