315. The West Memphis 3 Part 14 -- The Hutchinsons

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Prosecutors" – Episode 315: The West Memphis 3 Part 14 – The Hutchinsons

Release Date: June 30, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 315 of "The Prosecutors," hosted by Alice and Brett from PodcastOne, the discussion delves deeper into the intricate details of the West Memphis Three case. As seasoned prosecutors, Alice and Brett offer their unique perspectives on one of the most controversial true crime cases in history. This episode, focusing on "The Hutchinsons," marks the 14th installment of their extensive series, surpassing other major cases in both depth and length.

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Recap of Previous Episodes

Before diving into new material, Brett reflects on the extensive coverage thus far:

Brett (02:16): "We've talked about the timeline, various injuries to the boys, the autopsies... and whether or not multiple people could have been involved in this case."

The hosts acknowledge the complexity of the case, emphasizing the numerous angles they've explored, including autopsy analyses and alternative suspects.

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Initial Suspects Considered by Police

Alice and Brett outline the early suspects the police investigated:

• LG Hollingsworth: Connected to Richard Simpson.
• Richard Simpson: Associated with LG Hollingsworth.
• David and Michael Wren (The Wren Brothers): Noted for their criminal history and violent tendencies, making them prime suspects initially due to community biases.

Brett (02:30): "The Wren brothers... were the usual suspects and might have been the police's first two people they really looked at."

Despite initial suspicions, alibis for the Wren brothers eventually excluded them from suspicion.

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Damien Echols and Tunnel Vision

The focus shifts to Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three. Brett challenges the notion of police tunnel vision:

Brett (03:00): "It's not that Damien Echols wasn't on the radar from the beginning, but I do think the notion that this was tunnel vision and it was always an effort to railroad Damien Echols is belied by the facts of the investigation."

Echols became increasingly scrutinized, especially after Jesse Misskelley's confession, which played a pivotal role in the prosecution's case.

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John Mark Byers and the Mysterious Knife

A significant portion of the episode examines John Mark Byers and his enigmatic involvement:

Brett (04:00): "John Mark Byers... gave a knife to one of the producers of the Paradise Lost documentary... the knife had blood on it."

Alice raises concerns about the nature of the knife exchange:

Alice (05:20): "I believe he gave the knife as a gesture of friendship... it wasn't like he was handing over evidence."

The hosts discuss the inconsistent explanations Byers provided regarding the blood on the knife, which was later determined to match both his and his stepson Christopher's blood type.

Brett (06:28): "The blood was consistent with his own. But critically, it was also consistent with Christopher's blood."

This revelation underscores the complexity and potential red herrings within the investigation.

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Aaron Hutchinson's Testimony and Police Interview Techniques

The episode delves into the testimony of Aaron Hutchinson, a young boy whose statements were pivotal yet problematic:

Brett (14:00): "Aaron's story gets stranger and stranger... he describes them as in their 20s, young."

Alice critiques the police's interviewing methods, highlighting how leading questions may have influenced Aaron's recollections:

Alice (16:56): "When you're dealing with children, this is a difficult situation... they are seeking to please."

The hosts argue that the police mishandled Aaron's interviews, leading to traumatic outcomes and unreliable testimonies.

Brett (26:37): "They handled this terribly... they completely mess this up."

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Vicki Hutchinson's Involvement and Credibility

Vicki Hutchinson, the mother of one of the victims, plays a controversial role as an informant:

Alice (33:00): "Vicki is going to testify to all this... Jesse Misskelley's trial."

Alice questions the authenticity and motivations behind Vicki's statements, especially after she recants her initial testimonies.

Brett (42:31): "Vicki recants everything... she had a lot going on."

The hosts explore the possibility of Vicki's testimony being influenced by her personal relationships and emotional turmoil following her son's murder.

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Blood Evidence on Jesse Misskelley's T-Shirt

A critical piece of evidence discussed is the blood found on Jesse Misskelley's T-shirt:

Brett (46:15): "This blood was consistent with Michael Moore's, but it was also consistent with Jesse's."

The limitations of DNA testing at the time are highlighted, emphasizing how the evidence was inconclusive in definitively implicating either individual.

Brett (46:19): "The testing for blood DNA was just far inferior to what we have today."

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Damien Echols's Alleged Animal Cruelty

The episode scrutinizes allegations against Damien Echols regarding animal cruelty, a common trope in character assessments within criminal cases:

Brett (52:11): "Damien had skulls of these animals. The question is, did he do something like this, or is this sort of part of the legend of Damien Echols?"

Alice challenges the authenticity of these claims, suggesting they may be fabricated or exaggerated to fit a certain narrative.

Alice (54:44): "If there's some truth to what he's saying there... a dog with his intestines out because it'd been hit by a car."

The hosts debate whether these allegations genuinely reflect Echols's character or are mere constructs of public perception and media portrayal.

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Relationships Among the West Memphis Three

Understanding the dynamics between Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley is crucial:

Alice (50:03): "Damien and Jason are best friends, inseparable. Jesse's relationship with them is more complicated."

Brett posits that their interconnected relationships could have provided a plausible scenario for collective involvement in the crime, should they be guilty.

Brett (51:38): "They're close enough that they could have committed this crime... Jesse's the one who would crack."

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Potential Motives and Missed Investigation Opportunities

The hosts explore unresolved aspects that might have offered clearer insights:

Brett (28:21): "There were so many missed opportunities... if only the police had done things a little differently."

Topics include:

• Timing and handling of interviews.
• Preservation of evidence.
• Exploration of potential motives beyond satanic rituals.
• Overlooked information about the victims' possible experiences and relationships.

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Sexual Activities of the Victims: A Possible Motive

A controversial aspect discussed is the evidence suggesting the victims may have been involved in sexual activities, potentially explaining the brutality of their murders:

Brett (60:41): "Second, she saw Chris and Michael... naked, possibly engaged in some sort of sexual activity."

Alice adds that such discoveries could point to motives rooted in anger or shame from adult encounters with the boys.

Alice (65:11): "It could be some sort of molestation that's possibly going on... that could have tied this all together."

However, the investigation seemingly did not adequately pursue these leads, leaving significant gaps in understanding the true motive behind the murders.

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Conclusion and Future Episodes

As the episode wraps up, Brett and Alice reflect on the extensive coverage needed to unravel the complexities of the West Memphis Three case. They hint at upcoming discussions on the trials, confessions, and alternative suspects, emphasizing the multitude of unanswered questions that continue to perplex investigators and the public alike.

Brett (73:50): "We're going to talk about the trial of Damien and Jason... their histories and whether or not their histories are consistent with doing something like this."

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Notable Quotes

• Brett (02:16): "We've talked about the timeline, various injuries to the boys, the autopsies... and whether or not multiple people could have been involved in this case."
• Alice (05:20): "I believe he gave the knife as a gesture of friendship... it wasn't like he was handing over evidence."
• Brett (26:37): "They handled this terribly... they completely mess this up."
• Alice (33:00): "Vicki is going to testify to all this... Jesse Misskelley's trial."
• Brett (46:15): "This blood was consistent with Michael Moore's, but it was also consistent with Jesse's."
• Brett (52:11): "Damien had skulls of these animals. The question is, did he do something like this, or is this sort of part of the legend of Damien Echols?"

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Final Thoughts

Episode 315 offers a comprehensive examination of the West Memphis Three case, focusing on nuanced aspects such as witness testimonies, evidence handling, and interpersonal relationships among the accused. Alice and Brett provide critical insights into how investigative missteps and biased perceptions may have influenced the course of the case, leaving listeners with a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding one of true crime's most debated cases.

For those unfamiliar with the series, this episode serves as a thorough exploration of the Hutchinsons' involvement and the broader implications of the case, making it a valuable listen for true crime enthusiasts seeking a prosecutor's perspective on historical legal controversies.

Transcript

[Brett]

I'm Brett. And I'm Alice and we are the Prosecutors. Today on the Prosecutors, we continue our deep dive into the case of the West Memphis three. Sam. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always by my Wernoftig co host, Alice.

[Alice]

Hi, Brett. I love that pronunciation. I have no idea what it means, but way to go. We were just talking about how to.

[Brett]

Be oh, tell me reasonable in German.

[Alice]

I was gonna say, is it German? And I know you were trying to Google it to figure out how to pronounce it, but you bested Google because.

[Brett]

That's right.

[Alice]

Or any search.

[Brett]

I got pretty close. The Germans can let me know. It sounded good, how bad it was. I think it was brutal.

[Alice]

Ruthie says you pronounced it wrong.

[Brett]

Ruthie, native German speaker. Okay, so we are now. Sorry, there's not. We can't do chit chat. We're in episode 14. This is officially the longest series ever now. So what are we gonna do? Right? We gotta push through. We now surpass Adnan with this episode. So it's time to get down to business. We've only got like seven or eight episodes to go. I said it's possible we'll finish in 20, but we're not gonna rush it and we're gonna give a whole episode to Theories. So we're in this for the long haul, but we have. I don't even know what to say in recap at this point.

[Alice]

We talked about so much things happened.

