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http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=bGqnBERXfpcRTnC7cM73jmufuXlh7M0-&UserName=UnknownQ and A with the Directors of 'Paradise Lost'
Berlinger and Sinofsky [Bob Richman photo]
By Davina Willett
Documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky co-directed "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" (which Court TV named as the best crime documentary)and "Paradise Lost 2: Revelations." Both films center around the 1993 murder of a trio of 8-year-old boys killed in West Memphis, Arkansas, and the trials of the three teens (Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin ) who were accused of the crimes.
Q: When the "Robin Hood Murders" were committed, satanic ritual abuse conspiracies, later known as the "satanic panic," were prevalent around the country. Can you explain the climate in West Memphis when you began filming?
Bruce: There was no outrage [that three teenage boys accused of murder were presumed guilty before the trial] in the West Memphis area because, frankly, the media poisoned everybody down there. Joe and I were outraged at what was going on. There were very, very few people, maybe a handful, who thought these kids were innocent.
Joe: It was shockingly docile. People were out for blood. When the "Paradise Lost" movies came out, even today, the vast majority of people [in Arkansas] think that the right guys are in jail, despite the international outcry. And it's been shocking to us. There was a while when every time HBO re-ran "Paradise Lost" 1 or 2, the governor of Arkansas would post a message on his Web site saying the documentaries are works of fiction by an entertainment company and no attention should be paid to them.
Our main objective was to tell this story about the miscarriage of justice. But, unfortunately, the little boys, the victims, are often forgotten. This case was a lethal combination of things: It was a horrible, horrible crime that needed a resolution, [so] people [could] let their kids out the front door and return to normal life. [It was] a place where there was Bible-thumping fundamentalism, where people believe in heaven and hell and the prosecutor played to that phenomenon. There was also a very incompetent local media.
Q: So at the time, it wasn't just satanic panic in the south, it was news in New York?
Joe: The Associated Press wires posted the story, which had appeared on a local Memphis online paper, the Commercial Appeal Web site. It caught our attention. Although, interestingly, we thought, because we didn't question the reporters would get it wrong, that we were going down there to make a film about guilty teenagers. Kind of like a real-life "River's Edge" [a 1986 film in which a high school slacker kills his girlfriend and shows off her dead body to their friends]. We thought the question would be, "How could three teenagers do such a horrible thing?" because we didn't realize how one-sided the press was reporting it.
Q: How long was it before you started questioning the legitimacy of the arrests of the three local teenage boys?
Bruce: The more people we met, including John Mark Byers (the stepfather of Christopher Byers, one of the murder victims), the more it was becoming obvious that one plus one wasn't equaling two.
Joe: I would say the first six weeks we were there, something wasn't right. But it wasn't really until we met Damien and some others in person that we became convinced that something really was awry.
Bruce: I mean, if we had only met the families of the three little [victims], it would've seemed like, "Of course these boys are guilty." Slightly off kilter; that's the way the three teenage boys were perceived. Once we met Damien, Jason and Jessie, we began to see two sides of a coin. We began to finally get information other than the opinions of the police and the local media reports. The local media was convinced that these guys were guilty. And there was so much pressure to convict so that [towns]people could go back to their normal life. They wanted the perpetrators of the crime, whoever those were in people's minds, to be in jail so their kids could go back to playing in the front yard and life would go back to normal.
Joe: But interestingly, there was an early event that was quite profound for us. It gave us a glimpse into what we were dealing with, in terms of people's perceptions, the prejudice and what these teens were going to be up against. Specifically, within a week or two of being down there, with us still believing that these kids had committed this awful crime, before we had started digging into the evidence that was just totally fallacious, Damien was brought in for an early arraignment. Bruce and I are excited because we're in the center of the action. We were finally going to get a chance to meet Damien. At one point, Damien cranks his neck around and looks at everybody [in the press corp]. Bruce and I looked at each other as if to say, "Whoa, look at him, he looks evil," and so we had totally bought into the hype. [Because] then, six or eight weeks later when we were sitting in a room with him doing an interview, I was embarrassed that I'd had that feeling. It taught me a lot about [how you can] poison someone's mind.
That's the thing. How do you get a fair trial when Jessie's confession was published in the local paper [before the trial]? But not even in its factual entirety. Because in it's entirety you can see what a fallacious statement it was. The local reporters just took the most salacious highlights, compressed it and treated it like a singular narrative statement. [In the "confession," Jessie Miskelly places himself, Damien and Jason at the location in the woods where the three children's bodies were found].
Bruce: We also found out that Jesse was with the police for over nine and a half hours, but they only audio-taped about 45 minutes of it. Things were unfolding the more we dug. It was really the hard work we put in: getting to know people, meeting the judge, talking to the three defense teams and the prosecutor, that helped us start sorting out the reality of the situation. When you realized that this kid [Jessie Miskelly], who was underage, didn't have his parents present while he was in police custody, and when you learn more about the manipulation that went on with him, and he was borderline retarded, you realize that the police did a masterful job of manipulation.
Joe: But it was so instructive for us. Intelligent, well-educated New York filmmakers fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Because when he turned around that day in the courtroom, we felt this chill but then when we met him, he was slightly effeminate, highly intelligent and by the end of the interview, Bruce and I said, "There's no fucking way this kid did this."
Q: Even if you imagine for a second that they were possibly high on drugs and might not even remember doing it?
