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Under Stidham’s cross-examination, Hutcheson admitted that she’d been convicted of writing hot checks, and that her involvement in this case had begun because Detective Bray had called her in for questioning about another alleged fraud, the one that had resulted in her being fired from her truck stop job. But Hutcheson dismissed the incident as just “a credit-card mess-up.” And anyway, she added, “all the charges” had been dropped. Was it true, Stidham asked, that part of her motivation for getting involved in the case was the $35,000 reward? No, Hutcheson said. “The reward money never entered my mind.”218

The Absence of Aaron

Aaron Hutcheson, the alleged eyewitness on whom the police had relied so heavily, was never called to testify. Later, Fogleman explained his reason. “I had some police officers that were absolutely convinced of his story,” he said, “and I talked to him a couple of times. The first time, I was a little bit believing him. The last time, I guess when he started talking about draining the blood into a bucket, or whatever it was he said, it was so inconsistent and stuff that I got real concerned.”219

Stidham had his own reasons for not calling Aaron. The boy was wildly unpredictable. He’d already given Fogleman and the police a number of escalating accounts of what he claimed to have seen in the woods. Recently, since the start of the trial, he’d elaborated even further. Now the boy was telling Detective Bray that he had personally dismembered Christopher, having been forced to do it by a black man who’d stood over him, holding a gun to his head. Stidham did not want the jury to hear even one of Aaron’s stories, however fantastic it might be. He did not want a nine-year-old boy to point to Jessie, saying he was one of the killers. And just as important, Stidham did not want to place himself in the position of appearing to pressure, embarrass, or bully a child who’d been a playmate of the victims.

So the jury never heard from Aaron, the boy who some of the detectives were “absolutely convinced” had witnessed the murders. Given the child’s role in the development of the case, his absence from the trial was remarkable. Aaron’s friendship with the victims was what had first caught Bray’s attention. Bray, Gitchell, and Fogleman had questioned Aaron about events in the woods almost a dozen times. Aaron’s accounts of things he’d allegedly seen there, coupled with his mother’s reports, had prompted police to question Jessie. His enigmatic taped statement, played during Jessie’s questioning, had led Jessie to confess.

In one way or another, Aaron had been present at every critical juncture in the police investigation—from the moment his friends’ bodies were discovered until the day of the three arrests. He’d been a catalyst for key events, yet now that those events had culminated in a trial, Aaron’s potential testimony was being dismissed as too unreliable. In some respects, Aaron was, along with his friends, one of the crime’s young victims. He could not have witnessed or participated in all the bloody things he’d described, but somehow, the more investigators had listened, the more he’d imagined that he had. And too many adults, with agendas of their own, had been willing—even anxious—to believe him.

Fibers

Jessie’s confession was powerful evidence. But Fogleman knew that if Stidham could make the jury even consider that it had been coerced, the rest of the state’s case was precariously circumstantial. He bolstered it where he could. For that, Lisa Sakevicius, of the state crime lab, was Fogleman’s most important witness. She testified that a green polyester fiber analysts had lifted from a Cub Scout cap found at the scene was “microscopically similar” to fibers from a polyester and cotton shirt that she and the police had found during their search of Damien’s house. She further testified that fibers from the shirt were microscopically similar to fibers found on a pair of blue pants that had been submerged near the bodies. In addition, Sakevicius told the court, a single red rayon fiber found on a white