DEFAMATION TRIAL
Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell
VS
Citizens for an Honest Government Integrity Films and Pat Matrisciana
Editorial by Jean Duffey
When Linda and I learned that Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell had filed a defamation suit against Pat Matrisciana, we were confident of prevailing. The suit was filed because Pat’s film “Obstruction of Justice” implicated Lane and Campbell in the deaths of Kevin Ives and Don Henry and the subsequent cover-up of the murders.”
Linda and I were confident of a successful defense for Pat because of the amount of documented evidence amassed against them. However, the judge did not allow Pat’s attorney to present much of the evidence, and the jury found Pat liable for $.6 million to be paid to Lane and Campbell.
Pat, of course, appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, but during the months of waiting for the decision, Lane and Campbell took advantage of backing from the media. However, the appellate court found the evidence did not support the jury’s decision and the verdict was reversed. This was a huge win for us, although the media coverage was reduced to a few sentences on a back pages.
Linda wrote a scathing letter to the Benton Courier, but the true victory that can never be negated has been the decades since the 8th circuit opinion and the decades (even centuries) to come that the truth about Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell will be true history. Anyone can write or state in any form that “the appellate court found the evidence did not support the jury’s decision and the verdict was reversed.” This means that we can continue to implicate “Lane and Campbell in the deaths of Kevin Ives and Don Henry and the subsequent cover-up of the murders.” Their protection will not endure history
Origin of the Lawsuit
In the 1996 release of Pat Matrisciana’s documentary video, “Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection,” Linda and Jean name Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane as suspects in the murders of Kevin and Don. Campbell and Lane sued Matrisciana for defamation. They won at trial, but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the jury verdict because the trial judge withheld evidence that incriminated Campbell and Lane.
There were FBI agents, and other law enforcement officers who testified as character witnesses at the trial. The jurors surely couldn’t help but to be impressed with the clean-cut, sharp-dressed, articulate officers, sworn to protect and serve, as one by one they were sworn in and took the stand. One has to wonder just how well they knew Campbell, and just how foolish they must have felt when a decade later, Campbell’s true character was revealed when, as Lonoke Police Chief, he was convicted of running a criminal enterprise and sentenced to a 40-year prison term.
Newspaper Articles Covering the Trial
Sunday, August 1, 1999
Benton Courier
“Train deaths” libel case goes to trial Monday
Little Rock men say video falsely implicated
them in the murders of two Bryant teen-agers
By Karon Gregory
COURIER Staff Writer
A multimillion dollar libel suit that centers on the 1987 deaths of two Bryant teens in a case that has come to be known locally as “the train deaths” is set for trial Monday in federal court in Little Rock.
The case was filed on behalf of Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane of Little Rock, who were named in the film “Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection” as being connected to the 1987 murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives.
Lane and Campbell are seeking $16 million in damages from filmmaker Pat Matrisciana, president of both Integrity Films and Jeremiah Films Inc. and a parent company, U.S. Citizens for an Honest Government, which funded the film’s production and distribution.
The names of the men, who worked as deputies for the Pulaski County Sheriffs Department when the boys died, are not mentioned in the narration of the film, but are listed in a graphic that appears as Linda Ives, the mother of Kevin Ives, says, “Eyewitnesses have implicated several people in the murders and subsequent coverups of the murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives.”
Lane and Campbell say the use of their names, coupled with the comments contained in the film, falsely implicate them and have damaged their reputations personally and professionally.
The film, which advances a theory of how the boys died, is narrated in part by Ives. Jean Duffey, who once headed the now disbanded 7th Judicial District Drug Task Force, also had a role in the film’s narration. Duffey and Ives have said they had complete control over the film’s content.
M. Darren O’Quinn , attorney for Campbell and Lane, said last week the deputies will present evidence the statements in the film are false and the filmmakers either knew they were false or distributed the film without regard to whether they were false.
O’Quinn said he doesn’t ”expect a settlement in the case. Court records indicate it may take four to five days for the trial.
Matrisciana’s California office referred all calls to attorney John Wesley Hall of Little Rock. Matrisciana will travel to Arkansas for the trial, his secretary said. Hall did not return a reporter’s calls seeking comment.
The deaths of Henry, 16, and Ives, 17, were ruled accidental by former state Medical Examiner Dr. Fahmy Malak. The boys were struck by a Union Pacific train near Alexander about 4:30 a.m. Aug. , 23, 1987.
Their deaths were treated initially as an accident and very little evidence from the scene was preserved by investigators for the Saline County Sheriffs Department, which was headed by Sheriff Jim Steed.
The families of the boys insisted the deaths were not accidental and succeeded in getting Malak’s ruling , reversed.
A Saline County grand jury declared the deaths “probable homicides” in May 1988 after an out-of-state forensic pathologist found that Henry had been stabbed and Ives had been struck by a blunt object. Their bodies were placed on the tracks after these injuries were inflicted, the grand jury concluded.
Former 7th Judicial District Prosecutor Dan Harmon served as special prosecutor during the grand jury investigation. The grand jury returned no indictments.
The case remains open but inactive, Saline County Sheriff Judy Pridgen said. “We’ve gotten a few leads over the years and, of course, we worked them,” Pridgen said.
Ives believes Harmon, later convicted of federal drug charges and of running the 7th Judicial District Drug Task Force as a criminal enterprise, had a role in the deaths.
Ives said Friday she believes the allegations laid out in the film are true, although the legal issues involved in a libel case may not allow her to go into the details of the deaths in court.
“I just don’t think we’ll get to go into all that,” Ives said. “But they can’t prove it’s false. They can’t prove malicious intent and they can’t prove reckless disregard.”
To prove libel, public officials, as Lane and Campbell were found to be under a ruling by Judge G. Thomas Eisele, must prove the statements made in the film were false and the producers of the film knew they were false and distributed the statements “maliciously” or distributed them in “reckless disregard” to whether they were false.
Ives said she is interested to see how Lane and Campbell would present their case, but said it would be hard for her to sit in court and look at the two officers.
“The difficult part is knowing that they beat the system,” she said. Ives said the film had been started but had been shelved for some time when the FBI investigation into the deaths ended in November 1995.
“I cried for days,” she said. “I had nowhere else to go and nothing left to lose. For years I had been afraid to jeopardize the case by going public with what I knew.”
“The film was something she owed her son,” she said.
“It was the only thing left I could do for Kevin,” she said.
Ives said she believes charges eventually will be brought in connection with the deaths.
“They killed the wrong kid,” she said. “I won’t go away.”
In the more than two years since the suit was filed, several preliminary issues in the case were ruled on by Eisele, but Judge Warren K. Urbon will preside during the jury trial.
Tuesday, August 3, 1999
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Jurors see full video at filmmaker’s trial
By Linda Satter
An unsolved mystery from 1987 that spawned years of investigations and conspiracy theories was thrust upon a federal court jury on Monday as the producer of a film about the subject was accused of defamation.
Patrick Matrisciana of California is on trial for allegations aired in his 1996 documentary Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection, which focuses on the Aug. 23, 1987, deaths of two boys whose bodies were found beside railroad tracks in Saline County.
The hour-long video, shown to jurors in its entirety, contains allegations that the deaths of Kevin Ives, 17, and Don Henry, 16, were murders that various public officials tried to cover up, from local law enforcement officers to state and federal prosecutors to the governor’s office—then occupied by Bill Clinton.
