Episode 20: The physical evidence against the WM3 -- "It is Our opinion the crime had taken place where the bodies of the victims were recovered."

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=blood+on+black&qid=1559059428&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Where-Monsters-Go-Against-Memphis-ebook/dp/B06XVNXCJV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=XNLYB8QUIQ7F&keywords=where+the+monsters+go&qid=1559059470&s=gateway&sprefix=where+the+monsters+go%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B07C7C4DCH/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1559059536&s=gateway&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753HJZ1P/?ie=UTF8&keywords=gary%20meece&qid=1559059573&ref_=sr_1_6&s=gateway&sr=8-6 https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1559059573&s=gateway&sr=8-2   "It is Our opinion the crime had taken place where the bodies of the victims were recovered."        Despite fake news that authorities had no evidence against the WM3, investigators found physical evidence at the scene that linked the murders to the murderers.  Other physical evidence pointed to the West Memphis 3. None of the evidence was conclusive, but none offered grounds for exoneration.   Other evidence, such as inadmissible Luminol testing and a blood-spattered pendant discovered too late to be entered into evidence, didn’t make it to the courtrooms for various reasons.   The killers did not leave a great number of forensic clues.  Because of submersion in water,  no fingerprints were found of anyone, including the victims. Similarly, clothing items tested negative for traces of blood. Virtually all of the DNA recovered and tested matched the boys.  Several imprints from tennis shoes were found, but none matched the killers and may have been left by searchers or others walking through the woods.   By the time the bodies were found, a number of searchers had been over the woods, where the gumbo soil  was muddy from several inches of rain earlier in the week.   The crime scene itself had been cleaned up, with the banks washed and smoothed over.   The killers had gone to great lengths to obscure the location of the bodies, which were found only when a boy’s tennis shoe (a Scout cap in some versions of the story; two shoes, according to Allen’s testimony in the Misskelley trial) was spotted floating in the water. The West Memphis case has been influenced by the “CSI effect,” in which the public has come to expect a higher level of forensic evidence than often exists at crime scenes.  As a corollary to the effect, the value of circumstantial evidence has been discounted.  Television shows focusing on DNA and other forensics in investigations necessarily rely on such evidence to figure into the plot. Consequently the public is largely unaware that DNA from killers is found in a relatively small fraction of all murders, with latent fingerprints or any kind of biological trace found in much fewer than half of cases. Further contributing to the relative lack of forensic evidence in the West Memphis case were the cleanup at the scene, the submersion of the bodies in dirty water over an extended time and their exposure to heat and insects in the open air for about an hour, contamination by search efforts and subsequent recovery of the bodies, etc.   As a result, for example, two samples of apparent bodily tissues found in the ligatures of the shoelace bindings on Christopher and Michael were too small and degraded to yield DNA results.  “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the prototype of the forensics-based crime shows, premiered in October 2000, so the series and its many offshoots and imitators would have had no effect on the original juries.  Even the O.J. Simpson murder case in 1994-1995, the breakthrough case for public awareness of DNA testing, followed the WM3 trials. Even so, forensic science played a role in perceptions about the case from the beginnings.  The initial “Paradise Lost” film, while leaving out much about evidence against the killers, included the str