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Episode 8: "I thought we were sort of Friends" #WM3
Episode 8 of "The Case Against" tackles another persistent falsity about the West Memphis 3 case: Belying the claim that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were barely acquainted with Jessie Misskelley are their own words and the words of their friends and acquaintances. They knew each other and frequented the same teenage hangouts.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers/dp/B071K8VNBM/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1549233637&sr=1-4
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Monsters-Go-Against-Memphis-ebook/dp/B06XVNXCJV/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1549233533&sr=8-5&keywords=blood+on+black
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549233533&sr=8-1&keywords=blood+on+black
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B07C7C4DCH/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1549233533&sr=8-2&keywords=blood+on+black
https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/
"I THOUGHT WE WERE SORT OF FRIENDS"
Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were best friends, blood brothers, two boys from the trailer parks who had formed an inseparable bond. In May of 1993, Echols was a high school dropout who received Social Security Disability checks due to various mental illnesses. He stayed some of the time at his parents’ home at Broadway Trailer Park in West Memphis and some of the time at his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend’s home in Lakeshore Estates, a trailer park between West Memphis and Marion, Ark. Jason’s trailer was just down the street from where Domini Teer and her mother lived. Echols’ parents had recently remarried after years of separation. His mother, who had lifelong troubles with mental illness, had divorced his stepfather the previous year over allegations of sexual abuse of Echols’ younger sister, Michelle. The sprawling, trash-strewn trailer parks were near where Interstate 55 came from the north to join east-west Interstate 40 for a brief stretch through West Memphis. While Baldwin, a skinny 16-year-old, lived in Lakeshore and attended Marion High School, much of his social life revolved around the video galleries, bowling alley and skating rink across the interstate in West Memphis. Baldwin lived with two younger brothers and a mentally ill mother who had recently separated from his habitually drunken stepfather. His mother’s new boyfriend, a chronic felon, had moved in a few weeks ago. Echols told of ficers handling a juvenile offense in May 1992 that he and Baldwin were heavily involved in “gray magic.” One of their mutual friends, Jessie Misskelley Jr., 17, a school dropout and another trailer park teenager, was regarded as a bully and a troublemaker. Misskelley had been in repeated trouble for attacking younger children. He eventually would admit that he had been involved in satanic rituals with Echols and Baldwin. One of the WM3 myths is that Misskelley was a distant acquaintance of the other two. Misskelley and Baldwin had been off and on as close friends for years, and Misskelley and Echols often spent time together. In a letter to girlfriend Heather Cliett written from the detention center, Baldwin, showing a sense of betrayal, wrote: “What gets me is why Jessie would make up such a lie as that, because I thought we were sort of friends except for the night at the skating rink when he tried to steal my necklace, and that made me pretty mad, but not as mad as all of this is making me.” Mara Leveritt’s book “Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence” tells of Baldwin’s first encounter with Misskelley on his first day in sixth grade at Marion Elementary School. According to the book, Misskelley attacked Baldwin without provocation during recess, “hollering like he meant to kill him.” In eighth and ninth grades, the two boys lived on the same street in Lakeshore. They “got to be pretty good friends.” Around that time, Echols’ grandmother moved to Lakeshore and Echols began hanging out, mowing lawns and using the money to fund his interest in skateboards. In “Life After Death,” Echols described first noticing Baldwin, “a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet.” Echols was struck by the number of music cassettes Baldwin carried in his backpack — “Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and every other hair band a young hoodlum could desire.” After his Nanny suffered her second heart attack and had her leg amputated, the Echols family moved to Lakeshore. In “Life After Death,” Echols described Lakeshore as full of “run-down and beat-up” mobile homes, filled with jobless drunks and addicts who earned their money through petty crime or scrounging up recyclables. Echols more recently imagined that the dilapidated trailers somehow have improved with age along with the neighborhood: “I suppose it would now be considered lower middle class.” Not so. While some of the homes are kept up nicely, many of the yards are littered, youths roam the streets aimlessly and trailers often catch fire, sometimes from meth labs. Lakeshore residents routinely show up in Municipal Court hearings, often for petty crimes and drug offenses, for failing to appear at hearings, for not paying fines, for the sort of offenses committed by chronic small-timers everywhere. The “lake” at Lakeshore is the same scummy, trashy stinkhole that Echols remembered.
Lakeshore is still populated by many carnies and other itinerant workers. It remains a hotbed of occultism, witchcraft and Satanism, with the West Memphis 3 having achieved the status of folk heroes.
