January 2, 2008

Dear Friends & Supporters:

As a new year begins, we are also starting a new round of work to fully – and finally – exonerate the West Memphis Three. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that my husband, Damien Echols, has been on death row for nearly 15 years and that Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin have also spent their entire adult lives in prison for a crime they did not commit.

As you know, in late October we filed a 500-page motion in federal court with strong scientific evidence that all three men are innocent of the murders for which they were wrongfully convicted in 1993. This motion includes DNA testing on dozens of pieces of evidence, analysis from the nation’s leading forensic science experts, other solid scientific evidence and compelling witness affidavits. There was no credible evidence presented when these three men were on trial; they were convicted based on fear, hysteria and innuendo. With our recent court filing, reliable scientific evidence finally came into this case, nearly 14 years after Damien, Jessie and Jason were wrongfully convicted.

We urgently need your help to make sure this evidence is fully considered. With your help, the strong scientific evidence will have its day in court, and Damien, Jessie and Jason can finally see justice.

The harsh reality is that uncovering clear evidence that the West Memphis Three are innocent isn’t enough. A few weeks after we shared this extraordinary evidence with the federal court, we received an order from the judge saying we must resolve claims in state court before the federal courts will look at the evidence. The legal team has spent countless hours developing a strategy and plan to focus the court on this new evidence. Today, our lawyers – some of the nation’s best and most dedicated appellate attorneys – formally asked the state court to separate the new evidence from pending claims and review it quickly.

Simply put, today we told the court that this evidence is too important and too powerful to let sit any longer.

In the weeks and months ahead, our lawyers will be preparing to argue this new evidence in either state or federal court. At the same time, our investigators are pursuing even more new evidence that the West Memphis Three are innocent. I need to be honest with you: It is frustrating to come so far, only to see that we have farther to go. As Damien said recently during an hour-long “Larry King Live” interview, “You know, the legal system, they like to drag things out as long as they possibly can. Like I say, I’ve been here almost 15 years now.”

I want to write you a letter simply thanking you – from the bottom of our hearts – for your support and generosity that made it possible for us to uncover this new evidence. We are more grateful than you can ever know, yet we also need your help more than ever. We urgently need financial contributions to help pay for the legal work, investigation and organizing efforts that will correct this grave injustice once and for all. Please make a donation to the Defense Fund today.

Please make checks payable to:

Damien Echols Defense Fund
PO Box 1216
Little Rock, AR 72203

You can also donate online, through PayPal. It’s easy, free and allows you to use your credit or debit card. We also suggest that International Supporters use this option. Please use LDavis11@hotmail.com as the recipient address and kindly include your name and address in the notes box. The button you can click to include your address does not always work.

Over the last several years – and particularly the last several months – we have been overwhelmed by the support and generosity of longtime friends and people just learning about the case. Shortly after we made the new evidence public, a group of supporters in Arkansas began organizing to put political pressure on the Governor, Attorney General and District Attorney. Thousands of people, many of them in Arkansas and Tennessee, came forward to demand that the new evidence be fully considered.

The message is clear: The public wants elected officials to respect the scientific evidence, and most people – even those who once believed that the West Memphis Three were guilty – believe that the case is an intolerable miscarriage of justice. In the months ahead, we will be expanding these organizing and public education efforts, just as we redouble our litigation strategy to exonerate Damien, Jessie and Jason.

Thank you for everything you have already done. Without your help, we would not be on the verge of finally securing justice. And thank you in advance for making a donation that will enable us to finally overturn these convictions and free Damien, Jessie and Jason.

Thanks very much,
Lorri Davis
and the Damien Echols Legal Team

Press Inquiries:
Alice Whitman Leeds
Public Relations in the Public Interest
Ph: 212-874-0675
Mobile: 917-523-5029
aleeds@nyc.rr.com

The above letter came from www.wm3.org

For Immediate Release

Artist Cinquain opens online art store to
Aid in West Memphis Three Defense Fund
A participant in the 2006 Skeleton Key Art show in San Francisco

January 5, 2008: Albuquerque, New Mexico— The artist Cinquain donated artwork to the art exhibit Skeleton Key Auctions in May 2006. Now she has opened an online art store, ‘Art Benefiting the WM3’ to help raise funds for the West Memphis Three’s defense fund – Having no physical evidence, the three teenagers were pinpointed, harassed and accused of murdering and mutilating three 8-year-old boys.

Damien Echols sits on death row, Jason Baldwin was sentenced to life without parole, and Misskelley got life plus forty. July 2007 DNA evidence proved these three men should never have been convicted. Stories fabricated by the West Memphis Police Department have incarcerated these men for nearly 15 years.

