Read Devil’s Knot for Free Online Page B

the crime. Not only that; Jessie was admitting his own participation. But like so much about this case, the statement was riddled with problems. The most serious centered on the crucial factor of time. Jessie said the incident he described had occurred in the morning. Yet the police knew that Chris, Michael, and Stevie had been in school then—and that they had remained there until school let out at 2:45 P.M . Another problem was that even in this self-incriminating version, Jessie was saying that he’d left the scene without having witnessed the murders. Ridge tried again, taking Jessie back to the moment when he’d said Michael had “took off running.”
    “Which way does he go?” Ridge asked. “I mean, does he go back toward where the houses are? Is he going to the Blue Beacon? Is he going out toward the fields? Where’s he running to?”
    Jessie: “Toward the houses.”
    Ridge: “Toward the houses?”
    Gitchell: “Where the pipe is that goes across the yards?”
    Jessie: “Yes, he run out there and I caught him and brought him back, and I took off.”
    It happened repeatedly: Jessie saying he’d left the scene without witnessing the murders.
    Ridge tried again. “Okay,” he prompted. “And when you came back a little later, now all three boys are tied?”
    Jessie had said nothing about returning to the scene. But he answered, “Yes.”
    Ridge: “Is that right?”
    Jessie: “Yes, and I took off and run home.”
    Ridge: “All right, have they got their clothes on when you saw them tied?”
    Jessie: “No, they had them off.”
    Ridge: “They had already gotten them off? When he first hit the boy—when Damien first hit the first boy—did they have their clothes on then?”
    Jessie: “Yes.”
    Ridge: “All right, when did they take their clothes off?”
    Jessie: “Right after they beat up all three of them, beat them up real bad.”
    Ridge: “Beat them up real bad, and then they took their clothes off?”
    Jessie: “Yes.”
    Ridge: “And then they tied them?”
    Jessie: “Then they tied them up, tied their hands up, they started screwing them and stuff, cutting them and stuff, and I saw it and turned around and looked, and then I took off running. I went home. Then they called me and asked me, ‘How come I didn’t stay?’ I told them, ‘I just couldn’t.’”
    Ridge: “Just couldn’t stay?”
    Jessie: “I couldn’t stand it to see what they were doing to them.”
    Still, Jessie was not saying that he’d witnessed a murder.
    Ridge asked, “Okay. Now when this is going on, when this is taking place, you saw somebody with a knife. Who had a knife?”
    “Jason,” Jessie said.
    In answers to a half dozen more questions, Jessie said he saw Jason cut one of the boys in the face and another boy “at the bottom,” in what Gitchell established was “his groin area.” Then Ridge asked, in a rare acknowledgment of Jessie’s limitations: “Do you know what a penis is?”
    “Yeah,” Jessie answered. “That’s where he was cut.”
    The officers established that the boy in question was “the Byers boy again.” When Jessie confirmed, “That’s the one I seen them cutting on,” Ridge asked again: “All right. You know what a penis is?”
    Again, Jessie said yes, and that that was where he’d seen Jason cutting, “right there real close to his penis and stuff, and I saw some blood, and that’s when I took off.”
    The officers asked a few questions about where Jessie was standing as this bloody scene unfolded. He told them that he was on one of the banks overlooking the drainage ditch. “I was looking down, and after I seen all of that, I took off.”
    Ridge acknowledged Jessie’s claim to have left the scene. “All right,” he said, “you went home, and about what time was it that all of this took place? I’m not saying when they called you. I’m saying what time was it that you were actually there in the park?”
    “About twelve,” Jessie said.
    Ridge: “About