← The Prosecutors
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- [00:01]
Brett
Did you know that parents rank financial.
- [00:02]
Alice
Literacy as the number one most difficult.
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Brett
Life skill to teach?
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Alice
Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families.
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Brett
With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores automate allowance.
- [00:15]
Alice
And keep an eye on your kids spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money. With guardrails in place. Try Greenlight risk free today@greenlight.com wondery from the waters of Lake Erie, it was raising flags.
- [00:38]
Brett
He said there's no way that that fish should weigh 7.9 pounds. It's just not big enough.
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Alice
To a nondescript office building in Richmond, Virginia, home to a $700 million fund for children with special needs.
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Brett
If there were a cliche list of how to blow money that you just stole very quickly, this guy did all of them.
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Alice
To the ski slopes of Salt Lake City, where a former Olympic snowboarder landed on the FBI's most wanted list.
- [01:06]
Brett
Ryan James Wedding is one of those interesting Norcos who have had two very successful careers, one legal and one illegal.
- [01:14]
Alice
We're pulling back the curtain on a fresh lineup of opportunists who stopped at nothing to get ahead. These are the stories of people who saw a loophole, a moment of weakness, a chance to get ahead and took it. I'm host Sara James McLachlachlan. Join me for a new season of the opportunist on May 19th. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:55]
Brett
I'm Brett.
- [01:56]
Alice
And I'm Alice.
- [01:57]
Brett
And we are the Prosecutors. Today on the Prosecutors, we begin a deep dive into Jesse Misskeli's confessions. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always by my svelte co host, Alice.
- [02:58]
Alice
Hello, Brett. I don't know about being svelte.
- [03:00]
Brett
Well, Emily thinks you're svelte, so.
- [03:03]
Alice
Well, thank you. That's a great word. I love that word. I can never quite say it, though.
- [03:08]
Brett
Who knows? The way I pronounce it is always the correct way to pronounce it. So I said correct in that.
- [03:14]
Alice
But so. So Brett has some may say, a little bit of a southern accent.
- [03:20]
Brett
Some may say.
- [03:21]
Alice
Some may say. And it's like it's been a years long. I've realized you've taught me so much because I think in doing this podcast, I was at the store the other day, I live in the south, and there was like this woman talking to someone who clearly was not from the South. And she could not understand this lady who was like, Southern belle South. She was like an older lady who probably lived here her whole life. And that sweet, sweet, young, like, teenage girl who was doing checkout was like, what are you talking about? What? And I was the translator. It was so great. And I was like, look, I have a podcast with this guy who talks just like you. I got you, lady. So thank you.
- [03:57]
Brett
I think I've told this story before, but when I was in law school, there was a judge named Judge Santel. He's a brilliant guy, but he's from North Carolina, and he sounds like he never left North Carolina, but he's on the D.C. circuit, so brilliant judge. And he would give speeches at various events. And I would be sitting at these tables full of law students who were from New Jersey or New York or California or Chicago, and they would just be like, I can't understand anything he's saying. And so I would be the translator. So he would say something. I would laugh because he'd tell a joke, and then I would explain to them, like, what he said. It was something. But, yeah, I mean, it could be a difficult language.
- [04:35]
Alice
He has a great accent, though.
- [04:37]
Brett
It's, like, classic.
- [04:39]
Alice
It's like a movie kind of accent. Anyways, he really is speaking of. Speaking and being able to interpret what someone is or is not saying leads us right into today's episode with Confessions, because we can't always necessarily trust the words coming out of someone's mouth, can we? We don't know. We'll see.
- [05:00]
Brett
And this is episode 18 of our series here. And we have saved this very close to the end because basically we wanted you to have as many facts about the case as you could have. As we get into Confessions. Last week, we put the confessions, just basically took them off a call hand, put them into a single file and threw them up on the podcast so you guys could listen to them. I hope you took advantage of that. It's a valuable thing to do. It'll help you. As we're going through the confessions, there are two tape confessions that I know of. If anybody has tapes of the other ones, I'd be interested to hear those as well, and happy to put them up, too. But as Alice said, this is a critical point in the case. Whatever suspicions the police may have had about Damien Echols, the arrest didn't happen until Jesse Misskelley gave his confession. We're going to walk through that day. We're going to walk through the confession, but we're also going to talk about subsequent confessions Jesse gave because it wasn't just a one time thing. Jesse Confessy, some people have called him, whether fairly or not he was a serial confessor. He definitely was. Whether he was a murderer or not, he didn't like to confess. So we're going to talk about his confessions and we're going to talk about whether or not they are believable. And we're going to start off actually with a defense witness because I think this witness gives a lot of insight to confessions. He was, I believe he was with the lapd, had a long storied career in law enforcement. Warren Holmes, he became somewhat of an expert in polygraphs. He would testify on Jesse Misskelley's behalf through what was lengthy trial testimony from him and from others. We're going to talk about Jesse's confession and whether or not it was valid. Sometimes people will say that this was all suppressed by the judge and none of this came in the. That's just not true. I invite you to go read Warren Holmes testimony, read Richard Offshay's testimony. You can read them, describe why they believed this was a false confession. And one thing we get from Warren Holmes are some signs of a bad confession. So as we are getting into this confession, here are some things to keep in mind. First, an invalid polygraph test, which causes the investigators to become more assertive, is a catalyst to a false confession. We've talked about this before. Polygraphs. Do they tell you if someone's telling the truth or not? I guess it depends on who you ask. But a lot of police officers believe in them pretty deeply. The West Memphis police definitely did. We have seen throughout our discussion of this investigation how someone would pass a polygraph. And that was basically it. They passed it. They're good. Doesn't matter what the evidence says. If they fail it, they're going to be under suspicion. Jesse Miskelly, as we're going to discuss in a second, according to the West Memphis police officer who performed the polygraph, failed his polygraph. In his words, he was lying his ass off. So that certainly was something that would make the investigators more assertive. And it also is something that can be used to pressure a witness. Oftentimes, polygraph is an investigative tool because once you confront someone with a failed polygraph, they suddenly start to change their story. So that's number one. The person who falsely confesses is generally of low IQ and highly susceptible in personality structure. This is interesting for two reasons. Now Jesse Misskelley is of low iq. People debate how low it is. So he scored a 72 on his IQ test that was given to him before the trial. That is the number that will be cited to you over and over and over and over again. However, it is almost certainly lower than reality. Number one, he had taken other IQ tests before and scored higher, though not. Not like in the hundreds. I mean, he's in the seventies, still not quite 72. And his attorneys helpfully told him that the lower he scored on his IQ test, the more likely he wouldn't get the death penalty. So he had an incentive to malinger. And even his expert who testified at trial noted that the malingering score, because that is part of the test they are looking for that malingering, by the way, acting like you are failing the test when you're really not. You can malinger in all sorts of things. It happens when you're trying to show that you're incompetent to stand trial. You'll have people malinger and try and act like they're incompetent. It happens when you're pursuing an insanity defense. It happens on IQ test. So it seems like Jesse probably was malingering a little bit, though I think it is beyond dispute that he had a generally low IQ test. Now, I will say this. IQ generally speaking, is made up of two parts, performance and verbal. On performance, he's actually fine. He's normal. He's 88 on that. So he's pretty good on that. It was always his verbal that would bring him down. Verbal is typically how well you gonna do in school type thing. Performance is more how are you gonna perform in life? And Jesse had a job, he had a girlfriend. So it's not surprising that his performance portion is that high. We really should do a Luger briefs on this. Alice, I don't know if you've ever done any work with IQ when it comes to death penalty cases. I've done some of that work. And there's going to be a Supreme Court case next term. They've already granted cert on it about IQ and how it works. There are multiple ones that have come before, but we're going to refine that further. 70 has always been the unofficial cutoff. If you're below 70, we really look askance at executing someone. If you're above 70, you're more likely to be executed. And so there's this question about is that number really where it should be?
- [10:27]
Alice
That case might hit close to home. Or not.
- [10:29]
Brett
Yeah, it might be an Alabama case. I mean, I'm just saying might be. Could Be from a different state. But anyway, yeah, so I might be.
- [10:35]
Alice
Listening to the oral argument.
- [10:36]
Brett
So this is something people debate, and people even debate Jesse's iq. But I think one thing we can all agree on as a baseline here without too much controversy, Jesse was someone who had some intellectual difficulties when it came to iq, alcohol and substance abuse. This, number three, leads to confusion, and these subjects begin to doubt their own minds, especially when told they failed a polygraph examination. Jesse abused alcohol. In fact, Jesse would say he was drunk on the day of the murders. He also huffed gasoline. He also smoked marijuana. He was somebody who used a lot of substances. And as we said, he was told that he failed a polygraph examination. Number four, the subjects confess to get the police off their backs, and they assume that they can explain their behavior and their confessions at a later time. As a matter of fact, Jesse will say at a later time that he told the police what he thought they wanted to hear because he just wanted to go home. And that's what he says, whether you believe it or not.
- [11:31]
Alice
And that's why it's actually kind of fair to see who he confesses to at what point in time, because that's going to come into play in terms of that particular flavor of whether it's a false confession or not.
- [11:41]
Brett
So number five, those who falsely confess generally don't tell the investigators anything that the investigators don't already know. And their confessions conflict in detail on major points established by the crime scene analysis and investigation. The false confessor never provides any weapons, fruits of the crime, or anything physically material to corroborate the confession. We're going to talk about the confession. You can judge for yourself whether or not that happens. Number six, in most of these miscarriage of justice cases, there's a lot of pressure on the police to solve the case and a desire on their part to believe the false confession. To the lay individual, it is extremely difficult for them to conceive that a person would confess to a crime they did not commit. So two parts here. Number one, the police, they're desperate to solve a case. Somebody comes in and says, I did it. The police are more likely to believe them. That's a natural human reaction. And yeah, I think most lay people shoot. Most experts, and we've talked about this before, have a really hard time believing someone would say, yeah, I killed three kids, if they didn't kill three kids. We know false confessions happen, but knowing they happen and thinking that any particular confession is false are two different things. And it is very difficult to overcome this Jesse's attorneys knew that going into this trial, they knew this was going to be their biggest obstacle. That's one reason they have Warren Holmes testifying. So we're going to get into what makes confession valid. But before we summarize that for you, we're going to play for you Warren Holmes on the stand talking about what makes a confession valid. And obviously pay attention to this as well, because we're going to go through these confessions and see whether any of them match up with this.
