S3 Ep116: West Memphis Three: Satanic Panic (Part 2)

Crime Weekly

Audioboom Studios

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2023

⏱️ 126 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

West Memphis, Arkansas is located in Crittenden County and is directly across the Mississippi River from Memphis Tennessee, but in 1993, West Memphis and Memphis were worlds apart. Memphis boasted a healthy and growing population of over 620 thousand, while West Memphis had just over 28 thousand residents. But Memphis, TN struggled with high crime rates, with 1993 setting a record for the most homicides in one year, a record that wasn’t broken until 2016. West Memphis Arkansas had a more small town, laid back feel, and as cliche as it sounds, people felt safe leaving their doors unlocked and letting their young children play outside all day with no supervision. That was until May 5th, 1993, when three eight year old boys rode away on their bikes, eager to expel the energy they had built up all day while sitting in their second grade classrooms at Weaver Elementary School, but they never came home. It wouldn’t be long before the residents of West Memphis and then the world found out what happened to Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers. Their battered and mutilated bodies were found the next day in a swampy wooded area known to locals as Robin Hood Hills, and the community of West Memphis felt a shockwave hit their community that they would not recover from for some time. Within a month three teenagers were arrested and charged with capital murder, and it wasn’t long before whispers of witchcraft, devil worship and occult killings rippled throught the homes and businesses of West Memphis, and those whispers eventually turned into a loud roar, a roar that might accompany an angry mob looking for someone to blame for an unimaginable tragedy, akin to the infamous witch hunts that are dotted throughout history. This is the story of six boys from West Memphis, Arkansas; three were brutally murdered and stolen from this world far before their time, the other three were marched to the proverbial gallows, guilty in the court of public opinion, and found guilty in an actual court of law. Six lives destroyed, six lives forever changed, six lives eternally tied together.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow.
0:16.0	And I'm Derek Lobasser.
0:17.0	So today we are diving into part two of the West Memphis 3 series. This is, oh my god, this case
0:25.0	there's so much to talk about. And as I'm going through it, I'm trying to organize everything
0:30.0	because I want to be all over the place. And even in this episode, I sort of bounce around a bit
0:35.0	because there's so much information. And at times, you, you, as the listener wouldn't know why I'm giving the information.
0:42.0	So I have to give a little bit of like insight into why I'm giving the information and then just say, like,
0:46.0	oh, but we're going to come back to this later. And it's just, it's, it's a crazy case.
0:51.0	And I think that a lot of people in the comments of part one really kind of echoed that sentiment.
0:56.0	They were like, this is one of the cases that got me into true crime to begin with.
1:00.0	This is one of those cases that there just seems to be so much information, so much contrary information, so much battling information.
1:07.0	And it's like at some point you have to ask yourself, what's important and what's not.
1:12.0	And with a case like this, it just feels like that answer is like, everything's important
1:17.0	because, because it is, you know, in this case. And that's kind of what I've come to realize as I'm going through that,
1:24.0	that all these small little details, they're very important. And we haven't even really gotten into the minuscule details yet.
1:30.0	So we're going to dive. I think we should just dive right in because we have a lot to cover today. Is that okay with you?
1:35.0	Yeah, I think we're going to give people a treat this week. No need to put the timestamp in. We're getting right into it.
1:39.0	And we're going to start off where we left off last episode, which was, you know, these three eight-year-old boys were missing,
1:45.0	but they weren't missing for long. They were found. Their bodies were found eventually in Robin Hoodhills in an area of Robin Hoodhills called the Devil's Den,
1:56.0	which was kind of like a more precarious area to get to. You have to cross this like pipe bridge and a lot of the younger kids who were Stevie and Chris and Mike's age weren't necessarily usually crossing that pipe bridge.
2:12.0	So it's an out of the way area, very forested. And I mean, I think based on the way that these children's bodies were found,
2:20.0	somebody was clearly trying to conceal them. They didn't want them to be found right away.
	...

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