Just In!
Night in West Texas director Deborah S. Esquenazi will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 p.m. show on Wednesday, Dec. 10 at the Noho and on Thursday, Dec. 11 at the Royal.
Night in West Texas
Night in West Texas
In 1981, Father Patrick Ryan, a closeted Catholic priest, was found murdered in a seedy motel in a West Texas boomtown. The crime scene suggested a brutal act of “overkill.” A year later, a 23-year-old out-of-work oil engineer, James Harry Reyos, who was the last person seen with the victim, was charged with the priest’s murder. James was convicted to a 38-year sentence, despite the fact that he was out of the state at the time of the crime.
Law enforcement in the oil-rich town of Odessa, Texas, knew they were targeting an innocent man, but James was seen as a “throwdown character”—he was closeted and Native American, two characteristics that the prosecution used to exploit rampant homophobia and racism locally.
But times had changed when forty years later under a new Odessa Police Department, Chief Mike Gerke, reopened Reyos’ case when his daughter-in-law, a true-crime podcast fan, raised questions about the conviction after listening to an episode of “Crime Junkie.” Gerke’s re-investigation uncovered a massive oversight: latent bloody fingerprints from the scene had never been processed through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System), technology that didn’t exist in the 1980s. After reinvestigating the prints, three suspects emerge to breathe new life into Reyos’s battle to clear his name.
NIGHT IN WEST TEXAS, a feature documentary by Peabody & Critic’s Choice-winning journalist Deborah S. Esquenazi, embeds with the Innocence Project as they forge a rare alliance with the Chief of Police and the District Attorney’s office to rebuild James’s case, despite the slim odds of exonerations granted to defendants in the State of Texas. Will James win and live free after 40 years?
Law enforcement in the oil-rich town of Odessa, Texas, knew they were targeting an innocent man, but James was seen as a “throwdown character”—he was closeted and Native American, two characteristics that the prosecution used to exploit rampant homophobia and racism locally.
But times had changed when forty years later under a new Odessa Police Department, Chief Mike Gerke, reopened Reyos’ case when his daughter-in-law, a true-crime podcast fan, raised questions about the conviction after listening to an episode of “Crime Junkie.” Gerke’s re-investigation uncovered a massive oversight: latent bloody fingerprints from the scene had never been processed through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System), technology that didn’t exist in the 1980s. After reinvestigating the prints, three suspects emerge to breathe new life into Reyos’s battle to clear his name.
NIGHT IN WEST TEXAS, a feature documentary by Peabody & Critic’s Choice-winning journalist Deborah S. Esquenazi, embeds with the Innocence Project as they forge a rare alliance with the Chief of Police and the District Attorney’s office to rebuild James’s case, despite the slim odds of exonerations granted to defendants in the State of Texas. Will James win and live free after 40 years?
Genre
Documentary
Runtime
83
Language
English
Director
Deborah S Esquenazi
Cast
James Harry Reyos,
Allison Clayton,
Carlos Patino
Night in West Texas Get Tickets
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