Morgue

by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

  But it was all good. Nothing ever happened in West Memphis, Arkansas, a farming community where blues legends like B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf had once lived, worked, and made music. Folks here felt safely distant from the incessant violence and daily depravities of Memphis, one of America’s most dangerous cities, just across the river in Tennessee. Just a small town like a thousand others, barely clinging to a river and the interstate as if they were life itself. And in some ways, they were.

  Little boys don’t waste daylight. As they often did after school, Stevie, Michael, and Chris found each other, as if some magnet drew these three friends together. They lit out—Stevie and Michael on their bicycles, and Chris on his skateboard—for a swampy, brush-clogged woodland known by locals as Robin Hood Hills, where they could catch turtles, race their bikes through the trees on narrow footpaths, or play in the soupy ditches. Across the drainage canal, accessible only by a sewage-pipe bridge or a rope that swung from one bank to the other, was a darker woodland known as Devil’s Den, frequently haunted by transients, druggies, and teen partiers.

  West Memphis parents always warned the kids to stay away from the woods, but that made them all the more enticing and adventurous.

  Michael wasn’t the oldest, but he was the leader of the pack. He loved being a Cub Scout so much that he wore the cap everywhere, and the uniform as much as he possibly could.

  Chris earned the nickname Wormer by being in perpetual motion. He couldn’t sit still. Just a few weeks shy of his ninth birthday, he’d been disciplined by his stepfather that afternoon for not obeying the house rules, and yet here he was again, breaking house rules by going out with his buddies without permission.

  They knew Stevie as Bubba. He was heavily into the Ninja Turtles, already a little charmer with his shock of blond hair, blue eyes, and big smile.

  Now they embarked on their next great adventure, as in the movie Stand by Me, as they plunged into the woods to discover whatever mysteries they concealed. They were on the move, crossing a neighbor’s lawn a little before six p.m., passing Michael’s house a few minutes later, then pushing their bikes into the woods a little after six thirty. Small-town people notice such things.

  But small-town people don’t see everything.

  The boys never came out of the woods.

  That night their parents called the local police, and a search was begun after midnight, but it was too dark to see anything.

  The next day, around 1:45 p.m., a searcher spotted a tennis shoe floating in a filthy creek that flowed through the secluded thicket just fifty yards south of I-55.

  A West Memphis detective walked along the root-choked ditch bank, cluttered with a thick carpet of leaves and twigs, to the spot where the tennis shoe was found. He noted that a patch had been cleared, maybe deliberately swept clean, down to the slick, moist dirt below.

  The detective waded into the murky water, knee-deep. As he reached for the shoe he touched something unsettling just beneath the opaque surface. Something big and soft. Something that didn’t belong.

  A body.

  It was Michael Moore.

  The little boy was naked. He was splayed out in the water, hog-tied wrists-to-ankles with a black shoelace. Blood seeped from wounds on his head, face, and skinny chest.

  Moments later, searchers found the corpses of Chris Byers and Stevie Branch submerged just a few feet downstream. They, too, were naked, hog-tied with shoelaces, and badly beaten. They all bore strange punctures all over their bodies. And Chris’s penis had been cut off.

  No murder weapon was found. Two pairs of underwear were missing. The boys’ clothes and bikes had been dumped in the water, too, so any trace evidence left by the killer (or killers) was gone. And if there had been any semen in or on the boys’ bodies, it was gone, too.

  The small-town cops were shaken. They found a Cub Scout cap floating in the shallow creek, three tennis shoes, and one of the boy’s shirts wrapped around the end of a thick stick that was jammed into the mud. They found another such stick when they fished Michael Moore’s corpse from the water. Their bicycles had been thrown by someone into the canal near the sewage-pipe bridge.

  The only signs of blood at the crime scene were in the murky water and where the bodies had lain on the bank after they were plucked from the creek. Luminol testing was done two weeks later and found extensive blood traces on the bank where it had been cleared.

  But the crime scene had been compromised by the search and retrieval. The local coroner didn’t arrive for a couple of hours. Some items, including sticks that might have been the murder weapons, were touched but never considered evidence until later.

