The West Memphis Three w/ Thomas777: The J. Burden Show Ep. 411

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Hood Hills. And back then HBO had a reputation of pretty serious documentary filmmaking. There was a series called America Undercover. They produced that brand are the things that produced that movie about Irish Mickey Ward's brothers crack addiction called High on Crack Street. They made a whole movie about Mickey Ward and his brother and they that documentary is a plot device on the movie. And you know it it was. It attracted pretty serious filmmakers. And also there's a lot

of money behind promoting these projects. So what the deal was with this documentary film? These three little boys, these three eight year old boys, they were savagely murdered in this interstate town in rural Arkansas called Marion. Where the boys were found was in this forest preserve behind a truck stop called robin Hood Hills that was in West Memphis. Technically, Okay, so that's why the defendants were called the West Memphis three. This was on May fifth, nineteen ninety three, and nobody

really heard about it other than locally. But this film dropped in nineteen ninety six. And the guys who were behind this film, there's a guy named Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinowski, and they were both kind of these wannabes. They came up through the There was kind of an

American version of the cinema veritaean movement. If you've ever seen Gimme Shelter, this's the documentary on the on the Stones, you know, the ultimat Speedway concert that was, you know, the end of the sixties, as people have kind of branded it. That was kind of the prime example of it. And Berlinger and Sinofsky they'd been proteges of the guy who made that film. Okay, so Sinofsky he was always trying to establish himself as as this kind of serious documentarian,

but by the nineties that wasn't really in style. People weren't really thirsty for that kind of filmmaking. And uh, Sinofsky in his own right. What he was most known for later that idiotic Metallica documentary where they're all crying like bitches and going to therapy and stuff. He worked on that. He was always kind of a wanna be rock and roll guy. Okay, So Paradise Lost it was really kind of shocking because the opening scene of it, the camera pans over Robinood Hills and then it's almost

like trying for the will or something. It descends the ground level. Then it costs the actual footage of the dead bodies, you know, so it's it's like jarring, and the film kind of presented this narrative of this town being an evil town and there being something that conspired, you know, within the within the culture to make this happen.

It didn't declare that these that the defendants were innocent, but like all all documentary films about true crime, it always tries to raise a at least the suggestion a reasonable doubt, otherwise there's no narrative to it. But ultimately these three teenagers were arrested for the crime. Damian Eccles, Jesse mss Kelly Junior, and Jason Baldwin. And these three guys all kind of fit a rural stereotype. Jesse miss Kelly was this redneck with a mohawk, who was known

to his dad was next con. He was into hot rods and getting drunk and growing. Jason Baldwin was this unassuming guy, and this becomes relevant, the fact that he's so unassuming, but he he kind of seemed like a soft spoken every man kid with a mullet, you know, in a soft Southern drawl. But Damien Eccles, he was a fella my acolyte with a self identified Satanist and he was infamous in this town for being involved in

occult activities. So the documentary it kind of came to focus on Damien Echo just because he was so strange and like a lot of poor Southerners, both white guys and black guys, he had that kind of sensibility that for some reason fascinates a lot of bougie types. So he kind of became the focus of this movie. Okay, and it's the film is full of shots of these Southern people kind of acting in stereotypical ways. There's a lot of shots of them at church where there's a

fire and brimstone pastor. You know. It kind of made the people in this town seem as culturally out of step and alien, as possible, and Berlinger then it kind of become his m O. What put him on the map as a documentary filmmaker was this movie called Brothers

Keeper that came out in nineteen ninety. That was this gruesome case that took place in Utica, New York, which is an upstate New York and these elderly brothers who lived on this old estate that was worth a lot of money, but they were these kinds of hermit hoarders. One brother killed the other one, and as was alleged by the state, it wasn't clear if he died in

natural cause, as if he was strangled. But there was all these lured suggestions about homosexuality, incest, all kinds of gruesome stuff, and this got whatever was going sort of a tabloid story. It got all this praise from these sort of artsy people in Hollywood types. So Berlinger really got the bug for kind of trying to impress that that whole community.

these innocent teenagers. And I think that that's a big part of the reason that this story and several of the figures into it remained relevant through the George Bush years because it became a sort of piece of that anti fundamentalist narrative during the reaction to Bush the lesser. But I'll kick it back to you, no.

real thing. The you know recession, particularly in places like Mary in Arkansas, a lot of people are out of work. And I made this point of people too, this came up speaking of the sort of fundamentalist Christian boogeyman. You're too young to remember this, but when McCain was running against Obama, and he took on that silly woman as his running mate, Sarah Palin. I remember people talking about Palin and Alaska like these were a bunch of holy

roller hicks. I'm like, man, Alaska's first. It's like seventy percent mail. It's full of rough and tumble military guys, uh, fishermen. It's a it's a very it's a very unsavory culture. A lot of prostitution, a lot of drugs, casual violence. People don't really understand what rural America's about. It's not it's not a bunch of it's it's not a bunch of Mormons sitting around hiding people for having a beer. It's very it's very rough and.

different people it is not small town Southern America. But back to you, Thomas.

being into Metallica and wearing black. He's like, okay, Metallica was the number one band in America in nineteen ninety three, and if you've ever been to the rural South, everybody likes heavy metal. Everybody likes black T shirts. I miss I think actually got he captured a shot. One of the cops who rested Echos was he was like this, Uh, he was some special Task Force guy wearing a Mega Death shirt. So this idea like, oh, in the South and the nineties, everyone hates heavy metal when rock and

roll and they're afraid of you know, metallic. It's it's like these people watched, uh, that old Kevin Bacon movie where you're not allowed to dance and decided footloose or whatever. It's like very gay and very silly, but like.

bigoted South and the reason that happened. See I watched that when it aired, because again this was summer nineteen ninety six and that was a huge boxing fan. And that's right after HBO's Boxing After Dark had aired. This was their they'd have championship boxing, usually welterweight and middleweight and lightweight, but it was on at ten thirty pm

Central Time and they started promoting. They started running an ad for this movie during Boxing after Dark, and they presented it as, yeah, this was the Satanic Murderer, and I'm like, oh, wow, that's nuts. So I watched it and I'm like, Okay, that wasn't bad, but it's obvious those guys are guilty. And pretty much everybody I knew was like, yeah, that that was an interesting documentary. Really

nothing to see there. But then suddenly Hollywood said, this is a great movie about these people being framed and this is an outrage. And first of all, I was like, that's bizarre that Johnny Depp and Peter Jackson and the Dixie Chicks and Henry Rollins He's always an idiot, but uh, they really circled the wagons around this. And I remember at the time even other people in media saying, well, what did you see about this movie that I didn't see?

Like why why do you think that? But Berylinger, who was always a starfucker to begin with, he goes full odd like, yeah, you're right, that's why I made this movie. So suddenly he becomes, you know, mister Innocence Project for the West Memphis three. When he realizes that he got the attention of Hollywood, which he was always trying to

do period. So he proceeded to make this crazy easy sequel that now no one talks about anymore, that was essentially a hit piece on one of the victim's stepfathers, which uh it made no sense whatsoever, you know, and that he couldn't capture the same fire in a bottle with that one. But uh, you know, this became this became this huge uh cause celebrate and one of the uh, one of the reasons I'm disgusted by John Douglas is because,

you know, the the the mind Hunter guy. I mean, he's a total fraud criminal profiling is nonsense, total pseudoscience. When the when when Damian Eckles got all this Hollywood money and uh in g O money to fight his case post conviction, you know, uh Douglas is available to hives bidder, you know, to claim that based on his mind Hunter probably profiling expertise, he can divinate if people are guilty or not. So he came out he joined this this uh bandwagon too. I mean he does that

all the time. He's he got paid by jeoh Many Ramsey's mom, who obviously murdered her and uh the lead detective on the case wrote a whole book about it, which I advise anybody read if they're taken in by this delusion that there's some mystery behind what happened to that little girl. But her very wealthy parents hired John

Douglas to basically either pr man. I mean, he's he's a scumbig, but uh, you know he uh he's he's very much got clout with the kinds of rubs or in the true crime and things, so that further sort of I'm a de momentum behind this. But what it uh, what when it comes down to, was that what was presented in this film doesn't reflect the evident record at all. Okay, the claim is that Damian Nichols was just this cool kid who was into heavy metal music. He got singled

out by fundamentalist biggots who hated him. He having to be friends with this guy Jason Baldwin who just got roped in for being friends with him and Jesse miss Kelly was mentally retarded and the police tortured him for two days and an interrogation, and then he signed a false confession. That's not what happened, and we'll get into this as we go on. But the police didn't even intend to indict Jesse miss Kelly because they had no

idea he was involved. He confessed repeatedly, then he confessed to his lawyer, then he confessed to his cellmate, then he confessed after he was convicted and sitting in prison serving his fifty year bit that this kid can't stop confessing, you know, and again he he's not mentally retarded, he's stupid.

But even by the metric of the Supreme Court, you know, they arbitrarily said, if your IQ is under seventy, you can't you can't be executed because she likes the ability to You're too stupid basically to formuly specific intent, I think is the reasoning. But I mean, even by that metric or the colloaquial metric, he's not mentally retarded. But the way the way this basically shook out was obviously triple homicide a three eight year olds that that them

that's shocking. But also I mean that's that that's a very strange crime, Okay, And to be clear, I mean this is a this is a disgusting case. So if that kind of thing upsets you, you might want to skip forward or two out. But one of the boys bled to death because he was castrated. The other two were severely beaten. Then they were immersed in this irrigation ditch and drowned. They know that the one boy bled

out because he didn't have water on his lungs. He was and this becomes important to what was alleged in the post conviction appeals. Okay, being that they were immersed in water, that eliminated quite a bit of evidence, particularly

biological evidence. But one of the boys, there was trace him us a seminal fluid on his genes, and obviously an eight year old is not mature enough to ejaculate, so it's clear that there was some sort of I mean, based on these circumstances, it's clear that that there was there was a sexual aspect to this too. Okay, they couldn't type the DNA of the seminal fluid because it wasn't an adequate leave luminous sample. But you know the reason why Eccles became the folks of this investigation was

for a few reasons. The police kept on hearing that Eccholes had confessed to this to various people when he was drunk not in a remorseful way, but in an offhand way or because he was bragging. Now Echles wasn't arrested for until months later. Okay, so this wasn't some rush to judgment, and he wasn't even arrested when the police first received sworn statements from people claiming that he'd

made these confessions in their presence. But you know, proble cause to arrest is not probable cause to convict, and it's it has nothing to do with the manifest weight of evidence. It's merely probable cause to arrest. So the character is somebody and their behavior patterns overall is relevant. And looking into ecchos background because desplayer when Eckles claimed he wasn't terrorized by the police throughout his life and

they weren't keeping a dossier on him. Nobody even really knew who he was other than his in his local you know people, his own age and stuff. But he had a history of violence. He'd been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, most recently in Little Rock at Charter Hospital in June nineteen ninety two. He had a history of setting fires. He got in trouble for chasing another kid with an axe He was kicked out of school for a time for trying to gouge a kid's eye out.

He was repeatedly suspended for fighting. He Jason Baldwin's cousin, was interviewed by a homicide detective named Brent Ridge. This witness attested to the fact that he and Eccles and Jason Baldwin had been walking down the main road outside of the trailer park they lived in, the Leafshore Trailer Park. Echles came upon a dog that was in some way sick or injured and uh that Goles calmly grabbed a brick and began banshing the dogs head in until it died.

You know this, Uh, a pattern emerges of sadism and violent tendencies outside of the what's normal for you know, your accounting for the kind of anti social tendencies a teenager boys. You know. But what was most h what got the police's attention, particularly Brent Ridge and his immediate superior,

Gary Gotschell Lewis, the lead investigator. Eckles had gotten in trouble for having relations with an underage girlfriend named Deanna Holcombe when Eccles was seventeen or eighteen and she was fourteen or fifteen, and he caught charges for statutory rape or whatever the equivalent is in that hotel, and Echoles had apparently told Deanna Holcombe. She attested to this to

the juvenile officer in charge of the case. Jerry Driver told her that he wanted to get her pregnant and he wanted her to deliver bring the child to term, and he wanted them to sacrifice the child to some deity because he said that, you know, if you if you can divinate the correct deity or supernatural intelligence and sacrifice to them, you can absorb that victim's power. And he said that according to Thelema. Whether this is an

accurate reading of Theelema or not, I don't know. He said, according to Thelema, you know, the crowleag system, an infant or a little boy, particularly a male child, they've got the most power that could be taken by somebody who sacrifices them incident to the correct ritual, you know. And this didn't lead the more enhanced charges against Echos, but it did lead to the court ordering a psychiatric evaluation. And now, mind you, I don't have any great faith

in the medical profession on its own terms. But I also don't if discount diagnosedes rendered by qualified experts without cause to do so. This evaluation ordered by the court from nineteen ninety two suggested that, according to the diagnostic criteria then utilized by the APA, Echoals had sociopathic tendencies

and he was prone to gradiose and delusional thinking. He apparently disclosed that he drank the blood of other people because he said that you can obtain power by doing so in small ways, because life force is contained in certain bodily fluids, particularly blood, and he claimed that he learned about this owing to his unusual religious beliefs. Interestingly,

he never referred himself as a Satanist. When he was being availed to these sorts of diagnostic protocols, he'd he'd simply say that, you know, he was a male witch, or he was a pagan, or he was, you know, an accolyte of Crowley. But that's that's where the police got this idea of him being an occultist. He said he was, and we'll get into this and some of

this witness testimony. People said multiple witnesses, Miss Kelly Echoes himself declared himself to be an occultist Miss Kelly himself said Echos and a lot of people he knew were into Satanic worship. Another witness named LG. Hollingsworth, who was dead by the time of the proceedings, I believe, he said that in Marion it was well known that there

was an occult subculture. So I mean, this is what the police were hearing from all these people who were in the prime suspect's orbit, and this is what their prime suspect was had told the juvenile officer presiding over his case for statutory rape. And this is what he was telling the psychiatrists who'd interview him when he was

periodically ending up in psychiatric facilities for violent conduct. People weren't looking at Damon Eccols and saying, oh, he has a metallic assured I think he worships the devil, you know.

And to be clear, and I mean, I I'm not one of these people who looks down on the rural South or something like quite the contrary, but there is a weird subculture and a lot of these rural places, and particularly places that are kind of sustained by the interstate, like Marion, you get you get a lot of carnival workers you get a lot of guys who spend most

of their life on the road. You You've got you know, very very people with very very deep roots in this country who still abide folk ways from the old country. There's something pagan uh about it. A lot of these people's belief structures, you know, in a way that you don't really find among white people up North, Okay, even poorer ones. That's not some kind of prejudice or some or some sort of stereotype about you know, stupid primitive

hillbillies or something. I mean that that's a fact, you know. So I tend to I tend to believe what some of these people were saying. This wasn't just them being paranoid or or developing paranoiac ideas or something. You know. It uh in two thousand and one, and we're jumping ahead a little bit, but it's material to the subject matter or the point that we're at in the subject matter.

At Doctor George W. Woods, a Berkeley, California psychiatrist, he evaluated echoes incident to one of his post conviction appeals. And to be clear, a post conviction appeal, you're arguing it on, I won't over the subs at death with all the nuances. Once your direct appeals are exhausted, a post conviction appeal it's a collateral attack on your conviction, either premised on actual innocence or subset of violation of constitutional rights. So it's always timely, okay, and you can

file as many of them as you want. So it's not clear to me who of echals attorneys commission woulds to analyze echals record or if he just did this on his own accord, But they're no. His evaluation of their quest by the Eccles defense team, all right, strike that, I'm sorry, and his evaluation was promised on the claim was gonna. What eccles post conviction team was trying to

allege was that he'd been incompetent to stand trial. Okay, So this was several years after his conviction, and what was the termine That Eccles was periodically actively delusional owing to a tendency towards manic episodes, and that one of

that throws of psychotic euphoria Eccles. Eccles believed that deities or supernatural forces were transforming him into a superior entity or conferring power upon him, and direct his activity in criminal capacities would claim was that or his conclusion was that Echos wasn't incompetent as a matter of law, but that he was delusional and periodically psychotic. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, that's what the court generally relies upon in

