13 year old Arkansas boy abducted and raped to death by 2 homosexuals

BENTONVILLE — Rope bound Jesse Dirkhising’s hands to the ends of a baseball bat, and duct tape secured his mouth, which had a pair of underwear shoved inside.

Joshua Macabe Brown propped pillows under the 13-year-old’s midsection and sodomized him with several items, Benton County Prosecuting Attorney Bob Balfe said Wednesday during opening statements in Brown’s capital murder and rape trial.

Then, Brown, 22, left the bedroom of the Rogers apartment he shared with his older, homosexual lover and made a sandwich in the kitchen.

“And while he ate that sandwich in the other room, Jesse slowly suffocated and died,” Balfe told jurors.

Brown is on trial in the Sept. 26, 1999, death of Jesse, a Lincoln seventh-grader who prosecutors said was drugged when he died in the apartment shared by Brown and Davis Don Carpenter, 39.

Both men face possible execution if convicted. Carpenter is set for trial May 7.

Brown’s trial is expected to last into next week.

On Wednesday a defense attorney told the jury of eight women and four men that Brown was a “lost young man” who was under the corrupt influence of his oppressive lover, Carpenter.

Louis Lim, chief deputy public defender, also drew parallels between the “childlike” Brown and Jesse, whom Lim described as “mature for his age.” Both had been abandoned by their fathers at a young age and were susceptible to Carpenter’s parentlike attention, Lim said.

Lim also set a stage for the defense to shift blame from Brown to Jesse’s parents. Jesse’s stepfather, Miles Yates Jr., knew Carpenter through dealings with the highly addictive stimulant crystal methamphetamine, Lim said.

Yates will testify that he previously sold methamphetamine, Lim told jurors. Carpenter, Brown and Jesse had all taken crystal methamphetamine before Jesse’s death, Lim said.

Balfe said toxic amounts of a strong sedative contributed to Jesse’s death. After Carpenter’s arrest, he told Benton County jail inmates that he participated in Jesse’s sodomy by “shoving pain pills” down the boy’s throat, police said in an affidavit.

Balfe told jurors they’ll hear tape-recorded statements of Brown admitting to police that he stripped, bound and sodomized Jesse. Halfway through the four-hour ordeal, Carpenter bought items at a nearby grocery that were used in Jesse’s sodomy at the apartment, Balfe said.

“This wasn’t some spontaneous act that got out of hand,” Balfe said. “This wasn’t a consensual act.”

Jesse’s mother, Tina Yates, temporarily left the courtroom in quiet tears during Balfe’s opening statement. Brown’s mother, Judith Wasson, sat on the other side of the courtroom.

Balfe said that in interviews with police, Brown initially characterized the assault on Jesse as horseplay gone awry. Later, Brown blamed Jesse for initiating the sexual contact. Brown contended the boy came to him nights earlier and performed a sex act.

Brown’s account of Carpenter’s role in Jesse’s death also changed after his arrest, Balfe said. Brown initially said Carpenter was sleeping on the couch while Jesse was sodomized. Later, Brown said that Carpenter “perhaps was watching,” Balfe told jurors.

Lim said it was under Carpenter’s sway that Brown carried out the sex act that led to Jesse’s death. Carpenter’s parents stared stone-faced at Lim during much of his courtroom delivery Wednesday.

Brown didn’t know Jesse would die and tried to revive the youngster once he realized he wasn’t breathing, Lim said.

“Josh should have known better, but he didn’t,” Lim told jurors.

Lim pointed out that Tina Yates and Wasson both had sons at 17. “Both mothers had their children too young, and both failed to nurture and protect,” Lim said.

Brown was placed in state custody at age 9 in California, Lim told jurors. Wasson was struggling with mental illness and couldn’t care for her son. Brown bounced around foster homes until he was 17, when he moved to Mississippi, where Wasson was living.

Brown was a troubled, insecure teen with drug addictions when Carpenter walked into his life in 1997, Lim said. A successful hairstylist, Carpenter was a keynote speaker at Brown’s sister’s graduation from modeling school in Mississippi. Carpenter befriended Brown and offered him a job.

“Carpenter realized, ‘This is a young man who I can bring into my fold,’ ” Lim told jurors.

The pair moved to Florida and then to Rogers in June 1999. By then Brown depended on Carpenter financially, Lim said. Before his arrest Brown was a cook at a Wendy’s restaurant in Rogers. Carpenter managed the Regis styling salon in town, where Jesse worked sweeping up on weekends in the months before his death.

As he did with Brown, Carpenter worked to isolate Jesse from his family, Lim said. Carpenter knew the boy was trying to save money to buy a truck and offered him a job at the hair salon, Lim said.

Balfe said that handwriting experts have determined Carpenter authored some of the notes and other writings police seized from the apartment after Jesse’s death. One note, addressed to “Baby,” details how to drug, position and sodomize a child.