- [13:19]
Warren Holmes
And could you tell the jury what an interrogator would look for when they are taking a confession that might raise a red flag or be indicative that the person person has given them a false confession? Well, the first thing that you look for is he's got to tell you something that you don't already know. And the second thing that you look for is that whatever he says does not conflict with the evidence or the crime scene analysis. The third thing, he should be able to lead you to the fruits of the crime or the crime weapon utilized. Now, in the initial part of the confession, it's always in narrative form where he suddenly just gets it off his chest and is an indication of relief that sets in and he tells you about it. And you don't have to prompt him or lead him with questions. He just gets it all out at one time. Then when he gets done telling you in a narrative form, that's when you start asking the questions. Also, what you look for is that when you do start questioning them to clarify certain points in his confession, if you're wrong in a supposition, he will tell you that. He'll tell you, no, that's not the way it happened. He will correct you. You don't have to correct him. And then you always look for little incidental details and he'll say, well, just at the time this was going down, we noticed a man walking a dog across his field. And later on you verify that there was in fact a man walking a dog across a field. So anytime they supply an incidental detail of an occurrence that took place simultaneously with the crime, it lends credibility to the confession. They will describe the behavior of themselves and of the victims. They will describe their feelings at the time. They will describe the conversations between the culprit and the victims. They will describe the conversations between the co defendants. They will describe their feelings since the crime has committed. And when they're confessing, you get the impression that their words match the emotion that you see. They're reliving the experience of the crime. Now if you don't see that match and their manner is stilted, it could be contrived and you could be getting false information. But what you're always looking for when you take a confession is something that you can hang your hat on, something that corroborates a confession. One independent witness, one piece of physical evidence, a statement made by a co defendant that confirms it. But you're always looking for something beyond his word, just something to verify the validity of the confession. Most of what you see is that the suspect, once he confesses, he sounds and he looks like he's, he's telling the truth. And of course after you get the confession, the litmus test, the best test, is to take him out to the scene and let him walk you through the crime and see what happens. That's when you can assess whether or not he's telling you something based on memory or he's just fantasizing it as he goes along.
- [17:43]
Alice
Okay, so you just heard Warren Holmes on the stand talking about what makes a confession valid. So going through them quickly, what you just heard here is that the person is telling you something you don't already know, that whatever he says does not conflict with the evidence. Remember we've talked a lot about hold back evidence. This is one of the reasons is you can assess, you know, if there's not evidence out in the public, if what they're saying doesn't contradict maybe non public information, that's pretty good to help you understand if they're telling the truth or not. Number three, they should be able to lead you to the fruits of the crime. Number four, the way they tell you the confession should be a narrative form at first. So they're like reliving what it is, telling you what it is. And after they tell you the narrative form, the police then start asking questions. And if the police is trying to clarify something, it's not the police who are seeking to correct the person who's making the confession, but rather the confessor will correct you to let you know where you're wrong. Then there's also the incidental details that are not necessary to the crime, like not the knife, not anything that necessarily matters. We saw this in the Delphi case. Remember Richard Allen's confessions? One of the things he said was about a white van driving by at a certain time that only someone who was standing there could have seen. That's a great example of an incidental detail. That van didn't have anything to do necessarily with the actual crime, but it shows how it lends credence to his confession because there in fact was a van that was passing by at that very time, and no one else would have known that, but someone who was standing there with the girls committing the murders. So incidental details that you can imagine. If you're living in the middle of a scene, you're looking around 360, not everything is going to necessarily be pertinent to the crime scene. But you standing there in the middle of it, being the one who's validly confessing, will know more details than are necessary for the crime scene. Number eight, you will describe the behavior of yourself and the victims. Again, because you're seeing, you're taking in all these inputs all at once, and you'll be able to describe your feelings about them. Not just the actions, not just the boys were beaten, but rather how you felt as it was happening. You'll be able to do things like describe conversations, things that are happening in real time, and you can describe your feelings after the crime. Holmes said that this is because the confessor is reliving the experience of the crime so that their words should match their emotions. But if there's some disconnect, that should raise some red flags for you. And lastly, and probably most importantly, you never just take the words of the confessor for what they are. The person taking the confession is always looking for independent corroboration in order to validate whatever they are hearing. So it's not just words alone, words. And then you look for corroboration of whether the words of the confessor are in fact valid.
- [20:37]
Brett
And Alice has already mentioned one confession we know is true of Richard Allen and the way he gave that detail about the white van, it was really important. And that was his narrative confession, by the way. He confessed several times. The thing about it, really talking about a valid confession, when you're discussing the case with somebody, whether in his case with a therapist or with a police officer, obviously people can confess spontaneously and that happens. But he had that detail that he couldn't have known and was able to provide information that the police were then able to go and corroborate. Another great example, J. Wilds and Jennifer Pusateri. You know, talking about narrative form. You remember when we read Jennifer Pusateri and she said what happened that day? And it was like, I think I described it. She just vomited it out. She starts talking, and she didn't stop talking for like two minutes. And the police don't interrupt her, they just let her go. And she gives the whole narrative of exactly what happened when Jay called her, what he said to her, everything else, Jay might have lied to her. She wouldn't lie to them. And of course, Jay has the ultimate corroboration. He can tell the police something they definitely don't know, which is where the vehicle was in that case. So these are the kind of things you're looking for. You won't have all these, you know, and frankly, you're gonna have some things that contradict the evidence. Just because even people who are involved in crimes who were there and saw it still don't get it. Right? None of us do. No person describes a past event perfectly. They just don't. Particularly when it's very stressful or maybe they're under the influence of some sort of drugs. They're gonna mess things up. We're going to see that in this confession. And you just have to decide, are those mess ups because the person's making it up or because of some other outside stress? And that's why the corroboration is so important. So often in true crime, we are always trying to decide things based on feelings. We hear somebody say something and we're like, that sounds weird. Or somebody does something and we think, I wouldn't do that in that circumstance. Right. And that's a really terrible way to figure out truth. You know, you saw that in the Karen Reed case, right? I don't spend too much time on it. But how many people spent so much time on whether or not the Albert should have gone outside that morning? That was like a big thing for them. They didn't go outside that morning. There's all sorts of reasons they didn't. If they had have gone outside that morning, people would have been like, they went outside to corrupt the crime scene. Right. You don't know, you can't tell. And you can't put yourself in that person's shoes. Concrete things, corroborating evidence, that's really what you need to look at. You use your common sense, use your experience as human beings, but really always try and anchor it to something more solid than just how it hits you when you hear it.
- [23:12]
Alice
And the reason we're talking about valid and invalid confessions, of course, is because Jesse Misskelley had several confessions. He made at least eight statements confessing to police or his attorneys. So the first one was we've already Talked about before. June 3rd at 2:44pm he makes a statement to the police. That same day, he makes a clarification statement to the police. Then on June 8, so five days later, he makes a confession to his attorneys, Stidham and Crow. A couple days after that, on June 11, he makes another confession to his attorney, Dan Stidham. A couple months later, on August 19, he makes another confession, this time also to his attorney, Dan Stidham. Fast forward almost a year later. Well, not quite half a year later. February 5th, he makes a confession to police officers immediately after his conviction. So remember, he's tried first, and then the other two suspects are tried next. So after he's convicted, he makes the confession again. Three days later, on February 8, he confesses to his attorney, Dan Stidham again. About a week later, on February 17, he makes another confession, this time to attorneys Stidham, Crow, and prosecutors. So note that the majority of his confessions are actually not just before law enforcement officers, but rather with his own attorney. So how did we get here to begin with? At the end of May, Vicki Hutchinson told police her story of the S spots and Jesse Miscaliat, Damien Echols. Remember that whole story of getting Damien to come over, and then he took her to a field where they were these, like, sexual romps. Damien Echols had been on and off the police radar from the day of the murders. This, combined with Jesse's statement to police on May 15 that he'd seen someone chasing three boys led the police to want to speak with him. They would do so on June 3, after getting permission from Jesse's father, weirdly, they find Jesse at Vicki Hutchinson's house, where Jesse had stayed the night before, apparently because Vicki was afraid of a prowler. We've kind of noted this before, this teenage boy staying a woman's house who has a son the same age as the victims.
- [25:29]
Brett
So that brings us to Jesse's first confession on June 3rd. I do want to say one thing because Alice brings it up, and I think it's important. And as some people say all the time, and I have no idea where they get it. I mean, I. I know where they get it, but I don't know why they say it. So you notice Jesse's confessing to his attorneys all the time. If it's been said once, been said a hundred times that, you know, Jesse didn't know, he didn't understand lawyers. He thought lawyers worked for the police. And so he just assumed when he was talking to his lawyers, he was talking to police officers, that is absolute bunk. Jesse was very familiar with the justice system, number one, because his father had been very involved in the justice system. As we mentioned, his father had spent some time in prison because of various crimes he was committing. But Jesse himself had also been before judges with lawyers on multiple occasions. In November of 1992, he was in juvenile court on a charge of criminal mischief in the first degree. He had been advised of his Miranda rights before that, and he had an attorney who represented him. In April of 1993, which, by the way, is only about a month before the murders, he was in juvenile court on a charge of battery, and he was once again represented by an attorney and he was read his Miranda rights. So the idea that Jesse just didn't know, he didn't know that lawyers are people who represent you is silly. And as a matter of fact, Jesse had been told repeatedly, and has said this repeatedly, that his family had made very clear to him he should only trust his lawyers. He shouldn't trust anybody else. He certainly shouldn't trust the prosecutors. So I know people say this, but it is just something they say, and that includes his attorneys who say it. It is just something they say. There is no basis for it. And Jesse certainly understood what a lawyer was. So just want to get that out of the way before we get into the confession. Okay, so, June 3rd. So, as we said, Jesse has sort of inserted himself into this case. He's given the police some information about someone chasing the boys, and he's been drunk into it by Vicki Hutchinson, where he just so happens to be the day that he talks to the police. So he gets to the police station and he speaks to the police for about 30 minutes before he took a polygraph. And during that portion of the interview, he says that he was working as a roofer the day of the murder until about 5:00'. Clock. And then after that he went home and stayed home. Now, this is interesting as it contradicts his later story that we discussed last episode, that he went to Dyess, Arkansas, to wrestle. Jesse said that Damien was sick in the head and drank blood, both of which are more or less true. And Jesse stuck to really throughout. As you recall that scene in Paradise Lost when someone describes Damon as good kid, Jesse looks like he's about as shocked as he could possibly be. He said that he'd heard that Damien and Robert Burch had committed the murders, but he didn't have any firsthand knowledge of it. He also said that he didn't know Robert Burch. Well, now you may wonder, why is Jesse even telling all these details? Well, it's debated whether or not Jesse knew about the reward in this case. There are times where he said he did not. But there's also an indication that he thought he could use the reward money to buy a new truck for his father. So there may be. He's thinking if he can get the police on somebody's trail, he can get some reward money. I think it's interesting, given what's going to happen, that he points to Damien as someone who is involved in this murder. Now, who is Robert Burch? We've discussed him previously, but he's sort of a low level criminal known to the west Memphis police. He had stolen $200 worth of stuff from skate world in the infamous skate World in 1991. Also in 1991, he'd been hit with trespass and fleeing an officer when he broke into the junior high football field. So nothing serious, just general stupid teenager stuff. And it seems like the police never took Burch all that seriously as a suspect. They had spoken to him before. They talked to Jesse and never really followed up. So Detective Ridges notes indicate that during this initial interview, Jesse was unusually nervous. And this was something the police noticed because Jesse isn't coming in as a suspect. He hasn't been arrested. You know, he hasn't been asked to come downtown and talk to them. This is as much sort of a mutual thing. He's coming in based on some of the things he said before. And so it was strange to Ridge that he seemed nervous. And nerves are something police officers look for when they're talking to anyone, when they, you know, you stop someone on the side of the road for a broken tail light and they're incredibly nervous. It makes you think, what else is going on here?
