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Episode 15: An Unbiased Profile · Crooked Tree: A West Memphis 3 Podcast

• Paul: Welcome to Crooked Tree, a West Memphis 3 podcast. Today we'll be discussing the murders of children. The details are graphic. Please use caution when listening and make sure there are no children present. On May 4th, 1993, Todd Moore and Michael were driving on the service road when they passed by Robin Hood Hills. Michael asked his father if he knew about Robin Hood Hills, to which Todd replied that he would ride his motorcycle there when he was young. Michael stated that he had heard The older kids talk about Robin Hood Hills. Todd told Michael that he was to stay out of there because it was overgrown with brush. On may sixth, nineteen ninety-three, the bodies of the three boys were found in the creek in Robin Hood Hills. ⁓ Hello, everybody. Welcome back. My name is Paul Day, victim advocate for Christopher Byers. I'm here with Kristen Rich, criminologist. And today we are going to be talking about profiles and the West Memphis PD's interest in getting a profile for this case. This is not an area of the case that I am particularly strong being a scientist. My focus is usually on physical things, rocks, evidence, things like this. When it comes to these kinds of things, I've always relied heavily on Kristen's expertise. her experience and her many years of education on the topic. Kristen, you ready to dive into this profile episode that I think is going to really open people's eyes about this case? Yeah, I'm really excited. This is something that does pique my interest, always has. And so it's interesting on every case I've looked at to see what kind of profiles pop up if there's an unknown offender. And I'm always fascinated by how they get to That profile? Like what is it that speaks to them about the crime scene, about the victims, about the evidence that they find, the time of day, the location, all of those things form what they give the police department as a profile, and it just fascinates me that they can understand all of those clues and tell a police department who to look for. We've had the chance to go over these documents to see what is going to be discussed in this. And I have to admit that a lot of the information, the science in this information is Sophisticated. It's extremely interesting. There's very good crime statistics behind it. And so I'm looking forward to you and explaining the science that's implicit in a lot of the things that these guys are gonna do. But with that said, I'm going to be a decided second chair this episode because without a doubt, this is definitely what Kristen is going to shine at. And I think you're gonna be impressed with what she's got to say. Thank you. I think as a basis for understanding what the West Symphys Police Department was facing, we should read a newspaper article that explains what's going on at that time. As you know, we've covered several suspects already. They've been canvassing neighborhoods, talking to people, pulling people in for interviews. They've obviously processed the crime scene, sent evidence to the lab, they're waiting on a reply from the medical examiner's office, all these things. And They don't have any really good leads. They don't have any suspects. So they're kind of at a loss as to what to do next. And this is detailed in an article in the commercial appeal. So we're gonna read that for you. So this article, which was published on May the eighth, nineteen ninety-three, is entitled Autopsies Show Three Died of Multiple Blows to the Head. West Memphis gets extra help in hunt for a suspect. And before we get started, We'll have this posted to our Facebook group and we'll probably also have a link to it on our X account because this is mandatory reading for anybody interested in this West Memphis 3 case. So let's jump right into it. Three West Memphis boys found dead Thursday in a slow moving creek were killed by multiple head blows. The police's lead investigators said Friday. Weaver Elementary School second graders Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore are disappeared Wednesday evening while riding bikes near the so called Robin Hood Park, a boggy woods near the ten mile bayou. The kids' hands and feet were bound, said Inspector 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, bringing in teams of trace evidence technicians and serologists. Doctor Frank Peretti, a forensic pathologist with the Crime Lab's Medical Examiner's office, Completed the autopsies about 1 PM. Now, just as a side note, this 1 PM would have been Friday, May the 7th at 1 PM. At 4 PM, he issued a statement that said, quote, all three children died of multiple injuries. West Memphis police were still pouring over the crime scene Friday and canvassed 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 fifty yards away in the bayou. Gitchell said the three boys died, quote, 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. Governor Jim Guy Tucker offered Friday to bring the weight of the state's law enforcement power to bear on the case. Quote, 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, and the Memphis Police Department, and the FBI. For now, West Memphis police have declined an offer for more detectives from the state police, Gitchell said, but he said he might accept the offer later. Quote, we've got fifteen people on this now, and if we get too many, we'll be tripping over each other, he said. Colonel Tommy Goodwin, commander of the state police, said he called West Memphis Chief of Police, Bobby Sanders, shortly after the bodies were discovered. Quote, 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 twelve troopers and investigators assigned to the Eastern Arkansas District. We're an assisting agency. If they need anything, we'll give it to them, Goodwin said. The FBI's behavioral sciences experts in Quantico, Virginia. Are also being briefed on the details of the crime, Gitchell said, so that federal psychologists may develop a profile of the killer or killers. The West Memphis case has attracted the attention of departments throughout 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 forty. Quote, We have some major trucking in the nation going through here. Gitchell said. He said his detectives have not ruled out the possibility they are looking for hitchhikers, truckers, nearby residents, anybody. Quote, 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 three hundred phone tips since Thursday and that the reward funds. had swelled to six thousand dollars by Friday. The article at this point talks about a couple of local residents, and we've mentioned some of these in other contexts, so we're gonna go ahead and skip past them and go right down to the next relevant part where it says Jim Clark, director of the crime lab in Little Rock, said as the autopsies were underway, quote, 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 fieldwork done on the evidence, quote, making sure we have all the right exposures and all, Clark said. And that's the end of the article. Like I said, this is one of the most important articles. This is a primer on the whole case and how it's set up early on. And there's a lot of information that explains the architecture of how the West Memphis PD is working with other groups, what they're relying on, what information they're expecting and We've already been covering some of the suspects that they've been looking at this weekend, but they've been doing this organically without any profile, without anything. This is just coming from leads and they're just pushing into the neighborhood and getting whatever information they can. Aaron And at this point, they really do need help. They're kind of floundering as to what to do next, who to look at, and they need some direction. So they are going to turn to the FBI, and they specifically talked about that in the article. They're going to request a profile of the offender or offenders from the behavioral analysis unit in Quantico, Virginia. So I want to talk a little bit about the things that they look for at the behavioral analysis unit. I am not a profiler. I would not pretend to be. I would not attempt to make a profile in this case. The main reason is because I know too much about it. And I didn't know enough about it when I started to even attempt something like that, even as an amateur. So when I was learning about it, I learned too much about the case in order to have an unbiased profile of the case. It's just not something you can do. But the people in Quantico will be sent basic information. It's the facts. That's what they get. It's the facts. And then they can make a summary and point them to someone that they think might be a likely offender in the case. So behavioral analysis is kind of a combination of psychology, criminology, and sociology. all things that I find super fascinating. So they look at the crime scene. They want to know every little piece of information that they can find out about the crime scene, what's present at the crime scene, what's missing from the crime scene, you know, the exact location, the environment at the crime scene, all of those details. And then they also ask for victimology. They want to know as much as they can find out about their victims. And if there's anything that would lead them to be susceptible To an event like this? Do they have some sort of behavior that would make them more susceptible than other like eight-year-olds that they would end up being horrifically murdered? And they also want to know like their personalities and that kind of thing. Are they susceptible to talking to strangers? To are they overly friendly? Are they shy? Do they not want to talk to adults? Do they get along well with kids but not adults? They get along well with adults, but not other kids. All of these things factor into how they decide who the offender might be. And then the last one is the psychological profiling. So based on what they see from all of the evidence that they are presented with by a police department, some of those things can tell them specific things about the offender. So for example, just one example, I think if anybody's into true crime, this is pretty well established. If an offender hides a victim, it can mean one of a couple things, right? Either they want time to get away before A victim is found. It can mean that they're showing remorse if a victim is covered, for example. It often indicates remorse, which would indicate someone that knows the victim. And it can indicate that the offender is a local to the area and is trying to put distance between themselves and the crime. They want the victim or victims to be discovered as far into the future as possible. And that is why they would attempt to conceal a body. So those are just the kinds of things they can look at and go, ⁓ this is what this means. So like I said, in that example, typically if someone is concealed, if a victim is concealed, it often not always, but it often means that the perpetrator knew the victim or victims. And what about with respect to injuries to the victims themselves? For example, in this case, it is revealed on May the seventh at four o'clock in the statement that the boys didn't die of drowning. They died of trauma to their heads. They were beaten to death before they were put into the creek. So that seems to be indicative of I mean, I will just tell you in my novice opinion, I would look at that and say, I don't see this as something that a mom would do or a sister would do. This is something that a very strong certainly have to be strong enough to be able to do this to grab the kids and make this happen, but also to bludgeon them in this way requires a lot of strength and a lot of authority, it seems to me, but what do you say? Yeah, and actually that's where I was going to go next. ⁓ if you listen to a QA we did a while ago, there was a question in there about profiling and I answered that question. So we talked just a little bit, not in a regular episode, but in that QA about profiling, but a brief history is that the FBI started interviewing serial predators, mainly serial killers, back in the seventies, and they were trying