“Baby” was Carpenter’s pet name for Brown, Balfe told jurors.

After his arrest, Brown told police he used Carpenter’s “instructions” to carry out the sex act on Jesse, prosecutors said.

Also on Wednesday, Circuit Judge David Clinger denied a pending motion to move Brown’s trial out of Benton County. Charles Duell, chief public defender, had argued that pretrial publicity ruined Brown’s chance of a fair trial.

Clinger said the motion is moot now that a jury has been impaneled. Attorneys selected jurors after asking them if they’d bases opinions about the case on news accounts.

This article was published on Thursday, March 15, 2001

Update on This Case

Jesse Dirkhising, Kidnapped, Raped and Murdered by Two Homosexuals -News to You?

By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press Writer

BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) - Logic shows that a 13-year-old boy wasn’t a willing participant in a sexual bondage game that led to his death in a gay couple’s apartment, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday.

Making a late-night run for more duct tape, picking up only two sandwiches instead of three, and leaving the child unattended all prove that the men weren’t concerned about Jesse Dirkhising’s welfare, Prosecutor Bob Balfe said.

“Why did they need more duct tape? Was it because he was struggling?” Balfe asked jurors in his closing argument.

Jesse died Sept. 26, 1999, in the Rogers apartment of Joshua Macabe Brown, 23, and Davis Don Carpenter, 39. Brown’s trial is midway through its second week, and jurors could get the case Wednesday afternoon. Carpenter’s trial is set to start May 7. Both could face the death penalty.

Prosecutors say Jesse was drugged, bound, raped and sodomized before dying in the apartment. Witnesses said Brown sexually assaulted the boy in an attack Carpenter choreographed.

Brown has admitted binding and gagging the boy and raping him with a variety of objects. But his lawyer says he didn’t intend for the boy to die.

From the men’s apartment, police seized a number of documents that were blown up to poster size for the prosecution closing argument. A diagram on one used stick figures showing how to bind a child; a letter included the line: “Make him take those drugs.”

Judge David Clinger ruled the documents admissible last week, calling them “a blueprint for child rape” outside the presence of jurors.

In his closing argument, Balfe picked up on the theme and said the letters and drawing were his best evidence.

“We have their blueprint, their guide for how he was to be bound up,” Balfe said.

“In Jesse’s last hour on this earth, he was being violently raped by that man,” Balfe said, pointing to Brown. “Then he (Brown) goes to eat a sandwich and Jesse dies.”

The sandwiches were bought during Carpenter’s late-night run for more duct tape, Balfe said. There was enough food for two.

“Jesse wasn’t going to get anything to eat. It wasn’t stopping anytime soon,” Balfe said.

Earlier Wednesday, defense lawyers rested their case after a witness said Brown was dominated by his lover.

“Mr. Brown was totally dominated by Mr. Carpenter,” said Maryanna Aragon, who said Carpenter had been her family’s hairdresser. “He (Brown) was a very mixed-up kid who got lost in the shuffle.”

Two defense witnesses said Tuesday that Jesse had used drugs in the past. A pharmacologist testified that post-death lab work indicated Jesse had previously taken methamphetamine and an anti-depressant. Dr. Jimmy Valentine said Jesse had a near-toxic level of an antidepressant in his system when he died, but said no one could say whether he was forced to take the drug.

Another witness said she had seen Jesse use methamphetamine and that he was known to smoke marijuana.

Dr. Stephen Erickson, a one of the final prosecution witnesses, said Tuesday that Jesse died under his own weight. He said Jesse’s overdose and the position he was bound in prevented his chest from expanding enough to breathe.

No Hollywood celebrities mourned the passing of the 13-year-old Arkansas boy.

There were no nationally televised candlelight vigils for Jesse Dirkhising. No Hollywood celebrities mourned the passing of the 13-year-old Arkansas boy. The New York Times hasn’t reported how Jesse died of asphyxiation in 1999 after prosecutors say he was bound, gagged and sodomized by a homosexual couple. And the seventh-grader’s death has not caused powerful Washington activists to lobby for new federal laws to punish such crimes.

While the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming provoked a blizzard of media coverage about the death of the homosexual college student, the Dirkhising case is just “a local crime story,” one TV network spokesman explains.

Joshua Macabe Brown, one of two men accused of killing Jesse, was convicted yesterday of rape and first-degree murder in a trial that began March 13. Through yesterday afternoon, Brown’s weeklong trial produced a combined total of zero stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN.

Conservatives comparing coverage of the Shepard and Dirkhising cases, which both involve homosexuality, have scolded the media for ignoring Jesse’s murder. But the disparity in reporting on the two murders is now provoking comment even from homosexual critics.

“This discrepancy isn’t just real. It’s staggering,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in a column in the April 2 issue of the liberal New Republic magazine. Mr. Sullivan, who is homosexual, cited Nexis database statistics showing 3,007 media stories about the Shepard killing in the month after the Wyoming murder, but just 46 stories about Dirkhising’s murder in the month after the Arkansas boy’s death.

