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Episode 4: A Shoe in the Unnamed Creek · Crooked Tree: A West Memphis 3 Podcast

• Paul: Welcome back, everyone. I am Kristen Rich and I am here with my co-host Paul Day. And we are victim advocates for two of the families in this case. We are going to continue talking about the search by the families, the community, and the police department for these three eight-year-old boys who went missing on May 5th, 1993, in West Memphis, Arkansas. When we left off last episode, the parents have gone to bed somewhere 3, 4 a.m., though none of them slept. Todd Moore will arrive home around five AM to find out his son is missing. Throughout the night, there is no help from the West Memphis Police Department or the Crittenden County Sheriff's Office or Search and Rescue or anyone else. It was the parents looking by themselves. In fact, from the time Regina Meek got off work at eleven fifteen until Boskey and Slater began their search early the morning of the sixth around five twenty six AM. Between those hours, the There was no help from the West Memphis Police Department. And that is where we find ourselves on May the sixth, nineteen ninety-three. At six ⁓ three in the morning, the sun rose up over the horizon and we have new sunlight in which the parents can go out and start searching. And as soon as that occurs, there's a knock on the door at Mark Byers' house. So when Mark Byers opened his door, standing on his doorstep was Terry and Pam Hobbs, as well as Todd and Dana Moore. And they were out raring to look. Remember, Todd had just gotten home from work at about five o'clock in the morning, and so he has not searched yet and he's ready to go and find his son Michael. Once the parents have talked for a few minutes at the buyer's house and leave, Mark decides that he needs to make a phone call. He wanted search and rescue to be involved in looking for the boys the night before, and he was told to call them first thing in the morning. So that's exactly what he does. He calls search and rescue and asks for Denver Reed, the head of search and rescue. So he makes that phone call and informs him that his son is missing as well as two of his friends, all eight years old. They have been missing since the night before. No one has found them. They found some bike tracks. They found nothing else. And they need help. They desperately need help searching for their boys. After he places this call to Denver Reed, he decides that it would be extremely important to let the media know what is going on. He feels like if there is some media pressure out there that the police will all come together and help him find his son, search and rescue will show up there and anybody else that wants to help will come and help look for these three eight year old boys. Yeah, he's not very happy with the West Memphis PD's response. He's not happy that Crittenden County Sheriff's Office didn't send out search and rescue to help him the night before. So he's gonna make sure that they are going to help him in the morning. ⁓ he's gonna alert the world. Yeah. And his friends are missing and he's gonna hit the accelerator about as hard as he possibly can. Once Pam, Terry, and Jackie leave the buyer's home, they head out for their morning search. They decide to head up toward the Seventh Street Bridge. The Seventh Street Bridge crosses the ten mile bayou. It is another way to cross the bayou as opposed to the pipe bridge. And it is right next to Catfish Island, where Pam Hobbs works. So they are looking on the sides of the bayou, down into the water, on both sides of the bridge. Somewhere in there, Steve Branch shows up. He is Stevie's biological father, and he has come to help search. He has obviously not been there. All of this is new to him. His son is missing. And he is for the first time seeing the area where they believe that the boys have disappeared into. So they're gonna separate up into groups because Pam and Terry don't necessarily get along very well with Steve Branch Stevie's dad. They're gonna separate up into groups and they're gonna go up and down the bayou. Now they're gonna get along for this incident, but you know There's history there between the two of them and Pam makes that very clear that that was on her dad's mind and on her mind as well that morning. And so they wound up searching up and down this bayou along the banks, the fourteen hundred foot stretch between the seventh street bridge, which you could very easily walk up the bayou to the pipe bridge. And then of course adjacent to the pipe bridge is Robin Hood and the White House on one side, and on the other side is the Blue Beacon and the woods where the gunshot had come from the previous evening. And so they're gonna search this area extensively. for about a half an hour to an hour. Yeah, during that search, Pam recounts something that happened that really just stuck out in her mind. She said that during that search, when Steve arrived, we went out to the wooded area and stuff again. And at one point, I believe ⁓ dad and Terry were standing on the pipe. And Terry asked Daddy, do you think that you know that there was something in the water? He said, Do you think that