The Devil Went Down To Arkansas

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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 gonna take us back through time. More than half a century, actually. But I want to start in the more recent past. Wednesday, october eighth, two thousand eight. In prime time, for the second week in a row, the cable network TLC is airing a new show. It's called Seventeen Kids Accounting. This is the story of my family. That's me. I'm Michelle. There's Jim Bob, my wonderful husband. John David Ju. Ginger, Joseph, Josiah, Joanna, Jedediah, Jeremiah.

Justin Jackson Johannes. And Jennifer. That's 17 and 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 bases.

Yeah. 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. here to make friends. I'm not here. I'm not here to make friends. I ain't ain't here to make no f Seventeen 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 eighth, two new episodes aired, and the feature player in the first episode was the Duggar's eldest son Jack. Josh being the firstborn, he definitely um has a lot of initiative and uh 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 uh being able to communicate with others, and he's just uh very sensitive to others and uh He's a very likable person.

I used to take him down to the capital with me, but they lot of the other 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. Anna, will you marry? Yes. Yeah. So let's back up about a month earlier, September two thousand.

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 Damian Eccles. In the summer of 2008, Damien's attorneys submitted new evidence to the court, hoping to open the door to appeals or a possible chance at a retrial.

On September the 10th, 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 Damian Eccles. Duggar grew up with a stable family, relative comfort, privilege, rigorous education, and a strict religious upbringing.

Eccles, born Michael Wayne Hutchison, moved around constantly as a kid in both Arkansas and Oregon. By age eight, his parents had divorced, and by ten, he'd attended eight different elementary schools. He changed his name to Damien Eccles 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 and that involves tarot cards, black candles, and spells. To put it politely, teenage Damien was an 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 Damien because of the film The Omen, where a child named Damien turns out to be the Antichrist. Damien all right? Sure. Suspicions of Damien were helped by the fact that like a lot of teenagers in the nineties, he wore a lot of black, he listened to heavy metal, he had a mop of black hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and it was He had a vibe. There's no doubt if you go back and look at footage of Eccles as a teenager, he was Odd.

Here's a clip from his trial. All right. Could you explain to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what s 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 wick of religion and witchcraft? Wicca is also called witchcraft. The word uh Wicca was bastardized. It originally meant wise one.

Uh were you different in 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. It was like a defense mechanism. It would make people think like, well, he's weird, I'm not gonna go around him, so it kept people away. So

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, Convected.

Damien's two friends were sentenced to life without parole. Damien, who was eighteen, and the only one that was a legal adult, was sentenced to death by lethal injection. That sentence was handed down in nineteen ninety four. At that time, the Duggar family was only five kids in 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 and macabre.

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, Josh's parents, blocked out most of the entertainment and media that was Damian Eccles' 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 two thousand eight.

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 Eccles' appeal ends the way all of his appeals have ended for fifteen years, with a denial.

The judge says that the evidence presented by Damien's lawyers was, quote, 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 Damien and his friends, all those warning signs, the broken The transgressive attitude, the dabbling defense. The heavy metal in the mullets. Thank you. None of that made the murderers. Josh Duggar was a predator.

And Damian Eccles. From Christianity Today, I'm Mike Cosper, and you're listening to Devil in the Deep Loose. This season, we're looking at the same. And how chasing phantoms distracts us from real devils in our midst. Today, episode one. The devil went down to Arkansas.

Seventeen Kids in 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 Gother.

We'll have a lot to say about Gothard later in the series. For now, know that Gothard started his ministry in the late nineteen fifties 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, and 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.

Which was taught at his Institute for Life Principles, looked an awful lot like the way the Duggars were raising their children and growing up. Gothard's Institute. 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, 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 in the 70s and 80s. He would have these seminars that people would flock to. Over what he considered to be biblical principles or basic life principles, and he would go over everything from marriage to children to Handle your finances. Sort of pull passages from script. 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 Gotherton's teachers. 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 was incredibly appealing. I think coming The sort of chaos of the 60s, like the Vietnam War, things like that. I think there are 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 um that we could look to the Bible and we could say like you know God wants us

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 seminar of his, but weren't didn't necessarily like homeschool their kids. So they were still influenced by him, bank author. The author's influence was enormous, far beyond the seventh.

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 bring them back to their own local churches and ministries. And given the emphasis on family.

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 the as an expert on like raising children and Yeah, he was never married. That's TJ Hester. TJ 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, Yeah. Go the right way.

And when it came to child rearing and stuff, I mean that w like Yeah. And what Gothard offered was protection, the wisdom of a 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 Always strict about Specifically there was a I had a 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. Drums and electric guitars are of the devil. That judgment wasn't arbitrary. Gothard and others who were part of his ministry had rationalized. 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 uh 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 gonna 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 the 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. Teared down this wall.

Thank you. Faith and politics were intermingling in. 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 nineteen eighty election. And now they were pushing back against the sexual revolution, fighting communism, lobbying against Roe v. Wade.

