The Empathy Exams (25 page)

In getting mad at them, I suspect I’m doing precisely what I hate the system for doing: looking for a scapegoat. Their faces offer convenient vessels to hold my free-floating notions about a wrongness that cannot be accounted for. Individuals are easier targets than a faceless justice system too large to hate. I remind myself: these parents are only blaming the guys they’ve been told to blame. Which is another casualty of the justice system—not just robbing three boys of their freedom, but robbing three families of their grief, insisting that they turn this grief to something else. The police and the courts—with their conviction, in both senses, their certainty and their verdict—invited these families to trade grace for vengeance.

With the victims’ families, I find myself veering wildly between anger and guilt. I feel such sadness for what their grief must be like—forcing them to live inside such rage on top of their unimaginable loss. They lost their children, and in return were offered the chance to become complicit in a burning.

Prairie burning
is the name for what happens when people set fire to the land so that it will grow. It’s a controlled devastation, like irradiating cancer cells that rebel against a body, or amputating a foot gone black with gangrene. Years ago witches were torched like fields. Their bodies bore the controlled burn. Their bodies held evil like vessels so that evil would not be understood as something diffused across other bodies, across everyone.

The Trial

It’s the imperative of efficiency that got these boys accused and the mechanics of pride that got them convicted. Gary Gitchell, the chief inspector of the West Memphis police, is the face of this efficiency. At a press conference early in the first film, when asked about the strength of his case on a scale of one to ten, he says, “Eleven.” He says “eleven” and people clap. They laugh.

It’s an eleven the state of Arkansas will overturn, eighteen years later, when it sets these boys free as men. But in the documentary,
eleven
stands, immortalized forever. People laugh at this eleven because they need it so badly. They laugh from relief. They want to believe in what Gitchell’s words imply about the justice system and the nature of wrongdoing—they need to believe that for every irrefutable tragedy, there’s an irrefutable way to make things right again.

“I think the cops just can’t find who done it,” says Jessie Sr., shortly after his son’s arrest. He’s sitting in a recliner. He has a red face and dirty hands. He’s a mechanic. He looks calm. When Jessie is released, years later, father and son will bow out of the public festivities and get some barbecue instead. But Jessie Sr., trapped in this moment, doesn’t know about that barbecue—doesn’t know that it’s coming; or how many nights lie between. For eighteen years of phone calls, his teeth will show when he laughs. The camera already knows that, and brings you close to his face to show something animal in his laughter—not something brute, but something having to do with survival. It hurts to be this close to the simple fact of his mouth, the white of his teeth.

This intimate attention is constant across these films; it thickens their world and makes them ache. The same bikes dredged up from the creek are shown after the verdicts, being loaded into a van—presumably about to get shoved away for good in some dark storage locker of evidence. Or the camera lingers for an extra moment on the steel toilet in Jessie’s cell—the same one that bruised his fist but did not break it.
If you can move it, it ain’t broken.
If you can breathe in prison, you are still living. If you show teeth, you are laughing; if you can laugh, you are surviving.

This finely textured camera work forces empathy to effuse in all directions, even where it isn’t meant to go. You get so close to everyone, you can feel sorry for anyone. The angles are exacting and perceptive, catching tremors of pain on parents’ faces during trial, or flash-fissures of doubt from one of Gitchell’s officers on the witness stand—a sudden flick of his eyes, a moment of panic at having goofed up, at revealing a chink in the system—another testimony that everyone here is nervous, including the police officers who seem so smug. Everyone is afraid of something.

The films also do a fantastic job of capturing odd moments of triviality, the disconcertingly casual texture of being sentenced to die for a crime you didn’t commit. Life can’t feasibly be lived as dire gravity at every moment. The films get this. Sitting with his lawyers, Damien goes over a low point in his testimony. He was daydreaming, he explains, and only halfway paying attention to the question.

“Maybe they’ll only halfway kill you,” his lawyer replies.

