A HARVEST OF INNOCENCE-Dan Stidham

teenager accused of being a satanic child killer. Much later others began to respect his efforts in seeking justice for Jesse miss Kelly. In the real world, it is much more complicated than that. He was nothing more than a lawyer committed to doing his job what was required of

him by his moral compass. As a reward for his efforts, he spent a good deal of the past thirty years being pummeled by those hell bent on stopping his quest for justice for the West Memphis three, three young men who spent nearly two decades in prison his crimes they simply did not commit. This is the true story of those events. The book that we're featuring this evening is a Harvest of Innocence, the Untold story of the West Memphis three Murder Case, with my special guest, Dan Stidham.

Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.

now because it must be told. Take us back to May fifth, nineteen ninety three, Little Rock, Arkansas. How you first heard about this story, what you first believed from the accounts and the reporting, and how you incredibly became involved as an attorney in this extraordinary case.

remember having this conversation with my father. He said, you don't have any business whatsoever getting involved in something like that, so you need to stay away from that. And I said, well, it's so far away from Paragold where I live. It's ninety miles away, So I mean, I just there's no chance that I could possibly get involved in it. Of

course I did. I got a phone call out of the Blue Back on June seventh of nineteen ninety three, and the judge, Judge David Goodson, who was from my hometown, Paragold. He was on the bench that day and handed the task of appointing lawyers, and nobody wanted to represent mister Meskelly. There were throngs of attorneys jocking for position to represent the other two, but nobody wanted to deal with mister

Miskelly and the confession. And he said, I really need you to think about this because I think you could do a good job. And so I said, well, can I have time to think about it? And he said, yeah, you've got twenty minutes. So I quickly uh my law partner's home phone number and he didn't answer. I waited a few minutes, try it again. He didn't answer. The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning

towards doing it. And Judge Goodson hadn't even mentioned you know, all you got to do is get him ready to tessfy against the other two avoid the death penalty. It should be something that happens pretty quickly, and it'll be over with. And with that having been said, I still was a little reluctant, and I was still I had just got in out of the shower and still had

a towel wrapped around me. And I went to the door and asked my wife to step in the bedroom, and I told her as quickly as I could be is my twenty minutes was about up, what was going on and what had been asked of me. And I knew she was going to talk me out of it. I just knew she would. But instead she looked at me and she goes, do it. That's why you went to law school. This is the kind of case she loved.

talking about this case. Still it's never left the media in all these years, it's always been continuing media coverage about this or that or the other, and so it's it's it's a fascinating case and one I hope to still be able to solve. For the first two or three days, all we could manage to do was take phone calls from every media out that in the United States. I can't recall a name of them all in my book, but I can't recall at the top of my head.

But it was all the major networks and all the twenty twenty and talk show hosts and all that kind of thing. And so, of coursely I wanted to interview my client, and I wasn't going to let that happen under any circumstances. Of course, you know, here we were. We knew nothing about the case, my partner and I,

and we hadn't even met our client. So the first thing I did was have him train from he was in the Cross County Jail, which is just the county immediately west of Critin County where the crime occurred, and I asked to have him moved to Clay County, which

was a brand new facility at the time. I knew the sheriff there pretty well and I asked him if he'd be willing to house mister miss Kelly, and he agreed, and so they transferred him to Clay County, which is just north of me in Parible, and so it wasn't but about a thirty five minute drive to be able to go visit him instead of a four hour round trip. When we went to see mister miss Kelly for the

first time, I was expecting this. You know, the picture in the newspaper, which is how I read my client's confession, was in the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, who somehow got their hands on the confession. There were rumors about police officers trying to sell it thousand dollars. All of a sudden, the West Memphis Commercial Appeals printed it on the front page, so they didn't print it

in its entirety. But I ended up getting my hands on a copy of it from one of the other attorneys involved, and as I read it, I thought, oh, my gosh, this is horrible. It's just but immediately I picked up on the fact that there were some huge discrepancies in his confession and some impossibilities that just couldn't have happened the way he said it, you know, just based on what I knew about the case at that point.

So we drove off the picket, my law partner Greg and my legal assistant Vicky, and we went to the Clay County Detention Center and signed in and took the short walk down the hall and we were deposited into a common area at the jail that had some concrete picnic tables and benches, and so there set this small kid. He looked like he was maybe ten or eleven years old at most. He couldn't have been more than, you know,

just a little over five feet tall. And the jail jumpsuit that they had given him was was so big they had to roll up to he had to roll up the sleeves and wanted to be able to find his hands and feet. So he wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting a street thug, you know, a big kid, and I got just the opposite. So I was really surprised. And the last thing I wanted to do was stick a tape recorder in front of him, because I just

wanted to try to get to know him. And so we began talking and and Vicky was taking notes, and you know, we just kind of asked him, you know, hey, you said you were there, Can you tell us what happened? And this version of what happened was dramatically different than what he had told the police. And he kept insisting that the child who had been sexually mutilated was the bondheaded kid Stevie Branch, when in fact it was one of the others. But I mean, he would not back down.

He said, he insisted it was the bond kid, and so we were just horribly confused and about all he could do was just to answer yes or no questions. He could not provide any narrative about what happened, and seemed odd to me, even as a young lawyer just starting my fifth year of flaw practice with no jury trial experience, all of a sudden, I've got a problem. I've got to get a kid ready to testify against

the co defendants and he can't tell the story. So, in not having any experience whatsoever was doing with people who have intellectual disabilities, I didn't immediately catch on to the fact that he was suffering from MR, which back then we referred to as mental retardation. Today's jargon is MR, or intellectual disabilities, but he had MR and we didn't know that until much later. In fact, it was after the trial was over months later, ten years later.

told the police. And at one point he mentions that there were other people involved in the cult. And when I asked the names that he had mentioned, I said, where did you come up with these names? And he said those are all the kids in school who didn't like me and made fun of me. So I thought that was interesting, but he really couldn't put together any

kind of narrative about what happened. And if you see something that's, you know, so shocking as this, and these are the worst pictures I have ever seen, and nothing I could ever see would be worse than this. It's just it's horrible to look at. And I just could not believe that this kid had witnessed this happened and couldn't tell the story. And then he got parts of it just dead wrong. So we left that day with more questions than answers. And I remember his haircut was unique.

