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By Root 671 0

had advised the posture; he didn’t want anyone to think Jessie looked cocky, but some observers thought it reflected the defendant’s shame and guilt. Jessie also wore a more conventional haircut than when he was arrested. A front-page article in theJonesboro Sun called attention to the change. The paper ran photos of all three defendants, taken at their arrests, along with more recent photos, from when they’d appeared in court for pretrial hearings. An article describing the “metamorphosis” noted that when Jessie was arrested, he’d had “the look of a late 1950s Bohemian, more often known as a beatnik,” though now that he was on trial, he presented “more of a schoolboy look.”

Opposite where Jessie sat with his lawyers, Dan Stidham and Greg Crow, Fogleman sat with the district’s main prosecutor, thirty-six-year-old Brent Davis. Though Davis would play a significant role at both Jessie’s trial and the one to follow, Fogleman was the lead prosecutor. Fogleman was well known in Crittenden County, the scion of a family that was one of the oldest in the region. Near the courthouse in Marion, a monument commemorated the role the deputy prosecutor’s great-great-grandfather had played in what remains to this day the greatest maritime disaster in American history. At the end of the Civil War, in 1865, pioneer John Fogleman was operating a ferry on the Mississippi River between the Arkansas side and Memphis. In April of that year, the steamshipSultana was traveling upstream, loaded with newly released Union prisoners of war. The ship exploded in the middle of the night, near Fogleman’s Landing. Though the ferryman rescued those he could, more than eighteen hundred men burned to death in the explosion or drowned in the freezing water. More lives were lost than in the sinking of theTitanic, but the catastrophe was overshadowed by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, only a few days before. The monument near the Crittenden County Courthouse reflected the Foglemans’ place in local history from that early day to the present. The deputy prosecutor’s relatives had been prominent in the region’s commercial, civic, and legal affairs. They had worked as grocers, farmers, lawyers, bankers, deputy sheriffs, and circuit clerks. Fogleman’s father had served on the Marion school board for forty-five years; one of his uncles had served on the Arkansas Supreme Court, and his father had once been president of the Arkansas Bar Association. The John Fogleman who now faced the jury had been a deputy prosecutor for the past ten years. A respected and strait-laced teetotaler, he was seen as a rather formal fellow.

Opening Arguments

Fogleman rose to present his opening argument to the jury. In a slow, emotionless drawl, he recounted the nightmare of the previous May—how the little boys had disappeared, and the horror the next day. He reported the medical examiner’s findings that Michael and Stevie had died from drowning, while Christopher had died from “multiple wounds,” which included his brutal castration. Fogleman told the jury that a young woman who had a son the same age as the victims had been so disturbed by the murders that she’d decided to “play detective” to help police solve the crime. “Ultimately,” he reported, “Victoria Hutcheson would lead police to Misskelley, and Misskelley would confess.”

What the deputy prosecutor did not tell the jury was that Jessie Misskelley’s confession was virtually the only piece of direct evidence that he had. It was a compelling piece, to be sure, but it was also seriously flawed. Fogleman’s next task, if the jury was to believe the confession, had to be a preemptive one: to address the numerous weaknesses—and the outright errors—in Jessie’s statement to the police. Fogleman acknowledged to the jury that not everything Jessie had said in his confession was true. There were discrepancies, he admitted, between some of Jessie’s statements and the facts of the crime. But Fogleman said these were easily explained. They were the results of Jessie’s bungled attempts to minimize his involvement. Fogleman