Similarly, Echols in “Life After Death” described Marion High School as a sort of “rural” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “a place where kids drove brand-new cars to school, wore Gucci clothing, and had enough jewelry to spark the envy of rap stars.” Actually, the students of Marion High were and are the typical mix of modestly attired kids from a modestly middle-class community.
Marion is a small Arkansas town with a traditionally agriculture-based economy, with a number of residents who commute to jobs across the river in Memphis. As in many similar towns, a deeply entrenched elite holds sway over most municipal affairs. Their style is far from ostentatious. Marion is not an elite suburban community, though Marion residents do hold themselves aloof from the larger,
predominately black and considerably rougher town of West Memphis to the immediate south.
Median income in Marion today is roughly twice that of West Memphis. By comparison, median income in the elite Memphis suburb of Germantown is roughly twice that of Marion.
Nonetheless, there was a class divide between the trailer park kids and the more affluent students. Local teen Jason Crosby described “high society people which would be the people who come to school in shirt and tie, don’t want to get messed up, want to stay on the sidewalk all the time.”
Among students with parents with steady jobs, a strong work ethic, no arrest record and solid social standing, kids from the trailer parks often didn’t fit in.
As outsiders together at Marion Junior High, Damien and Jason became fast friends, sharing interests in music, skateboarding and video games.
In “Life After Death,” Damien described how he met Misskelley through Jason. Knocking on the door of the Baldwin trailer, Damien was told that Jason was over at Misskelley’s trailer, four or five trailers away. Damien described Misskelley was a short, greasy, manic figure prone to funny and slightly odd antics. The Misskelleys were pumping up the tires on the old trailer and moving it to Highland Trailer Park, just across the way, that very day.
Still, said Echols, “I never did see Jessie a great deal, but we became familiar enough to talk when we met. Jason and I would run into him at the bowling alley and spend an hour or two playing pool, or hang out for a little while at the Lakeshore store.”
Echols former girlfriend Deanna Holcomb described a tighter relationship between Echols and Misskelley, naming Jason, Jessie and Joey Lancaster as particular friends of Echols.
When Damien moved up to high school, he left Jason a grade behind. Damien made no attempt to fit in and soon adopted his trademark all-black wardrobe, complete with black trench coat, partially inspired by the Johnny Depp character in “Edward Scissorhands.”
All three hung around typical hangouts in West Memphis such as the bowling alley, the skating rink and video game booths. A surveillance video from the skating rink posted on William Ramsey’s Occult Investigations YouTube account recently showed Echols and Misskelley as two of the older boys hanging out at the skating rink soon after the killings.
Jennifer Bearden was a 12-year-old Bartlett girl when she first encountered the three killers at the rink around February 1993. She struck up a romantic relationship with the 18-year-old Echols. Concerning Misskelley, “I knew him a little bit. … I saw him at the skating rink several times.”
Asked about the relationship of Misskelley to the other two, she testified in an August 2009 hearing: “.… Whenever we were at the skating rink, uh, Jessie was, he, he was a little bit louder, he was a little bit more —- I don’t know — he liked to cause a little bit more trouble. … We kind of like stayed to ourselves and there was an incident that he stole the 8-ball from the pool table at the skating rink. … And uh, he showed (it) to us and actually, Damien and Jason got blamed for it. And they got kicked out of the skating rink for it. … They were pretty upset with him.”
Joseph Samuel Dwyer, a younger playmate of Baldwin living two doors down at Lakeshore in 1993, described in a hearing on Aug. 14, 2009, what he knew of the relationships among Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley.
Dwyer said that he knew Misskelley quite well from the neighborhood, particularly since Misskelley’s stepmother, Shelbia Misskelley, separated from “Big Jessie,” lived on the same street as Dwyer and Baldwin.
Though Dwyer was in frequent contact with the Baldwin boys, he merely knew Echols but did not associate with him. Echols shared few interests with most boys and usually dressed in black. “I just never really hung out with him or even tried to get to know him,” testified Dwyer.
He explained: “I really didn’t have anything to do with him just because, uh, just the way he acted. … We’d get off the school bus and he’d be standing there, it’s almost like craving attention in an all-black outfit so all of the kids on the bus would see him.”
Dwyer pegged Echols as a poser who reveled in drawing negative attention to himself. “… He liked horror movies. He would talk about watching horror movies and stuff like that.”
In an affidavit in 2006, Dwyer said of Echols: “I didn’t like what I saw of him. He liked to call attention to himself. One day he painted a star over one of his eyes. Damien was a talker. He liked to say things to get peoples’ attention.”
Dwyer characterized Misskelley as a “trailer park redneck.”
