HBO aired last week the final part of the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy covering the West Memphis 3 and the murders of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch, a trio of 8-year-olds, back in 1993. The whole sordid affair is a true tragedy on multiple levels -- the unbelievable death of these young boys, the sham of a trial of three teens for "Satan worshipping" that led to their conviction for the boys' murders, and then the gross incompetence and/or malice of a criminal justice system that spent the past 15 years denying the wrongly accused any chance at a re-trial despite the complete lack of evidence and a public outcry over the results after the first Paradise Lost documentary appeared in 1996. But finally, in August of 2011, after a series of fortuitous twists including new evidence, strident supporters, celebrity involvement -- particularly of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks -- and most importantly, this movie shows, the election of the original trial judge to the Arkansas State Senate, allowing his position to be replaced by a new judge who didn't feel it as a personal affront to ever grant an appeal to the West Memphis 3, the wrongly accused Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley, Jr., were finally, belatedly, after 17 years in a prison cell for a crime they almost definitely didn't commit, set free.
Part 3 is titled Purgatory and was filmed and edited before the dramatic reversal of fortune last summer and the narrative is clearly not based on a "but now they're free" edit, it's more a detailed documentation of both the history of the case and the events since 2000, when the last Paradise Lost film was released. The "Epilogue" that includes the hastily shot and edited events of last August doesn't feel tacked on, though, since the film is strong enough that even as the narrative ending changed, the preceding 1 1/2 hours of film is really great on its own. And of course, it's not a completely happy ending, as Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley are forced to plead guilty even as they maintain their innocence under an "Alford plea" agreement that basically prevents the state from being sued by the men for wrongful imprisonment, closes the case, and puts the trauma of the past 17 years in West Memphis behind them all. Except for the men who still claim to be innocent and the murdered boys whose killer(s) is still at large.
The film opens with what I would say was a very controversial and jarring decision to show footage of the crime scene, particularly the dead bodies of the three boys. I'm pretty sure these images did not appear in the first film and they are incredibly difficult to see (I pretty much had to hide my eyes) but I think the purpose is to ground the viewer in the reality of this case -- that it isn't just the story of innocent men jailed for a crime they didn't commit but also the story of a horrific murder and an unsolved crime. I used to watch Law & Order in the early '90s or whenever it was first on, but I stopped at some point and I don't watch any of the popular police / autopsy procedurals like CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New Jack City, or any serial killer movies or TV shows (sorry, Dexter). I just really have an aversion to seeing dead bodies autopsied on screen, unless they were decapitated by a vampire or something unrealistic like that. So the opening of the film was very, very unsettling. And in fact most of the first part was a story of the murders, the immediate aftermath of fear and desperation in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, and the subsequent "confession" and trial of Jesse Misskelley and the two teens he fingered for the crime, known "troublemaker" and possible "Satanist" Damien Echols and his best friend Jason Baldwin, a quiet, unassuming and seemingly harmless 16-year-old. Misskelley's trial is shown in some detail but the Echols-Baldwin trial is only glimpsed in the sentencing phase as Baldwin is sent to prison for life without a chance of parole and Echols is sentenced to death by lethal injection by the state of Arkansas. At this devastating moment, the first part ends.
And then the doubts begin. Largely due to the release of the HBO documentary Paradise Lost in 1996 by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, a national fervor about this case begins to foment. The original movie was intended to be a story of these possibly Satan-worshipping evil teens who murdered three Boy Scouts in cold blood, a follow up to the documentarians well-received murder tale Brother's Keeper, but when they got into the case and understood the facts -- the lack of evidence against Echols and, more strikingly, Baldwin, they realized "holy shit, these kids are innocent" and the film's focus changed. But the movie was presented in true documentary fashion, without voiceover, to let viewers judge for themselves whether or not the wrong people were arrested. The trials of Echols and Baldwin are explored more deeply in the second part of Paradise Lost 3, with the advantage of hindsight and new evidence that basically obliterates the prosecution's case. The three boys went missing on May 5, 1993, and their bodies were found after an extensive search on May 6th, naked and hogtied in a ditch by a muddy creek in the Robin Hood Hills woods. Christopher Byers had apparently been castrated and the boys had cuts all over them. After about 30 days the police had no good leads on the killer(s) when they picked up Jesse Misskelley, a mildly retarded teen who they thought might have some knowledge of Satanic rituals among teens in the area. At the time, the local and national media jumped on the grisly details of the murders as evidence of a Satanic sacrifice, and the film shows the mother of one of the dead children talking about how the murderer(s) "killed her son as a tribute to the devil!". Seriously. Horrible grief and tragedy and all, but the way the town got wrapped up in the hysteria of Satan worship is pretty incredible, what with this being 1993 and not Salem, Massachusetts, in the 16th century. Hell, one of the fathers said after the arrests that he hopes to seem them burned at the stake like in Salem. It's all really shocking in hindsight. Anyway, after 11 or 12 hours of interrogation, Misskelley -- despite denying any knowledge of the murders all day, finally confessed to the witnessing and abetting the crime by Damien Echols and his co-hort Baldwin, who were by then unofficial suspects of the West Memphis police, mostly due to a juvenile officer's obsession with the spread of Satanism among teens (he even attended a class about it a year earlier) and his belief that Echols and Baldwin's graffiti on bridges (mostly of their own names) were some sort of signs of Satanism. Oh, and they liked heavy metal music. And Damien wore black a lot. So Misskelley, who was at most an acquaintance of the teens, and had an IQ of a child, after 11 hours of interrogation, told the police interrogators that he'd witnessed Echols and Baldwin murder the children. And rape them (police subsequently ruled out any evidence of sexual abuse). On the morning of May the 5th (they didn't go missing until after 6:30 pm). And a bunch of other stuff that was inconsistent with the reality of the crime. Because he was making it up to, as he states in the film from prison years later, "say what they wanted to hear so I could go home. I just wanted to go home and see my dad." A 17-year-old with a low IQ interrogated for 11 hours without a lawyer or a parent present. I know it's Arkansas and all, but wow. The police had their killers after a month of failure and as they said later, "everyone was relieved."
