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more for the next several days, though he did make one statement that caught the region’s attention. He noted that his detectives were considering a wide range of possibilities, including that the murders might have resulted from “gang or cult activity”—though he quickly added that he had seen no evidence of either. To outsiders it seemed a strange pronouncement, an acknowledgment that detectives were considering an unusual explanation for the murders, despite the fact that no evidence suggested it. But readers in West Memphis understood. Within hours after the discovery of the bodies, rumors attributing the killings to satanism had begun to circulate. Two women had already reported sounds of devil worshiping in the woods. Whatever had prompted Gitchell’s remark, it suggested that he and his detectives were taking the rumors seriously. Word that the case might have satanic overtones was prevalent enough that when the West Memphis Police Department assigned the case number 93-05-0666 to the murder file, reporters asked whether the last three digits had been deliberately chosen. Did the number 666 suggest a police theory of the crime? Did it refer to the Antichrist? Gitchell insisted that it did not. The assignment of that particular number, he said, had been entirely coincidental. He explained that cases were numbered according to the date the crime had occurred and the number of cases that had already been entered for the year. It was entirely by chance, he said, that this particular case, which occurred in the fifth month of 1993, just happened to be the 666th worked by the department so far. Years later, discovery of a report written by Detective Ridge and dated two days after the bodies were found would cast doubt on Gitchell’s contention. That report—which was among the earliest in the case—identified it as #93-05-0555.

Chapter Two

The West Memphis Police

WITHIN HOURS AFTER THE BODIES WERE FOUND, Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, a former prosecuting attorney, contacted Gitchell to offer the assistance of the Arkansas State Police. The larger state police agency could have sent detectives from its Criminal Investigation Division into West Memphis to aid in what promised to be a difficult investigation. But Gitchell declined the offer, and though one state police officer did help conduct some interviews, the role of the state police in West Memphis was minimal.15

Gitchell’s reluctance to involve the state police might have been sparked in part by the misinformation the agency had broadcast in the first hours of the case—information that had been picked up by the paper. Gitchell’s strategy, from the moment the three bodies had floated up from the muck, had been to keep a tight control on information. The less the public knew, he reasoned, the better he and his detectives could work. If no one but the killer or killers knew the exact nature of the wounds, for example, the questioning of suspects would be easier. But Gitchell’s attempt to control the information had been immediately undermined—by the very investigative agency that was now offering its assistance. Anyone who’d heard the police band broadcast would know how the boys’ hands had been tied and the significant, if overstated, fact that “their genitals had been removed.” The morning after the discovery of the bodies, when theMemphis Commercial Appeal published that information, Gitchell had been livid.

State and Local Police Tensions

There may also have been another, darker reason for Gitchell’s coolness toward the state police. At the time the murders occurred, several officers in the West Memphis Police Department, along with officers in the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office, were themselves under investigation by none other than the Arkansas State Police. Gitchell himself had not been questioned, but much of the county’s law enforcement community had, and the relationship between the local police and the state police was, at the moment, severely strained. The incident that had brought state investigators into Crittenden County arose less than