Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 336: The West Memphis Three Part II - The Confession of Jessie Misskelley

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

On part two of our series on the West Memphis Three, we cover the secret mission entrusted to a waitress that officially moved the cops towards the boys, the false confession that put them away, and the bogus piece of evidence that sealed their fate. 

Hey there, Ben Kissel here for Last Podcast Network. I want to tell you about my show A. Blinken's Top At. For more than nine years, Marcus and I have strived to present you with the most accurate and honest political podcast out there. In these turbulent times, it's our intention to unite the country with impassioned debate that reaches out to the rational Americans who find their voices more muffled every day. Every week I use my political science background, my experience running for office, along with my lifelong passion to stand up for the downtrodden, the wrongfully accused, and the invisible

man and woman to bring you news like you haven't heard before. Let's face it, traditional news has failed us. We promise to always tell you the truth the best we see it, and I personally guarantee to not be swayed by hyper-partisanship but be guided by facts. To listen, search A. Blinken's Top At on any podcast platform or go to lastpodcastnetwork.com and find it under shows. Hail yourselves, everyone! Now back to last podcast on the left.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last top. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Hello. Don't mind my cape. Are you the sheriff of West Memphis, Arkansas?

What? Yeah. Ah, my name is Galactus. I play evil steel drum for Sisters of Mercy, and I've come to goth escape, those three boys from that jail. Shadow monsters, go! Oh, alright, welcome to the world! Go, my creatures of the night!

Go! Go! Go! No! Just like five, two hours, with Sister of Mercy's fucking merch on, the goth community did not save them. No. They should have sent some of these vampires to come get them out of jail.

Where was Peter Steele? That's what I want to know. Alright, well, we'll get to it! This is the last podcast on the left. I am Ben Kissel with Marcus Parks. How's your brain, Marcus? Brain's alright. Hey, okay.

Henry Zabrowski, coming off of his birthday party. How you doing, buddy? Hey. No, wait. Not your birthday party. Coming off of your bachelor party, I'm sorry. Yeah, buddy. Haha.

I tell you what, I'm top shape. I tell you what. I definitely could be openly bleeding right now. Why? But I'm not. I did fall down. Okay, very good. I did a bit of a fall down last night.

I had a lot of... You know what it is about? Tiki drinks? Uh-huh. They make your knees loose. It's something about the curse out. I don't know what it is. Whatever makes it blue or vibrantly yellow makes me not be able to walk.

Yeah, I think it's the liquor. I think it's the liquor. Oh. Alright. Oh. Well, we have a very sobering episode when it comes to the criminal justice system. We are on to... It is very sobering.

We are on to part two of the West Memphis Three. Let's jump right in. So when we last left the three, the West Memphis Police Department were edging closer and closer towards blaming Jason Baldwin and Damien Eccles for the murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore. But at that point, the police had nothing more than the suspicious accusations of their local witch hunter and a positive polygraph test from a hack. Whoa, Marcus.

I mean, what else do you need? They've got a hunch and there's a witch hunter. So this is perfect justice. I'm not a judge and I look at them squiggly lines. The squigglier they get, the more boys I know you have their blood on your hands. There it is. Well, all that changed when a woman named Vicky Hutchison came onto the scene. Vicky, you know, Vicky Hutchison shows, and it's the truth, is that if my waitress doesn't

have a full row of meth teeth, you're not at a diner. Right. Guy Fieri is not going to enjoy that experience without somebody whose teeth look like the skyline. I think it's Gotham City Apocalypse. Yes. Guy Fieri, of course, is how you pronounce the name. That's Flamertown.

Guy Fieri. We're not even rehashing this. We're not rehashing it at all. Moving on. Moving on. I will say meth, people who do meth, they make the best pancakes because they also have to eat them. That's true.

Gotta be soft. So Vicky was a 32-year-old local waitress who got called into the West Memphis Police Department on suspicion of fraud the day after the murders. And she just happened to bring along her eight-year-old son, Erin. Which the cop did notice, he did say specifically, seemed inappropriate at the time to bring your son to a police interview, but I'm not a babysitter either. I don't know. Yeah, you can't find a sitter.

You gotta do it. I understand she's a struggling waitress. See, Erin was a friend of the three murdered boys, and he told his mother that he'd seen a black man in a maroon car pick the three boys up after school on the day they disappeared. Now, this was definitely a lie, as the kids were last seen hours after that. But in this, Erin dipped his first toe into being a pivotal role in the police investigation concerning the child murders at Robin Hood Hills. You wait, Kissel.

There will be a trial one day when, and I will have to prove your love of Bud Light Lime, where it hinges on a thing like you are actually going to jail, but you will have to have been seen with a Bud Light Lime at some bar somewhere to keep you from being guilty. And I will get a little kid to help us, and he'll be like, I did see the man with the big green drink hanging outside the bar, and he was yelling about how it's not fair that he's tall. And like, but he will know it's true because you got the kid in there.

That might be true. I might be yelling that I'm tall, and I don't like that all the time. Nonetheless, it is interesting racial profiling ingrained in this child at such a young age. Kind of fascinating. Now, it was extremely common during the satanic panic of the late 80s and early 90s for the authorities to believe the outlandish claims of children when it came to arresting and convicting so-called devil worshipers. How many, seriously, the Salem Witch Trial, the same thing, how many people have kids

killed? I mean, it just seems like out of the mouths of babes comes a lot of death, a lot of convictions. These children are not to be trusted, but I do get it, but we want to believe the kids when they say something bad happens, but kids also have wonderful imaginations, and when it starts casting Bill Clinton in the role of head wizard of the Satan cult and that Spider-Man was there and all of a sudden turns into an Elsa Gate video script, but you're in the middle of it and it was like a rehearsal for it, you maybe want to like look into the claim.

Yes, this should be the cornerstone of your case. Well, three years before the child murders at Robin Hood Hills, eight child care workers employed at McMartons Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California were charged with 321 counts of abuse against children based on the accusation that the adults were engaged in what was known as Satanic Ritual Abuse. Now even though murders were definitely a part of the Satanic Panic, accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse were at the forefront of the hysteria and resulted in dozens of arrests, convictions, and ruined lives based on the bizarre testimonies of children.

And it all fit bizarrely into a subtle version of the government's constant war against the psychic awakening of the people of the United States, neither world, which I do believe is true. A part of dropping the seeds into the fear of ritual behavior, the idea of the fear of the Satanic group because the Church of Satan was delightfully innocent. All we did was have a good time, we enjoyed San Francisco, we liked women that consented to be nude furniture for the rituals and they didn't have to consent, but I say it. You were like eight years old at this time.

I'm not saying they should be there for that, it should be 18 plus, this is why I do believe this, it should be strip club rules for a Satanist event. But I'm saying for these children, the idea that the prosecuting people on just these fanciful tarot and built up fear of Satanic groups, and a part of it in a weird subtle way, what it does is denounce the idea of unbelief in anything outside of this universe and it plays into the controlling hands of the government. How many drinks did you have last night? How Hawaiian are you today?

I'm great, I'm set. I'm sitting in a chair. Very good for the dagger industry. If you are dabbling in creating daggers, this was a prime time for your business. Decorative knives were doing well. Well, the people who were being prosecuted here, they were not Satanists, they were not any sort of like, they weren't engaged in any sort of ritualistic behavior whatsoever. They were regular folk, but they still got swept up in this.

Some of the weirder claims made just in the McMartin preschool trial included a series of underground tunnels built underneath the school to transport children, kids being flushed down toilets over and over again before being cleaned up and presented to the parents and visits from Punky Brewster and Mr. T to keep the kids quiet and happy. That's great casting. And honestly, if you want to make a bunch of kids happy, you bring Mr. T in there because what was he saying? I pity the fool.

I pity the fool that is not entertained by Mr. T. No, absolutely. But very hallucinogenic visualizations, it does remind you sort of of the high strangeness of alien abductions, which is why, but within an adult's context, it makes a little bit more sense of it being like wildly outlandish when the child does sound like a lie. You know, while we can all yuck it up about this shit from decades away, just like with the West Memphis Three, this shit was taken with deadly seriousness at the time, and we cannot stress that enough.

How do you even flush a child down a toilet and then untwist? Big toilet! Big toilet! Toilet! You don't know what are those Japanese toilet-themed restaurants where it's a fun spot! Honestly, yeah, that's pretty cool. It's so fantastic. How did adults be like, yeah, they flushed them and unflushed them?

I mean, what a horrible day to be a plumber! Yeah, I mean, it's that same type of shit with like Pizza Gate, where all the kids were saying that they were all molested in the basement of Comet Pizza, and there was no basement in Comet Pizza, and then they'll come out and say something like, well, they ended up, you know, they actually built the basement out. Like they completely removed the basement when they found out that people are going to become looking for them, which would also be the same thing as McMartin Preschool removed the gigantic toilet before the authorities got there.

Of course! And anyone out there knows where this gigantic toilet is, I really could use it! You own one of those fun poop-emoji costumes, and you fill it with beer! This is the bachelor party we gotta do, again, when we redo it, we fill that toilet beer and it's just sloshing around in a big poop-emoji toilet, man, that'd be fun! Seems like your party is sort of surrounding my humiliation, is surrounded by my humiliation? Okay, I get it. They use the same tactic to say that it's real, to also denounce what people say about

alien abduction, or say anything else, where they say a part of it is the outlandish nature of the claims, is that you can believe in it because the kids were so traumatized by the memory that it kind of destroyed their idea of reality, which then, well, now we've just destroyed the idea of whatever is normal truth, like bottom-level facts, and now anything can be shoved in the silence. So it goes 180 because it's so extreme, there's no way they made it up! Exactly, and that's sort of thanking that it's so extreme that there's no way they made it up, that actually follows in the West Memphis 3 case.

And a couple more examples of satanic ritual abuse, because I think it's important to really drive home how widespread this stuff was. In Bakersfield, California, investigators convinced two kids that their parents have molested them and sacrificed babies in their basement. Based on those testimonies, the parents got 240 years in prison, and served 12 of those years before being exonerated after their children recanted. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe they didn't do it. It was after the kids were adults, and they started thinking back on it, because they've

been told for so long by people that they were told to trust, they were told to trust the police officers, they've been told so long that this was true, and then finally they recanted, and they're like, actually we don't remember any of that, and there's no evidence here to support any of this stuff. And that wasn't even the longest sentence served in that case, a local carpenter swept up and all that bullshit served 20 years of a 40-year sentence for supposedly molesting children and making them drink blood again, with no evidence whatsoever to back up the claims.

