Some concluding thoughts on the state’s most notorious murder case.ĭamien Echols contends his only crime was being different. An expert on false confessions told Misskelley’s lawyer that the taped interview showed the confession to be clearly coerced, but the trial judge did not allow the jury to hear the expert’s testimony. The mentally challenged Misskelley, 17, did go to the police and spent 12 hours with police Inspector Gary Gitchell and Detective Bryn Ridge, who got a statement from him in which he implicated himself, Baldwin and Echols.
Hutcheson then convinced Misskelley, whom she met through her son, to tell the police that he’d seen the boys killed. (Hutcheson and her son, who told police he’d witnessed the killings, testified in Miskelley’s trial, but Hutcheson recanted in 2004, saying police had coerced her into giving false testimony. Echols said nothing incriminating on the tape and the West Memphis police later said it was unintelligible, and then that it was lost. Though accounts differ on her motive, a woman named Vicki Hutcheson agreed to secretly tape Echols to get a confession and provide the tape to the police. The police first made contact with Echols the next day, May 6, at his family’s trailer in Marion. It was this probation officer who first suggested that Satanism was involved in the killings, through nothing at the scene suggested that. It wasn’t until eight days later that the State Crime Lab appeared at the scene with equipment to study the scene.Ī juvenile probation officer at the scene told police he’d been following the activities of Damien Echols for several years he’d never been able to pin anything on him. Perhaps because they were unused to handling such a homicide, the West Memphis police investigation at the scene allowed potential evidence to be destroyed. (Years later, attorneys for the defense would suggest that the boy’s wounds were not consistent with castration, but that the soft tissue had been eaten by fish in the creek.)
They were naked, and Byers had apparently been stabbed and castrated. Two of the three had drowned after the beatings. The children had been beaten and hog-tied with their shoe laces. Their bodies were found the next afternoon, in a creek in an area known locally as the Robin Hood Hills. Branch, Moore and Byers were reported missing May 5, 1993, several hours after they left Weaver Elementary School at the end of the school day.
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