Among the officials named in the video are Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, both now lieutenants for the Pulaski County sheriff’s office. They filed suit in April 1997, saying their reputations were destroyed when the film asserted that they were “implicated” in the murders and ensuing cover-up by unnamed “eyewitnesses.”
The men’s attorney, Darren O’Quinn, told jurors that he will ask them to return “a substantial verdict” against Matrisciana that will send a message that “we are not going to let people get by with making statements that damage people forever.”
Matrisciana is being sued personally and under the names he uses to do business: Citizens for an Honest Government Inc., Integrity Films and Jeremiah Films Inc.
O’Quinn contended in his opening statement that the film, which was produced in a “very professional, very believable” manner, “purports to be a documentary but is nothing but a tabloid-type production” designed to make money during Clinton’s presidential re-election bid.
“It makes allegations of him being involved in a drug conspiracy reaching up to the highest powers of the world,” O’Quinn said of Clinton.
Although the trial isn’t about the boys’ deaths, O’Quinn told jurors that “there have been seven independent local, state and federal investigations on these deaths from the FBI to the U.S. attorney to the Arkansas State Police, and no one has conclusively said that it was a murder.”
The video has sold 300,000 copies at a price ranging from $4 to $19.95 each, he said.
Matrisciana, who also produced a video called The Clinton Chronicles, said from the witness stand that he relied heavily on the diligent research and knowledge of Ives’ mother, Linda Ives, and a former Saline County prosecutor, Jean Duffey.
“They were also very active in writing the script,” he said of the two women, whom he said he believes to be credible.
He said he felt he had to tell their story because he didn’t think the “mainstream media” had done an adequate job of revealing the truth in covering the story.
As proof that some of the public corruption allegations in the film are correct, Matrisciana cited the convictions of former Saline County Prosecutor Dan Harmon on federal racketeering, conspiracy and drug charges.
Matrisciana’s attorney, John Wesley Hall Jr., told jurors that the plaintiffs must show that the film was produced with a reckless disregard for the truth.
To support Matrisciana’s belief that he was reporting the truth, Hall reminded jurors about the outcry that arose after former State Medical Examiner Dr. Fahmy Malak made an initial determination that the boys were killed while sleeping on the tracks in a marijuana-induced stupor. That outcry led to a reopening of the case, through which a Georgia pathologist examined the exhumed bodies and found both boys were killed before being placed on the tracks—Henry by being stabbed in the back and Ives by being hit in the face with a rifle butt.
Hall told jurors that Duffey’s fight to find the boys’ killers while working in an atmosphere of corruption eventually forced her from her position as chief of the county’s drug task force. She now teaches school in Pasadena, Texas.
The film surmises that the boys were killed because while walking along the tracks, they saw a plane fly low and drop a load of drugs that someone was there to retrieve.
The trial is scheduled to last all week before U.S. District Judge Warren Urbom of Lincoln, Neb.
Copyright © 1999, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
Thursday, August 5, 1999
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Slain boy’s mom testifies in libel trial
By Linda Satter
The mother of one of two boys found dead on Saline County railroad tracks nearly 10 years ago, in a case that spawned two grand jury investigations but no arrests, testifies Wednesday in defense of a filmmaker who made a widely distributed video about the case.
Linda Ives, whose son, Kevin Ives, 17, was killed along with his friend Don Henry, 16, testified for three hours on behalf of Patrick Matrisciana of Hemet, Calif., who produced the 60-minute program Obstruction of Justice: the Mena Connection.
It has sold about 300,000 copies.
Two Pulaski County sheriff’s lieutenants, Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, sued Matrisciana in 1997. They contended that he defamed them by mentioning their names at the end of the film, along with four other men, as “suspects implicated in Ives/Henry murders and coverups.”
Campbell and Lane, who as deputies in another jurisdiction didn’t participate in the investigation of the train deaths, blame former Saline County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Harmon for drawing them into the case.
Harmon, now in prison on drug and racketeering convictions arising partly from corrupt acts he performed while in his official capacity, was a private lawyer at the time of the boys’ deaths. But he took a special interest in the case and was appointed a special prosecutor to present the case to a Saline County grand jury,
Testimony this week has revealed that, unknown to the public, Harmon was the target at the time of at least one investigation into drug trafficking
Campbell and Lane, then narcotics deputies who were looking into the allegations about Harmon, contend that he heard about their investigation and cast them as suspects in the train deaths solely to taint their credibility and thwart their investigation.
Ives acknowledged Wednesday that Harmon called her the day before Campbell and Lane were to appear before a grand jury and told her that “the killers” would appear before the grand jury the next day.
Ives said she trusted Harmon at the time, but she has since come to include him among the list of suspects in the boys’ deaths and ensuing coverup. Harmon has denied wrongdoing in the case.
The two lieutenants say Matrisciana had no right to repeat the unsubstantiated, unattributed allegations about them in his nationally distributed video. The video was released in 1996 before Harmon’s convictions.
They say the allegations have damaged their personal and professional reputations.
But Matrisciana, using the First Amendment as a defense, contends that the two sources he relied on to make the film — Linda Ives and a former Saline County deputy prosecutor, Jean Duffey — both believed the video was accurate when they made it. Thus, Matrisciana contends, he cannot be found to have had a “reckless disregard for the truth” and thus be guilty of libel.
Though the case focuses on whether Campbell and Lane were defamed, theories about the boys’ deaths and related events have taken center stage in the week-long federal trial.
Among the information that has emerged is that John Brown, who reopened the investigation as an investigator under a new Saline County sheriff, Judy Pridgen, took a handwritten “confession” in May 1993 from Sharline Wilson, who once dated Harmon.
Though she would later recant her statement, Wilson named Harmon and two other men, one of whom was later killed, as having had a role in beating and stabbing the boys to death before laying their bodies across the tracks. Brown testified Tuesday that he corroborated “85 percent” of what Wilson told him.
Convicted of a drug offense when Harmon was prosecutor, Wilson is serving a 30-year prison sentence. Brown said Wilson’s first time drug offense would normally bring a probation sentence.
Wilson allegedly also “confessed” to lightly stabbing one of the boys while being egged on by men on the railroad tracks whom the boys had allegedly seen coming to retrieve a cargo of drugs that had been dropped that night from a small plane flying to the Mena airport in Crawford County.
Brown said in a sworn affidavit and in his testimony that he never told anyone making the video that Campbell and Lane were suspects in the deaths. Ives insisted that Brown was lying, that he had told her that “over and over,” and that she relied on his assertion while writing the video’s narrative.
Friday, August 6, 1999
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
U.S. Judge to rule on missing witness in defamation case
By Linda Satter
At the center of allegations that two undercover officers participated in the 1987 killings of two Saline County boys is a Little Rock man who left the federal courts building in Little Rock this week with a “scared look” in his eyes and hasn’t been seen since, a defense attorney said Thursday.
John Wesley Hall Jr., who is representing Patrick Matrisciana of Hemet, Calif, in a federal defamation lawsuit, made those assertions Thursday in seeking permission to introduce normally unallowable “hearsay evidence” of what the missing witness, Ronnie Godwin, once said.