It was pomegranate juice, I was told by the newspaper that it's a superfood. I've heard that. 30 people were sent to prison based on satanic ritual abuse claims, and those claims were extracted from children by investigators who told the kids that if they could just tell the cops what they wanted to hear, this would all be over, and they could all go home. And that is a sentence you hear again and again, there's a book that I will also be using as a reference as we go through this episode, which is called True Stories of False Confessions, which was edited by Rob Warden and Stephen A. Drizzen, and it's a very interesting

tell, and it does a breakdown of the many different ways false confessions come down, and it's a lot more prevalent than we think. Absolutely. On a more humorous side, it would be interesting to walk into a police station and be like, well, I got all this candy around. Are you bribing children to make up stories? You would be amazed what they'll say for a mini snickers. Well, that's exactly what they were doing, because they were talking to these kids, and

they'd needle things out of them. They would ask them leading questions, and then the kids found that every time they said something awful, they'd get a reward. They'd get a piece of candy, they'd go out to Chuck E. Cheese's, they'd get a reward every single time, so they just started saying weirder and weirder shit. Like when your dog poops outside and you give him a treat, because you didn't poop in some, and then slowly he learns. Interesting.

Yeah. So, in other words, the West Memphis Three weren't the only ones who got swept up in all this nonsense. They were just the only ones whose case included a trip to death row. Wow. Lucky. So lucky. Strange.

Strange. It is kind of lucky in a strange way. So, about a week after the murders, the detective who had immediately taken to the cult angle based on the accusations of witch hunter Jerry Driver, Skye's name is Don Bray, he brought Vicki Hutchison back in for questioning. He asked her if she'd ever heard about or seen anything around town that might be considered a cult behavior. She said she hadn't seen it herself, but she'd heard some kids in her trailer park might

be Dablin. I knew them kids were up to no good. They went out in that field and I saw, jack-o-lanterns have no reason to be carved in August. Oh, no they don't. And I also heard those kids complaining Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays. They said they wanted a chicken sandwich on a Sunday. If there was one Satanist branch of Chick-fil-A that was only open on Sundays, I would go to it so often.

It's amazing food. And since the reward money for breaks in the case was growing by the day, Vicki, with the full approval of a member of the police department, said she would quote-unquote play detective to see what else she could find out concerning those dabblings. I tell you what, I'll get to the bottom of all this with my swishy behind and my comfortable waitress shoes. Honestly, you can do a lot in waitresses. Y'all think they are very cozy.

It's like nurse shoes. Yes. Those big ones. Now, how Vicki came to be focused on Jesse Miss Kelly is a matter of speculation. But the most widely accepted theory is that Detective Don Bray had shown Vicki Hutchison Jerry Driver's list of satanic teenagers. I've seen each one of these. I followed Spider here.

I followed him to the Michaels where he bought all of the crosses. Oh, wow. No, no, why he did that, no, no, why, it turned out it was just X-shaped frames that you could get. But I know you could turn them upside down and say it's an upside down crow. I understand. They're dabbling. They're dabbling.

Well, great detective work. And if you'll remember, Jesse Miss Kelly had earned a spot on that satanic teenager list for his Spock Heron stuff. That's right. And Jesse Miss Kelly was the only person on that list that Vicki knew because Jesse would sometimes babysit her kids. So Vicki started talking to Jesse and she asked him if he knew Damien. Jesse said, yeah, little, because even though they didn't really know each other that well,

knew each other enough to say hi to, they weren't really what you'd call friends. They didn't hang out. No, it was a small town. Yeah. I mean, that's totally normal. Jesse openly said that he was afraid of Damien, that he thought Damien was super creepy. It's this thing where they're all certain to come being pushed together. Right.

Can I also just point out the fact that Jesse used to babysit her children? Yeah. Like, what do you do when you're out at the bar and your friends are like, where's the kids? We're like, oh, Jesse's taking care of it. It's a toss up. Like, how well are they doing? We don't really know.

They might be covered in macaroni when we get home or they might be really smart. The best part about being, I think, looked after by a simpler person is that the first two hours are great. It's really just when it starts again, it's losing control, where the macaroni game becomes serious and then he's now invested in the macaroni game, like, that's got to be a difficult babysitter. It's a very fun game. So Vicki goes back to Detective Bray and Jerry Driver, she tells him what she found

out, says, you know, Jesse knows the dudes, not friends with anybody, knows them. So these two assholes sent a waitress on a secret undercover mission to ferret out information on a person that they thought 100% was a vicious triple child murderer. Think about how hot this must have been. You've got Vicki. Yeah, Vicki's a little under the weather. She's got some, she's got some wear on the sightings, but she's ready to go. You know what I mean?

She's, she's at the hottest spot in town. She's a waitress. She's the go-to if you need to connect at that, that fucking, get that primo food. Her fearless man of God, deep down into the heart of a cult, he will drive the steak. He knows what he has to do. Now you have to cut off the head of the snake to get that tail wriggling and then you get it up in your hands and you can fucking suck on it. It looks like a limp little penis, but it's your dead snake now.

And these men are there now drawn together and which is deadly serious. Yeah. I mean, this idea, they're going to bust open a satanic cult in the middle of their home town by acting like it's the movie sneakers. I mean, that is absolutely, it is totally crazy. Yeah, it really is. So here was their plan. Vicki would get Jesse to bring Damien to her trailer under the auspices of romantic

interest. Oh. I'm going to light my Yankee candle. My favorite one, I got my one, the grass one, because it's nothing like pretending you're out in the barn and you're two piggies trying to make more little piggies. All right. The romance is in the air. Well, of course, like Jesse, he didn't know the real reason why Vicki wanted to meet Damien.

And he honestly, I mean, he's like, it's a little weird to this woman in her thirties wants to, you know, fuck this 18 year old kid, but he's like, all right, all right, I'll do it. So once Damien was in her clutches, Vicki's plan was that she would seduce him verbally without getting physical and eventually she would gain his trust and be brought into the local satanic witch coven. This was seriously their master plan. You know, I heard the sexiest, grooviest thing in the world, Damien.

No, what is it? Putting a penis in a vagina. It really is a trailer park version of the Jim Carrey classic once bitten. If you get a chance, check that out this Halloween season. I like the idea though that she does feel like she could seduce him just by talking. But like, there is nothing easier than seducing an 18 year old boy. Yeah. That is a pretty simple task.

Yeah. Do you know this for sure? 18 year old boy. Yeah. All you have to do is just be like, hi, the seduction is wrong with this one. Of course. But this is an idea. I just like the fact that this was all completely serious and she truly thought that she was

just going to get right in there. What if, what if, let's just say Damien was really in a satanic cult. Let's say Damien really was a killer. They would just put this woman just, it reminds me of Dumb and Dumber. When Jim Carrey, another Jim Carrey reference was at the very end like, what if he shot me in the face? We had to take that chance. My God.

Well, Driver even provided Vicki with set dressing. He gave her a list of books on the occult that could be found at the local library and he suggested that she should scatter them around her trailer so as to make herself seem a little spookier. And I'm going to say, this is actually not a bad tip for last podcast listeners and you know who you are. If you're just trying to get that person who's just the scooch spookier than you into the fold, you're trying to close that deal, you get Colin Wilson's The Occult and you leave

it on a table. Goosh, goosh. Oh yeah. Get Colin Wilson's The Occult. A field guide to demons is very good. You can get a couple of loose copies of Man Method Magic. Just a couple of. That's what you want to do.

If you just scatter them around the house, they're going to think you're an alcoholic. No, no, no. They have to be at strategic, strategic places. This is really. Like you do up here and then you accidentally, it's stuff for you like, oh, where do I, where did I put my wine glasses? And you put the books on top of where the wine glasses would be and you're like, better move these tomes of the occult.

And then people are like, oh, really, wine and a hole. So the day in question, Jesse ran into Jason and Damien in the trailer park and told them all about this older woman named Vicki that wanted a piece of Damien. So the boys followed Jesse to Vicki's trailer and went inside and Jesse stayed outside, just kind of milling around. I don't like me. I don't want to make fun of Jesse at all, but it's just, I could see him out there just kicking rocks and stuff because it's not a lot to do.

The opening of the Satanic cult's being brought down in there, I'll just be out here with me. Like he's very sweet. He's a very sweet man. Well, Jesse didn't even know that this whole Satanic cult thing was going on because all Vicki had told him was like, yeah, I kind of want to get a piece of this Damien kid. He seems kind of hot. And Jesse was like, all right, because he considered Vicki his friend because he watched

her kids. He trusted her. Yes. That is a mistake that this man will make again. Yeah. So the boys went inside and Jesse said after about 15 minutes, Damien's mom showed up in her car, picked up the boys and drove off. And as far as Jesse knew, that was the extent of Damien and Vicki's relationship.

But Vicki, she had a whole different story to tell. She said that Damien was immediately impressed by her spooky atmosphere. So he invited her to a local S-bot. Oh, I could help but notice I see this copy of Richard Dolan's UFOs in the 21st century. Have you ever been to an S-bot? You simply must. You simply must come. Well, the man you're talking to is probably 80 years old and overweight.

So an S-bot, for those of you who don't know, is a non-sabbath gathering of a witch coven. It's more like an informal get-together than an actual ceremony. Cool. So in fact, the word S-bot is derived from a word that means too frolic. Ooh, like a little leprechaun. The most ancient form of a mixer, I think that's also what you'd call it. And legally, you cannot go to an S-bot without one of those, you know those like very thin anklets with the little bells on them so you can do the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Those are fun. So according to what Vicki told Detective Bray, on May 19th, two weeks after the kids went missing, Damien picked Vicki up in a Redford escort and Jesse just happened to be in the back seat along for the ride. Like vampires need a hatchback for the coffins. Now right off the bat, anyone who had done their homework about Damien, and I'm talking about the police here, anyone who had done homework about Damien knew that this was a lie, because not only did Eccles' family not own a Redford escort, but Damien couldn't

drive to the point where it was one of his, like, one of his things. Oh yeah. I know those, it's Eddie's like that, Ed Larsen from Round Table of Gentlemen, where he will not drive, he refuses to drive, he just walks the highway. He really does, he's the journeyman like Rob Zombie's Halloween, he is the Michael Myers of our friends. But regardless, Vicki said the two boys took her to a secluded field in the middle of the night where they found ten other teenagers.

