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Q&A #5: The “Evil” Tattoo, The Phone Confession & Other Listener Questions · Crooked Tree: A West Memphis 3 Podcast

• Q&A Episode #5: Welcome to this QA episode of Crooked Tree, a West Memphis 3 podcast. This episode contains some details that are graphic in nature. Please use discretion when listening. Hello everybody, welcome back. My name is Paul Day, and I want to welcome you to this QA episode of The Crooked Tree. I'm here with my colleague, Kristen Rich, criminologist, and we of course are both advocates for the buyers family. We put an offer out on Facebook for people to send us questions and we got quite a few sent to us and we're gonna cover some pretty comprehensive questions that were asked by some really high level thinkers in the case. Kristen, you ready for this? Yes. I love these episodes. They have also become one of my favorites in addition to being the favorites of some of our listeners. So they keep us on our toes. These are some really in-depth questions that made us do some extra research. And we always appreciate that because then we refine our knowledge about the case. And that's always a good thing. I always like hearing from these questioners as well. They're all over the West Memphis 3 boards. Some of them are familiar names, Jody and Chris and Carly. These people are diggers. They like to get into the files. They like to pull them apart. They like to look at the pieces of the puzzle and see how they come back together. And you'll see that in the nature of the questions they're asking. They're course they're very active in our Facebook group. And I'm looking forward to seeing what they have to ask and seeing if we have some answers. Before we get started, we want to go over a couple of announcements on this QA episode. A few episodes ago, when we were talking about Wicca and witchcraft and other alternative faiths. We asked if there was anybody out there that had knowledge of these faiths, if they would be willing to come forward and answer some questions we had. And we had a couple of people in our Facebook group that did just that. And it was great. We had a good conversation. Everybody was respectful, asked interesting questions, and we learned a lot. So I just wanted to say thank you to Stephanie and Aria for their knowledge in this capacity. And we appreciate their willingness and their straightforwardness in answering all of our questions. Yeah, they were really comprehensive and they went over everything. They confirmed what we thought, which was that Wicca was a very personalized individualistic faith where everybody does it their own way. I mean two or three people could get together and do it together the same way, but for the most part, there's not some centralized authority that makes sure that everybody does it the same way. So it's a really interesting thing to read about and it I can understand now people's interest in it. The other thing is in our last episode we went over Damien's Polygraph. And on Callahan, the charts from his polygraph are posted there. But neither Paul nor I are even novices, much less experts in this area of expertise. We've reached out to quite a few people in law enforcement and in the legal system that we know trying to see if we could find someone who knows a polygraph examiner that might be willing to look at these charts and give us their opinion. We haven't found anyone yet. So if you are a polygraph examiner or you know a polygraph examiner who might be willing to look at those charts and give us an opinion on Durham's take on these polygraphs, we would love to hear from you. It can be completely anonymous. We just want somebody else's opinion. So if you know someone, reach out to us. You can message Paul or me on Facebook and you can message us on X, on Instagram, on YouTube. We also have a couple of email addresses. We have Cricketreepod at gmail dot com. And then we have another email address that we use for tips on the case. And that is justiceforchris ninety three at gmail dot com. That's J U S T I C E F O R C H R I S nine Three at Gmail dot com. So if you know someone or are someone who would be willing to take a look at that, please reach out to us and we will get those charts to you. Yeah, we're deeply interested in this. We've been asking all over. I've got friends in law enforcement and they said yeah. We don't know anybody that does this unless they're with the state police or something like this. So seems like it's pretty specialized. I would be really interested to see what a modern assessment of this would yield. Aaron Yeah. I think they're somewhat subjective too, at least from what I understand from reading about them. So I wonder if a different examiner would interpret the results differently than Durham did. That's pretty much what we're interested in. Aaron Yeah. And I'm kind of interested to see the science behind it. I understand there's a physiological aspect to it, but what goes into the quote unquote scoring of a question in a response as to whether or not deception is indicated or whether or not you just have a scared kid? All right, now we're going to start with our questions. A lot of these questions are complicated. They have several parts to them. So we're gonna kind of break them down in each part and answer the question so that it can flow and you guys can understand the answers to the questions. Alright, the first one comes from Jody. The envelope below was in her office mail to Gitchell from Inspector Hall on May 11th at 11 a.m. containing a tape made of a call at 336 p.m. on May 10th, where a male voice claims to have killed the three kids. Notwithstanding we have no way to know for sure this is a true confession. Some people think it sounds like Damien. I personally think it could sound like any number of people depending on expectations. For example, If you picture Matthew McConaughey, it starts to sound like him. To me, the voice sounds older than Damien, especially when you listen to his testimony featured in the last episode. Notwithstanding the several inconsistencies in the documentation, I would have to guess that the envelope is the most accurate on the date and time the call came in, since other sources have the call coming in after the envelope itself was dated. An impossibility. My question is, I know that Damien testified he was at the police station for eight hours on May 10th, 1993. Is there any documentation to corroborate this, or could he have been exaggerating? In any case, do you think it it is at all possible that Damien could