- [30:03]
Alice
And something to note here, again, if people say, of course, why wouldn't a teenager, especially one with lower IQ, of course you would expect them to be nervous around police. Kind of like what Brett said earlier. He is known to the police. So much so that remember, in some version of his story later, he's going to say that after that infamous slap, when the police are called, he's there. So this is not like his first time ever before law enforcement officers, before police. He has a little bit of a rap sheet. He's known to the police. So much so that the police themselves are like, yeah, we know who Jesse Misskelley is. He wasn't there the day of the murders when we were called out for the slap. So I note that also, yes, maybe generally, if we don't know anything about him or he's never had interactions with the police, you may be nervous. But again, this is not his first time before law enforcement. His own Story puts him at a situation where there's a criminal event, a slap, and the police are called, and he says he's there. So something to take in mind doesn't mean he can't be nervous, but. But those nerves are something, of course, that could indicate that there's more to the story than he's telling or that he's telling a version of the truth that is really just a lie.
- [31:06]
Brett
And let me just say this. I've read Dan Sitham's book. It was very good, very entertaining, very well written, gives a lot of insight. Dan Sidham is Jesse's lawyer, is absolutely passionate about this case. It is his life's work to prove that Jesse and the other members of the West Memphis three are innocent. But I will say this, I feel like that clouded his judgment and has clouded his memory. So there are things that he says that, number one, I just don't think happened. I don't think they're actually really that consistent with the record. And this notion that Jesse was this innocent kid, this harmless kid who had no idea what the police were, it's just not consistent with anything about Jesse's history. So you're never going to convince me that Jesse didn't know who the police were. I think he absolutely did. So he's being nervous. And this is unusual to the investigators. They didn't think of Jesse as a suspect. They thought Damian was a suspect. And they thought Jason probably got drug along with Damien because everybody told him if Damian told Jason to do something, he'd do it. Jesse's more of a witness. They know that he has some connection to Damien, he knows about his devil worship, maybe he has some information, but they're not thinking this guy is a suspect. And so they're like, huh, this is strange. So after about 30 minutes, they asked Jesse if he'll take a polygraph. Also not unusual. They polygraphed a ton of people in this case. He agrees. I think at this point they have to go find his father because he is 17. I think there was even some debate among the police about whether or not they should give him a polygraph because he was only 17. But whatever the case, they get the stuff they need and they decide, we're going to do this. And Jesse's dad is fine with it. So the testing was complete by about 12:30, at which point Bill Durham, who was the office polygrapher, says that Jesse is lying his ass off.
- [32:50]
Alice
So for the defense, Warren Holmes reviewed the charts for Jesse Misskelley from his polygraph. Now, Holmes was an extremely experienced polygrapher. He'd been doing it for more than 30 years and had taught around the country and at the FBI Academy, he'd been involved in investigations from the Kennedy and the King assassinations all the way to Watergate. So here are the questions and answers on the pertinent questions of Ms. Kelly's life. Polygraph. Have you ever taken a polygraph test before? No. In regard to the deaths of these three boys, are you going to tell the truth during this test? Yes. Third question. Have you ever been in Robin hood Hills? No. Fourth, do you smoke dope? No. 5. Have you ever took part in devil worship? No. 6. Have you ever sold any dope? No. 7. Have you ever attended a devil worship ceremony in the Turner twist area? No. 8. Have you ever taken any drugs or medication today? No. 9. Are you involved in the murder of those three boys? No. Do you know who killed those three boys? No. So on question four from do you smoke dope on the machine pretty just much just goes off the charts. Like he's just. He is lying. It's indicating deception on everything. Basically, after question four, which, by the.
- [34:22]
Brett
Way, I don't really know why they asked question four. Question four, to me seems like a mistake. Like you're trying to find out about a murder and you ask him a question about a random crime, right? He smoked dope.
- [34:35]
Alice
Well, you have. You're supposed to have these, like, stakes, right? You're supposed to ask things that are obviously easy to know if it's true or not. But usually you don't ask for something that's a crime. You don't ask if they sell dope. Even if you know he has dope. You usually ask something like, are your eyes brown? It's not quite that simple. But you try to ask something that's not controversial at all. Is your name Jesse, for example, is what you ask?
- [34:56]
Brett
Because here's the thing. If I was taking this and I had smoked dope, which is illegal at the time, and they asked me that question, and I lie about it. I'm then nervous from the rest. Then I'm thinking back like, oh, God, you know, I lied away with this or not. And now they're like, asking about murders and I'm thinking about the dope. I mean, I think that's legitimate criticism of this. Like, I don't understand why you ask the dope question at all.
- [35:18]
Alice
Yeah, I think it was a mistake. I don't think that it was a mistake that they were asking. I think it's a mistake that they did ask it because I think what they were trying to do is like a staking question, something that was non controversial. And I don't know why they picked that. Maybe it's because they knew of him to have smoked or sold dope before and maybe it's even worse. No, no, I agree with you. I agree with you completely. What I'm trying to explain is that they staked with the wrong question. Like I, I can imagine. Maybe like this was the police officer who arrested him. I'm trying to look at this in the most favorable light. Like this police officer was like, jesse, I arrested you last week for dope. Come on, like, tell me the truth. I don't know that that actually happened. But my point being, I think what they were trying to do is ask one of those non controversial questions that everyone knows the answers to to kind of say, like, okay, is the polygraph machine just going off all the time because you're just nervous or are you really lying on certain questions? And they picked a terrible question if that's what they were trying to do. So basically question four on you. You heard those? They were very direct questions, basically directly about this murder and then also about selling dope. That was also slipped in there. That was confusing to me as well. Right now the headlines are chock full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks, making us all vulnerable. But you can do something about it. Deleteme is here to make it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online. Do you want an easier way to deal with data breaches? Well, get Delete Me. The fact is, we're all at risk. How many times have you gotten an email or a letter saying your data has been breached? It's unsettling. But the good news is Delete Me can help. Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. And Delete Me knows your privacy is worth protecting. So sign up and provide Deleteme with exactly what information you want deleted. And their experts take it from there.
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Brett
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- [38:10]
Alice
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- [39:29]
Brett
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- [41:00]
Alice
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- [44:02]
Brett
And obviously this is interesting for us, but it was never going to be admitted in trial, even though the defense tried to get it in because polygraphs are not admissible. You know, Warren Holmes is a brilliant polygraph examiner. Maybe we should all take his opinion very seriously about Jesse's polygraph. But it's not scientifically valid according to the courts. So it doesn't get past the Daubert challenge. You can't get this kind of thing in because it's so subjective. When we were talking to Joseph Scott Morgan, he was talking about qualifying something versus quantifying something. You certainly can't quantify a polygraph. It's just sort of your take on it as an examiner. That's interesting. The report includes criticism that the police did not use what is known as the peak tension test, which is considered the most accurate by examiners. This asks questions related to key information from the case. Here are the questions and what he says about them. Do you know if any of the three boys are tied up with plastic tape? Do you know if any of the three boys are tied up with rope? Do you know if any of the three boys are tied up with wire, shoelaces, belts, clothing strips, string? If Jesse had reacted to D, that would have been the best indicator, D being shoelaces, that he possessed information that regarded the crimes. And he noted in his report that polygraph examiners in Israel and Japan reluctant to conduct any type of test other than a peak of tension test. Two things that are interesting about this, number one, if you do this test, the only problem is if you actually think this information is leaked into the public, then it maybe is not so effective because Jesse may know it. He may know that there are type of shoelaces. He might say no, he might say yes, and that might not mean anything. The other thing that's interesting about this, not to go back to Adnan, but there's so many similarities here. If you remember, in that case, Alonzo Sellars was given two polygraphs. The first one he failed, but he said he was nervous because he had to go buy a house that day. So the police gave him another polygraph and that time they used the peak of tension test, which he passed. And it's ironic, people criticize the police for using that test, but it sounds like that is an absolutely what they should have used. And he passed it. So that's the situation with Jesse's polygraphs. Did he fail? Do you not fail? I don't know, but the police certainly told him that he had.
- [46:22]
Alice
So Gitchell and Ridge began their interrogation, but they weren't recording. And at this point, Jesse says that Damien and Jason called him the morning of the homicides about whether or not he was going to go with Damian and Jason to West Memphis that day. And Jesse said no as he had to work. Now, despite saying he wouldn't go, he did actually end up going. Let me pause there real quick. So many people have said, why don't they, the police just record everything. Why isn't there the first part? Very interesting, especially when you have a recording eventually. Here's the thing, in an investigation, especially at first, when Jesse is coming in not as a suspect, you do not record every conversation for lots of reasons. Resources for one. Right. You just don't have that much tape. Number two, when you think you're just gathering information, you don't start recording until you think, okay, this is getting interesting. Because think about, for example, again, let's go back to the Delphi case. Just because this, that trial recently happened, there were thousands if not tens of thousands of tips and witness interviews in that investigation before they honed in. To be able to have that many tape recorders to pull it out at every time is a very big resource drain. And second of all, have you ever been recorded? People do change the way they talk and the way they're willing to be forthcoming when they're being recorded, even if they are completely innocent. I don't know if you guys do a lot of, like, video calls for work, zoom calls, teams calls, whatever. Whenever I'm on a call and all of a sudden there's that automated voice that says, your meeting is being recorded. I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm not even on video. Maybe I'm on video mute. And I immediately, like, kind of tense up just because I know I'm being recorded. And that is kind of human nature to know that's the case. And so it is not common practice across any jurisdiction to record every time you have a conversation with someone. Now, this can go back to that. A policy question may be, should we do that? Sure. That's a policy question you can absolutely debate. But in practice, that does not happen all the time. For many, many resource questions. For many ability to have kind of a normal conversation with someone, to be able to just see if they know anything. Because most people actually don't know anything about anything.
