West Memphis Three

• 1. Introduction

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  The West Memphis Three are three men who were convicted as teenagers of murdering three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. Around 7:00 pm on the 5th of May 1993, John Mark Byers made the first report to police. His adopted eight-year-old son, Christopher, had not come home. Two of the boy's friends, Steve Branch and Michael Moore, were missing as well.

  The case that followed would split families, polarize a region and reach far beyond Arkansas. It raises three questions. Who were the boys? What did investigators really have against three teenagers? And how did the men eventually walk out of prison while still maintaining their innocence?

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• 2. Three Cub Scouts

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  Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore were second graders at Weaver Elementary School in West Memphis. Each had reached the Cub Scout rank of Wolf, and the three were best friends.

  Michael Moore, the son of Todd and Dana Moore, loved his scout uniform so much that he wore it even when there was no meeting. He was considered the leader of the trio. He was about 4 ft. 2 in. tall and lived with his parents and his nine-year-old sister, Dawn. On the last day anyone saw him, he wore a Boy Scouts shirt and an orange and blue scout hat, and he rode a light green bicycle.

  Christopher Byers was born to Melissa DeFir and Ricky Murray. When he was four his parents divorced, and his mother soon married John Mark Byers, who adopted him. A 13-year-old stepbrother, Shawn Ryan Clark, lived in the house too. His mother described him as a typical eight-year-old. "He still believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus".

  In 1994, a memorial to the three was placed in the playground at Weaver Elementary. For the 20th anniversary, in May 2013, principal Sheila Grissom raised money to refurbish it. Steve Branch is buried in Steele, Missouri, Christopher Byers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Michael Moore in Marion, Arkansas.

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• 3. The Creek Bed

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  Around 6:30 pm on the evening they vanished, three neighbors later swore in affidavits, they saw the boys playing together. One of the neighbors also saw Terry Hobbs, Steve Branch's stepfather, calling the boys to come home. Police searches that night were limited. Friends and neighbors searched as well, and their route included a cursory visit to the place where the bodies would later be found.

  At 8:00 am on the 6th of May, Crittenden County Search and Rescue began a far more thorough hunt. Searchers covered all of West Memphis but concentrated on Robin Hood Hills, where the boys had last been reported. A human chain swept the hills shoulder to shoulder and still found nothing.

  At about 1:45 pm, juvenile parole officer Steve Jones noticed a boy's black shoe floating in a muddy creek that fed a large drainage canal. A search of the ditch then revealed the bodies of the three boys. They had been bound with their own shoelaces. Their clothing lay in the creek, mostly turned inside out, and two pairs of underwear were never recovered.

  Forensic pathologist Frank J. Peretti performed the autopsies. He found that Christopher Byers died of "multiple injuries", while Michael Moore and Steve Branch died of "multiple injuries with drowning". The meaning of Byers's wounds became one of the case's great disputes. Prosecution experts said a knife attack caused them. Defense experts said the likelier cause was animals feeding on the body after death.

  Police believed the boys were attacked where they were found, but critics doubted it. HBO's documentaries later noted that no blood was found at the scene. Misskelley's former attorney Dan Stidham called the scene "literally trampled, especially the creek bed." He said the bodies were taken out of the water before the coroner arrived, and the coroner was called almost two hours after the shoe was spotted. The creek was sandbagged only after the bodies were removed, and a small amount of blood at the scene was never tested.

  Investigative journalist Mara Leveritt, author of Devil's Knot, wrote that "Police records were a mess. To call them disorderly would be putting it mildly." Some physical evidence sat in paper sacks from a supermarket, with the store's name printed on them. Police also declined an unsolicited offer of help from violent crimes experts at the Arkansas State Police.

  At the scene itself, the juvenile probation officer was already naming a suspect. He said aloud, "it looks like Damien Echols finally killed someone."

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• 4. Three Teenagers

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  At the time of their arrests, Jessie Misskelley Jr. was 17, Jason Baldwin was 16 and Damien Echols was 18. Baldwin had been arrested for vandalism and Echols for shoplifting. Misskelley was known for his temper and for fistfights with other students. Echols and Misskelley had both dropped out of high school. Baldwin earned high grades and drew well, and a teacher encouraged him to study graphic design in college.

  Echols and Baldwin were close friends. They bonded over music and fiction and shared a distaste for the culture of West Memphis, which sits in the Bible Belt. Both knew Misskelley from school, but neither was close to him.

  Echols came from a poor family that social workers visited often, and he rarely attended school. He spent several months in an Arkansas mental institution and afterward received "full disability" status from the Social Security Administration. At his trial, defense witness Dr. George W. Woods described serious mental illness, including delusions and hallucinations. At his sentencing hearing, a psychologist reported that months before the murders Echols had claimed he gained super powers by drinking human blood. When he was arrested, Echols worked part-time for a roofing company and was expecting a child with his girlfriend, Domini Teer.

