Guilty or framed?: A powerful documentary about a triple-murder

The ca 1994 HBO documentary Paradise Lost is a truly incredible account of the arrest and trial of three teenage boys charged in rural Arkansas with the murder of three 8-year-old boys in what appears to be a satanic ritual involving sexual abuse and some grotesque body dismemberment that the film depicts with unflinching, graphic detail - too much for some viewers, I think. This film is a "pure" documentary - nothing re-enacted, nothing spliced in after the fact - all of the reportage and interviews are contemporaneous with the events, and the filmmakers - Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky - earned and maintained incredible access to almost all of the parties: the accused boys, their families, the families of the victimes, and the defense attorneys - though not to much access to the prosecutors. Also, Arkansas law seems to have given them a great deal of access to live courtroom filming - so throughout we see the anguish of the community, the anger of all of the families, the courtroom drama, the media frenzy. This film is as much about the culture of trailer-park life in the Deep South as it is about this particular case. All of the families involved are very poor, poorly educated, struggling with their lives, nowhere to go - you see this in everything from the horrible condition of their teeth to the sweltering life inside their trailers to the teenage pregnancies. It's a culture of angry fundamentalism (leavened improbably at one point by a beautiful church solo) and violence: guns and knives everywhere. At the heart of the story: are the boys satanic killers, or were they framed to get the police, unable to solve the hideous crime, off the hook? It's clear that there was no solid evidence against the boy. It's also clear that one of the 3 was an intelligent and very odd leader and that the other two suffer from significant retardation. It's possible to imagine him leading their hapless kids into criminal or even satanic activities - but a triple murder? One would think a jury would need more then a flimsy, police-coerced confession. There's no clear answer, but this became the first of a trilogy, as Berlinger and Sinofksy follow the case over a decade. It's long, painful, but impossible not to watch start to finish.