Adnan's Story by Rabia Chaudry

Author:Rabia Chaudry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250087119
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 8

SARAH KOENIG

And verily, with hardship, comes ease.

Holy Quran 94:6

If there was tremendous hope in the years leading up to the post-conviction appeal, the aftermath of the hearing brought a sense of depression bordering on desperation. A state prosecutor had testified that we had pressured our alibi witness, an absent witness at that, into making statements. What judge would take our word that a witness who refused to show up had written her more-than-decade-old affidavit in good faith?

It was one of the few times in over a decade that I heard a hint of despondency in Adnan’s voice. I think on some level we all knew that the chances of winning the appeal were slim to none, and the prospect of him living the remainder of his years in a supermax facility far from his family were high.

One night about a year after the hearing, in October of 2013, as we still awaited a decision from the court, I flipped through the new shows on Netflix. It was late, the dishes were done, my husband had already retired for the night, and my girls were peacefully conked out. But I couldn’t sleep.

I lay on my sofa, feeling restless, when a familiar name caught my eye as I ran through the titles: West of Memphis.

It was a new documentary, the most recent of four about a case that had long haunted me, and haunted much of the country. In 1994, three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, were tried for the murders of three young boys a year prior. Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin were all convicted, with Echols receiving the death sentence. Misskelley was sentenced to life plus twenty years and Baldwin was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The crime was shocking, gruesome. On May 3, 1993, three eight-year-old boys disappeared. The three friends, Michael Moore, Steve Branch, and Christopher Byers, had last been seen riding their bikes in the neighborhood. But as darkness fell and their parents began to look for them, they were nowhere to be found. Three days later, after an extensive police search, their small bodies were discovered naked, mutilated, and bound in a nearby creek.

At the time, in the early 1990s, the country was gripped by the fear of occultism and satanism. There was no daytime talk show host who had not covered the topic, and across the nation law enforcement agencies were being trained in the rise of crimes that might be tied to occultist rituals, such as human and animal sacrifice. In the eyes of the local police, this terrible tragedy immediately had the hallmarks of ritual or cult murder.

The impetus for the focus on a satanic angle came from the confused statements of a local child during a May 6, 1993, interview. The boy had accompanied his mother, Vicki Hutcheson, to the police station, where she was going to be interviewed in connection with the case. The attention of the police turned from mother to son when he began offering information about

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.