have been home by 3 36 p.m. on May 10th to have made this call? And before we answer the question, I just want to note that Jody asked this question prior to our last episode coming out, where we basically answered this question, but we wanted to include it. It is an important point in our case. And there are a lot of people who think this, but we put the call out for questions a week and a half, two weeks before we do these episodes. And he had asked this prior to us recording the last episode. He's asking two major questions here. One is, is it true that Damien was there for eight hours on May 10th? And if so, he couldn't have made the call at 336 on May the 10th. And the answer is yes. Damien was there until after seven o'clock. And we're gonna demonstrate that in the upcoming episodes that he's going to give Biological samples. He does a rape kit over at the hospital. He's then returned to the West Memphis PD and he is subjected to further questioning, including by Gary Gitchell. That questioning is going to extend all the way past seven o'clock. So he's going to be there between seven and eight hours that day, for sure, undergoing this questioning. This is a bad, bad day for Damien. So when the question is brought up here, is there any documentation to corroborate this? The answer is yes. We actually have testimony, including a timeline from Mike Everett, his attorney. That provides this detail that he's going to be there till after seven o'clock. Probably close to eight is when he finally gets out of there. His mother confirms that as well. Yeah. So Damien is definitely not exaggerating. In fact, he's probably understating the amount of time that he was there. He was probably there between seven and a half to eight and a half hours, probably about eight and a half hours total. And how he got home, I don't know. Maybe his attorney took him home because we know the West Memphis PD picked him up or somebody had to come and pick them up. So they were a captive audience for that entire time. This is not a pleasant experience. I'm sure this was very, very stressful. Yeah. And his point that when you have an expectation of who made that call, then that voice starts to sound like that person. And I think that's completely true. It definitely doesn't sound like Damien. Obviously it wasn't Damien. Damien was at the police station. He could not have made the call. But the voice doesn't sound like Damien. So anyone who has said that they think Damien made that call. It doesn't sound like him at all, I don't think. And I definitely think it does sound like an older male, just like Jody said. We don't know who made that call. We're gonna talk more about that call in another episode. But I do understand his point that if you want it to be a certain person, you listen to it long enough, it can turn into that person. Yeah. In fact I received a phone call from somebody very close to one of the victims who said, You know who that sounds like? It sounds just like and then I'm not gonna give the name of the person they dropped. So Is it because they're biased towards a person or persons being the perpetrator? No, not necessarily, but it could be. People hear what they want to hear in these things. It reminds me of the nineteen eighties when people used to listen for the voice of Satan on record. If you play a record player backwards or a recording backwards, and you can convince yourself that Stairway to Heaven had some satanic phrases buried into it. And in fact you can go on YouTube and listen to those things. But you just gotta persuade yourself that you're hearing something that isn't really there. So Do we know exactly who this person was? We don't know who this person was that called at three thirty six on the tenth, but there's a wrinkle to it, and Jody is bringing up a little bit of that wrinkle. We haven't gotten to it yet, and I'm debating whether or not to drop a spoiler or not. you know what? I think I'm gonna hold it back. We're just gonna let it be revealed in one of the episodes. The strangeness in the paperwork showing that it doesn't align. The phone call comes in at a weird time and it doesn't align with what's on the envelope and what Date and time to trust. We're gonna get into the clarification of this and once you hear what's really going on here. It'll be even creepier than it already is. Our next question comes from Chris. I'm listening to this week's episode, Two Questions So Far. We're gonna answer those one at a time. Ridge testified that he asked the religion-related questions to multiple suspects. Is there evidence in the documentation that supports that? Specifics, the occult which questions and ones like those. Yes. I went through a lot of interviews trying to find the answer to your question, Chris. And there are at least 20 interviews with 20 different people, not including Damien, but including Jason Baldwin, where religion related questions are asked of the people being interviewed. Most of those ridges involved Some of them not, but it's Ridge's case. He's the lead detective. So I would say that he has something to do with most of these interviews. Specifically, there were six people given that 32 question questionnaire, which has some of those qu religion related questions in them. And then two other people were given a partial questionnaire. So eight people total were given part or all of that 32 question questionnaire. And then in addition, another 12 people at least. were asked questions related to religion. In addition to this, and we didn't count up the number of these, but whatever they were going through subject descriptions, if somebody had a cross, they marked a cross on a tattoo or anything that was you know, remember when we were talking about the Pentecostal ministers that were living right there at Devil's Den, they went through and talked about all this. They didn't have tattoos, but they marked all their crosses and stuff like this that they had. So they didn't necessarily go through to everybody and say, Hey, what church do you attend? But they did take notice if there was a cross, for example, tattooed on a hand, or in several cases, the number six six six is going to be on people's hands and they're gonna take note of that as well. Yeah, and I don't want to list all those people here. Chris, if you are interested in a list of the people who were asked those questions, I have it. Feel free to message me and I will give you those names. All right. The second part of Chris's question reads as follows. Also, you covered some of Damien's alibi in this episode. In