The West Memphis Three Archive

Echols, Damien, and Lorri Davis. West Memphis Three Correspondence Archive. 1996–2010. In 1993, at the age of eighteen, Damien Echols, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., was arrested for the murders of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. During the trial, the prosecution asserted that the three teenagers killed the children as part of a satanic ritual, basing their accusations on the co-defendents’ taste in rock music and Echols’ interest in Wicca. Misskelley confessed to the murders, and was tried separately, and all three were convicted: Baldwin to life imprisonment, Misskelley to life imprisonment plus two twenty-year sentences, and Echols, the alleged ringleader, to death. Echols was incarcerated at an Arkansas Supermax unit on March 19, 1994, and two years later, HBO released a documentary on the case, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which raised significant questions about the trial, including the strong suggestion that Mis