When my grandparents moved to Little Rock in 1972, my parents, moved into the house with my brother, sister, and me. They lived there for 30 years.
about 1975. Polyester double-knit by the fish pond.
1980, me in front of the bow window at the east end of the house
Susan’s room, 1976
Fleabag
Rusty and Fleabag napping in the sun
Page Corman, 1978
Jay, also about 1978
The rose garden over the reflecting pond
Roy Lee Gray, groundskeeper extraordinaire
the living room and Jay, ca. 1982
Master bedroom
Living room fireplace, xmas 1984
Xmas 1984, Someone looks toasty.
Music session in the garden room – Fred & Jay
It sits on an entire city block on Main Street. In addition to the house, there were outbuildings: an old servants’ quarters (a two-room building with a bathroom that was used as an office), the children’s playhouse, a large tool shed, and a small greenhouse, a lath house where camellias were grown year-round. My grandfather and mother worked with prominent landscape architects to cultivate the grounds, and they had a landscape crew working daily. Specimen plantings, intricate brickwork, and careful planning groomed the city block where the house sits.
My mother and grandmother grew flowers and arranged them for the two living rooms, the mantels, the foyer, and the dining table. They rarely bought flowers, and the local florists knew that any they delivered would be rearranged once they crossed the house’s threshold. In early spring, daffodils of every imaginable color and configuration filled the backyard. Ancient oaks towered over the grounds. Crepe myrtles, plum and crabapple trees, quince, figs, apples, and pears grew around the property. The vegetable garden covered nearly an eighth of the property and divided beds with brick walkways. Except in the dead of winter, we had fresh vegetables and fruit from our own yard.
Then, my parents moved from Des Arc to Little Rock ten years ago, and the house was sold to at least two successive owners who lost it in foreclosure. No maintenance was done, and from the looks of things, the place was completely abused and neglected.
The front door. Is that black paint between the top of the portico and the master bedroom window above? The black stuff on top on the lintel looked like mold. I think Stewart Morton told us that the big lantern that used to hang over the door was stolen.
Slime mold and algae growing on the dormers, peeling paint, missing and damaged window screens.
Apparently the screen door never closed properly, because leaves halfway filled the space between the two lower screens. I wasn’t sure how they got there until one of the guys put his entire hand between the top of the two lower screens. The columns are rotting and one appears to have shifted. That handrail is pure art.
The living room window, with all kinds of signs warning people about things.
Kitchen window with a sign warning that “Trespassers Will…” and that vandalism will be prosecuted. As if the worst vandalism wasn’t accomplished by recent legal inhabitants. Not that I’m disgusted, or anything. really.
Algae on a dining room window frame, damaged siding with holes, missing shutter, peeling paint.
This is the ceiling in the kitchen below Jay’s bedroom. There is no water source to explain the ceiling damage. I’m dying to know how the ceiling paint got that rusty hue. I’m sure it’s some kind of artful paint effect.
Someone evidently attempted to caulk the big double-paned picture window in the kitchen. The stuff felt like plaster. Then again, it might be an artful representation of surf. Or something.
Susan’s room, looking toward her dressing room and the central hallway. Green and white are the colors of the Des Arc Eagles. This is perfect redecoration of the bedroom of a former cheerleader, don’t you think?
The little tub in Susan’s bathroom. Later, I’ll dig out and post photos of our boys in this tub when they were little, just to embarrass them.
The big window in the landing of the main staircase. I have a pretty photo of Page Corman Jones that was taken in front of this window when we were in high school – check it out and the one of Jay taken the same day for comparison. There were numbers posted all over the house. They indicated items to be salvaged before the house is torn down.
The doorjamb into the master bedroom apparently was optional. The control for the ceiling fan was ripped out of the wall. All over the house there were holes in the walls and big areas splotched with white paint.
The door to the master bedroom. Apparently someone opened it with a boot instead of twisting the knob. That is not the original brass knob.
This was taken from the big window in the master suite’s sitting room, looking down on the fish ponds and rose garden. The big reflecting pond was covered with plywood planks. The little pond, well, more on that in a moment. The crepe myrtles have grown so tall that they block the views from my bedroom, the upstairs landing, and the master suite areas.
The intercom outside to doorway into the little attic.
Someone etched smiley-faces into the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway. (WTF? Who DOES that?) This is the wallpaper that Darlene so admired. Maybe those faces are a ghostly reflection of happier times this house experienced with family and friends who loved it.
Mom, standing next to the fireplace in the front living room. She looks like she wants to cry, doesn’t she? She remarked on the stained marble. See the chipped and peeling paint? I think this is the same yellow and white that the room was when our family moved out. Our stockings hung by this fireplace every Christmas. (See the corresponding photos from 1984 in the photos above.) The nails were still there. The floor also surprised me. All the thick wool carpets had been pulled up to expose the hardwood floors, which were in terrible shape.
We kept our games in this cabinet in the library. Life, Clue, Parcheesi, all the rest. The weekend games were so much fun!
I am not sure what that disgusting-looking stuff on the door and cabinet is. The entire library, shelves and all, was encrusted with this nasty grime. This used to be such a peaceful, wonderful, book-filled room.
When they took up the carpet, they apparently didn’t repaint. You can see how thick the pile was. There was always a puzzle in progress, too.
