• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Lax interviewed five residents of Hutcheson’s trailer park.192All reported that Vicki Hutcheson had participated in the events that night when the police were called, and that Aaron had been with her. Lax didn’t know what Fogleman intended to do with Aaron’s many statements, but he felt better after talking to the neighbors.193Since he was there, he also asked the women about their experiences with Vicki Hutcheson in the days after the murders, and if Hutcheson had ever mentioned the $35,000 reward. One of the neighbors told Lax that the subject had come up twice. “At one time she told me that they were going to split the reward money between Aaron and another little boy,” the woman said. “Another time she told me they were going to give Aaron all the reward money.”

Another woman said she also recalled hearing Hutcheson discuss the reward. “She had told me that Aaron was receiving it,” the woman said, “and she told me how she was going to spend the money, what she was going to buy with it.”

“Did you ask her why Aaron was going to receive the money?” Lax asked.

“Yes sir.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said because he had seen the murders.”

“Did you believe it?”

“No sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was out here in the trailer park.”

Byers on Film

Family members of the victims were also listed among the witnesses Fogleman said he might call. Since they seemed to have no information that implicated any of the defendants, Lax did not interview them. The filmmakers Berlinger and Sinofsky, however, were very interested in the families. Their request to film the shower for Domini’s baby had been only the start.

Since then they had contacted all of the principals in the case: the families of the victims, the defendants and their families, the police, the lawyers, and the judge. They’d offered money to the defendants and to family members of the victims who agreed to be interviewed. Damien was offered $7,500 if he would agree to two interviews. His defense attorneys, and the others, were reticent.194But the filmmakers noted that the finished documentary would not be released until several months after the trials, and ultimately, the lawyers gave their clients the go-ahead for a couple of interviews each.195Though Judge Burnett withheld his decision on the filmmakers’ request to videotape both of the trials, he too relented shortly before the trials began.

From the summer of 1993 through the end of the year, filmmakers Sinofsky and Berlinger were able to record moments with members of both the victims’ and the defendants’ families as they grappled with what had happened—and contemplated what lay ahead. Michael’s parents, Todd and Dana Moore, seated together at a table in their house, were the quietest in front of the camera. After describing some of the questions that haunted them as parents—“Was he calling for me?”—Todd Moore said simply that Michael had been killed “by real monsters.”

Pam Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s mother, was filmed in front of the elementary school as she was being interviewed by a local TV reporter. Chewing gum, giggling, and fiddling with a yellow Cub Scout scarf that had belonged to Stevie, she looked, at turns, delighted to be on camera and sobered by the subject of her son’s murder. Microphone in hand, the reporter asked, “Do you feel the people who did this were worshiping—”

Hobbs finished the question for him. “Satan? Yes, I do. Just look at the freaks. I mean, just look at them. They look like punks.” She fairly spat the last word.

But no one’s rage or venom compared to that expressed by the Byerses. Melissa was filmed seated at a kitchen table. She had dark circles under her eyes. “Christopher never hurt anybody,” she said. “He had a gentle, loving, and giving heart, and they crucified him in those woods. And they humiliated his little body. They took his little manhood before he even knew what it was. And I hate ’em for it. I never hated anybody in my life, and I hate those three”—then, hammering the table with her finger, she added emphatically, “And the mothers that bore them.”

Her husband,