"West Memphis is Hell"

[bloodygranuaile]

Earlier this week I caught the last couple of minutes of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory on HBO, and it reminded me that I had neglected to track down and watch the series when the West Memphis Three were actually released last summer. I don’t remember what I was quite so busy with at the time—I think probably figuring out if I was going to lose my job or not—that I didn’t actually drop everything and devote myself obsessively to learning everything about the case I could like I usually do when an interesting new true-crime story catches my attention, particularly one that touches on so many of my interests (one of these days I might have to give up on the idea that I have particular interests and just admit that I’m fascinated by everything except higher math).

Anyway, I have much less going on this week, so I’ve watched all three Paradise Lost documentaries and read a bunch of stuff about the case online (note: the CrimeLibrary entry for this case kind of sucks). The Paradise Lost documentaries were all made by HBO and were released in 1996, 2000, and 2012. They are deeply disturbing, to put it mildly.

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills seems to have been pushed into production the minute the story broke, with HBO arriving on scene shortly after the initial arrests, and not a single person in the state of Arkansas seems to have had even the slightest inkling that being followed around by an HBO crew might result in publicity and therefore maybe they should try not to say things they don’t want everybody to know about.  The backstory that we don’t get HBO footage from—what footage there is seems to be pieced together from local media—is basically this: On May 5^th, 1993, the severely beat-up bodies of three local eight-year-old boys were found in a drainage ditch by a creek in the Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas. The bodies were naked, their wrists tied to their ankles with shoelaces, and covered in assorted vicious marks. One of the boys, Chris Byers, was missing his genitals. The police, the media, and the community in general decided the murders were clearly the result of Satanic ritual abuse (despite the lack of anything organized or ritualistic-looking about the crime scene), and one month later, the police arrested two metalheads and a borderline retarded kid and charged them each with capital murder. This is around when HBO shows up and starts following the trials.

The three kids were Jessie Misskelley Jr., age 17, who has an IQ of 72; Jason Baldwin, age 16; and his best friend Damien Echols, age 18. They were arrested after Misskelley gave a confession implicating all three of them.

Misskelley was tried separately from the other two; most of his trial revolves around the admissibility and truth value of his confession. The circumstances the confession was given under were more than a little bit fishy—while Misskelley and his father had agreed that it was okay for Misskelley to go in for questioning, it doesn’t seem that he was fully informed of or understood his rights, namely that he was allowed to leave. The police held and interrogated Misskelley for several hours, of which there is no record of any kind—no tape recordings, no video recordings; the officers didn’t even take notes. The officers testify to being unable to remember what they asked Misskelley that day or how or basically anything else whatsoever about what went on, and couldn’t answer any of the defense’s questions about that time period, unless they were being asked if they did anything wrong, in which case they are quite sure they remember that they didn’t threaten him or promise him anything or any other coercive behaviors, despite not being able to remember what they did do or say. At the end of this long blank period of herp-derp-we-have-no-idea-what-happened, there is less than an hour of taped confession, most of which is internally inconsistent, inconsistent with the facts of the case, or simply consists of the interrogating officer giving information and Misskelley repeating it back to him. The social psychology professor who served as the false confessions expert in the trial describes it as a “textbook” false confession, and from what I remember of criminology textbooks, he’s really not exaggerating. Misskelley was convicted to one life sentence plus two twenty-year sentences, and I made a lot of snide ableist comments wondering whether he was the only person involved in this case with an IQ of 72.

Baldwin and Echols’ trial was even harder to watch, as the range of terrifyingly problematic issues widened. Where the Misskelley trial was mostly upsetting due to police misconduct, false confession, and mistreatment of mentally disabled people, the Baldwin and Echols trial adds the following dramatic elements: suppression of evidence, phony experts, Satanic panic, witnesses with severe credibility problems (including a jailhouse snitch who was allowed to testify, but the testimony from the snitch’s youth counselor, saying he gave the snitch all the information for the story he was telling, was blocked as a breach of counselor-patient confidentiality), personal vendettas, barefaced prejudice against superficial “weirdness”, anti-intellectualism, incompetent handling of evidence, failure to follow obvious leads, and a really terrible haircut.

Several bizarre and tangled plotlines are teased out of the mess that is the Echols/Baldwin trial, spliced with out-of-court footage that gives background for each thing being mishandled in court. One section concerns another incident the night of the murder, where the manager of a nearby Bojangles restaurant called the police to report a man covered in mud and blood sitting in the ladies’ room. The police sent an officer over; inexplicably, the officer never even entered the restaurant, claiming it was out of her ward (this didn’t stop her from showing up instead of transferring the call to whoever’s ward it was). When the manager heard about the murders the next day, he called the police again, who collected blood samples from the ladies’ room for analysis, and then lost them. Yes, you read that correctly: they lost the blood samples before they could be analyzed.

