INTERVIEW: Investigation Discovery looks back at ‘West Memphis Three’
Image courtesy of ID / Provided by press site with permission.
The West Memphis Three case, involving a triple homicide in a small Arkansas town back in 1993, has spawned many news articles, documentaries and armchair detective theories. Investigation Discovery, a true-crime network, is taking a closer look at the case on its special series, An ID Murder Mystery. The documentary airs Sunday, April 5 at 9 p.m., with an accompanying digital series, called The Missing Pieces, being released immediately after the world premiere.
For those who don’t know the case, following the murder of three 8-year-old boys in the local area, a trio of teenagers was picked up by police and eventually arrested and charged with the crimes. They were Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, according to an ID press release. There was a belief that the suspects fit the part because they wore black and were known in the neighborhood as a group of “goth” friends. This was a time in recent American history when the so-called Satanic Panic gripped the nation, according to the network.
Pam Deutsch is executive producer of the series, and she believes audience members will be engaged by the special because of its deep storytelling.
“This is part of a franchise, the ID Murder Mystery, that has done really well for us in the past, and it’s super-immersive,” Deutsch said in a recent phone interview. “This particular series is one that our core audience really gravitates towards. It goes a little bit deeper into the storytelling because it’s multiple hours. … We’re looking for the big iconic cases that really captured the country’s imagination and the cases that tended to play out over many years and have a lot of chapters, and this certainly fit into that. There’s just certain things in this story. There’s a lot of firsts: one of the first big stories that came out of the whole Satanic Panic during the early ’90s. It was [one of] the first stories that cameras were allowed in the courtroom, so you really saw how the whole process worked. And then finally things turned around on the basis of new developments in DNA testing. Chapters in our own history are reflected in what happened in this investigation and this case.”
One of the key interviews for the TV special is Baldwin himself. In addition, Deutsch said that audience members can expect to hear from family members about the tragedy that descended upon West Memphis, Arkansas.
“I would say there’s certainly a period of research and getting the characters on board,” Deutsch said of the development process. “Probably all told it’s six to eight months from start to finish.”
The producer also hinted that competing theories will be presented, and ID will ask questions about whether the initial investigation was botched by local officials and whether the confession of one of the suspects was coerced. They look into an incident involving a man at a Bojangle’s restaurant and the loss of evidence from that scene.
“Really, in the end, it turns out it probably wasn’t any kind of ritualistic thing,” Deutsch ventured as a guess. “I think it may have been something sick, but I don’t think it was an intentional scene that was laid out on purpose.”
She added: “Others think that the location itself was within spitting distance of a truck stop, so it could have been something completely random. So there’s a lot more concrete theories and some broader conspiracy theories out there, and we have a digital companion series called The Missing Pieces for this one that, after the linear series, goes into the more obscure conspiracy theories.”
One important element of the case and its aftermath actually involved Hollywood and the music community. HBO aired a documentary about the homicides called Paradise Lost a couple years after the entire incident, and several famous people — including Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Henry Rollins, among others — came to the defense of the so-called West Memphis Three.
“It just started this grassroots movement to get these guys released,” Deutsch said. “This was in the early days of the internet, but in the form that it existed at the time, it was spreading through chatrooms and the like. Then the music community really glommed on to it, people like Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines and I think Metallica really got behind them. Then it just took off, so they had this enormous public pressure. And that helped them to reopen the case.”
To find out the end of this sad and devastating case — one that shook a community to its core and took the lives of three innocent children — audience members can tune in to the ID special for an in-depth look at what happened (and didn’t happen) in West Memphis in 1993.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The West Memphis Three: An ID Murder Mystery will air Sunday, April 5 at 9 p.m. on Investigation Discovery. Click here for more information.