his May 10 interview, he said that he was at the Sanders house from three to five. I know his quote shifting times was brought out at the trial, and non make a big deal about it. Why didn't they ask if he wore a watch? They asked Jesse that exact question when they weren't happy with his times. Did Damien wear a watch? I don't recall seeing that inventory and evidence anywhere. First, let's address this three to five time period that he was at the Sanders house. That is his best guess. far as we know, that was just a regular day for Damien. It wasn't something probably that stood out in his mind. So he's just guessing what time he was over there, to the best of his knowledge, that time is going to shift later when some more interviewing is done. You're looking at this as maybe a possible alibi. Our boys are alive and well and spotted from three to five o'clock that day. So where he was from three to five o'clock doesn't really matter. But Damien wouldn't know that if he doesn't know what time the boys disappeared, when they were last seen, the fact that they were never seen again after 6 30. So he's just giving information that he can think of when he's asked these questions in his interview. He doesn't know what the relevant times are. He's not saying he was there from three to five necessarily as an alibi. Maybe he is, but he clearly doesn't know when the boys disappeared. If he was trying to give them an alibi and he was shifting his times to create an alibi, he wouldn't have said three to five o'clock because as we just said, three to five o'clock doesn't matter. Our boys are alive and well and playing in the neighborhood at that time. Yeah, it's kind of an odd answer from Damien to come in and to say from three to five when the boys are clearly from three o'clock to five o'clock riding their bikes in the neighborhood. They're hanging out. Stevie's missing hours, playing out for between four to five o'clock. We've gone over that extensively. There are no sightings of Damien Eccles in the neighborhood at that time between four and five o'clock. So shifting your alibi Forward to a period of time where the boys are riding their bikes in the area doesn't make any sense to anybody. In fact, when the Sanders come along and they're questioned about it, they'll say, no, he was at our house at about seven o'clock, which is a relevant time. So his shifting it down to three to five doesn't help him in any way, shape, or form, but it doesn't hurt him either. The real accusation that is made is that he's quote unquote shifting his alibi. The shifting of the alibi allegation is really in response to the fact that the time of death is never established by the prosecutor's office. or the medical examiner. So the medical examiner is always shifting the time of death depending upon what their theory is at any time. So how do you alibi for a shifting time of death? You can't do it. So this three to five, it's a nothing for this. But if the prosecutor says, well, the murders happened between one and four AM on May the sixth in the middle of the morning, and Damien says, well, I was at the Sanders between three and five or whether he says it was from seven to eight or whatever time It's not relevant anymore because between one and four is when the boys died. Well, where were you at that time? Well, I was asleep. Well, that's not an alibi. So how do you alibi yourself if you don't know when the boys are dead or any of these other things? You don't say three to five. If anything, this is an indication that he's swinging an answer and he's not doing this based upon any information he has about the crime. He's simply trying to answer the question they asked. What did you do that day? Tell us your timeline for that day of where you were and He's answering the question the best he can remember, and he thinks that he was over there around that time. And we know that that's not true. We'll cover that later, that he wasn't there at that time, but that's the time he thinks he was there. And so that's the time that he gives the police when they ask him this question. And as an aside from a strategy standpoint, Paul Ford, Jason Baldwin's attorney, was confronting the exact same problem, which was the shifting time of death. The prosecutor could move it to any time. So Jason has A series of alibi witnesses that he could have put up on the stand up until after nine o'clock that night, maybe a little past that. Well, if you're alibied up until nine, that's great. But what if the prosecutor says, well, we think the murders happened between ten and eleven. Well, then if anything, you look like a liar, right? So the jury's gonna either agree with the prosecutor that the murders happened between ten and eleven, or they're going to agree with Jason that they occurred sometime prior to that. And for what? Your client's life is on the line. So Paul Ford decided not to put a alibi. defense up and unfortunately that didn't work for Jason Baldwin either. He was in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation at that point. For sure. Chris asks why they didn't ask if he wore a watch. From the documentation we have, that is true. Nowhere that we have seen did any of the investigators ask him if he wore a watch to verify what time he was at the Sanders house. Chris notes that they asked Jesse in his interview, which we haven't even gotten to yet, but they do ask Jesse that question. And then he's forced to shift his times as well. So did Damien wear a watch? Paul dug into this a little bit. What did you find out? Well, he had access to a watch, whether or not he was wearing a watch that day or routinely, we don't know. But we know that when his house is searched on June the third, they do photograph a watch at the trailer park at Broadway in his parents' house. So he had access to one. Whether that's a working watch, it was an heirloom or just something he had in a shoebox, we don't know. But we know that the police did not collect the watch. We also looked at the images taken of Damien by his mother when she had photographs taken of him shortly after the questioning that occurred on May the seventh. So sometime between May the seventh and probably about May the eleventh, these photographs were taken. And Damien is wearing some type of Black object on his right wrist. It looks like a leather bracelet or a cloth bracelet of some sort. I'm not exactly sure what it is. And then there's another object on his left wrist, which does have a silvery appearance to it, but it doesn't appear to have a watch face on it. So it could be a digital