The 1993 horror murders of three Cub Scouts that sent the West Memphis Three to prison were the sick work of a serial killer, one of their lawyers now claims.
Baying for blood, cops in West Memphis, Arkansas quickly rounded up three misfits — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. — who were convicted in the gruesome murders.
The trio were released in 2011 after 18 years in prison. They signed an Alford plea allowing them to continue to proclaim their innocence but admitting the district attorney had enough evidence to convict.
Now, Misskelley’s lawyer Dan Stidham has written a book on the case — A Harvest of Innocence: The Untold Story of the West Memphis Three Murder Case — claiming the Cub Scouts were butchered by a roaming serial killer.
“It’s a theory I’ve been putting together for the last five years with investigators,” Stidham told the New York Post. “I promised all those years ago to clear Jessie’s name, and I’m not stopping until the real killer is found.”
Cub Scouts Steve Branch, Chris Byers and Michael Moore — who were all 8 years old — were found murdered on May 5, 1983. Their bodies had been hogtied and thrown in a ditch outside West Memphis across the Mississippi River.
Their genitals had been so horribly mutilated that investigators believed their deaths were part of a satanic ritual.
The slayings became infamous and the subject of numerous documentaries and a movie.
Stidham — a young defence lawyer at the time — told the Post the crime-scene photos have haunted him for decades.
“The pictures of the children, their mutilated bodies, that’s something that doesn’t go away,” Stidham said.
The lawyer said he learned that Misskelley had confessed and believed it best for his client to flip on his co-accused. Stidham later discovered his 17-year-old client had no idea that he had confessed to cops and that he was intellectually impaired.
“Jessie just told the investigators what they wanted to hear because he wanted any way out of the interrogation,” Stidham said. “He was psychologically coerced to confess. … They even convinced him his own brain was lying to him about what he knew.”
Stidham was convinced of the boy’s innocence and began ripping into the police timeline.
But something struck him as odd in 1993 and has stayed with him. The ditch where the tragic boys were found was near the Blue Beacon truck wash and 76 Truck Stop station on the busy I-40.
The truck stop parking lots were very close to the crime scene.
“It would have been so easy for a trucker to pick up the boys, kill them, put them in the back of his truck, and then dump out the bodies in that ditch,” he said.
Stidham worked for years to clear the West Memphis Three. To do so, he enlisted two retired FBI profilers who shared his conclusion.
“America has seen a lot of cases through its highways of serial-killer truck drivers, some that have yet to be solved, and there’s been cases like this around I-40,” Stidham said. “I do believe this case is connected to one of those.”
Now, Stidham’s theory is gaining steam. The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that a judge wrongly denied Echols’ 2022 request for new crime scene DNA testing.
The veteran lawyer believes the new tests will provide a more accurate profile of the suspect. Ideally, a hit would lead back to a killer who is currently caged.
“My hope is that we do get more DNA testing and can compound that with what we have so far to create a profile of the real killer,” he said.
However, there is another possibility: In 2007, DNA found on Moore linked to Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs. Another match at the scene linked to Hobbs’ alibi witness.
Detectives cleared both men and denied any involvement. Stidham said his team hasn’t been able to fully account for Hobbs’ movements.
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