might be blood? And Daddy said, Nah, with the truck wash being over there and stuff, it's probably oil. But you know, Terry did ask Daddy, Do you think that could be blood while they were on the pipe? That's the story that Pam has told a couple of different times because it just stuck out to her. Here she is, found out late in the day that her son is missing, not knowing he'd been missing for hours, hasn't slept all night. First thing goes out to search the next morning and her husband is asking her father if he thinks there's blood in the water. This is after a conversation that all the parents had had standing under those streetlights the night before, wondering what had happened to their kids. Is it possible that they somehow drowned in the bayou? And now this is the conversation she's hearing. Yeah. So they're walking up and down there looking for bikes, they're looking for evidence of injured children or even worse, ⁓ children that may have drowned in the bayou. Just shows the level of alarm these parents have that morning and and the level of fear that they have. And ⁓ this comment of course is not gonna help settle Pam down at all. Her anxiety had to have been through the roof. I can't even imagine what she was feeling at that moment. They search for a little while and head back toward the seventh street bridge where they had started, looking up and down the bayou, trying to see if they can find more tracks, if they see bicycles, anything that might alert them to the where the boys might be. So they head back to seventh street. And when they get there they encounter Mark and Melissa who have started their search that morning. They talk and Terry informs Mark that they've been looking up and down the sides of the bayou from there down to the pipe bridge. That's the area they've been searching. Mark doesn't want to overlap what they've already done, so he says, Hey, I'm gonna go back to Devil's Den. So he heads that direction. Yeah, Mark had been searching Devil's Den all night the previous night, but remember he didn't have a flashlight? He had only the benefit of a full moon. It was the best really he could do. And so for the very first time he's able to go over there and in daylight actually look around and search aggressively the Devil's Den area. And shortly after he's over there, by about seven o'clock, we're gonna have a very large community response. People are gonna come out of that neighborhood riding on three wheelers, they're gonna be on bicycles, they're gonna be walking. They're gonna doing everything they can to support him. And over the next couple of hours, a very large community response is gonna ensue, helping look for these three boys that have been missing since the night before. They all search for a little while in their respective locations and they had decided that they would all show up to Weaver Elementary School where the boys attended school to see if they showed up to school that day. You know, it was hope against hope that they would be gone all night but still show up for school in the morning. They arrive at school a little bit before school is set to begin at 8 15 AM. When they arrive, there's also news media there. Mark had called them after his call to Denver Reed to try to get some things moving and get the community involved. And they are there as well to see if the boys have shown up and to just do some general reporting on these three boys missing, maybe talk to some of their teachers, other students that knew these boys. Unfortunately, the boys do not show up. to school that morning. The parents leave to go out and continue their searches. Pam and Terry and Jackie leave the school and begin knocking on doors, just going door to door, asking if anyone has seen them, if anyone saw them the night before, trying to get any kind of information to see if they were seen in other places besides going into the entrance at Devil's Den. Mark Myers, when it comes to getting this thing resolved, is not messing around. He's called Printing County Sheriff's Office. He's trying to get Denver Reed and the search and rescue people to take him very seriously. And he's alerted the media out in Memphis. And they are now descending upon West Memphis about these three boys. And so there's going to be a large media presence very quickly surrounding these missing three children. At seven thirty A. ⁓ the West Memphis Police Department held a morning briefing that was led by Gary Gitchell. He is the chief of detectives and goes by the name Inspector Gitchell. He's also the public information officer for the West Memphis Police Department, which is important throughout this case. You will hear a lot from Gary Gitchell. During that meeting, Inspector Gitchell explained that there were three eight year old boys missing. They had been missing since around six thirty the night before, and that due to some miscommunication The West Memphis PD had not been searching for them overnight, and that at that point everyone needed to start looking for them. This was the goal for the day was to find these three eight-year-old boys, whatever it took. He informed all of the police officers where they had been seen, which was going into the Devil's