  Investigators collected the boys’ bodies and feared the worst. Within hours, the whole town buzzed like a live electric wire with rumors of child rape, mutilation, and murder. What kind of evil people would do such a thing to three sweet little boys? Molesters who followed them? Drug dealers who’d been surprised? Satanists who hungered for innocent blood?

  Within hours, police were developing a theory.

  * * *

  Dr. Frank Peretti, a veteran associate medical examiner in the Arkansas State Crime Lab, autopsied the boys. Under the intense glare of the morgue’s lights, their wounds and mutilations were far worse than they had appeared out in the Robin Hood woods.

  He estimated, very loosely, that the boys had been dead and submerged in the water for about seventeen hours. They all exhibited what’s known as “washerwoman’s skin,” that wrinkled, white, soft, waterlogged skin condition that every swimmer and dishwasher knows well.

  There on the autopsy table, old leaves and pond scum stuck to them. Their wrists and ankles were still cinched together until someone could examine the shoelaces and knots for clues.

  Michael Moore suffered wounds on his neck, chest, and belly that appeared to have been caused by a serrated knife. Abrasions on his scalp were likely caused by another weapon, likely a hefty stick. His anus was dilated, and the soft, moist tissues inside were reddened—evidence to Dr. Peretti that something had been forced into it. Bruising and open wounds inside his mouth suggested to Peretti that Michael had been forced to perform oral sex. He’d still been alive when he went into the water, because he had breathed water into his lungs. He had drowned.

  Stevie Branch’s corpse also bore telltale injuries on his genitals and anus; Peretti believed Stevie’s penis, which was a reddish-purple color halfway down, showed possible evidence of oral sex. The left side of his face was grotesquely punctured and bloody; his teeth could be seen through his lacerated cheek. His head, chest, arms, legs, and back displayed many irregular gouges that indicated he’d was moving when he was stabbed. He, too, had drowned.

  Chris Byers seemed to have suffered the worst of this hideous assault.

  His corpse, too, bore signs to Peretti that he’d been forced to perform oral sex on a man. His penis had been skinned; his scrotum and testicles were gone. Bloody cuts around his anus indicated he was still alive when they were made.

  His head was gashed and scraped horribly. One patch of skin had been punched out, and one eye was bruised. The back of the skull had been cracked with a heavy, broomstick-sized weapon. His inner thighs were flayed with diagonal slices, and Peretti felt many of the cuts had been inflicted with a serrated knife.

  Unlike Stevie and Michael, Chris didn’t drown. He bled to death before he was thrown in the water.

  When a reporter found Chris Byers’s grief-stricken dad a few days later, he expressed the horror of West Memphis.

  “I can’t understand why three innocent boys who still believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny should have to die such a terrible death,” Byers said.

  While the good folks of West Memphis raised money to bury the boys and turned their desks in a second-grade classroom into makeshift memorials, cops churned. A sado-sexual child killer was on the loose, maybe still among them.

  The prevailing theory: The boys had been killed in a devil-worshipping ritual.

 
; In the late eighties and early nineties, small-town police forces had three big bogeymen: an epidemic of cheap methamphetamine, urban gangs moving to the country, and devil worship. Meth was real, the gangs and occult fiends not as much. Satanic molestations and sacrifices were fairy tales. But at that time, every small-town police chief made them all a priority.

  The mutilation, torture, rape, and murder of three little boys didn’t feel like the work of drug traffickers or gangbangers. The cops felt a twinge of “Satanic panic.”

  The day after the boys’ bodies were discovered, a detective shared his theory of a Satanic link with the county’s juvenile probation officer. Yeah, he said, there was a local kid who was involved in the occult and was probably capable of such horror.

  His name was Damien Echols.

  He was eighteen, a high school dropout. His family was poor, and cops knew him because of a few busts for vandalism, shoplifting, and burglary. He was a strange, long-haired kid who enjoyed his reputation as a fringe freak and a spiritual seeker who wrote dark poetry and described himself as a Wiccan. The rumor mill said he drank blood and participated in cult orgies.

