Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 2: A Harvest of Innocence is Dan Stidham's story until now,
Speaker 2: I'm told regarding his involvement in the West Memphis three
Speaker 2: murder case. He stepped into its current as a young lawyer,
Speaker 2: unaware of its strength and the immutable, unpredictable at ease
Speaker 2: that would forever change his life and his view of
Speaker 2: the law. He tells it now because it must be told.
Speaker 2: He spent most of the past thirty years viewed in
Speaker 2: widely disparate lights. In the beginning the sum he was
Speaker 2: a pariah, a man so bold as to represent a
Speaker 2: teenager accused of being a satanic child killer. Much later
Speaker 2: others began to respect his efforts in seeking justice for
Speaker 2: Jesse miss Kelly. In the real world, it is much
Speaker 2: more complicated than that. He was nothing more than a
Speaker 2: lawyer committed to doing his job what was required of
Speaker 2: him by his moral compass. As a reward for his efforts,
Speaker 2: he spent a good deal of the past thirty years
Speaker 2: being pummeled by those hell bent on stopping his quest
Speaker 2: for justice for the West Memphis three, three young men
Speaker 2: who spent nearly two decades in prison his crimes they
Speaker 2: simply did not commit. This is the true story of
Speaker 2: those events. The book that we're featuring this evening is
Speaker 2: a Harvest of Innocence, the Untold story of the West
Speaker 2: Memphis three Murder Case, with my special guest, Dan Stidham.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for
Speaker 2: this interview.
Speaker 3: Dan Stidham, Thank you for having men. It's an honor
Speaker 3: to be on your show.
Speaker 2: It's a big thrill to be able to talk to you,
Speaker 2: and congratulations on this book. Let's get to right away.
Speaker 2: Just in the introduction you talk about that this Harvest
Speaker 2: of Innocence is your story and then until now has
Speaker 2: been untold regarding your involvement in the West Memphis three
Speaker 2: murder case. You're right that you stepped in as a
Speaker 2: young lawyer, unaware of the cases strength and the immutable,
Speaker 2: unpredictable eddies that would forever change your life and your
Speaker 2: view of the law. And you say, you tell it
Speaker 2: now because it must be told. Take us back to
Speaker 2: May fifth, nineteen ninety three, Little Rock, Arkansas. How you
Speaker 2: first heard about this story, what you first believed from
Speaker 2: the accounts and the reporting, and how you incredibly became
Speaker 2: involved as an attorney in this extraordinary case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was May fifth, nineteen ninety three. I'll never
Speaker 3: forget that day. I was fishing with my father in
Speaker 3: Little Rock and Indian Head late and we had come
Speaker 3: in and were cleaning fish and putting up the tackle.
Speaker 3: As I was cleaning my hands heard the TV break
Speaker 3: into the story about three young children in Westminphis, Arkansas,
Speaker 3: who had been found in a mudfield ditch, and pretty
Speaker 3: soon the story evolved into our rumors of satanic colts
Speaker 3: and genital mutilation, and so it was really frightening. I
Speaker 3: remember having this conversation with my father. He said, you
Speaker 3: don't have any business whatsoever getting involved in something like that,
Speaker 3: so you need to stay away from that. And I said, well,
Speaker 3: it's so far away from Paragold where I live. It's
Speaker 3: ninety miles away, So I mean, I just there's no
Speaker 3: chance that I could possibly get involved in it. Of
Speaker 3: course I did. I got a phone call out of
Speaker 3: the Blue Back on June seventh of nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 3: and the judge, Judge David Goodson, who was from my hometown, Paragold.
Speaker 3: He was on the bench that day and handed the
Speaker 3: task of appointing lawyers, and nobody wanted to represent mister Meskelly.
Speaker 3: There were throngs of attorneys jocking for position to represent
Speaker 3: the other two, but nobody wanted to deal with mister
Speaker 3: Miskelly and the confession. And he said, I really need
Speaker 3: you to think about this because I think you could
Speaker 3: do a good job. And so I said, well, can
Speaker 3: I have time to think about it? And he said, yeah,
Speaker 3: you've got twenty minutes. So I quickly uh my law
Speaker 3: partner's home phone number and he didn't answer. I waited
Speaker 3: a few minutes, try it again. He didn't answer. The
Speaker 3: more I thought about it, the more I was leaning
Speaker 3: towards doing it. And Judge Goodson hadn't even mentioned you know,
Speaker 3: all you got to do is get him ready to
Speaker 3: tessfy against the other two avoid the death penalty. It
Speaker 3: should be something that happens pretty quickly, and it'll be
Speaker 3: over with. And with that having been said, I still
Speaker 3: was a little reluctant, and I was still I had
Speaker 3: just got in out of the shower and still had
Speaker 3: a towel wrapped around me. And I went to the
Speaker 3: door and asked my wife to step in the bedroom,
Speaker 3: and I told her as quickly as I could be
Speaker 3: is my twenty minutes was about up, what was going
Speaker 3: on and what had been asked of me. And I
Speaker 3: knew she was going to talk me out of it.
Speaker 3: I just knew she would. But instead she looked at
Speaker 3: me and she goes, do it. That's why you went
Speaker 3: to law school. This is the kind of case she loved.
Speaker 2: Go for it.
Speaker 3: And I was really kind of stunned by her response.
Speaker 3: So I called Judge Goodson back and at the courthouse
Speaker 3: and Marian and agreed to represent enigmatic Jesse Missus Kelly Jr.
Speaker 3: Now that's how it started, just like that. And of
Speaker 3: course I never even gave thought to what my father
Speaker 3: told me and what I had promised him. But I
Speaker 3: thought this limited intrusion into my life would not be
Speaker 3: that long. And here we are, thirty one years later
Speaker 3: talking about this case. Still it's never left the media
Speaker 3: in all these years, it's always been continuing media coverage
Speaker 3: about this or that or the other, and so it's
Speaker 3: it's it's a fascinating case and one I hope to
Speaker 3: still be able to solve. For the first two or
Speaker 3: three days, all we could manage to do was take
Speaker 3: phone calls from every media out that in the United States.
Speaker 3: I can't recall a name of them all in my book,
Speaker 3: but I can't recall at the top of my head.
Speaker 3: But it was all the major networks and all the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty and talk show hosts and all that kind
Speaker 3: of thing. And so, of coursely I wanted to interview
Speaker 3: my client, and I wasn't going to let that happen
Speaker 3: under any circumstances. Of course, you know, here we were.
Speaker 3: We knew nothing about the case, my partner and I,
Speaker 3: and we hadn't even met our client. So the first
Speaker 3: thing I did was have him train from he was
Speaker 3: in the Cross County Jail, which is just the county
Speaker 3: immediately west of Critin County where the crime occurred, and
Speaker 3: I asked to have him moved to Clay County, which
Speaker 3: was a brand new facility at the time. I knew
Speaker 3: the sheriff there pretty well and I asked him if
Speaker 3: he'd be willing to house mister miss Kelly, and he agreed,
Speaker 3: and so they transferred him to Clay County, which is
Speaker 3: just north of me in Parible, and so it wasn't
Speaker 3: but about a thirty five minute drive to be able
Speaker 3: to go visit him instead of a four hour round trip.
Speaker 3: When we went to see mister miss Kelly for the
Speaker 3: first time, I was expecting this. You know, the picture
Speaker 3: in the newspaper, which is how I read my client's confession,
Speaker 3: was in the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal,
Speaker 3: who somehow got their hands on the confession. There were
Speaker 3: rumors about police officers trying to sell it thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: All of a sudden, the West Memphis Commercial Appeals printed
Speaker 3: it on the front page, so they didn't print it
Speaker 3: in its entirety. But I ended up getting my hands
Speaker 3: on a copy of it from one of the other
Speaker 3: attorneys involved, and as I read it, I thought, oh,
Speaker 3: my gosh, this is horrible. It's just but immediately I
Speaker 3: picked up on the fact that there were some huge
Speaker 3: discrepancies in his confession and some impossibilities that just couldn't
Speaker 3: have happened the way he said it, you know, just
Speaker 3: based on what I knew about the case at that point.
Speaker 3: So we drove off the picket, my law partner Greg
Speaker 3: and my legal assistant Vicky, and we went to the
Speaker 3: Clay County Detention Center and signed in and took the
Speaker 3: short walk down the hall and we were deposited into
Speaker 3: a common area at the jail that had some concrete
Speaker 3: picnic tables and benches, and so there set this small kid.
Speaker 3: He looked like he was maybe ten or eleven years
Speaker 3: old at most. He couldn't have been more than, you know,
Speaker 3: just a little over five feet tall. And the jail
Speaker 3: jumpsuit that they had given him was was so big
Speaker 3: they had to roll up to he had to roll
Speaker 3: up the sleeves and wanted to be able to find
Speaker 3: his hands and feet. So he wasn't what I was expecting.
Speaker 3: I was expecting a street thug, you know, a big kid,
Speaker 3: and I got just the opposite. So I was really surprised.
Speaker 3: And the last thing I wanted to do was stick
Speaker 3: a tape recorder in front of him, because I just
Speaker 3: wanted to try to get to know him. And so
Speaker 3: we began talking and and Vicky was taking notes, and
Speaker 3: you know, we just kind of asked him, you know, hey,
Speaker 3: you said you were there, Can you tell us what happened?
Speaker 3: And this version of what happened was dramatically different than
Speaker 3: what he had told the police. And he kept insisting
Speaker 3: that the child who had been sexually mutilated was the
Speaker 3: bondheaded kid Stevie Branch, when in fact it was one
Speaker 3: of the others. But I mean, he would not back down.
Speaker 3: He said, he insisted it was the bond kid, and
Speaker 3: so we were just horribly confused and about all he
Speaker 3: could do was just to answer yes or no questions.
Speaker 3: He could not provide any narrative about what happened, and
Speaker 3: seemed odd to me, even as a young lawyer just
Speaker 3: starting my fifth year of flaw practice with no jury
Speaker 3: trial experience, all of a sudden, I've got a problem.