Damien laughs. The camera zooms in, as if querying: how could he laugh? And then it lingers a moment, as if suggesting, even insisting, since no response could be appropriate, in the sense of expected or adequate, since
appropriate
no longer means anything here—how could he not laugh? Who cares if he does?

As teenagers on camera, Damien and Jason giggle when they remember the night they got arrested. They were just watching TV on the couch. “Pigs busted in,” Damien says, and they shake their heads, as if they still can’t believe it. They laugh.
Eleven.
People laugh. Part of this whole saga still feels like a movie to Damien and Jason; even when they’re on trial it’s still a little bit absurd—and, for one saving moment of absurdity, not really happening. They tried to hide in a bedroom and turn off the lights. But the police wouldn’t go away. Not for another eighteen years.

The Bond

The friendship between these boys comes across as something deeply felt. At the hearing that sets them free, Jason will submit a plea he doesn’t believe in, admitting legal guilt, in order to save Damien’s life. (Damien was the only one of the three on death row.) Damien thanks him for this willingness at their press conference. For the first time in nearly twenty years, they hug. It’s hard to imagine what this hug would feel like, how intimate or inadequate—touching the body of a man who’d lost his life, just like you’d lost yours, but was still alive, just as you were, and now free. They lean across micro-phones, awkwardly, to embrace.

Damien closes his memoir with a simple moment: catching sight of Jason in prison. This was 2005. They were both living in the Varner Unit, a prison near Pine Bluff. They went for years without contact until Jason appeared out of the blue one day, on the other side of a glass wall. “He raised his hand and smiled,” Damien writes, “then he was gone, like a ghost.” It’s a sad scene because nothing happens. That’s what they have, all they have: a glass wall, a raised hand—one of them ghosted and the other haunted.

When they were boys, Damien and Jason had an entire world to disavow. There were arcade games to play and curfews to break and trailer parks to ditch, and there was music fierce enough to lend every breakage resonance. So much music: Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth. So much volume. In Damien’s memoir, the only relationships that appear flawless are his friendship with Jason and their shared love affair with music. They lived for it. They were always two boys crouching in a dark bedroom, waiting to be left alone, itching for sound.

I’ve often imagined my life with a sound track. Like we all have. I’ve heard music bloating the stories of my life, lifting common-place discontent to the pitch of tragic drama. I think of this bloat as Metallica thrums under the vistas of Damien’s story: sprawling trailers and blurred big rigs, yellow crime tape flapping in the breeze. Damien was given a sound track, probably the one he’d always heard anyway, but for reasons he’d never imagined—and it couldn’t comfort him during the days of his incarceration because he had no access to a stereo in prison. It couldn’t hold his emotions, deepen or soothe them—it can only do these things for
us
, now, as we watch a movie about his life. Surging chords of Metallica aren’t the sound track of Damien’s story so much as the sound track of
our
story of his story, which is to say: the story of our hearts breaking for him.

The Reason

One of the brilliant narrative betrayals of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, the grandfather of all highbrow true crime, is that the criminals at its center, the men who killed an entire family, ultimately emerge with no motive besides money. This feels like a second death: it makes the deaths feel meaningless by taking away the possibility of any affective frame that could explain them. The murderer at the center of the book, Perry Smith, is described as “capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest deathblows.”
With or without
, that casual eitherness, is terrifying.

It’s easier, somehow, if there’s a reason for tragedy—lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There’s something we recognize as human, a motive toward which we can direct our rage but can also understand, at some primal level, as an extension of ourselves.

“I see no motive,” says a disembodied voice in the first film, while the camera prowls the forest floor—getting close to the ground as if hunting for it, this lost motive, nestled in tangled tree roots or buried in a creek gully long gone dry. The parents need an explanation. So do reporters. So do prosecutors. There’s no motive apparent so motives are found. The press says “Satanic orgy.” The parents seem convinced of devil worship. Damien calls West Memphis “Second Salem.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote, meaning frightened people need motives. Meaning everyone does.

