I know I'm days behind, but I've been sick, distracted by my son, whose mental
illness is again rife, and trying to deal with damage done to my house during
the Kid's last visit.
I followed the West Memphis Three case from 1999 onwards.
May 5, 1993, three second graders from Weaver Elementary in West Memphis,
Arkansas, directly across the Mississippi from Memphis, Tennessee, went missing
right at dinner time. One minute one kid's mom sees the three of them riding
away from her family home, one kid riding double with one of his companions.
Fifteen minutes later her daughter is sent out to call young Michael into
dinner, and none of them is to be found.
Early the next afternoon the three boys' bodies were found, stripped and oddly
bound, pressed face-down in a shallow drainage ditch. The gully in which the
drainage ditch lay had been searched multiple times from six a.m. onwards. Even
if the bodies were there during every search, they could not be seen because of
the muddy nature of the water, which was so thick with mud that nothing deeper
than an inch could be discerned. In fact, the shoulders of the victims were
probably not much more than an inch and a half under the surface, but until a
detective slid into the ditch trying to retrieve a shoe that had broken loose of
the suction at the bottom and broke the suction on the body of Michael Moore no
one realized that anything else might be hidden under the surface of the water.
A juvie officer had first seen the floating shoe and had called for the
detectives to come investigate. One of the detectives broke protocol by getting
into the water and crawling down the ditch toward the drainage canal it drained
into, finding clothing held down in the mud by sticks and eventually the bodies
of Christopher Byers and Steve Banks, and laying everything he found on the side
of the ditch. Christopher's testicles were missing and his penis stripped. The
juvie officer declared, "Well, it looks as if Damien Echols finally killed
hisself somebody!" and the witch hunt was on.
Long story short: the police were convinced that there were satanic overtones
to the murders, and that the perpetrator was an eighteen-year-old kid named
Damien Echols, born Michael Wayne Echols but having changed his name when
adopted by his stepfather in honor of the newly recognized Roman Catholic Saint
Damien, the Leper Priest of Molokai--Damien himself had recently been confirmed
a Roman Catholic. As he got further into adolescence he'd begun looking into
the occult, and was considering himself aligned with Wicca. Both his interest
in Wicca and his Catholicism made him a pagan and thus a satanist in the eyes of
others, there in the heart of the Bible Belt.
They got a kid who was borderline retarded to make a highly questionable
statement that was represented to all as a "confession." First time I read this
statement I was appalled--no question that he was led, and that not even the
detectives feeding the details to him had any idea as to what had actually been
done to the three victims. The assistant medical examiner who did the autopsies
didn't release his reports until after the statement and a "correction
statement" were both wrung from poor Jessie Miskelly, neither of which reflected
the actual state of the bodies, the description of the wooded area and gully in
which the bodies were found, or much of anything else known about the scene of
the murders. If they didn't like a detail Jessie gave, they'd feed him a new
question and maybe another suggestion or detail, and he'd change what he'd said
to incorporated the new information. He was very pliable by that time. Finally
they were satisfied, but instead of letting him go home, they arrested him as an
accomplice to murder and he found himself being led to jail. Then they went off
to arrest Damien and his best friend Charles Jason Baldwin, age sixteen.
Jessie was tried separately from Damien and Jason, as they'd intended for him to
testify against the other kids. Problem was that no matter how many times they
got him to tell a story and change it to more closely follow the "facts," the
wilder and vaguer his stories got, and he'd still recant them within a day or
two, now the pressure was off. After a very vague so-called "confession" made
between the two trials he again recanted the story, and they could not get him
to testify against the other two defendants. He'd already been convicted solely
on the knowledge that he'd "confessed." After all, nobody would falsely confess
to something they didn't do, would they?
Damien and Jason's joint trial was a true mockery of justice, and no mistake.
Sticks and a survival knife were presented as "evidence" even though they
couldn't be tied to either the defendants or the crime itself, and it was
represented to the jury that scratch marks made on the boys' bodies by a variety
of animals were made by scraping the sawblade side of the survival knife down
the skin. Never mind some of these scratches were fine and sharp and nowhere as
evenly spaced as the sawblade and were probably left by turtles or a raccoon or
two; never mind others were made by the claws of a canine such as a large dog
with a slender foot or a coyote; never mind that the removal of Chris's
testicles was probably made by a snapping turtle rather than a knife. That
survival knife was characterized as THE murder weapon, although the medical
examiner admitted all three had suffered from most likely fatal blows to the
head. Two boys were said to have drowned, although only a couple of teaspoons
of frothy fluid was found in any child's lungs, consistent with choking on
vomited fluids from a nearly empty stomach in each case.
The number of people who became aware of this case all throughout the world was
phenomenal, and mostly due to the trials having been filmed by an HBO crew who'd
planned to do a documentary on this bizarre case. "Paradise Lost: the Robin
Hood Hill Child Murders" was eventually followed by "Paradise Lost 2:
Revelations" and finally a third Paradise Lost documentary first finished just
before an even more bizarre twist in August, 2011, in which Damien, Jason, and
Jessie took what is known as an Alford Plea, stating that they were in fact
innocent but were afraid allowing the case to go back to trial would put them
back into prison and were then granted a most unusual release. Among their
supporters were Johnny Depp, Eddie Vetter, the Dixie Chicks, and Peter Jackson
and Fran Walsh of Lord of the Rings fame. Money from Peter and Fran helped
finance DNA tests that proved that none of the evidence indicated that Damien,
Jason, or Jessie was at the scene where the bodies were found, had any
interaction with the victims, or handled any of the physical evidence. The
state of Arkansas has a bogus "guilty" plea from each of them and doesn't have
to pay reparations for false accusations or imprisonment, and it doesn't have to
reopen the case to find out who actually killed the children--or why. Damien
lives in New York City with his wife Lorrie Davis; Jason lives in Seattle where
last I heard he was working in construction to finance his law studies--he wants
to specialize in false convictions. Last I heard Jessie was still living with
his dad in West Memphis, and he'd married his childhood sweetheart Suzie, who
defends him spectacularly well. Peter and Fran financed a documentary on the
case while Jason cooperated with another one, and Colin Firth played private
detective Ron Lax in "Devil's Knot," a fictionalized movie on the case. I was
amazed at how authentic Firth was as Lax, and Grace Witherspoon was so
convincing as Steve Branch's mother Pam Hobbs I was amazed, as by that time I'd
had my own conversations with Pam and had seen her in all three of the original
documentaries. It was hard to tell Witherspoon from the real thing!
I don't keep up on things as I used to, as most of those who are active on the
discussion boards now are either rehashing old arguments long ago settled or
abandoned or are busy as has been true of nonsupporters all through the active
case days bashing those of us who've long maintained the innocence of Damien,
Jason, and Jessie. I only wish that they'd reopen the case and prove who
actually killed those little eight-year-old boys back in 1993.
I've written my own take on the case, setting it into Middle Earth, entitled
"Murder Most Foul." It can be read at
http://www.storiesofarda.com/chapterlistview.asp?SID=6900
Ï also have been made privy to the details of the conviction of a family friend
for allegedly running a methamphetamine lab that was found in Kent, Washington,
in about 1989. J spent almost twelve years of his life behind bars for
supposedly running a meth lab found in someone else's house, a house in which
there had been two major raids finding identical labs before he met the people
and twice more after he was put into prison. We finally learned that he was
scapegoated by the DEA so as to allow their tame lab people to get away with
their lab, as was true of the two people who went to prison five and ten years
before he became involved with these folk.
As for private prisons--they are an abomination! Should be outlawed! They only
allow people like Trump to continue slave labor and company store economies in
the name of supposedly protecting the general population, with us paying them to
exploit minorities and those too poverty stricken to obtain good lawyers.
Bonnie L. Sherrell
Teacher at Large
"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very
wise cannot see all ends." LOTR
"Don't go where I can't follow."
We gave the Goblin King control of our nation!