Another view of the library, and the dressing room leading to the bathroom and the big closet. Once when Susan and I had a sleepover in the garden room (on the other side of that closet), Mom and Dad told us a story of a little girl who died and whose body was walled up in that closet when the house was being built. Either Johnny or Flo Prislovsky hid in that closet and thumped on the wall, making all of us little girls scream – terrified that her ghost really did haunt the place! Aren’t parents great? Scaring the shit out of impressionable and delicate little flowers such as we were.
Another view if the library, looking into the dressing room and the long front hallway.
The breakfast room. The metal art deco chandelier was left when Mom and Dad moved, but it’s gone now. And I seem to remember this room being much brighter. How, with that huge window, was this room so dark?
The garden room’s big bow window, all rotted and awful. The flowerbed beneath the window on the brick terrace is overgrown with weeds. Mom used to keep caladiums in that bed, and the view of the yard was unobstructed.
The garden room fireplace. Just like the living room fireplace, the soot stains on the marble surround were awful, and just like in the library, the filthy woodwork is completely mind-boggling. The parquet floor was refinished in the about 10 years before Mom and Dad moved out, but you sure can’t tell it now.
Inside the playhouse. The most amazing thing is that it was still standing! Mom had considered tearing it down years ago.
The playhouse, which was still white when Mom and Dad left Des Arc. The brick patio in front of the playhouse was totally overgrown with weeds. Jay warned the school officials that they were standing on hallowed ground: countless squadrons of plastic army men are entombed next to that patio.
A view of the back yard from the playhouse patio. In the spring, this yard is filled with two giant semi-circles of daffodils. Missing in this photo are the lath house where Mom, and her parents before her, grew camellias year-round, and the sheds. The Des Arc School District has bought the house and will tear the rest of the buildings down. The brick structures in the distance are high school buildings.
Partial view of the back yard looking from the playhouse patio (aka the plastic green army’s sacred burial ground) toward the formal gardens behind the house. The raised brick flowerbeds cap the horseshoe-shaped yard outside the main back door. A single determined rosemary bush was all the remained of what mom planted there. The beds between the sidewalk and the raised beds were overgrown, and the crepe myrtles are so tall that the view from the house is obstructed.
Oak next to the playhouse. Two trees had what looked like the rims of bicycle tires nailed high on the trunks. Seeing them was another WTF moment for us.
Another view of the hoop nailed to the tree beside the playhouse.
This was my favorite spot in the yard when I was a little girl. I creatively christened it “The Place.” There used to be a tree here with a low branch that grew parallel to the ground that made a perfect perch for reading a book. The tree was surrounded by flowering shrubs, all of which are gone. It was a wonderful, peaceful, private place. Privet and overgrown scrub dominate it now, with a lovely patch of dirt.
The other hoop we found nailed to a tree.
Looking toward the playhouse from the back hedge
Looking toward the rear of the house from the back yard.
The plywood-covered large fish pond, the library window (downstairs) and the sitting room window (upstairs). These were beautiful formal gardens with wide brick sidewalks. The sidewalks are hidden by fallen leaves and overgrown weeds. The siding on the wall has been torn off in one spot – possibly to look for termites? The open window looks out of the front living room. The crepe myrtles are twice the size they were ever allowed to grow in my memory. I recall them being cut back to the ground at least twice, and pruned yearly to control the spread of the branches. Note the peeling paint and the algae slime on the exterior walls.
The little fish pond sits across a brick patio at the far end of the big fish pond. My grandparents installed a statue of a boy riding a dolphin, which was destroyed and taken by the people who bought the house from my parents when they left. The brick wall of the pond is seriously damaged, and the pillar that held the fountain lay on its side, broken. There is a formal portrait of Jay, Susan and me when we were about 5, 10, and 11 that was taken in front of the little pond. I don’t recall if it shows the fountain. I’ll try to locate it and post it for comparison. The brick wall behind the fountain becomes a latticed brick wall to the right of the fountain. An entire section of that brick wall was just gone.
The plywood on the big goldfish pond. I think every kid who ever came to our house fell into that pond at least once trying to leap across it. My dachshund, Fritzi, fell into it more than once, paddling frantically and unable to get her stubby little paws high enough to climb back out. A family of wood ducks used this pond as their home for a number of years. Feral cats attacked the ducklings once, and my dad sat on the back stoop with a pellet gun determined to protect the ducklings from the evil predators. And he liked duck. Yum.
Looking through the back window into the formal living room. The amount of algae and mold on the house – and inside it – was horrifying.
The formal lawn and the horseshoe-shaped sidewalk, with the raised beds. Surprise spider lilies can survive neglect quite happily, apparently.
This lawn was once surrounded on all sides by a formal rose garden inside the brick border. Not a single one of the 50+ varieties of roses that Mom and Dad left there survived, and it’s impossible to tell the lawn from the flowerbed.
This lawn was once surrounded on all sides by a formal rose garden inside the brick border. Not a single one of the 50+ varieties of roses that Mom and Dad left there survived, and it’s impossible to tell the lawn from the flowerbed.
