The Johnny & Scotty Show

AUDIO COMING SOON

Segment A

Johnny: Outrageous Talk Radio 100.7 The Buzz. It's the Johnny and Scotty Show. 421-1007. Toll free triple eight 647-1007 are the numbers if you wanna sound in on whatever our subject may be today.

Scotty: So today we're gonna have a series of guests on a—

Johnny: It's a really grisly story. I'm sure most of you have heard about it in the news. It started May 5, 1993 in the Robin Hills, uh, Robin Hood Hills neighborhood in West Memphis, where three eight-year-old children, Christopher Byers, Steven Branch and Michael Moore were brutally, brutally, murdered and dumped in a drainage ditch.

Scotty: They were stabbed repeatedly, one of them, their penis, the skin was actually carved off the penis.

Johnny: Yeah one of the children was emasculated. Steven Branch had multiple bite marks to the face and two of the victims were actually hog-tied.

Scotty: They were tied up with their own shoelaces. Their bikes were also find in this ravine or whatever it is.

Johnny: The investigation that followed kind of rings familiar with another criminal investigation that's very close to Scott, which is that of his dad, I mean, when you talk about botched investigations. They think they found the killers

Scotty: Yeah they think they found the killers. They've got three young men who were juveniles at the time when they were arrested in 1993 in prison today still sitting there and they're retrying their cases, they're trying to go to the Supreme Court. They're doing all these things to try and get out of this deal. And today we're gonna be talking to their attorneys and

Johnny: We've got all kinds of people lined up, Burk Sauls who is the founding member of the Free the West Memphis Three which is the name of the three suspects, are now know by, the three suspects that are now serving time are Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin. And Damien Echols is on death row.

Scotty: Yeah he's the only one sitting on death row. They kind of focused the whole investigation on him.

Johnny: Yeah right from the get-go to the complete and total, you know.

Scotty: We forgot to clear this up. Christopher Byers was the one whose penis was actually, basically, what, how do you even describe that?

Johnny: Well he was emasculated, his genitals were cut off, and his

Scotty: Well, his scrotal sack was cut off and the skin was removed

from his penis.

Johnny: Right.

Scotty: So.

Johnny: And the evidence suggest that he was alive while they did it because of the, the

Scotty: Entry wounds of the knife around his groin area. They were signs of struggle because the skin was ripped instead of just a clean cut. I mean these were really horrible brutal crimes to these three 8-year-olds that were most likely alive during the crime.

Johnny: And which immediately let the investigators involved, the finest of West Memphis to assume this was—

Scotty: West Memphis Arkansas

Johnny: ...definitely a satanic cult ritual. We're gonna take a look at that uh.

Scotty: The thing is, it also rings a little, you know, reminiscent to the Salem witchcraft trials, when, it's something called satanic panic I guess, and what happens is you take a small rural community and you get a bunch of people who haven't been well educated who are very religious and they can't explain something, they can't figure it out. So what they do is they either say God did it or it's the work of devil, rather than like using facts and science to try and figure out what exactly caused these problems.

Johnny: Yes, and in this particular case the devil's puns happen to be a few adolescents that wore Metallica t-shirts and had long hair and didn't quite mesh with the rest of the upstanding community in West Memphis, and

Scotty: Upstanding community in West Memphis that's—

Johnny: Damien Echols who is now on death row is a matter of fact, had been, they tried to frame him for a whole slew of different—

Scotty: Multiple things actually—

Johnny: It was just kind of like every time there was a crime in West Memphis they went straight to this guy.

Scotty: I guess like two counties over once there was a train was robbed while passing through a town. Where did they go? Damien Echols's house. They went to Damien Echols's house to try and frame him for this crime that like, why would they even think he was involved in it.

Johnny: And I think the thing that has really captured the imagination of the country about this case is that it could really happen to anybody, you got three adolescents whose only distinguishing characteristics were that they liked to wear dark clothes, they liked to listen to Metallica

Scotty: They liked to read Stephen King.

Johnny: They liked to read Stephen King, they—

Scotty: That was basically

the main pieces of evidence used in the court case was that Damien Echols copied the lyrics of Metallica into his notebook, he copied passages from Stephen King into his notebook and he wore a lot of dark clothing.

Johnny: Yeah, maybe even some eyeliner on occasions so I mean, boy—

Scotty: It was basically like—

Johnny: ...he's a killer.

Scotty: ...he was a Goth metal kid and he might have dyed his hair black or something. But, he didn't fit well in this town. And they don't like those types down there in Arkansas.

