Leveritt adds: “He had endured tremendous violence.

Slowly, before the horrified officers’ eyes, a child’s naked body, arched grotesquely backward, rose to the surface.” Leveritt says: “A pale form began to rise in the water. Next morning a police search of the woods was about to be abandoned when a cop spotted a child’s shoe floating in the ditch. Hysteria: Damien, Jessie and Jason served 18 years after wrongly being convicted of murder Four hours later his friends Michael and Stevie were reported missing too. The lad was last seen at 5.30pm sweeping the yard at home. Next day their little bodies, naked, savagely beaten and trussed up with shoelaces, were pulled from a water-filled ditch in nearby woods. She tells how on the night of terror struck the poor Arkansas Bible-belt town of West Memphis, when three eight-year-old boys – Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch – vanished within hours of each other. The film is based on the book of the same name by crime author Mara Leveritt. In this case there was this Satanic panic going around.” “When people are so frightened by a crime of some kind, people start to distort evidence.

It stars two Oscar winners – Brit actor Colin Firth as the investigator who exposes the truth and Reese Witherspoon, as a victim’s mother.įirth found the case deeply disturbing, He says: “Here’s a community that loses three children and they want to account for that by sacrificing three more. The story is told in the new movie Devil’s Knot, released in the UK this week. This travesty of a trial took place in America’s Deep South in 1994 – and it was nearly 20 years before justice was done. But the evidence against the teens was a concoction of fantasy, lies and false confession.Īnd it led to the innocent youths being branded Satanic killers for little more than liking heavy metal band Metallica and borrowing a book on witchcraft.ĭespite a total absence of proof and a shady star witness, all three were convicted of the monstrous murders in a bizarre case with echoes of the Salem Witch Trials.

With claims of devil-worshipping orgies fuelled by the drinking of blood, it was the stuff of horror stories. Three teenage boys accused of killing them in a Satanic ritual. Three eight-year-old boys plucked from the street and brutally murdered.

Devil's Knot by Mara Leveritt