Three 8-year-old Cub Scouts were found murdered in Arkansas in May 1993, their bodies hogtied and thrown into a ditch — and their genitals so horrifically mutilated that prosecutors could only describe the scene as part of a satanic ritual.
Shocked by the gruesome slayings, the city of West Memphis where the killings occurred rallied to convict three 17-year-old misfits who loved Metallica in a community where country music ruled above all.
The teens – Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., dubbed the “West Memphis Three” – were eventually released in 2011, after serving 18 years in prison, as part a deal that allowed them to continue to claim their innocence while acknowledging prosecutors had sufficient evidence to convict them.
The deal, a k a an “Alford plea,” was a spit in the face to Misskelley’s lawyer, Dan Stidham, whose recent book, “A Harvest of Innocence: The Untold Story of the West Memphis Three Murder Case,” proposes a new theory: that the Cub Scouts were actually killed by a serial killer roaming America’s highways.
“It’s a theory I’ve been putting together for the last five years with investigators,” Stidham told The Post. “I promised all those years ago to clear Jessie’s name, and I’m not stopping until the real killer is found.”
The saga of the “West Memphis Three” captured the nation’s attention and spawned the popular HBO documentary series “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” and the flick “Devil’s Knot,” starring Reese Witherspoon.
While most people remember the case through the films, the real-life horror haunted Stidham, 61, for nearly half his life.
The then-rookie southern lawyer said he spent decades suffering nightmares from the crime-scene photos he saw of the slaughtered little boys, Steve Branch, Chris Byers and Michael Moore.
“The pictures of the children, their mutilated bodies, that’s something that doesn’t go away,” Stidham said.
“It’s the very picture of a human atrocity.”
As with most people, Stidham read the newspapers after the “West Memphis Three’s” arrests to learn that police got a confession out of Misskelley. The lawyer then believed that the best path forward would be for his client to testify against Echols and Baldwin.
But when Stidham finally met with his client, he found that the 17-year-old boy had no idea he confessed to police, and even more shockingly, he learned that Misskelley had a learning disability with an IQ of about 70.
“Jessie just told the investigators what they wanted to hear because he wanted any way out of the interrogation,” Stidham said. “He was psychologically coerced to confess. … They even convinced him his own brain was lying to him about what he knew.”
Assured of his client’s innocence and learning about the gaps in the investigators’ timeline of events, Stidham set out to find the truth, and years later, what stuck out the most to him was the location of the crime scene.
When he arrived at the scene in the Robin Hood Hills woods in 1993, Stidham noticed that the ditch where the bodies were found was near the Blue Beacon truck wash and 76 Truck Stop station on the ever-busy Interstate 40.
What really stuck out to Stidham was just how close the truck-stop parking lot was to the crime scene, with the lay of the land captured in “Paradise Lost.”
“It would have been so easy for a trucker to pick up the boys, kill them, put them in the back of his truck, and then dump out the bodies in that ditch,” the lawyer theorized.
Years after the trial, as he worked to clear the names of the “West Memphis Three,” Stidham enlisted the help of two retired FBI profilers – including the late Mike Napier, who literally wrote the book on how to get into a killer’s head – with the agents coming to the same conclusion that the lawyer feared when he first arrived on the hills.
“America has seen a lot of cases through its highways of serial-killer truck drivers, some that have yet to be solved, and there’s been cases like this around I-40,” Stidham said.
“I do believe this case is connected to one of those,” he said.
Stidham’s theory might finally be realized after the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in April that a judge wrongly denied Echols’ 2022 request for new genetic testing of the crime scene.
Echols, who was thrown on Death Row after the teens’ 1994 convictions, has also spent the past three decades working to fully exonerate himself and his co-defendants, filing a request for additional testing of the DNA recovered from the scene to try to find new clues about what really happened.
Stidham expects the new testing will help investigators carve out a more accurate profile of the suspect, and in an ideal case, said he hopes “the tests link back to a killer who’s already in jail.
“My hope is that we do get more DNA testing and can compound that with what we have so far to create a profile of the real killer,” he said.
But the lawyer notes that there is one other distinct possibility, a theory he can’t abandon despite its disturbing implications.
In 2007, DNA testing found a partial match on Moore linking back to Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs, with another test finding a partial match at the crime scene to Hobbs’ alibi witness, David Jacoby.
Both men were cleared by investigators and have denied any involvement in the case. Hobbs even wrote his own memoir about the aftermath of the trial and the alleged death threats and harassment he received after armchair detectives at the time pointed to him as a potential suspect.
Still, Stidham said his team has never been able to fully account for Hobbs’ movements on the night the boys were killed, so he is still not ready to rule out the possibility.
While still hoping his own sleuthing, combined with the request for new testing, finally fulfills his decades-long promise to Misskelley, Stidham, now a judge in Arkansas, revealed that writing his book and continuing to put pieces together has allowed him to find some peace over the horrors and backlash he faced in 1993 when he first took up the case.
“After writing this book and trying to separate fact from fiction, I found that the nightmares had stopped,” Stidham said.
“I finally had the chance to sleep peacefully for the first time in 30 years,” he said. “But I know that the job’s not done yet.”