Lorri Davis agonized over the first letter she wrote to Damien Echols, in April 1996, a couple of weeks after she’d seen him in the documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. The film, about three 8-year-old Cub Scouts found dead in a West Memphis, Arkansas, ditch—and the three teen boys accused of murdering them—was showing as part of a film festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.