A second plotline concerns John Mark Byers, the stepfather of the boy whose genitals were missing, who gave a member of the HBO crew what he claimed was an unused hunting knife. When the HBO crew found what looked like blood on the knife, they turned it over to the police. The crime lab analyzed it and found it could match either the boy or the stepfather. Byers’ story changed every time they asked him a question about the knife—first he said he’d never used it and had never hurt himself with it, next that he used it to cut venison, then that he remembered he’d nicked his thumb. Although this is clearly at least as suspicious as wearing black t-shirts, the police never officially considered Byers a suspect, and the jury didn’t find this story enough to cast reasonable doubt on Misskelley, Baldwin and Echols. Over the course of the series, we find out that Byers has a brain tumor and several psychiatric conditions, that he is on several serious medications, and that he is pretty much entirely incapable of telling the same story twice on any subject you care to ask him about, including how or when he lost his teeth. It starts to look like Byers is not so much hiding anything as just completely scrambled, and probably not high-functioning enough to pull off a murder like this. It is over ten years before he stops being the prime suspect among people who think the West Memphis Three were wrongfully convicted, however.

A third and, for me, most disturbing “plotline” was the one about Damien Echols and his supposed involvement in Satanism. It appears that this story begins at least a year before the trial, when a youth counselor who knew Damien attended a lecture by the same ridiculous “expert” the prosecution used to testify about occult practices in teenagers, decided Damien was a Satanist, and spent a year basically trying to pin things on him. When the dead boys were discovered, he immediately named Damien to the police. After this, both the police and the local media spent a lot of time wandering around town asking people about “how weird Damien Echols was” instead of investigating or reporting. When Echols gets on the stand in the courtroom, the prosecution spends most of its time dissecting all of his life choices and trying to cast each one of them in the most negative light possible. They ask him about the music he listens to and the books he reads and his religious background and a variety of random things he’s written or drawn or scrawled Metallica or Shakespeare quotes on. They grill him about a random scrap of paper on which he’d been practicing some sort of alphabet to amuse himself. They ask him to speculate about why someone would commit the murders and then act like it is super sketchy when he gives basic, common-sense answers (murderers murder because they want to! How’s that for advanced knowledge you could only possibly obtain by being a murderer yourself or having a Ph.D. in abnormal psych?). They ask him a bunch of other questions apparently designed to make him open his mouth and have words come out of it, and continue to act like it is super weird and disturbing when he reveals, for example, that he has knowledge of basic Western literary symbolism, such as the equation of childhood with innocence and purity, or the phallus as a symbol of power, or blood as a carrier of life, which, of course, is one of the central symbols of the Christian tradition. They pointed to his reading Stephen King novels as proof of Satanism, even though Stephen King is a best-seller. In short: not only was Damien Echols on trial for dressing in black, listening to heavy metal, exploring various religions, and having a history of depression—all things that led to him being the most relatable person in the films for me—he was also on trial for being literate.

For these crimes, Damien Echols was sentenced to death by lethal injection. For the apparently slightly lesser crime of hanging around with him, James Baldwin was sentenced to life without parole.

While the meanness, inanity, prejudice, and lack of evidence presented in this trial should shock pretty much anyone who watches the movie, whether or not it will affect you as much as it affected me most likely depends on whether or not you were The Weird Kid In Black With Your Nose In A Book. Having been The Weird Kid In Black With My Nose In A Book in my teen years, I reacted very strongly to these movies, and to Damien Echols in particular. There was an initial, obvious sort of “tribal” identification, which kept growing stronger as we found out more and more stuff about teenage Damien that reminded me of teenage myself (he’s teaching himself new alphabets for fun? he picks up all the old books on religion when the library gets rid of them? he writes?). The stronger the sense of “this kid is a lot like me” got, the more I found the documentaries scary on a visceral, personal level as well as an intellectual and worldview one—not only is it scary that this happened, and we live in a world where this happened, but it is only an accident of time and place that it wasn’t me. Damien Echols spent eighteen years on death row for being like me, and if I had been there, I would have been on death row for being like me.

