Crime Weekly - S3 Ep117: West Memphis Three: Troubled Teenager to Murder Suspect (Part 3)

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

West Memphis, Arkansas is located in Crittenden County and is directly across the Mississippi River from Memphis Tennessee, but in 1993, West Memphis and Memphis were worlds apart. Memphis boasted a healthy and growing population of over 620 thousand, while West Memphis had just over 28 thousand residents. But Memphis, TN struggled with high crime rates, with 1993 setting a record for the most homicides in one year, a record that wasn’t broken until 2016. West Memphis Arkansas had a more small town, laid back feel, and as cliche as it sounds, people felt safe leaving their doors unlocked and letting their young children play outside all day with no supervision. That was until May 5th, 1993, when three eight year old boys rode away on their bikes, eager to expel the energy they had built up all day while sitting in their second grade classrooms at Weaver Elementary School, but they never came home. It wouldn’t be long before the residents of West Memphis and then the world found out what happened to Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers. Their battered and mutilated bodies were found the next day in a swampy wooded area known to locals as Robin Hood Hills, and the community of West Memphis felt a shockwave hit their community that they would not recover from for some time. Within a month three teenagers were arrested and charged with capital murder, and it wasn’t long before whispers of witchcraft, devil worship and occult killings rippled throught the homes and businesses of West Memphis, and those whispers eventually turned into a loud roar, a roar that might accompany an angry mob looking for someone to blame for an unimaginable tragedy, akin to the infamous witch hunts that are dotted throughout history. This is the story of six boys from West Memphis, Arkansas; three were brutally murdered and stolen from this world far before their time, the other three were marched to the proverbial gallows, guilty in the court of public opinion, and found guilty in an actual court of law. Six lives destroyed, six lives forever changed, six lives eternally tied together. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod ADS: 1. HelloFresh Go to HelloFresh.com/crimeweekly60 and use code crimeweekly60 for 60% off plus free shipping! 2. ZipRecruiter Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE: ZipRecruiter.com/CRIMEWEEKLY 3. Beis Go to BEISTRAVEL.com/CRIMEWEEKLY for 15% off your first purchase. 4. Honey Get PayPal Honey for FREE at JoinHoney.com/crimeweekly 5. PDS Debt PDS DEBT is offering free debt analysis to our listeners just for completing the quick and easy debt assessment at www.PDSDebt.com/crime.

History's masterpieces wouldn't be the same without their most notable accents. Neither would the Kia Sportage without its multiple drive modes. The Kia Sorento without its expansive 12.3-inch panoramic display. Or the Kia Telluride without its three rows of spacious seating. The 2025 Kia SUVs. Kia. Movement that inspires. Call 800-333-4KIA for details. Always drive safely. Kia. Movement. That inspires. Call 800-333-4KIA for details. Always drive safely. Limited inventory available. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow.

And I'm Derek Levasseur. So today we're moving into part three of the West Memphis Three series. And I guess we're, you know, kind of keeping the theme of three because today we're focusing our episode on the three suspects that would be arrested for the murders of these eight-year-old boys. We've got Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jesse, Ms. Kelly Jr., and that is who we are talking about today. Basically, I think because we're going in depth on this case, it's important to know and understand who these three suspects were. It's important to give all the information available, not just the information that supports whatever side of the story is being told or whatever narrative is being upheld. And in order to do this, I have turned to several sources to piece together what I hope to be a thorough and unbiased view of all three teenage boys who were

arrested and put on trial for the murder of eight-year-old Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore. And The sources that I used for this episode were the autobiography of Damian Echols, it's called Life After Death, as well as the book that's called The Case Against the West Memphis Three by Gary Meese, and also the book Devils Not by Mara Leverett, as well as obviously internet resources, Damian Echols' medical history, his interactions with law enforcement, things like that. And all of the sources that I used were both in support of the three teenagers and against them. So I tried to get a good sprinkling of different viewpoints in there in order to put

this together. And hopefully I did all right. I'm sure you did. And I'm glad we're going from both sides of it. There have been some comments. And when I say that, I I'm sure you did. And I'm glad we're going from both sides of it. There have been some comments. And when I say that, I always say it as if like it's not the majority. But we have new subscribers every single week and people who tune into specific series that we do because they have a personal interest in that particular case. And they may feel like they know everything about it and they want to hear what we have to say.

I don't know if this needs to be said, but I guess I'll say it for some of our newer listeners or watchers. Stephanie and I don't pull punches. If we don't care what the popular narrative is, I think we proved that multiple times, but in more recent history, Adnan Syed, we both said that even though he's out as a free man, it's still highly likely that he is somehow involved with Heyman Lee's death. I mean, that's not necessarily the popular opinion, but that's what we said. And we got shit for that and we don't care. We got some heat for that. We got some heat for that, but we try to be honest with you. And regardless of whatever the popular opinion is, whatever people are making money

off of, I know for me personally, the whole way I got into true crime was doing a special about OJ where a guy by the name of Bill Deere, who was a private investigator, made millions off his book about OJ's son, Jason, being the person who killed Nicole Brown Simpson. And I flew out to LA and I believe disproved his theory and told him that directly to his face and that was my first show so I could have easily like killed my career by doing it but I don't think we have a history of just going with the popular narrative so some people in the comments have said you know oh I can already see where they're going they're gonna they're already leaning towards someone else and that the West Memphis three didn't actually do it. And there's people who believe they did. And so just to put it out there, and I think I can speak for you, Stephanie, where if we believe that these individuals are somehow involved, even though they're currently out as free people, our opinion is just our opinion it doesn't mean they are but we will never shy away from that and i if i feel at the end of this that they are still good for

this crime regardless of the fact that they're out there i'll say i don't care who in the space has already covered it one way and feels certain way who is backing them as far as far as them being unjustly arrested in the first place i don't care't care. I think that's the good thing about this channel is I'm learning about these cases with you. So we're going through the emotions and the feelings and the process of figuring out the case where it may feel like I'm leaning one way like you guys are in episodes one and two, and then episodes three and four, we all change together or a majority of us do because of the facts being put out there. But we got to be allowed to go through that process we're not coming into it with preconceived notions and at the end we're going to call it how we see it some of you will agree with us some of you won't

but we're going to just be honest with you and you can take that for what it is and i can tell you what it is it's a pin in its opinion and everybody one. Doesn't make ours more right than the next person. But if you're coming here to listen to us, obviously you're interested in our opinions. So we'll be transparent and we'll go from there. I'm not leaning one way or the other. We'll just see how it goes. I mean, I'm not even going to say that I don't come into some of these cases with preconceived notions. Well, yeah, you do.

You're the storyteller. I think that's fair. I do, of course. And you've researched them before and covered them before. You've already gone through your process. But even then, I still find myself changing. It happened with the Michael Peterson case, sort of, when we were going over the staircase. That is true. It did. You're right. Because you were more convinced that he might be innocent at the beginning, right? That's right. I do remember that. So I definitely, like I'm a human being,

so I'm going to have like biases, like every single other human being that walks this earth. Not one of you is free of that. But I also like am really open and I'm not, I don't live in an echo chamber and I don't like people who do and I don't like generalities. So I will always like look at everything

that's put in front of me. And I go deeper with these cases with Crime Weekly than I ever did on YouTube, especially in the beginning, because we have more time and we have more, you know, freedom and flexibility to do that. So it's always going to change. But I think it's a little, you know, redundant to to assume or reductive to assume that just, you know, which way we're going after like one episode, that's dumb. You know, it's like watching a movie and you're like, oh, I already know where this is going. Well, they hit you with a twist, you know, at the end, like you think you know where it's going, but they, they hit you with a twist. So just sit down, strap in, get a snack, enjoy the

ride and follow along. Trust the process. What's the saying? Trust the process. What's the saying? I don't know. It's not always the destination. It's the journey, right? It is the journey. It's the journey of getting there. Yeah. So enjoy the journey. It's not only about the destination. We'll get there.

You've got to think about where we're going with it or what we're doing or if we have a narrative. We don't got no narrative. Just get that out of your head right away. Me and Derek, we don't have a narrative. We don't owe anything to anyone and we don't feel like we do at all I was standing 10 feet away from this person one of these individuals like you said at the at the at the bar that night At crime con I have no skin in the game. I don't I have I don't Love this person or hate them. I don't carry the way I just look at what i'm being shown and

listen to the facts and Come up with my own opinion And you could have seven other cops look at it and feel completely differently about it. Just one opinion. Yeah. So, I mean, let's do this. Are you ready? Let's do it. Okay. So, in order to talk about Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse, Ms. Kelly Jr., I think we first have to touch a little bit on Jerry Driver, the man who first put these three teenage boys on the radar of law enforcement. Now, Jerry Driver had originally worked as a commercial airline pilot before he kind of retired. And then he and his wife had tried their hand at opening their own business. It was a

cleaning service. That business failed. And then Jerry, sort of like as a last resort, took a job as a Crittenden County Juvenile Probation Officer. And he was in his 50s when he took this job. And in 1993, Jerry Driver was the county's chief juvenile officer and his assistant was Steve Jones. We've already talked a little bit about Steve Jones. He was the man who had spotted the floating tennis shoe that led the police to the location of the missing boys' bodies. So the day after the bodies were found, Steve Jones had a conversation with Lieutenant James Sudbury of the West Memphis Police. Now remember, Sudbury was one of the police officers who at that time was being investigated by the state police for corruption. Remember,

he had admitted it's like taking guns and stuff out of evidence. And he's like, we all do it. Like, what's the problem with it? We don't understand. And then Sudbury and a couple of his colleagues, you know, got caught up in this. But, you know, a judge ended up not pressing any charges against them and kind of not pushing anything with it and nothing happened to them. But in his report, Lieutenant Sudbury writes, quote, on the day after the bodies of the three boys were found, I had a conversation with Steve Jones, a juvenile officer for Crittenden County, Arkansas. In our conversation, I found that

Steve and I shared the same opinion that the murders appeared to have overtones of cult sacrifice. During our conversation, Steve mentioned that all of the people known by him to be involved in cult-type activities, one person stood out in his mind that in his opinion was capable of being involved in this type of crime. That person was Damien Echols, end quote. And even though Lieutenant Sudbury was on narcotics, he usually worked drug cases, and even though Steve Jones was a probation officer who had no law enforcement training, the two men decided to join forces and work the angle that the murders were cult related and that Damian Echols was involved. which was located at the Lakeshore Estates Trailer Park in Marion. So Sudbury claims in his report that he received permission from Damien's mother and stepfather to interview Damien. That wasn't actually true at all because he gives the complete wrong names in the report. And I don't even think at this point Damien's mother was living there.

I think Damien was living with his stepfather. But either way, he gives completely wrong names in the report. But according to Lieutenant Sudbury, this initial interview happened in Damien's bedroom. And Sudbury's report, it gives no indication of what questions he asked Damien or what Damien's responses were. But the police officer does note that, you know, Damien was kind of wearing like dark clothes and he kind of talked about what he looked like, stating, quote, At this time, I observed Damien to have a tattoo on his chest of a five pointed star or a pentagram, as best as I remember, one other tattoo on his shoulder or arm. I'm unsure of the nature of this tattoo, end quote. And Steve Jones, the parole officer, who's also the probation officer, I suppose I should call him, who was also there, he noted that two pairs of Damien's shoes, tennis shoes and boots, had mud caked on the bottoms. But at that time, the shoes were not taken into evidence. Now, in his book, Life After Death, Damien claims that Sudbury did not stay on topic about the murders. In fact,

it wasn't even really Sudbury who was doing the talking. Damien claims that it was mainly Steve Jones who was asking Damien seemingly random questions. Like, at first, you know, who's your favorite author? What's your favorite book of the Bible? And then he kind of like went into the deeper questions and he was like, have you ever read anything by anton lave and anton lave is a figure who was kind of like the head of the the church of satan and all of this stuff so that you kind of know the vein that they're going with with these questions and eventually damien was asked if he knew anything about devil worshiping in the area or if he'd been made aware of any plans to sacrifice children, which is a completely normal question that you'd be asked during a police interview, you know?