Den entrance of Robin Hood. He gave all of the officers the boys' descriptions, photos of the boys, so that they could identify them should they find any of them. Then he Gave specific police officers places to search. This meeting ended at about eight ⁓ five AM that morning. So the initial search of the West Memphis Police Department concentrated where you would expect them to look, which is right in the Robin Hood area. So every available unit that they had, for the most part, went through or started saturating Robin Hood. They were looking at Devil's Den, they were looking in the ditches, they were looking along the ten mile bayou, they were behind the Blue Beacon, they were at the seventy-sixth truck stop, they were walking over Turtle Hill. They were looking along Catfish Island and they completely saturated the area. Of course, one of the people that is very important in this search is Brian Ridge, and he checks in over there very early in the morning. Brian Ridge begins his search just after this meeting at West Memphis PD concludes, and he heads over to Robin Hood Hills. He Parks at the dead in on Macaulay, where the Pipe Bridge is located. When he gets out of his car, he notices that there's a man looking around over there and he approaches the man and it happens to be Steve Branch, Stevie's father. So he speaks with Mr. Branch for a little bit and then goes on about his search. He decides to cross the Pipe Bridge and go over to the woods there and search there. When he gets to the end of the Pipe Bridge, there is a bicycle. laying on the ground at the end of the pipe bridge. And he was not quite sure what to make of this, because of course we're looking for three boys and two bicycles. And so far, nobody has found three boys or either of the bicycles. And so Detective Ridge is not sure what he has come across at this point. He goes up the bank, crosses over Turtle Hill, when he comes down the other side, he can hear someone yelling the boys' names. He gets closer, realizes it's a teenager. And he approaches this teenager and starts talking to him and he said he's just out helping search. And Detective Ridge says, Hey, I just saw a bicycle on the Pipe Bridge. Do you know anything about that? And the kid says, Yeah, that's my bike. I took it over the pipe bridge, but it has a flat tire. So I just left it there and then walked up over Turtle Hill and down into the woods. And Detective Ridge said, You are gonna have to keep that bicycle with you. We're all looking for three boys and two bikes and when I saw it I wasn't sure what I was looking at, if that belonged to one of the boys or if it was somebody else's. So you need to keep that with you because somebody else might make the same mistake I did and wonder if it belonged to one of our three missing boys. So yeah, it's gonna create a moment of excitement where he thinks, Hey, we've got a bike here. We know that this is the area to be looking and this is one of the first exciting moments during the search during the daytime where they think they're on to something and it just falls apart very quickly. Yeah, that had to be super disappointing. I'm sure they all hoped that the search would end fairly quickly once the sun came up that morning. From there he decides to search west toward ⁓ 7th Street. He goes that direction, looks around. He notes that he sees about 15 people ⁓ out searching for the boys as well while he's walking that direction. He goes up to 7th Street, comes back down into Robin Hood and then decides he wants to go east to Devil's Den. So he makes his way over to the Devil's Den entrance. He doesn't pick up on anything. He doesn't see anything ⁓ that gives him any clues as to where the boys are. And then he decides he's gonna start looking outside of Robin Hood. So he's just one of many West Memphis PD officers that are saturating that area that morning. There's another location, a vacant house located at eleven twenty WE CAT. And it was actually checked twice. It's a vacant home. And of course it's located not too far away from the White House, so it was a prime spot for people to look. Hey, maybe the kids ditched their bikes somewhere and they're hiding out in that house. So that location was searched twice that morning. In addition to the area right around Robin Hood and the Blue Beacon, West Memphis PD spread out along both the 10 mile bayou diversion channel along its length throughout the city. They also started searching the 10 mile bayou. Now that sounds like the same bayou, right? Same name. One is the diversion channel to the north. The other one is the non-diversion channel, it's the original channel to the south. So we call one the ten mile bayou diversion and the other one just the ten mile bayou. The police decided to search both of them. And they searched along the length of the city, looking at different city parks that were overlooking the bayou. They were searching along the banks of the bayou. They were looking where the bayou went across seventh street off to the west of the neighborhood. And It's a convenient place to look because if the kids are coming in and out of that neighborhood, remember they gotta go across the bayou. So the bayou creates these