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murdered boy, Gitchell had also played him a tape recording featuring the eerie, disembodied voice of a child. The voice said spookily, “Nobody knows what happened but me.” Jessie was not told—and would not know until much later—that the voice was that of Aaron Hutcheson. The six-word segment of tape that Gitchell played for Jessie had been extracted from an interview with Aaron that police had recorded a few days earlier.
    Ridge made no mention of the photo, the circle, or the child’s voice in his typewritten report. 114 He did note, however, that, “at about 2:20 P.M ., Jessie told Inspector Gitchell that he was present at the time of the murders…. We then prepared for the interrogation to be taped.” 115
Self-Incrimination
    Until this day, Jessie’s most serious experience with the police had been an incident involving the theft of several flags belonging to the Marion High School marching band. After years in special education classes, Jessie had dropped out of school, but he had dreams of building a speedway, and he needed some flags for it. Not too cleverly, he had gone back to school to steal flags from the band. Driver had recognized that Jessie was “kind of slow mentally,” but Jessie’s age and intellectual limitations were of little concern to the police. Except for the permissions they’d sought from his father to question and polygraph him, Jessie’s claim that he understood his constitutional rights was treated the same as if he were a lawyer. Now, with the tape-recording about to begin, he was read his rights again, and again, without benefit of parents or counsel, he waived them.
    The taped part of Jessie’s interrogation began at 2:44. For thirty-four minutes, while tape fed through the recorder, Jessie answered questions for Gitchell, Ridge, and Allen. Most of his answers were vague. Many were contradictory. Almost all began with a prompt by one of the detectives.
    “Okay, Jessie,” Ridge said. “Let’s go straight to that date, May 5,1993. Wednesday. Early in the morning. You received a phone call. Is that correct?”
    Jessie: “Yes, I did.”
    Ridge: “And who made that phone call?”
    Jessie: “Jason Baldwin.”
    Ridge: “All right, what occurred, what did he talk about?”
    Jessie: “He called me and asked me if I could go to West Memphis with him, and I told him, no, I had to go to work and stuff. He told me that he had to go to West Memphis so him and Damien went and then I went with them.”
    Ridge: “All right, when did you go with them?”
    Jessie: “That morning.”
    Jessie said that he, Damien, and Jason had walked the three or four miles from Marion to West Memphis, and into the Robin Hood woods. Ridge asked what happened there.
    Jessie answered: “When I was there, I saw Damien hit this one boy real bad, and then he started screwing them and stuff…”
    Ridge showed him a newspaper clipping of the three victims and asked him which boy Damien had attacked. Jessie pointed to one of the pictures and said, “Michael Moore.” But the boy Jessie pointed to was not Michael Moore. Gitchell, pointing to one of the photos, interjected, “This boy right here?” When Jessie answered, “Yeah,” Gitchell said, “All right, that’s the Byers boy. That’s who you’re pointing at?” Jessie said that it was.
    Ridge continued: “Okay, so you saw Damien strike Chris Byers in the head?”
    Jessie had not said he’d seen Damien strike Chris in the head. Nonetheless, he answered, “Right.”
    Ridge: “What did he hit him with?”
    Jessie: “He hit him with his fist and bruised him all up real bad, and then Jason turned around and hit Steve Branch…and started doing the same thing. Then the other one took off. Michael Moore took off running. So I chased him and grabbed hold of him, until they got there, and then I left.”
    The statement marked a turning point, both in the questioning of Jessie and in the case. Jessie was saying that he had witnessed at least part of