to gather information about what types of individuals commit what types of crime, how their minds work, all of that. So The FBI through the Bureau of Justice Statistics also compiles statistics every year on major felonies, which obviously includes murder. And so those are really interesting because you can look at the trends year over year and it breaks down things like that. So I'm gonna answer your question in a second because it's actually in the statistics that I was looking up about murders of juveniles. So I just pulled a report. From the Office of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which is a section of the US Department of Justice, in a September 2004 report on the trends in murders of juveniles from 1980 to 2000. So I just want to give you some of the information that is in that report that I think is relevant to this case. I hope y'all like statistics as much as I do. Interestingly, of juveniles that were murdered in the United States during those years, the peak was actually in nineteen ninety three. And that was two thousand eight hundred and eighty children were murdered in the United States in nineteen ninety three. And that was the peak year from nineteen eighty to two thousand. So in twenty years, the peak was in nineteen ninety three. So the peak is right in the middle of nineteen ninety three, which is when these kids were killed, is in the middle of this swell of child murders that are moving across the country. Yes. That's astonishing. Isn't it? I I it like it gave me goosebumps. It's fascinating and horrifying at the same time. In nineteen ninety three, one in eight persons murdered, that's twelve percent in the United States was a juvenile. That's a horrific ⁓ statistic. And it says then that that proportion remained the same through nineteen ninety nine and then it began to drop. So for six years the juvenile homicide rate stayed the same. Juveniles younger than 12 comprised forty-two percent of juvenile murder victims between nineteen eighty and two thousand. Males accounted for sixty-seven percent of all juvenile murder victims, and seventy-seven percent of murder victims were ages twelve to seventeen. So ours obviously are in that younger category. In nineteen eighty, forty-one percent were killed with a firearm. By nineteen ninety-three, it had increased to sixty-one percent. So in the year our boys lost their lives, 61% of juveniles died by firearms. This is an absolutely horrible year to be a kid. Yes. And we were kids then. The large increase in the number of juveniles murdered between 1980 and 1993 resulted from more male than female homicides. During this period, the juvenile male homicide rate increased 117%. The increase in the murder rate For black juveniles was far greater than the increase for white juveniles. And of course that also varies based on location as well. Children ages two to eleven accounted for twenty two percent of the juvenile murder victims between nineteen eighty and two thousand. So our boys fit right in that category. And it seems to me, if my memory is correct, in nineteen ninety three there was a big upswell in gang related activity that was Predominantly affecting black males at that time. Yes. Yes, you are correct. I kind of concentrated on the statistics that applied to our situation in nineteen ninety three with Christopher, Stevie, and Michael, but there was a huge jump because of gang related activities for African Americans as well as Hispanics, males in the United States. Between nineteen eighty and two thousand, offenders in twenty six percent of murders of juveniles were unknown. So that means seventy four percent were known. To the victim. In cases in which murders of juveniles were identified by law enforcement, 38% were family members, 47% were acquaintances, and only 15% were strangers. Adolescents were far more likely to be murdered by family members than were juveniles younger than the age of 12. So they're talking about 13 to 18 were more likely to be murdered by a family member. And this pattern was most pronounced for male. Juveniles in the category of the known offenders. For males ages zero to eleven, family members as the perpetrators comprised 66% of the murders of males between the ages zero and eleven. Acquaintances were twenty-nine percent of that group, and only five percent were strangers. So if you want to take these statistics and apply them to our case, you're looking at a family. or an acquaintance is the most likely perpetrator to have murdered Christopher Stevie and Michael. The idea that it's a stranger, that's you're in the five percent category. So this is the origin of the idea of look close to the families, look at who they're close to, work your way out from that work through their social circles, right? Yeah. Because we hear that all the time in true crime or in any type of investigation. They always start with the You know, if the wife dies at home and it looks like a robbery, they still interrogate the husband. And you know, he might have made it look like a robbery, you know, that kind of thing. So they gotta clear him before they move to the next level out. So that's interesting. Yeah. So the juveniles with known offenders between nineteen eighty and two thousand, seventy five percent of those murders were committed by an adult, twenty one percent by a juvenile. And then there was an interesting group, four percent were murdered by a group that included at least one juvenile and at least one adult. Between nineteen eighty and two thousand, juvenile offenders were involved in eleven percent of the murders of juveniles ages two to eleven. So kids killing kids in eleven percent of these cases. But the overwhelming majority if I'm right is adults. These are grown ups, adults, people known to the kids that usually kill the kids. Yes. Yeah. And it's interesting. I didn't even know they gathered this kind of statistic, but it's interesting because it absolutely applies to our case. That in those years for juveniles, ⁓ kids under the age of eighteen, in those murders where there were multiple victims, that's seventeen point nine percent of cases, which really shocked me. That was a an interesting statistic. And in those cases where there were multiple offenders, that made up ten point four percent of all cases. So I thought that it would be far lower for multiple victims. I did not think that that percentage would be almost eighteen percent. Well if the country is in the grips of gang warfare at that time, that might make sense for some of those numbers, right? Yes. I think it's inner city kids killing other inner city kids. I mean I remember living in Southern California in nineteen ninety three and it was dangerous. Yeah. And this next statistic applies to all murders, not just juvenile murders. And this is from a different report. I've just included it here at the end because I think some of these statistics are pretty interesting. But those same years, nineteen eighty to two thousand, where there was a male offender and a male victim that comprised sixty-seven point eight percent of cases. A male offender killing a male victim, a female offender killing a male victim comprised nine percent of all cases. And I only pulled those because all of our victims are male, so I only looked at Male and female offenders and only male victims. But there's statistics for, you know, every possible category. But your question at the beginning of this was we're probably not looking at a mom. And you're right. We're probably not looking at a mom. Nine percent of the murders in those twenty years had a female offender and a male victim. Eighty-four percent of white victims were killed by a white offender, and ninety-three percent of black victims were killed by a black offender. So they really stay on racial line for the most part in these twenty years that we're looking at. As far as a victim knowing an offender, fifty-six percent knew or had some tie to their killer, and twenty-two percent were killed by a family member. That's a big number. ⁓ twenty-two percent. Homicides committed by a non intimate family member. So not a spouse, not a girlfriend, boyfriend, non intimate. Homicides committed by a non intimate family member were more likely to involve weapons other than guns. So if it's a family member, a brother, a sister, a parent, non-intimate, they use things such as knives, blunt objects, or some other personal weapon. And I found that to be pretty interesting. And then the last one I want to mention is that children killed by parents were the second most frequent type of family homicide. That broke my heart to read that. Like when you're talking about People in a family killing each other. Parents killing children were the second most frequent murders of children by a parent accounted for an increasing number of family homicides, regardless of race. So if we were to just kind of sit back and say, who is the person based on these statistics that likely killed Christopher, Stevie, and Michael? It's gonna be somebody who's Caucasian, probably male, somewhere twenty, thirty, forty years old, something like that, known to them. I don't have age statistics. It didn't include like age ranges for the murders of the juveniles in that article. But it would also be somebody who's known to them most likely. Or at least they have an acquaintancehip with them. Yes. Right. So this is just us looking at stats and just putting this is not a profile. This is just the numbers telling you what the numbers are. This is exactly what the West Memphis PD was requesting from the FBI. But the FBI said for us to produce a profile, there's some information we need from you. We need a case summary. We need to know what you know. We need to know about the victims. We need to know about the victims' families. And we would also like to get the medical examiner's reports so that we could see what happened to the victims so we could put together a profile. And undoubtedly they're looking at these same statistics that Kristen just went over and saying what seems to fit most likely here where that would direct this investigation. Because remember, this investigation is organic. They're going door to door. They're asking anybody on the street. They're looking for transients. They're looking for people at the Blue Beacon. They're doing everything they can to find out what happened here and they're just responding to leads that are coming in. And if you want to go on offense, you need some kind of profile. You need some type of direction to go or an idea to follow. And so that's what they're doing here. They're going to make this request. And I guess we're going to dig into this. Anybody who's ever researched the West Memphis III case immediately comes across the fact that profiles have been produced, but they usually don't see the FBI profile. Instead what they do is they see a profiles done by either defense team experts or somebody associated with the case after this thing is done. The profile that we're gonna be covering today is different. It's not a profile that is where the expert has been hired by a certain group to provide an opinion. Whether that opinion is biased or not is completely another issue. The real question is is what is the nature of the profile we're talking about today? So within the police department, and as you heard in that article that Paul read, even publicly Inspector Gitchell is saying, we're asking the FBI for help. We're going to ask them to give us a profile to give us some direction. And that's where they're going to go with this. Before that could possibly even occur, they are handed an unbiased profile from someone that they didn't ask for it. Someone who's highly qualified to give a profile and it may or may not help them. We will see. And we're going to go over that profile with you guys. It is the only unbiased profile in this case. It is the only profile that was produced prior to any arrest. And so it is absolutely one hundred percent the expertise of this individual looking at the facts of the case and giving his opinion on who the police department should be looking for. But before we do that, we are going to cover A document sent to the FBI to Quantico, Virginia, from