The Empathy Exams (24 page)

In 2005, Damien self-published a memoir called
Almost Home.
The cover shows a photo of his face, bleached and wide eyed, behind columns of vertical lettering that summon the stark lines of prison bars. The tone is immediate and engaging, sharp with insights and the disquieting heft of specifics, outhouses and clandestine sex. Sentiment rushes, as with Jason’s candy bar, toward particulars: the names of pets, the young love for Cyndi Lauper, a stepfather who once punched the family Chihuahua, Pepper, because it jumped onto the bed while he was praying.

The memoir’s mood is oddly light and full of humor, but Damien writes with ruthless emotional intelligence. It’s often difficult to read. Of the heartbroken mother we see on film, he says: “She knows very little about me, but makes up stories so she can seem closer to me than she truly is. It gains her more attention.” Of his girlfriend at the time of his arrest, the mother of his child: “There wasn’t much of a courtship and no scenes of seduction … I began sleeping with [her] just because she was there.” I remember her from the films—red-haired and pretty, angry—dandling her baby distractedly and running from the courtroom during sentencing. Damien knows the story he could tell about this girl—the story, in many ways, we are expecting: innocent passion shadowed by tragedy, young love broken by circumstance. But he refuses the story line loaded with sentiment and tells the one that happened instead.

It feels like a betrayal of the films, in certain ways, to read the memoir—to see Damien’s mother exposed as something more human than just a grieving woman, to see the mother of his child exposed as something more than suffering Madonna, to see Damien himself exposed as harsh. It made me realize what I already knew, on some level, about all these guys, or myself in relation to them: because I want them to be innocent, I need them to be saints.

The Parents

Pam Hobbs, mother of Steve Branch, is a pretty and flustered woman who wears floral-print dresses to the trial. She seems unhinged by grief. In an interview with a local newscaster, she wears her son’s Cub Scout uniform draped over her head like a turban. She’s convinced, at this moment, that the crime was Satanic and the accused are guilty. “Did you look at the freaks?” she says. “They look like punks.”

The camera moves directly into footage of boys playing on a jungle gym and spinning on a playground wheel, then pans to a row of empty swings. They twist and creak as if they’ve just been abandoned, or still hold ghosts.

Michael Moore’s parents, Todd and Dana, look like a pair of librarians. They have a daughter named Dawn. Steve Branch once bought her a moonstone. When they are interviewed, Todd Moore speaks to someone just beside the camera. Dana, on the other hand, looks at her husband when she talks. She wants his confirmation in her mourning. Todd wants to know if his son called out for him in the woods.

This was 1993. The Moores are still out there today, somewhere—still cooking dinner and eating it, clearing the table, falling asleep and dreaming. Probably in some of their dreams their son is still alive. They drive to work and drive home and watch comedies and laugh, or don’t, and their son—their son is still in second grade.

Steve, Michael, and Chris: each achieved the rank of Wolf in Cub Scouts. Michael wore his uniform even when he wasn’t at meetings. Steve had a pet turtle who probably outlived him. Chris was nicknamed Worm because he couldn’t hold still.

Requirements for the Wolf Cub badge include doing a crab walk, an elephant walk, and a frog leap; folding an American flag; learning four ways to stop the spread of colds; starting a collection, any collection; making breakfast and then cleaning up; visiting a historic site in the community. I try to guess what landmark these boys might have visited in West Memphis, a place history seems to have excluded from its archives: maybe Eighth Street, known as “Beale Street West” for its Depression-era Blues scene, or the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, a massive piece of infrastructure that helps trucks keep going somewhere else. Most of the infrastructure in West Memphis does this: helps things get somewhere else. Maybe the boys just sat by the highway and watched big rigs roll by.

They’d be twenty-nine this year, a year younger than I am.

Melissa and Mark Byers, Chris’s mother and stepfather, are the strangest of the victims’ parents. Melissa mainly seems angry. For her, the conversion of grief to rage has been swift and absolute, and the cameras crystallize this alchemy into scripted curse. She wishes the accused all sorts of violence. She says she’d like to eat the skin off Damien’s face. “I hate these three,” she says. “And. The. Mothers. That. Bore. Them.” She taps her fingers like a metronome.

