Tip: If you're a disaffected teen, don't change your name to 'Damien'.

With my thirst for information about "satanic panic" still unquenched after Thursday's screening, I decided to rent and view the film Paradise Lost over the weekend and give a little bit of summary and information about the documentary and the West Memphis Three. We talked a little about this in class, but I urge anyone who remains interested to get their hands on the video. It's truly powerful stuff.

In June of 1993, the bodies of three second graders were found in a ditch in West Memphis, Arkansas. The children had been molested, and their sex organs had been mutilated. Surprisingly, however, no blood was found at the scene of the crime.

A few weeks later, a local teenage boy named Jessie Misskelley confessed to the crime, naming his two friends Damien Echols and and Jason Baldwin as accomplices. He told the police that the other two boys held down and killed two of the kids while he chased down a third who was in the process of escaping. All three teens were arrested. Seems pretty open and shut, right?

Not even close. It turns out that Jessie has severe mental handicaps, and was interrogated by the police alone in a dark room for hours before producing the confession. His statement also contained numerous inaccuracies and impossibilities (such as claiming he killed the kids at midday when they were still safely in school). He also claimed later that his confession was the result of confusion and underhanded policework. Despite this, Jessie was given life plus 40 years in prison, where he remains today.

Damien and Jason were tried separately, and Jessie's original confession was not allowed as evidence in their case. The state offered to remove his life sentence if he would testify against his former friends in court, but Jessie decided not to "lie again". Thus, without any hard evidence whatsoever, the case against Damien and Jason mostly centered around the prosecution's attack on Damien's character.

Damien liked to dress in black and listen to Metallica and Megadeth, two facts which were brought up often as a way to paint a broad portrait of Damien as a satanist. He was accused of being a cultist, mostly due to owning a book about the history of witchcraft as well as having a passing fascination with Alister Crowley. Damien's answer was simpler: he was studying both Cristianity and Wicca, and was strugging to reconcile the two - just as many teenagers do. Unfortunately, Damien's decorum on the stand was one that wavered between standoffish and bored. While this is also a pretty normal teen way of dealing with a situation far beyond his or her comprehension, it didn't help Damien seem innocent. Ultimately, the jury found both he and Jason guilty of murder. Jason got life without parole, and Damien got the death penalty.

In looking back on the proceedings, it is pretty clear that there is a clear and reasonable doubt that these kids committed murder. The evidence is circumstantial at best: the case hinged on the testimony of two little girls who claimed they overheard Damien brag about the killing as well as a knife found in a lake behind Jason's house over six months later. In the end, it came back to the same thing we saw on Oprah and Geraldo: Satanic Panic.

Damien's wife, who had his child during the court proceedings, now runs a defense fund to free her husband. You can read about her efforts and the case here. There is also an interesting CNN article that talks about new DNA evidence that has come out only in the past few months that may finally exonerate the West Memphis Three. It seems to implicate the father of one of the victims, though right now it's all still up in the air.

For more evidence that Satanic Panic is still active in the world, take a look at this case of a woman in Saudi Arabia who has recently been sentenced to death for practicing witchcraft.