DNA Results Could Mean New Trial for West Memphis Three

New Results are "Significant"

Children don't just disappear in the sleepy Delta town of West Memphis, Arkansas. When friends Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch didn't return home at sundown on May 5^th 1993, family and friends searched the nearby woods and neighborhoods with a growing sense of dread. The next afternoon, the nude, bound bodies of the three friends were pulled from a shallow creek in Robin Hood Hills, just minutes from their homes and yards away from Interstate 40. Panic took over West Memphis and residents eyed each other suspiciously as rumors flew. Who would do such a thing to children? Local police believed they knew.

Damien Echols had been on the law enforcement radar since a minor brush with juvenile authorities. In the conservative Bible Belt town, Echols' black clothing and long black hair marked him as an outsider. Echols was questioned about the deaths, but detectives had no evidence tying him to the crime and he was released.

One month after the murders, local police were faced with increasing pressure to make an arrest. When mentally handicapped seventeen year old Jesse Miskelley came forward claiming to have information implicating Echols, he was questioned for 12 hours without the benefit of a parent or a lawyer present. At the end of the lengthy interrogation, he gave an error-filled confession that implicated not only Echols, but himself and a third local teenager, Jason Baldwin. Miskelley immediately recanted the confession, but to no avail.

In spite of the numerous inconsistencies in Miskelley's confession, including the time of day that the murders occurred and how the children were bound, Miskelley, Echols and Baldwin were arrested and charged with three counts of murder. Rumors of a satanic cult swirled around the town, along with the idea that the children were slaughtered in a ritual sacrifice.