The vegetable gardens were where Jay and the guy from the school are standing, and stretched all the way to the edge of the yard. brick walks, a brick-lined drainage ditch, and brick borders outlined the beds. A huge asparagus bed stretched at least five feet wide and twenty feet long – and they were DAMN good eating! We grew tomatoes, peppers, squash of all kinds, okra, beans, Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, spinach, carrots – if it grew from a seed, its seed was planted in the garden at some point over the years. There were several apple and pear trees, none of which survive. Those apples made the best pies in the world. We even had a grape vine. There was a gigantic fig, but apparently Jesus got mad at it (like he does) and shriveled it up because it sure isn’t there now. The building to the left is the tool shed and small greenhouse that mom built to replace the big one.
A view inside the little greenhouse, which apparently still works fine given the lush grass and vines growing within it.
The back side of the garden room, showing the chimney and the siding window covered with algae and mold. That broad leaf plant in front of the bay window is some kind of mysterious Little Shop of Horrors weed.
A close-up view of the missing siding in back. It looks like termites feasted well. The peeling paint was just amazing.
Another humorous anti-vandalism sign. As if. This was on the bow window in the garden room, I think.
This is what remains of my bathroom. the mirrored doors of the cabinet behind the sink are missing, as is one of the drawers and several of the ceramic knobs which mom installed when we moved into the house in 1972 when my grandparents moved to Little Rock. If I recall correctly, all the tiles were intact in those days.
Another view of my bathroom. The door is damaged, as were lots of damaged doors in the house. I have to wonder what the heck went on there that doors were such victims of violence.
The ceiling fan in my bedroom. I wouldn’t dream of turning that mold-encrusted thing on. Spores would be flung far and wide and attack us for generations.
The current view from one of my bedroom windows onto the croquet lawn – now obscured by gigantic crepe myrtles.
I had to check the secret hiding place in the top of my closet. mom used to stash her jewelry there when she and dad would travel. Good t hing the house never burned down while they were gone. Sadly, there was nothing in there.
A view from the landing, looking out the big window onto the sidewalk (obscured by leaves) and the horseshoe-shaped croquet lawn. See the rot on the windowpane?
Looking directly onto the lawn from the window in the landing. For a few years, Dad decided to become a lawn guru. His goal was to have perfect grass inside that U-shaped area. He bought books, devoured them, applied pesticides and herbicides, and personally plucked offending crabgrass and clover. He eventually did get it perfect. Then he moved on to another project, and things went back to normal.
The fireplace in the master bedroom. I’m guessing that the only reason it isn’t soot-encrusted is that no one ever lit a fire there. Carrying logs upstairs was a pain, and that fireplace never drew smoke properly. The green paint was applied over the wallpaper. In fact, paint was applied over wallpaper everywhere there had been wallpaper, except in the breakfast room and the wet bar. In many places, the wallpaper was peeling away from the walls, taking the paint along with it. I don’t know what the heck that red and green thing is on the wall next to the window.
This photo looks into what was my dad’s closet. Apparently the people who lived there after us used closets rather hard.
Another view inside Dad’s closet. The woodwork is separating from the door frame.
Dad’s closet again. Those big drawers were part of what made this house so perfect for hide-and-seek.
One of Mom’s closets, the “shoe closet.” She kept her Imelda Collection on these shelves, and, yes, we really did call it her “shoe closet.”
The other side of the shoe closet, with a dormer to the right. Another great hide-and-seek place.
My bedroom, looking from the hall door toward the bathroom. When Mom and Dad moved out, the walls were painted a soft peach and there was carpet on the floor. The pinkish patch on the wall is wallpaper, but none that was ever on the walls when anyone in my family ever lived there. Maybe it was there when my grandparents lived there. I don’t know.
Susan’s room, looking from the front hallway to the back hallway. Clearly, a fan of the Des Arc Eagles (go, team!) occupied this space. When it was Susan’s room, there was pretty wallpaper with birds on it. When it was my mother’s room as a girl, it was pretty, too. It was not splatter-painted with anything, and there were no stripes. The photo of her room in the earlier collection above was taken from the same spot.
Susan’s room again, this time from the back hallway looking toward the front hall and her dressing room and bathroom. Come to think of it, these Green and White colors of Des Arc High are absolutely perfect for the bedroom of a former cheerleader.
The laundry chute in the closet in the back hallway. Best. Hiding. Place. EVER. Hide and seek was really fun in this house. Before we were teenagers, we were small enough to fit inside the laundry chute, and hiders could climb unseen from the second floor down to the first to evade the seekers. There were two doors in the chute on the first floor level, and by balancing one’s feet just right on the ledge that marked the top door, a hider couldn’t be seen when the seeker looked either up or down the chute. Of course, SOME kids cheated and used flashlights to spot the laundry chute hiders.
The laundry chute again. I don’t know why I took two photos of the top and none of the bottom. I was in shock, I guess.
The toy closet in Jay’s room. The door to this closet is hobbit-sized, and adults cannot stand up inside. Evidently that did not deter a modern-day Michelangelo, who painted these shelves a shocking tu-tone blue.
Jay’s room, looking at the toy closet door. The toy closet was built under the slope of the roof next to a dormer. Jay’s room was also painted in multiple hues.
The cabinet leading to the secret room off Jay’s bathroom.
I remembered the secret room being bigger than this. Maybe I was just smaller. We left some posters in there when Mom and Dad moved. They had been removed. My recollection is that they were posters of Donny Osmond, David and Shaun Cassidy, and Styx, and one black-light poster of a mushroom. Really.
