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Speaker 4: Meaning the live man like this man letting butterfly, flapping.
Speaker 2: His wing, dig down in the forest. Man, it gonna
cause a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away. Man,
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Speaker 4: All right. Finally, uh, after many many requests, Thomas and
I are returning to our series on the Occult. I
think it was good to take a little break. This
stuff does obviously get depressing, but we weren't done yet.
So you can stop sending me emails, you can stop
leaving comments. We're continuing the series, so Thomas, I'll kick
it back to you.
Speaker 2: Man. Yeah, thanks for hosting me. You can't talk about
the phenomena of late twentieth century occultism in America and
that whole liminal tendency without dealing with the case of
the West Memphis three. And for those who don't know,
I assume most people do. They've at least heard of it.
This came into the public mind because in nineteen ninety
six there was this HBO documentary that was very heavily promoted.
It was called Paradise Lost the child Murders at robin
Hood Hills. And back then HBO had a reputation of
pretty serious documentary filmmaking. There was a series called America Undercover.
They produced that brand are the things that produced that
movie about Irish Mickey Ward's brothers crack addiction called High
on Crack Street. They made a whole movie about Mickey
Ward and his brother and they that documentary is a
plot device on the movie. And you know it it was.
It attracted pretty serious filmmakers. And also there's a lot
of money behind promoting these projects. So what the deal
was with this documentary film? These three little boys, these
three eight year old boys, they were savagely murdered in
this interstate town in rural Arkansas called Marion. Where the
boys were found was in this forest preserve behind a
truck stop called robin Hood Hills that was in West Memphis. Technically, Okay,
so that's why the defendants were called the West Memphis three.
This was on May fifth, nineteen ninety three, and nobody
really heard about it other than locally. But this film
dropped in nineteen ninety six. And the guys who were
behind this film, there's a guy named Joe Berlinger and
Bruce Sinowski, and they were both kind of these wannabes.
They came up through the There was kind of an
American version of the cinema veritaean movement. If you've ever
seen Gimme Shelter, this's the documentary on the on the Stones,
you know, the ultimat Speedway concert that was, you know,
the end of the sixties, as people have kind of
branded it. That was kind of the prime example of it.
And Berlinger and Sinofsky they'd been proteges of the guy
who made that film. Okay, so Sinofsky he was always
trying to establish himself as as this kind of serious documentarian,
but by the nineties that wasn't really in style. People
weren't really thirsty for that kind of filmmaking. And uh,
Sinofsky in his own right. What he was most known
for later that idiotic Metallica documentary where they're all crying
like bitches and going to therapy and stuff. He worked
on that. He was always kind of a wanna be
rock and roll guy. Okay, So Paradise Lost it was
really kind of shocking because the opening scene of it,
the camera pans over Robinood Hills and then it's almost
like trying for the will or something. It descends the
ground level. Then it costs the actual footage of the
dead bodies, you know, so it's it's like jarring, and
the film kind of presented this narrative of this town
being an evil town and there being something that conspired,
you know, within the within the culture to make this happen.
It didn't declare that these that the defendants were innocent,
but like all all documentary films about true crime, it
always tries to raise a at least the suggestion a
reasonable doubt, otherwise there's no narrative to it. But ultimately
these three teenagers were arrested for the crime. Damian Eccles,
Jesse mss Kelly Junior, and Jason Baldwin. And these three
guys all kind of fit a rural stereotype. Jesse miss
Kelly was this redneck with a mohawk, who was known
to his dad was next con. He was into hot
rods and getting drunk and growing. Jason Baldwin was this
unassuming guy, and this becomes relevant, the fact that he's
so unassuming, but he he kind of seemed like a
soft spoken every man kid with a mullet, you know,
in a soft Southern drawl. But Damien Eccles, he was
a fella my acolyte with a self identified Satanist and
he was infamous in this town for being involved in
occult activities. So the documentary it kind of came to
focus on Damien Echo just because he was so strange
and like a lot of poor Southerners, both white guys
and black guys, he had that kind of sensibility that
for some reason fascinates a lot of bougie types. So
he kind of became the focus of this movie. Okay,
and it's the film is full of shots of these
Southern people kind of acting in stereotypical ways. There's a
lot of shots of them at church where there's a
fire and brimstone pastor. You know. It kind of made
the people in this town seem as culturally out of
step and alien, as possible, and Berlinger then it kind
of become his m O. What put him on the
map as a documentary filmmaker was this movie called Brothers
Keeper that came out in nineteen ninety. That was this
gruesome case that took place in Utica, New York, which
is an upstate New York and these elderly brothers who
lived on this old estate that was worth a lot
of money, but they were these kinds of hermit hoarders.