The other evidence, besides Misskelley's coerced confession, was not only circumstantial but flimsy. Lots in the trial about Satan worship. Echols' love of heavy metal. Echols' dressing in black. Echols' poems and stories. Basically portraying this kid as a source of evil incarnate. Oh, and the police found a serated knife in a lake behind where Baldwin lived, some 6 months after the crime, and claimed the knife matched the cuts on the dead boys. That was it. Misskelley was convicted in a separate trial in which only 45 minutes of his day-long interview were entered into the public record (the rest was "mistakenly deleted"). But he had since recanted the confession and refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin so his confession could not be entered into the evidence at their trial. Of course, the confession was plastered on the front page of the regional paper months earlier and the jury pool was all from people who were intimately familiar with the crime and the confession, since they lived in the area. And Echols and Baldwin were found guilty of the murders. With no evidence linking them to the crime. At all. It's possible that they were guilty, I really can't believe it and I trust that all these people so much closer to the evidence who all became convinced of their innocence are right, but even if they were guilty, the trial rested on such paper-thin circumstantial "evidence" that almost had nothing to connect them to this crime, other than the confession of Misskelley, which was not part of the evidence so it's still shocking to me that the prosecution, judge, and jury could sleep at night after convicting these boys, although I guess they were all pretty much a part of that hysteria I referenced above and truly believed they'd found the killers. So "innocent until proven guilty" be damned. They were going to prison for the rest of their lives. And Echols was going to die.
The latest film focuses intently on new evidence that had come to light based on investigations by forensic experts into the case, paid for by supporters of "Free the West Memphis Three", which was started as a website by a few viewers of the documentary with some media experience and eventually turned into a national phenomenon of supporters who believed the boys in prison were wrongly convicted. Celebrities such as Natalie Maines, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder and others lent their names and their talents to the cause, and experts were hired to examine the case. One of the founders of the movement interviewed in this film says "I was just shocked that nothing was being done, nothing had been done, and these kids were rotting in jail for a crime they didn't commit. I felt I had to do something." So what started as a documentary about Satan worshippers turned into a clarion call for justice and provided money for experts who, in a press conference in 2007 at a Little Rock law school shown in this film, debunk any and all of the evidence used in the trial to convict the boys. #1 - the cuts on the bodies were clearly animal claw marks and the castrated boy was a victim of animal predation. None of the injuries were remotely consistent with this serrated knife found in a lake behind Baldwin's house. #2 - Misskelley's confession is a classic case of coerced interrogation and clearly false, due to the inconsistencies with the actual crime. #3 -- an FBI profiler says the boys were clearly murdered by a person with a history of violence, an expert in killing and cover-up, and a sadistic mind with no remorse, which doesn't remotely fit the profiles of the arrested boys -- even Damien, who when you meet him is apparently a shy, smart, and thoughtful human being (which I guess is why he didn't fit in West Memphis), and obviously Baldwin and Misskelley were the opposite of sadistic or violent or experts in killing. #4 -- the jury foreman, according to a lawyer he consulted for another incident (whose sworn affidavit isn't revealed in this film) and that lawyer's clerk, who overheard these conversations, was convinced before the trial that Echols and Baldwin were Satan-worshipping killers, wanted to get on the jury, lied about having previously made judgment to get on the jury, and then became the jury foreman (!), where, during the trial he openly talked about their guilt to this lawyer and how he planned to bring up the Misskelley confession -- illegally -- during deliberations, since it wasn't brought up by the prosecutors. Shocking stuff. And in the notes of one of the jurors laying out the evidence for conviction, unearthed by investigators years later, Misskelley's confession is in there as one of the reasons to convict. A more perfect example of juror misconduct probably couldn't be found. And #5, the smoking gun -- the DNA evidence collected at the scene but unable to be examined with the technology available in 1994, was examined by a lab in Virginia selected by the prosecutors and none of the DNA is consistent with any of the convicted men. They are in fact "excluded" from the population of people who could have left that DNA evidence on the victims and the crime scene.