Dwyer recalled the relationship of Baldwin and Echols: “I did see Damien and Jason together after Jason started getting friendly with Damien, I was around him less than before because I didn’t like Damien. I know that after Jason started hanging out with Damien, he got a trench coat just like Damien’s. It was a long black trench coat. Damien had a certain way of talking and Jason picked up some of Damien’s way of talking.”
Another myth in the standard WM3 storyline is that the police pegged Damien as the killer partially because he wore a black trench coat .
In 2009, Dwyer explained “the trench coat thing, at the time that was sort of a fashion fad. I have one, uh, everybody, if they didn’t have one they wanted one. That was kind of a fashion thing. … It was the rock shirt, rock T-shirts and the trench coat.” So
“everybody” had or wanted to have a black trench coat as part of a “fashion thing,” along with rock T-shirts. Baldwin and Echols tiresomely claim they were singled out, persecuted, arrested and convicted because they “didn’t dress like everyone else.” But “everybody” wanted to dress the way they dressed.
Dwyer added: “Everybody out there in the trailer park was terrified; everybody was profiled because of our rock T-shirts, the trench coat , the long hair. Everybody look at us like we were just part of this cult thing, and it was totally made up, if you ask me. Totally made up. And we all felt like we could just as easily have been, uh, picked as a suspect because we were in the the same trailer park, dressed the same. We were all scared about that. Channel 3 news, all the news station were riding through there every day trying to film us as we were walking down the street, you know.”
Echols testified that after he began dressing in allblack, other students followed his example.
Consider, too, the myth that the boys were singled out for their interest in heavy metal.
In 2006, Dwyer said, “A lot of people in our age groups at the time were interested in rock and roll music, and in heavy metal music … I remember that after the three boys were found dead, and the news cameras came out to Lakeshore from time to time, anyone wearing a Metallica t-shirt, or some other heavy metal band t-shirt, was viewed as a devil worshipper, especially if the person had long hair.”
Longhaired kids who were heavy metal fans were common, as were black T-shirts.
At trial, defense attorneys elicited police testimony that Echols was wearing a Portland Trail Blazers black T-shirt on the night of his arrest, establishing to no clear end that black T-shirts were mainstream enough to be worn by NBA fans. Or by Reba McEntire fans, as demonstrated by a T-shirt from the Misskelley home.
Juvenile Officer Jerry Driver testified about Misskelley’s links to Baldwin and Echols in Misskelley’s trial.
Driver, who died in August 2016, had seen the three together for the first time around Nov. 15, 1992, at Lakeshore. Damien, Jason and Jessie walked by while he and a sheriff’s deputy were dealing with a suspected drunken driver. “It was nighttime … They all had on long black coats, and Damien had a slouch hat and they all had staffs. … Long sticks that they were walking with.”
Misskelley dismissed the story as ridiculous during one of his many confessions, saying he did not have a black coat. Driver’s account has been widely ridiculed, though never refuted.
Driver repeated the story at the Echols/Baldwin trial. “We saw three gentlemen walking by … Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin … with long coats” and “long sticks or staffs.”
Driver had seen them together on a few other occasions, “maybe two or three times,” … “Twice, I think, at uh — at Walmart and once out in the trailer park.”
Otherwise, he had seen Echols and Baldwin together dressed in black.
Echols girlfriend Domini Teer, in a Sept. 10, 1993, statement, surprised Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Fogleman by volunteering that “Jessie came around after them kids was killed.”
Fogleman: “OK, what do you mean by that? That he came around after the kids were murdered? What do you mean?”
Domini: “I mean, the boy shows up a week after them kids were killed …. Out of nowhere. I mean we hadn’t seen Jessie for months. I mean he did that when Damien and me got back together, and Damien was living with his stepdad, Jack. All of a sudden, Jessie comes showing up, and the first time we’ve seen Jessie since the year before that. …”
Fogleman: “And … then Jessie was around quite a bit then?”
Domini: “Every once in a while, like once or twice, yeah, I saw him. … I mean, when all the cops were bringing everybody in and all and talking to everybody … It was like two days after the cops were coming around, um … Jessie came over to Jason’s house one day while I was sitting there, and wanting Damien to take Blockbuster movies to Blockbuster … And they went, and I guess, took Blockbuster movies back and they wound up over at Jessie’s house … because his mom had come over to get Damien … Damien’s mom … cause he was supposed to be at Jason’s house….
“And it made me mad, and I called over to Jessie’s and said where’s Damien. And he goes, Damien’s on his way back. Matthew just come get him. I said I know, I sent Matthew over there to come get him, cause his parents are here. And then I hung up the phone.”
Fogleman: “And about when did that happen after this Wednesday?”