I will say without knowing all of Steve's background, the questioning, that style, I think I've mentioned it here before, that is pretty normal where you want to start with more non-threatening questions that can also be referred to as control questions where there's no reason for the person you're interviewing to lie. They're just normally, what's your favorite red, you know, baseball team, you know, where did you grow up? Things like that. And what you're trying to do now, maybe Steve wasn't doing this. He could just be asking those questions to try to soften them up a little bit before he gets into the hard hitting questions. But what he should be doing at this point is asking those questions and being concerned with the answers

Obviously you want to be engaged but more so noting the physical behavior of the person of Damien while you're speaking with him as He's answering those questions. Is he belated towards you is his shoulders back is his arms open? Is he tapping his hand or feet? Is he doing anything? That's a worth noting in your mind? The reason you do that is so that when you ask those harder hitting questions, you can know if that behavior or his demeanor changes during those questions. Not a guarantee that he's lying at that point, but it can sometimes suggest a sign of deception or a sign of being anxious about the questions being asked. And that's how

you go back and forth between control questions and then questions that could be incriminating to see if the new behavior you're observing is something you only observe when asking those hard-hitting questions, right? You can go back and hit them with some more softball questions to see if the tapping of the leg or the tapping of the hands stops during those questions. Cause this is a subconscious response. In most cases, they don't even know they're doing it. So like ask easy questions to get a baseline and then see what happens when you start asking more intense questions. I don't think he was doing that. I think he was probably not. That's why I prefaced it. I think he was trying to be like, like non-assuming. Cause Damien said he kind of came in and he was like, we need your help with something, you know, kind of like this.

You know, we're on the same side. And like, let's, let's talk about, hey, have you heard about any plans to sacrifice children? Like, so I think that he's probably just trying to like make him feel safe and like let his guard down. Yeah. Which is, which is part of which is which is part of it which is part of it you want to have them feel comfortable and feel like they're helping you so that they may say something that may bring you to another question that could get you down a road but yeah who knows what it doesn't seem like the setting that you would do it in necessarily but i'd be lying if

i said i haven't had these more informal interviews at individuals' homes where you don't really know what you have, but based on these interactions, you may start to feel like, hmm, they really were giving us a lot of indicators. There's like 20 different indicators to look for and they hit like 12 of them. Well, now, even though you may not have something tangible to make an arrest or anything, it's just someone you might want to look into deeper based on how they behaved during that initial interaction. Yeah, well, Damien said, quote, before leaving, they took a Polaroid picture of me. Later, I found out that they showed it to nearly everyone in town, using it to plant the ideas in the minds of an already frightened public. In court,

they denied taking the picture or even coming to see me that day. They had to because Jones and Driver were from different offices and weren't supposed to be involved in the investigation in any way, end quote. So I did a little fact checking on this. In Sudbury's report, it does say that he took a picture of Damien, but during the trial, they did say that they didn't do that. So that's interesting. And I also kind of wanted to see if there was any like eyewitness statements or testimony like aside from Damien of people who remembered law enforcement or Jerry Driver or Steve Jones or Lieutenant Sudbury showing Damien's picture around town. And there were.

So there were people that said in the days and the weeks following these murders of these three boys that the police were like showing Damien's picture around town and saying like, oh, do you know if he's into anything weird? Like, is he into occult stuff, blah, blah, blah. And like, just in general, by default, that is going to start planting ideas in people's minds. And then you wonder why after this you have a rash of people coming forward and being like, I saw black hooded figures walking towards the forest with candles in their hands. Or I saw a dead dog with his entrails pulled out. And it was Damien who did it because I heard from my friend that Damien takes dogs and pulls their insides out to sacrifice them to the devil when nobody was getting those reports before that or giving them before that. But once you start like bringing this picture around and

you're like, ah, do you know if this guy worships the devil? Do you know if he's into occult stuff? Right after these three little boys are found dead and the paper's reporting that like it seems, you know, like they were mutilated and things like that. Like people are going to put stuff together in their heads, even if they don't know that they're doing it. So was it wrong for them to do that? Was it right? I would say it's probably wrong. Also, I'm not going to say they were nefarious about it.

I'm not going to say that was their intent. I think their intent was to try to get information because, you know, these, like Jerry Driver and Steve Jones especially, legitimately believed there was like a cult worshiping, devil worshiping going on in West Memphis. So I think that they thought they were doing the right thing. Like if there's all of this stuff going on, somebody has to know about it. And if we ask enough people about it, we'll get something. And they did get something.

But did they get something true? I don't know. And also, I think it is interesting that Damien says they were from different offices, so they shouldn't have been involved in the investigation. I don't know if it's like they shouldn't have been involved or if they were not. They weren't like sort of officially involved,

if it makes sense. They kind of just took it upon themselves as officers of the law in some capacity to go and question Damien and to continue questioning Damien and Jason and Jesse. Is that normal for a small town? I don't know. I don't think it's normal for regular city-sized police departments. I think you probably have specialized people who do specialized things, but I don't know how it is in like a small place like West Memphis. Yeah. I would like to think that's not the way it works because you want to make sure that there's some type of collaborative effort. There's a cohesiveness within the investigation where

the department has a plan of attack, how they're going to do this and making sure that the information that any investigator receives is sent back to the mothership, right? So that everybody, even though they may not be conducting that interview, is getting the same information relayed to them. So there's not these tentacles going off, kind of doing their own thing, having this lateral investigation that maybe the detectives who are actually assigned to the case don't even know about. You could taint the investigation investigation which back on to what you just said That's absolutely the case here when you start basically everything you said when you start to have all these Conversations happening amongst the community and then even if you're just showing the picture without any context which probably wasn't the case

But even if you're just showing the picture You're tainting that that community and you're tainting your pool of witnesses because they are organically going to start to ask themselves, why are they showing me this specific picture? They have to be somehow involved with this case. So now they're going to start to view that person saw that day? It's inadmissible in court. We have to create what's called a six pack or even an eight pack where you have, you know, if you have one person that you're looking to see if they're involved, you have to have five, at minimum, five other individuals to have similar characteristics to that person So that when you show the witness if they're able to identify them out of a lineup It can now be used if you show them a photo of that person before the lineup The lineup's never going to fly in court So this in a way is kind of like doing that where if down the road

You want to do something with damien eccles? That person has to first be asked, were they ever shown a photo of Damien in the past? And if that's the case, well, then you can't use it. And this is why having investigators or people in law enforcement doing their own thing, it could actually hurt the main investigator, could actually hurt the main detective. So I don't really like it, especially if it wasn't approved by whoever was in charge of this investigation. It doesn't seem like it was, and it absolutely could hurt the case going forward. It was Gary Gitchell, right? Which is something I wrote his name down so I

wouldn't forget to mention that, but he was the lead investigator and there's no sign or at least a paper trail of Gary Gitchell being like, hey, Lieutenant Sudbury, Steve Jones, you guys go and talk to Damien. It just seemed like Steve and Lieutenant Sudbury got together and they were like, this got some devil sent to it, you know, and then they like went over to Damien's house. So that's the problem. Can't happen. Great point with the photo lineup.

Like, I didn't even think about that, but that makes complete sense. You're suggesting to somebody already that this person's involved, even if you don't tell them what they're looking at them for, which, once again, doesn't seem like that's what happened. Like, they definitely showed the pictures and were like, do you know if this kid's, like, devil-worshipping? Of course. Of course they did. All right. Well, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. OK, we're back. So police in the area had also received a report on May 7th from a man named Dennis Ingle. So May 7th was the day after the boys bodies were found. And it was also the same day that Steve Jones and Lieutenant Sudbury were going and questioning Damien and then taking his Polaroid and showing it around town. So Dennis Ingle was the pastor at the Lakeshore Baptist Church,

and Ingles claimed that he heard there was some devil-worshipping going on at Lakeshore Trailer Park. So Lakeshore Trailer Park is where a bunch of people involved in this case live. Jason Baldwin lives there. Jesse Miskelley Jr. lived there. And Damien lived there, as well as Damien's then-girlfriend, Domini Teer. So it's kind of like they're all living in the same location, in the same area. And two days later, on May 9th, Ingalls told police officer Shane Griffin, who's another narcotics officer, that Damien Echols was known to hang around the trailer park and he was involved with a cult, a cult that was supposedly

said to meet somewhere around the Mississippi River. Now, Engels also said that he had personally seen Damien wearing boots with the numbers 666 on them. And Damien had a girlfriend named Dominique Teer who lived in the trailer park. So on May 9th, Jerry Driver was talking to Lieutenant Sudbury and they're talking about, you know, devil worshiping and the occult and all this stuff. And Jerry Driver was like, here, I made a list of nine names of people that I definitely think are involved in this devil worshiping cult. And of course, who was on the list? Well, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jesse Miskelley Jr., Dominique Teer as well, probably just because she was Damien's girlfriend and they all kind of hung out together. So this list prompted Shane Griffin, Officer Shane Griffin, to grab Detective Bill Durham, who was with the West Memphis Police Department, who's actually

their polygraph expert, and they drove over to the home of Jason Baldwin to interview him. And at their pleasant surprise, when they knocked on the door, they found that not only was Jason at home, but he was in the company of Damien Echols and Damien's girlfriend, Dominique Thier. Now that same day, a resident of West Memphis, Arkansas named Narlene Hollingsworth told police that she'd seen Damian Echols on May 5th. Remember, that's the day that these three little boys had gone missing. She said he'd been in the company of his girlfriend, Domini, and they'd been leaving Robin Hood Hills wearing muddy clothes. Once again, this is May 9th, four days later, after they've been showing his picture around after gossip starting to spread. Narlene Hollingsworth ain't had shit to say before that.

And you'd think you'd remember that, you know, three little boys go missing. Their bodies are found in Robin Hood Hills. You'd think you'd be like, oh, shit, didn't I see Damien and Dominique coming out of Robin Hood Hills all muddy that day? The same day the boys went missing and, you know, allegedly were killed? I should tell the police. No. the boys went missing and allegedly were killed, I should tell the police. No, she doesn't say anything until these rumors about devil worshiping and Damien being involved with the occult,

this, this, and that are starting to spread around town, which it's a small town. They're super religious, Bible thumping, et cetera, et cetera. And so word of anything like this is spreading literally like wildfire, like very quickly. Would have been great to know, we won't know now, but if Narlene was shown this photo as well before she came forward, did anybody approach her with a photo or did she hear anything about Damien Echols or any of the other people before coming forward? Or is this just completely out

of the blue where she just came forward with this information without any knowledge that law enforcement or affiliates of law enforcement were going around asking about specific people like Damian Echols? No, she had knowledge of it. Yes, for sure. She had knowledge. Okay. Well, then there you go. That's exactly what we're fearful of here when you're trying to be impartial. Yeah. Well, there was very little impartiality happening here. And this is another reason why, like for the people who who believe that these three teenagers are guilty and who knows, you might be right. The fact of the matter is this was handled so disgustingly badly by every single adult involved from law enforcement to the parents of these kids.

It was handled so poorly that you will never know. Because once this case got to an impartial judge outside of West Memphis, and once it was actually looked at objectively without bias, any normal person was like, holy shit, this was a witch hunt. You could have found physical evidence you could have found all of that stuff if you'd done a proper investigation but instead you literally went on a witch hunt and so the the evidence you came back with and brought to court was crazy you know so instead of actually doing forensics and trying to get dna and like tracking

fibers and things like that they were over here trying to get DNA and like tracking fibers and things like that. They were over here trying to find out where like the witch meeting was happening and stuff like that. So yeah, I agree that it's unfortunate because am I going to say 100% like they're not involved? No, I'm not even there yet. But if they were involved, there's no way to prove that now because of how it was handled, because of bias, because of, you know, what is it called when you have like this, this fear of something and it's like superstition and just kind of ignorance, really, you know, making sacrifices to Satan in the form of three eight year old boys, you better come correct with a lot of physical evidence to back that up because the whole theory in itself is ludicrous. So you've got to really have good supporting evidence, not just circumstantial, not that they even really had circumstantial evidence,

but physical evidence as well. And that didn't happen. Yeah. Nope. I agree with you. And it's one of those things where we said it last episode, where the reverse engineering the case from the suspects that they had already, I'd already came to the conclusion. It was them. Now it was like, okay, how do we tie them back to this crime? That's not the way it works. It works the opposite direction. And as far as what you just said a couple of minutes ago as to whether or not they're guilty or not guilty, I think it's similar with that. And I'm not saying that's the case here. I will tell you, as I said at the beginning of this episode, at the end how I feel, but there are two different things going on here. Yes, we want innocent people to be cleared of any

wrongdoing in a case like this. It's important to find out who did it. It's also important to find that exculpatory evidence that rules people out so you can take them off the list. So there are situations where you have had individuals who are arrested and charged and convicted of crimes they didn't commit. We already know that to be true and it should never happen, but it does. We also have cases where individuals have committed the crime and unfortunately, due to the lack of evidence or just

police misconduct and their inability to process a case correctly they go free that sucks but it does happen and we'd rather see that happen than then have the opposite the latter which i just discussed but i think it's important to note that there are people out there in my again my opinion oj simpson being one of them after looking into that case extensively who have committed two murders like oj and are walking amongst us as a free person even though they went to prison for a completely separate crime and then by the way wrote a book about his innocence so none of that really means much to me because i absolutely think oj killed those two people but just to say this does happen.