  Police officers James Sudbury and Steve Jones felt the crime had "cult" overtones. Echols's interest in occultism made him a suspect in their eyes. Police interviewed him on the 7th of May, two days after the bodies were found. The polygraph examiner claimed his chart indicated deception. On the 9th of May, during a formal interview with Detective Bryn Ridge, Echols mentioned that one victim had wounds to the genitals. Law enforcement viewed that knowledge as incriminating. No physical evidence connected Echols, Baldwin or Misskelley to the crime.

  On the 6th of May 1993, hours before the bodies were found, newcomer Vicki Hutcheson sat down for a polygraph with Detective Don Bray at the Marion Police Department. Bray wanted to know whether she had stolen money from her West Memphis employer. Her young son Aaron, a playmate of the murdered boys, came along and proved such a distraction that the test could not be given. Aaron mentioned that the boys had been killed at "the playhouse." When the bodies turned up near the spot he indicated, Bray asked him for more. Aaron then said Spanish-speaking Satanists had committed the murders in front of him.

  Aaron's later statements were wildly inconsistent. He could not pick Baldwin, Echols or Misskelley out of photo lineups, and no playhouse existed where he said it did. A police officer leaked parts of his account to the press, which fed the growing belief in a Satanic rite.

  About the 1st of June 1993, Hutcheson agreed to police suggestions that she hide microphones in her home for a meeting with Echols. Misskelley agreed to introduce the two. She reported that Echols said nothing incriminating. Police called the recording "inaudible", while she insisted it was audible. On the 2nd of June she told police that, about two weeks after the murders, a drunken Echols bragged about the killings at a Wiccan meeting in Turrell, Arkansas. She could not recall where the meeting took place and named no other participants. She was never charged with theft, and she later said she implicated Echols and Misskelley to avoid charges and to collect a reward.

  The next day, the 3rd of June, police interrogated Misskelley. His reported IQ was 72, which places him at borderline intellectual functioning, and he was a minor. He was questioned without his parents. His father had allowed him to go with police but had not clearly agreed to any interrogation. The questioning lasted roughly 12 hours, yet only two segments, totaling 46 minutes, were recorded.

  Misskelley quickly recanted, citing intimidation, coercion, fatigue and veiled threats. He said he had been "scared of the police." He had been told his Miranda rights but later said he did not fully understand them. In 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the confession was voluntary and that he understood the warning. Shortly after the confession, police arrested Echols and Baldwin. Portions of Misskelley's statements reached the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal before any trial began.

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• 5. Two Trials

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  In 1994, the Bruton rule divided the case into two trials. Misskelley's confession could not be admitted against his co-defendants, so he was tried alone, and Echols and Baldwin were tried together. All three pleaded not guilty.

  At Misskelley's trial, Richard Ofshe testified as an expert on false confessions and police coercion. A sociology professor at UC Berkeley, Ofshe called the brief recording of the interrogation a "classic example" of coercion. Critics added that Misskelley's various confessions contradicted one another and the facts of the crime scene. In one, he described watching Echols rape a boy, yet no forensic evidence indicated rape.

  On the 5th of February 1994, a jury convicted Misskelley of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life plus 40 years, and the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the conviction. On the 17th of February, eight months after his first confession, he gave police another statement. His lawyer Dan Stidham sat beside him and repeatedly advised him to say nothing. Misskelley ignored that advice and described how the boys were abused and murdered.

  Three weeks after Misskelley's verdict, Echols and Baldwin went on trial. Prosecutors accused the young men of a Satanic murder. They called Dale W. Griffis, a graduate of the unaccredited Columbia Pacific University, as an expert in the occult. He testified that the killings were a Satanic ritual.

  The physical evidence was thin. Two green threads from the scene were said to be microscopically similar to a child's green T-shirt found in Echols's sister's closet. One red rayon fiber was said to resemble a woman's robe in Baldwin's home. Under questioning, the state's witness conceded that many fibers look alike under a microscope and that the match proved nothing.

  The defense argued that Echols had learned about the genital injuries from news articles of the time. Echols said his knowledge came from what was "on TV". Prosecutors replied that he knew too much, since no report had mentioned the drowning or that one boy was mutilated more than the others. Echols testified that Detective Ridge's account of their unrecorded conversation was inaccurate, and that some of Ridge's claims were "lies." Leveritt argued the details may have spread through police leaks, such as Detective Gitchell's comments to Mark Byers.

  On the 19th of March 1994, the jury found Echols and Baldwin guilty on three counts of murder. Echols was sentenced to death and Baldwin to life in prison. The three defendants appealed in May 1994, and the convictions were upheld on direct appeal. Echols entered the Arkansas prison system that same day, the 19th of March, as inmate number 000931. He spent 23 hours of each day locked down at the Varner Unit Supermax.

