West Memphis Three (Part Two: 93-05-0666)

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Please do not suffer in silence.

It was just after dinner on a beautiful spring night in West Memphis, Arkansas.

Three boys, eight year olds, took their bikes out for a ride and they never came home.

Their bodies were found near a favorite place spot.

They have been murdered. In West Memphis today, there is shock, but no suspects.

At 8.42pm on the evening of May 5th, 1993, the West Memphis Police Department received a call from a restaurant.

It was a bow jangles, a fast food chicken place located on Missouri Street,

about a mile from the woods of Robin Hood Hills.

The manager, a young man named Marty Keen, reported that a black male had entered the restaurant

sometime in the last half hour or so and gone into the women's restroom.

The man was muddy and apparently bleeding.

There was blood on his face and blood dripping from his forearm.

He appeared in King's words, mentally disoriented.

Not drunk, not high, just dazed, confused.

He wore a blue nylon jogging suit, black pants, and a white cap.

There was a blue cast type brace on one arm, fastened with white velcro.

His shoes were caked with thick mud, like he'd been through a field,

King later said. His pants were soaked with water up to the knees.

The police dispatch log from the evening recorded the call in the clipped

shorthand of routine police business.

Bow jangles, black male, towards delta, bleeding,

WWCAP, blue shirt, black pants, cast right arm.

The call was assigned to officer Regina Meet.

The man stayed in the women's restroom for the better part of 30 to 45 minutes.

At one point, Marty King poked his head in the door and saw the man propping himself up against the wall.

There was blood smeared on the tiles and blood on the walls above the toilet.

Excriment covered the floor. It was on the man too.

The man himself was a wreck, bleeding, filthy, apparently unable to care for himself

or even understand where he was. The floor was a mess.

The man was a mess. Eventually, the man left.

He walked out the back of the restaurant toward the dumpster,

then reappeared and headed east on foot toward the delta service station.

Officer Regina Meet responded to the call.

She arrived at approximately 8.50 pm,

and she did was perhaps the single most baffling thing

in an investigation full of baffling decisions.

She took the restaurant manager's report through the drive-through window.

She did not enter the restaurant and definitely did not go into the women's restroom.

She did not photograph the blood on the walls or collect any samples.

She did not attempt to locate the bleeding disoriented man

who had just left on foot minutes earlier.

She spoke to King through the window, noted the details,

and left the premises at approximately 9 pm.

At around that same time, 9 pm on the evening of May 5, 1993.

Three eight-year-old boys had been missing for roughly three hours.

Their parents were calling the police.

Their neighbors were searching by flashlight.

The boys had last been seen heading toward the woods of Robin Hood Hills,

approximately one mile from the Bojangles restaurant.

A bleeding, muddy, disoriented man with water-soaked pans

had just spent 45 minutes in a restroom

a mile from where three children were about to be found dead in a drainage ditch.

And the responding officer took the report through a drive-through window

and drove away.

No one would enter that restroom for another 24 hours.

By then, the blood would be degraded,

partially cleaned by restaurant employees going about their business.

The samples eventually collected would be put in a desk drawer by Detective Brin Ridge.

Never sent to a crime lab, never analyzed, and eventually lost.

The man was never identified.

He was never found. He was never even fully investigated.

He became known in the years that followed,

simply as the Bojangles man.

And his story, a story of evidence ignored,

of leads unperseud, of an investigation that failed,

that almost every turn to do the basic work of police procedure,

is indicative of today's story.

Welcome to Unresolved.

I'm your host, Michael Wheelan.

Before we continue, I want to remind you that this is the second episode

in a five-part series on the West Memphis 3.

In episode one, we met Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers.

Three eight-year-old best friends who went out to play on a warm spring afternoon

in West Memphis, Arkansas, and never came home.

We ended that episode on the morning of May 6, 1993,

with search parties spreading out through the woods of Robin Hood Hills.

In this episode, we're going to cover what they found,

and I have to warn you what follows is going to be difficult.

