Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [165]
If the producers had understated their belief in the first film that the defendants were innocent, they made it clear in the second film that they believed Byers should be viewed as a prime suspect. Even with the cameras rolling, Byers did little to divert suspicion. Having agreed, for instance, to submit to a polygraph exam for the film, he unself-consciously referred at one point to his wife, Melissa’s, “murder.” After the polygraph examiner questioned Byers about the murder of the eight-year-olds and Byers replied he had nothing to do with them, the examiner pronounced his finding that Byers was telling the truth “as far as [he] could see them.” This finding was offset, however, by the information that before taking the exam, Byers had acknowledged that he was on several prescription drugs—medications that, the viewer was left to conclude, could have distorted the examiner’s readings. Nonetheless, Byers was thrilled with the examiner’s report. “Yes!” he exclaimed, slapping the examiner a big high-five. “I knew I was innocent!”
Reviews of the second film were favorable, though less enthusiastic than for the first.377As before, the region where the documentaries were set came under fire. A reviewer for New Jersey’sNewark Star-Ledger described West Memphis as “a bastion of Judeo-Christian righteousness threatened by the dark allure of secular America,” noting that “this theological landscape” probably explained “why the police would stick to their story and much of the town would support them.”378In a similar vein, film critic Roger Ebert called for the facts of the case to be reexamined in “a neutral setting” because it was clear, as he put it, “that the local people involved have a vested interest in being right about this, no matter whether they’re right or wrong.”
Not surprisingly, reaction in Arkansas was different. When the second documentary was released, two reporters for theArkansas Democrat-Gazette interviewed several people involved in “the bizarre case.”379They reported that Todd Moore had been “outraged” by suggestions that Byers had been involved in the murders. “Even though I did not like him as a neighbor, nor a friend, he is not a murderer,” he told the paper. Prosecutor Brent Davis said he was disgusted by the way the films were “slanted toward the defense,” and detective Mike Allen, who was now a lieutenant, agreed. “If I lived in California and saw that movie and didn’t know the facts, I’d be appalled they charged those boys with the murders,” the paper quoted Allen as saying. “I can understand someone living in New York City or Los Angeles getting fired up after listening to all this garbage.” On the other hand, Allen claimed, “If HBO would run the entire trial without editing it, and then ask viewers if he’s [Damien’s] guilty, I bet there’d be a different response.” But the foreman of the jury that convicted Damien and Jason said that he had seen the first documentary and found its coverage of the trial to be fair, just as he believed the verdict was. “If I was back in that courtroom now,” the foreman told the paper, “I’d vote ‘guilty’ again.”
When the second documentary aired on HBO, thousands of viewers went immediately to the Web site. The site’s organizers reported that from March 13, when the show first aired, to the end of that month, the site had received approximately 133,000 hits. The site urged visitors to send in a postcard from their state, with a message to “Free the West Memphis Three.” Organizers advised that the postcards would be assembled into a long banner, which would be taken to Arkansas as evidence of the national interest in the legal future of the men in prison. One of the site’s founders said that after the second film aired on HBO, the address they’d posted on the Web site began to receive up to sixty postcards a day.
That gratified the filmmakers. But they still hoped for a more dramatic result, such as had been achieved byThe Thin Blue Line, the classic 1988 documentary that had led to the exoneration of a Texas man who’d been held for years on that state’s death row.