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

if someone saw us? What are we going to do?”
    Jessie now told Gitchell and Ridge that he did know about the “satanic cult”, something he had earlier denied, and that pictures of the three boys had been passed around at one of their meetings. He told them about the animal sacrifices and “orgies” that took place at these meetings. He said that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were also in the cult.
    But there were problems with the information Jessie provided. Jessie told the detectives that Jason Baldwin had called him the night before the murders, telling him to come to Robin Hood the next night; they were going to “get some boys and hurt them.” 35 After initially telling Baldwin that he had to work Wednesday, Jessie eventually agreed to go with Jason and Damien to Robin Hood, though the timeline he gave was slippery. His whereabouts from early in the morning until around 1:00 p.m. were accounted for by Ricky Deese, his boss on a roofing job, yet Jessie first told police that he had arrived at Robin Hood “around 12:00.” He then inexplicably said the time was 9:00 a.m. 36 “So your time period may not be exactly right, is what you’re saying,” Gitchell prompted.
    “Right,” Jessie replied. Gitchell would have to interrogate Jessie a second time—extracting what would become known as the “clarification” statement—in order to place him at the crime scene at the time of the murders, and did so using a fair amount of suggestive interrogation. (It was brought out at the January 13, 1994, suppression hearing that prosecutor John Fogleman was outside the interrogation room feeding Gitchell questions to ask Misskelley.)
 
Gitchell : Jessie, uh, when you got with the boys and with Jason Baldwin, when you three were in the woods and then [the] little boys come up, about what time was it? When the boys come up to the woods?
Jessie : I would say it was about five or so, five or six.
Gitchell : [Did you] know . . . did you have your watch on at the time?
Jessie : Huh-uh [no].
Gitchell : You didn’t have your watch on?
Jessie : Huh-uh [no].
Gitchell : Uh, alright, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time is it?
Jessie : It was seven or eight.
Gitchell : Are you . . .
Jessie : It was starting to get dark.
Gitchell : Okay, it . . .
Jessie : I remember it was starting to get dark.
Gitchell : Okay, well, that clears it up. I didn’t know . . . that’s what I was wondering, was it getting dark or what?
Jessie : We got up there at six, and the boys come up, and it was starting to get dark.
Gitchell : Ok, so you and Jason and Baldwin . . . uh, Damien . . . you all got there right at six.
     
    Gitchell managed to guide Jessie from nine in the morning to dusk simply by suggesting what the “right” time should be. The duration of time between this second twelve-minute-long statement and the first is not known, though Misskelley and Gitchell were apparently alone while the second statement was being taken; Ridge had stepped out for a moment. “We were at the verge of getting a good witness,” Ridge said. “And I wanted, I just decided it was time to take a break and I wanted to inform Sgt. Allen of this information.”
     
    Misskelley’s confession was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case against him, and the defense went to great lengths to prevent it from being admitted. Once it was obtained, however, it was enough for the police to place Misskelley under arrest and to petition circuit court justice William P. “Pal” Rainey for a warrant to search the trailers of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Domini Teer. 37 (Nothing incriminating was found during the searches, which left an unanswered question: Where was Damien Echols’s signature trench coat, the one he was never seen without? On the witness stand at his trial, Echols said that he figured his parents had it. He said it was “laying [ sic ] in the floor whenever the police came,” but it was not on the list