Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (37 page)

On August 29, 2000, Byers was released from the Arkansas Department of Correction. Having served fifteen months of his eight-year sentence, he was placed on parole until May 2007.
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I
N
1997, P
AM
H
OBBS
, the mother of Stevie Branch, filed a $10 million lawsuit against the documentary filmmakers, alleging that they had breached an agreement not to show graphic material in the film.
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The lawsuit was decided in favor of the filmmakers. Two years later, in September 2000, Hobbs again protested the commercial use of images from the police file, this time after someone offered crime scene and autopsy photos for sale on the Internet auction site eBay.
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One young supporter e-mailed Arkansas’s governor, Mike Huckabee, who is a Republican and a Baptist minister. An aide who identified herself as the governor’s “criminal justice liaison” replied. After noting that the governor could not reopen a case or have any investigation done, the aide continued: “I do want to assure you that DNA testing was done, and that a match was found among the men convicted.” The statement was flagrantly misleading. It could only have referred to the DNA test conducted on blood found on Damien’s pendant necklace, the rough results of which suggested that the blood could have come from Jason Baldwin, Stevie Branch, or 11 percent of the Caucasian population, and it had never been introduced into evidence. Moreover, the aide wrote that the documentary about the case had been a “fictionalized” account and not a documentary. She referred the letter writer to the prosecuting attorney who had handled the case.
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The conduct of the West Memphis police during the murder investigation had raised enough questions for one of the Web site’s founders that she enrolled in a course in evidence analysis taught by a criminal profiler.
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The instructor, Brent Turvey, became intrigued when told about the West Memphis case, and his interest was heightened when he was shown photos and other evidence pertaining to the victims’ autopsies. In 1997 the profiler prepared a report, outlining his own assessment of the case. It raised a number of new questions. He noted in photos of Michael Moore what he called a “directional pattern abrasion” just below the boy’s right shoulder. He wrote that the abrasion did not correspond with any of the evidence collected at the site where the bodies were found, and that it was “inconsistent with any of the naturally occurring elements that exist in that environment.” In one of the photos taken in the woods, he also noted what he believed was a “piece of cloth” in Michael’s right hand. “This is a very critical piece of physical evidence,” he wrote, and he urged that it be found and “fully examined.”

The profiler’s analysis of photos of Stevie Branch was even more disturbing. He noted “the existence of patterned injuries all over this victim’s face that could be bite marks.” He wrote, “Bite mark evidence is very important in a criminal case because it demonstrates behavior and lends itself to individuation. It can reveal to an examiner who committed the act, because bite marks can be as unique as fingerprints.” He recommended that a forensic odontologist, or dentist, review the photographs.

With regard to Christopher Byers, the profiler noted, “The general constellation of wounds to this victim is more advanced, more extensive, more overtly sexually oriented, and includes the use of a knife.” After describing the wounds created by the removal of the boy’s penis, scrotal sac, and testes, he observed, “The nature of this emasculation, as indicated by these wounds, is neither skilled nor practiced. It was a rageful, careless, but purposeful act carried out in anger.” The profiler also looked for evidence of the whipping John Mark Byers said he’d given Christopher before the boy disappeared. He identified three sets of injuries on the body’s buttocks, two of which he concluded were “inconsistent” with marks from a belt. The third set, described in the autopsy report as “five superficial cutting wounds on the left buttock,” were “actually lacerations” that were roughly parallel, and Turvey concluded that they were “most consistent” with a whipping by a belt. He added, “It is further the opinion of this examiner that after having received this set of injuries, which tore open the skin and would have resulted in some severe bleeding, the victim would have been unable to walk or ride a bicycle without incredible pain and discomfort.”