It is all pretty powerful stuff. Refuting the very flimsy evidence used at the trial that shouldn't have convicted the boys in the first place and then adding some stuff (the DNA evidence) that not only excludes the boys but also points to the potential killer -- Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the victims, Steve Branch. Now, the second Paradise Lost film, released in 2000, was much more of an advocacy piece than the first or third films and raised some concerns about whether Mark Byers, stepfather of another victim, Chris Byers, might be the killer. So it's a bit circumspect that this film now focuses on another stepfather as the culprit. But it does make a compelling case. The DNA evidence taken from a hair on one of the ropes used to tie up the boys matches 1.5% of the population at large, including Terry Hobbs. Hobbs had a history of violence, worked in a slaughterhouse, had seen his wife kissing a "Mexican" (his words) in his house weeks before the murders, and left the town and his wife shortly after the murders, after he was arrested for hitting her in the face. He was later arrested for shooting (but not killing) her brother after an altercation. His now ex-wife, Steve Branch's mother, believes the West Memphis 3 are innocent (as does Mark Byers) and that her ex-husband is the most likely culprit. Of course, the West Memphis police never investigated Hobbs, despite his history of violence both before and after the murders, including to loved ones (his wife). And if they had investigated him, they would have learned from a neighbor that she and her parents observed the boys with Hobbs in front of their house around 6 pm on the night of the murders, the last time anyone had seen them alive. This information didn't come out until years later when the now grown woman who was a neighbor and assumed the police knew about the boys' whereabouts from Hobbs, reported this information. Hobbs denies ever seeing the boys at any time that day, which goes against what the witness says. And he has no alibi for large stretches of time on the night and morning after the murders. His one alibi for some of that time refutes the timeline he gives. It all looks pretty bad, particularly since this all came to light at a trial that Hobbs brought on himself -- a defamation lawsuit against Natalie Maines, who had blogged after the DNA evidence that Hobbs was the real killer. Hobbs' videoed deposition to Maines' lawyers takes up a lot of this latest film and... wow -- it does not make him look good. He may not have been the killer but it surely makes a lot more sense than the convicted boys. And the evidence against him is about 100x worse.
Throughout the last 17 years, lawyers for the convicted boys -- now, men -- have attempted to appeal. But every single appeal apparently went through the same exact trial judge who adjudicated the original cases and doesn't think at all that anything went wrong. So he refuses to grant a new trial. They repeatedly appealed his rulings to the Arkansas Supreme Court but they kept rubber-stamping the district judge's rulings without, apparently, looking at the facts of the case. That is, until the DNA evidence came out. Arkansas law, like many states, says that convicts can appeal based on new DNA evidence not available at the time of their trial, and if this evidence is compelling, the state must then consider ALL the evidence of the case, including -- perhaps -- additional evidence that has come out since the trial, which in this case, was pretty dramatic and exculpatory (see the 5 key points the investigators made above). The state DA argues that the meaning of "ALL" just means the evidence that pointed to their guilt should be considered along with the new DNA evidence, but the Supreme Court disagrees pointedly, saying "All means All" and remands the case to the district judge, who must now re-listen to all the evidence, both for and against, including everything unearthed since the conviction. At that point, the judge can grant a re-trial if he sees fit. Well as great as that ruling was for the West Memphis 3, if this all just sent them back to that same judge, it might not have mattered at all. But that judge was elected to the State Senate at the start of 2011 and a new judge would preside -- one who, in the state's estimation, would have definitely granted a new trial. So several months before the judge was to hear all the evidence, the state basically gave up and let the "killers" free in August 2011. It was a moment for incredible rejoicing but not particularly justice, as the state covered its ass from a lawsuit by forcing the WM3 to plead guilty in exchange for their freedom, thereby closing the case and letting the killer(s) walk free.
Well this turned out to be a pretty long post and I apologize for that. But the original movie meant a lot to me -- it touched me deeply, the sense of injustice, and I've followed the story of the WM3 ever since, donating when I could, blogging when it warranted, and hoping against hope that they might be freed. The film-making skills of Berlinger and Sinofsky are definitely the key to my fascination with this case and this latest film is a brilliant conclusion. Out of this tragedy for all involved, Jason Baldwin at the very end holds out hope for a restoration of sanity among those in power in the justice system. I have my doubts. But I'm glad he still has hope.
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