As Jessie is leaving the courtroom one day, Melissa calls out: “Jessie sweetie!” Her falsetto presumably imitates the voice of the man she hopes will rape him. She turns to the camera: “I’m going to mail him a skirt.” Her voice sounds venomous but also calculated—not that the anger isn’t authentic, but that she has constructed a very particular way of expressing it. She is performing her grief for a set of cameras that won’t stop following her around, and her performance can make it hard to believe that an actual grief is dwelling underneath. But it is. Some part of me wants to get angry at her, and I sense that the filmmakers want to grant this anger space. Another part of me remembers: her son died. This is probably the only certain fact for miles.

There’s also this: Melissa Byers is most likely a woman who felt invisible and disrespected all her life. The world never cared about anything she had to say. Now, all of a sudden, it does.

On the surface of things, Mark Byers seems like he’d make a perfect documentary subject. He’s unabashedly odd, and furious at everything, particularly the devil worshippers who killed his son. He’s a tall man with a big belly and a mullet. There’s a kind of crookedness to his face, like the residue of paralysis. He says he has a brain tumor. One of his favorite shirts is divided into stars and stripes. His performance of patriotism is striking for the desire it shows in him to come across as good, to be admitted entry into the culture of decency to which he pledges allegiance. (Wolf Scout Achievement number two:
With another person, learn to fold the American flag.
) Byers likes to curse—not just cussing but cursing, full-throated and biblical. He speaks of the fight between angels and demons. He often addresses the accused by their full names: “Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, I hope your master the devil does take you soon.” He swears he’ll perform bodily functions on their graves.

He returns to Robin Hood Hills a few years after the murders in a cowboy hat and overalls, using a machete to hack his way through the tall grasses that have grown where a crime scene used to be. The grass has moved on, the scene suggests, but Byers is in exactly the same place. He’s so attached to performing rituals—for an audience, or else for himself—that he’s grown impatient to deliver on a promise before its time:
I’ll spit on your graves
, when they’re not even dead. He makes grass mounds and calls them tombs. He douses them with lighter fluid. “My baby will put his foot across your throat,” he announces to the spirits of the accused—who are, by now, the convicted. It’s an odd prophecy:
My baby will put his foot
… He resurrects his eight-year-old son as a vengeful creature, caught as deeply in this anger as he is.

He lights his cigarette and then drops the match. Flames crackle the dry grass and Byers mashes them with the heels of his cowboy boots. He seems compelled by something powerfully internal and beyond his mastery, but the scene feels weirdly low budget. It’s like somebody trying to make a home movie about hell. “You wanted to eat my baby’s testicles?” Byers asks the air. “Burn, you sonofabitch. Burn.”

By the end of the scene, Byers’s theatrics just feel tired. He makes you cringe too much. He’s exhausting to watch. I imagine he got tired as well. He’s furious at everyone: the woman who tutored Jessie for his GED, the people who say the justice system is corrupt, the people who say the justice system isn’t corrupt. He’s furious at an ever-shifting
they.
His life is lived toward them. They haunt him.
They
haunts him.

He has an unnerving way of veering between wounded dis-orientation and rabid anger. There’s a sad slowness to his manner sometimes, and sometimes a scripted rage, but a sense of abiding effort, a kind of struggling for purchase, is common between these modes. He’s like a bad actor playing the role of grieving father. This constant aura of performance is why I think he’d actually make a difficult subject, even if at first glance he looked like a perfect one. It seems like he’s working so hard to pretend he’s something he actually
is:
a father who’s lost his son. It’s hard to trust any sliver of raw emotion underneath the stilted emotion he performs—the absurdity of his furious indignation, which robs him of precisely the sympathy he thinks it will summon.