Domini: “Um … it was about like that next week.” That would have been when Damien’s parents supposedly were temporarily separated, according to some contradictory accounts of Echols’ mother, Pam, and after Damien had been interviewed by police several times and failed the polygraph.
Jessie was trying to get Damien and selfappointed detective Vicki Hutcheson together about that time. “Dark Spell” described Baldwin’s version of the visit.
According to Baldwin, Misskelley showed up unexpectedly at the Baldwin trailer because a friend from Highland Trailer Park wanted to meet Echols.
from Highland Trailer Park wanted to meet Echols.
year-old Hutcheson.
Domini told Fogleman she had seen Misskelley a total of three times. “The first time, we had come up the street, and he was messing around with Matt, and we thought somebody was getting beat up, because they were all screaming and hollering out there, and when we walked out there was Jessie.” “Messing around” with younger kids was routine for Jessie.
“And the second time I seen him, they had come over there and me and Damien was together, and they had just come knocking on the door with him and B.J. … And that was the last time I’d ever seen him until that time that he …. came over to Jason’s to go get Damien.”
Charlotte Bly Bolois, who lived at Lakeshore the summer of 1992 and visited there often, told police that Echols and Misskelley were close friends at that time, constantly seen together along with her cousin, Buddy Lucas.
She also described how Misskelley got into a fight in June 1992 with her husband, Dan Bolois: “My husband has two younger brothers, one is fixing to be 16 and other one is fixing to be 18, and he started a fight with my husband younger brothers and um, my husband went up there and ask him what was the deal and little Jessie Misskelley was going to pull a knife, but I got behind Jessie and took the knife from him.”
The younger brothers were Johnny and Shane Perschke, and there have been various accounts of fights involving John Perschke.
Bolois recalled a fight “right there at my trailer” with Misskelley. “Him and my husband got into a fight later on down Fool Lake.” That was the fight involving the knife. She requested that Misskelley give her the knife. “And he turned around and handed me the knife, I said if you’re going to fight, fight fair. … He busted a hole in my husband’s lip.”
A recent account from a West Memphis resident who asked that her name be withheld painted a disturbing portrait of Damien, Jason and Jessie interacting with children from the neighborhood where their victims lived:
“In 1993 I used to live in Mayfair Apartments. I lived in the townhouses that are located in the back of the complex. I lived there for around a year and a half.
“One day I was coming home and parked in front of a park on the property close to my apartment. As I parked I noticed 3 teenage boys and 3 young boys. It caught me as strange cause one of the teenagers was dressed all in black with a long black coat the other 2 were standing a few steps back from the one in black. So I sat there in my car watching for a few minutes. The teen in black was coaching those 3 little boys (I guessed at the time were 8 or 9 years old) how to hold their bikes on their shoulders and climb a ladder of a slide and how to ride down. The other teen boys were just standing a little behind the one in black not doing much except watching and laughing from time to time. One was kinda stocky the other one skinny. It didn't seem to bother them that I was watching. They saw me.
“Any way one of the little boys was about to start up the ladder so I got out of my car and told him to get down. That's when the teen in black made a couple steps toward me and said I needed to shut the f--k up and take my ass into my apartment. This was none of my business. At that point I said if it didn't stop I was going to call the police. Then I was called a f--king bitch. So I got my kids out of my car as he stood there and watched. He watched me all the way to my apartment. It was kinda frightening. I go to call the police but looked back out to see if he or they were headed toward my apartment but instead they just left. So I decided to not call the police and never thought anything else of it. …
“About 3 weeks to a month later three 8 year old boys were murdered in the woods right out the back door of the apartment I used to live in. I remember thinking I was so glad we had moved. Well then I was watching the news showing that 3 teenagers had been arrested. When I saw the pictures of the boys I told my husband that the one called Damien Echols was the one that cussed me out and was the one trying to make the kids carry their bikes up the slide. I also recognized the other 2 boys. They are Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin.
“The three little boys I saw Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin with that day I can't swear was Michael, Stevie or Chris. I do remember 1 of the boys was blonde and 1 had a red bike. If I'm remembering correctly it was the blonde that had the red bike on his shoulder. I really wasn't watching the little boys. I was paying more attention to the 3 teen boys and what they were doing.
“I never told anyone what I saw but family and friends. I never thought it was very important at the time since they had caught them. I was in my early 20's, working, taking care of 2 young kids and my grandparents. My husband was working and going to school at night. I had my hands full. Looking back I wish I had told what I saw.” "DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE." The central figure in the investigation,
prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out of step with his peers in the Arkansas Delta.
