Misskelley's confession was the main evidence presented against him in court. The West Memphis police questioned Misskelley for several hours, gave him a polygraph, told him he flunked (an expert retained by the defense later said he passed) and then informed the mildly retarded teenager that he could either play ball with the law or fess up. Misskelley confessed as the police taped the last 30 minutes or so of his interrogation. But he made a series of mistakes, even though the officers asked leading questions. Misskelley got the time of the crime wrong until the cops corrected him. He said the boys were tied up with brown rope, instead of their own shoelaces. And more than once he misidentified the boys shown to him in pictures.

"I was telling them I don't know nothing about this," Misskelley told the filmmakers in "PL2." "But [the police] kept aggin' it on, aggin' it on, aggin' it on. Finally, I just said something so they would leave me alone."

Misskelley's attorney, Dan Stidham, now a municipal court judge in Arkansas, put experts in false confessions on the stand and presented a dozen witnesses to Misskelley's alibi that he was 50 miles away in another city on the evening of the murders. But the jury chose to believe the prosecution.

"I have it from a very reliable source that the initial vote was eight to four," says Stidham. "Eight for guilty on capital murder and four for outright acquittal. Over the next 12 hours, the jury came to a classic compromise verdict. Four said we'll vote guilty, but you're not going to do the death penalty because we're not sure. Mr. Misskelley was actually convicted on two counts of second-degree murder and one count of first-degree murder. Even though he confessed, and the state had the strongest case against him, he got the least punishment, ironically."

Stidham is appealing his client's case, though the focus of the WM3 cause is now on Echols because he's sitting on death row. Interestingly, Stidham does not believe that Gitchell set out to elicit a false confession from his client.

"Gitchell just didn't realize how mentally handicapped Mr. Misskelley really was," he says. "I think the situation got carried away, and they put too much pressure on this kid. Even though he was chronologically 17 years of age in 1993, he literally had the mind of a 5-year-old. Five-year-old children believe in the Easter Bunny and Power Rangers. You take someone of that intellect, you hook him up to a polygraph machine, give them an exam and then tell them they're lying their ass off. When you do that, you distort their view of reality. You're going to get what you want to hear, basically."

Yet Gitchell insists his conscience is clear. "When you put it all together, it's a convincing case," he says. "We treated Jessie and everyone else who was involved in this case as if they were our own kids. It's the law. You've got to. But we also knew the media was watching. We had to watch what we did because we knew we would be judged on it."

In 1994, Circuit Judge John Fogleman was the deputy prosecutor on both trials and he played a key role in convicting all three young men; he is a constant presence in both films. Over the phone, his accessibility and Southern charm are disarming -- like someone who has run for office before and no doubt will again.

"I don't have any problem with any amount of investigation," he tells me in his pronounced drawl. "If I'm wrong, if the jury is wrong, it ought to be corrected. But I don't believe we were wrong. I welcome any investigation."

Fogleman says he did have some "problems" with Misskelley's confession, but on the whole found it credible. He says he does not believe it was in any way coerced.

Like Gitchell, Fogleman cites the knife found near Baldwin's home as well as the hearsay testimony of the teenage girls and others. But all combined, it seems like an unusual paucity of evidence with which to seek a murder conviction, much less an execution.

"I would've loved to have had a stronger case," says Fogleman. "But you get what you've got. And when you get the evidence we had, and it was sufficient to go to a jury, what choice do you have?"

Fogelman concedes, "There was a lack of physical evidence to tie anyone or anything to the crime scene. There was not a drop of blood -- not that could be seen with the naked eye. The crime lab did some luminol testing, which is not admissible as evidence, and where we say that the murders happened, there was a reaction."

Fogleman and his fellow prosecutor, Brent Davis, also turned to the occult to help them out. As evidence they offered books that Echols had obtained from the local library on witchcraft, read excerpts from Echols' rambling notebooks, showed the jury "satanic" images Echols had on the walls of his room and offered "cult cop" Dale Griffis as an expert in teenage Satanists.

Possessing a mail-order Ph.D. from Columbia Pacific University, Griffis testified that the murders occurred near a couple of pagan holidays and were probably occult inspired. He also testified that some signs of occult activity by teenagers included black fingernails, black T-shirts and tattoos (the combination of which would be enough to indict many teenagers in America as followers of Beelzebub).

The prosecution was clearly playing to popular hysteria, which held that Echols was the leader of a satanic cult and that occult activity was rampant in that part of Arkansas. The defense blundered by putting Echols on the stand to explain his beliefs. Echols didn't help matters by describing himself as a Wiccan, a practitioner of "white magic." He told the jury that while investigating Catholicism he changed his first name to Damien in honor of the Catholic martyr, Father Damien, who ministered to lepers in Hawaii, caught the disease himself and died.

Like his testimony, this name change was highly unfortunate. No matter how noble the motivation, it's hardly surprising that in the minds of many (and especially in the context of the trial) the name he appropriated evoked the 1978 horror movie "Damien: Omen II," in which a boy possessed by demonic powers kills people. And Echols' cerebral explanations for his various interests as well as his naturally black hair and pale complexion undoubtedly damaged his situation.

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