At first glance the artwork by Cinquain looks like photography. However, it is not, it is charcoal on paper, drawn, and not created in Photoshop. You can now purchase the art created by Cinquain and all proceeds will go to the West Memphis Three’s defense fund.

“As a community we have power in numbers. While one of us may not be able to make a huge change, together we can make a significant difference. Now is your opportunity to make that change. Together we can help raise money for the defense fund where 100% of your donation will go to expenses such as lawyer’s fees.” said Cinquain artist of Deviant Art (www.cinquain.deviantart.com).

To buy the artwork to benefit the West Memphis Three visit the online store: wm3.media-mizer.com (Do NOT add www. before wm3.media-mizer.com)

This interview was conducted by email Nov. 29, 2006
By Mara Leveritt

ML: You had young sons of your own and a young law practice when you were asked to represent Jessie Misskelley, Jr. How were you brought into the case and how did it effect your personal and professional life, both in the early days and in the years since?

DS: My oldest son was 8 years old in 1993, the exact same age as the victims, Michael Moore, Stevie Branch and Chris Byers. My youngest son just turned 10 a few months ago. Having young children from the time of the trials until now has made my involvement in the case a little more difficult.

There were lawyers that had approached the court and volunteered to represent Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin. I did not seek the appointment in any way. Apparently no one volunteered to represent Jessie Misskelley. It may have been due to the confession, but I am not sure about this. As it turned out, Judge David Goodson, who was from Paragould, my hometown, just happened to be on the bench in West Memphis the day that the three defendants were brought before the court for their first appearances. He had the task of appointing lawyers for each of the defendants because the local public defender in Crittenden County advised the court that he had a conflict of interest with the case. I found out years later that his “conflict” was that he was a Christian and could not represent a “devil worshiper.”

Judge Goodson called me at home early that morning and asked me if I would be willing to take on the task. My initial reaction was “no,” but I was intrigued just enough to ask the judge if I could have a few minutes to think it over and discuss it with Greg Crow, my law partner, at the time. He only gave me a few minutes to decide, and when I could not find Mr. Crow, I had to make the call on my own. I asked my Wife, Kim, what she thought about the situation. I was surprised when she told me I should do it, so I called the judge back in Marion, and accepted the appointment.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday (Nov 25th) make yourself a turkey sandwich, reheat some stuffing then make your way to Identity Boardshop in Buena Park, CA for a Zero autograph signing with the whole team. Also check out Zero’s new board series which will benefit the West Memphis Three.

Friday October 13, 2006 @ 06:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Former Misfits singer Michale Graves is following in the footsteps of Henry Rollins, Pearl Jam and the makers of the two Paradise Lost documentaries in taking up the cause of three imprisoned men who’ve come to be known as “The West Memphis 3.”

The documentary makers first helped bring attention to the men (Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and James Baldwin), who many believe were wrongly convicted for murdering three young Arkansas boys in 1993. Rollins subsequently recorded an album and embarked on a tour to raise money for their defence fund, and Pearl Jam included an Echols-written song called “Army Reserve” on this year’s self-titled album. Graves is going one step further than those artists, as he’s collaborating on an entire album with Echols, who’s still appealing his conviction while sitting on death row.

After watching Paradise Lost and visiting the WM3 website, Graves emailed Echols’ wife, who put the two men in contact. “I challenged him to continue writing lyrics,” Graves told Billboard.com.

“I said, ‘You can articulate what you’re hearing and what kind of mood is happening, and I would put it to music.’ And that’s what he did. I would kind of meditate on it, pick up my guitar, and we wrote six songs together.”

The six songs — “Frost Bite,” “Nothing,” “Worm Wood,” “A Thousand Cracks Of Daylight,” “Silent Partner” and “Ascension” — will be included on a still untitled album that Graves is looking for a label for. He hopes to release it next June to mark the 14th anniversary of the arrest of the WM3.

Graves said Echols’ powerful words will be set to folk-influenced music, which is a far cry from the horror punk style he’s been associated with. Even his next solo album, Return To Earth, veers away somewhat from the sound of his past.

“I wanted to show a creative evolution,” Graves said of the record, which will be released by Horror High on Halloween. “I wanted it to be a much more mature record, both emotionally and musically.”

Graves was the singer of The Misfits from 1995 to 2000, and he wrote many of the band’s songs during that period. After leaving the group, he released an album each with Graves and Gotham Rd. before he joined the U.S. Marines. He was honourably discharged after hurting his back, but toured in support of his solo debut, Punk Rock Is Dead.

The 31-year-old is also one of the leaders of the Conservative Punk movement, and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss his views.

