Devil's Knot
The True Story of the West Memphis Three
Chapter One
The Murders
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.
John Mark Byers, an unemployed jeweler, was the first parent to report a child
missing. At 8 P.M., with the f ... read full excerpt from Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three ebook