interesting choke points where there's these bridges where the kids have to go over. So if they've come in or out, there's only a few places where they could do that. And so the police decide to saturate those locations as well. There was one officer that did go as far as the airport down to the southwest, but he had no luck down there. By nine AM, West Memphis PD requested air search assistance from Memphis Police Department. And so Memphis Police Department scrambled a helicopter. They called it Air Two. And so Air Two took off out of Memphis sometime after nine o'clock and it starts checking in on the search sometime around nine forty eight. So between nine o'clock and eleven o'clock, there's a helicopter up in the air, especially between about nine thirty until about ten thirty. It's extremely active in the area of Robin Hood. The other agency that is helping look for the boys that day is the Crittenden County Sheriff's Office through their search and rescue unit. And they began responding at about eight thirty in the morning. Mark Byers met with Denver Reed over at Barton and Ingram right around eight thirty to nine o'clock, and they had a conversation. And in that conversation, it was pretty clear that search and rescue was going to concentrate in the Southland area, which is a wide open space in the floodplain just to the north of the city, on the opposite side of the I forty, I fifty five interchange, meaning that the boys would have to cross the freeway in order to get up there. And the thinking that they had was that the boys were just hiding up there and probably camping. And this is sort of reasonable if you think about the fact that the boys are Cub Scouts. So they were looking between town and the Mississippi River. They were looking for camping gear. They were looking for tents. They were probably talking to transients, anybody that was coming through there. But the other thing that they were doing was they were looking to see if they could track the boys' movements through any of the Bayou's culverts that go underneath the freeway system by looking for bicycle tracks, looking for footprints, anything they could possibly find, because the boys would have to get across that freeway. And so they searched all that area as best as they could, and that's where they concentrated for the most part, was up in that open floodplain between West Memphis and the Mississippi River. And they didn't have any luck over there, but they spent a large amount of time looking. At nine twenty three that morning, the search and rescue team put a fourteen foot John boat into the ten mile biodiversion channel. This is the northern channel over which the pipe bridge goes. And they notified Mark Byers that this had been done. And the reason why they're doing this was the concern that the boys might have fallen in, they might have drowned, and that any type of injury or recovery that had to be done had to be done by water in an area that is inaccessible by just going down to the bank and climbing along people's backyards and looking down into the water and pulling them out. So the boat was out there at nine twenty-three and is going down the river, which is to say from the east to the west. Which is the direction of flow of the 10 mile biodiversion channel. Once Mark is notified by search and rescue that they're going to put a boat into the bayou, he alerts the other parents and they decide to meet at the pipe bridge to watch the boat come down the bayou and see if they find anything. So Mark Byers, Melissa Byers, Terry and Pam Hobbs, Jackie Hicks. Todd Moore and Dana Moore as well as Steve Branch all meet at the Pipe Bridge to watch this boat search the bayou for their boys and or their bicycles. Yeah, so this is the first time that we have on record that this group of people have ever been together during the search and it's right there, right about ten o'clock, maybe a little before. So Mark Byers has a recollection about what he was talking about when they were there waiting to see the boat come through the bayou. And he was trying to figure out how the three boys could have gotten the two bikes across the bayou from the south to the north side. And so he's getting up and he's looking at the pipe and he's trying to figure out, would you put the bike on the I beam? Would you put your bike on the pipe and walk on the I beam? He's trying to figure out logistically how these boys would have gotten their bikes across this pipe. So he gets up and goes on to the pipe, trying to figure out, you know, which way they would have taken their bikes across if that's what they had actually done. So he crosses the pipe and he goes up Turtle Hill and he's looking down at all the possibilities of which directions you know you could go once you come over Turtle Hill. And he finds a coat. So he picks that coat up. He describes it as a brown coat and he takes it back over to where Terry Hobbs and Jackie Hicks are sitting and Wants to know if they think that this coat could have anything to do with the disappearance of their boys. And Jackie Hicks says, nah, you know, it looks like it's been in there for a long time, probably belonged to a hobo or a transient. And Mark abandons the coat