Speaker 3: I've got to get a kid ready to testify against
Speaker 3: the co defendants and he can't tell the story. So,
Speaker 3: in not having any experience whatsoever was doing with people
Speaker 3: who have intellectual disabilities, I didn't immediately catch on to
Speaker 3: the fact that he was suffering from MR, which back
Speaker 3: then we referred to as mental retardation. Today's jargon is MR,
Speaker 3: or intellectual disabilities, but he had MR and we didn't
Speaker 3: know that until much later. In fact, it was after
Speaker 3: the trial was over months later, ten years later.
Speaker 2: What about any references to Satanism, because right away, before
Speaker 2: you get involved, there were already these rumors of Satanic
Speaker 2: ritualistic murder. So what does he say specifically in that
Speaker 2: confession that you read regarding Satanism whatsoever?
Speaker 3: Well, I talked about meetings and they would kill dogs
Speaker 3: and eat the flesh, cook the dogs on the campfire,
Speaker 3: and eat the dogs, and Damien was the leader. He
Speaker 3: told the police about there being sex orgies after the
Speaker 3: meetings were over, but there was no mention of any
Speaker 3: kids of being sacrificed, and so it really didn't sound
Speaker 3: like a Satanic ritual to me. That's the way the
Speaker 3: prosecution played their cards. And when we asked him about
Speaker 3: those things, he just really couldn't remember what he had
Speaker 3: told the police. And at one point he mentions that
Speaker 3: there were other people involved in the cult. And when
Speaker 3: I asked the names that he had mentioned, I said,
Speaker 3: where did you come up with these names? And he
Speaker 3: said those are all the kids in school who didn't
Speaker 3: like me and made fun of me. So I thought
Speaker 3: that was interesting, but he really couldn't put together any
Speaker 3: kind of narrative about what happened. And if you see
Speaker 3: something that's, you know, so shocking as this, and these
Speaker 3: are the worst pictures I have ever seen, and nothing
Speaker 3: I could ever see would be worse than this. It's
Speaker 3: just it's horrible to look at. And I just could
Speaker 3: not believe that this kid had witnessed this happened and
Speaker 3: couldn't tell the story. And then he got parts of
Speaker 3: it just dead wrong. So we left that day with
Speaker 3: more questions than answers. And I remember his haircut was unique.
Speaker 3: It was some kind of mohawk kind of deal with
Speaker 3: stripes cut down the sides of his head from the
Speaker 3: top of the mohawk, and then someone had carved in
Speaker 3: with some clippers and eight ball like off a pool table,
Speaker 3: and whoever did it obviously had some talent, but it
Speaker 3: made him look like a carnival freak. For lack of
Speaker 3: little better phrase, I said, hey, when your hair grows
Speaker 3: out a little more, here's some money to get a haircut.
Speaker 3: And by the way, which kid was it again that
Speaker 3: had his thing cut off? And then he said, just
Speaker 3: insisting that it was the block kid, And I was
Speaker 3: just wrong. So we'd get outside of the car and
Speaker 3: start heading back to the law office and we're just stunning.
Speaker 3: I mean, we certainly had more questions than answers. And
Speaker 3: I remember my law partner said, how are we going
Speaker 3: to get him to testify against the other two? And
Speaker 3: he can't even put together a story. I said, we
Speaker 3: may not be able to. It may be impossible. So
Speaker 3: it was very confusing, and as we started getting discovery
Speaker 3: and we were under the impression that our client was
Speaker 3: guilty because he said he was there. And if he
Speaker 3: hadn't told the police the one piece of narrative that
Speaker 3: was in the confession that he ran down one of
Speaker 3: the kids I think it was Michael Moore and brought
Speaker 3: that kid back to the crime scene, then he would
Speaker 3: have just been a false witness instead of a false confessor.
Speaker 3: That one little brief colloquy about running that kid down
Speaker 3: and bringing him back to the crime scene is what
Speaker 3: implicated him, because he said that he didn't participate in
Speaker 3: any of the sexual stuff that he described the sodomization
Speaker 3: of the little kids and then the sexual mutilation, and
Speaker 3: he described a sexual mutilation as Jason Baldwin just swinging
Speaker 3: a knife and removing the penis. And that's not what happened.
Speaker 3: That's not what the pictures reflected, despite their ugliness and
Speaker 3: horrible as they were, it just didn't happen that way.
Speaker 3: It was obviously it didn't happen that way. So we
Speaker 3: wasted about ninety days or so looking through the evidence
Speaker 3: that the prosecution was handing over to us in box loads,
Speaker 3: and with the thought that, you know, we've got to
Speaker 3: figure out some way to get this kid to come
Speaker 3: up with a narrative. In August late August of ninety three,
Speaker 3: I finally get the phone call from the prosecuting attorney
Speaker 3: in Crickland County in West Memphis. Name was John Foglman,
Speaker 3: and the first time I'd ever talked to him, I
Speaker 3: hadn't met him yet, and he said that they had
Speaker 3: found a DNA match on a bloody T shirt found
Speaker 3: in mister Miskelly's bedroom closet. So I thought, okay, well,
Speaker 3: now we're in trouble. That's a slam dunk. And of
Speaker 3: course DNA was still in its emphasy at that time,
Speaker 3: so immediately made a note that we've got to hire
Speaker 3: our own expert to make sure that the state's expert,
Speaker 3: you know, is reading this correctly. So I called his father,
Speaker 3: and his father was just heart broken, and he said,
Speaker 3: there's no way he could have done it. He was
Speaker 3: fifty miles away in Dias, Arkansas, which is the childhood
Speaker 3: home of Johnny Cash, and so his father just couldn't
Speaker 3: believe it. And I also got an offer from the
Speaker 3: prosecutor of fifty years in prison. I'm sorry, excuse me
Speaker 3: that came later. It was life in prison with the
Speaker 3: chance of parole, right, that was the offer. And so
Speaker 3: I went to the jail tried to explain this offer
Speaker 3: to Jesse, and he just couldn't seem to comprehend it. Life.
Speaker 3: Of course, in his simple mind, life in Arkansas means
Speaker 3: just that life. And if it's not without parole, then
Speaker 3: there's a chance to pro bowl or the governor could
Speaker 3: commute the sentence later on. But I was really worried
Speaker 3: about whether, you know, we could even perform that miracle
Speaker 3: with not being able to get a narrative out of
Speaker 3: my client. And I did something that day different, And
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly why I did it that way,
Speaker 3: but I did, I guess more than anything, I thought
Speaker 3: of trying to explain DNA to Jesse Miss Kelly Jr.
Speaker 3: Was going to be impossible, so I just simply asked him.
Speaker 3: I said, hey, there was a T shirt found in
Speaker 3: your bedroom at your mobile home and it has blood
Speaker 3: on it. Or I could finish my sentence. He jumped
Speaker 3: right in and for the first time, provided some narrative,
Speaker 3: which was very interesting. It was something that he knew
Speaker 3: something about. He said, oh, that's my blood. I get
Speaker 3: mad at my dad sometimes and I go outside and
Speaker 3: I bust stow the bottles with my fists. And I
Speaker 3: said really, and he said yeah. He reached out and
Speaker 3: showed me his knuckles on both hands or just littered
Speaker 3: the scars. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to
Speaker 3: ruin this magic moment of actually getting some sort of
Speaker 3: response from him that didn't come in the formula of
Speaker 3: a yeah or uh huh or no or uh uh.
Speaker 3: It was It was an actual narrative about why his
Speaker 3: blood was on that T shirt. So the following month
Speaker 3: we ended up in Maryon, where the courthouse is located
Speaker 3: in Crickton County, just down the road from what's Memphis,
Speaker 3: and we sat down the council table and Fogelman walked
Speaker 3: up to me and bent over and he said, hey,
Speaker 3: I was wrong about that DNA. That's not Michael Moore's blood,
Speaker 3: that's your client's blood. And it was just like a
Speaker 3: light bulb going off in my head. It was like whoa, Yes,
Speaker 3: he was telling the truth about something that he could
Speaker 3: actually provide a narrative for for the first time. Before
Speaker 3: I could tell my law partner, the bailiff announced that
Speaker 3: Judge Burnett was entering the courtroom, and we all stood
Speaker 3: up and went through that ritual, and while something else
Speaker 3: was going on, it didn't have any pertinence to our case.
Speaker 3: I leaned over and I said, Crow, that wasn't Michael
Speaker 3: Moore's blood on the T shirt. It was Jesse. And
Speaker 3: he goes, God, he was telling the truth and I
Speaker 3: said yeah, and that means he's innocent. And we both
Speaker 3: just looked at each other, like, you know, this is
Speaker 3: the worst thing that could possibly happen to the lawyers
Speaker 3: has no trial experience. I had actually set second chair
Speaker 3: in a jury trial in a different county, but I
Speaker 3: played no role but sitting there and offering some insight.
Speaker 3: But I didn't cross examine witnesses or do anything like that.
Speaker 3: But that was my sole jury trial experience. Mister Crow
Speaker 3: had some civil jury trial experience, but no criminal experience.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a
Speaker 2: second to hear these messages. So it's been established and
Speaker 2: that you were relatively inexperienced in jury trials. But you
Speaker 2: now believe that your client, Jesse Muskelly, is innocent. And
Speaker 2: now you also get to review the information as to
Speaker 2: how police and the prosecutor got that confession. Tell us
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 3: Well, there was an interesting lack of notes that the
Speaker 3: officers took. They took more than what they gave us.
Speaker 3: They threw him away or destroyed them, but you really
Speaker 3: couldn't make heager tails out of their notes. The one
Speaker 3: note that they gave him the polygraphs that day on
Speaker 3: June third, they told him he was lying his ass off,
Speaker 3: and it was in quotation marks one of the officer's notes.