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• 6. Loose Threads

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  Four days after the bodies were found, two West Memphis teenagers named Chris Morgan and Brian Holland left abruptly for Oceanside, California. Both had drug offense histories. Morgan had once driven an ice cream truck route through the boys' neighborhood and was presumed to know all three of them.

  California police arrested the pair on the 17th of May 1993 and gave them polygraph exams. Examiners reported that both charts indicated deception when the men denied involvement. Morgan described a long history of drug and alcohol use with blackouts, and said he "might have" killed the victims. He quickly recanted. California sent blood and urine samples to West Memphis, but nothing indicates local police pursued the two as suspects afterward. The trial judge barred Morgan's recanted statement.

  At 8:42 pm on the 5th of May, workers at a Bojangles' restaurant about a mile from Robin Hood Hills reported a bleeding man in the ladies' room. They described him as seeming "mentally disoriented" and said he had brushed against the walls. Officer Regina Meeks took the manager's report through the drive-through window. By then the man had gone, and police did not enter the restroom that night.

  The next day, after the bodies were found, manager Marty King reported the incident again. Officers inspected the restroom and took blood samples from the walls and tiles. King said the man wore a "blue cast type brace on his arm that had white Velcro on it". Such a brace would have made it hard to tie up and kill three boys. Detective Bryn Ridge later testified that he lost the blood scrapings. A hair identified as belonging to a black male was recovered from a sheet wrapped around one victim.

  On the 19th of December 1993, cameraman Doug Cooper told filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that John Mark Byers had given him a knife. It was a folding Kershaw hunting knife. Back in New York, the filmmakers found what appeared to be blood on it. HBO executives ordered them to hand it to West Memphis police, who received it on the 8th of January 1994.

  Byers first said the knife had never been used. After the blood was found, he said he had used it once to cut deer meat. When told the blood matched both his type and Christopher's, he said he had no idea how it got there. Tests were inconclusive. The sample was tiny, and father and son shared the same HLA-DQα genotype. During filming of Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, Byers passed a polygraph about the murders, though the documentary noted he was taking several psychoactive medications.

  In 1996 and 1997, the three convicted men submitted imprints of their teeth. Experts compared them with alleged bite marks on Steve Branch's forehead. Those marks had gone unmentioned in the original autopsy and trial. No match was found. Forensic scientist Brent Turvey had said in Paradise Lost 2 that marks on at least one victim could be human bites. The defense's expert said the mark was not from an adult, and state experts concluded it was not a bite at all.

  John Mark Byers had his teeth removed in 1997, before an imprint could be taken. He gave contradictory reasons, blaming both his seizure medication and dental trouble that had plagued him for years. After an expert thought he saw a belt buckle imprint on Christopher's body, Byers told police he had spanked the boy shortly before he vanished.

  In October 2003, Vicki Hutcheson told the Arkansas Times that every word she had given police was fabricated. She said officers implied they would take her child if she did not cooperate. She also said that when she visited the station, staff had photographs of Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley on a wall and used them as dart targets. The tape police called "unintelligible", and later lost, was in her words perfectly clear and held nothing incriminating.

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• 7. New Evidence

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  In 2007, Damien Echols petitioned for a retrial under a statute that allows post-conviction DNA testing, because the technology had advanced since 1994. A report issued jointly by the state and the defense in July 2007 said: "Although most of the genetic material recovered from the scene was attributable to the victims of the offenses, some of it cannot be attributed to either the victims or the defendants." None of the DNA matched Echols, Baldwin or Misskelley.

  A hair "not inconsistent with" Terry Hobbs was found tied into the knots that bound one of the victims. Prosecutors conceded that no DNA tied the accused to the scene. Even so, they declared: "The State stands behind its convictions of Echols and his codefendants."

  On the 29th of October 2007, Echols's lawyers filed in federal court seeking a retrial or his immediate release. The filing cited the DNA linked to Hobbs and new statements from his now ex-wife. It also offered expert testimony that the supposed knife marks were the work of animals after the bodies were dumped. In a declaration dated the 5th of May 2009, Pamela Hobbs said one hair was consistent with that of Terry's friend David Jacoby. She said she and her sister had found, in Terry's nightstand, a pocket knife that Steve had carried constantly and that police never found with him. Her sister also told her she saw Terry wash clothes, bed linens and curtains from Steve's room around the time of the murders.

  In 2013, written statements from Billy Wayne Stewart and Bennie Guy were introduced in court. Both said they had information linking Terry Hobbs to the murders and that police ignored them at first. Hobbs sued the band The Chicks, then known as the Dixie Chicks, after singer Natalie Maines made remarks implying he was involved. In 2010, Judge Brian S. Miller dismissed his suit and ordered him to pay Maines $17,590 in legal costs. The judge noted that Hobbs had chosen to involve himself in the public debate over the convictions.

