S3 Ep122: West Memphis Three: Alternate Suspects (Part 8)

Crime Weekly

Audioboom Studios

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 130 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.
0:15.8	And I'm Derek Lvassar.
0:17.3	Today we are diving into the eighth and final part of the West Memphis 3 series and trust
0:23.4	me, the next couple of episodes and next couple of series will not be this long because
0:28.4	you guys need a break and to be honest, I need a break. Okay, I need a break. This
0:33.4	was a lot of deep dive in. This was a lot of like reading court documents. This was a
0:37.6	lot of who a lot of work. So a lot of you know what I was good this
0:42.2	series. I didn't say anything last time I said I was like I'm over this and I got I got
0:45.7	crushed. I hear like a good little boy. Yeah, good little boy. And I didn't say
0:50.6	where it was like 12 parts. It's doing whatever you want.
0:54.4	Yeah, but in the last comments people were like Derek's over this one. But I mean
1:00.5	you're over it too. You're over it too. I mean because I feel like it's so obvious
1:04.2	at this point, you know, to me, it just feels like we're like belaboring it when it's
1:09.6	like and they said they did this, but they had no proof and this, but they had no proof.
1:15.6	And it just like feels like so repetitive. And I mean, it's not because it's like many
1:20.0	multiple things where they have no proof. But at some point it's just like, all right,
1:24.4	I get it. And it sucks because like these people lost a lot of their like a lot of
1:29.1	years of their lives. And so we're sitting here like we're over this, you know, it's
1:32.9	obvious. But it sucks. Like it sucks. We should talk about this stuff.
1:37.2	So I wrote about this on Patreon this week. Yeah, kind of give like my little like what's
1:42.0	my thoughts at that point and what the detective perspective, my detective perspective.
1:46.9	So did I was responding to some people that again, because in the episode we said this
	...

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