One brother killed the other one, and as was alleged
by the state, it wasn't clear if he died in
natural cause, as if he was strangled. But there was
all these lured suggestions about homosexuality, incest, all kinds of
gruesome stuff, and this got whatever was going sort of
a tabloid story. It got all this praise from these
sort of artsy people in Hollywood types. So Berlinger really
got the bug for kind of trying to impress that
that whole community.
Speaker 4: You know well, and Thomas, you spoke earlier about the narrative,
you know, within the documentary, But the way that this
story is cast in popular culture is very much in
the same language as the Satanic Panic. It's basically the
superstitious country pumpkins, you know, trying to you know, frame
these innocent teenagers. And I think that that's a big
part of the reason that this story and several of
the figures into it remained relevant through the George Bush
years because it became a sort of piece of that
anti fundamentalist narrative during the reaction to Bush the lesser.
But I'll kick it back to you, no.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent, and that's exactly what Echos and the
documentary really leaned into that, saying, you know, these people
in this town just hate my ass and they think
I worshiped Satan because they don't understand my religion. And
to be clear, this was nineteen ninety three, so even
if you accept the Satanic panic myth, that was all
over by then. What people were worried about in early
nineties was race, war stuff, organized gangs, which was a
real thing. The you know recession, particularly in places like
Mary in Arkansas, a lot of people are out of work.
And I made this point of people too, this came
up speaking of the sort of fundamentalist Christian boogeyman. You're
too young to remember this, but when McCain was running
against Obama, and he took on that silly woman as
his running mate, Sarah Palin. I remember people talking about
Palin and Alaska like these were a bunch of holy
roller hicks. I'm like, man, Alaska's first. It's like seventy
percent mail. It's full of rough and tumble military guys, uh, fishermen.
It's a it's a very it's a very unsavory culture.
A lot of prostitution, a lot of drugs, casual violence.
People don't really understand what rural America's about. It's not
it's not a bunch of it's it's not a bunch
of Mormons sitting around hiding people for having a beer.
It's very it's very rough and.
Speaker 4: Oh exactly, and again not to keep interrupting you here, no,
but that is very much. It's sort of this like
view of everywhere that isn't you know Brooklyn or California
as just the kind of like narrowly constituted South, which
is basically this like you know, insane vision of like
you know what Selma must have been like. And to
your point, like Alaska is, I mean, sure, you know
they they vote read, but very very different culturally, very
different people it is not small town Southern America. But
back to you, Thomas.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And also Gary mess who wrote a really he
was a journalist for I think the I think the
Little Rock Gizette or whatever the Little Rock main legacy
print brand was. He wrote a lot of serious stuff
on this case, very critical of the documentary. But he
was when this was going on. I think he was
in his late twenties, and he's like, look this narrative
that Echos particularly was singled out for being a for
being into Metallica and wearing black. He's like, okay, Metallica
was the number one band in America in nineteen ninety three,
and if you've ever been to the rural South, everybody
likes heavy metal. Everybody likes black T shirts. I miss
I think actually got he captured a shot. One of
the cops who rested Echos was he was like this, Uh,
he was some special Task Force guy wearing a Mega
Death shirt. So this idea like, oh, in the South
and the nineties, everyone hates heavy metal when rock and
roll and they're afraid of you know, metallic. It's it's
like these people watched, uh, that old Kevin Bacon movie
where you're not allowed to dance and decided footloose or whatever.
It's like very gay and very silly, but like.
Speaker 4: It know that was actually funny story that was actually filmed.
Uh not too far away from me. I've actually been there.
Interesting that looks like yeah because yeah.
Speaker 2: No that you know, so this kind of crazy narrative
developed around it and then you know once uh and
to be originally, like I said, the original film, most
of that was coming from what Eccholes himself was saying
and Beryling you're obviously was trying to treat his subject
matter like a geek pit and say, look at these
crazy redneck hull abilities. But it wasn't really until after
it was released that beryln Dur and Sinofsky would fall
on into claiming these three guys were framed by the
bigoted South and the reason that happened. See I watched
that when it aired, because again this was summer nineteen
ninety six and that was a huge boxing fan. And
that's right after HBO's Boxing After Dark had aired. This
was their they'd have championship boxing, usually welterweight and middleweight
and lightweight, but it was on at ten thirty pm
Central Time and they started promoting. They started running an
ad for this movie during Boxing after Dark, and they
presented it as, yeah, this was the Satanic Murderer, and
I'm like, oh, wow, that's nuts. So I watched it
and I'm like, Okay, that wasn't bad, but it's obvious
those guys are guilty. And pretty much everybody I knew
was like, yeah, that that was an interesting documentary. Really
nothing to see there. But then suddenly Hollywood said, this
is a great movie about these people being framed and
this is an outrage. And first of all, I was like,
that's bizarre that Johnny Depp and Peter Jackson and the
Dixie Chicks and Henry Rollins He's always an idiot, but uh,
they really circled the wagons around this. And I remember
at the time even other people in media saying, well,
what did you see about this movie that I didn't see?