[Brett]

Yeah, we talked about the timeline. We've talked about various injuries to the boys, the autopsies. We had just an amazing episode with Joseph Scott Morgan going through his sort of professional opinion on the autopsy photos and everything we learned. We talked about the knots last time. We talked a lot about whether or not multiple people could have been involved in this case. And we're going to do sort of a deep dive on alternative suspects at some point. But we can start today talking about some of the initial suspects that the police looked at. And we talked about these sort of as we went through the timeline, but I think if you read the reports and the questions the police were asking, it seems like the initial suspects, and frankly, some of these, I don't know if they ever really fell away. LG Hollingsworth, we talked about him some. We're going to talk in depth about him. Richard Simpson, who is sort of connected to LG Hollingsworth. The Wren brothers, David and Michael, who had this sort of deep criminal record. They had a history of violence. They were kind of the usual suspects and might have been the police's first two people they really looked at, and they were hearing that name because much like Damien Echols, when people in the community heard, oh, this terrible thing has happened, they immediately went to David and Michael Wren, but they had a strong alibi, and they were excluded. And then, of course, David, you have Damien Echols. And as the police are looking at this case, they become more and more interested in Damien Echols, culminating in Jesse Misskelley's confession, which led to the trials that we're going to talk about today. So, as we've said before, it's not that Damien Echols wasn't on the radar from the beginning, but I do think the notion that this was tunnel vision and it was always an effort to railroad Damien Echols is belied by the facts of the investigation. So as this continued, other people started to arise, both in the public's imagination and in the eyes of the defense team as possible alternative suspects. One of those people was John Mark Byers. And there was this interesting development in the middle of Jesse Misskelley's trial, which becomes sort of a focal point of both the first and second episode of Paradise Lost. So, Joan Mark Byers, you have these guys who come down from hbo. They're filming this documentary. Byers gets in with them. He would later say they were plying him with alcohol and drugs to get him to do crazy things, which he does plenty of, and he forms sort of a relationship with them. So at some point, he gives a knife to one of the producers of the Paradise Lost documentary. Now, by this point, possibly from the beginning, but according to them, they came down to Arkansas to chronicle this case believing the three were guilty, and then gradually came to the conclusion that they were not guilty. And they also started thinking about alternative suspects. And John Mark Byers and his behavior had led them to think this guy could be involved. He gives this knife to the producer, and they notice it has blood on it.

[Alice]

I think this is important to note. I believe he gave the knife as, like, a gesture of friendship. Right. It wasn't like, hey, this is evidence, because, of course, where this is going to go, it turns into evidence. But didn't he just give it to them, like, you're my friend, and I have, like, a gift to give you?

[Brett]

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, he was just like, hey, I like you.

[Alice]

Here's a guy which is kind of. Which is really interesting, right? I mean, all of this is interesting. So this is not because I've seen this kind of glossed over before. I do think it's interesting. There are lots of situations in these types of cases where people turn over what they think is evidence. This was not that situation. This was him thinking. He was very good friends with these producers. And if you watch Paradise Lost episode one and two, he is very dramatic and they have a lot of footage of him. So just based on what makes it in the cut, they probably spent a lot of time with him. And I think he felt like they were friends. But if you know anything about media folks, they are there for a job, which is to get content for their documentary. Maybe they're friends separately, but I think he was viewing it as this is just a knife. And of course they begin to look at it because they're thinking of alternative suspects. And they also notice blood on it.

[Brett]

Let's be clear. These are a bunch of Yankees from up north. They probably don't carry knives around like the good old rednecks down in Arkansas do. It is probably the case that John Mart buyers owned like 37 knives. That may be a low estimate. People in the south, particularly back then, just own knives like crazy. My grandfather had a ton of knives. He gave me a bunch of them. I still have them. They're super sharp. He always kept them super sharp. So I use them for everything. But people just had a bunch of knives. So it wasn't like John Mark Byers is giving his only knife to these producers. He probably was like, hey, this is one of 27 knives I have. Here you go, friend, take this knife and use it. Or if you think John Mark Bars was involved, which we don't, maybe he was trying to get rid of the murder weapon. And the producers noticing blood on this knife, they turn it over to the police. And at this point there would come a lot of questions about what exactly is going on here. Now Byers story sort of changed multiple times about this knife, which always leads people to question things. Initially he said he had no idea how it could have blood on it. Then he said, oh, he used it. He was dressing some venison, a deer. So maybe it's deer blood. But then it wasn't deer blood, it's human blood. And then he remembered, oh, I remember I cut myself while I was doing something with the knife. So it's probably my blood. And indeed, when they looked at the blood, it was consistent with his own. Alice and I were talking about this before. You think, what does consistent mean? Couldn't they know for certain? Well, in 1993, not really. You know, if they still had this knife and there was still some blood on it, maybe we could test it again. But at the time we could only get sort of a general idea. And it was consistent with his. But critically, it was also consistent with Christopher's blood. So his stepson's blood was also consistent here. Now, there's an interesting side note to all of this. You'll sometimes hear people say that it was consistent with their blood type, and you think, oh, so it's like O negative or something, right? And in fact, Chris and John Mark Byers did have the same blood type, but it's actually much more than that and much more interesting than that. So both Chris and John Mark byers had the HLA DQ alpha allele. Only 3.8% of people have this marker, which is interesting. So not a huge number of people, still a large number, you know, the population of the world or even the United States or probably even west Memphis. We're still talking about several thousand people in West Memphis, but not a huge number. Interestingly, Christopher Byers mother did not have this marker, so he had to get it from somewhere, presumably his father. Now, one thing that's interesting about all this is obviously John Mark Byers is Chris's stepfather. But John Mark Byers and Chris's mom knew each other at least as far as when Chris was born. You hear different things about when they met. His book is very vague on when they met. The story you often hear is a couple days after Chris was born. And so he was in Chris's life from the beginning. I got to tell you, I kind of wonder if maybe John Mark could actually have been Chris's father. They favor each other. If you've seen pictures of them, you have this number. It's fairly low now. I would think that by now, if that were the case, we would know it for sure. So maybe, maybe even probably it's just a coincidence, but just an interesting little thing. As you're looking through the facts in this case, you run across this very close connection between these two. And it just makes you wonder.

[Alice]

And I don't know that it necessarily tells us anything about this case. It's just another facet that's so interesting within all of this. I mean, for one, it's really interesting that like, John Mark Baez is one of the most vocal parents across the board for all the kids, and he's the stepdad. But then you wonder if, like, there were certain emotions or kind of backstories that we just don't know about that may affect how John Mark Byers viewed this entire thing. It might explain away some of his, shall we say, theatrics. Right. Because there's so much more than just the tragedy before him. Maybe there's a history of, I don't know, secrets or something like that.

[Brett]

And the thing is he had been Chris's father for his whole life. You know, he was his stepfather or you know, presumably he was his stepfather. But if he was, he'd literally been there since he was born. So I think it's not as if he walked into this situation when Chris was 7 or something. I mean this is a long standing relationship. So I do think the emotions there real whether he's his biological father or not. And you know, I think he and his wife had a lot going on. She would later die under quasi mysterious circumstances. That was pretty clear from the autopsy. She died from some sort of drug reaction or drug overdose. In the aftermath of all this, when people were trying to prove that it was John Michael Byers, a lot of people wanted you to believe that he murdered his wife. Pretty clear he did not do that. But it just sort of. They had a lot going on. They had a lot going on. I'll just put it that way.

[Alice]

So knife incident. Interesting. Seems very exciting. If you watch the episodes, it was like one of those subtexts and you kind of held your breath like do we have the real killer here now? But as we've talked about, I don't. I think it's pretty impossible for John Mark Myers to have done this. But let's talk about someone who we've touched upon who has a really interesting story to tell and that's Aaron Hutchinson. So on May 27, 1993, a boy named Aaron Hutchinson was brought in by his mother Vicki. We've spoken about Vicki to speak to the police. Now he just turned 8 on May 4th. So he's 7, just turned 8. Aaron said that Michael, Stevie and Chris were his best friends. And Aaron said that the day of the murders the boys asked Aaron's mom if they could go to play at the clubhouse, which was a tree house in the woods. Now this conversation he's having is with Detective Ridge. And Detective Ridge does a lot of heavy leading with Aaron. So Detective Ridge helpfully provides the name of the woods Robin Hood. And you'll see he does a lot of heavy leading. Now we are Talking to an 8 year old boy who may not be the most reliable narrator, shall we say, but Aaron said that ordinarily Michael and Chris would go with him down into the woods, and. And Aaron said that they would play, and sometimes they would watch men, quote, doing nasty stuff. Now, Aaron further stated that they would do what men and women do. And he described them as in their 20s, young. Now Ridge starts to ask questions about how they were having sex. So he is now really leading Aaron, because clearly, Aaron doesn't exactly know what he's seeing. He's saying, you know, adult things, things that men and women do. And Detective Ridge starts just feeding him a lot of, you know, rope, being like, is this what you mean? Is this what you mean? For instance, after Aaron says that these people that they would see in the woods were having sex, he said they were having sex, quote, in the front, which really doesn't make any sense if you're talking about men. Ridge helpfully provides, quote, with their mouth. Were they having sex with their mouth? And Aaron says yes. Aaron also says he saw this happen five different times, though precisely when is unclear. And. And he says it was every day, but it was every time. But it was every time but the Friday. So a little bit confused, but if, in fact they saw men having intercourse in the woods, he claims that he saw them five times. That's a lot of times to be seeing this now. So Aaron's story actually gets even more elaborate because he doesn't just report seeing two men having intercourse in the woods. He reports that there's five men, only one of whom he actually knew from the flash market. So the leader of the group, he reported, wore a white shirt while the others were wearing black. And one of them wore a necklace with a skull and a snake through it. And Aaron referred to him as the skull commander. They also inexplicably had a briefcase with them. But what's interesting about that is, okay, so you have this narrator, this, you know, this kid who's 8 years old. What do adults typically carry? Briefcase. I can kind of see that just being inserted. Right? Like, what defines an adult? They wear ties, briefcases.

