Reading this book filled me with enough incandescent rage to power a midsized costal city. I’d seen snippets of the HBO documentary, I’d seen YouTube videos, I *knew* this debacle was a massive miscarriage of justice. But there’s knowing and then there’s reading about it in minute detail, beat by beat, for 400ish pages.

For all the rock dwellers out there; this book covers a gruesome triple child homicide in the early 90’s, the…let’s say unusual police investigation that followed, and the subsequent trial and conviction of three teenagers based on nothing more than a single coerced “confession” and a handful of circumstantial evidence. If this sounds unbelievably awful that’s because it is.
The author does a phenomenal job handling the material. It’s difficult to think of a more upsetting topic but an air of tact, relative objectivity, and pursuit of the facts permeates the writing. I say relative objectivity because of course the writer has an opinion on the case, how could anyone not? Despite this, Leveritt refrains from making pronouncements or even claims, she lets the evidence, testimony, and particulars of the case speak for themselves. What she’s able to show is a massively compromised investigation from beginning to end. The author also shows a clear pattern of law enforcement seeking only the evidence that fits into their theory (that the murders were tied to a satanic cult of which Damien Echols was a participant) rather than suiting their theories to conform to the evidence. This bias runs so deep that officers fail to investigate someone who should have at least been a suspect, John Mark Byers, one of the murdered boy’s stepfathers. Byers had a history of crime and violence against family members and his alibi for the time of the murders had numerous inconsistencies. But despite these and other glaring red flags he was never considered a suspect nor interrogated. Indeed, the few times officers did speak with him their tone was apologetic, almost fawning, a sharp contrast from the rough tactics used on the teenage suspects they eventually arrest for the murders.

This pervasive bias extends to the courtroom too and the author shows in striking detail the many ways in which these accused did not receive a truly fair trial. In just one of dozens examples, the prosecution is allowed to call an “expert witness” whose only credentials come from a correspondence course he took on “occult activity” meanwhile the defense is forbidden from having one of their expert witness state his opinion that one of the boy’s confessions was coerced rather than voluntary.

This whole case is a twisted, murky, infuriating mess, a labyrinth of bias, misconduct, and abuse of authority at all possible levels. But this book does an excellent job of taking these mountains of information and synthesizing them into a single coherent and compelling narrative. This book is a difficult one, it will educate you, it will upset and enrage you, but you should let it. this is, I believe, a challenging but ultimately important non-fiction book.