Devil’s Knot by Mara Leveritt Read Free Book Online

noon?”
    Jessie: “Yes.”
    But the police knew that noon was no good. So Ridge’s next question was: “Okay, was it after school had let out?”
    Jessie: “I didn’t go to school.”
    Ridge: “These little boys…”
    Jessie: “They skipped school.”
    Every detective in the room knew, even if Jessie did not, that the statement was absurd. But the detectives persisted. And Jessie said it again: the boys had skipped school. In this version, he had met Jason and Damien in the woods “early in the morning,” at about 9 A.M ., and the victims, who had skipped school, had been murdered by noon.
    Exasperated, Ridge asked Jessie if he wore a watch. When Jessie said that it was at home, Ridge suggested: “So your time period may not be exactly right is what you’re saying.”
    “Right,” Jessie answered.
    As the interview progressed, Jessie’s version of events grew more convoluted. At one point he told the detectives that “after all of this stuff happened, that night that they done it, I went home about noon, then they called me at nine o’clock that night.” He said Jason placed the call, but that Damien was at Jason’s house with him at the time. “They asked me how come I left so early and stuff, and I told them that I couldn’t stay there and watch that stuff no more…And Damien was hollering in the background saying, ‘We done it. We done it. What are we going to do if somebody saw us? What are we going to do?’”
    But now Gitchell was growing impatient. He told Jessie, “I’ve got a feeling here you’re not quite telling me everything. Now you know that we’re recording everything, so this is very, very important to tell us the entire truth. If you were there the whole time, then tell us that you were there the whole time. Don’t leave anything out. This is very, very important. Now just tell us the truth.”
    Jessie responded, “I was there until they tied them up and then that’s when I left. After they tied them up, I left.”
    Gitchell: “But you saw them cutting on the boys.”
    Jessie: “I saw them cutting on them…”
    Gitchell: “So what else is there, after that?”
    Jessie: “They laid the knife down beside them, and I saw them tying them up, and that’s when I left.”
    Ridge: “Were the boys conscious or were they…?”
    Jessie: “They were unconscious then.”
    Ridge: “Unconscious.”
    Jessie: “And after I left they done more.”
    Ridge: “They done more?”
    Jessie: “They started screwing them again.”
    Jessie went on to describe a scene that, again, did not conform to the facts. The detectives knew that all of the bodies had been found in a highly unusual posture, backs arched and hands tied to ankles. Yet just as Jessie had failed to mention the removal of their clothes, he now ignored the peculiarity of how the boys were bound. He repeatedly mentioned only that their hands were tied. He even said that “one little boy” was “kicking” his legs “up in the air.” When Ridge asked, if “just their hands are tied, what’s to keep them from running off?” Jessie still did not say anything about the feet having been tied. The only reason he could offer for why the boys had not run off was that the assailants had “beat them up so bad so they can’t hardly move.”
    Ridge tried again: “You said that they had their hands tied up, tied down. Were their hands tied in a fashion that they couldn’t have run? You tell me.”
    But Jessie didn’t get it. “They could run,” he said.
    Gitchell took another tack, asking: “Did you ever use—did anyone use—a stick and hit the boys?” Jessie volunteered that Damien had hit one boy with a “kind of a big old stick.” He also said he’d seen Jason cut one of the boys on the face, using a “fold-up knife.” And he said he’d been involved in the “cult” for about three months. Asked by Gitchell what the cult’s members did “typically in the woods,” Jessie replied, “We go out, kill dogs and