Morgue (32 page)

Did you know those little boys?

“I'd never even heard of them before 'til I saw it on the news.”

Have you ever been to the Robin Hood woods?

“No, I have not.”

How do you feel about being accused of killing them?

“Sometimes angry. Sometimes sad. Sometimes scared.”

It was a valiant effort to rehabilitate an accused murderer who looked slightly menacing, had mental issues, and deliberately tried to shock his Bible Belt neighbors. But Echols's courtroom behavior didn't help: He sometimes blew kisses to the victims' families and licked his lips lewdly at the defense table. He occasionally glared at the gallery, snarled at photographers, or preened himself in a little mirror. As his lawyers tried to portray him as a kid going through an awkward stage, he sent strong signals that he was a manipulator and a creepy little narcissist who relished making people's skin crawl. And he reveled in all the attention.

The defense wrapped up its case with a cadre of more witnesses who rebutted some earlier claims about occultism, suggested other scenarios and other possible killers (including Chris Byers's father and a mysterious, blood-spattered man who stumbled into a West Memphis restaurant that night), and painted the police investigation as inept, overreaching, and desperate. Jason Baldwin never took the stand.

In closing, prosecutors invited the jurors to look into Damien, where they'd see “there's not a soul there.” The defense lawyers for Echols and Baldwin begged them to see doubt.

The eight-woman, four-man jury deliberated for eleven hours: Both were guilty in all three murders.

Jason Baldwin was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Damien Echols was sent to Death Row.

*   *   *

In 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld all three convictions, satisfied that justice had been done. Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin—now known as the West Memphis Three—were submerged in prison, out of view, the last home they'd ever know.

But not everyone was so satisfied.

That same year, HBO aired a documentary called
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
. It made a vivid case that the three oddball teenagers had been wrongly convicted by shoddy police work in a small town gripped by “Satanic panic,” in farcical trials by country-bumpkin jurors. The film convinced many people, especially some vocal celebrities. Soon a website was launched, then sequels, and more celebrity voices. Some pointed at a different possible killer.

Then a 2003 book,
Devils Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three,
by Mara Leveritt, also argued that the 1994 trials were gravely flawed. (Later, a 2012 documentary financed by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson and directed by Amy Berg,
West of Memphis,
added new fuel to the long-smoldering fire.)

Things got worse for the authorities when, in 2003, the waitress who claimed she'd attended an
esbat
with Misskelley and Echols admitted she lied.

What began as an indie-film exploration of a sensational murder case blossomed into a full-fledged movement to free the West Memphis Three. Celebrities such as actor Johnny Depp, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, pop philosopher Henry Rollins, and the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines, among others, lent their voices, money, and moral support. High-dollar defense lawyers and legal experts galore also came to the party.

In time, even Chris Byers's father and Stevie Branch's mother were convinced the West Memphis Three had been wrongly accused.

Then in 2007, a bombshell revelation: Preliminary tests indicated DNA found at the crime scene didn't match Echols, Baldwin, or Misskelley—but a hair found in a knot that bound one of the boys was declared “not inconsistent with” hair from Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch's stepfather.

A hair found tangled in a knot tied by the killer that didn't belong to one of the teenagers.
At the very least, that single hair posed a huge obstacle for the prosecution.

While Damien Echols's lawyers awaited final results, they contacted me. They wanted me to examine the boys' wounds and Dr. Peretti's autopsy for any details the forensic pathologists, cops, lawyers, and judges might have missed. I agreed.

I was familiar with the case. As I've said before, the forensic community is small, and the news media is pervasive. I had recently retired after twenty-five years as the Bexar County medical examiner and now was consulting on a variety of forensic cases that needed a “second look.” I knew what a lot of people knew about this particular grisly crime, and I'd had a few casual conversations with other medical examiners about it. I knew Dr. Peretti well and thought he was a good pathologist. In one of the most scrutinized cases in modern history, I doubted that I'd find anything new, much less evidence that would change everything.