So that's why we're coming into this with an open mind. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jesse, Miss Kelly. We may conclude at the end of this that they should have never been charged in the first place. Doesn't mean we believe they're innocent of the crime. We'll get there. It's going to take a while. But that's why there's a couple different things going on here. You can say, hey, they don't deserve to be in prison, but they may have been involved.

That's okay. That just means that it should have went down like that initially. They never should have been arrested in the first place. Or there should have been an actual police investigation done the actual way. Right. And here's the thing. Sometimes, even if the investigation is done the right way, if the criminal gets lucky or they just are very good

at what they do, there may be situations, this is a hard pill to swallow, where there's just not enough there to charge them. And it's not our jobs as the detectives to fill in those blanks with our own evidence. That's where it gets very, very bad for investigations going forward because police officers can only go with what they have, not with what they know. And that is a situation where sometimes you may know who did it, but unfortunately the evidence is not there to support it. And that's why we have a justice system. That's why everyone's has a right to due process and you go to court and you let an impartial jury decide whether the detective is right and they do have enough or they don't. So without going too much on a tangent there, that's

again, just to cover what we're dealing with here. Cause I know these three individuals are out and about right now. And some people are like, Oh, they did it. I don't know why we, you know, why are we even talking about it? Well, we'll see. Nobody said that. Somebody literally said they did it. I don't know why we're talking about this. Well, we'll see. Nobody said that. Somebody literally said they did it. I don't know why we're talking about this. Maybe not those words, but there's absolutely a good amount of comments that believe that they are guilty of this crime. I know that there's people that believe they're guilty. I still have one crazy asshole sending me threatening messages from literally years ago when I did the first series.

He's a crazy person. And every once in a while, every couple of months, he pops up and he's like, you're going to hell, you stupid bitch. And this, this, and that. So for helping the devils and all of this, I get it. I know some people think that they're guilty, but I don't- People were triggered by your initial monologue it was you had a very great uh polarizing monologue it's one of your best monologues and i agree with this by the way it was one of your best monologues you've ever done a lot of comments about how you just crushed the trailer that we always do at the beginning of a series but there were some people who took one sentence that you said and that don't quote me on this but it was like six lives

forever changed or changed or whatever and people are like oh she's already going with that you know yeah so that was the that was the the trigger sentence but yeah i know we're going off the path here i'm sorry imagine being triggered by a sentence imagine i can't even i can't i can't relate can't relate um yeah i also think once you muddy the waters of an investigation like this there's no going back you know it's it's like once it's tainted and once it becomes do it yeah you can't you can't put the genie back in the bottle you know you can't clear that that water up again to see things the way they are so that that's what happened and like so if you want to

be mad at somebody that these three guys got away, if you think they're guilty, then be mad at the West Memphis Police Department and Jerry Driver and Steve Jones and every other idiot who ran around chasing witches. OK, be mad at them. So according to Damien, after this first visit to his house and then when the police talked to him again at Jason's house, the visits from the police were non-stop. He said, quote, they were soon coming at me every single day. They came to my parents' house, to Domini's trailer, and to Jason's house. It wasn't always the same two. There was a rotating crew of about six of them. It was the same questions day after day. It became pretty apparent that these clowns weren't looking for a murderer.

Jerry Driver and his two cohorts put a bug in the ear of the West Memphis Police Department and they couldn't shake it. Instead of conducting a real murder investigation and checking the forensic evidence, the police started immediately chasing stories of black robed figures that danced around bonfires and chanted demonic incantations. End quote. But why? Right? That's the question. Why of all the kids in West Memphis did Jerry Driver, Steve Jones, and the West Memphis Police Department focus so heavily on Damian Echols and as a result on his friends, right? Because that's really what happened here. If it hadn't been for Damian, I truly believe that Jason Baldwin and Jesse Miskelley Jr. would have never come on their radar. Nobody ever would have looked at them for this.

It just so happened that they were focused on Damien. And because Jason was Damien's best friend and Jesse was known to hang out with them, they just kind of got like thrown into the mix because you can't have a cult with just one person. You just can't do it. The only cult. People have tried. But if you don't have followers, you don't have a cult. So why do they focus on Damien? Let's talk about that. In order to understand all of that, we have to go back to the beginning and we're going on to struggle throughout life with reports of bizarre behavior throughout middle school and high school. Pam would later drop out of school due to mental issues, at which point she had to receive psychiatric treatment. When she was just 15, Pam married Joe Hutchinson, and on December 11, 1974, at the Crittenden County Hospital in West Memphis, Arkansas, they welcomed their son into the world.

Now, Pam and Joe named him Michael Wayne Hutchison. And many years later, this little baby would grow up and change his name to Damien. And everyone was like, he changed his name to Damien because that's an evil name. You know, like the omen kid, you know, that little creepy kid, Damien the Omen. Not according to Damien. He was actually, you know, had always kind of gone through, I mean, he went through a lot, like whether you want to hate him or not, like if you look at his childhood, which is not just his narrative, it's like a very clear and real narrative of what happened. It's not just his story and what he says.

He went through a lot. And as a result, he didn't really know who he was. He had to find himself. He went through like a bunch of different religions. He did go and get baptized in like a Christian church. And he kind of was attending like Catholic mass, which apparently according to him was a little taboo to be like a Catholic in West Memphis because I guess everybody was, I forget what it was, you know, it's like a branch of Christianity, but being a Catholic was kind of like looked down upon. And so he went to Catholic

Mass and he got baptized and one of the saints that he really kind of admired and respected was named Damien. So he decided to change his name to Damien. That's what he says. So according to the book, The Case Against the West Memphis Three, Damien was a challenge, even as a baby. He began troubling behaviors such as banging his head against the walls and floors repeatedly. And Pamela, his mother, would go on to have a miscarriage before giving birth to Damien's little sister, Michelle. But when she had two children, Pam decided that caring for both Damien and Michelle was too much for her. So Damien was sent to live with his grandmother, Frances Gosa, who is a woman that he called a nanny. And at that time, she lived in Senatobia, Mississippi. Now, first of all, Damien writes

in his book about being a little bit resentful that his sister Michelle was born across the bridge in Memphis, Tennessee, whereas he was born in West Memphis. He felt that it should have been him who was born in Memphis. And he said, quote, in my youth, Memphis always felt like home to me. When we crossed the bridge into Tennessee, I had the sensation of being where I belonged and thought it only right that I should have been the one born there, end quote. And maybe Damien was also a little resentful that when his mother couldn't cope with the stresses of being a parent, he was the one who got sent away. Dr. George Woods, a psychiatrist from Berkeley, California, who had been hired by the defense team for the trial, would later say that Pamela was never able to live on her own or to care for her children without a lot of help and support. And Damien's grandmother, Nanny, she was also not biologically related to him because remember,

Pamela, Damien's mother, had been the product of an affair that her father, Slim, had had with Nanny, who was a Native American woman. So when Nanny found out that she couldn't have children of her own, she basically took Pamela in and raised her as her own child. And her husband, Slim, and Pamela's father had died the year before. So Nanny took in Damien, who, like I said, his name is Michael Wayne Hutchison at this point. We're going to keep calling him Damien so it doesn't get confusing. She took in Damien and, you know, she was working at a truck stop as a cashier and it was just a lot for her too at her age, but she wanted to help. And Damien has both good and bad memories from his time in Mississippi with his grandmother. He said they lived in a white and purple trailer on a hill surrounded with trees and they had two dogs, Smokey and Bear,

who they'd raised from puppies. But from a very early age, Damien found a strange fascination and sometimes a fear of certain things in life, and he would fixate on some of these things. He remembers being dropped off at daycare when he was little, and his grandmother went into work so early that when he got dropped off there, it was still dark, and the people would try to put him down in a cot and make him go to sleep, but he was so lonely and scared that he would just cry the whole time. Now, this obviously causes trauma in a young kid. And he said when his grandmother would tuck him into bed at night, she would tell him, you know, like many of us have done, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite. And he said that when the lights went off and his grandmother left, all he could

think about were these like bedbugs with their big sharp teeth crawling towards him, their mouths watering, just like trying to get a taste of his flesh. So he's got a big imagination, but in a child, this also signals something of like anxiety, you know, like, yes, you have an imagination, but right off the bat, things make you very anxious. Things stress you out. You know, you fantasize about things that aren't real and you think they are and they become this very real looming thing in your life that you're constantly scared of. And he seemed to do this a lot with things. We are going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. So we're back and we're continuing on with Damien Echol's childhood. And honestly, life never got more consistent or less chaotic for Damien.

It kind of got worse. He would eventually rejoin his family, but within just a few years, they would live in six different states because his father, Joe, seemed to also suffer from some emotional instability. Joe Hutchison was described as being immature, self-absorbed, and sometimes cruel to his wife and children. He would call them names. He would threaten to physically harm them. He would destroy things that he knew they liked or cared about. And Joe Hutchinson could not keep a job,

which meant he was unable to provide for his family, and this sent him into even lower depths. Damien said that the best memories he has of his father included horror movies. Horror movies were a big tradition for his family. He remembered staying up late, snuggling on the couch with his dad, watching scary movies, and sometimes his father would put on Halloween masks and stand outside Damien's window to scare him. So once again, he literally says like horror in general as a genre gives him warm feelings of nostalgia and things like that. But like it is traumatic to scare the

shit out of your kid with a Halloween mask outside of his bedroom at night. That's traumatic for a kid. Although it's hilarious, I will say as somebody who probably shouldn't be scaring my kids as much as I do, but I get such a kick out of it. But like if I stood outside my kid's window with a Halloween mask on, they would die. Like I can't even imagine. They would never want to sleep in their rooms again. So this does kind of like cause a feeling of I'm not safe here. I'm not secure here because there could be something outside the window waiting to get me or some bedbugs crawling towards me. In 1979, when Damien was in kindergarten, he and his family moved into the Mayfair apartment complex in West Memphis. Now remember, this is the same complex that borders

the woods at Robin Hood Hill. Damien said that at this age, he was very quiet and withdrawn. He didn't want to bring attention to himself. And when Damien was eight years old, they had moved to a rented house in Memphis, and he saw a man shot in the head, which was something that stayed with him. Over the years, because Damien and his family were incredibly poor, they had to live in very bad conditions. Sometimes they could only afford a shack in someone's backyard with no electricity and no heat. And one time they had to rush his little sister Michelle to the emergency room because she had accidentally backed into one of the space heaters that they'd been using, and she badly burned her legs and her back.

And Damien remembers having to constantly rely on charity and the kindness of others, whether it was food stamps, the Salvation Army, or the Shriners bringing food for Christmas. Damien said that his father Joe was extremely ashamed of having to accept handouts, and Damien believes this deeply wounded Joe Hutchinson in a way that pushed him towards an emotional cliff. In his book, Damien writes, quote, I wasn't old enough to really understand it. I just knew that he was chewing his nails so viciously

that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it's because a man who accepted a handout wasn't really seen as being much of a man. As I grew older, I learned to be ashamed of being poor, too. It became humiliating, something I'd do everything I could to hide from the rest of the world. I developed an overwhelming sense of being excluded from everything. Everywhere you look, you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect, end quote. At one point, Damien and his family had to move in with Nanny and her new husband because they just didn't have any money and they didn't have any place to live. And Joe Hutchinson was out there trying to find somewhere for them to live.

But it was during this time that Joe and Pam, who are Damien's parents, they began to fight a lot until Joe moved out and into a motel. And then eventually, after a couple of months, he and Pam split for good and they would get a divorce. Now, after this, Pam married a man 20 years her senior named Jack Eccles. He was a roofer. They had met at church. And it was during this time that Jack legally adopted Damien and Michelle. And that's when Damien changed his name from Michael Hutchison to Damien Eccles. And Damien heavily disliked his new stepfather. He described him as a hateful bastard who only got worse with age, a man who made them attend services at the Church of God at least three times a week. And apparently this was like one of those churches where, you know, you lay hands on

each other and like, you're healed, you're healed, you're healed, you know, like kind of one of those. What are they, Baptists? Are they Baptist churches? I can't even, I think they are, but I could be wrong. Oh God, I'm not even going to go down that road. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely, it might be Baptist. I want to, if you made me say that. Southern Baptist or something, you know? Someone in the comments will know because I'm sure it's prevalent in their community or whatever. It's not as prevalent up here in the Northeast at all.

It's more of a Southern thing, right? Is that fair to say? I mean, I think so. At least around where I live, I don't have a lot of those types. Church is a thing up here. It's prevalent. A lot of Catholic people are in there. We're on the I live, I don't have a lot of those types. Churches is a thing up here. It's prevalent. A lot of Catholic people. Yeah, but we're on the East Coast, so we're like Catholic.

