2 at Crime Lab carry scars of 3 boys’ deaths

After 18 years, a few lessons learned

 ADG photo by Rick McFarland 1/27/94
West Memphis Police Inspector Gary Gitchell plays a tape of Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr's confessin for the jury.
ADG photo by Rick McFarland 1/27/94 West Memphis Police Inspector Gary Gitchell plays a tape of Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr's confessin for the jury.

— The murders marked the careers of the two Arkansas scientists as indelibly as a bloodstain.

The pathologist, a fresh transplant from Maryland, didn’t know the killings had occurred until he walked into the morgue that Monday and found the bodies of the three boys waiting.

The blood expert, newly returned to work after the unexpected death of his young wife, got the call from the pathologist to head straight to the morgue upon arrival at the Arkansas Crime Laboratory on May 7, 1993.

From that day until this August, the two men spent countless hours testifying in the case, trying to serve the victims and the cause of justice by using the best science available.

Their path gave rise to bitter lessons about the limits of evidence and the criminal justice system.

The three men convicted of the 1993 slayings of three West Memphis boys were released Friday after reaching a plea deal in which they plead guilty to lesser charges but maintained their innocence.

Plea deal reached in West Memphis murders

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They learned that sometimes diligent police and forensics work and the best intentions don’t yield a satisfying result.

Kermit Channell, the serologist in 1993 and now the Crime Lab director, remains tormented by what he sawthat morning when assistant medical examiner Dr. Frank Peretti gingerly unwrapped the brutalized bodies of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore.

“We see the worst things that one human being can do to another,” Channell says. “And this is that case. Hands down.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Peretti says. His normally booming voice falls nearly to a whisper. “I was here by myself that day. No one notified me over the weekend. And I didn’t watch the news, so I didn’t know about it. I walked in, and I had these three boys.”

Although the men will forever be associated with the challenging investigation, they haven’t been free to talk about it until now.

The case, and their work on it, ended abruptly on Aug. 19 when Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley - all convicted in the case - were freed from prison after entering Alford pleas, which allowed them to plead guilty - each to three counts of first-degree murder - but still maintain their innocence.

The outcome stunned Peretti and Channell.

“All the time and effort to find anything ... we looked for blood and semen and anything that could be beneficial to the case,” Channell says. “And you go to court, you testify to your findings. And then it’s all suddenly gone.”

With the case officially closed, the pathologist and the lab chief opened their case files to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in September.

The two now grapple with what to take away from their experience. They are frustrated that no one is in prison for killing the boys.

They say the case’s unusual conclusion leaves them fearful that the lab’s reputation has been sullied by defense attorneys working to free Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley.

“We just simply wanted justice to be served,” Channell says.

Channell fears that the level of interest and international attention to the case over the past 18 years have muddled and distorted the science and evidence.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ve been very professional in this case,” he says. “The opinions have been professional. Our intent was true and just.”

Peretti’s professional opinions on the killings have been attacked by more than half a dozen forensic experts expounding various theories in court and with the media. He struggles to contain his ire when discussing the case.

“It makes you angry the way that money buys injustice.”

Peretti grows agitated when he describes opinions of expert witnesses who claimed “wild dogs grabbed [the dead boys] and shook their heads and hit them against a tree.Stuff like that came into court and people believe that!

“After a while you just get tired of constantly, constantly defending yourself.”

Experts hired by defense attorneys put forward the theory that the boys’ numerous injuries weren’t caused by a knife or even humans, that they were inflicted instead by turtles or other animals.

By odd coincidence, Peretti has raised hundreds of turtles as an avocation for more than 20 years. In fact, Circuit Judge David Burnett, who presided over the original case, certified Peretti as an expert on turtles.

Much of Peretti’s frustration has been rooted in his inability to discuss the case while the defendants’ attorneys and their chosen experts held news conferences, free to pick apart his forensic conclusions.

“I have to sit back and take it,” he says. “The Italian in me comes out.”

That Monday in 1993, Peretti’s normally relaxed and jovial voice had been noticeably subdued on the phone with Channell. The change in tone alerted Channell to brace himself before entering the sterile basement morgue in west Little Rock.

Peretti had witnessed horrific carnage during his time in Baltimore, where gang violence laid scores of young bodies on metal autopsy tables.

But the scene in the morgue in May 1993 was difficult to bear even for him.

The bodies looked even younger than the scrappy 8-year-olds had been in life. Naked, all three were fixed rigidly in the same vulnerable positions - hands tied to feet by laces ripped from their shoes. Their backs, unnaturally arched, exposed the most intimate harm inflicted on their genitals.

“I’ll never forget. When I went in there, it took me aback,” Channell, eyes downcast, remembers. Even now, after decades working in the field, he says, “nothing holds a candle to the brutality of this case.”

