Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [82]
Dan Stidham lacked Fogleman’s polish. More heavyset and more loosely tailored, he looked like a man whose favorite pastimes were hunting ducks or fishing, which is what he was. Stidham liked practicing trial law, and despite the glares he’d received from neighbors who couldn’t understand why he’d represent a murdering satanist, he felt passionately about the case—and Jessie’s innocence.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Stidham said when it was his turn to address the jury, “this whole case is a sad, sad story. But what’s even sadder is the way the West Memphis Police Department decided to investigate this crime.” Recalling the anxious month that had passed between the murders and the arrests, Stidham noted the strain the police had been under. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there was a public outcry. The public was demanding that someone be arrested for this crime, and the police department was trying to respond to this tremendous amount of pressure.” Besides offering a reward, he said, they had developed what he called “Damien Echols tunnel vision.” That meant that “from day one,” the West Memphis police had Echols “picked out as the person responsible.” Jessie, he said, had merely been caught in a net spread to ensnare Echols.
But as he spoke, Stidham knew that the most crucial battles in Jessie’s trial had already been lost. During the months of pretrial motions, he’d argued repeatedly that Jessie’s confession had been coerced and should for that reason be kept out of the trial. But Judge Burnett had rejected that claim, as well as Stidham’s parallel arguments that the confession should not be admitted because Jessie was mentally retarded, and that since Jessie was a minor, his case should be tried in juvenile court. Stidham’s only hope now was to make the jury believe that Jessie would not have said what he did but for the psychological pressure being applied by the police. It would be a hard sell, he knew. Most adults cannot imagine confessing to a crime they did not commit—especially one as horrendous as this. At the start of this case, even Stidham had found it hard to believe that anyone would confess to a murder that he did not commit. But Stidham felt that he had learned a lot since then. His education had taken a while. He wouldn’t have that much time to change the minds of the jurors.
What Jessie told the police was “a false story,” Stidham told them. He argued that Inspector Gitchell and Detective Ridge realized that what Jessie was telling them was “factually incorrect in many, many important areas…but they kept right on interrogating…. They didn’t care that what he was telling them was wrong.” Stidham insisted that details of the crime, including those the police said “only the killer would have known,” were in fact widely known. Instead of acknowledging that crucial information had been repeatedly leaked, Stidham told the jurors, detectives had been willing to terrify Jessie until he’d told them what they’d wanted to hear.
“They broke his will,” he said. “They scared him beyond all measure.”
Foundation for the Confession
The trial that followed would last for two weeks. Fogleman called Dana Moore and Melissa Byers to the stand, to give their grief-stricken accounts of the night their sons disappeared.211Stidham barely questioned Melissa. There were a lot of questions he would have liked to ask her, and still more that he would have liked to put to her husband. What about that beating Christopher had received just before he disappeared? What about the notation in the police report on the night that Christopher disappeared that he had not taken his Ritalin