Johnny: Living in an urban area and given the descriptions we've just described to you this applies to, I would say, I don't know, about 20 percent of the adolescents these days. Basically all the kids that aren't wear baggy pants or penholders. You know what I mean, you got your nerds, you got your baggy pants crew and then you got the kind of Metallica black shirt wearing kids. I mean—

Scotty: No they believed these kids were, you know, puns of Satan and the witch’s children and they believed these kids were out to, you know, cast black magic, and they believed they were doing that as this was a sacrifice. That's what they believed. They believed this was a satanic sacrifice in the woods, these three children. And there's a lot of evidence that points in other directions, a lot of interesting directions regarding their families.

Johnny: We're gonna talk to experts and people closer to the case that can supply the information probably a little more lucidly and better than Scott and I.

Scotty: By the way folks, I've had 4 hours of sleep.

Johnny: In the last week.

Scotty: (laughing) No no. Last night I went to bed at 4:30 in the morning. I was up all night working on this story and—

Johnny: I just got to the studio about 10 minutes ago, there's a big tree fallen in front of my, I couldn't get out of my driveway.

Scotty: Oh Jesus, so.

Johnny: So we're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about freeing the West Memphis Three and the brutal alleged satanic cult murders in West Memphis. Ah, first we're gonna check traffic with Sarah Johnson.

Segment B

Scotty: Alright, it's Outrageous Talk Radio, the Johnny and Scotty Show. 421-1007. Triple eight 647-1007.

Johnny: Today we're looking at the famous Robin Hills Hoods murders in West Memphis that occurred May 5, 1993, where Christopher

Byers, Steven Branch and Michael Moore, three second-graders, eight years-old, were brutally, and according to the police ritualistically, murdered. We're going to explore this ritualistic angle when we talk to the defense team.

Scotty: In just a moment, here we've got Joe Berlinger the director of the movie Paradise Lost which hopefully some of you have seen. You can go to Scarecrow video, and Blockbuster probably even has it. It's a huge documentary. You can go there, you can rent this video, and you can check it out. Joe Berlinger is also the director of a movie called Brother's Keeper and he is the director of the new Blair Witch Project 2.

Johnny: And he also did a follow up to—

Scotty: Paradise Lost.

Johnny: ...Paradise Lost, which was Paradise Lost Revisited. And also you can go to www.wm3.org.

Scotty: wm3 dot numeral three dot org.

Johnny: How are you Joe?

Joe: Hey how is it going guys?

Johnny: Good.

Joe: It's Berlinger (Phonetic)

Scotty: What did I say?

Joe: Berlinger (Phonetic)

Scotty: Berlinger (Phonetic). Sorry about

Joe: It's a common error, don't worry about it.

Johnny: We just do that to big time people.

Joe: (Laughing)

Scotty: Thanks for being on the show today.

Joe: My pleasure.

Scotty: You made this film as the whole trial, the original Paradise Lost film, as the whole trial was happening in 1993.

Joe: Right, actually my partner Bruce Sinofsky and I made it together. And we covered the story while it was unfolding. And originally we went down cause we read this little article about guilty, devil-worshipping teens killing three eight-year-olds and thought we were making a movie about disaffected youth, got down there, started looking around and realized that these kids were totally being screwed, that the evidence was a joke, and that, in fact because they did the terrible thing of listening to Metallica and wearing, you know, black, and, you know, liking pentagrams as dress articles that, you know, that somehow that must make them guilty of these horrible child killings.

Scotty: So you actually went down there originally thinking that these kids were probably guilty and you thought it was just an interesting angle, the disaffected youth thing?

Joe: Right, well it was right around the time that the little boy in England had killed the other little boy on the railroad tracks, the Jamie Bulger case, and, you know, when we read that, this very little article that was just an AP wire pickup in the back

of the New York Times that said, you know, three devil worshipping teens kill three eight-year-old boys in a satanic ritual, I was like, you know, how could kids do that? Such a horrible thing to one another. And that was really the impetus to go down there was sort of like a, you know, a real life's River Edge.

Johnny: How long did it take you, probably not long, to figure out something was amiss here?

Joe: Well it took, you know, I would say the first couple of trips cause we were only hanging out with the prosecution and with the victims' families, you know, we were sort of, you know

Johnny: So the first time you meet John Mark Byers, probably—

Scotty: John Mark Byers is the stepfather of Christopher Byers—

Joe: Yeah.

Scotty: ...the victim that, the victim whose penis was skinned.