We are going to discuss in detail what was done to three children.

As many of you know that I've been listening to this podcast for a while,

I have no interest in being gratuitous, but to understand this case

and to understand how the investigation went so catastrophically wrong,

you need to first understand the evidence, the crime scene,

and the decisions that were made in the hours and days that followed.

If you need to step away at any point, I understand, to carry yourself.

If you want to support the show,

head to Apple Podcast or Spotify to leave a rating and review.

And if you want to go even further and get access to exclusive bonus content,

head to patreon.com slash unresolved pod.

But first, let me briefly recap where we left off.

On the evening of May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys,

Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Buyers,

went out to play in the neighborhood around Robin Hood Hills in West Memphis, Arkansas.

They were supposed to be home by dark.

By 8 p.m., all three families had called the police and searches were conducted that night by flashlight

through backyards and along drainage ditches.

But the darkness and the terrain made a thorough search impossible.

Several searchers passed through the area where the boys would later be found without seeing anything.

The water, the mud, the branches concealing the bodies.

It was simply too dark and too dense.

So the night passed, nobody slept, and then the sun came up.

Let's continue.

May 6, 1993.

As the search got underway, officers began canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses,

and the timelines started to emerge from the statements that came in.

The boys had been seen after school around 3.30 to 4 p.m.,

riding their bikes through the neighborhood.

Michael and Stevie were on bicycles.

Some said Christopher was riding a skateboard.

Debra Otinger saw the three boys walking through her yard between 5.45 and 6 p.m.,

pushing a bicycle.

At about 6 p.m., Dana Moore, Michael's mother, saw the three boys together.

Michael was riding his bike, and then between 6.30 and 6.45 p.m.,

a man named Brian Woody reported seeing four boys heading into the Robin Hood Hills.

Two were pushing bicycles and one had a skateboard.

A fourth was reportedly walking behind them.

Four boys, not three.

That fourth figure, whoever he was, if he even existed,

was noted in the police reports but never conclusively identified.

It was one of many details that would be recorded and then never adequately pursued.

The police search focused primarily on Robin Hood Hills.

The wooded area behind the blue beacon truck wash where the boys had last been reported.

Despite a human chain making a shoulder to shoulder sweep through the woods,

searchers found no sign of the missing boys.

The terrain was brutal.

Big vegetation, standing water, mud that stuck to your boots and shoes.

The brush was so dense in spots that you couldn't push through it without getting tangled.

The families waited at the edges of the search area.

Hours passed.

Morning quickly turned to afternoon.

The heat was building.

Searchers were sweating through their clothes and swatting mosquitoes,

and still coming back with nothing.

And then at approximately 1.45 p.m.,

a juvenile parole officer named Steve Jones peered over the steep

bank of a water-filled ditch near where the woods bordered the blue beacon.

Spotted something in the water.

It was a small, black penishew, floating.

Jones radioed for help.

Minutes later, Sergeant Mike Allen of the West Memphis Police Department arrived at the ditch.

He waited into the murky water.

It was roughly two feet deep in that spot, dark and opaque.

The kind of water that doesn't show you what's underneath.

Allen reached for the shoe, and as he did, he slipped.

His movement dislodged something from the mud beneath the surface.

Something pale.

It was the body of eight-year-old Michael Moore.

He was naked.

He was faced down in the water.

His wrist were bound to his ankles with his own shoelaces.

He had been hog-tied, right wrist to right ankle, left wrist to left ankle.

Hands behind his back.

Yellow crime scene tape went up immediately.

The area was cleared of civilian searchers.

Detective Brin Ridge volunteered to search the rest of the ditch himself.

He got down on his hands and knees and began making his way through the muck.

He found clothing first.

Children's clothing twisted around sticks that had been driven into the muddy creek bed.

Then approximately 25 feet downstream from where Michael Moore's body had been pulled out.

Ridge found two more bodies.

Stevie Branch and Christopher Byers.

Both submerged, faced down, fully underwater.