  Between 1991 and 1993 he attempted suicide a few times, but the hanging, a drug overdose, and a drowning didn’t work. He’d spent a few months in a mental hospital with what a doctor called “grandiose and persecutory delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations, disordered thought processes, substantial lack of insight, and chronic, incapacitating mood swings,” but he was out now.

  Damien had started to wear only black clothing, including a long overcoat that gave him a sinister air. Some said he occasionally carried a club or a walking staff, like some medieval wizard. He sometimes filed his fingernails into talon-like points. He’d told doctors at the asylum that he had conversations with demons, pondered suicide and murder a lot, and stole energy from people by casting spells. He even claimed the spirit of a murdered woman lived with him.

  His real name wasn’t even Damien but Michael; he had adopted the name of Father Damien, a Catholic priest who’d cared for lepers in the 1800s, but folks around West Memphis believed it was really after Damien, the little-boy Antichrist in the Omen movies, or maybe even Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist.

  He liked his reputation as a freak. He cultivated it.

  A detective first interviewed Damien in his bedroom at his mother’s mobile home in a West Memphis trailer park, and later at the station. He snapped a Polaroid of Damien Echols, making note of a pentagram tattoo on Damien’s chest and “EVIL” inked across his knuckles. As a local expert on the occult, the detective asked Damien, how did he think those three boys died?

  Probably mutilation, Damien answered. A thrill killing just to hear the screaming, he speculated. He claimed he’d heard that “some guy” cut the bodies up, that they were in the water and probably drowned. He told the detective that one of the boys was probably “cut up” more than the others. The killer was a “sick” local guy, he said, and unlikely to flee. After all, he said, “the younger the victim … the more power the person would have gotten from the sacrifice.”

  At the time, the whole town was alive with rumors and half-truths about the killings, but the cops hadn’t yet revealed that Chris Byers had been mutilated more than his friends.

  Suddenly, cops had a break, but they didn’t yet have enough to arrest Damien Echols.

  For a month, cops looked for more evidence against Echols. In the process, they stumbled upon a local waitress who thought she could help by hooking them up with another teenager, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., a mildly retarded acquaintance of Damien’s who might know something.

  The waitress became an undercover informant for the West Memphis cops. She persuaded Jessie to introduce her to Damien, who reportedly took her to a field outside of town for a gathering of “witches” known as an esbat, where a dozen or more naked people chanted, painted their faces, and groped each other in the dark. She and Damien left early, but Jessie stayed, she said.

  A month after the killings, West Memphis police visited seventeen-year-old dropout Jessie Misskelley. They told Jessie there was a $35,000 reward for anybody helping the cops arrest the killers, and the kid agreed to be interviewed at the police station, where he told a shocking tale over several hours.

  It began early on May 5, he claimed, when a friend named Jason Baldwin, a sixteen-year-old friend from school, invited Misskelley to meet him and Damien Echols in the Robin Hood woods that morning. Baldwin was a wispy kid who looked much younger than sixteen. He was Damien’s friend, wore black, and liked heavy metal, although he wasn’t nearly the badass that Damien appeared to be. He didn’t take part in the black magic stuff. He was still enrolled in school, where he did better in art than math, but he’d had a couple of run-ins with the law, starting at age eleven. If Damien was the leader, Jason was his admiring follower.

  About nine a.m., the teenagers were jacking around in the creek when three kids rode up on their bikes, he said. Baldwin and Echols hollered to the kids and they came over. (Later in his statement, Misskelley estimated it had happened around noon, admitting that his times might be inaccurate. He explained the presence of the young boys by saying they had skipped school that day.)

  As soon as they were close, Baldwin and Echols attacked them in a furious assault. Misskelley told cops that he watched as at least two of the boys were raped and forced to perform oral sex on Baldwin and Echols.

  At one moment, one of the kids—Misskelley identified him as Michael Moore—tried to escape by running out of the woods, but Misskelley chased him down and brought him back.