U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom of Lincoln, Neb., who is presiding over the trial as a visiting judge, told Hall he would rule on the question as the defense case nears an end, if Godwin still hasn’t been found by a private detective that Hall hired Tuesday.
Godwin had been subpoenaed as a plaintiffs witness but left the courthouse this week after being excused without testifying. Hall said that Godwin claimed to have been “followed” from the building.
Linda Ives, the mother of one of the slain boys, Kevin Ives, 17, testified earlier Thursday that Godwin claimed in 1987 to have seen two men grab Ives and his friend, Don Henry, 16, outside the Ranchette grocery store in Alexander and beat them, then forced them into a police car on the night they were killed. Godwin’s description of the two assailants matched those of Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, then undercover narcotics officers for the Pulaski County sheriffs office.
However, a police report states that Godwin admitted he’d been drinking before stopping at the store where the two boys allegedly ran to a pay telephone to seek help and were grabbed. Police also quoted Godwin’s mother as saying he can’t be believed when he’s been drinking.
Ives testified that she believes Campbell and Lane killed her son and Henry, based on Godwin’s remarks, corroboration from another man named “Gerry” and remarks of John Brown of Mabelvale, a former Saline County detective who looked into the boys’ deaths years later under a new sheriff, Judy Pridgen.
Campbell and Lane, now sheriff’s office lieutenants, are suing Matrisciana for defaming them at the end of a 60-minute videotape, Obstruction of Justice: the Mena Connection, that Matrisciana produced in 1996. The video focuses on the unsolved deaths and some persistent theories that the deaths were committed by, and covered up by, various law enforcement officials.
Brown, while acknowledging that he had heard the “Campbell and Lane scenario,” as the allegations are known, testified this week that he didn’t personally investigate the claims or develop Campbell or Lane as suspects. He said the women knew that, and that he warned Matrisciana that “any such statement was uncorroborated and I did not think there was anything to it. “
Brown said he told the filmmaker that he “should not implicate Jay Campbell or Kirk Lane…. If he makes such statements, he could be sued.”
Matrisciana, sued personally and in names under which he does business — Citizens for an Honest Government, Inc.; Integrity Films; and Jeremiah Films, Inc. — is better known for producing a video called The Clinton Chronicles.
The offending passage in the Obstruction video states: “Eyewitnesses have implicated several people in the murders and subsequent cover-up, including …”
It then lists five names — Campbell, Lane, another officer, former Saline County Prosecutor Dan Harmon (who has also denied the allegations), and a former deputy prosecutor under Harmon.
Campbell and Lane say Harmon tried to paint them as suspects because, unbeknownst to the public at the time, they were investigating drug-trafficking allegations against him, and he had found that out and wanted to discredit them. Harmon is now in prison on drug and racketeering charges.
Brown’s testimony supported that assertion. He said Harmon “sidetracked me to them, and to other people, saying, ‘Have you checked them out?”
Hall asked, “Did he do anything to interfere with your investigation?” Brown replied, “Anything and everything that he could, yes sir.”
Matrisciana’s defense is based on his purported reliance on Ives and a former Saline County deputy prosecutor, Jean Duffey, who was a drug task force leader in Saline County in 1990, and the women’s purported reliance on Brown’s remarks and police reports. They contend the information caused them to believe that what they reported in the video was the truth.
Matrisciana, who said he is “nearly bankrupt,” testified Thursday that despite earlier statements indicating 300,000 copies of the tape had been sold, he has now discovered that just 44,748 videotapes have been sold or distributed, netting gross receipts of $271,835.
The case is expected to go the jury today.
Saturday. August 7, 1999
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Jury ponders whether film is defamatory to 2 lawmen
By Linda Satter
A federal jury was deliberating Friday night on whether a 1996 film about the mysterious 1987 deaths of two boys on Saline County railroad tracks defamed two law enforcement officers.
The 60-minute film, Obstruction of Justice: the Mena Connection, produced by Patrick Matrisciana of Hemet, Calif, states near the end, orally and in writing, that eyewitnesses had implicated six law enforcement officers in the boys’ deaths and an ensuing coverup.
It then names those officers. Among those named are Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, who worked as Pulaski County sheriff’s office narcotics detectives at the time of the boys’ deaths and are now sheriff’s office lieutenants.
Campbell and Lane filed a lawsuit in 1997 against Matrisiciana, who does business under the names Citizens for an Honest Government, Integrity Films and Jeremiah Films, and whose other films have included The Clinton Chronicles.
The deputies contend that in his quest to make money off right-wing conspiracy theories around President Clinton as he sought re-election, Matrisciana made the video, which he called a documentary, on the basis of mere speculation and unfounded allegations.
In a week-long federal trial in Little Rock before a visiting judge, U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom of Lincoln, Neb., Matrisciana’s defense has centered on his First Amendment rights to freedom of expression and his reliance on others who diligently researched the matter.
Those others are primarily Linda Ives, mother of one of the slain boys and a crusader for 12 years to expose those she believes are responsible, and Jean Duffey, who headed a drug task force in Saline County until moving to Texas in 1991 amid unproven accusations of impropriety leveled by Dan Harmon when he was a prosecuting attorney.
The women testified that they believed then, and still believe, that the words in the video are true. They believe that the boys, Ives and Don Henry, 16, were walking along the tracks about 4 a.m. Aug. 23, 1987, when they came upon a small plane dropping a cargo of illegal drugs as it flew without lights about 100 feet off the ground.
Speculation is that the plane was flying to the Polk County town of Mena but couldn’t land with drugs on board.
Linda Ives believes the boys’ inadvertent interruption of a clandestine operation was seen by someone waiting to pick up the drugs, and that the boys, knowing they’d been spotted, ran toward a pay telephone to call for help.
A man who had stopped by the nearby Ranchette grocery store in Alexander after drinking in a bar later reported that he saw the boys head for the phone, but two men grabbed them, beat them and stuffed them into a patrol car, where another officer waited.
Ives believes the boys were killed or at least rendered unconscious before their bodies were placed on the tracks, where a train ran over them.
Taking advantage of the two men’s description, which could have fit Campbell and Lane, Harmon subpoenaed the two officers to appear before a 1988 grand jury investigating the deaths, the officers contend. But first, they say, he spread the word that “the killers” were about to testify.
Campbell and Lane contend that Harmon, now in prison on federal racketeering and drug charges, was simply trying to save himself. Though the public didn’t know it at the time, the two narcotics officers were investigating allegations against Harmon. They contend he found that out and sought to pre-empt them and destroy their credibility, thus ending their investigation.
Though Ives and Duffey both said this week that they grew to disbelieve Harmon before they helped make the video, they insisted they got further corroboration of the “Campbell and Lane scenario” from John Brown.
Brown, a private investigator who had looked into the case as a Saline County detective and appears throughout the film, denied this week that he ever identified Campbell and Lane as the killers. In fact, Brown said, he warned Matrisciana against putting the men’s names in the video.
But Matrisciana and the women contended that Brown had some say-so over the final product and didn’t disagree then. He also bought 300 copies of the video, attorneys said.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Jim Rhodes brought out Friday, during Duffey’s cross-examination, that a second man who had reported being at the grocery store that night, whom Duffey cited as another eyewitness, had himself been arrested by Campbell and Lane.
Duffey acknowledged that she didn’t know about that arrest — and thus the man’s possible motive to invent his “eyewitness account” — when she helped write the video’s narrative.
