Show Notes
In this episode of Crooked Tree, hosts Kristin Rich and Paul Day turn their focus to Murray Farris, an 18-year-old West Memphis resident whose name appears on Jerry Driver’s list of possible occult-linked individuals. On the evening of May 9, 1993—hours after Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were questioned—Farris walks into the West Memphis Police Department.
What follows is a revealing interview. Farris describes his involvement in a small group identified as the Covenant of the Divine Light, a personal blend of Wiccan practice, biblical study, and protective symbolism including a pentagram medallion bearing the Tetragrammaton. He names associates, downplays any sinister intent, and, almost as an afterthought, offers a detailed description of a heavyset, blonde, bespectacled man in his late 30s known as “Lucifer”—leader of an “evil cult,” driver of a cream-colored van, and resident near Earle, Arkansas.
The next day brings more: a tip from a local Baptist youth counselor confirming that Farris and Chris Littrell were at a church youth night the evening the three boys vanished, followed by a lengthy fax from NYPD cult expert Detective Marcos Quinones outlining classic signs of occult crime scenes—missing organs, nine-foot circles, candle wax, inverted crosses, pentagrams, and more.
Kristin and Paul examine how this information lands with investigators already primed by the era’s Satanic Panic, how it intersects with Damien Echols’s circle, and why the police’s growing interest in ritualistic motives begins to take sharper shape—even as the physical evidence at the crime scene fails to match many of the classic markers Quinones describes.
A pivotal look at the investigation’s early pivot toward the occult, the people drawn into its orbit, and the cultural climate that shaped what detectives chose to see.
More from Crooked Tree: A West Memphis 3 Podcast
In this Q&A episode of Crooked Tree: A West Memphis 3 Podcast, victim advocates and researchers Paul Day and Kristin Rich dig into detailed listener questions drawn from the case files surrounding the May 1993 murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore.
On May 10, 1993—the day that never ends—Damien Echols leaves a grueling interrogation with Detectives Ridge and Sudbury and walks straight into a polygraph with Detective Bill Durham. What follows is a tense, unrecorded session of pretest questions, ten carefully crafted polygraph queries, and a high-pressure post-test interview that would haunt the West Memphis Three case for decades.
In this pivotal episode of Crooked Tree, forensic geologist and victim advocate Paul Day and criminologist and victim advocate Kristin Rich take a meticulous, slow-crawl look at one of the most consequential moments in the West Memphis Three investigation: the May 10, 1993, interview of Damien Echols at the West Memphis Police Department.
In the hours and days after the bodies of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers are recovered, West Memphis investigators begin receiving tips steeped in the era’s widespread fears of satanic ritual abuse. A call from a Texas Child Protective Services worker about alleged ritualistic killings in Gilmer, TX sets an early tone. Lieutenant James Sudbury and juvenile officer Steve Jones quickly zero in on Damien Echols, interviewing the teenager at his family’s trailer on May 7 based on their shared belief that the crime shows “overtones of a cult sacrifice."
In this gripping Q&A installment of Crooked Tree: A West Memphis 3 Podcast, West Memphis Three researchers and victim advocates Kristin Rich and Paul Day confront listener questions that cut straight to the heart of the case—and the shadows still lingering over the 1993 murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore.