The West Memphis Three

I was checking the links out on Kevin's Voidgazer page and I came across links to issues regarding the West Memphis Three... Having spent a great deal of my college life in the field of psychology and more specifically reasearching and studying forensic psychology, I had an occasion several years ago to see a documentary on HBO regarding the subject (and then a "part two" in 2000)... I believe they shared the title Paradise Lost.

For those of you out of the loop on the matter, about ten years ago, three little boys were murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. Three then-teenagers went to prison for killing them... The case against the boys had all kinds of Satanic underpinnings and stuff like that thanks to the local press, who were publishing all kinds of outlandish gossip. The murder investigation was botched worse than the O.J. Simpson case, yet the boys were all convicted, based pretty much solely on a coerced "confession" from one of the boys...

It was pretty clear to me that (one of) the actual culprit(s) stood to be one of the boy's stepfather (who is basically a complete and utter jackass)... There were bitemarks on the victims (that did not match any of the three boys), and then for some reason after the murders, the stepfather had all his teeth pulled, and then provided people with not one, not two, but three different stories on why he did it (one involving a medication he was taking that supposedly made your teeth fall out - which it, in fact, does not)... The mother (and wife of the man I believe is more likely responsible) once told school officials that she thought her son (who had begun to develop several behavioral problems) might be being sexually abused (when the body was autopsied, there were several previous wounds "of a possible sexual nature" that had healed)... She later died under suspicious circumstances (the husband claimed she had taken her own life with pills after not being able to "mend her broken heart")... Anyone that has seen the documentaries on HBO and saw this fool's grandstanding for the cameras and stuff (at one point, carrying out some form of ceremonial "burning-thing" where he sets fire to some ground with lighter fluid and stomps on it and stupid shit like that) and still thought that he had no involvement would need to be evaluated... What it boiled down to was that he was all buddy-buddy with the lead investigator and the cop swept all kinds of potentially exhonorating evidence under the rug... and these three guys are all still in jail...

Basically, the only reason I brought it up was because the local press made such a huge deal about how the boys were big Metallica fans at the time of the killings and how rock music played some kind of part in the killings... While Metallica may suck HUGE amounts of floppy donkey dick since after "...and Justice for All," that's no reason to convict some kids who liked to wear black (just like Johnny Cash liked to wear black to portray himself like the old west "outlaws") and listen to music that wasn't all happy and fun to dance to...

I did my best to keep an open mind to the possibility that these kids could have been guilty (I mean, if I had sat around and listened to "The Unforgiven," "Enter Sandman," "Nothing Else Matters," and crap like that all the time, I might be tempted to kill someone, myself), but I couldn't get over how obvious it was that this was a railroding of mass proportions...

Anyhow, if you are interested in doing any research of your own on the matter, I'm sure there's tons of webpages floating around on a Google search to be seen...

Thanks to Gemini's Twin (a.k.a. the Kevinator) for reminding me about it, again... Hopefully, I will be able to find a recent update on the matter...

Listening to: my ears ring...