Eighteen years ago, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys - bound, naked and mutilated - were found in a ditch in a wooded area near the town of West Memphis, Arkansas, in the United States. Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch and Michael Moore had gone missing on May 5, 1993.
The following year, after intense local media coverage and amid emotional calls for vengeance in the small town, three teenage boys - Damien Echols (18), Jason Baldwin (16) and Jessie Misskelley Jnr (17) - were convicted of the murders.
In 1996, an HBO documentary titled Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills argued that the jailed teenagers were not guilty of the crimes. The West Memphis Three, the filmmakers suggested, had been unfairly targeted by a police department that thought they were devil worshippers. Because they wore black, listened to heavy metal music and showed an interest in paganism, they were demonised by the Bible Belt community. As a result of the documentary, celebrities such as actor Johnny Depp, film director Peter Jackson and Eddie Vedder, frontman of the band Pearl Jam, threw their weight behind a campaign to have the young men exonerated.
As the years passed and alleged ringleader Echols sat on death row and Baldwin and Misskelley served life sentences, the momentum behind their exoneration movement grew. In 2000, a second documentary, Paradise Lost: Revelations, raised more questions about the prosecution's case, which relied largely on a confession given by Misskelley to police. During the trial, an expert had said Misskelley's statement was a classic case of false confession. A support group called Free the West Memphis Three sprung up and started the website wm3.org. Depp, Vedder and other celebrities, such as Dixie Chick Natalie Maines and singer-raconteur Henry Rollins, kept the cause alive in the media. Jackson helped fund investigations aimed at finding evidence that would clear the men.
Then, on August 19 this year, as the release date for a third Paradise Lost film approached, and faced with a long and expensive Supreme Court appeal, the State of Arkansas decided to free the West Memphis Three. But there was a twist. The men were released thanks to a legal loophole known as the 'Alford' plea. Under the agreement, they could protest their innocence but had to concede there was enough evidence to convict them. It was a messy resolution, but in a way it was fitting.
There's a counter-argument about the West Memphis Three that hasn't enjoyed as much attention as the Paradise Lost films. This argument - put forward on wm3truth.com - says Misskelley's confession wasn't coerced and was, in fact, repeated many times, including to his own lawyer after he was convicted of the murders. The argument also raises questions over the trio's shaky alibis for the night of the murders - their stories were inconsistent and contradicted by witnesses - and points to Echols' disturbing psychological profile, which details a history of death threats, animal torture and self-reported suicidal and homicidal feelings.
THE 50 OR SO REPORTERS in the theatre on the 15th floor of HBO's New York headquarters applaud loudly when the three men take the stage after a preview screening of Paradise Lost: Purgatory - the third documentary about the murder case by direc- tors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The response is nothing compared to the reception they will get when the film premieres at the New York Film Festival later that evening - there, the three men will receive a standing ovation.