the West Memphis Police Department requesting help with this case. So the following document was submitted by the West Memphis PD to assist with the production of the FBI's profile. This would have been submitted on May the seventh, nineteen ninety-three, so that Friday, and it looks like it was sent sometime after the medical examiner had given their statement because the contents of that statement are included in this. Summary So we're gonna go ahead and read this summary. For the information of the Bureau and the Behavior Science Unit, the following is a summary regarding the investigation of the murders of captioned victims. Branch, Byers, and Moore were last seen riding two bicycles towards a wooded area known as Robin Hood Hill. This wooded area is located at the dead end of Macaulay Street and north of the ten mile bayou in West Memphis, Arkansas. The last time of sighting was about six PM may fifth, nineteen ninety three. The victims were reported missing by their parents at approximately eight ten PM on may fifth, nineteen ninety three, at which time a search was initiated. At about one hundred thirty PM may sixth, nineteen ninety three, the body of Byers was located by a West Memphis police detective after he sighted a black tennis shoe located in a creek approximately sixty yards south of Interstate fifty five. Byers' body was submerged in approximately two to three feet of water. Byers' hands and feet were bound by shoestrings from the tennis shoes, and he had an obvious trauma wound. to his left forehead. Branch and Moore's bodies were located submerged approximately five feet from Byers. Both Branch and Moore were bound in the same manner as Byers. Branch had an obvious gouge wound to his left cheek. Moore had been obviously castrated. However, no other signs of external injury could be located. All three victims were nude when located. All clothing belonging to the victims, to including shirts, shoes, pants, and underwear was located in the creek in close proximity to the victims. A crime scene search failed to locate any traces of blood or other evidence which would lead investigators to believe that the victims had been murdered in the area where their bodies were located. A fingerprint and several tennis shoe prints were located in the mud near the site. Two plaster repairs castings were successfully made from the shoe prints, and the earth containing the fingerprint was removed from the area. The creek was drained to attempt to locate any physical evidence at the bottom with negative results. The two bicycles belonging to two of the victims were located, submerged in approximately five feet of water about fifty yards away in a body of water known as the ten mile bayou. The creek where the victims were located flows into the ten mile bayou. The victims were removed from the scene at approximately four thirty PM may sixth, nineteen ninety three, and taken to the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, Little Rock, Arkansas for analysis. To date, the analysis has determined that a knife with a serrated edge was used to castrate more, a hammer. or a round object was used to create trauma to the head of all three victims. Byers and Branch were alive when placed in the water and died as a result of drowning. Branch appears to have marks on his penis which would indicate that oral sex had been performed on him. There is a possibility that Byers may have been injected by a hypodermic needle. A dark colored hair, most likely Caucasian, was located on the buttock of one victim and the neck area of another. Forensic analysis is still being conducted And any additional information will be forwarded to the behavioral science unit. The Arkansas Medical Examiner also advised that evidence would tend to indicate that the victims had been struck with a belt containing studs or a raised surface. The report then goes on to give physical descriptions of the three boys, and then it continues with the following. After being advised of the aforementioned facts, the agent, whose name is redacted, stated that the behavioral science unit would assist local authorities by conducting a profile analysis reference captioned. matter. FBI laboratory assistance has been offered. However, at this time all evidence is being handled by the Arkansas State Police Crime Laboratory, Little Rock, Arkansas. For information of the Bureau, the Little Rock Division has received numerous news media inquiries, reference captioned matter. The Little Rock Division will continue to coordinate this matter between the West Memphis Police Department and the Behavioral Science Unit. Investigation continuing. Well they sent the behavioral science unit A lot of information and I will try not to be too hard on them because this was the day after the discovery of Christopher, Stevie, and Michael, but they got a lot wrong in this report. Let's talk about that. So the first most eye opening mistake that they make is they said that the first body they found was that of Christopher Byers. That is absolutely incorrect. The first body they located, of course, was that of Michael Moore. If you remember all the way back in episode five, we played the recording of Gary Gitchell reporting Michael Moore being put up onto the bank and a he actually identified him as Michael Moore. So the mistake came after the bodies were removed from the creek. Yeah, it seems that that mistake originated with the medical examiner's office. In some of their documents, you will see if you ever look at those, they have his name written with facts about the autopsy and the findings there listed for Christopher Byers, when it in fact was Michael Moore, th somehow they had that mix up and it continued for a little while before they eventually did correct that and label the bodies correctly. And just as a side note, anybody who's investigating this case today, looking at forensic reports, hair analysis, DNA reports, a lot of those still have the bodies misidentified where they came from. So you'll see something that it says, ⁓ this is coming from this part of the body of Michael Moore. And it's not. They're talking about Christopher Byers. So you have to know to make that correction. And they don't always make it explicit. And if you're looking at those documents, like the way that we figured it out and it took some doing having to go back and relabel the reports correctly, is that each of our victims was assigned a number, a victim number. And so sometimes on the documents it only lists the number. But it says Christopher Byers is this number, Michael Moore is this number, Stevie Branch is this number. So if you look at the document, it'll say Michael Moore and it'll be Christopher's number. So then you know they've got the wrong kid. And so then you can correct it yourself and go, ⁓ this is actually Michael Moore. This is not Christopher. ⁓ but you have to be very careful when you're looking at those documents because there was this mix-up that persisted for a little while before they fixed it. So a lot of those early documents, they are confusing Michael Moore with Christopher Byers. So the next one is obviously that branch and more, they mean buyers and branch were located five feet from Byers, which is actually Michael Moore. So they weren't five feet apart. They were what about twenty five feet apart? Yeah. They were twenty seven feet away from Michael Moore. And then those two were five feet apart, but there was a twenty seven foot gap. all the way up to Michael, up to the north, who was upstream. So that is definitely a problem. The other issue that I noticed was that they give the discovery credit to the West Memphis PD. They're implying it goes to Mike Allen. They completely omit that Steve Jones looked down and identified the shoes and got the attention of search and rescue who then notified West Memphis PD. They're taking full credit for this that they found the shoes, they found the body, it's all them. And this carries over to some newspaper articles at the time where they completely omit Steve Jones. Yeah, Inspector Gitchell says it was one of his officers that located the shoe in the newspaper. Yeah, he said that he was being inquisitive and he jumped in and made this discovery. The reason why they have suppressed Steve Jones as being the discoverer, nobody knows. It's always been a mystery. He was kind of a shadowy figure during this entire investigation. And people researching this case have always at scratched their head why was he omitted from this? He's the guy that found the shoe. That led to the discovery and he's completely omitted. We may have said it before, but we would refer you to the testimony of Mike Allen at trial that it was Steve Jones who made the discovery and his word is good enough for me. So then there's more confusion with they say that Moore had obviously been castrated. That is obviously Christopher Byers and not Michael Moore. They also said that all the clothing belonging to the victims, including shirts, shoes, pants, and underwear, was located. It was not. No, only one pair of underwear was found and one sock was found. The other five socks were not found. And the other two pairs of underwear were not found. That's a big deal if you're trying to put together a profile. Yes. Yeah, because we know that a lot of killers, depending on their motivation, take trophies, right? So is that underwear missing because the perpetrator took it? And if you tell the behavioral analysis unit that it's all there, they can't use that in their profile. Yeah, and there's a question of course if whether or not the castration resulted in a trophy from that. That's something that's going to play a major role in the trials that are going to come from this. And it's actually an open discussion, right? That part of Christopher Byers was never located. So what's really interesting to me is some of the observations that they include in this report that is not public knowledge. For example, this critical line, a crime scene search, failed to locate any traces of blood. So they didn't see any blood at the crime scene at all. or other evidence which would lead investigators to believe that the victims had been murdered in the area where their bodies were located. So they located no blood. And it seems that they're leaning towards the interpretation that this is a dump site, at least at this point on May 7th. Now this might be a little premature. There's different ways to go out and study this, but at this point they're not seeing any physical drops of blood on any leaves, on any banks or anything like this. There is testimony that suggests that there's blood in the water, but we also know that these bodies were bleeding. We've seen the crime scene photos Some of the stuff is not public and there's definitely blood associated with the removal of these children from the water. They mentioned that a knife with a serrated edge was used to castrate more. Obviously they mean Christopher Byers, not Michael Moore. And they've already come to this conclusion a day after the boys had been found and with initial analysis from the state examiner's office that a knife with a serrated edge was used. That would they didn't find a knife with a serrated edge at the crime scene. This would also indicate to them, or at least that's how they interpreted it, that this was done off site before the bodies were placed in the ditch. They're jumping to a lot of conclusions here early on that may or may not be accurate. Yeah. So they're asking the FBI to generate a profile based upon some likely poor assumptions that will be questioned later on. Right. Your profile is only as good as the information you give the profiler, right? So if your information is biased, if you've already come to some conclusions, These aren't just facts that they should be giving the profiler. They're already making assumptions. They're determining what they believe happened based on the little information that they have and they're passing that along to a profiler expecting an accurate profile of their offender. And that's not helpful. Yeah. They're also interpreting one of the murder weapons as a hammer or a rounded object or a round object to create the head trauma that