Both were nude, and both had been hog-tied with their own shoelaces.

Sticks had been deliberately jammed into the mud around and over them,

holding the bodies down, keeping them concealed beneath the surface.

All three boys were dead, and all three had been severely beaten.

All three had been stripped of every article of clothing.

Their clothes were scattered in the creek.

Most of them turned inside out.

Some twisted around sticks thrust into the ditch bed.

Two pairs of the boys underwear were never recovered.

A detail that nagged at investigators.

Had the perpetrator taken them?

Had they washed downstream?

No one could say for certain.

The scene was, by any description, a nightmare.

Three small bodies in a muddy ditch, hidden beneath sticks and branches,

in a patch of woods where they had once played and built forts and imagined themselves as kings.

The officers who processed the scene would carry it with them for the rest of their lives.

Some of them had children or even grandchildren the same age.

Some of them knew the victim's families.

In a town of 28,000 people, everyone was connected to somebody,

so their grief was not abstract.

It was personal.

Inspector Gary Gitchell walked to the edge of the woods, where a large crowd of

searchers and community members had gathered to deliver the news.

By this point, the activity, the yellow tape, the officers streaming into the woods,

the abrupt cessation of the civilian search, had already communicated the essentials.

People knew.

You could see it in their faces.

The hope that had sustained the search all morning had been replaced by something else.

A sick certainty that the worst had happened.

When Terry Hobbes, Steve Urbranche's stepfather, heard the announcement, he felt to the ground.

John Mark Byers, Christopher's adoptive father,

Dana Moore, Michael's mother, collapsed.

The search for Stevie, Michael, and Christopher was over.

What happened next?

The processing of the crime scene, the autopsies, the interpretation of the evidence,

those decisions made in the first critical hours would define this case for the next three decades,

and much of it was a disaster.

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Let me start with the crime scene, because the mistakes began immediately,

and they never really stopped.

What Inspector Gary Gittiel had on the afternoon of May 6, 1993 was, by any measure,

the most significant crime scene his department had ever processed.

The crime scene was complex.

The terrain was difficult in the water.

The ever-present evidence dampening water,

complicated everything.

But the West Memphis Police Department was a small town force.

They had roughly 40 officers total.

They had never handled anything like this.

They were trained for traffic stops and domestic disputes in the occasional burglary,

not necessarily tripled child homicides in the waterlogged woods.

And on May 6, it showed,

Dan Stidham, who would later serve as the defense attorney for one of the accused,

has been among the most vocal critics of how the scene was handled.

He described the creek bed as literally trampled.

The bodies, he said, were pulled from the water before the county corner arrived to examine them.

A critical error because the position and condition of the bodies in the water

could have provided important information about time of death and the sequence of events.

Once removed, the bodies were placed on the narrow creek bed and covered with black plastic

sheeting, where they sat exposed to sunlight, heat, and insects.

The corner,

Crittenden County corner Ken Hale,

wasn't called until approximately two hours after Steve Jones spotted the floating tennis show.

When Hale finally arrived, the bodies had already been moved.

The scene had already been walked through by multiple people,

and whatever evidence the water might have preserved was already degraded or gone.

Stidham would later describe the corner's investigation as extremely substandard.

The creek was eventually sandbagged, but only after the bodies had already been pulled out,

meaning that any trace evidence that had been in the water was left to wash down stream before

anyone thought to secure it.

Evidence that might have survived the initial submersion was lost to the current and the hours

between discovery and the belated decision to dam the ditch.

And here's a detail that tells you something about the department's approach to documentation.

The West Memphis Police Department owned both a video camera and audio recording equipment.

They did not use either to record any of their initial processing of the crime scene

or their early interviews with witnesses.

Chief Inspector Gitchell would later admit this under oath.

In this case, they had the tools, but they chose not to use them.

The evidence that was collected included the boys clothing,

the shoelace ligatures, a cub scout cap, a flashlight found nearby, various sticks and branches,

water and soil samples, and photographs taken from multiple angles.

Photographs at least, they remember to take.

And it's worth noting that the investigation itself was being conducted by a department

that was under investigation.

The Arkansas State Police had been looking into the

Crittenden County Drug Task Force, which included officers from the West Memphis Police Department

for suspected mishandling of funds.

This was the agency being asked to solve the most complex and horrific crime in the county's history.

Another detail, which is small but telling,

illustrates how porous the early canvassing effort was.

Debbie Moyer lived just three houses away from Stevie Branch.

Her daughter Jamie, who was 13 in 1993,

had actually spoken with Christopher Byers on the evening of May 5th.

One of the last known interactions with any of the boys before they disappeared.

No police officer ever came to the Moyer home to ask questions.

As Debbie Moyer would later tell CBS,

if they did, I did not see them.

A potential witness, three doors away from one of the victims, was never interviewed.

The Moyers would not come forward with their information until 2009,

16 years after the murders, when they called a tip line.

A critical question began to form immediately at the crime scene.

Was this where the boys were killed?

Or was this where their bodies were dumped?

There was very little blood at the scene, given the severity of the injuries,

which we'll get to in just a moment.

You would expect a primary murder scene to be saturated.

This one was not.

The water would have washed some evidence away certainly,

but the relative absence of blood troubled some investigators.

It suggested that the boys might have been killed elsewhere and then moved to this ditch afterward.

Others argued that the water had simply carried everything away.

The question was never definitively resolved.

The autopsy's were performed on May 7th, 1993, by Dr. Frank J. Peretti of the Arkansas

State Medical Examiner's office.

I went to walk through the findings for each boy because the details matter,

and because one set of findings in particular would determine the entire direction of the investigation.

Stevie Branch had suffered multiple injuries.

There were extensive abrasions and contusions on his face, head, and body.

There were injuries to his scalp and bruising on his torso,

as well as lacerations across multiple body parts.

Some of the injuries appeared defensive.

The kind of marks that you would find on someone's arms and hands when they're trying to protect themselves.

There was a significant skull fracture,

which resulted in brain injury from blunt force trauma.

And there was also water in his lungs.

Dr. Peretti's official cause of death was multiple injuries with drowning.

The head trauma was severe enough that Stevie likely lost consciousness before the drowning occurred.

Time of death was estimated on the evening of May 5th,

sometime between approximately 7 and 9 pm.

Michael Moore showed a similar pattern.

Multiple abrasions and contusions, head and facial injuries,

bruising across his body, defensive wounds.

His head trauma was significant but not as catastrophic as Stevie's.

There was water in his lungs, a substantial amount.

Dr. Peretti found that Michael's lungs were filled with water,

indicating that he was actively breathing when he entered the ditch.

As Peretti would later testify,

the volume of water indicated that when he was in the water, he was breathing.

I want to stop here for a moment because this detail deserves to be understood fully.

Michael Moore, who was just 8 years old,

standing 4 foot 2 and weighing 55 pounds,

was hog tied with his own shoelaces,

his wrist bound to his ankles behind his back,

and placed face down in a drainage ditch with roughly 2 feet of water.

The medical evidence shows that he was alive when this happened.

He was conscious, he was breathing,

and he drowned slowly in muddy water,

in the dark, unable to move his arms or legs,

in a place where he used to play with his friends.

That is what someone did to Michael Moore,

and I want you to hold on to that to carry the weight of it,

through everything that follows in this series.

Because whatever else this case becomes, it starts with this.

Three children being tortured and killed.

They deserve an investigation worthy of what was done to them.

Michael's cause of death was also listed as multiple injuries with drowning.

The time of death was the evening of May 5th.

The same window is Stevie.

And then there was Christopher Byers.

Christopher's autopsy is the most controversial,

and it's the one that would reshape the entire investigation.

Christopher had suffered the same general pattern of blunt force trauma as the other two boys.

Extensive bruising, multiple blows to the head and body of fractured skull.

But Christopher also had something that the other boys did not.