Speaker 3: So that intensified the interrogation up to that point. Repeatedly
Speaker 3: said I don't know anything about this, but I heard
Speaker 3: Damien did it. And so now all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: the polygraph leads to an intensified interrogation. He's there from
Speaker 3: nine o'clock in the morning till after dark that evening,
Speaker 3: which would have been about some time between seven and
Speaker 3: eight pm. So there was an extremely lack of evidence
Speaker 3: of regarding what happened during that time. And even though
Speaker 3: they had the ability the videotape the entire interrogation, which
Speaker 3: is a recommended view these days at least, then they
Speaker 3: chose to just do an audio tape. So we have
Speaker 3: basically about thirty minutes of audio tape and an interrogation
Speaker 3: that lasted throughout the well essentially that morning, but more
Speaker 3: ferociously after launch. There's a little clue was in the
Speaker 3: confession if you listen to it, where mister miss Kelly
Speaker 3: refers to the branch or the buyers, or the more,
Speaker 3: and I thought that was odd. And then I got
Speaker 3: a copy of the newspaper and they were showing him
Speaker 3: a picture that appeared in the local paper, and it
Speaker 3: referred to the victim buyers, the victim more, and the
Speaker 3: victim brand. So it was obvious that they were pointing
Speaker 3: out to him what to see. There was one note
Speaker 3: where Gechell had drew a circle and put three dots
Speaker 3: in the middle and a bunch of dots on the
Speaker 3: outside of the circle, and told Jesse that these three
Speaker 3: dots in the middle or you, Damien and Jason, do
Speaker 3: you want to be in the middle with them? Or
Speaker 3: do you want to be out here with us? And
Speaker 3: of course, and then Lauley challenge kid who has mr
Speaker 3: is going to say, I want to be out there
Speaker 3: with you guys. So Steve Drizhin, who is a professor
Speaker 3: and founder of the Northwestern School of Law Center for
Speaker 3: Ronical Convictions of the Youth, he once said at a
Speaker 3: seminar we did in Chicago, Jesse mis Kelly didn't confess.
Speaker 3: Garry Gitchell was the one who confessed, and all he
Speaker 3: had to do was get Jesse to go along with it.
Speaker 3: And that's pretty much what we had. There was so little.
Speaker 3: I found motion after motion with Judge Burnett to allow
Speaker 3: me to conduct the depositions of the interrogating officers because
Speaker 3: I had no idea what they were going to testify
Speaker 3: to at the suppression hearing, and I felt it was
Speaker 3: unfair because the state could issue a prosecutor subpoena and
Speaker 3: talked to anybody they wanted to, but I didn't have
Speaker 3: that power. Burnett denied the motions, but he ordered the
Speaker 3: officers to make time to visit with me, and they
Speaker 3: refused to visit with me. I think Gitschell was the
Speaker 3: only one who actually talked to me at all. Mike
Speaker 3: Allen and Brian Ridge did not. So we kept asking
Speaker 3: for this information and we weren't getting any, and so
Speaker 3: we knew the first time that we were going to
Speaker 3: find out what happened in that interrogation room was going
Speaker 3: to be during the suppression hearing, and so that's where
Speaker 3: we found ourselves. But it's important to point out that
Speaker 3: before that, I found out through our private investigator, Ron Lax,
Speaker 3: that there was a professor at UC Berkeley who was
Speaker 3: an expert in false confessions, and he got his phone numbers,
Speaker 3: said he need to call this guy because these kids
Speaker 3: are innocent and we need someone to contestify that this
Speaker 3: confession was coerced, in voluntary and false, and so, having
Speaker 3: no money as a public defender appointed to represent mister
Speaker 3: miss Kelly called the number. Doctor Alshet answered and he
Speaker 3: was very polite and had a kind soothing voice, and
Speaker 3: I told him what was going on, and he seemed
Speaker 3: somewhat excited about the possibility, and he said, send me
Speaker 3: all the officers notes, and I said, well, there's not many,
Speaker 3: but I'll send you what I got, and he wanted
Speaker 3: a transcript of the confession. There was a two part
Speaker 3: confession because when mister Fogerman got to the police station
Speaker 3: and they were all jumping and slapping hands and saying
Speaker 3: we've got him, we got him, he must have read
Speaker 3: the transcript and said, hey, you know this didn't happen
Speaker 3: at noon. Right, kids were in school all day, as
Speaker 3: was Jason Baldwin, so they couldn't have skipped school like
Speaker 3: miss Kelly said. And they were last seeing riding their
Speaker 3: box near the crime seeing at six thirty pm, So
Speaker 3: this is impossible. And so Kitchell went back into the
Speaker 3: interrogation room, but he did not state the time, so
Speaker 3: we don't know what time he went in, and we
Speaker 3: don't know what time he came out. I mean, we
Speaker 3: can look at the tape and determine the timing, but
Speaker 3: we don't know what time it was this occurred. But
Speaker 3: he walked into the interrogation room and he said, now, Jesse,
Speaker 3: earlier you told me this happened at five or six?
Speaker 3: Was it five or six? Or seven or eight? And
Speaker 3: even though mentally retarded kid is gonna say, what the
Speaker 3: officer wants him to say, because he's been promised he
Speaker 3: can go home as soon as it's over, and he
Speaker 3: said seven or eight. And this is the first time
Speaker 3: that even five or six had been talked about during
Speaker 3: the confession, right. The officer just seemed happy to have
Speaker 3: it at noon and didn't matter that the ligatures are wrong,
Speaker 3: and there were other things that were impossibilities. But once
Speaker 3: Jesse agreed with Gischell, it happened at seven or eight.
Speaker 3: You could hear him on the tape just kind of
Speaker 3: like that's over, we got it. He went back out
Speaker 3: and they transcribed the tape, issued the search warrants and
Speaker 3: resta warrants for each of the West of three and
Speaker 3: it was on. So getting back to doctor Richard Rolfshe,
Speaker 3: I sent him all that material and he called me
Speaker 3: back about a week later, I believe. Then I said, well,
Speaker 3: what do you think and he said, he said, Dan,
Speaker 3: that is the stupid, stupidest fucking confession I've ever read.
Speaker 3: Those were the exact words. I'm not adding that for emphasis.
Speaker 3: That's what he told me. He said, I want to
Speaker 3: consult on this case. And I reminded him again that
Speaker 3: I didn't have any money to pay him, and he said,
Speaker 3: I don't care. I'm coming to Arkansas to meet with
Speaker 3: mister miss Callaen. I will testify and consult on the case.
Speaker 3: And if the judge awards a fee at the end
Speaker 3: of the trial, and it's fine. If he does it,
Speaker 3: that's fine too. I thought, Wow, So suddenly I wasn't
Speaker 3: in this wilderness. Just met my law partner. All along
Speaker 3: we had an expert, a world class expert, and he
Speaker 3: asked me to read a book called The False Confessions
Speaker 3: and Police Interrogation Tactics by a fellow named giz Lee
Speaker 3: good Johnson from Iceland that doctor also had contributed to
Speaker 3: and so I read that, and having a background in
Speaker 3: psychology and a degree in sociology, it actually made sense
Speaker 3: and I could see how this happened, and for the
Speaker 3: first time I realized that we got a chance of
Speaker 3: winning this thing. We really do, and there's no testifying.
Speaker 3: We're gonna try this thing. It was scary, but that's
Speaker 3: the direction we started heading. But we'd also used up
Speaker 3: half our prep time reaching that point. So mister miss
Speaker 3: Kelly then began telling us he wasn't there, that he
Speaker 3: had never been there, and he told us he thought
Speaker 3: we were cops. He said, I thought you were cops,
Speaker 3: and I had to get the story the same as
Speaker 3: it was when I told it on tape. And so
Speaker 3: we tried to explain what an attorney is, and he
Speaker 3: just didn't seem to comprehend that. But we convinced him
Speaker 3: that we were on his team. We began to try
Speaker 3: to dismantle the confession because it was just like I said,
Speaker 3: there was even with Getro going back in and trying
Speaker 3: to get the time correct. That didn't take away from
Speaker 3: the ligatures being incorrect. Jesse said it was they were
Speaker 3: tied up with a big brown rope, and they weren't.
Speaker 3: They were tied with their own shoe strings. So there's
Speaker 3: just a and of course the way the utilation occurred
Speaker 3: was different, didn't match the evidence.
Speaker 2: What about the issue of alibi witnesses, because away, you say,
Speaker 2: one of the biggest obstacles was Jesse ms Kelly Senior
Speaker 2: and all the comments and press conferences and and you
Speaker 2: go into the book of about how the media got
Speaker 2: him drunk and to get their soundbites. But what about
Speaker 2: the issue of alibi witnesses? How did police contend with
Speaker 2: his alibi witnesses?
Speaker 3: Well, I beg mister miss Kelly to stop talking to
Speaker 3: the press, and he just wouldn't do it. They would
Speaker 3: bring him here by the case and you'd get lubricated
Speaker 3: and just start talking, and then he would name the
Speaker 3: people who were with Jesse that night in Das, Arkansas.
Speaker 3: So he, you know, breakfaced our alibi defense. And of
Speaker 3: course the cops show up at all these people's homes
Speaker 3: and they asked, were you was just and miss Kelly
Speaker 3: on the night of May fifth, And of course they
Speaker 3: all said no, and who could blame them. They didn't
Speaker 3: want to get in the middle all that stuff and
Speaker 3: ended up in jail themselves. So they denied it. And
Speaker 3: by the time we reached our epiphany that he was
Speaker 3: innocent and we started interviewing these witnesses, they're like, well, okay,
Speaker 3: this happened on that particular night, and they showed them
Speaker 3: calendars and they remembered events that took place, and they said, yeah,
Speaker 3: that was May fifth. We went wrestling with Jesse and
Speaker 3: Dyaz Arkansas, but they had already denied it. So when
Speaker 3: we put our alibi defense on, which we were compelled
Speaker 3: to do despite its problematic issues, they didn't come across
Speaker 3: very well. We had one witness who hadn't been spoiled,
Speaker 3: and his testimony was pretty compelling. It just just didn't
Speaker 3: go well, and that hurt us badly. And if mister
Speaker 3: miss Kelly Senior had just taken my advice and not
Speaker 3: had these press conferences, I mean it was every night
Speaker 3: they would take him beer, and then at one point
Speaker 3: he actually got drunk and called the prison and got
Speaker 3: Jesse on the phone, and the phone to his girlfriend
Speaker 3: and she got to talk to Jesse on the phone.
Speaker 3: That really made me mad. So I complained to the
Speaker 3: producer of that particular channel in Memphis, and he acted
Speaker 3: like it was fair, and I told him it wasn't fair.
