A Harvest of Innocence

In a case based on a lie, only one man knows the truth. Attorney Dan Stidham breaks his self-imposed 30-year silence to expose details only he knows about the infamous West Memphis Three murders. Exposing what happened will allow him to close the door on a case that tormented him for years and to help exonerate the three innocent young men who spent decades in prison because of the malevolence of the police, prosecution, and judge. The West Memphis 3 Murder case, which captured the world's attention in the 1990s to such an extent it remains one of the most discussed true crime stories even today, has become synonymous with injustice. The details of the case were lurid—horrifying beyond description. On May 6, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys were pulled from a fetid drainage ditch in West Memphis, Arkansas. Their hands bound with their own shoelaces, the boys had been beaten and sexually mutilated, police said. Deep in the Bible Belt, townspeople began to speak of Satanic ritualistic killings and demanded immediate arrests. Within a month of the brutal murders, a beleaguered police department served up three young men from the wrong side of the tracks. Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols, and Stidham's client, Jessie Misskelley Jr., were rounded up, arrested, tried, and sent to prison with lengthy sentences—Echols to Death Row. Other than a false confession, there was no other evidence linking the three to the crimes. A Harvest of Innocence is an intimate, unsettling, and balanced look at what the case did to Stidham himself, to the victim's families, and to the West Memphis Three themselves. It is a no-holds-barred exposition of the politics and unbridled ambition of a few men who destroyed so many lives.