CHAPTER 17

ROBIN HOOD HILLS

“Hello, this is John Douglas. I understand you want to talk to me.”

It was March of 2006. My website directed inquiries to my attorney in New York, Steven Mark, who had given me the name and number of someone who wanted me to consult on a case. This was an Arkansas phone number.

“Yes, thank you for calling. My name is Lorri Davis.” She had a nice voice. My instantaneous profile was early thirties, educated and sophisticated, maybe a professional of some sort. “Are you familiar with the West Memphis Three case?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Three young men were convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. But every one of them is innocent.”

Of course they are. No murder defendant is ever really guilty.

“Powerful people in Hollywood are fans of yours and believe in the work you do,” she went on. “Would you look at the case?”

“What is your relationship to it?” I inquired.

“I’m married to Damien Echols, one of the defendants,” she explained. “He was already in prison when we married.”

Okay, profile’s wrong! She may be educated and sophisticated, but this is another nut job.

I say “another” because this was a phenomenon well known to many of us involved with the criminal justice field. For various reasons, certain women tend to fall in love with incarcerated killers. It often starts out as a pen pal relationship, either out of altruism or simple curiosity. It can then blossom into love, and then even marriage with the full knowledge that her spouse will likely forever remain behind bars. And that is a good thing, because this individual is a violent offender; and if he ever got out, she would likely end up one of his victims.

The various reasons for these women’s behavior include loneliness and a real or perceived inability to make it with “normal” men; a vicarious fascination with excitement, violence or the taboo; a desire to nurture or “mother” those who have never had sufficient attention or “understanding.” This is often combined with the seemingly contradictory feelings of low self-esteem and an illogical, self-righteous confidence in their ability to “reform” the killer and make him a peaceful and productive member of society. Then, of course, some of them marry because it is “safe”; they can feel married without actually having to go through the accommodations of living with a husband.

There can be other motivations as well, but these are the ones we see over and over again. As much as it annoys me, since I think their sympathy is misdirected, I often feel sorry for these women. They can be pretty pathetic.

And who were these “powerful people in Hollywood” who were such big fans? The whole thing sounded strange.

But the more she talked, the more I sensed there was something different about Lorri Davis that just refused to fit this mold. She explained she was a landscape architect in New York who had seen an HBO documentary film entitled Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and had become convinced the three convicted defendants were innocent. She had begun corresponding with Damien Echols, the so-called ringleader who was on death row in Arkansas. Eventually they had fallen in love and decided to get married, even though their lives would essentially be lived apart and their relationship potentially short.

“I don’t know anything about the case,” I repeated, “so I don’t know what conclusions I can draw. We’ll have to get an attorney involved to write up an agreement.” The contract was important, because if I did get involved and my conclusions were not to the client’s liking, it had to be clear that my findings would not be altered.

I gave the standard rap about buying my time, but not my opinion; that they would be free to use or not use my conclusions as they wished; that I would not reveal any negative information obtained through nonpublic sources, but to remember that anything they asked me to put in writing would be discoverable by the prosecution in any future legal proceeding. I ended by saying that when I worked on a case like this, I was always ultimately working for the victims, no matter who brought me in.

Lorri said she thought all that was fine.

“Would the agreement be with you?” I asked.

No, she said, it would be with the lead appellate attorney, Dennis Riordan, of Riordan and Horgan in San Francisco.

“And who are these powerful Hollywood people, and how are they involved?”

“I can’t tell you that until after you’ve signed the agreement,” she stated. Very strange.

From there, things progressed quickly. She talked to Steve Mark, who wrote up an agreement. The “they” turned out to be a number of prominent show business people who, like Lorri, had seen the Paradise Lost film and concluded that the West Memphis Three were wrongly charged and convicted.

 

I began speaking regularly with Lorri. Normally, as I’ve suggested, I find women who fall in love with convicted murderers to be creepy and cripplingly dependent. But as I listened to Lorri, I could tell something else was going on here. Despite the seeming illogic of involving yourself with someone who is going to spend the rest of his (probably short) life in prison, she seemed to have her logic system and critical ego in perfect working order. She seemed neither dependent nor needy. Rather, she was extremely mission-oriented, but without losing her sense of humor or concern for the normal considerations of everyday life.

I received a voluminous amount of case material—forensic reports, interrogation accounts, photographs, newspaper clippings, maps, disks, timelines and the entire trial record. I set to work, immersing myself in the case.