  Using a folding knife, Baldwin cut the boys’ faces and sliced one kid’s penis, Misskelley said. Echols then whacked one of them with a big stick about the size of a baseball bat before they were forced to disrobe. Naked, wounded, and afraid, all three were tied up. That’s when he ran away from the scene, he said.

  “They started screwing them and stuff, cutting them and stuff,” Misskelley told his interrogators, “and I saw it and I turned around and looked, and then I took off running. I went home, then they called me and asked me, how come I didn’t stay, I told them, I just couldn’t.”

  Misskelley’s first polygraph exam and tape-recorded interview lasted about four hours, ending at 3:18 p.m. Around five p.m., he sat down for a second interview, and facts started to change.

  This time, he said he got a phone call from Baldwin the night before the murders. He recalled Baldwin telling him they planned to get some boys and hurt them.

  This time, Misskelley said he, Echols, and Baldwin had come to the Robin Hood woods between five and six p.m., but after prompting by the detective, he allowed that it might have been seven or eight p.m. In the end, he settled on six p.m.

  This time, the three young victims arrived near dark, he said. (Official sunset would have been close to eight p.m.)

  This time, Misskelley went into more excruciating details about the sexual assault. Both the Byers boy and the Branch boy had been raped, he said, and at least one of them had been held by the head and ears while being violated.

  All of the boys, Misskelley said, were bound with pieces of a brown rope before he fled the scene, but he believed Chris Byers was already dead when he left.

  “You said that they had their hands tied up, tied down,” an interrogator said. “Were their hands tied in a fashion to where they couldn’t have run?”

  “They could run,” Misskelley answered. “They just had them tied, when they knocked them down and stuff. They could hold their arms and stuff, and just hold them down like, where he couldn’t raise up and the other one picked his legs up.”

  After he got home, Misskelley said Baldwin phoned, saying, “We done it!” and “What are we going to do if somebody saw us?” He heard Echols jabbering in the background.

  Had he ever been involved in a cult? an interrogator asked.

  Yeah, Misskelley admitted. For the past few months, he’d been meeting with other people in the woods, where they had
sexual orgies and bloody initiation rites that included killing and eating stray dogs. At one such meeting, he said, he saw a picture that Echols had taken of the three boys. Echols had been watching them, he said.

  What were Echols and Baldwin wearing that day? a cop asked.

  Baldwin wore blue jeans, black lace-up boots, and a Metallica T-shirt with a skull on it, Misskelley recalled. As was his habit, Echols wore black pants, a black T-shirt, and boots.

  Misskelley’s story was a confusing mess. Times and events doubled back on themselves, and stark inconsistencies abounded. For one, Jason Baldwin had been in school all day. Had the crime happened at nine a.m. or noon, or closer to eight p.m.? Had Baldwin called that morning or the night before? Why was he certain the boys had skipped school when clearly they hadn’t?

  But some of Misskelley’s weird confession was actually supported by evidence.

  The boys had ridden their bikes to the Robin Hood woods. They had been severely beaten. Two of them had injuries consistent with bludgeoning by a heavy object like a baseball bat or tree limb. One had facial cuts. Chris Byers’s genitals were grotesquely mutilated. All had injuries the medical examiner found consistent with forcible rape and oral sex. Michael and Stevie were alive when they went into the water, but not Chris, consistent with Misskelley’s observation that Chris was already dead when Misskelley fled the woods. And the boys were in fact tied up, although with shoelaces, not a brown rope.

  And a witness later told detectives that he’d seen Damien Echols near the crime scene that same night, wearing black pants and a black shirt—both muddy.

  But during his interview, Misskelley was given a lie detector test and told he’d failed. Later, some would dispute whether he’d failed the polygraph. Some believe the alleged “failure” confused Misskelley, who grew frustrated and tried to please the cops even more by telling a wild story; others say it merely caused him to tell the truth.

  Either way, the focus was now entirely on three social outcasts named Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. All three were arrested and charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Police had a few other leads on possible killers, but they were convinced they had the right guys.