The recorder clicks on. The time is 21.30. The date: November 19 2002. The subject is Jessicah Black. She’s 16 years old, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She’s come down on her own. Nobody arrested her. And, “As of right now, you understand you’re still . . . free to leave,” the detective states. She replies that she understands.
But the truth is, she hasn’t felt free. Not for a moment. She’s felt trapped and threatened for hours, afraid she’ll go to prison if she doesn’t say what these men want her to say.
She didn’t come here to tell lies — the total opposite, in fact. At the beginning of the interview, she told the officers what really happened. In her tired, soft Southern drawl, she’d insisted on it. But they just got angry, said she was making things up, that she knew more than she was letting on.