Like why why do you think that? But Berylinger, who
was always a starfucker to begin with, he goes full
odd like, yeah, you're right, that's why I made this movie.
So suddenly he becomes, you know, mister Innocence Project for
the West Memphis three. When he realizes that he got
the attention of Hollywood, which he was always trying to
do period. So he proceeded to make this crazy easy
sequel that now no one talks about anymore, that was
essentially a hit piece on one of the victim's stepfathers,
which uh it made no sense whatsoever, you know, and
that he couldn't capture the same fire in a bottle
with that one. But uh, you know, this became this
became this huge uh cause celebrate and one of the uh,
one of the reasons I'm disgusted by John Douglas is because,
you know, the the the mind Hunter guy. I mean,
he's a total fraud criminal profiling is nonsense, total pseudoscience.
When the when when Damian Eckles got all this Hollywood
money and uh in g O money to fight his
case post conviction, you know, uh Douglas is available to
hives bidder, you know, to claim that based on his
mind Hunter probably profiling expertise, he can divinate if people
are guilty or not. So he came out he joined
this this uh bandwagon too. I mean he does that
all the time. He's he got paid by jeoh Many
Ramsey's mom, who obviously murdered her and uh the lead
detective on the case wrote a whole book about it,
which I advise anybody read if they're taken in by
this delusion that there's some mystery behind what happened to
that little girl. But her very wealthy parents hired John
Douglas to basically either pr man. I mean, he's he's
a scumbig, but uh, you know he uh he's he's
very much got clout with the kinds of rubs or
in the true crime and things, so that further sort
of I'm a de momentum behind this. But what it uh,
what when it comes down to, was that what was
presented in this film doesn't reflect the evident record at all. Okay,
the claim is that Damian Nichols was just this cool
kid who was into heavy metal music. He got singled
out by fundamentalist biggots who hated him. He having to
be friends with this guy Jason Baldwin who just got
roped in for being friends with him and Jesse miss
Kelly was mentally retarded and the police tortured him for
two days and an interrogation, and then he signed a
false confession. That's not what happened, and we'll get into
this as we go on. But the police didn't even
intend to indict Jesse miss Kelly because they had no
idea he was involved. He confessed repeatedly, then he confessed
to his lawyer, then he confessed to his cellmate, then
he confessed after he was convicted and sitting in prison
serving his fifty year bit that this kid can't stop confessing,
you know, and again he he's not mentally retarded, he's stupid.
But even by the metric of the Supreme Court, you know,
they arbitrarily said, if your IQ is under seventy, you
can't you can't be executed because she likes the ability
to You're too stupid basically to formuly specific intent, I
think is the reasoning. But I mean, even by that
metric or the colloaquial metric, he's not mentally retarded. But
the way the way this basically shook out was obviously
triple homicide a three eight year olds that that them
that's shocking. But also I mean that's that that's a
very strange crime, Okay, And to be clear, I mean
this is a this is a disgusting case. So if
that kind of thing upsets you, you might want to
skip forward or two out. But one of the boys
bled to death because he was castrated. The other two
were severely beaten. Then they were immersed in this irrigation
ditch and drowned. They know that the one boy bled
out because he didn't have water on his lungs. He
was and this becomes important to what was alleged in
the post conviction appeals. Okay, being that they were immersed
in water, that eliminated quite a bit of evidence, particularly
biological evidence. But one of the boys, there was trace
him us a seminal fluid on his genes, and obviously
an eight year old is not mature enough to ejaculate,
so it's clear that there was some sort of I mean,
based on these circumstances, it's clear that that there was
there was a sexual aspect to this too. Okay, they
couldn't type the DNA of the seminal fluid because it
wasn't an adequate leave luminous sample. But you know the
reason why Eccles became the folks of this investigation was
for a few reasons. The police kept on hearing that
Eccholes had confessed to this to various people when he
was drunk not in a remorseful way, but in an
offhand way or because he was bragging. Now Echles wasn't
arrested for until months later. Okay, so this wasn't some
rush to judgment, and he wasn't even arrested when the
police first received sworn statements from people claiming that he'd
made these confessions in their presence. But you know, proble
cause to arrest is not probable cause to convict, and
it's it has nothing to do with the manifest weight
of evidence. It's merely probable cause to arrest. So the
character is somebody and their behavior patterns overall is relevant.