The artistic endeavors in Jay’s room. Green and white, handprints, and – how the heck did they do those FOOTPRINTS? They are about three feet from the floor.
Jay’s room, from the hall door. There are these great patches of white paint everywhere. Do those patches cover graffiti or something? I didn’t ask.
The ceiling in the second floor hallway between the doors to my room and Susan’s room. No one dared go into the attic, so I have no idea where the moisture came from that did this damage – if it was caused by moisture.
Looking from the formal living room down the long front hallway into the garden room. I was amazed that the brass art deco light fixture was still there, although the globe was long gone.
These are the doors halfway down the long hallway between the living room and the garden room. The door to the library is to the left. Every Christmas these doors were gift-wrapped closed so no naughty kids could peek before Santa had a chance to leave. On Christmas morning, we were allowed to retrieve our stocking from the living room, but only Dad could break the ribbon on the gift-wrapped doors. He would then go into the garden room, shout at the fat intruder he found there, chase him up the chimney, and come back to declare the house safe once again. Oh, and presents.
The bar. Possibly the most highly trafficked three square feet in the entire house. The rule was that Mom or Dad would fix the first drink offered to any guest, but after that they were on their own. For some reason, there was a lock on the cabinet that held the booze. When we were teenagers it was kept locked. I don’t know why. We were happy to find the key, though. My mother wants everyone to know that that is not the original wallpaper.
The bar. The upper cabinet was kept locked during the 1970’s. I don’t know why. Really.
The living room ceiling, beneath the doorway into the master bedroom. This photo is yet another example of mysterious apparent water damage where no water should ever have been.
I’m shocked by how quickly the house deteriorated due to termites, moisture damage, and neglect. I’m even more shocked that this former showplace of a home now shows how it was abused after my family left.
Significant pieces of the landscape are already gone. The formal English rose garden is forlorn, almost bereft of roses. The reflecting pond and raised goldfish pond sit damaged and dirty. The vegetable garden is denuded of fruit trees and flowers. The privet hedge surrounding the property, which kept it private despite its main street address, is overgrown in spots and spotty in others. The camellias that filled the hothouse are mostly dead. This is what the death of a lovingly maintained property looks like, and it didn’t take long.
The public high school is next door, and the school district recently bought the property for $45,000 at auction. The school will tear down all the buildings. The plants aren’t far behind.
It was a gorgeous house with beautiful gardens. Its loss is a travesty.
Last week I went to the Market Street Cinema to see the free screening of West of Memphis, the newest offering among the documentaries about the West Memphis Three. (It’s offered again later this month for anyone interested, and will be back again later in the fall.)
In the event that anyone reading this has lived under a rock for the last couple of decades and isn’t aware of the case, the West Memphis Three are Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. They were teenagers when they were convicted of the capital murder of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas.
In 1993 and 1994, there was a media circus surrounding the arrests and the trials. The West Memphis police, ignorant and superstitious, claimed that Echols, who was a weird kid who dressed funny, liked magic, and listened to heavy metal music, was the leader of a Satanic cult that ritualistically killed the little boys. After a nine hour interrogation, the West Memphis Police coached a confession out of Misskelley, a mentally handicapped high school dropout. All three were convicted. Echols was sentenced to death; Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life without parole.
After nearly two decades of legal wrangling, the WM3 were freed from prison about a year ago, when, rather than go through a new trial, they entered pleas pursuant to North Carolina v. Alford,pleading guilty but simultaneously declaring their innocence. It was a long road getting there – 18 years long. That’s half again as long as the Millennium Falcon’s Kessel Run. They took the whole 18 parsecs to get there.
In the film, Prosecutor Scott Ellington repeated his assertion that, despite not having reviewed the evidence in the case, he believes the West Memphis Three are guilty. He was not the original prosecutor. That dubious honor went to John Fogelman and Brent Davis, a pair to whom I have no problem assigning contempt.
Likewise, the judge was not the one who had presided over the case for 18 years. Judge David Burnett repeatedly ruled against the defense at the pretrial, trial, and post-trial proceedings. Had he still been on the bench when this offer was extended, we cannot be assured of the same outcome.
A week before the murders happened, I hung out my shingle and opened my solo law practice. Even though I had been out of law school for five years, I felt like a neophyte when it came to actually practicing law. Oh, there are stories, some of which I’ve told and some of which I will never tell, about how I groped my way to a successful practice. But in 1993 I was uncertain and confused about the practice of law. And like most of the rest of the state, I was riveted by the unfolding case. By the time of the trials eight months later, I was appalled at the travesty of justice I saw. I felt completely impotent. I had no idea that I might have helped, and boy, I wanted to help. I had gotten into the business of law to help the underdogs of the world, and the West Memphis Three defendants were underdogs from the day they were conceived.