[Brett]

Late eighties, early nineties.

[Alice]

Right, Right.

[Brett]

Briefcase was like.

[Alice]

Like everyone had a briefcase.

[Brett]

Right.

[Alice]

Or at least that's like a marker for you're an adult. What does this say about what he's saying? I don't know, except maybe he's trying to explain why he thinks they're adults, because age is really just a concept, especially when you're young, because he reports they're young, but he also says twenties. So this is all. Take it with a huge grain of salt, especially with a lot of the feeding that he's getting from Detective Ridge during this questioning.

[Brett]

I do want to just say a couple things, though, because when you read Aaron's statements, there are many of them. You go on Callahan and read them all. We're not going to go into any depth on these, really, more than what we're talking about now. They get wilder and wilder as they go, crazier and crazier, more explicit as they go. But there are some things here which are interesting. So he sees what he says is this group of men in the woods. It sort of fits with the general idea that there were people in the woods gathering. The police thought it was for satanic rituals. This is more for illicit sex, which in 1993 in Arkansas, if you were going to engage in homosexual group sex in the woods might be the kind of place you would do it. You wouldn't necessarily just be hanging out at the, you know, the local restaurant or whatever. It was just a different time. And it's in Arkansas, the South as well. So you could sort of imagine that happening. There's a truck stop right nearby. I mean, it's not hard to let your imagination run wild here. The other thing that's interesting, he mentions this briefcase. This is something that's going to come up a couple times with Jesse Misskelley and his various confessions and other people talking about Damien having a briefcase. Jesse's gonna say that Damien had a briefcase that had a gun, cocaine, pictures of the boys in it. I'll let you. We'll get into that. More we talk about, basically, I think.

[Alice]

That'S what all kids think.

[Brett]

Exactly. All the adult, once again, coming out of the 80s, like Scarface, Echols over there with his cocaine, his gun. But nevertheless, he's gonna mention the briefcase, too. And it makes you wonder, because one thing to remember an obvious attack on Jesse Misskelly's confession is that it's not his own words. He's actually being fed ideas from the police. So you can imagine it's May 27. The police are talking to Aaron Hutchinson. He's giving them this very detailed thing. They, for a very long time, believed he witnessed this in some form or fashion. There was talk of putting him on the stand. They kept interviewing him. They believed he had seen something. So he talks about a briefcase. You know, is the briefcase. Is that something that the police feed to Jesse? Is it more that Jesse gives it to the police and. And then Aaron's talking about a briefcase. In later interviews, it's all the stuff, right? Like, where is this coming from? Who is the One who's originating this idea of the briefcase. Also the necklace, the skull, Right. Damien had several necklaces like this, not exactly like this, but he had a pentagram necklace, he had an axe necklace, he had various necklaces. So once again, is Eren being fed this as sort of part of the effort to prove that Damian was there, or is he coming up with this on his own? He talks about the skull commander. Those of you who grew up in the 80s and 90s, remember GI Joe, and you had Cobra Commander, right, Who didn't have a skull. But if you also watched he man, you had Skeletor. So maybe he's sort of combining these two fantasy ideas together. But in this, we talk about the satanic panic, and we talked about that a while ago. In this, you can see how the satanic panic happened, right? Because they're interviewing this child. He's very young. They think he has information. They're trying to get information out of him. And you can see how they are manipulating his story. And his story is getting wilder and wilder because of it. This is exactly what happened to McMartin. It's exactly what happened in places around the country. And it is a real just flashing warning sign to police out there. When you're dealing with children, this is a difficult situation. You think this boy has information about a triple murder, you're trying to get it out of him. But they clearly were not trained or ready to interview a child, and they entirely mess this up.

[Alice]

Absolutely right. This is why we have Guardian ad litems and specific interviewers for children. Because, I don't know, I have a bunch of children, it's impossible to get information out of them. And just like adults, they're seeking to please. Right? So if something sounds right, okay. Especially when he doesn't exactly know what he's seeing. And you can imagine. So you may think he must have seen something because he's saying that he saw something that's too adult for him to understand. But he never even says sex. He's saying they're doing what men and women do. And he's fed additional information from there. And since this is like an area that he has no idea what, what it is, if an adult is saying, oh, is it like this? What are you gonna do? Yeah, you know more than me. Sure. So Aaron goes on to say that he and the other three boys went to the forest at about 4:00. Now, this is obviously wrong, but he's also 8 years old. So my 7 year old can barely read the clock. And if he didn't have a clock, may not know what time it is either. So take it for what it's worth. But he says they go into the forest around 4. Now, he said that the boys get there first and they would hide so that they could watch these men later on. So they knew they were going to be there and they wanted to watch this adult thing happen. So the boys would sneak into the forest beforehand and they would hide. Now, Anna's story is going to include him witnessing the murder, but he initially tells police that he actually wasn't present on the day of the murder. Instead, his mom didn't let him go with the boys that day. And so that's the first iteration of his testimony. He wasn't there at all. In fact, he speculates that what happened was that the boys saw the men that day, since this is something they regularly did. At least five times they would go into the forest, hide, and then these men would come and do adult things and the boys would watch. So he speculates that what happened that day when he wasn't allowed to go with the rest of them, is they went into the forest like they had been doing, hid behind, but were discovered by these men and killed by the men. Now, somehow, the police allow Aaron to migrate from this story where he wasn't there the day of the murders, to one in which Aaron is personally involved and witnesses the murders. Now, Aaron's story grows stranger and stranger the longer it went, as most children's story do. At one point, officers asked him if there were any cats present. He said yes. And he said, quote, they caught a cat, they cut his head off and ate it. He clarified later that they ate the cat's body, but they left the head untouched. One really quick note about this. Yes, Seeing men have sex in the forest, probably top of mind. If you saw this, you wanted to report it. If you're a kid and you saw a cat get caught, beheaded, and then eaten in front of you. I actually. Therefore, any person, an adult or a child would think that would stick out more than the men having sex part. So he didn't bring this up on his own volition. It was like when he was prompted about cats that he talked about this very memorable event, if it happened.

[Brett]

Exactly. And this should have been the moment where the police said to themselves, whatever information he has, we've gotten it. We're not gonna get anything else. Because at this point, even if everything he's saying up to this point is true, he now has clearly events that he'll Tell you anything the police ask, was a cat there? And not only was a cat there, but he develops this whole story, right? Like this didn't happen. Even if everything else he said happened, this didn't happen. This is him generating a story, a gruesome story for the police because he thinks that's what they want to hear. Aaron is a victim. He is the. At least the fourth victim in this case. He underwent unimaginable trauma because of this. I think he suffers from this trauma to this day. This is something that never goes away from him at this point. My understanding is he has no idea what happened then. Like, his mind is so confused by all this, he couldn't start to tell you. Right. And I think it is possible that Aaron actually is a witness. It's possible that some of what he said is actually true. It's possible that in some way he held the key to understanding this. Maybe he could have identified who these people were. There are certainly people to this day who think this is what happened in some form or fashion, that there were people in those woods who were engaged in some sort of behavior that was forbidden in society, whether it was devil worship or some sort of gay rendezvous or doing drugs or whatever. And the boys stumbled upon it and they were killed. If you've seen Paradise Lost 3 or west of Memphis, some of this story comes out in accusations against Terry Hobbs. So maybe Aaron did have the key, but he doesn't have it anymore. And he didn't have it after this conversation. And this is one of those places where I think you can legitimately criticize the police on the one hand, while understanding what happened on the other. They're desperate to solve this case. They have a young boy who they know is close to the boys, who's friends of the boys, who would have been with them multiple times when they did those woods, and they mishandled it terribly. What they should have done, they should have stopped. As soon as Aaron said he had information, they should have stopped. They should have gotten with people who knew much more than they did about interviewing children, whether it's the state police or the FBI or somebody, and brought those people in to do this. They handled this terribly. I do not fault them for talking to Aaron. You know, some people act like they shouldn't talk to Aaron at all. That's crazy. They should have. It's the way they did it and the choices they made that not only victimized Aaron, but also lost any opportunity we have of determining whether or not he had legitimate information.

