Attorneys for Echols have submitted a formal request to inspect the records that are available, involving cataloguing of the evidence as well as information on the loss of the evidence. However, in 2010, a series of rapidly unfolding developments turned the tide for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley. Certain that, under what he felt were ridiculous circumstances, Echols' confidence and, on occasion, flippant attitude during the trial was often misinterpreted as evidence of his coldness toward the victims and their families. WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. Id like to see this put to rest. I think we were the first internet sleuths, but we were not internet sleuths.. Berlinger and Sinofsky expected a similar result to come quickly in the West Memphis Three case. Terry Roland Hobbs, 62, of Sweetwater, passed away on Saturday, September 11, 2021. And without substantial physical evidence, police zeroed in on a pair of teens they knew well: Echols, a self-professed Wiccan who wore all black and read Stephen King, and his best friend Baldwin, who was considered an outsider because of his love of drawing and bands like Metallica. It was born out of genuine admiration for the fact that these guys took the time out of their lives to dedicate, to go down to Arkansas, to build a website, to really step out of their lives, Berlinger says. That type of support made observers question the verdicts perhaps more so than any rock star who shouted Echolss name into a mic because of an HBO documentary. Misskelley, who reportedly had an IQ of 72, changed his story several times, and only a small part of his statements was recorded. Terry Hobbs was born in 1958 and grew up in Northern Arkansas. And that makes him hopeful that exoneration is on the horizon. Best selling books such as Lawrence Pazder's Michelle Remembers and disgraced evangelical comedian Mike Warnke's The Satan Seller fueled the madness with tales of ritual abuse and human sacrifice. One of Kathy Bakkens earliest jobs in Los Angeles allowed her a certain kind of cultural currency: She designed movie posters for an entertainment-advertising company, which meant she got to see films months before they were released. "I knew from when I was real small that people were going to know who I was," Echols said in 1994. I wouldn't do something like that. I just checked again and HE IS STILL MISSING. As reported by the Arkansas Times, examination of the shoe laces used to bind Michael Moore contained hair "not inconsistent" with that of Stevie Branch's stepfather, Terry Hobbs. You still dont really know what happened to these kids. Obituaries can vary in the amount of information they contain, but many of them are genealogical goldmines, including information such as: names, dates, place of birth and death, marriage information, and family relationships. MEMPHIS, Tenn. (localmemphis.com) - More than 25 years after the murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, a new book gives a first-person account of . This is before considering the 2013 dramatized movie based on the events (and Leveritts book), Stidhams plans to release the book Harvest of Innocence, and how elements of the case made their way into True Detectives third season. He was an actor, known for Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988), Fast Food (1989) and In the Heat of the Night (1988). That there were three victims was a link to the biblical number of the beast. There are no events scheduled. Well, perhaps not nobody. Leave your condolences to the family on this memorial page or send flowers to show you care. On Aug. 11, 2011, the West Memphis Three entered the courtroom for the final time. Baldwin and Misskelley were sentenced to life without parole while Echols received the death penalty. The second is by looking at it as an act of passion and perseverance. Published: Dec. 21, 2021 at 9:56 PM CST WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. Echols attorneys got a letter from the custodian of records for the West Memphis police department saying some of the evidence ended up lost, or misplaced, and some destroyed by fire. And yet Hobbs was not interviewed at all in the months after the crimes. It was clear that Paradise Lost was resonating. Branded the West Memphis Three, the mens case was featured in multiple documentaries, earning them support from an array of high-profile musicians, celebrities and activists. In 2004, Vicki Hutcheson recanted her trial testimony, stating that she had lied on the stand. West Memphis is in the heart of the Bible Belt: just a two-hour drive from where, legend has it, the devil tuned Robert Johnsons guitar, in a state thats 46 percent evangelical Protestant. Terry Hobbs (1969 - 2019) Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (Nightmare Vacation II) (1988) [Rob Darrinco]: Stabbed and hanged (after gaging), off-screen by Pamela Springsteen in Walter Gotell's office; his body is shown afterwards when Carol Martin Vines discovers him. She has since expressed her belief that her ex-husband was involved in the murders, citing the discovery of her son's favorite pocket knife in Terry Hobbs' belongings. Oxygen Insider is your all-access pass to never-before-seen content, free digital evidence kits, and much more. That the slain boys were each 8 years-old was important because eight was a "witch's number." So with less urgency surrounding full exoneration and no documentary cameras rolling, the question 25 years later becomes: Who is paying close enough attention to the case to pick up the fight? View