I walked into the Sundace Film Festival premiere screening of the Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh-produced documentary West of Memphis admittedly knowing little about the case of the West Memphis Three beyond what Eddie Vedder had told me (and everyone else in the world) about them, and what little I'd retained. Three kids in Arkansas were apparently wrongly convicted for murder because they were a bit off and easily branded as Satanists by whatever hyper-right-wing community they lived in.
Thanks to director Amy Berg creating the 2.5-hour detailed explanation of the frustratingly tragic events of the case, I know there's a hell of a lot more to it than that simplistic notion, and we've also got a pretty damn good idea as to who might've actually committed the crime.
The misery starts with the discovery of the disturbingly mutilated bodies of three 8-year-old boys - Christopher Byers, Steven Branch and Michael Moore - in a creek in Robin Hood Hills, West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. It continued with the Arkansas criminal justice system railroading teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley into prison in 1994 by branding them as Satanic cultists without any admissible evidence beyond hearsay testimony from some very questionable witnesses. Echols was even put on death row. However, the long, arduous story of hope starts with Lorri Davis, a woman who began exchanging letters with Echols after he was incarcerated - and a bond between the two grew strong enough for them to get married.
Davis' tireless dedication to seeing her husband freed and cleared of this miscarriage of justice against the constant stonewalling and intractability of the state eventually caught the attention of Walsh, Jackson's wife and frequent cinematic collaborator.
"I got an email from Fran and Peter one summer morning in Arkansas," Davis explained at Saturday's press conference for West of Memphis at the Blue Iguana Lounge in Park City, Utah. "They had sent some funding to help with the case, but they also sent a note that said 'anything we can do to help from New Zealand?' I wrote back immediately and Fran and I started this email correspondence that kind of gave me a reason to live for a while. It was just so amazing writing to her. She's such a remarkable, amazing... I could just go on and on."
"It began as an offer of help and it really evolved into a friendship," Walsh added. "I guess when you become emotionally invested in a friendship, then the case followed. We were curious about the case and astounded that, when we'd made the inquiry, that Damien, Jason and Jesse were still in prison. We couldn't quite believe it, and we offered any help we could."
"We got involved in about 2005," Jackson clarified, citing the importance of Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the first of three earlier documentaries about the case by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, in raising awareness of the West Memphis Three. "By the end of 2008, we'd helped the defense team get into DNA testing and various forensic testing and bringing in the experts they never had at the original trial. What Fran and I thought we could bring to this - and certainly Lorri was very much part of this as well - was to figure out 'what experts can we bring in? What science can we bring in just to cut through all the nonsense that had been generated about this case?'"
"If you look at Paradise Lost and the footage of the original trial," Jackson noted, "you've got prosecutors and the judges and the police who are paid. They are paid to prosecute these guys, and the defense have got hardly anything. No resources. In fact, when the few experts that the defense called come on the stand, they are grilled about 'are you getting paid to appear here?' As if it's a crime. We just thought this is not the way that justice should work."
While wealthy celebrity assistance was certainly crucial in gathering new evidence, it was by no means an automatic turn of the tide. "We went down a huge amount of dead ends and disappointments," Walsh explained. "It was a lesson in disappointment. It was a bitter experience." This was acutely demonstrated when they spent so much time and effort gathering credible evidence contrary to the conviction, only to be flatly denied by Judge David Burnett, who presided over the original case.
"He just said 'it's not compelling.'" Jackson said. "The words 'not compelling' got us so angry, as you can imagine. We didn't know what to do. We felt that there was a willfullness within the state to not allow any of the new evidence to actually get out there. They wanted to suppress it. At that point, Fran and I thought, well, maybe we should turn to the thing that we know how to do, and that's to make a movie."
Enter Amy Berg, whose work Jackson and Walsh had appreciated in her Academy-Award nominated documentary Deliver Us From Evil, about Catholic Church sexual abuse.
"We needed to find a filmmaker who could come on board who was the perfect person," Jackson noted. "We needed someone brave. We needed someone not just to be a filmmaker, because this wasn't about making a movie. This wasn't saying 'come on board, here's a story, go make a film.' This was an ongoing case, and Amy's been on this almost as an investigative journalist more than a filmmaker for three years now, and the story has been evolving the whole time. As you saw in the movie, Amy was filming an interview last weekend."
That's less than a week before its premiere on Friday night at Sundance, and those most recent interviews are absolutely crucial to the chances for a full exoneration of the West Memphis Three. But we'll get back to that.
"This case and this story and all the people involved - there was just so much information to sift through," Berg told us about coming onto the project. "It was daunting at first. This was something that had been looked at and looked at, and there were certain areas that had been neglected. It was daunting, and it did become an investigation as much as it became a film."
But it was certainly both, and one of the more theatrical elements came from an unusual and striking sequence where the entire nature of the crime is changed because of turtles. More specifically, big, nasty, hungry turtles who live in abundance in the creek where the boys were found, and were very likely the cause of all the post-mortem mutilations of the bodies that had been previously blamed on occult practices. "Peter, when we first started working together, told me I should go do this pig-turtle experiment," Berg explained of the sequence where the scarring on the boys' bodies was compared to the scars the big turtles left on a pig carcass. "I thought he was crazy, I couldn't believe it. It was insane. We had to humanely kill a pig."
It was worth the karmic price, because by taking the horrifying torturous aspects away from the actual crime, West of Memphis paints a very different picture of what actually happened to these three boys - and they make a compelling case for the guilt of Stevie Branch's stepfather, one Terry Hobbs.
