One of the nominees for tomorrow night's Documentary Feature Oscar, "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" completes a 15-year, three-picture odyssey by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky chronicling the case of the West Memphis 3, then-teenagers convicted of the brutal 1993 murder of three eight-year old boys in Arkansas. The alleged ringleader, Damien Echols, seems to have had no connection to the crime, but wore black clothes and dyed his hair black and was wrongly identified as a satanist at a time of rampant hysteria. His constant-shadow best friend Jason Baldwin was seemingly found guilty by association, while a third friend, the mildly retarded Jessie Misskelley, gave a wildly implausible and shifting confession that implicated the three after twelve unbroken hours of repetitive police questioning.