She said that she didn't recognize any of them and she couldn't give the names to Bray either because they all use nicknames like Spider and Snake and Lucifer. Well that's an actual name. That is my real name. My name is Lucifer, you may know me, but my nickname is Mr. Spoons, because I collect those little collectible spoons, I love them, you can find anywhere you go, you can find anywhere the spoons are, anyway, let's cut the dick off this baby. Well soon the attendees whose faces and arms were painted black, they all started dancing

naked in the fields, and they were, in Vicki's words, touching each other, yikes, touching each other. Oh, touching each other, they wish, I don't know, this would be incredible if this happened. Right. So this whole display offended Vicki's delicate sensibilities, so she said that Damien took her home while Jesse stayed behind to enjoy the orgy to come. I will say this, I don't want to even go into details, I'm just disturbing, but I will say this is not maligning waitresses whatsoever, I actually love this about them, but an early

30s waitress in a small town, they're grizzled, they've heard some stories, they can deal with a lot of stuff, they're tough, tough people. Now, of course this didn't happen, but that didn't stop Vicki, and this is serious, she testified about this in open court during a murder trial. That's a part of this story, right, because obviously our job is to joke around about it, we're sitting here trying, and it's very silly, we're playing it out, it's a very silly scenario, but like, as soon as it goes official, it's like you're just laughing yourself to the fucking electric chair, this is what they almost did, it's what our country's

sort of doing too, it's that whole entertaining ourselves to death thing, where it's just so wacky that you think it's funny, but if it's being said in a court, a stenographer is typing it, and it becomes like a precedent now, it becomes a part of legal history. I mean, this is why when you think about Damien Eccles' behavior, all of these stories are so batshit crazy, that he could not imagine anyone taking them seriously, so he just reacted in a way that he thought was appropriate, which was a total disrespect, he had total disrespect for the process, because they're talking about covens and all this nonsense, I mean he didn't even have ten friends.

Every one of these stories, and the true stories of false confessions, all says the same thing, it starts off with this wall of, I am innocent, the courts are fair, there is no way that anything I can say can even incriminate me, because I didn't do it, that all of this will come out, like it'll all be solved, but it's like you're still requiring those twelve people in the room to agree with your side of the truth. Good luck, there's gonna be a lot of righteous indignation once we get into all that. But the reason why we're saying this never happened is not just because it sounds ridiculous, because it does, we're saying it never happened, because Vicki Hutchison has said multiple

times since on camera that she lied about the whole affair beginning to end, according to her and everybody else, the extent of her relationship with Damien was in fact the fifteen minute visit before Damien's mom came and picked him up. It's amazing what people will do for small town cop approval. Not just small town cop approval, but a little bit of cash as well. This is my, can I ask that, maybe an expert listener can maybe inform me too, or maybe we could talk about this, what good is it offering a reward for tips for information? Because shit like this came, this really comes into play here, where thirty five thousand

dollars will change these people's lives, and they, it's obvious, it drives you a need to say something to the police, even if it's fake. Then it requires faith in the system, because the, like the Justice Department, you know, an investigator bodies, they also rely on a set of checks and balances, however those sets of checks and balances must be maintained within the system, and with every single law enforcement body there are smaller and smaller microcosms of checks and balances. This local law enforcement has a series of checks and balances that they're supposed to go through, state law enforcement does, the FBI does, everybody is supposed to check

and double check their work, and in the case of the West Memphis three, fuckin' nobody double check their work. Now it's never great when the detectives bring the witness back into a room where Howie Mandela's there, there's a series of briefcases, they call it deal no deal, and they say choose a box and that will be your reward for falsely accusing these people of murder. But I can switch the box, right, I choose one briefcase, and then I can do a last minute switch, right, I choose seven, I choose seven, okay, I switch it for twelve, I switch it

for twelve. It's been switched. Well here is where Detective Durham, the polygraph examiner from the last episode, comes into play again. Now remember, Durham did a test on Damien Eccles about a week after the murders, and said now that kid's lying, he knows more than he's saying. So he did a polygraph test on Vicki concerning her claims, and he found, by his readings, that she was 100% tell on the truth.

He also found her to be extremely stressed, because it turns out there wasn't a polygraph exam, he was wondering if she wanted to be in Scientology. This is ridiculous, everyone is so biased, it's so aggravating. Well it will be proved again and again over the course of the next couple episodes that Durham didn't know what the hell he was doing, and here's why. See, given polygraph tests is much more than just interpreting the readings given, it's also about asking the right kinds of questions, and because of the line of questioning he took about the night of the es-bott, it's possible he could have interpreted what really

happened that night as what he wanted to hear, as later on Vicki told the story as she actually remembered it. So tell me, let me ask you, first of all, is your name in fact Vicki Hutchinson? Yes. So you saw the nature of the event, the es-bott, you were speaking of, it was people nude touching each other, painted in black, writhing on the grass? Yes. Would you in fact be interested in doing something like that with this polygraph?

Yes, she's telling the truth. Wow. I know she wants me. Strange date indeed. But this is the real story. According to Vicki, on the day of the supposed es-bott, she'd broken up with her boyfriend and bought a couple of fifths of wild turkey to drown her sorrows. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gotta do it. Gotta do it. So far, I like her. She said she was already a bottle in by the time she was picked up by someone to go to some sort of party. I don't know. I think it was the guys in the pig cart from, remember, it's just like, you want to go with me?

What was that? Is that Jersey Devil? I'm not sure. I can't remember. No, Men in Black. It was the Men in Black episode. Well, yeah, the kids in the fucking cart full of pigs. This is the fanciest car I've ever seen.

So she's on 100-proof wild turkey. Wild turkey. A bit of wild turkey. She's already got a fifth of wild turkey inside of her. That would take down Andre the Giant. And pretty much all she remembered was that this party, it was in a field, it was weird, people were painted black or so she thought and the people were undressing each other or so she thought.

She didn't know where it was, who was there, who took her there or how she got home. The only thing she remembered was that she woke up alone in the front yard of her trailer the next morning with an empty bottle of wild turkey sitting next to her. I believe that because that's exactly how your night ends and that's kind of fun actually when you wake up and you're like, oh wow, I really did that. It's like the flip naughty side of the teddy bear picnic. Like if you have a full negative of it, it's like a fairy godmother being like, and if you just drink just enough wild turkey, the wild teddy bears of Sherwood Forest will come

and take you and strip you in a field and listen to their sweet teddy bear songs and do their sweet teddy bear dances. Strange children's book. Well, the thing is about this story is how it relates is that later on she just filled in the details with Damien and Jesse. I see. But that wasn't her only contribution to the case. Perhaps the more important one is the contribution that isn't mentioned in any of the documentaries

at all and seems to actually kind of go under the radar a little bit, but I think it's perhaps the key to understanding how the rest of the department finally came around. As Vicki's other contribution was her son, Aaron. By the time they got back around to him, almost three weeks had gone by without a single break in the case and the cops were starting to get even more desperate. The entire town is going through trauma. Yeah. The entire, like they saw the sights of three sweet little boys seem to be castrated in

front. Like it's a brutal crime. They have no leads. They have no clue where to turn. The medical reports have not come in. They don't know. They don't even know how they fucking died. And so they are grasping at straws.

Yep. The only thing they had at this point were rumors and hearsay about Damien and Eccles. Same shit they had two weeks before. Hot goss. And they hadn't heard Jack shit about Jason Baldwin at this point, but Jason and Damien hung out constantly. So there you go. And I'm not being facetious here at all.

That was the reasoning. That was the extent of their evidence against Jason Baldwin. No evidence. No evidence. It was just like, well, those two hang out together. Right. So there you go. Of course, if Damien was there, of course, Jason's going to be there because they're

always together. Look at that. Naturally. Guilt by association is a very intense claim and it's used by the police quite a bit to get what they want. And a part of it is that when it works, it's great, but it can be manipulated in a case like this where Jason Baldwin's life is ruined by it. Guilt by association, a lot of people being charged with meridiers, even if they didn't

pull the trigger because they were in a car or something like that. There's a great, I am a killer on Netflix has a couple of stories like that. And Damien tells a story when he's in solitary about a man who was, or when he was on death row, which that happened. One of the dudes pulled the trigger. The other guy was with him. They were executed on the same day. The guy who was executed was like really happy.

Did I tell this story? No. The guy who was executed was like whistling and stuff, and then the guy who was not innocent but Guilt by association when it comes to murder gave Damien all of his, all of his goods and very finite amount of goods, of course, but he couldn't eat. He was vomiting constantly. And it was one of those things that Damien, it really stuck with him as one of the horrors of death row.

Yeah. Well, Damien, he wasn't doing himself any favors either. He seemed to actually kind of be enjoying his newfound notoriety. He'd been going around town doing his goth kid bullshit, not taking any of this seriously and using all of it to bolster his spooky boy reputation. Right. I get it. Yeah, that's why Marilyn Manson let us believe that he cut out his ribs so he could suck

his own dick for 30 years. It's a weird thing, but it gives you an edge on people in a conversation. If they know you went to that full extent so I could fully accordion myself and suck my own dick, that tells you a lot about the person. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, am I also the character from the Wonder Years? I don't know. I don't know.

I'm not sure. I don't know. Well, the conversation that would get the most attention during this time was the infamous softball confession. Damien was standing in a group of kids at a softball game, just a local afternoon softball game. Damien told all of them that he was the one who killed the boys and he's going to do it again before he turned himself in and I already picked out the final victims.

Right. Oh yeah, buddy, but this is, you know, it's how you get power. It's what you do. It's how it's coming from a powerless position. Well, we know this is a mistake. Yeah. He's a young boy. Yeah, he's a young kid and you got to ask yourself, like, what's the more likely scenario

here? That this kid was not only admitting to a triple homicide but was openly talking about his next set of murders at a goddamn softball game. Right. That it was just some dumb kid talking shit. Crime. Crime. Crime.

Crime. Crime. You hear it sometimes with serial killers, but they really don't, mostly what they'll do is, because that's why it is outside of the character of a true, like, someone that would do this form of what they believe, they lust killing, something like this, where they would stay close to the crimes. That's what we've learned quite a bit about serial killers. They like talking to the police that are involved.

Yeah. But mostly they want to appear as model citizens because serial killers and people do this type of violent crime. A lot of times have, like, these inner games where they like to feel that they are hiding out as, like, a sheep and wolf's clothing, a wolf and sheep's clothing, with among the innocent people. And they get a thrill out of it. You see that all the time when someone goes up.

The first 48 shows this on a regular basis, great docu-series, where someone will just be like, I have some information that clears my name. And they're like, we didn't even know who you were. So thank you for coming. Interesting. My name is cleared. But this will just show you how born is West Memphis, Arkansas. They were at a softball game, and they're 18 years old.

This was the entertainment. This is what children do, and I'll tell you what. Groups of boys do weird shit. I got, I had the illegal cable box, and my baseball team came over my house one time, and I was like, boys, are you ready to see some pornography? And everyone's just like, part, part, part, part. And I went, I flipped the switch, and we put on the Spice Channel, and we sat in silence for four minutes.