terms of psychiatric and mental health experts. Echles was administered the MMPI on June eighth, nineteen ninety two, September second, nineteen ninety two, in February of nineteen ninety four. Each of these test results indicated strong profiles of mania, delusional psychosis, depression, and periodic psychotic periodic or intermittent psychotic thinking, including paranoid ideation, delusions,

and related emotional disturbances. Now, once again, and obviously, I mean this is part of the public record because these reports and this testimony was udded into evidence. These conclusions were based on symptoms and belief structures and ideas that that that Egos conveyed to the to the psychiatrists or the diagnosticians were presiding over these tests. The administrators of these tests didn't confabulate speculative things about Damien Eckles. He's

the one who's reporting belief in deities. He's the one who's reporting ideas about drinking human blood. He's the one who's reporting belief in supernatural phenomena that he could access owing to some sort of competence and in divinating these these these things or these alien intelligences, you know, and something else that's relevant to me. I mean, that's relevant in my opinion. I although it's not just positive anything

in of itself. You know, Eccles or at his defense team both that trial and post conviction, they claimed, Okay, so Eckles is supposed to the subject of this witch hunt in this small town and this is prejudiced against him. Well, Eckles had this bizarre familial arrangement. I guess his mom was fifteen and his dad was seventeen when they got married.

And and they got married because she was pregnant. I'm not saying anything wrong with young people getting married and in event of pregnancy or not, but you know, they it was a shotgun marriage. I guess eckles birth father was for all practical purposes it literate and had all kinds of mental problems. So they got his name was Joe Hutchinson, and they got divorced early on, So Eccles was raised by this much older man, whose mom subsequently

married name of Eccles. Then, when Eccles was a young teenager, his birth father came back into his life and his mom, who was estranged from this Eccles, they remarried his birth father. And eccles birth father was just a terran kind of laborer who has lived a kind of unstable life, and he moved he up and moved the family to Portland, Oregon, when Eccles was seventeen, sixteen seventeen in nineteen ninety two.

So Eckles is living in Portland and he's doing everything he can to get back to Marion, and he's acting out. He's saying, I don't belong here. I belong in Marion with my friends. You know, It's like, Okay, Portland, even back then, if you want to fly your freak flag and do what Eccles did, that'd be about the best place he could do it. Okay. So he's doing everything he can to was skate Portland that he hates staying there and he wants to go back to Marion, where

supposedly he's being terrorized by these witch hunt rednecks. Really does that make any sense? So he ends up hospitalized in UH Portland because his father calls the police on him, saying and the and the police report said that Eccholes was threatening to kill the family, kill his father and and and and kill his whole family basically if they didn't let him go back to Marion, and he was threatening suicide and everything else. So he ends up in

the psych word yet again in Portland. And this is all he was on probation from the statutory rape charge he caught, and his probation had been transferred to Oregon, so there was this issue of him having the transfer his paperwork back to this juvenile officer Jerry Driver, who again Eckles claim, was supposedly out to get him and framing him. So he's he's going back into the out, out of the out of the frying pan, into the fire, recording his own claims about what goes on in this town,

you know. But finally he ends up going back to Marion and lives with his UH, lives with Eccles, his UH, his stepfather who's now a strange from his mom. You know, we apparently didn't get along with basically his parents begged this mister Eckles to take him in because they couldn't deal with him, and he was demanding to go back to Marion. You knows he did everything in his power.

You know that that a teenager tan by acting out cajoling threats to go back to the jurisdiction where he claims he was framed and cident to this years on pattern of terrorism and are asked, you know, and anecdotally, that doesn't make any sense it, you know, And again a lot of particularly in criminal cases, not just because the evidentry standard is different. It's a totally different thing

than a similar matter. It's I mean that that's a discussion in its own right, but the totality of circumstances mayors particularly compared to what people do incident to the circumstances they describe, and whether it complies with the sort of picture of reality is they perceived it or if it doesn't, And if it doesn't, that indicates deception, you know.

And if you're on trial for your life, why are you lying about things that If I want to trial for my life, I'm either gonna say nothing at all, well, I'm gonna tell the truth because and to be clear, Echoes was looking at the death kind of leap. You know, So there's that which I don't know itself, doesn't prove anything, but it's absolutely material and relevant, you know, to be clear. The way, uh, y'all say that for next time. There's something I wanted to approach, but I I don't want to.

