« Creationism Will Turn You Into a Serial Killer? | Main | Government body listens to scientists shocker! »
United States: Progress in forensic science has cast serious doubts on the convictions of three men for satanic
murders when they are teenagers. The bodies of three 8-year-old boys, Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Chris Byers, were found hog-tied in a drainage ditch in Arkansas in 1993, and they appeared to to have been mutilated.
A young mentally reatrded
man, Jessie Misskelley, made a confession to the police, implicating two of his friends. He told police the boys had been sodomised, forced to perform oral sex, and mutilated. He also mentioned occult rituals and orgies, which led to satanic cult rumours spreading round the local area. But even at the time, Misskelley's testimony was known to be suspect:
Misskelley initially said the attack took place in the morning, when the three children were known to be in school. He changed the time — four times — after prompting from detectives, the defense said.
Misskelley also described brown rope used to tie up the boys, rather than the black and white laces that came from their own shoes.
Despite the judge deeming this statement to be inadmissible as evidence, a witness made reference to it, and it was considered by the jury. And there were other problems with the evidence:
A lack of evidence with testimony from questionable witnesses. Prosecutorial misconduct in closing arguments that prejudiced the jury. The effects of pivotal, sensational testimony from a self-described occult expert whose degrees came from an out-of-state university that didn’t require class attendance.
The new forensic evidence, the work of half a dozen scientists, has failed to link DNA evidence to any of the men convicted of the murders, but it has uncovered a link with the stepfather of one of the dead boys. The scientists also came to a different conclusion about how the bodies came to be mutilated: it was clearly the work of animals and fish in the ditch where they were found.
The oldest of the men convicted was sentenced to death, but fortunately has not been ritually sacrificed yet.
New evidence arises in 1993 triple murder—Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 30th October 2007.
Posted in
Conspiracies: Satanic Abuse Myth
at 19:41. Last modified on November 27 2007 at 17:20.
Permalink to this entry | View blog reactions
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
This is not a contacts site. If you are looking for help regarding a particular path, I suggest The Witches' Voice, which does operate a contacts service.
Allowed HTML:
a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, things will work better if you use the XHTML entities for those letters. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.