- [48:39]
Brett
Yeah. And I'll just say a couple things about this. Number one, it's 1993. They're using tape. If you listen to these, they have to flip the tape. Remember, Adnan, they had recordings. They were reusing old tapes. And you have people now, like, listening to that. And every pop and tap and everything else, they're like, oh, that's a signal. It's like, no, it's not. There's a lot of sort of negative consequences to certain things. Think about Delphi. The police probably wish they hadn't recorded so many of the interviews because some of the ones they did record got lost. And what do people say? It's a conspiracy. They deleted those because that was where they admitted they really did it. What the police would normally do with an interview is they just do a report, which they did in the Delphi case. And they had the reports. They just lost the recordings. The other thing, everything you record is discoverable, which means you're gonna have to review it at some point. Like, bodycam sucks. I hate body cam. Like, it's great in theory. Like, oh, great, we're gonna have a body cam that records exactly what happens. Except body cam gets lost all the time. Then it becomes conspiracy. Or it doesn't record what you want it to record, or it's pointing at the sky, or the sound doesn't work, or they forget to do it.
- [49:45]
Alice
I mean, truthfully, you and I have to sit there for, like, 20 hours of body. Nothing happens where someone's sitting eating a donut and I just have to watch them eat a donut because I have to review it before it goes out. And it's like mostly nothing or someone forgets to turn it off and it's like facing, you know, the sky for like hours and then it dies. And then they don't have it for when they actually need it because it was on. And then it's a conspiracy that the battery died.
- [50:10]
Brett
The number of times where there's been body cam for everything except the time that matters.
- [50:16]
Alice
All the time.
- [50:16]
Brett
It's like it happens all the time. Or they like they think they're turning it on, but they're actually turning it off. Because usually it's off until like the action starts and they hit the button to start recording. But you're watching them eat the donut because it's on. I mean, just all sorts of stuff like that. And I'll just say this, you know, they had limited resources at the time to record. To this day, Alice and I have sat through hundreds of witness interviews with the FBI and they haven't recorded a single second of it. They take notes and they write a report. They don't record it. It's just the way it is. So you may think that's sketchy, but just know it's not. Like it's not sketchy. Like maybe you think they should have recorded it, but they didn't not record it because this is all part of some conspiracy. They're gonna lead Jesse into this during the non recorded part. That is not what's happening.
- [51:05]
Alice
I think what you said was just that's. That was the point I was going to make because I've been racking my brain. I was like, have there been any witness interviews that I've been. That have been recorded? And the answer is not that I can remember. And we've talked to so many witnesses. The only one I remember that we almost recorded was a very special circumstance. And we decided against recording it because of the very reason I said, where people's behavior changed. And it was a child exploitation case and it was a young child. And we were trying to decide whether to record and we ultimately decided not to because she wasn't going to completely clam up and not speak. And we needed her to be able to speak freely. And that's why, by the way, you call law enforcement officers to the stand to talk about what they learned in the investigation. And then from there there's the independent corroboration of the evidence for what You've heard. So that's why we have reports of all of these interviews. Very common. Every agency has their own name or number for the forms like form ABC of what it means to take the report writing of the statement. Just know that in practice this is what happens policy, something totally different. I will just tell you if you are a lawmaker and you're going to pass some law that requires every interview to be recorded in practice it will really hamper investigations just like Resource Strain and it will never work as it's intended.
- [52:21]
Brett
We interviewed somebody who we knew was a co conspirator, who we knew had broken the law. We had the goods and we confronted them with the goods in the middle of the interview and they confessed. We didn't record that. The only one I can remember recording and I think this is typical policy interviews with people after we've arrested them. If we interview someone after we arrest them for the crime that is typically recorded. But any sort of pre arrest interview they're just not often recorded. And I think some of those policies are changing for the very reason that juries just less and less they don't believe cops and if they don't see it on tape, if they don't hear it with their own ears, they just don't believe when a police officer tells them something. So we're having to do more of this for that very reason. So it wasn't recorded at that point and that's standard operating procedure.
- [53:11]
Alice
Okay, so all of this is because of course when Jesse starts talking to Gitchell and Ridge it's not recorded and they start recording because Jesse himself brings up some very interesting things all of a sudden that really implicates him within knowing about these murders if not being part of them. So remember Jesse says that Damian and Jason call him the morning of the homicides and asked if he was going to go with Damian and Jason to West Memphis. Jesse says no, but we all know of course he ends up going anyway. Now Jesse said that he had been to several satanic meetings with Damien at least once in the Robin Hood hills. Now he said this location was behind the Blue Beacon truck wash. Accurate. When asked if he knew any of the boys, Jesse said no, but that at one of the meetings he'd seen Polaroid pictures of the boys and they'd been in a briefcase at some someone brought to the meeting along with a gun, cocaine and marijuana. Now after the murders he'd gotten a call from Damien and Jason and Jason was on the phone and Damien was in the background Saying, we did it, we did it. What are we going to do now? What are we going to do if someone saw us? He said that the killing would have been done as part of a satanic worship. And Jesse also said that Wednesday was a special day for the culture.
- [54:24]
Brett
Okay, so one thing that I want you guys to note. Everything we've talked about up to this point was not recorded. Everything we've talked about up to this point is before the confession. Some of you have listened to the confessions because we put them online, or maybe you've heard them before. And what a lot of you noticed was the police are really leading Jesse. And the question is, are the police giving him information and he's just repeating it? And I will tell you, the first time I heard these confessions, I thought, God, there's. It's just all. It's just all, lydia, this is insane. The cops are giving him everything. And then I had sort of a transcendent moment in my podcast listening. And y' all are gonna be surprised by this because, well, you understand. But I remember listening to the West Memphis Three coverage that Bob Ruff did back in, like, I don't know, 2018. Loved it. Listened to every episode. And he had Tim Clemente on his show. Now, Tim Clemente is Jim Clemente's brother. Jim Clemente is a famous profiler for the FBI. Tim Clemente was more on the interrogating side, more of that side of things. And he had him on to analyze this interrogation. And Tim Clementi made all sorts of points that I had never thought of that completely changed my view on whether or not this confession was entirely led. He pointed out that you really have to think about what was asked and discussed in the pre interview before it's recorded. Because if the police already have the information, you may see times where the police are trying to get the person to repeat that information. And that this is particularly true when you have someone who has a slightly lower IQ or a child or whatever, you're having to direct them more with the information you already know than you might someone.
- [56:09]
Alice
So I've never listened to Bob Ruff. So I haven't heard this interview before. But that was my initial. That's funny that you got there after. Because my first thought, maybe, because I had already done all the research before I listened to his confession, so I'd read all these things. I knew what he had said to the police. And the first time I listened to the actual recording that we have of the confession, I texted Brett and said, okay, I can totally see why people are up in arms that this is clearly feeding him the information. Except that I've been in that recorder's shoes before for in the sense that they just learned an insane amount of information that they were not trying to get out of him and they're trying to get it all down in recording as fast as possible. I'm putting myself in their shoes in the sense of like, this was not what they were digging for. They did not know this was going to walk through their door that day. And he is telling them this like insane satanic worship story, pointing to the specific people who are doing this now. It's not best interrogation practices, but because they just had the conversation. Think about when your friend has just told you a story and you're like, oh, is that when that happened that you already told me? It's much more of a back and forth in terms of the person who received the information saying things as if they knew the information because they heard it from you earlier. So we're dropping in in the middle of the conversation. And this happens often when you want to get everything down on recording. And maybe he already spoke in the narrative form. Right. Holmes said that the first confession is typically a narrative form. Then you start asking questions. So when you're asking questions, if they've already done the narrative form, real people don't talk like they do when they are being recorded. Right. So Jesse's like, I told you that. Why would I say again that the knife was six inches? You can see why the interrogator was it six inches. Remember you said that earlier? Yeah, six inches. I already told you that. Why do you have to have me say that again? So you have to know contextually where this recording comes in. Not necessarily defending this type of interrogation, but kind of understanding, though, that they had already been speaking for 20 minutes before all of this happened.
- [58:04]
Brett
And a good example of this is Brendan Dassey's confession. So those of you who've watched the most misleading documentary in the history of misleading documentaries, making a murderer may recall that in the Steven Avery case, Brendan Dassey is being interrogated. He's giving his confession and it's filmed. And the police are asking him a question. They're trying to get him to talk about shooting the victim, Teresa Halbach. And they finally just say, okay, I'm just gonna ask you straight out, who shot her? And this is presented and the document. Oh, my God, they just ruined it. They now they, of course he's gonna say there was a gun involved because the police introduced it I can't believe they did that. But we know from their notes that this came out in the pre interview. Brendan Dassey told them in the pre interview that a gun was involved and that she was shot. So now on the recorded interview, they're trying to get him to repeat that. This actually happens in trial. You know about leading questions on direct. You can't ask leading questions. One of the exceptions to that is if you've asked the question five different ways on direct and the witness isn't getting it, you can say, okay, I'm gonna ask you a leading question to get the piece of information I know you have out. So that's sort of something you have to look for. A huge problem we have in this case, though, the notes aren't great for. For the two officers who are writing down exactly what was said in the pre interview. So it is a valid question to wonder how much of what's happening in the interview is them repeating back things that were already said versus Jesse giving them information solely because they are leading him to that. And that is going to be the central question. This, by the way, is going to be a long episode because I do want to get through the first confession and we love to talk. Jesse started to tell the police all sorts of things that they are now really interested in and they are honed in on him, but they still feel like Jesse isn't being entirely truthful. So Ridge asked him to take another polygraph and Jesse says he needs to think about what all they've said to him. And Jesse talks about going to the side of the murders and crying. And this is all very strange for the police because they're like, why would you be doing that if you're telling us if you weren't involved? And at some point. So getchul is now really trying to get him. I think gitchell is on to him at this point. He's like, this is our key, you know, get your look. This interview is only like two weeks after that letter we talked about a few episodes ago where Gitchell is like begging the state crime lab for information. He's so desperate, he doesn't even know what kind of crime this is. And now this kid has walked into his office and is talking about these two people who get you was aware of and implicating them in this crime. So he takes a picture of one of the boys out of his files. One of the pictures taken the coroner's office. This is fairly common. This is a strategy you see used often whom he identified as the Moore boy. So I assume that's who it was. And he plops it down front of Jesse. And Jesse is transfixed by this photograph. And if it was the Moore boy, that's interesting because you may recall or you may already know, we haven't gotten to it yet, that Jesse, in his confession, is going to say that he chased down Michael Moore and brought him back. So if that's the photo he's being shown and he actually did that, you can imagine, while this is a big moment for him, Getchell takes out a piece of paper and he draws a diagram on the piece of paper. He puts some dots all over it, and he draws a circle. Some of the dots are in the circle, Some of the dots are outside of the circle. And he tells Jesse that he could either be inside the circle with the murderers or outside of it with law enforcement. We do this kind of thing all the time. And I'll just say, people act like the things get you doing are just outrageous. And they just broke Jesse's will. Like, with dots on a piece of paper in a circle, how could he ever not confess? And I just think that's so bizarre. Like, this is the lowest pressure type stuff ever. We do this all the time. We talk about being on Team America. You want to be on Team America.