watch that just has a very flush face on it, or more likely it's some type of precious metal bracelet that seems to be staining his skin. underneath. This type of jewelry was commonly worn by teenagers in the early nineteen nineties where you'd wear a copper or a silver bracelet and it would leave a black stripe across your skin. And I think that that's possibly the case in the situation. So I think he might have had a watch available to him, but there are photographs that are kind of ambiguous as to whether or not he's wearing a watch or whether it's a bracelet. So Paul and I have looked at these photos and can't really say definitively one way or the other if he had a watch on in these photos. We're gonna post those in our Facebook group. And let you guys tell us what you think about whether or not Damian had a watch on in those photos. And just because he has a watch and he might have had a watch on in those photos didn't mean he was wearing a watch that day, or it does mean he was wearing a watch that day. It's entirely possible that Ridge didn't ask him if he was wearing a watch because he might have walked into the interview wearing one, but Ridge made no note of it. So this is a great question for which there's no way to really answer as far as I can tell. The next question comes from Ryan. You said that on Damien's May 10 interview, you said that if he said two drowned and one was mutated, he could have only known that if he was involved. That's the first part of his statement. But I just want to answer that really quickly. I did say that. I said that kind of tongue in cheek. I was not saying that seriously. I'm sorry if it came across that way. I was not trying to throw shade at Damien. I do think it's peculiar that someone would say Two drowned and one was mutilated at that point because they wouldn't have known that. That wasn't public knowledge. That day, we noted this on the podcast. On May the 10th, the West Memphis Police Department received the cause of death forms from the medical examiner's office. The cause of death listed for all three boys on that day would be multiple injuries. There's nothing about drowning on the cause of death forms. The autopsies for all three boys were conducted on May the 7th. However, it would be quite a while until they received the actual typewritten reports about the autopsies. In fact, I went and looked because I assumed they were all done on the same day and I was wrong. If you look at the autopsy reports themselves, it has the date that that report was completed by Dr. Peretti. Stevie's was completed on May 24th. Michael's was completed on May 25th and Christopher's was completed on May 28th. And then at some date after that, they were sent to the West Memphis Police Department. So those indicate that two of our victims died because of multiple injuries with drowning. And then the other one just multiple injuries. So the West Memphis Police Department did not have written confirmation of that until sometime after May 28th. However, They were in constant contact with the medical examiner's office. There are several notes about either one of the officers or the prosecutor's office calling the medical examiner's office to ask for information because they really needed it for their investigation. So it is entirely possible that either some of the investigators, the detectives, or the prosecutor's office were told prior to receiving that report that. Two children had the cause of death of multiple injuries plus drowning, and that one was only multiple injuries. So I do think it's strange that Damien would have given that answer unless he was fed some of that information. Maybe some of that information slipped during questioning. I don't know, but I was not trying to say that I thought Damien was guilty because he may have said that in the interview. So that kind of goes into the next part of his. question, which is, but even assuming he really did say two drowned, could an innocent Damien have inferred that from hearing that all three were found underwater and that one had been mutilated much worse than the others, i.e., maybe that one died from injuries and the other two drowned. Yeah, in my opinion, this is actually a reasonable inference to make. It was common knowledge that they were found in the water. It was in the news reports on May 7th. It had been discussed all weekend long. And right after he talks on the news reports, He's having a meeting with Sudbury and Steve Jones. And Steve Jones says, Hey, one of them was castrated. So he knows this information that one of them is castrated. So the implication being, well, if one is castrated, what is the cause of death of the other two? Drowning, right? This is something that somebody could infer, I think. And of course, he's also going to make the allegation that Brian Ridge is asking leading questions during his questioning on May 10th. And he says, Hey, you know, Brian Ridge asked me, is it possible that one was hurt more than the others? And he goes, I I guess so. Well, that's your sexually mutilated kid, your castrated child. That'd be Chris Byers. And what about the other two? Is it possible that some of them were drowned in the water? Yeah, well, I guess so. So now all of a sudden Brian Ridge thinks he has a piece to the puzzle that he's gotten from the medical examiner. And so he's seeing if the knowledge of Damian Eccles is going to match this. And he's asking the leading question, and Damien is giving an affirmative of saying, Yeah, it's possible. Well, therefore only the killer would have known that. Therefore, Damian Eccles is now a suspect. That's the implication that we're going with. When Weir said the only person this would mean that he's the killer, it implies he's the killer in the mind of the West Memphis PD, is how we actually intended to say that on the podcast. So I that was probably a little inarticulate the way that we put it. I think that what you just said, Paul, is probably most likely what happened, which was Ridge is asking questions and Damien is saying, Yeah, I yeah, I guess that's possible. And so it ended up with Ridge's notes saying that Damien said that two drowned and one had multiple injuries. However, I don't know that that's without having leading questions or some other type of knowledge, I don't know that most people would jump to that conclusion. I think that would be a little strange personally. The interesting thing here is that I think that when this information came out that the medical examiner ruled that two drowned and one died from multiple injuries, that