Yep. As we watched the thing we didn't understand, and then we shut it off. But there was a secret that should have stayed within the baseball community. For some reason, that picture, you're with a beard still when you're like 10 years old. You want to see something? Well, concerning lust killers, I mean, I think Henry makes a pretty good point, bringing that up. Thank you.

You're welcome. Lust killers, they don't talk about their crimes this casually because they want to do it again. And also, a lot of times, lust killers are deeply ashamed of their crimes. And they don't confess to their murders until, if they ever do confess, until way, way down the line. Right. Basically, when they're already in prison, and it's the end of the line, they're backs against the wall, like when Casey Anthony took that tour of her job, and finally they

were just like, there's no more room to walk. Or like Ed Kemper, when Ed Kemper calls up and confesses and all that sort. And you know, a lot of them never confess, or a lot of them never turn themselves in because they want to keep doing it. And when they do talk about it, they're not casually talking to their peers about it. They're not casually talking to a bunch of children about this shit. They don't talk about it with a sneer. And see you later.

Damien technically nailed it on the head when he gave his shit head answers to the cops about why these people, why a person would do this crime. Right. Why someone would do the lust killer version of this crime, which is they really enjoyed what they were doing. And it's an essential nature of the serial killer. And this type of murderer is that they take their actions very seriously. So it's their message to the world a lot of the times.

It's a thing that is a weird inner ritual that they are a part of, and it's not just kind of flippantly thrown out. Yeah. And that is if this is a lust killing. Okay. We're going to get into that on part three. But with Damien and a softball confession, the nature of the crimes created a kind of paradox in the minds of people who believed Damien did it.

They thought, and thanks still, that a person who would commit these kinds of crimes would of course be evil enough to brag about it. Therefore, since Damien bragged about it, he must be the killer, because only the killer would be evil enough to brag about it. Makes all the sense in the world. I don't know. It's just that circular logic, because when you say, well, why would he brag about this stuff?

And when you tell him that, he's like, cause he's evil. So he's the Riddler. You're acting like this, it's like, oh, so you think that he goes like, it doesn't work like that. No. It doesn't work. It doesn't suit. Yeah.

That is the thing. It's the people that are selling us these phones. American Psycho, great example of evil. Well the conclusion about the softball confession was shared by the West Memphis Police Department. After three weeks of turning up nothing, Gary Getchel, the lead investigator, was finally desperate enough to hear what the nuts in town had to say about all this Satan business. Now I will say, at this point, I understand. He's out there running his mouth at the softball game, it's a little bit boring looking grundles

and stuff. A lot of grundles in softball. A lot of grundles. Guys, I really like those John Stockton shorts, especially back in the day. So I understand them going to Damien and being like, yeah, what was that all about? Yeah. Probably should have stopped there. Yeah.

Of course. Now in the meantime, Detective Bray had been pressing Aaron Hutchison for information. Just like all of, all the other detectives had done years before in the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases. Pressing the eight year old. Pressing the eight year old. Because that's what they did in all these cases. Right.

They talked to these kids and they just press him, and press him, and press him until finally they told him what they wanted to hear. And finally, Aaron had told Detective Bray what he wanted to hear, just to shut him up and send him away. Yeah, just get a Choco Taco. Yeah, just a child. It's literally a child being kept in a fucking interrogation room. They're getting bored.

Yeah. They don't really understand what they're saying. They're just going like, oh yeah, okay, because you're getting positive feedback from a police officer. They're just going on a story. Right. And that's all there, and that's all they think it is. And then, and then, he and the man came, and then, it's like that same thing, and then

it got passed, but he's acting super interested and not like your parents that are mostly highly bored of your existence. Right. Well, Aaron said that prior to the murder, he and the deceased boys had seen a group of men doing weird shit in Robin Hood Hills on the regular. The men would sit in a circle, chant, have sex with each other, and sing songs about the devil. Well, that just sounds like a wonderful city council meeting in San Francisco.

It does sound kind of fun. I would say that's a little bit more than weird, if it was actually happening, but that's interesting. Devil make me hard tonight, devil make me hard tonight, and they're like, yay, and they all get hard just staring at it like, whoa, running in a circle. That'd be fun. They were doing something that called the human centipede. By the way, I was thinking about those, a little bit of a side note, I was thinking

about those actors the other day. You haven't seen them already very much. I kind of feel bad for them. I'm certain they feel no shame. Okay, I hope not. Well, after the tidbit about the devil singing, Gary Gitchell and a couple other detectives drove out to Aaron's place to hear more, and when they got there, they found that there was a supposed piece of evidence to go along with that testimony.

Vicki had an earring. She had this little mail order plastic skull piece of shit, had a snake slithering out of the eye socket. You don't got to diss that, man, that's a pretty big ass earring. It's kickass. It's very kickass, but it's, you know. It's one of those QVC buys when the remote's on your stomach, but you can't turn the channel because you don't want to reach for the remote.

Yeah, yeah, well, those nights, we're like, I think I'll buy it. Maybe I'll be spooky now. It's like you buy it on the back of a comic book. Yeah, some shit like that. And Vicki had said that Damien had dropped this earring in her trailer and her son said that he had seen one of the devil singers wearing one exactly like it. So Gitchell, completely exhausted and looking for anyone to blame, decided that the man they were after was Damien Eccles.

And since Vicki wasn't getting anywhere further with her pretend detective work, the cops decided the only bridge they had to Damien was his backseat buddy at the S-bot, Jesse Miss Kelly. Okay. Poor, poor boy. I feel so bad for this kid. All he wanted to do, all he wanted to do was drive his truck. That's all he wanted.

He loved his truck. All he wanted to do is make people happy. That's all Jesse Miss Kelly wanted to do. Every time you guys say all he wanted to do, I think of nothing but trouble. We're stuck with this forever. We're paired forever with this. It doesn't matter. No, but he is really such a, they're all victims, but my God is Mr. Miss Kelly is a,

this is a devastating story. So to ensure that Jesse was exactly where the cops wanted him to be, they told Vicki to ask Jesse to stay over on her couch for the night because a prowler had supposedly been seen in the neighborhood. She is 32 years old. He is 17 years old. It's so weird. It's just with your, it's just, he was the, he was the man that would come around.

Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? And the night Jesse spent on that couch doing a favor for a woman that he thought was his friend would be the last night he would spend outside of prison for another 19 years. God. That's so hard to even rationalize in your head. Yeah. It's hard to put it, it's hard to think about that.

Yes. That's crazy. You're on a couch today, tonight you're on a couch, or tonight you're sleeping in your bed. Tomorrow you're in prison for the next 19 years and you don't fucking see it coming at all. No, and it goes by at such a whiplash speed, it happens before you know it. So at 9 a.m. the next morning Jesse's dad knocked on Vicki's trailer door and told

Jesse that the cops had some questions. Since his dad said it was all right, Jesse didn't really think he had anything to worry about. He's like, all right, yeah, let's do it. And Jesse's dad didn't really think Jesse had anything to worry about because the cops didn't tell him they were about to grill his son about his direct involvement in a triple murder. Oh, gosh.

In addition to that, on the way to the station, cops just happened to offhandedly mention that the reward was up to 35K. And then it might end up in Jesse's hands if he played his cards right. And Jesse's dad said, hell, yeah, if you know something, tell him, hell, I'll buy a new truck. Good. This is the thing too, again. Yeah.

We're playing towards a terrible future. Yeah. Like all this shit, it's just like fun, like mental games, like they're all gonna be like, yeah, we'll go talk to the cops and we'll get a little money out of it. Yeah, right. The whole thing where it's just like, no, man, this is deadly fucking serious. They are building their case, they're pulling the fish in. Yeah.

And to like Jesse and his dad, I mean, this is like, you know, a little, little grift they can play. It's like, oh, maybe we'll pull one over on him. All right, go ahead, go ahead, go on and try where it's like no real concept of how serious this is and how the consequences, how the dice can roll up snake eyes real fucking easy for this kid. I mean, this is a... Snake eyes.

Snake eyes. This is a great Nicholas Cage movie. It's a New York reference, but always asked for Ron Cooby. I don't even just... Always. Always asked for... Oh, right. Everyone knows Ron Cooby.

He's the best. Yeah. Yeah. So Jesse, I mean, and here's one more thing to know about Jesse before he goes into this confession. If you'll remember, he wanted nothing more than to please people and he especially wanted to please his abusive father because his dad used to beat the shit out of him. From the time he was a little, little kid.

And when people are abused, the person they want to please the most is their abuser. That's so sad. I think that if they finally do it, if you finally get to the point where you just make them proud enough that they'll stop, that they'll give you the love that you want. Yep. Yep. It's Stockholm syndrome. Absolutely.

And it happens all the time. If you look at, well, a film analogy would be Beverly from the film It's Sexually Abused and Abused. And then she ends up in relationships like that and that cycle happens over and over again. Yeah. So Jesse, he went to the police station ready to talk. Now, before we get into the confession of Jesse, Miss Kelly, let's talk a little bit

about false confessions, which is just about the hardest phenomenon in all of true crime for people to understand. And that includes the motivation of serial killers. It is very difficult for people to wrap their heads around the fact that you can commit, you can confess to a thing that you did not do, but there's ways to get around it. It's partially the way our justice system works, where they hold a confession higher above any other sort of scientific, like they're trying to get it. Right.

And as a polygraph experts, the system that they're taught is GTC, which stands for Get the Confession. And that's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to get it. So the book, True Stories of False Confessions, says a fun breakdown of how many of the different ways it happens. It has these nine little chapter heads of the ways they do it, which is brainwashing. You confess out of desperation to stop the interrogation, inquisition style questioning,

which happens again, child abuse, straight up just coercing a child into confess, which happens if a defendant is too mentally fragile, which is what we're seeing in the case of Jesse Miss Kelly, inference, which means you take statements they make about other crimes or other things that do not have anything to do with a crime that you are investigating and you basically pull them over, total fabrication, where they just make it up and pin it on you. There's opportunism where people who confess to get money, like to poor Jesse Miss Kelly, pretense, police force, they're just forcing you to do it.

And then I think called unrequited innocence, which is a very interesting topic, which is cases in which defendants were convicted of crimes based on confessions or incriminating statements that in all probability were false, but who have been denied relief. These are people that are kept in jail for forever, like Damien Nichols. Right. And of course, Miss Kelly was wanting to do what they wanted him to do. So theoretically, he would go home. Yeah.