I don't want to go to that rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, So don't go ahead. I'm just trying to find my interjection.

They walked all over the area of the woods they were playing in, even to the point of basically apparently forming you know, line to line arm and arm and walking across the area, getting apparently quite close to the eventual scene of the crime. When they found them the next day, I believe an officer discovered one of their shoes in the ditch, which led to discovering the rest

of the bodies. There are a couple of interesting things. One, the victims were found hogtied, basically bound kind of doubled over backwards, right, their wrist bound to their ankles.

you mentioned earlier. They tried to you know, constitute that as animals after the fact, right, kind of scavengers coming and you know, doing the worst of the damage. Already deceased boys. So one, I'm curious to get your your theory on the way that the you know, the victims were discovered. And also what do you make of you know,

that defense. I mean a certain point. Look, if your job is to you know, defend someone, you defend them how you can, right, But at a certain point it seems almost entirely irrelevant, you know, if this were you know, after the fact of the murder anyway. But I'm curious to get your thoughts, Thomas.

were trained animals that murdered him. Okay, not to be flippant about the murder of a child, but that's nonsense. I I looked at a lot of the evidence that there's this website, it's called Calvahan eight K it's every evidentary exhibit from the trial. And I spent a lot of time going over there, or I have like over the years. And this ditch at robin Wood Hills was sort of a there's this pipe bridge. It was literally a giant pipe, but it had rails welded on at

some point and it went across this irrigation. It was like this irrigation ditch sort slash small pond, okay, and with a muddy bottom. I believe post mortem, they were shoving or two of the boys. At least one of them. They he was still respirating, but he was unconscious post mortem in the case of two of them. The third

I'm pretty confident they thought was dead. I believe they were trying to push them into the mud and limbs kept popping up, so they took the shoelaces and tied a arm to or wrist to ankle, wrist to ankle, shoved them into the mud, and at least for a time, the bodies remained submerged. That's a conclusion I came to. You know, the Corners report or the police report describes them as being a hog tiede like not to be pedantic, but being properly hog tied is you know, like in a bundle.

a sadist. He isn't he's he isn't a cultist. Baldwin doesn't care about all that. Bald is just stunk cold. He just likes to hurt people. Miss Kelly is just a goon. Miss Kelly claims he was drunk and Evan williams he's hanging out with miss Kelly. He's hanging out with Baldwin and Eccles and eccles girlfriend lived across town. Baldwin and Eccles and miss Kelly all lived in this trailer park and across town was h eccles girlfriend's residence.

Her name was Dominie Tier. He'd walk pretty much every day to go see Dominie Tier and the short cut he take was through robin Hood Woods. Okay, So Baldwin and Eccles go to miss Kelly's trailer and they're like, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna go party and we're gonna like fuck up these kids who've been like at our spot, meaning robin Wood Hills. Miss Kelly's like, okay, he's always

down to like go fuck somebody up. So they get there and they see these three little kids playing around and according to uh, according to miss Kelly, Baldwin goes and grabs one of them, and his friends start running. So Baldwin pulls a Knight and say it's come back or he's dead. So Baldwin escalated right away, So the kids come back. Miss Kelly grabs on the bomb and starts just beating on him. He looks over, he says, Eccles is got this kid and he's like molesting him.

So miss Kelly says, he's kind of like the fuck. Then he says he looks over at Baldwin and Baldwin's cutting on the kid, and he said the kid's screaming, and then he goes silent, and then he said he saw Baldwin. He said, I thought he was stabbing him, but he was castrating him. Eccles isn't shocked because even though he's like raping this kid, basically, according to miss Kelly, goes with no idea, like bald was getting straight up like murder the kid. So Eccles freaks out starts strangling

the kid that he's got. Miss Kelly says, he's kind of in shock, so he let the kid go. He starts running, he said, Baldwin goes get him, and either out of fear of Baldwin or just you know, fear of a witness ideing him, miss Kelly goes and brings the kid back, and he said quite literally delivered him to Baldwin, and then Baldwin did him too, you know. And uh, that basically tracks with the crime scene. And uh, the luminol test thing obviously exists on soft ground, basically wetlands.