Speaker 3: You're tanning the jury pool. So but I just couldn't
Speaker 3: stop Jesse Senior from doing it. He was offending his
Speaker 3: kid in the only way he knew how, and that's
Speaker 3: by telling everybody he was innocent. So and for the
Speaker 3: first ninety days that's what we thought too, is that
Speaker 3: he was guilty. But then when we he was innocent
Speaker 3: and actually talked to these witnesses, that it became obvious
Speaker 3: that they had given prior inconsistent statements that the prosecutor
Speaker 3: is going to be able to use to are you
Speaker 3: telling the truth now or were you telling the truth
Speaker 3: when you talk to the police officer kind of routine
Speaker 3: that obviously did not go well. And then the psychologists
Speaker 3: that we hired, we found out on the eve of
Speaker 3: his testimony that he didn't even have a license. He
Speaker 3: had lost his license. We were scraping the bottom of
Speaker 3: the barrel because we couldn't find anybody willing to take
Speaker 3: on the case. I'd even tried to get part Deeps
Speaker 3: to get involved because he was the top guy on
Speaker 3: the food chain at the time on those issues, and
Speaker 3: I couldn't get past the receptionists without a fifteen thousand
Speaker 3: dollars check, so I didn't even have fifteen hundred to spend,
Speaker 3: and so we ended up with somebody who was unlicensed,
Speaker 3: and it was similar to a nuclear blast in the
Speaker 3: courtroom when he testified, and I bet to burnet for
Speaker 3: an opportunity to find another psychologist, but he wasn't interested
Speaker 3: in that, so we had to play the cards that
Speaker 3: were built us, and that hurt us a lot, but
Speaker 3: not nearly as much as what he did to One
Speaker 3: of the things that offsually told me was I needed
Speaker 3: to get a polygrapher to read Jesse's polygraph tests that
Speaker 3: the western of his police gave him unusual. They had
Speaker 3: their own in house polygraph guy, so most departments, especially
Speaker 3: small departments, don't have that. Sent the charts to a
Speaker 3: gentleman who had no intention whatsoever of getting involved in
Speaker 3: this case, and that was Warren Holmes. He was near retirement,
Speaker 3: if he wasn't already retired, but he was the top
Speaker 3: guy on polygraphs in the world. He'd worked on some
Speaker 3: very high profile cases and Martin Luther King assassination, both
Speaker 3: Kennedy assassinations, as I recall the Boston strangler case, and
Speaker 3: he taught the FBI and the CIA and Canadian Role
Speaker 3: Mounted Police about polygraphs and the results. So somehow I
Speaker 3: condid him to at least read the charge and I said,
Speaker 3: if you won't get involved in the case, I understand
Speaker 3: what could you at least tell me what they say
Speaker 3: to you, how do you interpret them? And so a
Speaker 3: few days later he called with a completely different demeanor
Speaker 3: and said, I want to testify in this case. I'm
Speaker 3: going to consult And I said, well, I told you,
Speaker 3: I don't have any money. I have to count on
Speaker 3: the court being willing to pay you after this is over.
Speaker 3: And he said, I don't care this kid's innocent. I'm
Speaker 3: coming to Arkansas, the same thing Offsha had said. Unfortunately
Speaker 3: Park Deets didn't say that. But here I was with
Speaker 3: two out of three. So that's a pretty good batting average.
Speaker 3: With no money and no financial to do it, I
Speaker 3: was able to swayed two of the greatest experts on
Speaker 3: the planet, and so we really thought that we were
Speaker 3: going to win this thing. We had gotten Burnett reversed
Speaker 3: mister Crow and I the year before, in nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 3: same year the crimes happened, but court later on that year,
Speaker 3: before the trial started in ninety four, we got it
Speaker 3: not only reversed, but dismissed in a seven ozer decision,
Speaker 3: and the court said that he had misinterpreted the statute incorrectly,
Speaker 3: and my client walked. So we felt like if we
Speaker 3: could just keep chess pieces on the board, that eventually
Speaker 3: Burnett would make a mistake and we'd have something that
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court could get hang its hat on. And
Speaker 3: we had a couple of very good issues.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages now you say you were very op mystic
Speaker 2: with these two leading experts, and your issues covered the
Speaker 2: important issues covered you thought, so tell us let's fast
Speaker 2: forward to what actually happens with these two experts testimony
Speaker 2: at this.
Speaker 3: Job well at trial, even though mister Holmes said, prepare
Speaker 3: to report that I shared with the prosecutors that mister
Speaker 3: miss Kelly had actually passed the polygraph test. The only
Speaker 3: question that he funk was that you ever done drugs,
Speaker 3: and all the questions about the murders, he didn't show
Speaker 3: any deception at all, and he testified to that at
Speaker 3: the suppression hearing. But jose Burnett would not let him
Speaker 3: testify about the polygraph exam even though we asked me.
Speaker 3: Case father said it was a misbel under these circumstances
Speaker 3: because it was used to create false confession, but Burnett
Speaker 3: wouldn't hear of it. So mister Holmes could only talk
Speaker 3: about lease interrogation techniques, which he described as horrible and
Speaker 3: said any good detective would have taken mister miss Kelly
Speaker 3: immediately to the crime scene and have him point out
Speaker 3: where everything happened. Even asking on the tape, I think
Speaker 3: at the end of the tape that he's willing to
Speaker 3: go out there and show him where it all happened.
Speaker 3: And his response was, I guess I don't have a
Speaker 3: problem with that, and so, but they never did. If
Speaker 3: they had, according to Warren Holmes, they would have immediately
Speaker 3: realized that this kid knew nothing about the case. But
Speaker 3: they didn't do it. And later on I was able
Speaker 3: to demonstrate that myself. Of course, that was post conviction. Also,
Speaker 3: the judge refused to let doctor offsha Offshade testifies to
Speaker 3: his conclusions that the confession was coerced and involuntary, and
Speaker 3: it's pointed out in the record, and I pointed out
Speaker 3: in the book that he said on the record, he said,
Speaker 3: what the hell do we need a jury for if
Speaker 3: I'm going to let your expert just tell him what
Speaker 3: to do, and that I've already ruled and it's voluntary
Speaker 3: and it's coming in, I'm not going to let him
Speaker 3: testify to those two issues, which were the two key issues.
Speaker 3: And of course that just cut us off with the knees,
Speaker 3: and you were just, you know, how are we going
Speaker 3: to get this kid not guilty without being able to
Speaker 3: put on our case. So we did what was called
Speaker 3: a proffer and it's still to this day called that
Speaker 3: where we proffer the evidence into the record, but the
Speaker 3: jury is not in the courtroom. They're in the jury room.
Speaker 3: And so we put off Chean and he tests everything
Speaker 3: he came to testify about and was cross examined the prosecutors,
Speaker 3: and we put all that information in the record so
Speaker 3: the appellate court would be able to see it, right,
Speaker 3: And so we thought, well, now we got a real
Speaker 3: good issue and allowing this evidence in. And so the
Speaker 3: judge took a break after our proffer and all these
Speaker 3: people in the courtroom, most of them were media folks,
Speaker 3: came up to me and said, you've just won this case.
Speaker 3: That was the most incredible testimony I've ever heard, and
Speaker 3: it makes sense. And I said, yeah, but the jury
Speaker 3: never got to hear that, and they were congratulating me
Speaker 3: and pat me on the back, and I said, the
Speaker 3: jury's never going to hear that. The trial certainly ended thereafter,
Speaker 3: and all the prosecutions needed was three bodies and all
Speaker 3: the pictures they showed to the jury, which we objected
Speaker 3: to because they were just so horrible. You show those
Speaker 3: to a jury and they're going to want to punish
Speaker 3: somebody and then when somebody is your client in the
Speaker 3: courtroom didn't turn out well, I did. Drury went to
Speaker 3: I think one am that night after they started deliberating,
Speaker 3: and then they asked to go home and get some
Speaker 3: sleep and come back the next day, which they did
Speaker 3: and started in again. At nine thirty. When I got
Speaker 3: to the court ouse, the sheriff came up to me
Speaker 3: and he said, hey, Dan. He said, I heard the
Speaker 3: initial vote in the drew room was four votes are acquittal.
Speaker 3: I said, I didn't want to know where he got
Speaker 3: the information. I just said, well, that's true, that's promising.
Speaker 3: Maybe we can get a home Dury, or maybe even
Speaker 3: the four can convince the eight. Later on, one of
Speaker 3: my students at Arkansas State University, I was teaching criminology
Speaker 3: classes there. He said, you raised his hand. The student
Speaker 3: did and he said, Judge, he said, that ain't correct.
Speaker 3: You had five votes for acquittal. And I said, well,
Speaker 3: how do you know that? He goes? My uncle was
Speaker 3: the jury foreman and he still has his notes. Would
Speaker 3: you like to see him? And I was trying to
Speaker 3: contain Mike's oide. So the next week he brought the
Speaker 3: notes in and you could tell as you read through
Speaker 3: the notes, all the objections that were made by the prosecution.
Speaker 3: The jury forema was doodling because you know, even at
Speaker 3: a very small courtroom, and they could probably hear us talking,
Speaker 3: and they were just bored with all the objections that
Speaker 3: the prosecutor was making. Of course we made our own
Speaker 3: objections too, but it was very enlightening. So seven to
Speaker 3: five is you know, that's a good number. And as
Speaker 3: the day wore on, it became increasingly obvious that this
Speaker 3: was bad for the prosecution. And so that's when the
Speaker 3: judge made a horrible judicial ethical decision to open the
Speaker 3: jury room door and asked them what they wanted to
Speaker 3: eat for lunch. And jury foreman was the only one
Speaker 3: who spoke, and he said, we don't need any lunch,
Speaker 3: we're almost done. And then Burnette said to not quote,
Speaker 3: well you're still going to have to come back after
Speaker 3: lunch and do the sentencing. And I couldn't believe that
Speaker 3: he had just told the jury what they had to
Speaker 3: do and find the guy guilty in it. I'm just stunned.
Speaker 3: And the foreman said, well, what if we find him menacing?
Speaker 3: And Burnett just reached through the door and closed it,
Speaker 3: and I looked over at Brent Davis and he knees
Speaker 3: were buckling as he had turned white as a ghost,
Speaker 3: and Burnett was the same. So I went back in
Speaker 3: the courtroom and told mister Crow what had happened, and
Speaker 3: he said, my god, we may pull this thing off.
