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Jesse William Dirkhising
Jesse Dirkhising
BornMay 24, 1986
Oxford, Ohio
DiedSeptember 26, 1999
Rogers, Arkansas
Cause of deathFrom positional asphyxia
Resting placeFriendship Cemetery, Springdale, Arkansas
NationalityUnited States
EducationSeventh-grade
Parent(s)Tina and Miles Yates Jr.

Jesse William Dirkhising (May 24, 1986 – September 26, 1999), also known as Jesse Yates, was an American from Prairie Grove, Arkansas who was bound, drugged, tortured, raped, and died as a result of the position in which he was tied down.

Dirkhising's death, later ruled a murder, received only regional media coverage until a Washington Times article ran a story nearly a month after his death noting the lack of national coverage in contrast to that given to the death of Matthew Shepard. The high-profile Shepard murder was approaching its first anniversary and as such was getting another round of national attention coupled with updates on pending hate crime legislation. Prompted by coverage in the Washington Times, the Dirkhising case gained notoriety as conservative commentators compared media coverage of the two cases and explored the issues of what was considered a hate crime.

The resulting controversy resulted in mainstream media also reporting the Dirkhising case in relation to the coverage of the Shepard case, with many attempting to explain why the two were handled differently by the media, and perhaps received differently by readers.

The media coverage of the Dirkhising case was repeatedly and consistently compared the Shepard case, although Dirkhising was a minor and the victim of a sex crime and Shepard the adult victim of a hate crime. Shepherd was an openly gay man attacked by two straight men, while Dirkhising's attackers were both gay.

Background

At the time of his death, Dirkhising was a thirteen-year-old seventh grader from the small town of Prairie Grove. David Carpenter lived about thirty miles away in a "small but booming northwest Arkansas town" called Rogers. Carpenter's younger lover, Joshua Macave Brown, shared his apartment. Carpenter managed a beauty salon and was a friend of Dirkhising's parents, Tina and Miles Yates Jr., and Dirkhising had stayed with the two men at their apartment on weekends for two months prior to his death. The child's family had been told he was helping out at the salon. Brown, who had sex with Dirkhising for two months prior his death, claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant.

Dirkhising died two weeks before the first anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder. Shepard, a University of Wyoming student and young gay man, had been met at a bar by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson who posed as gay men and offered Shepard a ride in their car. They drove Shepard to a remote part of rural Laramie, Wyoming; robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied him to a fence and left him to die. Shepard was still alive, but in a coma when discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. As he lay in intensive care, candlelight vigils were held by the people of Laramie. Police arrested McKinney and Henderson finding the bloody gun as well as the victim's shoes and wallet in their truck. It was revealed that the two men had also attempted to get their girlfriends to provide alibis.

When Matthew Shepard died on 12 October 1998, at the age of 21, five days after getting into a pickup truck with two goons who beat him mercilessly, he had already become a huge national news story that continues today. It made the cover of Time magazine with the headline 'The War Over Gays'.

Much of the media coverage also included calls for hate crime legislation. Gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan noted that both murders were rare and the difference in how they were treated was likely due to the political atmosphere and agendas.

Death and investigation

On 26 September, 1999 police in Rogers, Arkansas, responded to a 911 call and went to the home of David Carpenter; Joshua Brown was also present. Police found that Dirkhising had been tied to a mattress; his ankles, knees and wrists had been bound with duct tape and belts. He had been gagged with his own underwear, a bandana and duct tape. Police determined that Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped over a period of several hours. He had also been drugged. Dirkhising later died in hospital, his death hastened apparently as the result of positional asphyxia. Some believed the death was accidental. The Arkansas State Police recorded in their affidavit a statement by Brown that he had been involved in molesting Dirkhising for at least two months prior to Dirkhising's death. Brown called it 'horseplay' and claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant.

Police found instructions and a diagram to position the boy as well as other notes of fantasies of molesting children, including instructions how to sedate, tie up and position a child — indicates a strong interest in pedophilia. It was speculated that one of the men diagrammed it and the other carried it out. It was revealed that over a two day period Dirkising was repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects. After the men took a break to eat, Brown noticed Dirkhising wasn't breathing and alerted Carpenter who attempted to resuscitate the boy then called 911. Brown also later claimed he was "under the influence of methamphetamine" when talking with his arresting officers.

Media coverage

Dirkhising's case initially was reported regionally by "news organizations in Arkansas and also covered by newspapers in Oklahoma and Tennessee", yet almost no national press. The Associated Press ran the story on its local wires but not nationally until a month later when the story was focused on the lack of coverage rather than the crime itself. A LexisNexis search revealed only a few dozen articles which appeared only after the Washington Times story on the lack of coverage on 22 October, 1999, a month after Dirkhising's death.

Accusations of liberal media bias

On October 22, 1999, The Washington Times, ran a story with the headline: "Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy." The story contrasted the lack of coverage of the Dirkhising case with the treatment the murder of Matthew Shepard received. The story quoted Tim Graham, director of media studies at Media Research Center, a media watchdog group that frequently criticizes "liberal bias", as saying, "Nobody wants to say anything negative about homosexuals. Nobody wants to be seen on the wrong side of that issue." Brent Bozell, media critic and director of the Media Research Center, accused the media of deliberately spiking the story. Bozell wrote, "Had he been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks. But no liberal media outlet has as its villains two gay men."

