Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [88]
Lax said that after the encounter,
All the attorneys went into chambers to talk to Burnett. From what I heard of that meeting, Fogleman, Davis, and Burnett were all pissed. Fogleman reportedly made statements about my having intimidated witnesses—something to the effect of, “We don’t need an investigator from Tennessee who drives a Mercedes coming in here and intimidating our witnesses.” If I’d been there, I would like to have pointed out that I did all the interviews in front of the boys’ mothers, which is more than the police had done. But the result was they hadme investigated. I was going through a divorce at the time, and my wife called me and said an investigator for the Arkansas State Police had contacted her about me. She told him to get lost. We brought that up to Burnett. He asked Fogleman and Davis. They said that another prosecutor in their office had initiated the investigation. In chambers, the state police investigator reportedly told Burnett that I was the only person he’d found involved in the case who had not done something wrong. The matter was dropped there.
Faced with little choice, Fogleman moved on with what he had. He introduced pairs of black boots that belonged to Damien and Jason, because Jessie had mentioned in his confession that his accomplices had been wearing black boots. He introduced the bookNever on a Broomstick, which Damien had bought at a library used-book sale a year before the murders. Driver had found the book in Damien’s house a year before the murders. It was, Fogleman suggested, evidence of “cult-related” motivation. And to establish that Damien and Jason were close enough friends of Jessie Misskelley that they would have included him in their murderous orgy, he called Jerry Driver, who testified that he had definitely seen the three teenagers together, walking down a street in Marion. With that, Fogleman rested.
The trial was not half over, but Jessie felt almost victorious. He recognized that Fogleman’s case against him rested on his confession. But since, as Stidham explained, Fogleman’s evidence to support the confession had been slim and circumstantial, Jessie believed he was practically free. “At the time,” Jessie later recalled, “I thought a statement weren’t nothin’. If that was the only evidence against me, I figured it wouldn’t be no good. Because, the stuff I’d seen on TV, if you convict somebody, you’ve got to have some kind of physical evidence. Anybody can say anything.”
Chapter Fifteen
Thein Camera Hearings
STIDHAM WAS FAR LESS CONFIDENTthan his client. He recognized, as he began his defense, that he faced several hurdles. Some, like the trouble he expected with Jessie’s alibi, he’d seen coming for several months. Others that lay ahead would take him by surprise.
The problem with Jessie’s alibi had arisen the previous summer, when Stidham was first appointed to the case and believed that Jessie was guilty. At the time, Stidham was communicating with Fogleman, hoping to work out a plea bargain in which Jessie would get a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony that would convict Damien and Jason. “It was about that time,” Stidham later recalled,
when Mr. Misskelley Sr. began to raise issues about Jessie being in a different county on the night of the murders.222Jessie Sr. began to hold almost nightly news conferences on the front porch of his mobile home, and basically, laying out his [son’s] alibi. That was making the prosecuting attorney very angry. We were wanting to work with him, but when Misskelley was holding these press conferences, that was making the prosecution’s case weak, and Mr. Fogleman was telling us, “You’ve got to shut this guy up.”
So I talked to Mr. Misskelley, and he asked me when we were going to come and