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“These seem to be pretty important issues,” Stidham said. He asked if it ever occurred to Gitchell, while he and Ridge were questioning Jessie, “that his entire story was false?”

Gitchell repeated Fogleman’s explanation that Jessie had merely smudged the facts to minimize his involvement. But these were major errors, Stidham pressed. Calmly, the detective deflected any suggestion that the errors presented a problem. “Jessie simply got confused,” Gitchell said. “That’s all.”216

Now Fogleman tackled the delicate question of how the boys were tied. Jessie’s insistence that the ligatures were ropes posed a major problem for the prosecution. “Was there,” Fogleman asked Gitchell, “any evidence that would indicate that there had been some sort of binding other than the shoestrings?” Gitchell, to Stidham’s amazement, answered yes. The police department’s chief detective then testified that he had personally seen a wound on one of the boys that had “indicated” to him that, at some point, the boys could have been tied with a rope.

It was a stunning statement—one that was utterly unsupported by the police notes of the case or by any of the medical examiner’s findings. Stidham jumped to object. “I think that calls for pure, unadulterated speculation on the part of a witness, who is not qualified to render such an opinion,” he told the judge. But Burnett overruled Stidham and allowed the testimony. And despite Stidham’s further objections, Burnett also allowed Gitchell to draw a picture for the jury of the injury he remembered thinking might have been made by a rope.

Vicki Hutcheson to the Stand

Perhaps the biggest problem with Jessie’s confession was that it contained no explanation of why he had helped Damien and Jason kill the three little boys. In case any juror was wondering what might have motivated Jessie, Fogleman was ready with an answer. He called Vicki Hutcheson to the stand.

Again, Stidham objected. Judge Burnett told the lawyers to approach his bench for a discussion that the jury could not hear. The shortin camera hearing would be one of dozens that would punctuate the trial.217Reporters listened in, as was allowed, although the jury did not, as Fogleman explained to the judge his intentions in calling Hutcheson. He said he planned to have her describe the trip she’d reportedly taken with Damien and Jessie to the orgiastic “esbat.” Stidham countered that if the trip had occurred at all, it had, according to Hutcheson’s testimony, taken placeafter the boys were killed. More important, he argued, testimony about an alleged cult meeting was not relevant in any event, since nothing at the site where the bodies were found had indicated that the murders were the result of satanic or cult activity. Fogleman shot back that in Jessie’s confession he had referred to meetings “when we had that cult,” at which a photograph of the victims had been shown. No such photograph had ever been found, but based on that statement, Judge Burnett allowed Fogleman to put Hutcheson on the stand.

Looking demure, her red hair in a bun, she related how Damien had invited her to go with him to an esbat. She said that she looked the term up in “one of the witch books,” whereupon she’d learned that it meant “an occult satanic meeting.” Fighting back tears, Hutcheson explained that she began to “play detective” because the victims were friends of her son. “I loved those boys, and I wanted to see their killers caught,” she said. But like so much of the case, Hutcheson’s testimony was problematic. Not wanting Stidham to bring up the most damaging question, the prosecutor raised it himself. He let Hutcheson tell the jury that despite her suspicions about Damien and her claim that Jessie had accompanied Damien and her to the esbat, she had never suspected that Jessie might have been involved in the murders. In fact, she said, she’d felt “very close” to him. She’d felt so comfortable with Jessie, she admitted, that the night before his arrest she had asked him to spend the night in her trailer, to protect her and her children from prowlers.