A preacher remembers Damien saying he couldn’t be saved. He hadn’t taken the Bible into his heart. Damien self-identifies as Wiccan—which he explains on the stand as “basically a close involvement with nature.” Hearing him say this, I can’t help thinking of the woods. I think of three boys lying hog-tied. I don’t hear guilt, but I hear the connective tissue of imagining—how, faced with a tragedy, you want to put the pieces together any way they might fit. I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens in the minds of jurors. Who were they? What were they afraid of? What did a guilty verdict offer them that innocence wouldn’t have?

The films demand point-of-view train hopping as an ethical imperative—just when you’ve gotten deep inside the groove of someone’s pain, you are jolted suddenly into the pain of another. This empathy is thrown into relief by the fact that, in the films, empathy is rare. Which is understandable. The parents of these boys suffer deep into particulars.
Washerwoman wrinkling. Fly larvae. Ghost remnants.
How could a mother live with these details? Anger burns them like fuel. A man crushes fire with his cowboy boots.

These grieving parents are cocooned by anger, the only structure in which they find shelter. They don’t have much energy left over for compassion. They wear their curses like garments.
And the mothers that bore them.
These mothers are suffering too.

The convicted men are the only ones who summon much compassion. Damien thinks about the three boys who died all the time. “They didn’t do anything to deserve what they got,” he says. He has a son of his own, born a few months after his arrest.

“I have anger sometimes,” says Jason, after years in prison, “but there’s no one to direct it toward.”

He acknowledges explicitly what others simply enact: the problem of tragedy without a vector, anger without object or container. There’s a moment, in the first film, when Jason is asked what he’d say to the families of the victims. He shakes his head silently, bashful—looking, more than anything, like a boy who’s been asked which girl he’s got a crush on. He says, finally and quietly, “I don’t know.” This seems like a startling moment of
rightness
, in a world where everyone seems so absurdly sure of what they have to say to everyone. It feels right to confess unknowing amid voices so quick to reach for conclusion, so eager to clutch the stability of accusation and indignation, the talisman of demon or scapegoat. Now here’s a boy they say killed a boy, saying,
I don’t know.

Years later, in a sequel, he has something to say. Has
something
—which means, has what? Has the enduring fact of incarceration, too many beatings to count, a broken collarbone.

Now he would tell the families of the victims this: he understands why they hate him. But he’s innocent. He’d want to hate someone too, if it had been his little brother who died. But he’s innocent. He says it twice.

Why do I like Jason so much? My heart reaches for him in a way it doesn’t for the others. For starters, he looks so young, even when he begins—in the second and third films—to go bald. Also, he looks a little like my brother.
If it had been my little brother
, he said. It works like that. Kin is kind, is a kind of muscle memory. Maybe this is why I can’t stand to watch his face behind the glass of the patrol car, getting smaller as he’s driven away from the verdict. Maybe this is why I can’t stand to watch him getting into the backseat, moving so gracefully in his handcuffs, adept from months of practice. It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.

The Epilogue

The third film in the trilogy is subtitled
Purgatory.
It was named before the saving grace of its ending arrived. In its version of purgatory, certain things remain the same. The DA’s office is still claiming
eleven.
The boys still claim innocence. But other things have changed: now John Mark Byers thinks they’re innocent too. New genetic evidence has him convinced. His truck displays a WM3 sticker on the back window. He sings the same tune of careening indignation, but his lyrics are different:
They’re innocent
, he says now.
It’s an injustice.
He’s older now. It’s impossible to forget his cowboy boots on the forest floor, from the second film, stomping out his own grave fires.
You wanted to eat my baby’s testicles.
It’s impossible to tell whether he’s changed his mind despite his persona or because of it, whether his change of heart is a recanting of his former performance or simply the next act. Melissa Byers is dead. Pam Hobbs isn’t sure the boys are innocent, but she thinks they might deserve a new trial. We don’t see Todd and Dawn Moore. They’re done with documentaries.