ABOUT THE FILM

LOGLINE

Forty years after a gay Apache man is framed for the brutal murder of a closeted Catholic priest, a police chief uncovers long-buried evidence that shakes up the small, oil-rich West Texas town that imprisoned him.

LONG SYNOPSIS

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?

Director Deborah S. Esquenazi

Producers Daniel J. Chalfen, Adrienne Collatos, James Costa

Executive Producers Scott Brown, Megan Creydt, Jim Butterworth, Trevor Burgess, Gary Hess, Ken Nolan, Christina Nolan

Editor Liz Perlman

Cinematographers Maria Forsythe, Deborah S. Esquenazi, Rachel Mueller, E.J. Enríquez, Mike Attie, Rachel Anderson

Sound Marcelo Teson

Cast James Harry Reyos, Allison Clayton, Carlos Patino
A Texas Monthly presentation of a Myth of Monsters / Naked Edge Films production

FESTIVALS
2025: Dallas International (World Premiere), Frameline, NewFest

AVAILABLE TERRITORIES
The World

EXHIBITION FORMATS
DCP, Digital Download