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- LITTLE ROCK, Ark.
- Wild rumors have swirled through Arkansas for the past 12 years about
the mysterious deaths of two teenagers, 17-year-old Kevin Ives and 16-year-old
Don Henry, on the railroad tracks in rural Saline County in 1987.
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- Initially, the boys' deaths were said to be due to a
marijuana-induced sleep. Later, a grand jury overturned that finding, and
out-of-state pathologists determined that the deaths were in fact homicides.
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- At that point, controversial film producer Patrick Matrisciana
entered the scene. Matrisciana, from Hemet, Calif., is best-known for his
1994 conspiratorial "documentary" <news/1998/03/cov_11news.html"The
Clinton Chronicles," a mail-order film that's an underground bestseller
on the <news/special/clinton/whitewater.htmlClinton-hating extreme right.
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- Matrisciana's resulting 1996 film on the railroad mystery,
"Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection," alleged that the
teenagers were killed after they accidentally witnessed a clandestine drug
deal in which top state officials were involved.
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- The film asserted that the boys' bodies were laid on
the tracks so a train would run over them and destroy evidence. It further
alleged that two veteran sheriff's deputies, Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane,
were the boys' murderers, and that the crimes were covered up with the
help of state and federal prosecutors and -- naturally -- then-Gov. Bill
Clinton.
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- But last week, an Arkansas jury ruled that Matrisciana's
film had demonstrated "reckless disregard for the truth" and
had libeled deputies Campbell and Lane. The jury awarded the two sheriff's
officers nearly $600,000 in damages.
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- In so doing, the jury rejected Matrisciana's contention
throughout the trial that he could not be held responsible for any libel
because he gave full editorial control over the film to Linda Ives, the
mother of one of the boys, and Jean Duffy, a former Saline County deputy
prosecutor.
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- The unsolved mystery of the train deaths has attracted
national media interest over the years, including the editorial page of
the Wall Street Journal. In 1996, the Journal's Micah Morrison wrote "The
Lonely Crusade of Linda Ives," an article flowing with conspiracy
theories.
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- "It adds some credibility to a story when something
as widely known as the Wall Street Journal prints the story," noted
Jay Campbell, one of the deputies vindicated by the libel ruling.
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- The conservative Arkansas Democrat-Gazette heavily criticized
the Journal at the time for its inability to decipher fiction from truth.
"There is apparently no old story, discredited piece of gossip or
wild rumor that the Journal won't take seriously so long as its subject
is Arkansas," the paper editorialized.
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- (The Journal's Morrison did not return calls for this
story.)
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- Meanwhile, the recent libel trial brought out some new
evidence about who may have been behind the boys' deaths, including indications
that they may indeed have been killed for witnessing a drug deal of some
sort.
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