Meece, Gary. Blood on Black: The Case Against the West Memphis 3, Volume I (The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers Book 1) . UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
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By garymeece
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Episode 8 of "The Case Against" tackles another persistent falsity about the West Memphis 3 case: Belying the claim that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were barely acquainted with Jessie Misskelley are their own words and the words of their friends and acquaintances. They knew each other and frequented the same teenage hangouts.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers/dp/B071K8VNBM/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1549233637&sr=1-4
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Monsters-Go-Against-Memphis-ebook/dp/B06XVNXCJV/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1549233533&sr=8-5&keywords=blood+on+black
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549233533&sr=8-1&keywords=blood+on+black
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B07C7C4DCH/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1549233533&sr=8-2&keywords=blood+on+black
https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/
"I THOUGHT WE WERE SORT OF FRIENDS"
Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were best friends, blood brothers, two boys from the trailer parks who had formed an inseparable bond. In May of 1993, Echols was a high school dropout who received Social Security Disability checks due to various mental illnesses. He stayed some of the time at his parents’ home at Broadway Trailer Park in West Memphis and some of the time at his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend’s home in Lakeshore Estates, a trailer park between West Memphis and Marion, Ark. Jason’s trailer was just down the street from where Domini Teer and her mother lived. Echols’ parents had recently remarried after years of separation. His mother, who had lifelong troubles with mental illness, had divorced his stepfather the previous year over allegations of sexual abuse of Echols’ younger sister, Michelle. The sprawling, trash-strewn trailer parks were near where Interstate 55 came from the north to join east-west Interstate 40 for a brief stretch through West Memphis. While Baldwin, a skinny 16-year-old, lived in Lakeshore and attended Marion High School, much of his social life revolved around the video galleries, bowling alley and skating rink across the interstate in West Memphis. Baldwin lived with two younger brothers and a mentally ill mother who had recently separated from his habitually drunken stepfather. His mother’s new boyfriend, a chronic felon, had moved in a few weeks ago. Echols told of ficers handling a juvenile offense in May 1992 that he and Baldwin were heavily involved in “gray magic.” One of their mutual friends, Jessie Misskelley Jr., 17, a school dropout and another trailer park teenager, was regarded as a bully and a troublemaker. Misskelley had been in repeated trouble for attacking younger children. He eventually would admit that he had been involved in satanic rituals with Echols and Baldwin. One of the WM3 myths is that Misskelley was a distant acquaintance of the other two. Misskelley and Baldwin had been off and on as close friends for years, and Misskelley and Echols often spent time together. In a letter to girlfriend Heather Cliett written from the detention center, Baldwin, showing a sense of betrayal, wrote: “What gets me is why Jessie would make up such a lie as that, because I thought we were sort of friends except for the night at the skating rink when he tried to steal my necklace, and that made me pretty mad, but not as mad as all of this is making me.” Mara Leveritt’s book “Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence” tells of Baldwin’s first encounter with Misskelley on his first day in sixth grade at Marion Elementary School. According to the book, Misskelley attacked Baldwin without provocation during recess, “hollering like he meant to kill him.” In eighth and ninth grades, the two boys lived on the same street in Lakeshore. They “got to be pretty good friends.” Around that time, Echols’ grandmother moved to Lakeshore and Echols began hanging out, mowing lawns and using the money to fund his interest in skateboards. In “Life After Death,” Echols described first noticing Baldwin, “a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet.” Echols was struck by the number of music cassettes Baldwin carried in his backpack — “Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and every other hair band a young hoodlum could desire.” After his Nanny suffered her second heart attack and had her leg amputated, the Echols family moved to Lakeshore. In “Life After Death,” Echols described Lakeshore as full of “run-down and beat-up” mobile homes, filled with jobless drunks and addicts who earned their money through petty crime or scrounging up recyclables. Echols more recently imagined that the dilapidated trailers somehow have improved with age along with the neighborhood: “I suppose it would now be considered lower middle class.” Not so. While some of the homes are kept up nicely, many of the yards are littered, youths roam the streets aimlessly and trailers often catch fire, sometimes from meth labs. Lakeshore residents routinely show up in Municipal Court hearings, often for petty crimes and drug offenses, for failing to appear at hearings, for not paying fines, for the sort of offenses committed by chronic small-timers everywhere. The “lake” at Lakeshore is the same scummy, trashy stinkhole that Echols remembered.
Lakeshore is still populated by many carnies and other itinerant workers. It remains a hotbed of occultism, witchcraft and Satanism, with the West Memphis 3 having achieved the status of folk heroes.
Similarly, Echols in “Life After Death” described Marion High School as a sort of “rural” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “a place where kids drove brand-new cars to school, wore Gucci clothing, and had enough jewelry to spark the envy of rap stars.” Actually, the students of Marion High were and are the typical mix of modestly attired kids from a modestly middle-class community.