So for starters, let's remind everyone that investigators know that people confess to crimes they didn't commit all the time. That's why when there's a high profile case, certain details are kept from the public. That way, if someone confesses, the cops have something to cross reference with to see if that person is full of shit or not. Right. So drill that into your head. And an ethical investigative bodies use very strict procedures to ensure they have the

right person. Right. Otherwise, you have the situation as we saw with Brendan Dassey. Fascinating. That would make him a murderer in the Central Park Five Dock. If you watch that, you also see a very similar situation happening. Now according to the Innocence Project, whose sole mission is to exonerate the wrongly convicted out of the 350 people who have been exonerated in America using DNA evidence,

87 of them had confessed to their crimes. In fact, these confessions can be so convincing even to the people who make them that the people who confess can form very real memories of committing a crime that they had nothing to do with. One example is Ada Joanne Taylor. Taylor confessed to and was convicted of the 1985 smothering death of a 68-year-old woman named Helen Wilson. One was Joanne not only didn't commit the crime, she wasn't even there.

And neither were the other five people, five people who confessed to and went down for the crime. Six people in one case confessed to having a part in this crime and yet none of them were even there. We know this because through DNA testing, it was found 23 years after the murder that the perpetrator was a juvenile delinquent named Bruce Allen Smith, whose grandmother shared an apartment building with the victim. And yet, even though it was proved that none of these people committed the crime and it

was proved that none of them were there and only one of them even knew the victim in passing, all six of the wrongfully convicted still vividly remember doing it. A part of it is the power of the human mind to visualize. You could like, when we talk about ritual and we talk about like when you were doing chaos magic and talking about this kind of stuff, a part of it is this. It is creating an absolute bedrock truth in your mind that was not there before. The human mind is very capable of it. We are very imaginative and then we can adapt immediately to what we now consider to be

our new reality. And a part of what these, a lot of these crimes with false confessions, especially when I was reading about it in this book, is that there's pressure on the inside and there's pressure on the outside, is that these people, a lot of times it coming from a crime that is very emotionally charged, especially when it comes to children or an extravagant murder, something very, very intense, something that is causing a community to also start their court of public opinion already, you already guilty on the outside because we see there's this one guy named Kevin Fox, who's whole, he admitted to the, he confessed to the horrible murder

of his three-year-old girl and a part of it came from the entire community that they were this respected family, they turned their backs on them. As soon as he was accused, everybody flipped out saying he raped his little girl and he drowned her in a pool and it was very, very intense. He ended up folding under all of the lines of pressure. And then all of a sudden he's sitting with this and it's a part of it is that because he's innocent, he's like, well, in some deep, deep back part of his brain, like this shit will wash out.

Right, absolutely. And this stuff happens to regular folk. A 2015 study published in a journal called Psychological Science found that after conducting just three interviews with test subjects, 70% of them had formed memories of a past crime they did not commit. Well that is what a lot of police officers do, they paint the picture, it's almost like a mad libs where they just, they already have the script all worked out, you just got to fill in a couple of the blanks and of course those blanks are just, just say yes or where's

them. You know, and as we'll see here with Miss Kelly, the way that they manipulated him is so obvious and transparent, it's just unfortunate that there was no one in there to help this poor boy. I will say I'm Mr. Bojangles, thank you again for inviting me here to the police department. And I will confess that Bojangles does serve the crispiest chicken that you could find on this sweet, sweet flat planet of ours, that if you could just, and you could just check the test and you could see I ain't lying.

I'm sorry Mr. Miss Kelly, you're one I witness as a flat earther, we're gonna actually have to have him leave. But here it is true, his chicken is fantastic. It is. So, how does this happen? And more importantly, why do people do it? It just so happens that we have a textbook case with the confession of Jessie Miss Kelly. So the first person to get ahold of Jessie was the same guy who'd been stirring up shit

at every turn for weeks, Detective Durham. So Durham hooked Jessie up to the polygraph and asked, among other questions, do you know who killed the boys? Have you ever done drugs? Were you there? Did you kill the boys? Of course, Jessie said, you know what I mean, it's like twitching, imagine him being asked these questions.

And of course, Jessie said all he knew was what he'd heard. And he said no to all the other questions, but according to the detective's notes, Durham came out and said, quote, he's lying his ass off. So once again, Durham got exactly the response he was looking for, just like he'd gotten in every other test he'd done in this case. GTC, baby? Now this may be because Durham had no fucking clue what he was doing. See on Jessie's polygraph, unlike Damien's, the records were kept, so Jessie's lawyers

were later able to get a second opinion. They kicked the records over to this guy named Holmes, who'd worked for the FBI, the Mounties, the Texas Rangers, and a dumb polygraph work during the Watergate investigations. In other words, this dude knew what the fuck he was doing. In a business of bullshit detection, he was great at being the best version of a bullshit detective. Yeah, you want to read the lines right. And he said the only question Jessie lied about was the one asking if he'd ever done

drugs. He said he hadn't, which we all know is a bald-faced lie. You gotta have a little gasoline in your system every now and again, man. Come on. Something that really just relaxes you. That's all you gotta do. Some inhalant. It's very funny, because you need to have video in this shit.

Of course. Because you know when he asked if he did drugs, Jessie went like, no, and you have to hear that tone of voice. Right. But regardless, since Durham had said that Jessie was lying about everything, the investigators had ammunition. See, they told Jessie that the polygraph machine could read his mind and that his brain would tell the cops if he was telling a lie.

Oh my God. Whoa. And the readings, Durham told Jessie that his brain had told Durham that Jessie was lying about everything. Perfect. You mean to tell me my brain's a snitch against my mouth? Wow. So instead of being outraged or saying, check your bullshit again, or immediately asking

for a lawyer, Jessie trusted the police officer to the point where he couldn't understand why his own brain was telling the machine that he was lying when he knew that he was telling the truth. He blamed himself. This is such a great indicator, though, of his mental capacity. Yeah. And they knew what they were doing. There's a part of what they talk about in this book that actually was pretty illuminating

about talking with somebody with either a mentally handicapped or talking to someone with either a mental handicap or is just a little slow, but it's not up here to be, is one of the tools that they use within an interrogate. The jury would not know by looking at him that he has a mental handicap. He does not have the physical features of somebody that has Down syndrome or somebody who's medically mentally handicapped. These guys can sort of use that to their advantage, but he don't know to the degree of his learning disability.

And it's pretty distinct. He does not understand a lot about reality. He has the temperament of an 10 to 12-year-old. Yeah. They said about a third grader. Third grader. And you can tell that the cops knew because all you have to do is listen to the childlike way they used to explain the polygraph.

And even then, after they used that childlike explanation, Jesse still didn't understand it. No, because he was telling the truth. But nevertheless, after about two hours of polygraph examination, Jesse was shuffled into another room, and this was where lead investigator Gary Getchel was waiting. All right. Now you got to remember. By this point, the cops were a day away from the one-month anniversary of the murders,

and they had nothing. It's like Annie. It's like that famous song, Only a Day Away. Now I can't even imagine the pressure that was on Getchel at this point. And suddenly, he had a kid in front of him that he thought knew a hell of a lot about the murders because his polygraph examiner had just said so. But at this point, there was still time to go back. And this is where my sympathy for Getchel comes to a screeching fucking halt.

Yeah, under pressure is not an excuse for wrongfully convicting three kids. No. See, Getchel, he could have conducted himself like an honest officer of the law, which there are plenty. We're not cop bashing here. And he could have pretty quickly figured out that Jesse wasn't their man. And he could have soon after told Durham to throw away his fucking polygraph because he obviously didn't know what he was doing.

But he didn't. He went into that room, damn near decided that either Jesse was their man or he knew who that man or men were. And the men he wanted were Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin. The nice thing about Walls is you can constantly bang your head right on him there. It's a classic move, put him into another room, of course. You move him into an even smaller room, the pressure increases. And Jesse did have some starting knowledge of all this.

Like I said, Jesse, like everybody else in town and everybody else in the country, he'd heard rumors. In fact, one of Jesse's friends, it told him that he'd heard that it was probably Damien and Jason that done it. So when they asked, what do you know about these murders? He was like, I heard Damien and Jason done it. That's right. Yeah, they're evil cult members.

Yeah, but that was all he knew. And he told the cops that that was all he knew. So the cops gave him more. They kept giving him details. They tell him that the kids were tied up. And then when they asked Jesse if the kids were tied up, he'd say, yeah, they was tied up. And when they'd asked with what, Jesse said rope.

And then they get pissed off and say, no, god damn it, it wasn't rope, it was shoelaces. And they'd go through the whole thing again. And then Jesse would say, yeah, they was tied up with shoelaces. And then the threats began. And that was when Jesse started getting scared. His gitchell drew a little picture for him. It was a circle with a bunch of Xs on the outside and three little dots on the inside. Gitchell pointed at the dots and said, these right here, that's you, Damien and Jason.

These Xs out here, these are the police. So you got to make a decision, either you're inside with Damien and Jason or you're outside with us. And if you're outside with us, you can go home. And if you want to go home, all you got to do is tell us what happened. And if you haven't watched West of Memphis, watched that documentary, they really break down this strategy. Mirroring and mimicking is a very common thing that police will use.

They suggest it everything. Yes. And they put it, they plant the little things in your mind. And this is a point, I will say this to you, I'm almost not even comfortable with doing the podcast without a lawyer after reading all this. Like, I just need to have like a lawyer on a rope, not a slave. I'm paying him. Right.

We'll pay the lawyer. But you don't understand. That's called a retainer. You can actually do that and you don't actually tell them like you're a Colombian coffee maker and you have a goat. What's the name of the guy? Juan Valdez. You don't have to rope him like you're Juan Valdez with a mule.

You can actually, you can shoot them an email. No, I got a little piece of jerky. I feed them. Oh, okay. Thank you, Henry Zabrowski. My client, I want, but that's, but get a lawyer. Yes. Do not ever speak to a police officer without a fucking lawyer.

So Jesse just started saying shit, like how they had meetings every Wednesday in Robinhood Hills and how they ate dogs and how there were briefcases full of drugs. Where are they getting it? Yeah, right? I mean, that's the first thing. It's like, where are they getting these drugs? Because these, all of these kids are demonstrably dirt poor. Well, I was deeply, deeply poor, 15 years old, living with their grandmother.

Don't you think at some point grandma would have seen Nicole slitting the dog's fucking belly open or them prepping the dogs? There's just parts of shit where I mean, like the dog's going to come in from somewhere and be held in another place and all of a sudden all the accoutrements for the rituals need to be kept in place. All the fucking, the pentagram rugs, all the candles, that's like, that's got to be some place. They're carrying around briefcases full of coke, like Nicholas Cage and Pulp Fiction.

I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And I told this... Nicholas Cage wasn't in Pulp Fiction. Oh, I'm sorry. John Travolta. Like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Nicholas Cage and John Travolta, I confuse them in my head all the time. Weird.

