Don't Free the West Memphis Three

by Pat Brown

On October 23, 2009, nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten told her Mommy goodbye and skipped over to her little friend's house. She didn't come home. This young child, sugar and spice and everything nice, encountered the exact opposite late that afternoon. She went trustingly into the woods with her friend's older sister, fifteen-year-old Alyssa Bustamente (left), to explore, to play, to enjoy the special feeling of being given attention by an older girl. Only this teenager morphed into the nightmare her mother always told her wasn't real.

In the next moments, the last moments of Elizabeth's short life, she saw a monster come for her, cruel and nasty words spewing from her mouth. The monster hit her, shoved her to the ground, and there as the evil loomed over her, Elizabeth (below right) terrified, her eyes blurring with tears, wanted her Mommy. Mommy! Mommy! She felt hands clawing her throat, clamping down around her neck, and she couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe ... no ... no .... Mommy ... stop, Alyssa, stop ... no ... the fear screamed through her little body. The hands left her throat and as she gasped for air, she felt a pain shoot through her left wrist, and then her right. Through the tears coursing down her cheeks, she saw blood coming out of her arms, her blood, and the monster was laughing.

The monster with the knife came at her face, and she felt the burning, searing ripping of her throat ... and the knife came down again and the choking this time was from the blood filling up her airway .. and she knew ... she knew she wouldn't see her Mommy again ... she knew ... she knew the worst thing in the world had happened to her. She felt the dark rush over her, and she screamed silently in her head one last time.

Alyssa Bustamente confessed to killing the little girl. She wanted to know "what it would be like to kill someone." This is the same girl who thought it was funny to watch her little brothers shock themselves on an electric fence. She hated the world; she wrote that her hobbies were "cutting" and "killing people."

Now, let's back up to to an early May, 1993, evening in West Memphis, Arkansas, when three eight-year-old boys rode their bicycles into a wooded area known as Robin Hood Hills. They zigzagged through the terrain, daring each other to do a better trick, to jump a ditch, to beat each other to the far tree. They would have played on happily until one of them remembered it was time to go home -- if they hadn't encountered three other boys, teenagers, in their play space. At first, they thought it was cool; big guys, like older brothers, all dressed in rebel black, grins on their faces, yeah, swaggering, a bottle of whiskey in one of their hands, yeah, we are hanging with the men now, we are member of their club. The older boys joked with them, told them they had something neat to share with them. The little kids got off their bikes, let them fall to the ground, and eagerly went over to the trio. They were shown something, all right.

Each boy was grabbed, thrown to the ground. At first, confused, they thought maybe this was a game, like a wrestling game, until fists hit them in the face, repeatedly, and their clothes were pulled off. Shoelaces were stripped out of their shoes and used to hog-tie them. Pants dropped to the ground from the older boys' waists, and then the unimaginable happened, things that they had heard of, whispered and giggled about on the playground, repulsive things that were now happening to them. Pain, humiliation, terror rained down on the little boys, the brutality increasing by the minute until the knife came out and screams came from one of the boys as he was stabbed and mutilated. The other two lay in their agonizing contorted positions, frozen in horror as their watch their friend dying -- and then their heads were bashed in. They were still alive when they were dragged into the stream. Water filled their lungs and, if they were conscious at all at that moment, they would have felt themselves choking as they sunk into the their muddy, watery grave.

Chris Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore (all above left) would never ride their bicycles again.

Jessie Misskelley, 17, (right) confessed to the crime in detail. Three times. He had a temper and got in fights. He had a record for shoplifting and vandalism. He was a bit slow and a follower.

Jason Baldwin, 16, had a record for vandalism and shoplifting. He was Damien's best friend.

Damien Echols, 18, had a history of psychological problems for which he had been institutionalized. He is reported to have stomped a dog to death, attacked patients in the mental hospital sucking blood out of their wounds, starting fires at school, threatened to kill his teachers and parents, claimed he was a supernatural being, said he liked to drink blood because it gave him special power, and read Anton LeVay's Satanic Bible. Damien exhibits psychopathic behaviors. He bragged about committing the crime

Circumstantial evidence supported the involvement of the teens in the crime.

The three had no alibis.

Then who did it?

The defense needed a new suspect and a new motive. They brought in criminal profiler Brent Turvey. He provide one. His analysis concluded that the boys were killed at dawn, not dusk (giving the three teens alibis), that they were abducted, killed elsewhere, and the bodies driven back to that location (eliminating teens without trucks), and that there were bite marks that did not match the West Memphis Three (nor anyone else for that matter, because those blurry autopsy photos were not teeth impressions). The focus of the attack was to punish little victim Chris Byers (locking in his father, Mark Byers, as the killer). Recognizing the attack on the three boys required more than one person, Turvey allows the killer to have a more passive helper, his wife Melissa. She would be responsible for the "bite marks" on Steve Branch's face, the result of a female style of Battered Child Syndrome.

Okay. So let me get this straight. It is not believable that a violent psychopath like Damien Echols (left) got together with his deviant buddies and decided to follow some young kids into the woods and get a sick thrill out of attacking and torturing them, but THIS scenario makes sense?

The Byers leave their other son at home (and tell him to tell the cops he was with them when they went looking for his brother). They go out to find Chris and when they see him with his friends, they are already mad that he disobeyed them and didn't come home on time. They decide to lure all the boys away to some hideout and strip them naked and tie them up with their shoelaces. Then they leave them there while they go help search the park with the other parents. Sometime in between helping search the woods, Mark Byers and his wife sneak back the hideout, beat the crap out of the kids, and stab them as well. While Mark Byers is busy hacking off his son’s genitals, Mom is too busy biting up the Branch kid to be all that concerned. After Chris is dead, they jump in the truck with his body and his bleeding, dying little friends. They rush to the park to dump the bodies, hoping no one happens upon them while they are doing it, go home to their other son, meet with the concerned parents, talk with the police, go out on the search all night, and keep up this pretense for the duration of the trial.

This scenario lasted for years, with the Free the West Memphis Three side standing firm that Byers was the killer and had his teeth pulled in 1997 so he couldn't be matched to any tooth impression evidence. I am not sure when this theory went downhill, but maybe they were counting on those "teeth" to match something.

Now, they needed a new suspect. In 2007, one hair was found entwined in one of the knots and it was stated that it was "not inconsistent with" the hair of Terry Hobbs, victim Stevie Branch's stepfather. Another hair found nearby was supposedly "not inconsistent" with that of his good friend, David Jacoby, who he hung out with Since hair could have ended up there through secondary transfer and the one that was "not inconsistent" with David Jacoby was found two weeks later by a searcher (the hair was consistent with 7% of the population), it's not any evidence that can convict. But this hair and the new theory that Hobbs and his buddy killed the boys is what the defense hopes will get an appeal.

I hope they don't get it. The deaths of these three boys were not the result of domestic child abuse gone out of control. I have never seen a case where a parent becomes angry, decides to assault and kill the child AND take out a couple of friends as well, especially stripping them, hogtying them. Then leaving them close by where the bodies can be found along with any evidence? Unless the stepdads, one or the other did not have vehicles, those bodies should have been dumped some thirty miles away in a ravine or in three shallow graves.

Here is what I believe happened:

The crimes were committed by more than one person.

The offenders lived nearby the crime scene.

The boys were targeted because they were easy to access and control.

The boys were probably followed and conned or lured into the woods.

The boys were overpowered by larger assailants and the crime was committed at the scene, most likely in the water during the waning daylight hours.

The crime was planned but not in the sense that it would necessarily end with homicide. Like wilding, crimes involving groups of young teens often end extremely violently.
Nothing but a knife or two was brought with the offenders nor was anything but the weapons taken away. This shows lack of maturity or criminal experience.
The offenders did not attempt to get rid of the evidence. The water was a lucky break.

The crime was violent and was a show of power. Essentially, it was a thrill crime.

Now, who would be likely to live near the scene, not have a vehicle, have a posse big enough to handle three boys and be recognizable to the boys so they could lure them without them running away? Since the boys were dead by dusk (rigor mortis evidence and livor evidence and no evidence of the bindings being on a live body for any period of time), who was unaccounted for at that time? The crime was planned (even if just minutes before, when the boys were spotted going into the woods) but no materials were brought; a sign of a fairly inexperienced killer/killers or a sign of youth. The sexual aspects of the crime encompass power and control as do the actual murders. Who does this sound like to you? How about that cold-blooded psychopath who wanted to kill people and drink blood and be God, who knew the boys, lived near the boys and had his homeys with him?

Damien Echols is an evil, soulless creature. His two buddies aren't worth much either. They aren't being discriminated against because they wore black or were a bit weird. They are in prison because, like Alyssa Bustamente, sometimes teens kill.

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