In May 1993, three eight-year-old boys vanished in West Memphis, Arkansas. Their bodies were found the next day in a drainage ditch at Robin Hood Hills—naked, bound with their own shoelaces. Within days, a town already steeped in Satanic Panic turned away from careful investigation and toward a story it already believed: that three local teens who liked metal, black clothes, and occult books must have carried out a ritual killing.

This Time and Tales dark history episode walks through how Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. became the West Memphis Three: from a contaminated crime scene and a coerced confession to “occult experts,” trials built on vibes instead of evidence, and the 2011 Alford pleas that freed them without clearing their names. It’s a case study about what moral panic doe ...