Murder and Mimosas Podcast
A true crime podcast with a focus on lesser known crimes and the background of those who commit these heinous acts. Each case is told with a bit of southern sass, but with tons of in depth research and respect for those lost. Join this mom and daughter duo as they sip their mimosas while diving into tragic cases. New episodes every Saturday, just in time for brunch (and a mimosa of your own)!
Murder and Mimosas Podcast
False Confessions and Judicial Failures
Can a community's fear and paranoia lead to the wrongful conviction of innocent teenagers? Our latest episode grapples with this haunting question as we continue to dissect the infamous West Memphis Three case. We shine a spotlight on Damien Echols, whose troubled past and community suspicion made him a prime target during the satanic panic of the early '90s. The dubious actions of juvenile officer Jerry Driver, local teen LG Hollingsworth, and the fabricated tales spun by Vicki Hutchinson only deepened the shadows hanging over Damien, creating a maelstrom of accusation and fear. Adding to the chaos, we scrutinize Jesse Misskelly's grueling 12-hour police interview, of which only 45 minutes were recorded, casting significant doubt on the legitimacy of his confession.
The injustice doesn't stop there; we unravel the wrongful conviction of 17-year-old Jesse Miskelly, whose coerced confession and intellectual disabilities were overlooked by a flawed legal system. Highlighting his attorney, Dan Stidham's recognition of Jesse's mental incapacity, we expose the procedural failures that led to his unjust imprisonment. We also question the prosecution's evidence, from the suspiciously retrieved knife to the questionable credentials of occult expert Dr. Griffiths and the unreliable jailhouse confession by Michael Carson. Tune in as we challenge the integrity of the evidence and the broader implications of this miscarriage of justice, offering a critical perspective on the trials and tribulations faced by the West Memphis Three.
Sources:
https://famous-trials.com/westmemphis/2287-home
https://shakedowntitle.com/cases/west-memphis-3/
https://law.jrank.org/pages/3599/West-Memphis-Three-Trials-1994-Appeals-Fail.html
Jessie Miskelley, Jr. - First Taped Confession - 6/3/93 - Audio + Transcript
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=search&v=381949830464647
https://www.oxygen.com/the-forgotten-west-memphis-three/true-c
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DarkCast Network. Welcome to the dark side of podcasting.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Murder and Mimosas a true crime podcast brought to you by a mother and daughter duo.
Speaker 2:Bringing you murder stories with a mimosa in hand. With a mimosa in hand, murder Mimosas is a true crime podcast, meaning we talk about adult matters such as murder, sexual assaults and other horrendous crimes. Listener discretion is advised. We do tell our stories with the victims and the victims families in mind. However, some information is more verifiable than others. However, you can find all of our information linked in the show notes.
Speaker 3:Welcome back to Murder Mimosas, I'm Shannon and I'm Danica. This week we'll be talking about part two of our three-part series about the West Memphis, Three and Danica. Did you want to take a recap about last week?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so we really just a recap about last week. Absolutely so we really just set the scene last week of who our victims are. And I'm laughing because if you listened to last week I said set the scene like a million times, yeah. So back to setting the scene. We went over who our victims are, we talked about how they were found and then kind of the start of the police investigation into who killed Stevie Michael and Chris.
Speaker 3:So, before we get into the story today, we're going to talk about the satanic panic that was happening and to understand the mind frame of people during this time frame. I was alive at this time and it was all over the news media, especially talk shows, shows giving information about satanic cults coming after you. That was their alleged backmasking and the music where Satan was talking to you through the music.
Speaker 2:And for those that aren't familiar with that term, backmasking it was like when you would play a vinyl record backwards. I mean, and it seemed very real at the time and just another reminder we talked about at the end of the episode last week that this is, you know, 1993. So the internet is not like readily accessible to look things up and dispute them. So for most people what the media said was kind of just considered truth.