- [62:00]
Alice
We've talked about standing up. I think I've said this before in one of these investigations, we totally knew this guy was guilty and he was lying through his teeth. And I stood up, threw my book on the table and said, I'm gonna walk out. I want you to talk to your lawyer and think about if you want to tell the truth today. If not, I'm gonna come back in and ask you to leave. And it'll be the last time you see me outside of a courtroom. I've said that before, right? Was I being intimidating? No, I was telling the truth, first of all. But also, was I trying to give him one last chance and let him know I knew he was screwing with me 100%. Was that tactics that are untoward? No, we do that all the time. Think about how you talk to your children, from teenagers down to toddlers, if they're not telling the truth. What sort of tactics do you use? Right, because we're human nature who do use our brains and are. We're constantly weighing our cost benefits. What does it mean to be in the circle versus out of the circle?
- [62:50]
Brett
And, you know, what do we know about Team America? Team America always wins. So you want to be with Team America? You don't want to be against Team America. So we use that all the time. These guys want to be part of Team America, right? So it's the same type of thing. Are you with us? Are you with them? Like, now is the time to decide. Then get your. Pulls out a tape recorder. And who's on the tape recorder? Aaron Hutchinson. Now, we've talked about him before, Aaron Hutchinson, who said he saw all sorts of crazy things. Who knows what he saw or didn't see. But one thing I know about Aaron Hutchinson is that Jesse Misskelley babysat for Aaron Hutchinson. He knew Aaron Hutchinson. He'd been in the same home as Aaron Hutchinson the night before. It's where he'd spent the night. Getchul pulls out a tape recorder. I don't think Gitchell knew this. I think he just thought this was creepy. But he pulls out a tape recorder with the voice of Aaron Hutchinson, who Jesse had seen like a few hours before, and plays it where Aaron says, nobody knows what happened but me. They'll play this in trial eventually as well. And something about these, like, three events combined together. The photograph of Michael Moore, the piece of paper with the dots and the circles. The playing of Aaron Hutchinson's voice seemed to have a profound effect on Jesse, according to the reports of the place, he begins to cry, and he's saying that he's sorry for what happened. And he admits that he had been in the woods with Jason and Damien when the boys came into the area. He says that Damien called the boys over to where they were. And at this point, the officers take a break so Jesse can compose himself and so they can set up the tape recorder. Because now they're at a point where it's like, okay, we're about to get the confession. So they get the tape recorder, and the tape recorded version begins at around 2:44pm and the recorded interview ends at 3:18.
- [64:42]
Alice
So on the timing piece, it's often said that Jesse was interrogated for 12 hours. This is just false. But how significant is the length of time he speaks? So here's Warren Holmes again, first with what he said to Dan Stidham, Jesse Misskelley's attorney, and then on cross examination. So we'll play.
- [65:02]
Brett
I don't think this is. Yeah, we're gonna play this. This is important. Just because this has been repeated so often. And it's just one of those pieces of misinformation that a lot of people believe. I've seen people cite this on the gallery that Jesse was interrogated for 12 hours he was beaten down, and that's why he says what he did. And that's just not true. And this is a clip of the defense's own expert, their own witness talking about the length of the interrogation.
- [65:26]
Warren Holmes
Mr. Holmes, is there a point during an interrogation that the interrogator has to be careful after the suspect has been.
- [65:35]
Alice
In there for a while?
- [65:36]
Brett
Is there something that happens that you got to watch for?
- [65:39]
Warren Holmes
Most of your confessions, particularly in homicide cases, come in the fourth hour. There's a waning of resistance where the person becomes a victim of what I call a captive audience syndrome, where he almost becomes mesmerized by the relationship between himself and the interrogators. Anything from four hours on is a diminishing resistance that can lend itself to a confession, whether it be false or valid. And would it be accurate to say that when you train officers to conduct interrogations that you tell them that at a minimum in an important case, that you want them to go four hours uninterrupted with a suspect? True.
- [66:33]
Brett
Okay.
- [66:34]
Warren Holmes
So in this particular case, the time period that the officers were with the suspect doesn't pose any problem for you, does it? That would be what you would recommend them to do if you were advising them? Correct. I would have done the. Exactly what they did.
- [66:49]
Brett
So that's Warren Holmes on the length of the interrogation.
- [66:53]
Alice
So the 12 hours thing, totally false. I will say, before I looked into this case, I totally thought he was interrogated for 12 hours before getting this recording because it's so prolific out there in the Internet. The Internet's always true, right, Brett? Just kidding.
- [67:05]
Brett
Exactly.
- [67:06]
Alice
So during this interview, the police start by confirming that Jesse has signed his waiver of rights and his rights are read to him again. Now they begin the substantive conversation by starting with a question about the phone call he received from Jason Baldwin and by the way, reading him rights again, especially at the beginning of the recording. We often do that just to make sure there's no question of whether you violated someone's Miranda rights. So just to be clear, you know all your rights here. They say it at the beginning of the tape. So they start with the phone call that he got from Jason Baldwin the morning of the homicides. They wanted to know if Jesse could go with Jason to West Memphis. Jesse said no, that he had to work, but Jesse said he ended up going with them to West Memphis anyway, and he said they walked. Now Ridge asks when and offers the 9 o' clock in the morning hour, to which Jesse agrees.
- [68:00]
Brett
Which is weird. I don't Know, Rob Ridge does that because 9 o' clock in the morning doesn't really work for anything. And you're going to see how this gets weird as we go on. There's also a problem, which is that Jesse, he could not have received a call from Jason Baldwin that morning or the night before because he didn't spend the night at home the night before the murders. He was actually with a friend. This is going to change to Monday later on that. That's when he got the phone call. Got a phone call Monday about Wednesday. But this initial statement that he got a call either the night before or that morning couldn't happen. So we get sort of this question about this phone call and then Jesse is skipping straight ahead to Robin Hood Hills. He says, and look, I mean, this confession is vague and to the point. He says he saw Damien hit one of the boys real bad and that he started screwing him and stuff. Asked which one he hit, he points to a picture and says, michael Moore. It's actually Chris Byers. He doesn't know the name of the boys. I don't know how significant this is because I don't know that he knew any of the boys. We know their names anyway, so doesn't really matter to me. Basically, they've got like a newspaper that has all the boys pictures on it and they're using that for him to tell them which one. So unclear if he knows the names. He says that at this point he's been hit. Damian's hitting him with his fist, then Jason hit Stevie Branch, then the other one took off. This is really important. So Chris Byers is getting hit by Damian and Jason is hitting Stevie Branch. And then Michael Moore takes off and Jesse says that he goes after him and he grabs him and holds him until the other two arrive. This is really important because at this point, Jesse has now implicated himself in this murder. So it's interesting that he does this for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which, because if you're thinking through your mind sort of, what would the police have told him? What would they have fed him? I mean, just imagine we're thinking the police are feeding him all this information because they want him to confess. This is a very specific thing to feed him, number one. Number two, it implicates him in a crime. And it's interesting because it explains a discrepancy at the crime scene, which it's not even clear if the police would have recognized, which is the bodies were a little bit far away. Michael Moore is farther away than the other two boys. So if what Jesse is telling us is true, to explain that he catches Michael Moore, he holds him there. Michael Moore is basically killed and tied up there, dumped in the water. He ends up about 30ft, a little less than 30ft away from the other two boys, who are relatively close to each other. So just interesting thing that he says, one thing he says that is wrong is that Michael was running towards the houses when he ran. In fact, Michael was found away from the boys and away from the houses. Now, one thing I'll say about that, it's not clear that if Jesse was there, he actually was that familiar with the area. So I don't really put a lot of stock in that. People will point to that as a discrepancy. But to me, the direction vis a vis the houses or the river or the blue beacon is not something I would necessarily expect Jesse to get correct. Now, he also says that the boys had their clothes on before the beating started. This is problematic because no blood was found on the clothes. Now, the clothes had been in the water, but I don't think that would have stopped the police from finding blood. My dog recently decided to ram himself into a delivery truck, broke his jaw, and I had to take him to get jaw surgery. And he was in the back of my car for, like, 10 minutes. Blood all over the place, right? Because he was bleeding. He's shaking his head, and there's blood everywhere. Like, I'm trying to clean the thing up, and all I'm thinking is, man, how do you ever clean up after a murder? Because this is, like, there's blood all over the place, and, like, there's no way I'd find all this blood, right? I'm just blood in there now. So I just don't necessarily know that all the blood was washed off the clothes, but there's no blood found on the clothes. So if the boys are being beaten, like we know they were, based on our discussion, the autopsies, if they're being stabbed, if these things are happening to them, it is unusual that there is no blood on the clothes. And I think this is actually something that I don't see people talk about as much with the discrepancies. That, for me, is a really big discrepancy because I don't know how you could be beaten like that, attacked like that, and not have blood your clothes. But after this beating happens, Jesse says they took off their clothes and they tied their hands up. He then says that Jason and Damien started, quote, screwing them and stuff, cutting Them and stuff. And this is sort of the vagueness of Jesse's description. It does not make. You have a lot of faith in what he's saying because it's so vague. Now, I will say this about Jesse, and this is evident throughout his confession. He is definitely, number one, minimizing his involvement. Number two, he's trying to get through this as quickly as possible. And he's trying to end this discussion. Why ever you think that's happening? That's what he's doing. Throughout the conversation. He will say, and then I left. And the cops, like, whatever. He didn't leave, and they just asked him another question. And then he starts telling them something happened and then I left. Right. He's doing that a lot. So some of sort of his abrupt descriptions could be because of minimization. So at some point, Jesse says he left. He says he left multiple times, but eventually he actually left. And he will say that Damien and Jason will call him later and ask him why he ran. And he would say he just couldn't take it anymore. The police ask him more about some of the injuries to the boys. Jesse says one of the boys was cut in the face, the other was cut down on his penis. Now, he does not say his penis. And this is a place where the police somewhat lead him. He's saying he's like, he was cut on his bottom, I think is what he says. And get your. Like, are you talking about here in his groin area? And he says, yes. And then they start talking about the penis. Once again, I don't know. Number one, what did he tell him before? Has he already told them this detail before? I don't know. Number two, is he being intentionally vague? Because people don't like to talk about penises being cut. I certainly don't. I've not enjoyed that part.
- [74:29]
Alice
Or maybe it's further minimization. Right? Because, like, cutting someone's penis is a very. I mean, we are all horrified by the autopsies in part because of the sexual mutilation. Right. And so kind of minimization could be just the bottom part. And we see this minimization all throughout his confession. So could it be that. That's another possibility as well.