The profiler also offered his assessment of the site where the bodies were found. He concluded that this was not where the boys were murdered, and that “at least four crime scenes” were involved. He identified these as what he called “the abduction site,” where the boys were apprehended; “the attack site,” a nearby structure or residence where they were killed; “the dump site,” the ditch where the bodies were found; and “the vehicle” that was used to transport the bodies from the attack site to where they were dumped. He cited three reasons for his conclusions. One: “The nature and extent of the wounds inflicted upon these victims, especially the emasculation of Chris Byers, required light, required time, and required uninterrupted privacy. As it was dark in those woods, and as search parties were traveling in and out of the area all evening, this dictates a secluded structure of some kind away from the area of immediate attention.” Two: “The nature and extent of the wounds inflicted upon these victims, especially the emasculation of Chris Byers, would have resulted in a tremendous amount of blood loss. Very little blood was found at this scene on the banks of the drainage ditch.” And three: “The stabbing injuries and emasculation injuries inflicted upon Chris Byers alone, because Chris was conscious during at least part of the assault [as indicated by evidence of struggle during the attack on his penis], would have resulted in a great deal of screaming.” Of all the sounds reported that evening by searchers and local residents, screaming was not among them. The fact that the three boys were apprehended together and that their wounds showed they put up “limited resistance” suggested to the criminal profiler that they had been approached by “someone that the victims knew and trusted.”
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Filmmakers Berlinger and Sinofsky were now also looking at the case from a different point of view. They’d won prizes and accolades for their documentary
Paradise Lost
:
The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,
but their pride had been accompanied by disappointment that discussion of the film had never, as they put it, gotten “off the entertainment page.” While most viewers were appalled by what they saw in the film, a sizable number—the filmmakers estimated 20 percent—saw the documentary as proof that the three who were convicted were guilty.
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Berlinger and Sinofsky decided to make a sequel. Where the first film had been “more artistic,” this one would “be stronger, more of an advocacy film.” “Our attraction to the second story was much more that we wanted to help,” Berlinger later explained. “The first film never got the social attention it deserved. With this one, we wanted it to be discussed, not just on the entertainment pages, but on the editorial pages. We wanted people of power to rally.”

Footage from the trials had formed and informed the first film, but the filmmakers decided to base the sequel on creation of the Web site and the activism it had spawned. Another challenge was that many of the people who’d appeared in the first documentary didn’t want to be interviewed again. “Most people in Arkansas were pissed off at us,” Berlinger recalled. “The Moores would have nothing to do with us. Pam Hobbs had tried to sue us. Brent Davis wouldn’t talk to us. That left pretty much John Mark Byers. He was more than willing to appear on camera, and we put him front and center.”

Most of the filming took place in 1998—after Melissa’s death and after Byers’s banishment from the judicial district where they had been living when she died, but before the drug arrest that had led to his stint in prison. As in the first film, Byers expounded at length for the cameras, only now the pitch of his orations was more hateful and more histrionic. The film,
Paradise Lost 2: Revelations,
premiered on HBO in March 2000. Byers was more than “front and center.” He was the film’s target.

If the producers had understated their belief in the first film that the defendants were innocent, they made it clear in the second film that they believed Byers should be viewed as a prime suspect. Even with the cameras rolling, Byers did little to divert suspicion. Having agreed, for instance, to submit to a polygraph exam for the film, he unself-consciously referred at one point to his wife, Melissa’s, “murder.” After the polygraph examiner questioned Byers about the murder of the eight-year-olds and Byers replied he had nothing to do with them, the examiner pronounced his finding that Byers was telling the truth “as far as [he] could see them.” This finding was offset, however, by the information that before taking the exam, Byers had acknowledged that he was on several prescription drugs—medications that, the viewer was left to conclude, could have distorted the examiner’s readings. Nonetheless, Byers was thrilled with the examiner’s report. “Yes!” he exclaimed, slapping the examiner a big high-five. “I knew I was innocent!”

