May 5th, 1993 was a Wednesday, and when the Weaver Elementary school bell rang, three 8 year old boys headed home to their nearby West Memphis, Arkansas neighborhood. Only a few hours later they would be reported missing and an informal search by their parents would be under way.

The next afternoon at 1:45 PM, a child's body was pulled from a creek in an area known as Robin Hood Hills. Eventually the bodies of the other two missing children were found nearby. All three of them were naked and they had been tied ankle to wrist with their own shoe laces. The children had been severely beaten, and one child, Christopher Byers, appears to have been the focus of the attack; he had been stabbed repeatedly in the groin area and castrated.

A triple homicide is extremely unusual, and particularly when the victims are children and unrelated to one another. So far, two documentary films have been made about this case, and interest in it shows no sign of fading. The facts surrounding the Robin Hood Hills murders, the events which they triggered, the aftermath, the trials, the verdicts and the hearings have been the focus of an ongoing research project for the past several years and we have reached many surprising conclusions.

Having had no previous experience with this type of murder, the West Memphis Police Department allowed potential evidence to be destroyed at the site where the bodies of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore were located. Officers who were present made very little apparent effort to preserve or properly document the scene or to make accurate notes. Perhaps this was due to negligence or perhaps it was due to the fact that they were inadequately trained and inexperienced in handling such a crime and the events that naturally follow. Many unidentified people can be seen milling around the bodies in the brief crime scene video, and the Chief Investigator, Gary Gitchell can be seen smoking a cigarette well within the perimeter of the area.

Strangely, a juvenile probation officer was present when the horrible discovery was made and he indulged in speculation with a police officer about who might be responsible for such an unspeakable act. The probation officer had been following the activities of a local teenager named Damien Echols for years, and his first instinct what that the moody, dark haired teen was responsible. In fact, he and the police officer agreed that Damien was the only person they felt was "capable" of such a thing. Both men decided that the triple homicide had actually been a bizarre Satanic ritual sacrifice performed by a "cult" which they imagined Damien was the leader of.

Of course, there was no evidence of any "cult" activity in the woods, and the investigating officers found nothing incriminating the next day when they visited Damien Echols in his trailer in the nearby town of Marion. The juvenile officer had questioned Echols before whenever something happened for which he could find no explanation. When a piece of guidance equipment disappeared from a train that had passed through West Memphis, Damien was questioned even though the train didn't even slow down when it passed though the small truck stop town. When a girl was killed 100 miles away, Damien was questioned. It seems that this juvenile officer was looking for a crime that he could pin on what he saw as a "sinister" teenager, and the homicides of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore were good enough. Though there wasn't any evidence to connect Damien to the victims or to the murders, the rumors, irresponsible police work and the media created an environment where it was decided, well before the trials, that the three teenagers were devil worshippers who were guilty of the murders.

A local woman who was in trouble for writing bad checks agreed to assist the police in their efforts to investigate Damien by trying to record something incriminating with a hidden tape recorder. Her motive may have been to help catch a killer, but it might have also been the $30,000 reward that was being offered. She invited Damien to her house, but recorded nothing unusual. This same woman later urged her young son to tell police that he'd seen what had happened in the woods on May 5th. The boy told the police a series of strange tales about