S3 Ep121: West Memphis Three: Trials and Tribulations (Part 7)

Crime Weekly

Audioboom Studios

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 136 minutes

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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.
0:16.6	And I'm Derek Lovasser.
0:18.1	So today we are diving into part seven. Is this part seven?
0:22.0	It is part seven.
0:23.5	Yeah, I actually labeled the script part infinity because I had no idea where we were at
0:28.8	at this point. But so we've got today's video with the West Memphis three. And then we
0:32.3	have next week is the final part and next week is going to be probably a longer episode
0:36.3	because we're going over basically all the alternate suspects. And that's when we're going
0:40.6	to talk about Terry Hobbes and John Mark Buyers and you know, a few other extraneous suspects
0:46.3	like Mr. Bo Jingles, people that could be involved with these murders if it's not Damian
0:51.9	Jason and Jesse. So we are going to probably finish up with eight parts. And I mean, there's
0:58.1	so much like that was the hard thing about this case. There's so much that I could talk
1:03.6	about even as far as like what happened to some of these detectives, you know, after
1:09.1	after they were done with this case and what happened to the district attorney John Fogelman
1:13.3	and like kind of even Gary Gitchell, like kind of things that they did that did cause
1:18.4	some suspicion and like maybe people were wondering, were they on the up and up and things
1:24.0	like that. But there's just so much. I definitely suggest that you look into this case more
1:30.4	yourself if you're left wanting to know everything. There's just no possible way we could put
1:35.5	everything into the series because some people would not mind if it's 20 parts, but I think
1:41.1	some others would. Yeah, there were some people who emailed me and DMed me about this case
1:46.2	and they're in the mindset of, they're of the mindset that that these three did actually
1:51.1	do this. And they had directed me to some websites. And one of the big things that they
	...

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