Joe: Yes, something was odd there, for sure. But it wasn't until actually, you know, we started digging around the evidence and it just didn't seem to add up and then, you know, meeting Damien was what sold it for me. I mean I just, you know, you look into somebody's eyes and you talk to them and, you know, you get a, this sense of humanity and, you know, you just don't believe they ever could have done this. And then the evidence doesn't support it. And umm, you, know, the prosecution went on television saying on a scale of one to ten this is an eleven and to me it was like a one.

Johnny: That was Gary Gitchell who was the chief prosecutor in that case.

Joe: Right.

Scotty: He was quoted as saying that it was an eleven.

Johnny: And Gary Gitchell he still sticks to his guns.

Scotty: Except Gary Gitchell declined comment. We tried to contact a lot of the detectives and prosecutors and none of them want to speak out on this anymore

Joe: Well in fact the Governor of Arkansas, when the sequel to Paradise Lost came out in March called Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, they were once again inundated with email and letters and their response was to claim that the two HBO movies were works of fiction. So, I mean, the official response in Arkansas has been—

Scotty: Yet you're actually—

Joe: — shameful.

Scotty: You're actually filming in court real time events and they're claiming that it's works of fiction?

Joe: Works of fiction, yeah.

Scotty: Wow that's impressive.

Johnny: Now what

are the, obviously one of the most striking aspects of the case is that virtually no other avenue was explored. They seem to arrive at the—

Scotty: Almost immediately

Johnny: Yeah, just almost in a vacuum. They came up with a, you know, Jessie who originally, Jessie Misskelley whose confession, if you can touch on his coerced confession if you will. Because this was really the Rosetta Stone of the prosecution's case. Could you tell us—

Joe: Well, they got this guy to confess, and got him to confess a couple of different times cause there were a lot of problems with time. At first he was saying it happened in the morning, and then they led him down to re-issuing a statement that gave the proper times. And you know, he's not a bright kid, that's sort of an understatement.

Johnny: His IQ is seventy-two.

Joe: Right.

Scotty: We actually have Dan Stidham on the phone.

Johnny: To give you an idea Scott's is seventy-four, so—

Joe: Well there ya go.

Johnny: That gives you an idea.

Joe: There you go, that says it all then.

Scotty: Dan, welcome to the Johnny and Scotty Show.

Dan: Well thank you.

Scotty: You're on with Joe Berlinger (Phonetic)

Joe: Berlinger (Phonetic)

Johnny: Berlinger (Phonetic)

Scotty: Berlinger (Phonetic)

Johnny: Still big-time, still big-timing you (Laughing)

Scotty: God

Joe: Hey Mr. Stidham.

Dan: Hi Joe, how are you?

Joe: How are you doing, I hear you are a judge now.

Dan: Well that's what they tell me, I start January 1st, I'm really looking forward to it.

Joe: Congratulations.

Dan: Thank you.

Joe: Maybe you can start serving up some justice in your state.

Dan: Well I'm certainly gonna do my best.

Scotty: Now Dan you represented Jessie Misskelley. He was one of the accused that confessed to the crime. Explain the confession process; explain how they got this confession.

Johnny: And also real quickly we should say that Dan Stidham has been, worked on this case I believe for over five years for free. Just out of the belief that these kids were wrongly accused. Is that correct?

Dan: That is correct and I believe strongly that my client is innocent and this so-called confession is really nothing but garbage. As you pointed out earlier the police almost immediately began to pin everything on, or try to pin everything on, Damien Echols, and a few weeks after the murders took place they picked up Jessie Misskelley who is borderline mentally retarded. They picked him up under the guise that if he

gave them information that he would get—

Johnny: They just wanted a material witness correct?

Dan: Right, exactly, and—

Scotty: They picked him up under the guise of what? Sorry

Dan: They offered to give him thirty-five thousand dollars, a reward that had been placed for information leading to the perpetrators. And so that's how they talked his dad into letting him go down to the police station.

Scotty: So he was going down there thinking he was gonna possibly come out with thirty, thirty-five thousand dollar richer, which in Arkansas is like a two year salary.

Dan: (Laughing) Well I guess you can say that.

Johnny: Three, four double-wides with that kind of cabbage.

Dan: Well he—

Joe: Not everyone in Arkansas lives that way, like Mr. Stidham.

Dan: He was taken down—

Scotty: Are you saying Mr. Stidham lives that way? (Laughing)

Johnny: Sounds like you're saying Mr. Stidham does live that way. (Laughing)

Joe: I'm saying j