by Greg Day
Dana was relating what she knew to Officer Meek when Terry Hobbs, Steve Branch’s stepfather, drove up to the Byers residence. It was approximately 8:30, and Mark says this was “the first time [he] ever laid eyes on Terry Hobbs.”2 Their boys had been friends for some time, but Mark and Melissa had never met the Hobbses. Although Meek made no mention of Hobbs in her testimony at either trial, Mark is confident not only that was she still present when Hobbs rolled up, but that she took at least minimal information from Hobbs before she set out to look for the boys.
The initial searches didn’t begin until dark. Several small, informal search parties were formed, Mark Byers and Christopher’s brother Ryan Clark among the participants. Upon reaching the entrance to Robin Hood, Byers realized that the shorts and flip-flops he was wearing would not do for a woodland search. He walked the two blocks home for a change of clothes and returned wearing coveralls and boots. “I probably had them on for the next two or three days,” he told police. He made a few passes from the road down to the banks of the bayou and back again but was hampered by the rapidly fading daylight, and he was contemplating borrowing a flashlight from a neighbor when patrolman John Moore of the West Memphis Police Department pulled up. He and Byers entered the woods south of a large canal—Ten Mile Bayou—that separated the north and south sections of Robin Hood Hills. Together, using Moore’s flashlight to guide them, they began a tentative search of the darkening woods, starting with an area south and east of the pipe bridge. This “bridge” was the only way across the bayou to the area where the boys’ bodies eventually would be found, but Mark didn’t cross it that night.
While Mark and Officer John Moore searched the woods near the end of North Fourteenth Street, Ryan and three of his friends, Brit Smith, Robbie Young, and Ritchie Masters, fanned out along the bayou. Robbie and Ritchie crossed the pipe bridge and began searching the area north of the bayou, toward the Blue Beacon Truck Wash and the North Service Road, while Ryan and Britt stayed on the south side. After venturing east a short way and shouting Christopher’s name several times with no response, Ryan and Ritchie were startled by a series of splashing sounds, as well some rustling coming from the brush. Ryan claimed he heard a gunshot. Spooked, they ran out of the woods and up to the pipe bridge, where Robbie and Ritchie were waiting.3 Ryan and Britt arrived at Ten Mile Bayou, to the west of where Byers and Officer Moore were searching. At that point all four boys crossed the pipe bridge together and searched for an additional thirty minutes before calling it quits.
While the searches were getting underway at Robin Hood, Pam Hobbs, Steve Branch’s mother, was working the evening shift at Catfish Island, a local restaurant where she waited tables. She had told Stevie that he was to be home by 4:30 that afternoon so that she could see him before she left for work. By 4:50, Stevie still hadn’t come home. After taking a quick ride through the neighborhood, Terry had taken Pam to work, promising her that he would continue to look for Stevie. According to Pam, Terry returned to pick her up at 9:25 p.m. and gave her the news that Stevie was still missing. The police were called immediately, and Officer John Moore came to Catfish Island to take statements from Pam and Terry Hobbs.4 Terry told Pam that Stevie, Chris Byers, and Michael Moore were all together and that Mark Byers and Dana Moore had already spoken to police. Leaving Catfish Island, Terry and Pam began searching the neighborhoods, paying particular attention to Robin Hood Hills. According to Pam’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial, the Hobbses entered Robin Hood by the Fourteenth Street entrance at approximately 9:30 p.m. and worked their way up toward the West McAuley Drive entrance, but Pam never crossed the pipe bridge toward the area where the boys were eventually found. After searching the woods, the family rode “around town looking anywhere [they] could think of.” According to her testimony, Pam and her four-year-old daughter Amanda went back to the house at 1601 South McAuley while Terry, family friend David Jacoby, and Pam’s father, Jackie Hicks Sr., spent the entire night searching the woods and surrounding area.
