By Skip Sheffield
“West of Memphis,” directed by Amy J. Berg and produced by Peter Jackson and Damien Echols, is a deeply disturbing documentary film at many levels. If you ever fancied yourself an outsider or a bit of a rebel in high school, you will be especially chilled by this miscarriage of justice.
West Memphis is a poor suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, across the river in Arkansas. On June 4, 1993 a triple murder rocked the small town of Blytheville, Arkansas. Three 8-year-old boys were viciously murdered and mutilated. Circumstantial evidence pointed to three high school boys: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelly.
Damien was portrayed as ringleader of the gang. The fact he had a “death book” and Satanic symbols and skulls and bones in his art work did not help his cause.
The film goes into gruesome detail as to how the boys were murdered: hogtied, mutilated in horrific ways and thrown into a pharmacy viagra 100mg cheapest drainage ditch.
This was a time when conservative Southerners were getting whipped into a frenzy over Satanic cults and blood rituals. All three of the accused were
“bottom of the barrel poor white trash.” Jessie Misskelley was doing poorly in school and came from a troubled home. Jason Baldwin was borderline retarded. The eight-woman, four-man jury found the boys guilty of murder in 1994. Damien was sentenced to death as the alleged leader.
“I know he’s guilty,” said one of the jurors grimly after the trial. Jessie and Jason got life in prison.
The first ray of hope for the boys came in 1996 when crusading filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinovsky aired the first of three HBO documentaries: “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.”
It wasn’t hard for the filmmakers to find contradictory and downright false testimony and evidence. I won’t go into the gory details, but there was a reason the dead boys were so mutilated, but it had nothing to do with Satan, or even humans for that matter.
As the years dragged on the imprisoned “West Memphis 3” gained supporters. A very intelligent and dedicated San Francisco lawyer named Lorri Davis began a correspondence with Damien in prison. In 1999 the couple married in prison and Lori dedicated the rest of her life to clearing the name of her husband and the other two “conspirators.”
An even bigger boost came when New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh became interested in the cause. The couple had plenty of resources from Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, but even more important was their righteous indignation and their clout in the film community.
American rock musician and poet Henry Rollins took up the Memphis Three as a personal cause. He was later joined by celebrities like Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Natalie Maines and others.
Soon top legal experts joined the fight, pro bono. The more they learned, the weaker the state’s case looked.
But all is not fair in the legal system; particularly in the rural South. This documentary is quite long- nearly three hours- and it is damning in its proof of misconduct, false witness, superstition, innuendo and hypocritical piety. You may shake your head in disbelief as to what ultimately happened to the West Memphis 3. It is beyond outrageous and a travesty of all that the US legal system is supposed to stand for. Regardless of how you feel about the case, these three young men lost nearly 20 years of their lives. Nothing can bring that back, but worse: the real killer has not been brought to justice.
