Read Online Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three by Greg Day - Free Book Online

of items seized from Echols’s home.)
    Echols and Baldwin were arrested during nighttime raids on Thursday, June 3, and arraigned the following day. Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were charged with capital murder in the deaths of Christopher Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore. Armed with Misskelley’s confession and little else, the Crittenden County District Attorney’s Office began to prepare its case. Subsequently, circuit court judge David Burnett, who would be the trial judge, granted a severance motion for Jessie since he refused to testify against Damien and Jason, who were less fortunate; they were to be tried together. Misskelley would be tried in Corning, Arkansas, some 110 miles north of West Memphis in rural Clay County. Baldwin and Echols would be tried together in Jonesboro, 64 miles to the northwest, in Craighead County. Although neither trial would be held in West Memphis, the publicity surrounding the case was enormous, and leaks of information would make it nearly impossible to seat twenty-four jurors who hadn’t heard about the case. Though Judge Rainey had sealed the records from public access, critical information had already leaked, most notably the confession itself, which, after being shown to the defendants’ families by police, found its way into the local newspapers. 38
    But Jessie soon recanted his confession and provided alibi witnesses to account for his whereabouts on May 5. Jessie’s neighbor, Stephanie Dollar, told Marion police officer Stan Burch that Jessie and his girlfriend had been at her house babysitting until 5:15 p.m. on May 5. Several witnesses claimed that they had seen Jessie at Highland Trailer Park at 6:30 p.m. Big Jessie insisted that he had seen his son sometime around 7:15 p.m. and that he was going wrestling in Dyess with some friends. He was sure of the time, he said, because he had just come home from DWI (“driving while intoxicated”) school, which had let out early that day. When asked how his son got to the match, Big Jessie had to admit that he had never actually seen him leave.
    Many believe that the Misskelley confession was coerced and false. It isn’t known how Jessie’s interview with police began because it wasn’t recorded. Inspector Gitchell, Detective Ridge, and Officer Bill Durham of the WMPD insist that Jessie wasn’t a suspect when he was brought in, but within an hour of arriving at the police station, Jessie was given a polygraph examination, one that, according to Durham, Misskelley failed. 39 Prior to that examination, Misskelley presumably gave police some version of the wrestling story. After the exam, and after Jessie was told he had failed, the interrogators surely became more aggressive. Because Gitchell and Ridge knew that the murders had happened well after 5:00 p.m., they focused on Jessie’s timeline. Rather than risk recording the entire interview, police cherry-picked a total of forty-six minutes that made up the “confession” (thirty-four minutes from the first taping and approximately twelve minutes from the clarifying statement). The investigators got what they wanted, and once they cleared the suppression hearing in January 1994, the confession was in.
    Some very troubling questions arise regarding the Misskelley confession. For example, did police know they were dealing with a mentally challenged youth? Were they trained in questioning suspects—particularly teens—with developmental handicaps? Considering that at one point they asked Jessie whether he knew what a “penis” was, it is difficult to imagine that they missed the characteristic signs of a significant lack of intelligence. Could they not see by his answers how easily led and eager to please his interrogators he was? He changed the time he arrived at the woods at least three times in order to “get it right.” Given the glaring inconsistencies contained in the confession, it is hard to fathom that Judge Rainey would hand down arrest warrants for the