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. Baldwins attorneys even avoided putting him on the witness stand or mounting much of a defense, believing the burden was on the state. They saw this movie and they felt like, I have to do something.. But on the subject of Paradise Lost, he speaks emphatically: He understands how important the movies were in helping him, Echols, and Misskelley walk free 10 years ago this August. While police had focused on Echols and Baldwin in the intervening weeks because of their reputation, the arrests came largely because of a confession by Misskelley, which was leaked to the largest newspaper in the area, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and ran under the banner headline Teen describes cult torture of boys. At a press conference shortly after the arrests, the lead investigator was asked how confident he felt about the case on a scale of 1-10. Terry Roland Hobbs <p>Terry Roland Hobbs, 62, of Sweetwater, passed away on Saturday, September 11, 2021.</p> <p>Terry was born on September 11, 1959 in Sweetwater, to Jack Harvey and Marjorie Hobbs .Terry graduated from Sweetwater High School in 1977. He says his dad and Berlinger werent seeking notorietydocumentaries certainly werent a means to get rich or famous in those days. Metallica had never licensed a song for a film before, but when they learned about the case, Berlinger says, they made an exception. They were found nude and hogtied in a creek in a wooded area in West Memphis. They formed the organization Proclaim Justice, a nonprofit that reinvestigates crimes with the hopes of freeing innocent people. Due to marital problems stemming from Stevies death, the couple divorced in 2004, reported CNN. 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 . Berlinger says that after months of filming, the parents of one of the victims raised the issue of payment. Once there got to be this global pressure, and there was a big concert here with really big-name musicians within a mile of our Supreme Court building, things started suddenly to change, she says. I still believe in my heart that Jessie, Jason, and Damion Echols [sic] are responsible for what happened to our children, Hobbs told Memphis ABC affiliate WATN in June 2019. In 1994, the FBI said there was scant evidence that violent satanic crimes had ever occurred in America outside of a few isolated incidents, but that was long after TV hosts like Geraldo, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Oprah had spread moral hysteria about musicians weaving supposedly anti-Christian and occult messages into their songs, and long after wrongful convictions were handed down in the infamous McMartin Preschool sexual assault trials. February 27, 2023 (82 years old) View obituary. 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. I deeply admire that and I thought it was worthy of putting on film.. of Auburndale, FL passed away Monday, August 16, 2021. the only grade you receive is from quizzes, exams, and the final. Create your free profile and get access to exclusive content. In 2004, Vicki Hutcheson recanted her trial testimony, stating that she had lied on the stand. They were releasedfrom prison in 2011 on whats called an Alford plea, after new forensic evidence was presented as part of the case. Find the obituary of Terry Hobbs (1957 - 2021) from Caldwell, ID. The idea of the average citizen becoming embroiled in a criminal investigation isn't far-fetched in 2021, . Luminol tests, which reveal the hidden presence of blood, were not performed at the scene until six days later. Griffis also found the devil in nearly every number associated with the crime. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019. Rather, they were fighting for something they believed in. Their main worry was Damien, who was staring down the threat of lethal injection should the appeals fail. It's affected a lot of lives, but for some reason it keeps being brought up," said Hobbs. After roughly 18 months of editing, Paradise Lost debuted at Sundance in January 1996 before heading out to other festivals. And that makes him hopeful that exoneration is on the horizon. Terry was born on September 11, 1959 in Sweetwater, to Jack Harvey and Marjorie. Mojo was right. Family and friends can send flowers and/or light a candle as a loving gesture for their loved one. The reason for the credit gets less curious when hes asked about it: He was a huge Metallica fan. After ending his first marriage, he wed Pamela Hicks Branch in 1986, when her son Stevie was almost 2 years old. A statement he made to the producers of Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills did little to help his public image. A quarter-century later, what does the documentary tell us about citizen activism, the criminal justice system, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s? The footage included raw jailhouse interviews with the defendants, strategy sessions held by legal teams on both sides, and extended monologues from Mark Byers, the tall, goateed stepfather of one of the victims, who spoke as though he were reciting the Book of Revelation and who, at one point in Paradise Lost, fired a handgun at a pumpkin while reciting the names of the accused. 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. Support came from unlikely corners: a classroom of kids who held a cookie sale that raised $30, local bands in Chicago who held a benefit show and sent $150. The third put forth the unusual theory that the killings were committed as a cult ritual. Quality. Terry Hobbs stated both family and co-workers believed he was guilty from day one and continued to believe him guilty after the trial and convictions of the West Memphis Three. 