Inside the West Memphis Three Case and the Evidence That Sparked Decades of Doubt

On May 6, 1993, the bodies of three 8-year-old boys were discovered in a wooded area near Interstate 40 in West Memphis, Ark. Friends from nearby Weaver Elementary School—Stevie Branch, Chris Byers and Michael Moore—had disappeared the previous afternoon. 

As grisly details of the murders came out, the community grew increasingly shocked and enraged. Hogtied with their own shoelaces, the second graders had been bludgeoned and drowned in a drainage ditch. Their bodies had seemingly been sexually assaulted and mutilated.

Later forensic work would determine that the most sensational details were misleading or untrue (e.g., much of the supposed mutilation was likely caused by scavenging animals rather than a sadistic killer), but at the time some in the West Memphis Police Department became convinced that the killing had been an act of satanic ritual. The narrative was at least in part inspired by a larger media-fed “satanic panic” that was gripping the nation. 

That in turn brought police attention to 18-year-old Damien Echols, a local who wore all black and described himself as Wiccan. 

Approximately one month after the murders, investigators arrested Echols and fellow teenagers Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. 

When asked on a scale of 1-10 how solid he thought their case was, Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell told reporters: “Eleven.”

In a way, Gitchell was right. Authorities would, in fact, secure convictions against all three defendants. But in the years that followed, doubts about the condemned started creeping in.

The biggest piece of evidence against the West Memphis Three (as the accused would come to be called) was the confession of 17-year-old Misskelley. 

Police questioned Misskelley after learning from a local woman that Misskelley and Echols were acquaintances. During a 12-hour interrogation, Misskelley confessed to the crime and implicated the other teenagers; Baldwin was a close friend of Echols’. However, Misskelley also got several facts about the murders wrong, initially telling investigators that the crime had been committed in the morning when the victims had been in school all day. He later recanted his confession.

Nonetheless, he was tried and convicted of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second degree murder, leading to a sentence of life in prison plus 40 years.

Misskelley refused to testify against the other two, who were tried separately. Because of Misskelley’s refusal, the evidence was inadmissible in Echols’ and Baldwin’s trial, but the other two were also convicted on the supposed strength of other evidence, including a Rambo-style knife found in a lake behind Baldwin’s house, which investigators claimed had been used by the teenagers to mutilate the bodies.

There was no DNA evidence on the knife linking it to the crime scene or on the bodies of the victims linking them to the supposed perpetrators. 

Baldwin, 16 at the time of his arrest, was given life imprisonment. Echols was sentenced to death.

In the years that followed the convictions of the West Memphis Three, doubts increased, spurred on by journalism that pointed out the scant evidence—such as Devil’s Knot, a 1993 book that was later turned into a movie.

Those works drew noteworthy celebrities like Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder to advocate on behalf of the convicted.

In an interview with CBS, Depp said that Echols “comes from a small town in Arkansas; I come from a relatively small town in Kentucky. I can remember being looked upon…as a freak or different…so I can empathize.”

As scrutiny around the convictions grew, so did concerns that police hadn’t done their due diligence in following all the leads. 

Eyewitnesses said that a man who was bloodied and covered in mud appeared at a Bojangle’s restaurant about a mile from the crime scene on the night of the boys’ disappearance. Police collected a blood sample that the man had left in the bathroom of the restaurant only to lose it.

Later, new forensic evidence raised questions around family members of the victims, most notably Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs, whose hair was found in the shoelaces that had tied together one of the other boys, Michael Moore. Hobbs has repeatedly denied the accusations.

In 2011, Arkansas released the three men under an Alford plea deal, in which the men both proclaimed their innocence while simultaneously accepting that there was enough evidence to convict. Echols and Misskelley were 36 at the time; Baldwin was 34. 

As a condition of the deal, they are still convicted felons. However, they continue to push for their full exoneration and won a case with the Arkansas Supreme Court that allowed for new DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene.

That testing was conducted in November 2025 with local reporting suggesting at the time that it could take up to a year for those results to come back. At time of publication, those results had not yet been reported.