Speaker 3: And so we talked about a mistrial, and we thought, well,
Speaker 3: if you make one, the judge will probably granted, and
Speaker 3: then if we find out later that the jury was
Speaker 3: going to quit, then we'll never forgive ourselves for asking
Speaker 3: for that mistrial. We didn't realize at the time because
Speaker 3: of our inexperience, you could actually do both. And so
Speaker 3: that was perhaps the biggest blunder that I made in
Speaker 3: the case. Then that's one of the things I like
Speaker 3: to point out about my book is that this was
Speaker 3: the older Dan looking back at the younger Dan and
Speaker 3: going at I can't believe this happened, and why did
Speaker 3: you let that happen? And you know, now, I've been
Speaker 3: doing this for over thirty years and I can try
Speaker 3: this case with no sleep and win. But at the
Speaker 3: time I just didn't know any better, and so we
Speaker 3: could have asked for a mistrial and then waited for
Speaker 3: the jury verdict and if he had been acquitted, we
Speaker 3: could have withdrawn our mistrial motion. So we didn't handle
Speaker 3: that correctly. And in the book, I'm as tough on
Speaker 3: myself as I was everybody else. When I made a mistake,
Speaker 3: I admitted it. When everybody else made their mistakes, they
Speaker 3: ran from it and would deny it. I felt that
Speaker 3: was very important. That was one of the goals of
Speaker 3: my book, was to separate the fact from the fiction
Speaker 3: and the mythology that's grown around this case. And there's
Speaker 3: a very small number of people who still believe the
Speaker 3: West Memphis Three are guilty, and they do podcasts and
Speaker 3: they write books, and I don't know how much they sell,
Speaker 3: or they've asked me to come on and debate them.
Speaker 3: Mark Twain once said, never argue with a fool, because
Speaker 3: onlookers won't be able to tell the difference. I just
Speaker 3: don't argue with them because it's not going to get
Speaker 3: you anywhere. It's like talking religion or politics. It's just
Speaker 3: not going to be worthy of the conversation. So I
Speaker 3: just ignore them. And because I've had my mailbox blown
Speaker 3: up a couple of times, once on the day I
Speaker 3: announced I was writing the book, and the local paper
Speaker 3: at a front page story and pairical Daily Press, and
Speaker 3: someone decided it'd be fun to blow up my mailbox
Speaker 3: with a small bomb on my bomb and that was
Speaker 3: the second time that that had happened. Also that day
Speaker 3: I got email threats from one from the UK and
Speaker 3: one from North America. I thought, you know, this is
Speaker 3: really going to be fun writing this book, and I
Speaker 3: expected these people would come at me like Kama causes
Speaker 3: and the first couple of weeks, you know, on Amazon,
Speaker 3: when somebody leaves a review, it tells you whether they've
Speaker 3: read the book or not, or ordered the book, and
Speaker 3: so I wasn't surprised that mister Moore put up a
Speaker 3: disparage and comment, and I was surprised that some young
Speaker 3: attorney I don't know if they ever got license, but
Speaker 3: I met him one time in Memphis at a seminar
Speaker 3: and he put up this horrible review saying that I
Speaker 3: hadn't addressed the false confessions, and I hadn't addressed this,
Speaker 3: that and the other, and I had addressed each and
Speaker 3: every one of those things. So apparently he read the
Speaker 3: book finally and realized that I had because I haven't
Speaker 3: heard from him since. But that's enough to keep me
Speaker 3: from having a five star rating. I got it four
Speaker 3: to six, which is good. I'm not complaining, but that's
Speaker 3: been I haven't heard anything from these folks, and I'm
Speaker 3: really kind of surprised. I've learned to be vigilant, careful.
Speaker 3: I have a concealed carry permit and I carry everywhere
Speaker 3: I go because of that. Hopefully that the trend will
Speaker 3: continue and I won't have to confront any of those folks.
Speaker 2: Let's get back to how on earth you're able to
Speaker 2: fulfill your promise to Jesse mus Kelly to get him
Speaker 2: out of prison, not to abandon him, and how you
Speaker 2: do that, and the issue of ineffective counsel. So let's
Speaker 2: get to this very vivid scene where before this you're
Speaker 2: at a hearing and you see Michael Boden, doctor Michael Boden,
Speaker 2: another doctor David, and another doctor Haskell.
Speaker 3: Well. I found out through a colleague that there was
Speaker 3: an Academy American Academy of Forensic Science seminar going on
Speaker 3: in San Francisco, and I thought, you know, you got
Speaker 3: all these guys in the same place at one time.
Speaker 3: Now is the time to go window shopping. And I
Speaker 3: had no money and barely enough money to fly out
Speaker 3: there and pay my hotel room. But within three hours
Speaker 3: I had moved the case forward light years ahead. And
Speaker 3: I knew what Michael Boden, doctor Michael Boden looked like
Speaker 3: because I'd seen him on TV with his show Autopsy
Speaker 3: that played on HBO. I saw him walking around and
Speaker 3: I walked up to him, and I explained who I
Speaker 3: was and asked him if he could spare ten or
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes to look at my photographs, primarily because that's
Speaker 3: what he is, he's a forensic pathologist and get his opinion.
Speaker 3: And I didn't expect him to jump on the case.
Speaker 3: I knew I couldn't afford him, but I just wanted
Speaker 3: to get, you know, someone appoint me in the right direction.
Speaker 3: And he kind of, you know, gave me the well,
Speaker 3: I might have time later in the day or tomorrow.
Speaker 3: And this kind of blew me off, and I decided
Speaker 3: to step into one of the sessions. Of course, I
Speaker 3: wasn't even I wasn't a member, but I just walked
Speaker 3: in and sat down. And it's a very interesting session
Speaker 3: room full of forensic pathologists asking each other for help
Speaker 3: on certain cases because they couldn't make a determination as
Speaker 3: to the manner or the cause of death, and they
Speaker 3: were asking for inside and extra set of eyes. And
Speaker 3: it was intriguing to watch. And so as I stepped
Speaker 3: out of the conference room, I looked up and there's
Speaker 3: doctor Michael Bowden headed towards the elevator, and I thought,
Speaker 3: here's my chance. I got in. I was the last
Speaker 3: one in the elevator. Doctor Haskell was in there. Doctor David,
Speaker 3: I knew by sight because we'd actually retained him to
Speaker 3: look at some forensical ontology issues that we thought we
Speaker 3: had but decided that we later we're not going to
Speaker 3: pursue that angle. But got on the elevator and I said, look,
Speaker 3: I said, I really, I'm my client's sitting in prison
Speaker 3: for something he didn't do. One guy's on death row,
Speaker 3: the other one serve in life without row. Can you
Speaker 3: least just look at what I got. Give give me
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes, ten minutes, and just look at this and
Speaker 3: tell me what you think. Doctor Haskins said, yeah, that
Speaker 3: sounds great. Let's do that. And doctor David said, yeah,
Speaker 3: let's let's do that. Let's take a look at what
Speaker 3: he's got. And doctor Boden sort of reluctantly agreed, so
Speaker 3: we went up. I was on the seventeenth floor and
Speaker 3: we went up to my room and I spread all
Speaker 3: these autopsy photographed. They were in a throwing binder. I
Speaker 3: took him out of the binder and just laid them
Speaker 3: out and I'll never forget this as long as I live.
Speaker 3: Doctor Boden immediately gravitated towards the picture of the sexual
Speaker 3: mutilation of Christopher Buyers and he picked it up and
Speaker 3: he looked at it and he said, there's no way
Speaker 3: three teenagers pulled this off. And he said, this is
Speaker 3: not a Satanic ritual. This is animal predation. And doctor
Speaker 3: Haskell jumped in. He said, yeah, it's probably turtles or
Speaker 3: predacious diving beetles, but that's definitely animal predation. Sought and said,
Speaker 3: you know, I've done ten thousand autopsies in my career
Speaker 3: and those are the worst pictures I've ever seen. And
Speaker 3: I thought that would be my luck to my first
Speaker 3: caste get the worst pictures ever seen by doctor Michael Boden.
Speaker 3: And so the fifteen minutes was over and Askell invited
Speaker 3: me to go downstairs to the bar and have a drink.
Speaker 3: And continue our conversation, and we talked about the idea
Speaker 3: of going out there to the same ditch and placing
Speaker 3: a pig the water and use a time lapse camera
Speaker 3: and see what critters showed up. As fate would have it,
Speaker 3: we never got that opportunity. But when I got back
Speaker 3: to Paragould, I immediately emailed Ed Molette, who was Damien
Speaker 3: Echo's lawyer at the time from Houston, and I emailed
Speaker 3: him and said, you know, I gonna believe this, and
Speaker 3: I said it's animal predation. He said, well, who told
Speaker 3: you that? I said doctor Bowden, and Neil Haskell, he's
Speaker 3: an entomologist. And so I said, this changes everything. This
Speaker 3: wasn't the cutting off of any thing. It was animals
Speaker 3: eating it off. They go for the soft tissue, They
Speaker 3: go for the genitals and the lips and the nose
Speaker 3: and ears, anything that they can, you know, buite away easy.
Speaker 3: And of course there's always competition for what's a available.
Speaker 3: They were feeding on these kids, and there were also
Speaker 3: animal scratches and found out later after we did some
Speaker 3: retesting that there were animal hairs found down the victim's bodies.
Speaker 3: So the problem was I still had no money. The
Speaker 3: following year, in December of nineteen ninety nine, I get
Speaker 3: a phone call from Eddy Vedder's lawyer and he's asking
Speaker 3: me to fly out to Seattle to meet with Better
Speaker 3: and some of the top lawyers in the country to
Speaker 3: have a discussion about the case. And I said, of course,
Speaker 3: I said when is it? He said Mother's Day? Forgot
Speaker 3: the date. It was like May fourteenth, two thousand. I
Speaker 3: think that's the day. I may be wrong about that.
Speaker 3: Had to pull the book out and find the page.
Speaker 3: But in any event, that created two problems. One I
Speaker 3: was going to be going on Mother's Day, which did
Speaker 3: nothing to help my marriage that was struggling because I
Speaker 3: was subsessed with this case and trying to solve it.