Lorri suggested I interview Damien in prison, but I told her that wouldn’t be helpful to me. At this stage, I didn’t want to get emotionally involved or be influenced by personal relationships. I wanted to base my opinion strictly on the facts of the case.

 

West Memphis, a city of some 27,000 residents, lies just to the west, or the Arkansas side, of the Mississippi River. It connects to its larger and distinctly more cosmopolitan namesake—Memphis, Tennessee—by bridges for Interstates 40 and 55, which split off from each other near the northeastern edge of town. These two highways join the country from coast to coast and from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that the east-west I-40 and north-south I-55 come together for several miles here makes West Memphis an attractive place of business for anyone servicing the trucking industry.

The Blue Beacon Truck Wash, part of a hundred-plus location chain throughout the United States and Canada, was one such establishment. This particular location closed in 2012, but in 1993 it was a thriving business just off the interstates’ South Service Road. South of the highway there is a long channel running roughly east to west that came off Ten Mile Bayou, one of the many such waterways in the area. It is called, appropriately enough, the Ten Mile Bayou Diversion Ditch. Its function is to take up the rainwater that normally would flow into the Mississippi from the bayou, but is blocked because of the levee system that keeps the river from flooding. The channel carries water south to a point beyond the levee.

Back then, squeezed in between the highway and Ten Mile Bayou Diversion Ditch, was a heavily wooded patch of land known locally as Robin Hood Hills, or just plain Robin Hood. There was a creeklike drainage channel coming off the diversion ditch, which ran into the heart of the woods, and a large sewage drainpipe supported by metal beams across the channel, which allowed brave souls, or those wanting to seem brave, access to Robin Hood from the neighborhood of modest houses to the south.

Parents tried to keep their kids out of Robin Hood Hills. It was reputed to be a haven for drug use and disreputable transients from the interstates. But the creek, hiking and bike-riding trails, rope swing and dense foliage, where any fantasy adventure was possible, were too much of a temptation for all but the most obedient or timid of children.

On May 5, 1993, Christopher “Chris” Byers, Michael Moore and Steven “Stevie” Branch, all eight-year-olds from the adjoining neighborhood, went missing. They were best friends and often hung out together. All three were second graders at nearby Weaver Elementary School.

John Mark Byers, Christopher’s stepfather, was the first to report his concerns to the West Memphis Police Department (WMPD), at about 8:00 P.M. He said neither he nor his wife, Melissa, Chris’s mother, had seen him since 5:30 P.M., nor was it like him to be late.

Officer Regina Meek responded to Byers’ call at 8:08. While she was taking his information, Dana Moore, who lived across Barton Street from the Byers, came over and reported that her son Michael was also missing. She had last seen him around 6:00 P.M., riding bikes with Stevie. Chris was on the back of Stevie’s bike. She’d lost sight of them and sent her nine-year-old daughter, Dawn, to find them. Dawn went after them, but she couldn’t keep up. Dana Moore described the brown-haired, blue-eyed boy in his habitual outfit: his blue Cub Scouts uniform.

Stevie Branch’s mom, Pamela “Pam” Hobbs, was equally distressed. They lived a few blocks away from the Byers and Moores, and she had not seen him since right after he came home from school. Her husband, Terry—Stevie’s stepfather—got up and left the house early each morning for his job distributing ice cream to retail stores. He said he hadn’t seen Stevie all day. The boy had brown hair and blue eyes. Chris’s hair and eyes were light brown. All three were proud Cub Scouts, though Chris and Stevie didn’t wear their uniforms everywhere like Michael did.

As the alarm spread, neighborhood parents and friends joined the police and began searching—anywhere they thought the boys might be. Some even ventured into Robin Hood Hills, which took on a distinctly sinister and forbidding aura once the sun went down. It was difficult to see anything at night in the dense woods, but the search was resumed at sunup. Nobody found anything, not even a clue as to which direction the boys might have gone. By now, the parents were beside themselves with worry.

Meanwhile, Gary Gitchell, chief inspector of the West Memphis PD detective division, had requested a search-and-rescue team from the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office. The Memphis, Tennessee, PD sent its own helicopter to join the search, but the foliage in the Robin Hood area was too dense for any kind of ground visualization.

By 1:30 P.M. the next day, most of the searchers had abandoned Robin Hood Hills. But that was when Steve Jones, a county juvenile officer, glanced down the steep sides of the creek near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash and saw a black tennis shoe. He radioed for backup before he tried to retrieve it. Police Sergeant Mike Allen was on the other side of the woods, in the neighborhood. He made his way across the sewage drainpipe over the overflow ditch and rushed to meet Jones, where he was waiting.

