"The investigators are now filing in and the reporters are getting ready to cover this news conference." "Many parents in the community will be breathing a sigh of relief if this indeed is the break that police have been waiting for." "Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell is about to begin and he's also bringing in some photographs." "Obviously these will probably be photographs of the suspects." "Of course, suspects unofficially at this point, although many believe in this triple murder of the three 8-year-old boys." "Arrested at 2:44 p.m., Thursday, June the 3rd, 1993." "Jessie Lloyd Misskelley." "Jessie Misskelley is 17 years of age." "Charles Jason Baldwin." "He is 16 years of age." "Michael Wayne Echols." "Mr Echols is 18 years of age." "He is charged with three counts of capital murder." "Were you surprised when these guys were arrested?" "I was surprised about Jason because he's, like, the quiet one of them all." "But I wasn't surprised about Jessie Misskelley and Damien Echols because I just expected it out of them sooner or later." "Killer!" "When the police were asking for clothing so they could give it to the dogs to pick up scent the bandana here was the only thing that I had in my household that had Stevie's scent on it." "I've never washed it." "When I get the need to just want to feel him again I'll grab it and I'll hug it and I'm so thankful I feel an embrace back." "I was walking the route to take Stevie to school and I checked him out, I believe, at 2:30." "Stevie told me a hundred times, probably a thousand, on the way home:" ""I love you, mama." "I love you too, son." And it was just constant." "We got home, first thing I asked him, "Do you have any homework?"" "He said, "I did, but I did it in school."" "And he hung his homework on the refrigerator." "And Michael Moore came up and they started asking, could Stevie go to Michael's house?" "And I said, "No, I'm getting ready for work, I'm cooking supper."" "Both of them, you know, begging:" ""Please, please, please, we'll be back," and all that." "I gave in and I said, "Okay." I said, "But, boy, you better be home by 4:30." "If you're not, I'm gonna ground you for two weeks from that bike."" "I'm gonna say Christopher probably arrived at the house around 3:35 maybe, and he asked me if Stevie was there." "I told him, I said, "I'm surprised you didn't run into him because him and Michael just left."" "He left and he was gonna go searching for Stevie and Michael." "Well, around 4:45, Stevie had-- Still hadn't arrived." "Terry came in." "I told Terry, "Well, let's go ahead and leave."" "We went ahead, and he took me to work." "My night at work was a normal night." "Terry walked in, to the phone, didn't say hi, bye, nothing." "He just walked to the phone and I took two pieces of candy to the car and Amanda was there and I asked her, "Where's Bubba?" She said, "Mama, we can't find him."" "And I thought the worst, that he was dead." "I got out of the car, went through this door, got out of my uniform put sweats on and put a T-shirt on." "Because all I was trying to focus on is where's Stevie, where's he at and I gotta get out there, and I gotta start searching." "Last time we saw him was about 6:30 yesterday evening." " What's--?" "Give me your name." " My name is Mark Byers." "Okay." "Has your son, has this ever happened before?" "None of the boys have ever gone off anywhere." "None of the three have ever been missing or taken off ever before." "What's going through your mind as a parent?" "I'm scared to death." "That's, you know, plain and simple." "I'm scared for the safety and welfare of all three boys." "That particular day, I'd called the West Memphis P.D." "The dispatcher Lucy answered the phone." "She said, "We've had three children missing since last night."" "I said, "Well, you know, I'm gonna go help too."" "I'm not seeing anything." "Not seeing no kids running around on bicycles or nothing." "And then I thought about Robin Hood Trails as I was driving down Goodwyn, and I said:" ""Well I'll" " I'm gonna go over there, just get out and walk around."" "I was looking around, you know, just physically looking out and about." "And then I looked into the small ditch." "That's where I saw the tennis shoe at." "I called West Memphis Police Department to have Mike Allen meet me out here." "And so I showed him the area of the tennis shoe." "And Mike had said he was going to take it out." "Mike fell into the water." "I was looking down on him like this." "He looked up and I said, "What?"" "And he said, "It feels like my leg is caught on something." "Like a log or something."" "And Mike fell backwards, and when he fell backwards his leg came up and one of the little bodies was on his leg." "From the moment they told me Stevie was dead I really lost it, lost all touch with reality." "Pam Hobbs' son, Steve, and two of his friends were found murdered Thursday before last." "It's more a part of my life than I would like it to be." "Because frankly I'd like to be able to not have those three 8-year-old boys' pictures in my mind." "What you found, you found three boys that had been hog-tied and thrown in the water." "It appeared that they had been sexually mutilated." "That appears to be cult-related." "The West Memphis Police Department a lot of times would ask me about occult things as though I were the guru." "I probably was because there wasn't anybody else that was doing it." "This programme is designed to help law enforcement officers better understand Satanic cults." "I got some books and I spoke to police organisations around the country that had some experience with it." "Okay, we have a rope here." "If you look at it closely" "I don't know if the camera can pick this up." "but there's blood on this noose." "The police department asked me to put together a list of people that we had on probation that might be involved in that type of activity." "Well, the guy that I knew that was involved the most in it was Damien Echols." "The two guys he ran with, Jessie and Jason...." "Jessie would fight." "Jason was not very aggressive, in that respect but I believe he would do anything that Damien asked him to do." "Eight months have passed since the three boys were killed." "Cameras are in place and miles of cable laid in preparation for this highly publicised murder trial." "I guess they found that those three were the most likely to have done it." "Move back." "And then, of course, they had the confession from Jessie." "The most compelling evidence yet was introduced in open court." "Misskelley's taped confession made to police." "I saw Damien hit this one...." "Hit this one boy real bad." "Then he start screwing him and stuff." "Jason turned around and hit Steve Branch and started doing the same thing." "Michael Moore took off running, so I chased him and grabbed him and held him until they got there, and then I left." "If he does not run through the woods and chase him down and bring him back, Michael Moore lives." "Did Damien invite you to some meeting?" " He did." "A cult, Satanic meeting." " Okay." "Tell me some of the things y'all do, being in this cult." "We go out kill dogs and stuff." "Some of my friends had said they saw a hog's head out here and they saw the body in a plastic bag." "The state is now trying to prove motive in this case calling this a cult-related killing." "Whether that will be enough to sway the women and men sitting on this jury remains to be seen." "Damien, any comment about the charges?" "Did you do it?" "I got a letter in the mail telling me that I had summons to be on the jury." "And I didn't want to be on there in the beginning." "But I didn't know how to get out of it." "Is it your opinion and do you want to tell this jury that these crimes were motivated by occult beliefs?" "Yes." "Blood is the life force." "They prefer to have a child that is young." "There's evidence of genital mutilation, and the red is the shaft of the penis." "Jason told me how he dismembered the kid." "He sucked the blood from the penis and the scrotum and put the balls in his mouth." "You take this knife and drag it, and it rips and tears." "The knife is being twisted and the victim is moving." "Just like in the picture." "Damien, he had a book that he wrote in." "It was pretty dark." "A lot of death, a lot of-- He talked about dead children." ""Thirsty for blood and the terror of mortal men." "Look favourably on my sacrifice."" "I think they went out in the woods." "They may not have been meaning to kill them." "And then it just got out of control." "And Damien, I think he was the mastermind over Jason and Misskelley." "I do believe that." "I do." "You begin to see inside Damien Echols." "And you look inside there and there's not a soul in there." "I know he's guilty, you know." "I can't imagine the fear going through them boys watching one another get killed." " Knowing they was next." " I can't believe the heinous crime." ""We, the jury, find Damien Echols guilty of capital murder in the death of Stevie Branch." "Guilty of capital murder in the death of Chris Byers." "Guilty of capital murder in the death of Michael Moore."" "A message has to be sent." "You can't be involved in murder and expect to get away with it." "Misskelley was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Michael Moore." "And 40 years for the murders of Steven Branch and Christopher Byers." ""We have determined that Jason Baldwin shall be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole."" "If I'd been on the jury, I sure would have found them guilty." "If there is ever an appropriate case for the death penalty in Arkansas..." " ...you've got it in your hands now." " That they burn in hell." "They wanna worship the devil, let them meet him." "I hope they do soon." ""We the jury have determined that Damien Echols shall be sentenced to death by lethal injection."" "I was kind of, I guess, happy, if I could" "Might say that word, that everybody else was as angry at them as I was." "Now my boy can play and go on about his life in heaven the way it is and I'll go on with mine the best I can." "And I'm glad it's over." "It's like the community felt like they were relieved that somebody was behind bars and that they didn't have to be as scared as they were." "They were guilty." "This call originates from an Arkansas correctional facility." "I have a prepaid call from:" " Damien." " An inmate at Varner Unit." "If you wish to accept" " Thank you." "Damien and I probably have 5000 letters that we've written to each other over the past 15" " Fourteen, 15 years." "You know, it's the way we got to know each other." "I saw the film Paradise Lost, which is a documentary that was made about the original trial." "I was living in New York City at the time and I saw it at probably the second time it was screened." "We were just watching TV the night we were arrested." "We were in the bedroom, turned the light off." "To hear Damien talk in that film, he reminds me so much of myself." "Did she tell you whenever she awarded herself the first-place prize and rode in a parade?" "She had this sign on the side of a car that's saying "first place" and it's got a blue ribbon on it." "And it was not even a contest!" "She just gave herself "first place."" "After a series of letters, writing, corresponding with him and then I cared deeply about him." "And the next thing I know, I'm in Arkansas." "When I was a real little kid, I had, uhh a pet turtle for a while." "A box turtle." "Did you do any painting on its shell?" "I most certainly did not." "We did." "Seeing the film, you realise something has gone wrong." "You don't get the full picture because there's so much to the story as we've learned, as it's unfolded over the years." "I was struck by the fact that these people didn't commit these crimes." "They don't have the right people in prison." "Questions about whether justice was served have loomed in this case since the verdicts." "The HBO documentary Paradise Lost gave the case worldwide attention." "I'm so glad to see so many people here, people who are interested in this case." "When I started to write Devil's Knot, my friends said, "Mara, they did it."" "And I said, "Well, that may be, and if that's true I'm gonna find out."" "This was probably the first crowd-sourced criminal investigation in history, is about the only way to describe it." "The case was supposedly solved." "If it was an open case the West Memphis Police wouldn't be required to make available documents." "The West Memphis Police put together an incredibly large investigation." "Even if a lot of it was nonsense and rumours." "So we could take on the case, we could begin to ask the questions." "We can look at Jessie's confession and we could say:" ""Wait a second, what did he really say..." "From the start, after Jessie Misskelley made his statement to police it was recorded, transcribed." "And then it was immediately leaked to The Commercial Appeal." "I read the confession on the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal just like everybody else did." "And it seemed like it happened." "When we were appointed by the court in 1993 we thought it wasn't gonna be a jury trial." "We thought it was gonna be a plea." "As I got deeper into the case and looked at things they just didn't start making sense." "Misskelley's versions of what happened changed wildly and he couldn't get the story right every time or any time." "Everybody round here knew that Jessie didn't do it." "He didn't like Damien, he was scared of him." "He, uh, stayed away from him as much as possible." "Well, he wasn't too good in school." "Had to take him out of school and I got him started doing mechanic work." "He caught on pretty good." "When I was growing up, my dad always taught me, you know...." "Tell the truth." "Tell the police the truth." "I thought the police was there to help you." "That's when they, uhh, started questioning me." "Gary Gitchell and Bryn Ridge was you know, asking me some questions." "You know, about the kids." "And I tell them, "I didn't know nothing about it."" "The only thing I knew was what, you know...." "What I was told from another guy." "I mean, I kept telling them the whole time, "I wanna go home." "I wanna go home."" "Certainly one of the reasons behind why he confessed is that he's borderline