Mark Byers and Officer Moore were concluding their nearly fruitless search of Robin Hood after circling the woods in a wide loop, covering much of the same ground earlier searched by Ryan and his friends. It was only “nearly” fruitless because the two did discover some bicycle tire tracks near the bayou, but no sign of any bikes. Could these tracks have been made by the boys’ bikes? Moore returned to his patrol car and headed back to the police station. It was time for an 11:00 p.m. shift change, and he would be going off-duty. Mark Byers returned home and contacted the sheriff’s office again, much more agitated this time because it was late at night, and as far as Mark could tell, no official police search had been mounted. Pam Hobbs later made the same complaint, saying, “I wish they would have started [searching] earlier than what they did.”
Mark and son Ryan drove over to the north side of Robin Hood, to the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. The truck wash was right off the interstate, and the two headed toward the back of the building, where they pointed the Isuzu’s headlights into the woods and began blowing the car horn and shouting Christopher’s name. Later, with the help of his friend Tony Hudson, Mark Byers checked vacant houses and buildings that the boys might have crawled into during the night. After this yielded nothing, they returned home, and Ryan went to bed. Mark and Melissa waited from about 3:00 a.m. on, waited because there was nothing else to do. A knock on the door at 6:00 a.m. roused Mark Byers; it was Terry Hobbs. The two headed back toward Robin Hood to continue the search. Todd Moore, who had just gotten off work from his trucking job, and Steve Branch Sr., little Stevie’s biological father, joined them. An hour or so later, Mark met up with Denver Reed of the search and rescue unit, and Reed gave Mark an idea of how they would conduct their search of the bayou.
There was a police briefing that morning at the West Memphis Police Department, and Inspector Gary Gitchell gave the news to the officers who were just arriving for duty: three small boys had been missing since about 6:00 p.m. and had last been seen heading toward the woods at Robin Hood Hills. All available personnel would be assigned to the search. Several detectives were to cover the streets in the northeast quadrant of West Memphis, canvasing door-to-door with a prepared questionnaire, while the rest returned to Robin Hood and the surrounding area for a thorough daylight search. Crews of neighbors joined the police in Robin Hood, and soon the area was buzzing with activity. A helicopter had been dispatched from Memphis to perform an aerial survey of Robin Hood Hills and the surrounding area. Search and rescue dropped their john boat into the bayou to eliminate the possibility that the boys had drowned, though this was unlikely; Christopher was a strong swimmer, and three boys drowning together in a drainage canal seemed doubtful.
Detective Bryn Ridge, a ten-year veteran of the West Memphis Police Department, was busy working his way through brush and vines, making a tedious and painstaking search of the undergrowth that covered the area east of the woods. Finding the going difficult and the search unproductive, Ridge went home to get his three-wheeler and moved his search to the west of the woods behind Walmart. He had been at it since 7:30 a.m., and it was nearing 1:30 p.m. when he got the call summoning him back to Robin Hood, about three miles east of the open fields on Airport Road where he was presently searching.
Detective Sergeant Mike Allen had been in law enforcement for twelve years, the last six with the West Memphis Police Department, and he knew the area well. He initially had been dispatched to survey the neighborhood in search of vacant houses that the boys could have gotten into overnight. Shortly after one o’clock, however, Allen received a call directing him to return to the woods right away; the searchers had found something. When Allen arrived at Robin Hood, he came to a pipe that ran about five to six feet above Ten Mile Bayou, a height that varied depending on rainfall. This was a popular entrance to the woods for the local children, and Allen proceeded carefully across the bridge, making his way uphill to an area where a small group of police officers and search and rescue workers were gathering. His att
ention was directed to an ominous sight: two small tennis shoes were floating in the murky water of a shallow drainage ditch. Finding an area from which he could access the water, Allen scrambled down a bank and lowered himself into the creek (actually, he slipped down the embankment and landed rather unceremoniously in the ditch). Allen started making his way toward the floating sneakers. As he reached for one of them, his foot struck an object in the creek. When he lifted his right foot, little Michael Moore’s body floated to the surface.