Within days, a package arrived at my house. It contained hundreds of pages of autopsy reports, testimony, other experts' conclusions, and legal opinions. Most important, it contained a binder and compact disc with nearly two thousand high-resolution, full-color crime scene and autopsy photos.

Very quickly, just as in the Wyoming case, I saw a problem.

The horrific genital mutilation on Chris Byers was not in fact done by a human. It was caused by animals gnawing on the soft tissues after he died. Bruises and gashes in the boys' mouths—first interpreted as evidence of forced oral sex—were also caused by animals. Those strange punctures on the skin that looked like knife-inflicted torture? Animals nibbling and chewing. The huge bloodied patch on the left side of Stevie Branch's face? Also animal damage.

Similarly, the knife wounds and scrapes Dr. Peretti saw on the bodies were not inflicted by a blade but were the tooth and claw marks of feeding animals.

What animals? Snapping turtles, possums, feral cats, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, stray dogs, and the occasional coyote inhabited the Robin Hood woods. Any or all of these predators could have been attracted by the scent of fresh blood, found the bodies very quickly, and nibbled on the softest parts, which were most easily chewed off. To me, they looked like turtle bites.

The makers of the 2012 documentary,
West of Memphis,
tested the theory. They released several snapping turtles, like those found in the West Memphis area, near a pig carcass. The wounds they inflicted in a very short time looked nearly identical to the wounds I saw in the autopsy photos, wounds that investigators and prosecutors attributed to a serrated-blade knife and occult rituals.

It's an unsavory reality: At the moment of death, a human body becomes food. Bacteria, insects, and animals begin to recycle dead muscle, fat, fluids, and other tissues into their own life-sustaining nourishment. They don't allow a proper interval for grief, meditation, or cooling. The bacteria are already inside, mostly in the intestines, and they don't die when their host dies; insects and wild animals might take a little longer to find a dead body left in the open, but usually not more than a few minutes.

But there was more to suggest that the evidence jurors heard was not what it seemed.

The boys' dilated anuses were interpreted by the original medical examiner as possible evidence of forcible sodomy, either by a penis or another object. In fact, a dilated anus is a normal postmortem artifact. After death, the body's normal muscle tension relaxes. Sphincter muscles loosen, too, and if submerged in water for a time, can look misshapen and stretched. I saw no evidence of any anal trauma, and I don't believe any of the boys was sodomized.

And Stevie Branch's halfway discolored penis, which was interpreted as evidence of forcible oral sex, was simply caused by the positioning of his body after death, not by a sexual trauma.

These boys were obviously murdered, but the evidence didn't necessarily add up the way cops and prosecutors said.

At the time, I didn't know that a single hair found in one of the shoelace knots matched the DNA of Stevie Branch's stepfather, Terry Hobbs (plus about 1.5 percent of all humans). It generated an intriguing question: How could such a hair be tangled
inside
a knot that trussed up a little boy moments before he was murdered if his killer hadn't tied the knot?

Hobbs, who had a history of domestic violence, has steadfastly denied all implications and accusations—and there have been many—that he killed the boys. He claims Stevie could have transported the hair on his clothing and it was caught up in the vicious assault. No charges have ever been brought against him, although the angry debate rages among the West Memphis Three partisans to this day.

John Douglas, the famed former FBI profiler, examined the evidence and interviewed witnesses, too. He concluded the three boys died in a “personal-cause killing,” motivated by emotional conflicts, not personal gain or sex. He thinks at least one of the victims knew their assailant—a lone killer who probably knew the boys and had a violent past.

Maybe more important for the West Memphis Three, Douglas saw nothing to suggest it was a ritualistic murder, the prosecution's primary theory.

Douglas also saw evidence that the murders were not planned and the killer lost control.

“There was another rational and logical criminal reason why the offender hid the victims, their clothing, and bicycles in the drainage ditch and bayou,” Douglas has said. “The offender did not want the victims to be immediately found; he needed time in order to establish an alibi for himself.”