It was limited in what could be revealed, but what was revealed it basically tracked with what miss Kelly said. And the filmmakers Bell and jurn Sinofsky, as well as the post defense team, they made a big issue out of, Oh, miss Kelly was wrong by the time of day. No, here's what miss Kelly was doing. The kids were murdered after dark, Okay. Miss Kelly kept saying, oh, yeah, I was there, and you know, I helped him restrain the kids. Then I left. Oh it was before it got dark

that I left. Like in his kind of like ignorant mind, he thought he was getting himself off of murder charges by saying, oh, yeah, I believe me. I participated in it, but I was gone before the murder happened. That's what he was doing. He wasn't being fed dada by the cops and screwing up the time of day. It's obvious if you read that, that's what he's doing. Okay, and what's really the cops? Two things here and again this

is very gross. One of the boys head, uh, you'reine in his stomach and obviously, uh you know the uh, the other boy was castrated. That wasn't release to anybody. Miss Kelly knew that, you know, it wasn't even release that there was any edged weapon injuries, let alone castration. And the first thing out of miss Kelly's mouth is yeah, then Jason started cutting on him. How do you know that?

was hanging out in the woods. He somehow could control three eight year old kids, assault them, murder all three of them, all by himself, you know, without any of them run and uh then he staggers presumably on the woods through the blue beacon car wash is walking down the highway all bloody and messed up. Then he just like ends up in this fast food restaurant bathroom. Like

I don't I don't find incredible anyway. It's also they've tried to make a big deal about the fact that, I mean, I think UH DNA and five evidence is dubious in my opinion, not because the science if identifying it as dubious. It's because people put too much it's it's not binary in terms of what it indicates. The

people put too much weight on it. But one of the uh, one of the kids shoelaces that they were bound with their shoelaces, like interstitially bound on the shoelaces was a hair like one of the kids stepfather's friends, because which obviously got picked up at the kid's house

where this man was regularly. And you know, there's people who advocate for the in a sense of these defendants claiming, oh that that that proves that this random guy, David Jacobi did it because there's a hair consistent with his uh DNA profile that you know was at the scene. So I mean, I think that that's nonsense. And uh there clearly had to be multiple offenders because you can't. I mean that that's that's like trying to hurd cast. You can't. Like, one man wouldn't be able to control uh,

three eight year old boys. He'd be able to accost one of them. And then I mean, even even if the guy was as fast as like an NFL wide receiver, he's not gonna be able to murder one kid, grab the next one, murder him, and grab the next one without them running, you know. And and also they they took their time with these kids, which is one of the really horrible things about it. This wasn't a quick thing. They tortured these kids, you know.

in which trial. Uh do you want to speak to that just a little bit before we wrap and obviously we'll be around for another one.

rights and refused to testify. And so then okay, well now you're using statements against that gals in Baldwin that they can't challenge the declarant on and as I'm constitutional.

And also it was uh even that notwithstanding they they had miss Kelly dead the rights, despite what the Berlin Jersonofski documentary says, had they joined his trial to Echals in Baldwin, any defense counsel with as Salt would uh would have said, hey, he was there, but it's these two scumbags who did it, and they made very well

have gotten his charge is knocked down. If not a full on a quill, Okay, like, hey, my client's slow witted, and yeah he you know, he's he's not a good man and he might maybe he's a bully, but he's no child molester and he's no killer. And he was led astray by these two sadists and you know, blah blah blah. You know, I don't see acquittal coming out of the app but I definitely see you know, I definitely see mitigation, you know.

he had private council. It was some local big shot who you know, had had a lot of trial work to his name. Ecoles had an appointed attorney, but he wasn't a PD if memory serves, and I'll double check the record for this before he reconvene the way they he was a private attorney was appointed by the court. So but I mean again, so these guys weren't they weren't being set up for a fall by not being afforded adequate talents that wouldn't getting it.

Axios is doing real well. You may see their ads on a few other of your favorite podcasts coming up soon, so get in on the ground floor. Head over to JD's website and yeah again, Thomas, thank you so much.