Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)

A week and a half ago, after serving nearly twenty years behind bars, Jessie Misskelley Jr., Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols – also known as the West Memphis Three (WM3) - were released from prison after entering Alford pleas (a plea which allows the defendants to assert their innocence while acknowledging  the existence of substantial evidence that could be used for a conviction) with the Arkansas court system.  The release of the trio was bittersweet.  On one hand, three men who appear to be innocent are free to walk to the street.  On the other hand, three innocent men were convicted because their interest in Stephen King and Metallica made them different from the bulk of the West Memphis population and they lost almost twenty years of their lives.  Most significantly, the killer or killers behind the murders of three, eight year old boys (Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers) have yet to be found. 

The Alford plea deal was the long-awaited resolution for a narrative that began in 1996 with the release of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary Paradise Lost:  The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (which is now running on HBO On Demand along with the 2000 sequel Revelations in celebration of the WM3’s release, a third film is debuting this fall with a fourth film being rumored in the light of the most recent developments).  When Berlinger and Sinofsky arrived in West Memphis in 1993/1994, they found the mutilated remains – an image which haunts the opening moments of the documentary – of three youngsters, left along the riverbanks of a wooded park.  One of the boys was castrated, rape was alleged, and the town of West Memphis called for justice.  Their calls were answered by a confession by Jessie Misskelley Jr., who stated that he watched as Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols murdered the three boys. 

Misskelley’s confession unleashes a climate of fear, anger, and contempt; a logical effect.  We are shown footage of Mark Byers, father of Christopher, and another bereaved family member shooting pumpkins with firearms, a fantasy role play of their assassination of their children’s murderers.  Another mother alleges that Damien Echols “deserves to be tortured for the rest of his life.”  The problems with Misskelley’s confession only begin to become apparent later:  the boy has an IQ of 72, his confession includes several inaccuracies, and he was held by the police without a lawyer present.  When we hear the reading of a transcript of his confession in the court footage, we realize that very little of it matches the physical evidence we are presented with.  First, the murders took place at night, while Misskelley confessed to witnessing them during the day.  Second, he alleges that Damien and Jason raped the children, but no physical evidence was found at the scene suggesting that.  After his initial statement, Misskelley refused to testify against his friends in court but the damage was already done. 

Guided by Misskelley’s problematic confession, the West Memphis police arrested Baldwin and Echols and put them on trial for murder (Misskelley would be found guilty and sentenced to life plus forty years in prison).  Little physical evidence tied them to the scene (a knife was found in a lake behind Baldwin’s house, but it was largely circumstantial) with the bulk of the evidence against them being testimony from townsfolk, whose personal motives and conflicts of interest are later brought to our attention.  To further complicate things, in the midst of a trial, the documentarians were given a gift from Mark Byers, father of Christopher Byers.  The gift was a knife which exhibited traces of blood that was tied back to either Mark or Christopher Byers.  Essentially, this is the only piece of physical evidence offered up in the trial and it is inconclusive. 

Essentially, Berlinger and Sinofsky provide us with the portrait of a town that is stuck in a Bible Belt mentality.  Since Damien confesses to being a Wiccan and dresses in black, the Christians of the town brand him and his friends “Satanists.”  It’s a modern Witch Hunt motivated by understandable grief that has morphed into anger and vengeance, two concepts opposed to the Christian philosophy.  While the bulk of the bereaved live out fantasies of torture and murder themselves, only one states the obvious:  if we are to believe in an after-life and if we want to see our lost ones in it, we need to forgive, not seek retribution.  Granted, Damien didn’t exactly help his case when he stated that “I kind of enjoy it [the notoriety from the trial] now because even after I die, people are gonna remember me forever.  People are gonna talk about me for years.  People in West Memphis will tell their kids stories…  It’ll be sorta like I’m the West Memphis boogie man.”  Yet, this unquenchable rage blinds many to the lack of real evidence that was used to send Jessie and Jason to prison and Damien to Death Row. 

In the end, Paradise Lost and its sequel Revelations - which explores the route that Mark Byers may have been the actual killer, a once a plausible detour that has now been widely dismissed thanks to improved DNA testing that has linked another family member to the scene - are the best defense lawyers the WM3 could have hired.  The films do an excellent job of capturing everything from the cultural climate of West Memphis, the intricacies and bumbling of police procedure, scientific evidence, and the overall tragedy of both the murders and the wrongful conviction of the WM3.  It took two movies, Henry Rollins, Pearl Jam, and Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh to get the WM3 released.  That in itself is a tragedy of the American justice system, perhaps the greatest tragedy depicted in the film.  Yet, this was a case of documentarian being in the right place at the right time, bringing our attention to an injustice.  Hopefully, between the films and the notoriety of the case, the same mistake will not be made again.