THE INDISPENSIBLES – #23: PARADISE LOST / REVELATIONS: PARADISE LOST 2
The true weight and overwhelming sense of awe with these two brilliant documentaries (each unbelievably stellar in their own right and watched individually) comes when you watch them as one 280 minute piece, hence its inclusion here as one singular event. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 – known here on in as simply Paradise Lost – placed together is the greatest documentary feature I have ever seen.
You will watch it and be consistently disturbed, sickened, disgusted, infuriated and dumb-founded at the events presented to you by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky – who went on to make Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster about a band who not only score and provide songs for Paradise Lost, but whose musical creations are an alleged contributing factor to why innocent teens are considered capable and guilty of murder – but do not let that detract from the fact that this is something that has to be seen.
On May 5, 1993, the mutilated bodies of three young boys – Chris Byers, 8; Michael Moore, 8; Steve Branch, 8 – were found in a wooded area near West Memphis, Arkansas. The film opens with distressing police video footage from the crime scene, showing the bodies as they were first discovered. Those are not placed mannequins at the grounds of their deaths; those are the actual bodies. Please be warned. This is very, very unsettling imagery! Murder charges were subsequently filed against three local teenagers, 17-year-old Jesse Misskelly Junior, Damien Wayne Echols, 18, and Jason Baldwin, 16, who were accused of killing the children in “a satanic ritual” for no other reason, as we are told repeatedly over the course of Paradise Lost, then that they wore black, listened to heavy metal and, in the case of Echols, read books on and believed in Wicca (known also as “white magic”).
Paradise Lost not only suggests that, inflamed by emotion and a need to hold someone accountable, the police rushed to condemn these teens on the foundations of very shaky evidence indeed, but also that the real killer walks free… and regularly presents himself, and grounds to believe him guilty, throughout this film. The documentary, as a complete piece, is aided superbly by the fact that Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, seem to have had completely unrestricted access to both sides of the trial process, family meetings, conferences with lawyers, sessions in the judge’s chambers… to the point that, at a certain juncture, the documentary makers provide assistance to the investigation when it comes to the real (in my opinion) killer and a gift he provided.
Echols, Misskelly Jnr and Baldwin have become known as The West Memphis Three. No sane, intelligent and logical human being can make themselves aware of the events relating to this murder case and truly believe for one second that any of them committed this crime. I direct you to the website set up in support of them and their case, which you can find here, and urge you to donate – watch Paradise Lost first – to their cause as I did within an hour after first seeing this documentary.
I don’t want to go into too much, in fact any, detail regarding the sheer weight of facts, evidence, alibis and the like that show you why their arrest and incarnation is quite possibly one of the greatest injustices I will probably see in my life time. I think the real power of the documentary comes from being presented with that yourself as you first view it. Let Paradise Lost lead the way, then do your own research and then donate!
What I do want to talk about is John Mark Byers, the stepfather of Chris Byers, one of the murder victims. Just retyping this man’s name makes bile rise up in the back of my throat. I don’t think Byers’ is entirely mentally ‘together’, but I do think he is mentally gathered enough to understand right from wrong and to show a quite staggering ability to think on his feet, create fiction and present it as fact, and – in my opinion – outwit the West Memphis police department and frame three innocent (now) men for a crime they did not commit. To that end, I believe that Byers is guilty of the murders and I feel that when you look into his eyes you truly feel you are witnessing actual evil personified.
When we first meet Byers in Paradise Lost he is at the crime scene, re-creating the crimes verbally in grisly and somewhat surprisingly accurate detail while vowing “vengeance” to those who “murdered” his step-son and their friends. In an uncomfortable scene that follows, Byers and another relative of the victims fire off some ’target practice’ rounds at pumpkins they have named after the defendants.