Reviews of the second film were favorable, though less enthusiastic than for the first.
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As before, the region where the documentaries were set came under fire. A reviewer for New Jersey’s
Newark Star-Ledger
described West Memphis as “a bastion of Judeo-Christian righteousness threatened by the dark allure of secular America,” noting that “this theological landscape” probably explained “why the police would stick to their story and much of the town would support them.”
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In a similar vein, film critic Roger Ebert called for the facts of the case to be reexamined in “a neutral setting” because it was clear, as he put it, “that the local people involved have a vested interest in being right about this, no matter whether they’re right or wrong.”

Not surprisingly, reaction in Arkansas was different. When the second documentary was released, two reporters for the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
interviewed several people involved in “the bizarre case.”
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They reported that Todd Moore had been “outraged” by suggestions that Byers had been involved in the murders. “Even though I did not like him as a neighbor, nor a friend, he is not a murderer,” he told the paper. Prosecutor Brent Davis said he was disgusted by the way the films were “slanted toward the defense,” and detective Mike Allen, who was now a lieutenant, agreed. “If I lived in California and saw that movie and didn’t know the facts, I’d be appalled they charged those boys with the murders,” the paper quoted Allen as saying. “I can understand someone living in New York City or Los Angeles getting fired up after listening to all this garbage.” On the other hand, Allen claimed, “If HBO would run the entire trial without editing it, and then ask viewers if he’s [Damien’s] guilty, I bet there’d be a different response.” But the foreman of the jury that convicted Damien and Jason said that he had seen the first documentary and found its coverage of the trial to be fair, just as he believed the verdict was. “If I was back in that courtroom now,” the foreman told the paper, “I’d vote ‘guilty’ again.”

When the second documentary aired on HBO, thousands of viewers went immediately to the Web site. The site’s organizers reported that from March 13, when the show first aired, to the end of that month, the site had received approximately 133,000 hits. The site urged visitors to send in a postcard from their state, with a message to “Free the West Memphis Three.” Organizers advised that the postcards would be assembled into a long banner, which would be taken to Arkansas as evidence of the national interest in the legal future of the men in prison. One of the site’s founders said that after the second film aired on HBO, the address they’d posted on the Web site began to receive up to sixty postcards a day.

That gratified the filmmakers. But they still hoped for a more dramatic result, such as had been achieved by
The Thin Blue Line,
the classic 1988 documentary that had led to the exoneration of a Texas man who’d been held for years on that state’s death row. In that case, questions raised by the film had prompted Texas officials to reopen the investigation. The filmmakers believed that someone in power could initiate a similar review of the case in Arkansas. They focused on getting the films to the former Arkansas governor who was now the president of the United States.

Berlinger, who was now working on another film, said he asked everyone he knew in Hollywood who socialized with President Bill Clinton to send him copies of the documentaries, but that most had demurred. Given his conviction that the inmates were innocent, and that one could be put to death, he found their reticence frustrating.
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Berlinger finally e-mailed Roger Ebert, who’d praised
Paradise Lost,
both one and two. He asked Ebert if he would mind sending the films to the president (as Clinton had been on Ebert’s show), and to Berlinger’s delight, Ebert agreed. “Two months later,” Berlinger said, “I get a letter from Bill Clinton. It’s on official White House stationery, and it comes in protective cardboard, as if I’m going to frame it. It said, ‘Dear Joe, I found both of the films fascinating and disturbing, but please be aware….’ He said that as president he had no influence on the court system in Arkansas. It was a total cop-out.”

If the president of the United States felt powerless with regard to the case, a growing number of musicians, oddly, did not. The group Metallica had been the first to express support for a new look at the case when it donated its music for the sound track of the first documentary. As the realization spread that prosecutors had linked Damien and Jason’s tastes in music to the satanism the state claimed had been the motive for the murders, other musicians saw the tactic as an assault—one that they felt threatened both their form of artistic expression and, potentially, anyone who listened to it. Where the filmmakers had been from New York and the founders of the Web site from Los Angeles, the musicians who stepped most energetically into the case hailed from Seattle.