Marion is a small Arkansas town with a traditionally agriculture-based economy, with a number of residents who commute to jobs across the river in Memphis. As in many similar towns, a deeply entrenched elite holds sway over most municipal affairs. Their style is far from ostentatious. Marion is not an elite suburban community, though Marion residents do hold themselves aloof from the larger,
predominately black and considerably rougher town of West Memphis to the immediate south.
Median income in Marion today is roughly twice that of West Memphis. By comparison, median income in the elite Memphis suburb of Germantown is roughly twice that of Marion.
Nonetheless, there was a class divide between the trailer park kids and the more affluent students. Local teen Jason Crosby described “high society people which would be the people who come to school in shirt and tie, don’t want to get messed up, want to stay on the sidewalk all the time.”
Among students with parents with steady jobs, a strong work ethic, no arrest record and solid social standing, kids from the trailer parks often didn’t fit in.
As outsiders together at Marion Junior High, Damien and Jason became fast friends, sharing interests in music, skateboarding and video games.
In “Life After Death,” Damien described how he met Misskelley through Jason. Knocking on the door of the Baldwin trailer, Damien was told that Jason was over at Misskelley’s trailer, four or five trailers away. Damien described Misskelley was a short, greasy, manic figure prone to funny and slightly odd antics. The Misskelleys were pumping up the tires on the old trailer and moving it to Highland Trailer Park, just across the way, that very day.
Still, said Echols, “I never did see Jessie a great deal, but we became familiar enough to talk when we met. Jason and I would run into him at the bowling alley and spend an hour or two playing pool, or hang out for a little while at the Lakeshore store.”
Echols former girlfriend Deanna Holcomb described a tighter relationship between Echols and Misskelley, naming Jason, Jessie and Joey Lancaster as particular friends of Echols.
When Damien moved up to high school, he left Jason a grade behind. Damien made no attempt to fit in and soon adopted his trademark all-black wardrobe, complete with black trench coat, partially inspired by the Johnny Depp character in “Edward Scissorhands.”
All three hung around typical hangouts in West Memphis such as the bowling alley, the skating rink and video game booths. A surveillance video from the skating rink posted on William Ramsey’s Occult Investigations YouTube account recently showed Echols and Misskelley as two of the older boys hanging out at the skating rink soon after the killings.
Jennifer Bearden was a 12-year-old Bartlett girl when she first encountered the three killers at the rink around February 1993. She struck up a romantic relationship with the 18-year-old Echols. Concerning Misskelley, “I knew him a little bit. … I saw him at the skating rink several times.”
Asked about the relationship of Misskelley to the other two, she testified in an August 2009 hearing: “.… Whenever we were at the skating rink, uh, Jessie was, he, he was a little bit louder, he was a little bit more —- I don’t know — he liked to cause a little bit more trouble. … We kind of like stayed to ourselves and there was an incident that he stole the 8-ball from the pool table at the skating rink. … And uh, he showed (it) to us and actually, Damien and Jason got blamed for it. And they got kicked out of the skating rink for it. … They were pretty upset with him.”
Joseph Samuel Dwyer, a younger playmate of Baldwin living two doors down at Lakeshore in 1993, described in a hearing on Aug. 14, 2009, what he knew of the relationships among Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley.
Dwyer said that he knew Misskelley quite well from the neighborhood, particularly since Misskelley’s stepmother, Shelbia Misskelley, separated from “Big Jessie,” lived on the same street as Dwyer and Baldwin.
Though Dwyer was in frequent contact with the Baldwin boys, he merely knew Echols but did not associate with him. Echols shared few interests with most boys and usually dressed in black. “I just never really hung out with him or even tried to get to know him,” testified Dwyer.
He explained: “I really didn’t have anything to do with him just because, uh, just the way he acted. … We’d get off the school bus and he’d be standing there, it’s almost like craving attention in an all-black outfit so all of the kids on the bus would see him.”
Dwyer pegged Echols as a poser who reveled in drawing negative attention to himself. “… He liked horror movies. He would talk about watching horror movies and stuff like that.”
In an affidavit in 2006, Dwyer said of Echols: “I didn’t like what I saw of him. He liked to call attention to himself. One day he painted a star over one of his eyes. Damien was a talker. He liked to say things to get peoples’ attention.”
Dwyer characterized Misskelley as a “trailer park redneck.”