Yeah. Yeah. And the churches are very traditional, I guess, in the sense of what you would think of a church, where down there it's a little bit more, it's different. We'll just say it's different. It's different. Yeah. Damien does this a lot.

So he talks a lot of shit about Jack Ackles. Jack was kind of seemed like not the greatest guy. He had six children from his previous marriage and the oldest child was only a couple of years younger than Pam, his new wife. And so, you know, Damien wasn't a big fan, but he does this with Jack he does this with his mom he does this with everybody that he kind of talks badly about in his book he'll be like oh he was kind of a dick he did this he did that like there was a couple of times where Jack did get physical with him only twice Damien is very quick to point that out it was only twice that Jack kind of put his hands on him but he also also says, listen, like, he wasn't all bad.

And Damien does this with a lot of people that he talks about in his book. He said, quote, he wasn't an absolute monster any more than anyone else. He was just a man, both good and bad. I believe he did care about both my sister and me in his own way. He could be generous. He would stop to help every single person whose car was broken down on the side of the road, and he always gave hitchhikers a ride. He was also more tolerant of any form of self-expression I chose than any other parent would have been. I was free to dress however I pleased and listen to whatever music I liked. He had no problem with things like me

wearing earrings, and I heard him tell my mother more than once, He's just trying to find himself, end quote. So Jack, Pamela, Damien, and Michelle moved to a place, I don't even know what to call it, a place outside of Marion, Arkansas, and reportedly this was just like a rundown shack in the middle of a field with no running water and only a wood stove for warmth. Damien said that rent was only $35 a month, but they were constantly spraying the field with pesticides and other chemicals, which not only ended up in the air, but also in their well water. And so Damien always had a constant headache and he struggled with allergies and he just like wasn't sleeping. He wasn't eating. He was miserable there. Damien said it was

without a doubt the worst place he had ever, and he'd lived some pretty bad places. And he said, quote, The entire house consisted of one room covered with an aluminum roof. There was no running water or electricity to speak of, no heat or air conditioning, and half of the front porch had caved in on itself. Looking at it, you would believe that such structures were inhabited only in third world countries. End quote. For example, Damien said during the summer, it was so hot inside because of the metal roof, you felt like you were cooking and there was no escape from it. And then during the winter,

it wasn't much better. The only source of heat was from a wood-burning stove, which filled the tiny shack with more smoke than heat. So your eyes would always be burning and your clothes would always be covered in soot. There were rats everywhere. And because their only source of water was from the well, often the whole family had to bathe in the same water, which he was very disgusted by. He hated that. From later mental health evaluations, we can see that Damien's stepfather, Jack, also felt that there was something wrong going on with his stepson at this point because he said, quote, Damien went through these spells where he could not sleep no matter how hard he tried to. He stayed up for three or four nights in a row without sleeping at all.

These periods were very hard for him, and by the end of the second day of no sleep, he was exhausted, fussy, and miserable. He cried a lot during these times. We can never figure out why he was so upset. Damien never was a really happy boy. He got really sad sometimes and no one, including Damien, had any idea what was wrong. He cried really hard and I asked him what was making him so sad and he told me that he did not know. Damien used to spend a few days in a row

where he cried really hard. During these periods, Damien sometimes started laughing uncontrollably. There were other times when Damien had so much energy, he did not know what to do. He got really excited and kind of hyper, and he always walked at these times. Damien walked to some of the parks in the area and to some of his friends' houses and across town. Damien did not decide where he was supposed to walk to, but got a feeling about where he should be. But when he got where he was going, his feeling changed and he had to go somewhere else. Sometimes Damien did not have any appetite and he did not eat for several days, end quote. And people who are anti-Damien Echols, they'll use these things to sort of illustrate like he was troubled, like he was disturbed. He had all of this stuff going on. And like, I get it. But at the same time, like,

I think that they're forgetting this was a teenager, like a young kid. He's 13, 14 years old. There's a lot of changes happening. It does sound like he had some mental health issues. I mean, if you also look at it, both his mother and father suffered from some emotional and mental instability. So we do know that it can be genetic sometimes and you got a double dose there. Maybe some depression, maybe some bipolar. Do we not call it bipolar anymore? I don't want to be offensive. I don't, I don't, I think bipolar is still a

recognized term, right? I mean, to be bipolar disorder, that's a, that's a thing. Okay. Sounds like a little bipolar, right? Staying up for nights, you're in your manic phase, you're not eating, you, you got to walk, you know, and then kind of like you're, you're in your manic phase, you're not eating, you got to walk, you know, and then kind of like you're crying for days on end and you're miserable. That's, you know, that's what it sounds like to me. And I mean, maybe I am biased because I went through a lot of these things when I was his age, like at that time, like a young teenager and kind of growing up, I went through a lot of these things. I felt this way. There'd be times where I was sad and I didn't know why and I would cry and I wouldn't know why and I didn't want to sleep and I didn't want to eat and I was just unhappy. And I think that sometimes people

go through that and it does mean maybe you're a little disturbed and you've got stuff to work through, but it does not mean that you're going to go on and kill three eight-year-old boys and then like torture them. You know what I mean? Because I really want us to keep in mind as we're going through this, not just that Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were murdered. They were tortured. Okay, so you can look at Damien and say he was disturbed. You know, he had some stuff going on. But would he be capable of torturing three eight-year-old boys and then murdering

them? That's really something we have to keep in mind here. It does. And I think what you said as far as genetically, that he could be predisposed to these types of feelings, because obviously it can come from your parents. I also think environmentally, whether you're genetically predisposed to it or just the conditions you're in, like you're talking about here, where it was not the best conditions. But you're genetically predisposed to it or just the conditions you're in, like you're talking about here where it was not the best conditions. But you're right.

Not everybody. A lot of people have had struggles as a childhood based on their home life and have gone on to be very successful members of society and contributing members in all different ways. And they actually use these things to motivate them and to help others. What I'm interested in, and we're not going to get it from Damien's book, and I'm not knocking him for this. You wouldn't expect it, but to find out if there's any evidence in his childhood of him doing things, maybe to other kids or animals, things that you would expect to see with someone who would be capable of doing what they did to

these three little boys, right? Like you have to assume that this wasn't the first time the offender or offenders had carried out something like this. It might've been an escalation where this was the first time with human beings, but I would expect to see something in our, if we knew who the offender was right now, and we had a biography on them and it was not, you know, it was not being written, it was not an autobiography, but But something where we had evidence whether it was through law enforcement or social services that suggested this

Individual had carried out or conducted things In a similar manner like this where they had caused harm to like I said smaller, you know Other kids siblings or even small animals. This is something you would expect to see during that phase where as they got older, their urges elevated and they ended up going on to hurt actual people. Yeah. So there are reports of Damien, like I said, disemboweling animals, dogs, things like that, but there's no evidence of it. It's just people came forward and said, oh, I heard that Damien does this. Okay of it. It's just people came forward and said, oh, I heard that Damien does this. Okay. Yeah. That means absolutely nothing to me. It means absolutely nothing. And Damien will admit like, yeah, I did this. He would get into fights in school, kids his own age, things like that. He's angry. He's got his different reasons

for that. But everything that is said where he's involved with some sort of harm to a younger child or an animal is all hearsay. There is no proof or evidence of it, correct? And that is very important, obviously, because anybody can say anything about Jits. What do you have to back it up? And I also say this, and I'm not something that I'm doing, but I will also say not to defend this type of practice, but devil worshipers or people who are into that sort of thing, I think it's also important to note that not all people in that realm that practice that are people who automatically want to hurt other human beings. I'm not astute enough to talk about it. You're not a cult specialist? Are you kidding me? You're not a cult specialist, but even just someone who studies the devil and that side of it

doesn't necessarily mean that they're out there to kill people or hurt people. It may not be something that you or I agree with or practice ourselves, but it's important not to lump everyone like, okay, if we were able to prove definitively that Damien Echols and his crew were devil worshipers, let's say we had photos and video of them sitting there with a pentagram, candles, doing a dance, whatever you want, we have proof of it. Still doesn't mean they killed those kids because the two don't automatically go together where, okay, you're a devil worshiper, therefore you're a murderer. So I think it's important to separate those two as well. Yeah, you're right. It really felt like these people in this town were like,

as soon as we find the devil worshipers, we'll have the murderer. And that's not true. And that's not true. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, no matter what you believe. And you can be morally against somebody worshiping the devil, which I mean, I think is like,

okay, you can feel morally against that. I don't blame you. I'm not on team devil. That's just me personally. We're not team devil here. But I've always been of the mindset is like, do what you want. If you're not hurting anybody. Who cares? Are there some people who not even necessarily worship the devil, but I know that there's other cultures like South Africa. They do something called Muti and they basically kill children and young people to take their body parts to, I guess, get good luck and stuff. Get good luck and basically make wishes.

It's like voodoo kind of thing. So there are cultures out there who do these things but even then you could say like oh you're a South African who practices mooty but unless I have evidence that that is what you did in this case it's just you know a hint it's just circumstantial at that point and they're not mutually exclusive it doesn't mean you did this just because you happen to believe something or follow a religion that does this. prove that Damon Echols had hurt someone or killed someone else in the city or in the town. It doesn't mean that they carried out this evidence. It may be more suggestive, but you still have to have evidence to link them to the specific crime that you're investigating.

You can't just make the leap. So I'm not trying to give him an out here. I'm not a defense attorney by any means, but you have to have something in this specific case that tangibly links him to the crime. That's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm waiting to hear or see. Haven't seen it yet. Haven't heard it yet. Still very early. We still got half the episode to go here. We got other parts to go, but it's important to note that there is a difference. As we just said, you can't just link one part of it and automatically make the leap that it would lead him to commit three murders. Absolutely. And I will say, if there's anybody listening or watching and you are very much

anti-Damian Echols and Jason Baldwin and Jesse Miskelly, and you believe a million percent that they're responsible for this, I respect you. And I'm so totally open to hearing that. Send me an email, stephanieharlow at stephanie at Stephanie Harlow calm and give me a list of all the reasons you think that and then give me a list of all the physical evidence or even circumstantial evidence that you have to support that list of beliefs and I will look at it and I will include it in this absolutely a hundred percent like you there are people like Derek was saying who know these cases inside and out far better than I ever could because I have to move on to another case and there's some people who spend years Just looking at one case. Well, you said there's a book right? There's a book about how they who based on

Them being guilty, right? The West month the case against the West Memphis Published book out there of some an author who believes they're guilty. And you use that as reference material. So we're going to have some of that in here. Yeah. But I mean, I really want people to feel heard. And I don't want you to think that I'm writing off your beliefs. And if you're passionate about this, like if somebody looked at me and said, I think Casey Anthony is innocent. Prove me wrong. Send me an email. I'd be on that shit quick. I'd send you a 10-page email because I'm that passionately in belief of Casey Anthony's guilt. And I am that passionately like, I believe that she did this. And it would bother me to hear somebody say that she didn't. And I'd have to have a conversation with them. So I completely get it. Send me an email, stephanieharlow at stephanieharlow.com. Let me know all the reasons you think that these three teenagers were guilty and any evidence you have to back it up. And I'm not even being sarcastic. I know it's hard to tell with me sometimes. You just opened that Pandora's

box, but okay. That's all right. I'll just dive in that freaking box. I'm ready for it because the people who follow us are logical human beings with brains and nobody's going to comment me sideways. And we're going to have some really good, productive conversations from these emails. So I truly believe that and I hope that everyone proves me right. But let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. We are back and we're continuing on. So Damien's obviously having a hard time. Life sucks. And he said during this time, and basically for the rest of his life, the only thing that brought him any

comfort was music and books. He liked to walk a lot. And the only places that were close enough to walk were the courthouse and the library. So he would spend hours in the library reading Stephen King and Dean Kuntz over and over again. But Damien also stumbled on other material too. He said, quote, later I discovered the ultimate horror, the Inquisition. The first time I stumbled across this atrocity was in a book by some demented adult that was titled something like The Children's Book of Devils and Fiends. It was filled with tales of witches having orgies, standing in line to kiss the devil's ass, eating children and cursing people so that they went into convulsions. It is not possible to overstate the impact all of this had on my young mind. I would lie in bed at night scared to move while my imagination conjured up horrific images, end quote. Damien said that this, along with his stepfather's religious

zealousness, convinced him that he was going to burn in hell for all of eternity because of the things that he thought about, you know, the things that any normal young boy thinks about. He said at this time his sexual appetite was insatiable, you know, he thought he was smarter than everyone else. And although he wanted badly to be good, he said he didn't seem to be able to manage it. And once again, I think we've all struggled with these thoughts. They will use him saying something like this. I wanted to be good, but I couldn't seem to manage it and use it against him like, oh, he was evil.

