It was May 5,
1993. There were three victims, Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and
Michael Moore, three eight-year old friends out playing together in the
late afternoon in West Memphis, Arkansas. They were abducted, probably
at twilight, tortured and then discarded in a wooded area next to the
highway known as Robin Hood Hills. Their bodies were found submerged in
a creek the next day, naked and hog-tied with their own shoelaces.
Christopher bled to death from being mutilated; Michael and Steve, still
alive despite severe head injuries, drowned.
Having had no previous
experience with this type of murder, the West Memphis Police Department
allowed potential evidence to be destroyed at the site where the
victims' bodies were found. In the brief video tape made at the crime
scene, many unauthorized people can be seen walking around the bodies
and Chief Investigator Gary Gitchell can be seen smoking a cigarette.
A
local juvenile probation officer was present when the bodies were
discovered. For years, he had been following the activities of a local
teenager named Damien Echols and his first instinct was that the moody,
dark haired teen was responsible. In fact, he and a police officer
agreed that Damien was "the only person who was capable" of
committing such a crime.
It seems both men instantly determined that the
triple homicide had actually been a Satanic ritual human sacrifice.
There was no evidence of any "cult" activity in the woods or
surrounding areas, and the investigating officers found nothing
incriminating when they visited Damien at his home the next day.
On June
3, 1993, the police questioned mentally handicapped, 17-year-old Jessie
Misskelley. They assured him that he was not a suspect and that they
only wanted to question him. Jessie passed a lie detector test but was
informed by the police that he failed it. The police then interrogated
Jessie for nearly 12 hours, but only fragments totalling nearly 46
minutes were recorded. No one will ever know what transpired when the
recorder was off but within the taped sections, Jessie finally
implicated Damien.
At first displaying an obvious unfamiliarity with
circumstances of the murders, Jessie was coached throughout the
interrogation by Inspector Gary Gitchell and Detective Bryn Ridge to
agree with their version of the events. Jessie finally managed to not
only corroborate the unfounded suspicions that the police had of Damien,
but he implicated himself and Damien's best friend, Jason Baldwin, too.
Jessie was arrested that evening and a few hours later, so were Jason
and Damien.
Long before the trials began, portions of Jessie's
statements to the police were leaked to the press and reported on the
front page of The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis, Tennessee newspaper.
Inspector Gitchell was so convinced of their guilt that when asked by
the local media on a scale of one to 10 how sure he was that he had the
correct suspects in custody, he replied "11." By this time
there was no way the accused could be tried before an impartial jury.
Books written by best-selling authors Stephen King and Anne Rice and
black concert T-shirts were used as "evidence" against Damien
and Jason when no real, physical evidence linking them to the crimes
could be found. The inconsistent testimony of a jailhouse snitch and two
young girls who claimed to have overheard Damien "confessing"
were taken seriously, as was the testimony of a "satanic cult
expert" with a mail-order degree.
"Satanic Panic" is a
term used to describe a phenomenon that occurs with alarming regularity
in areas with deep-rooted religious convictions. The aftermath of the
Robin Hood Hills murders was obviously a Satanic Panic, and the verdicts
of the two trials (Damien and Jason were tried together) bear this out.
Jason was sentenced to life without parole, Jessie was sentenced to life
plus 40 years and Damien was sentenced to die by lethal injection.
  
The night the children were reported missing, Officer Regina
Meek received a call to investigate a suspicious black man in the ladies
restroom of a local restaurant, only a few blocks from Robin Hood Hills
woods. (According to the manager of the restaurant, the man was muddy,
bleeding and mumbling.) Officer Meek drove up to the take-out window and
never entered the restaurant.
Twenty-four hours later, after the bodies
had been found, other officers returned to this restaurant wearing the
clothes in which they had searched the woods and handled the victims'
bodies. Blood scrapings were taken from the walls and tiles of the
restaurant’s bathroom, but Detective Ridge later testified that he "lost"
them.
More potentially useful evidence came in the form of human blood
found on a serrated knife that was given to HBO documentary filmmakers
by the stepfather of one of the victims. When the filmmakers noticed
what appeared to be blood in the mechanism of the folding blade, they
gave it to the West Memphis Police. The blood was given only a blood
typing test that potentially ruined it for further DNA testing. It was
revealed, however, that the blood type matched victim Christopher Byers
as well as the knife's original owner, his stepfather, John Mark Byers.
Because of the lack of real information obtained by this type of
testing, the judge ruled this evidence inconclusive.
Adult human bite
marks, which were found on Steven Branch, were also overlooked during
the original investigation - the children were buried without undergoing
autopsies by a qualified forensic pathologist. Nearly five years after
the murders, a board-certified medical examiner, forensic pathologist
and forensic odontologist examined the victims by looking at
photographs. At an appellate hearing for Damien, the odontologist
testified that the bite marks were of human origin and after obtaining
court-ordered dental impressions from Jason, Jessie and Damien,
concluded that their impressions did not match these bite marks. Judge
Burnett, the same judge who presided over their original trials, decided
that the wounds identified by legal experts as adult human bite marks
were not in fact adult human bite marks.
The conspicuous lack of blood
in Robin Hood Hills where the bodies were found led many investigators
and the coroner to believe that the murders took place elsewhere, and
that the wooded area was simply the dumpsite. This theory was never
fully researched, apparently because it contradicted Jessie's
confession.
During Jessie's trial, Dr. Richard Ofshe, an expert on false
and coerced confessions, testified that the brief recording was a
classic example of police coercion. He pointed out how the officers
heard Jessie state that the murders had taken place in the morning but
since they knew that the victims had attended school that day, they
suggested to Jessie that it "must" have occurred later. Jessie
obligingly agreed with most of their suggestions. Unfortunately, Judge
David Burnett did not allow the jury to hear most of Ofshe's testimony.
The release of two HBO documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
show that the many unresolved mysteries of this complicated case are not
going to go away. The verdicts and police work came under serious
scrutiny in the two "Paradise Lost" documentaries, as well as
innumerable newspaper articles, television programs, radio shows and
websites including www.wm3.org,
the support fund for the West Memphis Three.
The fact that this case is
still alive in the minds of thousands of people all over the world who
are outraged by what happened in those Arkansas courtrooms is a
testament that justice may yet be seen. The police not only betrayed the
memory of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore by not fully
investigating their deaths, they betrayed Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols
and Jessie Misskelley by using them as scapegoats for the crimes. These
betrayals, the solemn photographs of those three murdered boys and the
West Memphis Three - still in prison for something they did not do - are
the things that drive people toward understanding and rectifying this
injustice so that we can try keep this type of witch hunt from ever
happening again.
Please visit the website and lend your support to this
campaign. It's been 13 long years now but one day the innocents that are
Damien, Jason and Jessie will be free and justice will be done.
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