Dwyer recalled the relationship of Baldwin and Echols: “I did see Damien and Jason together after Jason started getting friendly with Damien, I was around him less than before because I didn’t like Damien. I know that after Jason started hanging out with Damien, he got a trench coat just like Damien’s. It was a long black trench coat. Damien had a certain way of talking and Jason picked up some of Damien’s way of talking.”
Another myth in the standard WM3 storyline is that the police pegged Damien as the killer partially because he wore a black trench coat .
In 2009, Dwyer explained “the trench coat thing, at the time that was sort of a fashion fad. I have one, uh, everybody, if they didn’t have one they wanted one. That was kind of a fashion thing. … It was the rock shirt, rock T-shirts and the trench coat.” So
“everybody” had or wanted to have a black trench coat as part of a “fashion thing,” along with rock T-shirts. Baldwin and Echols tiresomely claim they were singled out, persecuted, arrested and convicted because they “didn’t dress like everyone else.” But “everybody” wanted to dress the way they dressed.
Dwyer added: “Everybody out there in the trailer park was terrified; everybody was profiled because of our rock T-shirts, the trench coat , the long hair. Everybody look at us like we were just part of this cult thing, and it was totally made up, if you ask me. Totally made up. And we all felt like we could just as easily have been, uh, picked as a suspect because we were in the the same trailer park, dressed the same. We were all scared about that. Channel 3 news, all the news station were riding through there every day trying to film us as we were walking down the street, you know.”
Echols testified that after he began dressing in allblack, other students followed his example.
Consider, too, the myth that the boys were singled out for their interest in heavy metal.
In 2006, Dwyer said, “A lot of people in our age groups at the time were interested in rock and roll music, and in heavy metal music … I remember that after the three boys were found dead, and the news cameras came out to Lakeshore from time to time, anyone wearing a Metallica t-shirt, or some other heavy metal band t-shirt, was viewed as a devil worshipper, especially if the person had long hair.”
Longhaired kids who were heavy metal fans were common, as were black T-shirts.
At trial, defense attorneys elicited police testimony that Echols was wearing a Portland Trail Blazers black T-shirt on the night of his arrest, establishing to no clear end that black T-shirts were mainstream enough to be worn by NBA fans. Or by Reba McEntire fans, as demonstrated by a T-shirt from the Misskelley home.
Juvenile Officer Jerry Driver testified about Misskelley’s links to Baldwin and Echols in Misskelley’s trial.
Driver, who died in August 2016, had seen the three together for the first time around Nov. 15, 1992, at Lakeshore. Damien, Jason and Jessie walked by while he and a sheriff’s deputy were dealing with a suspected drunken driver. “It was nighttime … They all had on long black coats, and Damien had a slouch hat and they all had staffs. … Long sticks that they were walking with.”
Misskelley dismissed the story as ridiculous during one of his many confessions, saying he did not have a black coat. Driver’s account has been widely ridiculed, though never refuted.
Driver repeated the story at the Echols/Baldwin trial. “We saw three gentlemen walking by … Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin … with long coats” and “long sticks or staffs.”
Driver had seen them together on a few other occasions, “maybe two or three times,” … “Twice, I think, at uh — at Walmart and once out in the trailer park.”
Otherwise, he had seen Echols and Baldwin together dressed in black.
Echols girlfriend Domini Teer, in a Sept. 10, 1993, statement, surprised Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Fogleman by volunteering that “Jessie came around after them kids was killed.”
Fogleman: “OK, what do you mean by that? That he came around after the kids were murdered? What do you mean?”
Domini: “I mean, the boy shows up a week after them kids were killed …. Out of nowhere. I mean we hadn’t seen Jessie for months. I mean he did that when Damien and me got back together, and Damien was living with his stepdad, Jack. All of a sudden, Jessie comes showing up, and the first time we’ve seen Jessie since the year before that. …”
Fogleman: “And … then Jessie was around quite a bit then?”
Domini: “Every once in a while, like once or twice, yeah, I saw him. … I mean, when all the cops were bringing everybody in and all and talking to everybody … It was like two days after the cops were coming around, um … Jessie came over to Jason’s house one day while I was sitting there, and wanting Damien to take Blockbuster movies to Blockbuster … And they went, and I guess, took Blockbuster movies back and they wound up over at Jessie’s house … because his mom had come over to get Damien … Damien’s mom … cause he was supposed to be at Jason’s house….
“And it made me mad, and I called over to Jessie’s and said where’s Damien. And he goes, Damien’s on his way back. Matthew just come get him. I said I know, I sent Matthew over there to come get him, cause his parents are here. And then I hung up the phone.”
Fogleman: “And about when did that happen after this Wednesday?”