And looking into ecchos background because desplayer when Eckles claimed
he wasn't terrorized by the police throughout his life and
they weren't keeping a dossier on him. Nobody even really
knew who he was other than his in his local
you know people, his own age and stuff. But he
had a history of violence. He'd been in and out
of psychiatric hospitals, most recently in Little Rock at Charter
Hospital in June nineteen ninety two. He had a history
of setting fires. He got in trouble for chasing another
kid with an axe He was kicked out of school
for a time for trying to gouge a kid's eye out.
He was repeatedly suspended for fighting. He Jason Baldwin's cousin,
was interviewed by a homicide detective named Brent Ridge. This
witness attested to the fact that he and Eccles and
Jason Baldwin had been walking down the main road outside
of the trailer park they lived in, the Leafshore Trailer Park.
Echles came upon a dog that was in some way
sick or injured and uh that Goles calmly grabbed a
brick and began banshing the dogs head in until it died.
You know this, Uh, a pattern emerges of sadism and
violent tendencies outside of the what's normal for you know,
your accounting for the kind of anti social tendencies a
teenager boys. You know. But what was most h what
got the police's attention, particularly Brent Ridge and his immediate superior,
Gary Gotschell Lewis, the lead investigator. Eckles had gotten in
trouble for having relations with an underage girlfriend named Deanna
Holcombe when Eccles was seventeen or eighteen and she was
fourteen or fifteen, and he caught charges for statutory rape
or whatever the equivalent is in that hotel, and Echoles
had apparently told Deanna Holcombe. She attested to this to
the juvenile officer in charge of the case. Jerry Driver
told her that he wanted to get her pregnant and
he wanted her to deliver bring the child to term,
and he wanted them to sacrifice the child to some
deity because he said that, you know, if you if
you can divinate the correct deity or supernatural intelligence and
sacrifice to them, you can absorb that victim's power. And
he said that according to Thelema. Whether this is an
accurate reading of Theelema or not, I don't know. He said,
according to Thelema, you know, the crowleag system, an infant
or a little boy, particularly a male child, they've got
the most power that could be taken by somebody who
sacrifices them incident to the correct ritual, you know. And
this didn't lead the more enhanced charges against Echos, but
it did lead to the court ordering a psychiatric evaluation.
And now, mind you, I don't have any great faith
in the medical profession on its own terms. But I
also don't if discount diagnosedes rendered by qualified experts without
cause to do so. This evaluation ordered by the court
from nineteen ninety two suggested that, according to the diagnostic
criteria then utilized by the APA, Echoals had sociopathic tendencies
and he was prone to gradiose and delusional thinking. He
apparently disclosed that he drank the blood of other people
because he said that you can obtain power by doing
so in small ways, because life force is contained in
certain bodily fluids, particularly blood, and he claimed that he
learned about this owing to his unusual religious beliefs. Interestingly,
he never referred himself as a Satanist. When he was
being availed to these sorts of diagnostic protocols, he'd he'd
simply say that, you know, he was a male witch,
or he was a pagan, or he was, you know,
an accolyte of Crowley. But that's that's where the police
got this idea of him being an occultist. He said
he was, and we'll get into this and some of
this witness testimony. People said multiple witnesses, Miss Kelly Echoes
himself declared himself to be an occultist Miss Kelly himself
said Echos and a lot of people he knew were
into Satanic worship. Another witness named LG. Hollingsworth, who was
dead by the time of the proceedings, I believe, he
said that in Marion it was well known that there
was an occult subculture. So I mean, this is what
the police were hearing from all these people who were
in the prime suspect's orbit, and this is what their
prime suspect was had told the juvenile officer presiding over
his case for statutory rape. And this is what he
was telling the psychiatrists who'd interview him when he was
periodically ending up in psychiatric facilities for violent conduct. People
weren't looking at Damon Eccols and saying, oh, he has
a metallic assured I think he worships the devil, you know.
And to be clear, and I mean, I I'm not
one of these people who looks down on the rural
South or something like quite the contrary, but there is
a weird subculture and a lot of these rural places,
and particularly places that are kind of sustained by the interstate,
like Marion, you get you get a lot of carnival
workers you get a lot of guys who spend most
of their life on the road. You You've got you know,
very very people with very very deep roots in this
country who still abide folk ways from the old country.
There's something pagan uh about it. A lot of these
people's belief structures, you know, in a way that you
don't really find among white people up North, Okay, even
poorer ones. That's not some kind of prejudice or some
or some sort of stereotype about you know, stupid primitive
hillbillies or something. I mean that that's a fact, you know.
