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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