I don't know what the cross is. Weird. I think because they both made movies that make me... You just took face off incredibly literally and they never switched back in your mind. Honestly, that's what it is. That's why it is. Yes, it's face off. No kidding.

What? Can I just tell that one story about the fire? Marcus mentioned that they were super poor and just to hammer home how poor Mr. Eccles was, Damien was, his house was in the middle of a farm. This was the house when he was a kid, when he was a young kid. Yes. This is the house when he was a young kid and they moved around quite a bit, but that was because they were poor, not because they were moving on up, lateral at best.

And so their house was in the middle of these farm fields and at the end of every season they burned down the fields in order to create fertilizer. They didn't warn them or anything like that, they just burnt down the fields and Damien talks about how they would just, the flames would get like four feet from his house. It was a wood shack and he was like, it was a miracle. They never, it never burnt down. Yeah. I mean, when the actual, like when the crimes happened, Damien was living in a two bedroom

trailer with five other people. I tell you what, in a real satanist would be delighted to be so close to these flames. Yeah. Because it's so like, as the flames come up the hell and he's like, consume me, consume me. Fucking flame. Well, I think maybe that's why you moved to Los Angeles so you could sort of live that life.

Feel the heat. Oh, the whole time that Jesse's saying this shit, the cops are just nudging him along, shaping the story for him. Then they showed him the autopsy pictures. Now, if you've seen any of the West Memphis three documentaries, you've seen the post Mortem pictures of these little boys. They are easily the most horrifying pictures I've ever seen and I'm a dude that's seen some shit going all the way back to Rotten.com.

Oh, yeah. I would say the Dahmer crime scene photos for me are still number one. These are awful just because it's just, it's again, it's the position of the fucking bodies or we're horrifying to look at. Well, Henry, you mentioned this is sort of a listicle that you're starting. I'm an editor at BuzzFeed. Could you write down your top 10 favorite murder pictures for us, please? Can I please have an ad tie in?

Well, that's the thing is that, you know, these pictures, like they disturb the hell out of us and this is our job. You know, like we've seen some, we've seen some awful. This is my job. This is my job. A job. Dammit. A job.

And Jesse, Miss Kelly was just some kid. Yeah. I mean, he'd never seen anything like this in his life and these pictures scared the hell out of him and they upset him greatly. Yeah. Then there was one final manipulation and this one just seems, it seems weird and it seems cruel, but it worked. Gitchell played Jesse a short tape recording only once in its long.

It was the voice of Aaron Hutchison. The cops had gone through the little boy's whole testimony and it plucked out one line which was intended to freak out Jesse as much as possible. All he heard was the disembodied voice of a child saying, nobody knows what happened to me. Good. That's like fucking out of fucking the conjuring or something. You just hear a lot, nobody knows what happened to me and she's like, oh yeah, in a concrete

interrogation cell, like how the acoustics of that, the way that shit bounces off the walls, just disembodied, doesn't tell me who the kid was or anything like that. Just like, Jesse, I want you to listen to this. And again, remember, you see a 17-year-old boy, but think of him like a third grader. Just imagine what his brain was going through. And also on this tape, here we have some creepy chain noise. Sounds like a big heavy door is open and closing, hmm, what's in there? That's a crow.

Interesting. Do you have Dr. Dre when he sings, what was it, Frankenstein verses? It wasn't Dr. Dre, Dr. Dre produced it. Oh, you're still stuck on this. It's incredible. So they're railroading this thing. And that, after they played the tape, that's when they decided it was a good time to start taping the interview, hours after the questioning of this unrepresented minor had already begun.

Unreal. So the cops told Jesse to start from the beginning, as by this point, he'd all but told him he was involved. And these cops were salivating because here was a kid who was about to tell them that Damien Eccles and Jason Baldwin were the killers. And this was all about to be over. But even after all that coaching, Jesse's tape confessions still had monstrous contradictions. First of all, he said that he, Jason, and Damien had met up that morning at 9 a.m.

have an already planned who they were going to kill because the little boys' pictures had been in the briefcase that was shown at the previous Wednesday's devil meeting. And of course, they met at 9 a.m. because there's one thing about teenage goths. Wake up early. They always do. They always do. I always think of a 17-year-old quiet goth man. Golly risers.

Absolutely. That's how I mean it. And I tell you what, it continues into adulthood. Oh, totally. It definitely does. Yeah, early to bed, early to rise. That's how it is when you worship the devil. You need to be rested.

Oh, boy. And you need to have your oatmeal and a couple of egg whites. You got that protein in there. Oh, no, it's not like I built this entire lifestyle almost solely so I wouldn't have to get up before 10.30 a.m. every day. No way. I love waking up with the sun. Well, according to Jesse's first go at the story, the boys were all dead by noon.

But it was known that the boys were in school all day, and they last been seen alive around sundown. So when the cops asked Jesse about this, he said, oh, they must have skipped school. So when they told him, no, they hadn't. Jesse said, all right, well, it happened around five or so. But that was still too early. So they kept pushing. And finally, he told him that it happened at seven or eight.

And that's when Gidgel said, oh, that clears it up. It's unbelievable. They're just so happy. You just see them copy and pasting what they want to hear in real time. It's so hard because I can see why they want to. I can see why they are desperate. They don't know what to do. But it's just like it's not justice.

No, no. Now, Jesse was slow, but he goddamn sure knew the difference between noon and nighttime. There were other inconsistencies as well. I mean, Jesse said that Damien had choked one of the boys to death with a big old stick. But none of the boys had shown any signs of neck trauma in the slightest, much less a trauma that would be bad enough to be the cause of death. And Jesse still couldn't get the ligatures right either. Even though Jesse had been corrected multiple times before the confession was recorded,

he still said that the boys had been tied up with brown rope, not shoelaces. And to the guilters who say that there was evidence of rope burns, that was deemed to be a possibility by the incompetent medical examiner's office, who we'll cover in detail on part three, but the rope burn was ruled out by competent professionals. Jesse said the boys were tied up, but he only ever mentioned their hands. We unfortunately know that the boys' hands were tied to their feet. And that's what makes Jesse's next statement so inconsistent. The guilters refute the false confession narrative based on one admission.

Jesse said that while Damien and Jason were quote unquote beating the hell out of the other two boys, Macklemore ran away. And Jesse chased him down, brought him back, and then left before the three boys were killed. Because a part of that is that he had to have a reason for being there. And that was the multiple killers angle, was that how do you corral the kids, how do you keep them in the area in order to kill all of them, they won't they run. And so he now put himself as the goalie of the group where they can't, but they positioned them into that.

Because they were trying to work it out in their own heads, how the crime went down. Out of all the misstatements, that was the one that screwed himself over the most. And they were working on multiple killer angles from the beginning. Because the one thing that they did know is that the hog ties, the knots in the shoelaces, there were multiple different kinds of knots. Like they saw that the little boys were tied up with different, it was just obviously tied up by different people. And that's partly how they brought Jason Baldwin into this because they're like, well, Damien

Eccles did it, but there are multiple knots, so he's got to have somebody there. So who else would be there but Jason Baldwin? Do you remember that growing up as a boy when they tried to get us to like really be interested in knots? I just remember there was a teacher who was talking about knots, I don't use knots now. Never had a knot, don't care about knots, but they really wanted just to care about them. So knots and calculus, there was no reason for me to ever learn calculus, it never went, it didn't go in.

I don't remember a moment of trigonometry. I definitely was strategic and I sat behind a very smart person and I was just tall enough to peek over and look at his page. There you go. Teacher never know how I got the answer. Winners win. That's how it goes. Well, let's go through some of the logic on Jesse's statements.

If the boys were tied up as they were found, how the hell did the kids run away? Because their hands were tied to their feet. And if Jason and Damien were beating these kids up as bad as Jesse said they were, why weren't they covered in bruises? They weren't. Plus, it isn't rare in a false confession for a suspect to create parts of the story themselves. In the aforementioned case of Joanne Taylor, the woman who said she remembered everything,

she said that she had suffocated the old woman with a pillow as an act of compassion. The cops didn't give her that, she came up with that on her own. But this statement about chasing the boy down is what one juror in Jesse's case said was the clincher for a guilty vote. Because he Jesse never said that he killed any of the boys. He said his only part was chasing down Michael Moore. And that's partly because the cops kept saying that if he told them what they wanted to hear, he could go home.

So basically he was just tiny from House of a Thousand Corpses, he was just his job to go retrieve. Yeah. Anyone running away? He put himself into it in an ancillary position where he is not directly guilty of murdering these kids. Yeah. He has somehow worked his way into the story, but he also sort of in his wake, but distanced

himself enough, saying because he knew that he did not kill anybody, but he can say, maybe I did hold one, like maybe I could have done that. Yeah. When the cops told Jesse that he could go home if he told the truth, Jesse believed him. And he trusted them so much that after the interrogation was over, Jesse patiently sat in a jail cell, figuring his dad would come pick him up once he got around to it. It is so unbelievably sad. Yeah.

No, they did the same thing with the story I brought up with Kevin Fox. They straight up told him, we would put you out on bond. Yeah. Well, basically we built this narrative that you are, you killed your daughter by accident. And once you sign all this shit, you'll go out on bond and that he was immediately in jail for a year. Yeah. They do it all the time.

You watch those, you watch the programs when it comes to interrogations. I know you didn't do it. Get a lawyer. Get a lawyer. Always get a lawyer. Always get a lawyer. Give me Ron Kuby, man. Yeah.

Big Lebowski. But that's what they say. I know you didn't do it. I know you didn't want to do it. And then they slowly put you there and then you're screwed. Yeah. And by the time Jesse was putting that cell, he'd been at the police station for 11 hours. And there were ways to test whether or not Jesse was telling the truth.

All they had to do was take him out to the crime scene and have him walk him through the crime. And they would have easily seen how many inconsistencies there were there. Right. But they didn't do that because these men were tired. And even more than that, they finally had who they'd wanted all along. Don't mess up a good thing. Damien and Jason.

So based on Jesse's confession at 906 that night, the cops brought forth the evidence for an arrest warrant just as Jason and Damien were settling in at Damien's trailer to watch Leprechaun on VHS. I honestly got to say he also loved Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Yeah. Oh. So this is when we talk about relating to him, Leprechaun's a pretty dope movie. Jennifer Aniston, role of her life and work.

She was great. Warwick Davis is just a phenomenon. I mean, we talked about this again and again. And guess what? They're doing a Leprechaun revamp like I thought that they were. No, without Warwick fucking Davis. Honestly. Yeah.

