Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [150]
Many viewers in Arkansas were dismayed by the image of their state presented in the film—and by the way reviewers focused on the small-town mentality that they generally assumed had given rise to the verdicts. Michael Atkinson wrote inSpin magazine that West Memphis was “the kind of dreary hellhole that America is sick in the blood with.” Robin Dougherty observed in theMiami Herald that Damien’s “wardrobe and his page-boy-gone-bad haircut wouldn’t get a second look at South Beach.” Roger Ebert focused on the prosecutors’ explanation of motive. “Oh, it’s a great film,” Ebert said, “and one of the things it points out is the need, the real need to create the idea of Satanic rituals in order to explain crimes, because it’s not enough that there could be a sick deviate out there who would kill these boys…. But everybody in the town and in the courtroom and on the jury are all blinded by their fantasies about Satanic cults, and they can’t listen to reason.”
wm3.org
Many filmgoers assumed that since release of the documentary, all three defendants had appealed, and that if the problems revealed in the film were real, they were now being corrected and the teenagers would soon walk free. But three friends in Los Angeles—writer Burk Sauls, graphic artist Kathy Bakken, and photographer Grove Pashley—were not content to assume. They wanted to know more about what had happened in the case, but found it hard to get information. Sauls later explained that after seeing the documentary, “I felt like I’d missed that part where they show why they thought these teenagers were responsible for the murders.” Bakken was equally perplexed. “I felt like I was hanging,” she said. “It was a horrible feeling. I hoped that something was going on, but just to make sure, I wrote to the lawyers and what I found out was that the guys were still languishing in prison.”
In October 1996, the three traveled to Arkansas, trekked through the woods where the bodies were found, drove to three different prisons, and met with Damien, Jason, and Jessie. They also met with Jessie’s lawyer Dan Stidham, the only one of the defense attorneys still committed to proving his client’s innocence. As they later recalled, they found “not a single thing” that supported the idea that the three teenagers had committed the murders. Equally troubling was the sense that “no one was out there helping them, and they had just been abandoned.”
The three began to view what happened in West Memphis as amodern-day version of the infamous Salem witch trials, in which rumors and hysteria had supplanted reason, and resulted in executions. As they often later explained, they also became convinced that just as an uncritical media had promulgated the view of the defendants as evil, a forum for a more rational discussion of what had actually taken place might introduce some of the objectivity that only the passage of time had been able to bring to Salem—in that case, many years too late for the unjustly convicted.328
As the three Californians obtained answers to their questions and dug up supporting material, they decided to publish their findings on the Internet. The Web site they founded, wm3.org, quickly became a clearinghouse for information and opinion on the case.329A synergy developed between the documentary film and