Jesse Dirkhising

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Jesse William Dirkhising
Jesse Dirkhising
Born	May 24, 1986 Oxford, Ohio
Died	September 26, 1999[1] Rogers, Arkansas
Cause of death	From positional asphyxia[2]
Burial place	Friendship Cemetery, Springdale, Arkansas[3]
Nationality	United States
Education	Seventh-grade[1]
Parents	Tina and Miles Yates Jr.[4]

Jesse William Dirkhising (May 24, 1986 – September 26, 1999), also known as Jesse Yates, was an American teenage boy from Prairie Grove, Arkansas who was bound, drugged, tortured, raped, and died as a result of the position in which he was tied down.^[5][6]

Dirkhising's death, later ruled a murder, received only regional media coverage until a Washington Times article ran a story nearly a month after the death noting the lack of national coverage when contrasted to that of Matthew Shepard.^[7][8] The high-profile Shepard hate crime was approaching its one-year anniversary and as such was getting another round of national attention coupled with updates on pending hate crime legislation.^[9] Prompted by the Washington Times article the Dirkhising case gained notoriety from conservative commentators comparing media coverage of the two cases and exploring the issues of what was considered a hate crime.^[8]

The resulting controversy resulted in mainstream media also reporting the Dirkhising case in relation to the lack of coverage compared to Shepard's case,^[9][10] with many explaining why the two were handled differently by the media and perhaps received differently by readers.^[7][11]

The media coverage of Dirkhising's case was repeatedly and consistently compared to that of Shepard although Dirkhising was a minor in a sex crime and Shepard's murder was a hate crime involving adults.^[5][7] The sexualities of the victims and attackers differed, with Shepherd being an openly gay man attacked by two straight men while Dirkhising's attackers were both gay.^[12][13]

Contents 1 Background 1.1 Matthew Shepard's murder 2 Death and investigation 2.1 Death 2.2 Investigation 3 Media coverage 3.1 Accusations of liberal media bias 3.2 Accusations of homophobia 4 Trials and convictions 5 References 6 Further reading

[edit] Background

Dirkhising was a thirteen-year-old seventh grader from the small town of Prairie Grove.^[8] David Carpenter lived about thirty miles away in a "small but booming northwest Arkansas town" called Rogers.^[8][14][15] Carpenter's younger gay lover was Joshua Macave Brown who shared the apartment.^[8][4] Carpenter managed a beauty salon and was a friend of Dirkhising's parents, Tina and Miles Yates Jr.^[4] Dirkhising had stayed with the two men at their apartment on weekends for two months prior to his death. The child's family had falsely been told he helped out at the salon.^[4] Brown, who had sexual relations with Dirkhising for two months prior claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant.^[16][17]

[edit] Matthew Shepard's murder

Dirkhising died two weeks before the first anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder.^[18] 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.^[12] 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.^[19][20] 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.^[21][22][23] As he lay in intensive care, candlelight vigils were held by the people of Laramie.^[24] Police arrested McKinney and Henderson finding the bloody gun as well as the victim's shoes and wallet in their truck.^[18] 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'.[10]

”

Much of the media coverage also included calls for hate crime legislation.^[10] 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.^[25]

[edit] Death and investigation

[edit] Death

On September 26, 1999, police in Rogers, Arkansas, responded to a 911 call and went to the home of David Carpenter, 38.^[4] Also present was Carpenter's gay lover Joshua Brown, 22.^[8][2] They found that Dirkhising, a 13-year-old boy from nearby Prairie Grove had been tied to a mattress.^[2][16][17] Dirkhising's ankles, knees and wrists had been bound with duct tape and belts.^[5] He had been gagged with his own underwear, a bandana and duct tape.^[26][2] Police determined that Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped over a period of several hours.^[26] He had been drugged.^[5] Dirkhising later died at the hospital, his death hastened apparently as the result of positional asphyxia.^[16][17][2] Some believed the death was accidental.^[27]

[edit] Investigation

The Arkansas State Police recorded in their affidavit a statement by Brown that he was Carpenter's (younger) lover and that he had been involved in molesting Dirkhising for at least two months prior to Dirkhising's death.^[2] Brown "characterized the assault on Jesse as 'horseplay' and claimed that Jesse was a willing participant."^[16][17]