Significant injuries to his genital area.

To be specific, his scrotum had been removed and his penis had been partially skinned.

Dr. Peretti's initial assessment was that these injuries represented sharp force trauma.

Knife wounds inflicted at or near the time of death,

possibly with a serrated knife.

He described the wounds as appearing intentional.

Christopher's official cause of death was listed as multiple injuries,

with examination, blood loss, from the genital injuries as a significant contributing factor.

Now, there is an alternative explanation, and it's one that multiple forensic experts would

advance in the years that followed.

That perhaps this wasn't an intentional act, but animal predation.

After all, the bodies had been submerged for 12 to 18 hours.

The drainage ditch was home to snapping turtles and other aquatic scavengers.

Turtles are known to feed on soft tissue, and genital areas are among the first areas

targeted by aquatic predators on submerged remains.

Turtle bites can, under certain circumstances, produce marks that closely resemble knife wounds

on the relatively delicate skin of a child.

This wasn't fringe science.

Dr. Werner Spitz, co-author of Medical Legal Investigation of Death,

the standard textbook in the field, would later review the autopsy photographs and conclude

that the injuries were post-mortem and consistent with animal feeding rather than deliberate mutilation.

Other forensic pathologists reached similar conclusions independently.

The debate would persist for decades.

Dr. Peretti maintained his knife theory.

Defense experts maintained the turtle theory.

Neither side could exclude the other's interpretation with absolute certainty,

but in May 1993 there was no debate.

There was only Dr. Peretti's initial assessment that the wounds had been caused by a knife,

that this was intentional, maybe even ritualistic,

and the West Memphis Police Department ran with that.

Let me talk about what the autopsy's did not find, because the absence of evidence matters

as much as the evidence itself. No semen was found on any of the three bodies.

There was no evidence of sexual assault.

This is significant because the prosecution later claimed that the boys had been raped.

The medical evidence flatly contradicted this.

There was anal dilation observed during the examinations,

but this is a naturally occurring physiological process that happens at or near the time of death,

and might have been misinterpreted as evidence of sexual assault.

No drugs or alcohol were found in any of the boy's systems,

with the exception of Christopher's Ritalin prescription,

which was at subtherapeutic levels, suggesting he hadn't taken his dose on May 5th.

No restraint marks were found other than the shoelace ligatures themselves.

No chafing, no abrasion from prolonged binding.

This suggested that the boys had been tied relatively quickly,

and had not struggled against the restraints for an extended period,

which in turn suggested they were already subdued,

through injury fear or some other means, when they were bound.

The ligatures themselves were among the most significant pieces of physical evidence.

All three boys had been hogtied with their own shoelaces.

Black and white laces were moved from their own shoes,

which were used to bind their wrists to their ankles behind their backs.

The bindings were tight and deliberate.

Someone had removed their shoes, pulled out the laces,

and used them to restrain each child individually.

This required time, control, and a perpetrator who had complete physical dominance over the victims.

The water was the central forensic problem of the entire case.

12 to 18 hours of total submersion in a flowing drainage ditch is devastating to trace evidence.

Whatever forensic material might have connected a perpetrator to the victims,

stuff like hair, skin cells, blood, clothing fibers,

had been exposed to running water and the elements for the better part of an entire day.

The police and prosecutors would later argue that the water explained

why no physical evidence connected any suspect to the crime scene.

The defense would argue that you can't use the absence of evidence as evidence of guilt.

What the police had in total amounted to,

the boys clothing, the shoelace ligatures,

a few fibers, some environmental samples,

a flashlight found nearby, and photographs of the scene.

That was it.

The fiber evidence would later be presented at trial.

Two green threads described as microscopically similar to a shirt found in a suspect's home,

and one red fiber similar to a robe found in another suspect's home.

Under cross-examination, one of the state's own witnesses conceded that the fibers

proved nothing.

As many fibers are microscopically similar in the discovery,

could not link the items to the crime with any certainty.

