The West Memphis Three
If you are at all interested in the Robin Hood Hills killings of 1993, then I recommend you watch the HBO documentary “Paradise Lost.”
A quick synopsis of the court case. On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys go missing in West Memphis, Arkansas. The next morning their dead bodies are found, naked, and tied together with their own shoelaces. One of the boys is severely mutilated. Within a month, Jessie Misskelley comes forward and confesses the crime to police, and names two other young men — Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin — as co-assailants. According to the confessor, the three boys are killed as a part of some sort of bizarre satanic ritual. The three accused in these murders — Jessie, Damien and Jason — have come to be known as “The West Memphis 3” (WM3).
The controversy? Jessie Misskelley is mentally retarded and many people feel his confession was coaxed by police. The crime scene has no physical evidence that uniquely link the three accused inviduals to the victims, or the area where the bodies were found.
Critics of the verdict see the trial as a case of satanic panic in a bible belt town, where police failed to investigate other suspects, and the trial focused largely on Jessie’s questionable confession and Damien’s obsession with the occult. Many of the witnesses in the case were accused of other crimes at the time and magically never tried. In some cases, they’ve come forward in recent years to claim that their testimony was corroborated to help the case.
Proponents of the verdict see it as a justice served. There are witnesses to the crime and the behavior of the perpetrators. Damien, while in custody, was once seen blowing kisses to the parents of the victims. Jessie had many inconsistencies in his recollection, but most of them serve his alibi to back-out of being prosecuted at a later date (thus implicating only the other two).
I won’t go into more details of the case, only because there are entire website devoted to rehashing every piece of evidence in the trial.
If you do watch the HBO documentary, I recommend you take everything with a grain of salt. While it does bring up some very valid points about the prosecution of the case, it is also extremely pro-WM3. It casts the entire city as dumb white trash who were full of hate for anyone that was different.
I took personal offense to the way the documentary cast the parents of the victims. It’s one thing to lose your eight-year-old son, another to lose him to a murder, but a whole other scenario to know that his testicles were chopped off along with the skin of his penis. Meanwhile, the whole time the authorities are telling them the people responsible for this are the WM3. They are angry, and that is an understandable emotion. Instead the HBO documentary cast them as dumb vindictive white trash.
In recent years, the case has been getting more attention because of bands and Hollywood types wearing ‘Save the WM3’ T-shirts to draw attention to the cause. Jason and Damien were both Metallica fans and Metallica provided the soundtrack to the documentary. The Alkaline Trio song ‘Prevent This Tragedy’ is about the WM3. (On a side note, in one scene of the documentary, Jason talks about how he or Damien would buy a Metallica tape and then dub for the other. Given Metallica’s relationship with Napster, it makes me wonder if Lars Ulrich isn’t secretly happy to see those horrible copyright pirates in jail.)
Overall, here are my opinions of the trial.
Are the boys guilty? I don’t know.
Did they get an unfair trial? Yes. The trials had little or no physical evidence about the crime scene.
Are pro-WM3 groups doing the WM3 a great service?
Its great to raise awareness for something you feel strongly about, but not with mis-information. Many people believe Jessie wasn’t read his rights when he confessed. He was. His father signed a document waiving his rights. Many claim he had been questioned for 12 hours before he confession. False. The questioning started around 8:30 that morning and he confessed at roughly 1. They *DID* continue to question him for a long time, but he hadn’t been under 12 hours of scrutiny when he confessed.
Many people also feel that one of the victims fathers may be responsible for the crime. There is little physical evidence to support this claim. Anyone who seriously pushes this theory has about as much tunnel vision as the West Memphis police who insisted it was the WM3.