was probably a surprise to whoever did kill Christopher, Stevie, and Michael. I think that the killer or killers probably assumed that all three boys were deceased prior to them being put in the water. I think they were put in the water to hide them, not to kill them. I don't think that whoever did this didn't intend to drown them. I think that that person already thought that they were dead. So I think this was probably a surprise to whoever committed this crime. Yeah, we haven't gotten to the autopsies yet because the West Memphis PD doesn't get the autopsies until about a day before they interview Miss Kelly in June. I think they arrive the evening of June the first or the morning of June the second is when they get the autopsy reports for the very first time. So everything up until then is just word of mouth, phone calls, people just bantering back and forth on things. The weekend where all this stuff is happening, all the way up through May 10th, the victims are all at the medical examiner's office from May 7th until May 10th. So on May 10th, while Damien is going through his interview with Ridge in Sudbury and later on with Durham and then later on with Gitchell and giving all these samples, the boys are en route back to West Memphis from Little Rock. They've been in Little Rock, the medical examiner's office the entire weekend long. So there's not a whole lot of information that's known about them. this is still fresh. We haven't even gotten to the funerals and what happened yet. This is gonna happen in the upcoming week. So Damien is being asked about these questions. And on May 7th, the medical examiner is gonna give an interview. And during the interview, he says that the boys died of head injuries. Damien doesn't say head injuries at all. He says, I heard they were in the water and I'd heard that one of them was cut up. That's what he says. And he says, I heard one of them was castrated, and I heard that from Steve Jones. So we haven't gotten into those medical examiner's reports, but one of the things that it definitely documents is that the boys did receive fatal blows to the head, which Damien doesn't mention. So those alone would have killed all three of them. Then they're going to be put into the water. And is it possible that one was castrated? We'll get into that and discuss that because it's one of the most debated things in the case. But you get where this is going, right? Does Damien have perfect knowledge of what happened in those autopsies? No, absolutely not. In fact, when Peretti rules on this, he's not even going to say two died of drowning. He says multiple injuries with drowning. Well, what's multiple injuries? Well, that doesn't tell us anything. It just simply says multiple injuries. So yeah, to your point, Ryan, this is a great question that you're asking here. Could he have innocently inferred it and accidentally answered his way into this? Yeah, you can. There is definitely a plausible pathway to this. He knows the information from Jones. He knows what he sees in the newspapers. He's not mentioning the head injuries, which he doesn't know about, and he gives the answer that Ridge is looking for. I don't know. This seems to happen a lot in this case that people give the answers that Ridge is looking for. Yeah. I do think, as Ryan put it, an innocent Damien could have inferred this. I think, like I said before, only with the caveat that he had heard some additional information or was asked leading questions by Ridge. Otherwise, I think that that's a strange answer. It is a strange answer, especially given what the medical examiner's going to document later on. And Kristen and I have seen these autopsy photos and they're brutal. And I mean absolutely brutal. But let's just say those head injuries, those happened while the kids were alive. This wasn't something that happened. They weren't dropped on their heads after they were dead. Whoever did this brutally attacked their heads. And then we'll leave the rest for that episode when it comes because it's going to be a hard episode for people to listen to when we get into the autopsies. But fortunately, West Memphis PD, you're getting it in about the same order they're getting it. It's not going to be for a while till we get to The end of May. There's a lot of places this case is gonna take us over the next, I don't know, thirty episodes or so. And when we get to them autopsies, this is gonna be a two drink minimum type of episode. Our next question comes from Carly. Which Jason Baldwin had evil tattooed on his knuckles? Or was this an extrapolation made by Ridge in Sudbury while Damien was being questioned? Surely if it's the Jason we all know that would have been noted on a subject description form somewhere. So Carly, you are in luck. We got a very lucky response when we made an inquiry on this. And Kristen, you wanna tell who responded? Yeah, we we went straight to Jason Baldwin and he answered this question for you. Jason Baldwin, Charles Jason Baldwin, never had evil tattooed on his knuckles. I even inquired as to whether or not he had written it like with pin or marker on his knuckles, and the answer was no. He said maybe he was talking about the other Jason Baldwin. So we looked there too. Yeah. So The other Jason Baldwin had been arrested in nineteen ninety one and nineteen ninety two, and we'll get into his legal troubles at a future episode. But there's a little portion of the subject description on there, and in both of those descriptions it mentions the fact that he doesn't really have anything that's peculiar about him. There's no notable scarring, there's no tattoos, nothing. So there's no evidence that evil is written on his hand either. It is curious though, because in Ridge's notes on the interview from May the tenth, he wrote Quote, evil across left knuckle along with young Jason Baldwin. And then in his final report on May the tenth, it said quote, Damien has evil across his left knuckles just like his best friend Jason Baldwin. So I'm not sure if Damien misremembered or if Damien said it at all and Ridge wrote this into the report, but Jason said he never ever had evil on his knuckles in any way, shape, or or form and that's the best we're gonna get straight from Jason. Yeah, and just as a corroborating witness on this that it was never there, his brother Matthew Baldwin made a social media post some years ago and he was unequivocal on the very same question. He says, My brother never had a tattoo of the word evil on his hand or anywhere else. So he made it very clear that Jason Would never have done something