Speaker 3: And Two, I just happened to be in the middle
Speaker 3: of a political race running for a part time judicial position,
Speaker 3: and my campaign manager, who was one of my closest
Speaker 3: friends and colleagues, said hell, no.
Speaker 4: You can't go this the last week and you're gonna
Speaker 4: if somebody finds out that you're in Seattle, you're going
Speaker 4: to lose. And he said, you're probably going to lose anyway,
Speaker 4: but this is this is bad. You don't need to
Speaker 4: be leaving, I said, I got to go.
Speaker 3: I don't. I didn't get to pick the date. I
Speaker 3: even asked him to move the date beyond the election,
Speaker 3: and I couldn't, So this is it. I got to go.
Speaker 3: He wasn't happy, but I left. We had taken a
Speaker 3: very unscientific poll of likely voters in Green County, my
Speaker 3: home county, and I was ahead in the poll sixty forty.
Speaker 3: But I couldn't convince Brad brought away my campaign manager
Speaker 3: that we were ahead soundly. I take off the Seattle
Speaker 3: and meet with Better and Michael Burt, who ended up
Speaker 3: being mister miss Kelly's pellet counsel. John Phillips Born, who
Speaker 3: became the architect of our defense team. Stephen Bright, I
Speaker 3: think was there from the Southern Lasser, and that's all
Speaker 3: I can remember off the top of my head, being
Speaker 3: so long ago. Without pulling my book off the shelf
Speaker 3: and digging. We met that afternoon and I felt like
Speaker 3: I was pitching an ad campaign. I gave updates on
Speaker 3: all three defendants's cases, where they were in appeals process,
Speaker 3: and what we needed and what each case needed, And
Speaker 3: after the lawyers got done asking me questions, mister Vetter
Speaker 3: to give them what they want. And the only person
Speaker 3: that was with him was his publicist, and she immediately
Speaker 3: started saying, well, what about the whales, what about saving
Speaker 3: the whales and in our commitment to the homeless, And
Speaker 3: he said, we'll do that, but well, if we have to,
Speaker 3: we'll just make more money. We'll hold another co concert
Speaker 3: or do something different. But I knew he was all
Speaker 3: in and and so I thought, gosh, this this baby.
Speaker 3: And you know, I just got the break that I
Speaker 3: needed the year before at the conference stalking doctor Bowden
Speaker 3: for lack of the a better word. And now all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, a celebrity is willing to get involved
Speaker 3: in the case. But he wanted to do so on
Speaker 3: a confidential basis, which didn't last long because he invited
Speaker 3: me and my children to a concert in Memphis. They
Speaker 3: were in the middle of a two and I went
Speaker 3: to the concert and at the end of the concert
Speaker 3: he said Free the West Memphis three and I was
Speaker 3: talking about it publicly. So his fight and his being
Speaker 3: part of the army of people who later got involved
Speaker 3: other celebrities, including Johnny Depp and others. This was amazing.
Speaker 3: When on a writer helped raise some funds for the defense,
Speaker 3: and suddenly we had lawyers. I couldn't find a lawyer,
Speaker 3: a single lawyer in the state of Arkansas wanting to
Speaker 3: take on the case and bring the most important issue
Speaker 3: to light. And that is my ineffective assistance of counsel
Speaker 3: because the Arkansas Supreme Court on direct appeal had ruled
Speaker 3: that Crow and I did not raise an issue that
Speaker 3: would have resulted in an automatic dis dis missile of
Speaker 3: the case. They said we didn't raise it in a
Speaker 3: timely fashion, which was complete nonsense. You know. I was
Speaker 3: just horrified in ninety six when the decision came down,
Speaker 3: it was seven oh and then later in the year,
Speaker 3: in December of ninety six, the Supreme Court denied the
Speaker 3: appeals of Eccles in Baldwin in a seven old decision.
Speaker 3: So we asked for a rehearing and pointed the justices
Speaker 3: to the exact age number in line number where we
Speaker 3: did raise the issue, and I even drafted the order
Speaker 3: where Judge Burnett denied. He said he considered our our
Speaker 3: motion and amended motion, and they still would not hear
Speaker 3: the case. They would not hear the issue. They just
Speaker 3: essentially threw me under the bus. So it was very
Speaker 3: frustrating getting your tea kicked in and thrown under the
Speaker 3: bus at the same time. And so when I made
Speaker 3: that promise to my client, I knew the odds were
Speaker 3: nearly impossible. But I made a promise and I was
Speaker 3: going to keep it no matter what. But it was
Speaker 3: going to take a lot of help. Fortunately, that help arrived.
Speaker 2: That just as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: Now you say the odds were vastly against you, but
Speaker 2: you had the help of Hollywood, of some people in Hollywood,
Speaker 2: including you say, Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder, Susan Sarandon
Speaker 2: who had urged Eddie Vedder to become involved, Peter Jackson,
Speaker 2: Lord of the Rings. So and you also say that
Speaker 2: the attitude, the overall attitude because of the Paradise Lost documentaries,
Speaker 2: the three of them. By that time there was a
Speaker 2: second one revelations. You say that really helped this case
Speaker 2: people to be aware of it, but also pushed the
Speaker 2: case forward to your advantage. Oh.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely. And the irony of that is the rule
Speaker 3: in Arkansas, which remains the rule today. If any party
Speaker 3: objects the defense or the prosecution, the judge will not
Speaker 3: or shall not allow cameras in the courtroom. And we
Speaker 3: had these HBO documentary fellas from New York, Bruce Sinofski
Speaker 3: who passed away in twenty fifteen, missing greatly, and Joe Berlinger,
Speaker 3: and they're trying to convince us to agree to this.
Speaker 3: And it became obvious that no matter what our objections were,
Speaker 3: all three defense teams and the prosecutors objected to the
Speaker 3: cameras in the courtroom. But Burnett said, no, we're having them.
Speaker 3: They're going to make a documentary. I'm going to allow
Speaker 3: them in the courtroom. So my first jury trial is
Speaker 3: chronicled in perpetuity, my first directoral. It's gonna be there
Speaker 3: for everybody to see over and over again. And I
Speaker 3: may be the first person that that's ever happened to.
Speaker 3: There have been other trials that were televised live the
Speaker 3: OJ trial, and I could name several others if I
Speaker 3: can remember the name of the defendants. But this was
Speaker 3: a documentary that was going to be taped and not
Speaker 3: shown until after the case had been concluded in the appeals,
Speaker 3: the first direct appeals had been concluded, if that movie
Speaker 3: had come out before the Supreme Court, Arkansas Supreme Court
Speaker 3: had ruled. I think it might have made a difference.
Speaker 3: So that's what fueled the All the people, including the
Speaker 3: celebrities they could. They saw Damien Eckles and Jason Baldwin
Speaker 3: and Jesse ms kelly Is themselves when they were growing up,
Speaker 3: and they listened to heavy mental music. They listened to
Speaker 3: music that most people in West Memphis, Arkansas didn't listen to.
Speaker 3: They listened to regular rock music or country music. Very
Speaker 3: big thing. So Nashville's just a couple of outs down
Speaker 3: the road. They stuck out like sore thumbs, and they
Speaker 3: became the immediate focus of the police.
Speaker 2: You also write that Mara Leverett also wrote a book
Speaker 2: called Devil's Not and then that was optioned and turned
Speaker 2: into a major movie starring Reese Witherspoon.
Speaker 3: Yes, Colin Firth played the lead Mail role and she
Speaker 3: played Pam Hobbs did. The movie was less than desirable.
Speaker 3: To put it mildly, it didn't stick to the facts
Speaker 3: that the two riders, I don't remember their names, but
Speaker 3: they wrote and produced The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I
Speaker 3: knew it was to be more of a horror flick
Speaker 3: than it was going to be a factual depiction of
Speaker 3: the case, and at one point during the movie insinuated
Speaker 3: that Pam Hobbs and Ron Lax, who took my place
Speaker 3: as the lead male character, end up almost The strongest
Speaker 3: situation was they became a love interest. I turned down
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand dollars for that job, and I'm glad
Speaker 3: that I did still have my life story rights. I
Speaker 3: could write my book and I didn't want no part
Speaker 3: of that film. I couldn't stop him from portraying me.
Speaker 3: Michael Gladys took that nod, and he's most famous for
Speaker 3: his role on mad Men. I can't remember the name
Speaker 3: of the character that he played, the mad Man, but
Speaker 3: his agent reached out to me and asked me if
Speaker 3: i'd be willing to talk to Michael about the case.
Speaker 3: I said sure. He wanted to get a feel for
Speaker 3: the cadence of my voice and house, and we talked
Speaker 3: for hours and had a lot of things in common,
Speaker 3: and after the movie was over, we kept in contact
Speaker 3: for a long time and ultimately that obviously dissipated, but
Speaker 3: he I was impressed that he put that much effort
Speaker 3: into his craft for such a small role, because it
Speaker 3: wasn't a very big role. He asked me, do you
Speaker 3: want to copy the script? And I thought, yes, please,
Speaker 3: So he emailed me a copy of the script and
Speaker 3: I read it and the first time I read it,
Speaker 3: I was so pissed off I couldn't see straight. And
Speaker 3: the second time I read it, I thought, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't come out look at that bad. And the
Speaker 3: third time I read it, I thought, you know, I
Speaker 3: actually came out looking pretty good compared to the other lawyers.
Speaker 3: And just I think it grows half a million at
Speaker 3: the box office, which is I'm pretty sure Colin and
Speaker 3: Reese don't work that cheap. So it's not a didn't
Speaker 3: get nominated for an auscer. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2: Let's get to explaining what this new team, these appellate
Speaker 2: lawyers John Phillips Borne, also Michael Burt, and also other
Speaker 2: counsel and assistant Stephen Bright and Rosenwick. Let's talk about
Speaker 2: what the strategy is your role in testifying ineffective counsel
Speaker 2: and exactly how they plan to be able to somehow
Speaker 2: get these people. How it comes to be the Alford Police.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's a that's a big question. But essentially,
Speaker 3: after Eddie Vedder got involved and others. There are a
Speaker 3: lot of donors that I don't even know who they
Speaker 3: were because they didn't want to be public about there
Speaker 3: and and and that's perfectly normal, because there were news
Speaker 3: organizations that contacted me a by doing news special but
Speaker 3: then at the last minute they pulled the plug because
Speaker 3: their producers were afraid that what if they did it.