Source Suggest Edits Memorial Photos Flowers Created by: Legend Added: 11 Aug 2021 Find a Grave Memorial ID: 230642037 But I had to. During Misskelley's trial, Hutcheson testified that she had attended an "an occult Satanic meeting" she referred to as an "esbat." The only possible culprits were 18-year-old Damien Echols, a poor teen with an interest in the occult and a record of mental illness, his friend Jason Baldwin, a quiet kid whose talent for art tended toward dark subjects, and Jessie Misskelley, a 17-year-old misfit with an IQ of 73. They saw the same thing you did. Other details that have come to light include that many wounds on the slain children, originally attributed to human bites and/or a serrated blade, were the result of animals feeding on the bodies. Terry. I couldnt not watch it at this point. The third put forth the unusual theory that the killings were committed as a cult ritual. As the movement to free the West Memphis Three gained traction, a number of celebrities joined the cause, bringing the case under more scrutiny. Filming the activists work seemed like the best place for Berlinger and Sinofsky to turn their attention; what better way to show the continued plight of the West Memphis Three than to show regular people dedicating their free time to fighting for them? Berlinger says that he counts Errol Morriss The Thin Blue Line as one of his greatest influences, not just for the innovations Morris brought to the documentary genre, but also because it helped free Randall Dale Adams from a sentence for the murder of a Texas police officer that he did not commit. Although blood scrapings were taken, the West Memphis police lost the evidence. The boys were so mutilated, investigators thought the murders were part of some kind of Satanic ritual. doesn't know how to teach the material and you will end up teaching yourself everything. When we were driving in the car a lot, wed play a lot of the Metallica album Master of Puppets, says Alex Sinofsky, who became a doctor instead of getting behind the camera himself. "The reason I made the West Memphis boogeyman comment during the first film was because I was making light of the situation," Echols says in Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. They began attending appeal hearings and visiting Baldwin, Echols, and Misskelley in prison. Everybody Id come in contact with was hostile to the truth, Baldwin says. Getting that kind of creative validation was exciting, but we were also extremely frustrated that it didnt move from the entertainment page of the newspaper to the editorial page, Berlinger says. It wasnt hard for him to imagine his teenage self ending up in Echolss situation. . By the time she got done watching it, her life was forever changed. A later confession during the trial phase would prove equally problematic. Two questions plagued the conservative, middle-class community: Why would anyone commit such a heinous act, and, more importantly, who? We were mainly in it for the aesthetics of filmmaking, but the last scene of Paradise Lost, when Damien is chained up and sent away to death row, that was just heartbreaking and devastating for us, Berlinger says. The judge ruled that Hobbs could not establish actual malice, and ordered Hobbs to pay Maines legal fees amounting to more than $17,000, according to the Associated Press. Baldwin, the youngest member of the trio that had come to be known as the West Memphis Three, was serving a life sentence after being convicted on charges connected to the 1993 killings of three 8-year-old boys. The idea of killer teens in the Christian South, not any greater sense of purpose, was mainly what intrigued Sheila Nevins, then the head of HBOs documentary division, when she spotted a story about the case on the inside pages of The New York Times. " Every crime, no matter what it is, gets blamed on Satanism.". So much progress had been made in the fight for new trials, most notably a November 2010 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that ordered a hearing on new DNA analysis and other evidence not considered in 1994. Jesse was gonna take it anyway. Griffis also found the devil in nearly every number associated with the crime. It's one. Hes subdued when discussing the facts of the case, but he comes alive while recounting his work with the Jaycees while in prison, or buying Metallicas Black Album when it came out in 1991. The obituary was featured in Idaho Press Tribune on March 13, 2021. Wading into the murky water, Allen unknowingly dislodged the pale, grotesquely arched form of Micheal Moore. The community's worst fears were confirmed. That's not the same Terry Hobbs. More than 25 years after the murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis,a new book gives a first-person account of what was happening behind the sce More than 25 years after the murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis,a new book gives a first-person account of what was happening behind the scenes. But they were saying that he was about to die.. Echols said in 2012, he will never give up his mission to exonerate himself. Sheila Nevins, the HBO exec who pushed for Berlinger and Sinofsky to make that initial trip to Arkansas, is most proud of the companys willingness to let her finance three documentaries over 18 years without knowing where they would go. In November, Judge David Burnett, who had presided over the trial, was elected to the state senate. . Also part of the plea was the provision that the three could not sue the state. A spiritual successor to Errol Morriss The Thin