Domini: “Um … it was about like that next week.” That would have been when Damien’s parents supposedly were temporarily separated, according to some contradictory accounts of Echols’ mother, Pam, and after Damien had been interviewed by police several times and failed the polygraph.
Jessie was trying to get Damien and selfappointed detective Vicki Hutcheson together about that time. “Dark Spell” described Baldwin’s version of the visit.
According to Baldwin, Misskelley showed up unexpectedly at the Baldwin trailer because a friend from Highland Trailer Park wanted to meet Echols.
from Highland Trailer Park wanted to meet Echols.
year-old Hutcheson.
Domini told Fogleman she had seen Misskelley a total of three times. “The first time, we had come up the street, and he was messing around with Matt, and we thought somebody was getting beat up, because they were all screaming and hollering out there, and when we walked out there was Jessie.” “Messing around” with younger kids was routine for Jessie.
“And the second time I seen him, they had come over there and me and Damien was together, and they had just come knocking on the door with him and B.J. … And that was the last time I’d ever seen him until that time that he …. came over to Jason’s to go get Damien.”
Charlotte Bly Bolois, who lived at Lakeshore the summer of 1992 and visited there often, told police that Echols and Misskelley were close friends at that time, constantly seen together along with her cousin, Buddy Lucas.
She also described how Misskelley got into a fight in June 1992 with her husband, Dan Bolois: “My husband has two younger brothers, one is fixing to be 16 and other one is fixing to be 18, and he started a fight with my husband younger brothers and um, my husband went up there and ask him what was the deal and little Jessie Misskelley was going to pull a knife, but I got behind Jessie and took the knife from him.”
The younger brothers were Johnny and Shane Perschke, and there have been various accounts of fights involving John Perschke.
Bolois recalled a fight “right there at my trailer” with Misskelley. “Him and my husband got into a fight later on down Fool Lake.” That was the fight involving the knife. She requested that Misskelley give her the knife. “And he turned around and handed me the knife, I said if you’re going to fight, fight fair. … He busted a hole in my husband’s lip.”
A recent account from a West Memphis resident who asked that her name be withheld painted a disturbing portrait of Damien, Jason and Jessie interacting with children from the neighborhood where their victims lived:
“In 1993 I used to live in Mayfair Apartments. I lived in the townhouses that are located in the back of the complex. I lived there for around a year and a half.
“One day I was coming home and parked in front of a park on the property close to my apartment. As I parked I noticed 3 teenage boys and 3 young boys. It caught me as strange cause one of the teenagers was dressed all in black with a long black coat the other 2 were standing a few steps back from the one in black. So I sat there in my car watching for a few minutes. The teen in black was coaching those 3 little boys (I guessed at the time were 8 or 9 years old) how to hold their bikes on their shoulders and climb a ladder of a slide and how to ride down. The other teen boys were just standing a little behind the one in black not doing much except watching and laughing from time to time. One was kinda stocky the other one skinny. It didn't seem to bother them that I was watching. They saw me.
“Any way one of the little boys was about to start up the ladder so I got out of my car and told him to get down. That's when the teen in black made a couple steps toward me and said I needed to shut the f--k up and take my ass into my apartment. This was none of my business. At that point I said if it didn't stop I was going to call the police. Then I was called a f--king bitch. So I got my kids out of my car as he stood there and watched. He watched me all the way to my apartment. It was kinda frightening. I go to call the police but looked back out to see if he or they were headed toward my apartment but instead they just left. So I decided to not call the police and never thought anything else of it. …
“About 3 weeks to a month later three 8 year old boys were murdered in the woods right out the back door of the apartment I used to live in. I remember thinking I was so glad we had moved. Well then I was watching the news showing that 3 teenagers had been arrested. When I saw the pictures of the boys I told my husband that the one called Damien Echols was the one that cussed me out and was the one trying to make the kids carry their bikes up the slide. I also recognized the other 2 boys. They are Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin.
“The three little boys I saw Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin with that day I can't swear was Michael, Stevie or Chris. I do remember 1 of the boys was blonde and 1 had a red bike. If I'm remembering correctly it was the blonde that had the red bike on his shoulder. I really wasn't watching the little boys. I was paying more attention to the 3 teen boys and what they were doing.
“I never told anyone what I saw but family and friends. I never thought it was very important at the time since they had caught them. I was in my early 20's, working, taking care of 2 young kids and my grandparents. My husband was working and going to school at night. I had my hands full. Looking back I wish I had told what I saw.” "DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE." The central figure in the investigation,
prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out of step with his peers in the Arkansas Delta.
Meece, Gary. Blood on Black: The Case Against the West Memphis 3, Volume I (The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers Book 1) . UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
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