As soon as Jones pointed to what he had seen, Allen clambered down into the water to retrieve the sneaker. He lost his balance and fell in. As he later described it, “I raised my right foot up and a body floated to the surface.”

It was a child. He was naked and his back was severely arched. Soon police were all over the site. Gary Gitchell established a crime scene perimeter and his men began looking to see if there were two more bodies nearby.

Detective Bryn Ridge took on the unpleasant task of climbing down into the stream and searching, foot by foot, on his hands and knees. He was hoping against hope that he would not find anything, but he knew that at any step he might. Instead, he ran into a stick stuck upright in the mud. When he pulled it up, there was a child’s white shirt attached, twisted around the end of the stick as if someone had been trying to hide it by pushing it down into the streambed.

The police had not wanted to disturb the crime scene, but personnel felt they couldn’t just leave the body in the water. While this was an understandable human and humane response, it was the wrong one. The victim was dead, beyond help. The scene should have been left alone until the medical examiner and crime scene technicians arrived.

Instead, Ridge waded back and carefully lifted the corpse onto the creek bank. From photos the officers had been given, they identified it as Michael Moore. The unnatural arch of his back was because he had been hog-tied—left wrist to left ankle and right wrist to right ankle—but not with rope or cord. Rather, he had been restrained with shoelaces, presumably his own. Wounds to the head made it look like he had been struck hard, more than once.

Men and women in the operational end of law enforcement get hardened to seeing horrible things, but almost no one can harden him or herself to something like this.

Ridge got back in the water. Tracing the bottom with his hands, he found more clothing, including Michael’s Cub Scout cap and shirt and two more pairs of sneakers—both with their laces missing. Soon they had an almost complete collection of what the three boys had been wearing, most of it secured with sticks beneath the bottom of the creek. What was that all about? I wondered. Significantly, much of the clothing was turned inside out, suggesting it had been hurriedly pulled off, either by the boys themselves or their attacker.

Now there was no hope among the officers, only the waiting horror of where the next body would turn up. Ridge discovered it downstream, adhering to the soft mud. He pulled it loose with a firm tug and guided it to the surface. It was Stevie Branch, naked and hog-tied with shoelaces like Michael.

Christopher Byers was found a few minutes later, facedown in the muddy water. He was naked and similarly tied, but it was even worse: it seemed he had been castrated. Only skin remained where his genital organs should have been. Puncture marks, such as would be made with a large knife, surrounded the area.

Detectives found two bicycles in the water, one red and one green, not far from where the large drainpipe allowed access to Robin Hood over the diversion ditch. By that time, county coroner Ken Hale had been called. He examined all three bodies, where the officers had left them on the creek bank, and pronounced death at around four in the afternoon. At that point, no determination was made as to when the boys had actually died.

Gitchell directed that the entire scene be photographed and videotaped and also ordered sandbagging of the stream above where the bodies and clothing had been found so they could search for more evidence, as well as Chris Byers’s missing body parts.

I noted in my reading that investigators had not retrieved and catalogued the sticks used to submerge the clothing in the mud.

After giving his orders, Gitchell came back out of the woods, where an anxious crowd had gathered behind the yellow police tape. The first person he talked to was Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather, who crumpled to the ground and began weeping. As soon as she heard, Pam—his wife and Stevie’s mother—fainted. Gitchell spoke briefly to some reporters; then he went over to Christopher’s stepfather, John Mark Byers. Byers said he had been out searching the area most of the night and thought he must have come within ten or fifteen feet of where Gitchell said the bodies were found.

The community went into mourning. Grief counselors were brought into the boys’ elementary school. A sizable reward was established for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the killer or killers. Neighbors and church groups took up collections to help pay for the funerals and burials. Gary Gitchell said his detectives were looking into a wide range of possibilities, including that the murders might have resulted from “gang or cult activity”—though he didn’t say if there was any evidence to support this hypothesis.

News of the horrendous crime spread quickly. Governor James “Jim” Guy Tucker contacted Gitchell and offered the services of the Arkansas State Police to help in the investigation. But as would happen three years later with the JonBenét Ramsey case in Colorado, Gitchell turned down the state police. It is possible, like the Boulder PD, he was confident his department could close the case itself. But there might have been another reason. At the time, WMPD was under investigation by the state police for corruption, resulting from allegations that one or more of the officers had taken confiscated drugs from the evidence room and had sold them for his own illegal purposes. If that was what was going through Gitchell’s mind, working with the state police could have been extremely awkward.