Official WM3 Myspace Site
September 14, 2006

The Free the West Memphis Three Support Fund now has an official Myspace account. Supporters can find each other via Myspace and post comments for the three in prison. We will periodically send them the comments and friends list so they can see all of their supporters in one place. Visit and add us to your own friends list.

Link: WM3 Official Myspace

August 31, 2006
by Annette Stark

The West Memphis Three were convicted of child murder, but troubling questions and a series of films have led many to doubt their guilt.

Portrait of a killer? Damien Echols, now 30, says he didn’t kill the three little boys.

The Robin Hood Hills child murder crime scene has grown incredibly cold in 13 years. Even the morbidly curious college students finally stopped haunting the drainage ditch behind the Blue Beacon Truck Wash in West Memphis, Arkansas, where eight-year-olds Christopher Byers, James Moore, and Steven Branch were found killed and mutilated on May 5, 1993. “We tore that old place down,” says a Blue Beacon worker. He refuses to discuss the murders and won’t give me his name. “It’s over with and I’m not allowed to talk about it. All these years later, I’m still trying to figure out if those three kids that got killed were the same kids we told not to play here that day because of the trucks.”

When I ask him if he believes they got the guys who did it, he hangs up.

The town has moved on. But questions about the murders and subsequent convictions of three West Memphis teenagers linger, many of them raised by two HBO documentaries, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations.

Paradise Lost documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (who both also directed Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) first chronicled the 1994 Arkansas trials and subsequent convictions of three West Memphis teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley – now known as the West Memphis Three. (Baldwin and Misskelley got life. Echols got the death penalty.)

The follow-up, Revelations, revisits West Memphis for Echols’s ill-fated state appeals and also highlights the earliest efforts of a now-worldwide network of WM3 supporters, led in the beginning by three Los Angeles advocates from the film industry: Kathy Bakken, Burk Sauls, and Grove Pashley.

And interest in the case is still growing. Sinofsky and Berlinger’s Paradise Lost 3 is slated for release sometime this year and Dimension Films plans to release a film in 2007, which will be based on the book Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three by Arkansas-based investigative journalist Mara Leveritt.

Paradise Lost turned the West Memphis Three into cult icons. Supporters say it’s impossible to watch the documentary and miss the awful sense of American justice gone wrong, that the only crime the West Memphis Three ever committed was sticking out as black-clad outsiders in 1993 in a small southern town.

“What struck me was that I kept thinking I was watching a movie with character actors,” recalls former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. “The things the prosecution were saying, their witnesses, it was all so hopelessly stupid and sad. Justice got a black eye in those trials.”

Rollins is one of an ever-growing list of celebrity WM3 supporters that includes Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Jello Biafra, Winona Ryder, Jack Black, Steve Earle, Trey Parker, and Metallica – to name a few – whose fundraising efforts include concerts, art benefits, and compilation CDs. In 2002, Rollins released Rise Above, a CD of 24 Black Flag songs performed by various artists including Tom Araya (Slayer), Lemmy (Motörhead), Nick Oliveri (Queens of the Stone Age), Corey Taylor (Slipknot), and Ice-T, with all proceeds going to the West Memphis Three defense. The support website wm3.org, which is run out of West L.A., has received more than 3,485,769 visitors as of this writing.

Today, West Memphis advertises itself as “a hometown feeling with big city attractions,” a description you can read on the town’s chamber of commerce website or just glean by counting churches and ministries that line the residential streets. But West Memphis is also a known drug hub, a shady blotch at the intersection of Interstates 40 and 55 where cops regularly seize illegal guns, pounds of marijuana, and kilos of cocaine at the West Memphis cargo inspection station, aptly described by the National Drug Intelligence Center as one of the two busiest in the nation.

“I would characterize West Memphis as a place where a lot of folks travel through,” says spokesperson Steve Frazier of the FBI in Little Rock, Arkansas. “It’s a crossroads, a highly traveled city, and sometimes that brings the criminals who travel I-40.”

Yet, in a town lousy with crooked cops, manic drug informants, dirty cash, and violent vagrants, when the bludgeoned bodies of three small children were found in a drainage ditch behind the Blue Beacon Truck Wash, local police convinced the public that three impoverished local teens were good for the killing. This was accomplished with a stunning lack of evidence, the West Memphis Three advocates say. Moreover, it was accomplished within one day.

