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  For Jason, the episode slid into the category of “life’s disappointments,” where it joined poverty, an absent dad, a fragile mom and a drunken stepdad. But his nature bent towards resilience. On the cusp of adolescence, he envisioned a better life for himself and his family. Unconsciously embracing “the American dream,” he looked for what was hopeful and kept his focus on that.

  “Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.”

  ~ T.S. Eliot

  Whatever they did in that shed, the kids clearly should not have entered. The court held them responsible, and their families suffered the consequences. That, supposedly, was justice. But “justice” has always played favorites, especially with regard to its own. For example, Fogleman, as a young prosecutor, made some mistakes of his own. And though it could be argued that they bore consequences much more severe than whatever damage was done to the cars, and though, like the kids, courts found him at fault, he suffered no penalty.

  By the time Fogleman charged Jason, Matt and the other children with vandalism and threatened them with reform school, the Arkansas Supreme Court had already cited Fogleman’s improper conduct in orders that reversed two high-profile convictions he’d won. The first concerned Fogleman’s prosecution of a fifteen year-old boy from West Memphis. Ronald Ward was in the seventh grade—and had been for three years—when Fogleman took him to trial in 1985 for the fatal stabbing of two elderly sisters and their twelve year-old great-grandnephew. The jury found Ward guilty, and Judge David Burnett, a former prosecutor himself—and the judge who would later officiate at Jason’s trial—pronounced Ward’s sentence of death.

  Ward became the youngest person on death row in the United States, and his sentence drew national attention. In an interview weeks after his trial, Ward, an African-American, claimed that he was innocent. “When they gave me an all-white jury,” he told a reporter, “right then I said, this is not going to be a fair trial.” Two years later, on Ward’s direct appeal in 1987, the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed that Ward’s trial had, indeed, been unfair.

  In reversing Ward’s conviction, the high court noted, “All of the peremptory challenges exercised by the prosecuting attorney— eight in this case—were used to strike black people from the jury.” The Supreme Court found that Fogleman’s use of the peremptory challenges had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and thus denied Ward a fair trial. The Arkansas Supreme Court wrote that “any prosecutor who uses all of his peremptory challenges to strike black people [from the jury] better have some good reasons.” The Court found that some of the reasons Fogleman had offered “were exactly the type of explanations the United States Supreme Court said were unsatisfactory.”13

  Ward was retried before Burnett. This time the jury sentenced him to life in prison.

  Fogleman’s other early reversal as a prosecutor came in a case that also resulted in a sentence of life in prison. There, the Supreme Court ruled that Fogleman had failed in his “duty” as an officer “of the State and the court to come forth with critical evidence.” The court ruled that Fogleman’s “error consisted of the withholding of significant evidence,” thus denying the defendant a fair trial.14

  To some, unfair trials that result in sentences of death or life in prison would seem more serious than a spate of vandalism—if that’s what it was—by kids who were not yet teenagers. But, as law is a world unto itself, prosecutors can make life-threatening mistakes and not be held accountable.15

  While Fogleman was forging his career on a path that seemed to be tracking his uncle’s, Jason’s path was laid by his mother. Because of her move back to Arkansas, Jason started sixth grade at Marion Elementary School, where word quickly got around that the new kid was on probation. Jason didn’t know anyone, but he’d changed schools before. He’d found it easy to make friends. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for the first day there. As soon as Jason’s class went outside to recess, a short kid flew at him out of nowhere, fists flying. Startled, but quick, Jason avoided the blows. Then the short kid started chasing Jason, hollering like he meant to kill him. Jason kept well ahead but wondered: “What’s up with this little guy? He must be nuts.” Finally, a girl named Donna Spurlock yelled, “Hey, Jessie, leave him alone.” The short kid stopped. Donna came to straighten things out. She told Jessie Misskelley, Jr., to promise not to mess with Jason anymore. Jessie promised. Jason shrugged. “Kids fight,” he later said. “It’s like that everywhere. It was just the playground hierarchy.”