What will drop your jaw to the floor and what serves as the most astonishing development in a documentary filled with them, comes when Byers presents Berlinger and Sinofsky with a knife as a “gift”. They turn it over to the police and subsequent lab reports show traces of blood that apparently came from himself and his stepson! On the witness stand, he testifies that he beat his stepson with a belt at 1730 on the day of his death. The welts from the belt buckle had previously been blamed on The West Memphis Three.
Furthermore, among new evidence introduced on appeal for the three wrongly convicted young men is the finding that human bite marks, found on one of the children’s bodies, do not match the bites of the three defendants in any way, shape or form. We desperately yearn to get Byers’ teeth indented and checked but Paradise Lost quickly points out that he had all his teeth extracted in 1997, four years after the murders, although on camera he places the extraction much earlier, then changes his mind before changing it back again but giving several contradictory reasons for their removal along the way.
As we move into the ‘second chapter’ (i.e. Revelations: Paradise Lost 2) Byers starts to spend a lot of time on camera and we are quickly let in on the fact that his wife, Chris’ mum, died of “undetermined” reasons between “Chapter 1″ and “Chapter 2″. Byers rants that people are continually accusing him of her death which is unfair because, he says, she died in her sleep of natural causes. Later, he says “After my wife was murdered”. Furthermore, in a truly sickening and barely watchable scene he re-visits the murder scene once again, stages a mock burial and cremation of the three defendants, saying “there’s your head marker, you animal,” pouring on lighter fluid whilst laughing and declaring “Now we’re gonna have some fun,” before setting the ground alight. During this process, I am absolutely convinced that – as he reads out the three “murderers” names – he mistakenly says the name of one of the murder victims before quickly correcting himself and saying “Damien” instead.
Paradise Lost is even-handed enough to present the whole host of problems that Byers allegedly lives with on a daily basis: a brain tumour, manic depression, unreliable finances, drug abuse, hallucinations, blackouts, drinking-and-driving offences, neighbours who had to get a restraining order after he hit their child, and then the death of his wife. Byers takes a lie detector test in order to prove that he did not murder the children or his wife. He passes, however the film is quick to note that at the time he was on five mood-altering medications that would have had some impact on the results of such a test.
If I have done my job properly I should have elicited a reaction in you, the reader, where you are sat back, mouth agog at what you have read, feeling strangely internally angry and desperate to check this documentary out for yourself and to help in any way you can.
There are little infuriating chinks in this documentary’s otherwise flawless veneer. Most obviously in the fact that all three of the young men state that they had alibis that prove they could not have carried out the murders but this is not given any screen time, and the complete DVD is unfortunately free of deleted or extended footage as an extra. But maybe not all the answers are meant to be provided, maybe the makers want to leave some stuff for us to research ourselves?
In the end though, Paradise Lost is a staggeringly worthy and enormously commendable piece of work. A third chapter is due to be unveiled this year, which is nothing if not necessary because events will continually need to be revisited. If miracles could occur, then the would-be God that is President-Elect Barak Obama would intervene and do the right thing before Damian Echols is put to death by lethal injection.
Remember, Jesse Misskelly Junior, Damien Wayne Echols and Jason Baldwin have been jailed for life (Echols is sentenced to die!) because they’re interests are deemed not to fit the norm within the town where they live. When you go to bed tonight, spare ten minutes to think about what would happen if you had your freedom rescinded because of the DVDs you watch, the music you listen to or the type of clothes you wear. Think about that… then act!
Please.
3 Responses to “THE INDISPENSIBLES – #23: PARADISE LOST / REVELATIONS: PARADISE LOST 2”
It’s ****ed up, I found out about the West Memphis 3 a while back, it’s really a ****ed up. ****ing hicks.
Damien Echols is going to end up dying for something he didn’t do. It’s just so ****ing upsetting!
Now, admittedly, over there in Texas there’s a whole host of “mentally deficients” as Bush Jnr once called them, who are going to be sent to death for things they didn’t do, but PARADISE LOST personlises Echols and his friends…
… and that’s going to make this injustice sting just that little bit more than all those hundreds of nameless others!
Interesting post, thanks for posting it
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