- [74:49]
Brett
And when he's asked which of the boys was cut there, he identifies Christopher Byers. And when he's asked if he was sure that was the one, he says yes. Okay, so what's interesting about this is we know from our lengthy discussion of the autopsies, Christopher Byers is the one who has the genital Mutilation, and he is the only one who has that. Despite public reports that all three boys were castrated. There's also one of the boys, Stevie Branch, who has wounds to the side of his face, just like Jesse says. Now, two problems with that. We now know that there's a big question about whether both or one of those injuries is caused by animal predation, which would be a big problem for Jesse's confession. If some of the things he's really grabbing onto and the things that have been pointed to, as Warren Holmes had said, does he know details he wouldn't otherwise know? Does he know things that can corroborate this? If the details he's giving us, which seem to corroborate the rest of his statement, despite the mistakes, if those details are actually wrong because they were animal predation, that is a huge blow to Jesse's confession.
- [76:00]
Alice
But at the time that he makes this statement, the public knowledge was still that all three boys had been mutilated in the general area. Is that right?
- [76:07]
Brett
That's correct.
- [76:08]
Alice
So that was still the public reporting because remember when that first report went out for the be on the lookout or whatnot, that statement was wrong and then they never fixed it. So this is still at that time, he does not know it's only one of the boys who has the genital mutilation.
- [76:23]
Brett
If you believe the standard reporting. Obviously there are plenty of people who think all this information was out there. So that's something to remember. Now one thing that's interesting, and I find this fascinating is Jesse will describe himself as he's describing what's happening, as being on the blue beacon side of the ditch. So you got this, remember, you got a 10 mile diversion canal, 10 mile bayou, the big river, and then you have this little ditch running off from it and that's where the boys are. And he describes himself as being on the blue beak inside of that sort of up on a cliff almost. Not really a cliff, but you know what I mean. While the other two are on the West Memphis side with Jesse sort of looking down at this as he's watching this. And this is just so classic minimization, just this notion of, you know, I'm reading the Great Gatsby because I read the Great Gatsby every year. And there's this part in the Great Gatsby where the narrator talks about being someone in the street looking up at the apartment where he really is and watching what's going on in the apartment where he is currently standing, right? So he's sort of talking about being outside of himself. And that is the way Jesse is describing this. I'm not a psychologist, but it is so like classic, if you're in a traumatic event to view it as almost an out of body experience where you were watching it happen, not being a part of it. It's just really striking when he talks about this.
- [77:49]
Alice
And also remember when we talked about Gitchell and Ridge using the circle and saying do you want to be inside or out of it? That is not something like ingenious that they came up with or any interrogator does think about what Jesse is doing here. He himself in his. What I think is minimization, if this confession is real, is drawing a physical line between him and what's happening to the boys. Right. He's not just standing on the other bank. He's standing on the blue beacon side. There's a line in between where he's watching because he is not part of them. Just like really what Gitchell and Ridge were trying to indicate with the circle and the dots, whether you're inside or outside, because that's how our brains think. Are we with them or something separate? I'm not a murderer. I'm not part of them. And so he's putting a physical barrier between him and Jason and Damian who he says are doing this. Okay, timing. So Jesse says all of this that we're talking about here takes place at noon. Jesse claims that the boys had skipped school. We know that's not true. And he said that they had been on their bikes but that they laid them down after Damien called out for them. Jesse said he wasn't sure where the bikes were left. That Jesse said Damien had been watching the boys and he claimed that there were pictures of these three boys all together. Jesse also maintained that everything happened earlier in that day. Jesse said that they cut them first, then tied them up when they were unconscious. And Jesse claimed that the boys were forced to have both oral and anal sex. And he also said one of the boys was kicking, saying, don't, don't. Jesse said that the boys had their hands tied but that they could have run had they not been beaten so badly. Now this is incorrect because we know how they are tied. They couldn't have run. It wasn't just their hands tied, right. It was hands to their ankles. Jesse also said that after Damien knocked one of the boys down with his fist, he picked up a big stick about the size of a baseball bat and beat the boy. As for Jason, he had a six inch folding Knife. And Jesse said that Damien did not have a knife. There's a lot of information in there, some of it patently false, such as the timing.
- [80:00]
Brett
And we're going to talk about sort of the, the problems with confession, but timing's a big one. Didn't happen. Boys didn't skip school. Didn't happen. Boys also weren't forced to have anal sex. Didn't happen. Maybe oral sex, not anal sex. Now the part about him being beaten with something the size of a baseball bat, that is consistent with the autopsies. One interesting thing is the folding knife. Jesse's gonna stick to this folding knife idea throughout, despite the fact that the prosecution is going to claim that that hunting knife, that Rambo knife they found in the lake, the lake knife, was actually the knife used. That's interesting. Jesse sticks with the folding knife idea throughout. So Jesse, you may recall in the pre recorded interview, had talked about the briefcase. And he brings the briefcase up again. It had some cocaine and a little gun in it, along with pictures of the boys, which, by the way, of all the things that I find to be utterly unbelievable about this confession, this is the one that is the most unbelievable. He talks about the cult because of course he did. He said he'd been in it for about three months. He said they killed dogs and they took girls for orgies. He said they skinned the dogs, built a bonfire and then ate the dogs. They'd eat the leg. And if a new member couldn't handle that, they couldn't get into the cult. You know, they got so many people trying to get into the cult that they have hard rules. Can't handle the meat. Can't. Can't be it.
- [81:21]
Alice
At least they cook it.
- [81:22]
Brett
Yeah. So Ridge, you know, Ridge is there and this is all interesting stuff. But he pulls Jesse back to the beginning of the attack and he says something interesting here. He says, the night you were in the woods, had you been in the water? Now this is interesting as it anchors Jesse to the nighttime. Remember, he's been talking about the morning up to this point, and he says that they, three of them had been in the water. He says the boys dropped off their bikes near the entrance when Damien called for them. This sort of makes sense. I mean, if they're in that sort of creek area, which I don't know why you'd be in that water, but if they were in that area and the boys are sort of riding their bikes across that pipe bridge and they drop their bikes at the end of the pipe bridge or somewhere around there, and then come on in. I mean, that would make sense because the bikes end up in the bayou. That's where they end up. And so you would think whoever did that went back to where the bikes were and threw them in. I don't know. You know, the locations are a little iffy with all this, but that's what he says. So after being asked by the police, Jesse said he was willing to take the police there and show them where everything had happened. He spoke of going back once, and he said he sat there thinking about everything that had happened and that he threw up thinking about it, which is visceral. And if you think about back to the very beginning of this episode, what are you supposed to be looking for? You know, things the boys said. At one point, he says, the boy's saying, no, no. His emotions about this. He's talking about throwing up now. One of the absolute mistakes by the police. And honestly, something that I totally understand people questioning if they did this because they didn't want to see what the result would be. They never took Jesse up on his willingness to return to the scene, which was a massive mistake. They should have taken him there, let him show them where everything happened, but they didn't do it.
- [83:07]
Alice
I don't understand. So I really don't know, honestly, when Dan Stidham was trying to get, like, the true answer out of it, for purposes of using it in the next trial for Jason and Damien, why didn't he do it? He was already convicted at that point. You know, like.
- [83:21]
Brett
Yeah, yeah. Which is. This is going to be something we talk about. So they talk about what they were wearing. Jesse said that Jason was wearing a Metallica shirt with a skull on it that night in blue jeans with holes in the knees, which is interesting because we talked about the whole Hollingsworth clan sighting where they see someone coming out of the woods. They describe it as being Domini, but one of them talks about wearing jeans with holes in the knees. And that's going to be the police's theory, that that was really Jason. Damien was wearing black pants, boots, and a black shirt, which sounds right. And Jesse said he gave the shoes that he was wearing that night to Bobby Lucas, which he absolutely did give a pair of Adidas, which are the shoes, to Bobby Lucas. That when he gave them to him, what their condition was is something that Bobby Lucas would change his story about several times.
- [84:15]
Alice
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- [85:00]
Brett
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- [86:24]
Alice
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- [89:29]
Brett
And so then there's the distancing. And we've talked about this before. Now, one possible sign of a false confession is a rush to the end, trying to get it over with. And Jesse at multiple points does exactly that. He attempts to end the confession by saying he left. So is this a sign of a false confession in this case? So in the context of Jesse's confession, maybe not. Instead, Jesse attempts to end the confession. And it seems much more like this minimization we've talked about before. And this is something that happens when you have a co conspirator who's telling the truth about what happened, but not about their role. I hate to keep coming back to this, but I think this absolutely happened in the Adnan Syed case. I think you had some of that with J. Wiles. I think he was trying to minimize some of his role in what happened. And you have that instance where Jesse's putting himself across the creek from the murders. Now it's interesting because he does get the location of the murders correct at this point he's putting himself on sort of the top of the bluff, looking down at the crime. So he's sort of on the bluff side and then on the other side there's a slicked off area we've talked about before. So that is interesting. Now it's often pointed out that there are multiple inconsistencies in his statement which are proof that he's lying, but that's not necessarily it. He is attempting at multiple times to separate himself from what is happening. And he's doing the same thing constantly saying that when X event happened, he left. And this happens over and over and over again. The police know this is likely not true, so they keep ignoring him basically and moving on to the next question which he then answers. He doesn't say, I don't know, I wasn't there. No, he answers it and then he says, and then I left.
- [91:08]
Alice
So most importantly, it's naive to assume that just because you're hearing what sounds like leading in the recording, the police are actually leading. And we explained this earlier, but what often happens is that the police get the entire story first and then record it. And in this instance, they didn't know they were even going to get this story. So it makes sense that they were just talking to him. And as it's leading into this, oh my goodness, you're putting yourself basically there. You know who did this and Then, of course, there are indications that he's minimizing even as they're speaking with him. The police know so much information, and rather than them feeding it, it could be that they already know this because the person who's confessing has told it to them already. And this type of leading is not uncommon during an interrogation. Now, we know that after the polygraph test, Jesse told much of the story to Ridge and Gitchell. We also know that after Ridge left, Jesse told Gitchell details of what happened which led to the recording. It is, of course, deeply frustrating that we do not have either detailed notes or a recording of what was said and how it was said in these parts of the interviews. And given the history of this case, it's not surprising that many people find this suspicious or even sufficient to dismiss the confession altogether. But to treat this recorded interview as if it were the first time Jesse told this story to police is either uninformed or deliberately misleading. So there are things that Jesse gets right. So what are the things that Jesse gets right? In this first statement, this first confession, he said that one of the boys had his groin area and penis cut. He identified Christopher Byers as the victim. And this is all accurate. Moreover, we know that media reports and rumors had said that all the boys had been emasculated, but that wasn't true. And as Jesse said, only Byers had these wounds. The second thing Jesse gets right is that Jesse said he was on the blue beacon side watching the attack happen on the east side of the bank. This is also accurate. Luminol tests and the general condition of the bank indicate that the attack did happen at that location. Number three, Jesse said that another boy, Stevie Branch, had his face cut. And indeed, Stevie was the only victim with what appeared to be a knife wound to the face. We covered this extensively in the autopsy episodes. And fourth, Jesse said that Michael Moore ran away and that Jesse caught him and held him until the other two arrived. This statement, which was wholly unprompted by the police, even in the versions of the recordings we have, it's incredibly damning for Jesse because it happens to fit the facts, though Jesse gets the direction wrong in which way he ran. Now, while Stevie and Chris were found in the water next to each other, very close in proximity, Michael's body was found some 30ft upstream from the other two boys, as if at some point, for some reason, he was separated from the other two. And Jesse's explanation of Michael running would fit this set of facts.