Speaker 3:So, if you remember, last week LG Hollingsworth had pointed the finger at Damien Echols, but that had nothing to substantiate the accusation. However, he wasn't the only person putting the blame on Damien. Jerry Driver, a juvenile officer, also had Damien in his sights. About a year before the murders, a woman called the police and reported Damien for threatening her daughter, who was Damien's ex-girlfriend, deanna Holocone. Deanna's mother told the police she was fearful for her daughter's life. Within a month, deanna's mom had called the police again, saying her daughter and Damien were seeing each other again. The officer warned Damien to stay away from Deanna. Six nights later, deanna's mother called the police yet again.
Speaker 3:She advised the police that her daughter had run away and she assumed she was with Damien. The police had begun to search for her and found her with Damien. They were found at Lakeshore Estates in an abandoned trailer, both nude from the waist down. They were both taken to the county jail and charged with robbery although nothing was stolen and sexual misconduct. A juvenile officer went to Eccles' home and asked to search Damien's room, which his mother allowed. Driver was left with notebooks which included Damien's writing and poems. Driver put this in Damien's juvenile record as quote unquote evidence that showed his interest in the occult.
Speaker 2:And I actually read one of Damien's books called Life After Death, and he talks about how later he really wished he'd never kept a journal, because he never expected like his personal notes, poems and writings to come back as evidence against him.
Speaker 3:Right. Nobody wants their most personal items read for everybody to see. That's the point of a journal. But Driver continued to keep tabs on Damien. Even when he moved to Oregon for a brief time, driver would write letters to officials there. One was that Damien was trying to contact the girl he was arrested with, which was in violation of his terms of probation, although there was never any evidence to support this. As the investigation moved forward, vicki Hutchinson was called back into the police department for another interview, so she came up last week.
Speaker 2:She is Erin Hutchinson's mom and we talked also about Erin a little bit in last week's episode. Her being called into the police department was for something totally unrelated to the murders. So if you recall the Blue Beacon truck wash that kind of backed up to Robin Hood Hills, recall the blue beacon truck wash that kind of backed up to robin hood hills that we talked touched about a little bit last week we rarely recommend a map so you can see what we mean, but vicky worked there and she was being called in because the owners at the truck wash noticed a 200 overrun on a customer's credit card and they had suspicion that she had stolen the money and that's what she was being interviewed by the police for. So nothing to do with the murder of the three boys.
Speaker 3:Right. So Vicki comes in with her eight-year-old son. Of course police are asking why she brought him to a police interview and she claims he was still upset about his friends being killed. The police think this 200 credit card fraud might be nothing to be worried about, since Vicki might help them in their investigation. Vicki Hutchinson decides to play detective, so she started by speaking with her neighbor, jesse Miss Kelly, about Damien, since they were close in age and rumors around town already pointed toward Damien. Jesse said he knew of Damien but they weren't really friends. He just knew that Damien was weird, so to speak. However, she does go to the West Memphis police with her own concocted story of events. She claimed that Jesse told her that he had a friend named Damien who, quote unquote, drank blood and stuff. The police have Jesse come in for an interview and the interview lasted 12 hours. But can you guess how much of this was recorded? I would hope that for 12 hours.
Speaker 2:Either all of it or most of it is recorded.
Speaker 3:Well, that would be wrong. So there was a whopping 45 minutes that is recorded. Well, that would be wrong. So there was a whole whopping 45 minutes that was recorded. Those 45 minutes contained a confession from Jesse, if you want to call it that. So let's talk a second about Jesse and his interview with the police. For starters, jesse's just 17 years old, so he's a minor, and he had no parents present during these 12 hours. He also has an IQ of 72.
Speaker 2:And for those that may not know, a normal IQ is like 85 to 114. So for Jesse's IQ, since he's a little bit below the minimum, he's considered to have a borderline mental handicap.
