Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [86]
Neither the shirt found at Damien’s house nor the bathrobe from Jason’s were items the teenagers would have worn—a point that Fogleman acknowledged. “Just so the jury understands,” he said, “you’re not suggesting that Damien wore this little shirt or that Jason wore the bathrobe?” Sakevicius said she was not. She explained that fibers can be moved from one place to another by either “primary” or “secondary” transfer. Primary is direct. Secondary transfer, she explained, occurs when a person picks up a fiber from one place and deposits it in another. In other words, Fogleman suggested, Damien and Jason had picked up fibers from items in their homes and inadvertently left them with the bodies.
For three hands-on murders, one of which involved a castration, the fibers amounted to very bare threads of evidence. The claim of secondary transfer made them highly circumstantial, and Sakevicius’s repeated and careful statement that they were “microscopically similar” made them more circumstantial still. The fact that the fibers were similar did not signify with any degree of certainty that they had come from the garments in question, a point which Sakevicius noted. “I should say that they were similar fibers,” she emphasized while on the stand, “not that they came from them.” Later, under questioning by Stidham, Sakevicius acknowledged that many fibers are “microscopically similar,” and that the “discovery proved nothing.”
Sakevicius also described for Fogleman how the boys were tied—Michael with a combination of square knots and half hitches; Stevie with a combination of half hitches, a figure eight, and loops; and Christopher, most consistently, with four double half hitches. Fogleman would later suggest that the different types of knots pointed to multiple killers.
Stidham asked her about other fiber evidence as well; specifically, the mysterious fragment of “Negroid hair” that had been found on the sheet in which Christopher’s body had been wrapped when it arrived at the lab. Sakevicius said that the origin of the hair remained unknown. Whatever else Stidham had accomplished in his cross-examinations, he had demonstrated that none of the state’s evidence—not Jessie’s confession, not Vicki Hutcheson’s testimony, not even the crime lab’s conclusions—was what anyone would call a clincher.
But Fogleman was saving one of his strongest witnesses for last. When the witness’s appearance failed to work out as he’d hoped, the deputy prosecuting attorney was, by one account, “furious.”
William Jones
Toward the end of Fogleman’s case, he planned to call a teenager named William Jones, who would support Vicki Hutcheson’s testimony. More than that, Fogleman expected William to link Damien to the satanic cult Hutcheson had described, and to the murders as well. Fogleman had a videotape in which William was shown telling West Memphis detectives that once, when Damien was drunk, he had confessed to him that he was a member of a satanic cult and that he had raped the three eight-year-old boys, then killed them with a knife.
While the trial was under way, Lax had located William and asked him about that interview. William said he wanted to consult first with his mother and stepfather. The three had gone into another room of their trailer, while Lax waited for almost a half hour. When they rejoined him, William’s mother asked Lax what would happen to William if he had lied to the police.220Lax said he was not an attorney and could not be sure, but it was probably a good thing that the boy had not been placed under oath by the police. William then told Lax that he did not like Damien and that he’d falsely boasted to his mother that Damien had confessed to the murders. To his surprise, he said, his mother had believed him and called the police. William, being unwilling to admit to his mother that he’d lied, had expounded on his claim to Detective Ridge, and he’d continued to lie