After the Washington Times article the lack of coverage of Dirkhising's case was noted by conservative commentators and was attributed to the homosexuality of the perpetrators as well as the nature of the crimes. Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan noted that showing gay men as sadistic barbarians does not fit the "villain-victim script of our cultural elite".

The Dirkhising case was repeatedly compared to the media coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard although Dirkhising was a minor in a sex crime and Shepard's murder is a hate crime involving adults. Also the sexualities of the victims and attackers differed somewhat with Shepherd being an openly gay man attacked by two straight men while Dirkhising's attackers were both gay. There is also speculation that Dirkhising was openly gay with some stating it.

Jonathan Gregg wrote in Time:

Matthew Shepard died not because of an all-too-common sex crime, but because of prejudice. Essentially, Shepard was lynched; taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other" whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is.

In the month after Shepard's murder, LexisNexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death compared to only 46 in the month after the Dirkhising murder. However, once the media seized on the story, this count rapidly rose into the thousands. Many of the articles justified the lack of coverage, citing that the death did not justify national attention; initial reports failed to mention that the two perpetrators were gay whereas the Shepherd reports identified Shepherd as gay and the crimes as hate-crimes from the beginning. In a 4 November, 1999 Time magazine Jonathan Gregg noted that accusationa of liberal media bias were not justified because the two cases varied with the Dirkhising murder offering "no lessons" whereas the Shepard murder "touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons."

Accusations of homophobia

Gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in The New Republic accusing the liberal media of political correctness and using the opportunity to attack the Human Rights Campaign for its support of hate crime legislation. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) also complained that the Washington Times "omitted a key piece of information" for its front-page story on Dirkhising. The HRC had provided a statement strongly condemning the crime and called for the perpetrators to be punished "to the fullest extent of the law". Sullivan also criticised some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense". Sullivan squarely summed up the differences in media coverage as being due to political interests. Sullivan stated that whereas the Shepherd case was used to support including LGBT people in federal hate crime law the Dirkhising case was ignored for concerns of inciting anti-gay prejudice. In November 1999, E. R. Shipp, ombudsman at The Washington Post, noted that: "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to LGBT people and to what they view as a ‘liberal’ press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case. Shipp, said however, that she "made a clear distinction" between the Dirkhising and Shepard cases: "Matthew Shepard’s death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news… That Jesse Dirkhising’s death has not done so is hardly the fault of the Washington Post." Shipp also noted that the Shepherd story was newsworthy because of the debate it fostered on hate crimes and the level of intolerance towards LGBT people in the United States.

The story of the September 26 death was transmitted by Associated Press national news wires on October 29 and the Post ran a news brief the following day.

Jonathan Gregg, in a November 9 Time magazine editorial, asserted that, " was the kind of depraved act that happens with even more regularity against young females and, indeed if the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much less Arkansas. The same editorial also said: "A red herring worth addressing at the outset is the failure to distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia, which creates a false parallel at the core of the Washington Times argument. But sex with children is a crime regardless of the sexes involved, and is not synonymous with homosexuality…."The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. "Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men."

Trials and convictions

Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Brown were each charged with capital murder and six counts of rape and they faced the death penalty in Arkansas for the crimes. Neither man had any known prior convictions. The two men were tried separately as it was believed "each of them will blame the other for the murder." The Arkansas state prosecutor "maintained that the older man had mapped out the assault and watched a portion of it" so chose to send Brown (the younger lover) to trial first. Carpenter's court-appointed attorney, criminal defense lawyer Tim Buckley, sought a change of venue from Benton County citing excessive pretrial publicity. "It's been on everyone's lips down here for a month and a half", Buckley stated. The Washington Post was "almost alone among national newspapers" reporting on Brown's trial and Fox News was the only network to cover the murder trial and conviction. The prosecutors "argued that Jesse suffocated to death during the sexual assault because of a combination of the drugs and the way he was trussed up". In March 2001 Brown was found guilty of first-degree murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison, and this sentence was upheld on appeal by the Arkansas Supreme Court in September 2003. In April 2001, Carpenter pleaded guilty to similar charges and was also sentenced to life. Subsequently, Carpenter said on the Fox News Channel that Brown was solely responsible for the rape and murder of Dirkhising while Brown said that Carpenter was the director.

See also

References

  1. ^ Skoloff, Brian (13 March, 2001). "Case of Boy's Rape, Murder Goes to Jury Selection". The Oak Ridger. Retrieved 2008-01-30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ McMath, Kathryn (27 September, 1999). "Affidavit of the Jesse Dirkhising murder: In The Circuit Court of Benton County, Arkansas". State of Arkansas: County of Benton. Retrieved 2008-04-23. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. "Jesse Dirkhising". Find a Grave. Retrieved 2008-04-23.
  4. ^ Price, Joyce Howard (29 November, 1999). "Media Tunes Out Child Torture Death - Media Accused of Not Covering Story Due to Political Correctness". Insight on the News. Retrieved 2008-01-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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  13. "Arkansas town still reeling over death of 13-year-old: Homosexual suspects, gruesome death anger residents". Washington Times. December 20, 1999. Retrieved 2008-01-18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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  23. "University of Wyoming Matthew Shepard Resource Site". University of Wyoming. Retrieved 2006-11-01.
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  26. Holland, Erik (2004). "The Nature of Homosexuality: Vindication for Homosexual Activists and the Religious Right". iUniverse, ISBN 0595305083. Retrieved 2008-01-23.
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  32. ^ Andrew Sullivan The New Republic 04/02/2001, Vol. 224 Issue 14, p8, 1p Accessed through Ebsco, 17 June 2001
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