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. . I had a friend who was working on 20/20, and they had done a film about exorcism in one of the magazine pieces, Nevins says. Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers were best friends. People have come out of the woodwork and said this and this and people have done things and a lot of them are wrong, said Hobbs. They were naked and hog-tied with their own shoelaces, and showed signs of blunt force trauma and mutilation, the latter of which may have been the work of wild animals, reported the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. 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. They began attending appeal hearings and visiting Baldwin, Echols, and Misskelley in prison. By getting to the story quickly, the directors were able to document the post-arrest period and two trials that followed in painstaking detail. TERRY HOBBS OBITUARY Terry Roland Hobbs, 62, of Sweetwater, passed away on Saturday, September 11, 2021. Debates still occur regularly onlinethe West Memphis Three subreddit is fairly active for one on a 28-year-old caseand podcasts have looked at the crime from all angles. On Aug. 11, 2011, the West Memphis Three entered the courtroom for the final time. (WMC) - Its a case that has captured the nation and certainly the Mid-South. In June 1996, Paradise Lost debuted on HBO, bringing the story of the West Memphis Three to TV sets and showing the power of the camera in the courtroom. A year after the DNA results were released, Hobbs sued Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines for defamation, claiming she implied he was a murderer on the bands website and at a 2007 rally, according to The New York Times. La Mirada, California. Their advocates believe the Alford pleas represent their own form of injustice, but correcting that is a less pressing issue than the early battlesthe men are free and have been able to mostly live their lives in the years since their release. Thursday, August 19th 2021. Classmates at Weaver Elementary School, the three were active in their Cub Scout troop and responsible enough to be trusted to roam their neighborhood without supervision. The districts current prosecuting attorney, Keith Chrestman, did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but his predecessor Scott Ellington, whose office negotiated the deals, told The New York Times in 2011 that while new trials would have likely resulted in acquittals, We dont think that there is anybody else. The Moore family has been outspoken about the end result, vehemently protesting the 2012 Oscar nomination for the third Paradise Lost installment. Two questions plagued the conservative, middle-class community: Why would anyone commit such a heinous act, and, more importantly, who? When the pair got the call from Nevins, they mobilized immediately, landing in Arkansas shortly after the arrests. Misskelley told Hutcheson that he really didn't know much about Echols other than that he was "a weird person." Its first season ostensibly focused on the disappearance of a Georgia beauty queen, but it spent nearly as much time digging through the salacious details of the victims love life and dipping into amateur psychology as it did looking at evidence. Other possible suspects includedBrian Holland and Chris Morgan, two young men from Memphis, Tenn., with a history of drug offenses. Reaching its apex in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Satanic Panic was a wave of paranoia rooted in the belief that Satanic cults intent on corrupting the souls of the young had infiltrated American society. 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. Stidham, who was just 30 years old and not long out of law school when the court appointed him to be Misskelleys attorney, went in thinking he would negotiate a deal for his client, who had told police that his acquaintances Baldwin and Echols committed the crimes and that he was present and played a role as an accessory. Its gone from a controversial legal theory to an accepted phenomenon. 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. Mojo, however, was considerably more fired up, believing the same thing many of Paradise Losts viewers did: that the movie showed an incredible miscarriage of justice, one that would surely be fixed. 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.) Bray asked her if she knew about rumored cult activity in the community. Michelle McNamara helped crack the Golden State Killer case by poring over thousands of pages of case files while working on her book Ill Be Gone in the Dark, which was published two years after her 2016 death, while Chris Lambert and his podcast Your Own Backyard were highlighted by authorities after two arrests in April in connection with the 1996 disappearance of Cal Poly student Kristin Smart. I spoke with one of the jurors, years later after the trials and convictions, and he said he had no doubt that people could throw their lot in with the devil and be commanded to do things that they wouldnt have done otherwisethat they have basically made the deal with the devil, Leveritt says. As more people learned about the case from Paradise Lost and the work of people like Bakken and Sauls, the phrase Free the West Memphis Three caught on as a slogan for progressive musicians and actors in the 1990s, up there with Save the Rainforest and Free Tibet. Eddie Vedder became an early leading voice, soon followed by the likes of Peter Jackson, Johnny Depp, and Natalie Maines from the band then known as the Dixie Chicks. 