It was some kind of mohawk kind of deal with stripes cut down the sides of his head from the top of the mohawk, and then someone had carved in with some clippers and eight ball like off a pool table, and whoever did it obviously had some talent, but it made him look like a carnival freak. For lack of little better phrase, I said, hey, when your hair grows out a little more, here's some money to get a haircut. And by the way, which kid was it again that

had his thing cut off? And then he said, just insisting that it was the block kid, And I was just wrong. So we'd get outside of the car and start heading back to the law office and we're just stunning. I mean, we certainly had more questions than answers. And I remember my law partner said, how are we going to get him to testify against the other two? And he can't even put together a story. I said, we

may not be able to. It may be impossible. So it was very confusing, and as we started getting discovery and we were under the impression that our client was guilty because he said he was there. And if he hadn't told the police the one piece of narrative that was in the confession that he ran down one of the kids I think it was Michael Moore and brought that kid back to the crime scene, then he would have just been a false witness instead of a false confessor.

That one little brief colloquy about running that kid down and bringing him back to the crime scene is what implicated him, because he said that he didn't participate in any of the sexual stuff that he described the sodomization of the little kids and then the sexual mutilation, and he described a sexual mutilation as Jason Baldwin just swinging a knife and removing the penis. And that's not what happened.

That's not what the pictures reflected, despite their ugliness and horrible as they were, it just didn't happen that way. It was obviously it didn't happen that way. So we wasted about ninety days or so looking through the evidence that the prosecution was handing over to us in box loads, and with the thought that, you know, we've got to figure out some way to get this kid to come

up with a narrative. In August late August of ninety three, I finally get the phone call from the prosecuting attorney in Crickland County in West Memphis. Name was John Foglman, and the first time I'd ever talked to him, I hadn't met him yet, and he said that they had found a DNA match on a bloody T shirt found in mister Miskelly's bedroom closet. So I thought, okay, well,

now we're in trouble. That's a slam dunk. And of course DNA was still in its emphasy at that time, so immediately made a note that we've got to hire our own expert to make sure that the state's expert, you know, is reading this correctly. So I called his father, and his father was just heart broken, and he said, there's no way he could have done it. He was fifty miles away in Dias, Arkansas, which is the childhood home of Johnny Cash, and so his father just couldn't

believe it. And I also got an offer from the prosecutor of fifty years in prison. I'm sorry, excuse me that came later. It was life in prison with the chance of parole, right, that was the offer. And so I went to the jail tried to explain this offer to Jesse, and he just couldn't seem to comprehend it. Life. Of course, in his simple mind, life in Arkansas means just that life. And if it's not without parole, then there's a chance to pro bowl or the governor could

commute the sentence later on. But I was really worried about whether, you know, we could even perform that miracle with not being able to get a narrative out of my client. And I did something that day different, And I don't know exactly why I did it that way, but I did, I guess more than anything, I thought of trying to explain DNA to Jesse Miss Kelly Jr. Was going to be impossible, so I just simply asked him.

I said, hey, there was a T shirt found in your bedroom at your mobile home and it has blood on it. Or I could finish my sentence. He jumped right in and for the first time, provided some narrative, which was very interesting. It was something that he knew something about. He said, oh, that's my blood. I get mad at my dad sometimes and I go outside and I bust stow the bottles with my fists. And I

said really, and he said yeah. He reached out and showed me his knuckles on both hands or just littered the scars. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ruin this magic moment of actually getting some sort of response from him that didn't come in the formula of a yeah or uh huh or no or uh uh. It was It was an actual narrative about why his

blood was on that T shirt. So the following month we ended up in Maryon, where the courthouse is located in Crickton County, just down the road from what's Memphis, and we sat down the council table and Fogelman walked up to me and bent over and he said, hey, I was wrong about that DNA. That's not Michael Moore's blood, that's your client's blood. And it was just like a light bulb going off in my head. It was like whoa, Yes, he was telling the truth about something that he could

actually provide a narrative for for the first time. Before I could tell my law partner, the bailiff announced that Judge Burnett was entering the courtroom, and we all stood up and went through that ritual, and while something else was going on, it didn't have any pertinence to our case. I leaned over and I said, Crow, that wasn't Michael Moore's blood on the T shirt. It was Jesse. And he goes, God, he was telling the truth and I

said yeah, and that means he's innocent. And we both just looked at each other, like, you know, this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the lawyers has no trial experience. I had actually set second chair in a jury trial in a different county, but I played no role but sitting there and offering some insight. But I didn't cross examine witnesses or do anything like that.

But that was my sole jury trial experience. Mister Crow had some civil jury trial experience, but no criminal experience.

Damien did it. And so now all of a sudden, the polygraph leads to an intensified interrogation. He's there from nine o'clock in the morning till after dark that evening, which would have been about some time between seven and eight pm. So there was an extremely lack of evidence of regarding what happened during that time. And even though they had the ability the videotape the entire interrogation, which is a recommended view these days at least, then they

chose to just do an audio tape. So we have basically about thirty minutes of audio tape and an interrogation that lasted throughout the well essentially that morning, but more ferociously after launch. There's a little clue was in the confession if you listen to it, where mister miss Kelly refers to the branch or the buyers, or the more,

and I thought that was odd. And then I got a copy of the newspaper and they were showing him a picture that appeared in the local paper, and it referred to the victim buyers, the victim more, and the victim brand. So it was obvious that they were pointing out to him what to see. There was one note where Gechell had drew a circle and put three dots in the middle and a bunch of dots on the outside of the circle, and told Jesse that these three dots in the middle or you, Damien and Jason, do

you want to be in the middle with them? Or do you want to be out here with us? And of course, and then Lauley challenge kid who has mr is going to say, I want to be out there with you guys. So Steve Drizhin, who is a professor and founder of the Northwestern School of Law Center for Ronical Convictions of the Youth, he once said at a seminar we did in Chicago, Jesse mis Kelly didn't confess. Garry Gitchell was the one who confessed, and all he had to do was get Jesse to go along with it.