That's not what that means. That means you're a kid who's growing up in a very conservative, traditional, suffocating sort of environment. And so natural urges like sexual urges and things like that are really viewed as being bad. And so you feel bad as a result. You feel guilty and you feel like a sinner because you're told you are. So that's what he's saying. He's not saying like, oh, I was a bad person. Like I'm evil. And no matter what, I just couldn't be good. Like we have to remember we're

talking about a teenage boy here. It was in that book that Damien also got his introduction to Alistair Crowley. So Alistair Crowley was a British occultist and author who was a practitioner of magic with a K. And Alistair Crowley called himself the Beast 666. And after his death, he would become a pop culture figure. His picture was on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club album cover. That's a Beatles album. And Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin, would buy a house near Loch Ness in Scotland that had once been owned by Crowley. So yeah, Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey, they all kind of became synonymous for a time with like musicians and how they kind of like branched out and they were like looking into darker things and stuff like that. Completely normal. I mean, whether you agree with it or not,

completely normal. There was nothing that like, you know, the lead, the guitarist, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin wasn't out there murdering kids because he read Aleister Crowley. So going forward, in 1986, Damien began junior high, and this is where he would get his first taste of beer. He would also be introduced to pornography and meet his good friend Jason Baldwin. Damien ended up having to repeat his first year of junior high because he had turned in zero assignments and gotten Fs in every class. But that summer, he started skateboarding. He got really good. He liked it. And Damien became that guy that was different from everyone else. His hair was different. One side of his scalp was shaved, but he kept the other side long.

He wore combat boots while everyone else was rocking Nikes, and he had both his ears and both his nipples pierced. And he was so disruptive in class, screaming out nonsense randomly, mocking teachers, so he was thrown out at least once a week. When Damien met Jason Baldwin, he said it was a case of opposites attracting. Quote, I don't recall hearing him ever speak during his first year of junior high. I was the immature pervert who liked to amuse himself by looking up vulgar words in the dictionary during study hall. One day after exhausting my sexual vocabulary for the millionth time, I slammed my dictionary shut and looked up

with the intention of finding someone to bother. Looking back at me was a skinny kid with a black eye and a long blonde mullet. He was wearing a Motley Crue t-shirt and judging by the paper on his desk, he'd been drawing and doodling to kill time. There was a backpack propped up next to his End quote. Now, at this time when he met Jason Baldwin, Damien was still living in the shack in the middle of the field, but then his grandmother Nanny had a heart attack, and this was her second heart attack, and he also called her an amputee, so I'm not sure exactly what she had amputated, but basically she's older. She's an amputee. She's had two heart attacks. She needed someone to take care of her.

So Damien and his family moved into Nanny's trailer in Lakeshore, and this was when he and Jason began interacting outside of school because they were on the same bus. They lived in the same trailer park. Jason would come over to Damien's, and they would listen to music after school And every weekend, they either stayed together at Damien's or at Jason's. Damien said, quote, over the years, Jason and I became as close as brothers because we knew there was no one else to look out for us. We shared everything we had, food, clothes, money, whatever. If one of us had it, both of us had it. It was known without having to be said. End quote. Now, the way that Damien met Jesse Miss Kelly Jr. was according to him completely by accident. One day he had knocked on Jason's door, but Jason's mother, Gail, told Damien that Jason

was at Jesse Miss Kelly's. And Damien said, quote, I'd heard the name before, and from the sounds of it, he was supposed to be one of the Lakeshore badasses. About halfway down the street, I heard Jason yell and looked to my left to see him standing in the open doorway of a trailer. It turned out that Jesse Miskelley lived only about four or five trailers down from Jason, end quote. Before we move on in the timeline, let's talk about Jason Baldwin and Jesse Miskelley Jr. a little bit more in depth because we have more to talk about with Damien. But Jason Baldwin, who'd be 16 in May of 1993 when these three boys were killed, he was generally known around town as a good kid. He lived in a trailer with his mother who struggled with schizophrenia. She worked nights and she left Jason in charge of his younger brothers because their father had left

years ago. The father left when Jason was four. Jason would get his brothers dinner, help them with their homework, and get them into bed each night. And Jason didn't mind this. He felt protective of his mother. He appreciated that even though she struggled very much with her mental illness and some days were better for her than others, she still worked so hard to support them and to make sure they had a roof over their head. In fact, once his mother had tried to take her own life and Jason had been the one to find her and call 911. And later in a school essay, he referred to this experience as pretty devastating. His neighbors referred to Jason as a sweet and gentle boy that they often left their own children with, or, you know, they felt safe with Jason keeping an eye on their children.

He was a good student. You know, he wasn't like an excellent student, but he was good. He got good grades. He was a talented artist. He wore concert tees. He liked heavy metal music, and he was best friends with Damien Echols, which I really believe would be his downfall. And the only run-in with law enforcement that Jason had ever had was in 1990 when he was 12. And he would be charged with breaking and entering in criminal mischief. So apparently near the trailer park, there was a rusted building with some old cars inside. And one day, Jason, his younger brother, Matt, who was 10 at the time, and two other boys went in there. And I guess they were like throwing some rocks at the cars. And I guess Jason and his friends and his brother thought it was just like

a broken down kind of abandoned place. But according to the police report, the cars inside were vintage. The report said the boys had broken the glass on a front end loader, a 1969 Cadillac and a 1959 Ford. And this is ultimately what put Jason on probation, where he met Jerry Driver and Steve Jones, who he believes hated him from the start, and accused him and Damien of getting a cult started far before these three eight-year-old boys were murdered. Jason claims that other kids would approach him and they'd say, hey, we hear you and Damien have a cult. And when Jason asked where they'd heard this, they told him that they had heard it from the police.

Yeah, that's not good. When even the kids are hearing it, because where are they usually hearing it from? Their parents. There you go. Yeah. That's dinner talk. You know, not good. Yeah.

And I mean, keep in mind, too, like these are very religious people. They're all going to church every Sunday. And you know that they were talking to their kids and like you stay away from those kids because from what we hear, they're into some like dark nonsense and they're into something bad and so obviously the kids are like what like they're enchanted by this they're they need to know more and so they're approaching Jason and Damien and they're like oh we heard you guys have a call and you know it's just it's ludicrous. One other thing about Steve Jones, you know, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing as a probationary officer or a juvenile officer if you're, I mean, your number one job is

to help rehabilitate these kids, right? Like there's still a course correction for most of them where they're making the wrong choices. They get a slap on the wrist. They get reprimanded for what they're doing. And you can help them get back on the right track so that they end up in the right place down the road. That's your goal. That's your job.

You can still know these children that are having issues because sometimes, regardless of how much effort is put into trying to straighten these kids out, sometimes they still go down a life of crime. It's just the way it goes. So it is okay to note this and be aware of it because there may be something down the road that because of past behavior, because of past criminal history, some kids you didn't get through to may be good for a bigger crime down the road and having this intelligence may help you solve it. I've definitely had cases where we've had juveniles who are in our system, who are, they start off breaking car windows,

then they have like an assault. Then they're stealing stuff from the store. Then they light something on fire. I'm thinking of one kid in particular, he dealt with him my whole patrol career. And sure enough, time went on. He started to hang around with the wrong people. He got into a local gang. We tried to help this guy out a million times and sure enough he ended up committing a murder on a street over from the police station and it was because of his past history and his affiliations that we were able to track it down and someone long story short we caught him but it was tough because even though we had developed a relationship with him through his juvenile past

it was you kind of look at him and think, you know, see your failure for yourself professionally, because you couldn't, as much as you tried, you couldn't deter him from that lifestyle. But if it wasn't for those past interactions and understanding the way he operated, we wouldn't have gotten him as an adult when he had just turned eight, he had literally just turned 18 when this happened. And so that was what allowed us to solve the case. But in this particular situation, yeah, it's okay to say, oh, these guys didn't have the best childhood. They may have done some things, but to go from car vandalism to murder, that's a big jump to make. Yeah. And sometimes something like what Jason did is a gateway

to worse behavior. And sometimes it like what Jason did is, you know, a gateway to worse behavior. And sometimes it's just stupid kid shit. It's a bump in the road. Yeah. Like and this is like I'm going to sound like such an old person, but this is where like parental guidance needs to come in. Because I know I sit before you today looking like a sweet, innocent girl. But man, I was not a good kid. Who said that? Who said that? Everyone just gave you the stink eye as

soon as you said that. You don't think I look sweet and innocent? You may look sweet and innocent until you open your mouth. Yeah, what are you talking about? I don't think anybody looks at Stephanie Harlow and says you're sweet and innocent. They may think you're empathetic and you're someone who cares about the people she talks about and all these things. But I don't think I'm going to go, Stephanie Harlow, she's so sweet and innocent. You don't give that impression at all. I think they say that, Derek. Okay.

Way down in the comments below on that one. Sweet and innocent. So anyways, I may sit before you today looking like the sweet, innocent little girl that I have become. However, I was a bad kid. And my mom brought me and my friend. I always tell this story. My mom brought me and my friend to like one of her appointments and we were hanging out in the parking garage and we were bored, man. Idle hands. Okay. We were bored. And so for some reason, we just picked up rocks and started throwing them from the top level of the parking garage to the bottom level. Where there's cars there, you know, and we broke some windshields. Were we trying to break some windshields? No.

Were we mad that we'd broken the windshields? Not really. I was 12 and I was like, this is kind of sweet. Like, ha ha ha. I felt like really, and yo, my mom, I don't want to tell you what she did, but in the end, I had to pay for that shit. I had to pay for those windshields. I didn't need any jury drivers or Steve Jones or probation officers. My mother

was like, that's not how I raised you. And you're going to feel this. You're going to hurt and you're going to sacrifice and you're going to suffer until these windshields are paid off and you'll never break another one. I promise you not to throw another rock at a car. And I have not. In fact, every time I have a rock in my hand, I just drop it because I have PTSD now. I'm like, no rocks. Okay, so this is where parental guidance comes in, but it doesn't necessarily mean

that that person's gonna go on to be a juvenile delinquent just because they were bored and with their friend and they did something stupid. So, and this is once. He's never been in trouble with the law before, after that, you know, or before that. So I think that also says something, especially when you're in West Memphis and it feels like these police officers ain't got nothing better to do than just like troll around and catch kids doing things they shouldn't.

I mean, even remember the night that the three boys were missing, Regina Meeks had to go and like answer a call about eggs being thrown at a house. You know, it's not like this is New York City. You know, it's not like Brooklyn. And there's like all the cops are just like running around trying to to take care of violent crime and stuff. This is like West Memphis. And the cops were pretty bored. And it seems like if he was getting into trouble, he would have been caught. So I don't think he was doing anything after that incident with the cars. Exactly. He's on the radar at that point. So yeah, where's the things in between that led to this escalation that got you to a triple homicide?

Nothing. You don't always need that. Not sitting here saying, oh, you don't have that, so you can't have this. But you would expect to see some type of escalation, something else between the car vandalism to that. So let's talk about Jesse Miskelley Jr. He was 17 in May of 1993 when the three boys were murdered. Damien was the oldest. Damien was 18. Jesse was 17. And Jason was 16.

And Jesse Miskelley lived with his father and his younger brother. His mother had left the family when he was just four. And Jesse's often described as being simple-minded or simple. and it's a known fact that his IQ was very low. During the trial, Dr. William Wilkins testified that Jesse's IQ was 72, and his reasoning levels were that of a six to eight-year-old. Dr. Wilkins also said that Jesse came from a family with a history of substance abuse and child abuse, and Jesse had admitted to huffing gasoline for two years when he was about 13 or 14, and he regularly used both marijuana and alcohol. And the defense would have liked you to believe that Jesse was very childlike and susceptible, while the prosecution wanted you to believe that he functioned completely normally for a 17-year-old, and I think the truth

lies somewhere in the middle. I don't think that Jesse was as simple-minded as the defense team wanted him to appear, but I definitely don't think he was as calculating and intelligent as the prosecution wanted him to appear. So I do think he was someplace in the middle. He definitely wasn't like, and you will know this because some of his interview with police is tape recorded and so you can hear him. And then also there's transcripts of his interviews. So you can clearly see he's not processing things like a 17 or a typical 17 year old would. He's not using logic and reasoning

that a typical 17 year old would. So whether it's just because he had a low IQ or whether it's because he was huffing gasoline, killing all his brain cells when he was like 12, 13 years old, I don't know, but he definitely wasn't like. Fair to say it's a combination of the two probably. Could be. Maybe a recipe for making stupid decisions. I've never huffed gasoline before. I didn't know that it was a thing. So I couldn't tell you. Have you, did you know that was a thing? I've never huffed gasoline before. I didn't know that it was a thing. So I couldn't tell you.

