Rich Perez (0:01)

There's no denying that how our cities and neighborhoods are shaped have a deep impact on our lives. Even more so, the design of our neighborhoods reflect our values. So who gets to shape them? You see, while it's easy to recognize a city, identifying a just one is more challenging. The urban landscape tells a story of who's prioritized and who's marginalized, what's deemed worthy of investment, and what's considered expendable. In this podcast series, we'll explore the relationship between race and place. And together, in conversation with neighbors and experts, we'll unravel the threads that shape life in our cities. I'm Rich Perez, and this is this great and complicated place. Join us on Spotify, itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe today and join the conversation. We'll see you there. This is CT Media. A note to listeners this story contains sensitive content including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark spiritual themes, and may not be suitable for all listeners. The story I want to tell in this series is going to take us back through time. More than half a century, actually. But I want to start in the more Recent past. Wednesday, October 8, 2008 in primetime. For the second week in a row, the cable network TLC is airing a new show. It's called 17 Kids Encountered. This is the story of my family. That's me. I'm Michelle. There's Jim Bob, my wonderful husband. And our children, Josh, Jana, John, David, Jill, Jessa, Ginger, Joseph, Josiah, Joanna, Jedidiah, Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johanna, and Jennifer. You lost count. That's 17 in all. If reality TV had a golden era, 2008 was certainly the peak. CBS had premiered the show Survivor eight years earlier, and the genre had remade network and cable television shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians, Real Housewives, Kitchen Nightmares, Little People, Big World, and of course, the Apprentice, featuring Donald Trump were raking in advertising dollars and amassing loyal fan bas. In a genre that was dominated by sex tapes, screaming chefs, thrown wine glasses, and the infamous phrase, I didn't come here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I ain't ain't here to make no friends. 17 kids and counting offered something a little different, something both wholesome and odd. The Duggars were extremely conservative, part of an evangelical movement that was committed to homeschooling their kids, insulating them from things like, well, reality television and to strict rules around dating. The show was both earnest and knowing you Couldn't help but admire the close knit nature of the family and you couldn't help but laugh at some of the things that made them odd. It was one part Little House on the Prairie, one part freak show. On October 8th, two new episodes aired. And the feature player in the first episode was the Duggars eldest son, Josh. Josh being the firstborn, he definitely has a lot of initiative and he can get the job done. From the time he was little, if he set out to do something, usually he would finish it. And he's a great people person. He's good at being able to communicate with others and he's just very sensitive to others and he's a very likable person. When I was a state representative I used to take him down to the Capitol with me. But a lot of the others. The episode is titled Josh Gets Engaged and it follows him from his home in Arkansas to a gator themed restaurant in Florida where he pops the question to his girlfriend, Anna. You gotta take that one off. Yeah. Anna, will you marry me? Yes. Oh, I don't think I really had to fight myself off to keep from kissing her but I, I love her that much and I really did want to and so the best restraint that I can. So let's back up about a month earlier, September 2008, at the other end of the state, a very different story is underway involving a very different cast of characters. If the Duggar family is one part Little House on the Prairie and one part freak show, the story unfolding in West Memphis, Arkansas is basically just pure freak show. And at the center of it is a death row inmate named Damien Echols. In the summer of 2008, Damian's attorneys submitted new evidence to the court, hoping to open the door to appeals or a possible chance at a retrial. On September 10, the presiding judge over the case, Judge David Barnett, issues his ruling about the new evidence. It's hard to imagine two people who are more polar opposites than Josh Duggar and Damien Echols. Duggar grew up with a stable family, relative comfort, privilege, rigorous education and a strict religious upbringing. Echols, born Michael Wayne Hutchison, moved around constantly as a kid in both Arkansas and Oregon. By age 8, his parents had divorced. By 10, he'd attended 8 different elementary schools. He changed his name to Damien Echols after his mom remarried, Eccles being the last name of his stepfather and Damien apparently because of a Catholic saint. Not that Damien was devout or Catholic. He was spiritually curious though. And by the time he was in high school he was Interested in things like the occult, Wicca, magic, the kind of magic you spell with a K that involves tarot cards, black candles and spells. To put it politely, teenage Damian wasn't eccentric. And to put it bluntly, he was weird, off putting. Adults didn't know quite what to do with him. Some adults around him actually wondered if he'd chosen the name Damian because of the film the Omen where a child named Damian turns out to be the Antichrist. Damian, all right. Yeah, yeah. You sure? Yes. Suspicions of Damian were helped by the fact that like a lot of teenagers in the 90s, he wore a lot of black. He listened to heavy metal, he had a mop of black hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and he had a vibe. There's no doubt. If you go back and look at footage of Echols as a teenager, he was, well, odd. Here's a clip from his trial. Could you explain to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what some principles about the Wicca religion? It acknowledges a goddess in a higher regard as a God because people have always said we are all God's children and men cannot have children. Is there a difference between the Wicca religion and witchcraft? Wicca is also called witchcraft. The word Wicca was bastardized. It originally meant wise one. Were you different in other ways as well? Yes. I've never had a lot of the same interests that other people have, like sports, things like that. I've never been into anything like that. It was like a defense mechanism. It would make people think, like, well, he's weird, I'm not going to go around him. So it kept people away. So back in 1993, in Arkansas, when he was a teen and police began investigating a multiple murder that had signs of cult activity, he and two friends with their shaggy hair and mullets, their Metallica T shirts and their bad reputations, and especially Damien's eccentric demeanor, his chatter about the occult, they quickly became the prime suspects. They were arrested, charged, tried, convicted. Damien's two friends were sentenced to life without parole. Damien, who was 18, the only one that was a legal adult, was sentenced to death by lethal injection. That sentence was handed down in 1994. At that time, the Duggar family was only five kids and counting, and Josh Duggar was about to turn six years old. The two boys make for a stark contrast. Everything in Josh Duggar's life signaled stability, opportunity, character and religious formation, social acceptability. Damien's world was full of trouble. A broken marriage, an unstable home life, lack of long term friendships, trouble at school, interest in the morose the macabre Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Josh's parents blocked out most of the entertainment and media that was Damien Echel's bread and butter. There would be no Dungeons and Dragons, no violent or scary movies, no books on the occult, no heavy metal, certainly no Ouija boards or tarot cards. It was a world apart by design to protect their home from the dangers that lie out there. So Fast forward to 2008. Josh Duggar is following the path his parents laid out for him. After courting Anna for a prescribed period of time, he's getting married and he wants a big family. He plans to get into conservative politics like his father had been a few years before. Meanwhile, in Judge Barnett's courtroom, Damien Echols appeal ends the way all of his appeals have ended for 15 years, with a denial. The judge says that the evidence presented by Damien's lawyers was inconclusive as to his claim of actual innocence. And so he gets one step closer to that lethal injection. Now, my hunch is that many of you listening know the rest of one or both of these stories. And if you don't, it's worth saying now that neither of these stories are what they appear to be. Because it turns out that all that sheltering in the Duggar household, all the ways they locked the gates and barred the door from the evil that was out there, didn't protect the Duggar children from Josh. And as for Damian and his friends, all those warning signs, the broken homes, the transgressive attitude, the dabbling with the occult, the heavy metal in the mullets, none of that made the murderers. Josh Duggar was a predator and Damien Echols was innocent. From Christianity Today, I'm Mike Kosper and you're listening to Devil in the Deepest. This season we're looking at the Satanic panic and how chasing phantoms distracts us from real devils in our midst. Today, Episode one the Devil Went down to Arkansas, but you never hear it coming when you're covering up your ears. 17 Kids and Counting would run for 10 seasons, becoming one of TLC's biggest hits and most watched programs. The draw really did center on what made the Duggars both wholesome and strange. This idea that they'd withdrawn from the American mainstream to forge something different, something odd and archaic, but also quaint, nostalgic, compelling. The philosophy that shaped their way of life came from the mind of one man in particular, an evangelical minister named Bill Gothard. We'll have a lot to say about Gothard later in the series. For now, know that Gothard started his ministry in the late 1950s after graduating from Wheaton College. He was concerned at the time about the state of the souls of young people in high schools, colleges and universities. He started a ministry called Campus Teams to fight Juvenile Delinquency. What he found over time, in spite of not having any specific expertise in child rearing and not being a parent himself, was that parents especially gravitated towards his work precisely because it provided answers to complicated questions. If one wanted to frame it positively, they'd say that Gothard met a felt need for overwhelmed parents, providing a roadmap for training children in the way they should go. If one wanted to frame it negatively, and many have, they might describe his work and the systems he developed as a way to enable parents not to think about the choices their kids were making, to eliminate the need for wisdom and discernment, and to govern everything from television watching habits to sleep schedules to dating with a rigid, clear schema of rules. The practical result of following Gothard's way, which was taught at his Institute for Life Principles, looked an awful lot like the way the Duggars were raising their children and growing their family. Gothard's institute was considered an evangelical mecca for families who wanted to live counter to a culture they believed was growing more secular by the day. Here's Sarah Pulliam Bailey, a religion writer who's contributed to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Before that, she was also a contributor at ct. Bill Gothard was an extremely influential leader in the homeschooling movement for many years. He was incredibly influential. Influential in the 70s and 80s he would have these seminars that people would flock to and he would go over what he considered to be biblical principles or basic life principles. And he would go over everything from marriage to children to how to handle your finances. He would sort of pull passages from scripture and he would show you from scripture how. How to think, how to behave, how to live your life, how to. Are the operative words here. Everything Bill Gothard believed was formatted into curriculum, including an educational conference called the Advanced Training Institute. ATI was popular for many, particularly Christian homeschoolers. These seminars were pivotal in the formation of the Duggars values, and they became something like a poster family for Gothard and his teachings. They spoke about their involvement with the group both on and off camera. Many look at the Gothard phenomenon and see something strange and off putting, but for many evangelicals, it was incredibly appealing. I think coming out of the sexual revolution civil rights movement, the sort of chaos of the 60s like the Vietnam War, things like that. I think there were a lot of people who were looking for a more like structured like something that made sense to them, like rules that, you know, principles. These like God given principles that we could look to the Bible and we could say, like, you know, God wants X, God does not want us to have tattoos. God wants women to have long hair. I think they liked kind of the biblical literalism that came out of it. It gave a lot of security and comfort to some people. So it was really in like the 80s, 90s that it picked up. And so. So a lot of people, like especially evangelical boomers, have been to a seminar of his, but didn't necessarily like homeschool their kids. So they were still influenced by him, by Gothard. And I think Gothard really influenced a lot of other evangelical leaders. Gothard's influence was enormous. Far beyond the seminars, his ideas permeated evangelical culture because so many people who attended the seminars were pastors or church leaders, people who would take his ideas and, and bring them back to their own local churches and ministries. And given the emphasis on family and parenting, on gender marriage, one might imagine that Gothard would have a large family of his own. But that was not the case. He totally touted himself as an expert on like raising children and family lifestyle and all these best practices. And yeah, he was Never married. That's T.J. hester. T.J. works on this show. You'll hear him credited with editing and mixing and sound design in the end credits. But he also grew up in a family shaped by Gothard's ministry. Eleven Brothers and Sisters, homeschooling seminars, the works. The biggest theme of ati IBLP Gothard. If you just obey in the right ways, your life is going to go the right, right way. And when it came to child rearing and stuff, I mean, that like one of the biggest verses was raise up a child in the way he should go, and in the end he won't depart from it. There was a real sense that the world around you was dangerous. And what Gothard offered was protection. The wisdom of a sage to see through the facade of culture, to discover what was hiding underneath. TJ remembers him preaching against public education, including college as well as pop culture. So, like a lot of rules around what music you're allowed to listen to, what movies you're allowed to watch, just content that you're allowed to consume. And my parents were always strict about only letting me listen to Christian music. And I remember very specifically there was a. I had a Michael W. Smith Cassette. It was. It was the only thing I was allowed to listen to, really. And then one day they just kind of flipped the switch and they were like, actually, even if it's Christian, no rock, no pop. The reason was fairly straightforward. It's drums and electric guitars are of the devil. That judgment wasn't arbitrary. Gothard and others who were part of his ministry had rationalized it, though their rationalizations don't make it much better. A lot of those ideas are actually, like, really intensely racist. The logic that they use is like, drums are evil because they go back to like African tribal ceremonies where they're summoning demons. And like, I remember hearing speakers at ATI conferences say modern Christian music is demonic because they're using drums. And you don't know what you're inviting into your home when you listen to drums. Now, if you're a certain kind of evangelical, that's really familiar stuff. And in a later episode we're going to dive deeper into it. But for today, I actually want to talk about the background a little bit. It's easy to take some of this stuff, especially if you grew up with it or were actively harmed by it, and sort of pull it out of its context. Forget the world in which it came from. Evangelicals were far from the only ones talking about the devil during these these years. In fact, more broadly, there was this real sense of existential dread in the air, that a cosmic battle was playing out on the world stage and that nuclear apocalypse could happen at any moment. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Faith and politics were intermingling in the 80s new and unexpected ways. This was the era of Jerry Falwell Sr. S Moral Majority. It is good to know that perhaps this time next year he will be President George Bush. They felt like they brought Ronald Reagan into power in the 1980 election and now they were pushing back against the sexual revolution, fighting communism, lobbying against Roe versus Wade. And of course, it wasn't just people like Falwell or Bill Gothard that were talking about Satan's influence on children. The following is an NBC special presentation. You have to give a blood sacrifice to Satan. It's supposed to keep you protected. It's supposed to keep you pure. They said that if we told that the devil would come and kill our parents. This geraldo special from 1988 was typical of many news stories from this decade. Specials, episodes from talk shows, segments on news magazine programs, late night talk shows, radio programs, stories and print media. In the midst of a decade of prosperity, decadence, wildly sexualized music and entertainment. There was also a profound belief that across the country, Satanism was everywhere. In California, New Jersey, Alabama, and elsewhere, police have found inverted crosses and the remains of mutilated animals. But by far the most frightening of all are the reports of teenagers killing other kids in Satan's name. Item Douglas County, Georgia. Today we will meet people who say that their families were perfect on the outside, but behind closed doors, they were very dangerous. Satan worshippers who murdered children. There were many who came forward claiming to have been the victims of satanic ritual abuse, and some who claimed to have taken part in it, having been brainwashed at the time and deprogrammed afterwards. Perhaps no case was as infamous as that of the McMartin Daycare. Let's go now to the McMartin Preschool parents who have gathered for us in Los Angeles. You recall that case? Notorious case. I must state for the record, however, that the charges against most of the defendants have been dropped. Charges are still pending against two of them. However, we know that the parents and the children allege child abuse. What is much less known is that they say it was ritual abuse as part of a satanic cult. Please tell us why you believe this was part of a ritual cult. Abuse as part of a satanic cult. Well, the easiest reason to that question, Geraldo, is the fact when the children started talking, they started talking about robes and candles. They described an Episcopal church. And once they started narrowing that down, you could see that it had to be Satanic. It's very important in satanic religions to have a priest because they truly do