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The Case Against The West Memphis 3 Killers
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Book Synopsis The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers by : Gary Meece
Download or read book The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers written by Gary Meece and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beaten, bound and mutilated bodies of three 8-year-olds, Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, were pulled from a muddy ditch in a wooded area in West Memphis, Ark., on May 6, 1993. The boys had gone missing the day before. Weeks of investigation led to arrests of Damien Echols, 18, Jason Baldwin, 16, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. on June 3, 1993, after the 17-year-old Misskelley confessed that he and two friends murdered the boys. All three were convicted. The convictions held up on appeal. Eventually, thanks to Hollywood celebrities and misleading documentaries, the killers walked free. They passed up the opportunity to present new evidence, taking instead guilty pleas that allowed them to claim they were innocent. No exonerating evidence, despite many years of investigation and a defense fund in the millions of dollars, was produced. They became known as the West Memphis 3. This is a combined, revised version of "Blood on Black" and "Where the Monsters Go," written by Gary Meece, a veteran Memphis Commercial Appeal journalist and the former managing editor of the West Memphis Evening Times.
Download or read book Blood on Black written by Gary Meece and published by . This book was released on 2017-03-26 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They did it. The West Memphis 3 are guilty. They are guilty despite what the documentaries, books and news stories have said over and over. Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. killed three 8-year-olds, Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, on May 5, 1993, in a wooded area in West Memphis, Ark. The murders were thrill kills, according to Echols himself. But they were much more than that. Police were struck by the ritualistic aspects. Local dabblers in the occult immediately came under suspicion. Under questioning, Echols, already acknowledged as a witch, flaunted his knowledge of the occult, his theories of how the killings could have "magickal" implications and his insights into how the killer would think and feel. He demonstrated special knowledge about the case beyond the little publicly known. He gave out signals that he was a prime suspect; a series of witnesses further implicated him. A confession broke open the case. The widely accepted WM3 storyline is that inept police and prosecutors, with a howling mob of religious fanatics to placate, somewhat arbitrarily picked out three innocent boys to blame for horrific murders because Damien and his best pal Jason wore black T-shirts, listened to heavy metal music and had funny haircuts and because the third boy, Little Jessie, was practically retarded and thus easily manipulated. Almost every element in that storyline has little relation to reality. The weirdness that drew the attention of authorities stemmed from bad choices by the suspects rather than clothing, haircuts or rocking out to Megadeth. The West Memphis police did their duty in a diligent if imperfect manner. The investigation was professional and painstaking. Detectives took many statements, followed strange and unpromising leads and administered the polygraph dozens of times. All three of the teens from the trailer parks were convicted. The convictions held up on appeal. Eventually, thanks to Hollywood celebrities and misleading documentaries that left out crucial evidence, the killers who became the West Memphis 3 walked free. No exonerating evidence, despite many years of investigation and a defense fund in the millions of dollars, has been produced. None of the three has a credible alibi. The mainstream media bought into the premise that "those boys were innocent." By putting the focus on mullet-headed rednecks, drawling overweight cops and righteously angry Christians, the media played upon the most egregious stereotypes of Southern whites, while positioning a murdering sociopath as a hip kid who was just too cool for the uptight hometown idiots. The West Memphis 3 myth was made to order for the familiar narrative of the perceptive young outsider that every hipster and aspiring artist imagines himself to have been. Among the sensitive souls who found a doppelganger of their teen selves in Echols were professional outsiders - such as Johnny Depp and Henry Rollins. In Aleister Crowley's "magickal" system, which Echols embraced in his preteen years, orgasm and ecstasy are equated with death and sacrifice and the sexual fluids are often represented as blood or water. Echols felt he was in transition to a state of being a god, something other than human; he believed that drinking blood invested him with spiritual energy. Echols and "blood brother" Jason formed a pathological dyad, cultivating elaborate violent fantasies. Via the ritual torture, killing and eating of dogs, cats and other animals, they educated themselves in the curriculum of occult murder. The lurking allure of a "thrill kill" finally became irresistible when the killing time coincided with sunset, the rise of a full moon and the pagan holiday of Beltane.
Download or read book Devil's Knot written by Mara Leveritt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-10-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning investigative journalist takes readers deep inside the 1993 slayings of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, revealing the overzealous prosecution that may have improperly convicted three teenagers.
