Review: Leveritt, Devil's Knot

[truepenny]

Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three by Mara Leveritt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[audiobook]
[library]

Thirteen discs is a very long time to hate somebody's voice.

The book is fascinating, and I'm glad I own it in print, but I cannot recommend the audiobook because that's how much I hated the reader's voice. That said, this is an excellent book about the West Memphis Three and I do recommend it highly. Leveritt is careful and thorough and she digs into questions in a way I really appreciate. I'm sure people who believe the guilty verdict think she's grossly biased; I think she's doing her best to be fair to people who don't deserve the courtesy

In 1993, three little boys were horribly murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas; with no evidence except hearsay, the police decided (1) the murders were "occult" and (2) they were committed by a kid named Damien Echols because he was "weird," a kid named Jason Baldiwn because he wore black t-shirts and listened to Metallica and was (gasp!) Damien's friend, and a kid named Jesse Miskelley because they browbeat him into confessing. Damien, Jason, and Jesse are about my age, and I think of all the kids I knew in high school who were "weird" or who wore black t-shirts and listened to heavy metal (and because I did not grow up in western Arkansas, I knew more than one of each), and I want to start screaming at people, starting with the juvenile probation officer who decided without evidence that Damien was a Satanist more than a year before the crimes and would not leave him the fuck alone, then the cops who conducted such a slipshod and panicky investigation, advancing to the prosecutors, and possibly not even ending with the judge. All three boys were tried as adults and found guilty of capital murder; Damien (the alleged ringleader) was sentenced to death. (After the book was written, a circuit court judge reviewed the trials and allowed the three, after a decade in prison, to enter Alford pleas and walk free. To this day the murders have not been solved.) The gross prostitution of justice documented in this book makes me furiously angry, and I think Leveritt's comparison with the Salem witchcraft crisis is not inapt, in that the people committing evil here are not the suspects, but their prosecutors and judges. It's hard for me to believe that anyone would commit such evil--the railroading of innocent teenagers--on purpose, but it's equally hard for me to believe that any rational human being could look at Jesse Miskelley's "confession" and not recognize that it is made of leading questions and desperation. And that's clearly something that perplexes Leveritt as well.

So yeah. Excellent book, shame about the audio version.



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