And that's pretty much what we had. There was so little. I found motion after motion with Judge Burnett to allow me to conduct the depositions of the interrogating officers because I had no idea what they were going to testify to at the suppression hearing, and I felt it was unfair because the state could issue a prosecutor subpoena and talked to anybody they wanted to, but I didn't have that power. Burnett denied the motions, but he ordered the officers to make time to visit with me, and they

refused to visit with me. I think Gitschell was the only one who actually talked to me at all. Mike Allen and Brian Ridge did not. So we kept asking for this information and we weren't getting any, and so we knew the first time that we were going to find out what happened in that interrogation room was going to be during the suppression hearing, and so that's where

we found ourselves. But it's important to point out that before that, I found out through our private investigator, Ron Lax, that there was a professor at UC Berkeley who was an expert in false confessions, and he got his phone numbers, said he need to call this guy because these kids are innocent and we need someone to contestify that this confession was coerced, in voluntary and false, and so, having no money as a public defender appointed to represent mister

miss Kelly called the number. Doctor Alshet answered and he was very polite and had a kind soothing voice, and I told him what was going on, and he seemed somewhat excited about the possibility, and he said, send me all the officers notes, and I said, well, there's not many, but I'll send you what I got, and he wanted

a transcript of the confession. There was a two part confession because when mister Fogerman got to the police station and they were all jumping and slapping hands and saying we've got him, we got him, he must have read the transcript and said, hey, you know this didn't happen at noon. Right, kids were in school all day, as was Jason Baldwin, so they couldn't have skipped school like miss Kelly said. And they were last seeing riding their box near the crime seeing at six thirty pm, So

this is impossible. And so Kitchell went back into the interrogation room, but he did not state the time, so we don't know what time he went in, and we don't know what time he came out. I mean, we can look at the tape and determine the timing, but we don't know what time it was this occurred. But he walked into the interrogation room and he said, now, Jesse, earlier you told me this happened at five or six?

Was it five or six? Or seven or eight? And even though mentally retarded kid is gonna say, what the officer wants him to say, because he's been promised he can go home as soon as it's over, and he said seven or eight. And this is the first time that even five or six had been talked about during the confession, right. The officer just seemed happy to have it at noon and didn't matter that the ligatures are wrong,

and there were other things that were impossibilities. But once Jesse agreed with Gischell, it happened at seven or eight. You could hear him on the tape just kind of like that's over, we got it. He went back out and they transcribed the tape, issued the search warrants and resta warrants for each of the West of three and it was on. So getting back to doctor Richard Rolfshe, I sent him all that material and he called me

back about a week later, I believe. Then I said, well, what do you think and he said, he said, Dan, that is the stupid, stupidest fucking confession I've ever read. Those were the exact words. I'm not adding that for emphasis. That's what he told me. He said, I want to consult on this case. And I reminded him again that I didn't have any money to pay him, and he said, I don't care. I'm coming to Arkansas to meet with mister miss Callaen. I will testify and consult on the case.

And if the judge awards a fee at the end of the trial, and it's fine. If he does it, that's fine too. I thought, Wow, So suddenly I wasn't

in this wilderness. Just met my law partner. All along we had an expert, a world class expert, and he asked me to read a book called The False Confessions and Police Interrogation Tactics by a fellow named giz Lee good Johnson from Iceland that doctor also had contributed to and so I read that, and having a background in psychology and a degree in sociology, it actually made sense and I could see how this happened, and for the first time I realized that we got a chance of

winning this thing. We really do, and there's no testifying. We're gonna try this thing. It was scary, but that's the direction we started heading. But we'd also used up half our prep time reaching that point. So mister miss Kelly then began telling us he wasn't there, that he had never been there, and he told us he thought we were cops. He said, I thought you were cops, and I had to get the story the same as it was when I told it on tape. And so we tried to explain what an attorney is, and he

just didn't seem to comprehend that. But we convinced him that we were on his team. We began to try to dismantle the confession because it was just like I said, there was even with Getro going back in and trying to get the time correct. That didn't take away from the ligatures being incorrect. Jesse said it was they were tied up with a big brown rope, and they weren't.

They were tied with their own shoe strings. So there's just a and of course the way the utilation occurred was different, didn't match the evidence.

all said no, and who could blame them. They didn't want to get in the middle all that stuff and ended up in jail themselves. So they denied it. And by the time we reached our epiphany that he was innocent and we started interviewing these witnesses, they're like, well, okay, this happened on that particular night, and they showed them calendars and they remembered events that took place, and they said, yeah, that was May fifth. We went wrestling with Jesse and

Dyaz Arkansas, but they had already denied it. So when we put our alibi defense on, which we were compelled to do despite its problematic issues, they didn't come across very well. We had one witness who hadn't been spoiled, and his testimony was pretty compelling. It just just didn't

go well, and that hurt us badly. And if mister miss Kelly Senior had just taken my advice and not had these press conferences, I mean it was every night they would take him beer, and then at one point he actually got drunk and called the prison and got Jesse on the phone, and the phone to his girlfriend and she got to talk to Jesse on the phone.