- [93:56]
Brett
So let's talk about what Jesse Gets wrong because there's a lot of it. So Jesse says that Chris Byers was choked to death with a big stick held over his neck. This is completely wrong. Chris Byers was not choked to death. And there's no evidence that he was choked at all. So I don't know where he gets this. And this is the kind of thing that makes you think, if you were there, wouldn't you know, that that didn't happen? Like, that is something he just made up. Like, if he was there and if this is a legitimate confession, he just made up that Chris Byers was choked. Which seems pretty significant to me. You know, you'll see people say sometimes that, oh, the things he got right are so significant. The things he got wrong are really insignificant. Really. I mean, just little things, like the time, right? It's like, well, I mean, that seems like a pretty big deal, right? Like, because there's no explanation for that other than he just made it up at a whole cloth. Right? He just made that up. There's no. To me at least. I don't know any other explanation. But anyways, he also said the boy's hands were tied. And when he's asked, well, why couldn't they run away? He says, well, because they were beaten so badly. Well, that's another thing he just completely makes up. Their hands were tied, but they were tied to their ankles, and that's what the police were going for. And this is, by the way, one of the things people will say is there's a spectrum here, right? And on one side of the spectrum is the police knew that Damien was innocent. They're just trying to railroad Jesse and Damien. This is completely fabricated. They made the whole thing up. Okay? That's crap, right? That didn't happen. I'm not even gonna dignify that with a response. But one possibility, a much more realistic possibility, is the police really want to solve this, and they have somebody who's walked in and they're giving them what they want. You think about the JonBenet case when you had that one random guy who was a child predator who confessed to murdering her. And everybody wanted that to be true. They wanted to solve that case so badly, but it turned out it wasn't him. Right? Well, in this case, what you certainly could imagine happening is they want to believe this so badly that they're inadvertently subconsciously giving Jesse information to help prompt his story and build up his story. Absolutely possible. But then you have something like this. They're not doing that here, Right? They're actually Trying to figure out whether he knows what he's talking about because they want him to explain, oh, well, they couldn't run because their wrist was tied to the ankle. But that's not what he says, right? He says this other thing. Now, one possibility here is that he wasn't there when they were tied up. And so he really is just making it up because he wants the police to believe him. So he's actually bolstering a true story with lies. And this is why these confessions are so hard, because it's so easy if you just have an agenda to say, well, it's obviously false because that's a false piece of information. Or it's obviously true because he got this part right without thinking about the complexities of the human mind and the fact that you could lie about the truth to make the truth more believable. And people do it all the time, right? And you can imagine that here. But either way, he gets it wrong. He says that the murders happened at noon. That's not true. They happened at sunset. And one point that's often stated is that it was Ridge, and we stated this earlier, that moved the time from morning to night. But in fact, and this is kind of interesting, it was Jesse, he was the first person to mention it happening at night. And he does it with this part of the conversation. Detective. Ridge says it was like early in the day, but you don't know exactly what time. Okay, because we got. I've got some real confusion with the times you're telling me. But now this 9 o' clock in the evening call that you got, explain it to me. Well, after all this stuff happened that night, that they done it, Ridge, okay, I went home. But then, so this is what's crazy. Jesse says when it all happened at night, right? But then he immediately says, I went home about noon. Then they called at 9 o' clock at night, they called me. Now you have Jesse within seconds, two statements being on both sides of the times. On the one hand, he says it happened at night, but then he talks about going home about noon. But Ridge is going to grab onto that because he knows it happened at night. So Jesse said it happened at night. So from that point forward, Ridge is going to refer to it happening at night. Why would Jesse do this if he's telling the truth? I don't know. Jesse's later gonna say that he said things that were false to throw off the cops, which is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I mean, that doesn't even make sense. Like you're admitting to being part of a murder and then you're lying about little details to throw off the cops. I don't know. I mean, we've established that Jesse isn't the most intelligent person, so maybe this made sense to him. But it is weird that he doesn't seem like he can get the time correct. So another point about this, it's often noted that Gitchell mentions the crime happening at 8 o' clock and that this is another leading incident. And you hear this a lot. But in fact it is Jesse, he was the first person to say that he received a call from the other two an hour after the murders. So Jesse, basically this is Gitchell doing math. Jesse has said the call came in at around 9, so it was no great feat for Gitchell to do the math. Subtract the hour from nine because we know it happened an hour before the call. We know the call happened at 9. And to say 8. And Gitchell will actually testify about this at trial. And this is another thing. All this stuff actually was testified about. And the defense, Stidham. Stidham was pretty good at attacking the confession. So he's pointing out these discrepancies and so on redirect or on rebuttal, you have these people going back to talk about some of this stuff. So that's where you can see, get. You'll explain like, I KNEW it was 8 because of what he said. Another big thing he gets wrong. Jesse says the boys were sodomized and Peretti testified there was no evidence of sodomy. I think it's pretty clear the boys were not raped. Now I say that, though I will say talking to Joseph Scott Morgan and him talking about all the care that's normally taken to ensure that you can identify that kind of circumstance. And that care was not taken here. So I don't know. I mean, maybe we can't be sure of that, but it seems like we would know if it happened. And Jesse gets it wrong, at least.
- [100:03]
Alice
In terms of people thinking that some of the, or all of this confession was fed to him by the police. The police didn't think that the boys were sodomized or at least didn't know at this point. Remember the letter where they're writing to the forensics lab saying we need to know this information. So it'd be weird to feed information that they don't know actually exists at this point.
- [100:21]
Brett
And I'll say this about Jesse, we're doing the same thing the police did. We're Interpreting what he said and putting spin on it. I mean, he doesn't say the boys were sodomized. I'm gonna go on a limb and say Jesse does not know what the word sodomized means. He says they were screwing them and stuff. Now what exactly that means, does that mean penetration? I don't know. We're going to talk about a, or.
- [100:43]
Alice
Messing with them, like in different ways.
- [100:45]
Brett
We're going to talk about a guy later when we talk about alternate suspects who explain to the police that pedophiles often don't penetrate because they know that's the way to get caught. So I don't know, maybe it's not the same thing, but nevertheless, it seems like an inconsistency. Then there's the phone call. Jesse says he was called by Jason and Damian the morning of the murders. But according to Josh Darby, Jesse spent the night with him the night before the murders. Darby statement is corroborated by Ricky D's who testified that he picked up Jesse at Darby's house. So that phone call didn't happen that night. Jesse will eventually move that phone call, as I said earlier, to Monday when it could have happened. But this is a significant error as well. And these timing errors. Oh, and there's another one which I didn't mention, that Jesse says the boys were Todd with a rope. This kind of goes back to their having their hands tied. They were not tied with a rope, they were tied with shoestrings. And you would think that is such a striking detail. I mean, that's the thing. You can't say these are small discrepancies. You can explain them away, you can ignore them, but they are not small, they are massive. And this is the biggest one. You cannot mistake a rope for shoestring. And it's bad enough that in Jesse's trial get you even trying to say, you know, we thought maybe this was rope burn, so maybe they were tied with a rope at some point. Ain't the best you can say for this. Once again, you know, Jesse keeps talking about leaving the things he gets wrong, the biggest things other than the time are the way the boys are tied and what they're tied with. And, and I believe the tying happened at the end of the crime, not earlier, not when Jesse's saying it happened. So it's possible he actually does not know that, that he wasn't there for that, he didn't see it. And once again, he is bolstering the truth with lies. And so he's trying to make up how they were tied because you know they were tied. So he's trying to make that up. And he just assumes, of course, they were tied with rope. What else would they be tied with? I think that's the best you can do.
- [102:38]
Alice
And one other thing that keeps popping up in my mind is we know that on the performance IQ he does okay, but his verbal IQ or the way he expresses himself is very poor. He doesn't do well in school. He drops out of school, in fact. And what is this confession, his verbal. If this is all true, one of the most difficult, I don't know, like having to describe this is going to be difficult for anyone in terms of using the English language. And he's using a medium of communication that he is not good at. Just objectively on all the tests that have shown that he's not good at basically communicating with words. So that I also know too, because I agree with you, I would never mistake rope for shoelaces. But we also know that verbal communication is just not something that he has a strength in.
- [103:24]
Brett
So the timing, eras in particular, and the tying issue are so significant that, you know, the police have their confession. Really the last thing you want to do when you have a confession is go talk to the guy again because chances are he's going to contradict himself. But they're bringing this information to Fogelman, the prosecuting attorney. He knows he's going to have to take this to a judge. He looks at it and he says, well, it seems like there's some pretty glaring mistakes here, like the time, so can you go back and figure this out? And so the police actually sit down with Jesse again that day a little bit later in the day to cover these mistakes as well.