Did you know that was a thing? I've never heard of that in my life. Gasoline? Gasoline. I do love the smell of gasoline. I will tell you that. A lot of people do. Spray cans, things like that.

Like paint, you can flip them upside down. The cool whip cans, you know, like the whipped cream cans. Yeah, the Whippets. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff you can inhale. Yeah, we did that, man. But huffing gasoline, I always loved the smell. Like when my mom was pumping gas, I would roll down the window and it smelled so good. Explains a lot. That's where my brain cells went.

Yeah, there we go. got into some fights in school, including with Jason Baldwin, apparently. Like, he and Jason Baldwin met when Jesse, like, punched him in the face. And Jesse ended up dropping out of school after being held back two grades, and then he started working with his father, who was a mechanic. Now, Jesse was only just over five feet tall, but he had dreams of being a professional wrestler. And besides some, like I said, fighting at school and some fights, he'd only gotten in trouble with the law once when he'd stolen some flags from the high school band to use on his homemade racetrack.

So basically, Jesse was driving by the school and he saw these flags, the band flags, and he was like, let me take these for my track and then display them on my track, which is in public. So to me, that is a sign that Jesse's not like using logic and reasoning because it's like a small town. If you steal the flags and like I said, the West Memphis Police Department ain't got nothing better to do than be like, where'd these band flags go? We need to track it down. And they find them at his house. It's not like he tried to hide it. He didn't even think like, oh, they're going to put two and two together. He just was like, I want these flags for my homemade racetrack. And he took them. But that's the only trouble that I could find where he's been in with the law. Let's take our last break and we'll be right back.

Okay, we're back and we're talking about Damien again. And we're talking about how did Damien get on the radar of law enforcement and why did Jerry Driver become so fixated on him? Because Damien was older than his best friend Jason. It was a really big shock for him when he went to high school and Jason had to stay in junior high. And Damien said that things shifted for him at this point. He said the sense of security and stability he'd achieved through his friendship with Jason for the past three years, it was gone. And he felt he had to start from scratch. On top of that, Damien could not have felt more isolated from the kids in his new school. He said that Marion High School pulled its student body from mainly middle and upper class neighborhoods, and this

was a place where, quote, kids drove brand new cars to school, wore Gucci clothing, and had enough jewelry to spark the envy of rap stars. This was a place where I definitely didn't fit in. In response to my new environment, my behavior grew even more outrageous, and I was viewed as a freak, end quote. A 16-year-old Damien met 15-year-old Deanna Holcomb when she was passing out programs during one of his little sister's choir concerts. He basically fell in love with her on first sight, if you hear it from him.

He says she grinned at him like she knew something amusing that he didn't, and Damien was immediately hooked. In his book, Life After Death, Damien said, quote, I never went in to see the choir that night. Instead, I stayed out in the lobby with this girl who reeked of sex. It emanated from her like static electricity and was present in every gesture. The way she stood too close and looked up at me, the way she hooked her arm through mine and cocked her hip to the side as she talked, She didn't seem to be able to control it like a cat in heat, end quote. Weird. But Damien and

Deanna began to see each other. They fell in love. And, you know, she told him that she was a Wiccan. And this was a term he claimed he hadn't heard before. So he started to do his own research. And he also became friendly with a group of local teenagers who practiced Wicca. So Damien said that he found it to be a beautiful religion in theory, but he didn't really like the people who were involved in it. He found them to be immature and melodramatic. But he said it did act as a gateway to other areas of religion and spirituality. And so he would start kind of like investigating that and researching that. He just couldn't get enough. He was really interested in all these different religions and different spiritual ideas and things

like that. Now, Deanna's family, they were traditional and proper people. They didn't even let Deanna or her two sisters watch MTV. And at first, they welcomed Damien into their home and their lives. But when they found out that he and Deanna were having sex, that all changed. Deanna's parents told her she couldn't have anything to do with Damon anymore. And after a few months of trying to sneak around and still see each other, Deanna eventually said she could no longer do it and she ended things. And Damien was, of course, heartbroken. And at this time, his mother and his stepfather were arguing a lot, making everyone around them miserable. And so Damien would just kind of like hide out in

his room, reading Deanna's letters over and over again until eventually the pain became too much and he burned them all in the sink. Now to fill a little bit of the hole that Deanna had left in him, Damien began hanging out with another girl who lived in the trailer park, Dominique Teer, a transfer student from Illinois. And Damien said, you know, maybe at that point Dominique Teer, a transfer student from Illinois. And Damien said, you know, maybe at that point, Dominique saved his life. He had a lot of fun with her, but he doesn't know if he could say that he loved her, not like he had loved Deanna. He said Dominique was a good person, honest, loyal. She didn't like to complicate things. And that is why they remained friends basically throughout his entire life. But he wasn't in love with her and he was still hung up on Deanna.

And during this time, Damien got into a fight in school when he found out through a mutual friend that his ex Deanna had been intimate with another person while she and Damien had been together. And so when Damien saw Deanna and this guy together at school, he lost it and he went for him, scratching his face. And basically later he would say like oh he had tried to take out his eye and stuff like that like that's what he wanted to do and once again this will be used by people who are anti-damien has you know showing he's capable of violence i mean it's a stretch it is a big stretch for me like yeah you're jealous you're in love with this girl you're a teenage boy like yeah you want to kick the shit out of the guy that she slept with while she was dating you.

It's different than going after and murdering three eight-year-old boys that you don't know and torturing them. It's things to note. It's obviously things to note, but this doesn't tie to this case in any way, shape, or form. There's no similarity to it. You could make an argument, maybe, maybe, if this was a woman that was killed, that had been his girlfriend at the time, and there was some signs of infidelity there that maybe this would have been motive for him to carry out something like this, where he had showed signs of jealousy in the past, tendency to maybe become violent. And now you have a similar situation in the future where, okay, now you can see a pattern, but there's really no similarities here. So that's why, yeah, we'll note it. I'm writing it down right here

on my notebook, but it's not something that I'm saying, ooh, here you go. Now we're onto something. So yeah, noting it, but not really giving much weight to it. I agree. And on May 7th, 1992, that's just about a year before the three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis were murdered, Damien told a social worker who'd been sent to his home because of his behavior in school. He told the social worker that he'd been suspended seven times just in the past semester for starting fights at school and also for starting fires. Now after some tests, a report stated, quote, the behavior of this youngster is characterized by impulsive hostility. The desire to gain power and demean others springs from animosity and a wish to vindicate past grievances.

This teenager believes that past degradations may be undone by provoking fear and intimidation in others. Cool and distant, this youth demonstrates little or no compassion for others. End quote. Once again, this is often used by the people who are against Damien, who are there like, look, he said that he wants to gain power and demean others. And he's, you know, has no compassion for others and, you know, things like this. Yes, once again, we will note it, but I could, you know, gather a group of 117 year old boys right now. And I guarantee you half of them would exhibit these same sorts of feelings and emotions. And, you know, they would all not all not not at all but some of them would be exhibiting these things because agreed teenagers are hard and they suck agreed and i know friends and relatives who've done similar things and they're not bad people and i'll even say and i

gave that example two minutes ago but just to refer back to adnan syed's case that that whole situation where we're where we were talking about an ex-girlfriend. So it's more in line with what we're discussing and therefore it becomes more valuable to look at it because it's in the same realm of the circumstances surrounding the actual case, the actual murder. We're talking about three little boys who were mutilated and tortured. There's a big difference between that and being jealous over a girlfriend and maybe wanting to get into a fist fight. There's a big difference there. And one of those two things is something that you may find with a lot of teen boys. The other is not. And that's why I was saying earlier, we're looking

at not things like this, but more things where it shows signs of an inability to process the harm to others, right? Not seeing the dangers of hurting an innocent animal or a small child and not being able to understand what you're doing and how it affects them. I'm not seeing that lack of connection here. The things that I'm seeing here is more in line with the a teenage boy who not only had a rough childhood but even if they didn't these are very uh i don't want to say normal things but things you do say see more often with kids around these ages yeah and i will say um

you know could you could you like try to psychoanalyze damien you know like people always get mad at me for doing and tell me i'm not like a mental health professional could you like try to psychoanalyze Damien you know like people always get mad at me for doing and tell me I'm not like a mental health professional could you psychoanalyze Damien and say well he had such a shitty childhood he felt resentful towards children who had good childhoods and or you know who who didn't have as bad childhoods as he did and so he wanted to like make them pay for it or he wanted to take his like anger and aggression out on them. Like, yes, I guess you would say that. But you also couldn't say that Stevie Branch, Michael Moore or Christopher Byers had any kind of good childhood. It's not like they were living it up and they had these wholesome families and like everybody was happy. You know, they kind of all share that in common. These six boys, Damian, Jason, Jesse, Stevie, Michael Moore, Christopher Byers, like they all

kind of shared that in common is they came from very, you know, disruptive homes, like broken homes, even they had, they had issues, they had step parents that they didn't always necessarily get along with and things like that. So you could like try to psychoanalyze it and say his bad childhood make it made him resent all their children. But there's no evidence of that. He's never said anything like that. He's nobody's even come forward and said that he's relayed feeling that way to them. So, you know, anybody who's who's saying that and there are people who do say that, like he hated children because he had a bad childhood. It's a stretch. It's a very big stretch. Yeah. I'm not so much as concerned with what we've heard so far. I definitely want to see how we get from here to the case itself, right? Like, I'm assuming for the people who believe they're guilty, they're going to put something forward. We may not believe in it. We may, but there's going to be something where they try to link the two crimes. And now maybe they're right, but that's what I'm interested in because nothing here tonight, although very important to discuss because

people may feel differently than us. You're just giving them the facts. There may be people in the comments are saying, I don't agree with you. This is how it is relatable to this. And this is why it is important. So we'll hear what you guys have to say. You're hearing it for the first time like I am. I'm not seeing anything in here that if I had this in a nice police report and I had all the juvenile reports from Damien's past or any of their pasts, I'm not looking at any of this and highlighting it as something that may be a sign of what was to come. Nothing yet anyways. All right. Well, let's continue on. So Damien was suspended after like going after this kid, but he and Deanna would

later reunite. You know, she came to him. She was like, I miss you, blah, blah, blah. And so they planned to run away together. They figured this was the only way that they could be together away from her family. Now the plan was to do it after the last day of school. And since neither of them had a driver's license or drove a vehicle, they set off on foot. And when it became too hot and they got tired of walking, Damien and Deanna decided to camp out in an abandoned trailer for the night. But Deanna's parents had called it in as soon as they realized she hadn't come home from school and the two teenagers were soon discovered by the police. Damien was arrested and brought to the Crittenden County Jail,

where he was introduced to a man who would become instrumental in his later arrest, Jerry Driver. This would also signal a point in time where things for Damien and his family went downhill very quickly. Because while Damien was in jail, he called his mother Pam and found out that his little sister Michelle

had made sexual abuse accusations against their stepfather, Jack. Now, here's the thing. Why is Damien getting arrested for this when he and his girlfriend ran away? Like, what is the arrest? What is this happening? I don't know. I thought you were going to tell us, like, what was the charge? There had to be something there. I mean, at least something on paper. I don't know what it would be. She was of age, right? I mean, how old was she exactly?

He was, she was 15 and he was 17 at that point. He turned 17. So that could be the issue. That could be something where it's like technically she, I mean, consent, she's under 16 years old.

So you could have a situation where it could be viewed a child endangerment. Maybe. I don't know. It's all a strat. I mean, if I'm doing that case, unless the parents are insistent on some type of charge, more than likely I'm bringing them both home to their respective parents and I'm letting them handle it amongst themselves. Now, there may have been something to just be to give the benefit of the doubt here,

even though we're going over all this. Maybe it was something where the parents were adamant about it because they were trying to separate Damian from their daughter. The parents did seem very adamant about bringing charges. So to be fair to law enforcement here, because I know we have a lot, we just got to call it how we see it. There may have been something here where not only do they know who Damian Echols was and what they believed about him, now you have something where technically there is an offense here, an arrestable offense, and that's what they went with. Which, and in that case, you know, call me crazy.

I'm not against that. If that's what the parents want, it's their daughter, and a crime is a crime. It's black and white. If they committed the crime, do I think that the law enforcement might have taken some joy in that because of how they felt about damien i guess that's not for me to say but on paper they there may have been a crime committed and if that's the case well then you do the crime you the time right i guess that's how you want to look at it i know i'm not even more agree with that but so he was charged with burglary and sexual misconduct so yeah so yeah so she's under she's under the age of consent.

