Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [89]
But then two things happened simultaneously. When I confronted Jessie about the blood on the T-shirt, he said, “That’s my blood.” He said he busted a Coke bottle with his hand—that was one of his favorite pastimes to show how tough he was: he’d throw a Coke bottle up in the air and bust it with his fist. A day or two later, Fogleman called me and said, “We were wrong. That blood wasn’t Michael Moore’s.” And Mr. Misskelley Sr. was getting hot because we weren’t questioning these alibi witnesses. So when Fogleman told us the blooddidn’t match, I decided I’d go to West Memphis and question these people. And it became obvious that Jessie had an alibi for up to midnight the night the boys disappeared.
Most of the time, alibis are successful. But in this case, all of the witnesses had been interviewed by police, because Jessie Misskelley Sr. had been holding these press conferences. The police wouldn’t have gone to interview them, but when they did, the witnesses were afraid of getting involved, and basically, they couldn’t remember the exact night. When we sat down and started going through the tedious process, they said, “Yeah, that was that night….” But when we got to trial, and called these witnesses to testify, the state was able to stand up and say, “Well, you told Officer So-and-So that you couldn’t remember, so how are you so sure now?” And they’d say, “Well, because Mr. Stidham talked to us.” And of course, it looked to the jury like we were cooking this up. I know Mr. Misskelley Sr. was frustrated that nobody—not even I—believed him. But those press conferences came back to haunt us. In fact, they may have made the difference in the case.
Fogleman saw the development in exactly the same light. “Alibis are real tough,” he said. “It would be tough for anyone to say, ‘Well, I was with so-and-so a month ago.’ They’re real tough. But if you try to put on an alibi defense that’s not good, then the jury’s going to sit up there and say, ‘Well, they’re lying.’ And it hurts the credibility of the entire defense case.”
Stidham had tried to present Jessie’s alibi, but the net result was probably a loss. Under other circumstances, he might have put his client on the stand so the jury could see him speak up for himself. But as Stidham saw it, with Jessie, that approach was out of the question. On one hand, Jessie would not be able to articulate much on his own behalf, and on the other…Well, Stidham cringed at the thought of Jessie being cross-examined by Fogleman or Davis. To call Jessie as a witness, Stidham thought, would be to hand him to his prosecutors on a silver platter.
No, what Stidham had to do, he figured, was to raise doubts for the jurors, as to both Jessie’s abilities and the conduct of the police. First he tried to show that by the time Jessie was questioned, the police were desperate, and that that was partly due to the shoddy work on the case. As illustrations, he introduced testimony from the crime lab analyst of the “Negroid” hair that was found in the sheet wrapped around Christopher Byers—the hair whose presence there was never explained. Then he called Marty King, the manager of the Bojangles restaurant, to testify about the bloody man whom he’d reported to the police, and about the officers’ lack of follow-up. When Stidham questioned Detective Ridge, the detective admitted that the blood scrapings that had been taken from the restaurant the following day had been lost and that, as a result, DNA that would have been recovered from them could not be tested against DNA from the hair. Stidham felt that all of this made an important point, but he also realized that it was an abstract one. Abstractions, he knew, could