Of course, it wasn't just people like Falwell or Bill Gothard that were talking about Satan. You have to give a blood sacrifice to Satan. It's supposed to keep you protected, it's supposed to keep you pure. Told that the devil And kill our parents? This Geraldo special from nineteen eighty eight 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 in 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 In California, New Jersey, Alabama, and elsewhere, police have found inverted crosses and the remains of mutilated. 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 Please tell us why you believed this was part of a ritual. Abuse as part of a satanic. 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 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 one thousand Two hundred molested kids in the city of Manhattan Beach have told the Sheriff's Department, and it's an outrage that's not a good thing. Hãy subscribe cho kênh La La School Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn 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 day.

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 saints. trafficking and murdering children around the globe.

When this Heraldo 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 to 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 with a magic eight ball, and if you don't know what that is, kids, Google it.

Somehow the magic eight ball was tied to the occult. Same thing with the smirk. The way the stories were told, it 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. But often, even in pop culture, the idea of Satanists next door was taken seriously. Like in the 1989 comedy, The Bird.

Or 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 him to take your family care? Wait, you're chanting. Unconscious chanting. You're chanting! I wanna kill everyone. Satan is good. Satan is our pal. So I'm not Ray. Once they're not going to be able to do 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 eighties 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 could understand why paranoia about all this took hold, why parents got anxious about what 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 Who is? We'll be right back. This paid message is from the 2026 Moms, Dads, and Grads gift guide from Christianity Today's Creative Studio. Whether you are celebrating your mother, father, a new graduate, Just because these books can become companions for you and those you love. Trusting that in their pages lie seeds of transformation. Visit momsdadsgrads.com to browse our books.

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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 out. 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, Damian Eccles stuck out for his eccentricities and his antisocial reputation. He might have been any other troubled teen until a crime shocked the community and put him and his two friends under the magnifying gate. Three little boys, Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers, were found naked, hog tied, mutilated, and submerged in a drainage deck.

A crime so unimaginably violent and awful, it's hard to even comprehend. What kind of monster tortures, mutilates, and murders an eight year old child, much less three eight year old children simultaneously? The day that the bodies were discovered, I was in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is Dan Stidham. Today, he's a judge in Arkansas, but back in nineteen ninety three, 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 and all of a sudden a breaking news story came on about three eight year old boys. had been found murdered in a ditch just off the interstate in West Memphis, Arkansas. My dad Kinda shook his finger at me and said, You do not need to be involved in that case. That comment was more present than his father could have known. Yeah.

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. that everybody was flocking to represent Damien and um Jason Baldwin.

But nobody wanted to represent Jesse Miss Kelly. So I thought, Well, if there's anybody who can talk me out of this, uh, it'll be my wife. So I'm still sitting there with a towel wrapped around me dripping from the shower.'Cause that's when I got the phone call and I um so I asked her to come in the bedroom and I said, Look, Judge Goodson gave me twenty 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 Miss Kelly. He wasn't prepared for what he'd encountered. He was just a kid, he was seventeen years old. I had no experience in dealing with uh kids or even adults for that matter with uh 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 an a uh a child. And um when I got to the jail with my law partner and my uh legal assistant, Vicky Cross We got there and walked into the cell and here said this kid looked like he was about ten years old. And um it was really just the exact opposite of what I was expecting to see. A kid. A kid with intellectual disability. Jessie Miss Kelly had an IQ of seventy two, which meant intellectual, emotional, and social impairment. He was also a poor kid.

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 jarbled junk. It was like Steve Drizden from the Northwest Law School in Chicago summed it up the best when he said this wasn't Jesse Miskelly 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 tortured. 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 gonna 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 Miss Kelly's capacity as a defendant. Or they did, and they didn't care. Before we ask 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? Yes.

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, that 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. Again, with an IQ of seventy-two, 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 important.

Yeah. And those are your next Now put yourself back in Dan's shoes at this moment. 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 that he gets a fair trial and maybe negotiate a plea agreement. To get him to testify against his friends. After all, Dan Siddham himself is in the weird milieu. He too is caught up in that cultural fever. He's caught hold of everything.

And beyond the mayhem and monsters, it's said that a nation The narrative's compelling. Like so many cases that were publicized on daytime TV. This was another story of every parent's nightmare. Teens seduced by the occult, caught up in fantasizing power and bloodshed. Three innocent boys. Whatever else was true of Jesse Miss Kelly, he confessed on tape to being on site for the crime, said he'd seen Damien and Jason after.

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 top. He'd been in Dis, Arkansas, at a wrestling city. 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 call did come, but not with anything. uh it was uh hey we've got a DNA match on a bloody T shirt in Jesse's trailer. I thought, Oh gosh, now they've got a slam dunk That phone call represented the end of any real defense.

One of the boys' blood was in Jesse Miss Kelly's bedroom back at his trailer. As far as Dan was concerned, the nail was in the coffin. Jesse was guilty.

A pretrial 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 gonna 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, it's having a conversation and I said, Hey, the 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 twenty seventh 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. Uh that was That was the

That was that was the day that everything changed. That's why it's just as fresh today as it was then. Jesse, Damien, and Jason would eventually become known to the world as the West Memphis III. They were all arrested in june nineteen ninety three and stood trial between January and march nineteen ninety four. 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 eighteen 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 Miss Kelly's tape confession, despite his intellectual disabilities and the absence of an attorney, parent, or guardian in the room.

