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Friday, August 19, 2011

Reading about the murders: West Memphis Three


With a strong potential deal in the acts for the West Memphis Three, as per  the NYTimes, this may be a time to rewinness the gory 1993 triple-murder in greater detail through books about the case.

In May 1993, the dead bodies of three boys were found in the woods of West Memphis, Ark., and their mutilation sparked fears of Satanic worship and sparked a frenzy among townspeople. After the incident several people believed the three men convicted of the crimes were victims, literally, of a witch-hunt -- a theory promoted in the award-winning documentary "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills."
For more about the case, check out "Devil's Knot" by Mara Leveritt. Here's an excerpt, courtesy of Simon and Schuster:

"At 7:41 P.M. on May 5, 1993, a full moon rose behind the Memphis skyline. Its light glinted across the Mississippi River and fell onto the midsized Arkansas town aspiringly named West Memphis. Sometime between the rising of that moon and its setting the next morning, something diabolical would happen in West Memphis. Three eight-year-old boys would vanish, plucked off the streets of their neighborhood by an unseen, murderous hand. Under the glare of the next day's sun, police would discover three young bodies. They would be pulled -- naked, pale, bound, and beaten -- from a watery ditch in a patch of woods alongside two of America's busiest highways. But the investigation would unfold in shadow. Why had one of the boys been castrated? How to account for the absence of blood? Why did the banks of the stream look swept clean? The police would stumble for weeks without clues -- until the moon itself became one."

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