[Alice]

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Remember how this started? He comes in to talk to them because he's saying, these three boys were my best friends. His best friends were just brutally murdered. That in and of itself is incredibly devastating for an eight year old. And I do think there's elements of truth in what he says. For one, I think he did play with these boys a lot in the woods and he may have been able to tell us maybe not what happened this day, but generally, what did they go do? Which path did they take? Did they leave their bikes on this side of the pipe bridge? Would they ever walk in? Did they ever get in the water? I think there was actually a lot of information that has nothing to do with, with the day of the murders. If he were interviewed properly, there was information that you could hopefully separate him from kind of the trauma of everything and try to glean information of what typically happens when you guys go, how long would you go for? Would you ever stay there past dark? What would you do about the mosquitoes? Things that were helpful? Because it does seem that in fact they were friends and they did hang out together. And we know for a fact that the three boys had been in those woods before. They would hide it from their parents, they would come back muddy, they were told not to go in the woods. They like to go the woods. So it would not be a huge le of reasoning to assume that Eren also went into the woods with him at some point and probably would have some information, even if separate from the actual day in which they were murdered. But I don't think we'll be able to know that information now because of the way everything has shaken out and how these interviews, when they were focused on just trying to get him to tell them information about a traumatic event that he may or may not have seen.

[Brett]

What is shocking about this case and what is endlessly frustrating or how many missed opportunities there were. You know, this is just one of them. But there were so many things that happened that if the police had done things a little differently, could have preserved evidence, have opened up leads later on, preserved avenues of investigation, which either because of choices they made mistakes, they made things they didn't know to do, things they did sloppily were lost forever. And I feel like if there's a through line in this entire coverage, we're on episode 14 now. There are so many moments where it's like, if only we knew this, maybe we could solve the case. Whether it's if only we knew. If Mr. Bojangles blood matched the hair found in the sheet. If only we knew about whether the boys times of death. If only their bodies hadn't been left on the side of a ditch bank in the. In the sun on a hot Arkansas day for hours. You know, if only Aaron Hutchinson had been interviewed in a way that made more sense. If only the boys timeline had been nailed down. If only Terry Hobbs had actually been interviewed at the time of the murders. Like there are so many things that. If only they had been done in 1993. Maybe we're not even talking about this case, or maybe we are because it's a triple murder, but we did it in one episode because we know exactly what happened, but we're not there. And if you want to know why this is taking so long while we're doing so many episodes, it's because there are so many unanswered questions that have to be discussed. But that's all we can do is discuss them. We can't give you answers. And it's because of the mistakes that police make.

[Alice]

And one other thing I want to note because I know it's been pretty hard on Detective Ridge and the way this interview was done. So Aaron comes and talks to the police May 27. Do not underestimate what he may have heard, that maybe some of this didn't come from the police. Now, they were certainly leading him, leading him hard. But some of you are saying, but would he really make up the whole like cat head being cut off? You know, all the police said, was there a cat? Not was a cat beheaded? And was there some sort of ritualistic animal sacrifice? Okay, we know that Jesse, Ms. Kelly was hanging around at their house. We know that, you know, Vicky, his mother, is having conversations. This is obviously the talk about town. Kids hear a lot of things, even if you don't think they're in the room, even if you don't think they fully grasp what's going on. So who even knows how much of this is just from bad interrogation or interviewing skills and how much of it was. He overheard things, misunderstood what he heard. And this story comes out and is exacerbated by the fact that he's being interviewed in a way that is not helping draw out the information that he actually does have.

[Brett]

Of course, Aaron doesn't come to the police department on his own. It's not like he drove over in his, you know, 1985 Ford Escort. He comes with his mother, Vicki Maladine Hutchinson, who we have mentioned before. And. And you really could do an entire episode on Vicki if you Wanted to. So for a time, Vicki and Aaron had lived only a block away from the Byers. And Aaron was, as we said, a close friend with the three boys. But Vicki had sort of fallen on hard times. And only a couple weeks before the murders, she had moved to Highland Trailer Park. We talked about Highland before because that's where Jesse Misskelley lived. And in fact, she. He lived only a few doors down from her, and they became friends. Friends can mean a lot of things. Jesse was known to spend the night at her trailer. In fact, he spent the night there the night before his confession. She's always denied there was any sexual relationship. I believe he's denied the same thing. But why a grown woman is having this teenager spend the night at her house, I don't know. And don't give me the whole was different time thing. I'm tired of that. This is not okay. But this was the kind of stuff she was doing. And because she was friends with Jesse, she learned some things that would be of interest to the police. It was Jesse that told her strange stories about a friend of his that drank blood and worshiped the devil, Damien Echols. Now, Vicki, in her own words, had decided to play detective and solve the case herself. Driven, she would later say, by a desire to see justice for the boys. They were, after all, known to her. They were her son's best friends, if she's to be believed at least one of her stories. They had asked if Aaron could come with them that day. She had said no. And that was the whole reason that Aaron wasn't there when the murders went down. Now, coincidentally, in addition to a $35,000 reward for solving the case, she also had been on police radar for a $200 charge on a customer's credit card at a business where she worked. Either a mistake, as she claimed, or an act of theft. This act of theft would eventually get her fired. She would not, however, be prosecuted for this action. Now, I will say this. It's not that unusual for someone not to be prosecuted for what is a relatively low level offense, particularly when they've already been fired. But it certainly is a coincidence that just as this is happening, she comes into the police station and says she has all this information she wants to share. So whether this was to get on the cops good side or because she was generally intrigued, she had decided to become friends with Damien. And in fact, she had invited him to her home through Jesse Misskelley. Now, this is interesting because whatever you believe about Vicki, one thing that is true is that Jesse and Damian were close enough, however friendly they were, that Jesse could be the intermediary here. I think everyone agrees he was the intermediary here, and he is the one who connected Vicki Hutchinson and Damien to each other. Now, when Damien comes over, Vicki's ready. She has decorated her house with satanic and witchcraft books that she had picked up at the greatest library in the south, the West Memphis Library, where you can get everything from the Necronomicon to the book about Satan's second son and how to, you know, do your sacrifices to all these witchcraft books that she is using to decorate her house. It's actually quite amazing. I mean, if I ever go to West Memphis and go to library, it's first place I'm going. We'll see what else they got. So she invites Damien through Jesse, as we said. And Damien would later describe this as. Jesse just kept bugging him about it, right? Like, you need to meet my friend. You need to meet my friend. So eventually he goes over, and it was really to just kind of stop him from asking. I'm good. Fine. I'll take care of it. So he goes over to her house, and Damien talked to her about being questioned by the police and about the murders of the boys. And when asked why they target him, Damien said, according to her, at least, because I'm evil.

[Alice]

So let's talk about Vicki and the fact that she's a CI in this. So a lot of people, by the way, when you talk to them, if they want to insert themselves, they want to be part of something exciting. They want to work off a charge or something, want to be, like, on team government, team investigators. Most of them were like, thanks, but no thanks. Vicki would normally fall into that category. Nothing about her jumps out as, wow, you would have a ton of information about these boys. The tie she has is potentially that her son is close to the boys who have been brutally murdered. That's not a tie necessarily to who may have done this. Right. And so the fact that the police take her up on her undercover work is very bizarre. This is not like a typical investigation, and we typically don't send, like, a layperson to. To catfish someone into giving their confession the way CIs are typically used. You guys probably know this because you probably watch the Wire and, like, TV shows, is someone who has an existing relationship with your target because they will trust you, and you show the illegal action they're doing. So if you normally buy crack cocaine from someone, then you decide, you say, hey, you know, we always meet up whenever I text him on Tuesdays and he gives me money. I give him crack cocaine and we meet at my house. So I can set that up for you because it's not going to be weird because we do this every week and the police are like, great, we'll wire you up, we'll give you a body cam and we'll catch this interaction because you have this pre existing relationship with the fact she doesn't have a relationship with Damien before. This is strange. I know all this because I kind of think it shows how desperate the police are. They don't have a lot of leads, They've talked to a lot of people, they've heard a lot of things. There was so much smoke, right? There's gotta be a fire somewhere and they want to put out that fire badly. And so the fact that they take Vicki up on her offer to be an informant, I think shows how desperate they are and they aren't really getting anywhere.

[Brett]

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[Alice]

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[Brett]

I think it's important to note Alice is right. They take her up on this offer. She'll even say at one point she didn't have a library card to the super library at West Memphis. And so one of the police officers let her borrow their library card so that she could get the satanic books.