believe in power. The truth about Satanism is they truly do use blood, and they mix it with urine. And then they also use the real meat, the real flesh. This is what makes Satanism true. And this is what 1,200 molested kids in the city of Manhattan beach have told the sheriff's department. And it's an outrage that we are where we are with this case and these poor, unprotected kids. We'll have much more to say about the McMartin story in a future episode, but for now, it's worth sketching out a few of the details. It began in 1983 when a parent accused a worker at a daycare of sexually assaulting her child. In time, there was kind of a snowball effect, other parents coming forward to make similar accusations. And the accusations steadily became more and more bizarre. Tales of Satanists levitating around the room, drinking blood, eating feces, even murder, all of it taking place in some kind of hidden tunnel network. Underneath the building of this otherwise nondescript neighborhood daycare. And that's just scratching the surface of how bizarre it all became. And yet, in the zeitgeist of the 1980s, somehow this was all believable. The idea that ordinary people, people who worked ordinary jobs, took care of their lawns, paid their taxes, raised normal seeming children. They were all part of a coven, a satanic cult. Or as some stories went, they were part of an international cohort of satanists trafficking and murdering children around the globe. When this Geraldo special aired, the audience was riveted. Not because they found it outlandish, but because they believed it. They'd heard these stories in their own towns, in their own neighborhoods. Stories about kids going missing, pets found dismembered or disemboweled. Satanists poisoning children's candy with hallucinogens, tucking razor blades into tootsie rolls or hypodermic needles. I mean, if you grew up in the 80s, did you ever have to take your candy to a hospital, have it x rayed before you could eat it on Halloween? Do you remember hearing those stories? Did you ever hear that people were losing touch with reality while playing dungeons and dragons and unable to discern what was real and what was fantasy, they just started killing people? Were you ever warned that playing was a Magic 8 ball? And if you don't know what that is, kids, google it. Somehow the Magic 8 ball was tied to the occult. Same thing with the Smurfs. The way the stories were told was as if the entire world was a trojan horse targeting the lives and souls of kids wanting to either turn them into black magic, practicing occultists through hidden messages on Saturday morning cartoons, or worse, turning them into prey for the satanist next door. Sure, sometimes the paranoia was a punch. Could it be Satan? But often, even in pop culture, the idea of satanists next door was taken seriously. Like in the 1989 comedy the Burps, where Tom Hanks is the skeptic who doesn't want to believe his next door neighbors are satanists who might have killed the people who lived there before. Ray, do you want them to take your family, kidnap them, tear their livers out and make some kind of satanic pate? You're chanting. Unconscious chanting. You're chanting, I want to kill everyone. Satan is good. Satan is our pal. Ray. Ray, you're chanting. Hey, once they get in here, it's over, pal. Now the thing about this movie, a movie starring Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern and Corey Feldman, most of the way through Hanks is the skeptic. He can't imagine Satanists living next door, but it tells you something about the zeitgeist of the 80s that spoiler alert, he's wrong. They are Satanists. They did kill his neighbors and it's his skepticism that nearly gets him killed. You can understand why paranoia about all this took hold, why parents got anxious about was happening in that school or that neighbor's house or that daycare or after school program. The idea of putting up every obstacle you can to that kind of evil. You can understand what made it so attractive, why people like Gothard found an audience and a fortune promising to protect your kids. Take all these steps, train up your child, block out the outside world. Because if Tom Hanks isn't safe out there, who is? We'll be right back. This paid message is from Alabama Astronaut. The church I grew up in spoke in tongues, laid hands on the sick, cast out devils. But what about the two other signs mentioned in Mark? Chapter 16, the Handling of Serpents and the Drinking of Poisons. Alabama Astronaut presents a pair of new podcasts investigating these two rarely performed signs through the prism of undocumented worship music. Ex Fundamental Baptist preacher Abe Partridge ventures into the hills of Appalachia to capture the songs of the serpent handlers. This concept dawned on me. Take up your cross and follow me. A critically acclaimed podcast Garden and Gun magazine calls utterly fascinating. And our new podcast, Mark for Life is the first ever memoir from this group which details the rocky life of one preacher seeking God's forgiveness for a dark and sinful past. Two new podcasts, One Magnificent Journey, Alabama Astronaut and Mark for Life now available@alabamaastronaut.com or find them on your favorite podcast app. An east Arkansas town is stunned tonight after the apparent murder of three young boys. I'm Andy Pearson. I'm Gina Curry. Folks in West Memphis have their guards up tonight. Some of them not even let letting their kids West Memphis, Arkansas is a small town, less than 30,000 people right across the river from Memphis, Tennessee. It was a working class community deep in the Bible belt and experiencing economic hardship. As we already mentioned, Damien Eccles stuck out for his eccentricities and his anti social reputation. He might have been any other troubled teen until the crime shocked the community and put him and his two friends under the magnifying glass. Three little boys, Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers, were found naked, hogtied, mutilated and submerged in a drainage ditch. A crime so unimaginably violent and awful it's hard to even comprehend what kind of monster tortures, mutilates and murders an 8 year old child, much less 38 year old children, simultaneously? The day that the bodies were discovered, I was in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is Dan Stidden. Today he's a judge in Arkansas, but back in 1993, he was a fresh out of law school attorney. My dad and I had been crappie fishing and we came in and started cleaning fish and putting up our tackle. And all of a sudden a breaking news story came on about three 8 year old