all three victims had experienced. So you've got a hammer. Any suspect that's gonna have a hammer in their house, they're gonna be going right for that hammer. If they have a serrated blade or if they're somebody who collects knives of any type, they're gonna be a target of their investigation. Somebody who might have some type of s sexual misconduct or some type of criminal behavior, you know, a rapist or something like this, is somebody they're gonna have a deep interest in. The revelation that Steve Branch has a mark on his penis that they interpret very quickly as being indicative of some type of sex crime. is new information. The public does not have this information. And of course this idea that Byers, who we know is actually Michael Moore, may have been injected by a hypodermic needle, then all of a sudden you're asking yourself all kinds of questions. Why a hypodermic needle and what is the evidence for this? Right. And where is it? Where's this puncture? You know, th there's not much information, but the information they give is alarming. Yeah. And later on we would never see any evidence of a hypodermic needle. We know that, you know, again, we're piercing the the fog of the investigation a little bit by telling you that. So they're giving some information to the FBI that might not be useful for getting an accurate profile of this killer. But some of the stuff is very interesting and new information. And at least you get the idea of what they are thinking is going on with these kids. They clearly see that in their opinion, some type of sex crime that has occurred here. Yeah. And then they mentioned that there's evidence that tends to indicate that the victims have been struck with a belt containing studs or a raised surface. The picture you do get is that they're abducted, they're taken somewhere, they're assaulted physically, maybe sexually, they're beaten, maybe even some kind of torture, and then put into the creek. That's kind of what this report is saying to me. Yeah, and that somehow the castration occurred somewhere else and the underwear and possibly the removed body part was taken by the killer. So there's another fax transmission that is a general summary of the case that they sent out that day. And all the information that's in it is in the one that Paul just read you. So we're not going to go over that one again. But those are some facts, the way they're interpreted by the Medical Examiner's Office and the West Memphis Police Department. So we talked about that at the beginning, the things that need to be sent to a profiler in order for them to create their profile. So that's the first one. That's about the crime scene. That's what they found. That's the way they're currently interpreting what they found. The next thing that they need is victimology. They need to understand who these victims were. Yeah. And so we happen to have the victimology reports from the FBI that were used presumptively to start preparing for the production of a profile. And they've got really good information that most of the public doesn't know about three of these boys. Some of them are very eye opening and some of them are, you know, it makes you really feel connected to these boys in a way that the public in the past probably hasn't experienced. We'll go ahead and we'll read these for you because there's a lot of information in here and it gives you an idea of not only how the investigators were thinking, but how we're thinking about this crime. So the first child we're going to read the report for is for James Michael Moore. And I just want to say this as a side note, if you ever go and visit any of these children, Their gravesites are still there. When you go to look for Michael Moore, you have to ask the person that's going to direct you there for James Michael Moore to be able to locate him. He was born on july twenty seventh, nineteen eighty four, and ⁓ Michael Moore attended kindergarten at Richland Elementary School in West Memphis and then transferred to Weaver Elementary when the family moved back to the house on East Barton. Michael Moore liked to watch television and preferred action movies, ninja turtle cartoons, and the Nickelodeon Children's Stations. Michael was very active in the Cub Scouts, and his father was the troop leader. Michael's favorite hobbies were bicycle riding and playing Nintendo television games. Sounds just like me as a little kid. Michael liked school, however, he suffered from attention deficit disorder, ADD, and was extremely hyperactive. Due to his hyperactivity, Michael had problems concentrating at school, and as a result, his grades were average. Michael was described as being a quote class clown. And his parents received numerous telephone calls from Michael's teachers because they had problems getting him to do his work. His parents attended several parent teacher meetings to discuss Michael's problems in school. Michael took the medicine Ritalin for his hyperactivity, and when Michael took the medication regularly, it seemed to help control his problem. Michael is described as having a very outgoing personality and made friends very easily. His favorite color was blue, and he liked pizza and ramen noodles. God, I love this kid. Michael was very scared of the dark, and his parents were constantly struggling with him concerning keeping his room clean. Michael got along with the other kids and adults in his neighborhood. There were a couple of thirteen or fourteen year old boys who picked on him occasionally, however, not any serious harassment. Michael had been told by his parents that he was forbidden to play in Robin Hood Hills and was assigned a boundary. Michael couldn't play past the end of Weaver Street, and he had to be home before the streetlights came on at night. Michael had attended a program at school by the McGruff. Crime dog during which the children have been taught what to do if approached by a stranger. Unfortunately the next person is redacted, but it's almost certainly one of the parents of Michael Moore. So this parent did not like Michael Moore playing with Christopher Byers, also a victim in the homicides, due to the fact that and then unfortunately the next line and a half is redacted. So Blank felt that Christopher Byers was a good boy, and then it's redacted again, so we don't know what this information is. Then it goes on to say Michael and Steve Branch Third victim in the homicides were very good friends, and in addition, Michael also played with a name is redacted, resides on fourteenth Street in West Memphis. Steve Branch had a crush, and then it's redacted, but we know who this is. This is Don Moore. And due to this was constantly playing at the Moore House. And then last paragraph is extremely telling for this crime. On May 4th, 1993, Todd Moore and Michael were driving on the service road when they passed by Robin Hood Hills. Michael asked his father if he knew about Robin Hood Hills, to which Todd replied that he would ride his motorcycle there when he was young. Michael stated that he had heard the older kids talk about Robin Hood Hills. Todd told Michael that he was to stay out of there because it was overgrown with brush. On May sixth, nineteen ninety-three, the bodies of the three boys were found in the creek in Robin Hood Hills. And that is the end of the victimology report for Michael Moore. So let's jump over to Christopher Byers. Kristen, you're gonna read that for us? Yeah, Christopher's full name is Christopher Mark Byers. He was born on june twenty-third, nineteen eighty-four in Memphis, Tennessee. Christopher Byers liked to watch television, and one of his favorite shows was the weekly cartoon The Simpsons. Christopher also enjoyed watching afternoon cartoons after school and liked to color in coloring books. Christopher liked to ride his bicycle and skateboard with his brother, Ryan. They have a pool in their backyard, and Christopher had become a very accomplished swimmer. He was very athletic and played t ball. In a local league for the past three years. Christopher liked to throw baseball in the yard with his brother and enjoyed playing outdoors with his remote control race cars. Christopher Byers was a second grader at Weaver Elementary School in West Memphis and was described as a problem student. Christopher had attention deficit disorder, ADD, and was extremely hyperactive. He had problems concentrating in the classroom and was a disciplinary problem for his teachers. Christopher was taking the medication Ritalin for his hyperactivity, however, it did not seem to be helping. When Christopher's physician changed his medication to Dexatrine, his performance in school improved. Christopher was an average student and most of his report cards contained Cs with a few Bs. His conduct report was usually fifty fifty, with half of the marks being satisfactory and the other half stating that he needs improvement. Christopher liked school and was very seldom late in the mornings. Every day after school he would do his homework, and his father, Mark, would help him with his spelling lesson. His parents had told Christopher on numerous occasions to stay out of Robin Hood Hills and And Christopher had never mentioned playing or seeing any strangers there. Christopher had attended a program at school with the McGruff Crime Dog, during which the children were taught what to do if approached by a stranger. His parents had told Christopher that if he was ever confronted by a stranger, he should run to a neighbor's house or run home. His parents told Christopher that if he couldn't run from the stranger, he should yell and scream as loud as he could. Christopher's favorite colors were red and blue. However, He liked to wear clothes that were brown and tan because his parents had told him those colors matched his eyes and hair. Christopher was not allowed to ride his bicycle near the intersection of fourteenth Street and Broadway in West Memphis, due to the fact that his parents felt that it was an area where the bad part of town started. Several boys with the last name of redacted, who resided on Holiday Circle would pick on Christopher on occasions, so his parents told him to stay away from them. And then it says the boys ranged in age and it has the age of redacted. Christopher would play quite a bit with Michael Moore, also a victim in the homicide. However, his parents attempted to discourage Christopher from playing with Michael. This was due to Michael also being very hyperactive, and it seemed that whenever Christopher and Michael played together, they always got into trouble. His parents advised that Michael Moore liked to play with fire, and that on one occasion set fire to his sister's bedroom. On another occasion, Michael started a fire in his backyard with gasoline. They felt that Michael was basically a good boy. He simply had a problem with his hyperactivity. Christopher liked the Cub Scouts, however, was not as involved in the organization as were the other two victims, Michael Moore and Steve Branch. Christopher also liked to play with a and it's redacted. To the best of his parents' knowledge, Christopher never had a problem with any adults or parents in the neighborhood. So when you hear about Christopher and Michael and knowing that these two guys are best buddies, right? What's interesting is that Mark and Melissa had concerns about Michael Moore's behavior, which is exactly the same description that Todd and Dana had about Christopher, right? So these two boys are ⁓ mirroring each other in a lot of ways, right? The hyperactivity, the fact that they were very social, they were very outgoing. It's really interesting to me. I think it's a little concerning that This is the only place we hear that Michael Moore had an issue with starting fires. That's not something his parents mentioned or that I've seen in any other documents besides this one. And that information comes out in talking about Christopher's victimology. And so that's really interesting to me. So that leaves us with one child yet to cover, and that of course is as they have him listed as Stephen Edward Branch. Of course, we refer to him as Steve or Stevie because his mom called him Stevie. But Stephen Edward Branch. Date of