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. Here's when clocks will 'spring forward' in 2023. (At one point, Sauls says, it landed on Yahoos list of the top 100 websites.) Berlinger contrasts this with the approach taken by Bakken, Sauls, and Co., who considered the truth sacrosanct and avoided rumor and innuendo in part because similar speculation helped convict the West Memphis Three. We are sad to announce that on September 11, 2021 we had to say goodbye to Terry Hobbs of Sweetwater, Texas. People would drive by and yell at us, Theyre going to burn in hell, Sauls says. There also were issues with other details he provided, including how the victims were bound and whether the boys were raped. I don't know if the other 2 did, but even if they did polygraphs aren't admissible in court. Almost 30 years ago, three eight-year-old West Memphis boys were found murdered and three teenagers were charged in the murders. He graduated from Sweetwater High School in 1977. It wasnt hard for him to imagine his teenage self ending up in Echolss situation. During the trials of Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols, Griffis drew tenuous links between circumstantial evidence, such as the killings taking place near the date of the pagan festival of Beltane. 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. Further down, it includes names such as Rick Dior, a sound mixer who worked on Apollo 13 and Dirty Dancing, and Bob Richman, a three-time Emmy-nominated cinematographer whose rsum also includes renowned docs like An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman. She says she is too because they believe they are hearing different stories. 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. 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. He also lost the defamation case because of his violent past. As for Paradise Lost, it was the inciting incident in the two-decade chain of events that led to the release of the West Memphis Three. Echols is an author and mystic living New York with his wife, architect Lorri Davis. Main Page; 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. Im not the jury. Updated: 9:42 AM CDT June 11, 2019. Im seeing the things I experienced, but not through my own point of view. On 04/08/2021 Terry Hobbs was filed as a Bankruptcy - Chapter 13 lawsuit. With a large population of fundamentalist Christians, the American South was particularly subject to occult paranoia. As the movement to free the West Memphis Three gained traction, a number of celebrities joined the cause, bringing the case under more scrutiny. They werent connected in any direct way, Bakken says. The three have always maintained their innocence. 24 to Jun. At the request of West Memphis authorities, the two were picked up and questioned by Oceanside police. The nonprofits work hasnt always been easyfundraising is hard, and because hes a convicted felon, hes unable to visit clients in prison or discuss pleasbut its been essential for him as he strives to live the words by 14th-century Persian poet Hafez that he keeps as an email signature: The small man builds cages for everyone he knows / While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low / Keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners. Baldwin says hes learned that justice isnt a computer programthat you can input all the evidence and testimony and still get the wrong results. Mojo had a different idea of what might get the man he affectionately called J.B. out of prison. Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, breaking news, sweepstakes, and more! As the first in a trilogy of Paradise Lost films about the case, the 1996 movie was a stunning example of cinma vrit, as directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky embedded themselves with the prosecution, the defense, and the families of both the slain and the accused to put human faces on a heart-wrenching tragedy, as well as highlight the overblown worries of satanic rituals and murderous cults that proliferated throughout the 1980s and 90s. In 2013, Jackson and Damien Echols produced a fourth documentary about the case. Hes since parlayed the popularity of the show into a booming podcast network and documentary deal with Oxygen. However, within the first crucial hours after the bodies were discovered, mistakes were made at the crime scene that negatively impacted the investigation. At the time of the West Memphis Three trial, Griffis claimed to have given seminars to 38,000 police officers all over the globe. The next to be found was Stevie Branch, quickly followed by Christopher Byers. October 13, 2018 - Happy 94th Birthday Terry! The whole point of the web sleuths presented in the Cecil Hotel is that you cannot assume something is truthful just because circumstantially it seems interesting. Terry was born on September 11, 1959 in Sweetwater, to Jack Harvey and Marjorie Hobbs .Terry graduated from Sweetwater High School in 1977. 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? In 1996, HBO released the documentary film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. Hobbs was Branch's stepfather. Case Details Parties . People in West Memphis are going to tell their kids stories. . Few celebrities at the time did as much as Henry Rollins, however. there are no assignments to cushion your grade, so either pass or fail. The bodies had been removed from the water and placed on the adjacent embankment, possibly disturbing physical evidence or otherwise contaminating the scene. By 2005, Rollins himself had raised $100,000 for the cause. Terry Hobbs says he is a church member, a father, and working man and in no way a killer. It has happened to a lot of people that just dont have the spotlight of a documentary, he says.