  Jessie was a sixth-grader too, but in a different class. The two saw each other only at recess. Jason had no idea where Jessie—or, for that matter, where most of the kids at his school—lived. When Jason wasn’t at school, the winding roads of Lakeshore Trailer Park constituted his world. The trailer park was home, but it was socially isolating. Most of his school friends lived in houses, either near the town’s center or in subdivisions. They lived so far away he couldn’t ride his bike there to play. Jason felt the physical separation as “sort of a cultural gap.” But he also understood that the trailer park was only part of what separated him and Matt from their classmates. Poverty was the big divide. For the brothers, it was a good—and a not-so-good – thing when teachers brought them second-hand clothes.

  Tastes in music also distinguished the brothers from most of their peers. Gail loved rock ‘n’ roll, and she’d passed that love on to her boys. But, although Elvis came to be revered in these parts after his death in 1977, four months after Jason was born, the region as a whole viewed rock with deep suspicion. Preachers warned that the devil was in it, ensnaring those who listened, using them for his purposes. Heavy metal was the worst. Gail didn’t believe that and neither did Jason. “I was raised to listen to rock music,” he later wrote. “My mom listened to it so I did too.” By sixth grade, his fingers itched to play the guitar. Of course, for a family that couldn’t buy eyeglasses, a guitar was out of the question.

  Nevertheless, Jason did get a guitar when he was in sixth grade— if only for a night. A kid who lived around the corner from him had a guitar that sat, unused, in his closet. Jason asked if he could borrow it. The kid had a better idea. “I’ll give it to you,” he said. “But you have to give me all your rock t-shirts, all your cassettes, your Nintendo, your skateboard, your jacket—and your bicycle.” Jason said they had a deal. Plans were made. At midnight, Jason loaded all the booty into a backpack, rode his bike to the boy’s house and knocked on his window; the transaction was made. “I said, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and went home and jammed until like 7:30 or 8 in the morning,” Jason recalled. “That’s when I heard a knock on the door and there stood his mom holding all my stuff.” Over time, Jason came to regard the episode as part of a pattern that ran through his life, one he described as “having and not having, experiencing and not experiencing, good stuff and bad.”

  Once Gail had divorced Jason and Matt’s dad, Charles Baldwin, she never mentioned him to the boys again. There were no pictures of him in the house. It was as though he had never lived. But one day, after an absence of eight years, Charles Baldwin came back. Gail allowed him to see his sons only after he’d promised her that he would not reveal who he was. But the promise made no difference. Jason knew his father immediately. His memories—like those of the movies the two had seen together—were clear. However, as the adults seemed intent on believing the boys didn’t know, Jason went along. The charade finally ended when the couple drove to a store where Gail got out of the car to buy cigarettes. The man turned around to Jason, who was sitting in the back seat, and asked, “You know who I am, Boy?” “Yeah,” Jason answered. “You’re my dad.” When Gail returned, Jason’s dad looked at her, jerked his head in Jason’s direction and said, “He knows who I am.” Furious, Gail ordered Charles to leave. Before he did, Jason recalled, his dad told him, “You should tell your mom to get you some glasses.”

  Even without glasses, Jason liked school and did well in it. He had the advantage of a last
name that started with “B,” which got him a front-row seat in Marion’s alphabetically arranged classrooms. He could see the teacher and the blackboard. Though Jason had a couple of other strikes against him—poverty and probation— he had a gift for getting along. When Steve Jones, his probation officer, visited the school to check on him as the court required, the two would sit and talk. “I’d show him my report card,” Jason said. “And sometimes when he came to the house to talk to my mom, he’d even buy us sodas. He was real nice and respectful. He never abused his authority. I always felt he thought it was a load of crap that we got arrested, but since we did, the visits were okay. They were just him doing his job.”

  By the time Jason got to seventh grade, his grandma’s renters had moved out. She gave Gail and her three boys the doublewide by the lake. The boys loved having the dock and fished from it whenever they could, catching crappie, bass, catfish and brim, with their cat Charlie hanging around, doing some fishing himself. Gail would cook the catch with hushpuppies for dinner, and if the weather was good, she’d fry it—and they’d eat it—right there on the dock, tossing bread to the ducks as the sun set. Mrs. Littleton next door would be on her dock too, regaling the family with stories of catches from the past.