[Alice]

There you go. I mean, I'll tell you this. Brett and I have worked with a lot of CIs, a lot of confidential informants. I don't give them anything of my own to help them with whatever is going to happen. I don't give them the drugs. Maybe we'll provide them with, like, marked money so that we could track the money later. Because money's fungible and it's hard to track cash. So we'll mark cash in advance. So you know what money's changing hands and can prove that's the money that was changed hands for whatever legal activity. But I'm not pulling out my personal, like, zoo membership card so that they can go meet at the zoo and, like, have something go down at the zoo. I'm not inserting myself in that way. So I do think this puts you in the midst of all this, though, because there are so many disturbing accounts coming out, but no one has been able to point the finger directly at something. And this is a desperate time and a desperate situation. Now, according to Vicky, Damien invited Vicki to an espat, or orgy that took place in a field two weeks after the murders. And it goes pretty quickly. Goes from, like, meeting Damien for the first time and impresses him with all these library books to, would you like to come to an orgy in the field with me? Supposedly, Damien picked Vicky up in a red Ford Escort. Now, we know that he doesn't have a car. He typically walks all over town. We've heard a lot of people say he does all this walking. So that's clearly not his car. But maybe he borrowed it from Narlene Hollingsworth. Maybe it's another car. Jesse told police that Damien's dad drove a red car and that he'd let Damien borrow it sometime. So whatever it is, it wasn't his car. But Vicki says that a red car picked her up. Now, Jesse, Damien and Vicki went 15 miles north of West Memphis to a field in Terrell, Arkansas, near a creek or a river. I think Terrell was also where Jesse did his wrestling. Wrestling. Right.

[Brett]

So I think that's right.

[Alice]

Yeah.

[Brett]

No, that's Dyess Dais.

[Alice]

Okay, so sorry.

[Brett]

Maybe they're close to each other.

[Alice]

They. They are actually close to each other, but this is not right. Right in town. It's a little bit outside of town. And they note they go to water near a creek or a river. Vicki Sundays there were 10 kids there. I just have to note again, it's like Vicki and a bunch of kids, but 10 kids are there, and their faces, she says, are painted black. She says that they took off their clothes and they started the orgy. Now, Vicki said she wanted to leave, but Damien took her and I guess took her home because he's a gentleman, and Jesse decided to stay. Now, Vicki told detectives that there was an older man at this orgy who ran the cult, and his name was Lucifer, though Damien always called him Lucy. Now, Vicki claimed that Damien thought they were in a relationship, even smashing a board on her front porch in an act of jealousy. And she also said that Jesse had spent the night at her house, but only because she was afraid of prowlers, not because they had any sort of romantic relationship. All of this is a little bit strange. We do have, like, two teenage boys hanging out with them, at least by her words. One of them stayed over, and the other one thought that they were in a relationship. I don't know what to say about that. It sounds like there's shenanigans happening with both of those situations, whether they were romantic or not. But the reason this is important is obviously, when you get romantic relationships involved and who you want to cover for whom, what stories you tell, you have to read all of that testimony through a lens of, are you involved in some way? Are you trying to cover for someone, or are you trying to build up something more than is actually there? Now, as with a lot of other witnesses, Vicki's saying a lot of things that are interesting to the police, but they don't quite know how to decipher if it's true or not. So they subject her to a polygraph test, which she took. And for what it's worth, she passed the polygraph test.

[Brett]

We should tell you all you need to know about polygraphs. Look, you know, it's funny because there are through lines in this that are consistent. This whole Lucy thing. Lucy comes up all the time. Multiple people talk about Lucifer as head of the cult, nickname Lucy. I don't know. The police were never able to nail that down. I don't know. You know, we did a whole episode of satanic panic. I can't tell you what was going on. West Memphis, this stuff, it's just so ridiculous, right? I mean, so much of it going to an s bat, which I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, Alice, you've caused some controversy, and us discussing this case is. You know, we knew there'd be some controversy when we talked about the West Memphis three, but people, they are very upset about the way you pronounce coven.

[Alice]

Yeah. What is up with that?

[Brett]

Why you pronounce it Covid?

[Alice]

Did I say Covid?

[Brett]

Which I just let it go. You say coven every time. I just let it go because it's like whatever Alice wants called a coven. That's fine. The people really are like, it's a coven, which it is.

[Alice]

Fine. It's a coven, y' all. I think that shows you how much I spend reading witchcraft books, which is.

[Brett]

To say, she reads them, she doesn't attend.

[Alice]

I don't attend them.

[Brett]

She's seen them in writing. She's never heard the word.

[Alice]

That's actually true.

[Brett]

It's not into this kind of thing.

[Alice]

I'm so not into this.

[Brett]

So anyways, so this is Vicki. Vicki is going to testify to all this? Yes. This is not just her going into the police station. She's going to testify to all of this. Jesse misskelley's trial. Now, very shortly after that, she recants everything. She gets a lawyer. She calls Jesse's attorney, Dan Stidham, and basically says, none of that's true. Problem is, and we talked about this before, recantations just don't really mean a whole lot in the eyes of the law because she took an oath to tell the truth. And now you're saying afterwards, oh, never mind. I didn't do it. So, you know, didn't help a lot. I believe her recantation more than I believe her initial statement. I think the most interesting thing about Vicky and about the only thing you can take away from her involvement is that Jesse and Damian were close enough that Jesse set this up. I mean, that's a legitimate thing to take away from this. I don't think they went to an orgy. I don't think any of that stuff happened. But I don't think, obviously, Jesse has a connection.

[Alice]

I'm not even sure there was a red car involved.

[Brett]

I don't think there was a red.

[Alice]

Car because I don't think they went anywhere. I think it's very possible that Damien came over once or twice. And the other thing, to give Vicky, like, the benefit of the doubt, she may have wanted to insert herself, because these three boys could have easily been her own son as well. Right. That's like, the greatest gloss I Can put in all of this is she wants to make sense of this tragedy because it was very close to home. Now, I think all the things that feel like are completely fabricated don't help meet the ends of justice. But for what it's worth, she had this strange relationship. And you know what? She was enabled. The police were like, yeah, go for it. And so we have these stories because the police allowed her to play this undercover informant role and talk to her about it. Okay, let's talk about Jesse's T shirt, because police recovered a T shirt that Jesse had and it had blood on it. Now, this blood was consistent with Michael Morris blood. All of you may be thinking, oh, my goodness, red flag. This is a huge piece of evidence. Now, unfortunately, though, for the prosecution, this blood was also consistent with Jesse. This is what we were talking about 32 years ago. The testing for blood DNA was just far inferior to what we have today. So while it was consistent with Michael's, it was also consistent with Jesse's. If it's Michael's, more blood. Oh, my goodness. Why would Michael's blood be on Jesse's? That is huge. Huge red flag, right? Huge piece of evidence here. But why would Jesse's own blood be on his shirt? That's a lot more understandable, Right? Especially because Jesse has an answer for it. He says that he got blood on his shirt when he was smashing bottles with his fist. And we actually know later when we cover his confessions, he does in fact smash bottles with his fist. He is a very furious actor on his emotions. He punches a girl in the face when he doesn't like what she says. He doesn't really think before he acts. So the whole punching fists into bottles is actually something that works his way into some of his confessions. And there's indications that he, in fact did smash bottles. And it seems to be consistent with the type of hot headedness that he did have. So whether that is true or not, the fact that he is kind of a violent guy in general, like, he punches things, he punches people, he wrestles. It would not be completely surprising if he did in fact have his own blood on his shirt. So this is not great.

[Brett]

You know, like you're knocking wrestling. Is that a negative comment about wrestling?

[Alice]

Because no, if you're wrestling, you have nosebleeds and everything, you get your teeth cut up.

[Brett]

That's a good point.

[Alice]

Yeah, I'm not. No. My boys wrestle every day.

[Brett]

This is endlessly frustrating, the blood thing. So both Michael Moore and Jesse miskelly had HLA DQ Alpha Allees 4, 4 and 4, which only occurs in about 7.9% of the population. So higher than the 3.8 I believe we talked about earlier with John Moore, Byers and Chris, but still not that high, you know, and yet you have this blood that could be consistent with either Michael or Jesse Misskelley. This, by the way, is one of the places where Dan Stidham misleads you in his book. And I enjoyed his book. It's a good book. Not knock and dance at him. He is a loyal defender of Jesse Misskelley, but he, in his book says that the prosecution told him at one point there was blood on a shirt that was consistent with Michael Moore's. And at that point he's like, well, I guess my guy's guilty. And then later on they told him, no, it's Jesse's, not Michael's. Well, actually, both are true. They didn't mislead him the first time, as he indicates in his book. Both are true. They're consistent with both of them. Could be either one of them. So, you know, just one of those facts. That is unfortunate because if the blood typing had been a little bit better or if the blood types have been a little bit different, this wouldn't even be something we'd be talking about. But instead, we're stuck with this sort of unknown. Just another interesting thing. We're going to see more of these. This is going to happen again with a necklace that we're going to talk about. So just more complications in this case.

[Alice]

Now, we've already touched upon this of what we can take away from Vicky's story, and that is Jesse Misskelley's relationship with Damian and Jason. Obviously, we know, and a lot of witnesses have told us as much, that Damian and Jason do seem to be best friends, inseparable. Some have said Jason is always where Damien is. And the conventional wisdom in this case is that while we know Jason and Damian are best friends, they were not close to Jesse. Now, there are reasons to believe that according to Jennifer Bearden, Jesse was a brawler and he'd stolen one of Jason's necklaces. And that, you know, that made Jason, and therefore Damien, not really like Jesse. And also, Jesse had stolen the eight ball from the skating rink's pool table and Damien had been blamed for it, which further angered Jason and Damien and make them not like Jesse. Still, there were some people who said that the three did hang out, and there were multiple witnesses who did confirm that one of them was Jason Baldwin himself. So Jason referred to Damien and Jesse as his two best friends. In a 2012 interview now, Deanne Holcomb testified that Damien had a few friends, one of which was Jesse Misskelley. Deanne, being very close to Damian, should know who his friends are right now. Throughout the investigation, the police were told that Damien and Jesse were, in fact, friends. This would be supported for police by the fact that Jesse, of course, was able to get Damien and Vicky Hutchinson set up to meet at her house. Damien has acknowledged hanging out with Jesse at the skating rink, playing pool. Now, were Jesse and Damien close the way that Damien and Jason were? No. But were they as estranged as some would like you to believe that? There's just no way the three of them could have been committed a crime because Damian and Jason were not even friends with Jesse. Probably not. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle in terms of their relationship.