In total, this was not a lot to build a case on,

but the interpretation of the evidence.

Specifically, the interpretation of Christopher Byer's injuries

was about to give the police something far more powerful than any physical evidence.

It was about to give them a theory.

And a theory, any frightened community desperate for answers,

can be more dangerous than any amount of physical evidence.

Because physical evidence can be tested, challenged, and refuted.

A theory, once it takes hold in the minds of investigators in the public,

becomes a lens through which everything is viewed.

Evidence that supports the theory is emphasized.

Evidence that contradicts it is minimized or explained away.

And evidence that points in a different direction,

perhaps a bleeding man in a bow jingles restroom, is simply ignored.

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In the days following the autopsies,

a narrative began to form within the West Memphis Police Department.

Three children had been murdered in a wooded area.

They were found nude with their bodies showing signs of extreme violence.

One of them reportedly mutilated in the genital area.

The location had been deep in the woods,

away from roads and houses,

and the mutilation, which didn't look to the officers

reviewing the autopsy findings,

like ordinary violence.

Then it looked symbolic, maybe even ritualistic.

Inspector Gary Getschold did nothing to discourage this interpretation.

In one of the first public statements about the case,

he told reporters that his department was investigating the possibility

that the murders were connected with cult activity.

Those two words would set the course of the investigation for the next year,

and argue a belief for the next three decades.

I'm going to talk about the Satanic panic in more detail in the next episode,

because it's essential context for understanding what happened,

but I want to plant a seed here.

In 1993, the belief that secret Satanic cults were operating across America

was not a fringed theory.

It was mainstream.

It was taken seriously by law enforcement,

by prosecutors, by journalists, by the public at large.

Law enforcement officers across the country

had attended training seminars on a cult crime.

Sessions that taught police to look for signs of cult involvement at crime scenes,

such as symbols, ritualistic positioning of bodies,

or evidence of sexual or violent ceremony.

Books about ritual abuse were becoming bestsellers.

Daycare abuse scandals had been dominating headlines for a decade.

The Mick Martin preschool trial,

the Kern County Child Abuse cases,

the Little Rascals daycare case.

One after another, communities across America

had been convulsed by allegations of Satanic ritual abuse.

Nearly all of these cases would eventually collapse,

but in 1993, the panic was still very much alive.

And when three children were found murdered in the woods,

stripped naked and mutilated,

in a small town in the Arkansas Delta,

a community steeped in evangelical Christianity,

where the line between good and evil was drawn in simple vivid colors.

The explanation did not require much imagination.

The devil did it.

Or more specifically, the devil's followers did it.

Somewhere in West Memphis,

there were people who reportedly worshiped Satan,

who conducted dark rituals in the woods,

who had taken three innocent children and sacrificed them.

That was the theory forming in the minds of investigators

and that the whispered conversations of a terrified community.

And once that theory took hold,

it would prove almost impossible to dislodge.

Saturday morning,

these streets should be filled with the sounds of children.

Instead, the first thing that catches your ear is an eerie quiet.

It's a shame to keep your children locked up.

You watch everybody else,

it's kids, and you watch your own two,

and you keep them close range.

Saw the more boys come up and down the street,

all the time back here planting the mud,

wallowing and everything, and now they're gone.

It's just not fair.

Chris Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch,

disappeared Wednesday evening.

Investigators found their bodies the next day

in this wooded area behind a truck stop on Interstate 40.

Their hands and feet were tied.

They had been beaten to death.

West Memphis police have called in the FBI

as the search for the killer stretches coast to coast.

Authorities don't know for sure when or if the killer will strike again,

but in a way,

his list of victims has already grown to include many of the children in this area

who are paralyzed with the fear that they may be next.

I'm afraid they'll come and get me.

It's sad.

The funerals were held on May 11, 1993.

All three boys were buried.

Stevie, Michael, Christopher.

The community turned out in force.

The grief was raw.

The pews were full and tears were real,

and their little caskets were impossibly

part-breakingly small.