That really made me mad. So I complained to the producer of that particular channel in Memphis, and he acted like it was fair, and I told him it wasn't fair. You're tanning the jury pool. So but I just couldn't stop Jesse Senior from doing it. He was offending his kid in the only way he knew how, and that's by telling everybody he was innocent. So and for the first ninety days that's what we thought too, is that

he was guilty. But then when we he was innocent and actually talked to these witnesses, that it became obvious that they had given prior inconsistent statements that the prosecutor is going to be able to use to are you telling the truth now or were you telling the truth when you talk to the police officer kind of routine that obviously did not go well. And then the psychologists that we hired, we found out on the eve of his testimony that he didn't even have a license. He

had lost his license. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel because we couldn't find anybody willing to take

on the case. I'd even tried to get part Deeps to get involved because he was the top guy on the food chain at the time on those issues, and I couldn't get past the receptionists without a fifteen thousand dollars check, so I didn't even have fifteen hundred to spend, and so we ended up with somebody who was unlicensed, and it was similar to a nuclear blast in the courtroom when he testified, and I bet to burnet for an opportunity to find another psychologist, but he wasn't interested

in that, so we had to play the cards that were built us, and that hurt us a lot, but not nearly as much as what he did to One of the things that offsually told me was I needed to get a polygrapher to read Jesse's polygraph tests that the western of his police gave him unusual. They had their own in house polygraph guy, so most departments, especially small departments, don't have that. Sent the charts to a gentleman who had no intention whatsoever of getting involved in

this case, and that was Warren Holmes. He was near retirement, if he wasn't already retired, but he was the top guy on polygraphs in the world. He'd worked on some very high profile cases and Martin Luther King assassination, both Kennedy assassinations, as I recall the Boston strangler case, and he taught the FBI and the CIA and Canadian Role

Mounted Police about polygraphs and the results. So somehow I condid him to at least read the charge and I said, if you won't get involved in the case, I understand what could you at least tell me what they say to you, how do you interpret them? And so a few days later he called with a completely different demeanor and said, I want to testify in this case. I'm going to consult And I said, well, I told you,

I don't have any money. I have to count on the court being willing to pay you after this is over. And he said, I don't care this kid's innocent. I'm coming to Arkansas, the same thing Offsha had said. Unfortunately Park Deets didn't say that. But here I was with two out of three. So that's a pretty good batting average. With no money and no financial to do it, I was able to swayed two of the greatest experts on the planet, and so we really thought that we were

going to win this thing. We had gotten Burnett reversed mister Crow and I the year before, in nineteen ninety three, same year the crimes happened, but court later on that year, before the trial started in ninety four, we got it not only reversed, but dismissed in a seven ozer decision, and the court said that he had misinterpreted the statute incorrectly,

and my client walked. So we felt like if we could just keep chess pieces on the board, that eventually Burnett would make a mistake and we'd have something that the Supreme Court could get hang its hat on. And we had a couple of very good issues.

Case father said it was a misbel under these circumstances because it was used to create false confession, but Burnett wouldn't hear of it. So mister Holmes could only talk about lease interrogation techniques, which he described as horrible and said any good detective would have taken mister miss Kelly immediately to the crime scene and have him point out

where everything happened. Even asking on the tape, I think at the end of the tape that he's willing to go out there and show him where it all happened. And his response was, I guess I don't have a problem with that, and so, but they never did. If they had, according to Warren Holmes, they would have immediately realized that this kid knew nothing about the case. But they didn't do it. And later on I was able

to demonstrate that myself. Of course, that was post conviction. Also, the judge refused to let doctor offsha Offshade testifies to his conclusions that the confession was coerced and involuntary, and it's pointed out in the record, and I pointed out in the book that he said on the record, he said, what the hell do we need a jury for if I'm going to let your expert just tell him what to do, and that I've already ruled and it's voluntary and it's coming in, I'm not going to let him

testify to those two issues, which were the two key issues. And of course that just cut us off with the knees, and you were just, you know, how are we going to get this kid not guilty without being able to put on our case. So we did what was called a proffer and it's still to this day called that where we proffer the evidence into the record, but the jury is not in the courtroom. They're in the jury room.

And so we put off Chean and he tests everything he came to testify about and was cross examined the prosecutors, and we put all that information in the record so the appellate court would be able to see it, right, And so we thought, well, now we got a real good issue and allowing this evidence in. And so the judge took a break after our proffer and all these people in the courtroom, most of them were media folks, came up to me and said, you've just won this case.

That was the most incredible testimony I've ever heard, and it makes sense. And I said, yeah, but the jury never got to hear that, and they were congratulating me and pat me on the back, and I said, the jury's never going to hear that. The trial certainly ended thereafter, and all the prosecutions needed was three bodies and all the pictures they showed to the jury, which we objected

to because they were just so horrible. You show those to a jury and they're going to want to punish somebody and then when somebody is your client in the courtroom didn't turn out well, I did. Drury went to I think one am that night after they started deliberating, and then they asked to go home and get some sleep and come back the next day, which they did and started in again. At nine thirty. When I got to the court ouse, the sheriff came up to me

and he said, hey, Dan. He said, I heard the initial vote in the drew room was four votes are acquittal. I said, I didn't want to know where he got the information. I just said, well, that's true, that's promising. Maybe we can get a home Dury, or maybe even the four can convince the eight. Later on, one of my students at Arkansas State University, I was teaching criminology classes there. He said, you raised his hand. The student did and he said, Judge, he said, that ain't correct.

You had five votes for acquittal. And I said, well, how do you know that? He goes? My uncle was the jury foreman and he still has his notes. Would you like to see him? And I was trying to contain Mike's oide. So the next week he brought the notes in and you could tell as you read through the notes, all the objections that were made by the prosecution.