But she, too, contends that Harmon sought to tarnish her reputation because her officers were learning incriminating information about him. She testified this week that Harmon was falsely accusing her of stealing task-force money and wanted to jail her, to thwart her work, but she got a tip that she would be killed in jail so she became a fugitive by moving to Texas.
Mentioning several police agencies’ failure to solve the murder case, Rhodes asked Duffey if she thought that “any and everybody who has failed to solve this mystery is involved in a mass coverup or conspiracy to protect Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane.”
“I don’t use the word ‘conspiracy,’ but to the rest of your statement, absolutely,” she replied.
Of at least seven investigations by agencies with access to scientific analysis, “none of them have agreed with your beliefs, have they?” Rhodes asked.
Duffey replied that they “amazingly” had not — at least, publicly.
Rhodes then named at least five other scenarios that have circulated about how the boys may have been killed, suggesting that she and Ives simply developed tunnel-vision on the Campbell and Lane theory.
Rhodes suggested that perhaps Duffey and Ives didn’t so much really believe that the two officers killed the boys, but a videotape editor, David Manasian, wanted to add the names to the video as an afterthought, and the two women recklessly allowed the inclusion.
“The bottom line,” Rhodes told jurors in closing arguments, “is there was absolutely no evidence to support what’s in this statement” in the video. He told jurors that “if you don’t find this defamatory, we’re putting our stamp of approval on the right to say anything at any time about anybody, whether it’s corroborated or not.”
Hall argued that even if the statement is wrong, it wasn’t made recklessly and “the truth doesn’t really matter if you can get the question out in the open and bring about free debate…. The public decides what the truth is.”
He also noted that “Linda Ives has every possible motive to get the right person” and therefore wouldn’t name someone she didn’t truly suspect.
Copyright© 1999, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sunday, August 8, 1999,
Benton Courier
Jury begins deliberation in ‘train deaths’ libel trial
By Karon Gregory
COURIER Staff Writer
A U. S. District Court jury deliberated into the evening Friday and will reconvene Monday to decide if a film linking the names of two Pulaski County sheriff’s deputies to the deaths of two Bryant teens constitutes libel.
In 1997, Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell sued filmmaker Patrick Matrisciana individually;. as well as his corporations, U. S. Citizens for an Honest Government, Jeremiah Films and Integrity Films for defamation. The two deputies were implicated in the alleged murders of Don Henry, 16, and Kevin Ives, 17, of Bryant in a film produced by Matrisciana called “Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection.”
At the end of the film, the narration states that several law enforcement officers have been implicated in the alleged murders. Simultaneously, a graphic appears listing six names, including those of Campbell and Lane and former 7th Judicial District Prosecutor Dan Harmon.
The deputies are seeking $16 million in damages.
The boys were found near the Shobe Road crossing of the Union Pacific railroad tracks near Alexander after they were hit by a train at about 4:30 a.m., August 23, 1987. The deaths were ruled accidental by then-state Medical Examiner Fahmy Malak, who said the boys were hit by the train while in a marijuana induced coma.
After Ives’ parents, Linda and Larry Ives, held a press conference and expressed dissatisfaction with how the deaths were handled, a prosecutor’s hearing was held, a second autopsy was done and the deaths were ruled “probable homicides” by a Saline County grand jury in 1988.
Matrisciana’s attorney, John Wesley Hall of Little Rock, rested his case Friday afternoon after five days of testimony. The jury began deliberation s at about 4:10 p.m. without hearing from Ronnie Godwin, a witness Matrisciana had been searching for since Tuesday.
Godwin had told Arkansas State Police detectives investigating the case that at about 2:30. a.m. August 23, 1987, he saw two men he believed were police officers beating two teenagers on the parking lot of the Ranchette Grocery in Alexander. His statement, included in state police files obtained by Ives under the Freedom of Information Act, did not include any identification of the men or the boys.
Hall had wanted to call Godwin to the stand to ask if he could rule out Campbell and Lane as the police officers he saw. He was subpoenaed by attorneys for the two deputies and released Tuesday at noon when his statement had not been brought into question.
The jury was not allowed to hear testimony from Ives about a conversation she had with Godwin Tuesday in which he reportedly said that he “would not answer that question.” Hall said Godwin was followed after court Monday and that he was afraid to testify.
Ives testified that Godwin’s statement is the basis for her belief that the deputies were the killers.
Matrisciana testified he turned over editorial control of the film to Ives and Jean Duffey, a former 7th Judicial District Prosecutor and head of the Drug Task Force who left the state in 1991 after Harmon made several allegations of corruption against her. She was never charged and the allegations were never proven.
Matrisciana had no doubts of their ability to handle the project at any point, he testified.
In order to win the suit, the jury must be convinced that the statements in the video that the deputies were “implicated by eyewitnesses” was false and that Matrisciana acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth when he allowed the video to be distributed.
To meet the legal standard for reckless disregard, Matrisciana, or Ives and Duffey acting on his behalf, would have had to have serious doubts about the truth of the statement, U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom told the jurors in his final instructions.
Ives’ theory of her son’s death contends that Ives and Henry wandered into an area that was used as an airplane drug-drop and that was being staked out by various law enforcement officers, because an earlier drop had gone missing. Some among the officers then beat Ives and Henry, perhaps killing them by accident. Their bodies were then placed on the tracks to cover up evidence of the murder.
Lane and Campbell testified Tuesday they never knew they were suspects in the case and had nothing to do with the deaths. They presented a parade of character witnesses including:
- Richard Stephen Holland, a reserve officer with the Benton Police Department and a close friend of Lane. Holland testified he has had to defend his friendship with Lane because of allegations made in the movie.
- Charlie Collins, a sergeant with the Pulaski County Sheriffs Office. He testified he had discussed the film with both Lane and Campbell, who outrank him, but he does not completely discount the allegations. Those allegations do affect his ability to work with the men, he said.
- James Handley Jr., chief of campus police at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He called the film “garbage.”
- Brian A. Marshal, a 28-year veteran with the FBI. Marshal said he was “shocked” by the allegations in the film and did not believe them.
- Dallas County Sheriff Donny Ford. Ford said he had not seen the video, but that the film ruined any chance Campbell had at a political career.
Lane and Campbell testified to the effects the film has had on their lives. Campbell said he believed the film was a factor in his being passed over for promotion. His law enforcement career has been “absolutely ruined” by the allegations in the film, he said.
Both men said the allegations had affected their credibility in personal relationships, as well as with other officers who did not know them personally and with members of the community. Both testified about discussing the film with extended family members who were disturbed by the allegations.
Campbell said he believes they were implicated by Harmon during a Saline County grand jury investigation into the deaths because they were investigating drug trafficking in which Harmon was allegedly involved in 1988. Harmon, who was between stints as prosecutor of the 7th Judicial District, was appointed as special prosecutor for that grand jury.
He was convicted in 1997 of federal charges of running the 7th Judicial District Drug Task Force as a criminal enterprise. The 7th Judicial District then covered Saline, Grant and Hot Spring counties.
Duffey, who headed that task force before Harmon, testified that he made allegations printed in news stories that eventually resulted in her firing. She believes those allegations were made to discredit her so she would not discover Harmon’s drug trafficking.
Duffey said she took evidence of Harmon’s drug activities gathered by her task force to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1991.