Todd Moore, Michael's father,

would later capture the community's mood in a statement

as unflinching as it was revealing.

Telling filmmakers that he was all for executing whoever did this,

comparing it to what they did in Salem,

without apparently recognizing that the accused at Salem

turned out not to be guilty.

The fear was equally real.

Parents stopped letting their children play outside.

Yards that had been full of kids just days earlier sat empty.

The woods behind the neighborhood,

Robin Hood Hills,

became a place of dread.

Something terrible had happened there,

and whoever did it was still out there.

People started locking doors that had never been locked.

Children who had spent every afternoon outdoors

were kept inside,

watching television and living rooms

that felt smaller than they used to.

Meanwhile, some standard investigative procedures

were to the department's credit being followed,

at least initially.

The stepfathers were questioned.

There was John Mark Buyers,

Christopher's adoptive father,

who was polygraphed with results

that were inconclusive or suggestive of deception.

Though Buyers' explanation was reasonable.

Of course he wasn't calm, he said.

His son had just been murdered.

Terry Hobbs, Stevie's stepfather,

passed his polygraph.

His account of May 5th was straightforward.

He said he came home from work at around 4.30 to 5 pm,

found that Stevie wasn't there

and eventually joined the search.

His employer confirmed his work schedule.

Pam Hobbs corroborated his timeline.

The police cleared Terry Hobbs quickly,

perhaps too quickly as it would turn out.

The neighbor witnesses who saw the boys

at approximately 6.30 pm

also reported seeing Terry Hobbs in the vicinity,

apparently calling the boys home.

This detail was recorded but not pursued in any depth.

In 1993, it was simply an account of a stepfather

looking for his stepson at dinner time.

At the time, it was considered unremarkable.

It would not remain unremarkable forever,

but that's a story for later in the series.

Odd Moore, Michael's father,

was questioned and cleared quickly.

He was the least suspicious of any family member.

He was cooperative and genuinely shattered by grief.

Steve Branch Sr., Stevie's biological father,

was interviewed as a matter of protocol and cleared.

Registered sex offenders in the area

were checked and interviewed,

none emerged as strong suspects.

Two men with ties to West Memphis,

Chris Morgan and Brian Holland,

were picked up by police in Oceanside, California on May 17th,

having left town just days after the murders.

Both failed polygraphs.

Morgan, who had driven an ice cream truck route

in the boys' neighborhood

and would have had to have at least

been casually familiar with the victims,

was interrogated for what he later testified

was 17 hours over two sessions.

He said the Oceanside police never read him his rights.

After more than 13 hours of questioning,

Morgan became frustrated and blurted out.

What do you want me to do, lie to you?

I'm going to lie, I'm going to lie.

I killed them and all that other bullshit.

He recanted almost immediately.

The outburst appeared to be a sarcastic capitulation

to sustained pressure rather than a genuine confession.

But it was a stunning moment.

California police sent a blood and urine samples

from both men to the West Memphis Police Department.

And then nothing happened.

There is no indication that the WMPD investigated

Morgan or Holland any further.

These were two men with local ties,

who were both deceptive on polygraphs,

one who had known the victims

and who had left the state days after the murders.

And the lead was quietly dropped.

Why?

Well, the most likely answer is the simplest

and the most damning.

By mid-May, the police had already committed

to a different theory and a different direction.

Everything else they were gathering was noise.

Meanwhile, John Mark Buyers, Christopher's adoptive father,

would generate suspicion for a different reason months later

when he gave a folding knife to a member

of an HBO film crew working on a documentary about the case.

The knife was later found to have dried blood in the hinge.

Crime lab analysis determined that the blood was consistent

with both Christopher and Buyers' own blood types.

When police questioned John Mark Buyers' history shifted,

first he said that no one had ever cut themselves with the knife.

Then when told about the blood,

he recalled cutting deer meat with it.

A blood that matched Christopher's type

was never conclusively explained.

But this too was not pursued with the urgency

it perhaps deserved.