Speaker 3:he's considered to have like a borderline mental handicap. So on top of all this, the police performed some techniques that in our opinion were unethical. Besides questioning him for 12 hours, they told Jesse that he flat out failed his polygraph test and for someone with mental abilities and without a parent, he didn't understand that the police could lie to him. They also showed him the crime scene photos of one of the boys which would be hard for really anyone to see. I mean, we saw those on the video and they're heart wrenching. So to really push him over the edge, they played a tape recording of a little boy's voice saying nobody knows what happened but me.
Speaker 2:And, for the record, the little boy on that tape was Aaron Hutchinson, which is Vicki's son, and the police had convinced him to make this recording for them to use.
Speaker 3:At this time, jesse began to spin a story of what happened that night, with constant discrepancies and changes as the police fed him information, and we're going to listen to a short clip of Jesse's actual confession.
Speaker 4:They skipped school, they skipped sales, or just their poster and those on the bikes. Alright, they were on the bikes. Where were the bikes at? They laid the bikes down. When they came out there to do it, when they hollered for them to come out there, where did they lay the bikes down? That's what I'm asking. I don't know where they laid the bikes down Out behind that way, way behind them. And when they hollered man. I seen boys. Oh, boys came out. Had Damien seen these boys before, has he?
Speaker 6:Most people aren't interested in just one topic Don't settle for a podcast about just one subject. That rhymed.
Speaker 1:Greetings. We're Technically a Conversation, a podcast for curious people by curious people.
Speaker 6:On our podcast, we do things just a little bit different Every week we share a new topic and the other hosts have no idea what the topic will be. Our topics are all over the place, from light and funny to dark and sometimes spooky.
Speaker 5:We've covered everything from true crime, historical events and people, the supernatural and the occult.
Speaker 4:I like that. Urban legends and folklore my favorite.
Speaker 6:No matter what we cover, we try to make the episodes interesting and funny. Don't mean to be the bad guy.
Speaker 1:But our lawyer said we legally couldn't call our show funny.
Speaker 5:We have a lawyer. Let me tell you what I told our lawyer.
Speaker 6:Come here so I can show you how far I can legally stick my high-heeled boot up your Check us out at technicallyaconversationcom, apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Technically a conversation. We're like a lifestyle brand. Yeah.
Speaker 3:This story that was told implicated not only Jesse, but also Damian Echols and Jason Baldwin. Jason Baldwin is a 16-year-old boy who lives in the same trailer park as Damian and they are best friends, which this may be just you know by where they live, and not really their interest, which was all it took for Jason to be implicated in this horrible scenario. The same night that Jesse gave his so-called confession, the West Memphis police raided Damian Echols' trailer and arrested both Damian and Jason. I'm sure you're wondering what evidence they have against any of these three boys besides Jesse. Word is Nothing.
Speaker 2:They have literally absolutely nothing.
Speaker 3:So, with their so-called mountain of evidence, they take Jesse to trial first. At first, jesse's lawyer assumed he was guilty, because who would have been to doing something this awful if they hadn't participated in it? The attorney quickly realized that Jesse wasn't guilty of anything, except for being not that bright. To give you an idea of what we're talking about, we're going to actually talk to Jesse's attorney himself, dan Stoddum.
Speaker 4:It all came down to one thing that I failed to understand, because we did not have a very good criminal psychologist at the time of trial. But when we finally got the services of Dr Tim Durning 10 years later, in 2004, he spent a lot of time with Mr and Ms Kelly. He spent a lot of time with Mr and Ms Kelly and, according to and I devoted an entire chapter to that. In fact I sent it to Dr Dermody to make sure that I hadn't made any mistakes in his testimony and he said no, you nailed it. So Mr and Ms Kelly is. Back.
Speaker 4:Then we called it mental retardation, today we call it MR or intellectual disabilities it's a much nicer term to put it and he was not fit to stand trial. He didn't understand why he was on trial. He thought Mr Carroll and I were police officers and he didn't understand the judge's role or the jury's role, and so he was just in an alien landscape just trying to survive. So it was really like not having a client at all, because he just was no help to us at all, and in fact it seemed like idiocy at times, even as a young lawyer. When I read my client's confession, it was immediately apparent to me that he didn't know what was going on. He said the boys had skipped school that day and came down to the creek bed at about 9 am. And he said Jason Baldwin had skipped school that day. And none of that was correct. They were all in school until 3 pm and then the cops got him to move it to noon, which still didn't do him any good because it wasn't past 3 o'clock, and so they just kind of settled on noon.