like that on his hands. And the report, Damien's subject description, isn't even thorough because it does have a number of tattoos listed there. The evil on his knuckles is not one of them. They don't even list that on Damien's subject description. So I don't know how accurate all of these documents we're looking at are. And I found out from Jason that he does have a tattoo. Not an evil tattoo or anything else, but he does have a single tattoo and that was not listed on his subject description. So these subject descriptions are not accurate as far as we can tell. But Jason never had evil tattooed on his knuckles. Which is an interesting observation to make because he didn't have it at trial, yet it's there in the questioning. It's in Ridge's report. And I don't know if it would be possible for somebody to look over at Jason's hand and go, Well, there's not evil written on his hand. So the report obviously has errors in it. So I don't know if you could do that without calling Jason to the stand, which he wasn't going to do. But that would have been an interesting way to impeach the report. They didn't even get this right. Right. And that's pretty innocuous. Of course, they're saying that this has something to do with them being Satanists or into the occult or Wicca or whatever. That's what this leads to, right? But i as things go, this isn't explosive evidence of anything. So it's not a huge deal, but it does show that they're careless. Their reporting is not completely accurate. And so if it's not accurate here, where else isn't it accurate? Well, not only is it careless, but it was used as the basis for a prosecution to put somebody on death row. Like that is astonishing to me. All right. Our next question comes from Kim. I know the timeline was done in depth of when where the boys were last seen, but is there a timeline that logically covers the timeline of when they were last seen and then found? So we have produced that timeline as part of our research in the case to compile that thing took a year of going through thousands of documents, looking at tens of thousands of pages of interviews, and we put together our timeline and it's huge. It's massive. So What we really have been doing is giving you a condensed Cliffs Notes version of the timeline. And then we've been adding on to that Cliffs Notes over time and piling it up. So every once in a while it's probably worthwhile to take a moment and to take a breather and to say, okay, this is what we know in terms of the timeline, because timelines tell the story, right? The timeline is the story. And so this is going to change and evolve over time. We have new details coming in. We'll realize that some of the witnesses aren't. completely truthful. Some are very, very reliable. Some are gonna change their testimony. But it's probably worthwhile for us from time to time to come in and give an updated timeline where we if by logically you mean here, this is what we know about when the boys disappeared and when they were discovered and who looked where. That's something that we could definitely put out and we could probably put out a condensed version as it exists today and then maybe update that as time goes on. I think that's a great idea. I do think that the timeline is one of the very first things Paul and I started with As we began researching this case, we thought, okay, as we go, as we read things, we're gonna plug these into a timeline. And it really does tell a story. So I understand why that would be important to you. And as we've gone through pieces of the timeline in our episodes, you would have to write them all down and keep your own timeline in order to put them all in order. So we will do that for you. I'll try to work on a document to post in our Facebook group and maybe we can even put out a little bonus episode. That just covers the timeline. But as Paul said, it's not going cover everything right away. We're happy to put in there what we've covered so far on the podcast. But there are lots of things we haven't gotten to yet. So maybe we can update it as we go. Our comprehensive timeline with just the bullet points is nearly 30 pages long and in small type. This is a massive timeline for what happened between the time that the boys got out of school. Till they are discovered and then the investigation begins the next day. It's wild. So at some point we're gonna probably release most of this timeline to the public, but we're nowhere near releasing it right now. The second part of Kim's question says, also, I realize the children were small, young, but was there any specific evidence on how one person restrained all three? Or is there speculation with evidence that there was two killers? So the first half of that is I realize the children were small, young. But was there any specific evidence on how one person restrained all three? The question is whether or not it's even possible one person can restrain all three. And that's been hotly debated by a lot of people. You can do it if you have a weapon or if you are an authority figure. I think that's what a lot of people have concluded. If you have a gun, you could hold up a bank. But if you're an authority figure, you could hold three children in place unless one of them is just completely not gonna have it. So That's one of the reasons why the door-to-door questionnaire is going to ask the question about whether or not there's somebody that has a uniform living in the house. Do they command some kind of authority that these kids would have respected? Were they people of the cloth, for example? Maybe one of the children or all three of the children would have said, it's a minister. I go to church with this guy. We could trust him and then he's the one that does this. This kind of question. So is it possible? It's possible that one person could do it. It's not easy, but it's possible if the right conditions exist. I also believe that one person absolutely could have. Restrained all three. And in addition to being an authority figure or having a weapon, I think it's also possible through use of threats. If someone threatened them, you know, they're gonna harm siblings, they're gonna harm someone else in their family if you don't do what I tell you to do, something along those lines, or even just threatening them, the boys themselves. You're gonna stand right here and you're not gonna move, or I'm gonna do this thing to you. That could have kept them in one place. So I think it is possible. For one person to have restrained all three boys. The second part is their speculation that there was