“I was right about Dan Harmon then and I am right about Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell now,” she testified.
Linda Ives testified that Harmon told her early in 1988 that Campbell and Lane fit the description eyewitnesses had given of the killers.
In December of that year, Harmon told her the killers would be called before the grand jury the next day. Campbell and Lane were among those who testified the next day, but they were never named as suspects, Ives testified.
Former Saline County Sheriffs Deputy and Alexander Police Chief John Brown also testified Tuesday. He said he had urged the filmmaker not to include any names in the film, “for a variety of reasons.”
Brown was assigned to review the case when current Sheriff Judy Pridgen took office. A significant portion of the file on the case was missing, Brown testified.
Brown said he first heard the names of Lane and Campbell in connection with the case from either Linda Ives or Herman Reeves, a former constable and current Saline County justice of the peace, who had done some work on the case.
Both Ives and Duffey testified that Brown lied on the stand about wanting to remove names from the film.
Brown told her “over and over” that it was Campbell and Lane who killed the two boys, Ives testified. She said she now believes the two deputies were the “actual hands-on killers” of her son and Henry.
Duffey testified that she was in the courtroom and heard Brown lie on the stand.
Hall introduced a video clip of raw footage that was cut from the final film in which Brown named Lane and Campbell as suspects.
Duffey and Ives both said they are interested in seeing perjury charges filed against Brown.
David Manasian, who edited the tape, testified that Brown gave him the names of Lane and Campbell in a phone conversation. He kept notes on that conversation. Both the handwritten notes and the typed versions were provided as evidence.
Manasian said Brown told him the boys had escaped from Harmon at the tracks and were apprehended by Campbell and Lane at the Ranchette Grocery store. They were placed on the tracks by another law enforcement officer, Manasian said Brown told him.
Sunday, August 8, 1999
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Jurors take weekend off from lawsuit by 2 lawmen
By Linda Satter
A federal jury will resume deliberations Monday on whether a 1996 film about the mysterious 1987 deaths of two boys on Saline County railroad tracks defamed two law enforcement officers.
The 60-minute film, Obstruction of Justice: the Mena Connection, produced by Patrick Matrisciana of Hemet, Calif., states near the end, orally and in writing, that eyewitnesses implicated six law enforcement officers in killing the boys and covering it up.
It then names those officers. Among them are Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, who worked as Pulaski County sheriff’s office drug detectives at the time of the boys’ deaths and are now sheriff’s office lieutenants.
Campbell and Lane filed a lawsuit in 1997 against Matrisciana, who does business under the names Citizens for an Honest Government, Integrity Films and Jeremiah Films, and whose other films have included The Clinton Chronicles.
The deputies contend that in his quest to make money off right-wing conspiracy theories involving President Clinton as he sought reelection, Matrisciana made the video, which he called a documentary, on the basis of mere speculation and unfounded allegations.
Testimony in a week-long federal trial in Little Rock before a visiting judge, U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom of Lincoln, Neb., ended Friday afternoon, and jurors deliberated about 3 hours before deciding to rest for the weekend.
Before adjourning for the day, they asked for a copy of the First Amendment and asked to watch the video again. Urbom told them to adhere to jury instructions on their First Amendment questions, but he gave them the videotape.
Matrisciana’s defense has centered on his First Amendment rights to freedom of expression and his reliance on others who diligently researched the matter.
Those others are primarily Linda Ives, mother of one of the slain boys and a crusader for 12 years to expose those she thinks are responsible, and Jean Duffey, who headed a drug task force in Saline County until moving to Texas in 1991 amid unproven accusations of impropriety leveled by Dan Harmon when he was prosecuting attorney.
The women testified that they believed then, and still believe, that the words in the video are true. They believe that the boys, Ives and Don Henry, 16, were walking along the tracks about 4 a.m. Aug. 23, 1987, when they came upon a small plane dropping a cargo of illegal drugs as it flew without lights about 100 feet off the ground.
Speculation is that the plane was flying to the Polk County town of Mena but couldn’t land with drugs on board.
Linda Ives believes the boys’ inadvertent interruption of a clandestine operation was seen by someone waiting to pick up the drugs, and that the boys, knowing they’d been spotted, ran toward a pay telephone to call for help.
A man who had stopped by the nearby Ranchette grocery store in Alexander after drinking in a bar later reported that he saw the boys head for the phone, but two men grabbed them, beat them and stuffed them into a patrol car, where another officer waited.
Ives believes the boys were killed or at least rendered unconscious before their bodies were placed on the tracks, where a train ran over them.
Taking advantage of the two men’s description, which could have fit Campbell and Lane, Harmon subpoenaed the two officers to appear before a 1988 grand jury investigating the deaths, the officers contend. But first, they say, he spread the word that “the killers” were about to testify.
Campbell and Lane contend that Harmon, now in prison on federal racketeering and drug charges, was simply trying to save himself. Though the public didn’t know it at the time, the two drug officers were investigating allegations against Harmon. They contend he found that out and sought to pre-empt them and destroy their credibility, thus ending their investigation.
Though Ives and Duffey said this week that they grew to disbelieve Harmon before they helped make the video, they insisted they got further corroboration of the “Campbell and Lane scenario” from John Brown.
Brown, a private investigator who had looked into the case as a Saline County detective and appears throughout the film, denied this week that he ever identified Campbell and Lane as the killers. In fact, Brown said, he warned Matrisciana against putting the men’s names in the video.
But Matrisciana and the women contended that Brown had some say-so over the final product and didn’t disagree then. Brown also bought 300 copies of the video, defense attorney John Wesley Hall Jr. noted.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Jim Rhodes brought out Friday, during Duffey’s cross-examination, that a second man who had reported being at the grocery store that night, whom Duffey cited as a corroborating eyewitness, had himself been arrested by Campbell and Lane.
Duffey acknowledged that she didn’t know about that arrest—and thus the man’s possible motive to invent his “eyewitness account”—when she helped write the video’s narrative.
But she, too, contends that Harmon sought to tarnish her reputation because her officers were learning incriminating information about him. She testified this week that Harmon falsely accused her of stealing task-force money and wanted to jail her, to thwart her work, but she got a tip that she would be killed in jail, so she became a fugitive by moving to Texas.
Mentioning several police agencies’ failure to solve the murder case, Rhodes asked Duffey if she thought that “any and everybody who has failed to solve this mystery is involved in a mass cover-up or conspiracy to protect Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane.”
“I don’t use the word ‘conspiracy, ’ but to the rest of your statement, absolutely,” she replied.
Of at least seven investigations by agencies with access to scientific analysis, “none of them have agreed with your beliefs, have they?” Rhodes asked.
Duffey replied that they “amazingly” had not—at least, publicly.
Rhodes then named at least five other scenarios that have circulated about how the boys may have been killed, suggesting that she and Ives simply developed tunnel-vision on the Campbell and Lane theory.
Rhodes suggested that perhaps Duffey and Ives didn’t so much really believe that the two officers killed the boys but that a videotape editor, David Manasian, added the names to the video as an afterthought, and the two women recklessly allowed the inclusion.
“The bottom line,” Rhodes told jurors in closing arguments, “is there was absolutely no evidence to support what’s in this statement” in the video. He told jurors that “if you don’t find this defamatory, we’re putting our stamp of approval on the right to say anything at any time about anybody, whether it’s corroborated or not.”
