Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory / A Review
I don’t have much time to write this, but I just finished Pararadise Lost 3: Purgatory, the third installment in a series of documentaries by HBO about the 18-year imprisonment of the West Memphis Three—Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin—who were falsely accused of killing three 8-year-old boys in 1993.
I didn’t see the first two documentaries in the series, which brought a lot of international attention to the wrongful incarceration of the West Memphis 3, but they aren’t necessary to following Paradise Lost 3, which was released in January, and is currently on HBO On Demand.
Basically what happened was that the body of the three murdered boys—Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers—were found on May 6, 1993. They had been hog-tied and beaten. One died from head wounds, and the other two from head-wounds and drowning. They had been missing for a single night, and in that time, animals had mangled their bodies. In the original trial, it was posited that whoever had murdered them had castrated them with a serrated knife. There was some evidence, inadmissible, that they might have been raped.
Two days after their bodies were found, the police arrested Damien Echols, who had a history of misdemeanors and depression. He was a smart, handsome kid who had grown up in an extremely poor, uneducated family. He dropped out of school, and was expecting a child. He was pin-pointed as an occultist, a satanist and a weirdo because he dressed in black and wasn’t like other kids. At the time of his arrest, he was 18, and looked like Elliott Smith.
Both Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley were arrested along with Echols. Jason was Echols shadow, a young, very shy 16-year-old who hero worshipped the older kid. Jessie Misskelley was a short, mentally handicapped kid with an IQ of 72, making him admissibly retarded. If you watch Justified, picture Dewey Crowe in your head, and then make him even uglier. He gave a statement to the police, after 12 hours of interrogations, and without his parents or lawyer present, that along with Echols and Baldwin, he had killed the three 8-year-olds. Based on his testimony, all three were put in prison—Echols was sentenced to Death Row, and Jason and he were incarcerated for life.
Needless to say, not only were the West Memphis 3 not guilty, their lives were also ruined. In prison, the guards repeatedly allowed them to be raped. In the last 7 years on Death Row, Echols was not allowed to see sunlight. He spent 24 hours a day in a cell, 7 days a week. All the while, a movement that included the Dixie Chicks and Johnny Depp set the wheels into motion for a re-trial based on DNA evidence and common sense.
In essence, the documentary meticulously catalogs the faults of the trial—the backwardness of the judiciary system in Arkansas, where the case was tried, the general hysteria that led the community where the boys were from to believe that they were guilty, the biased jury, and the general foolishness of the experts called to the stand.
It also explores who might have actually killed the boys, and makes a strong case for one of their stepfathers—Terry Hobbs, who lived with Stevie Edward Branch and his mother—having committed the murders. Four months after his step-son was found, he moved out of his mother’s house after having beaten her and shot her brother.
I know I’m not doing a great job explaining what the movie is about, or making a strong case for why you should watch it. But it is incredibly moving. For the first half of it, I was numb with shock. In the last ten minutes, when the West Memphis 3 plead guilty in order to be set free, I sobbed uncontrollably.
The documentary is flawlessly made, but it’s really Echols and Baldwin, who are both incredibly articulate, that make the story so fucking heartwrenching. “Every day, I look at what I do have, and try to be thankful,” Echols tells the camera at one point. “In many ways, my life is quite amazing.”
If you’ve ever been an outsider, you’ll relate to this movie. If you’ve ever been unfairly accused because you stand out, or are smarter than the circumstances from which you came, then you’ll relate to this movie. Or if you can find pity for the destruction not only of three innocent 8-year-old boys, but also the 3 innocent teenagers who were implicated in their murders—six kids, already batting with the odds so poor in their favor that they might never have left the trailer parks where they were raised—then you’ll love this film.
The only consolation after watching the whole thing is that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley (ok, not Miskelley) may have actually gotten something—an education, religion, a perspective, a mission, in Echols case, an extremely hot wife—from their stint in jail, and that is an opportunity to be given an out from the poverty-stricken, backwards world in which they would have gotten lost. The only problem was that they were imprisoned for 18 years before they were even given a glimpse of the larger universe. And is heaven enough of a reward for the purgatory they endured?
