On the other hand: the physical evidence was real. The rifle purchase under a false name by Jo Ann Harrelson was real. The recorded conversations involving Jimmy Chagra were real. The testimony of Joe Chagra was subjected to cross-examination and apparently credited by the jury that heard it. The conviction was affirmed by appellate courts that examined the specific claims of procedural unfairness. Woody’s belief that his father was wrongly convicted is his belief; the legal system’s conclusion is its conclusion.
The question of what the relationship between father and son actually contained — beneath the public statements and the documented visits and the appeal funding — is another thing that remains genuinely beyond the reach of the public record. What it felt like, from the inside, to be the son of a man who killed people for money; what the conversations in the prison visiting room were actually about; what the two men who shared a birthday and a surname and apparently considerable natural charm found in each other that was worth sustaining across twenty-five years of prison walls — these are things that only Woody Harrelson knows.
He has given interviews about it across four decades. He has said what he chose to say. The rest is his.
The story of Charles Voyde Harrelson ends in a cell at ADX Florence in 2007, with the conviction intact and the appeals exhausted and the biography of a man who killed people for money fully documented in the federal criminal record. The story of Woody Harrelson continues — in the films he continues to make, in the life he lives in Maui with his wife and daughters, in the public positions he holds on marijuana and hemp and environmental issues, in the career that has produced three Oscar nominations and eight Emmy nominations and one of the most varied bodies of work in contemporary American acting.