White sheets under the boys were creased crimson from wounds still bleeding, even after hours of being submerged in water. Their pale skin was smeared with dried mud and specked with deadleaves.

Steve’s left cheek was mangled with deep wounds that had turned his spiky blond hair red.

By contrast, Michael’s and Christopher’s faces seemed eerily pure, like babies who had cried themselves to sleep - eyes closed, lashes wet against soft round cheeks.

Although Channell’s role that morning was to collect evidence for scientific analysis, at age 31 he lacked Peretti’s emotional armor.

In those first jarring moments, he was simply a single father to two young boys. Channell’s 28-year-old wife had died less than two months earlier. His sons were 3 years old and 15 months old. He’d only recently returned to work.

Channell and Peretti began the gruesome task of recording each of the hundreds of wounds on the boys’ bodies.

It took them three days.

About a month later, Channell went searching for more evidence in the thickly wooded area in West Memphis where the boys’ bodies were discovered.

But too much time had passed. Little evidence of the slayings remained. The crimescene had been trampled by legions of lawmen and utility workers who had drained the shallow ditch where the submerged bodies were found in the hopes of finding clues in the frothy, pea-green water.

Still, Channell collected evidence from a succession of suspects, including the teenagers who would eventuallybe arrested, charged and convicted in the slayings.

Years later, as Channell became an expert in DNA analysis, he helped re-examine the evidence using newer science and technology.

Through the years, Peretti and Channell would wait together in courthouse hallways and take the witness stand intwo trials and many subsequent hearings. Channell went on to become director of the state Crime Lab in 2007.

A 1996 documentary film about the case, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, questioned the convictions of Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley, highlighting the frenzy and allegations of satanic ritual that surrounded their trials in West Memphis, population about 27,000.

As the documentary and a book about the case gained national attention, celebrities began to rally around the three men, whom their advocates nicknamed the West Memphis Three.

As Echols waited on death row, and Baldwin and Misskelley served life sentences in state prison, new lawyers and a string of famous forensic experts descended on the case.

Peretti and Channell were asked over and over to reiterate for judges and juries details of the ghastly injuries to the three little boys.

“There’s no doubt” that the West Memphis Police Department made mistakes in its investigation of the three boys’ disappearance and their deaths, former West Memphis Police Chief Bob Paudert readily acknowledges.

But, he says, no department the size of West Memphis in 1993 would have been prepared for that kind of slaying.

“That was a triple homicide. That was a major blow, not only to law enforcement, but to the community.”

Paudert, who retired recently, was chief of a suburban Tennessee department at the time of the killings and didn’t take over the West Memphis department until 1999. Even then, he says, the police force was 40 years behind in technology and training.

“There were no computers. They didn’t have Internet.They were so far behind I was really shocked.”

Still, he thinks the police officers who investigated the triple homicide “did pretty well for what they had to work with. They did the best they could.”

Dr. Charles Kokes, the state’s chief medical examiner, wasn’t on the staff when Peretti conducted the autopsies on the boys, but he has been asked repeatedly to review the work.

He agrees with Peretti’s findings.

Kokes says he understands how difficult it is to maintain a professional detachment when you believe others are “grossly misrepresenting the facts.” Pathologists are scientists, but they’re human too.

“It’s frustrating when you come out of a situation where you feel like whatever passes for true fact in a case has been misrepresented or underplayed, and people have lost sight of a bigger picture or a more accurate picture of a crime,” he says. “As a human being and a citizen, I feel that whoever is responsible should pay a significant price. Beyond that, though, you put on your professional blinders, and you do what you have to do for that case.”

Channell is determined not to walk away from the experience empty-handed.

“You’ve got to have the courage to step up and say, ‘I can learn from this thing.’”

Channell says today that any investigation is more productive if the Crime Lab andthe medical examiner’s office share an open channel with police.

“I’ve said forever that the best instrument in the laboratory is the telephone. We want as much information from that on-scene investigator as quick as we can because it helps us put the story together. We always encourage that.”

But a previously undisclosed May 26, 1993, letter shows that there was little open communication between the Crime Lab and West Memphis police at the time.

Peretti readily acknowledges that he shared as little information as possible with law enforcement in the days after he examined the boys. He believed information was being leaked to reporters who were scrambling for any morsel of information about the case.

The community was in a panic, Peretti says. Some rumors were being reported as facts.

Peretti also admits that he tried to draw the FBI into the investigation because he feared that the West Memphis Police Department was in over its head. The FBI declined.

“I knew that from day one this was going to be a highprofile case, and it was probably never going to go away,” the doctor says. “When you’re doing the autopsy, you’re not thinking ahead to what some defense witness is going to say.”