The jury forema was doodling because you know, even at a very small courtroom, and they could probably hear us talking, and they were just bored with all the objections that the prosecutor was making. Of course we made our own objections too, but it was very enlightening. So seven to five is you know, that's a good number. And as the day wore on, it became increasingly obvious that this

was bad for the prosecution. And so that's when the judge made a horrible judicial ethical decision to open the jury room door and asked them what they wanted to eat for lunch. And jury foreman was the only one who spoke, and he said, we don't need any lunch, we're almost done. And then Burnette said to not quote, well you're still going to have to come back after lunch and do the sentencing. And I couldn't believe that he had just told the jury what they had to

do and find the guy guilty in it. I'm just stunned. And the foreman said, well, what if we find him menacing? And Burnett just reached through the door and closed it, and I looked over at Brent Davis and he knees were buckling as he had turned white as a ghost, and Burnett was the same. So I went back in the courtroom and told mister Crow what had happened, and he said, my god, we may pull this thing off.

And so we talked about a mistrial, and we thought, well, if you make one, the judge will probably granted, and then if we find out later that the jury was going to quit, then we'll never forgive ourselves for asking for that mistrial. We didn't realize at the time because of our inexperience, you could actually do both. And so that was perhaps the biggest blunder that I made in

the case. Then that's one of the things I like to point out about my book is that this was the older Dan looking back at the younger Dan and going at I can't believe this happened, and why did you let that happen? And you know, now, I've been doing this for over thirty years and I can try this case with no sleep and win. But at the time I just didn't know any better, and so we could have asked for a mistrial and then waited for the jury verdict and if he had been acquitted, we

could have withdrawn our mistrial motion. So we didn't handle that correctly. And in the book, I'm as tough on myself as I was everybody else. When I made a mistake, I admitted it. When everybody else made their mistakes, they ran from it and would deny it. I felt that was very important. That was one of the goals of my book, was to separate the fact from the fiction

and the mythology that's grown around this case. And there's a very small number of people who still believe the West Memphis Three are guilty, and they do podcasts and they write books, and I don't know how much they sell, or they've asked me to come on and debate them. Mark Twain once said, never argue with a fool, because onlookers won't be able to tell the difference. I just don't argue with them because it's not going to get you anywhere. It's like talking religion or politics. It's just

not going to be worthy of the conversation. So I just ignore them. And because I've had my mailbox blown up a couple of times, once on the day I announced I was writing the book, and the local paper at a front page story and pairical Daily Press, and someone decided it'd be fun to blow up my mailbox with a small bomb on my bomb and that was the second time that that had happened. Also that day I got email threats from one from the UK and

one from North America. I thought, you know, this is really going to be fun writing this book, and I expected these people would come at me like Kama causes and the first couple of weeks, you know, on Amazon, when somebody leaves a review, it tells you whether they've read the book or not, or ordered the book, and so I wasn't surprised that mister Moore put up a disparage and comment, and I was surprised that some young attorney I don't know if they ever got license, but

I met him one time in Memphis at a seminar and he put up this horrible review saying that I hadn't addressed the false confessions, and I hadn't addressed this, that and the other, and I had addressed each and every one of those things. So apparently he read the book finally and realized that I had because I haven't heard from him since. But that's enough to keep me from having a five star rating. I got it four

to six, which is good. I'm not complaining, but that's been I haven't heard anything from these folks, and I'm really kind of surprised. I've learned to be vigilant, careful. I have a concealed carry permit and I carry everywhere I go because of that. Hopefully that the trend will continue and I won't have to confront any of those folks.

I had moved the case forward light years ahead. And I knew what Michael Boden, doctor Michael Boden looked like because I'd seen him on TV with his show Autopsy that played on HBO. I saw him walking around and I walked up to him, and I explained who I was and asked him if he could spare ten or fifteen minutes to look at my photographs, primarily because that's what he is, he's a forensic pathologist and get his opinion. And I didn't expect him to jump on the case.

I knew I couldn't afford him, but I just wanted to get, you know, someone appoint me in the right direction. And he kind of, you know, gave me the well, I might have time later in the day or tomorrow. And this kind of blew me off, and I decided to step into one of the sessions. Of course, I wasn't even I wasn't a member, but I just walked

in and sat down. And it's a very interesting session room full of forensic pathologists asking each other for help on certain cases because they couldn't make a determination as to the manner or the cause of death, and they were asking for inside and extra set of eyes. And it was intriguing to watch. And so as I stepped out of the conference room, I looked up and there's doctor Michael Bowden headed towards the elevator, and I thought, here's my chance. I got in. I was the last

one in the elevator. Doctor Haskell was in there. Doctor David, I knew by sight because we'd actually retained him to look at some forensical ontology issues that we thought we had but decided that we later we're not going to pursue that angle. But got on the elevator and I said, look, I said, I really, I'm my client's sitting in prison for something he didn't do. One guy's on death row, the other one serve in life without row. Can you

least just look at what I got. Give give me fifteen minutes, ten minutes, and just look at this and tell me what you think. Doctor Haskins said, yeah, that sounds great. Let's do that. And doctor David said, yeah, let's let's do that. Let's take a look at what he's got. And doctor Boden sort of reluctantly agreed, so we went up. I was on the seventeenth floor and we went up to my room and I spread all

these autopsy photographed. They were in a throwing binder. I took him out of the binder and just laid them out and I'll never forget this as long as I live. Doctor Boden immediately gravitated towards the picture of the sexual mutilation of Christopher Buyers and he picked it up and he looked at it and he said, there's no way three teenagers pulled this off. And he said, this is not a Satanic ritual. This is animal predation. And doctor Haskell jumped in. He said, yeah, it's probably turtles or

predacious diving beetles, but that's definitely animal predation. Sought and said, you know, I've done ten thousand autopsies in my career and those are the worst pictures I've ever seen. And I thought that would be my luck to my first caste get the worst pictures ever seen by doctor Michael Boden. And so the fifteen minutes was over and Askell invited me to go downstairs to the bar and have a drink.

