“I James Harry Reyos, am innocent in the killing (of) Denver City Priest Patrick Ryan,” read a letter to the editor he wrote that appeared in the Odessa American in 1983. “I did not kill Father Ryan. I am innocent!”
Reyos was referring to the 1981 murder of a closeted Catholic priest named Father Patrick Ryan, who was found murdered in a seedy motel in Odessa; the crime scene suggested a brutal act of “overkill.”
Despite being out of the state at the time of the crime, Reyos, then a 23-year-old, out-of-work oil engineer who was last seen with Ryan, was charged with the priest’s murder a year later and convicted to a 38-year sentence.
Due to Reyos also being closeted, as well as being a Native American man, he was seen as a “throwdown character” due to his sexuality and race as the prosecution used those characteristics to exploit rampant homophobia and racism.
In fact, one unidentified juror in the trial called the Odessa American themselves on June 11, 1983 to tell the newspaper the jury’s decision to convict Reyos was “based on his confession and characteristics.”
Now, decades later, the case along with new evidence and suspects is at the forefront of the documentary “Night in West Texas,” which is premiering this Sunday in Brownsville during the 32nd annual CineSol Film Festival.
Behind the film is Peabody and Critic’s Choice-winning journalist Deborah S. Esquenazi, a director and screenwriter that has also been nominated twice for an Emmy, and embeds with the Innocence Project as they forge a “rare alliance” with law enforcement to rebuild Reyos’ case.
The 48-year-old from Houston also made the critically acclaimed documentary “Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four,” which helped exonerate the four women — Anna Vasquez, Cassandra Rivera, Elizabeth Ramirez and Kristie Mayhugh — as well as having the film mentioned in the opening passages of their writs of habeas corpus in ex parte.
While working on that documentary 10 years ago, Esquenazi explained that she was also embedded with the Innocence Project of Texas for that specific case and due to its success in helping exonerate the San Antonio women, she said they wanted to see if they could do it again since exonerations are extremely rare in Texas.
“Anything that these lawyers and advocates can do to uplift a profile of a defendant is going to help them, right?” Esquenazi said. “So over the years after making that film, they brought me cases — they’re all really heartwrenching.”
Reyos’ case came across Esquenazi’s desk when one of the lawyers with the Innocence Project insisted she look at the case due to its rare circumstances.
“At the time I joined the team obviously as a documentarian to embed myself, [James] had been waiting 40 years for his freedom, so I just thought I could help and I thought I could tell a story that he would be proud of,” she explained. “Most importantly, when I met him, he asked me … ‘Would you be willing to do this,’ and so I decided to take it on.”
But the hope of exoneration is one part of it. The other crucial aspect to Esquenazi is being able to tell a queer story from her home state, especially since stories like Reyos’ are important ones to share because “we don’t really hear the point of views of queer Apache and queer Indigenous folks as much.”
Being a gay Apache man during the 1980s in a small, oil-rich West Texas town, Esquenazi elaborated further how Reyos’ story is extremely relevant to the queer experience specifically during that decade and the 1990s.
“I wanted to play with the essence of myth and folklore, which I did in ‘Southwest of Salem’ because their case was part of the satanic panic and also a queer case,” she said. “With James Harry Reyos, he was sort of subject to a multifaceted campaign against him because of his queerness but also because he was indigenous.”
During that time, Reyos was an oil engineer and struggling with addiction, which coalesced to make a difficult life for him; he also knew Father Ryan and was the last person on record to see the victim alive.
“I can’t imagine a world where one day I see somebody and the next day this person is brutally murdered,” she said. “I became really compelled and curious about all the layers and that really also motivates the story.”
From John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” and John Steinbeck’s essays on the struggles of living in Dust Bowl-era poverty, in addition to a plethora of different forms of film and literature, to feminist queer performance art from the 70s and even Judeo-Christianity (which refers to having historical roots in both Judaism and Christianity), Esquenazi explained she could cast an “extremely wide net” of the influences on her work.
“Being a lesbian who grew up in the 80s and came of age in the 80s with a family member who was very close to me died from AIDS, the reality was we were depicted — because we were gay — as deviants,” Esquenazi explained as she discussed her personal experience also as an inspiration. “Deviancy was considered a reason to be guilty whether or not you did anything — whether or not you breathed, you were a problem.”