Police found "handwritten instructions and a diagram of how to position the boy as well as other notes of fantasies of molesting children",^[7] including "instructions on how to sedate, tie up and position a child — indicates a strong interest in pedophilia."^[11][2] It was speculated that one of the men "diagrammed it and the other carried it out".^[28]

It was revealed that over a two day period "the boy was repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects."^[28] After the "lovers took a break to get a sandwich" Brown noticed the boy wasn't breathing and alerted Carpenter who attempted to resuscitate Dirkhising then called 911.^[28][4][2] Brown also later claimed he was "under the influence of methamphetamine" when talking with his arresting officers.^[1]

[edit] Media coverage

Dirkhising's case initially was reported regionally by "news organizations in Arkansas and also covered by newspapers in Oklahoma and Tennessee",^[26] yet almost no national press.^[5] 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.^[7] A LexisNexis search revealed only a few dozen articles which appeared only after the Washington Times story on the lack of coverage on October 22, 1999, a month after Dirkhising's death.^[7]

[edit] 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.^[7] 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."^[4] Brent Bozell, media critic and director of the Media Research Center, accused the media of deliberately spiking the story.^[29] Bozell wrote

“

Had Jesse Dirkhising been shot inside his Arkansas school he would have been an immediate national story. 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.[5]

”

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.^[5] Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan wrote

“

[T]his torture-rape-murder got almost no national press. Why? Because this was a "sex crime," not a "hate crime," and because to show homosexuals in acts of sadistic barbarism does not fit the villain-victim script of our cultural elite.[5]

”

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.^[7] 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.^[12][13] There is also speculation that Dirkhising was openly gay with some stating it.^[30]

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.[9]

”

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.^[31][5] However, once the media seized on the story, this count rapidly rose into the thousands.^[32] 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.^[7]

On 4 November 1999, Jonathan Gregg addressed the issue in Time magazine. He wrote:

“

Could it be because we in the media elite were unwilling to publicize crimes committed by homosexuals because it didn't suit our agenda? The next stop in that line of reasoning was clear: That news is controlled by a bunch of gay-loving liberals only too happy to wield a double standard.[11]

”

In his column, Gregg noted that the discrepancy in media attention was:

“

…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. There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators.[7]

”

[edit] Accusations of homophobia

Gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in The New Republic accusing the liberal media of political correctness^[33] and using the opportunity to attack the Human Rights Campaign for its support of hate crime legislation.^[25] The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) also complained that the Washington Times "omitted a key piece of information" for its front-page story on Dirkhising.^[34] 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".^[34] Sullivan also criticised some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense".^[32] Sullivan squarely summed up the differences in media coverage as being due to political interests.^[25]

“

The answer is politics. The Shepherd case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate crime law. 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.[25]

”

On November 14, 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."^[7] Shipp also stated

“

The Shepherd story was news…because it "prompted debate on hate crimes and the degree to which there is still intolerance of gay people in this country. It was much more than a murder story for us." More "routine" crimes may be ignored or limited to news briefs culled from the wire services.[7]

”

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.^[7]

Jonathan Gregg, in a November 9 Time magazine editorial, asserted that, "[the killing of Dirkhising] 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.^[11] 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.^[11] 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.^[7][11] 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."^[35][7][11]

[edit] Trials and convictions

Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Brown were each charged with capital murder and six counts of rape^[13] and they faced the death penalty in Arkansas for the crimes.^[26] Neither man had any known prior convictions.^[2] The two men were tried separately as it was believed "each of them will blame the other for the murder."^[28] 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.^[16][17] Carpenter's court-appointed attorney, criminal defense lawyer Tim Buckley, sought a change of venue from Benton County citing excessive pretrial publicity.^[6] "It's been on everyone's lips down here for a month and a half", Buckley stated.^[6] 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.^[5] 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".^[16][17] 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. On 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.^[36]

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Campbell, Shannon; Laura Castaneda (2005). News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications, Inc. ISBN 1-4129-0998-8. 
• Mathis, Mark (2002). Feeding the Media Beast: An Easy Recipe for Great Publicity. Purdue University Press. ISBN 1-55753-247-8. Retrieved on 2008-04-23.