The crimes at the heart of the story of the West Memphis Three are truly horrible: three young boys whose bodies were dredged out of a drainage ditch, their hands tied to their legs. The genitals of one boy were cut off and removed. It is difficult to read or even think about three boys whose lives were snuffed out in such gruesome fashion, and difficult, too, for different reasons, to read about three slightly older boys, teenagers, who were tried and convicted of the crime despite a lack of physical evidence.
The West Memphis Three were, for a long time, a cause celebre. Amateur sleuths and celebrities insisted that the trials had been essentially unfair, and agitated for their release until it finally and miraculously happened in 2011. Police focused immediately on the supposed "ringleader," Damien Echols, they say, because he was a "weird" kid. He wore black, he listened to Metallica, he self-identified as a Wiccan. Along with Damien two other boys were convicted, Damien's friend Jason Baldwin and an acquaintance named Jesse Misskelley. Arkansas officials insisted that, contrary to the claims of the innocence campaign, anyone who took a long and honest look at the evidence and the trial would see that the case was a solid one. Mara Leveritt's book The Devil's Knot is meant to take the officials' word at its face, going through the murders, the evidence, and the trial with painstaking meticulousness. It can seem, at times, like a dry and clinical exercise--much of the book is a complete blow-by-blow of the legal wrangling at the two trials that convicted them--but it ought to leave anyone who reads it with no doubt that the convictions were a miscarriage of justice.
It shares several recognizable elements with the daycare abuse allegations that caused a similar "Satanic panic" around the same time. For one, the case relies on the testimony of a single person, typically a woman, whose paranoia about abuse is outsized enough to mask concerns that ought to be had about her reliability. Here, it's Vicki Hutcheson, a woman who self-appoints herself an "amateur investigator" in the boys' death, and insists that Misskelley took her to a Satanic ritual known as an "esbat." Those claims are bolstered by the unethical and leading interrogations of children, here Vicki's son Aaron, a friend of the victims whose story becomes--like the ones in the daycare abuse stories--more outlandish and unbelievable as time goes on. That interrogation is mirrored, in a way, in the interrogation of Jesse Misskelley, a young man with an I.Q. hovering around intellectual disability. As detailed by Leveritt, Misskelley's interrogation turns on a single act of police malfeasance: a cop tells Misskelley that he has failed his polygraph, when he hasn't, making him panic to the point where he's willing to tell the cops whatever they want to know. And what they want to know is that Damien Echols is the killer.
Leveritt notes that one of the police inspectors in this case kept a list of about eight teenagers he suspected of Satanic activity, and on whom he wanted to keep an eye. When the child murders occurred, Damien Echols was the first person he thought of. Damien's notebooks were taken from his room, and his poetry used against him, lines as innocuous as "I want to be in the middle, / in neither the black nor the white, / in neither the wrong nor the right." In Jason Baldwin's case, investigators noted that they took from his room "eleven black t-shirts." Faced with an act of great evil, Arkansas investigators turned immediately to the typical and most banal signs of teenage rebellion.
What is it that these investigators most misunderstood? Was it how teenagers react, in relatively modest ways, to poverty, marginalization, and a stiflingly conservative atmosphere? Or was it the real nature of evil, that doesn't usually announce itself with pentagrams and metal t-shirts? In the case of Jason, who appears to have been convicted mainly because of his friendship with Damien and nothing else, the investigators' belief that evil can be counted in black t-shirts prevented them from seeing a person of tremendous character: pressed to accuse Damien for a reduction in his sentence, Jason refused. "It was wrong," Jason said, "It was against everything I was brought up to believe in... even if you said you'd let me go right now." Jason was eventually convicted of life in prison. Can you imagine having that kind of integrity?
Some might ask: How can you be sure they aren't responsible? The fact is, Satanic ritual murder just doesn't seem to be real at all. It wasn't real in the daycare abuse allegations, and it's not real here. One thing that became clear to me in reading this and Satan's Silence is that there is no coherent theory of what Satanic worship is or looks like. Aside from the vague intimation that drinking blood is believed to provide power, investigators here have no clue why a ritual sacrifice like this would take place or what it's meant to accomplish. Their understanding of Satanism requires sketchiness, it has to reduced to a set of signs and symbols for the charges to stick. The mystery of it contributes to the hysteria; the vagueness enables their accusers to see what they want to see in Damien, Jason, and Jessie. And it allows for things which are harmless--non-traditional religion, rock music, and a general unwillingness to be and act like everyone else--to get pulled into the dragnet with everything else. In this case, it robbed three men of nearly two decades of their life. And let's not forget, it also let whoever killed the three boys go free.
1 comment:
Good review.
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