So back in 2007, armed with new evidence and observations from me and my forensic friends such as the eminent Drs. Werner Spitz and Michael Baden, lawyers for the West Memphis Three asked for a new trial but were denied by the state court. They appealed.

In November 2010, amid a growing doubt that the West Memphis Three were guilty of murder, the Arkansas Supreme Court was convinced that the evidence, new and old, should be reviewed. It ordered a new evidentiary hearing.

Now, amid a swelling outcry that the West Memphis Three were innocent, the State of Arkansas was in a legal, financial, and public relations pickle. New trials would be expensive and potentially embarrassing. Prosecutors might also lose a new trial, given the widespread public outcry. Restitution for three wrongfully convicted kids could amount to tens of millions of dollars the state couldn't afford.

Ironically, the state dodged this speeding bullet when one of Damien Echols's lawyers offered a win-win compromise:
What if Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin pleaded no contest under a so-called Alford plea, are declared guilty by a judge, and then are released with time served?
The three would go free and the state would keep its convictions with little expense, embarrassment, or restitution.

The Alford plea, a rare legal maneuver, has existed since 1970. It allows the defendant to admit prosecutors could likely convict him, but he needn't admit the crime. Under an Alford plea, a judge usually declares the defendant guilty, but the defendant maintains his innocence in case any further related charges or lawsuits arise.

If the deal sounded like a no-brainer, it wasn't. Jason Baldwin, who had been offered a reduced sentence to plead guilty and testify against Echols back in 1983 when he was only sixteen, didn't want to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit. His former cellmate had publicly apologized for his graphic allegation about a confession, casting further doubt on whether it had happened at all. And Baldwin had grown strangely comfortable in prison. Instead, he wanted a new trial to prove his innocence. But if he didn't take the no-contest offer, then the deal was off, and his old friend Echols faced an impending execution.

On August 11, 2011, after eighteen years and seventy-eight days in prison, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin pleaded no contest to killing three young boys in 1983. A judge accepted their pleas, gave them ten-year suspended sentences, and freed them with time already served.

Convicted killer Jason Baldwin captured the legal bedlam succinctly: “When we told prosecutors we were innocent, they put us in prison for life. Now when we plead guilty, they set us free.”

That day, three young ex-convicts walked out of the courthouse twice as old as when they went in. They were not exonerated. The boys were not magically resurrected. The case wasn't solved. No mistakes were admitted.

But the West Memphis Three were free.

*   *   *

Twenty years after the crime, a memorial stands in the playground of the boys' elementary school in West Memphis. Last I heard, two of their homes have been abandoned and boarded up. The Robin Hood woods were cleared and the land bulldozed, as if to erase an invisible stain. Now it's just an empty field beside a superhighway.

These three best friends who died together now lie in three different graves in three different states. Chris is buried in Memphis; Michael is in Marion, Arkansas; and Stevie in Steele, Missouri.

The convicted killers, now free, have resumed their lives. Echols married in prison, wrote a memoir after his release from death row, and now lives with his wife in New York City, where he teaches tarot reading. Baldwin went to Seattle, where he works in construction and hopes to someday study for a law degree. Misskelley moved back to West Memphis, got engaged, and is attending community college.

Trying to slog through the rest of the West Memphis Three case is like wading in the filthy ditch of the Robin Hood woods. It's murky and impossible to gain a secure foothold. Collecting facts is made especially treacherous by misinformation and disinformation, recantations, conjecture, bad journalism, Internet trolling, “new evidence” submitted by partisans, armchair sleuthing from a thousand mothers' basements, and the usual Internet noise. Every account is sliced and diced, parsed into oblivion by zealous fans and foes seeking only the pieces that fit a puzzle they've already solved. This case stands now as both an example of everything that's right and wrong with our system of crime and punishment. Confusion reigns.