[Brett]

I think there's one thing we can say for certain, and it's that if Damien, Jason and Jesse had committed this triple murder, Jesse's the one who would crack because Jesse is the one who is most distant from the other two. Jason never would have turned on Damien and Damian never would have turned on Jason, but Jesse would have. And if you believe what happened, Jesse did. So their relationship to me, I think they're close enough that this could have happened. They're close enough that they could have committed this crime. I think it would have been one of those things that happened sort of suddenly for various reasons. Obviously not a cult sacrifice, but things went haywire. Maybe they were trying to bully the boys and it went too far. They end up killing them. They have to cover it up. Jesse's now a part of it. Jesse's the one who cracks and tells the police. If this weren't the West Memphis Three case, if it were just any other case involving multiple people who committed a crime, that's exactly what you would expect to see. Right? So that's just not surprising. So to me, I think it's basically proven they were close enough for that situation to have happened. So I don't have a problem with their relationship as far as was it tight enough to commit this kind of crime. If it had been a planned crime, then I would have had a bigger issue with it. It's not that unlike the Adnan sayed J. Wiles type of situation, frankly. So, I don't know. People make a big deal about this. They want to separate them. I think they're close enough that you could see this happen.

[Alice]

Yeah, I think that's right. And they're kind of like, at least with Damien and Jesse, a little bit ne' er do wells, you know, and there's like. So you get on each other's bad sides, but also you are the kind of people who hang out. You understand each other, right? You're. You're the people who would steal eight balls and get in brawls and those sorts of things and get blamed for each other. And Damien, I could completely see those situations where you're close enough that you're a little bit frenemies, but you're certainly in the same group and you're certainly connected socially enough that something like this could have happened.

[Brett]

So we've mentioned this briefly, but let's talk about Damien's treatment of animals, because this is one of those things that makes people think Damian is the kind of person who could commit this crime. We sort of glossed over this before. Now we're going to go into detail about it. So according to Joe Bartouche Jr. He was present in November 1992 when Damien killed a sick Great Dane by smashing it in the back of the head with a brick. He then cut it open and pulled out its intestines. He intended to come back with battery acid and burn the hair and skin off the dog's head so he could keep the skull. According to Bartouche, he already had two cat skulls, another dog skull, and a rat skull. And Damien used a camouflage survival knife on the dog. Damien would later deny this, saying instead that he and his stepfather collected skulls of already dead animals because they thought it was cool. And, hey, you know, people are into that kind of thing, whatever. If they were already dead, it's one thing. If you killed an animal to do it, it's a different thing. But there's no question that Damian had skulls of these animals. The question is, did he do something like this, or is this sort of part of the legend of Damien Echols? The myth that was created by people who thought he had killed three young boys. Now, several people, quote, unquote, confirmed the dog story, though it seems as though this had become something of a legend in the trailer park. And firsthand accounts are hard to come by. Now we have Bartouche. Obviously, he claims he was there and saw Damien do this. Another girl claimed to have not seen the act, but saw the dog with its intestines pulled out. And a boy who was with her at the time said Damien Echols did that. Bartouche had said that Damon used a camouflage survival knife, and Damien absolutely had a camouflage survival knife that he carried with him at all times. Why is this significant? Torturing and killing animals is one of the things you look for in sort of the triad of the sociopath, the person who's going to go on to kill people. If you'll do this to an animal, you probably do it to a person, too. It's one reason that you should never discount the seriousness of animal cruelty. It is a very real crime that can lead to even worse crimes down the line. But obviously, the people who think the West Memphis three are innocent and defend Damien Echols say this is a slander and he denies it to this day.

[Alice]

Now, we've said this about other things that Damian has said. This is what makes this case so hard. I could also see Damien claims responsibility for doing something he didn't do. We've said this before. I could even see that there was a dog with his intestines out because it'd been hit by a car, for example, and that he is the one being like, yeah, I'm the bad boy who did this. Right. So this is why it's so hard, because we know for a fact that Damian lies and he likes to kind of pump up this aura around him and he says these things to the police directly. And so whether Bartuche really hired it or not, the fact that I think a lot this has become lore and a lot of people heard it secondhand, but very few people heard it firsthand, leads me to believe at least he didn't deny it. Maybe it was. He was. He liked that it was attributed to him. And so this is why I think a lot of the information in this case is difficult to know because we rarely have someone who is able to say firsthand that they heard something, especially when we have, like, the subject of these rumors, sometimes be the one feeding the rumors or even taking responsibility whether he did it or not in order to do it. But I will note this. That's a lot of skulls to have of domesticated animals. We're not talking about, like, squirrels and like, kind of wild animals, typically domesticated animals, when they die, people they. If they were someone's pet, they are taken to the vet or they're buried because someone has had very, you know, close feelings to it. It's not like a wild animal. So that's a lot of domesticated animals, skulls that he has. And I do think it's interesting that he says it's a pastime that he does with his stepfather, who we obviously know has. He has a very tortured relationship, shall we say, with him, including of course, the night before the boys were murdered. So this is all very interesting in terms of like how close were they? Is he really going skull hunting with his stepfather who he thinks molested his sister? Again, I think hard to know these things, but I think it's worth noting these common themes that keep going through everything he's saying.

[Brett]

And you know, just as an aside, we talk about Rule 404 a lot and why certain evidence is kept out of a trial. I know there are plenty of you out there who are listening to this and are thinking, well, if he did that, I don't care if he's guilty or not, he deserves to spend 18 years in prison. And I get your, your emotional reaction to that. And that's why we often keep out unconnected prior bad acts from these trials because we don't want a jury to say, I don't know if he committed this crime, but he needs to go to prison. So I'm gonna send him there. And look, Damien, maybe everybody was out to get him, right? Everybody was out to get him. Everybody's making up stuff about him. I mean, according to Damien, he never drank blood. People just made that up about him, including Jason Baldwin and others. He never attacked Shane Devilbus. People just making that up, including apparently Shane DeVilbiss and including himself when he's in mental facilities. He never was cruel to animals. People are just making that up about him. Everybody's just so mean to Damien and making things up. Maybe that's possible. I guess maybe this is mostly Damien saying all this stuff to create the image he wanted. Frankly, I think this is your best case. Your best case for Damian Echols is, is he wanted people to believe he was the kind of person who would do this to an animal, who would drink people's blood, who would attack other people. He was a dangerous guy. That's who he was. That is the image that he wanted to portray. And it's the reason that in West Memphis or in Paradise Lost, at the end of Paradise Lost, when he's just been convicted for murdering three 8 year olds and sentenced to death, he's almost giddy over it. Oh, now I'm the boogeyman? Yeah, kids are going to be. They're going to look under their bed and say, is Damien there? Right. I mean that's your best case, is that's the kind of person he was. That's not great. Right. And you can understand why to this day there are a lot of people who think he did this. Regardless of what you think of the Evidence. And a lot of it is his fault. And I just think it's worth noting that a lot of this is Damien Echols fault. I think he bears some responsibility for what happened to him. Jesse Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, if they're innocent, you know, you can blame Jesse. Let's assume for a second they're innocent. If they're innocent, then Jesse Misskelley was manipulated by the police and pressured into a confession that wasn't true. I don't know that you can really blame Jesse Misskeli for what happened to him. Right. Jason Baldwin was just along for the ride. He just happened to be friends with Damien Echols. The person of the three of them who is most responsible for them being in the situation they were in is Damien Echols for his behavior and for the things he said and did. So I just have a really hard time having a lot of sympathy for Damien Echols. If he's innocent, he shouldn't have been sent to prison, granted. But I do not like him. And I think that is obvious in these Last few episodes. 14 episodes. I am not a fan of Damien Echols, innocent or guilty. And it's kind of icky to me the way people hold him up on some sort of pedestal just because he was convicted for a crime he may not have committed.

[Alice]

Yeah, I think that's right. Because you'll hear often people say it's not fair that Damian and the rest, they usually use Damien as a stand in. They got tunnel vision on him just because he wore black and listened to rock metal. I wore black. I listened to rock metal. Was I? No. Were you saying that you pulled intestines out of dogs and, you know, drank people's blood. It is an oversimplification when people say the only reason anyone focused on him was because he wore black. That's not why he wore black and told police that he liked to do things that shocked the conscience and that he regular did these things and that he pulled intestines out of dogs for these rituals and that he was a white witch and covens and whatnot. So I do think it's over simplistic to only say the only reason he was focused on was because he wore black. That is not the case with him.