When I read the initial reports, my first thought was a mixed sexual homicide: that is, a crime committed for sexual gratification with elements of both organization and preplanning and disorganization, or reacting to the scene. It was unclear whether murder was the initial intention, but it seemed likely that the crime got out of hand, since there were three victims, resulting in the killing of all of them. When we see a homicide in which the genitals, buttocks, anus and/or female breasts are primarily involved, we further classify it as a lust murder. Since there appeared to be a castration and all three boys were stripped and suggestively bound, that designation seemed likely here. But I wanted to withhold judgment until I had immersed myself completely in the case.

The autopsies were performed by Dr. Frank J. Peretti, a pathologist with the Arkansas State Crime Lab. Chris Byers, he reported, had died of multiple injuries, while Stevie Branch and Michael Moore had drowned in about two feet of water after receiving less intensive wounds. Unlike Chris, neither one of them appeared to have any defensive wounds, suggesting they had not struggled.

As details of the murders spread throughout the community, residents began to speak of the undertones of evil and darkness attending the case. Lieutenant James Sudbury, of the West Memphis PD, contacted Steve Jones, the juvenile probation officer who had made the first horrible discovery in Robin Hood Hills. Both men thought this looked like a cult-type crime, and Sudbury wanted to know if any of Jones’s young charges was capable of this kind of atrocity.

Jones’s boss, Jerry Driver, was the senior juvenile probation officer. He was a former airline pilot who had retired and opened a housecleaning service, but it didn’t last long. Afterward, he went into probation work. The bearded, bearlike Driver had become deeply concerned about satanic cult activity and saw signs everywhere that it was coming to east-central Arkansas. When the three boys were murdered, he realized his worst fears had come true. He made up a list of the eight young men he considered most capable of committing a crime like this. On the top of that list were Damien Wayne Echols and another boy known to be his close friend, Charles Jason Baldwin. I wondered why he had put them on this list. He shared his list with the local police agencies.

 

Damien Echols, eighteen years of age, was what was commonly identified as a troubled kid. He had been born Michael Wayne Hutchison, and as long as his parents Eddie Joe and Pamela Hutchison were married, he was constantly being moved around due to Joe’s work. By the age of twelve or thirteen, he wrote in his memoir Almost Home, I had already decided life was hopeless. Because of all this, he developed into a loner, turning inward to reading, music and an apparently long-term quest for spiritual meaning, which involved moving from his Pentecostal background into Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and eventually Catholicism. Along the way he looked into Wicca.

At one point homeless, the family moved in with Pamela’s mother, Francis, and her new husband, Ivan, in West Memphis, while Joe looked for a permanent place for them. But the strain between Joe and Pamela had been building for years, and the marriage fell apart. Michael had grown very attached to Ivan and was devastated when the man died a few years later.

Sometime after her divorce from Joe, Pamela married Jack Echols and moved into his house in West Memphis. In 1990, Jack adopted Michael, who reluctantly took his stepfather’s last name. Since he was changing his surname, he decided to change his first name to Damien, having been inspired by reading the story of Father Damien de Veuster, the Belgian Catholic priest who dedicated his life to the lepers of Molokai, Hawaii. Ironically, once Damien was associated with the Robin Hood Hills murders, the story spread that the new name came from The Omen movie series about the earthly appearance of the Antichrist.

The life Damien describes with Jack, his mother and his sister, Michelle, was bleak. Jack joined a succession of small Pentecostal churches and moved the family into smaller shacks, each sending them further down the poverty ladder. When his grandmother had a heart attack and needed care, they moved into her trailer park house.

I’ve heard many jokes about poor people living in trailer parks, Damien wrote, but I no longer considered myself poor. I was now in the lap of luxury—I could take a shower whenever I wanted, there was central heat for the winter, and a window unit air conditioner for the summer. The toilet flushed, there were no crop dusters, and we had neighbors. It was heaven.

In junior high school, Damien developed the persona that ultimately brought him to the attention of the authorities. He later conceded he was suffering from depression, which was certainly understandable, given his circumstances. His grades slipped and he became disruptive in class. He developed a passion for heavy metal, especially the bands Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax. He also liked the popular Irish rock band U2. He dressed all in black, wearing a secondhand black trench coat even in the humid Arkansas summer. He shaved one side of his head and let the hair on the other side grow long. In his ongoing spiritual quest, he embraced paganism, mysticism and the occult. He became a Wiccan, following a path that he equated with nature and the creative force of life.

And he found his new best friend.