birth is november twenty sixth, nineteen eighty four, according to this report. Steve Branch, so they actually got it the way that his friends called him. Steve Branch attended first grade at Maddox Elementary and second grade at Weaver Elementary. Steve liked school at Maddox, however, at first he was not real fond of his second grade teacher at Weaver. Hey, Stevie, I'm there with you. I had troubles with some of my school teachers too. After an adjustment period, Steve made some friends and liked Weaver Elementary a little better. Steve Branch was an excellent student and has made the honor roll every semester he has been enrolled in the West Memphis School District. Steve Branch's favorite activities included bicycle riding, skateboarding, roller skating, swimming, weightlifting, and playing Nintendo television games. Steve liked to watch television and especially enjoyed martial arts movies and the Nickelodeon Children's Station. Steve's favorite color was purple. Steve spent the majority of his time with Michael Moore, also a victim in the homicide. Steve and Michael were very active in Cub Scouts, the next portion is redacted. Steve made friends very easily and never mentions any other children or adults who were harassing him. The next line, the names of the persons are redacted, but almost certainly this is Pam Hobbs and Terry Hobbs is who this is referring to. So Pam and Terry Hobbs never knew that Robinhood Hills existed until Stevie's body was found in the woods on may sixth, nineteen ninety three. Steve had never mentioned the area before, and his parents never knew that he had played there. Steve had attended a program at Weaver Elementary where McGruff, the crime dog, had given the children a lesson on what to do if they were ever approached by a stranger. His parents had told Steve that if a stranger ever approached him he was to run and if the stranger grabbed him, he should scream as loud as he could. His parents also told Steve that he should never accept candy or another item from a stranger. So they all did the McGruff crime thing. Is that still a thing, by the way? I don't think so, but I I could be wrong. Yeah, it was a big deal when I was a kid and I was sure it was a big deal into the nineteen nineties, but ⁓ I haven't seen anything about it in a while. Yeah, I think the victimology reports are really interesting and as Paul said before, y get a little bit more of an intimate view of our three victims, even more so than what we'd had talked about in the past and You feel a little bit more like you know them. And so it's just even more heartbreaking when you hear these reports and what kind of kids these were. And they just sounded like a lot of fun. I mean, a little mischievous, yeah. You know, Michael and Christopher were l were a little hyperactive, but it just sounds like they probably had a really good time together. And it's just heartbreaking that their lives were cut short. Yeah. These guys are peas in a pod. And what's really kind of interesting is on Stevie, for example, you know, we always hear him being described as like the shy kid that doesn't really know a whole lot of the neighborhood and this and the other. But when you look at the things he's into, I mean, he's eight years old, he's into weightlifting. And if you know anything about his family, and I've got the chance to talk to several of them, they are a very athletic family. And for him to be into that kind of stuff, wrestling and all this other stuff, those are a part of the culture that he was raised in. And so he's a tough kid. He's a smart kid. And I'm sure that Everybody just loved being around him. And you got these other two kids that just are magnetically attracted to each other because they have very similar personalities. And then you add Steve into the mix of this and you probably had the makings of a pretty fun afternoon for them. So now that we've gone through all three of the victimology reports, do you have any comments that you want to add on the value of victimology to a case? Yeah. There are a few things there that might be of use to a profiler. The fact that two of our three kids have ADD. might factor in somehow. They didn't have reported problems really with people in the neighborhood or adults. They did talk about Michael and Christopher being picked on by some of the kids in the neighborhood, but that sounds like just normal, everyday kids stuff. But their behavioral issues might indicate that if they were approached, attacked by someone, they might fight back. They seem to, you know, especially with like the behavioral problems in school, Maybe they talked a lot. Maybe they talked back to teachers. Maybe they were a little mouthy. We don't know specifically, but it might be that they would either fight back or that they might antagonize someone who approached them with ill will. ⁓ so those are things that they might look at in the profile. There's just the fact that they're eight year old little boys is probably enough. You know, they're not grown, they're not teenagers, they don't have the strength really to fight back against an adult offender or even an older teenager if that's who you're looking at. So I'm not sure how much is useful from the victimology for what was reported to them. But like I said, I'm not an expert in it. So I'm not sure what they took from that victimology report that they would have used in an offender profile. Well what I immediately start thinking about is the private conversations we've had with Chris's family, specifically with George and getting to know about Mark and One of the things that we know from people close to Chris and the family was that Chris would verbally stand his ground. And I don't think he cared who he was saying it to. He wasn't adverse to getting in trouble. When I was a kid, I didn't talk back that often because I didn't want the consequences. It doesn't sound like Chris was mindful of consequences. And maybe to a certain extent, Michael wasn't either. Maybe that's part of the ADHD symptoms that they were dealing with. But Chris, by all accounts, would just kind of Tell you to shove off if you had something that he didn't like to say and he was going to do what he was going to do. And that's how he was. Aaron And stating it that way might have been more helpful. I mean, that wasn't exactly spelled out in the victimology report that was sent to the FBI. So that might have been something that if they had literally said what you just said, might have weighed in on their offender profile. Trevor And my understanding and talking to Pam once about this, and she made it very clear that Stevie was also very, you know, aware of strangers and how to handle his business and he wasn't afraid of people. He wasn't like some scaredy cat, some shy kid. But he also wasn't a somebody that went out and looked for trouble. He was somebody that liked to be on the right side of people rather than the wrong side of people. And things got crazy, he just got out of there. So he was more street smart than people give him credit for. They usually look at Michael Moore and Christopher as being so the street smart kids and Stevie didn't have that type of experience. It that's almost certainly not true. All three of them just had different ways of manifesting it. It is interesting to me that they mentioned McGruff, a crime dog, and for all three boys in their victimology reports. The thing that really stood out to me and maybe to you too after I read you those statistics about homicides against juveniles, we know from those statistics that a huge percentage of children were killed by a family member or an acquaintance. And They're stressing in this victimology report that they learned from McGruff the crime dog and then reinforced by all of their parents that if you see a stranger, you run, you run to somebody you know, or you kick and you scream and you make a bunch of noise. What if it's someone you know? Do we teach our kids? Did they teach their kids what to do if someone you know approaches you and is acting wildly, is being inappropriate, is threatening you, is attempting to harm you, did they teach their kids what to do in that circumstance? And do all of us teach our kids what to do in that circumstance? And I think that's a huge part of what we should be looking at based on the statistics of what we know about the murders of juveniles, most of the time it's not a stranger, dangerous situation. It's somebody that they know. Yeah, and outside of the bullying or the harassment they might be getting from some of the older kids in the area, Christopher's older brother Ryan was quite popular, so that probably got Christopher a lot of social credit that Michael Moore didn't enjoy because Michael Moore's older sister, Dawn, was only a year older. She was nine or ten when this whole thing happened. So she didn't have that type of social credit like Ryan did. And certainly Stevie didn't have that type of thing. He's new to the area, relatively speaking. A lot of people didn't even know where he lived. They'd seen him a few times hanging out with Michael Moore previous to this. But for the most part he was a relative unknown because of either his moving around or just becoming a recent acquaintance of Michael Morris at that point. And of course it went from acquaintance to there were best friends within a month, is my understanding. So now the FBI has victimology. The FBI has some information from the medical examiner in the form of a quick description. They have a summary, but they don't have medical examiner's reports. They don't have any of the autopsy reports. They just have these kind of quick summary notes that they're getting from the West Memphis PD. And so obviously they have enough information to crank out a amazing profile that's going to solve this case super fast, right? That would be incorrect. I had hopes. I had hopes. I was praying for it this whole time. Yeah. So they've requested assistance from the FBI, specifically the behavioral analysis unit. They are looking for a profile to help them narrow down a list of suspects who they should be looking at. And they receive a document from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, which is from the FBI. And it is not a profile. What they receive in a fax on May the tenth. in a routine unclassified document according to the facts is two sets of documents, both entitled Behavioral Analysis Interview. So essentially they are sending a generic document or a set of documents that they provide police departments with on how to interview potential suspects. So no profile, just instructions on what you should be doing in the meantime or In lieu of a profile, or if you want to help us out further, this is how you ask your questions. We're gonna go over some of this stuff because it's interesting, at least to me and probably to some of you. When you read through interviews that they have with some of the people that they bring in, you will see some of these questions pop up. So it's interesting. They did learn something, maybe, take something from these documents they received from the FBI, but it's not the documents they asked for. They asked for an offender profile and they did not get one. So let's go through these interview questions that they recommend asking of persons of interest. So they say to start off with an innocuous question, just general information about the person, get them comfortable in that environment, and then ask them, Do you know why you're here? So that's an interesting question because if you're innocent, you might have no idea why you're here, or you might say something like I guess it's about those three homicides, but I don't know why you brought me in here. You know, someone who's gonna be deceptive might try to talk their way around it or be intentionally deceptive or try to be funny. The next one is they kinda start playing bad cop and they're like, Well, we we've looked at all these people, people have brought up your name several times. If you have anything to do with this, you should tell me right now. Just just go ahead and tell me. Confess. I don't know how often that works, but that's Number three on their list of things that they should ask. Then