[Brett]

So the last thing we're going to talk about today is something that I did not. I have take no pleasure in discussing. Because you think about the victims of a crime like this. You have three 8 year olds and their lives are just laid bare for the world. Right. And just the whole world learns all these things about them, things that would be so embarrassing to them, things they would never want people to know, but things that might be important. And this is something I think, maybe for that reason that you never hear discussed at all, but I actually think is pretty important. And it starts with the statement of Chad Bell. So Chad Bell was a friend of Ryan Clark. You may remember Ryan Clark as Chris's older brother. And Chad will tell police that two months before the murders, he and Ryan found Chris and Michael behind Weaver School. He said both of them were naked and they were possibly engaged in some sort of sexual activity. Another boy who was with them, Damon McDermott, said he thought it was possible that one of the boys was simply going to the bathroom, but that Chad had a better view. A month before the murders, he and Ryan walked in on Christopher masturbating. Now, why is this significant? Well, as you may recall, all the boys were found naked. And the presumption has always been that the killer forced them to take their clothes off. But when you think about this, a few possibilities emerge. It is possible that going to the woods was actually a bit of sexual exploration for these boys. And it's possible that someone, maybe someone in authority, possibly someone in their lives, found them in such a state. One of the things that people have always questioned is if it was someone who knew the boys, what could drive them to such rage that they would do something like this to these children? Could it really be they stayed out past curfew? Could it really be they were in some woods that were dangerous and that just doesn't feel like a possibility? But if in 1993 in Arkansas, the right person stumbled upon three boys without their clothes on doing something that that person would think was inherently evil or embarrassing, you could imagine that would be the kind of thing that would drive someone to a rage. And it would also explain why the boys don't have any clothes on, which is not something that is easy to explain just based on the murders themselves. And so you could imagine someone becoming enraged to the point where they needed to severely punish the boys. The other thing that's interesting about this is eight may seem young to be engaged in this kind of activity. And in fact, it is. But one thing that can lead to this kind of sexual activity at such a young age is sexual abuse or some sort of molestation. In fact, Melissa Byers was worried that someone was molesting Chris and had asked him point blank about it. This also ties in to what we were talking about with Aaron Hutchinson. Who was it that Aaron Hutchinson said he was in the woods with. The one person who's missing from this discussion is Stevie Branch. Stevie Branch is not in any of these incidents. It's Chris and Michael. And according to Aaron, it was Chris and Michael who went with him to the woods and witnessed men engaged in some sort of sexual activity. So you could imagine it's some sort of molestation that's possibly going on that would lead to the boys doing this, or maybe they had seen something that was like this and they were emulating it in the same place. Either way, you could imagine this is a really important thing. This is the kind of thing that could have tied this all together, the kind of thing that could have led to a motive. If you discover that someone's molesting the boys or you discovered that they had witnessed something like this, or you had considered the possibility that a parent or a loved one or a close friend had come upon them doing this and wanted to punish them, maybe it would have opened avenues of investigation. It does not seem though, other than taking these reports that the police ever ran this down, that they ever investigated it, that they ever tried to discover what was at the heart of these stories, which once again are close friends of Ryan Clark and Ryan Clark himself, who's one of the boys brothers who are relating this to the police.

[Alice]

And whether Chad really saw what he thinks he saw. The fact that another person who was with them who's like unrelated to any of this, Damon McDermott, at least he says, I don't know if they were doing, you know, anything sexual. But if he's noting he thinks one of the boys is going to the bathroom, that's indicating at least partially of what Chad is seeing or saying is backed up by another witness. Right. If you're going to the bathroom, there's, you know, genitals out, there's at least closed partially off. I think this is really interesting. I don't know that we have more to pull from. But remember when we were going through the timeline, which of the boys Brett was like said he was in a rush or he was in a hurry? Michael. Michael had said to the effect I'm in a hurry. What does a 8 year old boy like after school? So other than having to come home later, have to be in a hurry of. Aaron had mentioned something about getting there before these men would show up so that they could hide in order to see them. Because obviously if you showed up in the middle of it, you would be discovered. So I've always wondered, what is the hurry? What possibly Hurry. Could you be. Kids make each other wait all the time. They have no concept of time. You know, if you say you're going to meet a friend in five minutes at the playground, five minutes could mean 50 minutes for all they care. What is hurry? And I have no idea if it has anything to do with this, but it has always hung on me. What is the hurry? Where was he trying to get to? Like does he even have a clock? He's not watching, you know, some show on tv. So what, what is it going to. He's not running to someone's house in order to catch a show, but he's running off presumably to join the boys somewhere. And it's so hard to know what Aaron could have said. Not said, but the way he describes the sexual activities before Detective Ridge starts feeding him the words, using the mouth and was it sex before he starts feeding those. He does describe it in kind of the way you would think an 8 year old who was still a child would describe something they didn't fully understand except they knew that it was something that was not what you should be doing in public. Right. We know to keep our clothes on, that sort of thing. You can imagine that. Is there some truth to what he's saying there? Because the detective rigidly starts leading him once he goes down that path. What had him start on the path, they really see something. And was it more than just seeing? Were they discovered before and they were molested or they got to see or hear more than even Eren was letting on at that time. And the fact that Christopher Byers mother suspected this was before, before the murders happened. Suspected to the point where she even asked. I mean asking that to an 8 year old boy is very suggestive in and of itself. There would be no reason to bring it up. Right. Because you would think the 8 year old wouldn't even know what you're talking about. So to even ask it point blank at least had enough like mother's intuition or signs to be able to think I need to ask something here. All of this again is like, it's all incredibly hazy. There seems to be something there but there's nothing to follow up on.

[Brett]

And Chris, you know, he was acting out in a lot of ways and doing a lot of things that were very frustrating for his parents. A lot of it was pretty serious and it was sort of chalked up to oh, he's hyperactive, he's got adhd, give him some Ritalin. Right. I mean that was. Nobody tried to get to the heart of the issue. And I think his mom possibly was really onto something here, that something else was going on in his life, maybe the lives of all three of these boys that may very well have been significant to why they were killed. Chad Bell, just to finish up on him, he also reported seeing a strange white van in the neighborhood. There has never been a case of any significance where a white van was not reported. Usually has nothing to do with anything. But the white van does come up in several people's statements, driven by suspicious looking thin white male in his 20s or a suspicious looking man in his 40s with a Redmond cap and sandy brown ponytail, depending on the report. The West Memphis police took this seriously and did request a report of every white van registered in Crittenden County. But it does not seem as though it came to anything. All right, well, we have reached the end of this episode, but not the end of the outline. As Al said, I was crazily over optimistic that we might actually finish it today. I think we will finish it next time. We are going to talk about the trial of Damien and Jason. Some of the things that happened in that trial, the physical evidence that sort of exists in this case, some witnesses who were important, and Jesse Misskelley, of course, and the things that were happening with him. And then once we wrap that up, we have a few more deep dives into things like Jesse Misskelley's Confessions, which obviously is going to take us a little while to get through the alibis of all three. We're going to do a deep dive on that. Their histories and whether or not their histories are consistent with doing something like this and alternative suspects, sort of a deep dive. And of the people who may have done this, if the West Memphis three are in fact innocent. So we're definitely halfway through and probably on the downward slope.

[Alice]

So, you know, we're definitely halfway through.

[Brett]

I would like to think. I would like to think that everything we've discussed was. Has been interesting.

[Alice]

I hope so.

[Brett]

Even if we've been doing it for 14 episodes. But still, we don't shortchange, you guys. You want us to cover a case, we're going to cover it. So don't ask us to cover OJ Unless you want us to do a year on that case. Because I think that's probably what it would take. So I think I do think this will be the longest series we ever do.

[Alice]

I can't imagine what could be longer, to be honest.

[Brett]

I think O.J. is probably the only thing that could be longer. Like if you actually tried to go through that case in the trial. The trial shouldn't last that long, so maybe you could have. Yeah, exactly. We're going to talk about O.J. we're going to read his book said if I did it. And so that's the end of our discussion on O.J. oh, it's kind of.

[Alice]

You'd like to know how he'd do it. Read page 28.

[Brett]

Yeah, it'd be kind of like if you were accused of hitting somebody and afterwards you said, I hit him, I hit him, I hit him over and over again. How much coverage do you need? It's obvious what happened in that case, but maybe you just me oversimplifying. Anyway, so we're interested to know what you guys think now that we're 14 episodes in. If you have any thoughts on the stuff we talked about today, if you feel like we missed anything or got anything wrong, shoot us an email on prosecutors podmail.com prosecutors pod for all your social media, join us on the gallery where we're discussing this case and many others and also have active discussions on places like Reddit or Twitter. If you want to follow us on Instagram or TikTok, we're there as well. Or if you'd like to watch us record these episodes, you can do so for as little as $3 a month. Or if that's not your thing, you still get the episodes early and add free. So join us on Patreon. Well, Alice, is there anything you have to say before we sign off for today?

[Alice]

Yeah, I'm glad we made it to this halfway point. I hope you guys join us for the next half.

[Brett]

The next 14 episodes. No, I guess we could answer a question.

[Alice]

Yeah, well, let's answer a question. Animal cruelty, children. Oh, all of it is so, so sad.

[Brett]

When we talk about it's a rough case.

[Alice]

When we talk about Aaron Hutchinson, we talk about these boys. We talk about all it's all of it is so incredible, incredibly tragic. Yes. Let's do a question.

[Brett]

So Andrew, 420 wants to know, have you considered doing in person live events?

[Alice]

We have. We just keep getting thwarted with babies.

[Brett]

You know, babies have thwarted us. We you guys trying to find a good location.

[Alice]

We've had four babies since we started this podcast. Not together, you guys. Conspiracy theory. We're not together to get collected and.

[Brett]

Had two very young babies when we started.

[Alice]

I was going to say one was like just born when we started this podcast. He was two months old when we started Squanto, the one I had to go deal with Was two months old when we started recording for this podcast. So we intend to. It's just a little bit hard, you know? I don't know. Invite us. Invite us. You know what you can make.

[Brett]

Okay.

[Alice]

Make our. Make our lives.

[Brett]

Want to make this happen.

[Alice]

Get a venue.

[Brett]

Make this happen.

[Alice]

Invite us, and we'll do it for free.

[Brett]

If you. If you're out there and you own an event space, if you own a brewery, if you own a restaurant, a bar, etc. Etc. If you can provide a location, we will come and do a live event at your place. Yes, that's the deal.

[Alice]

That's really the problem is we don't have time to, like, find the venue and deal with. So, like, if you'll just say, hey, I own this bar. Come on over. We'll come.

[Brett]

We'll fly up.

[Alice]

We'll fly up. You don't have to pay for that.

[Brett]

Yeah, we'll fly up and we'll, like, figure out a way to sell tickets or whatever for not a lot. And we'll hang out all night, and we'll talk about a case.

[Alice]

We'll just get enough tickets to get Brett a couple old fashions that night. We are. We are very easy.

[Brett]

We're like the Blues Brothers, you know, you just have to give us the first three drinks are free or whatever, and we'll sing while you throw beer bottles at us.

[Alice]

So we've said this before, but, like, follow up, guys. We're almost back to traveling status, so there you go.

[Brett]

So if you have a venue, and we've had some people, some very nice people who've offered various venues before, but they just didn't work for whatever reason. Like, they were pretty small or they couldn't serve alcohol, which, I mean, it's not like you have to serve alcohol, But I feel like if people are gonna listen to us for a couple.

[Alice]

Hours, they probably want to drink, Right? Can we bring chocolate?

[Brett]

I mean, we can bring whatever we want, I guess, but.

[Alice]

No, I'm kidding.

[Brett]

The key is if you have a place and you're willing to give it to us for free, we will pay the money to fly to you and your 100 best friends and do a live show. So that's. That's it.

[Alice]

Yes. Good question.

[Brett]

Take us up on that.

[Alice]

Hold us to it.

[Brett]

Okay.

[Alice]

Because we have not gotten that off. Yes. For real.

[Brett]

We've been meaning to do it for a while because we had it. I don't know. I guess we still technically have an agent. We had an agent, and when we initially got the agent, they were very excited about that, but the agent's too.

[Alice]

Busy dealing with, like, actual movie stars, actual people. We are not real to them.

[Brett]

That was a problem because we got signed by this agency that's like, the biggest agency in the world. And it was like, oh, this is cool. But.

[Alice]

But they're dealing with a list. We're like Z listers.

[Brett]

Yeah. They're like, hey, if you guys grow, like, a hundred times what you are, we'll take you seriously. Right. So they never really did anything, but it was cool to have them. But nevertheless, if you know, you're out there, you want to facilitate this, make it happen. Okay, well, thank you for that question. Should I ask another one? That was pretty straight.

[Alice]

Yeah, let's do another one. That was a great question. This is. This is helpful.

[Brett]

This is a good one. Kate Kaplinger says, obviously not asking you to share your kiddos names, but what are some names you each like for your kids that you didn't end up using? I think what names people like are interesting and speak to their personalities. Okay, so that's interesting. That's an interesting question. So I have always really liked the name Riley. And so I was a big fan of Riley for my oldest daughter, and so was my wife, but we ended up not naming her Riley. We ended up naming her something else, which I think it just fits her. I mean, I don't know. You probably think your name always fits your kids, but it fits her so perfectly, and she loves it, and it set up our naming scheme from that point forward. So. So Riley was the name I really liked, though.

[Alice]

So I really. For some reason, I got fixated on the name Thaddeus for Squanto number two. I really wanted to name him Thaddeus. And Mr. Alice was like, no. And. But here's why he said, no, not because Thaddeus is a bad name. It's because he's like, well, where does the name come from? Like, do you know a Thaddeus? Is there something about Thaddeus that you really like? And I was like, I'm not gonna tell you. And he's like, why? And I was like, okay, so it was one of my case files, and I'm gonna prosecute this guy. And his name came up, and I was like, I love this name. And I just kept saying, seeing his name all over my case file, and I, like, had, you know, an indictment ready, and it was like, you know, versus something Thaddeus. And he was like, we're not naming it after one of your Case files.

[Brett]

That's hilarious. You find a lot of awesome names.

[Alice]

You do great spelling, especially the akas. The. Also known as. That's a great name.

[Brett]

Yeah, there's some great names. I will say this. I'm not a huge fan of Thaddeus. There was when I was in high school, I talked about how when I was in high school, I was friends with everybody. And it's really true because when I started I went to high school, I didn't know anybody, right? Because no one from my middle school went to the high school that I went to. So I had to make all new friends. And obviously, you know, not very popular starting off. But one of the things that sort of bound me with all my other freshman friends was we had gym class. So if you were a freshman, you had to take gym class. Or if you were a senior who had never taken gym class and never done any sports, you had to take gym class before you graduated. So the people who ended up being seniors in gym class tended to maybe not be the most athletic, most the go getters, the whatever. They weren't great, right? I want to be critical of them, but they weren't great. And they hated us, right? So we're all freshmen, they're seniors. And there was one guy named Thaddeus. Everybody called him Thad. And the thing I remember about Thad is how he would. You had to watch him at all times because he would pick up like a five pound weight and throw it at your head.

[Alice]

Oh my gosh.

[Brett]

Wait, that's like dodge it. I know. So that was my gym class disregard for life. Lifting weights in dodging five pound weights that Thad was throwing at me.

[Alice]

Why, why was he allowed to throw more than once?

[Brett]

Sat over in the corner and didn't do anything. I mean, they were just crazy. One time they locked us all in the tennis courts. So you know how tennis courts tend to have really tall fences to keep the balls in, right? So they locked us in the tennis court. And so to get out, then they just left. And so to get out, we all had to climb up the fence, the like, you know, 20 foot fence or whatever, and climb down to get out. Now it's amazing none of us got killed, but that was sort of our lives in, in 9th grade. Dodging weights and climbing out of.

[Alice]

I mean, maybe Thaddeus, maybe your Thaddeus was who I was prosecuting.

[Brett]

Maybe.

[Alice]

Because the Thaddeus I was prosecuted was pretty violent.

[Brett]

Thad and his buddies, they were the Stoners. I mean, they were, you know, he was probably high the whole time, didn't know what he was doing.

[Alice]

Yeah. Anyways, probably. And it's actually probably really good because my second child, who, you know is the two month old when we started recording, also has the most adorable, very severe lisp. So he definitely would not have been able to say his name. He has the best attitude though, because his older brother makes fun of him all the time. And about. Which is so mean about his list. It's like the cutest little list ever. And the other day he was like, his brother was like, say rare, you know, like R A R E. He's like, say ran. He's like, well, well, well, you know what? I just can't do it and I'm never gonna be able to do it. So whatever. I'm like, what a great attitude, bud. That was a good question. I liked that.

[Brett]

All right, well, thank you for the questions. If you leave a five star review on either the prosecutors or the prosecutor's legal briefs, we will answer it in a future episode. So go do that. But remember, has to be five stars, not four stars. Definitely not one star. Five stars and we'll answer your question. So. Okay, Alice. Well, this has been fun. We'll be back next week for part 15, but until then, I'm Brett.

[Alice]

And I'm Alice.

[Brett]

And we are the prosecutors.

[Alice]

I've read these so ever. I like reread it so many times that whenever I try to refresh, I keep changing them. Well, no, I, I, I keep refreshing where we are. And didn't I, didn't we already do this? You know, like, there's so much. But the reality is just there's so much delight. Delight. You're delightful. Okay. Oh, my goodness. All this DNA, like blood stuff is so interesting when, like, blood wasn't quite as good as it is now. The blood.

[Brett]

See, the funny thing is we're at a point in this that like, whenever we get done, like, this is like a vacation now because we have so.

[Alice]

Many more we have to research to.

[Brett]

Yeah, I was like, I don't have to research any of this. I just like, you know, do whatever. Okay.

[Alice]

I mean, it's because we've already researched the different. Your people are going to take that out of context.

[Brett]

What is daddication?

[Alice]

The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariona. We call him Day Date for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job.

[Brett]

That's dedication. Find out [e-mail] brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.