My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Saturday, March 14, 2015

A new suspect - in part 2 of Paradise Lost

Anyone who watched Paradise Lost (The child murders at Robin Hood Creek) will have a pretty good idea about how becomes the center of attention and the most likely suspect in the follow-up documentary, Paradise Lost 2, so I won't be giving anything away (I don't think) by noting that this follow up focuses on whether Byers, the stepfathers of one of the murdered boys, is the killer. There's no doubt that the three young men convicted of the crime were the victims of a terrible police investigation, very shoddy defense and a highly prejudiced judicial system - essentially convicted on the shaky, probably coerced confession of the weakest among the 3, a boy with an IQ of 72. Following the initial documentary, sympathizers from around the country bean a campaign to free the 3 and in particular rallied around Damian Ecles, the obvious leader of the three boys and a somewhat charismatic, intensive, thoughtful, and oddly alluring young man sentenced to death. The filmmakers (Berlinger and Sinofsky, who keep themselves entirely off camera and mic) faced a tough challenge in this followup in that only one of the 3 sets of defense attorneys would speak w/ them, only one member of the victims' families (Byers) would speak with them, and they were denied access to the courtroom and to other locales (many must have felt burnt by the first documentary). So this documentary focuses on the team of supporter for Damian (they are obviously selfless, devoted, liberal-progressive, and much as I admire that I found their obvious fascination with Damian and their enjoyment of the attention from media to be creepy in itself), on Jesse Misskelly's noble defense lawyer and his work with a pathologist who is determined to examine the bite marks on the victims (very upsetting, close-your-eyes scenes there), and on Byers - who by all reasonable accounts is the one guy who should refuse to participate, but he's so weird and obviously disturbed and a drama queen, as M put it, of the highest order that he provides access when he definitely should not. By the end, most viewers will be 100 percent sure that he could have done the killings and at the very least should have been a police suspect (the investigating detective, retired by the time of the sequel, remains convinced he got the right killers). It's not hard to see that Byers was a victim of abuse, that he may well have abused his stepson, and that he is so emotionally unstable that he could have committed these crimes. Not sure if we'll ever have answers, but will watch part 3 sometime soon to find out.

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