West of Memphis Page #5

wrong was prevailing and that wrong

was being perpetrated by people

who, I believe,

knew they were doing wrong.

DAMIEN:
Most people think that this

case is something extraordinary.

It's spectacular in some sort of way,

and it's not. Burnett and Fogleman

thought they could make a name

for themselves off of this case.

Because, really,

you're dealing with three kids

who were bottom of the barrel,

poor white trash

that nobody's ever gonna

ask another question about.

He thought they would say, "Guilty."

This whole thing would be swept

under the rug.

The state would kill me.

Jason and Jessie would spend

their lives in prison.

He'd move up the political ladder.

That's all he cared about.

This case is nothing out of the ordinary.

This happens all the time.

How did I decide

which trial would go first?

And the reason I'm hesitating,

I'm trying to think if that's a question

that I should be answering.

In general, a case with a confession,

uh, would be your easier case

as opposed to one

without direct evidence.

Ten feet, ma'am. Back up.

REPORTER 1:
Okay.

Are you gonna testify

against your co-defendants?

REPORTER 2:
Jessie, were you

forced to talk about this?

The prosecutors had a problem.

They could not play the tape

of Misskelley's statement

at the second trial.

They needed Mr. Misskelley to testify.

They thought they were gonna lose

the other two.

Are you worried about his testimony?

STIDHAM:
Judge Burnett appointed Phillip

Wells to interview Mr. Misskelley

to make sure he didn't really,

really, really want to testify

against Baldwin and Echols.

Here's a young 18-year-old,

under a lot of stress,

facing life plus 40 years in penitentiary.

He has to make sure whatever options

and offers are available to him

are looked into or communicated.

NIRIDER:
Promises of lesser sentences,

you know, a much easier life in prison.

DRIZIN:
Many defendants would have

jumped on that deal. Jessie said no.

NIRIDER:
They can't come

up with physical evidence.

They've got to turn to witnesses

who they can convince

to give statements in court. That's

the only evidence they come up with.

REPORTER:
Just when it seemed attorneys for

the state had their back against a wall,

Craighead County Courthouse

came to an eerie silence

as 16-year-old Michael Carson,

a formerjuvenile inmate,

who spent time with Baldwin,

took the stand.

CARSON:
I was doing serious adult drugs

and, I mean, I was doing a lot of them.

I got out there.

I thought birds had cameras on them.

Michael Carson, he was fixing

to go to the penitentiary

for several counts

of residential burglary,

and that is when the prosecutor

got a hold of him.

Were you offered anything

as far as a reward

or anything of that nature?

No, sir, and if I was,

I would deny it.

Jason was not very outspoken. He wasn't,

you know, jumping around and stuff.

He's a very quiet,

to-himself type of person.

What did he tell you?

He told me

how he dismembered the kid,

he sucked the blood

from the penis and scrotum

and put the balls in his mouth.

I remember not knowing

why I was doing what I was doing.

I remember it actually going

through my head.

I would have this massive illusion

in my head and swear to God it was real.

CURTON:
And the kids, that night

I let them listen to the news,

and they just went crazy.

They said, "He's a lying son of a b*tch.

Jason didn't tell him nothing."

CARSON:
I could understand why he

would never want to see me again

or talk to me again, but I'm just

telling him right now that I'm sorry.

CURETON:
I made the statement

to Larry, the sheriff.

I said,

"Larry, those kids are not guilty."

He said, "Joyce."

He said, "it's this simple.

Crittenden County f***ed up,

now we've got to clean up."

I'm a drug addict.

I was doing a lot of inhalants, LSD,

I was huffing gas all the time.

It's bad. It takes your whole perspective

on life and makes it a dream.

And they knew that.

They knew the drugs that I was doing.

LORRI:
Did you walk in

those woods in the winter?

DAMIEN:
Yeah, that was

the best time because during summer

it's really marshy.

During the winter it was froze,

the ground would be froze solid.

So you didn't have to worry about

all the mud and all that business.

I love the thought of being out there.

DAMIEN:
The cool, dark part of the year,

it's my absolute favorite time of year.

Part of it was that whenever I was out,

that was always the time of year

whenever I felt the safest.

Because most people, whenever

it gets cold, you know, they're not out.

So it's almost like at that time of year

the entire world is almost yours.

Nobody else wants it.

Jason and I would talk about leaving

that place, moving out of that place,

but we were so young that it never was

a definite plan, it was always just

we've got to get the hell out of here.

The thing that Jason always loved

was art. You know, painting,

drawing, things like that.

He would do these paintings

that were absolutely incredible

when he had art class in school.

The teacher would refuse

to grade them.

She would say,

"That's not what I told you to paint.

That's not what I told you to draw,

I don't want to see one more skull."

She would say, you know, "You were

assigned to do a still-life of flowers."

Jason was like, "F*** that, I'm not

doing that, it's not what I want to do."

I've jokingly said to Lorri before

that I think that, in a lot of ways,

I may have brought this on myself,

this entire situation.

Because when I was a child

I knew what my passion was,

I knew what my drive was, I knew

what my desire was. I loved magic.

I would say to myself, you know,

these names that people think of.

I would say, "One day my name

is gonna eclipse all of them."

I'm gonna be the greatest magician

there's ever been."

And I had no idea that that meant

I would have 20 years

to sit alone in a prison cell

and practice and study.

But that's a word

that you don't even use here,

because when people

hear the word "magic,"

anything even remotely

connected to magic

has to be evil in some kind of way.

Uh, I noticed that Damien,

he had on kind of a black

duster-looking coat and carried a staff.

And I... You know,

that's kind of weird-looking.

But that's one of the things

that I testified to in the court hearing.

Damien, Jason

and Jessie had no motive

whatsoever to kill these three boys.

You know,

boys that they didn't even know.

And so, therefore, the state went

to the only motiveless theory

that they could possibly go to.

We thought that the best thing

to do would be to

actually get some expert analysis

on the crime itself.

As far as we could see the best person

to get would be John Douglas,

who was there at the creation

of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit.

From the evidence and the crime scene,

they start to put a picture together

of who committed the crime

and why they committed the crime.

DOUGLAS:
My role when I was brought into this

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