He might be a little too old for it at this point. I'm just going to go and say, you'll ever fuck it. No. No. We're going to do this one. Have a horror movie nerd conversation in the middle of our West Memphis episode. I'm just saying that makes me upset. But how scary would have been if he got that summons from the police, but it was from the

Leprechaun. And you hear like, oh, I hear you've got to me go. You really do that and they're like, no, no shit, it's a Leprechaun. I will say the Leprechaun is a great example of being frugal. Yeah. Don't spend your money. So an hour later, the cops burst inside and both of the boys were arrested on capital murder charges.

And when the press asked Gary Gitchell at the press conference the next day how strong he felt the case was against these kids, how strong it was on a scale of one to 10, Gitchell said 11. It's not fucking. Spinal time. Spinal time. It's not spinal time. In most cases, only go to 10.

Right. In this case, it goes to 11. It goes to 11. It's one guiltier. No, he is very, he was so smarmy. But also I get it. They were just trying to bring it home. I don't get it.

I don't get it. And of course later on in a matchup, we'll get to this, but he does say that that was probably a mistake and everyone was in the heat of the moment. But how? And he looks so tired. Oh. Yes. And when Jason's mother asked the cops what they had on her son, one of the detectives

told her this. Well, you've got a story that is very, very believable. It is so close to perfect that we have to believe. And of course the very next day, Jesse's confession leaked to the press and the entire town went nuts with stories about that boy Damien. I wonder who leaked that to the press. No way. Yep.

They quoted boys who said Damien's house was haunted and they'd seen ghosts. They quoted a girl who said she saw Damien drink blood once and they quoted a pastor who said he had never witnessed anyone harder. And yet Damien had still rejected both the pastor and Christ himself. Unbelievable. Why is the pastor witnessing all hard at these children? I don't know, man. But they knew they had to do that.

They knew they had to get public opinion on their side. Yep. Well, that's what we're going to learn. That's what pushes everything all the time and it will fuck it a case one way or another. Look at Casey Anthony. He did the opposite. Yep. Where then it was they had a real back from everybody saying that she was guilty.

They had to find a way, I mean, to revert it. Can you imagine? I know now we know that it was a massive injustice, but at the time in real time, if Twitter existed, just think about the people, what they would be saying about Damien and the other two. Fucking just look at Twitter now. Yeah, honestly, look at it now. Look at, I mean, seriously, look at YouTube comments. The YouTube comments on anything, like any interview with Damien Eccles, 90% of them

is burn in hell, you fucking baby murder, you got away with murder. I mean, it is some vitriolic shit. People are just as pissed off about this now as they were back then. In fact, I mean, it got around back then that the genitals of Christopher Byers have been found in a glass jar in Damien's trailer. And people still bring that shit up today on the internet. I saw people talking about this shit as evidence of guilt, and that was just a rumor. And it was also, by the way, a rumor that probably came from the cops.

This whole thing is that it's because the emotions are high, but also because of the nature of the crime. Of course. And also the idea of the strange evangelical stripe that still exists in this country. The people are truly afraid of the devil, and they don't understand he will only help you get laid. Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true. Come on, lean in, buddy, lean in, come on.

Well, of course, I mean, the cops knew that they didn't have the little boys' testicles in a fucking jar. In fact, they had no hard evidence at all. Go to that pastor. He's apparently full of hard evidence. I don't know what he does. I don't know about all that. So that is when they turned back to eight-year-old Aaron Hutchison for more help.

So now that the boys were caught, suddenly Aaron said, oh, yeah, then was the boys that was in the woods that night. Not only that, he said, I'd seen him do it. I saw him do the whole thing. He's eight years old. He's eight years old. And he said, yep, there was five of them, but I didn't know the other two. And now I know that these three was these boys.

And also they had black shirts with dragons on them. And also, I mean, and nothing is eag- Nothing is more evil than pictorials of pewter figurines. Oh, absolutely. And also, Bebop and Rocksteady were there. And I'm pretty sure the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle showed up. I like Raphael because I'm kind of emotional. I mean, don't get us wrong.

We are not in any way, shape, or form blaming the kid here. No, he's a victim in all this. He is absolutely. Nah, he's having fun. No, he's not. In fact, he was fucked up for years afterwards. Sure. That's what his mother said.

She said, that's what I regretted most about this because this boy had psychological problems for years. It completely fucked him up. This by fun, I mean the opposite of fun. It's like saying something's bad, but you mean it's good. Very confusing to 80s fathers. Every father in the 80s is like, what do you mean it's bad? Oh, but it's good?

OK. Now, this was completely and totally the work of the detectives involved, particularly Don Bray, because he'd already decided before Aaron said that he'd witnessed the murders that this little boy had watched the whole thing happen. So he's in the driver's seat, and Aaron's just following him along. Can I just ask, how the hell did the kid get there? We're talking about in the middle of the woods, right? And it's midnight?

Why is the eight-year-old there? Well, no, that's the... How did they explain that? He didn't even... They didn't. They just didn't. And these kids, they would all play... Robin Hood Hills was where all the kids played, and they'd stay there until dark, and then

they'd go home. And I guess they kind of juiced it around where they said that, OK, well, I guess the kids got killed right before sundown, or the kids got killed when it was still, like, a little bit light outside. But the thing is, though, is that Aaron Bray never testified. All Aaron Bray was, he was a little engine that drove them towards arrest. The little engine that could is a wonderful parable if your intentions are good. But other than I see a lot of people, you know who really thought he could?

Adolf Hitler. Oh, my. And that's a train that no one wanted to be on. Speaking of painters, George W. Bush. He's still at it. He's still at it. He's still at it. Oh, man, we really are turning into those old hippies, right?

Like, just remember when you were a kid, and, like, you'd mention Nixon and, like, old hippies would get, like, really angry, and, like, and Nixon was really funny to us? Same thing with this generation. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I love him. They think he's cute. Yeah, they think he's an adorable man who likes to paint his feet in his bathtub.

My favorite conversation is bringing up...my favorite bar conversation is bringing up W. Bush. My God. Oh, man. You must be a joy. Oh, we have fun. We have just rolling in there. We have fun.

So on June 7th, 1993, the West Memphis Three were appointed their public defenders, because these boys sure as fuck didn't have enough money to pay for their own defense teams. Damien, he got Val Price and Scott Davidson. Paul Ford and Robin Wadley were assigned to Jason, and Jesse got Greg Crow and Dan Stidham. Oh! Oh! The nice thing about trial is I get to nap, which I really enjoy.

Now, to me, Stidham is easily the most interested lawyer out of all these, particularly because he was the only one who didn't abandon his client after the first trial was done. That guy is very...he was tried and true. He's a good man, very good man, believes in the law. First of all, Stidham went into this case thinking Jesse was guilty as hell, and as far as he was concerned, he was just there to broker a plea deal in exchange for testimony against the other two. But when Stidham asked Jesse to repeat the confession, he found that it wasn't the same

confession that he'd read, because Jesse kept getting shit wrong. And when Stidham asked him to try again, it would be a whole different story from even the time before. Right. Furthermore, Stidham quickly realized that Jesse didn't even know what a lawyer was. It is never good when the confession starts with the game of zip-zap-zap, just so you get the improv flowing in your head. That's been like, imagine I'm a monkey, right?

And you're another monkey at the zoo. Okay, okay. Now, your job is, you're a funny cute little monkey. And you like bananas? I do, I do. Yeah. And you also helped murder three little boys, didn't you? Zip?

Yeah. I mean, Jesse, he knew that lawyers existed, but he didn't know what they actually did. Jesse thought his lawyer was another cop. He thought he was another detective. Honestly, it might as well have been. It might as well have been at this point. Well, no, Stidham, not quite. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's tough. And then it got even deeper. Stidham was visiting Jesse one day, and Jesse asked him out of the blue who Satan was. Stidham had no idea what Jesse was talking about, so Jesse handed over a pamphlet that a preacher had given him regarding the dangers of Satan. So here was Stidham sitting in a jail cell with what was supposed to be a confessed satanic killer, and Jesse didn't even know who the fuck Satan was. Man.

Oh, man. Yeah, a night like this back toy too, which is really sad. He didn't even know who Bill Clinton was. No, and this is 1993. This is the year after Bill Clinton went from governor of Arkansas to president of the United States. Right. He didn't even know who Bill Clinton was.

And honestly, a lot of people called him Satan. Yeah. So it should be. No, that was back when people were still on the Clinton train. There were some folks in Arkansas I'm pretty sure were upset with the Democrat in the White House. Oh, yeah. Some of them definitely were, but this was long before the Clintons became the boogeyman

of American politics. That was too bad. I mean, at the same time, he was doing his running drugs and money with the CIA, allowing them to fly into Arkansas all that shit. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. It's a whole other episode. Yeah, we could do an episode on that.

Yeah, we absolutely could. So Stittem pretty quickly realized that maybe this kid didn't do it. And meanwhile, Damien was still pulling his goth kid bullshit. He told the police that he'd tell him everything he knew about the murders, but he'd only tell it to his mother. So the cops set up all this audio and video equipment. They're ready for a confession. They bring in the mother and then when she asked him what he knew, he just looked at

her and said, nothing. Honestly, when you think about setting up equipment from 1992, ladies and gentlemen, you got to remember that's a lot of wires, a lot of work, a lot of cords. That's like 600 pounds of equipment. It really is. A TV was like 200 pounds. That was a lot of work on those people. So that's kind of fun.

That's just set your fucking... I mean, it makes me angry, because I could see a kid doing it and was like, ah! Honestly, that was funny. Yeah, all of this bullshit. You feel like... I think that's a good friend of mine's move, actually. I like it. I think it's quite humorous.

See, both Damien and Jason thought that there was no way in hell that they could ever be convicted of these crimes. In fact, when they talked to each other, they were like, this is suspect one, talking to suspect two. Right. Like, they're laughing about all this and you can even see in Paradise Lost that they're sitting before the trial and they're joking with each other and you can tell they don't really take it seriously.

I mean, Jason, he took it pretty seriously, but Damien, he just kept putting up this goth kid front. And so you gotta remember the context is that they murdered three people, so they see them laughing and it just plays into that narrative that they're soulless and they go back to a time and time again. Damien's smiling, he's blowing kisses to the grieving families during the hearings, which is, I mean, the shittiest and dumbest thing that he could have done. Yes, of course.

He just doesn't know, because again, they're like, we're innocent. We don't... Nothing is going to happen to us. We're innocent. Like, what can they have on us? They don't do anything. And then you're like, oh, oh, shit, they could say anything that they want. I didn't know that.

He didn't go full Michael Jackson and show up in his pajamas. No. But he also didn't dress really well either or show respect for the court. But again, he just didn't imagine that such an injustice could occur. And if you want to hear one of the great ironies of the case, Jason Baldwin had faith in God that he wouldn't go to jail. He had faith in God, in his God, in the Christian God, that this couldn't happen to him. That God didn't let things like that happen.

