Dark Spell by Mara Leveritt

Author:Mara Leveritt [Leveritt, Mara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781499175752
Publisher: Bird Call Press
Published: 2014-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

“there is one question, Inspector Callahan: Why do they call you ‘Dirty harry’?”

~ Harry Julian Fink

Like so many, Christian Hansen had become fascinated with the case when he saw the first Paradise Lost documentary. That was in 1998, while Jason was at Grimes. In the three years that followed, Hansen read everything he could find about the investigation and trials. Hansen understood supporters’ arguments that there was no physical evidence linking Jessie, Damien and Jason to the murders. But he remained troubled by the knowledge that Jessie had confessed to the murders, not once but twice, after his conviction. (The first time was as sheriff ’s deputies were driving Jessie to prison; the second occurred on Feb. 17, 1994, with Davis and Stidham present.) Those confessions made it hard for Hansen—and many others—to accept the notion that the teenagers were innocent.

However, Hansen was unlike many others drawn to the case. He was keenly interested in facts and willing to separate them from the many layers of emotion that had imbued the case since the murders. He lurked in chat rooms, reading what was said there, but he preferred to look at unbiased source materials. For a number of very rational reasons, for example, he wished that the West Memphis police had recorded Jessie’s entire interrogation.

Hansen was not a lawyer, a college graduate, or what in the U.S. would be called a white-collar worker. Single, he lived in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, where he’d grown up, graduated from high school, and worked in manufacturing. He’d gotten his first computer, a Commodore 64, at the age of thirteen—three years before the West Memphis murders. Having studied English in school and polished it with TV, movies, and the Internet, he had almost mastered the language by the time Jason returned to Varner. By then, Hansen was running the website “Callahan.8k.com,” which was posting an increasing number of documents about the West Memphis case. Supporters of the WM3 and non-supporters alike were beginning to recognize “Callahan” as a vast and neutral online “reference room” for the case, even though few knew who was running the site or why it had that unusual name.

The answer was simple. Hansen had become a fan of American actor Clint Eastwood long before he saw Paradise Lost. Because of that, an Internet friend had nicknamed him “Callahan,” after Eastwood’s character in Dirty Harry. So when Hansen created his own website, he named it “Callahan.8k.” At first, Hansen said, he devoted just some of his posts on the site to “the whodunit and motive aspects” of true crime, including the West Memphis case. But as his interest in law expanded, he realized that no other case intrigued him like the one from Arkansas did. When another non-supporter took down a document archive he’d begun about the case, Hansen thought it was “unfortunate that people no longer had access to the documents,” so he uploaded the material to his own site. Eventually Hansen devoted the entire site to the West Memphis case and Callahan.

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