So I tend to I tend to believe what some
of these people were saying. This wasn't just them being
paranoid or or developing paranoiac ideas or something. You know.
It uh in two thousand and one, and we're jumping
ahead a little bit, but it's material to the subject
matter or the point that we're at in the subject matter.
At Doctor George W. Woods, a Berkeley, California psychiatrist, he
evaluated echoes incident to one of his post conviction appeals.
And to be clear, a post conviction appeal, you're arguing
it on, I won't over the subs at death with
all the nuances. Once your direct appeals are exhausted, a
post conviction appeal it's a collateral attack on your conviction,
either premised on actual innocence or subset of violation of
constitutional rights. So it's always timely, okay, and you can
file as many of them as you want. So it's
not clear to me who of echals attorneys commission woulds
to analyze echals record or if he just did this
on his own accord, But they're no. His evaluation of
their quest by the Eccles defense team, all right, strike that,
I'm sorry, and his evaluation was promised on the claim
was gonna. What eccles post conviction team was trying to
allege was that he'd been incompetent to stand trial. Okay,
So this was several years after his conviction, and what
was the termine That Eccles was periodically actively delusional owing
to a tendency towards manic episodes, and that one of
that throws of psychotic euphoria Eccles. Eccles believed that deities
or supernatural forces were transforming him into a superior entity
or conferring power upon him, and direct his activity in
criminal capacities would claim was that or his conclusion was
that Echos wasn't incompetent as a matter of law, but
that he was delusional and periodically psychotic. The Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, that's what the court generally relies upon in
terms of psychiatric and mental health experts. Echles was administered
the MMPI on June eighth, nineteen ninety two, September second,
nineteen ninety two, in February of nineteen ninety four. Each
of these test results indicated strong profiles of mania, delusional psychosis, depression,
and periodic psychotic periodic or intermittent psychotic thinking, including paranoid ideation, delusions,
and related emotional disturbances. Now, once again, and obviously, I
mean this is part of the public record because these
reports and this testimony was udded into evidence. These conclusions
were based on symptoms and belief structures and ideas that
that that Egos conveyed to the to the psychiatrists or
the diagnosticians were presiding over these tests. The administrators of
these tests didn't confabulate speculative things about Damien Eckles. He's
the one who's reporting belief in deities. He's the one
who's reporting ideas about drinking human blood. He's the one
who's reporting belief in supernatural phenomena that he could access
owing to some sort of competence and in divinating these
these these things or these alien intelligences, you know, and
something else that's relevant to me. I mean, that's relevant
in my opinion. I although it's not just positive anything
in of itself. You know, Eccles or at his defense
team both that trial and post conviction, they claimed, Okay,
so Eckles is supposed to the subject of this witch
hunt in this small town and this is prejudiced against him. Well,
Eckles had this bizarre familial arrangement. I guess his mom
was fifteen and his dad was seventeen when they got married.
And and they got married because she was pregnant. I'm
not saying anything wrong with young people getting married and
in event of pregnancy or not, but you know, they
it was a shotgun marriage. I guess eckles birth father
was for all practical purposes it literate and had all
kinds of mental problems. So they got his name was
Joe Hutchinson, and they got divorced early on, So Eccles
was raised by this much older man, whose mom subsequently
married name of Eccles. Then, when Eccles was a young teenager,
his birth father came back into his life and his mom,
who was estranged from this Eccles, they remarried his birth father.
And eccles birth father was just a terran kind of
laborer who has lived a kind of unstable life, and
he moved he up and moved the family to Portland, Oregon,
when Eccles was seventeen, sixteen seventeen in nineteen ninety two.
So Eckles is living in Portland and he's doing everything
he can to get back to Marion, and he's acting out.
He's saying, I don't belong here. I belong in Marion
with my friends. You know, It's like, Okay, Portland, even
back then, if you want to fly your freak flag
and do what Eccles did, that'd be about the best
place he could do it. Okay. So he's doing everything
he can to was skate Portland that he hates staying
there and he wants to go back to Marion, where
supposedly he's being terrorized by these witch hunt rednecks. Really
does that make any sense? So he ends up hospitalized
in UH Portland because his father calls the police on him,
saying and the and the police report said that Eccholes
was threatening to kill the family, kill his father and
and and and kill his whole family basically if they
didn't let him go back to Marion, and he was
threatening suicide and everything else. So he ends up in
the psych word yet again in Portland. And this is
all he was on probation from the statutory rape charge
he caught, and his probation had been transferred to Oregon,
so there was this issue of him having the transfer
his paperwork back to this juvenile officer Jerry Driver, who
again Eckles claim, was supposedly out to get him and
framing him. So he's he's going back into the out,
out of the out of the frying pan, into the fire,
recording his own claims about what goes on in this town,
you know. But finally he ends up going back to
Marion and lives with his UH, lives with Eccles, his UH,
his stepfather who's now a strange from his mom. You know,
we apparently didn't get along with basically his parents begged
this mister Eckles to take him in because they couldn't
deal with him, and he was demanding to go back
to Marion. You knows he did everything in his power.