Hall argued that even if the statement is wrong, it wasn’t made recklessly and “the truth doesn’t really matter if you can get the question out in the open and bring about free debate. … The public decides what the truth is.”
He also noted that “Linda Ives has every possible motive to get the right person” and therefore wouldn’t name someone she didn’t truly suspect.
Copyright © 1999, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, August 10, 1999
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
2 deputies win $598,750 award for defamation
By Linda Satter
A federal jury awarded more than half a million dollars Monday to two Pulaski County sheriff’s lieutenants after finding that a California filmmaker defamed them in a film about the deaths of two Saline County boys in 1987.
After three hours of deliberation Friday, followed by seven hours Monday, the seven-woman, five-man panel returned a unanimous verdict against Patrick Matrisciana of Hemet, Calif.
They found that in his 1996 documentary, Obstruction of Justice: the Mena Connection, Matrisciana libeled veteran sheriff’s deputies Jay Campbell, 38, and Kirk Lane, 37, in accusing them and four other law enforcement officials of murdering the boys and covering it up.
The other officials, also named at the end of the film, have not sued.
Campbell and Lane, through Little Rock attorneys Darren O’Quinn and Jim Rhodes, argued that Matrisciana and his collaborators stated as fact a piece of unfounded gossip spread years earlier by a prosecutor the deputies were investigating. That former prosecutor, Dan Harmon, is now in prison on federal drug and racketeering charges — as a result of later investigations by other law enforcement officers.
Matrisciana and his attorney, John Wesley Hall Jr. of Little Rock, argued that the 60-minute film constituted free speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
As producer, Matrisciana said he wasn’t even aware that the officers’ names were included at the end of the film until after it was made. He said that’s because he was hospitalized during the making of the film, after being attacked by a dog, and because he left the content of the film up to Linda Ives of Benton and Jean Duffey of Pasadena, Texas.
Ives’ son, Kevin, 17, was one of the boys who died. Duffey, a former Saline County prosecutor who headed a drug task force, said she fled Arkansas in 1991 because she heard Harmon planned to arrest her on unfounded charges so she couldn’t investigate him and that she would be killed in jail.
Campbell and Lane, narcotics officers at the time of the boys’ mysterious deaths, contended that Harmon dragged their names into the case to thwart their investigation of him. They say that being named in the film, which has been distributed nationwide, tarnished their reputations.
That reputation, Lane said Monday, “is everything, especially in law enforcement.”
Noting the $200,000 in punitive damages that jurors awarded to each of the officers, Campbell said he believes it was intended as a twofold message.
On the one hand, he said, it means that “even if you’re in law enforcement, you don’t need to sit back and tolerate anybody saying anything about you.” But he said the verdict also makes clear to Matrisciana that “you can’t turn your company over to people that have imaginations like Jean Duffey and not be liable … and then sit back and say, ‘it’s not my fault.’ “
In addition to the punitive damages, jurors awarded compensatory damages of $109,750 to Campbell and $89,000 to Lane, for a total of $598,750.
Matrisciana, who is better known for his 1994 film, The Clinton Chronicles, said he saw the “incredible” verdict as an indirect method of punishing him for that earlier film, which was unfavorable to the president — the state’s former governor.
“In Arkansas, I believe it’s almost impossible for me to have a fair trial, but I do believe justice will prevail,” Matrisciana said. Noting that he still has a motion pending before the judge to dismiss the case for lack of grounds, he said an appeal will follow if that motion is denied. “We’re not going to give up. We’re going to fight every inch of the way.” Matrisciana said.
Even if he loses his appeals, Matrisciana said, he cannot pay the verdict.
“They think I’m such a big, rich Hollywood film producer, but I have six employees. … We’re a little mom and pop operation. … We don’t have the money. I live in a mobile home in the desert,” he said. However, he acknowledged that the mobile home is on a large spread of land that he owns.
He said if he had it to do over again, he still would make the film. But, he conceded with a laugh, “I’m not sure I would put the names in.”
Like Matrisciana, Duffey said after the verdict that “I think the jury had a problem applying the law correctly.”
“I think they understood what the facts are,” she said. “I think they might have been concerned because we didn’t present the evidence in our film before we named the officers.” But, she quickly added, that was “OK, as long as we knew we could back up the accusations.”
The film stated that “eyewitnesses have implicated” the officers.
But questions were raised during the trial about the reliability of one of those men, who was frequently drunk, as well as whether the other eyewitness even existed.
Duffey testified that during a conversation with her while he was in prison, a third man had corroborated that the second eyewitness not only existed, but had described seeing the two officers assault the boys. But Rhodes and O’Quinn noted that the third man had been arrested by Campbell and Lane, and thus may have had a motive to lie.
Kevin Ives and Don Henry, 16, were found dead on railroad tracks in Alexander on Aug. 23, 1987. Though their deaths were initially found to be accidental, caused by a drug-induced sleep, a grand jury eventually overturned that finding and determined the boys were victims of a homicide.
The film contended that the boys were killed, and then laid on the tracks so the train would run over them and destroy evidence, because they unwittingly witnessed a clandestine aerial drug drop in which law enforcement officers were involved.
Because Campbell and Lane were considered “public figures,” they had a higher burden to meet to prove their case than had they been average citizens.
First, jurors had to find that the defamatory statements “were published with knowledge that one or more of them were false” or were published with “reckless disregard” for the truth.
“Recklessness” implies a higher degree of culpability than “negligence,” which would have applied had the men not been public figures.
Second, the “reckless disregard” had to be proven by “clear and convincing evidence” as opposed to the lesser standard of “preponderance of the evidence.”
And because the case was tried in federal court, the verdict had to be unanimous — which wouldn’t have applied in state court.
Copyright © 1999, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, August 10, 1999
Benton Courier
Deputies defamed, jury says
By Karon Gregory
Courier Staff Writer
A U.S. District Court jury determined Monday that a film connected to the deaths of two Bryant teen-agers defamed two Pulaski County deputies.
The jury deliberated 11 hours before determining Lt. Kirk Lane and Lt. Jay Campbell should be compensated almost $6 million for the damage done to their reputations by the film ”Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection.”
The deputies had sought more than 26 times that amount—$16 million in damages. However, they said they are more than satisfied that their names have been cleared.
Lane was awarded $289,000 in punitive and compensatory damages and Campbell was awarded $309,750. Filmmaker Patrick Matrisciana is to pay 25 percent of the damages. His company, Integrity Films, and its parent company, Citizens for an Honest Government, are to pay 75 percent of the damages. Jeremiah Films, also named in the suit, was not ordered to pay damages.
Matrisciana’s attorney, John Wesley Hall, said he planned to enter a motion for a directed verdict from Judge Warren K. Urbom. Urbom, who heard the case, was not in Little Rock Monday. The verdict was heard by Judge James R. Moody shortly before 5 p.m. About 4 p.m. the jury foremen sent a message to Moody, saying the jury had agreed the deputies had proven their case and the jury had arrived at amounts for compensatory damages, but not made a determination on punitive damages. Compensatory damages reimburse actual losses, while punitive damages punish wrongdoing. Each deputy received $200,000 in punitive damages.
