This series contains adult language and depictions of graphic violence.

Listener discretion is advised.

The small town of West Memphis, Arkansas sits on the fringe of the Mississippi Delta,

where the slow moving river winds its way through a land of cotton fields, swamps, and thick woods.

It was a place where life moved at a deliberate pace,

where neighbors still knew one another,

and where the past, both its triumphs and tragedies cast long shadows.

But in May of 1993, something happened that would forever change the small town, rippling far beyond its borders to

captivate the attention of a nation and beyond. It was a story of murder, of

justice miscarried, and of three boys known to the world as the West

Memphis three whose fate would become the subject of a decades long battle between truth and the limits of human belief.

Welcome back to the Devil Within.

You're listening to the West Memphis Three.

On the afternoon of May 6th, 1993, the bodies of three young boys were found in a ditch in a wooded area known as Robin Hood

Hills, a place where children often played in the shadow of the towering Arkansas trees. Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers, all eight years old, had gone missing the previous day.

When searchers discovered them submerged in a shallow muddy stream, they knew immediately that something

unspeakable had occurred. The crime scene was horrifying. The boys had been stripped naked, their hands and feet bound with their own shoelaces. Their bodies bore the marks of violence.

Stevie Branch and Michael Moore had suffered multiple injuries, while Christopher

Byers had been mutilated in a way that suggested to investigators something even darker, something

ritualistic.

The shock that hit West Memphis was immediate and palpable. The town already

weathered by the challenges of poverty and a high crime rate

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