mentally retarded." "He was trying to compose a story as though he was there." "He just didn't have the details." "Right after, uh, they beat up all three of them." "Beat them up real bad?" "And then they took their clothes off?" "Mm..hmm." "And then they" "Then they tied them?" "Then they tied them up." "Tied their hands up." "And about what time was it that all this was taking place?" "I was there about 12." "About noon?" "Okay." "Was it after school had let out?" "I didn't go to school." "It couldn't have happened at noon." "It couldn't have happened before the kids were out of school." "So they kept leading him down the path from noon to 4:30, 5:30, 6:30." "Was it getting dark?" "Your time period might not be exactly right, what you're saying." "Police officers don't like the word "interrogation."" "They like the word "interview."" "So Mr Misskelley wasn't interviewed, he was interrogated." "And he was interrogated from 9:00 in the morning until after dark." "This is an entire day that he was being interrogated yet we only had a few minutes of the audio tape." "Jessie...." "About what time was it when the boys came up to the woods?" "I'd say it was about-- It was about 5 or so." "Five or 6." "Ummm...." "All right, you told me earlier it was around 7 or 8 or...." "Which time is it?" " It's 7 or 8." " Okay." "I remember it was starting to get dark." "Okay, well, that clears it up." "We all have our breaking points." "I think it's important that people realise that this is not just about a person with disabilities falsely confessing to a crime." "This is about police misconduct." "That's what this is about." "Once police convince the person to make a statement against their interest, how does that person know what to say?" "Did anyone use a stick and hit the boys with?" "Damien had a kind of a big old stick when he hit that first one." "It's because of this phenomenon known as contamination the police will suggest facts about how the crime happened." "What was to keep these little boys from running off?" "Were their hands tied in a fashion to where they couldn't have run?" "You tell me." "They're sitting there listening to the police." "Listening to their interrogators ask those leading questions." ""Were these boys sexually assaulted?" Then they know what story to tell back." "Another boy was cut, I understand." "Where was he cut at?" " At the bottom?" " On his bottom?" "Do you mean right here?" "In his groin area?" "Do you know what his penis is?" "Yeah, that's where he was cut at." "Did it ever occur to you that what he was telling you was false?" " His entire story was false?" " Jessie simply got confused." "That's all." "I mean, Jessie was not convicted on the basis of his confession." "And neither was Damien and Jason." "They were convicted on the basis of Gary Gitchell's confession." "That was his story." "All they had to do was get Jessie to agree to it." "It's not particularly difficult to get a confession from someone who's mentally handicapped." "It's like interviewing a 3- or 4-, 5-year-old child." "People don't tend to confess to crimes that they didn't commit." "You know, I'm sure there may be circumstances where a person might have a low mentality." "He's slow-minded, is what it is, you know what I mean?" "It took a while for him to, you know, get things straight in his mind." "Kind of slow-minded, you know." "Well, hell, everybody's a little bit slow-minded anyway." "I just have better faith in our law enforcement than to force somebody to make a statement that's untrue." "I think that it was essentially poisoned from the very beginning." "The most basic things about the investigations talking to the family members." "Getting statements from police that evening." "You know, whether they had these alibis or not, but it wasn't done." "And it's why the case went bad." "Y'all need to be investigating some of these people who've been arrested for child molestation." "Well, it's like this." "We've got a story that is very, very believable." "It is so close to perfect that we have to believe it." "I don't see how anyone could believe it." "Jessie Misskelley said it happened that morning and everything." "Jason was in school." "And then Jason mowed his uncle's yard." "He got some money, went to play video games." "I called Jason's house, and Jason and Damien and Jason's brother were playing video games." "They weren't talking much." "I got a little irritated at them." "Damien asked me to call him later that night." "There was never a night that we never spoke." "I remember that we had talked that night." "When I spoke to police and they came one afternoon and they spoke to me and I talked to them once and that was it." ""On 9-10-1993, I met Jennifer Bearden at her residence in Bartlett, Tennessee." "The interview was a result of having obtained information that she'd been on the phone with Damien on the day of the homicide." "She informed me of several times when she'd been on the phone with Damien and Jason after school." "And until about 9:30 p.m. on the evening of 5-5-'93."" "I was never given a chance to at least give them, you know an alibi to the jury, I mean." "And honestly, I don't think it would have changed their minds." "I think they were pretty dead-set on what they were gonna decide." "The evidence will show that not only was Mr Misskelley not in Robin Hood Hills at the time of these homicides, he was in a different county 40 miles away the time these crimes occurred." "There were a lot of alibi witnesses." "When was the first time you remember seeing Jessie?" "At 2:00." "Jessie came to the house." "I asked if he could watch the kids while I went to a conference." "She got back about 4:00 and we went walking." "I seen him walking down the street." "I met him on the corner." "Talking about him fixing to leave to go to wrestling." "A lot of these folks, when we went back and visited with them they came to the conclusion, "Oh, yeah, that's the night that we went wrestling with Jessie."" " Did you go wrestling?" " Yes, sir, I did." " Okay, do you remember who went?" " Jessie, Freddy." "Me and Jessie and Freddy and James was at wrestling that night, you know." "And that's the night that he got hurt." "And that's the night that so-and-so only went with us..." " Once." " ...one time." "That was the same night that we signed this register at the wrestling hall." " Do you remember seeing Misskelley?" " Yes, sir." " Yes, sir." " Yes, sir." " You remember Jessie Misskelley?" " Yes, sir." " Are you positive about that?" " Yes, sir." "Looking through the juror's notes, they hardly seemed to pay attention during the alibi portion of it." "You could say I sort of, like, died myself because I shut out humanity and I didn't like people, I was a hateful person and before this happened I wasn't that type of person." "Words can't explain what the grief, and what you go through...." "We have found this to be a world of its own." "We had quite a few arguments and stuff because I couldn't let go." "He told me I had to let it go, I had to keep living and I told him I was still in that ditch just as much as my son was and I was clawing my way out of it the best way that I knew how." "I left Terry in 2002 and we were divorced in 2004." "I do think that you can meet someone and know that there's something there." "That there's some journey there for you." "But I think it takes a long, it does take a long time and I think it's a painful process, actually." "I was talking about it and how really and truly stressed out you were that day." "It was the first time you'd been touched by anybody, like, in seven years." "And I'll never forget you were, like, so completely pale." "And you were shaking, and I kind of thought you were gonna pass out at one point." "It was a Buddhist ceremony, and we kind of wrote it ourselves and" "They had a little" " We had a little temple set up or a little altar set up..." "We did." "...incense burning on it." "You know, they had two guards up there watching the whole thing." "And you could tell they had no idea you know, what the hell was going on." "So they just pretty much stayed out of the way." "We'd intersperse lots of, you know, bowing, then kissing and hugging." "I think you're supposed to only kiss once or something in the ceremony." "We just" " We made it seem like it was a part of the ceremony." "So that was nice, that was really nice." "But, you know, back then it was nothing like it is now, you know with the people who knew about the case." "So it was kind of nice because it was real low-key." "I had talked to Lorri." "She had come out to talk about the case." "My attitude at the time was, you know, we cannot do this." "They were adamant that this should be and was a case about innocence." ""We don't want you to focus on death versus life without parole." "This is a case about innocence."" "My reaction was, if it is a case about innocence what they said is that there's all of this investigation that has to be done on the ground in Arkansas." "And we're, you know, a two-lawyer partnership in San Francisco." "How are we possibly gonna get the resources to get on the ground and really investigate a case in Arkansas?" "Lorri Davis said, "I'll find a way to do it."" "I've quit my job, my other job, so I that can work full-time on the case." "Attorneys for Damien Echols are appealing their client's conviction on Arkansas Rule 37, ineffective counsel." "Prosecutors disagree." "It was effective, it was thorough." "It was a 17-day trial." "Outside the court, supporters unveiled a banner of more than 2500 postcards each pleading to free the West Memphis Three." "It was always about free the West Memphis Three." "We were raising funds and it wasn't even to raise money for their defence." "It was to raise money so they had money when they got out." "Because the day was coming soon." "I decided it should be Black Flag songs." "I called Iggy Pop, he said sure." "I called Lemmy, he said, "I'm in."" "Called Chuck D from Public Enemy, he said, "You got it."" "All to help these three guys who I'd never met." "I went to your benefit show in '03 for the West Memphis Three." "It was like the best concert I've ever been to." " See?" " I can't believe this is still going on." "Yeah, well." "I saw a little bit of myself." "Damien liked to hang out alone and wrote in his journals that he was depressed." "Hello." "He liked to listen to weird music." "Check." "He was a wise-ass in the face of law enforcement." "I mean, are you kidding?" "It could have been me." "Could have been me." "Not everyone agreed with Rollins' message." "The parents of the murdered children showed displeasure with picket signs." "My baby was murdered and butchered like an animal and his two friends were too." "Whatever punishment they get, they deserve." "Michael's mother, Diana Moore, agrees, telling us, "Make no mistake about it." "These three you see convicted and sentenced did it."" "I started getting very passionate, very sincere hate mail." "Because if you are seen to be sticking up for someone who someone else truly believes has murdered a child there's no way you can reason with that person." "I remember thinking that if we could get involved we'd probably get them out in maybe one or two years." "That's how naive I was." "It's usually on average of like 15 to 20 years." "If you would have told us that three or four years in I think it would have been quite daunting." "This is the first e-mail that I received from Fran and Peter, and it's 7-25-'05." ""What a horror story, unbelievable." "Something positive has to come from this." "What can we do down here in New Zealand?" "Our names are Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh." "We would like to offer financial assistance to help facilitate, hopefully a positive outcome in Damien's appeal to the federal court."" "When Fran and I first got involved it felt like the case was in a holding pattern." "But it wasn't a holding pattern for Damien's chances of staying alive." "That doesn't go into a holding pattern." ""Dear Fran and Peter, your e-mail was a welcome sight on a very hot Monday morning here in Arkansas." "My name is Lorri Davis and I have been involved in working on the case for nine years." "There are many twists and turns to the story." "It's still incredibly frustrating." "Appeal's taking forever and funds always needed."" "I have a pathological hatred of bullying and people in power crapping on people who have no ability to defend themselves." "I believe in justice." "I think there are good people and bad people." "People do horrible things and should be punished." "Justice should be fair, it should be honourable it should be decent, it should speak to our values as human beings that right must prevail." "And all that I could see in the case of the West Memphis Three is wrong was prevailing and that wrong was being perpetrated by people who, I believe, knew they were doing wrong." "Most people think that this case is something extraordinary." "It's spectacular in some sort of way, and it's not." "Burnett and Fogleman thought they could make a name for themselves off of this case." "Because, really, you're dealing with three kids who were bottom of the barrel, poor white trash that nobody's ever gonna ask another question about." "He thought they would say, "Guilty."" "This whole thing would be swept under the rug." "The state would kill me." "Jason and Jessie would spend their lives in prison." "He'd move up the political ladder." "That's all he cared about." "This case is nothing out of the ordinary." "This happens all the time." "How did I decide which trial would go first?" "And the reason I'm hesitating, I'm trying to think if that's a question that I should be answering." "In general, a case with a confession would be your easier case as opposed to one without direct evidence." " Ten feet, ma'am." "Back up." " Okay." "Are you gonna testify against your co-defendants?" "Jessie, were you forced to talk about this?" "The prosecutors had a problem." "They could not play the tape of Misskelley's statement at the second trial." "They needed Mr Misskelley to testify." "They thought they were gonna lose the other two." "Are you worried about his testimony?" "Judge Burnett appointed Phillip Wells to interview Mr Misskelley to make sure he didn't really, really, really want to testify against Baldwin and Echols." "Here's a young 18-year-old, under a lot of stress facing life plus 40 in penitentiary." "He has to make sure whatever options and offers are available to him are looked into or communicated." "Promises of lesser sentences, you know, a much easier life in prison." "Many defendants would have jumped on that deal." "Jessie said no." "They can't come up with physical evidence." "They've got to turn to witnesses who they can convince to give statements in court." "That's the only evidence they come up with." "Just when it seemed attorneys for the state had their back against a wall Craighead County Courthouse came to an eerie silence as 16-year-old Michael Carson, a former juvenile inmate who spent time with Baldwin, took the stand." "I was doing serious adult drugs and, I mean, I was doing a lot of them." "I got out there." "I thought birds had cameras on them." "Michael Carson, he was fixing to go to the penitentiary for several counts of residential burglary and that is when the prosecutor got a hold of him." "Were you offered anything as far as a reward or anything of that nature?" "No, sir, and if I was, I would deny it." "Jason was not very outspoken." "He wasn't, you know, jumping around and stuff." "He's a very quiet, to-himself type of person." " What did he tell you?" " He told me how he dismembered the kid he sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth." "I remember not knowing why I was doing what I was doing." "I remember it actually going through my head." "I would have this massive illusion in my head and swear to God it was real." "And the kids, that night I let them listen to the news and they just went crazy." "They said, "He's a lying son of a bitch." "Jason didn't tell him nothing."" "I could understand why he would never want to see me again or talk to me again, but I'm just telling him right now that I'm sorry." "I made the statement to Larry, the sheriff." "I said, "Larry, those kids are not guilty."" "He said, "Joyce." He said, "It's this simple." "Crittenden County fucked up, now we've got to clean up."" "I'm a drug addict." "I was doing a lot of inhalants, LSD, I was huffing gas all the time." "It's bad." "It takes your whole perspective on life and makes it a dream." "And they knew that." "They knew the drugs that I was doing." "Did you walk in those woods in the winter?" "Yeah, that was the best time because during summer it's really marshy." "During the winter it was froze, the ground would be froze solid." "So you didn't have to worry about all the mud and all that business." "I love the thought of being out there." "The cool, dark part of the year, it's my absolute favourite time of year." "Part of it was that whenever I was out that was always the time of year whenever I felt the safest." "Because most people, whenever it gets cold, you know, they're not out." "So it's almost like at that time of year the entire world is almost yours." "Nobody else wants it." "Jason and I would talk about leaving that place, moving out of that place but we were so young that it never was a definite plan, it was always just we've got to get the hell out of here." "The thing that Jason always loved was art." "You know, painting drawing, things like that." "He would do these paintings that were absolutely incredible when he had art class in school." "The teacher would refuse to grade them." "She would say, "That's not what I told you to paint." "That's not what I told you to draw, I don't want to see one more skull."" "She would say, you know, "You were assigned to do a still-life of flowers."" "Jason was like, "Fuck that, I'm not doing that, it's not what I want to do."" "I've jokingly said to Lorri before that I think that, in a lot of ways I may have brought this on myself, this entire situation." "Because when I was a child I knew what my passion was I knew what my drive was, I knew what my desire was." "I loved magic." "I would say to myself, you know, these names that people think of." "I would say, "One day my name is gonna eclipse all of them." "I'm gonna be the greatest magician there's ever been."" "And I had no idea that that meant I would have 20 years to sit alone in a prison cell and practise and study." "But that's a word that you don't even use here because when people hear the word "magic" anything even remotely connected to magic has to be evil in some kind of way." "I noticed that Damien he had on kind of a black duster-looking coat and carried a staff." "And I" " You know, that's kind of weird-looking." "But that's one of the things that I testified to in the court hearing." "Damien, Jason and Jessie had no motive whatsoever to kill these three boys." "You know, boys that they didn't even know." "And so, therefore, the state went to the only motiveless theory they could possibly go to." "We thought that the best thing to do would be to actually get some expert analysis on the crime itself." "As far as we could see the best person to get would be John Douglas who was there at the creation of the FBI Behavioural Science Unit." "From the evidence and the crime scene, they start to put a picture together of who committed the crime and why they committed the crime." "My role when I was brought in was primarily to analyse the case to see does it really fit the three people they have in prison?" "I didn't wanna know anything about them." "I don't want to become prejudiced and be swayed in any way." "If I do an analysis like this, you may not like what I say." "I'm not a hired gun." "When I work on a case like this, I work for the victims." "No matter who brings me in, I'm working for the victims." "This appeared to be what we call a lust murder." "There's blunt-force trauma inflicted on these children." "There was evidence of sexual mutilation to one of the victims." "Three victims were hog-tied with their shoelaces from their wrists to their ankles." "And on the surface, it appeared to be a sexually motivated crime." "The focus of the investigation is always on the families." "You start from there, and you work your way out." "There were some police notes where they had looked into the possibility that a stepfather might be involved." "They take me back to the police station and said:" ""We have information that you are involved in this crime and that you did it."" "I may have information that you have something to do with the disappearance of the boys, and, ultimately, of the murder." "It's almost more than I can believe, you know, what you just said to me." "And it makes me so mad inside that I just kind of got to hold myself here in this chair." "I had hair removed." "I had to have over 30 pubic hairs pulled out, plus the roots." "We're gonna interview the other two fathers." "We're gonna ask them the same questions." "They said, "We're gonna do the other family members just like we gonna do you."" "The assumption is that the crime was unusual, it was bizarre, grotesque." "Even when Paradise Lost 2 comes out and they are presenting an alternative scenario they're going to an equally theatrical possible perpetrator, John Mark Byers." ""Dearest Damien." "There are many things we can do that can shed light on the truth of what happened to those boys." "It is impossible to do something this heinous and not leave a personal imprint." "We need to do extensive investigative work on Byers investigative work that the police failed to do."" "I went down to the Memphis area and conducted an interview with Mark Byers, or attempted to conduct an interview." "I knocked on his door, he came out, his wife came out and pretty much, he wanted to kick me off his porch." "He didn't wanna talk to me." "It was daily grind, fighting on the Internet with people, being in a place and someone recognising me and get up and go call their friends then all of a sudden, I got a mob, and I got to sneak out the back door because I know a ass-kicking's coming." ""We need to find Mark Byers' living relatives." "We need to find Ryan Clark." "We need to figure out a strategy for getting him to talk." "We need to know where and at what time they went looking for Christopher on May 5th." "We need to locate all of Byers' vehicles that he owned at that time and Luminol-test them." "We need to access Byers' ex-residence and Luminol-test every floor surface in the house." "Lots of questions, and not many answers." "But right now we're still stumbling around in the dark looking for a light switch."" "Mark Byers, he had a tough life." "He has a criminal history, got busted for some prescription drugs." "But he is not the type of personality that would perpetrate a crime like the crimes I was looking at here in West Memphis." "When we learned the case the timeline just didn't add up to us." "Beyond the theatrical nature of Mark Byers he didn't have a motive, he didn't actually have the opportunity." "It became clear to us that you know, people were looking at Byers because they thought he was the sort of person who could do this." "And our reaction to that was the reason Damien got convicted was that people thought he was the sort of person who could do this." "When I was in the Bureau we came up with a crime classification manual we designed." "We considered Satanic because these cops were bringing back these cases to us." "Satanic murders, Satanic murders." "There were classes being offered all over the country." "Oprah Winfrey had shows Geraldo Rivera had shows, it was all over here." "Another area that you might find Satanic ritual carving is in the stomach area." "This is not a Satanic-- This is not a ritual." "It's a murder." "It's a murder maybe by one crazy guy." "If you're calling this Satanic, we could have just as many murders where a Bible is left there." "Does that make it a Christian murder?" "It's a Bible?" "I mean, no, it's nuts." "It's just one, you know, crazy person." "Police say Satanists in our area often conduct their rituals in remote, wooded areas." "At some point did Damien invite you to some meeting?" "He did." "The West Memphis Police didn't seem interested in corroborating anything, they just took everything at face value." " A cult, Satanic meeting." " Okay." "I got a phone call from a lawyer in Fayetteville who had Vicki Hutcheson sitting at her desk." "Would you raise your right hand?" "Said, "She's ready to recant her trial testimony, how fast can you get here?"" "She obviously asked for immunity from the state which they refused to grant." "So here's the State of Arkansas at the Rule 37 hearings still stonewalling still refusing to let the truth shine on this case." "Damien and I stood back and then these kids took their clothes off and I looked at Damien and I said, "I want to leave."" "I testified to it but I lied on the stand." "It was frightening to listen to her tell the truth the truth that I knew had existed all these years." "The truth that she wouldn't come out and say because she was afraid of what would happen to her." "You mentioned that you went and met Jerry Driver at the Marion Police Department." "I'm trying to remember." "I do, I know who she is." "It's just kind of back in my mind somewhere." "What did they ask you to do?" "Do I think" "They asked me, do I think I could get, um, Jessie to introduce me to Damien." "All we asked her was to go in and see what she could find out." "Now that was with police department's knowledge and consent." "He's the one that suggested:" ""If you're gonna have Damien over, you to need to have demon books on your coffee table."" "The only thing she was coached to do was to not get caught because we were actually afraid that if she got caught, he'd kill her." "Damien looks down at those demon book things." "And I said, "Why are you so nervous?"" "And he said, "Well, you'd be nervous too if they thought you killed three little kids."" "And I said, "Why would they think you, of all people?"" "And he goes, "I'm" " Because I'm weird, I guess, you know." And I was like" "I was like, "Well, did you kill them?"" "He said, "Well, no!" "I wouldn't do something like that," like I was stupid." "And he was just like any other kid his age, you know." "He was just a normal kid." "Any other contact with Damien?" "None at all." "I was just a big liar, and I really was just a big liar." "I've spent a lot of the last 17 years looking back at what I should have done and what I could have done." "You know, it would be easy for me to say I did the best I could." "But I didn't." "There's no substitute for experience and it's hard to look back." "It was before the trial when Mr Fogleman was leaving my office I stopped him in the hallway, and I asked him, "Is this actually Satanic?" "Is that what they're saying?"" "And he" " His response was no, it's not Satanic." "It's just murder." "It's not something made up, it's not something dreamed up it's not a figment of our imagination." "The evidence was that this murder had the trappings of an occult murder a Satanic murder." "When you take the crime scene, the injuries to these kids the testimony about sucking of blood, and there's a transference of power from drinking of blood." "Could you have any reason to understand why someone would do that to three 8-year-old boys?" "Well, you know, everyone can say, "Well, who did you tell?" Well, nobody." "I think this case was never about justice because they knew we didn't do this." "Fogleman knew we did not do this." "Is it a coincidence this knife is found in the lake hidden behind Jason Baldwin's house?" "And the same person that this knife is found behind is the person that told Michael Carson that he did it and he sucked the blood out of the kid's penis, is that a coincidence?" "If you ask me, the single greatest offence with the knife in the lake." "Fogleman had divers search a small lake behind the trailer park where Baldwin lived." "That search produced a knife." "To go out there in this big pond and to go right there and in just less than 30 minutes and come up with this" " This knife." "I mean, you win the lottery." "And then there's a reporter covering it." "We interviewed and have the declaration of the diver." "He said that he was given a description of the knife and where it would be located." "The press said they were told-- And we have the reporter." ""Come to the lake, we are about to make a discovery."" "The prosecution knew the knife was in the lake." "Nothing wrong with that." "You have an informant, they tell you:" ""Oh, the crime was committed and we know where the murder weapon is." "They committed the crime and they threw it in the lake."" "The thing is that informant is of critical importance." "They're the one who connects it to the crime." "They're the one who allows you to say it was the murder weapon." "Why don't you call that informant at trial?" "Why instead do you tell a lie, as John Fogleman did and say, "I just had a hunch it was in the lake"?" "The reason is that John Fogleman had been told how it got in the lake." "It was thrown in the lake by Jason's mother." "All I know is my son is innocent, and he has been quiet." "And so there's a connection to Jason." "Why not bring it forward?" "Because the same people who told them that it was in the lake let him know that it was thrown into the lake a year before the crime." "He knew that knife in the lake had nothing to do with the crime because he had been told when it was thrown in the lake." "This knife, state's exhibit 77, caused those injuries right there." "Dash, dash, dash." "I think the knife that was in the courtroom was the one that was used on the Byers boy." "I still think that." "People that found the bodies and saw the wounds said that it appeared to be cult-related." "Serrations are consistent with being inflicted with this type of knife." "The only way you can tell if a serrated knife has been used is by looking for the serrations that rub across the skin." "Arkansas is one of the last remaining states that has a prosecutor-controlled crime lab." "What that means is the medical examiner is not a witness for what actually happened, but he is an actual arm of the prosecution." "At this time I would ask that Dr Peretti be allowed to show the photographs and use...." "One of the key elements of the case that we wanted to get into was Frank Peretti." "Dr Frank Peretti was the assistant medical examiner at the time the autopsies were conducted." "He's not actually board-certified." "You get five chances to take the board exams in Arkansas and Frank Peretti has failed them twice." "He's opted out of taking them again for personal reasons." "His medical testimony at the trial created a picture in the jury's mind of a ritualistic, sexual murder." "These type of injuries we commonly see in the female rape victim." "Trying to spread the legs for penetration." "The anal orifice was dilated, it could be from putting an object in the anus." "Those types of injuries we generally see in children who are forced to perform oral sex." "There's evidence of genital mutilation." "This is the cutting wound here and the red is the shaft of the penis." "Cutting wounds, superficial cuts, gouging-type injuries." "Multiple superficial, interrupted cuts, multiple cuts." "Stab wounds and cutting wounds." "The knife is being twisted and the victim is moving." "Gouging where the skin has been pulled out." "Gouging wounds, cutting wounds, stab wounds." "Skin is going to tear, skin has just been pulled away, torn out." "Those were the most horrifying photographs that anyone could imagine." "Those jurors were scared to death." "He's painting the picture in jury's minds of an absolutely horrific murder." "Cruel and unusual." "It's what the jury hears coming out of Frank Peretti's mouth more than anything that sentences Damien Echols to death." "We took our lead from Peretti himself because during the trial he holds up this textbook on forensic pathology." "It's written by Vincent DiMaio, who is a renowned medical examiner in Texas." "I believe you indicated that Dr DiMaio and you are on a first-name basis." "Yes, I did." "And so we went to DiMaio himself." "The thing that's most interesting in this case is that while the autopsies are done in exquisite detail to me, the interpretation of the findings are completely wrong." "There is nothing here that I would say was due to a knife." "Either the cutting edge, the tip or the back of a knife." "If you think about how stupid it is, they're saying they're killing these kids." "And, you know, dragging the back of a knife across them." "When I looked at the photographs it's obvious that by the appearance of the wounds they had occurred after death." "If you're gonna torture and mutilate someone, that's to cause pain to them." "But these wounds are postmortem so why are you torturing and mutilating dead bodies?" "It doesn't make sense." "The irregular nature of the wounds, some scratches." "There's no bleeding, there's no pattern." "To me, it's obvious animal activity." "We actually called the place back there we used to ride our bikes Turtle City." "That's just behind there, because there were so many turtles." "Everywhere, hundreds of them." "Painted turtles, snapping turtles, soft-shell turtles, all kinds of turtles." "And they actually got such thing called the alligator snapping turtle that could be found." "I mean...." "Big turtles with humps in their back." "That make them look kind of like alligators." "Our house was up against a ditch, so we would go back." "There was a lot of them there, turtles, fish and mud." "You'd see an armadillo that fell in the water or got hit by a car and there'd be like four or five turtles just chewing on it." "Red flags should go up when a body is pulled from the water." "Especially in the month of May." "At that latitude, those reptiles are in high gear." "They're feeding at their highest level, their most voracious appetites." "Just keep going, keep going." "This is the bite mark I'm looking for." "You can already start to see the outline of the jaw." "The animals usually start with soft tissue." "And the scrotum and the skin around the penis is soft, they're coming off so the animal doesn't have to go against the body mass itself but goes at the things that are dangled in front of it." "And then they'll go to things like lips and the tip of the nose and the ears." "What you're dealing with is a horrendous crime." "Three young boys murdered in cold blood." "Just that alone upsets people." "You look at the bodies and there's these savage injuries all over." "It affects people emotionally and it warps their judgement." "And then someone says, "Maybe it's Satanic!"" "And they say, "Well, the only type of person who would do this would be someone like that."" "We didn't want just one opinion." "We thought the best thing to do was basically to get six or seven of the very best people, get a wide range of views." "Every single one of the independent experts that we approached came out with the same findings." "There's no evidence that these injuries occurred while they were alive." "There's no evidence that, as the medical examiner testified they were sexually assaulted, pulled up by the ears, fellatio involved." "The problem is bad science drives out good science." "You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a forensic dentist to look at that serrations on the back of that knife and say that that knife made these marks." "I mean, give me a break." "That is the most ridiculous statement that I've ever heard." "And to sell that to a jury is unconscionable." "We flew several of these forensic pathologists down to Arkansas to meet with Dr Peretti face-to-face." "Dr Peretti listened patiently and nodded his head." "And said he would consider all this." "But he'd concluded that this couldn't have been caused by a turtle and that's kind of where he drew his line." "Now here all this information comes in." "I start seeing a totally different kind of situation." "This is not a lust murder where the killer is going after the genital areas of the victim." "This is what's starting to develop to me as a personal-cause homicide directed at these children, but maybe one more than" " More than others." "In all probability this person would have been interviewed." "Should have been by now, because he would be the logical person." "There's a connection with the victims." "The person who killed those three kids is still out there walking on the street." "To me, that would seem like the highest priority." "Not this case." "Not me, Jason or Jessie." "You know, don't get me wrong we're thankful for the support that people give us." "But the main thing I would be thinking about is there's someone who killed three kids still living in my neighbourhood." "If you disregard the state's Satanic ritual theory the entire nature of the crime changes." "It starts you thinking, "Maybe we're not looking for these extreme suspects." "We're looking for someone who's kind of ordinary, invisible."" "So at that point we thought we should put more funding into the DNA testing." "We're getting packages and shipments of all sorts of DNA samples that we're then forwarding on to our DNA expert." "Out there was a process that was going on that either would be the impetus for exoneration or would be the state's last chance to demonstrate in this controversial case that he was good for it." "And Damien's reaction to that was that he was absolutely adamant about the DNA testing." "Of all the samples and all the various hairs and things that got tested there was nothing, none of the DNA came back." "Nothing matched Damien, Jason or Jessie." "What was interesting, however, were some unknown hairs." "There was one hair in particular that was in the binding of one of the ligatures." "The boys had their hands tied with shoelaces and right in the middle of a knot that had been tightened there was a hair jammed in that knot." "Had the hair been located anywhere other than inside a ligature binding I would say, you know, it's not as significant as it could be." "But given its location, I think it's particularly damning evidence." "The hair tied into Michael Moore's ligature had to come from somebody." "So over Christmas, 2006, we studied John Douglas's report and started to think about who that foreign profile could belong to." ""This crime was not nearly so convoluted nor as twisted as the public were led to believe." "John Douglas said that this is most likely a personal-cause killing." "That is to say, the perpetrator knew one or more of the victims and had good reason, at least in his own mind, to act out violently." "We know the boys were bashed on the head, tied up and thrown into the drainage ditch."" "The children were submerged in water, which is an unnecessary act if you're a total-- You know, total stranger." "And an unnecessary act to throw the bicycles into the bayou." ""We know that all of this could have happened in the space of just 20 minutes." "It almost certainly happened before dark which means the crime in all likelihood occurred between the hours of 6:30 and 7:45 p.m." "Who knew these boys well enough to kill them?" "Who was out looking for them?" "From where I stand we are pretty much left with a list of three people." "Mark Byers, Terry Hobbs, and Todd Moore." "Mark Byers began looking for Chris from 6 p.m." "Terry Hobbs was looking for Stevie Branch from 5 p.m." "Todd Moore was out of town." "We're left with two stepfathers." "But only one of them has ever been scrutinised as a suspect." "Byers once referred to himself as the giant red herring of this case and I think he was speaking the truth." "That is why I am interested in Terry Hobbs." "Hope this helps to explain where I'm coming from." "Sending much love to you, Fran."" "We were working with a private investigator, Rachael Geiser and we asked Rachael to start to investigate Terry." "I'd come in to work daily, and I would have all of these e-mails from Fran about:" ""Here's what we need to do, thanks for what you sent."" "We really didn't know a whole lot about Stevie because Stevie's life was kind of confusing." "These are the photographs of Steven Branch." "You had his father, Stevie, his biological father." " Here we can see...." " You had Pam, and then you had Terry." "Other than the fact that nothing's there, there's nothing that would raise flags." "And so getting Terry's DNA became a priority for us now and the brief to Rachael was really get Terry's DNA without him knowing." "Saturday morning, it was raining out, I remember and we showed up at his house early and he opened the door, and we told him who we were." "He said, "I've been expecting y'all."" "I'll never forget it, he was like, "Come on in."" "I remember we sat there with him for a while, and he, you know...." "He was a likeable-enough guy, he really was." "He talked about their life and how their life was." "He didn't talk a whole lot about Pam." "I think they were fighting at the time." "And he didn't talk, really, about Amanda at all." "He interviewed with us, told us where he was." "He said that was the first time he'd ever told anyone his whereabouts." "So we waited in the living room while he was in the bathroom, I assume and that's when I took the cigarette butts out of the ashtray." "Yeah." "We got the fax, and I'm reading the fax and I'm reading the fax, and at some point I said, "Holy fuck."" "We all were just kind of stunned to see this very dramatic DNA result." "Terry comes in, sits down, and we tell him, you know...." "The DNA that was found on the hair doesn't match Damien or Jason or Jessie." "So it's somebody else's DNA." "They don't know whose?" " Tell me." " Yours." "No." "Yes, it is." "No, that's wrong." "We had to get him to come in because we knew that he didn't voluntarily give us this DNA." "We wanted to get either a voluntary sample or we need to see him do something, you know, that would have left his DNA." "Terry Hobbs would not, at any point, give me his DNA voluntarily, no." "The biggest bombshell of the new defence investigation is that an unexplained hair that could be from another victim's stepfather was found on shoelaces at the crime scene." "They say the DNA matches victim Stevie Branch's stepfather, Terry Hobbs." "Hobbs tells me tonight, quote, "I don't have anything to hide." "I'll answer any questions."" "Do you feel like the attorneys are accusing you of this crime?" "The answer to that would be no." "Is it possible, Mr Hobbs, that that was your hair?" "Sure, it was his son, Steven Branch who was murdered, and he's had to deal with this for the last 15 years." "The first tattoos I got was my parents' name because I love them more than anything in the world." "I've abused drugs for many years and I'm only 21 and I feel like it's because I'm trying to hide." "I did it to suppress something, to cover something up." "And where are your kids during this time, at your mom's?" "They live with my mom." "And so why don't you stay with your mom?" "She thinks I'm too wild." "So she says, "You can't stay here because you're too wild"?" "And I'm hung out on a limb." "What's that mean, you're hung out on a limb?" "That I'm going crazy the way she did when Stevie died." "Once Terry Hobbs surfaced, it certainly advanced things." "It helped shift the momentum." "The West Memphis Police Department realised that they had never actually interviewed him despite the fact that he was a stepfather of one of the victims." "They quickly conducted an interview with Terry Hobbs in 2007." "Anything unusual when you got home, at all?" "Nothing other than, uh, Stevie wasn't home." "Terry Hobbs said to everyone that he was very concerned when Stevie Branch didn't come home at 4:30 that night." "If he was so worried at 4:30, why didn't he call Stevie's mom?" "When he does finally tell her, 9:00, almost five hours later." "This person knows that he will be a logical suspect at some point but what he needs, he needs time on his hands." "He needs to establish an alibi." "We studied his movements that night." "He had spent some period of time on the evening of May the 5th in the house of David Jacoby, who was a friend of his." "And I asked David, I said, "Would you go help me?"" "He was with me probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning." "May the 6th." "Jacoby here is kind of a witness." "He never had this window of opportunity to perpetrate a crime like that because he was with him for such a long period of time." "We got a sample of David Jacoby's DNA voluntarily and the analysis came back to say that another hair that was found on a tree stump by the ditch where the bodies were found was consistent with David Jacoby's DNA." "I wasn't even aware that he went to David Jacoby's." "According to Terry, he was walking the streets and searching the whole night." "So that was news to me when I found out." "Is there anything you can think of that we hadn't gone over?" "That we hadn't asked, something you remembered through the years?" "You'd thought they would do a meaningful interview with Terry Hobbs." "It was as if they were sitting out on the back porch just sharing a beer." ""We know you didn't have much to do with this." "Just, you know, for old time's sake, why don't you describe again how you didn't have anything to do with this?"" "It didn't have the atmosphere of a serious interrogation at all." "You know, I don't know what happened out there in them woods that night." "Mike Allen, the lead investigator at the time and now the sheriff of Crittenden County issued a statement saying Terry Hobbs was not a suspect then and he's not a suspect now." "A question that has got to be asked is that why have they so staunchly refused to regard him as a person of interest?" "There." "Terry, appreciate it, man." "As we sit here today, there are 272 post-conviction DNA exonerations." "DNA is the essential element to prove their innocence and these people have done more than 3500 years in prison." "On the other hand, there are many, many cases where there's been DNA that's helpful, as in the West Memphis Three case because it does shed light on other suspects." "And it does put particular significance on the absence of evidence." "There's an old phrase in the forensic science business that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." "Yeah, that's true." "On the other hand, when you have DNA testing and you've gone through every piece of trace evidence at a crime scene and you find nothing that links the defendants who have been convicted to the crime, that is significant." "This may be Damien Echols' final appeal at the state level." "If his arguments are denied, the case then jumps into federal court." "A decision is expected in about a week." "All the investigative findings, the scientific results including the DNA, all of that is going to be presented to Judge Burnett." "Finally, Judge Burnett can consider this case with all this new information that wasn't available to him or the prosecution back in 1994." "And so we were looking forward to having him reevaluate the case." "We really had high hopes." "We wanted to give the attorney general some sense that it was coming." "We told him that there'd be these DNA results and we got into a discussion." "What would you have to show to get a new trial?" "And there was a point of laughter where one of them said:" ""We're gonna set this bar as high as we possibly can." "Which is to say, we're gonna try and get a court to rule that it is really impossible to ever win under the Arkansas DNA statute."" "People ask us what we're gonna do whenever I'm out, when we're together." "And we do talk about that." "For Lorri and I, life isn't something that will happen one day down the road." "You know, we're together now, here." "We're not just in a state of suspended animation, waiting." "He was 21, I guess, when I met him." "He hadn't yet really started studying at that point, so it was kind of funny." "You know, I was in a different place in my life, and" " But now I mean, I would ask him for advice before I would ask anybody." "I send him a lot of used books, and it is really fascinating to look at." "Because when I'm reading a book or when he's reading then we're going through-- As everyone does in their life." "you're going through specific things." "You have 90 seconds left on this call." "Uh, I don't normally read a lot of fiction anymore." "I haven't for several years but a couple of days ago, someone sent me the new Stephen King book." "You know, I started reading his books when I was probably 10 or 11 years old." "People have always undervalued him." "You know, they look at him as this, um, hack." "This hack writer who churns out horror novels." "In all of his books at the end he always addresses the reader." "You know, he thanks you for going on this voyage with him and so I wanted to read it to you." ""All right, I think we've been down here in the dark long enough." "There's a whole other world upstairs." "Take my hand, constant reader and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine." "I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good." "I know that I am." "It's you I'm not entirely sure of."" "A judge says no to new trial." "Judge Burnett made it clear that DNA evidence isn't enough for a new trial or to overturn the conviction." "David Burnett wouldn't hear the new evidence." "He complete-- He denied it without even hearing it." "What can you do?" "I mean, in our minds, we started to entertain the idea that Damien might be executed." "My life would have been a lot simpler if I hadn't been involved in that case." "I had to fiddle with it for 18 years and get beaten over the head by folks that were opposed to what happened." "But I didn't pick and choose, I just took what came down the pipe." "It's not unusual for post-conviction motions to be made in front of the judge that originally heard the trial." "The theory behind that is the judge who originally heard the trial saw all the witnesses testify and is in the best position to evaluate the new evidence." "But all of us are victims of bias that we don't even understand or know and sometimes you have to abandon hypotheses that you've relied on in the past and try to freshly evaluate the evidence." "All of this hoop-de-la about newly discovered evidence." "There is no newly discovered evidence." "All of the evidence that was found originally at the trial scene." "Judge David Burnett finally decides to stand for Senate." "We hoped like hell that he would get elected." "Because once he was elected to Senate he was unable to have anything to do with this case anymore." "So Judge Burnett heard what he heard and he and his jury made their decision." "It was up to people from all over the world, and that would be you." "And the people next to you right now..." "I would like to read something to you guys." ""I can't remember what it's like to walk as a human being anymore." "It's been well over 16 years since I've actually walked anywhere." "There are times when I've thought surely, someone is gonna put a stop to this." "Oh, well, it does no good to dwell on it." "Either I waste my energy by focusing on things I cannot change or I conserve my energy, and apply it to small things I can change."" "Each small thing connects to make a great, big thing." "And that big thing is to bring those boys back home." "This is something I came across today and it's just a small paragraph of one of Damien's letters from this February." ""The thing I like most about time is that it's not real." "It's all in the head." "There's no such thing as the past, it exists only in the memory." "There's no such thing as the future, it exists only in our imagination." "If our watches were truly accurate, the only thing they would ever say is 'now.'"" "And that's what time it is." "Now." "One day, I get a phone call from my manager saying Terry Hobbs is suing me." ""Dearest Lorri, are the Dixie Chicks fighting this?" "This is a great opportunity to give Terry Hobbs his day in court get all the facts out in the open and let a jury decide."" "You swear to tell nothing but the truth..." " ...so help you God?" " I do." " State your name for the record, sir." " Terry Hobbs." "You can put your hand down now." "Could you tell the ladies and gentlemen why you sued my client?" "All of the emotions, distress, the anger." "That her statements caused you?" " Correct." " I didn't say anything about him." "I had no intentions of finger-pointing at Terry Hobbs." "I don't even know that Terry Hobbs did it." "I sort of asked my attorney, "Why would he be doing this?"" "He was confident that he was gonna win and he was gonna get millions of dollars." "I think he's gutsy." "He had to have been warned that if he did that, he would have to be deposed which he was, and have to answer questions." "We gave Natalie's attorney, D'Lesli Davis access to our investigative files on Terry, his background his relationship with Stevie." "And it enabled them to basically sit him down and to finally question him in a way that he had never, ever been questioned about this murder before." "Describe your reputation, other than "a good man." What else would it be?" "A hard-working man, good dad, good husband in the past." "Pretty good man." " Are you an honest fellow?" " I try my best." " Law-abiding man?" " I do pretty good at it." "We started doing background on Terry." "I went to Garland County because I knew he had lived there before specifically to interview his ex-wife." "And it raised some flags at that point." "She told me he had gotten in trouble." "I went to the court records in Garland County and pulled the incident involving Mildred French." "Let me give you a minute to go through the declaration of Mildred French." " All right." " Have you read it?" "No, I'm not going to." " Why not?" " It don't mean nothing to me." " Why doesn't it mean anything to you?" " It just don't." "Mildred French was a neighbour of yours back in the '80s, wasn't she?" "I don't remember." "Paragraph number four, "On one occasion I heard a baby crying and sounds that indicated to me that Terry Hobbs was beating his wife..." " ...and/or his child."" " She kind of let out a cry and then I heard the baby." ""I ran next door to Terry's unit and rang the bell to Terry Hobbs' residence."" "He said it was none of my business and I said, "I'm making it my business, you do it again."" "I said, "Because I've heard you before."" " Do you recall she was your neighbour?" " Some old woman was." ""A few months later, I worked outside in my yard." "I went inside my home to take a shower and get cleaned up."" "And I got out of the tub and when I was reaching in to get the towel...." ""Terry Hobbs, who had broken in and somehow gotten upstairs into my bathroom...."" "I didn't see him come into the bathroom." "He just grabbed me on my breasts." ""I screamed at Terry loudly, 'What are you doing in my house?" "'" " And screamed, 'Get out!" "'"" " He said:" " "I kept repeating loudly." - "Get out of my house!"" ""And ultimately Terry ran out of my home and ran downstairs into his unit."" "What is your recollection of those events--?" " I don't have any." " Let me finish." "What is your recollection of the reason that the police were called and those events that Ms French remembers so clearly?" "I don't have any." ""I said to Terry, 'Tell them what you did to me.'" "Terry looked at me square in the eye and said calmly, 'It never happened.'" "I looked at Terry and told him, 'You are a liar and you are sick.'"" "And I say, "You know, you're sick." And he says, "Yeah, I'm sick."" "I never did like him, I mean...." "Even when Pam first married him there was just always something." "He creeped me out." " Do you lose your temper very often?" " No." " Pretty even-keeled guy?" " Try to be." "He's got a look that's plum evil and when that look of evil comes over him, you know, I know he's mad." " What" " What's this?" " It is a judgement against one Terry W. Hobbs for aggravated assault in '94 in conjunction with the shooting of your brother-in-law." "Is that your signature at the bottom of the first page, sir?" "It is." "He can snap into a nice guy and a bad guy by a snap of a finger." "You did backhand Pam Hobbs the night you ended up shooting her brother..." " ...correct?" " Okay." " Is that correct?" " Yeah." "All right." "Is that funny?" "Well, it's" " You get tired of talking about it after a while." "I need, for the record, for you to state under oath that you did..." " I did." " ...backhand Pam Hobbs." "It was over a jealousy of a woman." "I was just trying to get away and calm down, cool off and come back home, and he wouldn't let me have the keys." "So he punched me pretty hard that day." "Were you jealous over the attention that Pam gave to Stevie?" " No." " Did you compete with Stevie..." " ...for Pam's attention?" " No." "He had made a comment to his mom that I paid more attention to my son than I did, you know, being a wife, so...." "Stevie started talking to me probably when he was about 6 years old and he wanted to know if I could keep a secret." "And I told him, yeah, because we were really" " We were very, very close." "Kind of like, you know, grew up together." "Because I was 8 years old when he was born." "Daddy Terry, as he called him, was mean to him." "And that he" " He treated him different than Amanda." "The very first thing he ever told me is about how he would whup him." "Make him hold his hands up in the air and he would hold him by the hair of his head while he was whupping him." "He'd hold their hands in the air as he whipped them." "Sometimes when he whipped Stevie, he would leave belt marks on him." " Is that true?" " No." " Did you whip Stevie with a belt?" " Yes." "Is it true that you whipped Stevie and made him hold his hands up in the air?" "I didn't want to hit him on the hands." " So that's true?" " Yes." "The only thing that's not true about paragraph number 10 .is that you would leave belt marks on him?" "Not that I recall." "Stevie had a belt mark on him, and I asked Pam who whipped him." "I thought she had and she said Terry did." "She didn't want to tell at first, but she finally told me." "Stevie never would tell us because he's afraid he'd get beat to death or whatever when he got home." "And about locking him up in the closet if he didn't do what he was told right when he was told." "I lived with them." "I was around them off and on." "It was a happy time." "I've got pictures everybody's smiling, everybody's happy." "Everybody's swimming, everybody's having a good time." "There was no fighting and screaming and hollering and beating the kids and stuff like that." "I can't say, "I wish he wouldn't have married her." I can now." "Back then I didn't know her enough to say:" "But I do now, so:" "Then he got into more detail about things that were happening about...." "Terry would come into his room while he was asleep or going to sleep and he would make Stevie watch him masturbate." "It progressed so much that he started making Stevie mess with Amanda." " Is that true, sir?" " No, it's not true." "Can you think of any reason that Judy Sadler would say that about you..." " ...if she had not heard that from Stevie?" " You'd have to ask Judy." " Can you think of any reason?" " No." "She's told me about that, but I really feel like, if that was true why didn't you say that 16, 17, or 18 years ago?" "Why do you wait this long to say it?" "Because maybe if it would have been true and she said something then my mom would've kept me, she would've fought for me." "This is kind of a new thing for y'all, this therapy stuff so that's pretty stressful." "But you'll get comfortable with that." ""Guilt." "I feel guilty all the time." Can you put a finger on the guilt?" " Where's that guilt coming from?" " I don't know." "Just can't seem to pick it out?" "Attached here, too, is exhibit one, pages from Amanda Hobbs' journal in her handwriting." ""You know, I think I'm the only 19-year-old that can't remember what happened in my life 10 years ago." "Was I traumatised as a child that I had to turn to drugs to forget about it?" "I used to tell my mom, 'My dad messed with me.'" "I honestly don't remember." "I used to dream about my dad having sex with me, but it was just a dream." "As far as I remember, my dad never touched me sexually but he beat the hell out of me."" "He hit me one time with a belt, but he used the buckle." "And it left a welt, probably that thick, across my back and it was purple." "Is it still your testimony you never hit your daughter?" " Correct." " You never sexually molested her?" "Never one time." "When we talk about emotional or other problems your daughter has had you do not feel you are responsible for any of those." " Is that correct?" " Correct." "I know Stevie asked me about two weeks before he was murdered to leave Terry, and I asked him why." "And he said, "He loves Amanda, but he don't love me."" "I feel like I'm putting the pieces of a puzzle together and I'm so scared." "Talking to Terry over things that's happened and all that they did their job, they got the right ones, and all this." "I just want the truth." "I want the answers." "Since the programme aired, convictions were handed down to all three of the accused teenagers, and it became undeniable that the brutal murders had been part of a Satanic ritual." "Back with us today, Pam and Terry Hobbs." "I mean, all murder is horrible." "Is the manner of his, the specific manner in which he died is that something that will always haunt you?" "Yeah, I'll go to my grave with it, thinking about it." "I realise my son is in a better place." "I got a phone call back in 2003 about the Hobbs knives that Pam discovered when their marriage went south." "What stuck out to our attention is Stevie's knife in there." "According to Pam, that knife would have been in the boy's pocket the day that he was murdered, and so that was very interesting." "How did he get it?" "More important, when did he get it?" "Pam says she knows Stevie Branch had it until he died." "Terry Hobbs says...." "I was his dad, I was acting as a responsible parent." "Not letting a 6-, 7-, 8-year-old little boy carry a pocket knife." "Aren't you aware that his mommy, his mother said that he carried the knife with him up until the time that he disappeared?" "So?" "And she stated that she didn't trust the prosecution and she wanted to turn it over to the defence." "I'm asking if it surprised you, given the fact that the West Memphis Police has spent so much time and so much money over the years saying they got it right, that when DNA attributed to someone else was found in the ligature of one of the victims that they attributed it to secondary transfer?" " What if it was secondary transfer?" " What if it wasn't?" " What are you saying?" " I'm saying there could be a question about whether or not you were somehow involved in these crimes." "Well, who says that?" "How do you explain Mr Jacoby's DNA?" " Which is the second" " I have no explanation for that." " Objection to form" " We was in them woods all night." "The first time I heard about DNA was the lack of DNA at the crime scene." "The first time I heard about my DNA, it was just shock therapy, I think." "Telling me that they found my DNA at the crime scene." "Sleepless nights, you know, going over and over trying to see if there was something you missed or heard or...." "It's your testimony Mr Jacoby was with you all night in the woods?" " We were together quite a bit that night." " No, that's not my question." "You testified earlier that you and Mr Jacoby were together all night until it was time..." " ...for him to go to work." " Exactly." " Is that your story, or did it change?" " No, we were." "So I'm at home and I hear a knock on the door." "And it's Terry and Amanda." "I ask him what's he doing." "He says:" ""Oh, looking for Stevie, he was supposed to be home."" ""Terry and Amanda came inside my house." "Amanda played with toys and Terry and I sat down and played guitars for up to one hour." You've already stated that it's possible you went to David's house and played guitars for one hour." " I didn't say that." " You said that in your last deposition." "I don't recall playing the guitars." "I went over to see if David would help me look for the three little boys." ""Pretty Woman," Roy Orbison." "I handed him my guitar and asked him to play that part of that song again so I could get it down and he-- We did that two or three times you know, before I finally got it right." "So, you know, a little time went by and he says:" ""Well, you know, I need to go look for Stevie."" "I said, "Terry, let me know." "Let me know where you find him."" "Did you see Stevie at all that day, May the 5th?" "No, I did not." "Did you see any of the three boys that day?" "No, I did not." "I think the timeframe is what pulled us in more than anything else because I was like, "Wait a minute."" "We went to church every Wednesday at the same time." "We left about 6:30 every single Wednesday, we never missed church." "And we saw them out there." "Terry Hobbs and Steven Branch lived three houses down from us on South McAuley." "About 6:30, we came out the door and Steven was in front on his bike." "Christopher and Michael were running behind him and they zoomed out real fast." "I told Christopher, I yelled to him, "You need to go home." "Your brother said to go home."" "He said, "I don't have to do what you tell me to do."" "And I saw Terry walking down the sidewalk, and he was saying:" ""Y'all come back down here," and they all went in that direction toward him and we got in the car and went to church." "The next day at school, Ryan came up to us and he said they couldn't find his brother, his brother didn't come home." "I told him, "I saw your brother, I talked to him." "I told him to come home." "What are you talking about?"" "He was really devastated, he was crying." "And he said that they found his brother, and he wasn't alive anymore." "We knew we saw him but we thought, "There, his dad was out there with him." "Surely, they told him that they were down there."" "So we thought all this time that they already knew." "If deemed credible, it's more damning than even the DNA evidence, you know." "I mean, the last person to be in the presence of these three victims." "By denying that occurred, rather than offering any explanation of it it's awfully powerful stuff." "These people here were never interviewed." "They were just neighbours of Hobbs." "Hobbs wasn't interviewed." "Didn't do a neighbourhood." "They'll swear on a stack of Bibles that they saw Terry Hobbs..." " ...with the three children around 6:30." " I don't know how many years before anybody had asked me anything about it too." "You say you were not ever alone on the night of May 5th and the morning of May 6th and yet David Jacoby says you left his house twice, alone." "What Jacoby has told us so far is that it could be two hours where Terry Hobbs can't be accounted for." "I'm saying that you don't have an alibi witness for two to two and a half hours on the evening of the murders." " From 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m." " I don't know." " Does that concern you?" " No." "Hello?" "Hey." "Had me a visitor today." "John, what's--?" "John Douglas?" "John's the FBI." "What'd he say?" "There's a bunch of discrepancies on where I said where we're at and where you say we were at, and it just...." "I don't give a shit what them people got to say about where I was at and what time I was there." "We don't have to answer to them people." "David is his primary alibi and what he has done in the past, he's fed information to David putting them together." "I don't know, from what I said and what you said and what they're telling me, 6:30 to 9:30's really fucked up." "Six-thirty to nine-thirty." "I don't know what they're playing...." "We rode around looking for three little boys." "We got out and we did a little walking, looking for three little boys." "I went and picked my wife up at 9:00." ""Where did you ride around, Mr Hobbs?" West Memphis." "What?" "You was with me, David." "You remember that?" "Jacoby is starting to realise that he was being set up by Terry Hobbs as an alibi." "Well, we know we didn't do it, okay?" "The police know who done it and they're sitting in prison." "At the time, I wasn't looking for three murdered kids." "I was helping my friend look for his kid and who happened to be with another kid who happened to be with another kid." " So I mean, and what upsets me is...." " Yeah." "I gotta stop with the camera, here it goes." "It just gets me that he didn't come back, you know?" "Fuck." "Why do you not come back to your friend's house to help you..." " ...if you can't find your kid?" " Yeah." "I stopped myself from saying that he did it you know, in all these years." "I've actually, you know, said he couldn't...." "It gets to the point, I'd give my life to know the fucking truth." "Fucking Terry." "But I've been that little kid, you know?" " You been that step--?" "That stepchild?" " That stepkid, yeah." "That gets his ass whupped at the drop of a hat for" "You know, for something somebody else's done." "And you catch what's built up from everybody else." "And that, I felt that with Stevie." "I mean, like with the marbles." "He's throwing marbles and bouncing them off the wall." "Terry is telling him, "I'm gonna bust your ass." "Quit." "Stevie, I'm gonna bust your ass." "Stevie, quit." "Stevie, quit." "I'm gonna tell you one more time, Stevie."" "And, you know, you just want-- You wanna get that last marble." "And Stevie's looking like that last marble's fixing to come again and I said, you know, "Sit down, let me show you how we played marbles."" "And it got Terry, you know, off of him, and...." "Terry hated him." "What he did to him to make him hate him, I don't know." "Stevie was scared of Terry." "He was hid in the closet, and I asked him why he was hid in a closet." "You know, he had a mishap in his underwear and Daddy Terry would whip him." "And one time he had thrown him against the wall." "I do not believe the homicide was planned." "This person responsible for the murders lost control and had to kill them." "They were already heading that way, he said, "Get back down to the house."" "And they passed him, they were laughing and playing." "We thought it was a normal day." "It was things we saw them do all the time." "You were not angry in the sense that you become physically abusive?" "Correct." "These young boys were overpowered." " You do not fly into rages?" " Correct." " And you do not beat your children?" " Never." "If he was capable of doing this, and I can almost picture it that he freaked out, and the other two boys being there...." "They've got skull fractures, they've got brain injuries." "If it had been an accident, the Terry Hobbs that I know no, I don't think that he would say that, "I accidentally did this." "I'm sorry," and turn himself in for it." "These children were alive until they inhaled water and drowned." "To do what he did to the children, hide the clothing, hide the children he got in water, got muddy." "There's been some discussion about you doing laundry the evening of the 5th or the morning of the 6th." " Recall that?" " It didn't happen." " You didn't do laundry?" " No." "I saw him cleaning." "I saw him washing clothes." "I saw him in Stevie's room." "I mean, he had bleach and everything and was cleaning." "I had never seen Terry clean anything the whole time I had known him." "When he took me to work, I believe Terry changed into a purple tank top a pair of shorts and his LA Gear tennis shoes." "He's muddy, he has to change his clothing." "When he picked me up from work he was in blue jeans and flannel top shirt on." "He has to get prepared and wait to be interviewed." "And you have a dispute with every single one of your alibi witnesses." "If you put all of these statements together and all the evidence together that I've just run through and you're the police wouldn't you wanna look at Terry Hobbs for this murder?" "You'd have to look at Terry Hobbs." "From an investigative perspective it solidifies Terry Hobbs as the principal suspect." "It's gonna be tough for someone like him to confess." "If he is in fact the guy, it's extremely tough." "He's had 18 years to think about it." "He's got an answer for everything." "You throw him a pitch, he's got it." "You know, he knows how to hit it." "The attorney general's office has taken the position that not only should these wrongly convicted young men not have the opportunity to prove their innocence but that no one ever in Arkansas be given that opportunity on the grounds that Arkansas is incapable of ever convicting anyone wrongly." "It's one thing to build perception that there's something wrong." "It's another thing to get a formal judgement overturning it." "There are still some formidable legal obstacles to opening that door." "Tell us why you're here today." "I'm here for justice and the real killer to be found out." "If I've had to be the spotlight of people thinking I was involved if that kept the case alive to get where we are today I'd turn around and do it all over again." "Talk about what's been so impactful in this case that has changed your mind." "Because that day, you believed he was the killer." "That day I believed what the state told me." "And it took quite a while of being blinded and when I finally got my answers none of the roads led to the three in prison." "All the roads and all the evidence lead to Terry Wayne Hobbs." "This case is outrageous." "People need to get involved and help on this case." "I am happy to get involved donating my time, time from my law firm, pro bono because these young men need a fair trial." "If they're convicted again?" "Fine." "But do it fair." "Do it constitutionally." "It's an endurance test to keep up with this." "I think I was in my late 20s when I first heard about it." "I am now 45." "We'd buy Doritos and Skittles and MM's." "And we'd sit down, and I'll have napkins and then Damien would say:" ""All right, put out your napkin, okay, try this, all right." "One Ruffle, two orange Skittles." "All right, get the root beer ready." "Now eat that, drink that at the same time, isn't that crazy?"" "It's a long process." "We've all had to educate ourselves and learn patience." "We'd make a small breakthrough or something and Lorri and I would have a long two-hour phone call." "We'd get off the phone think this is gonna be a happy ending." "There's gotta be a happy ending to this." "One thing that could happen is they could say no." ""Judge Burnett was right." "You lose, no new hearing, Damien." "Sorry, done."" "And then he literally is done in the Arkansas court." "The oral argument today is Damien Wayne Echols v. the State of Arkansas." "So we have a situation here where the Arkansas legislature passed these statutes out of, quote, "In response to nationwide concerns that innocent persons were being imprisoned and even executed for crimes that they did not commit."" "However, the state takes the position that the only evidence other than DNA allowed in a DNA action in this state is evidence of guilt." "The fact of the matter is that DNA evidence that couldn't have been obtained 15 years ago begins to make things relevant." "Connect to other evidence that did not appear relevant 15 years ago." "So your interpretation is it's not really just new scientific evidence." "It's new evidence across the board that'll come?" "Yes, Your Honour." "The animating purpose of this statute is not to do away with finality of judgements but to test evidence of innocence." "Doesn't that include the last 17 years?" "No, well, I'm sorry." "Does it include the last...?" "The last 17 years, or are you limiting the evidence that can be presented?" "You can't bring in evidence that is just further reweighing of evidence that state post-conviction processes permit you to make in other forums." "Now certainly he would like to have a much freer reign to go back to court and bring in 17 years' worth of claims that have been made and retry his case." "Counsellor, what harm is there in allowing him to present the evidence..." " ...from the last 17 years?" " I'm sorry?" "What harm is there to--?" "In allowing him to present all evidence?" "The harm is in the finality of a criminal judgement that is not demonstrated to have any constitutional or procedural defect and just to try it again." "I mean...." "We would submit that the court is to consider the DNA evidence along with all other evidence, whether or not admitted at the first trial." "All simply means all." "I talked to him, actually, right after the hearing." "Guards came into his cell and took everything, everything he owns." "All of his books." "Fifty-one books, his journals, his shoes." "When he asked why they were doing that they said they were sick of seeing him on the news." "It's terribly abusive." "They were horribly abusive to him." "They don't like the death-row thing." "They're trying to get Damien Echols off of death row so they can put two new people in there and you know who them two new people is?" "Don't even say it." "Me and you." "I ain't never felt the need to have to try to defend somebody in our family before but now I feel like my brother's getting a bad rap." "Somebody's got to say something." "He, obviously, is just gonna keep letting it go and letting it go because he feels like he's had enough, you know, and it's" "Somebody needs to say something." "If they're trying to put the blame on someone they need to dig deeper and find that someone." "Received December 11th at 11:02 a.m." "Ummm...." "Hello." "I need to speak to somebody so please have someone call me." " Marker." " State your name, please." " Blake Sisk." " How old are you?" " Twenty years old." " Okay." "The other day, the tipline got a call." "This young man had been a friend of Michael Hobbs Jr., who is the nephew of Terry Hobbs." "Michael Hobbs Jr. lives in a town called Mountain Home, Arkansas." "His dad, Michael Hobbs Sr., runs a restaurant there and they've lived there for a long time." "First thing he told us was that when he was about 12 or 13 he and Michael Hobbs Jr." "had been playing football in the yard." "When they got done playing football, they came into the house got a drink and were gonna go to the basement to play pool." "Michael said, you know, that his uncle and dad were in their downstairs basement and we were gonna go downstairs, but his dad hollered you know, "Don't come down here, we're busy talking."" "So me and Michael decided to listen in." "Michael Hobbs Jr. told the witness that his dad was down there with his uncle sounding like he might have been crying, saying:" ""I'm sorry for what happened and I regret it."" "Michael's dad was just consoling him about, you know, the situation and everything would be all right." ""You're not in any trouble."" "A number of years later, he and a friend were picked up by Michael Hobbs Jr." "in Michael Hobbs Jr.'s truck." "My name's Cody Gott." "This is fine." "You can use this for whatever you need to use it for." "You have my permission." "When he picked us up, it was like-- It wasn't the same Michael that I" "You know what I mean?" "He wasn't...." "Wasn't in the same mood that he usually is." "He's usually outgoing, like, ready to go do something." "Ready to talk, ready to-- And he was just real quiet." "He wasn't as talkative, and I asked him what was going on and he...." ""What's up, man?"" "And he said, he told me that:" ""My uncle Terry, he killed those kids in that case, in the West Memphis Three case."" "And then he was like, well, "My dad told me that my uncle's the one who murdered those three kids and it's been, you know, on my mind all day." "It's been just running through my head."" "And I was just in shock, I didn't really know what to say." "Then, according to Michael Hobbs Jr., the second witness says that his dad called this, quote, "the Hobbs' family secret," close quote." "He said, "Only me, my dad, my uncle" and I think maybe his mom and someone else in the family might have knew." "It might have been the other brother." "He called it the Hobbs' family secret, and he said:" ""If they knew I told you, I would be in deep crap."" "There was one third friend that they thought might also have some information." "What this third witness told me:" ""Michael Hobbs Jr., a third friend and I were playing pool in the basement." "During the game, the third friend said something about the West Memphis Three case."" "Then this young man, the third witness, asked:" ""What's the West Memphis Three case?"" "Might be the only teenager in Arkansas who didn't know what the West Memphis Three case was." "He asked that question and Michael Hobbs Jr responded to him by saying, quote:" ""My uncle killed three kids in West Memphis," close quote." "And according to this third witness, Michael Hobbs Jr was dead serious when he said this." "He was not fooling around." "In addition to getting them to sign the declarations under penalty of perjury they all took polygraph examinations." "The polygraph examiner concluded that these three young men were absolutely telling the truth about what they heard Michael Hobbs Jr. say." "I don't even think Michael knows why he did it." "I just" " You know, he knows it happened, he knows he did it." "And it was his dad-- His dad is" " Probably would know you know, why he did it." "We don't have any power as defence attorneys to call Michael Hobbs Sr. into my office and to ask him to tell me whether he called this the Hobbs' family secret and why he did." "The prosecutor can issue a grand jury subpoena and ask Michael Hobbs Sr. in the grand jury where he's under penalty of perjury if he lies, "Did you say this?" "Why'd you say it?" "What did you mean?"" "And I think that's the kind of information that only the prosecutor can get that could really crack this wide open." "I don't give a shit what happened 17 years ago." "I know what didn't happen." "Me and you didn't do nothing wrong." "So fuck them motherfuckers." "We're proud people." "We don't have no reason to tuck our head." "You hit a bump in the road, you wasn't expecting a speed bump being there but you pick yourself up on other side of that speed bump and go, "Damn, I didn't see that one coming," and keep on going." "Pam's a speed bump." "I'll put her that way." "Was Terry capable?" "Did Terry do it?" "Did I stay with a man that possibly murdered my child?" "And it does raise a lot of questions." "The court rejected every single thing that the state argued." "Basically saying Burnett was wrong in not allowing a hearing based on DNA." "One, by one, by one." "Just no, no, no." "Wrong, wrong, wrong." "Finally the Supreme Court has ruled in our favour." "We could not be more excited." "It was unanimous." "This is huge for Arkansas." "The Supreme Court is-- Has ruled in our favour." "The State Supreme Court is on our side." "Finally." "We won." "We won." "The mother of Stevie Branch, one of the three 8-year-olds killed in that murder, joins us now on the phone." "What is your reaction to the ruling by the Arkansas Supreme Court that the killers can have a new hearing?" "My reaction to it is now with the DNA evidence and things that doesn't point to the three men convicted that lets me know for sure they didn't lay a hand on my son." "They keep constantly pushing the date of the hearing back." "First they told us it was gonna be in June." "Then they told us it was gonna be in October." "Now they've pushed it all the way back to December." "The wake of the victory was probably the most difficult and frustrating time for Lorri of all." ""Dearest Lorri, you never, ever need to apologise for how you are feeling." "I totally understand what you said, and why you said it and I'm glad you felt you could say it to me." "This situation is so very hard." "You and Damien have been treading water for years and the shore never seems to get any closer." "It's no wonder you feel like giving up."" "After years and years of filing and hear" " You know, this and that and never-ending bureaucracy it keeps going back and forth." "To go 16 or 17 years and finally have what was a remarkable victory and not simply for the three but about the whole nature of DNA testing in Arkansas." "Then say, "Well, when will this actually lead to Damien being released?"" "And the answer being, you know, who knows?" ""It took me a while to understand what you must have learned long ago." "Nothing, and I mean nothing, comes easily with this case." "The breakthroughs are small and the obstacles never seem to decrease in size." "Any small piece of progress is clawed from unforgiving rock." "All we can do is keep going." "If we keep on pounding on the wall, it will break, because it must break." "All things eventually break." "I would love to see photos of the 1920s house in Garton when you have them." "It sounds wonderful." "Sending much love to you always, Fran."" "You're so worn down you know, you might get something like say a common cold and the next thing you know, you're laying in bed sick for next six months." "Damien, you know, he's struggling because of the health issues he's facing in prison just not having adequate nutrition, not being able to go into the sunlight." "You know, lack of vitamin D. His eyesight is starting to dim." "Everything in your body is just hurting and shut down." "It made me wanna be nicer to you." "It did!" "Sometimes it appears to me that the attitude of the players involved in this case are:" ""Let's sweep this under the rug, let's hope it goes away."" "No one wants to admit they made a