Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [12]
Another key part of the report was oddly ambiguous. It read: “A crime scene search failed to locate any traces of blood or other evidence which would lead investigators to believe the victims had been murdered in the area where their bodies were located.” That seemed to suggest that detectives’ earliest suspicion was that the boys were murdered somewhere else. The document also noted that “a hammer or a round object was used to create trauma to the head of all three victims”; that “there is a possibility that Byers may have been injected by a hypodermic needle”; and that “the medical examiner also advised that evidence would tend to indicate that the victims had been struck with a belt containing studs or a raised surface.” This was interesting information, but in light of the statement’s obvious errors, its overall credibility had to be questioned.
The medical examiner’s reference to the possibility that the children had been struck by a belt might have focused attention on John Mark Byers, since Byers had acknowledged when he’d reported Christopher missing that he’d given the boy “a few licks” with a belt just before he disappeared. But for two weeks detectives appeared to be disinclined to seriously question Byers. If they checked with the local child abuse agency to see if it had a record on Byers, no report of such an inquiry was ever placed into the file.
While that most logical prong of the investigation, the one looking at family members, was receiving scant attention, and the most unusual one—the possibility that a “gang or cult” had committed the murders—had already been announced to the media, detectives devoted hundreds of hours to examining a third possibility. This was that someone completely unknown to the children—someone not in a gang or a cult, but not in their families either—had mutilated and murdered the children.
Various Tips and Leads
As police questioned residents who lived near the woods, news of what kind of questions they were asking spread quickly by word of mouth. Although Gitchell vowed to maintain tight control over information pertaining to the case, information leaked all over. It was no secret, for instance, that detectives had requisitioned a list of customers who’d washed trucks at the Blue Beacon. And after residents reported seeing an unfamiliar white van in the area, it was widely known that police were investigating all vans in the area, white and otherwise. Descriptions of the driver had varied—some witnesses described a middle-aged white male with gray hair; others, a young white male with blond hair—and ultimately the lead had led nowhere.
Alarmed citizens called the police reporting hundreds of tips and leads. Detectives worked frantically, if utterly unsystematically, to follow up most of them. No voice was considered too small to be heard, no suggestion too absurd. On Friday, May 7, the day after the bodies were found, Aaron Hutcheson, an eight-year-old classmate of the victims, told police that he’d seen Michael Moore talking after school to a black man in a maroon car.29According to Aaron, the man was tall, had yellow teeth, and wore a T-shirt with “writing on it.” Aaron reported that the man told Michael that his mother had asked him to bring Michael home, and that Michael had climbed into the car and ridden off with the man. Though no tall black man with yellow teeth and a maroon car was ever located, the report was a perplexing one. Aaron was a close friend of Michael’s and could reasonably