In an instant, the mode of the investigation switched gears. Chief Inspector Gitchell was called to the scene to take charge. Crime scene tape was unpacked and strung up around the pipe bridge area, and all entrances to the woods were blocked. One look at Michael Moore’s body, lifeless and beaten, with his wrists bound to his ankles, left no ambiguity about the cause of death; this was a homicide and, by all appearances, an especially vicious one. The area was now a bona fide crime scene and needed to be secured before any more evidence was rendered useless, though with dozens of people traipsing through the area the previous night and all through the day, there was a high probability that much critical evidence had been destroyed. Now two more boys needed to be found, but with the discovery of Michael Moore’s body, hope for a positive outcome all but vanished.
Detective Bryn Ridge volunteered for the grim task of continuing the search of the ditch. Having just arrived as Mike Allen discovered the Moore boy’s body, Ridge prepared for what was ahead. Slipping into the debris-laden creek, which was only about two feet deep, Ridge dropped to his knees and began moving toward the location where the first body had been found. Moving his hands along the mucky creek bottom, from bank to bank in a sweeping motion, he carefully felt around for what he expected would be another body. When he reached Michael’s body, floating face down in the water, he gently scooped up the boy and placed him on the nearest riverbank. The other officers looked on, stupefied; how could anyone, even a police officer, behold such a scene and not be forever changed?
Continuing his search of the creek bottom, Ridge started to find clothing that had been jammed down into the mud with sticks. Michael’s Cub Scout shirt and hat, more shoes, two pairs of trousers (turned inside out with the zippers fastened), shirts, underpants—all had been shoved into the muck in the same manner. About ten yards downstream from where Michael had been found, Ridge located the second body, that of Stevie Branch. He was positioned face down in the mud, having been beaten and bound in the same way as Michael—left wrist to left ankle, right wrist to right ankle. Shoelaces served as the binding. Stevie had an additional injury: the left side of his face was torn open in a grotesque, jagged wound. Next, not more than a few feet from where he found Stevie, Ridge came upon the body of Christopher Byers. As the boy’s body was lifted from the water, the searchers saw one final horror inflicted on the child: Christopher had been emasculated, his scrotum removed and most of his penis with it. The boys’ bodies were laid on the riverbank in approximation to where they had been found, with Michael alone and Christopher and Stevie together further downstream. A shaken and weary Bryn Ridge pulled himself out of the water and regained his composure before continuing his work. It was going to be a very long day, and the worst part was still to come: someone had to inform the parents.
Todd Moore, who lived right on the other side of East Barton Avenue at number 1398, alerted Mark Byers to a broadcast he’d heard on his police scanner: the searchers at Robin Hood had found something. The two fathers hopped into Todd’s truck and hurried over to the dead end on McCauley only to see the area being cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. As Mark rushed the thin barrier in an attempt to get to the scene, he was halted by police guarding the perimeter. Gary Gitchell was nearby and told the officers to let Mark past. Gitchell quickly related that they had found a tennis shoe, black and purple, at the scene. Mark’s heart sank; he had bought Christopher a pair of black and purple tennis shoes a few days earlier. Gitchell then managed to tell Mark that they had found the boys. “Did they drown?” Mark asked, the fear gripping him tighter.
Gitchell looked Mark level in the eye. “No, this is a homicide,” he said. “You need to tell your wife.”
Pam Hobbs was also at the scene. When the news spread through the crowd, she collapsed on the street. Among the other neighbors gathered at the police line were Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson. Little Aaron was trying to tell Mark about the clubhouse that he and Chris had in Robin Hood and how they used to play there, but Mark barely heard him.5 After being briefly consoled by another officer, Mark turned and headed for home, trying to figure out how he would tell Melissa that their son was dead.
