There was no physical evidence connecting any of the three to the killings. At the time of the arrests, the police had only Jessie’s rambling statement and the general consensus that Damien was a weirdo. So in order to paper over the lack of reputable facts in their case, the police and prosecutors created a motive: satanic worship.

This was not as preposterous in 1993 as it is in 2011. In the late ’80s, ritual Satanism was a mainstream panic. Respectable newspapers and television programs reported on the supposed phenomenon, and conferences of psychologists, occultists, and law-enforcement personnel were organized around the country. The specter of Satanists slaughtering innocents has long since been debunked, but in a southern town of God-fearing Baptists in the early ’90s it was not unreasonable to believe that teenagers would kill little boys as an offering to the Devil. The local authorities certainly seemed convinced. Asked by a reporter how solid the case was on a scale of 1 to 10, the lead investigator smiled. “Eleven,” Gary Gitchell said, and he then gave a curt nod, as if he was winking with his whole head.

Because all three defendants were poor kids from the trailer parks, they were assigned public defenders, whose experience in murder trials ranged from minimal to none. Since he refused to testify against Damien and Jason, Jessie was tried separately. His lawyer, a young bear of a man named Dan Stidham, argued that Jessie’s purported confession was coerced—”a false story,” he told the jury—to no avail: Jessie was convicted on February 4, 1994, of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.

Damien and Jason were tried three weeks later before the same judge, David Burnett, and by the same prosecutors, Brent Davis and John Fogleman. To establish motive, they called a crackpot with a mail-order Ph.D. to testify that Satanists typically wear black clothing and listen to heavy-metal music; that killing three boys, as opposed to one or two or four, was significant because 666 is the sign of the Devil “and some believe the Beast wrote a six as three”; and that Damien drew creepy pictures in his journals. It was noted that the defendants liked Metallica. (Jason was even wearing a Metallica shirt when he was arrested.) In his closing argument, Fogleman distilled his case to a single sentence. “You see inside that person,” he said, pointing at Damien, the supposed high priest of a death cult, “and there’s not a soul in there.”