Buyers was, at the time, a drug informant

who was on friendly terms with officers

in the police department.

Then there was the matter of the bow jangles man

who was never identified.

The blood scrapings that Detective Ridge collected

from the restroom on May 6th were put

in his desk drawer at the police station.

Never submitted to a crime lab for analysis

and eventually lost.

Ridge would later testify to this at trial,

calmly and matter of factly,

as though misplacing evidence from a triple child homicide

was an unremarkable administrative oversight.

Then there was a pair of sunglasses

that the bow jangles man had reportedly left behind

in the toilet.

The detectives had not even bothered collecting them.

It was a pair of sunglasses sitting in a restroom

smeared with the blood of an unidentified man,

a mile from a murder scene on the night of the murders.

And the police left them there.

Later, crime lab analyst would find a hair identified

as belonging to a black male on a sheet

used to transport one of the victim's bodies to the morgue.

Whether this hair had any connection to the bow jangles man

was a question that could never be answered

because the blood evidence that might have established

or ruled out such a connection

had been put in a desk drawer and lost.

At the trial that would take place later in the story,

prosecutor John Fogelman would dismiss

the bow jangles lead as a complete absurdity,

arguing that criminals who took pains

to hide bodies would not immediately go into a public restaurant

covered in blood.

Critics pointed out that disoriented panicked people

do irrational things all the time

and that dismissing a lead without investigating it

is not the same as investigating it and finding nothing.

Roughly two weeks into the investigation,

the police had no strong physical evidence.

No fingerprints, no DNA, or at least none

that 1993 technology could process in a meaningful way.

They had no murder weapon, no forensic connection

between any suspect in the crime scene.

The community was demanding answers.

The media was asking daily, any arrest?

The families were desperate for justice

and the investigation, despite leads

that pointed in multiple directions, was beginning to narrow.

Tips were coming in, names were being called into the police

and one name in particular kept appearing

again and again and again.

The police department assigned a case file

The West Memphis Police Department assigned a case file number to the Robin Hood Hills

investigation. That's standard procedure. Every case gets a number for record

keeping, filing for the bureaucratic machinery of criminal justice. The number

they assigned was 93-05-0666. 93 for the year, 05 for the month, and then 0666.

666, the number of the beast, the mark of the antichrist, the most loaded three

digit sequence in the Christian imagination. Inspector Gitchell would later claim

that this was a coincidence, but the number was simply the next in sequence. Later

reporting suggested it was not, and honestly it almost doesn't matter whether

or not it was intentional. What matters is what it tells you about the atmosphere in

which this investigation was being conducted. An atmosphere in which the murder of

three children was being interpreted not as a crime necessarily, but as something

supernatural, something satanic, because the West Memphis Police Department

wasn't just building a murder case. They were building a narrative, and the

narrative was about evil. Not the ordinary human evil of violence and

cruelty, but something older and darker, something that required a particular

kind of perpetrator, someone who worshipped the devil, someone who would kill

three innocent children and mutilate their bodies in a ritual sacrifice. The

investigation had three dead children, a traumatized community, an almost total

absence of physical evidence, and now a theory about satanic ritual murder. Now

it needed a suspect. And the phone was ringing in the West Memphis Police

Department. The tip line was lighting up and one name in particular kept appearing

in the notes over and over and over again. That name was Damien Eccles. Eccles was

not necessarily a monster. He was not a Satanist. He was not a cult leader. He

was an 18-year-old high school dropout who dressed in black and read strange

books and listened to heavy metal music and was, by his own admission, a stupid

teenager. In May 1993, in the climate of fear and grief that had descended on

West Memphis, Arkansas, being a stupid teenager who was different in all the

wrong ways was enough to make you a suspect in the murder of three children.

That's on the next episode of Unresolved.

And that's going to do it for this one. Thank you so much for listening. It

genuinely means the world. If you want to get in touch you can reach me by email

at michaelatunresolved.me. That's m-i-c-h-e-a-l at unresolved.me on Instagram at

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