Speaker 3: No one of the movie posters that friends of mine
Speaker 3: did for the movie the documentary said it's it's horrible
Speaker 3: to think they did it, and terrible to think they didn't,
Speaker 3: the vice versa, And so news organizations were afraid of that.
Speaker 3: So some of the celebrities wanted to stay in the background,
Speaker 3: but others were right center and out front. And in fact,
Speaker 3: we did a shoot in Memphis, and I got one
Speaker 3: tomorrow that I'm doing as a matter of fact in Memphis.
Speaker 3: And that story really propelled the case for because it
Speaker 3: was the first time a mainstream it was a forty
Speaker 3: eight hours clip an hour or two, and they'd spent
Speaker 3: a long time looking into the case and the facts,
Speaker 3: and it was really the first time that anybody was
Speaker 3: willing to do that, and it really was a big help.
Speaker 3: Johnny Depp was interviewed thank goodness, because I had probably
Speaker 3: run my mouth too much during the.
Speaker 5: Episode, so of me got cut out, and I was
Speaker 5: glad because I by that time I had become so
Speaker 5: bitter and angry that these kids had spent all this
Speaker 5: time in prison for something they didn't do.
Speaker 3: That bitterness hung around for a long time. It was
Speaker 3: a long, long fight, and at first we still couldn't
Speaker 3: find anybody in Arkansas willing to take on the case.
Speaker 3: So Michael Bert and John Phillips won. Who, by the way,
Speaker 3: two of the sharpest and best lawyers I've ever confronted
Speaker 3: and worked with. Oh well, they got gears that most
Speaker 3: of us don't possess. Michael is probably the leading DNA
Speaker 3: expert attorney as far as I'm concerned, and John Phillisborne
Speaker 3: is just absolutely amazing and skillful than they both are.
Speaker 3: But since there was nobody here to file the motions
Speaker 3: because they weren't licensed to practice in Arkansas, they would
Speaker 3: draft motions and I would go get Jason and Jesse
Speaker 3: to sign them pro se because I couldn't sign off
Speaker 3: on my own ineffective assistance of counsel. But I drafted
Speaker 3: it and filed it so the time when it wouldn't run.
Speaker 3: And somehow I convinced Jason Baldwin to sign it as well,
Speaker 3: and I wasn't sure whether he would because his lawyers
Speaker 3: had abandoned him and had no intentions of helping him
Speaker 3: find another lawyer. So when Jesse, miss Kelly's lawyer, showed
Speaker 3: up at the prison and told Jason just me, of course,
Speaker 3: I wasn't sure he was going to sign it. But
Speaker 3: he did, and I said, I'm telling you you can
Speaker 3: trust me, and you're going to sign this pro se,
Speaker 3: which means on your own until I can find lawyers
Speaker 3: to help. And so we beat the deadline, and I
Speaker 3: kept getting these motions to file. I would follow them,
Speaker 3: get the clients. I would the lawyers in California would
Speaker 3: send me the motions and I would get the clients
Speaker 3: to sign them and filed And so that was kind
Speaker 3: of a ninja as described in the book. And I
Speaker 3: can't remember the date, but ultimately Jeff Rosensweig and Blake
Speaker 3: Hendricks from Little Rock were persuaded to get involved in
Speaker 3: the case because in order for the California lawyers to practice,
Speaker 3: they had to have a Arkansas lawyer work with them,
Speaker 3: and that's the only way they could be admitted to
Speaker 3: practice in Arkansas that they had an Arkansas lawyer. So
Speaker 3: once we had that in place, then we started doing
Speaker 3: motions to retest the evidence. Mark Taylor came out as
Speaker 3: one of the guys who developed a new blood test
Speaker 3: in the OJ case and found the blood in the
Speaker 3: white bronco. He came out and reviewed the evidence. Philipsborn
Speaker 3: came out at least once, maybe twice, to catalog all
Speaker 3: the evidence and determine what we needed to retest, and
Speaker 3: we filed a motion for retesting. Arkansas had passed a
Speaker 3: DNA retesting motion, and so we took full advantage of
Speaker 3: it and did some retesting. Got the results in two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven, and that changed the whole dynamic of
Speaker 3: the case because the lawyers held a press conference at
Speaker 3: the law school on Little Rock, which was attended by
Speaker 3: the media. These experts just completely destroyed the prosecution's case.
Speaker 3: And I actually had people walking up to me on
Speaker 3: the street pat me on the back saying, you were right.
Speaker 4: After all, we thought you were crazy, but you were right.
Speaker 3: They are innocent. And I said, well, they're innocent, yes,
Speaker 3: but they're still in prison. We got to get them out.
Speaker 3: And so in Arkansas, there was this strange nuance where
Speaker 3: the trial judge makes the determination as to whether the
Speaker 3: trial attorney was competent or you know, past the trickling test,
Speaker 3: and it was clear that I did not, and the
Speaker 3: Spring Court had already written it in stone. As Crow
Speaker 3: reminded me throughout the years to keep me motivated, was
Speaker 3: they can't have it both ways. They can't say we
Speaker 3: didn't raise an issue that we did because it would
Speaker 3: have resulted in a reversal and dismissal because there was
Speaker 3: no other evidenced against Ms. Kelly other than his confession.
Speaker 3: If we got the confession toss, that was over. So
Speaker 3: Crow said, they can't have it both ways. We either
Speaker 3: raise it or we didn't. They said we didn't, So
Speaker 3: that's automatic reversal ineffective assistance Council. We just didn't know
Speaker 3: would take eighteen years and seventy eight days for that
Speaker 3: to happen. We brought on thanks to the generosity of
Speaker 3: Peter Jackson and fran Walsh and Eddie Vedder and others.
Speaker 3: We had the funds to hire the best experts on
Speaker 3: the planet, which incidentally included doctor Boden and at the
Speaker 3: rule thirty seven hearing. That's what we call it. In Arkansas.
Speaker 3: The ineffective assistance Council claim is called Rule thirty seven hearing.
Speaker 3: And I was the star witness. The first question was
Speaker 3: were you qualified under the American bar standards that were
Speaker 3: promulgated in nineteen eighty nine. I said no, I wasn't,
Speaker 3: and then I recounted the bizarre dury room experience with
Speaker 3: Judge Burnett, and that brought gasps in the courtroom. But
Speaker 3: the way Burnett set that up, he chose to perhaps
Speaker 3: the smallest courtroom in Craighead County, and so none of
Speaker 3: the media folks could make it in along with all
Speaker 3: the other bystanders. Then we were all under a gag order,
Speaker 3: the witnesses were, and we couldn't talk to the media
Speaker 3: because they did not want the media to hear what
Speaker 3: was going on in that courtroom. Since I was a
Speaker 3: witness when I got them testifying over the course of
Speaker 3: two years, they told me I was not allowed back
Speaker 3: in the courtroom to be able to listen to what
Speaker 3: the forensic experts would testify to I had seen there after,
Speaker 3: David and I watched the press conference, so I knew
Speaker 3: pretty much what they were going to say, but I
Speaker 3: found the transcripts of the Rural thirty seven hearings and
Speaker 3: started reading them well after the Alfred Please. While I
Speaker 3: was writing the book, I thought it was important to
Speaker 3: gather as much information as I could because the Alpha
Speaker 3: plea was perplexing to me. I was not the architect
Speaker 3: of the Offerd plea. I didn't know what was happening
Speaker 3: until the night before when I got a courtesy phone
Speaker 3: call from the new prosecutors got Ellington and he said,
Speaker 3: your boys getting out tomorrow. And I said, what are
Speaker 3: you talking about, my boy? He said, miss Kelly, and
Speaker 3: I said, for kidding me. He said, nope, it's going
Speaker 3: to happen tomorrow. Be in the courtroom at nine thirty.
Speaker 3: He said, don't tell anybody. This is completely top secret.
Speaker 3: And that lasted for about fifteen minutes. But the thing
Speaker 3: that started me the most about what he told me
Speaker 3: was he said they're doing an alphad plea. And I
Speaker 3: didn't know what that was. I had to look it up.
Speaker 3: And he said the other lords for Echoles were more
Speaker 3: than willing to leave your client behind. And he told
Speaker 3: me told him it's all or none, they all get
Speaker 3: out with the Alpha player none of them get out,
Speaker 3: and so I never have found out who who that
Speaker 3: lawyer was that was willing to leave my guy in.
Speaker 3: But I certainly had my suspects, and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: It's over and done with. But at the time, all
Speaker 3: I could do was call Philips born in San Francisco,
Speaker 3: and he was in the middle of jury deliberations in
Speaker 3: a capitol murder case and he couldn't come to Arkansas
Speaker 3: to talk to Jason about the plea offer. And so
Speaker 3: the next day Alfred plea was entered and one of
Speaker 3: the West members three walked off death row, which I
Speaker 3: submit to you a happens quite infrequently in jurisprudence. And
Speaker 3: my client, who was serving life plus forty and mister
Speaker 3: Baldwin who was serving life without role, just literally walked
Speaker 3: out of the courthouse. Three men. The only problem was
Speaker 3: they had to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence, and
Speaker 3: which doesn't make sense in the law because I would
Speaker 3: not accept a guilty plea from somebody who's maintaining their innocence.
Speaker 3: I would never do that. But you know, you've got
Speaker 3: three They're not teenagers anymore, they're middle aged. And you say,
Speaker 3: if you just say you're guilty, you get to go
Speaker 3: home while maintaining your innocence. How could they turn that down?
Speaker 3: Mister miss Kelley took him about half a second to
Speaker 3: decide that that's what he wanted to do. Damien's health
Speaker 3: was declining rapidly, and I think that's why Jason finally relented.
Speaker 3: He was the last holdout. He didn't want to make
Speaker 3: a decision that was not his best interest. He had
Speaker 3: the best chance of getting out and being acquitted after
Speaker 3: a new trial, but he chose to go along with it.
Speaker 3: It happened. I remember I wanted to go in and
Speaker 3: see I always call them the kids because there were
Speaker 3: kids when we started this thing. In fact, I was thirty,
Speaker 3: my client was seventeen, so I wasn't much of it.
