An Explosive Expose

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Available May 1: A New Book by Dan Stidham and Tom McCarthy

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 on a case that tormented him for years and to exonerate the three innocent young men who spent decades in prison because of the malevolence of the police, prosecution, and judge whose only goal was political expediency.

The West Memphis 3 Murder case – which captured America’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 callous judicial malfeasance.

The details of the case were lurid, horrifying beyond description.

On May 5, 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--based a confession police had coaxed from Misskelley, a hapless 17-year-old with limited intellectual capacity. Police interrogated him for 12 hours and released a tape with a ten-minute confession.

There was no other evidence linking the three to the crime.

In a case riddled with falsehoods, obfuscations, and judicial ill-intent, Dan Stidham knows exactly what happened.

Over the years, Stidham’s once solid faith in the power of the law would be tested, his emotional balance strained. His new law practice would suffer, his marriage would fail, and the first of a recurring series of nightmares would

begin years of sleepless nights.

Harvest of Innocence is an intimate, unsettling, and balanced look what the case did to Stidham him, to the victims’ families, and to the West Memphis 3 themselves. It is a no-holds-barred exposition of the politics and unbridled ambition of a few men who destroyed so many lives.