Paradise Lost (1 & 2) - Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills is the first of two documentaries about the murders, that premiered on the cable network in 1996. It begins with footage of the crime scene: a secluded, wooded area in West Memphis, Arkansas, where three eight-year-old boys were found murdered and mutilated. These images are among the most horrific committed to the screen. Practitioners of the occult were immediately suspected. Why? Because in such a small, tight-knit community, it’s more comforting..

According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky are in production on Paradise Lost 3. I think they should keep making the Paradise Lost movies until the story is over, or until it is clear that the story never will be over. Sixteen years after the events that inspired them, that point is yet to come.

Some quick internet research reveals that the West Memphis 3, the trio of young men convicted of a grisly triple homicide, remain in prison despite a preponderance of evidence that all but exonerates them. John Mark Byers, an alternate suspect in the killings and the single greatest opponent of the West Memphis 3, has changed his tune and now lobbies for the prisoners’ release. New DNA evidence implicates Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the victims. To date there is no physical evidence to connect the murders to the three men in prison for them, including Damien Echols, who has been on death row since 1994.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the first of two HBO-produced documentaries about the murders, premiered on the cable network in 1996. It begins with footage of the crime scene: a secluded, wooded area in West Memphis, Arkansas, where three eight-year-old boys were found murdered and mutilated. These images are among the most horrific committed to the screen. Practitioners of the occult were immediately suspected. Why? Because in such a small, tight-knit community, it’s more comforting to suspect One of Them than One of Us.

Damien Echols was One of Them. He wore black clothing, listened to Metallica, checked out books on witchcraft from the library. His friend was Jason Baldwin, who is like Doogie Howser’s less threatening little brother; he looks like One of Us, but he hangs out with One of Them.

Jessie Misskelley isn’t One of Them either, but his IQ was measured at 72, so he would probably agree to be anyone you tell him to be. His confession was obtained through twelve hours of interrogation. Only forty-five minutes of that interrogation were recorded, but even those scant minutes include evidence of leading questions that steered Jessie to the right answers whenever he provided the wrong ones; the police had a heck of a time getting Misskelley to get the time of death right. Imagine what they didn’t record.

Berlinger and Sinofsky follow the two trials — the first for Misskelley, the second for Echols and Baldwin, whom Misskelley implicated — and interview the participants: the lawyers on both sides, the defendants, the families of the victims. Their approach is straight-ahead journalism; they observe, but don’t comment. If we are outraged, it’s because we are blessed with good sense.

A line of questioning involves a name Echols scribbled on a piece of paper; it’s the name of an author who wrote about human sacrifice. This is barely evidence of a passing interest, let alone murder. One of Baldwin’s fellow inmates testifies that Baldwin confessed to him; a counselor at the detention facility believes the inmate is lying, but the jury would never hear from him. The prosecutors have no physical evidence, are most likely mistaken about where the murder was committed, have no credible statements from the suspects, and no verifiable testimony from witnesses. But it couldn’t have been One of Us — it must have been One of Them! So there you have it.

Paradise Lost does not set out to persuade;  nevertheless it persuades us that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley in all likelihood didn’t commit the murders. And even if they did, it probably didn’t happen the way the prosecutors think it did. But there was a lot of scary evidence about reading books about witchcraft and wearing black, and those are capital offenses in West Memphis.

Compelling though it is, Paradise Lost isn’t a complete picture, because nobody has the complete picture. It’s Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, Berlinger and Sinofsky’s 1999 followup, that elevates the story to a true-crime saga on the same level as In Cold Blood.

John Mark Byers became a person of interest in the first film, but he gives us more reasons to suspect him in the second. We learn that there were bite marks on one victim, Byers’s stepson Christopher, and in the next scene Berlinger and Sinofsky show us John Mark Byers removing a set of false teeth from his mouth; the camera follows the false teeth as if it can’t believe its eyes. He had his real teeth surgically removed in 1997, but that’s not the story he tells. There may be many reasons to have one’s teeth removed, but there are very few reasons to lie about it.

Byers’s wife passed away in 1996 of undetermined causes. He explains that she lost her will to live after the death of her son. But during a pre-interview for a polygraph test, he states, in response to a different question, that he was arrested for DUI “after my wife was murdered.” It’s a titanic declaration uttered in so offhand a manner that even the interviewer overlooks it.

If Byers participated in the second film to clear his name, it didn’t work. At 6-foot-8, he is an imposing physical presence. He seethes with anger and emotes grandly, but there comes a point where it seems like grotesque performance art, as when he stages a mock funeral for the West Memphis 3 at the crime scene. When Byers turns to face the camera at his wife’s grave site or sings along to a hymn he recorded on audio cassette, it’s like looking into the heart of something you don’t recognize. He’s one of the most fearsome creatures to ever be seen in a motion picture.

But Paradise Lost 2 isn’t only about John Mark Byers. It’s about itself. The first film spawned a “Free the West Memphis 3” movement and brought to the case people who might not otherwise have taken an interest, including a criminology expert who systematically discredits the prosecution’s case. Berlinger and Sinofsky, at first observers, finally become analysts and inquisitors; they are now inextricably part of the story, which has exploded around them and because of them. This is a great, galvanizing work about how the legal system works and doesn’t work, how it is subject to the whims and prejudices of its participants, and about how the media can do good or bad simply by how it shines its light.

Watch the opening segment of the documentary on the West Memphis 3: