The Empathy Exams (23 page)

LOST BOYS

The first film begins with bicycles salvaged from a muddy creek. We’re in the woods. Men stand to their shins in dirty water, moving awkwardly in button-down shirts, speaking in ragged Arkansan accents, saying, “Don’t let nobody in here,” like boys defending a fort, cordoned by yellow tape, except they aren’t boys; there are no boys, which is the point. The boys are dead. They say boys killed them.

The police stand over three bodies so unbelievably pale and thin on the ground, hog-tied by their shoelaces, their ghost skin stuck with green leaves. They look like sleeping changelings.
Changeling
means a child stolen by spirits, or else the demon left in his place. Three boys were killed in May, in 1993, and in their place three demons were found, delivered as sacrifice.

The film’s opening shots crackle with the back-and-forth of police radio. The officers don’t know what to do with these bodies. The film is gray and bleary; the visual quality seems plucked from that strange purgatory just after waking when you are trying to remind yourself that whatever you dreamed—a death, a guilt, some wreckage—isn’t real. That failed hope thickens this gray light.

Gradually, music swells under the voices of the police. You can barely hear the men anymore but you can see the darker lines of water on their pants where they have waded into the creek. Two of the boys were drowned. One bled to death on the banks. The music is Metallica, the early chords of “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).” Its volume rises stubbornly, obscuring the sounds of the investigation. It sounds like a kid turning up the stereo in his bedroom to drown out the sound of his father’s voice beyond the door.

The Case

Here’s what happened: three boys were killed, three more were charged, and three films were made, by two men who spent more than fifteen years following the story.

On May 6, 1993, Steven Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were found in a patch of woods behind a truck stop in an Arkansas town called West Memphis. Three teenagers—Jessie Misskelley Jr., Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols—were brought into custody and charged on counts of capital murder. The murders were deemed Satanic rituals and Damien was called a Satanist. He and Jason were known for wearing black, loving heavy metal, and sketching wizards. Their hair was long. They hated where they came from. They were teenagers, basically, charged with a brutal crime on largely circumstantial evidence. Two New York filmmakers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, decided to make a film—and then a sequel, and then a third—to show the world how this trio—soon known as the West Memphis Three—got to prison and stayed there. The trilogy, called
Paradise Lost
, follows the accused through their original trials, their appeals, and the years of their incarceration.

The third film was already in postproduction by the time something unexpected happened: the men filed something called an Alford plea on August 19, 2011, and were released. This was basically the state admitting it was wrong without admitting it was wrong. The release appears as an epilogue to the last film—and, though it emerges from an exhaustive legal tangle the film makes comprehensible, it still feels like an unaccountable miracle: an ending that might have been called unbelievable, had the films been anything but documentary.

The Place

You see a lot of highways in
Paradise Lost.
You see a lot of highways because West Memphis has a lot of highways. The town sits where two of the country’s biggest interstates—I-55 and I-40—intersect at the Mississippi River. Real Memphis is just across the water. These days average per capita income is just under twenty thousand a year.

The film seems fascinated by the macadam arteries of the city. Its camera keeps swooping along the lines they carve, over concrete lots and beige mall roofs, trailer parks and junked trucks on dirt shoulders. Metallica provides the sound track for all these panoramic shots, lending music to the ugliness of it all, the sameness, the irony of being trapped poor in a land full of highways going everywhere else. These aerial views begin to tell the story underneath this story, which is a story about poverty. It’s a story about doublewides in disrepair and chain-smoking and chain-link fences and weeds growing through rusted truck cabs and neighborhoods built around the fact of highways and boys who hang out at convenience stores and break into trailers with their girlfriends and mothers with hair gone crunchy from gel and mothers with pill habits and everybody with crooked teeth. Only the teeth of lawyers and police officers are straight.

This is a story about “white-trash” families kneeling at the graves of their sons. This is a story about people who felt invisible before this tragedy brought them into view. It’s a story about boys who can’t afford their own suits or their own legal representation. They take whatever the state hands them, and they will continue doing this for years—until a set of films makes it possible for them to do otherwise.

Jessie’s stepmom sums it up pretty nicely: “If we had money,” she says, “do you think these three boys would’ve been picked on?”

The Woods

The bodies were found in a patch of forest called Robin Hood Hills, a swath of lush green nestled beside a truck stop. It’s right next to the highway but large enough to get lost in. The fallen Eden of the overly developed world skirts the fallen Eden of these woods. Robin Hood Hills should summon a merry band of outlaws, but every time I hear it I think of Peter Pan instead. My mind insists on the fairy tale that best applies. Peter Pan means Neverland, where boys never become men.

Boys
is a confusing word when you’re trying to tell this story: three boys accused of killing three boys, six characters splitting custody of youth but not of innocence.

“These are not boys that murdered our kids,” one victim’s father says. “They stopped being boys when they planned this.”

The trailers for the film show a three-by-two grid of photos: school portraits of the dead boys forming the top row, mug shots of the accused underneath. The visual insistence on this geometric alignment—on the news, in the papers—stems from the same hunger for answers that eventually prompted the conviction: the compulsion to find a symmetric solution to all this mess. Three victims, three killers. A three-by-two grid is comprehensible as a spreadsheet. People crave some web of correspondence, however evil, something captured and framed by right angles, made right, made orderly—in a still, six stills, finally kept still, finally ordered.

The Accused

Why did Damien and Jason and Jessie get arrested? Jessie confessed, is why, and implicated the other two. Confession can be hard to see around but Jessie’s confession looks pretty frail in context. He’s brought into the station on nothing and treated like a criminal; he’s got an IQ of seventy-two, which puts him at roughly the mental capacity of a six-year-old; he’s interrogated for twelve hours straight and only the last forty-one minutes are taped. He gets some important details wrong before he’s guided into getting them right. He says the murders happened around noon, when the boys were still in school, until he’s corralled into admitting they actually happened at night.

I know false confessions happen all the time. I’m horrified by them, of course, and by the fact that many can’t admit, can’t
accept
, that they happen, and horrified by the justice system that lets them happen, that forces them to happen—and still, despite all this, it’s hard to deny how convincing it is to hear a voice confessing to a crime. I feel compelled against myself, listening to the recording as it’s played during Jessie’s trial. How could it be anything but the truth? Why would somebody speak words they didn’t mean? “Western culture,” says literary theorist Peter Brooks, “has made confessional speech a prime mark of authenticity, par excellence the kind of speech in which the individual authenticates his inner truth.” An authenticated inner truth: twelve hours, a couple of cops trying to do their jobs.

After his conviction, Jessie is offered a reduced sentence to repeat his confession at Damien and Jason’s trial. He refuses. He could have years of his life back, and he says no.

Jessie is tiny. At one point, his defense lawyer refers to him as “little Jessie.”
Little Jessie.
Not big enough to be a boy-killer. He’s dwarfed by the officers who escort him into court. He’s dwarfed by his own suit. Michael Moore’s father wonders why taxpayer money has funded suits for the accused. “They’re in jail,” he says, “they should wear jail clothes.” This is the tempting tautology of accusation: guilty until proven innocent. Wear your jail clothes until we decide you deserve something else.

Jessie wears clothes that don’t fit. He looks like he’s playing dress-up. He looks like the little boy he’s forfeited his right to be. He’s got ruffled hair and he mumbles and there’s still some joy and mischief in his grin, when it comes. In his cell, he keeps Hallmark cards from his family lined on a shelf. He reads their messages in a shaky, effortful voice, sounding out every syllable. He’s partway between schoolboy and man; he’s propped up a magazine picture of a chick in a bikini.

When Jessie talks to his father on the phone from prison, their conversation is wrenchingly banal (“How are you?” “All right.” “All right?” “Yeah, I’m all right”), but it eventually gets around to the subject of a hurt hand. Jessie punched the metal toilet in his cell. He’s worried a bone might be broken. His father says, “If you can move it, it ain’t broken.” There is a deep care evident between them. At moments, Jessie Sr. still laughs. The camera gets close on his laughter, on his unstraight teeth. A father takes pleasure in his son, over a telephone line, despite everything.