Book Synopsis Where the Monsters Go by : Gary Meece
Download or read book Where the Monsters Go written by Gary Meece and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is the myth of the West Memphis 3 -- innocent teenagers railroaded by malicious police and prosecutors into murder convictions because of the way they dressed and the music they listened to, there being no evidence against them except the prejudices of Southern white Christians. And then there is the reality --- three criminally inclined young thugs involved in occultism who gleefully tortured three 8-year-old boys and then brought the justice system down upon them based on multiple factors, including a series of confessions, failed lie detector tests, failed alibis, eyewitness sightings and a history of violence. The second volume in this series, following -Blood on Black, - continues to examine the evidence against Jessie Misskelley Jr., Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols in the murders of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch on May 5, 1993. Misskelley, Baldwin and Echols met up that afternoon just outside Lakeshore Estates Trailer Park, according to the multiple confessions of Misskelley. Echols and Baldwin were drinking beer. The plan was to go to West Memphis and beat up some boys. They walked about two miles into woods known as Robin Hood or Robin Hood Hills. Echols knew the woods well, having lived in the nearby Mayfair Apartments, frequently walking through the area as a shortcut between his home in West Memphis and his friends in the trailer parks and having been spotted in the woods recently by an acquaintance. Michael, Stevie and Christopher Byers, all second graders at Weaver Elementary School, lived south of the woods and visited the woods frequently to play. That afternoon they were spotted heading toward Robin Hood around 6, close to the time their killers entered from the north. When Echols heard the children approaching, he began making sounds to lure them in, while Misskelley and Baldwin hid. Then, according to the confessions of Misskelley, and indicated by the blood patterns at the scene and other evidence, the teens jumped the 8-year-olds, beat them viciously, stripped them of their clothes, mutilated Stevie's face, castrated Christopher, sexually molested them, hogtied them and dumped them in a muddy ditch, where Michael and Stevie drowned. Christopher already had bled out from his wounds. Misskelley quickly left the scene, which was scrupulously cleaned up. Echols was spotted walking along the service road near the crime scene later that evening in muddy clothes. After frantic parents sparked an extensive search for the missing children, their bodies were discovered the next afternoon by law enforcement officers. Tales of strange rituals held in the woods by mysterious strangers spread quickly among the crowd gathered near the crime scene. As detectives and other officers gathered information and talked to witnesses or potential suspects, Echols quickly drew the scrutiny of officers. Besides the talk among the boys' neighbors, the ritualistic aspects of the murder -- including the way the boys were bound, and timing possibly influenced by setting, proximity to a pagan holiday and celestial events -- furthered suggested occultism as an impetus for the killings. Local officers were familiar with Echols as a dangerous, mentally ill teenager immersed in witchcraft. Among the many tips coming into police were reports that Echols had been seen near the crime scene that night and that he was heavily involved in a cult. A series of police interviews with an all-too-knowing Echols did nothing but deepen suspicions. Echols failed a lie detector test, thereafter refusing to talk. Police heard that Echols had been telling friends about his involvement in the murders. Vicki Hutcheson, an acquaintance of Misskelley, decided to -play detective.- Soon police brought in Misskelley for routine questioning. After he, too, failed a lie detector test, he gave the first of a number of confessions. The case was solved, but the questions continue.
Book Synopsis The Blood of Innocents by : Guy Reel
Download or read book The Blood of Innocents written by Guy Reel and published by Pinnacle Books. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the events surrounding the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, and the trials of the three teens who were convicted of the crime.
Download or read book Untying the Knot written by Greg Day and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On May 5, 1993, second-graders Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore disappeared from their West Memphis, Arkansas, homes. The following afternoon, their nude, beaten, and bound bodies were discovered in a drainage ditch less than a mile away. After a troublesome confession, three local teenagers, later dubbed the "West Memphis Three," were arrested, tried, and convicted in early 1994. Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley received life sentences, while ringleader Damien Echols went to death row. Three years later, the documentary film "Paradise Lost" premiered on HBO, and the effect on viewers was dramatic. Many became skeptical of the verdicts and also felt one of the fathers of the victims was a better suspect-John Mark Byers. In Untying the Knot, author Greg Day tells the true story of John Mark Byers and the about-face he made to free the men convicted of the crime. Day exposes the propaganda campaign used to convince a gullible public that Byers was complicit in the deaths of his wife and son. Based on court transcripts and hours of personal interviews, Untying the Knot explores all the case evidence while interweaving dialogues and statements. It traces the life of Byers from his roots in rural Arkansas, to his son's murder and the death of his wife, to his ultimate imprisonment in 1999. It reveals a man redeemed by prison and whose change of heart changed his life. "Day has captured the essence of a towering personality engulfed by an impossible situation. John Mark Byers is an immensely complex character, and Untying the Knot pulls no punches in revealing the man in all his seeming contradictions." -John Douglas, Mindhunter
Book Synopsis Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three Murders by : William Ramsey
Download or read book Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three Murders written by William Ramsey and published by William Ramsey. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three Murders provides a detailed, time-lined analysis of the murder that shocked the nation: the heinous killing of three eight year old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas on May 5th, 1993. A wall of deception has led the American public to erroneously believe that the three men were falsely accused and convicted for the crime. Unfortunately, this is not true. William Ramsey, author of Prophet of Evil: Aleister Crowley, 9/11 and the New World Order, provides shocking insights into the lives of the convicted murderers and their involvement with witchcraft. Relying on actual court and police records, William Ramsey shows that the evidence abundantly points to the guilt of the West Memphis Three.
Book Synopsis Boxful of Nightmares by : Vicky Edwards
Download or read book Boxful of Nightmares written by Vicky Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terry Hobbs, step-father of one of three young boys brutally murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993, recounts his tragic story to Vicky Edwards.
Download or read book High Magick written by Damien Echols and published by Sounds True. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Magick is not a path for followers; it is a path for questioners, seekers, and anyone who has trouble settling for dogma and pre-formulated answers. Magick is for those who feel the desire to peel away the surface of reality and see what lies beneath. Like various persecuted forms of mysticism, magick promotes direct contact with the source of creation.” —Damien Echols Discover a Powerful Practice for Transforming Yourself and Your Reality At age 18, Damien Echols was sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. “I spent my years in prison training to be a true magician,” he recalls. “I used magick—the practice of reshaping reality through our intention and will—to stave off incredible pain, despair, and isolation. But the most amazing feat of all that practice and study was to manifest my freedom.” With High Magick, this bestselling author shares his first teaching book on the powerful spiritual techniques that helped him survive and transcend his ordeal on death row. Though our culture has consigned “magic” to fiction, stage illusions, or superstitions about dark practices, the magick Damien learned is an ancient Western tradition equal the Eastern practices of Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga in its wisdom and transformative power. Here he brings you an engaging and highly accessible guide for bringing magick into your own life, including: • What is High Magick? Damien clears away the stigma and reveals the history and core teachings of this extraordinary art. • The Four-Fold Breath—a foundational meditation practice to train your mind and body to channel subtle energies. • The Middle Pillar—how to bring divine energy into the central channel of your body for empowerment and healing. • The Qabalistic Cross—a centering technique to help you stay balanced and protected regardless of circumstances. • The Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram—powerful practices for banishing negative energies and invoking energy to manifest your goals. • Working with angelic beings and other spiritual allies to support your practice. • Creating thoughtforms to assist you in your ongoing magickal development. • Guidance for overcoming your doubts, enhancing your visualization skills, creating talismans, practicing magick ethically, and much more. “Magick is a journey,” writes Damien. “It’s a continuously unfolding path that has no end. You can study and practice magick for the rest of your life and you will still never learn everything that it has to teach you.” If you’re ready to discover your untapped potential for co-creating your reality with the energy of the divine, then join this extraordinary teacher to begin your training in High Magick.
Download or read book Dark Spell written by Mara Leveritt and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jason's story illuminates the many ways America's justice system can go wrong and fight-often with a vengeance-to sustain that wrong. It celebrates the ordinary heroes who rose up, using art and new technology to challenge trials they saw as mockeries of justice"--P. [4] of cover.
Book Synopsis Yours for Eternity by : Damien Echols
Download or read book Yours for Eternity written by Damien Echols and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis reveal their intimate and affecting letters, written while Echols was wrongfully imprisoned on death row. An explosive bestseller, Life After Death turned a national spotlight on Damien Echols, who was just eighteen when he was wrongly condemned to death. But one of the most remarkable parts of his story still remained untold. After seeing a documentary about the “West Memphis Three,” Lorri Davis—a New Yorkbased landscape architect—wrote him a letter, beginning a thirteen-year correspondence that witnessed their marriage while Echols was still on death row and culminated in Echols’ release in 2011. Sharing their private letters, Yours for Eternity is a must-read for the legions who followed the case as well as anyone who appreciates an extraordinary love story.
Download or read book Life After Death written by Damien Echols and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the wrongful conviction of the infamous West Memphis Three, Life After Death is a powerful and unflinching first-person account of life on death row. In 1993 three teenagers, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley Jr, were arrested and charged with the murders of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The ensuing trial was rife with inconsistencies, false testimony and superstition. Echols was accused of, among other things, practising witchcraft and satanic rituals — a result of the 'satanic panic' prevalent in the media at the time. Baldwin and Miskelley were sentenced to life in prison. Echols, deemed the ringleader, was sentenced to death. He was eighteen years old. In a shocking reversal of events, all three were suddenly released in August 2011. This is Damien Echols' story in full: from abuses by prison guards and wardens, to descriptions of inmates and deplorable living conditions, to the incredible reserves of patience, spirituality, and perseverance that kept him alive and sane for nearly two decades. Echols also writes about his complicated and painful childhood. Like Dead Man Walking, Life After Death is destined to be a classic. West of Memphis, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson (director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and Fran Walsh, details the campaign to have their sentences overturned. The West Memphis Three are also the subject of Paradise Lost, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO.
Download or read book Unsolved No More written by Kenneth Mains and published by Wildblue Press. This book was released on 2017-05-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a law enforcement officer for over fifteen years, Detective Kenneth L. Mains has investigated thousands of cases. Although he has been called a modern day success story, it wasn¿t without failure. This book will take you on a journey from a struggling kid who barely graduated High School to a teenager who joined the Marine Corps and finally to a man who put himself through college in order to accomplish his lifelong goal of being a Detective. Mains has held a distinguished career in law enforcement which has included working undercover with the FBI, solving cold cases, investigating the Mafia and later leading one of the greatest cold case organization ever assembled. Because of his innate ability to solve cases, Mains is routinely sought out by law enforcement and victims¿ families to help solve cold cases. He will take you through some of his very own cold case investigations to give the reader an insight on how he solves cases by using the art of deduction. Through triumph and tragedy you will see that he has succeeded by staying focused on his goals regardless of the obstacles placed in front of him. Yet, this is a story about success as much as it is a cold case instructional by someone who has been referred to as One of this Country¿s Greatest Detectives. He will show you how he has succeeded in law enforcement but more importantly he will show you how he has succeeded where it matters most...in life.
Download or read book Savage Appetites written by Rachel Monroe and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them. Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.
Book Synopsis The Boys on the Tracks by : Mara Leveritt
Download or read book The Boys on the Tracks written by Mara Leveritt and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Arkansas teenagers are run over by a train. The state medical examiner rules they smoked themselves into "a marijuana-induced stupor" before lying down, side by side on the tracks. He rules the deaths accidental. Case closed. Except that when the parents of one get the bodies exhumed, new autopsies point to murder. That launches the mom of one of the boys on a journey that will lead her into a dark world of drugs and political corruption. In 2001, after this book's release, a U.S. court of appeals wrote: "The record in this case reads like a John Grisham novel." Shockingly, this story is true.
Book Synopsis The Kill Jar by : J. Reuben Appelman
Download or read book The Kill Jar written by J. Reuben Appelman and published by Gallery Books. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now the subject of the Discovery+ series Children of the Snow, a cold case murder investigation is cracked open by “a powerful, confident voice in the new true crime memoir genre” (James Renner, author of True Crime Addict). Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977, their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was only six years old when the murders began and even evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings. Autopsies showed that the victims had been fed while in captivity, reportedly held with care. And yet, with equal care, their bodies had allegedly been groomed post-mortem, scrubbed-free of evidence that might link to a killer. There were few credible leads, and equally few credible suspects. That’s what the cops had passed down to the press, and that’s what the city of Detroit, and Appelman, had come to believe. When the abductions mysteriously stopped, a task force operating on one of the largest manhunt budgets in history shut down without an arrest. Although no more murders occurred, Detroit remained haunted. Eerily overlaid upon the author’s own decades-old history with violence, The Kill Jar tells the gripping story of Appelman’s ten-year investigation into buried leads, apparent police cover-ups, con men, child pornography rings, and high-level corruption saturating Detroit’s most notorious serial killer case. “Always deft, often sublime, Appelman uses his investigation to draw us into his personal journey through darkness, to light and life” (Chip Johannessen, producer of Dexter).
Book Synopsis Beyond Robin Hood Hills by : David Kennedy
Download or read book Beyond Robin Hood Hills written by David Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-12 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to The West Memphis 3, depending on which side of the argument you stand, you can find evidence both for and against whichever person you are gunning for and I find that horrifying and interesting in equal measure. Many of the supporters based their opinions on what they learned watching one of the three HBO Documentaries in the Paradise Lost trilogy. This book will take you through the numerous scenarios and countless suspects from that moonlit night in West Memphis Arkansas in May 1993. We will look at the evidence that points to the West Memphis 3 as the killers but also at the evidence that points to numerous other suspects. Moreover, it has to be said, the result (in my mind) would be that the West Memphis 3 are either guilty of one of Arkansas deadliest murders or the main players in a truly unbelievable series of coincidences and lies to protect Terry Hobbs, Buddy Lucas, L.G. Hollingsworth and David Jacoby. We will sort out the fact from fiction and find out what really happened "Beyond Robin Hood Hills".