  Former FBI agent John E. Douglas, who led the Investigative Support Unit of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime for 25 years, wrote a report for Echols's team. He said there was no evidence of Satanic rituals. He believed the crime fit a single killer with a violent history who knew the victims and the local geography, not three unsophisticated teenagers.

  In July 2008, it emerged that Kent Arnold, the jury foreman at the Echols and Baldwin trial, had discussed the case with an attorney before deliberations began. He was accused of pushing for a guilty verdict and sharing inadmissible information, such as Misskelley's statements, with other jurors. In September 2008, Dan Stidham testified that Judge David Burnett had improperly spoken with the foreman during deliberations. Stidham said he overheard the judge say, "You'll need food for when you come back for sentencing." The foreman asked what would happen if the defendant was acquitted, and the judge closed the door without answering.

  On the 10th of September 2008, Judge Burnett denied the retrial request, calling the DNA tests inconclusive. The Arkansas Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the 30th of September 2010. On the 4th of November 2010, it ordered a lower judge to consider whether the newly analyzed DNA might exonerate the three and to examine the claims of juror misconduct. In early December 2010, Burnett was elected to the Arkansas State Senate, and Judge David Laser took over the hearings. Attorney Stephen Braga of Ropes & Gray had taken up Echols's defense for free in 2009.

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• 8. Plea and Legacy

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  On the 19th of August 2011, after weeks of negotiation, Stephen Braga reached a plea agreement with prosecutors that made the ordered hearings unnecessary. Judge David Laser vacated the earlier convictions, including the capital convictions of Echols and Baldwin, and ordered a new trial. Each man then entered an Alford plea. Such a plea lets a defendant state his innocence while accepting that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict.

  Laser sentenced all three to time served, a total of 18 years and 78 days, with a suspended sentence of 10 years. Any new offense could send them back to prison for 21 years. They also gave up the right to sue the state for wrongful imprisonment.

  Jason Baldwin resisted at first. He insisted he would not plead guilty to something he did not do. Then he realized that refusing would leave Echols on death row. "This was not justice," he said of the deal. "However, they're trying to kill Damien."

  Prosecutor Scott Ellington gave three reasons for agreeing. Two of the victims' families had joined the defense cause. The mother of a witness who testified about Echols's confession had questioned her daughter's truthfulness. And the state crime lab employee who collected the fiber evidence had died. Ellington said he still considered the men guilty but expected an acquittal at a new trial.

  In 2011, supporters urged Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe to pardon the three. Beebe said he would refuse unless evidence showed someone else committed the murders. Ellington said the state crime lab would run any DNA from the defense team's private testing through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System.

  The victims' families remain divided. In 2000, Christopher Byers's biological father, Rick Murray, voiced doubts about the verdicts. In 2007, Steve Branch's mother, Pamela Hobbs, called for further investigation. In late 2007, John Mark Byers, once vehement that the three were guilty, announced he now believed them innocent. "I had made the comment if it were ever proven the three were innocent, I'd be the first to lead the charge for their freedom," he said.

  Three films by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, are strongly critical of the verdicts. They were the first films to feature music from Metallica, which drew attention to the case. Mara Leveritt's Devil's Knot, Guy Reel's Blood of Innocents and Echols's 2005 memoir Almost Home also appeared. So did The Last Pentacle of the Sun, a collection of writings edited by Brett Alexander Savory and M. W. Anderson.

  Musicians raised money as well. In 2000, KOCH Records released the album Free the West Memphis 3, organized by Eddie Spaghetti of Supersuckers, with artists including Steve Earle, Tom Waits and Joe Strummer. In 2002, Henry Rollins put together Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three, and all sales money went to the legal funds. West of Memphis, directed by Amy J. Berg and produced by Peter Jackson and Echols, premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Atom Egoyan's Devil's Knot, with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon, reached U.S. theaters on the 9th of May 2014.

  Lorri Davis, a New York landscape architect who began writing to Echols in 1999, became his wife that year. After his release he moved to New York City and later to Salem, Massachusetts. He published Life After Death in 2012 and co-wrote Yours for Eternity with Davis in 2014. In 2016, the Copro Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited his art in a show titled SALEM, which compared the Salem witch trials to his own case. Misskelley became engaged to his high school girlfriend and enrolled in community college to train as an auto mechanic. Baldwin moved to Seattle and said he hoped to become a lawyer to help the wrongfully convicted.

  In August 2021, ten years after his release, Echols said he would keep seeking retesting of the remaining evidence. Officials told his lawyers that evidence had been lost or destroyed in a fire for which there is no public record. In June 2022, a judge rejected a January request for DNA testing. In April 2023, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Echols's appeal. In April 2024, it again reversed a lower court order denying his postconviction motion for DNA testing for lack of jurisdiction.

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