And continue our conversation, and we talked about the idea of going out there to the same ditch and placing a pig the water and use a time lapse camera and see what critters showed up. As fate would have it, we never got that opportunity. But when I got back to Paragould, I immediately emailed Ed Molette, who was Damien Echo's lawyer at the time from Houston, and I emailed him and said, you know, I gonna believe this, and I said it's animal predation. He said, well, who told

you that? I said doctor Bowden, and Neil Haskell, he's an entomologist. And so I said, this changes everything. This wasn't the cutting off of any thing. It was animals eating it off. They go for the soft tissue, They go for the genitals and the lips and the nose and ears, anything that they can, you know, buite away easy. And of course there's always competition for what's a available.

They were feeding on these kids, and there were also animal scratches and found out later after we did some retesting that there were animal hairs found down the victim's bodies. So the problem was I still had no money. The following year, in December of nineteen ninety nine, I get a phone call from Eddy Vedder's lawyer and he's asking me to fly out to Seattle to meet with Better and some of the top lawyers in the country to have a discussion about the case. And I said, of course,

I said when is it? He said Mother's Day? Forgot the date. It was like May fourteenth, two thousand. I think that's the day. I may be wrong about that. Had to pull the book out and find the page. But in any event, that created two problems. One I was going to be going on Mother's Day, which did nothing to help my marriage that was struggling because I was subsessed with this case and trying to solve it.

And Two, I just happened to be in the middle of a political race running for a part time judicial position, and my campaign manager, who was one of my closest friends and colleagues, said hell, no.

being mister miss Kelly's pellet counsel. John Phillips Born, who became the architect of our defense team. Stephen Bright, I think was there from the Southern Lasser, and that's all I can remember off the top of my head, being so long ago. Without pulling my book off the shelf and digging. We met that afternoon and I felt like

I was pitching an ad campaign. I gave updates on all three defendants's cases, where they were in appeals process, and what we needed and what each case needed, And after the lawyers got done asking me questions, mister Vetter to give them what they want. And the only person that was with him was his publicist, and she immediately started saying, well, what about the whales, what about saving the whales and in our commitment to the homeless, And he said, we'll do that, but well, if we have to,

we'll just make more money. We'll hold another co concert or do something different. But I knew he was all in and and so I thought, gosh, this this baby. And you know, I just got the break that I needed the year before at the conference stalking doctor Bowden for lack of the a better word. And now all of a sudden, a celebrity is willing to get involved in the case. But he wanted to do so on a confidential basis, which didn't last long because he invited

me and my children to a concert in Memphis. They were in the middle of a two and I went to the concert and at the end of the concert he said Free the West Memphis three and I was talking about it publicly. So his fight and his being part of the army of people who later got involved other celebrities, including Johnny Depp and others. This was amazing. When on a writer helped raise some funds for the defense,

and suddenly we had lawyers. I couldn't find a lawyer, a single lawyer in the state of Arkansas wanting to take on the case and bring the most important issue to light. And that is my ineffective assistance of counsel because the Arkansas Supreme Court on direct appeal had ruled that Crow and I did not raise an issue that would have resulted in an automatic dis dis missile of the case. They said we didn't raise it in a

timely fashion, which was complete nonsense. You know. I was just horrified in ninety six when the decision came down, it was seven oh and then later in the year, in December of ninety six, the Supreme Court denied the appeals of Eccles in Baldwin in a seven old decision. So we asked for a rehearing and pointed the justices to the exact age number in line number where we did raise the issue, and I even drafted the order

where Judge Burnett denied. He said he considered our our motion and amended motion, and they still would not hear the case. They would not hear the issue. They just essentially threw me under the bus. So it was very frustrating getting your tea kicked in and thrown under the bus at the same time. And so when I made that promise to my client, I knew the odds were nearly impossible. But I made a promise and I was going to keep it no matter what. But it was

going to take a lot of help. Fortunately, that help arrived.

second one revelations. You say that really helped this case people to be aware of it, but also pushed the case forward to your advantage. Oh.

And it became obvious that no matter what our objections were, all three defense teams and the prosecutors objected to the cameras in the courtroom. But Burnett said, no, we're having them. They're going to make a documentary. I'm going to allow them in the courtroom. So my first jury trial is chronicled in perpetuity, my first directoral. It's gonna be there for everybody to see over and over again. And I may be the first person that that's ever happened to.

There have been other trials that were televised live the OJ trial, and I could name several others if I can remember the name of the defendants. But this was a documentary that was going to be taped and not shown until after the case had been concluded in the appeals, the first direct appeals had been concluded, if that movie had come out before the Supreme Court, Arkansas Supreme Court had ruled. I think it might have made a difference. So that's what fueled the All the people, including the

celebrities they could. They saw Damien Eckles and Jason Baldwin and Jesse ms kelly Is themselves when they were growing up, and they listened to heavy mental music. They listened to music that most people in West Memphis, Arkansas didn't listen to. They listened to regular rock music or country music. Very big thing. So Nashville's just a couple of outs down the road. They stuck out like sore thumbs, and they became the immediate focus of the police.

they wrote and produced The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I knew it was to be more of a horror flick than it was going to be a factual depiction of the case, and at one point during the movie insinuated that Pam Hobbs and Ron Lax, who took my place as the lead male character, end up almost The strongest situation was they became a love interest. I turned down one hundred thousand dollars for that job, and I'm glad

that I did still have my life story rights. I could write my book and I didn't want no part of that film. I couldn't stop him from portraying me. Michael Gladys took that nod, and he's most famous for his role on mad Men. I can't remember the name of the character that he played, the mad Man, but his agent reached out to me and asked me if i'd be willing to talk to Michael about the case.