You know that that a teenager tan by acting out
cajoling threats to go back to the jurisdiction where he
claims he was framed and cident to this years on
pattern of terrorism and are asked, you know, and anecdotally,
that doesn't make any sense it, you know, And again
a lot of particularly in criminal cases, not just because
the evidentry standard is different. It's a totally different thing
than a similar matter. It's I mean that that's a
discussion in its own right, but the totality of circumstances
mayors particularly compared to what people do incident to the
circumstances they describe, and whether it complies with the sort
of picture of reality is they perceived it or if
it doesn't, And if it doesn't, that indicates deception, you know.
And if you're on trial for your life, why are
you lying about things that If I want to trial
for my life, I'm either gonna say nothing at all, well,
I'm gonna tell the truth because and to be clear,
Echoes was looking at the death kind of leap. You know,
So there's that which I don't know itself, doesn't prove anything,
but it's absolutely material and relevant, you know, to be clear.
The way, uh, y'all say that for next time. There's
something I wanted to approach, but I I don't want to.
I don't want to go to that rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah,
So don't go ahead. I'm just trying to find my interjection.
Speaker 4: You spoke a little bit about the scene of the
crime and the way in which obviously the fact that
there was you know, these boys were found basically in
like a drainage ditch or a creek, several things. One effectively,
what happened is that the you know, the boys' parents
had sent them out to play together at around six
point thirty, right around eight, they began to get worried.
They walked all over the area of the woods they
were playing in, even to the point of basically apparently
forming you know, line to line arm and arm and
walking across the area, getting apparently quite close to the
eventual scene of the crime. When they found them the
next day, I believe an officer discovered one of their
shoes in the ditch, which led to discovering the rest
of the bodies. There are a couple of interesting things. One,
the victims were found hogtied, basically bound kind of doubled
over backwards, right, their wrist bound to their ankles.
Speaker 2: It was very weird because yeah, it was like right wrist,
right ankle, left wrist, left ankle. I've got a theory
on that being go ahead.
Speaker 4: Well, right, and as you've said, you know, a lot
of several pieces of their clothing were missing, some were
never recovered, but because of the fact that they water logged,
that made it somewhat difficult to determine. And the defense
really leaned into this, right They tried to you know,
dispute you know, if they drowned, if they were killed
with a knife, which was you know, one allegation. And also,
of course the more kind of the sinister injuries which
you mentioned earlier. They tried to you know, constitute that
as animals after the fact, right, kind of scavengers coming
and you know, doing the worst of the damage. Already
deceased boys. So one, I'm curious to get your your
theory on the way that the you know, the victims
were discovered. And also what do you make of you know,
that defense. I mean a certain point. Look, if your
job is to you know, defend someone, you defend them
how you can, right, But at a certain point it
seems almost entirely irrelevant, you know, if this were you know,
after the fact of the murder anyway. But I'm curious
to get your thoughts, Thomas.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The reason they focused on that and claimed to
his animal predation is because the one of the a
knife that was recovered from behind Baldwin's house. It was
a Rambo knife like serrated type knife. And uh, at trial,
the corner concluded that a knife like that with a
serrated blade was used to cast rate the victim. So
the defense said, this boy wasn't castrated at all, it
was animal predation. Well, he bled out, okay, unless these
were trained animals that murdered him. Okay, not to be
flippant about the murder of a child, but that's nonsense.
I I looked at a lot of the evidence that
there's this website, it's called Calvahan eight K it's every
evidentary exhibit from the trial. And I spent a lot
of time going over there, or I have like over
the years. And this ditch at robin Wood Hills was
sort of a there's this pipe bridge. It was literally
a giant pipe, but it had rails welded on at
some point and it went across this irrigation. It was
like this irrigation ditch sort slash small pond, okay, and
with a muddy bottom. I believe post mortem, they were
shoving or two of the boys. At least one of them.
They he was still respirating, but he was unconscious post
mortem in the case of two of them. The third
I'm pretty confident they thought was dead. I believe they
were trying to push them into the mud and limbs
kept popping up, so they took the shoelaces and tied
a arm to or wrist to ankle, wrist to ankle,
shoved them into the mud, and at least for a time,
the bodies remained submerged. That's a conclusion I came to.
