Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three by Greg Day Page A

outside the circle and telling them what they wanted to hear would mean not only an end to the interrogation, but also that he’d be able to go home. Detectives also played a section of their taped interview with Aaron Hutcheson, with Aaron claiming, in a small, remote voice, “Nobody knows what happened except me.” Finally, they showed Jessie a photograph of a much brutalized and very dead Christopher Byers. The effect of this strategy was dramatic, and any reluctance Jessie had felt to talk disappeared.
    Jessie talked for forty-six taped minutes—several hours of the interrogation were not taped—and told his version of what had happened the night of May 5, 1993, in the darkening woods at Robin Hood Hills. 33 During the first thirty-four minutes, Jessie led Gitchell and Ridge through a bizarre, rambling account of the killings, in which many of the details were incorrect and Misskelley’s complicity was minimized. The very wording of the statement made it clear that Misskelley and his questioners had been over this ground before actually turning on the tape recorder. For example, after establishing that Misskelley had been in Robin Hood that day, Gitchell asked, “Okay, what occurred while you were there?”
    Misskelley blurted out, “When I was there, I saw Damien hit this one . . . [long pause] . . . hit this one boy real bad, and then, uh, and he started screwing them and stuff . . .” This sounded rehearsed, with Misskelley unsure of where he was supposed to begin his narrative. He also could not reliably identify the boy Echols had allegedly attacked, pointing to the picture of Chris Byers (whom he often referred to as “Myers”), but identifying him as Michael Moore. Jessie went on to claim that Damien had been watching the three victims for some time and had a picture of the three boys together. During the attack, he said, Damien was “screwin’ [Christopher Byers] up the ass.” He stated that Jason stuck “his in one of ’em’s mouth.”
    The three had been drinking, Jessie said; he was drinking Evan Williams whiskey, and Jason and Damien were drinking beer. Echols and Baldwin appeared to Jessie to be intoxicated. When they heard the sound of the little boys “hollerin’” in the woods, Damien yelled to them, luring them toward where Damien, Jason, and Jessie were hiding. According to Jessie, Damien “jumped ’em.” Jason, he said, “turned around and hit Steve Branch.” As Michael Moore took off running, Jessie “chased him and grabbed him and hold him [ sic ] until they got there, and then [he] left.” 34 Jessie said Jason Baldwin got “real close to [Chris Byers’s] penis and stuff, and [Jessie] saw some blood, and that’s when [he] took off.”
    It was a very disjointed and error-laden statement, but Misskelley nonetheless provided police with details that they felt could not be known by someone who wasn’t present during the murders, details such as the presence of a gash on the left side of Steve Branch’s face and the castration of Chris Byers. In his statements, Jessie claimed that he had left the scene at differing points in the attacks, but Gitchell and Ridge were able to pin him down to saying that he had left the crime scene before Jason and Damien did, with Jessie adding, “They did more after I left.” This is in contradiction to his claim elsewhere in his statement that he had seen Jason and Damien place the boys’ bodies in their watery graves, leaving unanswered the question of how much “more” they could have done and how Jessie would have known. Jessie headed back to Highland, he said, throwing up and smashing the whiskey bottle on the way (in a subsequent statement, he claimed that he never threw up). He then headed off to wrestle in Dyess, some forty miles away. The next day, Jessie said, he received a call from Echols and Baldwin. “We did it! We did it!” Jason reportedly said. Jessie said he could hear Echols in the background saying, “What