The sign of the cross

Christopher Byers, James Moore, and Steven Branch first went missing on the evening of May 5, 1993. According to John Mark Byers, the boy’s stepfather, Christopher had misbehaved at the Weaver Elementary School and was sent home. “I spanked him three times with my belt with his pants up,” Byers recalls. And then he told the child not to leave the house. When Byers returned home at 6 p.m., Christopher was not there. Byers first told a cop that Christopher was missing at 6:30 that night and then was the first parent to report to the West Memphis Police at around 8 p.m.

The children’s bodies were discovered in the ditch sometime in the afternoon on May 6. All three were naked and had received multiple head, limb, and torso injuries; they were hog-tied with shoelaces binding their wrists to their ankles. Steven Branch had bite marks on his face. It was determined that both James Moore and Steven Branch had drowned and suggested that Christopher Byers had drowned, as well. Of the three, Christopher Byers had sustained the most violent injuries, including what appeared to be a sexual assault. He had a skull fracture at the base of his neck, stab wounds on his genitals; his penis was skinned and the killer had removed the child’s testes and scrotum.

One day later, the West Memphis Police Department had a motive – ritual child sacrifice, a profile of the killers, whom they decided were probably members of a Satanic cult – and three suspects: local teenage heavy metal fans Damien Echols (18), Jason Baldwin (16), and Jessie Misskelley (17). At noon on the following day, they visited the Broadway Trailer Park residence of 18-year-old Echols and began questioning him.

Jessie Misskelley has an IQ of 72, which is mildly retarded. On June 3, West Memphis police investigators questioned Misskelley about his role in the heinous crimes. The interrogation lasted 12 hours. Misskelley was never provided legal counsel or allowed to call his family. Only about the last hour of this was recorded, during which Misskelley confessed, implicating himself, Echols, and Baldwin in the murders.

The Misskelley statement was riddled with errors. He repeatedly got the timeline wrong. First he said the murders had occurred at 9 a.m., which would have been impossible as the children were all accounted for at school. Then he changed it to noon – also impossible.

Misskelley recanted his nonsensical statement almost immediately afterward, and his public defender, Dan Stidham, said that the only reason his client confessed was because he thought he could get the $50,000 reward. But within a day, the three teenagers were formally charged with murder.

Misskelley was tried and convicted in February 1994, but since he refused to testify against his friends, his statement was ruled inadmissible in the Baldwin/Echols trial. That commenced within the month, with Berlinger, Sinofsky, and the HBO cameras following every step of the way. “We thought we were going there to make a real-life River’s Edge and that these kids were guilty,” recalls Sinofsky. “We wanted to look into why they would commit such a heinous crime. When we realized they were innocent we went back to HBO and let them know it had gone in a different direction. We said we were kind of thinking the stepfather John Mark Byers did it. He was a fighting kind of guy and one time he even said to us, ‘Just remember boys, it all started here.’”

In March 1994, Echols and Baldwin were convicted of triple homicide. Echols was sentenced to death by lethal injection and is on death row at the Arkansas state penitentiary in Grady, where Misskelley is serving life plus 40 and Baldwin life without parole.

There was no weapon at the scene, and no blood, other than what had collected when police removed the bodies from the water and placed them on the ground, leading to speculation that the murders were committed someplace else and the bodies dragged to the ditch. The state’s evidence that Echols was a Satanist amounted to an expert witness in the occult who had a mail-order degree, and pentagrams Echols had scribbled in jail. The murder weapon was a clean knife that was found in a lake near Echols’ home, which resembled the knife that was possibly used at the crime.

Echols’s current attorney, noted San Francisco defense lawyer Dennis Riordan, was retained in 2004. He says: “The thing that led me to take this case was the startling sense that, in a death penalty case, there just wasn’t any credible evidence that connected him to the crime. You can read the Arkansas State Court opinion and they list everything that was offered against them, and it’s just terrifying that anyone could have been sentenced to death on any one of those six factors. A knife that was serrated? You could go into any home in Arkansas and find a serrated knife.”

According to FBI’s Frazier, who checked the old files, there was a request for an FBI profile on a probable killer – at first they were looking for a “Rambo” type – but it was not completed. “The West Memphis Police Department request for a profile was discontinued based on the fact that arrests had been made,” he says.

The devil wears Prada

Damien Echols wasn’t every teenager in America in 1993, but you could pretty much recognize the type. He dressed in black, wore skull earrings, and thought Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose was God. He dabbled – some say – in the occult. And he was poor – there wasn’t always enough to eat – and even less for a poverty-stricken kid to do in West Memphis, Arkansas, where he lived in a shabby trailer park with a mom that he loved and a stepfather he was ambivalent about. So he hung out with his friends, listening to heavy metal and reading Stephen King and Anne Rice. Sometimes they’d just sit by the lake all day and throw rocks at the water.