When the first appeals were being pursued, Arkansas’s Death Penalty Resource Center, a state agency that provided litigation support and appellate representation in death penalty cases, was defunded and disbanded. One of its attorneys, Al Schay, sublet office space from me. The day he trundled in the boxes that held the transcripts of the Echols-Baldwin trial, he said I could read them. I had read countless transcripts as a law clerk for an appellate judge, and was undaunted by the thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits. I sat on the floor of Al’s office after hours and I read. And read. And became enraged at the prosecutors and the judge who presided over the cases. The fact that those three young men were convicted of capital murder on such flimsy evidence was appalling. What’s worse, I don’t remember a single motion that went in the defense’s favor – except one. That one favorable ruling was ultimately undermined by juror misconduct. The ruling should have prevented Jessie Miskelley’s coached confession from coming into evidence against his co-defendants. However, the jury foreman in the Baldwin-Echols trial made a special effort to ensure that the jurors were aware of it.
Courtroom Rotunda at the Arkansas Justice Building (source)
The day the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the convictions, I realized that the court was nothing more than a calculating political beast. The majority reached its conclusion because that was the conclusion they felt they politically had to make. Three devil-worshipping teenagers had ritually murdered three little cub scouts. It was sensationalism that sold papers. It was sensationalism that provided job security even in the august halls of the Supreme Court, where I had been so proud to work not long before. It sickened me.
Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols should never have been convicted. They did not receive a fair trial. Did Jessie Miskelley? I don’t know. I’ve never read the transcript of his trial. My guess is that with the same people in positions of power, and the same facts, he did not. I know that Dan Stidham, Misskelley’s lawyer, believes he did not.
I met Dan Stidham at a seminar recently. For fifteen years, Dan Stidham was an active hero in the West Memphis Three case. He was appointed to serve as Jessie Misskelley’s attorney at trial, and was the only attorney who stuck with his client after the trials, even to the point of preparing Jason Baldwin’s appellate paperwork when Jason had no lawyer. Stidham is now a circuit judge, but he was Jessie Misskelley’s lawyer throughout the trial and appellate process until 2008, when he assumed the bench. I told him that I wished I had reached out back in those days. I didn’t because I thought I had nothing to contribute. I realize now that I could have offered my time. I told him that when the trials were ongoing, I had wanted to do something – anything – because I saw what a miscarriage of justice was happening. He gave me a look that said, “Why didn’t you?” and I felt more impotent than ever. I regret not doing something back then, even though I didn’t think I was competent to do anything.
(source)
In the years between their convictions and their release, I was peripherally aware of the movement to free the West Memphis Three. I had seen the billboard in West Memphis with its tipline phone number. I read each court’s decision denying any relief at all to the convicted men. I never forgot them, but I believed their case was hopeless. A results-oriented judicial process was at work, one I knew intimately from the inside. It didn’t matter how the judges reached their decision, only that they reached the one most politically appropriate. They had constituents to answer to each election cycle. A case as notorious as the West Memphis Three had to be controlled with an iron fist.
I never saw Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills or Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, the HBO documentaries about the West Memphis Three. I never read Devil’s Knot, investigative reporter Mara Leveritt’s book about the case. I had read news articles about the case, though, and read each judicial opinion at every level, both state and federal, as the fruitless appellate process lumbered on over the years.
Then, in the spring of 2011 I heard from Ken Swindle, an attorney in the northwest part of the state, whose contributions to a listserv for trial lawyers I had admired for several years. Would I sign a petition asking for a new trial for the West Memphis Three? I didn’t have to think about it. Hell, yes, I would! The West Memphis Three case exemplifies for me what is wrong with the criminal justice system on so many levels: cronyism among law enforcement officials and the State Crime Lab, results-oriented judicial decision-making, religious bigotry, a lack of critical thinking skills among the population at large (which make up our juries), prejudice, bad science, superstitious ignorance, the lack of resources available to all but the wealthiest criminal defendants, and the complete failure of standards of reasonable doubt and the assumption of innocence.
There’s no way I could ever practice criminal law. I would stroke out in very short order from the stress caused by the rampant injustice. The assembly-line attitudes I have encountered in family court and in juvenile court are bad enough without compounding it with the inequities of the adult criminal justice system.
But finally, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the right thing. Finally, it agreed that DNA evidence had to be considered in light of all the rest of the evidence – including evidence that at least four trial witnesses had recanted in the intervening years, and possibly including evidence that the Echols-Baldwin jury was tainted by the published confession they were never supposed to consider – and which the jury foreman made sure they did. And when the Arkansas Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court this time, there was a new judge in town.
Judge David Laser acknowledged in open court that the release of the West Memphis Three pursuant to the Alford pleas wasn’t justice for anyone – not for the defendants, and not for the victims – because innocent men remained convicted, and were robbed by the State of nearly two decades of their lives. The terms of the plea agreement allowed three victims of a miscarriage of justice to finally go free, albeit under the burden and stigma of probation. Judge Laser said,
I don’t think it will make the pain go away to the victim families. I don’t think it will make the pain go away to the defendant families. I don’t think it will take away a minute of the eighteen years that these three young men served in the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
WM3 at the Press Conference After Their Release Hearing (source)
Since their release, I have seen the first two Paradise Lost documentaries as well as the third one, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which was being made just as the WM3 were freed. I have read Devil’s Knot. The thing is, it didn’t take any of these efforts to convince me that justice was not served. While they told me more than I knew before, I knew when I read the transcripts and looked at the evidence on the first appeal that the West Memphis Three were innocent. Not just “not guilty,” which can mean that they probably did it but the state didn’t prove the case, but innocent.Â
And that leads us to the real question: who killed Chris Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore?