  Life in the trailer beside the lake flowed between the ordinary tasks of home and school, the pleasures of music, art and goofing around, and visits with Jones, the probation officer. Eighth and ninth grades came and went. School was going well. But Gail had resumed seeing Terry. About a month after the family moved into the bigger trailer, Terry had moved in too. He’d quit his job in Memphis, saying that he would take care of the house and children while Gail supported the family of five, working nights at her job as a truck dispatcher in Memphis. “My mom and Terry loved each other, and there were promises to do better,” Jason said. “But old habits die hard, I guess. They returned to the old patterns pretty quickly. I remember she’d be yelling at him, and he’d slap her, and I’d be, like, ‘Stop!’ and stuff, and Matt would be too, and he’d turn around and punch us.”

  Though Jason had no idea that Fogleman sat on the school board, he felt that he was getting a good education in Marion, and he appreciated it. However, he also realized by the ninth grade that not everyone valued school as he did. He knew, for instance, that Jessie Misskelley, whose family had recently moved to Lakeshore, was struggling, even in his special education classes. And he recognized that Damien Echols, one of the smart kids he knew, was just marking time in school. Damien was more than two years older than Jason, but the two were in the same grade, in part because Damien had had to repeat the fifth grade. In Jason’s view, “Damien was just there because he had to be. He was pretty much a smart aleck. He didn’t really have much respect for the teachers.”16

  For about a year and a half, while Jason was in the eighth and ninth grades, he and Jessie lived on the same street. “We got to know each other,” Jason said. “We got to be pretty good friends.” The two rode the same bus to school. “We’d play dodge ball or kick ball while we were waiting. We’d have a good time.” Jason knew that Jessie had been charged once with theft of property, but having been judged by some people for being poor and by the court for the shed incident, he preferred not being judgmental.

  As for the theft, Jessie told Jason that he thought he was doing a good deed. Walking home one day, he’d taken a shortcut through a field. There, he’d seen the strangest thing: a bunch of flags lying on the ground with no one in sight. He said he didn’t even think about it; he just picked up the flags and took them home. He said he was going to ask his dad what he should do with them but until then he would protect them. However, before he saw his father to ask his advice, the flags were noticed missing, and someone had seen Jessie Jr. picking them up from the field. That’s when Jessie Jr. was arrested and catapulted into the world of juvenile justice.

  One day, while riding his bike in Lakeshore, Jason was surprised to see Damien riding his skateboard there. As it turned out, Damien and his family had moved to the trailer park too. Among the kids who lived there, Jason had far more in common with Damien than he did with Jessie, and before long, Jason and Damien were hanging out together. “Usually, that’s how it goes,” Jason said. “You spend time with friends who live close to you. It’s hard for a kid to have long-distance friends. It’s not like you had everybody in the world at your fingertips to choose from. He was there.”

  Connected by circumstance, the two became best friends. They’d go to each other’s houses, play Nintendo, and listen to cassettes. Jason introduced Damien to Metallica, explaining how Metallica “can build all these different harmonies and melodies with their single instruments, and yet the music that they build independently becomes an instrument in itself, to make the overall song.” In turn, Damien shared his appreciation of Pink Floyd, Guns n’ Roses, and Nine Inch Nails.

  Jason thought his mom was strict because she made him check in at home, in person, every hour. But Damien’s mom was even more watchful. “A lot of times, I’d go over to his house, and his parents wouldn’t let him have company or come out,” Jason said. “I thought that was weird. But gradually, after his mom talked to my mom, she would let him come to my house. It was like going through an act of Congress just for us to play together.” Often the friends only sat on the dock, chucking rocks into the lake. Sometimes Damien smoked cigarettes. Jason never did. “People thought we did drugs because we looked wild, but we didn’t,” Jason said. “We didn’t need them.”

