COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Emotions of Misskelley trial unfold in low-key location
By Bartholomew Sullivan
Sunday, January 23, 1994
Hatred and fear have surrounded the West Memphis murder case from the day the bodies of three 8-year-olds were found eight months ago. A new phase in the case begins this week as Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr. goes on trial for his life.
Misskelley won't see much of this town of fat meadowlarks and bright cardinals, where strangers nod friendly hellos to outsiders or help pull their cars from snow drifts. He won't stand under the glassy branches of tall elms.
Last week the weighty matter of selecting a jury was completed in a calm and patient way, a way that might describe the people of Corning. Inside and outside the courtroom, some small sketches of lighter scenes may help capture the undramatic undercurrents of one of Arkansas's strangest murder cases.
Seventy miles from Corning, victim Steve Branch is buried beneath a gray granite monument in Mt. Zion Cemetery in Steele, Mo., about the same distance
from Interstate 55 as the woods in West Memphis where police found him dead May 6. In the summer, it will be shaded by a pecan tree that's bare now.
On the back of the stone, there's an inscription: "Here lies a rosebud in the flower garden of heaven."
Caretaker O. D. Loveless told a strange story about the monument on Friday. He said shortly after the burial in May and before any arrests in the case, a blond-haired kid showed up at the cemetery. "He stood there and stood there and stood there, then fell to his knees and had some sort of spiritual experience," Loveless said.
When the youth got up to go, Loveless, who was mowing between the gravestones, stopped his rig and hollered at him. "I asked him, 'Was you kin to this boy?' And he said, 'Yeah, kinda sorta.' He acted real strange.' "
Loveless reported the incident to the family and West Memphis Police Detective Stan Burch showed up the next day. Together, they looked for the blond boy. They didn't find him.
But recently, as Loveless watched television coverage of the case, he said he saw the boy again: Misskelley co-defendant Charles Jason Baldwin, who goes on trial next month with Damien Wayne Echols in Jonesboro.
"If it wasn't him, it was kin to him," Loveless says.
Clay County Sheriff Darvin Stow has a face designed to intimidate; his permanent scowl could terrify the roughest ne'er-do-well in six counties. He's let it be known he will keep order in the courtroom and will "monkey jump" anyone - especially any reporter - who steps out of line.
Stow was asked about the expression, which doesn't appear in mainstream dictionaries of American slang, and he told this story:
A few years ago, a man was being placed under arrest on a drug charge and tried to elbow a deputy in the chin. Stow saw it and "went over the top of my deputy," grabbing the suspect by the hair, "and laid his face down gently on the highway," he said.
His deputies marveled at the technique and started calling it a monkey jump, and the term stuck.
"We just don't want any problems," Stow says of his security concerns. ''I don't want Clay County to come away from this with egg on our face."
Late on Wednesday, the first day of jury selection, after most jurors and the assembled news media had been magnetically frisked half a dozen times by sheriff's officials using a hand-held instrument, a walk-through metal detector arrived from the U.S. Marshal's Service in Little Rock.
After it was plugged in, Clay County Sheriff's deputy Chuck Malone walked through it several times, wearing a loaded bullet belt and a handgun in a holster. The test yielded uncertain results.
"I don't think it works," said a colleague. Later adjustments got it going.
Circuit Judge David Burnett demonstrated the mental agility he's known for when he recognized a potential juror called into the jury box from a case 16 years earlier. In the course of the questioning, Burnett asked if any in the group of 12 had ever served on a jury before, and Clay County Quorum Court Justice Betty Haskins raised her hand. Burnett said he remembered her and, before she could, named the defendant in the trial - a first-degree murder case from 1977. He later recited some of the facts of the case to a reporter. The Second Judicial District's Prosecuting Attorney from 1974 to 1982, Burnett had prosecuted the state's case that year, and got a conviction.
Burnett, who presided over a process in which almost 100 prospective jurors sat in the courtroom while no more than three at a time were being questioned, acknowledged the tedium: "I warned you yesterday to bring your knitting and your books."
In questioning another group of jurors about possible scheduling conflicts if the trial case goes its expected two weeks, a farmer spoke up. "I know about lawyers always asking for continuances," he said, and he wanted to make sure he could get to work when the fields dry up.
"I think we'll get through by spring," Burnett assured him.
Corning Police Chief Ronnie Stewart said he has heard a lot of rumors about the case, including the possibility that witches would stage a demonstration like some did Aug. 1 in Jonesboro.
"I've heard all the rumors," said Stewart, "but I learned a long time ago to see it with my own eyes, then believe half of it."
Town Atty. Gary Garland said the town doesn't have an ordinance on its books requiring a permit for marches, mainly because there's been no need. "I don't really see the need for it, as long as they're exercising their right of free speech peacefully," he said. "We're a small town, as this rarely has occasion to come up."
Standing at the counter of the Corning utilities department as residents braved inch-thick ice and five inches of snow to complain about being without electricity after three days, a woman named Wilma put things in perspective: ''We could be worse. We could be Los Angeles."
Deputies in the county clerk's office have taken to collecting reporters' business cards and are disarmingly frank in their discussion of the case. They're also entrepreneurial, collecting 50 cents a can for sodas stored in a cooler outside in a snow bank. The money will go for a new soda machine. The antique dispenser in the courthouse lobby has been on the fritz for some time.
First Baptist Church pastor Rev. Charles N. Lewis said his 125-member congregation hasn't asked him about the Misskelley case, which involves police allegations the suspects were part of a satanic cult. "It hasn't affected my preaching plan," he said.
Lewis said Corning is a "laid-back country town, where everybody knows everybody, and everybody's kin to everybody." Residents have one concern: that Corning won't become best known as the place where the trial occurred.