two killers. You're asking a loaded question there. There are a number of theories in this case that it's one person, it's two people, it's three people, it's four people. Everybody has their own ideas of what number of people committed this crime. Is it possible there were two killers? Absolutely. I tend to think that it was one or more, but I do think it's absolutely possible that one person. could have done this for sure. And as far as evidence that there were two killers, we haven't seen any yet that we've covered on the podcast. We will get to some evidence that points to that in other episodes. Yeah, remember the West Memphis PD's theory of the crime is that this is three people that did this. So they have multiple perpetrators doing this. And some of the reasons why they think this is not unreasonable. And we'll be getting into what we are seeing there as well as to whether or not we feel like it has a a lot of weight. I think some of it does. I think there is some merit to some of the concerns that they have about this having multiple perpetrators involved. But we'll get into the nature of that evidence and people are free to disagree with that when we get to it. One more thing. It is interesting in thinking about your question, Kim. In the beginning of this investigation, we covered several other possible suspects that were looked at briefly and then the police department moved on. Those were all an individual, one person with the exception of one where there were Two men that had harassed some young girls. Otherwise, it was all one person. They considered a serial killer, they considered a truck driver. We've got the tattooed man. Most of those they were looking at one person. So the police department believed that one person was capable of this. Interestingly, once tips started coming in pointing at Damien, they almost all mentioned Damien plus another person. Now, whoever that second person is, they differ. on who they you know, the rumors are that killed these boys, but it's Damien with another person. So all of a sudden we're shifting from they think they're looking at one person, possibly. And then once the tips on Damien come in, they're looking at Damien plus one other person. So for a little while they were looking at possibly two people, one of them being Damien. And then they move on to it being three people. So the West Memphis Police Department wasn't really set on how many people could have done this at the beginning of the investigation. Yeah, the structure of the investigation is exactly as Kristen is mentioning this. They're pretty persuaded by the tenth that Damien is one of the parties involved, but they don't have enough dependent on him. So they are now going to start looking for accomplices. And that's really what they're doing for the next twenty to twenty-five days is looking for those accomplices. So they're going to interview all of his ex-girlfriends, they're going to interview all of his friends, they're going to interview the covenant of the divine light. They're going to put these people on the polygraph machine and get the quote unquote truth out of them. And multiple times in some cases, they're gonna polygraph LG Hollingsworth. We haven't even gotten to LG yet, but LG is supposed to be one of these supposed accomplices. So it's one of those situations where they are highly focused on this being a satanic cult ritual that occurred. And Damian probably didn't do the ritual by himself, and we haven't gotten to it yet, but when a little kid named Aaron Hutcheson shows up and says, Hey, I saw five people out there in the woods painting their faces and speaking Spanish and talking about how they hate God and they love the devil, that got the police's attention. Yeah, I think what we know from the documentation of the West Memphis Police Department's investigation is that they never looked at Damien as a sole perpetrator in this case. All right, our next question comes from Ari. One piece of the story I can't quite get over is the gunshot in the woods during the search. If it was true, and this was also a spontaneous crime I think the perpetrators would be someone who commonly carried and happened to have a gun on them. Was Terry Hobbs known to carry? As a reminder, Terry Hobbs was Pam's husband, Stevie's stepfather. I know he had previous gun violence on his record, but if he was known to carry, I think that would be very telling. So one of the things that we are aware of is that there is a very pro-gun culture in Arkansas. People carry guns all the time out there. And We had been told that some of the searchers, Jackie Hicks in particular, was packing iron that night. We didn't talk about that when he was doing a search, but he was carrying a gun with him and he was there to use that gun if it meant saving his grandson. In terms of Terry Hobbes, was he known to carry? The answer based upon some conversations I have had with Stevie's family members over the last six months is yes, he did have a weapon. He kept it in the car. Sometimes he kept it right on his nightstand. But he was asked Whether not he had a gun that night in a lawsuit that was filed in 2009. And in the deposition he provided, he said, No, I was not carrying a weapon that evening during that search. Aaron The interesting part to me, Ari, is your question is if it was true and this was also a spontaneous crime, I think the perpetrators would be someone who commonly carried. There were no gunshots on our victims. There's no evidence of a gun being used on our victims. So if the perpetrator was someone who carried, they might have used that weapon to make the boys do what they were told as a threat, as a way to control them. But we have no evidence that there was a gun directly involved in the murders of Christopher Stevie and Michael. Now you're saying this in reference to the gunshot in the woods. It is documented there was a gunshot in the woods that night during the search. Obviously, with people in the woods searching, the boys were either already deceased or they were concealed somewhere, not conscious, not able to yell, scream, get the attention of the searchers. So the gunshot was probably to scare someone, whether it was the boys if they had still been alive, or People who were searching because they were getting too close to the crime scene. I will say that just like Paul said, it's pretty common to carry a gun in Arkansas. I'm in Tennessee. Same thing here. If I personally was going out to search for my missing child, my missing nephew, my missing grandson, and I didn't know what I was going to