mistake." "What about the lawsuits that are gonna follow?" "And who cares about that issue?" "Let's just do the right thing, it's simple to do the right thing." "Something we'd planned on doing was to try to get the state to agree:" ""Let's just go right to the new trial, because, of course Damien and Jason and Jessie are sitting in the cooler each time there's a delay." "Let's get to it."" "So the defence decided to approach the state and say:" ""Hey, let's skip the evidentiary hearing and just go straight to a new trial."" "Two weeks ago yesterday, we sent Patrick Benca, our local counsel in to have a lunch meeting with Dustin McDaniel, the attorney general." "I've known Dustin from law school and I knew he'd be approachable about it." "I wasn't sure whether he would take it in consideration." "Matter of fact, during the lunch he said to me, "That's a big ask."" "But I felt that he was listening to everything that I had to say." "Much to our surprise, the discussions progressed sort of away from the "agree to the new trial" idea to is there a way to reach a practical resolution of this case for everybody?" "The attorney general brought in Scott Ellington, a circuit county prosecutor." "He came to Little Rock with a bunch of his lawyers." "The defence attorneys have maintained complete innocence on behalf of the defendants all this time." "I mean, I don't underestimate our ability to have obtained convictions in these cases." "But I wasn't looking forward to having to go to trial in this case because of the deterioration of evidence." "Memories lost." "You know, stories changed." "Every time there was a filing, you know, there was a DNA...." "Came out in the paper that there's new DNA, new DNA." "I was not looking forward to that." "We didn't want to show weakness in maintaining the judgement so one of our positions was the state is not making an offer." "The state said they're guilty." "Our guys said they're innocent." "How do you bridge those two gaps?" "There's only a couple of options in between." "We started making our pitches." "We started making our pitch for the Alford plea which we talked about before going in." "It's not a perfect resolution." "It will be a guilty plea but it's a very, very rare and unique kind of guilty plea where you get to maintain your innocence." "Prosecutors hardly ever allow this and judges have the right to say, "We're not gonna accept it because you can't maintain innocence and plead guilty at the same time."" "It kind of seems oxymoronic." "I'm" " I guess I'm kind of a "shoot from the hip" guy to start with." "I kind of jumped on it real quick and then the attorney general and I visited just briefly and he was like:" ""Are you sure that you want to agree to this?" "Are you sure this is the right thing for you, politically?"" "Because he knows I'm elected as a prosecutor." "And this could backfire." "We knew what we needed to make this deal, which is really only two points." "We needed it to be a deal where the West Memphis Three could maintain their innocence." "We needed it to be a deal where they got out of prison the day it was entered." "Not two years from now." "Not, "We'll consider you for parole."" "Not 10 years more." "Enter the plea, maintain your innocence, get out of jail." "This notice was released today out of the Craighead County Circuit Court." "It's vague, saying that the court will take up certain matters pertaining to the West Memphis Three case tomorrow." "It went to Damien first and Damien readily accepted it." " How you doing?" " Then the deal went to Jessie." " Been a while." " It has been a while." " And Jessie accepted it." " We're almost home." "Which means by the time it got to Jason, Jason had the full veto power." "If he said yes, the deal would work for everybody." "If he said no, everybody was left right where they were, in prison." "I come home, turn the TV on, it's all over TV." "Rumour mill got started this afternoon, and it's all over the place but I think everything's gonna work out fine in the morning." "His position was, "I, Jason, would rather stay in jail and fight this with my last dying breath until somebody recognises I am 100 percent innocent."" "There are reports that at least two of the infamous West Memphis Three could be released from prison." "And I told him that I wanted three or nothing." "I didn't sleep much." "I think the last time I looked at the clock it was 4:00 this morning." "Mixed emotions, all type of things, so...." "What do you think is going to happen?" "Are you pretty sure, are you not sure, you doubtful this would happen?" "I'm not sure, I'm doubtful, I don't know." "I'm just a pawn in this, just like they are." "They've been a pawn in this the whole time." "I have to say, because I've been in the Arkansas Department of Correction I understand where they're coming from." "If I had to roll the dice for my freedom or get out today by copping to a lesser plea I would probably take the plea to get out of prison." "But then I'm stuck for life with the stigma, while the real killer walks free." " Who do you believe is the real killer?" " This is not justice!" " No comment." " No comment?" " Do you feel any relief?" " No." "None?" "I gotta go." "What are you gonna do next, Terry?" "Hey, hey, Terry, just for a second...." "There's the baby-killer." "Talk to him." "This is a free world." "I can say what I want." "Freedom of speech, First Amendment right." "I contacted the other attorneys, asking them what was up." "If they knew anything that was going on." "They really indicated that they didn't know." "Jason was quite resolute and not agreeing to taking the Alford plea." "And, I mean, really that's about the biggest illustration of innocence that you could ever imagine." "But this was really coming to a head and we didn't know how long this offer was gonna be on the table." "And it was there for the taking." "We were trying to figure out alternate ways to get in touch with him." "Somebody who cares about him and loves him needs to be talking to him." " We need to get Holly." " It's busy." "I'm just gonna keep dialling over and over." "You know, over the years we've just grown to be...." "I mean, I'm closer to Jason Baldwin than I am to many people that I have known my entire life." "Everybody just cannot believe that he would choose to stay in prison when he can walk out, no matter what the reasons are." "I got a call from Lorri." "She said, "I'm gonna ask Eddie Vedder to call you."" "I was trying to explain to Jason, look, anyone's gonna have to understand locally and globally State of Arkansas is not gonna let go of three convicted child murderers based on time served." "It's implied that they don't have enough." "They don't have enough to keep them in." "They don't have enough to win a trial." "I was able to get a call in to the prison to have Jason give me a call." "He said, "This isn't fair." "I don't wanna concede anything to the state."" "He did not wanna talk about it, and he didn't call back." "And I was devastated." "I believed in his decision, and I didn't wanna question it." "I would never ask another man to compromise his ideals." "But it was so close to freedom." "It was unbearable." "Not hearing from him and not knowing what he was thinking was unbearable." "Jason Baldwin is 16 years old." "He's been in jail for months." "And he's about to enter a trial where prosecutors are going to ask for the death sentence." "He's offered two deals in secret if he would testify that Echols had done the killing." "He tells the prosecutors, "No, that would be a lie." "My mother raised me better than that."" "The 16-year-old refused, not once, but twice." "At 16 years old, it never even crossed his mind to throw somebody under the bus to save his own skin." "So Monday night, I get this call from him." "He says, "Neither option is really fair."" "I said to him, "If you wanted to do something you didn't feel right about you could have done that 18 years ago and gone free."" "And he said, "Yeah, but the difference is, this time I can set Damien free by my decision."" "I mean, that was his best friend, you know." "This deal sucks, but we want their freedom." "All rise." "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen." "Be seated, those of you who can." "We are still waiting to find out...." "I am David Laser, Circuit Judge of Division 9, the Second Judicial District." "continue today for this 11:00 hearing on the West Memphis Three." "Will they be set free today?" "Answer still unknown but, of course, we will continue...." "Mr Echols, Mr Baldwin, Mr Misskelley if you would stand, please, and face the court." "Spend a lot of time explaining it." "They had a private, closed-door hearing...." "Mr Echols, how do you wish to plead in this case?" "Your Honour, I am innocent of these charges but I'm entering an Alford guilty plea today based on advice of my council." "And my understanding that it's in my best interest to do so given the entire record of the case." "Same as relates to you, Mr Misskelley." "How do you wish to plead?" "I'm pleading guilty under North Carolina v. Alford in the Arkansas rules." "Although I am innocent." "This is-- And this plea is in my best interest." "Everybody just be patient." "We're waiting too, like everyone else." "Just gotta stay in place." "Mr Baldwin, how do you choose to plead in this case?" "Your Honour, first of all I am innocent of murdering Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Steven Branch." "However, after serving 18 years in the penitentiary for such I agree that it's in the state's best interest, as well as my own that based upon North Carolina v. Alford that I plead guilty for first-degree murder for those crimes." "All right." "The court finds that there is a factual basis for the plea the pleas are voluntary and will be accepted and received by the court." "I'm aware of the controversy that's existed." "I'm aware of the involvement of the people in this case." "I don't think it'll make the pain go away to the victims' families." "I don't think it will take away a minute of the 18 years that these three young men served in the Arkansas Department of Corrections." "What I've just described is tragedy on all sides." "And I commend people in the case that have assisted towards the end of seeing that justice is served to the best that we can do." "The tremendous judge." "He didn't have to say the things that he did at the end." "Sometimes outside help is in fact a big help and for those of you who have been a participant in that regard that are here, I commend you personally and publicly for having done that." "It was great to see a crowd of people outside of the courthouse you know, 18 years ago were screaming for blood." "And Damien, Jessie and Jason walked out with their hands held high and the crowd is cheering and supporting them." "Some are happy, some are angry and some are perplexed and that's the case at the end of every trial, and this one is no different." "First of all, I understand that nobody in that room wanted to hear from me, particularly." "I needed to be heard by my voters and I needed to offer some explanation." "I'll tell you, let me tell you this." "This judge was most likely going to grant a new trial." "As far as gathering up evidence, I hadn't gotten there yet." "I've not reviewed reams and reams and volumes and boxes and boxes but the evidence I've seen, I believe these guys are guilty." "I know they pled guilty." "With their entry of a plea of guilty we have removed the question of them filing a civil law suit against the state that could result in many millions of dollars." "I mean, because you have three individuals times 18 years is 54, I mean, so, 60ish?" "I have spoken with members of victims' families and I can tell you that they are still suffering the loss of the little boys." "We put to rest a question for these families of the little boys that were killed." "These three individuals pled guilty to the murder of those three little boys that day." "That put that matter to rest." "Period." "End of sentence." "I don't even know where to begin." "I guess we eat, right?" "I was dead-set against this, like a mule." "And I am not moving an inch." "I was just trapped up in it, just by myself." "You reminded me that I'm not by myself and I gotta think of everybody." "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing." "I'm just enjoying the moment, right?" "I think that's cheese." " You think it's what?" " There's cheese in there." " Yeah." "Cheese." "Have you had cheese?" " Yeah, but not in a salad." " All right, I'm done with the salad." " Okay, let's move on." "And it's not just this war between one person and the state." "It is everybody involved, you know, and it was, like, how could I forget?" "Mom!" "I still feel like it's a dream." "I just talked to you Monday and you didn't tell me nothing." " I wanted to." " Free man." " My suitcase." "Check it out, pretty cool." " I like that." "I called him yesterday and said, "I got a little suitcase and it's all packed."" "And he said, "I've never had a suitcase before."" "It's these things." " Gosh, I love you so much." " I love you too." "Every time I turn around, you wanna talk to me." "Look, every time I turn around." "It's great." "It's a great feeling." "I'm used to the guards being around me all the time." "Every now and then, I turn around, make sure you know, damn, is this really real?" "Hey, man." "How you doing, man?" "It's a blessing, you know, to be here with my family and friends." "Last time I seen them, we was all kids and everything." "And here we are, grown up now." "That's really what kept me going over the years." "When are you gonna come to the house and say hi?" "Prison is really hard." "You know, if I could stay out of prison, I could go anywhere I want to, free man." "All I just got to do is, you know, just stay out of trouble." "That's why I'm trying to do things different in my life." "So I know I can do it." "I think we all had our mental image of what this was gonna be at the end." "Which was three of these guys walking out of the courtroom exonerated." "Everything I had in the prison, I carried out in one small envelope." "Everything else, when they told me I was leaving they said, "Pack up whatever you wanna take."" "I just threw it all in the garbage and left it."