This article is 1996 THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
FILM ON W. MEMPHIS MURDERS IS DEPRESSINGLY VIVID AND TRUE
Date: SUNDAY, June 9, 1996
Section: Fanfare
Page: G2
Source: By Bart Sullivan The Commercial Appeal
Bartholomew Sullivan is a reporter for The Commercial Appeal. He and staff reporters Marc Perrusquia and Guy Reel wrote The Blood of Innocents: The True Story of the West Memphis Murders, last year.
Memo: COMMENTARY
Edition: Final
Correction: CORRECTION from June 16, 1996: Eddie Joe Hutchison, the natural father of Arkansas death row inmate Damien Echols, was misidentified in a commentary on an HBO documentary in last Sunday's Fanfare.
It's been three years since the murders at Robin Hood Hills in West Memphis.
It's been two years since the trials in which three teenage defendants were found guilty in the glare of lights used to film the documentary that HBO premieres on Monday.
Seeing the long-awaited film recently, it was difficult revisiting the sad and sickening banality of the defendants and their supporters and the strange behavior of victims grieving for public consumption.
It's one of those stories one wishes he didn't know so well.
The West Memphis triple murders are the subject of Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. It requires a 2 1/2-hour retelling because the case was exceptional in all kinds of ways: In its stunning violence, in its hint of an occult motivation, in its police miscues and consequent prosecution excesses. And there was the disturbing quality of the justice dispensed at trial.
Some portrayed here have stayed in the news beyond the scope of this film as bit players in a grim tale of seedy, steady decline. The mother of one victim is now herself mysteriously dead. Four parents of victims have been arrested for various offenses. The parents and sister of one defendant were witnesses to yet another West Memphis murder.
Appeals are pending.
Paradise Lost's behind-the-scenes look at the families, the defense lawyers and their experts, the highlights of the trials, including the effective and determined prosecution - all are here, and all are in the right proportion.
There are some memorable scenes. Prosecutor Brent Davis holding the photograph of Michael Moore over defendant Jessie Misskelley's head. Damien Echols combing his hair and using the mirror that courtroom bailiffs used to search for bombs under benches. Judge David Burnett telling the audience not to express its emotions at the Jonesboro trial, then Echols's girlfriend Domini Teer goes running, shrieking, from the courtroom.
All backed up by music from Metallica.
When John Mark Byers, the police informant, and his neighbor, Todd Moore, shoot at pumpkins they pretend are their sons' killers, it's high drama, and it's not overdone.
It is appropriate that this celebration of low expectations and dead-end lives should appear on television. As a documentary, it is first-rate because it paints such vivid portraits of some dangerously crude people living wasted lives. But that's also what makes it, as a film and as a story, so depressing. It is disturbing to witness these denizens of depravity. In a case where truth was far stranger than fiction, Jason Baldwin tells his lawyer that, if he's acquitted, he wants to go to Disney World and Misskelley tells his girlfriend of his dream of having sex in public.
This mind-numbing look at self-indulgence and its consequences raises a question: Should children see this kind of program at all? Its subject matter cries out for parents to turn off their televisions and to limit their children's freedom in an effort, literally, to save their lives. Frankly, there is nothing enlightening here, and much that offends.
When Joe Echols asks what's wrong with wearing black, since Johnny Cash does it, what parent won't wonder if it wasn't just this sort of silly and irresponsible coddling of a kid who was already a juvenile delinquent that led Damien Echols from dabbling in the occult and drinking blood to murder?
On its national stage, Paradise Lost is painful to watch because it shows, in one character's words, that ''West Memphis is hell.'' The cameras can't help but spotlight what are now accepted commonplaces of late 20th Century America: stupid children obsessed with sometimes dangerous pleasures; inattentive parents; the ex-convicts and minimum-wage urchins that inhabit roadside trailer parks; destructive interest in, but shallow understanding of, the occult; and graphic brutality.
One could argue pursuasively that the film's opening crime-scene video, shot by police, crosses the line into offensive bad taste. The jury saw these things but there's little to justify displaying the blanched corpses of children to the general public.
When the film crew took Byers and his now-dead wife to grieve at their child's Shelby County gravesite, one might say such a maudlin display also stretches the bounds of propriety. But that the Byerses were willing does tell us something.
As a document for national consumption, the film raises the same disturbing questions that Mid-Southerners wrestled with during the trials in Corning and Jonesboro in early 1994.
A monthlong search for the killers of the three 8-year-old boys led to unusual police tactics that even the Arkansas Supreme Court later said it ''cannot condone.'' Even with the arrests of Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin, some of those familiar with the case continue to believe that others involved in the murders have escaped arrest.
The film avoids the more complicated aspects of the case, including the claims of a fourth 8-year-old who said he was an eyewitness and the legal objections to the prosecution's use of Echols's jailhouse scribblings. But the prosecution's ''expert'' on the occult is there, acknowledging his mail-order PhD.
Much is made of the press and television coverage, hinting that the defendants may have been railroaded by a public familiar with their unsavory backgrounds and satisfied with circumstantial evidence. There is no question eastern Arkansas was poisoned against these three, just as the nation was against O. J. Simpson and is against Timothy McVeigh. This newspaper obtained and printed one defendant's confession on the front page just three days after his arrest - admitting his part in a dog-eating cult. In these high-profile cases, we have to hope for honest, thoughtful juries.
Media meddling aside, the crew that made this film was so close to the Byers family that the stepfather of one victim offered - and the crew member accepted - a gift knife that later became both a trial exhibit and a basis for a plausible defense theory. The filmmakers acknowledge their faux pas.
But one aspect of the behind-the-scenes maneuverings is not made evident, and it should be. In the course of pretrial hearings, the makers of this film argued in court that their interviews were protected fruits of a journalistic endeavor. It's not that the results aren't well done. But when Janet Maslin in her New York Times review refers to the ''exceptionally ready access'' to the families the film crew obtained, it bears noting that that access was bought and paid for in this curiously modern form of ''journalism.''
The directors acknowledge making the payments but refer to them with the obfuscating term ''honoraria.''
Lastly, it's curious how this film got its title. John Milton gave us Satan and a paradise to lose. When I think of paradise, West Memphis seldom springs to mind.