Well, sometimes God goes to fucking sleep. I guess. Well, all of Damien's goth bullshit. That might be why the case's judge, David Burnett, had such a heart on for these boys. He really did. And Judge Burnett, who oversaw both trials and almost every trial after the originals, he's what you'd call a real piece of work. He looks like he's surprisingly orange hair.

Yes. Honestly, he has the same hair as a Lego. Like you can see him snap it on in the morning. Yeah. No. Before the case, Judge Burnett said in preparation, he'd read a book on Satanism quote for information purposes. I'll tell you what.

I like the covers and there's a thing I learned about. I honestly, to be honest, I'd never heard about this before. It was an item of clothing called a pasty that I seem to really enjoy. I see I seem to really enjoy it. Well, he should have been reading the Constitution. Plus. Wow. Powerful.

Powerful. Constitution. Every day, all day, you're going to fucking fall asleep while you're driving. Just reading the Constitution. Not only was that the extent of his preparation, the other thing and this other thing really fucked over Jesse. Judge Burnett didn't believe that psychiatrists or psychologists had any business being in a courtroom.

In fact, that was the whole subject of his judicial master's degree that he was working on. Yeah. That he was working on while the trials were taking place. It's always nice when the, when the judge is also dabbling in Scientology, second Scientology reference. These psychologists, they cause nothing but doubt. That's what I don't want.

I don't want to need any doubt. And they're not on this life sentence slash death sentence case. Right. Yeah. I mean, this guy, he did everything he could to stymie the defense, put the boys away, and keep them locked up forever. It's like he read a book on how to be a biased judge. Yeah.

He went by the book. Yeah. And he kept it going for, oh, well, almost two decades. He still doesn't fully, he doesn't admit to how horribly of a job he did. No one would have been so. No. And I'll tell you what, stymie was also my least favorite little rascal. Oh.

Mostly because I think it was a mistake to just have a little rascal whose whole personality was having colon cancer. Oh man. Well, that's why you got to have the soapbox derby, raise some money there. And colon is stymie because I've never shipped. For example, I mean, concerning how much Judge Burnett really fucking hated these boys, he cited judicial economy as far as how many trials they were going to have. So he ruled that there was going to be two trials.

There was one for Jesse and one for Jason and Damien. This was wildly unfair to Jason because the only evidence they had against him was Jesse's confession, at least the only evidence they had at the time. That's all they had. By including Jason and Damien together, the jury, they were going to hear all that goth shit that the defense was going to bring up concerning Damien. They had none of that shit on Jason because, you know, as bullshit as the softball confession was and all the other shit, like all the things that Damien told the cops, like that shouldn't

have been heard in Jason's trial at all. And of course, as Chevy Chase said in the film Dirty Work, when he bet against Rocky and he bet Mr. T to win, hindsight is 20-20 and they didn't know that confession, the way they edited it and stuff, people really took that confession seriously. Now, yeah, if Jason had gotten a trial all on his own, it's much likelier that he would have walked free. I mean, it's not certain, but he would have had a hell of a lot better chance. But months after the arrest, investigators found what they needed to link Jason to the

crime. See, the prosecution had been searching for months after the arrest for any sort of hard evidence. The best they had come up with was a couple of sticks that Gitchell had plucked out of a forest that were in the general vicinity of where the bodies were discovered. And Gitchell was like, well, they could have been used in commission of the crime, maybe. Just picking up sticks. Yeah.

Honestly, it's just like, we're just picking up sticks. There's another stick. That's more evidence. And the evidence is all right. This has got a straight up heft enough to kill a boy with, or you could make a nice table out of it and get it carpenters involved. But all that changed on November 17th. According to John Fogelman, the prosecuting attorney, he'd had, quote unquote, a hunch

that there might be something of interest in the small lake behind Jason's trailer. And this hunch was so strong, in fact, that the cops called up the local media to document the dive, and lo and behold, after only 30 minutes in the murky water, the diver found a big old combat knife. And the next day's front page featured a picture of that diver holding it up for everyone to see. Yep. And the headline was just not a stick, but also evidence.

Do you think that they did a thing where when he said, like, I have a hunch, and then did he take a big, like, genie's turban, like Johnny Carson used to do and, like, put it on me, like, I think there's something in the lake. Like, oh. Well, I'm sure we'll tell the story of all that went down, right? Yeah. Now, this begs the question. How the fuck did this diver find a knife at the bottom of the lake after only 30 minutes?

I'm going to say, how the F did the diver find the knife. Are you not going to go for Frick this time? No, no, Frick. How the Frick? How the HG double hockey sticks is he finding a knife just in a lake? What is he? Is he the Arthur? Is that what this is?

Well, the fact that he found the knife so fast implies that someone told him where to look. Yep. Which implies they had an informant. And if they had an informant, then it stands to reason that this informant would have been a devastating witness for the prosecution. But no such informant was called to the stand. That's because the person who had told Fogelman about the knife had been Jason's mother.

And the reason why she'd known just about where it could be found was because she'd thrown it in herself about a year before. A year before. You know how upset Jason was. You know how upset that afternoon was when she was like, I'm taking your goddamn combat and I'm not throwing it in the lake. No, there's more combat and I'll save money for it, I gotta let the knife exhibit it. And he has to go and just toss it in the lake.

Unbelievable. And the detective did this on purpose. He knew all this. He knew it. Easy day to be a diver, though. Yeah, real easy day. I mean, the prosecution, they actually got pretty lucky with the knife because the knife had a serrated edge.

And the medical examiner had said from the very beginning that the wounds on the boy could have only come from a knife with a serrated edge. And the medical examiner is just slightly worse than the head doctor from Reanimator. Just slightly worse. Hey man, what are you talking about? He kept a head alive. And a body. He did a horrible thing.

And a body. I'm not talking about Wes. I'm not talking about Wes. I'm talking about the bad dude. Yeah, the bad dude. Yeah, the bad dude. Yeah, there was the head and the body and remember the body did the... They never explain how the frickin' body can move without a...

I'm right. No, the science. It's science past what we understand, so it's great science, bad goals. I see. He did try to eat that woman's pussy. Honestly, that's a very problematic scene. Oh yeah. But we'll get into just how devastatingly wrong the assumption that a serrated knife

was used along with plenty of other errors and flat out lies as we cover the trials of the West Memphis Three and the aftermath of those trials on the conclusion to our series. Yep, yep. And I tell you, you know what happens when you assume? You know what happens? What do you do? You make an ass of... No, no.

Things get all fucked up in it. All the bullshit runs into a fuckin' ditch and you're a fuckin' skeleton, congrats. You fuckin' piece of shit. Errors and lies. What are you saying? Errors and lies also sounds like a horrible prank show. Errors and lies, lies and errors, yeah. Awesome.

All right, well, that is, we're beginning to see the railroad job that occurred there in West Memphis, Arkansas. And I'd also, I would love to thank Carolina for all of the amazing work that she contributed to on the research for all the false confession stuff on this, so thank you very much. Thank you, Carolina. And listen to all of her programs, Movie Signs with the Mad, and the... Esquela Sangre. Esquela Sangre.

Yeah, if you speak Spanish, it's a show for you, they just did a two-part series on Ritchie Valance and the day the music died. Even though I can't listen to the show, because I don't understand Spanish, hearing all about it in the house was very interesting. I'll tell you one thing, buddy, she's been saying some pretty mean things about you. Yeah, because he's a Spanish, he is a Spanish expert, and you are very, very lingual. Oh, yeah. I've seen the signs.

All right, everyone. Hey, guys. Yeah. So good. Deep into the season. Again, send your creepypasta stories to Side Stories L-P-O-T-L at gmail.com. We're building up towards the Halloween season. We're gonna get spooky with that.

Uh-oh. Yeah. Spooky with that. Hey. Gotta get spooky with it. Yes, thank you all so much for listening, and thank you so much for giving to our Patreon. We really appreciate that. Oh, yes.

Without you, none of this is possible, and you've allowed us to just have a little family here. We were just talking about this the other day. Yeah. How lucky we were to have such, or we are to have such great fans, and it's just us. Yeah. Which is so nice, because we don't have to deal with the corporate elites who are really everything that's always us.

Oh, okay. Pieces of shit. All they want us to do is suck their dicks and be a part of their fucking weird-ass Bohemian Grove-style parties, but we won't go there yet, because we're not good at keeping secrets. Yeah. Honestly, we're just bad at keeping secrets. Real bad. We're going to see your fucking asses in Indiana, and then we're going to be seeing you very

soon in Chicago. We're coming to your cities. Actually, Chicago is all sold out. Completely. Yeah, Chicago is completely sold out, but we're coming to a bunch of places coming up in November and the beginning of December, specifically in November. We're going to be coming to Texas, the 7th and the 8th. We're going to be in Dallas on November 7th.

We're going to be in Austin on November 8th, and we're going to be in Oklahoma City on November 9th. Awesome. I can't fucking wait to come back home. Can't wait to do it. I mean, it's not a hometown show, but about the closest I'm going to get. Absolutely. Let's do the show in Lubbock.

We sold out the theater. Let's go to Lubbock. Yeah. We could totally do a show in Lubbock. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be... Yeah, we people are in Lubbock.

I like 210,000 somewhere on there. Oh, 210,000. Yeah. Lubbock's a large town. It's a large city. I'm going to forget that piece of information. There's a division one school there, which I graduated from, I am a graduate of Texas Tech University of both the school of English and the school of mass communications.

And you know it's the Harvard of Texas because their slogan is, get your guns up. Get your guns up. Get your guns up. Fuck yeah, motherfuckers. How do you guys organize the horses so you could sit on them in class? Ahh, Yours name is Brownock. That was good. Ruppoad.

Ahh. Gosh, there's sort of a statement about the culture there,... I layer myенить. Thank you all so much for listening. I guess that's it. Follow us. Follow us here on the left for all your internet needs. Just log off all of that stuff and search for us.

We'll just listen to the show. We tell you when the shows on. Yeah, just subscribe to the show. It'll come up and it'll pop up and say, you got to do a show. can't miss it hail yourselves everyone hail sweet Satan the bringer of knowledge the true luminary allow him to destroy your prejudices hell game as well yeah can quite preachy he's getting very preachy yeah yeah yeah yeah i have to for these episodes normally i wouldn't i don't do it as much anymore but for these episodes it's important to remember what satanism

is all about no he's witnessing i think he's witnessing i think i'm feeling witness too harder than anybody's ever witnessed honestly an evangelical satanist might be my example of living hell yeah i had to sit yes yes yes keep constantly preaching to join a group that's not really a group huh um hail me magustylations everyone call a lawyer