This article is 1993 THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
AUTOPSIES SHOW 3 BOYS DIED OF MULTIPLE BLOWS TO THE HEAD
W. MEMPHIS GETS EXTRA HELP IN HUNT FOR A SUSPECT
Date: Saturday, May 8, 1993
Section: News
Page: A1
Illustration: photo (6)
Source: By Rob Johnson and Joan I. Duffy The Commercial Appeal
Edition: Final
Three West Memphis boys found dead Thursday in a slow-moving creek were killed by multiple head blows, the police's lead investigator said Friday.
Weaver Elementary School second-graders Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore disappeared Wednesday evening while riding bikes near the so- called Robin Hood Park, a boggy woods near Ten Mile Bayou.
The boys' hands and feet were bound, said Insp. Gary Gitchell of the West Memphis Police Department.
Officials of the State Crime Lab in Little Rock gave top priority to the case, completing autopsies by early Friday afternoon and bringing in teams of trace-evidence technicians and serologists.
Dr. Frank Peretti, a forensic pathologist with the Crime Lab's medical examiner's office, completed the autopsies about 1 p.m. At 4 p.m., he issued a statement that said "all three children died of multiple injuries."
West Memphis police were still poring over the crime scene Friday and canvassing the boys' nearby neighborhood, looking for anyone who might have seen something suspicious.
The boys' bodies were found submerged in a creek Thursday afternoon, and their bikes were found 50 yards away in the bayou.
Gitchell said the three boys died "from trauma, just trauma" to their heads.
Gitchell would not comment on or deny an Arkansas State Police radio broadcast Thursday night that said West Memphis police were investigating the abduction and sexual mutilation of the three boys.
Gov. Jim Guy Tucker offered Friday to bring the weight of the state's law enforcement power to bear on the case.
"I hope that additional resources will assist local law enforcement to catch the person or persons responsible for this horrible crime," Tucker said in a statement.
West Memphis police say they are being assisted by the Arkansas State Police, the Crittenden County Sheriff's Department, the Memphis Police Department and the FBI.
For now, West Memphis police have declined an offer of more detectives from the state police, Gitchell said. But he said he might accept the offer later.
"We've got 15 people on this now, and if we get too many, we'll be tripping over each other," he said.
Col. Tommy Goodwin, commander of the state police, said he called West Memphis Chief of Police Bobby Sanders shortly after the bodies were discovered.
"I have offered everything - anything that we've got they can have. Bobby said they would call me if they needed anything," Goodwin said. The department has 12 troopers and investigators assigned to the Eastern Arkansas district.
"We're an assisting agency. If they need something, we give it to them," Goodwin said.
The FBI's behavioral sciences experts in Quantico, Va., are also being briefed on the details of the crime, Gitchell said, so that federal psychologists might develop a profile of the killer or killers.
The West Memphis case has attracted the attention of departments through the country, and investigators have been phoning Gitchell's office, eager to see if the West Memphis case might shed light on their own.
The woods where the boys were found stand between the Mayfair Apartments and the Blue Beacon Truck Wash, which faces an access road paralleling Interstate 40.
"We have some of the major trucking in the nation going through here," Gitchell said. He said his detectives have not ruled out the possibility that they're looking for hitchhikers, truckers, neighborhood residents - anybody.
"We are leaving no stone unturned," Gitchell said Friday afternoon. "We have some hopeful leads that we are checking on."
He added, "It's frustrating. We will rely heavily on the Crime Lab to bring forth some information to sort of steer us in one direction or the other."
He said his criminal investigation division has received almost 300 phone tips since Thursday and that a reward fund had swelled to $6,000 by Friday.
Lynette Thomas sat on her back porch at the Mayfair Apartments Friday afternoon, gazing toward the undulating terrain beneath the thick canopy of brush and trees.
The area has attracted young bike riders for years, she said.
"Sometimes you see one of the policemen's heads pop up while they're working over there," she said.
The woods are popular with far more than the neighborhood bike riders, she said.
"It's a pathway for bikes, for kids, for adults, for teenagers, for people cutting through to work at the truck wash," she said. "All kinds of people
cut through there."
Charity Collum, 16, who lives in the W.E. Catt Street house closest to the crime scene, agrees.
"People are going into those woods all the time," she said. "No telling who was back there then. It's really pretty scary.
"I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night. It's all so close."
"I'm not going to let them get out of my sight, not until they catch who done it," Donna Johnson said of her 3-year-old son and two other small children she was babysitting Friday at her apartment about 150 feet from where the bodies were found.
"There is fear over here. It happened right in our back doors. That's scary."
Jim Clark, director of the Crime Lab in Little Rock, said as the autopsies were under way, "We at the Crime Lab are going to expedite to the fullest extent as we can. . . . We're probably looking at the trace-evidence section and the serology lab section (to be) heavily involved as well as the medical examiner's office."
The lab's photographers and fingerprint experts duplicated some of the field work done on the evidence, "making sure we have all the right exposures and all," Clark said.
Caption:
Photographs by Dave Darnell
(Color) Flowers hang at the home of Michael Moore, one of three 8-year-old
West Memphis boys found slain Thursday.
CAPTION: By Michael McMullan
View over a West Memphis neighborhood shows where three schoolboys were
found slain, in swampy Robin Hood Park, the wooded area at left north of W.E.
Catt Street (bottom). Police investigators focused their search for evidence
there Friday. McAuley Drive West is at left; Interstate 40-55 at top.
CAPTION: Gary Gitchell, Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, Michael Moore