they ask about the victim if they know anything about the homicide, the victim, or if they think that there's anyone that they should be looking at as far as a suspect. So they're gonna ask the person in front of them who is a potential suspect who they think might have done it. So I mean you could get some leads that way and th and they certainly did in this case. That's happened several times, right, Paul? Yes, absolutely caused some chaos for a couple of Potential witnesses. Yep. Yeah. So then they they recommend that you ask the following questions and they want you to pay attention to their behavioral response. And they're talking about posture, body language, if they're nervous, anything that would indicate that maybe that they're being deceptive. So these questions are designed to elicit a physical response or even a verbal response. You know, some people will stutter, some people will sigh, some people will cough, they'll do a myriad of things to try to delay their response or they're trying to act normal and that you have got all this nervousness and they don't know how to get it out. So they're having some sort of a physical reaction. And so they want you to look for that. So that they want you to ask why do you think somebody would do this? Of the people that you know, is there anybody you believe would be above suspicion? That's an interesting question. They're not asking again who did it, but who do you think didn't do it? I not I don't know if I've ever seen that in an interview. Who do you think might have done it? There's that question again. This is a very, very popular one and was asked several times in this case. What do you think should happen to the person who did this? And we get a lot of interesting answers to that question. Yeah, this winds up on the West Memphis PD questionnaire. That very question does. Yeah. And they say that if the person that you're speaking to is innocent, they're going to give a very harsh punishment or what they did to the victim should be done to them, that kind of thing. You know, they deserve the death penalty. They should hang, they should rot in jail for the rest of their lives, something very punitive. And if the answer is everyone deserves a second chance, that's a red flag, right? That's not the answer to this question. Yeah. That's definitely a red flag, right? Yeah. Then do you ever think about Whatever the crime is, even though you didn't go through with it. So now they want to know their thoughts. You know, are you homicidal but you've never carried it out? Do you want to assault people but you've never carried it out? And I like it's close, cousin. We don't think you did it, but if you did, how would you have done it, right? Yes. Which they also ask in this case. All right, would you be willing to take a polygraph test to verify that what you've told me is the truth? And obviously the West Memphis Police Department conducted a number of polygraph examinations. And then the next one's basically like, if you took that polygraph, how do you think you would do? Do you think you would pass or do you think you would fail? Well, what's really interesting, I just want to interject this on the polygraph thing because it's really fascinating, is they're using the acceptance of the polygraph in and of itself as the polygraph. Yes. They have a note here that says the innocent usually is willing. The guilty begins making excuses such as they are not very reliable, et cetera. Exactly. And so if someone says, Those aren't admissible in court, are they? You know That person's probably trying to hide something. That's not a an acceptable response to that question. Did you discuss whatever the crime is with your family or close friends? And if we can identify the person who did this, do you think they should be given a second chance? There's that second chance question. So somebody who's guilty, somebody who's committed another crime, whether it's the same or a different offense, will often say, you know, yeah, they should get a second chance kind of thing. Whereas someone who's pretty much a law abiding citizen wants to throw the book at them. So this is a far cry from receiving a profile. This is instructions on how to proceed on your own. Yeah. Yeah. The next part is actually a little bit more interesting, I think. And they're telling them how to interpret the behavior of the person that they're speaking with. And so they talk about verbal behaviors. So words that are spoken, but also gestures, a nod, just saying yeah, shaking your head. And there's also nonverbal behaviors, which include eye contact, body posture, facial expressions, changing your speed, pitch, tone of voice, body movements. There are people who are nervous and they constantly tap their foot, or they just can't sit still, they're squirming in their chair. Those are the kinds of things that they want people to pay attention to when they're interviewing a potential suspect. So in that little section of behavior analysis you're talking about, there's a note by the FBI that they want you to read and it says Social scientists have said that we communicate thirty eight percent through tone of voice, fifty-five percent through physical reactions, this is eye contact, etc., and seven percent through verbal content of what we say. Most interviewers spend the majority of the interview taking notes on the verbal content and missing the ninety three percent of the communication that could help them determine the guilt or innocence of the suspect. So here I am, I'm a physical scientist, right? I deal with physical things. How do they know ninety three percent of communication? is nonverbal. Like how do they get those, you know, thirty-eight percent is that that kind of thing just always blows me away. Whether it's true or not, it's just interesting that this is a major part of their behavioral analysis, which is it's not what they're saying, it's what they're saying by not saying it. Yeah. I don't know about the percentage wise. That seems like a very, you know, missing ninety three percent, that seems like a big percentage. But I think that's probably pretty accurate. There are experts out there, body language experts You know, a lot of them are out there because they're analyzing a political pundit or something like that. They're trying to decipher their body language. Does your body language match the words that are coming out of your mouth? Because they'll talk about people who will say no while they're nodding, right? So they don't match. The word coming out of your mouth does not match your physical movement. But I'll tell you where they get this stuff from, a lot of it. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of that from the West Memphis Police Department. It's videotaped interviews. They will have someone go back because I'm sure they're accurate that police officers a lot of times are taking notes and not watching all of the behavioral cues they're getting from the person that they're interviewing. They will go back and watch taped interviews and somebody else will pick up on that. I'm not berating police officers. at all or detectives. But when you're just like when you're in any situation, when you're the one involved, you're focused on something. You're thinking ahead to the next question you're going to ask. You're trying to figure out a gotcha moment, whatever it is. And our brains don't process all of those things at the same time. So a videotaped interview is really useful because somebody else or even the same detective can go back and watch it and pick up cues they didn't pick up during the interview. And a lot of those are nonverbal cues. So the next part is entitled Limitations and Exceptions to Behavioral Analysis. So these are things that are going to throw off the normal tactics you might use during an interview with a subject. Number one is intelligence of the subject. So it's been found that the higher the intelligence of a suspect, the more reliable the behavior symptoms he will exhibit. Individuals with low intelligence may not completely understand the questions and their behavior symptoms are less reliable. This will cause come into play in our case. And number two is emotional stability of the subject. If they have like serious emotional or behavioral psychological problems, if they're on drugs, there's a lot of reasons that you can't rely on what you're seeing because there's something else that's controlling their behavior. Children and juveniles, obviously in most cases, hopefully these days, there is a parent or an attorney present when a child is being interviewed. The exception to that is when the child is the victim. And especially in sexual assault cases, often they will not disclose a lot of details when a parent is in the room. And so they will have a sexual assault interviewer interview alone with the child. But that I would say that's the exception to that rule. And then cultural variations, if it's somebody outside of what you understand, your social norms, you may misinterpret a verbal or a nonverbal cue because you're just not familiar with their culture. And I already mentioned drugs and alcohol. So if they're under the influence of something, their verbal and nonverbal cues are not going to be accurate. Then they talk about a specific behavioral symptoms like eye contact, body posture, that kind of thing. We already went through a f a few of those, you know, tapping, licking your lips, yawning, stretching, all those things indicate deception. And so if the body posture indicates deception, so they're slouched in their chair. They're not looking at you. They're rigid. Lack of frontal alignment. So they're sitting in a chair and they've got their feet turned toward the door or the wall instead of toward the person that they're speaking to. Changes in posture, that kind of thing. The one I like is they sometimes exhibit runners position. They have one foot back, like they're at a track start. So they're just itching to get out of there. They're done. They don't want to talk to whoever they're talking to anymore and they're just ready to go. And then the head and body slump. They're looking at the floor, they're looking down, they're looking in their lap, maybe they're fidgeting with their hands in their lap. But those are things too, you know, like we talked about like drugs, alcohol, you gotta think about like people who are on the spectrum, you gotta think about people with behavioral disorders. A lot of those types of people are gonna exhibit behaviors that would indicate deception, but that's not what it is. It's something else. We will post this document for you guys to look at because there's a lot we're skipping over, but I think it's fascinating to read. The very last part is structuring the interview. And I I've seen these details before, but you may not have. So it's really interesting to see how they set this up. So they're talking about the room setting and talking about how important that is for an interview. Privacy is the most important element in the room setting. So it's the interviewer and the suspect alone in the room so that they're free from interruptions. No telephones, no secretaries, nothing that can distract. So the rooms are very plain. There's very little furniture. They're sparsely furnished. It says the size of the room should be small. The ideal size is eight by ten. It should be soundproofed so that whatever's going on outside of that room will not be a distraction to the people that are inside the room. It says the interviewer should ⁓ minimize distractions by removing office supplies, ashtrays, posters, pictures, training certificates, and all other reminders of punishment from the walls. The lighting should not be overly bright. The furniture should be simple and not overly comfortable. The suspect should not be able to look out any windows. And they said the suspect's chair should be placed near a wall to prevent excessive movement during the interview. So they're they're boxing you in and giving you nothing to look at. So hopefully you will be present and look only at the person interviewing you. And what's important in this is that the West Memphis PD if appears to have to at least