Viable suspect: Terry Hobbs #1

[Graznik]

Zen, I am very sorry to hear that you've been subjected to domestic violence. It's unfortunately not as rare as people think, and the perpetrators don't walk around with a sign that says "monster" around their neck. And anyone can fall victim to it.

CL, I think what you're saying about TH and his "home turf" is really interesting. There's definitely a pattern and I had never noticed it!
I don't think the green beans pose a problem here. Especially not since your theory is based on the fact that the murder occured at the house. It's not hard to imagine that SB would've seen the food and grabbed a handful of beans. Maybe he weren't ready to have his dinner yet, but couldn't resist some beans as they were his favourite (according to PH I believe). I used to do that all the time as a kid, and admittedly still resort to the same pattern everytime I go 'round my mum's for dinner...
Have you put any thought to why he chose the ditch for a dump site? And I'm not just talking about a ditch, but that particular ditch. It's always been one of the main reasons why I've believed the murders where committed in the RHH/BB woods.

Once again, I think it's really great that you've come up with your own theory and dared to post it!

 

[Cher Lockhomes]

Have you put any thought to why he chose the ditch for a dump site? And I'm not just talking about a ditch, but that particular ditch. It's always been one of the main reasons why I've believed the murders where committed in the RHH/BB woods.

Once again, I think it's really great that you've come up with your own theory and dared to post it!

Thanks once again Graznik.

That is indeed a good question! Yes I've got my ideas about "why" this location, in a geographical sense, and also my speculations "why" this location, in a psychological sense, but why this exact ditch in particular ? Perhaps someone has an idea. If the crime took place in the RHH/BB, this ditch was in the direct vicinity right ? It could be argued that the 10 mile diversion channel would have been an even better alternative, and after all the bikes were also disposed there.

From a psychological point of view, TH might be the type of perp who would have buried the bodies in his own back garden. The Ten mile bayou itself, is close to S.McAuley, but is almost completely lined by residential buildings. From a geographical point of view, I think he knew the RHH/BB area well. He was a local delivery driver in the tri-state area. He would have frequented the interstate almost every day. He would have known how much, and which parts of the area were visible from the interstate. As far as residents in the area go, the top stories of the Mayfair A. posed the only problem.

I think he knew he could access the ditch area with a vehicle from the Eastern meadow via the service road, and on foot from the pipe bridge. This gave him the possibility to "control" the area during the search period, and the time between the search periods. As to why this particular ditch, I will keep this in the back of my mind along with things like "buried underwater", why the bodies of SB and CB were facing South, and MM facing North. TH knew that he had to pick PH up at around 21:00, I think this played a big part in everything.

 

[Graznik]

That's a relevant question regarding why he'd choose the ditch over the bayou. Some people argue that he wanted the bodies to be found, and wash away evidence at the same time. Just off of the top of my head, the ditch provided a more secluded dump site as opposed to the bayou which was visible from the Mayfair apartments IIRC. Throwing the bikes in is one thing, bodies another...

I too believe it's utter BS that he didn't know the area. Like you said, he was most likely on that interstate every day.

 

[Compassionate Reader]

First, Cher, thank you for your kind words. Your theory is well-reasoned. I only have two problems with the crime occurring at the South McAuley home: (1) the closeness (physical) of the neighbors might have made it possible for them to overhear the crime and (2) the physical evidence that would have been left.

(1) I know that, with TH being the child-abusing sicko that I believe him to be, the neighbors might be "used to" sounds of this nature, but, with three boys involved, I would believe that the noise would have attracted someone's notice. Also, either AH was deliberately left at DJ's to give TH the additional privacy needed to commit this act or she was a silent witness to this horror. The former is possible; the latter is horrible to consider!

(2) I know that one of PH's sisters (JLM) has reported TH washing bedclothes and curtains and the like on May 6th. I just find it a little unbelievable that PH would not have noticed blood or the like on May 5th when she returned home. The only way I can see this resolved is if TH attacked all three boys quickly and by blunt force trauma, which would not cause much external bleeding.