West of Memphis left me with more questions than ever before. In December 2011, three new witnesses came forward with hearsay evidence that Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather, has admitted guilt to members of his family. It’s my understanding that, despite his strong assertion that he would look into anything the defense brought him, Ellington has not done a single thing in the last nine months to look into those allegations. Hearsay is plenty good enough for investigators to launch investigations in much less serious crimes. If it is true that the “Hobbs Family Secret” is that Terry killed those boys, Arkansas is denying justice not only to the WM3, but to the victims and their families.
That having been said, West of Memphis did not show conclusive evidence of Terry Hobbs’s guilt. I don’t think it intended to. It raised serious, valid questions that need investigation, though. Someone killed those kids, and that someone has never done a single day’s worth of prison time for their murders.
Also disconcerting to me were David Jacoby’s on-camera statements and his willingness to allow recordings of his telephone conversations with Terry Hobbs about the night the boys disappeared. Jacoby is a friend of Terry Hobbs, and was with Hobbs for part of the evening and night when the families and police searched for the missing children. He stopped short of saying outright that he wasn’t with Hobbs during the time Hobbs claims. Since he is Hobbs’ alibi, I wish Jacoby had been asked that tough question directly, and I wish he had given a straight answer. The implied answer is there, but the lawyer in me wants it airtight.
I don’t know if Terry Hobbs did it. I don’t know if there was someone else in those woods who killed the children. But “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty” have to mean something. They just HAVE to. And despite two juries, and despite the affirmed decisions of the appellate courts, the West Memphis Three were not proven guilty.
As a postscript, my hat goes off to Ken Swindle, who didn’t stop working on the case when the West Memphis Three walked out of that courtroom last August. Ken has filed requests for disclosure of evidence under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of two of the victims’ parents. The West Memphis Police Department maintains that the case is closed, so the information is fair game under FOIA. The problem is, they won’t deliver. The plaintiff parents, Pam Hobbs, ex-wife of Terry Hobbs and mother of Stevie Branch, and Mark Byers, adoptive father of Chris Byers, are both very outspoken supporters of the West Memphis Three. Today, Ken requested a hearing on the FOIA request, which has been resisted by both the West Memphis PD and Scott Ellington, the current prosecuting attorney.
According to Article 19, Section 1 of the Arkansas Constitution of 1874 – which my third-great-grandfather helped write – I am ineligible to hold any office in the civil departments of the state government, nor may I testify as a witness in any court.
Why? Because I don’t believe in a divine being.
It will take over 70,000 signatures of registered voters (from Arkansas’s total population of about 3 million) to get the repeal of the constitutional provision on the ballot. Since we are in the buckle of the Bible Belt, the effort to find that many signatures would be Herculean. I seriously doubt many churches would do anything to support the initiative, and most would actively work against it.
That being said, put me down as a scofflaw. I’m a Notary Public and worked for years as a state employee. I’ve testified multiple times and served as a Special Circuit Judge.
Federal law prohibits enforcement of this provision, but its presence still rankles.
John Hornor Jacobs has written a powerful novel of the Zombie Apocalypse. In his just-published second novel, the zombie virus is a biological weapon that is accidentally released from the installation in Whitehall, Arkansas. The opening scenes take place at a Little Rock hospital. After the government drops nuclear bombs intended to eradicate the outbreak, a doctor and a truck driver join forces with a military unit to set up a local government and defend against the hungry hordes of undead. They soon find themselves in conflict with a megalomaniac who wants to take over what remains of the still-living world.
Well written and fast-paced, the first-person voices of survivors shape this novel into an exposition of how some people survive and many others die when society falls completely apart. This Dark Earth is more robust than an ordinary zombie novel. It deserves classification with the exceptional novels of catastrophic social change, including Steven King’s The Stand, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon.
The news says that Oklahoma – OKLAHOMA! – experienced an earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter Scale about the time I felt it.
Geologically stable areas of Arkansas have been experiencing earthquakes in recent months. Some reports connect them to fracking because the epicenters are where natural gas is extracted in significant quantities.
There is a great tragedy unfolding in my hometown. Des Arc is experiencing the worst flooding in 75 years – maybe longer. I-40 is closed because of the flooding. Parts of the county were evacuated last week. The National Guard is there, and two highways into town are underwater. People have lost their homes, businesses are deep in water, and farms are in the middle of a vast, wild river. This disaster is as great as any tornado in Alabama or any hurricane in Florida.
U.S. Congressman -wannabe Tim Griffin wants to create jobs here in the US “like China does.”
Child labor. Prison labor. Virtual slave labor. Sweatshops. Lack of regulations maintaining worker safety. Low pay. Unsanitary work sites. Industrial pollution rivaled by none. Staggering environmental damage perpetrated unchecked by industry as well as smaller employers.
Gosh, Tim, I don’t agree. I just can’t see creating jobs like China does.
Mount Holly Cemetery, Little Rock, Arkansas Photo by David Habben, www.findagrave.com
My mom wanted me on the board of an historical cemetery. I thought it would be awesome – it’s a great old place with lots of ghost stories and locally famous – and infamous – people buried there. Including a truckload of my ancestors.
“I need your resume,” she told me.
