Devil’s Knot by Mara Leveritt Read Free Book Online Page A

stuff, and then carry girls out there…. Wescrew them and stuff…. We have an orgy and stuff like that.”
    Jessie had provided the detectives with a few details they could use. But they still lacked the crucial one. Ridge made a delicate move. “Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you something. Now this is real serious, and I want you to be real truthful, and I want you to think about it before you answer it. Don’t just say yes or no real quick. I want you to think about it. Did you actually hit any of these boys?”
    Jessie: “No.”
    Gitchell: “Now, tell us the truth.”
    Jessie: “No.”
    Ridge: “Did you actually rape any of these boys?”
    Jessie: “No.”
    Ridge: “Did you actually kill any of these boys?”
    Jessie: “No.”
    Ridge: “Did you see any of the boys actually killed?”
    Jessie: “Yes.”
    Ridge: “Okay. Which one did you see killed?”
    Jessie: “That one right there.”
    Gitchell: “Now, you’re pointing to the Byers boy again?”
    Jessie: “Yes.”
    Ridge: “How was he actually killed?”
    Jessie: “He choked him real bad and all.”
    The police had not seen—and the medical examiner had not mentioned—any indication that the boys had been choked, much less that that’s how they died. But Ridge carried on. “Choking him? Okay, what was he choking him with?”
    Jessie: “His hands, like a stick. He had a big old stick, kinda holding it over his neck.”
    Ridge: “Okay, so he was choking him to the point where he actually went unconscious, so at that point, you felt like he was dead?”
    Jessie: “Yeah.”
    Jessie had claimed to have witnessed at least one of the murders. But again there was a problem, and not a minor one. Christopher Byers clearly had sustained a profound injury—one severe enough to have killed him—yet Jessie was not mentioning that. Instead, he was attributing the boy’s death to strangulation with a stick. The trouble was that Christopher’s neck was one of the few parts of his body that had shown no signs of trauma. Aside from a few scattered scratches, his neck appeared to have been untouched. 116
    Ridge and Gitchell did not press the point. They had an eyewitness to the murders. They opted not to be picky. But there was still the nagging problem of Jessie’s times to be addressed. Ridge approached it once again. “Okay. They killed the boys,” he said.
    Jessie had not said he’d seen the other two boys killed, but Ridge glossed over that point. He continued. “They killed the boys. You decided to go. You went home. How long after you got home before you received the phone call? Thirty minutes or an hour?”
    In an interview full of misrepresentations of what Jessie had said, this was one of the greatest. Jessie had repeatedly stated that he’d arrived at the woods at about 9 A.M . and that he had left there at “about noon.” He said the phone call from Jason had come at about nine o’clock that night. Yet now Ridge was giving him a choice. How long after he’d left the woods had the phone call from Jason come? Thirty minutes, or an hour?
    Jessie was silent for a moment. Then he said, “An hour.”
    The police decided to end the interview there. Ridge noted the time, 3:18 P.M ., and the tape recorder was turned off. By now, Jessie had been at the police station for almost six hours. He had been questioned, polygraphed, questioned, and then questioned once again. Of all that questioning, only the past thirty-four minutes had been recorded.
“Discrepancies”
    But Jessie’s interrogation was not over yet. 117 Police took a twenty-minute break, during which Jessie smoked two cigarettes. Then Gitchell began another interview—and this one he also recorded. The time of this second interview is disputed, but a police report listing the chronology of the day’s events noted it was conducted “to clear up some discrepancies concerning time and events in the first interview.” 118
    This time, only Gitchell was in the room with Jessie, and for