The West Memphis Three are three men who were tried and convicted as teenagers for the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The three 8-year-old boys—Steve Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers—were last seen playing together on May 5, 1993. When they failed to return home, Christopher Byer’s father filed a report to the police. Searches that were conducted by police and neighbors for any sign of the missing boys ended up to be fruitless. The following day, a parole officer found the boys’ bodies in a ditch, all of them hogtied with their own shoelaces. They had been beaten and sexually assaulted, and one of the victims, Christopher, had been tortured with a knife and had his own genitals cut off. A month later,
Damien Echols Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and Jason Baldwin were arrested and by 1994, Damien was sentenced to death and the rest were given life imprisonment. During the trial, the prosecution argued that the trio had murdered those boys as part of a Satanic ritual. Despite this, many people, including celebrities and musicians, held fundraisers in the belief that they were innocent. In 2011, the West Memphis Three entered an Alford plea while maintaining their innocence. The judge accepted their pleas and they were released from prison after serving 18 years.