“Mom, I hardly think that my work history has anything to do with why I might be qualified to serve on that board.”
“So dress it up. Emphasize your genealogy research and your history research. Talk about your volunteer work.”
In other words, she wanted me to re-craft my resume entirely. Therefore, I did exactly what I always do when given an irritating assignment: I procrastinated.
A week later: “I really need your resume.”
Two weeks later: “If you don’t get me that resume I can’t nominate you.”
Three weeks later:Â “I need it today.”
Crap. And I was having so much fun putting it off.
“Just write something. I’ll rewrite it to suit our nomination style.”
Had she said this in the first place, I could have whipped off a few relevant paragraphs and been done with this a month ago. But she said she wanted a freaking resume. So after lunch, I sat down and wrote:
Anne has a keen interest in genealogy and history, and has done research on both in this particular cemetery, once regrettably denting the side of her car as she took a turn too sharply around a certain walled plot in the northeast corner of the place.  Her interest in these disciplines began in high school, when in 1976 she won the esteemed and coveted Annual Ninth Grade History Award at All Saints Episcopal School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, mostly to prove to a certain boy that she was smarter than he was. It must have worked, because that intimidated lad has refused to this day (over 30 years later!) to come to class reunions. Her interest was fed her freshman year at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, when given the task of charting the genealogy of Zeus’s progeny she instead charted the genealogy of the entire Greek pantheon. While mostly accurate, her work earned her a C for failing to follow directions. Her professor was not interested in reading that much. Anne didn’t really care, since being right was all that mattered. When she graduated from Colgate in 1984, her major was English, not Greek.
With no immediate better use to put an English major, Anne returned to her Arkansas roots the following year to go to law school. Â Anne clerked for Justice David Newbern at the Arkansas Supreme Court, then worked for a state agency or two until her secretary, one Gennifer Flowers, decided to hit the front page of the papers and not return to work. Anne opened her own law practice in 1993 and has remained in private practice ever since. Today, after 16 years in the trenches of litigation, Anne is a managing member of the law firm Almand, Orsi & Campbell, PLLC, which handles civil litigation. Â Both she and her cousin and law partner, Donald K. Campbell, III, have generations of ancestors buried at this cemetery, stories about whom they occasionally pull out, dust off, and tell to their children and other passers-by, whether or not such innocents are especially interested.
Anne has maintained a moderately noticeable profile among local bar and statewide bar associations. She joined a whole slew of them in 1988 immediately after getting her J.D. from UALR Law School and passing the bar. In 1993 she was made Parliamentarian of the Arkansas Association of Woman Lawyers, then served as  Vice President in 1994-1995, and as President in 1995-1996. She remains a member of the group today. She has been a member of the Pulaski County Bar Association since 1988, and served as co-chair of the Hospitality Committee in 1995-1996. Likewise she retains her membership in the Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, for which she chaired the Domestic Relations Division in 1997-1998. She was a member of the American Bar Association from 1988-1996, when membership became prohibitively expensive. Most of her bar activities have been through the Arkansas Bar Association, for which she has served on numerous committees, including the Real Estate Committee, Probate Law Committee, Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Committee, Women and Minorities in the Law Committee, Mock Trial Committee, Online Legal Research Committee, Civil Litigation Committee, and Access to Justice Committee.
Very conscious of the fact that not everyone has access to the legal system in a meaningful way, Anne donates her time and expertise through two of Arkansas’ legal services organizations. The Center for Arkansas Legal Services helps clients in the central Arkansas area, and Anne is one of the attorneys who accepts legal representation of clients in need who meet low income guidelines. Anne volunteers in rural areas of the state for Arkansas Volunteer Lawyers for the Elderly, another legal aid program that ensures that senior citizens with limited assets and income can access the legal system.
She has served on the boards of other historical societies, including Scott Connections in Scott, Arkansas (Director, 2007-2008), and the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Arkansas (Director, 2006-09; and Board of Managers 2009-present). This spring Anne was selected to be the state’s Regent of Gunston Hall, the Northern Virginia home of founding father George Mason, a position she will hold for the next four years.
Anne is active in several of her family’s businesses. She is on the board of directors of ARNO, Inc. and Pioneer Farms, and has served as Chairman of the Board of Three Rivers Title Services, Inc. since 1999.
For pleasure, Anne loves to grow herbs, read, and write short stories. She maintains two blogs: one is purely for pleasure and the other is purely for work. She is also working on three novels, none of which she ever expects to finish unless the Fountain of Youth is found and she drinks copiously from its non-Stygian depths.
“Very amusing, my dear. I will extract the pertinent information to send out to the rest of the Board, omitting the humor, sad though that makes me.”
She will extract the pertinent information? That means most of what I wrote will end up in the trash.
And I worked so hard to get it to her!
Sadly edited in 2012 to remove links to the defunct law firm of Almand, Orsi & Campbell, PLLC.
Yesterday in Little Rock, ground was broken on something amazing.
I say it’s amazing, because here in the Bible Belt, there is precious little tolerance for non-Christian points of view. If one isn’t Christian, one is unknowably alien, and to some, one is completely suspect.
Isn’t this a Christian nation? (Well, no, actually this country isn’t a theocracy at all.) Without Christian values, aren’t we likely to devolve into moral depravity? (No. Christians don’t have a monopoly on moral behavior – never have had and never will have.) But we all should accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior! (Says who? Jesus? That has all the logic of a parent whose justification is, “Because I said so!”)
