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By Root 578 0

have been with him immediately after school. The boy’s details were specific. And there seemed no reason for him to have concocted such a story. On the other hand, police knew that Michael’s mother, Dana Moore, had sent no one to pick up her son. And why would she have? The Moores’ house was on the lot next to the school. She told police that Michael had come immediately home. Aaron’s report sounded like the product of a child’s frightened imagination, and the police soon dismissed it. But as the detectives’ frustrations mounted, they would visit young Aaron again—and in later interviews they would take his accounts more seriously.

For now, Gitchell’s detectives cast a wide and imaginative net in their search for the killer or killers. When someone suggested that the way the boys were tied—wrists-to-ankles, behind their backs—was like the way some American soldiers had been tied when captured in Vietnam, the police checked hospitals for reports of veterans in the area who might have been treated for injuries to their penises. They checked area carpet cleaners, looking for any who had cleaned up bloodstains. They investigated a man who had once been arrested for performing surgical sex change operations without a medical license. They compiled descriptions of vagrants, strangers, mental patients, loiterers, and hoboes. They investigated one man who was said to have made “vulgar remarks” to two young girls, another who had reportedly drilled holes through his apartment wall to spy on his neighbors, and another who had aroused suspicion by failing to attend church for the past few weeks. They filed reports on men who were said to have tortured and killed animals, or who had confided having murderous fantasies, or who were said to be into child pornography, or whom a tipster had described as “brutal.” They also saw to it that the outline of the crime—which was pretty much all they knew—was reported on the television showAmerica’s Most Wanted . As news of the murders spread, police across the nation tried to help by relaying information about hundreds of cases that they thought might be related.

On Wednesday, May 12, six days after the bodies were found, Gitchell’s detectives belatedly tested the site by the ditch for blood. They sprayed Luminol, a product that glows luminescent in the dark in places where it has interacted with blood. Results of the test were sketchy—and minimal.30By the end of the first week, police found themselves struggling to separate information from the tide of rumor and speculation being phoned in by the public. A woman reported that on the evening the boys disappeared, while driving along the service road in the vicinity of the Blue Beacon between 6 and 6:30P.M ., she’d seen all three of the victims riding on two bicycles. If that report was true, it would place the boys at the opposite entrance to the woods from the one where other reports had placed them last. But some reports were more credible than others. A narcotics detective in Memphis reported that both John Mark and Melissa Byers had worked as confidential informants for both the Memphis police and the sheriff’s department in Shelby County, where Memphis was located. The information was potentially important—if, indeed, the West Memphis police did not know it already. It suggested that the mother and stepfather of the most seriously brutalized child were involved, some way or another, with criminal activity. But if the West Memphis police followed up on this lead, they entered no record of it in the file.

Another interesting tip also pointed to Memphis—and to a connection with drugs. A week and a half after the murders, police in West Memphis were told that four days after the bodies were found, two young Memphis men, Chris Morgan and Brian Holland, had left town abruptly and had moved to Oceanside, California. When West Memphis police checked on the two they learned that Morgan’s parents and his former girlfriend lived in West Memphis, near where the victims lived, and that he had once had an ice cream route in the victims’ neighborhood.