And I'm assuming he broke into the car. It was like a trailer, an abandoned trailer. Abandoned in the fact that it was left there or abandoned the fact that nobody owned it? I think it was left there, but probably somebody still owned it. There you go. There you go. So you have this person. Let's say it's me.

They call me up because it's still registered to me. And they say, Derek, you have two people who broke into your trailer. They broke the lock or the window or whatever to get inside. They were sleeping in there. A little bit of damage to the door or whatever. What do you want to do? I want to press charges. Well, then there you go. Now you have a complaint. Okay. So Damien claims that from the first moment he met Jerry Driver, the man was talking about Satanists, asking Damien if he'd heard anything around town about them. Jerry then pulled out Deanna's diary, and he told Damien that she was being held at a women's detention center because she had psychiatric troubles in the past.

Damien would also be sent to a psychiatric center, but only after spending a week in the Craighead Countyien would also be sent to a psychiatric center, but only after spending a week in the Craighead County Jail in May of 1992. I suppose that they did justify putting a 17-year-old in jail for a week because he had tried to run away with his 15-year-old girlfriend, but the report also states that Damien and Deanna had made a suicide pact and they'd both voiced suicidal ideations to people at the detention centers they were being held in. Now, like I said, while all of this was happening, these allegations are happening against his stepfather, Jack, and Damien's mother,

Pam, removed her husband, Jack, from the home, even though she said she didn't believe Michelle's accusations about him. After Jack had moved out, Michelle tracked down her biological father, Joe Hutchinson. Remember him? He was actually in Arkansas visiting family at the time. And Joe and Pam reunited and they began making plans to get back together. While Damien was in jail, he was given a psychiatric evaluation, but he said he didn't know it was a psychiatric evaluation at the time. Jerry Driver just brought him to this woman. She asked him some questions, showed him some flashcards, and then she looked at Jerry Driver and said simply, we have a bed for him.

Jerry Driver told Damien's mother and father that a stay in a mental institution would be a better option than the alternative, which was nine months in jail. So on June 1st, 1992, Damien Echols was admitted to Charter Hospital and he was prescribed antidepressants. Now, according to his intake report, while Damien had been in the detention center, he had told Jerry Driver that he and Deanna were trying to have a baby so that they could sacrifice it. This is something that Damien denied when asked about this at Charter. Damien told them that he was involved in witchcraft, not Satanism. Jerry Driver also claimed that Damien had chased a younger child with an axe and attempted to set a house on fire.

Damien denied this as well. I would like to say that outside of Jerry Driver saying these two things, nobody else said this stuff. Nobody else said that Damien and Deanna claimed they were going to have a baby so they could sacrifice it. And nobody else said that Damien chased a younger kid with an ax. This was all from Jerry Driver. I agree with everything you said there, but I'll just say just because allegedly he only said it to Jerry Driver, doesn't make it not true. Doesn't give it as much weight, but there is a world where he did say it. And why would Damien later say, Oh, I didn't say that. So if I'm in a room with you, okay, we're on, we're talking and you say to me, Hey, Derek,

I killed this person. Right. And I later dime you out. And I tell them, Hey, Stephanie told me she killed this person. do you have any proof of it no do you have a recording of it no do you have anything to show that other than what you're telling us that she actually said it no so they go to you and they say stephanie did you tell derek that you killed this person and you're like no absolutely not i didn't kill him he's crazy now that may be the case here where he didn't say it to Jerry Driver. Maybe based on past things that you've talked about throughout this episode, we're more likely to believe that it wasn't said. But I will just say just to put it out there to try to stay impartial. I don't expect Damien to admit, yeah, I told them that I wanted to sacrifice a child, especially when he knows what he's being looked at. Yeah. But why would you expect him to say it to Jerry Driver if he knew it was wrong and he wouldn't admit it later? Yeah. So that's the thing. I've had people while in custody or while

talking to them, not in the right state of mind, they're flustered, they say something and it may not even be true, but I've had them say things to me that they've later redacted. I've had that happen from both suspects and witnesses where in the moment you have a witness tell you something, confide in you about something their significant other or someone did to them. And then we go to court and I've been under oath and they have been under oath and under oath, they tell the judge or the lawyer, I didn't say that to officer Levasseur. You never said to him that he kicked you in the ribs. No, I absolutely didn't. And unfortunately we didn't have body cams. So it's my word against theirs. I'm only putting it out there from my anecdotal experience. I'm not saying it says either way that this is true. I just feel it's important for me to mention that Jerry Driver could be saying the truth. I don't know the context in which Damien would say this in the first place. I'm with you there, but we really don't know. Dude, there's no context where anybody would say that, especially when this dude's asking you about Satanism right off the

bat. Do you know if there's any Satanism? Well, I don't know if there's any Satanism, but I will tell you, me and my girlfriend were planning to have a baby so we could sacrifice it. Like, come on. I agree with you. I wouldn't expect it. I don't, I wasn't there. I wouldn't expect him to say that, especially with what we're talking about now. But obviously at the time when this would have been said, the murders hadn't happened yet. He might be more willing to say something like i don't know or maybe he's you know like let's say he did say it do we think he said it seriously or do we think he said it because like this dude's asking about satanism and he's like let me just fuck with this guy yeah exactly who would say it and actually mean it mean it yeah yeah no i'm with you and

and i'm not i'm not sitting here trying to convince you or anybody else. Otherwise, I'm just saying, is it possible he did say it? Yeah. The tone and context in which he said it in. Well, that's a whole different story. All right. So this next thing, though, is not a Jerry driver allegation. Apparently, when he was in one of these like holding centers, another patient like cut his arm or something. He was bleeding and damien like grabbed his arm and like like licked the blood i don't know okay that's weird and this is someone again this is before the murders so yeah a year before but like also angelina jolie and billy bob thorin wore vials of each other's blood around their necks for like years and talked about how they like drank each other's blood during sex. So nobody thought they were out there like sacrificing eight year olds to Satan. It's, you know, it's just like, Would you be surprised if they were though? Yeah. Yes.

I mean, I mean, if, if you learned that the people that were carrying vials of each other's blood around were later implicated in some type of act, would you be like, oh yeah, didn't see that coming? No, not, not, yes. If it it was happening today, but like you don't understand that time man Like everybody was into that weird shit Licking other people's blood that you didn't know their wrists and shit that that's normal No, it's not normal, but he was in like a psychiatric facility man He was like, you know disturbed and like. Like, and he wanted to be different and he always wanted to stand out and he wanted everyone to know, like, I'm not like other boys. It's weird

for sure. Like, I'm not going to lie. I mean, we could sit here and go back and forth on this one as far as, yeah. Now, during his stay at the hospital, he was described as staring into space and exhibiting no emotional response to any kind of stimuli. That's called dissociation. Once again, very common. He was paranoid and he didn't like the idea that cameras were watching him and he drew witchcraft symbols and spoke of bizarre and unusual practices. One note says that Damien would make a sound with his mouth that sounded like the purr of a cat. Damien remained at Charter Hospital until June 25, 1992, at which point he was released, and he ended up moving with his family

to Oregon, where he began working with his father Joe at a gas station. But for two days at the start of September 1992, apparently Damien was held at St. Vincent's Hospital in Portland due to a fight with his father. Joe Hutchinson would later give a statement about this saying, quote, While we were in Oregon, Michael got really sad. Like the time when we were driving up there. One day he locked himself up in a closet and had taken something in there with him. His grandmother told me that Michael had a knife.

I thought that this was really serious and Pam and I made him go to a hospital in Oregon. Michael got really upset with me and I lost my temper and after I yelled at him, he got even more upset. I feel bad about this whole incident because what started it was Michael's grandmother saying he had a knife. I do not know why I immediately trusted her instead of checking it out, but what I found out later was that Michael may have just had a spoon with him, end quote. So Jerry Driver claims something completely different happened during this interaction. He said that at the time of the incident, he'd spoken to Damien's parents and they claimed that Damien had tried to kill his father and he threatened to kill both his mother and father and that he was going to eat them alive. And in his book, Damien says, like, yeah, I told my father, like, I'd eat you alive, you know, because he was like yelling at me and i didn't have a knife and like i was getting accused of something i didn't do and i was being like forced to go to a psychiatric hospital again when i just felt like i just got out of one and i shouldn't have been there in the first place and then he was like making me feel like crap and so i was like i'll eat you alive you know i wasn't

like i'm gonna cook you and eat you so that's that maybe he wasn't gonna cook them maybe you're just gonna eat them alive. Well, I mean, yeah, you wouldn't be cooking them if you were eating them alive, I suppose. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Check mark for Derek there. Point. There you go.

So even though Damien was hundreds of miles away from West Memphis in Portland, Jerry Driver could just not forget about him. He couldn't let Damien go, and he immediately contacted juvenile authorities in Oregon and asked that as long as Damien was on probation, they should have him under supervision. So one of the counselors in Oregon, Calvin Downey, he said that when Jerry Driver had given him Damien's name to look into, Driver had made the following comments. One, Damien and several of his associates were involved with a satanic cult. Two, Damien claims that he's a witch. Three, Damien and his girlfriend Deanna were planning to have a child so they could sacrifice it to Satan. And finally, the Arkansas authorities also believed that Damien's parents were involved

in the satanic belief system. So when Downey, he visited with Damien and his family, he wrote in his report, you know, Damien seems pretty normal. Like Damien's working with his father. He's making $5 an hour. He's not enrolled in school. He had no hobbies. He had no fun. He was just pretty much working. He's kind of like a melancholy kid. Among other things that seemed to be in limbo at that time, though, was Damien's name, which, once again, he had changed when he'd been adopted by Jack Eccles. And also he was converting to the Catholic faith and he took that name of the saint that he admired. But he said now he was in the process of having his name legally changed again

back to Michael Damien Wayne Hutchison. So he's adding Damian as a middle name, but he's going back to his original birth name. And apparently during that time where he was in Oregon, Damian was going by the name Michael with his family, with his work colleagues, which is why we saw his father Joe refer to him as Michael in that statement. When Calvin Downey asked Damian about Jerry Driver's claims of Satanism, Damien denied being involved and Downey wrote, quote, he expressed considerable displeasure with Mr. Driver in making such assertions. Damien did acknowledge a suicide pact that he and his girlfriend had made if the authorities or her parents tried to keep them apart. However, he indicates that following hospitalization,

he's no longer interested in hurting himself or anyone else. Damien denies ever making threats of killing his girlfriend's parents. Damien acknowledges that he is a witch and indicates that it is his religious preference. He also distinguishes his religious beliefs from Satanism, indicating that he believes in a series of gods and goddesses, and he sees this as his religious preference that should not be the concern of state authorities. Damien felt that my inquiries in this area were an intrusion into his privacy and declined to discuss matters further, end quote. Oh yeah, so Jerry Driver claimed that not only did Damien threaten to kill his own parents, but he threatened to kill Deanna's parents. And Damien said like,

yeah, when he was in the back of the car, the cop car, when they got arrested outside the trailer, he saw Deanna's father like yelling at Deanna. And Damien said, I'll kill him if he hurts her. But once again, this is like a lot of this stuff is taken out of context, man. Just in Crime Weekly News today, I said that if any teacher touched my child in a sexual manner, that they wouldn't have to worry about prison because I would kill them. It's like just something people say. But did you not mean that when you said it? I mean, do I think that if it came down to it,

I would have it in me to take a human life? Probably not. No, I wouldn't want to, right? But like, can I kill someone? No, I can't even kill a bug. I'd like chase down bugs and let them out of my No, I can't even kill a bug. I like chase down bugs and let them out of my house because I don't want to kill them. So no, probably not like actually capable of killing somebody. But like, is there a rage when you see somebody you love hurt and you feel

like the thing you want to do, especially when you're not like, you know, I'm not like an emotional person and I'm not like in charge of my emotions. The only productive emotion I feel that I can have is anger. So everything turns into anger, you know? And I think Damien also kind of went through that too. Like he just didn't have normal, typical emotional coping mechanisms. Yeah. As I do not. Always went to the extreme.