“Anne, you’re an atheist.” I hear the condemnation, and I take umbrage. I prefer the term “polyatheist.” There are a lot of gods I don’t believe in. And no doubt, anyone reading this is also a polyatheist. There are lots of gods that have been worshipped over the eons of humanity, and I’d bet my money that not a single reader of this essay believes in very many of them.
Christianity adopted many pagan traditions as it evolved. Celebration of the solstices and equinoxes are among those traditions. Christmas falls within a few days of the winter solstice, as does Hanukkah. Likewise, do the celebrations called Saturnalia, Maruaroa o Takurua, Deuorius Riuri, Amaterasu, Yule, Bodhi Day (also known in Buddhism as Rohatsu), Hogmanay, Soyal, Zagmuk, Beiwe, Shabe-Yalda, Lussi Night, Meán Geimhridh, Brumalia, Lenaea (the ancient Greek Festival of Wild Women), Alban Arthuan, Choimus, Inti Raymi, Maidyarem, Karachun, Makara Sankranti, Ziemassvētki, and Perchta. This list is by no means exhaustive. We will never know the many ways the winter solstice and the days surrounding it were marked by paleo-humans, but they left unwritten records of the fact that the event was noted and celebrated. Places like Stonehenge make drawing this conclusion inescapable.
This, in a place where the State Constitution makes discrimination against atheists legal!
You don’t believe me? See Article 19, Section 1 of the Arkansas Constitution:
“No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.”
Do you ever wish you had known at 23 what you know now?
At 23 I was passionate, opinionated, brave, and uncertain. I was passionate in my relationships, opinionated about what was right, brave to do what terrified me, and uncertain that I could do it. At 47, of course, I’m still passionate and opinionated. I bravely embrace change, just like I always have, even though a part of me is terrified by it. But instead of being uncertain about my abilities, I am only uncertain as to how to help my own child bridge this awkward abyss between childhood and adulthood. Being even more passionately opinionated in my dotage keeps the rest of the uncertainty at bay.
Knowing what I know now, I would make my 23 year old self choose differently about some pretty substantial things. I would require my 23 year old self to make it on my own where the weather was tolerable. I definitely would not allow my 23 year old self to return to Arkansas. The summers are just too damn brutal.
Sure, I should have gone to graduate school. But I should have gone for history or literature, not law school. I should have followed my own dream, not someone else’s. It wasn’t my idea to go to law school. My dad planted that seed, and although I don’t regret having a career that I can pick up or put down at any time, I do wish it was more transportable. (How do I hate the summers in Arkansas? Let me count the ways…)
There is lots of advice I would give my younger self.
<strong>* Follow your dreams. </strong>You want to study paleoarcheology, be a writer, go on a dinosaur dig, or live in Greenwich Village? Do it. Don't mistake the dreams other people have for you as your own dream. Be sure of whose dream you're following.
<strong>* Travel.</strong> Everywhere. Maintain your rucksack in good condition and stash money away for no purpose other than to pay for plane tickets, cheap meals in exotic places, and museum fees. It's okay to sleep in a train station or on the steps of a cathedral in Europe when you're 23.
<strong>* It's not love.</strong> At least not yet. Lust, pheromones, and heat, yes. But it is not love and you can live without that person because someone else will be along shortly to scratch the itch. For the love of Pete, don't get married, start having babies, and acquire a mortgage yet. You've got too much to see and do before you're chained down to all of that. Love doesn't develop until the bright flush of physical desire dissipates and you're used to each other's most annoying habits and bodily functions, and you've decided not to commit either murder or seppuku over them.
<strong>* Run toward things, not away from them.</strong> I was terrified of looking for something different, but I hated - absolutely hated - my sales job just after college. It was worse than waiting tables, and I was truly horrible at that. But going back to school a year graduating from college was a cop out. I made the decision to go back to school - and back home - because I hated my job. I made the wrong decision for the wrong reasons. I was running away, not running toward something. There have been so many times I have wished I could take a mulligan on that one.
<strong>* If you can't pay cash for it, you don't need it.</strong> If you can't move to a new place by loading everything you own in your car, you have too much crap. Get rid of it and don't buy more. It'll save on the interest you pay for those credit cards, and it will simplify your life. If you don't need it, don't buy it. If you can't pay cash for it, you don't need it. Unless it's prescribed medication.
<strong>* There is no reason to be bored, ever.</strong> With so much in the world to see, do, and make, boredom should not be a concept within your realm of familiarity. If you're bored, it's because you won't open your eyes to the world around you. Go to a park. Visit a museum. Watch a river flow. Go to a bookstore or library.
<strong>* It's okay to fail. </strong> Fear of failure prevents us from doing so many things, and more often than not it is a hollow fear. Robert Sculler asked, "What would you do if you knew you would not fail?" We should never assume failure. If we assume failure, we try nothing and therefore achieve nothing.
<strong>* Screwing up is okay, too.</strong> Stupid mistakes are also a way to learn. Granted, they aren't the best way, or the least painful way, but they are effective. And the next time, we slow down and think things through more carefully.
What advice would you make your younger self heed?
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