![]() ![]() Either those questions were not asked, or the filmmakers decided not to use them. We would like to hear testimony from Byers about whether the other victims were then present, or if his stepson later joined them, and where they were later, and where he was. The welts from the belt buckle previously had been linked to the ritual killing. On the witness stand, he testifies that he beat his stepson with a belt at 5:30 p.m. Crime lab reports show traces of blood that apparently came from himself and his stepson. In the movie's single most astonishing development, Byers gives the filmmakers a knife. One of these men is John Mark Byers, stepfather of one of the victims, who earlier has been seen in a video at the crime scene, re-creating the crimes in grisly detail while vowing vengeance. One mother says of Damien, “He deserves to be tortured for the rest of his life.” She curses not only the defendants, “but the mothers that bore them.” In one especially uncomfortable scene, relatives of two of the victims take target practice by shooting at pumpkins they have named after the defendants, aiming at parts of the “bodies” they have not yet hit. The parents of the murdered children are quick to believe the theories about the crime, and unforgiving. Time and again, the documentary describes someone as a boyfriend, girlfriend, stepfather, stepmother, ex-wife or ex-husband there seem to be few intact original marriages in this milieu. Meanwhile, we meet members of the families on both sides. For the defense, a pathologist testifies that it would be so difficult to carry out the precise mutilations on one of the boys that he couldn't do it himself-not without the right scalpel, and certainly not in the dark or in muddy water. His mother says she told him she would be sitting right there in the courtroom, and didn't want to hear him lie.Īt the trial of Damien and Jason, evidence of the satanic orientation of the murders is supplied by a state “expert occultist” who turns out to have his degrees from a mail-order university that did not require any classes or schoolwork. He was offered a reduced sentence if he would testify at the trial of the other two teenagers, but refused. Jesse, whose trial was split off from the others, was found guilty and sentenced to life plus 40 years. The state's case is based on Jesse's testimony and hearsay the defense argues that the statements made by Jesse contained only facts first supplied to him by the police, and there is a fascinating cross-examination in which a police transcript shows Jesse shifting the time of the crimes from morning to noon to after school to evening (when they actually occurred) under leading suggestions by police. Although one of the victims lost five pints of blood and the others bled freely, there is no blood at the murder site. ![]() In the courtroom, they make a poignant trio: Jesse, small and blinking Jason, who does not testify and indeed hardly speaks except in soft, shy generalities, and Damien, intelligent and articulate, known locally for dressing in black, listening to heavy metal music and reading books on Wicca, or “white magic.” There is no significant physical evidence linking them to the crime, and the crime scene itself is without clues. Local prosecutors brought murder charges against the boys. ![]() A month after the murders, an undersized 17-year-old named Jesse Misskelly, with an IQ of 72, testified that he had been present when Damien Wayne Echols, 18, and Jason Baldwin, 16, killed and mutilated the boys.
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