I said sure. He wanted to get a feel for the cadence of my voice and house, and we talked for hours and had a lot of things in common, and after the movie was over, we kept in contact for a long time and ultimately that obviously dissipated, but he I was impressed that he put that much effort into his craft for such a small role, because it wasn't a very big role. He asked me, do you

want to copy the script? And I thought, yes, please, So he emailed me a copy of the script and I read it and the first time I read it, I was so pissed off I couldn't see straight. And the second time I read it, I thought, you know, I don't come out look at that bad. And the third time I read it, I thought, you know, I actually came out looking pretty good compared to the other lawyers. And just I think it grows half a million at the box office, which is I'm pretty sure Colin and

Reese don't work that cheap. So it's not a didn't get nominated for an auscer. Let's put it that way.

No one of the movie posters that friends of mine did for the movie the documentary said it's it's horrible to think they did it, and terrible to think they didn't, the vice versa, And so news organizations were afraid of that. So some of the celebrities wanted to stay in the background, but others were right center and out front. And in fact, we did a shoot in Memphis, and I got one tomorrow that I'm doing as a matter of fact in Memphis.

And that story really propelled the case for because it was the first time a mainstream it was a forty eight hours clip an hour or two, and they'd spent a long time looking into the case and the facts, and it was really the first time that anybody was willing to do that, and it really was a big help. Johnny Depp was interviewed thank goodness, because I had probably run my mouth too much during the.

of us don't possess. Michael is probably the leading DNA expert attorney as far as I'm concerned, and John Phillisborne is just absolutely amazing and skillful than they both are. But since there was nobody here to file the motions because they weren't licensed to practice in Arkansas, they would draft motions and I would go get Jason and Jesse to sign them pro se because I couldn't sign off

on my own ineffective assistance of counsel. But I drafted it and filed it so the time when it wouldn't run. And somehow I convinced Jason Baldwin to sign it as well, and I wasn't sure whether he would because his lawyers had abandoned him and had no intentions of helping him find another lawyer. So when Jesse, miss Kelly's lawyer, showed up at the prison and told Jason just me, of course,

I wasn't sure he was going to sign it. But he did, and I said, I'm telling you you can trust me, and you're going to sign this pro se, which means on your own until I can find lawyers to help. And so we beat the deadline, and I kept getting these motions to file. I would follow them, get the clients. I would the lawyers in California would send me the motions and I would get the clients to sign them and filed And so that was kind

of a ninja as described in the book. And I can't remember the date, but ultimately Jeff Rosensweig and Blake Hendricks from Little Rock were persuaded to get involved in the case because in order for the California lawyers to practice, they had to have a Arkansas lawyer work with them, and that's the only way they could be admitted to practice in Arkansas that they had an Arkansas lawyer. So once we had that in place, then we started doing

motions to retest the evidence. Mark Taylor came out as one of the guys who developed a new blood test in the OJ case and found the blood in the white bronco. He came out and reviewed the evidence. Philipsborn came out at least once, maybe twice, to catalog all the evidence and determine what we needed to retest, and we filed a motion for retesting. Arkansas had passed a DNA retesting motion, and so we took full advantage of

it and did some retesting. Got the results in two thousand and seven, and that changed the whole dynamic of the case because the lawyers held a press conference at the law school on Little Rock, which was attended by the media. These experts just completely destroyed the prosecution's case. And I actually had people walking up to me on the street pat me on the back saying, you were right.

they can't have it both ways. They can't say we didn't raise an issue that we did because it would have resulted in a reversal and dismissal because there was no other evidenced against Ms. Kelly other than his confession. If we got the confession toss, that was over. So Crow said, they can't have it both ways. We either raise it or we didn't. They said we didn't, So

that's automatic reversal ineffective assistance Council. We just didn't know would take eighteen years and seventy eight days for that to happen. We brought on thanks to the generosity of Peter Jackson and fran Walsh and Eddie Vedder and others. We had the funds to hire the best experts on the planet, which incidentally included doctor Boden and at the rule thirty seven hearing. That's what we call it. In Arkansas. The ineffective assistance Council claim is called Rule thirty seven hearing.

And I was the star witness. The first question was were you qualified under the American bar standards that were promulgated in nineteen eighty nine. I said no, I wasn't, and then I recounted the bizarre dury room experience with Judge Burnett, and that brought gasps in the courtroom. But the way Burnett set that up, he chose to perhaps the smallest courtroom in Craighead County, and so none of the media folks could make it in along with all

the other bystanders. Then we were all under a gag order, the witnesses were, and we couldn't talk to the media because they did not want the media to hear what

was going on in that courtroom. Since I was a witness when I got them testifying over the course of two years, they told me I was not allowed back in the courtroom to be able to listen to what the forensic experts would testify to I had seen there after, David and I watched the press conference, so I knew pretty much what they were going to say, but I found the transcripts of the Rural thirty seven hearings and

started reading them well after the Alfred Please. While I was writing the book, I thought it was important to gather as much information as I could because the Alpha plea was perplexing to me. I was not the architect of the Offerd plea. I didn't know what was happening until the night before when I got a courtesy phone call from the new prosecutors got Ellington and he said, your boys getting out tomorrow. And I said, what are you talking about, my boy? He said, miss Kelly, and

I said, for kidding me. He said, nope, it's going to happen tomorrow. Be in the courtroom at nine thirty. He said, don't tell anybody. This is completely top secret. And that lasted for about fifteen minutes. But the thing that started me the most about what he told me was he said they're doing an alphad plea. And I didn't know what that was. I had to look it up. And he said the other lords for Echoles were more

than willing to leave your client behind. And he told me told him it's all or none, they all get out with the Alpha player none of them get out, and so I never have found out who who that lawyer was that was willing to leave my guy in. But I certainly had my suspects, and it doesn't matter. It's over and done with. But at the time, all I could do was call Philips born in San Francisco, and he was in the middle of jury deliberations in a capitol murder case and he couldn't come to Arkansas

to talk to Jason about the plea offer. And so the next day Alfred plea was entered and one of the West members three walked off death row, which I submit to you a happens quite infrequently in jurisprudence. And my client, who was serving life plus forty and mister Baldwin who was serving life without role, just literally walked

out of the courthouse. Three men. The only problem was they had to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence, and which doesn't make sense in the law because I would not accept a guilty plea from somebody who's maintaining their innocence. I would never do that. But you know, you've got three They're not teenagers anymore, they're middle aged. And you say, if you just say you're guilty, you get to go home while maintaining your innocence. How could they turn that down?