You know, the Corners report or the police report describes
them as being a hog tiede like not to be pedantic,
but being properly hog tied is you know, like in
a bundle.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 2: I think that's why that happened. And I'll get into
blow by blow and the interrogations and the defendants in
the next episode. But basically, here's what I believe happened,
and at based this not just done the trial record,
but what Gary Meaest described as well as miss Kelly's
many confessions. Despite what people think, Baldwin actually was the
ringleader of this because Baldwin's a straight up psycho. Okay,
Eccles is a sick fuck. He's a sexual deviand he's
a sadist. He isn't he's he isn't a cultist. Baldwin
doesn't care about all that. Bald is just stunk cold.
He just likes to hurt people. Miss Kelly is just
a goon. Miss Kelly claims he was drunk and Evan
williams he's hanging out with miss Kelly. He's hanging out
with Baldwin and Eccles and eccles girlfriend lived across town.
Baldwin and Eccles and miss Kelly all lived in this
trailer park and across town was h eccles girlfriend's residence.
Her name was Dominie Tier. He'd walk pretty much every
day to go see Dominie Tier and the short cut
he take was through robin Hood Woods. Okay, So Baldwin
and Eccles go to miss Kelly's trailer and they're like, yeah,
we're gonna we're gonna go party and we're gonna like
fuck up these kids who've been like at our spot,
meaning robin Wood Hills. Miss Kelly's like, okay, he's always
down to like go fuck somebody up. So they get
there and they see these three little kids playing around
and according to uh, according to miss Kelly, Baldwin goes
and grabs one of them, and his friends start running.
So Baldwin pulls a Knight and say it's come back
or he's dead. So Baldwin escalated right away, So the
kids come back. Miss Kelly grabs on the bomb and
starts just beating on him. He looks over, he says,
Eccles is got this kid and he's like molesting him.
So miss Kelly says, he's kind of like the fuck.
Then he says he looks over at Baldwin and Baldwin's
cutting on the kid, and he said the kid's screaming,
and then he goes silent, and then he said he
saw Baldwin. He said, I thought he was stabbing him,
but he was castrating him. Eccles isn't shocked because even
though he's like raping this kid, basically, according to miss Kelly,
goes with no idea, like bald was getting straight up
like murder the kid. So Eccles freaks out starts strangling
the kid that he's got. Miss Kelly says, he's kind
of in shock, so he let the kid go. He
starts running, he said, Baldwin goes get him, and either
out of fear of Baldwin or just you know, fear
of a witness ideing him, miss Kelly goes and brings
the kid back, and he said quite literally delivered him
to Baldwin, and then Baldwin did him too, you know.
And uh, that basically tracks with the crime scene. And uh,
the luminol test thing obviously exists on soft ground, basically wetlands.
It was limited in what could be revealed, but what
was revealed it basically tracked with what miss Kelly said.
And the filmmakers Bell and jurn Sinofsky, as well as
the post defense team, they made a big issue out of, Oh,
miss Kelly was wrong by the time of day. No,
here's what miss Kelly was doing. The kids were murdered
after dark, Okay. Miss Kelly kept saying, oh, yeah, I
was there, and you know, I helped him restrain the kids.
Then I left. Oh it was before it got dark
that I left. Like in his kind of like ignorant mind,
he thought he was getting himself off of murder charges
by saying, oh, yeah, I believe me. I participated in it,
but I was gone before the murder happened. That's what
he was doing. He wasn't being fed dada by the
cops and screwing up the time of day. It's obvious
if you read that, that's what he's doing. Okay, and
what's really the cops? Two things here and again this
is very gross. One of the boys head, uh, you'reine
in his stomach and obviously, uh you know the uh,
the other boy was castrated. That wasn't release to anybody.
Miss Kelly knew that, you know, it wasn't even release
that there was any edged weapon injuries, let alone castration.
And the first thing out of miss Kelly's mouth is yeah,
then Jason started cutting on him. How do you know that?
Speaker 4: So what do you make of this other character that
call him you know mister Bojangles right that, you know,
after the crime, a manager at a local boj Angles said, yeah,
there's this you know, older black guy comes in, you know,
kind of bloody, disgruntled, cleans himself up in the bathroom
and leaves. And at least some sources indicate that there
was you know, hair found in one of the blankets
wrapping up one of the bodies that could have been
linked to a you know, a guy of African descent.