The pathologist’s silence in 1993 didn’t sit well withGary Gitchell, the lead West Memphis police investigator.

In a threepage letter to Channell three weeks after the bodies were sentto the Crime Lab, the West Memphis police inspector said his department “desperately” needed information from the lab.

The letter contained a list of 16 questions that had yet to be answered, including the most basic: “Time of death?” and “Cause of death?”

“Were the kids sodomized?” “Can you provide a wound diagram and explain injuries the boys received?” “Any residue found under nails of boys?” “Is there anything which would indicate a black male involvement?” “Can you tell us which kid was killed first?”

“We realize you have other cases coming in and must go to court on other matters, however, this case has received National recognition and without the Crime Labs information our hands are tied,” Gitchell wrote. “We feel as though we are walking blind folded through this caseat this moment.”

Gitchell, who has since retired and moved out of the area, couldn’t be located for an interview.

Paudert says he understands why Peretti was slow to share information with West Memphis authorities.

“He’s got to protect his evidence even though they’re the case agency,” he says. “There are some times when you don’t feel like you can share information because it will get out.”

Crime-scene investigation and expectations about evidence have changed markedly since 1993.

Crime-scene-investigation expert Paul Echols says 1993 was “an evolutionary time” in the field.

“From the late ’80s and to the early ’90s, forensic science from both the street level and the lab level ... there was a lot of transition taking place,” says Echols, a member of the board of directors of the International Crime Scene Investigators Association.

Echols, who is not related to Damien Echols, began working in crime-scene investigation in the 1980s in Carbondale, Ill. He became his department’s only fulltime crime-scene technician in 1986.

“In those days, the best piece of evidence you could have was a fingerprint.”

As police added comput-ers to their investigative tool belts, the possibilities seemed endless, he says.

“Software systems and scanners were built, and they figured out a way to create databases of known fingerprints to compare with the unknown fingerprints. That was a huge evolution, and that took place in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

When West Memphis police discovered the boys’ bodies in 1993, DNA was not a tool used by local law enforcement agencies.

“I doubt [DNA] would have been on their radar,” Echols says.

But Channell says that even today, with the best training and equipment, the West Memphis Police Department would still have little evidence to work with if they were called to a similar scene.

“Ultimately, they had never dealt with a case like this before. And No. 2, it’s compounded by the fact that it’s underwater. And No. 3, it’s this huge outdoor environment,” the Crime Lab director says.

Also, jurors today would likely expect more from prosecutors than they did in 1993, Echols says. A public that watches the numerous television shows that feature crime-scene investigations wants indisputable evidenceand DNA.

“The rules have changed,” Echols says. “What was plenty of evidence to convict someone in 1993, would not touch it today. People realize our burden of proof ... means more now than it did.”

West Memphis will alwaysbe linked to the deaths of the three boys and the three teenagers who were convicted of their killings, former Police Chief Paudert says.

But police and city leaders can’t let criticism of how the case was investigated stop them from moving forward, he adds.

“West Memphis has a stigma now. Every time you say you’re from West Memphis, they say, ‘Well, what do you think about the West Memphis Three? Are they guilty or not guilty?’” Paudert notes.

“I think West Memphis gets a bum rap sometimes because of the things that have gone on. It just got a bad name.”

Regardless of what people think of the city’s police work on the case, Paudert believes the department had smart, well-meaning detectives working it.

“I don’t think they were a bunch of bumpkins. I think there were some pretty intelligent guys in that unit and leading it,” he says.

“I was impressed with their ability to investigate. West Memphis had some top-notch investigators back then.”

Having worked with the investigators on the case in later years, Paudert is offended by critics’ suggestions that police jumped the gun and recklessly arrested the three men convicted of killing the boys.

“There is no way that I would ever believe that ... any of the guys on that case would just make an arrest because of public pressure to find the person,” he says.

“They were fathers. They had kids. I think they were interested in getting the right person.”

Peretti says the case has shadowed him through the years. He’s been threatened and followed by those who believe in the innocence of the men convicted of killing the boys.

“People don’t know all the facts,” he says. “They onlyread the garbage.”

Peretti compares supporters of the three men to a cult.

“They are being worshipped as child killers,” he says. “In my 25 years as a pathologist, I’ve been involved with high-profile cases, but I’ve never had groupies attack me like this.”

Numerous defense attorneys in unrelated cases have questioned the pathologist over the years about his findings in the case.

“They bring it up to try to discredit me,” he says.

But Peretti stands by his findings and has tried to adopt a sense of humor about efforts to debunk his opinions.

“I feel honored that they had to hire seven forensic pathologists to try to take me down.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/27/2011

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