A Harvest of Innocence: The Untold Story of the West Memphis Three Murder Case

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 3 murders. Exposing what happened will allow him to close the door 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 the judge.The West Memphis 3 Murder case, which captured the worlds attention in the 1990s to such 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 demand 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.