  Still, both boys were aware that their lives were not what they wanted. Jason understood by now that his mom suffered from depression, and he recognized the same illness in Damien. He believed that their friendship helped him. With few opportunities to do much else, the two did a lot of walking. “We used to walk to the local Walmart and bowling alley all the time,” Jason said, “even when we didn’t have any money. Neither one of us ever had any money. We definitely never had twenty bucks! We could maybe get five or ten to go to the bowling alley or the skating rink, where we would just enjoy being around people, especially the girls. That is basically why we went to these places: to meet new girls, shoot pool, and play video games.”

  Damien and Jason shared the clunk and splash of rocks in the lake, the fun of pool or video games, the prospect of meeting girls, and a sense of their lives’ limitations. But they also respected their differences. Jason wore mostly blue jeans with t-shirts featuring the bands he liked. Damien dressed to distinguish himself. He preferred to wear all black—black pants and plain black t-shirts. Though Jason’s family no longer went to church, Jason had read the Bible, felt a personal relationship with God, and “talked with Jesus like a brother.” He could not remember a time when he did not pray. Damien, on the other hand, was more curious about religion, spirituality, and the possibilities of magic. The two didn’t discuss that much. “I was a Christian, and I didn’t care about the rest of that stuff,” Jason said. “But I always supported his quest for knowledge.”

  The boys regarded their families differently too. In Jason’s view, “Damien didn’t have any respect for his mom or his dad, or even his sister, really.” By contrast, Jason loved his mom. He respected and obeyed her. He accepted the responsibilities she gave him, like washing dishes, mowing the yard, taking out the trash, helping his brothers with their homework, and watching them when Terry, Sr., wasn’t home. Jason also helped his grandmother and his neighbor Mrs. Littleton. Every now and then, he acknowledged, he got “resentful” because he didn’t have “more nice things and more freedom.” But his mom told him often how proud she was of him and how much she appreciated him, and to Jason, that love and approval mattered more than anything else.

  In the spring of 1992, when Jason was nearing the end of ninth grade, Damien, seventeen, and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Deanna Holcomb, feeling thwarted by her family, decided to run away. As Jason recalled, it was an intense and complicated situation. Deanna’s family had forbidden her to see Damien. In the void left by that
edict, Damien had found Domini Teer. “Their love was passionate and wild,” Jason said. “However, when Deanna started flirting again with Damien in the high school hallways, Damien responded. He would flirt with her during school hours, then after school, promise love to Domini. This worked until Deanna found out and gave Damien the ultimatum that if he truly loved her he would run away with her. In deciding to go with Deanna, he broke Domini’s heart.

  Damien and Deanna tried to talk Jason, who was thirteen at the time, into coming with them. “They said it would be a big adventure. We’d go to California and escape our miserable lives.” But Jason declined, explaining that his mom and brothers needed him. “I tried to talk them out of it,” he recalled, “but her parents forbade them to see each other, and they felt it was the only way they could be together.”

  The romantic escapade failed before it began, when Damien and Deanna, neither of whom could drive—let alone obtain a car—took refuge from a thunderstorm in an unoccupied house trailer. “That was a sad, dark day,” Jason said. Damien and Deanna were caught and arrested. Damien was charged with burglary, breaking and entering, disorderly conduct, sexual misconduct, and terroristic threatening. At the time, Jason didn’t know what had happened to his friend.

  What he did know was that, right after Damien’s arrest, Jason’s mother grounded him for weeks because of the incident. Jason never understood why he was grounded because, after all, he’d chosen to stay home. While Jason was grounded despite his sound decision, Damien’s family moved away to Portland, Oregon. The whole situation was hard. Because of the family’s move and because Jason was grounded, he never got a chance to say goodbye to Damien’s sister, Michelle. Only a few days earlier, he and Michelle had begun holding hands—and even kissed. Until Damien returned, Jason had no idea what had happened to him or his family. They were simply gone. For Jason, that summer passed strangely. He and Domini both missed Damien.