run into, I would absolutely carry a weapon, just like Jackie Hicks. Because you don't know what you're going to find. You don't know if you're gonna need to defend yourself or defend someone else, defend the boy that you're looking for. And so I don't think that someone carrying a weapon during the search would have been uncommon at all. In fact, I think it makes sense. And we'll be circling back to the gunshot in a future episode when we get into detail. about what the four teens had experienced, as well as what some of the people over at the Blue Beacon experienced. And they all confirmed that the gunshot came from the woods at that time. So we'll let you hear it from them, how they took it and how they interpreted what the gunshot implied. Last part of her question here says, I know he had, he being Terry Hobbs, had previous gun violence on his record, but if he was known to Carrie, I think that would be very telling. In terms of previous gun violence on his record, I don't show anything that I've ever seen for previous to May the fifth, but subsequent to May the fifth, he definitely does have a gun violence issue. He wound up shooting Stevie Branch's uncle, Jackie Hicks Jr., in the stomach. And eventually through a series of blood clots and surgeries and things like this, Jackie Hicks Jr. does succumb to the gunshot about 10 years later and dies of this. So Terry Hobbs does wind up indirectly or directly, depending on how you look at it. Terry looks at it as I was defending myself. Pam Hicks' family looks at it as a cold blooded murder, but he does wind up shooting his brother in law in the stomach and winds up killing him. All right, our last question comes from Ricky. I can't recall, but do you know if Damien's troubled past was mentioned during trial? The psychiatric hospitalizations, history of violence, violent threats, and animal cruelty? If so, do you think that was a major factor in the guilty verdict? Great podcast by the way. Thank you, Ricky. We appreciate your kind words. And I'll let Paul answer your question. So some of this did wind up showing up at trial, but not in the way that people think it did. The psychiatric hospitalizations, for example, were not a major part of the state's case in chief against Damian Eccles. It did get brought up at the penalty phase at the end. And the hope by the attorneys was that the admission of His psychiatric hospitalizations would lead to d some degree of sympathy for Damien so that he wouldn't get the death penalty. I would say that that record, which is referred to as exhibit five hundred, was not received by the jurors in the way that his attorneys intended it to be received. In a lot of ways, it made it worse. But it was not used for a finding of guilt. In terms of his history of violence, the prosecutor did try to introduce this at several points in the trial, and each time it was objected because the Incidents that they mentioned, the fight that occurred between Damian Eccles and a boy named Shane Divalbus and Shane was Deanna Holcomb's new boyfriend after there's a whole drama there. But Shane was the new boyfriend that replaced Damien for a short period of time before they put their relationship back together. We'll get into the history of this later on. He attacked Shane and this was a pretty vicious attack, apparently, and people were very upset and irritated about the situation and I guess there were several reports filed about it. There was also another series of threats and of violence and it was more of a domestic nature within his household. Again, the prosecutor tried to bring this up during trial, but this was so far removed from the actual murders in terms of time that the judge said, you can't really bring this up. It doesn't seem to be connected or related directly to this crime. And so again, they attempted to bring it in, but it wasn't really the reason why he was found guilty. In terms of the animal cruelty stuff, that was never brought in at all. The closest they got to this at trial was introducing some animal skulls that Damien said that he had found or that had been gifted to him. But the implication by the prosecutor was that he might have killed the animals and then taken their skulls and done these things to them. But they were never able to actually put that out there. But it was sufficient for the jury to see these skulls introduce as evidence to possibly draw that inference. But whether or not that was a major factor, as you're putting it, I don't think it was. I don't think that was the major factor in this, but it was possibly a supporting factor in the state's larger claim that this was a satanic inspired ritualistic killing of three little boys in the woods. All right. I think that is it for this Q and A episode. Thank you guys so much for your questions. They get more in depth each time we do this and it's great. Helps keep us sharp and we get to Find out even more information than we already had. So we we really do appreciate your questions. It helps us hone all the information that we're putting out on this podcast. Yeah, I always appreciate the opportunity to clarify things. If we say something that is not a hundred percent accurate or is mistaken to mean something that we don't intend it to, then it gives us the opportunity to come back and clean that up a little bit. I appreciated, for example, the opportunity to come back and clarify that we're not say that Damien had some type of insider knowledge. We're just saying that was an aha moment for Ridge. And he would have said, yes, this is something only the killer would have known. But we now know that the killer probably thought he had killed them by smashing their heads, not by drowning them and castrating them. So this would have been odd, I think, to the killer if they were reading the newspaper and saw this. And thanks so much to Jason Baldwin for answering our listener question this week. We appreciate you. Thanks so much. one other thing, don't forget if you're watching on YouTube, W you can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. So we're on multiple formats. If you're on a format that keeps you tied to your TV and you want to try something else, hey, Apple Podcasts instead. Yeah. And come join our Facebook group. That's where all the stuff goes on. So we'd love to have you join and give us your thoughts and theories on the case and respond to some of those questions that we put in there that we can't quite decipher and we need your help with. Yeah, we have great people there. Only the best people come into the Facebook group. Mm-hmm.