- [103:58]
Alice
So the police begin by asking Jesse what time it was when the boys came into the woods. And he says, I would say five or six. Now this is already much better than what he'd said before. Remember the 9 o' clock a.m. hour, though he's not quite there yet. That's not quite late enough. Gitchell then says that Jesse told him seven or eight. Which is it? Jesse says seven or eight. Gitchell asks if Jesse's sure. And Jesse said it was starting to get dark, that he remembered it was starting to get dark. Now, although using darkness is a much better marker for time, particularly given that Jesse did not have a watch, it's still hard to explain how he started off in the morning, 9am and ended up in the evening. I mean, like flip flop hours of the day. It's not even like 9am is sunrise and you somehow forget, you know, that it's sunrise is actually sunset. 9am is like at this time May, it's already fully bright. It doesn't even make sense if Jesse were making this all up. Everyone knows that the kids disappeared in the evening, not in the morning. Like, this is all over the news. This is in the neighborhood. Like, remember all of the sightings for our timeline of people seeing the boys going into the woods or riding their bikes? Like, it is very well known and very well reported that it's the evening that they are missing. There's no reporting that they disappeared and never went to school and they were all absent from school. That's how they were figured out, that they were missing. None of that. So this is a very striking error. But it's also possible that Jesse's just terrible with timing. Now he told the police he worked at his roofing job till 5 o'. Clock. He actually got off around noon. So maybe he's trying to manufacture the alibi, which is a sign of guilt. Or maybe he got off at 5 and. And he just thought that was noon. Like that's how bad his timing is. Right. Noon and 5 are not close to each other. But that may be an indication of just how bad he is with time and how he can mix up 7 or 8pm with 9am in any event, Jesse says that the three of them were in the forest and that the three boys came up around 7 o'. Clock. So the timing is probably fine now. But then Jesse introduces another error during this clarification interview. When asked how the boys were tied, Jesse says the boys were tied with a brown rope. But of course we know that the boys were tied with their own shoelaces. Instead of digging more into this, Gitchell just moves on without challenging what Jesse has said. Jesse goes on to say that Jason and Damien raped Stevie Branch and Chris Byers, but that the Moore boy was not raped. Jesse eventually says that they were holding the boys by the ears, which is good for Gitchell, as we know that the boys had some unusual bruising on their ears. And we had, you know, speculated based on the autopsies that in fact they had been dragged by their ears for or held there for something.
- [106:44]
Brett
So that ends the second. We call it the second confession, the clarification. The first confession. I mean, one thing that's interesting, and Warren Holmes talked about this a little bit in his testimony. You know, he said you basically have this moment where the person gets it all off their chest. And then they won't necessarily tell you again, or they may start to deny it. And all this other stuff. Jesse doesn't. When they come back to Jesse after this, he doesn't say, you know what? All that was a lie. I didn't do that. He continues with the story. He introduced some more errors, but he keeps talking. This is the conclusion of the first confession. The first confession, as you've seen, has issues. It has issues with. A lot of the details are off. Jesse says things that absolutely did not happen. If you just listen to the confession, there's a lot of leading by the police. And I think there's an open question about what is Jesse repeating from what he told them before. You know, the discussion they had when we're making the dots and the circles and everything else. I mean, there was the vast majority. It wasn't that long a conversation, but the vast majority of their conversation happened unrecorded. Right. So we don't know. We have their records. We can read what they said, but they're not very detailed and they certainly don't include a lot of the details that Jesse talks about in his confession. So this confession has been debated endlessly since Jesse gave it, but it is not the only confession, and it is easily not the best. He has other confessions that we're going to get into that are very interesting for the details that they have. This is where we're going to leave you with this episode. It's been a long episode, but I think that was necessary. Next week, we're going to talk about some of his other conversations that Jesse had with other people. We will talk about his statement to his attorneys. We will talk about a statement, a discussion that he has that I think people don't normally focus on. And that's his conversation with Richard Offshay. He was an expert hired by the defense on false confessions. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff in that conversation. We will talk about the Bible confession, the infamous Bible confession. Jesse put his hand on the Bible and swore to his attorney that he committed this crime. And we'll talk about the other confession he made to the prosecutors, and we'll talk about the confession he made to the police after he was convicted. Go through the details and see what we can make of those. This is the first step in this. This is the confession that got Jesse convicted. Jesse would not end up testifying against Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols. So theoretically, this confession did not come into that trial. But as we know from cases new and old, jurors often know information about cases when they walk in the door. They certainly knew about this confession and it probably had some impact on Damien and Jason's trial and frankly is one of the things that probably led to the overturning of their conviction later on. Really interested to know what you think about this. If you haven't listened to this confession yet, it is available on Callahan or you can listen to the recording that we did and put out, which also has Jesse's later confession to the police on it as well. Check that out. Listen to it with your own ears. It is different to listen to it than it is to read it in a cold transcript. I would advise you to do that. Let us know your thoughts. Shoot us an email prosecutors pod gmail.com@ ProsecutorsPod for all your social media. If you would like to watch us record these episodes and join us while recording them and make comments in the chat, usually making fun of me, do so for only $3 a month on Patreon. And our note, once again, if you are joining Patreon, if you can do it without doing it through the App Store, that is the best way. If you do it through the app store, a $3 membership will cost you $4.50. So don't do that. Do it some other way. Or if you have no interest in seeing our beautiful faces, discuss these cases. You can still get the episodes early and ad free with patreon for only $3 a month. All right, Alice, do you have any other comments about this confession or anything else about this case?
- [110:59]
Alice
There's a lot to digest in this first one, especially whenever there's a first statement. And in this case, I think it's very worthy to note that he came in not as a suspect at first and a lot of this came out unprompted in narrative form. And it's really the reason we started with Warren Holmes's testimony about valid and invalid confessions is incredibly helpful to assess this and any sort of confessions that you see in cases like these. Obviously what we have seen in this very first statement, first of at least eight statements that we know of where he's confessed. We see lots of things that indicate both invalid and valid confessions. As Holmes testified to. There is not a slam dunk. And also humans don't fit into boxes. There are people that we have talked to, Brett and I have talked to who are confessing and very rarely, almost never can I think of a confession where all the details are correct, that they fit the evidence or that they are completely truthful because People have perspectives in which they are telling a story. Minimization is real. And the human brain is something that I will never understand. I'm not a psychology major, except that I've talked to a lot of people and seen the way their brains work and seen the way that they lie in places that just don't make any sense or they get things so obviously wrong. You know, I can show people the inconsistency. Honestly, the jury talking in Karen Reed, I think really highlights this, that we can be looking at something so blatant. And the witness that you are talking to, or in this case, the criminal defendant that you're talking to, can see the inconsistency, but their brain doesn't square it away. And so I think we can beat our brains over and over and think, oh, if I can't reconcile why Jesse says this, this or this, I think you really need to pull back and see if the things he gets right are so weighty that you can't oversee them, or if the things he gets wrong are so wrong that you can't get over them. Rather than kind of parsing every single word he does because that's a fool's errand.
- [112:55]
Brett
It's just a moment of transparency. I go back and forth on this like every day.
- [112:59]
Alice
Every day. Brett and I text each other every day, like, what do you think happened?
- [113:02]
Brett
It's like, is this. He makes this point, oh, wow, that's a good point. Maybe he's telling the truth and this is. This is it, you know, and then. But what about that rope?
- [113:13]
Alice
I'll say this. If I put myself in the investigator's shoes, there's this horrendous triple murder. I have a bunch of like feelers and nothing is quite hot. And I hear this confession, even knowing all the points that are really wrong. I know Jesse because he's a known entity to the law enforcement officers there. He's just kind of, you know, kind of a low level criminal. He has a rap sheet. He punches 12 year old girls in the face, right? Like, he's not an unviolent person. I know of him. And I also know that he's not a great communicator because he has a lower iq. And he tells me this story, my jaw is dropped and I'm going to believe him. In the first instance, there's so much I need to do, more investigation, I need to corroborate. But in the first instance, when I press record, I'm like, guys, this is about to get blown wide open. There are Things he's getting wrong. But that always happens in every witness that I interview. So, of course, a lot happens after that. But the first time, if I'm hearing this, putting myself in that time and place on whatever day, this is June 3rd, like, within a month of the murders, I'm thinking, he's telling me something, and there's gonna be more to parse. We know he lies like, he's minimizing. There's other things we need to work through. But my initial gut reaction is, hot damn, we're finally on the trail.
- [114:25]
Brett
Yeah.
- [114:26]
Alice
And, you know, I'm not saying that's how I'll feel now. I'm saying if I'm the investigator, that's exactly how I feel.
- [114:32]
Brett
One thing that keep thinking about is we have walked into the room with people and sat down with them, and known facts based on our investigation, known things that were true and talked to people who I 100% believed were telling the truth. We're not lying. They weren't trying to cover anything up. You know, they're just witnesses, innocent people who had nothing to hide. And they tell me things that don't fit with reality. And I know that they're telling me the truth about it, but they're missing these big things, you know, I mean, that has happened, and you see something like this. And that experience always colors. Like, I'll never forget I've told this story before, but it's so striking to me. The guy we sat down with before that one trial and interviewed, and he told us this story which was 100% accurate. It was supported by all the documents. It was very good for us. Put him up on the stand. I'm questioning him, and he doesn't remember any of that. You know, he's like, no, that never happened. And it's like, I had a discussion with you four days ago.
- [115:41]
Alice
Days ago.
- [115:42]
Brett
Yeah. Where you laid all this out in detail with supporting evidence.
- [115:47]
Alice
And we showed him the evidence during trial to being like, what about this phone call on your phone records?
- [115:53]
Brett
And he just. He couldn't get there. And so I see stuff like this sometimes, and I'm like, I get why you would think, man, this guy is full of it. I think back on those circumstances, and I'm like, people are just weird. Now. I'll say this. When you're talking about convicting someone based on this information and you have these kind of thoughts, that is an issue, right? We're talking about reasonable doubt. We're talking about everything else. It's a problem that you have These big, gaping holes in Jesse's story and what we're gonna have to do as we go through this and we're talking about corroboration, is there corroborating evidence? And talk about the other confessions, and maybe at the end, you'll have a clearer idea about what's going on here. But it surprises me that there are people who are so certain that Jesse is completely telling the truth or completely lying. Lying. It just surprises me that people are just so certain about that and have no. Seemingly no doubts at all. You know, they can hear the thing about the brown rope and be like, whatever. Or they can hear the details about the wounds of the boys and be like, well, you know, like, I just. I don't know. To me, those. Those facts are really hard to reconcile. So, anyways, we've rambled enough. Join us next week. We're going to continue our discussion of these confessions, and maybe that will give a little bit of clarity to this one, and we hope see you there. But until then, I'm Brett.
- [117:17]
Alice
And I'm Alice.
- [117:18]
Brett
And we are the prosecutors.
- [117:40]
Alice
Let me check my sounds. I have to check it every time.
- [117:42]
Brett
And I'm using my new focusrite, so you just. We're gonna see.
- [117:48]
Alice
I don't know if it's me or you, but you sound breaky uppy.
- [117:52]
Brett
Really?
- [117:53]
Alice
It might be me. It might be me. But it's like, how's it sound for everybody else?
- [117:57]
Brett
Is there anybody else having me break it? I have no negative sounds. Oh, my.
- [118:02]
Alice
Now. Now you sound okay.
- [118:05]
Brett
Okay.
- [118:06]
Alice
That's the weirdest thing. Like, it. It was. It was just like crackly. Yeah, see, someone else heard it too. It was like. But now you sound. Keep talking. Keep talking.
- [119:18]
Brett
Talking, talking, talking. Talking sounds better now. Talking. Dogging. Dogging.
- [119:24]
Alice
It wasn't just me. You know what, software man, when they upgrade, it makes it actually harder.
- [119:32]
Brett
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