West Memphis 6 the need for justice

Three eight-year-old boys (Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers) were reported missing on May 5, 1993. The first report to the police was made by Byers' adoptive father, John Mark Byers, around 7:00 pm. The boys were last seen together by a neighbor, who reported that they had been called by Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of Steve Branch around 6:00. Hobbs later denied seeing the boys at all on May 5. Initial police searches made that night were limited. Friends and neighbors also conducted an impromptu and unsuccessful search that night, which included a cursory visit to the location where the bodies were ultimately found.

A more thorough police search for the children began around 8:00 am on the morning of May 6, aided by Crittenden County Search and Rescue personnel, along with several others. Searchers canvassed all of West Memphis, but focused primarily on Robin Hood Hills, where the boys were reported last seen. Despite a human chain making a shoulder-to-shoulder search of Robin Hood Hills searchers found no sign of the missing boys. Search and Rescue personnel broke for lunch at 1:00 pm, but police and others continued searching.

Around 1:45pm, Juvenile Parole Officer Steve Jones spotted a boy's black shoe floating in a muddy creek that led to a major drainage canal in Robin Hood Hills. A subsequent search of the ditch found the bodies of three boys. They were stripped naked and had been hogtied with their own shoelaces: their right ankles tied to their right wrists behind their backs, the same with their left limbs. Their clothing was found in the creek, some of it twisted around sticks that had been thrust into the muddy ditch bed. The clothing was mostly turned inside-out; two pairs of the boys' underwear were never recovered. Christopher Byers also had deep lacerations and injuries to his scrotum and penis, most likely caused by post-mortem animal predation.

The original autopsies were inconclusive as to time of death, but the Arkansas medical examiner determined that Byers died of blood loss, and Moore and Branch drowned. A later review of the case by a medical examiner for the defense determined that the boys had been killed between 1:00 am and 5:00 am on May 6, 1993.

The official interpretation of the crime scene forensics for the case remains controversial. Prosecution experts claim Byers' wounds were the results of a knife attack and that he had been purposely castrated by the murderer; defense experts claim the injuries were more probably the result of post-mortem animal predation. Police suspected the boys had been raped or sodomized; later expert testimony disputed this finding despite trace amounts of sperm DNA found on a pair of pants recovered from the scene. Police believed the boys were assaulted and killed at the location they were found; critics argued that the assault, at least, was unlikely to have occurred at the creek.

Byers was the only victim with drugs in his system; he was prescribed Ritalin in January 1993, as part of an attention-deficit disorder treatment. (The initial autopsy report describes the drug as Carbamazepine.) The dosage was found to be at sub-therapeutic level, which is consistent with John Mark Byers' statement that Christopher Byers may not have taken his prescription on May 5, 1993.