On a warm sunny May day three eight-year-old boys set off on a bike ride around their hometown of West Memphis, Arkansas. The next afternoon, their bruised and mutilated hog-tied naked bodies were pulled from a stream, setting off an all-out effort to find their murderers. Within a month, investigators were convinced they had found the killers, three out-of-the-mainstream teenagers who would become known as "The West Memphis Three." The convictions and court battles that followed provide a cautionary tale for police and prosecutors too sure of their instincts and too quick to rely on the questionable evidence that supports them.
The Investigation
About 8 P.M. on May 5, 1993, the West Memphis police department received a call from John Mark Byers reporting that his son, Christopher Byers, was missing. Byers and his wife Melissa told a patrol officer that Chris had last been seen about 5:30 working in the yard. Within the next ninety minutes, police responded to two more calls from worried parents. Dana Moore said she saw her son, Michael, riding off on bikes with two friends around six o'clock, but he never made it back for dinner. Pamela Hobbs said she hadn't seen her son, Stevie Branch, since he left for school. News of the three missing eight-year-old boys led to a search of a mosquito-infested four-acre woods near Interstate 40, where neighborhood children would sometimes play. The search, of the woods called Robin Hood Hills, turned up nothing--at least that night.
The next morning, Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell announced he would be heading up the search for the missing boys. In the early afternoon, Steve Jones, a juvenile officer, spotted a black tennis shoe floating in the water of a ditch in the Robin Hood Hills, near where the woods bordered the Blue Beacon car wash. Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Mike Allen of the West Memphis Police Department pulled the naked body of a child to banks of the ditch, and yellow crime tape went up around the area. Within an hour, police recovered two more bodies of children. Both were naked, with wrists bound to ankles with shoelaces. The body of one of the boys, identified as that of Chris Byers, was found with its scrotum gone and its penis skinned. Gitchell walked to the edge of the woods, where a large crowd had gathered, to report the news of their discovery. Upon hearing the news, Terry Hobbs, stepfather of Stevie Branch, fell to the ground and wept.