The atmosphere at the Hobbs house had been chaotic from the time that Terry picked Pam up at work at the end of her shift. That night, before the bodies were found the next afternoon, Pam was becoming increasingly agitated, and Terry took her to David Jacoby’s house so that she could call her father, Jackie Hicks, who lived in Blytheville, Arkansas (the Hobbses allegedly had no phone, though years later Terry would insist that they did). It was normally an hour’s drive from Blytheville to West Memphis; according to Pam, her father made it in thirty minutes that night. Alternating between searches by foot and searches by car, the four—Terry, Pam, Jacoby, and Jackie Hicks—rode through the neighborhoods, again, and ended up at Robin Hood, which had become the focus of the search. The four entered the woods from the Blue Beacon entrance. When Pam surveyed the area by flashlight, she neared panic. “Lord have mercy, son. You’re not out here.” The woods, she said, were overgrown, mosquito-infested, and downright scary. She started calling his name. “Stevie,” she shouted, “you’re not in trouble. Come home!” In her heart she knew that he would never be out in this place at this time of night. “Stevie is afraid of the dark”, Pam later recalled. “He sleeps with a night light.”6
At one point, Pam found herself on a path deeper in the woods, when she felt a kind of fear she had never felt before. “The hair was standing up on my arms,” she said. She turned around and walked back to the truck. “I wanted to run,” she said. “Thinking back to when it happened and all that, I think maybe [who] might have done it [wasn’t completely] out of the woods, and was watching me.” At about 2:00 a.m. on May 6, Terry had a similar experience in the woods. “It was like an evil presence was out there. And you see people praying, casting evil spirits out. I’ve seen that done. It’s like that presence of evil.” Years later, in 2008, Terry was interviewed by Cathy Frye of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, at which time he repeated the story, this time adding more detail. “I couldn’t breathe. I froze. The hair started standing up.” Hobbs told Frye, for some strange reason, that he knew what blood smelled like from time he’d spent with his father, slaughtering and butchering animals, but that he hadn’t smelled it on the path that night. “I had to get out of there. Something just wasn’t right. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t remember if I told police.” He didn’t tell police. He finished his interview with Frye by saying that he was glad he hadn’t been the one to discover the bodies, adding, “They were buried underwater.”
The City Reacts
West Memphis was a community in shock. There had been gruesome murders in the past. There was the Ward triple homicide in 1985, in which fifteen-year-old Ronald Ward murdered two elderly sisters and their grandnephew. The city had also experienced the Gurvis “Buddy” Nichols homicides in 1960, in which two nine-year-old boys were shot to death. And there were the Barbara McCoy killings in 1988; McCoy and a female accomplice murdered and then burned McCoy’s two children in a bizarre spiritual ritual. West Memphis was clearly a very violent place, but somehow this new horror galvanized the community in a way that past killings had not. It seemed that everyone in West Memphis had a story about “cult” activity and strange goings-on with satanic and ritualistic overtones. Since the Charles Manson murders in California in 1969 and the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana in the fall of 1978, followed by the murderous rampage of “Nightstalker” Richard
Ramirez in the mid-1980s—as well as the “satanic ritual abuse” scares of the late 1980s and early 90s—the public had been increasingly frightened by a perceived rise in bizarre, cult-like killings.
But there was more to it than that. Nothing takes hold of the emotions quite like the death of a child. Adam Walsh, JonBenét Ramsey, Amber Hagerman, Kimberly and Kristen McDonald, and more recently, Caylee Anthony—these stories force us to confront the potential for total depravity that exists in humankind. It’s also easy to empathize with grieving parents, particularly if one has children of one’s own. If it could happen here, in our town, to people we know; why not to us? The thought is terrifying. The murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore were, it seemed, totally random. And the children had not just been killed. The brutalization, abuse, and mutilation stood in sharp contrast to the almost orderly way they had been “disposed” of—neat little packages tied up, clothes submerged separately, the crime scene practically erased of evidence. How could so much hate and anger be unleashed on three eight-year-old boys?7 It was little wonder that the people of West Memphis were on edge and anxious during the period following the murders. The question is, how badly frightened were they? Frightened enough to hang the killings on the first viable suspect to be presented, to put reason and their sense of justice aside in exchange for swift vengeance? For many, mostly those outside of West Memphis, there would be reason in the coming months and years to question the judgment and motives of the police, the judges, the prosecutors, the juries, and almost anyone who became connected with the case. In a society besieged with violent crime, the case would nonetheless garner national attention and spread in notoriety in a way that few could have predicted.