Always goes to the extreme. That's what I do. So like I get it, but I'm also probably not going to go out there and kill anybody. I'm definitely not going to. I'm sorry. I don't know why I said probably. So suspicious. Yeah. So he got accused of trying to, you know, threatening to kill his girlfriend's parents, too. And he explains this. And I guess once again, it's all what you believe. But what I will tell you is if he threatened to kill his parents and Deanna's parents, none of those people ended up dying. So if we're really concerned about threats that he's making, don't you think that those people would be dead in the woods instead of three random eight-year-old boys that Damien didn't even know? Never even attempted it. So it was decided that Damien would remain under a minimum amount of supervision until

he turned 18, which was four months later. But two days after this visit, the Oregon officials got another letter from Jerry Driver claiming that Damien was trying to get in touch with Deanna, which was a violation of his probation. And he was. He was calling her and he was like, you know, do you miss me? And this, this and that. She's like, yeah, but she couldn't talk. You know, so he was like he loved her. So why is Jerry Driver in Arkansas so committed to making sure that Damien's life is still miserable in Oregon, like completely opposite ends of the country? It seems like you've got an obsession here, my dude. Well, I maybe her parents, Dana's parents reached out and they filed a complaint. Yeah. But you're, why are you like messaging the juvenile probation department there? He's not on probation in Oregon. He's on probation in Arkansas. You're messaging them and saying like, as a courtesy, you need to like watch him because he's into Satanism and this, this,

and that. Like there was no professional reason for Jerry Driver to do that other than like, you're obsessed with this kid and you're sure he's like a devil worshiper and you you think wherever he's going to go, he's going to be worshiping the devil. He definitely had it out. There's no doubt about it that he had a hard-on for Damien. And you see cops like that, where there's just that one guy that they just think is a bad egg, and they're just, yeah, they can't let it go. So Damien goes to St. Vincent Hospital for two days and the therapist there found him to be a bit depressed. And he said, yes, I am depressed because I miss my girlfriend, Deanna, and my best friend, Jason. And they also found him to be very smart. He wasn't great in math, but he was very

good at reading and writing. And one examiner said that Damien's use of language was at a very high level, and it was beautiful in quality, even though it had a morbid appeal to it. And so, I mean, he was released after two days. They were like, what are you doing here? We're not really sure. We don't have any reason to keep you here. You're not a risk to yourself or others. Now, reportedly, it was kind of a mutual thing that Damien's parents didn't want him to come back home and he didn't want to go back home. It's reported that they believed he was dangerous to them and to other children in their home. That was in the book, The Case Against the West Memphis Three. I could not find that said anywhere else. I looked through some interviews from his parents and I couldn't

find the place where they said that, but that doesn't mean that they didn't say that. It just means I couldn't find it at that time. And Damien expressed his intentions to move back to West Memphis where he would live with his stepfather, Jack Eccles. And the folks at St. Vincent saw no issue with this. They wrote that Damien's plans to become emancipated and returned to Arkansas seemed reasonable. St. Vincent passed this information on to the Oregon juvenile officials, and they passed it on to Jerry Driver, who. And so Damien boarded a bus to Arkansas and when he arrived, he immediately hooked up with his old friends, Dominique Teer and Jason Baldwin. And they had a fun few days

until Jerry Driver knocked on his door and hauled him away. Basically, Damien says that Jerry Driver was like, you're under arrest. And then Damien was adjudicated as a juvenile and brought back to the Crittenden County Jail. I'm not sure why. Maybe because he was in violation of his probation. Maybe because he had tried to contact Deanna.

And when he came back to Arkansas, Jerry Driver and the West Memphis police had, you know, some stake in it all of a sudden. I don't know. But once he was back at the county jail, Damien said, quote, This time, Driver's questions became even more bizarre and outrageous. I was taken into a small office and chained to a chair while he and another guy tried to entice me to read texts to them that were written in Latin. He showed me odd objects that I'd never seen before, such as glass pyramids and silver rings with strange designs. He wanted me to explain the significance of these items to him. I had not the slightest clue what any of it meant, but he refused to accept that answer. When he was finished with this, I was left in a jail cell for a few more weeks."

Jerry Driver also had Damien hospitalized again for a short time, and even the doctors there seem to have no idea why Damien is patient. And his medical record is public because it was part of the trial. So you were able to read through the whole thing. And you can see like one of the doctors is like, I don't really understand why he's here. He's super intelligent. He's got a huge vocabulary, especially without having a traditional education. He has a way with words. He has a strong ability to express himself through writing. Was Damien a little bit withdrawn and angry? Yes. But this doctor was like, who would really expect him to be much different considering

what he's been through in his life? We don't really expect him to be completely well-adjusted and settled at this point. But he's intelligent. He seems to be in touch with his emotions because he writes in his journal. He's always talking about how he's feeling. And we don't really know why he's intelligent. He seems to be in touch with his emotions because he writes in his journal. He's always talking about how he's feeling, and we don't really know why he's here. So Damien lived with his stepfather, Jack Eccles. He gave himself an education. He got his GED, and he continued to see Jerry Driver once a week, at which times he says that Jerry and Steve Jones would grill him about the occult. And according to Damien, Jerry and Steve were busy spreading rumors about him around town.

He said one day he and Jason were watching TV in Jack's trailer when a kid named Bo stopped over and said that Jerry Driver was asking questions about Damien at the corner store. And Driver had told everyone there to keep their distance from Damien because he was going down. And anyone he was close to or with would be going down too. Now, when Damien turned 18, he said the only thing he was happy about was that he would no longer be under the purview of Jerry Driver, a man who seemed hell-bent on finding any way to get Damien behind bars for the rest of his life. And I personally have often wondered if this transition from childhood to legal adulthood made Jerry Driver feel a bit

panicked, you know, like he was racing a clock, like he was running out of chances to prove that Damien was a bad seed because he wasn't in charge of him anymore. And did this lead to desperation? Desperation to either, I don't know, formulate a plan that would once and for all get Damien off the streets of West Memphis or to find any way to tie Damien to a crime that happened in order professional at times. There was definitely an interest, a fascination with Damien Echols on the part of Jerry Driver. Now, I'm going to go out and say, although there's some things that Damien did that I think a lot of kids would do, I also do think there are some things that were not okay and are not warranted or not justified and i'm not condoning them. I think Damian regardless of his childhood, which we discussed

There are many kids who have similar childhoods and don't do some of the things that damien did like what? I don't think running away with your 15 year old girlfriend breaking into a trailer Having sex with her when she's underage is a normal thing that most boys do I don't now i'm not saying he's a killer for that That's not true. It's a crime. So if you think that most guys- When they met, she was 15 and he was 16. He turned 17 while she was still 15.

But like, come on. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. They'd been dating for a year. There should be preclusions to that. That's Romeo and Juliet. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. And I'm not saying it doesn't happen more than just a couple with a couple of kids, but I do. I don't think that's the norm. I don't think, um, I don't think breaking into a trailer that you don't own

is right. I don't think threatening parents to kill them is normal. I don't think making a pack to kill each yourselves. If you can't be together is, is something that should be. Definitely. I agree with that. So there's definitely things in there that I think are situations that as from law enforcement and from a government perspective where you're in this role of juvenile probation, et cetera, there are things that you should be aware of. Do I think Jerry had it out for Damien? Absolutely. Do I think his fascination with him to go out to the lengths of making professional, quote unquote, professional courtesy calls to other states? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know if I'd be doing that. I do think once Damien violated probation, although it's not an extraditable thing, would I maybe give a professional courtesy to that agency to let them know about it? Yeah, maybe at that point, but I don't think I'm giving a preempt preemptive heads up to that agency that there's someone in my town that I need to watch. I don't know if I'm doing that. That's probably, I'm not probably not going to that length, but I do think there are things you would, if you, if you genuinely believed he was like a bad guy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If I do think he's a bad guy. So, and that's what I'm saying. I think Jerry in his mind definitely thought that. And so I don't know if I would do it.

I think he was coming from a place where he's like, this guy is a bad dude. And it's only a matter of time before he seriously hurt someone. That's what I think he was thinking. So, you know, I, I see that, but here's the thing. He's being preemptive. He's being proactive. If you want to call it that he hasn't actually done it yet. As we've noted in the episode, there's really no serious crimes of violence here.

There's threats of it, but there's no actual serious crimes of violence. It definitely, there's a pattern here where, and even Damien admitted it, where there was some mental things going on where he did need professional help to get through that. So those, that is the good side of it, where he was, those issues were addressed and there may have been some residual effects from it. He knew that it was, it wasn't, he was not allowed to contact his girlfriend and yet he still was afterwards. So there were things that he was doing that

is a freaking teenage boy. Who's like raging hormones. And that's what I'm going to ask you. Like, yes, breaking into the trailer, running away, even the suicide pact, you know, is that like to you, if you had two columns and one column was like going to ask you? Like, yes, breaking into the trailer, running away, even the suicide pact, you know, is that like to you if you had two columns and one column was like murders and tortures three eight-year-olds or, you know, slightly disturbed, not well-adjusted emotionally teenage boy who's not super in control of his emotions and his impulses, where are those things going to fall more?

Probably to the column of emotionally disturbed 17 year old boy who's not in control of his impulses that running away. The suicide pact, it's dramatic, man. Don't you remember being in high school? Weren't you dramatic in high school? Probably not. You're so even keeled.

You're probably such a boring teenager i i don't i don't normally go into like my past i mean i talked about in my book i know you said you had a bad past mine's documented uh through school not good i got assigned to multiple grades i didn't get to graduate uh my junior my junior year with everyone else because of a fight i got in at the end of the year that involved a knife not a knife on my part so i I had a path, a lot of fights. I got a, I had a path where I could be behind bars or go after the people that were needed to be there. And I chose that path, but that's a different story, different day. I don't think some of the things he did from my perception were things that were being done by my friends or me. Again,

doesn't make him a murderer. Now that all being the case my friends or me. Again, does it make him a murderer? Now that all being the case, if something like this happened in my town and I was an investigator and I'm looking at someone, would he be someone I may look into on a list of a lot of people? Of course, of course, especially when he's admitting that he's practices certain things like this. I'm not saying that the things he practices insinuate he would kill a little child, but it would be a reason for maybe why he would have been in the woods at that time. Do you see how I'm linking it as opposed to maybe he was, there was his friends practicing that. Yes. But Wiccans worship nature. They don't kill little children. Right. So I, I'm not saying they do, but I would look into

it and you wouldn't be doing your job if you didn't. Now where they were, again, we still have a lot to go, but where the problem persists is that looking into that person and then trying to find a way to link them to it, even if there's nothing there. And that's what we really got to get into because I really want to, we talked about a lot of background stuff tonight. Yeah. And yeah, that is part of it. I feel like we had like we had to yeah no that's part of the equation right like it's part of the story but i think what really matters is going to be the evidence in the case right okay where is the connection to damien and these little boys now you may there may be none i don't know but there's no I- There's no freaking evidence. There's no freaking evidence. There's no physical evidence

tying any of these three teenage boys to these three eight-year-old boys. That's like, therein lies the crux. So like, let's have an episode about the evidence. It's blank, it's a blank episode. It's like- Didn't two juries convict him of the crime? I don't know the case specifically,

but didn't two different juries both find them guilty of this we're gonna talk about it okay i want to talk about it because i'm assuming it's a circumstantial case and you know the same argument could be made a freaking expert of the occult to testify i'll just say that okay okay yeah i mean i'm i'm open minded i'm open-minded to it i know that we're in a point right now where these gentlemen are free and that's that's something that i have to be i'm aware of obviously but i'm i-minded to it. I know that we're in a point right now where these gentlemen are free and that's, that's something that I have to be, I'm aware of obviously, but I'm, I'm looking at it episode by episode. And I want to hear the circumstantial evidence surrounding this case that led to juries to convict them of murder.

I don't know if I'm going to get there as well. It doesn't really matter if I do or not. I have no, no skin in the game with the case, but I'll be honest with you guys. If I think they were wrong, I'll say they were wrong. If I think they were right, I'll say they were right. Like I said, Adnan Syed, his case is, let's be honest, it's mostly circumstantial. It's a lot of people saying comments, but then there's a lot of people disputing those witness testimony and phone.

It's all circumstantial. But we both have said that even though it's circumstantial, it's more likely than not that he might have been involved, right? Yeah. We said it's circumstantial and he probably should not have been put on trial with that evidence. However, there are things that make us feel that he was at the very least involved. So let's see if that's the case here. Now, the way you're talking, it sounds like there may not be, but that's what I'm saying. Just because there's no DNA at the scene or any, I want to see what we have because in totality, I may feel differently than most people.

I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, maybe. I mean, we'll see. We'll go through it. We'll go through it. And now I have to go to bed. All right.

Now, it was a great episode. I'm glad we get the background. We kind of know in the foundation of where Jerry Driver comes from as far as now we're caught up to the murders and his first thought is it's got to be Damian Echols and his crew. Okay. Now we understand we may not agree with it, but we know where that came from. We know the foundation of where that thought process was derived from. So it's important. No final words, I'm assuming you're ready to go to bed. I am so ready to go to bed. Okay, real quick.

And this is at the end of the episode. We didn't do it at the beginning, but I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that right now, if you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on audio, Stephanie is rocking the criminal coffee sweatshirt. Pre-orders are now filled by this point. If you pre-ordered, you should have your merch.

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