First of Two Parts
[WARNING: STORY CONTAINS SOME GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS]
As the third anniversary of Jesse Dirkhising’s death (September 26) approaches, interviews with the prosecutor who tried the Arkansas boy’s homosexual murderers and information gleaned from Northwest Arkansas local news reports shed new light on factors that led to the tragedy.
News of 13-year-old Jesse’s gruesome sadomasochistic killing ignited an outcry among conservatives and pro-family advocates who questioned why the case received only a small fraction of the media coverage devoted to the murder of Matthew Shepard — a "gay" Wyoming college student — a year earlier. A Nexis media database search reveals 13,500 total stories on the name "Matthew Shepard" and 632 for "Jesse Dirkhising." That does not include the massive TV coverage of the Shepard case, including two major Hollywood specials. Meanwhile, Dirkhising has been largely forgotten.
The following account is deeply disturbing. We included only enough detail to highlight the nature of the crime. However, we left many facts out due to their extreme graphic nature; a fuller version will be made available through Americans for Truth, a pro-family organization that opposes the homosexual movement.
There is an aspect of Jesse’s killing that was almost completely ignored by the conservative and "mainstream" media: that it flowed from the almost unthinkable depravities practiced most prominently by homosexual male sadists. Interestingly, the group now known euphemistically in "gay" circles as the "leather community" protests that it practices "consensual," controlled sexually violent behavior and disavows child abuse. Nevertheless, it celebrates pain, degradation and torturous acts of the sort that lit the perverse fantasies of Jesse’s older killer, Davis Carpenter, and ultimately snuffed out young Jesse.
Both Carpenter and his younger homosexual lover, Joshua Brown, are serving life-without-parole sentences in Arkansas jails. Next week’s article will report on some of the lessons learned from his killing. — Editor
By Allyson Smith
Thirteen-year-old Jesse Dirkhising suffocated to death during the early morning hours of September 26, 1999, after being bound, drugged, gagged and brutally sodomized by "gay" lovers Davis Don Carpenter, then 38, and Joshua Macabe Brown, then 22, at the men’s apartment in Rogers, Arkansas.
Earlier that summer, Jesse — with the permission of his mother and stepfather, Tina and Miles Yates — had begun spending weekends with the homosexual couple. His parents knew the two adult men were homosexual lovers.
Carpenter, who had known Miles Yates for several years and was considered a "family friend," made a 60-mile round trip on weekends to pick up Jesse at his trailer park home in Prairie Grove and take him back to Rogers, where he earned $45 helping to sweep the Regis Hairstylists beauty salon that Carpenter managed. Jesse planned to use the money to fix up a truck.
During the five-hour assault, which began around midnight in the couple’s bedroom, Brown, acting on written instructions from Carpenter, bound the seventh-grader with nylon rope, placed a T-shirt blindfold over his head, and gagged his mouth with a pair of underwear secured by a bandana and duct tape.
After propping pillows beneath Jesse’s abdomen, Brown sodomized him a variety of ways, including with an enema laced with the sedative drug amitryptiline while Carpenter (engaging in a lewd act) watched in the bedroom doorway.
Midway through the assault, Carpenter went to an all-night grocery store to purchase additional rape implements.
Upon Carpenter’s return from the store, Brown continued sodomizing Jesse. He then left the room to eat a sandwich. When he returned, the boy was no longer breathing. Frantic, he woke Carpenter, who by that time had fallen asleep on the living room sofa.
After the men attempted unsuccessfully to administer CPR, Carpenter called 911. When police arrived at the apartment, they found Jesse naked and near death on the bedroom floor. His face was blue, according to reports. We are unable to report other details about the crime scene due to their horrific nature.
Jesse was pronounced dead after being rushed to nearby St. Mary’s hospital. Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Erickson later testified that the boy died as a result of "suffocation, positional asphyxiation and acute amitryptiline intoxication."
KILLER CONFESSIONS - Under questioning by Detective Martha Armstrong, Davis Carpenter denied any participation in Jesse’s assault. However, a grocery clerk at the Price Cutter store where Carpenter bought the food items later testified that he "was wide awake when he came into the store" and that he was "pretty happy" about finding the duct tape on a low shelf, according to The Benton County Daily Record.
Carpenter admitted to police he had used several drugs in the hours leading up to the assault, including methamphetamine.
After his arrest, Carpenter told Benton County jail inmates that he participated in Jesse's sodomy by "shoving pain pills" down the boy's throat, according to a police affidavit.
In the taped interview, Carpenter also said he had "counseled" Jesse about his sexuality and drug use: "If he wanted to bring in a 28-year-old woman and [have sex with her] in the back room, I wouldn’t care. As long as he was there and he told me about it and was honest about everything I asked him about the thing he was doing.
"Just like I told him, ‘If you want to smoke pot that’s fine. You can smoke it in my house but don’t you go out there with the rest of these d--- crazy kids because they’re not good people.’"
"Jesse’s confused," continued Carpenter. "Jesse is attracted to guys and … hates … that part of himself." He said that Jesse’s mother, Tina Yates, had mentioned Jesse’s homosexuality to him.
Carpenter said on tape that he left home at age 15 because of his own homosexuality: "My dad didn’t, my whole family didn’t think fags deserved to live."
However, his father later accepted him. In an April 2001 interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Davis Carpenter Sr. said that his son "came home one day and proceeded to tell me he was gay. We sat up and talked for a long time that night. I saw that I couldn't change his mind. So I accepted it."
Carpenter denied that he and Brown practiced any bondage in their sexual relationship. However, he told Armstrong that Brown and Jesse’s "play" included "mummy type stuff" where "they’ve taped each other like a mummy." ("Mummification" is one of many sadistic sex rituals.)
In his police confession, Joshua Brown said he and Jesse "were just playing around." He said they often hog-tied each other and that the young teenager was a willing participant in their "games."
Brown called Jesse his "on-the-side lover" and said that the boy had performed unsolicited oral sex on him during his first weekend visit. However, Brown insisted he had never had anal sex with Jesse until the fatal assault.
Brown said he didn’t know that the "game" would kill Jesse. In his taped confession, Brown stamped the table several times with his fist in apparent remorse and said, "I just don't believe I [expletive deleted] killed him."
Brown also told police that "Davis gots [sic] a whole slew of videos" that are "mostly guy-on-guy [porn films]," but he was not sure if they had arrived yet from the couple’s previous residence in St. Petersburg, Florida.
When asked by Detective Jarod Mason if Carpenter ever fantasized about "little kids," Brown answered, "Sometimes, yeah" but denied that Carpenter would ever act on them.
Joshua also said that Davis "had fantasies about dogs" and would draw pictures of bondage acts.
Later, Brown told Mason, "Jesse … really didn’t have nothing to offer except maybe sex every now and then."
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