There’s a scene where Byers and Todd Moore crouch in a field and take turns shooting a pumpkin. For a while Byers steals the show as usual, calling each boy’s name as he kills him: “Oh Jessie!” “Jason! Blow me a kiss!” There’s a stubborn ferocity to the way Byers invokes the possibility of these boys being raped in prison, as if he’s earned the right to imagine it—to take pleasure, even, in imagining it. But as with so much of his anger, it feels weirdly stale. He’s playing a part. Todd Moore is trying to learn the script. “What kind of range we got in that courtroom?” he asks, inspecting the gun, like an apprentice to the craft of Byers’s alchemy—his crusade to turn sorrow to vengeance, to turn three dead boys into six.

I feel betrayed by Moore. I wanted him to be the parent for whom my sympathy could be complete. Instead it’s corrupted by this terrible sadness at the impulse toward retribution—how we crave it and how it deforms us, how it whittles everything to an empty field, a pumpkin riddled with bullets, the crisp
thwick, thwick, thwick
of each shot.

The Anger

When I watched these films as a teenager, I got drunk. I wanted to feel things without thinking them through. Anger lifted me into a sentimental flurry urgent enough to match what I’d seen. These filmmakers are curators of outrage; they entrust you with an injustice it hurts to hold. So you figure out somewhere to put it. Some folks started a protest movement—
Free the West Memphis Three
—while others gave millions of dollars to their defense. I got drunk and pretended to be a lawyer. I gave impassioned speeches to my hallway mirrors.
This is not justice!
I delivered closing arguments to no one.

Of course, that’s not the whole story. Because I knew some part of me was glad for it. For
it?
For the injustice. Some part of me liked feeling spellbound by it. I rose up against it and felt myself shaped by this opposition.

We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren’t entirely aware we had.

Or I guess I should say,
I
. Why project the shame of this rubber-necking onto everyone? I don’t want to suggest I wasn’t genuinely troubled, hurt, aching for these boys—I thought of them for the next ten years, and wrote Jason several letters in prison, never returned—but I admit that some part of me enjoyed these films. I didn’t enjoy what was happening, but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.

Back then, when I practiced playing defense lawyer for the boys who were accused, I wasn’t thinking as much about the boys who’d died. It was only years later I found their autopsy reports online. All three were found naked, covered with mud and leaves. All three showed “washerwoman” wrinkling of the hands and feet from their submersion in the water.

Their bodies are cataloged in terms of injuries—cuts, bruises, and skull fractures, stripped skin and contusions, “semi-lunar abrasions” above their lips, below their ears, feces around their anuses, the residue of unimaginable fear. The weight of their organs is listed in grams. Christopher’s right lung weighed ten grams more than his left; so did Stevie’s. The autopsy reports move with chilling under-statement between descriptions of the bodies and descriptions of their damage: “The irises were green. The corneae were clear … Fly larvae were present in the left periorbital region.” The language occasionally turns lyrical. The toxicology report on Christopher includes the following entry on his penis: “Bacterial colonies. A few ghost remnants of red blood cells.”
Ghost remnants.
Every beautiful description of violence becomes—in its beauty—a violation of its object.

The word
unremarkable
shows up in odd places. Perhaps, in these documents, it would feel odd anywhere. Stevie Branch’s report offers his body in summary: “The chest and abdomen were unremarkable, except for the injuries to be described further below. The penis showed injuries as described below. The upper and lower extremities showed no abnormalities except for the injuries … described below.” He was sixty-five pounds and blond. His body was unremarkable except for the ways in which it had been brutalized. He was naked save one item: “A cloth friendship bracelet was present around the right wrist.”

Why didn’t I spend more time thinking about these boys when I first heard the story of their deaths? Maybe because they were past reclamation. So I got angry about the boys who could still be saved.

In a way, I got angry just like the parents of the victims got angry, only the objects of my anger were different. If you’re a juror, or a mother, or an ordinary citizen of an ordinary town, you are delivered an outrage—as a witness, or a victim—and you have to purge or off-load it somehow. So you get scared. You fling the hurt wherever it will stick. You make sense of it however you can. The parents wanted three men to go to prison; they wanted them to hurt, to burn, to die. I get angry at their intolerance, their unwillingness to consider any option besides guilt, their insistence on the easiest possible narrative as salve for their pain. The more they insist upon their right to vengeance, the less sympathy I have for them.