Speaker 4:And that was the narrative, and they just kept on going like it was no big deal. At one point during the interrogation of Jesse Miskelley, he was 17 years old, mentally retarded and had no parent or lawyer present, nor did his father sign the Miranda form which was required by law for minors. They proceeded on, and at one point during the interrogation they asked him if he knew how to tell time and he said yes. And then the kicker for me was they asked a 17-year-old kid, even though he was initially handicapped, if he knew what a penis was. So most 17-year-olds know what those are, must have picked up on the fact that he was not, you know, should have picked up on the fact that he was mentally challenged, but they didn't, it just kept on going. I don't think they cared.
Speaker 4:I don't think so either. There's other things in the confession. They were tied up with their own shoelaces. They were. Miss Kelly said they were bound with a brown rope. None of that was true, and he describes the genital mutilation of one of the boys as he's going to sweep with a pocket knife, which is not what happened. Even somebody who Just the casual observer would know that's not what happened.
Speaker 3:Going into the trial, the only evidence against Jesse was his own contradictory words, despite his alibi witnesses and his attorney's attempt to have any expert witnesses on false confessions testify.
Speaker 2:And the expert witness was shot down by Judge Burnett, who was presiding over the case was shot down by Judge Burnett who was presiding over the case.
Speaker 3:He was convicted of first-degree murder of Michael Moore and second-degree murder of Stevie Branch and Chris Spires. The sentence handed down to him was life for Michael and 20 years each for Stevie and Chris. So police questioned Damien and Jason on several occasions. None of the interviews were ever recorded.
Speaker 2:What a shocker, since it was 12 hours and they only got 45 minutes out of it.
Speaker 3:Right. So Damien was asked to submit blood and hair samples, and he freely gave them. He was asked to take a polygraph test, which he also agreed to, and to our surprise there was not a recording of this as well and there was no evidence of the machine's electronic responses. Another shocker I know what was in the police report was a one page report written by Duran that Damien had been untruthful.
Speaker 2:Wow, just wow. This seems like a total lack of accountability and credibility on the part of the police.
Speaker 3:Right, and that's how everything goes through this, through everything with this. So next up is Damian and Jason's trial, as they were tried together because that is monetarily more efficient for for the state, for the city, the county. The evidence in their trial was fibers that were microscopically similar and that's in quotations, even though you can't see it to clothing items found in their homes.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's focus on that for a minute. Found in their home, not necessarily their clothes. I know that a red fiber, specifically, was tied to Jason, as it came from Jason's home, and it was microscopically similar to a red robe that was also found in his home, which I would venture to guess is probably not Jason's, as I just have a hard time seeing a 16 year old boy with a robe.
Speaker 3:Right, he's not Hugh Hefner, so we also have witnesses claiming they heard Damien confess to the crimes and a serrated knife.
Speaker 2:Okay, now let's focus on the knife for a second, because I'm sure that you're thinking, okay, they have a murder weapon, like that's kind of big evidence. That's very, you know, kind of the caught red-handed thing, but this knife was never linked to be the murder weapon. It was also brought up by Jason's mother that she had taken the knife from Jason and threw it in the pond behind their trailer, which is where it was found. The kicker to that, though, is she threw it back there a year prior to these murders. As to the reason why, I don't know why she threw it back there, but that's what she says.