Echols was strange. Despite that, he didn’t have a history of violence; there was one brush with the law when he was 15, and he ran away with his girlfriend after her father discovered them having sex. He was then sent for treatment for a non-specific “psychotic disorder” at Charter Hospital. Echols was prescribed just the usual, run-of-the-mill antidepressants available at that time. By the time he was released, the conclusion by his doctors was that he was no longer depressed.

In his muck gray and bulletproof glass visitors’ cell on death row, Echols (now 30) considers this and says, “If I had to do it all over again, I would not have stood out.”

Death row inmates are allowed a two-hour no-contact visit with the media. So Echols speaks through a vent in the wall. When wife Lorri Davis comes on Fridays, she is allowed one extra hour and she gets to sit in the fishbowl with him.

He’s pale and anemic – he lives on a diet of Froot Loops and granola bars provided by Davis – and in his prison whites he blends into the walls. Except for his eyes, which are big brown sockets in his head. He explains that he has arthritic hips from spending 13 years in a nine-by-nine-foot concrete cell, getting fed through a slit in the door. There have been an estimated 30 executions since he got here – many of the other inmates have become so desensitized to the process they don’t even look up from the football game.

Attorneys have come and gone in 12 years – too numerous to even list here – and there have been three failed appeals. Even though several jurors now admit to considering the inadmissible Misskelley statement, the appeals court ruled that it came too late, stating: “Echols’s claim of juror misconduct has been brought over a decade after his conviction. Clearly, this is a matter which could have been brought in a motion for new trial immediately after the verdict and conviction, but the argument is now untimely.”

Echols shakes his head: “Basically they are saying, ‘You didn’t file it on time so we’re going to kill you on a technicality.’”

There is no reason to expect a different Damien Echols from the one we saw in Paradise Lost; after all, he went straight from that documentary to death row. Many of his supporters cite his intelligence, and his outspokenness, and that this is what they liked about him from day one. “I’ll tell you anything,” he says.

During his trial, his dismissive attitude and even his contemptuousness hurt him on the stand. When asked to explain the difference between Wicca and Satanism (so as to exonerate himself from charges that he worshipped the devil), his exasperated voice and facial demeanor indicated to the jury that this just wasn’t worth his time.

“I was in shock at my trial,” he explains. “When you’re innocent, you keep thinking, surely somebody’s gonna realize something’s wrong and say, ‘This has gone on long enough.’”

In the late ’90s, Echols became a Buddhist, inspired by the teachings of another Arkansas death row inmate, Jusan Frankie Parker, who was executed in August 1998. He meditates – sometimes as much as five hours a day, wrote his autobiography, Almost Home, Volume 1, and has had his poetry published in Porcupine, a literary arts magazine. He estimates he’s read a thousand books.

“A huge deal for me is not even thinking about this place. I read from the time I get up in the morning till the time I go to bed. My cell is nine-by-nine. There’s nowhere to look away.”

“Damien has done an amazing job of adapting to his environment and finding a way to deal with it,” Rollins observes. “He’s really impressive. If he could find a way to get it across, he could be a great teacher.”

So he reads catalogues and dreams about getting out – about wearing Prada ties and a nice Brooks Brothers suit, working in a bookstore, raising children, and voting in a presidential election. He dreams about the political impact he could have on this system one day.

“I was taught – and I believed – that our system worked; an innocent man couldn’t be convicted in America. I thought ‘Any moment now, I’m going home,’” says Echols.

Echols’s 11-year-old son, Seth, was born during the trial and visits once a year. He’s a fan of rapper 50 Cent. The last time Echols saw Seth he asked, “How can you like a guy who isn’t even smart enough to not get shot?”

The family that stood by Echols during the trial has scattered. His mother calls maybe once a year; his dad remarried about six years ago and has a new family. His son’s mother, Domini, was around for two years after his incarceration and then married someone else. “People don’t stick around when you’re on death row. In the beginning everyone rallies around you but you can’t expect them to put their lives on hold just because yours is.”

Waiting for the DNA

Mostly now it’s just about his wife. Pretty and wholesome – with long brown hair, bangs, and a bike rack on her car – Lorri Davis’s sweet voice and demeanor suggests she hasn’t had a tough day in her life. Originally from Morgantown, West Virginia, Davis was living in New York and working as a landscape architect when she attended a screening in 1996 of Paradise Lost. It hit her about halfway through the film: “I was so horribly upset by it, and the next morning I woke up and thought, ‘Oh my God, they didn’t do it.’ I never saw a movie and felt compelled to do something.”