boys had been found murdered in a ditch just off the interstate in West Memphis, Arkansas. My dad kind of shook his finger at me and said, you do not need to be involved in that case. That comment was more prescient than his father could have known. A few days later, the phone rang. It was a local judge who'd been assigned the task of getting representation for the three teenagers who were charged with the murder of those boys. He also happened to be from Dan's hometown. Everybody was flocking to represent Damien and Jason Baldwin, but nobody wanted to represent Jesse Misskelley. So I thought, well, if there's anybody who can talk me out of this, it'll be my wife. So I'm still sitting there with a towel wrapped around me dripping from the shower because that's when I got the phone call. So I asked her to come in the bedroom and I said, look, Judge Goodson gave me 20 minutes and I told her what was going on. And she said, do it, that's what you love. Not long after, Dan found himself sitting across from a young Jesse Misskelley. He wasn't prepared for what he'd encountered. He was just a kid. He was 17 years old. I had no experience in dealing with kids, or even adults for that matter, with mental disabilities. Here he is, he's about 30 years old. And I think it's fair to say that he's a bit idealistic. You have to be to do public defense work. All these years after the case, you still get the sense that he's a bit of an idealist, but it's also true. Back in 1993, he had no idea what he was getting into. It was a huge case. It's not just that this story has made national headlines, it's that it fits this broader pattern, this broader anxiety around Satanism and the occult. That is the water Dan is swimming in when the current leads him into that room. In a detention facility in 1993, I was expecting to meet Charles Manson as a child. And when I got to the jail with my law partner and my legal assistant, Vicki Cross. We got there and walked into the cell, and here sat this kid. Looked like he was about 10 years old. And it was really just the exact opposite of what I was expecting to see. A kid. A kid with intellectual disabilities. Jesse Misskelley had an IQ of 72, which meant intellectual, emotional, and social impairment. He was also a poor kid, a kid from the trailer park, A kid that had no options for legal representation other than a fresh out of law school idealistic lawyer who thought that he was guilty before he walked in the door and just wanted to get him the best deal that he could. First thing that jumped out at me was reading the transcript of the confession. Is it. It wasn't a confession. It was just a bunch of garbled junk. It was like. Steve Drizen from the Northwest Law School in Chicago summed it up the best when he said, this wasn't Jesse Misskelley who confessed. It was Gary Gitchell, the lead investigator for the West Memphis police, who confessed. We have the audio of that confession. It's pretty grim, both in terms of the quality and the content. The two detectives, Brian Ridge and Gary Gitchell, walk Jesse through a version of the murders that is gruesome, sexualized, and torturous. Jesse clearly wants to tell the cops what they want to hear, but he also wants to distance himself from the most torturous and murderous moments in the story they're trying to get him to tell. And as disturbing as some of that confession is, I actually think this next part we're going to play is the most disturbing part. Not because it's graphic, it actually isn't, but because it illustrates clearly that either these detectives really didn't understand Jesse Misskelley's capacity as a defendant, or they did and they didn't care. Before we asked you any questions, you must know and understand your legal rights. Therefore, we want and advise you that you have the right to remain silent. Do you understand that? Yes. And those are your initials on the line in front of that statement. Again, we know that audio is kind of rough, so in case it isn't clear throughout that clip, Detective Ridge is asking Jesse to acknowledge his Miranda rights. He has a right to an attorney, that anything he says may be held against him in a court of law. And Jesse is acknowledging it. Again, with an IQ of 72, Jesse is two standard deviations below the mean. To get concrete, this means that he's not just somebody who struggles with testing or with information recall. Rather, his capacity for logic. His ability to connect actions and decisions in the present with consequences that may come downstream, say, in a courtroom, is significantly impaired. Anything you say can be used against you in court. You understand that? And those are your initials? Yes, it is. Now put yourself back in Dan's shoes. At this moment, it's 1993, you're green, the case lands in your lap, and crucially, you think Jesse did it. So you think your job isn't to exonerate an innocent kid. It's to make sure the gets a fair trial and maybe negotiate a plea agreement to get him to testify against his friends in exchange for a more lenient sentence. After all, Dan Sydenham himself is in the weird milieu of the 1980s. He too is caught up in that cultural fever that's caught hold of everything. And beyond the mayhem and monsters, it's said that a nationwide network of satanic criminals exists. Start with the warped and wicked Charles Manson. The narrative's compelling. Like so many cases that were publicized on daytime TV and cable news, this was another story of every parent's nightmare. Teens seduced by the occult, caught up in fantasizing of power and bloodshed. Three innocent boys made into victory. Whatever else was true of Jesse Misskelley. He confessed on tape to being on site for the crime. Said he'd seen Damian and Jason actually carry it out. Of course, later he'd recant that confession and his father, Jesse Sr. Would say that actually he hadn't even been in West Memphis at the time. He'd been in Dyess, Arkansas at a wrestling match. And so Jesse Sr. Said he had witnesses that could put him there at the show. Then came the phone call from the prosecutor. Dan had been waiting for them to call, anticipating that in exchange for Jesse's testimony against Damien and Jason, they'd offer him that more lenient sentence. Take the possibility of the death penalty off the table for sure. The call did come, but not with an offer. It was. Hey, we've got a DNA match on a bloody T shirt in Jesse's trailer. Oh, gosh. Now they've got a slam dunk. That phone call represented the end of any real defense strategy. One of the boys blood was in Jesse Misskel's bedroom back at his trailer. As far as Dan was concerned, the nail was in the coffin. Jesse was guilty. A pre trial hearing was scheduled for September. In advance, Dan tried to explain the situation to his client. For some reason, I knew at this point at least, that I wasn't going to be able to make him understand what DNA was. There's no way. So instead of interrogating him, I just did. What we're doing now is having a conversation. And I said, hey, there was a T shirt in your trailer that had blood all over it. And he immediately. I was stunned. He said, well, that. That's my blood. Dan shows up for the hearing in September with the weight of evidence stacked against his client. So when I got to court on the 27th and the prosecutor told me that it was his. His own blood, it was just like a light bulb going off in my head like, oh, my gosh, the kid is innocent. Was there an element at any point here where you're going, man, I'm in way over my head? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That was the day. That was. That was the day. That was the day that everything changed. That's why it's just this fresh today as it was then. Jesse, Damien, and Jason would eventually become known to the world as the West Memphis Three. They were all arrested in June 1993 and stood trial between January and March 1994. All three were convicted. Jesse and Jason got life sentences without the possibility of parole. Damien was sentenced to death by lethal injection. He was 18 at the time of his arrest. No physical evidence tied them to the boys or the crime scene. The case rested almost entirely on the theory that the boys had been murdered as part of a satanic ritual and that the wounds on the victims bodies were evidence of ritualistic and sexualized torture. The prosecution also depended heavily on Jesse Misskelley's taped confession, despite his intellectual disabilities and the absence of an attorney, parent, or guardian in the room. And so when the prosecutor started feeding this story of satanic ritual killings, it really gripped the town with fear. I mean, all the ministers at their Sunday sermons were talking about the work of the devil. And it just. It just. The community was whipped up into a frenzy of fear and hysteria. That's Joe Berlinger, a documentary filmmaker who recently released the Netflix series Cold case. Who killed JonBenet Ramsey? The year before the West Memphis murders, Berlinger released a documentary called Brother's Keeper about the alleged murder of a teenager by his brother in rural upstate New York. When the West Memphis case got on his radar, he thought he was dealing with was something similar. The documentary he produced about the 1993 trial of the West Memphis Three was released on HBO as Paradise Lost. The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. It's a powerful and intense documentary. It takes you inside both the prosecution and the defense within days of the teenager's arrests. You know, and I remember like it was yesterday. At some point, Damien turned around and craned his neck back to the crowd and, and kind of gave this smile. He was being arraigned and being charged again. This is like two weeks after the arrest. And I remember feeling this chill. Oh my God, look at that guy. He's so evil. Because I was believing the story, you know, and that emotion was very important to me. Once we realized that they were innocent, just remembering how easy it was to be manipulated, to feel guilty, guilt to feel that they were guilty and creepy, when in fact the opposite was true. The film caught the world's attention for several reasons. First and foremost, it was compelling. It's a striking story. But it also made headlines for more mundane reasons. Several times during interviews, Damon Echols and his mother referenced Metallica as a way to talk about their feelings of doom, judgment and persecution. Berlinger then was able to secure the rights to a number of Metallica's songs for the film's soundtrack. And in 1995, when the film came out, that was something that the band had never done before. They'd never allowed their music to be used in a film or a television show in that way. They chose to do it, in this case because of the weight of the film's message at the time. This garnered a lot of attention. Metallica was one of the biggest bands in the world. And suddenly there was a sense that these kids had been targeted not because they were guilty, but because they were part of the wrong tribe. They were the kids with mullets and black T shirts, kids who liked dark, heavy music. The kind of kids that were part of the Metallica tribe. Over the next 15 years, Berlinger would make two more films about the case. What became obvious over time was that the West Memphis Three had been victims not only of questionable police work, but of a culture wide moral panic. You have a very religious community. You have a crime that's beyond horrific. Three naked eight year olds found in a ravine with horrible wounds on them. And allegedly it was a satanic ritual killing. I mean, so only by understanding that context can you understand why there was a rush to judgment, why the police felt that they had to had pressure to solve the crime, and why they developed this tunnel vision against the three local weirdos in quotes that they felt, you know, pulled off this terrible crime, you know, and. But if you had sat in that courtroom and saw how little actual forensic evidence was presented, you know, things like Stephen King novels or Metallica lyrics were introduced as evidence that these guys are satanic ritual Killers. I mean, I don't think that would have happened in LA or New York. These tales of satanic cults, I'd heard them since I was a kid growing up here in northeast Arkansas. And every kid, if you're old enough to remember this, every missing kid on a milk carton was assumed to have been killed by a Satanist. And so Geraldo took off with it. Oprah Winfrey took off with it. Some of the less mainstream talk show went with it. And the Oprah Winfrey show probably caused, in the Geraldo show caused the most damage and created the most panic. I think the religious fervor of the community, the trust in the police, the horrific nature of the crime, all coalesced to create this cocktail of the suspension of disbelief. And people just fed what was being told to them by the police. And the prosecution, where the first film follows the prosecution and conviction, the second film follows the appeals process showing a groundswell of grassroots concern and support for the West Memphis Three, including many in law enforcement, forensics experts, lawyers, legal commentators, all of whom, after examining