Speaker 3: I wanted to go in the jury room where they
Speaker 3: were being held until the hearing, and talked to him,
Speaker 3: and the court security officer said, hey, you can't go
Speaker 3: in there. I said, you mean I can't go in there?
Speaker 3: He said, you have to have permission from Judge Laser,
Speaker 3: who unfortunately just passed away a few days ago. So
Speaker 3: I walked a short distance to Laser's office and I said, hey,
Speaker 3: do you Carabine talked to my client. He said, no,
Speaker 3: of course not, but you need to get Rosenswig's permission.
Speaker 3: I thought that was kind of unusual, and so I
Speaker 3: started to walk out of his chambers and he said, hey, Dan,
Speaker 3: you're not going to try to derail his train, are you?
Speaker 3: And I said, why would I do that? My client's
Speaker 3: going home. That's the promise I made to him, and
Speaker 3: I'm going to get to keep it. And to me,
Speaker 3: it was a victory and it wasn't going to affect
Speaker 3: my client whether he had a felony conviction or not,
Speaker 3: because he has MR and it's static and it's not
Speaker 3: ever going to go away. There's no treatment for it,
Speaker 3: and him having a felony conviction is really not that
Speaker 3: much of an inconvenience for him, but it is for
Speaker 3: the other two.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now, finally, with this the promise that you
Speaker 2: made to Jesse ms Kelly, and you helped Jason as well,
Speaker 2: and of course it helped Damian Eccles. These people, these
Speaker 2: boys that were now men, were released after eighteen years
Speaker 2: I believe.
Speaker 3: Eighteen years and seventy eight days exact.
Speaker 2: Tell us about this book that's taken over thirty years
Speaker 2: to complete. Tell us about your co author. Tell us
Speaker 2: a little bit about this book before I let you go.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, I had been writing it. Of course,
Speaker 3: I had my file. I knew what was in the file,
Speaker 3: and I started writing about it and kept my notes.
Speaker 3: And after the case was over, part of the offer
Speaker 3: play was that the defendants had to stay out of
Speaker 3: trouble for the next ten years. They had a ten
Speaker 3: year suspended imposition of Senate so if they committed a
Speaker 3: serious crime, then make you go back to prison again.
Speaker 3: That was congnizant in my mind. And the plea was
Speaker 3: August nineteenth, twenty twelve, twenty eleven. I'm sorry. The reason
Speaker 3: I remember that date so much is it was my
Speaker 3: son's birthday. Fortunately, he passed away in his sleep a
Speaker 3: couple of years ago, almost three years ago now, and
Speaker 3: it was his birthday. That's why I can remember the day.
Speaker 3: But a ten year sis kind of frightened me, especially
Speaker 3: for miss Kelly, because he went right straight back to
Speaker 3: the mobile home park living in utter poverty that he
Speaker 3: was plucked out of in nineteen ninety three. And by
Speaker 3: writing this book. I didn't want to put a target
Speaker 3: on any other backs or backlash from the book. There
Speaker 3: were a lot of things that I talked about in
Speaker 3: my book. There were people that thought was going to
Speaker 3: be buried and never talked about, but now it is.
Speaker 3: So that was part of my goal was to talk
Speaker 3: about these things, and I think I accomplished that goal,
Speaker 3: as I hope I did. But going back to the
Speaker 3: alphrod play I started writing. I got the help of
Speaker 3: a good friend who was working on her degree at
Speaker 3: Arkansas State. She helped me kind of sketch out. Her
Speaker 3: name is Hailey Fitzgerald, doctor Fitzgerald, I guess I should
Speaker 3: say now. She was using the project as her thesis
Speaker 3: for her doctorate degree, and she wrote some very compelling
Speaker 3: chapters that we used in the book. But it became
Speaker 3: clear as we shopped the first hundred pages around agents,
Speaker 3: and of course I always started at the top and
Speaker 3: worked my way down. So I figured out who the
Speaker 3: top agent was, literary agent in New York was and
Speaker 3: I sent it to him and he very kindly called
Speaker 3: me and said, you're a lawyer, not a writer. You
Speaker 3: write like a lawyer, and that's not how this book
Speaker 3: and the story needs to be told. You need someone
Speaker 3: a ghostwriter or whatever you want to call it, to
Speaker 3: come in and help you with this. And I thought, yeah,
Speaker 3: it makes sense. So I started shopping around, and I
Speaker 3: was immediately drawn to Tom McCarthy because he had written
Speaker 3: some New York Times bestsellers as a ghostwriter for some
Speaker 3: celebrities and others. Obviously was killed at his craft. In fact,
Speaker 3: he retired from one of the big book houses there
Speaker 3: in New York and he was the acquisitions editor, so
Speaker 3: he basically chose which books were going to be published.
Speaker 3: And so I thought, this is the kind of guy
Speaker 3: I need. And so we agreed on a price, and
Speaker 3: it was June in twenty fourteen, and I sent him
Speaker 3: what I had and refinanced my house and paid him,
Speaker 3: and off we went. And he said, well, i'll have
Speaker 3: this done by Christmas in twenty fourteen. I said that's great.
Speaker 3: So Christmas rolls around and we don't have a draft yet.
Speaker 3: So I got married that same year and to my fiancee,
Speaker 3: and today is our tenth anniversary, as a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: a happy anniversary to Leanne. So in twenty fifteen we
Speaker 3: were just about there, but the problem was we had
Speaker 3: it was over five hundred and fifty pages long. Tom McCarthy,
Speaker 3: my co author. When this got more complicated than either
Speaker 3: of us could imagine, I asked him to come on
Speaker 3: as a co author. He is my co author, and
Speaker 3: so I would tell the story and then he would.
Speaker 3: I'd send him a chapter and he would clean it
Speaker 3: up little bit. And he has the gift of being
Speaker 3: able to say in one paragram of what it took
Speaker 3: me four pages to say, right, and got I got
Speaker 3: better at writing along the way. But here we are
Speaker 3: ten years later. We're selling a lot of books. Things
Speaker 3: are going well. I'm really excited. It's never been about
Speaker 3: money to me. It's about telling the story. And I'm
Speaker 3: very pleased. I just got the book uploaded today this
Speaker 3: morning to Ingram so that booksellers can buy the book
Speaker 3: wholesale or their stores all around the world, So I'm
Speaker 3: excited about that. We're also on Barnesandnoble dot com. I've
Speaker 3: got a book signing at Barnes and Noble next week
Speaker 3: next weekend, and so things are going great. I'm really excited.
Speaker 2: You were in Crime Con in Nashville, I understand recently.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was an amazing experience. I'd never been to
Speaker 3: one before, and we got the last book available. Somebody
Speaker 3: had canceled and we were fortunate enough to grab the
Speaker 3: last booth, and we actually sold quite a few books
Speaker 3: there at the conference. And more importantly, my PR guy
Speaker 3: Johnny Dwinell, he lives in Nashville and so he was
Speaker 3: able to come to the event and meet everybody that
Speaker 3: I didn't have time to get out and touch base
Speaker 3: with because I was busy signing books. And so we
Speaker 3: met a lot of folks and got some invitations, and
Speaker 3: in fact, I got an invitation I need to respond
Speaker 3: to before I head off to Memphis tomorrow for our shoot.
Speaker 3: And so I'm just really pleased how things have gone.
Speaker 3: It's exceeded my mom's a pacination. So I'm just very excited,
Speaker 3: very excited.
Speaker 2: You've received a lot of validation for your work, recognition
Speaker 2: for your work, and that just like at Crime Con
Speaker 2: at Nashville, you got to see doctor Michael Boden again.
Speaker 2: He was one of the feature speakers and also famed
Speaker 2: profiler John Douglas as well.
Speaker 3: Well. Actually I didn't that was my intent to. In fact,
Speaker 3: Jones just had a birthday. I wished him happy birthday.
Speaker 3: On Facebook, and I said I'd never had the chance
Speaker 3: to run into you, and he said that it was
Speaker 3: his first crime crime Con. Yes, crime Con. I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: there's another crime Festival that's about to go on next year,
Speaker 3: but crime Con, he said, they kept me so busy
Speaker 3: that I never got a chance to visit with anybody.
Speaker 3: And so he wished me luck on the book, and
Speaker 3: he signed a poster movie poster from West to Memphis
Speaker 3: for me, and he wrote on the poster to to
Speaker 3: find the artists, look at the artwork. And I thought
Speaker 3: that was very profound, and so I'm still looking at
Speaker 3: the artwork. My book is available now at Amazonbarnesandoble dot Com.
Speaker 3: Hopefully it'll be in their stores soon around the country,
Speaker 3: and hopefully it'll be available at family owned bookstores or
Speaker 3: smaller bookstores around the country and then libraries. You can
Speaker 3: check the book out, but I hope you get a
Speaker 3: chance to take a look at it, because I think
Speaker 3: all these things that I couldn't talk about all these
Speaker 3: years are suddenly now on focus, and we can take
Speaker 3: away all the mythology and replace it with cold arm facts.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on and talking about
Speaker 2: your book. A Harvest of Innocence, The Untold Story of
Speaker 2: the West Memphis Murder Case. For those that might want
Speaker 2: to take a look further, could you tell us about
Speaker 2: your website and if you do any social media.
Speaker 3: I do. I'm on Facebook. I have a Facebook pays
Speaker 3: for the book, but it seems like most people gravitate
Speaker 3: towards my personal page. But I'm on Facebook. I haven't
Speaker 3: mastered any other of the social media's yet, but I
Speaker 3: do have a website. It's Danstidham dot com and there's
Speaker 3: information about the case and where you can find the
Speaker 3: book and pictures and articles about the case that have
Speaker 3: been done over the years, in a bio and a
Speaker 3: way to contact me if you just have a question
Speaker 3: about the case. Welcome questions like in fact, I enjoy
Speaker 3: interacting with my readers.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on and talking about
Speaker 2: A Harvest of Innocence, the Untold Story of the West
Speaker 2: Memphis Murder Case. Thank you so much for this interview
Speaker 2: and you have a great evening. Dan Stidham, and you
Speaker 2: as well as an honor, thank you, It was an honor.
Speaker 2: Thank you.