some extent followed these instructions on how to structure the interview with this room layout. If you ever see a picture of the polygraph room where Bill Durham was doing his polygraph work, this is a very good description of what he was doing there. It's a relatively small room. He has your undivided attention. He's conducting his interviews in this small room. Undoubtedly the other rooms where interrogations were happening were also very similar. And this basically creates a home court advantage for the West Memphis PD when people come in to talk to them inside those offices. As of May eighth, the West Memphis PD is still waiting for documents from the FBI. And they talk about this in an article in the commercial appeal entitled FBI Asked for Profile of Suspect. ⁓ you wanna read that for us, Paul? Yeah, it reads FBI specialists apparently have been asked to draw a psychological and social profile of the killer or killers of three eight year old boys found in a West Memphis drainage ditch this week. The specialists work at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, known for its ability to fuse crime scene details, psychological insight, interviews with known killers, and other information into a picture of likely suspect in murders that don't Follow usual patterns. Its work was the basis for two novels by Thomas Harris, Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. Except for those killed during a robbery or other violent crime, murder victims usually die at the hand of someone they know. For suspects, investigators usually look first at relatives, friends, and acquaintances. They have no starting point when the killer selects his victims at random. A detailed profile would be a substitute, giving West Memphis investigators a place to start in looking for possible suspects. Few details have been released, but the absence of an apparent motive creates speculation that they were random victims. Information that FBI agents in Arkansas have asked for a profile of a possible killer was revealed, perhaps inadvertently, by a woman who answered the telephone at the center in Quantico. She said the agents had furnished information to analyst Tom Self about noon Friday. The agents there could not be reached to verify the request. Self, reached at the Quantico Center, said information on the West Memphis killing was sketchy. And the center had no general profile of serial killers available. Quote, it's not a cookbook type of approach, he said, and then referred further questions to the center's public relations office. Any federal involvement in the investigation will be handled by agents based in Arkansas, said Robert Wright, FBI's special agent in charge of the Memphis office. Speculation that the children may have been victims of a serial killer isn't, quote, far fetched, he said. But he said he'd never heard of a general profile of serial killers. Nevertheless, numerous articles and books on the subject enumerate characteristics many of those apprehended had in common. In his nineteen eighty nine book, Profiling Violent Crimes, an investigative tool, Ronald ⁓ Holmes, said most serial killers are white and from twenty five to thirty four years old. They are intelligent or at least street smart, he wrote, and are often charismatic and charming. Many are interested in police work, writing in nineteen eighty nine. Holmes estimated 35 serial burglars were then at large in the United States. There's a couple of interesting things in this article. One, that they basically straight up say in this article that you should start in the center and work out. So we know that you start with the family, then you go to the friends. You work out in concentric circles when someone is killed, because most often someone is killed by someone they know. And it's right here on May 8th. Two days after the boys are discovered and we have almost no information from family members in relation to the homicide of our three boys. Yeah, there isn't a meaningful interview with any of the parents. Certainly for a couple of weeks. There's some superficial conversations about this or that, you know, Mike's badge, for example, but not really a question about what did you see, what have you heard, what is going on with this, that, the other to start putting together the timeline. Who might he have known? Did he have any enemies in the area? We don't have any of those notes from his parents. Or where were you? We don't know where the parents are. I mean, Todd Moore's out of town. We know when Pam went to work and while she was at work. Otherwise we don't really know and that stuff is pieced together by missing persons reports, what they say on the stand, what other people observe. Like, you know, I saw Mark at this Flash market. Like they're pieced together by what other people are telling us instead of being asked directly by the police department. Yeah. When you go through the files and you start looking not only at parents but at people close to the parents and the friends, they'll say I was at work. You would say, Okay, well, let's see a time card. And there are some, but very rarely do you ever find a time card for a relevant person anywhere in the files. Yeah. The other really interesting statement in this article is Self reached at the Quantico Center said information on the West Memphis killing was sketchy and the center had no general profile of serial killers available. One, why is the information sketchy? We know why it's sketchy now, you know, in hindsight, but they thought it was sketchy then. So I would be curious to know the things they were questioning when they got the case summary from the West Memphis PD. What were they questioning out of that? And second, their response is we have no general profile of a serial killer. So they're immediately jumping to the perpetrator being a serial killer and they don't have a general profile of a serial killer. They I guess they need more information. So that's interesting that that's immediately where they go on May the eighth. It's a serial killer that has killed our three victims. So I bet at this point you're just dying to know. Is there a profile that can be produced from this? Is there any information that's out there? Well, you can see in the newspapers there's a ton of information that the public knows, right? The medical examiner is making statements. Gitchell is out there making statements. There's leaks all over the place. We've been documenting those leaks. So the public knows what's going on. They know about the leads. Generally speaking, they're almost kind of side by side with the West Memphis P D. The public knows way more than they should, and that makes it kind of difficult for them to figure out what is knowledge that the murderer would have and the public shouldn't have, right? To be able to separate these things out. But fortunately for us, there is a genius who has done this kind of stuff before, living over in Memphis, who decides to lean into this with all this information that we're all looking at. And he decides he's going to give the public a profile. And this profile is the only unbiased profile ever provided for this case. And he made it available for the world to read. Yeah, this is gonna come from a man named Dr. L D. Hutt Junior. And just a little bit about his background. He graduated from high school in Texarkana. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Arkansas. He earned a master's and a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Arkansas. He participated in postdoctoral studies in clinical psychology. He worked as a clinical psychologist and director of psychology training at the Tennessee Psychiatric Hospital from 73 to 77. He was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis from 73 to 99. And in 74, he established the Hutt Psychological Group and worked as a clinical psychologist until he retired in 2015. He is a ⁓ Expert in his field, and he was sought after by many attorneys who had cases primarily of people with some sort of a mental disorder. So they would take him to Dr. Hutt. Dr. Hutt would evaluate the person to let them know whether or not their mental disease, defect, whatever, was a cause for a crime they committed, or even if they were sane enough to stand trial. So he was called. as an expert witness in lots of trials, but he notably went before the Supreme Court of Mississippi and is kind of famous for that. That was in 1995 in Westbrook versus state. So he has spent a lot of time evaluating offenders who have mental issues and looking at the causes of crimes against victims. So he's just a member of the public that is seeing all this information. He's got great interest in the case. As we're gonna discover, he's not talking to the West Memphis PD, so he doesn't know what their leads are. He doesn't know what they've submitted over to the FBI. So he doesn't know what direction they're trying to go with this, but he's a professional, he's a profiler, he's a psychologist, he's done this before, he's been around this thing before, and he's just gonna reach into the into the back of his mind, put together a profile, and he's gonna speak it into the media. So this is gonna be out for everybody to see and hear. Yes. So in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on May 9, nineteen ninety three, there was an article entitled Psychologist Believes Killer Knew One of the Boys. A Memphis psychologist familiar with criminal cases said the person who killed the three West Memphis boys last week is someone familiar with the town, is known by at least one of the boys and hasn't killed before. This was not a crime of a mad genius, doctor L D. Hutt said. This is a much lower level kind of person. I would expect he has a marginal job, and I would expect when he is apprehended, nobody will be surprised it was him. Hutt said he hasn't been to the crime scene or talked to the police investigating the murders, but he sees a basic personality pattern based on the facts of the case that have been made public. Basically, it's a young white male in all probability in his late teens or early twenties, Hutt said. He said based on that opinion of FBI cases he has studied and criminal cases he has participated in. This was probably the killer's first murder, because an experienced killer would have taken the bodies away and hidden them better, Hutt said. This is a person whose mental abilities are not all that great, Hutt said, adding that the killer probably has a history of mental problems or a low IQ. The FBI and police have expanded their investigation for possible suspects across the country because the three boys' bodies were found near a truck stop and interstates forty and fifty five go through West Memphis. But Hutt said he didn't think the killer is a drifter because the boys' neighborhood is quiet and inconspicuous and not the kind of place that attracts attention. So Hutt said he believes the killer is familiar with West Memphis, particularly the boys' neighborhood. That is a profile. And that is a profile that is one hundred percent consistent with the information that Kristen was going over at the beginning of our conversation here. I mean, this doesn't surprise us, but hearing it from an expert, he's laying it out and I just get chills hearing this because he's following the science to a profile and he's putting it out there for the public to see. Right. And he's not a member of that community. He's not a police officer. He doesn't know any of the usual suspects in that area. He doesn't know anybody that the police have talked to. I mean, except maybe if there was something in the newspaper. But he's not in the middle of it. He's on the periphery looking in And so he is unbiased. This is before an arrest is ever made. He doesn't know what is going on in the investigation. He is making this based off of what is public knowledge. And he is right on the nose based on what we've learned so far about criminal profiling. He expands this profile in another article in the commercial appeal. So the commercial appeal on May 10th, 1993, so this is the day after, in the article entitled Faith Helps Slain Boys Family. face abiding grief, tips promising in three deaths, police say. And