Resurfacing for a moment

[cleolinda]

At the risk of making y'all wonder why this is such a big deal, I have collected a number of links about the West Memphis Three. In case you missed it (and you easily could have, because it came out of nowhere), on Thursday night, this appeared on Twitter:

@wm3org: West Memphis Three leave prison with all belongings; source says they are not

Comments

[ladyhadhafang]

Just when I thought Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh couldn't get any more badass... :3 Still... #Prays the real murderers will be caught soon.

[cleolinda]

I ended up removing "UNEXPECTED PETER JACKSON IS UNEXPECTED!" as not being in tone with the rest of the entry. But I enjoy the image of him dropping into the prison with a briefcase full of money LIKE JUSTICE FROM ABOVE. Maybe Fran is fluttering beside him.

[ladyhadhafang]

That would be seriously awesome. :3

[bailunrui]

Thank you for your summary because it pieced together a lot of the things that I had been seeing in thew news. And who knows how many other people have been hurt by the true killers in the mean time?

[cleolinda]

I know, right? I just kept reading articles, trying to find out what the latest was, and I kept stumbling over details I'd either forgotten or never known at all. And I couldn't find any single article that would just TELL ME, GODDAMMIT. And it turns out that I'd never even heard the most compelling evidence--and none of it involved Mark Byers, who I was certain had done it.

[ginmar]

Reminds of the case of a woman in Maryland, who was raped when man broke into her house. The cops didn't like the way she told her story and demanded she take a polygraph. She flunked. Duh. They dismissed her case. A few weeks later, a rapist with the same MO got caught. The samples matched. How often does that happen?

In that case, a few years later, the detective who had been so vile to her was caught, arrested, and convicted for sexual assault himself. He had used his badge to intimidate women into....God, how you do sum that up?

And then there was a rape victim I wrote about recently. She was found guilty of making a false report, convicted, fined, and all of this was reported in the news because----seeing as how everybody agreed the rape didn't happen----the rape shield laws no longer applied.

Except they did. She'd been raped by a serial rapist. I think he'd raped at least three women before the cops caught on.

The examples are endless.

[azzinita]

You know, having read crimelibrary's description of the WM3 case earlier today (I've been following the case ever since I saw the documentary in 2000 in conjunction with Paradise Lost 2) and then reading that bit about Terry Hobbs, he fits the profile of the killer they came up with here, down the near the bottom almost disturbingly.

I'm so happy they're finally free (even with this complete bullshit plea agreement) and that they have enough good people around them to help them transition back into the real world.

[cleolinda]

I just realized that Crime Library would have a section on it--not terribly updated, though--so I'd just started reading it shortly after I hit post, yeah. My question at this point is--why did Christopher Byers get the worst injuries, if Terry Hobbs did it? What kind of interaction had they had before? I'm still trying to read up on what the hell any of it was supposed to be about, from the killer's point of view--why the boys were killed the way they were. I don't know that anyone can know, at this point.

[azzinita]

In Hobbs's case, maybe an obsession with Byers as opposed to his stepson? They were friends, after all. Small neighborhood. There's also the theory that the "knife injuries" on Byers, including the ah, more sensitive bits, may have been due to animals than injuries caused by the killer.

It also seems that Branch and Byers were the focus of the attack, as they received the worst of it. Moore was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. :(

(I know way too much about this)

[cleolinda]

HOMG THIS COMMENT

http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/991515.html?thread=60723483#t60723483

[cleolinda]

I genuinely never thought this would happen--partly because the crime scene was so mishandled; I thought they'd never be able to pull out anything conclusive after all this time, so nothing would ever move forward.

I am DYING to know how this just suddenly all happened this week.

[robinmc]

This is the best summary of this entire ordeal that I've read. Thanks for putting it together.