Speaker 2: I mean, I the rule. I mean, if you want
to raise reasonable doubt, just generally, you've got you've got
to produce this alternative suspect. You got to say, oh,
there's this guy. Okay, that's great man, you know, like
I it's who is this guy? You know? That doesn't
rise to the level of it doesn't rise a standard
of reasonable doubt. And also I basically what they're saying
is that there was some presumably like black hobo who
was hanging out in the woods. He somehow could control
three eight year old kids, assault them, murder all three
of them, all by himself, you know, without any of
them run and uh then he staggers presumably on the
woods through the blue beacon car wash is walking down
the highway all bloody and messed up. Then he just
like ends up in this fast food restaurant bathroom. Like
I don't I don't find incredible anyway. It's also they've
tried to make a big deal about the fact that,
I mean, I think UH DNA and five evidence is
dubious in my opinion, not because the science if identifying
it as dubious. It's because people put too much it's
it's not binary in terms of what it indicates. The
people put too much weight on it. But one of
the uh, one of the kids shoelaces that they were
bound with their shoelaces, like interstitially bound on the shoelaces
was a hair like one of the kids stepfather's friends,
because which obviously got picked up at the kid's house
where this man was regularly. And you know, there's people
who advocate for the in a sense of these defendants claiming,
oh that that that proves that this random guy, David
Jacobi did it because there's a hair consistent with his
uh DNA profile that you know was at the scene.
So I mean, I think that that's nonsense. And uh
there clearly had to be multiple offenders because you can't.
I mean that that's that's like trying to hurd cast.
You can't. Like, one man wouldn't be able to control uh,
three eight year old boys. He'd be able to accost
one of them. And then I mean, even even if
the guy was as fast as like an NFL wide receiver,
he's not gonna be able to murder one kid, grab
the next one, murder him, and grab the next one
without them running, you know. And and also they they
took their time with these kids, which is one of
the really horrible things about it. This wasn't a quick thing.
They tortured these kids, you know.
Speaker 4: See, Thomas, I think we're coming up on time. There's
a couple other aspects, uh, that I want to get into.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: You have this this female witness who plays sort of
an interesting role in the trial, as well as this
uh shall I say somewhat sinister character, Richard offsh Yeah, right, Uh,
you know, the the so called expert on h you know,
coerced confessions. Interestingly enough, there were actually two trials, if
I'm not mistaken, right, Uh, they sort of split them
up and you know, limited which confessions could be used
in which trial. Uh do you want to speak to
that just a little bit before we wrap and obviously
we'll be around for another one.
Speaker 2: So yeah, no, the it's a Miskill, he's uh Baldwin
and Echoles there they were tried together. Miss Kelly was
tried separately, and uh that was tactical. But also they
you know the confrontation clause if they if miss Kelly
refused to take the stand, they wouldn't have been able
to introduce his his his uh confession against Eckles and
Baldwin because he just didn't he'd invoke his Fifth Amendment
rights and refused to testify. And so then okay, well
now you're using statements against that gals in Baldwin that
they can't challenge the declarant on and as I'm constitutional.
And also it was uh even that notwithstanding they they
had miss Kelly dead the rights, despite what the Berlin
Jersonofski documentary says, had they joined his trial to Echals
in Baldwin, any defense counsel with as Salt would uh
would have said, hey, he was there, but it's these
two scumbags who did it, and they made very well
have gotten his charge is knocked down. If not a
full on a quill, Okay, like, hey, my client's slow witted,
and yeah he you know, he's he's not a good
man and he might maybe he's a bully, but he's
no child molester and he's no killer. And he was
led astray by these two sadists and you know, blah
blah blah. You know, I don't see acquittal coming out
of the app but I definitely see you know, I
definitely see mitigation, you know.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 2: Uh. And also I mean, like I said, they Dan Stidham,
who uh was Meskill's defense counsel, he did a very
good job, you know. Uh, I don't agree with but
sori of the case obviously, but you know he was
he was adequately represented. Baldwin had some I don't know
where he got the money for this because his family
was poor. Maybe the guy did it pro se or
pro bono. I mean, but uh, Baldwin had a real
he had he had he had a real lawyer, you know,
he had private council. It was some local big shot
who you know, had had a lot of trial work
to his name. Ecoles had an appointed attorney, but he
wasn't a PD if memory serves, and I'll double check
the record for this before he reconvene the way they
he was a private attorney was appointed by the court.
So but I mean again, so these guys weren't they
weren't being set up for a fall by not being
afforded adequate talents that wouldn't getting it.
Speaker 4: Well, sure thing. We will continue the discussion in a
week or so. Thank you so much, Thomas. This was
a ton of fun, obviously, I, like many other people,
am eagerly awaiting your new manuscript. I know it's getting close.
People can find you on your website on substack.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 4: You know everything will be linked down in the description.
As far as my stuff, Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
you want to artis, you can throw me a few
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JD's website and yeah again, Thomas, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Man, thank you buddy, everyone to know them.
Speaker 4: Keep your head up. I can't last forever. Good night,