there on the bank of the Bayu. And then just as that has happened, Mark says he couldn't remember if it was his wife or Pam Hobbs, but one of the women that were standing up a little ways up on the hill called to them and they went. Back up the hill and out to search other places. At that point, Mark and Melissa decided to go ahead and go home and start listening on the scanner. During this period of time, there's about 50 searchers combing this area. I mean, it is absolutely being saturated. We have a helicopter flying overhead. There were three wheelers moving throughout all that swampy floodplain, trying to do everything they could to scare any kids out that might be hiding out in those woods or in any of those flat open areas. We've got a John boat in the bayou coming down and searching the banks of the bayou. This is an absolutely incredible search. This is the kind of search that should have been happening the night before. And unfortunately it's not happening until the next day. That's one of the big tragedies of this. So at ten twenty three, West Memphis PD received an interesting lead when they found footprints in the mud near the Amaco Station on the North Service Road. That amico station is located at seven hundred North Service Road, and it's located about fourteen hundred feet north of Catfish Island. The reason why this is so interesting is because if the boys made those footprints, they have to somehow get across the ten mile bayou either on the seventh street bridge or the pipe bridge and then get over to 7th Street and then go north and get across the freeway, and which point they're up in the Southland area. This is exactly where Search and Rescue has been searching for the boys already. So this kind of confirms their hypothesis that the boys might have gotten out there and possibly gotten out into the floodplain area between the city and the city. and the Mississippi River. So for the next thirty minutes or so, the helicopter begins to concentrate its search efforts between Seventh Street and Ingram, Ingram Boulevard being located off to the east where there is a large dog track. Now the dog track is a gambling area. It had been closed on Wednesday night, and so this is another area where the boys could be holed up or hiding out, knowing that there isn't a whole lot of activity in that area. So they searched the area around the dog track. They search the area around the woods just to the southwest of the dog track. They searched the open fields that are in there and they go all the way to the Mississippi River. Unfortunately, the helicopter never picks up the kids or sees any evidence of them anywhere out in the area. And by eleven o'clock it's off scene. This does change the overall complexion of the search, however, because now the entire area around Blue Beacon has been completely saturated. Robin Hood has been completely covered. There are young people, community people walking all over in that area looking for the boys and haven't been able to find them. And It's pretty clear that they're not in that region. They're not in that part of the city. So the West Memphis PD starts to spread out. They start looking in areas to the southwest where it's possible they might have been picked up or abducted or they were in a parked car somewhere hiding out in a car. Several officers continue north past the Amoco station and that takes them up into the town of Marion. Once they get up into Marion, it takes them up to a couple of interesting locations. There's a camping spot located up to the north called Harvard Yard, which is very Closely examined by West Memphis PD and also Lakeshore Trailer Park, which is located off to the west of the I-55 freeway after its separation from I-40 down in West Memphis. And that area is searched extensively by several officers, mainly looking for tents or for transients or people that are underneath the bridges and maybe the kids are with them. Unfortunately, to no avail. By 1230, Crinton County Search and Rescue decides that they're going to go ahead and take a pause and they're going to. reassess where they're gonna look. They're going to give their searchers. There's nine searchers. Denver Reed is going to give eight of them the opportunity to check back into work because they are volunteers. And during this period of time, effectively we're going into a lull during a lunchtime. West Memphis PD is still searching actively, but far less active in the area around the Blue Beacon. When Search and Rescue is deciding to go ahead and take that pause, the news decides to show up over at Mark Byers's house and get a couple of comments and standing next to him is Jackie Hicks Senior. In this interview, which is crucial for understanding the timeline of this case, Mark Byers gives the following interview. Last time we saw ⁓ the three boys were ⁓ riding bikes together and they headed down towards a wooded area at the end of the street, which was about six thirty yesterday evening, and they're always in the house before dark. ⁓ none of the three have ever been missing or taken off ever before. What's what's going through your mind as a parent? I'm scared to death. I s you know, plain and simple. I'm scared for the