She began writing Echols within a few days. One year later, she quit the New York job – “Rue the day,” she says – and moved to Little Rock, where she gets to spend three hours every Friday visiting her husband in prison. She brings him the granola bars, strokes the fundraising machine, shuttles supporters back and forth from the airport, packs Echols’s 26 boxes of books, types his manuscripts, or sends a book he picked out to a stranger who took the time to write.

One could easily conclude that Lorri Davis is crazy. Even Stidham recalls thinking as much when he learned that Davis had married Echols. “Naturally, I made that assumption,” he says. “But she’s just a decent human being. And once you meet her, you realize she’s very intelligent and sane. I admire and respect her.”

Decent, sane, and tenacious: Last year, right before she hired Dennis Riordan, she got the cell phone numbers of several noted defense attorneys. She called and begged them until they finally asked her to stop.

“When I first moved here, I would go to court hearings and sit way in the back,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone to know who I was. When we got married, I thought, ‘I’m married to this person and I’ve got this role.’”

“In the beginning, I was not convinced,” Davis’s mom, Lynn, remembers. “I said, ‘Should he get out, I wonder if he rolls over in bed and says, “Lorri, I did it. I beat the system.”’ But we met with Damien about four times, and the first time I asked him. I said, ‘Damien, did you do it?’ And he said, ‘I did not.’ And I felt it. I just knew that he couldn’t do that to those little boys. I know that every little town has its problems and they pinpointed Damien and his buddies because he was a thorn in their side.”

With nearly every state appeal exhausted, Echols hopes to be headed for federal court, but Misskelley and Baldwin still have pending state appeals. All three are waiting for the results of DNA testing. Since this is a post-conviction case, they first had to obtain the prosecution’s cooperation, which they did. (Baldwin and Misskelley declined through their attorneys to be interviewed for this article.)

Tragedy makes a reality star

John Mark Byers stands by the coffee machine in the Parkway Convenience store in Millington, Tennessee. He listens, visibly bored, to another man’s story about being wrongfully arrested for a car theft. By anyone’s standards, this isn’t the most interesting tale, but to John Mark Byers, stepfather star of two HBO documentaries, Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2, it’s gotta sound dull as dirt. So when the man finally works around to the part where he gets his car out of the police impound, Byers interrupts. “Do you recognize me,” he asks, impatiently.

The man shakes his head slowly. “I’ve seen you,” he says. Clearly, he has not.

“Were you in this area in ’93?”

He was.

“Do you remember the three eight-year-olds that were murdered in West Memphis? One of those three eight-year-olds was my son. Do you remember seeing me in the media?”

The man registers shock, but he nods politely. Uh-huh, maybe … .

“That’s it,” Byers says, satisfied. “People ask me for my autograph all the time,” he tells me later. “There wouldn’t even have been a Paradise Lost 2 if it wasn’t for me.”

He repeats it a couple of times during our two-hour breakfast at the Parkway Convenience, where we chow down on eggs, bacon, biscuits, and grits. “You don’t know what these are,” he says, pointing to the plate heaped with grits. He’s gracious, but it’s a challenge: A New York liberal – which he believes me to be – doesn’t eat grits, and John Mark Byers doesn’t like New Yorkers.

A lot of people don’t understand John Mark Byers, including a lot of big city folk who – he is sure – believe the WM3 were victims of “hillbilly justice.” He reserves special venom for the producers of Paradise Lost.

“Two Jew-boys from New York City took advantage of our families in this crisis to make money,” he says, noting that he calls the HBO documentaries “joke-amentaries.”

Still, he’s gracious. His new wife, Jackie, is a lovely person. They buy me breakfast and Byers helps me off with my jacket. He’s currently working as a house painter.

Believing in the guilt of the West Memphis Three and resentful of the documentaries that stirred up questions about their innocence, the parents of James Moore and Steven Branch have mostly avoided the press, declining HBO’s offer to appear in Paradise Lost 2. “They felt we had betrayed them by making the first film,” Sinofsky says of his attempts to reach out to both families.

Byers, on the other hand, made quite an impression in Paradise Lost: In one scene he was ranting and raving about the details of the crime. In another he curses the men who killed his babies. He gave the HBO producers a knife, which turned out to have his and Christopher’s blood on it. Additionally, it turns out that Byers was working for the police as a drug informant. His antics so impressed the HBO producers that, halfway through the filming of Paradise Lost, they began to believe that he might have been the killer. Byers has a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, and was drunk throughout the making of both films.

“I wasn’t in my right mind,” he admits. “I tried to stay on medicine and marijuana, and they [Sinofsky and Berlinger] capitalized on that. They set me up to look like the fool.”