Speaker 2:So they brought in scuba divers to find it, and the police aren't actually the ones that arranged this. The prosecuting attorney arranged this, attorney Fogelman, and this was supposed to be like a very hush-hush type of thing. Nobody was really supposed to know about it. However, the media just happened to show up to this event that no one is supposed to know about, as the scuba divers are going out. So they send them out to find this knife, and they do find it. I I mean, that's where it was found, but I'm not understanding their theory, because either they're saying that jason's mom is a liar, or their theory is that jason's mother threw this out a year ago into the pond and then the boys decided that they wanted to commit a murder. So they wade out into the water, search around until they find the knife, get the knife, use it for a triple homicide and then throw it back into the same pond, which I don't know doesn't fit for me.
Speaker 3:Right, and I don't know about you, but if I'm needing a murder weapon, I'm not going to dig it out of a pond and then throw it back in there. Maybe I'm just a little lazy on that account, but I'm just not doing that. So they also have an quote unquote occult expert which. Let's talk about him for a moment. For starters, the so-called occult expert, Dr Griffiths, has his PhD in psychology of occult. The defense was able to finally get Griffiths to finally reveal that he took a whopping zero classes to get his mail order PhD.
Speaker 2:Okay, but how does that work? He just caught up and was like hey, can you mail me a?
Speaker 3:PhD. Well, he read a lot of books is what he told the defense. He read a lot of books and was mailed a PhD in a cult. So, danica, you and I have been able to have a PhD back in 1993, but I don't think it works like that.
Speaker 6:I have a lot of PhDs.
Speaker 1:I was going to say you and I read a lot of books.
Speaker 2:You should have a lot of PhDs in a lot of books, phd in true have a lot of PhDs and a lot of books and true crime and cults and Right.
Speaker 1:I mean I don't even know. Grab your marshmallows and sleeping bags for the Burnt Marshmallows podcast, where cozy mysteries come alive around the crackling campfire. Picture yourself wrapped in a warm blanket, sipping hot cocoa as we share spooky tales that will whisk you away to a world of mystery, ghosts and perhaps even an occasional monster, crime-solving spirits, urban legends, bigfoot, we've got it all join burnt marshmallows every tuesday wherever you listen to podcast for cozy mysteries books.
Speaker 3:And we also have a so-called jailhouse confession.
Speaker 2:OK, so let's now talk about this for a second. We keep saying that we need to talk about all of these things because because everything's so bizarre.
Speaker 2:Everything is just if you just hear it, like on the surface, you're like, ok, they have a knife, they have an expert, they have, um, a confession, a jailhouse. Right, yeah, they have fibers. Like you're like, okay, yeah, I see why they're convicted. But then if you take each of these pieces and you talk about, like what came out on the stand with the jury heard, and then you're like that doesn't make sense. So let's talk about the jailhouse confession, all right. So first of all, this confession didn't come up until five months after the supposed confession occurred. Okay, so this didn't happen. And, like, the person he confessed supposedly confessed to was like, hey, he told me this. Fyi, okay, but for the sake of argument, let's talk about what was supposedly said.
Speaker 2:So, supposedly, jason baldwin, while in jail, met this 16 year old boy named michael carson and, after just two whole days of knowing this guy, decided he would just spill his guts. Okay, michael takes a stand with this claim. Now let's talk about why it took him five months to come clean and I put clean in quotes because I don't think you can come clean if you made it all up. But it wasn't until Michael was in some more legal trouble that he decided to let anyone know about this confession that Jason supposedly told him.
Speaker 2:In his testimony he claims Jason told him that Jason had cut off the penis of one of the boys, drank the blood and put the scrotum in his mouth. Not only do I personally not believe anything Michael says, but even if Jason did do all these things right, even if this were true by some stretch of the imagination, I just really struggle with the idea of him telling someone he's only known for two days all of this stuff, but he is maintaining his innocence the entire time. He never says he did anything. He always says he's innocent. So why would he tell this to some I mean, basically random stranger?
Speaker 3:Right and this might be a hot take, but I'm just completely not a fan of jailhouse confessions on the stand anyway. I mean, most of them are there, in my opinion, to take a field trip, to get out of jail for a bit or to help themselves to get leniency. So they also have Damien and his writings in his journal. What they do, or what they do have, is Jesse's so-called confession, because they don't have that.