safety and welfare of all three boys and would appreciate any help that anyone would give us in recovering our three sons. Now around nine thirty in the morning, Steve Jones, who's a juvenile officer for Crittenden County, called into the West Memphis PD dispatch because he'd heard from search and rescue that there were three missing boys and he wanted to find out if he could contribute to the search. After getting confirmation that in fact there was an active search and they would probably love to have his help, he started looking around in the area. He was very familiar with where a lot of the boys in the neighborhood would probably have hung out, and so it took him up near Robin Hood, an area that he was somewhat familiar with, was driving around on Goodwin, and decided to go ahead and look behind the blue beacon in the woods. This is where the gunshot had occurred and where the four teens and Terry Hobbs had had their ominous and frightful feeling the night before. And he was taking that same trail down Turtle Hill. And as he went down Turtle Hill, he realized it descended down into a little gully and then up along a series of bluffs. And in that gully there was a creek. And so he decided that he was gonna walk and look along that creek and see if he could find anything in there. And lo and behold, he gets up to the top of a bluff, he looks down and he sees what appears to be a little white shoe floating in the water. He then called out to his friend Denver Reed, who was the only remaining member of Search and Rescue that was still looking that day. Denver walked over to him. He said, I think that's a shoe down there. And they began taking a very close look at it. This is a tall bluff. It's about ten feet high. And in looking down into the shadows and into the murky water, they realized that there was not only the one white shoe, but there were two black shoes that seemed to be floating right next to it. And even more ominously, right next to the black shoe appeared to be a Cub Scout cap floating in the water. Fearing that these shoes and this hat belonged to the boys, Steve Jones immediately jumped to the conclusion that the boys had fallen into the bayou and probably drowned. So he and Denver Reed immediately called West Memphis PD Dispatch and requested assistance from the West Memphis Police Department. After Officer Jones calls requesting additional assistance, Detective Mike Allen and Officer Phillips are radioed by the West Memphis Police Department to report to the North end of Macaulay. They are dispatched at one fourteen PM and arrive at that location at one sixteen PM after being notified that a tennis shoe has been reported floating in a creek just north of the ten mile bayou. We happen to have audio of Mike Allen describing that discovery. Detective Allen, about what time did you begin your search efforts that morning? Approximately. Approximately. A few minutes after eight o'clock. Okay. And ⁓ at some point in your searching did you receive ⁓ some dispatch or some need to go ⁓ to another area? I was informed ⁓ to go to the area of the end of it's West Macaulay. The north end of West Macaulay, the dead end. When you got to that area, what if anything unusual did you see in the in the creek? I was pointed out a I observed what appeared to be two small tennis chews floating in the s in the creek. Detective Allen realizes that he needs to further investigate this shoe and he is looking for a place that he can safely go into this creek. It is too steep where he originally sees the shoe and he walks down to where he thinks that he can cross and perhaps just lean in and pick up this shoe. But that does not happen. Yeah. Unfortunately, he comes down to the edge of the creek and he realizes that the shoe is just out of reach. And so he starts looking for a place where he can ford across. Unfortunately the water's a couple of feet deep roughly. He doesn't want to get wet. And so he starts looking around and when he looks over to the east bank, he notices that there is a tree and it's got a nice big crooked bend in the bottom of it. We call it the crooked tree. In fact, we named our podcast after it. He finds the crooked tree and he tries to reach over and grab it. And unfortunately, trying to pull himself across the creek, it doesn't work for him, and he falls down into the water. And we'll let Mike Allen tell the story from there. Now after seeing these tennis shoes, what did you do? I went ⁓ we were on top of an i the top of a bank there the I would say ten, fifteen foot down to the where the creek was. And ⁓ did you get in the water? Yes, sir, I did. Right. And after getting in the water, what did you find? My intentions were to reach get into the water and reach for the tennis chute, at which time ⁓ when I got into the water I I felt ⁓ I felt an object in the water, I raised my right foot up and the body floated to the surface of the water. Next time on Crooked Tree. Okay, we've a third body. Time is two fifty-nine PM. Five foot south of the second body. It's approximately five feet south of the second body. Northbound, head southbound. Feet are facing north, head facing south. this third body is also bound and tied in summer fashion. Mm.