In July 1994, Byers was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allegedly instigating a knife fight between two youngsters. That same month, he was arrested for burglary. During that summer, neighbors filed restraining orders against Byers for allegedly whipping their sons with the metal handle of a flyswatter, and firing shots at their home. Byers was on probation when he was arrested for selling Xanax to a narc in 1999. He served 18 months. His ex-wife, Melissa, who was highly visible during Paradise, had a longstanding heroin problem. She died of undetermined causes on March 29, 1996. The couple had lain down to take a nap, and when Byers awoke, she was dead.

Byers made Jackie watch the documentaries the first week they met. “I watched them and I was like, dang,” says Jackie Byers. “My major in college was psychology … . I’m a pretty good judge of character, and if I thought for one second he did something terrible in his life I wouldn’t have married him.”

WM3 supporters have tried to connect Byers to the murders, but they’ve turned up very little in the way of hard evidence. His recollections of the crime include some inaccuracies: He claims the WM3 flunked lie detector tests when there is no evidence to support this; he claims Echols had driven by his house a few months before the murders when Echols never had a driver’s license and had never driven a car. Then, there is his attitude. Some find it strange that Byers claims the HBO documentaries ruined his life, when you’d expect a parent to say that his worst trauma was losing his child.

Misskelley’s lawyer, Stidham, says the case is confused because Byers and Echols both act strange: “[Echols] was a kid and not sophisticated enough to understand how he came off. And Byers still doesn’t understand how his antics made him look guilty.”

Byers regrets that he didn’t get more money for appearing in the documentaries and swears he’s not going to do another. A few minutes later, he corrects this. He might, if he has a contract and a lawyer by his side.

“This is news to me,” Jackie Byers laughs.

“Oh, yeah. I’ve got a different aspect on it. They would pay me big money,” he says.

At the end of a four-hour interview, he asks me, “Now that you’ve met me and I’ve answered every question, do you think I’m the kind of guy who could have done such an awful thing?”

Decades of research by the FBI and hundreds of millions of dollars committed to investigating the “phenomenon” of Satanic murders has not turned up one single example of a ritual child-killing in this country by any religion – including “Satanists” – in an entire century. As of this writing, Damien Echols has been on death row 4,796 days.

08-31-06

San Francisco—On June 3rd Mondo Generator, The Girlfriend Experience, Blag Dahlia from Dwarves and Dave Dalton from Cell Block 5 will blast the house to raise funds for the defense fund of the West Memphis Three (WM3). Mondo Generator and the Girlfriend Experience aim to make your ears bleed, while BLAG from local punk legend Dwarves and Dave Dalton, known, as “the Pastor” of Cell Block 5 will play unplugged.

Advanced tickets are available at cafedunord.com for $15.00. Doors open at 9:30 PM, show starts at 10:00. Ages 21+ only.

Cool memorabilia donated by Henry Rollins, Supersuckers, Mondo Generator, QOTSA, Counting Crows, Alternative Tentacles Records, and many others will be raffled and auctioned for more fundraising fun. Presented by Vela Entertainment and Music 4 Life, all proceeds from the event go directly to the WM3 Defense Fund.

The WM3 are three men who were railroaded by a corrupt and incompetent justice system in Arkansas in 1994 for the gruesome slayings of three eight-year-old boys. The men, then in their teens, were social misfits in their Bible-saturated town of West Memphis. Because the only physical evidence used to convict them were possessions such as black concert t-shirts, heavy-metal tapes, and song lyrics, many believe that satanic panic overcame reason in the town’s need to blame someone for the senseless crimes.

June 3rd, 2006 marks the 13th anniversary of Damien Echols’ incarceration. The thirty-one year old awaits execution by lethal injection on Death Row. Each year on June 3rd, supporters who believe in the Three’s innocence make a special effort to raise funds and awareness about the unbelievable miscarriage of justice that ruined the lives of Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and their families. To learn more about the WM3, visit wm3.org.

With a “punk rock spirit” and “an unhealthy dose of heavy metal attitude” Nick Oliveri of Mondo Generator “brings an excitingly unpredictable element to all his musical projects.” An original thorn from the SoCal desert punk cactus, Oliveri has scarred punk fans’ eardrums with his bass and guitar in Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age and Dwarves.

For The Girlfriend Experience, the June 3rd show will double as their welcome home party after touring to spread the word about their upcoming CD “When in Rome…Do As The Lions” due out on Heyday Records June/July ‘06. “A band of fugitive alt & punk rockers, The Girlfriend Experience’s members bring their divergent musical experiences to the songwriting table and deliver heartfelt, psychedelic-tinged tales of apathy and addiction, emptiness and empathy, sores and STD’s.”

