Synopsis: |
On the evening of May 5, 1993, in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, three eight-year-old boys disappeared. The next afternoon, the naked bodies of Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were found submerged in a nearby stream. The boys had been bound from ankle to wrist with their own shoelaces and severely beaten. Christopher had been castrated.
The crime scene had yielded few clues, and despite Christopher's castration, there was a remarkable absence of blood. The police were stymied, and citizens' alarm mounted as weeks passed with no suspects. Finally, a month after the murders, detectives announced three arrests and a startling theory for the crime: the children had been killed by members of a satanic cult.
Detectives attributed their break in the case to a former special education student, seventeen-year-old Jessie Misskelley, Jr. After twelve hours of questioning, police announced that Jessie had implicated himself and accused two other teenagers, eighteen-year-old Damien Echols and sixteen-year-old Jason Baldwin. Damien and Jason both immediately denied Jessie's account, and Jessie himself recanted it within hours, but by then all three had been charged with capital murder.
With no physical evidence connecting anyone to the crime, prosecutors contended that the murders bore signs of “the occult” and that the three accused teenagers – alleged members of a satanic cult -- possessed a “state of mind” that pointed to them as the killers. As proof of the defendants' mental states, they introduced items taken from their rooms -- such as books by Anne Rice and album posters for the rock group Metallica. Despite stunning investigative blunders, a confession riddled with errors, and an absence of physical evidence linking any of the accused to the crime, the jury found all three teenagers guilty. Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. were sentenced to life in prison. They sentenced Damien Echols, the accused ringleader, to death. |