this case, see it as a disaster. But there's a weird legal obstacle in Arkansas. The judge that tried the case, Judge David Barnett, was also the judge who would hear every appeal, every motion for new evidence to be considered, every request for clemency, and every request to admit new evidence or request a new trial. In other words, the judge who allowed questionable evidence to convict the West Memphis Three and who sentenced them to life sentences, death would be the exact same judge who would get to decide whether the court maybe, perhaps got something wrong. And for 17 years, he ruled the same way again and again and again. And of course, that brings us all the way up through history to 2008 to another moment where Judge David Barnett denied a motion for from Damien Echols to reconsider the evidence against the West Memphis Three. We'll be right back. This is a paid message from Brazos Press. I'm Mike Kosper, and I'm here to talk to you about my new book. If you, like me, have been troubled by the growing crisis of abuse and the failures of leadership in modern evangelical churches, you might just want to check it out. It's called the Church in Dark Times. In it, I bring some of the lessons of my CT podcast, the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, into conversation. With the insights of a 20th century political theorist named Hannah Arendt, I look at how the church has embraced subtle ideologies that gave it permission to make all kinds of moral compromises. I also explore the concept of banality of evil, the thoughtlessness that allows ordinary people to become complicit in corruption. This book seeks to uncover the underlying causes of church breakdowns and offers practical steps for healing and renewal. The Church in Dark Times will help you understand why these crises keep happening and how we can resist them moving forward. It's for anyone committed to following fostering a healthier, more resilient church community. Get your copy today. Wherever books are sold these days, the Satanic Panic is mostly a punchline. We laugh at its excesses even while we stare in wonder at how powerfully it took hold. But we're often numb or blind to its costs. After years of appeals and a mountain of criticism of the convictions, The West Memphis Three got out of jail in 2011. But they got out on what's called an Alford plea. It's a legal agreement in which defendants can plead guilty while maintaining their innocence, opening the door to diminishing their sentences. We'll tell more about that story on a later episode of our show, but it's useful to know that even to this day, they're appealing to the Arkansas justice system to test evidence, reconsider the case and exonerate them fully. As things stand, they're still legally considered child murderers. That's one aspect of the cost, the witch trial atmosphere and the people who were falsely accused. There's another cost, though that's a little less obvious and a little less often talked about. But we see it in the story of Josh Duggar, the goal of following the Gothard model. The promise of the Gothard model was to avoid the pitfalls that shaped the lives of kids like Damian, Jason, Jesse. It was to safeguard the family from sin, from playing with the devils, from drugs, from heavy metal and so on. But of course, the story also doesn't end with Josh getting engaged 2008. And it doesn't end when the show suddenly got pulled from the air in 2015. It stretches further into the past and fully into the present. Years before they were America's biggest Christian family, a different, much darker story took place in the Duggar home, one the family thought was safely locked in the past. The kind of story you could hardly imagine playing out on a show like 17 kids and counting on the show, 19 kids and counting real quick, if that's confusing at all. The Duggars had two more kids, so 17 kids and counting became 19 kids accounting. Okay, here we go. Josh Duggar and his family are portrayed as the picture of wholesome perfection. Now that show has been pulled as Josh Faces accusations he sexually molested underage girls when he was a teenager. In March and again In July of 2002 when Josh Duggar was 14 years old, he confessed to his parents that he had inappropriately touched several younger girls, four of whom were his own sisters. The parents were rightly devastated but they didn't go to the police and they didn't go to a licensed professional counselor who would have been obligated to call the police. Instead they took the matter to friends from their local church. Jim and Bobby Holt. We had known him from a baby, you know and he was her first daughter's boyfriend. This is the Holtz and footage from a documentary called Shiny Happy People about the Gothard movement. And Josh says something like I'd like to know if I'd be able to court Kaylee for the purpose of marriage. And we said yes. So March 30, 2003 when we found out I went out to the field and just bawled. He had apparently been doing it since he was 12 but we found out about it when he was 15. So when were you going to tell us? And Michelle said we weren't going to have them tell you guys at all. We were going to have Josh confess to Kaylee. Once they were married, Josh's behavior didn't improve. In fact it escalated. In March of 2003 he confessed additional incidents of molestation to his parents. This time they had Josh speak with a family acquaintance who served as an Arkansas State trooper, Joseph Hutchins. Truman Hutchins tried to scare Josh straight and gave him a firm talking to. But he didn't formally report the incident which he was legally required to do. And while it's unrelated to the Josh Duggar story, that trooper is currently serving a 56 year sentence for a child pornography conviction in an unrelated case. So without the intervention or direction of professionals or legal authorities, the Duggar family chose to send Josh to a three month counseling program at the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a treatment center for addiction founded on Gothen's ideas about authority, scripture and submission to elders. Josh completed the program confessing his sin to their community and moving back into the Duggers home. Jim, Bob and Michelle, believing the matter had been dealt with also believed that nonetheless their way of doing things as a family was exemplary and worth displaying to a watching world. But the Duggars family secret couldn't stay hidden forever. In 2015 Josh was serving as the executive director of FRC Action, a lobbying group founded by James Dobson in 1981 and currently led by Tony Perkins. Well, good