And so when the prosecutor started uh feeding this story of satanic ritual killings it really gripped the town with fear. 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 John Bonet 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 something.

The documentary he produced about the 1993 trial of the West Memphis III 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 arrest. 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 kinda gave this smile. He was being arraigned and being charged. Um 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. Cause 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 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, to striking story, but it also made headlines for more mundane.

Several times during interviews, Damon Eccles and his mother referenced Metallica as a way to talk about their feelings of doom, judgment, and persecution. Burlinger then was able to secure the rights to a number of Metallica's songs for the film's soundtrack. And in nineteen ninety-five, 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 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 fifteen years, Berlinger would make two more films about the case. What became obvious over time was that the West Memphis III had been victims not only of questionable police. But of a culture wide moral panic. 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 sol h had pressure to solve the crime, and why they developed this tunnel vision against uh the three local weirdos.

in quotes, that they felt, you know, pulled off this terrible crime, you know, and 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 a Satanist. And so Heraldo took off with it, Oprah Winfrey took off with it. Some of the less mainstream talk show uh went with it. And the Oprah Winfrey show probably caused and the Heraldo 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 coalesce to create this cocktail of the suspension of disbelief and people just fed what was 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 III, 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 and who sentenced them to life sentences and death, would be the exact same judge, who would get to decide whether the court, maybe, perhaps, got something wrong. And for seventeen years he ruled the same way, again and again.

Yeah. Yeah. And of course that brings us all the way up through history to 2008 to another moment where Judge David Barnett denied a motion from Damian Eccles to reconsider the evidence against the West Memphis III. We'll be right back. This paid message is from beyond ordinary women ministries. Do you want to grow your influence as a follower of Jesus or as a leader?

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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. We're often numb or blind to its costs. After years of appeals and a mountain of criticism of the convictions, the West Memphis III got out of jail in 2011. But they got out on what's called an Alfred plea. It's a legal agreement in which defendants can plead guilty while maintaining their innocence, opening the door to diminishing their sentence.

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 murder. 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 Damien, 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 in two thousand eight. And it doesn't end when the show suddenly got pulled from the air in twenty fifteen.

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 Seventeen Kids and Counting. On the show Nineteen Kids and Counting.

Real quick, if that's confusing at all, the Duggars had two more kids, so seventeen kids and counting became nineteen kids accounting. Okay. Here we go. Josh Duggar and his family are portrayed as a picture of wholesome perfection. Now that show has been pulled, as Josh Fashes' accusations he sexually molested underage girls when he was a teenager.

In March and again in July of two thousand two, when Josh Duggar was fourteen 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.

Uh we've we had known him from a baby, you know, and he was her This is the Holtz and footage from a documentary called Shiny Happy People about the Gothard movie. And Josh says something like, 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 thirtieth, two thousand

we found out. I went out to the field and just bawled. He had apparently been doing it since he was twelve, but we found out about it when he was fifteen. I said, well when were you gonna tell us? And Michelle said, we weren't gonna have them tell you guys at all. We were gonna 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 Trooper. 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 fifty-six 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 Principals. A treatment center for addiction founded on Gothers' ideas about authority, scripture, and submission to the world.

Josh completed the program, confessing his sin to their community and moving back into the Duggars 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. But the Duggers felt

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. 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. DC. as well myself. Now some of you may know that I'm part of a small family from northwest Arkansas. We only have uh 19 kids in our family, so my parents really tried.

Uh 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. Thank you. And time and again, when Arkansas voters resurfaced that here. 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 Holtz, 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 information.

The crimes that were reported fell outside the Statue 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 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 in County. 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 was just curious about girls and he had gone in and just basically touched them over their clothes while they were asleep and they didn't even know he had done. Notice the language they use. It's all language that downplays the severity of what jobs.

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's been outed. There's a culture of this in the family, the community, in 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 Damian Eccles to die and his friends to spend the rest of their lives behind bars was so slow to acknowledge that they'd gotten something. What ties these stories together is that word panic. The panic that left West Memphis terrified and looking for devil 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. They're still convicted felons. Today, Josh Duggar is behind bars. He was arrested in twenty twenty one for possession and distribution of child pornography and was sentenced to twelve 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 happens. 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, fifty years back, to where this particular contagion first began to cultivate. Next time I'm Devil in the Deep Blue Sea.

Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity today. It's hosted and written by Mike Cosper, produced by Mike Cosper and Rebecca Sebastian, with production assistance from Don Adams. Sound Design and Mix Engineering by TJ Hester, Sound Design, Animation and Video by Steve Scheidler, Graphic Design, NIM Design. Eric Pietrick 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 listening. Ministries. Discover the Word Podcast, presented by our Daily Bread Ministries, is a 15 minute weekday conversation where trusted hosts and guests break down. Passages and uncover fresh insight for your everyday life. Start your morning encouraged, grounded, and ready to live out God's word. Listen wherever you