Blue Line, and a forerunner of more recent documentaries like Making a Murderer, the film stands today as the most affecting examination of one of the most studied legal cases in U.S. historyone that put heavy metal lyrics and black T-shirts on trial and helped lay the groundwork for the current thinking around false confessions. Much of Cecil Hotel focuses on the amateur investigators who turned coincidences into conspiracy theories, ultimately accusing an innocent person of her death. February 27, 2023 (82 years old) View obituary. But most notably, his initial timeline of events didnt match what was known about the crimes, and every time he offered a detail that diverged from the accepted chronology, the interrogating officers seemed to steer him back in the direction of the official version. Robin Lynn Jones. Misskelley returned to life in West Memphis. That November, he says, HBO agreed to give an honorariumroughly $5,000to the families on both sides. (Police questioned Byers several times during the investigation, but never considered him a suspect.) He just didnt know it would take another 14 years to happen. He was 56. We were finally winning, he says. What has never been definitively answered, however, is who committed the 1993 murders, and The Forgotten West Memphis Three, premiering Saturday, March 28 at 8/7c on Oxygen, reexamines the case and key theories. Well theres been a lot of things that happened over the years. However, within the first crucial hours after the bodies were discovered, mistakes were made at the crime scene that negatively impacted the investigation. They were found nude and hogtied in a creek in a wooded area in West Memphis. Local 24 News EXCLUSIVE: Terry Hobbs on his new memoir on the West Memphis 3. Polygraph tests revealed deception in the answers of both men in regard to the crimes. February 27, 2023 (76 years old) View obituary. He says his dad and Berlinger werent seeking notorietydocumentaries certainly werent a means to get rich or famous in those days. Hobbs was Branch's stepfather. Among them was a disoriented, muddy, and bleeding African-American man who stumbled into a West Memphis Bojangles restaurant men's room less than a mile from the crime scene. Although the appeals were repeatedly denied, a new batch of DNA testing done in 2007 reignited the investigation. 25, 2021. To date, no DNA evidence from the crime scene can be linked to Damien Echols, Baldwin, or Jessie Misskelley. Under order of the Arkansas Supreme Court, there were to be new evidentiary hearings in the case. Produced and directed by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the film and its two sequels, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, gave audiences a unique and detailed look into the case, the accused, and the families of victims. Jessie took a polygraph. According to Griffis, black hair, black T-shirts, and black jeans were signs that a kid was in league with the devil. The news was devastating beyond just word of his friends suffering. every single person in my class was either . Im not the judge. A month later, authorities arrested Baldwin, Echols, and Misskelleythree teenagers who lived in trailer parks near West Memphis and had previous run-ins with the law, though nothing rising to the level of murder. Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of West Memphis Three murder victim Stevie Branch, has denied any involvement in slayings of Branch and his two friends. The first being that boys were killed by someone they knew. The West Memphis Police Department interviewed Hobbs, who was dismissive of the findings, claiming the hair could have been picked up during a visit to his home since the victim "played with our little boy regularly," according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Mara Leveritt, a journalist who followed the case throughout the 1990s and wrote the 2002 book Devils Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, calls the strain of Christianity that runs through the region very literal and says that even her children faced harassment as teenagers for playing Dungeons & Dragons and listening to Ozzy Osbourne. He was 56. Two of the West Memphis Three's most ardent supporters were director Peter Jackson, best known for The Lord of the Rings films, and his partner Fran Walsh. With the area secured, Detective Bryn Ridge volunteered to search the ditch. Funeral Home Services for Terry are being provi. There also were issues with other details he provided, including how the victims were bound and whether the boys were raped. He could have been me, he told Rolling Stone in 2011. In 2009, three witnesses filed affidavits claiming they saw Hobbs with the murdered boys the night they disappeared, contradicting Hobbs previous statements to police, according to CNN. But the list of people who have looked at the facts of the case and come away believing Baldwin, Echols, and Misskelley are innocent is long. He was an actor, known for Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988), Fast Food (1989) and In the Heat of the Night (1988). With a large population of fundamentalist Christians, the American South was particularly subject to occult paranoia. Speaking by phone last month, he comes across, in many ways, like the person Berlinger says he encountered in prison in 1994: polite, deferential, soft-spoken. Hobbs, with the help of an author, put all that journaling intoa book about the 1993 murders of his stepson Stevie Branch, and Branchs friends Michael Moore and Chris Byers.
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