we're not going to read the whole article because the portion that is relevant to us is really in the second half, and we'll start there. A Memphis psychologist who has served as an expert witness in criminal cases said Sunday he does not believe the boys were the victim of a drifter or experienced killer, but rather of someone one of them knew. Dr. L. D. Hutt said the background of the situation quote, implies a familiarity with the area. Not just the physical knowledge, but also that this was a popular place for kids to go. He knew where he was going, and he knew the purpose, Hutt said. He said he had no official connection with the case and has not spoken to police about it. Odds are, he said, the killer was someone who at least knew one of the boys, though was not necessarily a long term friend. The killer, if there was one killer, he said, may have been, quote, posing as a police official, or some other authority figure. That would imply planning, he said. But Hutt said, quote, this does not have the signs of a crime by a mad genius. He's not a real brilliant individual, he said. The crime showed premeditation, he said, but the crime scene seems to indicate a disorganized person, someone possibly with neurological damage. There is a good chance that the person has a criminal record, though possibly for minor violations. If not detected, the person will, quote, almost certainly kill again, Hutt said. However, he said the killer's efforts to flee will likely, quote, be pretty obvious, not highly planned out. Hutt said the killer probably left a lot of evidence at the scene, but that evidence may have been degraded by the water or by anyone coming upon the scene accidentally. The killer he said would probably not meet the legal definition of insanity since he showed planning and attempts, however clumsy, to cover up his crime. Lastly, he said, the killer probably had a low level job and likely had some contact with children on his job. That's really interesting. And when I was doing some of my research, I actually read an article where They had done an analysis of profiling and how accurate it is. And that article said that based on the profiles they had reviewed and then killers or rapists or whoever it was they were looking at were apprehended and convicted that profiles were accurate in fifty to seventy percent of those cases. And I thought that was a really high percentage. Yeah, it's an astonishingly high percentage. I think one of the things that's pretty clear about this is LD Hutt is saying you gotta look in the neighborhood. You gotta look at people that these kids knew. One of the kids knew the person that did this or persons that did this. I mean, he actually opens it up to it being more than one. And furthermore, I think it's kind of interesting that he says these people or that person will try to get out of here. So that's a an interesting additional tidbit that he adds to this. I kind of want to touch on something that Dr. Hutt said. He was talking about a disorganized offender. When analysts are looking at the behaviors of offenders, and that can be, you know, obviously before they have someone in particular in mind, they categorize them into organized and disorganized offenders, which helps give them clues as to who they're looking for. So in an article in Simply Psychology, and this was actually just a few days ago, this came out on August 26th. So it's very, very recent. They were actually discussing Organized and disorganized offenders and they categorize organized offenders as showing high levels of planning and control. They often choose a specific victim and lead them to a controlled environment. These criminals bring their own weapon and remove it afterwards. Because they are methodical, they leave very little physical evidence behind. An organized offender leads an ordered life and kills after some sort of critical life event. They are likely to be of average to high intelligence and employed. They show signs of having planned their crime in advance. They're socially adequate, sexually competent, charming, geographically or occupationally mobile. They have a high IQ and live with a partner. As far as their post defense behavior, they often return to the crime scene and they will offer or volunteer information to authorities. And so It says that these offenders are often socially competent, meaning they interact well and fit into society, and that this allows them to manipulate others with their charm. It said this pattern often overlaps with antisocial personality disorder, which is marked by a lack of empathy and disregard for others. On the other hand, disorganized offenders, which is who Dr. Hutt considers to be the suspect in this profile, they commit crimes that appear impulsive and chaotic. They do not plan their actions in advance and often act in the heat of the moment. The crime scene usually remains messy and contains significant evidence. The evidence might include fingerprints, blood, or the murder weapon itself. They are socially inadequate, sexually incompetent, they live or work near the crime scene, they have a low IQ and often live alone. They will return to the crime scene to relive the event and keep a diary or news cuttings of the events. They empathize with other offenders and they will introduce evidence indirectly. So by that they mean if this person happens to be interviewed, they will let things slip rather than keeping those things to themselves. They can't figure out that the things that they might say might implicate them in the crime. The offenders are socially inadequate, they struggle with interpersonal relationships and communication. They are often unemployed or in low skilled work, and they live alone or with a partner near the crime scene. Their behavior is reactive, not controlled. Most offenders exhibit a blend of traits. And this makes this binary system of organized and disorganized sometimes hard to pinpoint. So then they went on to start talking about something else that we haven't really talked about a whole lot in this case, which is. confirmation bias. And that describes the tendency to search for, interpret, and favor information that confirms one's existing beliefs. So if an investigator labels a crime scene as organized, then they might ignore all the things that actually indicate that it's disorganized, right? Because they're trying to fit everything into the box of what they think happens. This is also true if they've got a particular suspect in mind. They're gonna ignore things that don't point to that suspect or don't point to their theory of the crime. And we will see that in this case. Well can we just kind of do a quick application for how this is right here. Which is if you look at the crime, for example, as a chaotic mess, kinda like how El D Hudd saying it, right? You know, he would have put the bodies in differently, he would have done this. That's one interpretation. Whereas on the other interpretation might be from somebody saying, This is a crime scene that was meticulously cleaned up with perfection and you know, this is the perfect crime that was committed here and only a genius could have done it. That's gonna create a very different confirmation bias, right? If you're coming in with those types of You not that L D. Hudd a confirmation bias. He's reading the tea leaves and he's saying, This seems to be a disorganized crime. Whereas somebody else might come in and say, Everything here has meaning. Everything here is exactly where the killer wanted it, that it was part of his plan to make it this way. Right. And this reminds me, I'm gonna go off on a little tangent here. If y'all don't listen to Small Town Dicks, you're missing out. It is one of my favorite podcasts. And This summer they've been doing a special series with Paul Holes. He was an investigator, lab tech, like he'd just done all the things. And this summer they're doing a series where he is detailing his investigation of who would ultimately be the Golden State Killer, ⁓ Joseph D'Angelo. And I was listening to an episode the other day. It was from July 17th and it's called The East Area Rampage, and it's in the Chasing the Golden State Killer series. I highly recommend it. If you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. But Paul Holes was talking about like mistakes that they had made along the way. And he realized at one point that they were investigating backwards. And I actually stopped and rewound and like typed out the quote because I think that it's really important. And Paul said, You've chosen a suspect and now you build a case against that suspect. Well, this is the wrong way to do it. The investigation needs to be led by evidence, not by the suspect. And I think that's really, really important, especially in our case. And in every case, you go where the evidence takes you. You don't go where a suspect takes you and make it fit the evidence. And we're gonna see that in this case. Yeah, and to that point, you know, we've gone very long on this podcast. This is going to be the longest one we've ever made for sure. It's like epic. Yeah. So those of you that like long podcasts and like us talking about West Memphis Three and how profiles work and stuff, you're gonna be in love with this podcast episode. But, you know, we didn't do this for no reason. Obviously this plays a major role in this investigation. It also plays a major role in the fact that the public is aware of this. The public is aware that the FBI is involved, that there's a profile that is being requested. They also know that L D Hutt has published a profile and this makes waves through the neighborhood, the entire area There's several leads that actually come in based upon L D. Hutt's profile. And there's indications that the FBI also received leads based upon these discussions that we're having. So we'll get to those at some point. We're not gonna probably cover those in the next podcast, but when the time comes, we'll mention those people and say this guy came on the radar because of L D. Hutt's profile that was published in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette or the ⁓ commercial appeal. Yeah, so there's one last article from the evening times. May the eleventh, gonna read a couple sentences. Gitchell said Monday that a more complete FBI profile and test results from the Arkansas State Crime Lab in Little Rock should come in by the end of the week. How did that work out for him, Paul? Gary Gitchell is still waiting for his FBI profile right now. Thirty three years later. Yeah. It was never generated. And there's several reasons why, but one of those reasons you can chalk up to the medical examiner not getting the autopsy reports over to the FBI in a timely fashion. And by the time that would have been made available, they didn't need the profile anymore. So But that is a conversation for a future podcast episode. We probably need to close out this epic thing or our listeners are gonna come to expect long episodes from us when it's not always feasible to do so. Yeah, I hope you found it interesting. I certainly, you know, find all this stuff interesting. You can tell by the amount of of speaking I did that this is something I really love to read about. I wish I didn't have to. I wish we weren't in these circumstances. Reading these statistics and then reading the victimology reports just reminds me three eight year old boys that lost their lives senselessly. And I it always comes back to the victims and we cannot forget that. There are three real they were alive, they were vibrant little boys who lost their lives. And that's the reason we're talking about this case. If you want to join the discussion, we strongly encourage you to contribute to the case by following Crooked Tree Pot on Facebook, on X, or to follow us on YouTube. Next time on Crooked Tree, the interstate drug teams in Crittenden County have long been a source of suspicion. Davis, Sudbury, Bradley, current Sheriff's Task Force Coordinator Mickey Thornton, and others were listed as suspects in an earlier nineteen ninety three probe of drug interdiction efforts in Crittenden County. When West Memphis and the Sheriff's Office worked as one coordinated task force.