In an interview, Jessie is asked what he does at night. “I just cry a lot,” he says. “And then I go to sleep.”

At the time of his trial, Jason Baldwin looks too young for puberty, much less the death penalty. It’s heartbreaking. His hair is light blond like an aura around his head, something from nineteenth-century spirit photos. When I watch him, I feel almost broken at his frailty—his teeth as skewed as his mother’s, a gaunt woman whose voice seems to chew on itself—and it’s in these moments of aching for Jason, at the climax of my sadness, that I catch myself wondering: What if they actually did it? I get a terrifying flash of them in the woods, doing the things they’ve been accused of—and I feel a pang of guilt, as if I’ve betrayed them simply by doubting their innocence for a moment.

But here’s the thing: I have no idea. I can look at the evidence, as mediated by a documentary, and feel outraged; I can look at the court’s eventual decision to overturn its own decision, practically speaking, and I can feel confirmed in that outrage; I can look at the faces of these boys and feel the strength of truth in what they say; but I can’t ever
know.
No one can know, except for them—and the person who did it, if that person is out there. So I feel my heart breaking toward a truth I can’t be entirely sure of. It’s an odd sort of vertigo: affective conviction thrust against epistemological uncertainty.

During his first film interview in jail, Jason drinks a Mello Yello and eats a Snickers bar. This is somehow the saddest part of the scene—sadder, even, than the things he says—to think of how these treats are nothing, in the face of everything, but still the only things he got to choose all day. Empathy is easier when it comes to concrete particulars. I can’t imagine being in prison, but I can imagine choosing a snack. So I’m pulled close to the fact of Jason’s candy bar—and, once close to this detail, feel suddenly overwhelmed by the split that renders it irrelevant: the essential divide between his incarceration and my freedom. Jason is free as well now, and I wonder what he eats. I wonder what he missed most.

But on screen, still in jail, all he can do is drink a pee-yellow soda. He says he couldn’t kill an animal or a person. He talks about his iguana. It’s his favorite of all his pets. I understand the detail of this iguana as an instance of editorial construction: how can you see a boy who looks ten years old, talking about his iguana, and believe he’s a murderer? I’m aware that the filmmakers are essentially deploying this moment—how it proclaims Jason’s innocence more effectively, affectively, than his own denial—but I’m also complicit in the vision they’ve offered me. I believe what Jason says about his iguana. I believe what he says about not killing those boys. His lawyer asks him: What does he want to do once the trial is over? Maybe go to Disneyland, he says. He’s never been on a trip except to some mineral springs nearby. Sounds like
hero springs
in his mumbling, though he might have just said
hot.
I want to picture Jason Baldwin on a trip. I want to be inside his head when he hears “Not guilty,” and I want to follow him on an airplane all the way to Anaheim. This is one of the delusions documentary invites: if it’s all edited anyway, if it’s all artifact, couldn’t it take another turn? Couldn’t there be another ending?

On the witness stand, Damien is asked about his name. He gave it to himself. The question he is not asked is “Did you name yourself for the devil?” But the possibility is clearly on the table. It turns out Damien named himself after Father Damien, a Catholic priest who ministered to lepers in Hawaii and eventually died of their disease. It would be nice to find some parallel here—an illumination, at least a segue—but there is no parallel. Defendant Damien hasn’t ministered to any lepers. His tragedy doesn’t lie in the heroism of his vocation but in its absence—the negative space, those lives unlived, which is to say: the definition of incarceration itself.

Damien could have ministered to anyone, anywhere, but he was kept to one place, one single
here
, where he ministered to no one. Not that his life didn’t happen in prison—he speaks beautifully of his meditation practice and his reading, his relationships with other men on death row—but that this life could have happened elsewhere. It haunts his story as a thousand empty margins.