Damien Echols, of course, is not me; he is his own person, and as screen time accumulates—particularly in the second and third films, where he is older and not so awkwardly teenage—you get more of a sense of him as an individual and not just a martyr of the Black-Wearing Depressive Metalhead Kids Tribe. And he is awesome. Teenage me wants to bend time and space and be awkward melodramatic disdainful friends with teenage him. Adult me is going to be meticulously following his creative career and buying his book in September, and also wants to give him a hug. The more he talked the more I found him to be just a really interesting, strong, intelligent-sounding person—way too smart and way too cool for Bible-thumping Bumfuck Nowhere, Arkansas. I found myself getting sort of smug and East-Coast-liberal-elitist specifically on his behalf, instead of just in general (which I was already doing), like, “I hope this guy gets out of prison and out of Arkansas and moves to a real place with a solid alternative scene, and, like, smart people” and douchy things like that.

But I am getting a little ahead of myself.

Paradise Lost 2: Revelations is the weakest movie, in my opinion—quite a lot of it consists of repeated footage from the first one, and it doesn’t have as strong of a narrative structure. A lot of it about John Mark Byers, basically letting him make himself look bad by allowing him to spend a lot of time in front of the camera. By the end of the movie, I was less inclined to consider him a suspect than in the beginning, partly for the reasons I mentioned earlier, although this might be partly because I was influenced by knowing that he’s no longer really considered a likely suspect. On the other hand, Revelations introduces us to the growing public interest in freeing “The West Memphis Three,” as they are now known, and walks us through the activities of the support group to hire new lawyers and forensics experts to examine the evidence and sort out the ways the investigation was botched the first time. While HBO’s access to courtrooms, etc., has been curtailed significantly since the last movie, we do get updates on the legal status of the cases—in short, every attempt to appeal the conviction is denied by the same judge who convicted them, so pretty much no progress is made for quite a while, although the endless run of hearings does serve to delay Damien’s execution. Unfortunately, some of the forensics experts hired by the privately run support group don’t seem to be much better than the forensics experts used by the prosecution, so there is no agreement as to how to interpret some of the marks on the boys’ bodies. The most disturbing part of this one is the interviews with the three convicted men—they seem to have grown up pretty damn quickly. Damien seems half-dead in a lot of the footage. We learn at one point that he has sued the facility in which he was kept for allowing other inmates to sexually abuse him.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is, in contrast, quite action-packed. As more money and support has poured in for the WM3’s case and advances in forensics technology have been made, a clearer and much more definitive picture seems to emerge about what happened to the boys. FBI forensics experts identify a number of the mutilations on the victim’s bodies, including the one boy’s missing genitalia, as being the work of wild animals postmortem, seriously undermining the sensationalism—if not the brutality—of the murders themselves. New DNA tests are run, including on evidence that had been taken but never really looked at. New evidence surfaces, including evidence of serious juror misconduct. New information pertaining to the victims and their families emerges, identifying a possible new suspect. In an adorable bit of much-needed adorableness, much of the work on this case was done by a woman named Lorri Davis, who saw the first documentary, started writing to Damien, and ended up moving to Arkansas and marrying him. The three petition for a retrial under a recent Arkansas law designed to account for advances in forensic technology; apparently, this would be the first criminal case to be retried under this law, so there is a lot hanging on how it is interpreted. It is with this possibility of a retrial on the table that the state of Arkansas unexpectedly offers the men the opportunity to enter an Alford guilty plea, which is basically a weird legal maneuver where they maintain their innocence but plead guilty at the same time and the state lets their convictions stand but reduces their sentences to time served. The purpose of this maneuver seems to be to let the men off without (a) the bother of a retrial, (b) admitting the state did anything wrong, or (c) giving the men the opportunity to sue for damages for wrongful conviction. Even more disturbingly, it also allows the state to consider the case solved without ever actually going and finding who did it. The “Free the West Memphis Three” support group, however, has not disbanded, and is still applying pressure to the state of Arkansas to reopen the case and exonerate the three by finding the real murderer.

A fourth documentary is coming out later this year—it premiered already at the Sundance Film Festival but isn’t in general release yet—called West of Memphis, and it is partly the work of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, because they are awesome, and also partly the work of Damien Echols and Lorri Davis, so that is pretty cool. I will definitely be going to see it and probably having multilayered tangled messes of personal and intellectual emotional reactions and reactions to my reactions (the snide elitist ones are usually a defensive reaction to the goddamn terrified ones, or at least I am telling myself that to make myself feel better), because if you haven’t noticed, this case kind of hit home for me.

I’m really left with only one major question: How in hell did I not hear about this before last year? I thought I was at least moderately well-read about witch hysteria, Satanic panic, persecution of Gothy kids, weird murder cases, and famously bad police work. You’d think I’d have run across it in my pursuit of one of these topics.

Damien Echols on death row, several years ago