Campbell and Lane sued Matrisciana and his corporations in 1997 over a single line in the film. Accompanied by a graphic, the narration said the two were “implicated” by “eye witnesses” in the: deaths of Kevin Ives, 17, and Don Henry, 16, of Bryant.
Matrisciana gave control of the project to Linda Ives, mother of Kevin Ives, and Jean Duffey, former head of the now-disbanded Seventh Judicial District Drug Task Force.
The boys were found on railroad tracks near Alexander after they were hit by a Union Pacific train about 4:30 a.m. Aug. 23, 1987. The deaths were ruled accidental by then-state Medical Examiner Fahmy Malak, who said the boys were hit by the train while in a marijuana-induced coma. After Linda Ives and husband Larry held a press conference and expressed dissatisfaction with how the deaths were handled. a prosecutor’s hearing was held, a second autopsy was done and the deaths were ruled homicides by a 1988 Saline County grand jury.
Campbell and Lane testified last week they never knew they were suspects in the case and they had nothing to do with the deaths. At the time of the deaths, they were off duty, their work records show. Campbell said they were “probably asleep.” They also presented a parade of character witnesses including:
- Richard Stephen Holland, a reserve officer with the Benton Police Department and a close friend of Lane;
- Charlie Collins, a sergeant with the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office;
- James Handley Jr., chief of University of Arkansas, Little Rock Police;
- Brian A. Marshal, a 28- year veteran with the FBI; and
- Dallas County Sheriff Donny Ford.
Campbell said he had considered a run for sheriff of Garland County, but the allegations in the film would make a political race “humiliating” for his family, he testified. Campbell’s brother and Lane’s wife testified about the effects the allegations have had on the family lives of the deputies.
Campbell said he believes they were “implicated” by former 7th Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Dan Harmon because they were investing drug trafficking Harmon was allegedly involved in while a 1988 Saline County grand jury was investigating the deaths. Harmon was appointed special prosecutor for that grand jury. He was convicted in 1997 of running the 7th Judicial Drug Task Force as a criminal enterprise.
Duffey testified Harmon made allegations about her in news stories that eventually resulted in her firing. She said she believes those allegations were made to discredit her so she would not discover Harmon’s drug trafficking. She took drug-activity evidence gathered by her task force to the U.S. attorney’s office in 1990.
Linda Ives testified that Harmon told her early in 1988 that Campbell and Lane fit the description of the killers. In December of that year, she said he told her the killers would be called before the grand jury the next day. Campbell and Lane were among those who testified the next day. He never named the deputies as suspects, Ives testified.
Former Saline County sheriffs deputy John Brown testified that he had urged the film maker not to include any names in the film, “for a variety of reasons.” Brown was assigned to review the case when Sheriff Judy Pridgen took office in 1993. A significant portion of the file on the case was missing, Brown testified.
Brown said he first heard of Campbell and Lane in connection with the case from either Linda Ives or Herman Reeves, a former constable who had done some work on the case and now a Saline County justice of the peace.
Ives and Duffey both testified that Brown lied on the stand about wanting to remove names from the film.
Brown told her “over and over” that it was Campbell and Lane who killed the two boys, Linda Ives testified. She said she now believes the two deputies were the “actual hands-on killers” of her son and Henry, based on the 14- volume Arkansas State Police file on the murders.
Duffey testified that she was in the courtroom and heard Brown lie on the stand.
Hall introduced a video clip, cut from the final film, in which Brown named Campbell and Lane as suspects in 1994. Duffey and Ives both said they want perjury charges filed against Brown. They have turned their files over to the Department of Justice.
David Manasian, who edited the tape, testified that Brown gave him the deputies’ names in a phone conversation. He kept notes on that conversation that he later typed. Both the handwritten notes and the typed version were provided as evidence.
Manasian said Brown told him the boys had escaped from Harmon at the tracks and were apprehended by Campbell and Lane at the grocery store. That theory has the boys placed on the tracks by another law enforcement officer.
Hall rested his case Friday afternoon and the jury began deliberations about 4:10 p.m. without hearing from Ronnie Godwin. Godwin allegedly told Arkansas State Police investigators that he saw two men he believed were police officers beating two teen-agers on the parking lot of the Ranchette Grocery in Alexander about 2:30 a.m. the day of the deaths. His statement, included in State Police files obtained by Ives under the Freedom of Information Act, did not include any identification of the men or the boys.
Hall wanted to call Godwin to the stand to ask if he could rule out Campbell and Lane as those two men. Godwin was subpoenaed by the deputies’ attorneys and released Tuesday at noon when his statement had not yet been questioned. Hall retained a private investigator who was not able to find Godwin by Friday afternoon.
The jury was not allowed to hear Ives’ testimony about Godwin reportedly telling her Tuesday that he “would not answer that question.” Hall said Godwin was followed after court Monday and that he was afraid to testify. Matrisciana said that was because many people connected with the investigation of the deaths, including the film’s main cameraman, have also died. No charges have ever been filed in the alleged murders and the case remains open but inactive.
Friday, August 27, 1999
Arkansas Times
The Lingering Pall
News and Politics
Opinion
By Mara Leveritt
The trial earlier this month, in which two former Pulaski County narcotics detectives accused a filmmaker of libeling them, served as a sad reminder of how justice, once miscarried, will keep on dispensing its grief so long as the untreated wound remains open.
For central Arkansas, the case that recently passed through court represented yet another example of how questions lingering from a crime can contaminate even the present.
This latest situation arose when two Pulaski County sheriff’s deputies, Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, sued California filmmaker Patrick Matrisciana after Matrisciana identified them as murder suspects in a video he produced. The film, “Obstruction of Justice,” detailed the bizarre—and still unsolved—deaths of Kevin Ives and Don Henry, two Saline County teenagers who, one night 12 years ago this month, were found run over by a train. The video alleged that “eyewitnesses” had “implicated” a number of people in the boys’ murders, including Campbell and Lane. Linda Ives, the mother of one of the victims, and Jean Duffey, a former deputy prosecutor in the district, testified in behalf of Matrisciana. They explained that he had relied on them for information about the case, and that their own conclusion, after examining the results of multiple, failed investigations, was that the film’s allegation was correct. They believed that officers of the law were involved in both the crime and its cover-up, and they hoped that now, after a dozen years of frustration at the hands of public officials, the jury would agree.
But on the specific question before it—whether the video had libeled Lane and Campbell—the jury was not convinced. It found that the evidence presented at trial did not support the video’s damning allegation and it ruled that Matrisciana owed the men a retraction plus sizable damages.
I was called as a witness because, in writing a book about the deaths, I had worked closely with Ives and Duffey and had dealt with much of the same information that Matrisciana had had to handle. I testified that, although I knew that Ives and Duffey believed the deputies were suspects, I did not repeat that allegation in my book.
What I did report was that, at a time when Dan Harmon, the district’s once popular former prosecutor, was conducting a grand jury into the deaths, he had made a show of calling Lane and Campbell to testify. Few who followed the proceeding could fathom why. Privately, Harmon told Ives that a witness had identified Lane and Campbell as suspects in the murders. When I interviewed Campbell about the episode, he told me that he and Lane believed that Harmon’s decision to subpoena them was nothing more than self-serving courtroom theater.