Blag Dahlia, the crazy lead singer for Dwarves is sure to delight fans and frighten little old ladies with his mischievous melodies and raucous riffs. No John Denver covers here. “In this age of prepackaged punk and ready-made rebellion, the Dwarves remain fiercely independent and unrepentant to the end.”

Dave Dalton “has been assaulting ears for years with bands such as the Screaming Bloody Mary’s and Social Unrest and while touring with Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls and Mink DeVille in the late 70’s. In 1999 Dave founded Cell Block 5 and moved the Block from its birthplace of San Francisco, CA down to Orange County, CA.”

Music 4 Life is a non-profit that organizes live music events to raise funds for, and awareness about social justice issues such as death penalty reform. It uses rock concerts as forums to educate the public about the injustices that regularly occur in courtrooms across the US.

Contact Anje Vela at velaentertainment@yahoo.com.

On May 12th at 6:00 PM, 111 Minna Street Gallery will be hosting an art auction for death row inmate Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three (www.wm3.org).

Skeleton Key will be premiering pieces by Damien Echols to raise funds for his defense.

This one-night-only event includes music, speaking, and poetry readings by punk legends Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra, Jonathan Richman, Jacob Pitts of Strangers With Candy, former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, Penelope Houston (of the Avengers), and Michale Graves (former Misfits singer). Local DJs Justin McNeal and Marco Vega will spin tunes between sets.

The gallery showing opens at 12:00 PM, and includes works by artists of both local and international fame. Pieces by Bob Gruen, Winston Smith, Shepard Fairey, Mick Rock, Jayne County and Jonathan Richman are just a few of the exhibits surprises.

The reception begins at 6:00 PM, the art auction closes at 10:00 PM. A minimum donation of $15 will be required for the reception. Advanced tickets are available at TicketWeb. For more information visit 111minnagallery.com or call 415.974.1719.

The Associated Press are confirmed to be in attendance, reporting on the event and interviewing key figures.

Echols’ art debut should prove interesting since he is allowed very little other than paper in his solitary confinement. One of his previous paintings was rendered in coffee. Some of the show’s featured works were co-created by he and his wife, Lorri Davis.

“Unfortunately, you can’t send me any art supplies,” Echols recently lamented. “I have to make do with whatever I come across. My collages are made with a stack of old magazines.” Since his arrest 13 years ago, he has written five books by hand. Forget iPods and Blackberries—he has never even seen a web site or a DVD. As such, the digital world may be refreshingly absent from his artistic vision.

Recently, some of Echols’ friends created skeletonkeyart.com to display Echols’ writing and visual creations. A complete list of “Skeleton Key” artists appears there, as well as information about other upcoming Bay Area events for the WM3. Also published is an interview conducted by Anje Vela with Damien about his art.

Jonathan Richman has been performing and influencing underground rock for over thirty years. He recently interviewed Damien on Death Row in Mesh Magazine about his meeting last December. Jonathan will be performing at Santa Cruz’ Attic on May 16th and at the Great American Music Hall on June 3rd to raise funds and help spread awareness about the WM3’s unbelievable story.

In 1994, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. were convicted of the vicious slayings of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Had it not been for two HBO documentaries, and help from such celebrities as Winona Ryder, Henry Rollins, Eddie Vedder, Supersuckers and Metallica, the world might have thought justice was served. But the camera revealed the two highly publicized trials to be bizarre, twentieth-century witch-hunts. The three teens were convicted with no physical evidence in what should have resulted in mistrials. The police botched the investigation, and lost evidence that might have exonerated the defendants. Echols awaits death by lethal injection in solitary confinement. Baldwin received life without parole, and Misskelley got life plus forty. To learn more about the WM3, visit wm3.org.

We would like to thank our sponsors: RecordPressing.com and Alternative Tentacles Records. RecordPressing.com is located at 475 Haight Street, San Francisco CA 94117. w-coast 415-462-1992, e-coast 646-837-0761.

Alternative Tentacles Records can be contacted at: Alternative Tentacles Records, P.O. Box 419092, San Francisco, CA 94141 and www.alternativetentacles.com

We would also like to thank Portal Design for creating the flyer image and ad art.

If you would like to be a sponsor for this event (or other WM3 events), please contact myself or Anje Vela.

This event is being produced by Music 4 Life, and Lady Monster.

Music 4 Life is a non-profit that organizes live music events to raise funds for, and awareness about social justice issues such as death penalty reform. It uses rock concerts as forums to educate the public about the injustices that regularly occur in courtrooms across the US. Contact Anje Vela at velaentertainment@yahoo.com.