morning. It's a great day to be here in Arkansas. A little bit chilly. I'm Josh Duggar, the executive director of Family Research Council action in Washington, D.C. and a native Arkansan as well, myself. Now, some of you may know that I'm part of a small family from northwest Arkansas. Arkansas. We only have 19 kids in our family, so my parents really tried. Let me tell you, though, this is. This is an honor for me to be here and to stand with so many of you. You know, when I think of our Constitution and what our founders set out, it was to create a country that was built on we the people. And let me tell you, right here in Arkansas, we the people have spoken and we have said we support marriage. And time and again, when Arkansas voters have been called, the story resurfaced that year. And it resurfaced the way many such stories do because of an odd mix of chance, thoughtlessness, and providence. At the same time that Josh's predatory behavior first surfaced. When Jim Bob and Michelle went to their friends, the Holts, Josh was courting their daughter, Kaylee, and her parents told her what they'd learned about him. She responded by venting her emotion into a letter, which she folded up, stuck in a book and stuck on her shelf. Three years later, without thinking about it, she loaned that book to a friend. Her friend happened upon the letter, and the friend reported the information she read to the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline, which sparked an investigation, which led to a police report. The crimes that were reported fell outside the statute of limitations, but in a sense, by simply having an investigation and documenting other people's awareness and admission of what he had done, the damage was done. While Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar kept building their brand and empowering the kids to embody their way of life. The damage from Josh's story couldn't be undone, both in terms of the trauma he'd inflicted on a number of young women and the lapses of judgment that are evident in Jim Bob and Michelle. They also couldn't erase a paper trail that led people back to Josh's behavior. The whole thing ticked like a time bomb under every episode of 17 Kids and Counting. That bomb finally went off in 2015. Josh Duggar was outed as a predator, and the Duggar brand, over a decade in the making, was obliterated in a matter of moments. While members of the family addressed the matter publicly, many felt the response was lacking. One of our children made some really bad choices. And I think as a parent, we were just. We Were devastated. Did he explain why? I mean, was that a question that you asked? He said he was just curious about girls, and he had gone in and just basically touched them over their clothes while they were sleeping, and they didn't even know he had done it. I think we had one ray of hope and that Josh had a tender conscience, and he was the one that came and shared on his own, even though the others really didn't know anything of his wrongdoing. Notice the language they use. It's all language that downplays the severity of what Josh had done. Likewise, not taking the matter to authorities or professionals for treatment, Relying on unqualified church leaders to direct Josh's care, Not appropriately safeguarding young women, including his sisters, in their home after knowing and understanding what he'd done. There's an assumption of goodwill, good character from Josh top to bottom, even after his predatory behavior has been outed. There's a culture of this in the family, the community, and the church that assumed the best for Josh because of the way he was raised, because of the people around him, because he came from such a good family. And it is, of course, all based on a mythology, a mirage of stability, order, authority that existed around Josh and insulated him from consequences for his own evil behavior. And it's such a stark contrast from the West Memphis three, who were offered none of those assumptions of good character, much less the legal standard of a presumption of innocence. What we have to come to understand then is the gap between these two worlds. How the world that celebrated Josh Duggar found ways to overlook his real predation. How a legal apparatus that condemned Damien Echols to die and his friends to spend the rest of their lives behind bars was so slow to acknowledge that they'd gotten something wrong. What ties these stories together is that word panic, the panic that left West Memphis terrified and looking for devil words, worshippers in their midst and led to the railroading of the West Memphis three, the panic that not only leads Christian families to withdraw into sectarian enclaves, but makes them so convinced they're doing the right thing, they lack the vocabulary for the evil in their midst. Today, Damien, Jason and Jesse are free, but not entirely free. They're still convicted felons. Today, Josh Duggar is behind bars. He was arrested in 2021 for possession and distribution of child pornography and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. It's fair to wonder what might have happened if he'd gotten the help he needed and faced real accountability two decades earlier, rather than papering over his sin with spiritual language. What might have happened if, instead of jumping to the conclusion that three little boys in West Memphis were murdered in a satanic ritual, the cops had followed the evidence, which pointed to much more mundane, if no less horrific answers. Maybe whoever killed them wouldn't have escaped justice. Maybe the children harmed by Duggar's trafficking of child pornography could have escaped one more instance of exploitation. But to ask those questions is to ask how it all happened, what drove the current behind these stories, how everyone got so drunk on panic, and how we might resist the temptation of moral panics in the future. To understand that, we have to go back 50 years, back to where this particular contagion and first began to cultivate. Next time on Devil in the Deep Blue Sea Foreign Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity Today. It's hosted and written by Mike Kosper, produced by Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian, with production assistance from Dawn Adams. Sound design and mix engineering by TJ Hester Sound design, animation and video by Steve Scheidler Graphic design Nim Ben Ruven, Eric Petrick and Mike Cosper are executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our senior producer. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. It'll help more people find the show. Thanks for.