As Campbell explained it, Harmon knew, back in 1988, what the general public did not: that Harmon was being investigated for drug violations by a team that included federal agents, members of the state police—and the two Pulaski County detectives. Campbell’s theory was that, by calling him and Lane to appear, Harmon was trying to discredit them as a hedge against his own possibly impending indictment. Campbell figured that if Harmon were brought up on drug charges, he planned to claim that he was being targeted by a crooked pair of cops whom he was investigating for murder. A fiction writer might have a hard time selling such a plot. But in Saline County, when reasonable explanations fail, conspiracy theories fill the void. They’re a poor substitute for justice, but in this case, they’re all anyone has got.
Whatever was going on back in the late 1980s, the multi-agency investigation into Harmon’s drug activity—just like Harmon’s investigation into the murders—quietly and utterly fizzled. Several years would pass before Harmon’s involvement with the local drug underworld would finally be exposed.
He’s now serving time in prison, but getting rid of him, unfortunately, did nothing to clear up the questions that still buzz around his most famous murder case. And the recent libel case shed no light on it, either.
This assessment does not absolve Matrisciana. Massive wrongs should not be compounded. But the fact is they often are. Just as rotting flesh tends to attract maggots, corruption in civil authority tends to breed confusion, cynicism and contempt. Such a haze still envelops this case.
But we have more than Harmon to thank. If, a dozen years ago, county officials had conducted a decent investigation into the two boys’ deaths, if state officials had not botched their every contact with the case, or if the FBI had given a single straight answer once it became involved, the circle of grief that surrounds these killings never would have widened so. Everyone would have been spared, not only the endless conspiracy theories, but the trauma of speculation.
Copyright 1996, 1997, 1998 Arkansas Writers’ Project, Inc.
Evidence the Jury Was Not Allowed to See
A Turning Point in the Trial
Matrisciana’s attorney, John Hall scheduled Brown’s deposition through the attorney of Campbell and Lane as Brown was now their witness. However, Brown was a no-show, and I chronicled the follow-up of that day in the below article, “John Brown: The Witness Nobody Wants.”
Matrisciana filmed his response to Brown in the video clip below. The video clip was made before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the jury’s decision and found that there was ample evidence to name Campbell and Lane as suspects. See excerpts from the Eighth Circuit Opinion.
Overturning of Verdict
July 10, 2001
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision and noted ample evidence to support the allegation. There was very little coverage of the reversal by local media – only an Associated Press article buried in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Benton Courier.
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
Associated Press
Appeals court rejects libel judgment
By Kelly P. Kissel Associated Press Writer
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)—A federal appeals court Tuesday threw out a defamation judgment against a filmmaker critical of former President Clinton, saying one of the conspiracy-laden videos blurred the line between fact and fiction, but two sheriffs deputies mentioned in the film had no standing to sue.
In dismissing a $598,750 judgment against Patrick Matrisciana, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis wrote that it was not saying he was ethical or fair in his documentary about the railroad track deaths of two Saline County teen-agers.
The video, “Obstruction of Justice: the Mena Connection,” focused on the unsolved deaths of Kevin Ives and Don Henry. In the documentary, Pulaski County sheriff’s Lts. Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane were listed among six law enforcement officers that alleged eyewitnesses said could be implicated “in the murders and the subsequent cover-up.”
The court said the sheriffs lieutenants were public figures and had to prove Matrisciana knew the information was false or that he was reckless in weighing information presented in the film.
Ives and Henry were found dead in 1987 after being hit by a train while laying on the tracks. Their deaths were initially ruled accidental due to marijuana intoxication, but after a second autopsy and a lawsuit filed by Ives’ parents, the deaths were ruled homicides.
“As the theory goes, they were first killed and their bodies then laid on the tracks to make their deaths appear accidental,” the court wrote.
Matrisciana’s defense at his trial centered on his right to freedom of expression.
He said that, according to his research, the boys were walking down the train tracks about 4 a.m. on Aug. 23, 1987, when they came upon a small plane dropping a cargo of illegal drugs as it flew without lights 100 feet from the ground. A witness reported seeing the boys seized by two men, and their bodies were found after they had been run over by a train.
Various conspiracy theories floated during the Clinton administration suggested that illegal drugs were routinely flown into the airport at Mena in western Arkansas during the 1980s and that Clinton, then Arkansas’ governor, knew about it but did nothing to combat it. Matrisciana, who also produced “The Clinton Chronicles,” which took a highly critical view of the former president, said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles that justice had been served.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Linda's Letter to the Benton Courier
Monday, July 16, 2001
The Courier did not consider this newsworthy
Next month will mark the 14th anniversary of the murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry. Years ago, a Benton Courier editor noted that the “train deaths” file, as the case became known, was the largest ever compiled by the paper. The murders were covered by local, state, national and international news media and thousands of newspaper articles were written about the murders. The murders were also the subject of many television shows over the years, including Dateline NBC in 1992.
In 1993 a witness contacted me and told me he had been an eyewitness on the tracks the night of the murders. He claimed a high ranking elected Saline County official was one of the persons present on the tracks the night Kevin and Don were murdered. The witness was taken to FBI headquarters where he passed an FBI polygraph test and was immediately placed into protective custody by the FBI. This witness’s testimony corroborated information the FBI had obtained from yet another eyewitness who placed this same official on scene of the murders.
In 1995 I was devastated and outraged when FBI officials told me and my husband Larry that they were not certain that a crime had even been committed. I was convinced that officials would not allow the crime to be solved because of connections the case had to a government sanctioned drug smuggling operation based in Mena, Arkansas.
I decided to go to go public with details never published anywhere. In May of 1996 a documentary video was released by Integrity Films entitled “Obstruction of Justice – the Mena Connection”. The narrator of the video states that eyewitnesses have implicated several people in the murders and subsequent cover-up including Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane who were Pulaski County narcotics officers at the time of the murders.
In 1998, Campbell and Lane sued the video’s producer, Pat Matrisciana and Integrity Films for defamation. The case went to trial in August of 1999 and was covered extensively by the Benton Courier. It was the Courier’s lead story for 8 days, and on August 10th when the jury found for Campbell and Lane and awarded them nearly $600,000.00, the Benton Courier’s three and half inch banner headline screamed:
“DEPUTIES DEFAMED JURY SAYS.”
I knew that the statements in the video were not only true, they were documented. I also knew that the jury was not allowed to hear or view all of the evidence. The verdict was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and all of the evidence was reviewed by 5 federal judges.
On July 10, 2001 the ruling came down. The Court reversed and dismissed the case stating that there are eyewitnesses who implicate Campbell and Lane in the murders or cover-up. They further stated that Campbell and Lane failed to prove that the statement was false and that Pat Matrisciana had not acted recklessly in relying on the investigation done by myself and Jean Duffey, a former Saline County Deputy Prosecutor and former head of the 7th Judicial Drug Task Force.
The Benton Courier was faxed the entire 26 page Court ruling but apparently did not consider it newsworthy. No front page banner headlines that there are eyewitnesses implicating county officials or law enforcement in one of the biggest murder cases in Saline County. No sir, they didn’t even bother to write a story about it – they simply buried the AP article on page 5. And what was newsworthy and on page 1 of the Benton Courier that day? A large photo of a downtown business putting out a fern plant in preparation for a sidewalk sale. There was also an article about a new area code in Northwest Arkansas.
Wake up Courier – this is why I and many other Saline County residents look for news somewhere besides the Benton Courier.
Linda Ives