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

reasons that are not explained, the interview began with Jessie offering a dramatically different account of the time at which he, Damien, and Jason allegedly arrived in the Robin Hood woods. Throughout the first interview, he had maintained that they were there in the morning and that he had left by noon. Now, after a twenty-seven-minute break, during which the tape recorder was off, all of that had changed.
    Gitchell: “Jessie…when you three were in the woods and the little boys come up, about what time was it?”
    Jessie: “I would say it was about five or so. Five or six.”
    Gitchell: “Did you have your watch on at the time?”
    Jessie: (Shakes his head no.)
    Gitchell: “All right, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time was it?”
    Jessie: “It was seven or eight.”
    Gitchell: “Are you…”
    Jessie: “It was starting to get dark.”
    Gitchell: “Oh. Well, that clears it up…”
    With that troublesome matter now quickly and neatly “cleared up,” Gitchell turned to another of the problems with the earlier confession, the part in which Jessie’d said that the boys had been tied with ropes. The correct answer would have been shoestrings, some white, others black, that had been removed from the children’s own shoes.
    Gitchell: “All right. Who tied the boys up?”
    Jessie: “Damien.”
    Gitchell: “Did Damien just tie them all up, or did anyone help Damien?”
    Jessie: “Jason helped him.”
    Gitchell: “Okay. And what did they use to tie them up?”
    Jessie: “A rope.”
    Gitchell: “Okay, what color was the rope?”
    Jessie: “Brown.”
    Quickly abandoning that line of questioning, Gitchell moved on to the question of rape. Because the boys were naked and tied the way they were, police had suspected that sexual violation might have been part of their murders. Jessie said he saw Damien and Jason rape two of the boys, whom he identified oddly—and incorrectly—as “the Myers” and “the Branch.” 119 Gitchell asked about several forms of sex. Jessie said that, in addition to raping them, Damien and Jason had had oral sex with two of the boys or, as he put it, “They stuck their thang in their mouth.”
    At one point, Gitchell rose from his seat, apologizing to Jessie. “Okay. All right,” he said. “Hold on just a minute.” There was a pause, during which Gitchell left the room. When the chief detective returned he explained, “I’m sorry I keep coming back and forth, but I got people that want me to ask you some other questions…” When the questioning resumed, he asked, “Did anyone go down on the boys and maybe sucked theirs or something?”
    Jessie said, “Not that. I didn’t see neither one of them do that.”
Probable Cause
    Whether anything had been “clarified” or not, that concluded the second session. Though the time was not mentioned on the tape, a police time chart noted that at 5:05 P.M ., Jessie was offered food, and that an hour later he was brought a “burger and Coke.” But while Jessie was getting to relax, detectives Ridge and Gitchell—along with deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman and municipal court judge William “Pal” Rainey—were busy preparing an affidavit. 120 At 9:06 P.M . they appeared in municipal court, this time in front of Judge Rainey, for a hearing to explain why they had probable cause to arrest Jessie, Damien, and Jason and to search their houses. By then, Jessie had been at the police station for more than eleven hours.
    Years later, Jessie would recall that his questioning by police had seemed to him like a game. He said that when the detectives refused to accept his answers to their questions, he didn’t know what to do. Then he figured out that they were giving him clues, and that when he provided answers that conformed to the clues, things went better for him. Though the questioning had seemed serious, it had also struck him as silly. “I figured they knew I was lying from the git-go,” he said, “because