Mister miss Kelley took him about half a second to decide that that's what he wanted to do. Damien's health was declining rapidly, and I think that's why Jason finally relented. He was the last holdout. He didn't want to make a decision that was not his best interest. He had the best chance of getting out and being acquitted after a new trial, but he chose to go along with it. It happened. I remember I wanted to go in and see I always call them the kids because there were

kids when we started this thing. In fact, I was thirty, my client was seventeen, so I wasn't much of it. I wanted to go in the jury room where they were being held until the hearing, and talked to him, and the court security officer said, hey, you can't go in there. I said, you mean I can't go in there? He said, you have to have permission from Judge Laser, who unfortunately just passed away a few days ago. So I walked a short distance to Laser's office and I said, hey,

do you Carabine talked to my client. He said, no, of course not, but you need to get Rosenswig's permission. I thought that was kind of unusual, and so I started to walk out of his chambers and he said, hey, Dan, you're not going to try to derail his train, are you? And I said, why would I do that? My client's going home. That's the promise I made to him, and

I'm going to get to keep it. And to me, it was a victory and it wasn't going to affect my client whether he had a felony conviction or not, because he has MR and it's static and it's not ever going to go away. There's no treatment for it, and him having a felony conviction is really not that much of an inconvenience for him, but it is for the other two.

August nineteenth, twenty twelve, twenty eleven. I'm sorry. The reason I remember that date so much is it was my son's birthday. Fortunately, he passed away in his sleep a couple of years ago, almost three years ago now, and it was his birthday. That's why I can remember the day. But a ten year sis kind of frightened me, especially for miss Kelly, because he went right straight back to the mobile home park living in utter poverty that he was plucked out of in nineteen ninety three. And by

writing this book. I didn't want to put a target on any other backs or backlash from the book. There were a lot of things that I talked about in my book. There were people that thought was going to be buried and never talked about, but now it is. So that was part of my goal was to talk about these things, and I think I accomplished that goal, as I hope I did. But going back to the alphrod play I started writing. I got the help of a good friend who was working on her degree at

Arkansas State. She helped me kind of sketch out. Her name is Hailey Fitzgerald, doctor Fitzgerald, I guess I should say now. She was using the project as her thesis for her doctorate degree, and she wrote some very compelling chapters that we used in the book. But it became clear as we shopped the first hundred pages around agents, and of course I always started at the top and

worked my way down. So I figured out who the top agent was, literary agent in New York was and I sent it to him and he very kindly called me and said, you're a lawyer, not a writer. You write like a lawyer, and that's not how this book and the story needs to be told. You need someone a ghostwriter or whatever you want to call it, to come in and help you with this. And I thought, yeah,

it makes sense. So I started shopping around, and I was immediately drawn to Tom McCarthy because he had written some New York Times bestsellers as a ghostwriter for some celebrities and others. Obviously was killed at his craft. In fact, he retired from one of the big book houses there in New York and he was the acquisitions editor, so he basically chose which books were going to be published. And so I thought, this is the kind of guy

I need. And so we agreed on a price, and it was June in twenty fourteen, and I sent him what I had and refinanced my house and paid him, and off we went. And he said, well, i'll have this done by Christmas in twenty fourteen. I said that's great. So Christmas rolls around and we don't have a draft yet. So I got married that same year and to my fiancee, and today is our tenth anniversary, as a matter of fact,

a happy anniversary to Leanne. So in twenty fifteen we were just about there, but the problem was we had it was over five hundred and fifty pages long. Tom McCarthy, my co author. When this got more complicated than either of us could imagine, I asked him to come on as a co author. He is my co author, and so I would tell the story and then he would. I'd send him a chapter and he would clean it

up little bit. And he has the gift of being able to say in one paragram of what it took me four pages to say, right, and got I got better at writing along the way. But here we are ten years later. We're selling a lot of books. Things are going well. I'm really excited. It's never been about money to me. It's about telling the story. And I'm

very pleased. I just got the book uploaded today this morning to Ingram so that booksellers can buy the book wholesale or their stores all around the world, So I'm excited about that. We're also on Barnesandnoble dot com. I've got a book signing at Barnes and Noble next week next weekend, and so things are going great. I'm really excited.

with because I was busy signing books. And so we met a lot of folks and got some invitations, and in fact, I got an invitation I need to respond to before I head off to Memphis tomorrow for our shoot. And so I'm just really pleased how things have gone. It's exceeded my mom's a pacination. So I'm just very excited, very excited.

And so he wished me luck on the book, and he signed a poster movie poster from West to Memphis for me, and he wrote on the poster to to find the artists, look at the artwork. And I thought that was very profound, and so I'm still looking at the artwork. My book is available now at Amazonbarnesandoble dot Com. Hopefully it'll be in their stores soon around the country, and hopefully it'll be available at family owned bookstores or

smaller bookstores around the country and then libraries. You can check the book out, but I hope you get a chance to take a look at it, because I think all these things that I couldn't talk about all these years are suddenly now on focus, and we can take away all the mythology and replace it with cold arm facts.

about the case. Welcome questions like in fact, I enjoy interacting with my readers.