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm sorry they do not have Jesse's so-called confession. I'm sorry I misspoke Because Jesse actually refused to perjure himself, so prosecutors could not use Jesse's so-called made-up confession. With this evidence, the jury deliberated and came back with a conviction for both of them, for capital murder for all three boys, and Damien was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Jason was sentenced to life without parole.
Speaker 2:I struggle a lot with this because I understand it was 1993, so it's a different time. But even then, like we've talked about the little bit of evidence that they claim to have, I just it's hard for me to see that people came back at all with a guilty verdict.
Speaker 3:Ok, it was 1993, but like when I watched this HBO documentary, like I was still very young and I'm watching all this and I'm like they have would say that some of this falls on satanic panic and I also believe that the police at the time that they probably held the so-called experts in very high regards despite their lack of formal education.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean this is before that we have, like the information on course, confession so and they didn't even get to hear about that because the expert wasn't allowed in. They don't get to hear about Jesse's lack of mental capabilities, but his confessions don't even used in the second trial. So it's just crazy. But I'm sure for some of you you're wondering like how is this even tied to satanic panic Right? What did this guy who had his mail order PhD even have to say that could have swayed someone? So let's break that down, because even before knowing this guy's PhD was mail ordered.
Speaker 2:Listening to him talk on the stand, I was struggling ordered. Listening to him talk on the stand, I was struggling, okay. So he claims that because there's three victims, that that's what make that's one mark towards satanic right. And, um, he doesn't really explain very well why he just talks about the number six, six, six and how that's tied to it. I don't know if it's because there's three sixes, but overall that seems like an entire stretch to me. Then there's the fact that the murders occurred on a full moon, which in my ignorance I thought was a werewolf thing. I guess it connects to satanism as well. Not gonna lie, I have not apparently read enough books about.
Speaker 2:Satanism to get my PhD mail ordered in because I didn't know that full moons had anything to do with it. Here's a real quick kicker, though right, he testified on the stand what he believed made Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols quote satanic. And Damien Echols quote satanic. They paint their nails black, damien has black hair and the boys wear black. To the point that he pulled Jason Baldwin into this, right, because Jason didn't paint his nails black and he didn't have black hair. That was Damien, but he had to bring Jason in too, right, this can't just be Damien who's part of this Satanism, and Jason was just chilling there or he won't get convicted. He pulled Jason into this by saying he felt that Jason was part of the occult because Jason owned 11 black T-shirts Mind-blowing Right.
Speaker 3:Like if you looked in my closet, though, I mean, I guess, yes, I would be into so much satanic stuff.
Speaker 2:I love black here's what I know, it's supposed to be slimming. Here's what I know about 1993. I could have multiple mail order phds, but I'd also get convicted as a satanist, except too many black t-shirts.
Speaker 3:So right, I have so many black of everything black shoes, black shirts, black pants I have black hair.
Speaker 2:This is naturally really really dark. But that would make me a Satanist, especially if I put on a black shirt.
Speaker 3:Right, it's just, it's mind-blowing. So Damien did get a harsher sentence and that's probably because maybe he had 13 black shirts instead of 11.
Speaker 2:I'm not really sure. I mean, they never gave us a number, but he must have had more since he got death. I mean, or maybe it's because of the nails and the hair, you know, he's a little bit more, I don't know.
Speaker 3:None of it made sense, but next week we will talk more about what happens after they are convicted, where are they now and where things currently stand in their case. We will also hear more from Dan Stodman. We always recommend more bubbly and less OJ Cheers. Bubbly and less OJ Cheers.
Speaker 2:If you'd like to see pictures from today's episode, you can find us at murdermimosas on Instagram. You can also find us at murdermimosas on TikTok, twitter, and if you have a case you'd like us to do, you can send that to murdermimosas at gmailcom. And lastly, we are on Facebook at Murder and Mimosas Podcast, where you can interact with us there. We love any type of feedback you can give us, so please rate and review us on Spotify, itunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts.