Dark Spell Read online

  Sequel to Devil’s Knot

  DARK SPELL

  Surviving the Sentence

  ––––––––––––––

  Mara Leveritt

  with Jason Baldwin

  BIRD CALL PRESS

  Little Rock

  Also by MARA Leveritt

  Devil’s Knot

  The True Story of The West Memphis Three

  ––––––––––––––

  The Boys on the Tracks

  Death, Denial, and a Mother’s Crusade to Bring Her Son’s Killers to Justice

  Contents

  Chapter Jason’s World Page

  1 Home 3

  2 Juvenile Detention 26

  3 Diagnostic 62

  4 Varner 74

  5 Grimes 108

  6 Varner II 141

  7 Little Tucker 181

  8 Super Max 196

  Notes 214

  Index 274

  BIRD CALL PRESS

  DARK SPELL – SURVIVING THE SENTENCE

  Copyright © 2014 by Mara Leveritt All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  For information, contact Mara Leveritt at maraleveritt.com

  Design by patrickhouston.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leveritt, Mara

  Dark Spell - Surviving the Sentence / Mara Leveritt

  ISBN – 13: 978-1499175752

  ISBN – 10: 1499175752

  1 Murder--Arkansas--West Memphis--investigation Case studies

  2 Judicial process--Arkansas--West Memphis Case studies

  3 Murder trial--Arkansas--West Memphis Case studies

  4 Baldwin, Jason

  5 Echols, Damien

  6 Misskelley, Jessie

  7 West Memphis Three--United States--History--20th century

  8 Alford Plea--Arkansas--West Memphis Case studies

  First edition, June, 2014, by Bird Call Press.

  Printed in the United States by CreateSpace

  To LSB with love

  Acknowledgements

  In memory of Ron Lax, the first supporter 1949 – 2013

  I thank my family, the nuclear one that fuels my heart, and the expansive, generous one that has helped me write this book. As I cannot possibly list everyone who has supported me and this project for the past twenty years, I’ll take this page simply to thank: Jason Baldwin and Holly Ballard, Christian Hansen and the contributors to Callahan.8k.com, Joe Berlinger, Helen Bennett, Kathy Bakken, Grove Pashley, Burk Sauls, Lisa Fancher, Martin Hill of jivepuppi.com, Laird Williams, Patrick Houston, Stephanie Keet, Mike Poe, Mike Ledford, the family of Booker Worthen, the Central Arkansas Library System, Laman Library, my “DK2” subscribers, the gang at Arkansas Times, everyone who granted interviews or helped me get records, and all the supporters, attorneys and investigators who helped free the West Memphis Three.

  Author’s note

  The madness unleashed in West Memphis, Arkansas, in May 1993 ended three young lives and horribly altered three more. Since then, it has touched thousands of other lives—some, like mine, profoundly. I began writing about the murders the summer they occurred, shortly after the teenagers were charged. For a reporter focused not just on “what” but “why,” the case became an irritant. Ordinary information was sealed, while key records were released improperly—signaling irregularities to come. When the trials were finally held in 1994, they resembled a dance of phantoms with innuendos more than a rational process. Yet the convictions that resulted were as real as the children’s graves.

  I wrote Devil’s Knot to explore the legal underpinnings of verdicts that seemed insupportable. In contrast to the prosecutions, I wanted that book to be as straightforward and emotionally neutral as possible in order to credibly challenge the conclusions of two juries and a state Supreme Court.

  Dark Spell is different. First, although Chapters One and Two cover some of the period examined in Devil’s Knot, including events that preceded and led to the convictions, here these episodes are seen through Jason’s eyes, and the book focuses primarily on what followed those convictions. Second, while Devil’s Knot dealt with all three of the accused, Dark Spell is Jason’s story. I thank him for letting me relate this painful part of it. Quotes come from letters exchanged while he was in prison, visits with him there, and interviews since his release. Finally, this book makes no attempt at neutrality. While I remain as committed to fact-based reporting as ever, I tell this story plainly as I’ve come to see it: a tragedy replete with victims and heroes responding to abuses of power.

  It is unusual for a reporter to devote so much of her life to a single “story.” This case deserves such attention because, in its complexity, it represents so many of the individual problems that plague American courts. A forthcoming book will conclude this Justice Knot Trilogy.1

  Locator Map

  Jason’s World

  1977 - 2007

  “A prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate. this responsibility carries with it specific obligations to see that the defendant is accorded procedural justice, that guilt is decided upon the basis of sufficient evidence, and that special precautions are taken to prevent and to rectify the conviction of innocent persons.” ~ American Bar Association

  A prosecuting attorney “may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.” ~ Berger v. United States

  “A lawyer should avoid even the appearance of impropriety.” ~ Arkansas Supreme Court, “Rules of Professional Conduct”

  Chapter ONE

  HOME

  April 11, 1977 - June 3, 1993

  No child understands the forces that gather before he is born. No one tells children that they’ve been born into a matrix, especially if it’s a dangerous one, in part because some intricacies are too fine even for adults to see. So, like most kids, Jason Baldwin took life at face value. Absorbed in the familiarity of his growing up, he could not imagine the violence at hand, how formally it would come cloaked, or how hard it would try to kill him.

  In 1977, the year Jason was born, John A. Fogleman, Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, wrote the controversial opinion that declared Arkansas’s death penalty to be constitutional. 2 The court’s decision was a narrow one, with three of its seven justices dissenting. But Chief Justice Fogleman maintained that Arkansas law provided “adequate safeguards against arbitrary, capricious or freakish imposition of the death penalty.”3

  Jason didn’t know that eleven years later, by the summer of 1988, the Chief Justice’s nephew, John N. Fogleman, was already serving as a deputy prosecuting attorney in the family’s stronghold of eastern Arkansas. Nevertheless, in August of that year, Jason’s childhood path would cross that of the up-and-coming young prosecutor.

  Jason was about to enter the sixth grade. Prosecutor Fogleman was in his early thirties. The young district attorney had charged a group of trailer park kids, including Jason and his younger brother Matt, with vandalism. The boys said the cars were junkers, kept in a rusted, overgrown shed with one collapsed wall. To the kids, the shed presented adventure, one of the few places around to play. But the building’s owner caught the kids playing there. He claimed the junks were antique autos that the boys had damaged, and he called authorities. Ultimately, that meant Fogleman. The slim, erect prosecutor agreed that the boys had destroyed valuable property. In court, he argued that the lot of them should be sent to reform school.

  They weren’t. Instead, the court ordered the kids’ pare
nts to pay a fine for each child charged—with the understanding that, if they failed to pay, the reform school option would kick in and their children would be taken away. Jason couldn’t see well. His vision had been poor since birth, his family too poor to afford glasses. Still, he saw well enough to realize what went on that day in court. He saw that it was all about power. Put simply, the trailer park kids and their families had none, while Fogleman, the scion of a well-established family, wielded it like a prince.

  The experience offered Jason an inkling of the adult-world dynamics around him. But he was more focused on school, fishing, his brothers, his cat Charlie, his art—the substantive elements he called “life.” Besides, even if someone had been able to explain the malignancies forming around him, Jason would not have believed. A serious but easy-going kid, by the early 1990s, he’d come to love rock music, and though lyrics usually meant little to him, he’d taken to heart the line from one of his favorite band’s songs.

  “Forever trusting who we are, and nothing else matters…”

  ~ Metallica

  No brave sentiment, however, could protect Jason from the fateful vortex forming around him. Once he was caught in it, five years after the shed incident, he again faced Fogleman in court. This time Jason was sixteen, the prosecutor was planning to run for judge, and Jason, along with two other teenagers, was charged with murdering three children. Only one of the other boys arrested, Damien Echols, had reached the age of eighteen. The third, Jessie Misskelley, Jr. was seventeen. Though Jason and Jessie were still juveniles, Fogleman charged all three as adults, and he announced that he would ask jurors to sentence all three to death.4 After all, the death penalty was constitutional in Arkansas, even for teenagers—so long as the trials did not rest, as the prosecutor’s uncle on the Supreme Court had opined, on anything “arbitrary, capricious or freakish.”

  Families known as Fogleman (and Fogelman) moved to the area around Memphis, Tennessee, before the Civil War. One branch, the Foglemans, settled on the other side of the Mississippi River, a few miles northwest of Memphis, in the region around the present-day town of Marion, Arkansas.5 There, a stone marker in front of the Crittenden County Courthouse commemorates the family’s role in a monumental historic event that coincided with—and has remained overshadowed by—the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The marker honors the heroic actions taken by the prosecuting attorney’s ancestors in the chaotic days just after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender. In the dark of night on April 27, 1865, as President Abraham Lincoln lay dead but not yet buried in Washington, a steamboat overloaded with newly freed prisoners of war exploded in the middle of the Mississippi River, a few miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, and just south of Marion, Arkansas. Only the jubilation over the war’s end, followed by the shock of the president’s assassination, could have eclipsed news of what still remains America’s greatest maritime disaster.

  The steamship Sultana was laboring upstream from New Orleans to St. Louis. Built to hold three hundred seventy-five passengers, the boat was packed instead with more than two thousand just-released Union prisoners, three hundred ninety-eight civilians and seventy-five horses. Plowing against a river fast with winter’s runoff, the Sultana’s engines overheated. While most aboard the boat slept, three of the boat’s four boilers exploded, tearing it apart and igniting a blaze that could be seen from Memphis. Passengers were blown into the freezing water, some alive, others instantly dead from scalding steam, fire or shrapnel.6

  A paper the next day reported: “The river for a mile around was full of floating people; the light of the burning boat shone over a scene such as has never before been witnessed; such as language cannot paint or imagination conceive.”7 An estimated eighteen hundred people perished in the Sultana disaster—almost three hundred more than would die forty-seven years later with the sinking of the Titanic.8

  Boats from both sides of the river came to help, and almost 500 lives were saved. Men from the Arkansas side, including one named John Fogleman, rescued nearly one hundred of the survivors. That Fogleman and two of his sons lashed together logs that they paddled into the river to raft victims to shore. Thereafter, a newspaper reported: “Mr. Fogleman’s residence was converted into a temporary hospital for the sufferers, and every possible care and attention were bestowed on them by Mr. Fogleman and his family.”9

  In the years that followed, the Foglemans of east Arkansas rose to prominence in farming, real estate, politics and law. For generations, the family christened men John. By the end of the twentieth century, when Chief Justice John A. Fogleman was a state Supreme Court justice, his brother Julian Fogleman served as both a deputy prosecuting attorney and Marion’s city attorney. John N. Fogleman, Jason’s prosecutor, was Julian’s son. John N. Fogleman had graduated from law school in Arkansas with honors when Jason was about six. By 1993, when police found three children murdered in the city of West Memphis, a few miles south of Marion, John N. Fogleman had a private law practice and was serving, as had his father, as Marion’s city attorney and as a deputy district prosecutor, in addition to holding a seat on the Marion School Board.10

  Jason’s family was almost rootless by comparison. He was born on April 11, 1977, across the river in Memphis to a mother who had earned a high-school equivalency degree and a father who at the time was illiterate. Though Jason’s vision suffered from birth, he savored vivid memories, such as sitting on the kitchen floor as a child, scraping cake batter from the sides of a bowl with his finger, while his dad, Charles Baldwin, sat at the table holding Jason’s baby brother Matt in his arms. From a later time, he remembered going to the movies—Beast Master and Conan the Barbarian—with his dad. That was all before his parents divorced when Jason was four.

  Jason was five when Gail moved him and Matt across the Mississippi River to Marion, where the three lived just down the road from Gail’s mother in her home at Lakeshore Trailer Park. Jason started kindergarten in Marion. But when Gail married another man, Terry Ray Grinnell, the family moved again, back across the river, to a community north of Memphis, where Jason attended first grade. Every Sunday and Wednesday, Gail took him and Matt to a Southern Baptist church. Jason liked the Bible stories in Sunday school and though his mom didn’t talk about the Bible at home, Jason felt “she lived it.” He believed she instilled in him the “the flavor” of the Bible.

  With second grade came a new little brother, named Terry after his dad, and a “nicer” house in Memphis. Jason started another school, his third in as many years, but he didn’t mind the changes. Life was an adventure to him. The new house had trees that he and Matt could climb, and they reveled in the freedom of riding their bikes to school. Sometimes, their stepdad took them fishing. Other times, the family would drive back to their former trailer park in Marion to visit Gail’s mother. Jason’s grandmother owned a regular-sized trailer at Lakeshore, in which she lived. But she also owned a doublewide that fronted the park’s namesake lake, and this she rented out. One summer, while Jason was visiting, one of Gail’s brothers built a dock on the rental property into the lake. Jason hung around during the construction and got to know Mrs. Littleton, the woman next door. He helped her with various chores, and she brought lemonade to him and the builders.

  But home was back in Memphis, and there, life was rough and getting rougher. Terry, Sr., worked maintenance at a motel. He stayed sober during the workweek but drank heavily on the weekends. Gail and her boys suffered living with a weekend drunk. Jason remembered: “He’d be off in the bars, and she’d get us all in the car, going out in the middle of the night, going into bars, checking and looking for him. It happened every weekend. He was responsible at his job, but on weekends, he’d go out to shoot pool. He was good at it. He won our washer and dryer by shooting pool. But he’d also be drinking. Mom would be trying to get him to come home. There’d be arguments. He’d be yelling. It would escalate to violence. I’d have to run out the door to the neighbors to get them to call the cops. And there we were—me and Matt—having scho
ol the next day.”

  At first, only Gail felt Terry’s direct violence. “He didn’t take it out on us until later on,” Jason said. Finally, Gail ended it. Jason was almost at the end of fifth grade when he and Matt came home from school one day to find Gail’s mother at their house. Again, they packed. And again, Gail—now with three boys in tow—crossed the river to Marion, to move in with her mother.

  In Marion Jason turned eleven and Matt nine. They had few places to play in the trailer park, but the fallen-in building with the old cars was a favorite. “Some of the cars were burnt out, with trees growing up through them,” he recalled. “They looked like they’d been there for years. None of them had windows. And the shed had only three walls. It was like a Little Rascals place. All the kids played there all summer.” Jason doesn’t remember damaging the cars, and Matt doesn’t recall Jason “breaking anything,” either. However, Matt does remember that he was “jumping from one antique car to another” and that “a lot of us were wrecking the place.” Whatever was going on, the fun ended with the appearance of two men demanding to know, “What are you kids doing in here?”

  “We told them we were playing,” Jason said. “They said, ‘Y’all just wait right here.’ And we did. Then they went and called the cops. The police took us all to jail. Our parents had to pick us up. The next thing I knew, we needed a public defender.” Jason’s only memory of the attorney who was assigned to represent him and Matt was that “he just gave us a New Testament and told us everything would be okay.”11

  Jason recalled that he, Matt and the other boys were charged with breaking and entering. The owner of the shed claimed that some of the cars were damaged and that at least one headlight had been shot out. Jason remembers the chill he felt when he heard Fogleman recommend that all of the children be sentenced to two years in reform school. He remembers his even greater shock upon hearing his own attorney agree that “That would probably be for the best.” In the end, however, Jason, Matt and the other kids were placed on probation. His mother, now named Gail Grinnell, was ordered to pay a fine of four hundred fifty dollars for each of her two boys.12 Nine hundred dollars was a lot for a woman who could never spend more than one hundred dollars for her three children at Christmas. One family had four children who’d been at the shed. These parents would spend years trying to pay off the fines, while their children now all had records.