Outside of Arkansas, the Tulsa World and the Memphis Commercial Appeal were the only large newspapers to carry daily Associated Press coverage of Brown’s trial. The Washington Times has carried the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s reports on the trial in Bentonville, Ark. The only TV network to report on the trial has been Fox News Channel, where “O’Reilly Factor” host Bill O’Reilly featured a segment on the Dirkhising case titled “Is There a Double Standard in Coverage of Hate Crimes?” on his Monday broadcast.

By contrast, the Shepard murder made front-page news - and the cover of Time magazine - in October 1998. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt were among the politicians who appeared with Hollywood stars like Ellen Degeneres at a candlelight vigil on Capitol Hill to mourn Mr. Shepard’s death and demand new hate crimes laws to protect homosexuals.

TV networks featured footage of a weeping Miss DeGeneres -whose televised “coming out” as a lesbian made headlines in 1997 -telling the crowd at the Capitol Hill vigil, “I’m begging heterosexuals to see this as a wake-up call to help us end the hate. Please raise your children with love and nonjudgment. . . . This is a war, we need your help.”

Critics have charged that “political correctness” explains the different media treatment of the Shepard and Dirkhising murders. News organizations deny any such bias. “Absolutely not,” responded CBS News spokeswoman Sandy Genelius. “Every day we have 22 minutes to fill on the ‘CBS Evening News,’ and every day the producers and the senior production staff have to determine what stories make the broadcast and which don’t,” said Ms. Genelius. “Obviously, we can’t cover every story that happens in this country every day,” the CBS spokeswoman said Wednesday, “so each day we make an editorial judgment and, on the days when [the Dirkhising murder] story was unfolding, the overall editorial judgment was that it couldn’t fit into thebroadcast that day.”

“We’ve been watching the trial and will continue to monitor it,” ABC News spokesman Todd Polkes said Wednesday. “Currently, we have no plans to report it in our national newscasts. It appears to be a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that would warrant our coverage.” After yesterday’s guilty verdict for one of Jesse’s accused killers, Mr. Polkes said there were still “no plans to [report the verdict] on ‘World News Tonight.’ ”

“We’ve been monitoring the trial,” CNN spokeswoman Megan Mahoney said Wednesday. “We have an affiliate [in Fort Smith, Ark.]. But it has not been on our air yet. . . . Every day, we’re striving for fair, accurate and objective reporting.” After yesterday’s verdict, Miss Mahoney said CNN was receiving coverage from its Arkansas affiliate, although no decision had been made whether the story would be reported on the cable news giant.

Powerful lobbying organizations like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which has an annual budget of nearly $4 million, work to shape media portrayals of homosexuality. Within 48 hours of the attack on Mr. Shepard, GLAAD representative Cathy Renna had flown to Wyoming to coordinate media interviews, delivering the organization’s spin that a “climate of hate” fostered by conservative activists had caused Mr. Shepard’s death.

Ms. Renna told The Washington Times in 1999 that GLAAD has “evolved as an organization that has access to the media,” having “spent a lot of time developing relationships with people” in the news industry. Another factor in coverage of homosexuality is the large number of open homosexuals employed by major media outlets.

At the New York Times, for instance, “literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals,” Richard Berke, that paper’s national political correspondent, told a gathering of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association last April.

Ordinary newsroom attitudes are also a factor. Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly has written that “most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates into which they plug each day’s events.” U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo described these “templates” as “a conventional story line in the newsroom culture . . . a ready-made narrative structure.”

Because the Dirkhising murder “didn’t fit the template,” Mr. Leo wrote last year, “it had no symbolic value and went unreported.”

“The Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate-crimes law,” according to the New Republic’s Mr. Sullivan. “The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could feed anti-gay prejudice, and the lack of any pending interest-group legislation to hang a story on.”

Comparisons between the Shepard and Dirkhising cases are unfair, said GLAAD’s Ms. Renna. “I think making a comparison between Matthew’s murder and Jesse’s murder does an injustice to both victims,” she told The Washington Times on Wednesday. “They were both brutal, horrifying crimes. . . .

“Our concern about this particular case is that the facts of the case, the brutal details of this, are what is on trial, not the sexual orientation of the two perpetrators,” Ms. Renna said. “This was . . . not directed against an entire group of people, as a hate crime is.” But even some in the homosexual community are skeptical of such judgments.

Southern Voice - an on-line journal for homosexuals - asked its readers if they could face Jesse Dirkhising’s parents “and disclaim any responsibility for gay culture in his killing.” In an editorial, Voice writer Chris Crain scolded those who “shrug our shoulders and file away Jesse’s murder as the random act of twisted minds that just so happen to be gay.” Researcher John Sopko contributed to this report.

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