Those influences — the notions of guilt and innocence, mythology, folklore, truth versus justice, evil versus sacred — and their paradox as well as the way they interact with each other are questions Esquenazi tries to bring along.
“I think that’s one of the things that is so extraordinary about James is, you watch this individual who has suffered for 40 years … watching every iteration of a path to whether your life is gonna be saved or not, in one moment what does it feel like? What does it look like? And I couldn’t possibly understand that,” she expressed. “But I can understand the feeling of always being treated as a problem or always being treated as something that people had to question because of the way gender and sexuality have been viewed.”
This brings to light something rare in Reyos’ case; the fact that it wasn’t a queer advocacy team that reopened his case to help him. Instead, it was a conservative police chief of a small conservative town.
Odessa Police Chief Mike Gerke reopened Reyos’ case following his daughter-in-law raising questions about the conviction after listening to an episode from the popular true-crime podcast “Crime Junkie.”
In the re-investigation, Gerke uncovered a massive oversight where latent bloody fingerprints from the scene had never been processed through a technology that didn’t exist in the 80s. Through AFIS, or Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the prints led to the discovery of three suspects and thus movement toward Reyos’ battle to clear his name.
“I always say to my students when I’m teaching … there’s no such thing as easy villains and there’s no such thing as easy heroes,” Esquenazi said. “It’s very easy to say everybody is homophobic — everybody in our state is homophobic — well that’s not true.”
Pointing to her own home in Austin where she’s happily raising two children with her wife as well as the “extraordinary humans” on the frontlines fighting for trans folks getting their rights back and queer people receiving the platforms they deserve, Esquenazi says “sometimes we find heroes in not the most expected places, and that sort of is also part of the story.”
As with any story, there’s the crucial component of characters. And according to Esquenazi’s belief, “great movies are about great characters.”
There’s Reyos, who Esquenazi describes when we meet him on-screen as very quiet and a “shaken human” due to the yearslong trauma he has endured.
Then, the audience meets the Innocence Project of Texas’ Deputy Director Allison Clayton — who Esquenazi views as a “spitfire Texan in the vein of a Molly Ivins or an Ann Richards” (in fact, she frequently says Clayton will be the governor of Texas one day).
“I’m worried that you’re not going to survive long enough for me to have a hearing for you,” Clayton tells Reyos through a phone call in the film’s trailer.
“I’ve waited 40 plus years, I can wait however much longer,” Reyos responds, prompting an emotionally moved Clayton to cup her face with her hand.
While Reyos is the main character the audience follows, Esquenazi explained the procedural parts are through Clayton.
“One of the things you will discover is they are both sort of a foil for each other,” Esquenazi says. “I just found as a filmmaker — you want your characters to also have complexities and layers, but you want them to be vulnerable and … honest, right? You need them to be extremely present for you when the cameras are rolling and I just thought that the two together — you couldn’t have dreamed up a better quote-unquote ‘cast.’”
However, audiences should not expect your run-of-the-mill procedural, or even documentary. Amid the intimate moments between the characters, there are also certain surprises to “Night in West Texas” — a major one you’ll have to go see for yourself.
“Night in West Texas” will be screened Sunday afternoon at Texas Southmost College Set B, located at 711 Ringgold Road in Brownsville. Tickets are $6.50 and available to purchase at cinesol.com
Back in mid-November, the Academy announced various documentaries eligible for an Oscar this year, which included “Night in West Texas.” Though campaigning is costly, when asked about the possibility of her film making the shortlist and maybe even nominated, Esquenazi quipped “if it happens I’ll be the first to scream my head off.”
“As much as everybody s**** on the state, there’s a lot that I really love about it and I’ll be damned if people just keep s******* on it because I keep seeing these moments of extraordinary grace and beauty,” Esquenazi said in closing. “I feel sometimes I can’t even handle why everybody is so constantly not seeing the beauty in it. This was an opportunity for me because I was sensing a sort of tide or shift in the way the political atmosphere was feeling.
“I want to tell a story that is not your obvious story here (in Texas) and this was an opportunity.”