Joe: No way. Despite many, many arguments that you could focus in on and the oddity of some of the players in the tragedy, for me, it all comes down to one thing: You put three 8-year-old kids in the woods at dusk, plus three unprofessional teen killers who have never done this before, presumably (there's no evidence to the contrary), you beat the shit out of kids and you slaughter them in the most grotesque and profound way, and then there's no blood at the crime scene? [The place those bodies were found] is obviously a dump site. There's no way [that] these three teens, particularly since one of whom is an imbecile, could have done this kind of harm to these bodies and not have left evidence. There was zero physical evidence in this case.
Q: But f it wasn't the three teens, how could one person successfully kill three energetic eight-year- olds?
Bruce: Well, I can't put myself in the body, in the mindset of an 8-year-old boy that may be so petrified that if somebody says, with a knife, or anything, "go over there and don't move," that I wouldn't have done that. If it were, say, a trucker, or someone they knew, why wouldn't they just sit in one place? Now, I don't believe that Jason, Jessie and Damien knew these kids whatsoever and I can't believe that they actually did the crime. Wherever this crime took place, it wasn't in Robin Hood Hills, where the bodies were found, it just couldn't have been. In my mind, from all the time I spent there with Joe and our small crew, I just can't believe that. Especially in "Paradise Lost: Revelations," where we went back there and it was very clear from further forensic testing that there was no blood at the crime scene and yet one of the boys basically bled to death. And the prosecution's theory was just that: "Oh well, animals came in that night and ate up the blood or it rained." There was never any real excuse as to why there was no blood.
Joe: The other thing is the historical context of all of this: The 1980s and early 1990s saw a huge wave of satanic panic hysteria. Yet not one murder has ever been attributed to some underground satanic cult. All of these experts decided that they could make a living testifying in very vague and general terms, but not one murder has ever been connected to these so-called satanic hysterias. This case was on the tail end of that wave. I forget the exact percentage, but the vast majority of child homicides and abductions are by a parent or a guardian or a person known to the family.
Q: Let's talk about John Mark Byers, the zealous, eccentric stepfather of one of the 8- year-old victims who features prominently in "Paradise Lost: Revelations."
Joe: I just want to say that the first "Paradise Lost" never intended to prove, and this is an important distinction, that the teens were innocent, nor did it intend to offer up an alternative killer. In "Paradise Lost: Revelations," we felt that it was not enough to show a capital murder case in which the measure of the law "beyond all reasonable doubt" is challenged. It was about showing the doubt, and all the other plausible explanations that might make sense or those which weren't explored. And so, at the very least, these kids deserve a new trial that's observed by other people.
We're not saying that Byers is the killer, per se; we're saying there's a lot of things pointing in that direction that were completely overlooked. And that the prosecutor allowed the investigator to give Byers every opportunity to talk his way out of why he owned a hunting knife with dried blood on it. First Byers said the knife had never been used, then he said it was used on animals, then he said he used it to cut deer meat. Then, when the investigators said it was human blood, John Mark Byers said, "Oh, I cut myself with it." For some reason, Byers was just not taken seriously as a suspect.
Bruce: The West Memphis police department brought in all the fathers of the 8-year-old victims and talked to them because, as Joe said, it tends to be a family member or somebody the victim knew. And actually, a better case could have been made against John Mark Byers. More so than the circumstantial evidence that was used for Jessie, Jason, and Damien. Our mindset was that we wanted the viewer of the film to be on the jury. We wanted to show them the case against the teens being persecuted, plus the evidence to disprove that it might have been them, and let the viewer make up their own minds. They could say guilty or not guilty, but we were not there to show that John Mark Byers or the Bojangles chicken man were guilty. And we certainly weren't there to show that Damien, Jessie and Jason were guilty. It is our own opinion that Damien, Jesse and Jason are not guilty. We were convinced that they were innocent, but we wanted the audience to make up their own minds.
Q: In a recent article, John Mark Byers claimed he was drunk and high for most of the filming of the documentaries.
Joe: Yeah, that article is completely fallacious. Bruce was misquoted as saying we thought John Mark Byers was definitely the killer. I mean, that's just not our official position.
Bruce: We're also getting tired of being called "the two Jew boys from New York," which Byers continues to do.
Q: How has Damien changed over the years?
Bruce: Well, he's all grown up. At 18, he was a kid getting all this attention. He was his own worst enemy during the first trial. He's 32 now. I think in some ways he was enjoying the attention he was getting back then, but he also believed in his heart of hearts that he couldn't be convicted for something he didn't do. He's such a bright, intelligent guy. He's somebody that we call a friend. One of the hardest things for Joe and I was when he was convicted, sentenced to death, and then taken away. We were just waving goodbye. It was very difficult. It was a very hard film for Joe and I, and here we are, 13 years later, and we're still talking about the film. It's still with us at least on a weekly basis. There was a time it was with us every day. You think about those kids [Damien, Jason and Jessie] and what they missed out on. How it affected their parents. And when you have kids of your own, as Joe and I do, it's unfathomable, that sense of loss.
Q: What is the status of "Paradise Lost III"?
Joe: It's far from being released. To our shock and dismay, the wheels of justice are shockingly slow. This case has really grabbed the attention of the entertainment community -- and a lot of people who wish to remain anonymous -- so it's a very visible case. But I've come to the conclusion that I don't actually think Arkansas is going to kill Damien. I think that would cause too much controversy. But they're in no hurry to see this go to a federal level.
Bruce: The only good thing about the slowness of the process is that it's keeping Damien alive.
Joe: "Paradise Lost III" is going to follow the case to its eventual conclusion, be it exoneration, stalemate, or execution. At this rate, though, the film won't be out for a couple more years
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