Generally, I'm not sure if TH needs a motive (other than his resentment of SB) to kill SB, but, short of eliminating witnesses, he would have no motive for killing the other two boys. That's not a real problem, IMO, for a sicko like this. However, did he restrain the other two in some way while he attacked SB or were they rendered unconscious before the attack on SB? One of the questions nons always ask is how one person could control three boys. IMO, in the woods, this was either done by location (he found the boys in a manhole or a tree house) or by surprise (the other two were too surprised to do anything when the original attack occurred). If the attack were in the house on S. McAuley, I believe that CB and MM would have been able to run to the neighbors for help (unless they were incapacitated in some way). It would have been much harder to run for help from the woods.

Please don't take offense! I believe that your theory has real merit. I'm simply pointing out some perceivable problems to be addressed.



zen, so glad you came out on the other side of your horrendous experience!

 

[Cher Lockhomes]

That's a relevant question regarding why he'd choose the ditch over the bayou. Some people argue that he wanted the bodies to be found, and wash away evidence at the same time. Just off of the top of my head, the ditch provided a more secluded dump site as opposed to the bayou which was visible from the Mayfair apartments IIRC. Throwing the bikes in is one thing, bodies another...

I too believe it's utter BS that he didn't know the area. Like you said, he was most likely on that interstate every day.

The argument that he wanted the bodies to be found, yes and no. The argument that he wanted to wash away evidence, I think that is more important. Put it this way, if he didn’t want the bodies to be found, he had better alternatives (Mississippi for instance). I think he was working in a time frame, wanted to keep the situation under control, have access to the site at a later time. Getting rid of the bodies was main priority, he had to use a vehicle and get as close as possible to the location. He could take his time with other things like the clothes and bikes, these could be disposed of on foot. If he wanted the bodies to be found, guide the search to the RHH, and the bodies would have been found. If he didn’t want the bodies to be found, hide the bodies in the manholes, guide the search to the RHH, when the searching in that area is finished, place the bodies in the ditch. He knew the search was going to continue the next day, so why place the bodies in the ditch overnight ? Did he feel that he was out of it ? I think there was a lot of improvisation. The bayou was not easy to access, except from the pipe bridge, but as you said, throwing the bikes in, OK, but throwing three bodies in, risky.

Just brainstorming.

 

[Cher Lockhomes]

CR, good questions, looking forward to answering them as soon as I can.

 

[Cher Lockhomes]

CR, I recently visited a recreational park in my home town. The parking lot was about a quarter of a mile from the park. After getting out the car, I immediately heard a group of young children playing in the park. After sitting on a bench for 15 minutes and watching these four 8 to 10 year olds whizzing about, screaming, shouting, singing, sometimes squealing as if their life depended on it, I asked my companion, if it would be possible to hear the difference if they were being attacked after sometime. She said "yes, if I was concentrating on the noise they were making". "If however, I was doing something else, and had "turned off " after a while, the noise would become a background noise, and I wouldn't pay much attention to the details". That's exactly how I perceived the situation.

If the pool was full, or half full of water, the boys were in the pool, TH was in the pool, the boys were alternately pushed underwater, and struck on their heads with something blunt and heavy like the weights. I hate talking about this, but this is the kind of scenario I think might have happened. This is where the boys could have drowned. I don't think TH needed to constrain them, and take them one by one. Children can't move quickly in a pool, Grown ups have more strength, more weight, and their feet on the ground.

If you are a trusted person, there is one magic sentence to control three children, "let's play a game" If you make it plausible to the kids, you can tie them up, blindfold them, you have lot's of possibilities. A stranger would not have these possibilities.

By the time PH got home, it was dark. If any evidence was there, it was out the back in the dark. If the boys were in the pool at the time, or just after the attack, the evidence, namely the blood, was in the pool.

The motive, and if it was pre-meditated, or a spontaneous lack of impulse control ?, I'll get round to this later. Amanda ? I hope she wasn't a witness. I hope she was at Jacoby's or locked up playing video games. As usual, all in "my" head, not necessarily in anyone else's.

 

[Compassionate Reader]

But wouldn't the blood in the pool be visible when daylight came? I've never heard it discussed if the pools in the neighborhood were searched or not, or, if I have, I've forgotten. I know the Hobbs' pool was drained and the Byers pool was searched, but it was years later. Good point.



ETA: I'm trying to figure out the time line here. You're supposing the initial attack to have occurred in the 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm time frame, right? After the guitar playing? So, he comes home, finds the boys swimming and attacks? I still believe that the only explanation for not dumping in the river would be so that the bodies would be found easier because the river's so close (and really more accessible than the ditch or a manhole in the woods) that I don't see time as a factor. Yeah, AH could have been at DJ's, for sure. I still think it would have been extremely risky to move three bodies in his truck in broad daylight. I guess it's possible, but I still think attacking in the woods offered him more cover. BTW, I've been asking, and no one (yet) has remembered any report of the pools being searched until years later. I'm still asking, though. It's certainly strange if the pools weren't searched!

 

[Compassionate Reader]

I've checked with a "local" who happens to know that TH's pool on May 5, 1993, was scum-covered and hadn't been opened for the summer yet. My source told me that opening a pool prior to Memorial Day would have been highly unusual. Although it is possible that someone in West Memphis had their pool open, it is unlikely, and it certainly was not the aforementioned pool.



ETA: However, so far, no one can remember any pool having been searched. IMO, that's very unusual, especially if most (if not all) of the pools in the area were in the same "shape" as the one in TH's yard! I know it's been said that the boys were all strong swimmers, but to not check on the pools when three boys were missing is, IMO, the height of incompetence! Way to go, wmpd!

Oh, one other thing. Some years back, someone thought that the "green vegetable matter" found in SB's stomach might have been algae from a pool. Just remembered that and thought I'd throw it out there.

 

[Userid]

Graznik, I think it would be foolish to try and construct something that paid tribute to all sightings of the boys. Although I do not dismiss any of the sightings as not true, the only 2 sightings I really take seriously, are the JB sighting, and the DM sighting. The JB sighting because of the detail, the reference points, in time and date, and because she describes the boys like 8 year old boys act. I can imagine the boys were in and out of her back yard in this hour, I don’t think she stood at her window for this whole hour. Children at that age are whizzing about all over the place, playing hide and seek, exploring the world, let’s go here and let’s go there. DM will have recognised her own son, even from a distance. Don’t see any problem there. One thing that I have yet not considered, is the matter of the Green beans.

So you don't take the Kim Williams/Dawn Moore sighting as accurate either, then?

 

[Lethalmatthew]

It's an interesting question: why were the bodies in the place they were in? Why weren't they thrown in the Mississippi river? If that was done so they could be found, that begs another question: why did the perpetrator want the bodies to be found? And that brings me back to something I read in John Douglas' book Mindhunter: people who kill their own relatives have a tendency to stage their crime. That's what happened in this case, IMO. The bodies were placed close to the Blue Beacon truck wash to make it seem like it had been a random (sex) crime. The bodies were tied this way to make it seem like there was a sexual element to the crime and the perpetrator was a pedophile. That's my theory about why the bodies were in that location and in that manner.

 

[Userid]

It's an interesting question: why were the bodies in the place they were in? Why weren't they thrown in the Mississippi river? If that was done so they could be found, that begs another question: why did the perpetrator want the bodies to be found? And that brings me back to something I read in John Douglas' book Mindhunter: people who kill their own relatives have a tendency to stage their crime. That's what happened in this case, IMO. The bodies were placed close to the Blue Beacon truck wash to make it seem like it had been a random (sex) crime. The bodies were tied this way to make it seem like there was a sexual element to the crime and the perpetrator was a pedophile. That's my theory about why the bodies were in that location and in that manner.

Not bad, LM -- I like your reasoning why it would be staged in that particular area. I guess I would have to ask, though: would the risk be worth the reward? You have two 24 hour establishments here, in addition to a service road of a busy highway; and you have searchers saturating the area the whole night on May 5th. I can understand wanting to stage it, but staging it there would be extremely risky.

 

[Compassionate Reader]

Not if you were part of the search effort and knew where people were searching and when they were searching. That would make your concealment task much easier, IMO.

 

[Cher Lockhomes]

I've checked with a "local" who happens to know that TH's pool on May 5, 1993, was scum-covered and hadn't been opened for the summer yet. My source told me that opening a pool prior to Memorial Day would have been highly unusual. Although it is possible that someone in West Memphis had their pool open, it is unlikely, and it certainly was not the aforementioned pool.



ETA: However, so far, no one can remember any pool having been searched. IMO, that's very unusual, especially if most (if not all) of the pools in the area were in the same "shape" as the one in TH's yard! I know it's been said that the boys were all strong swimmers, but to not check on the pools when three boys were missing is, IMO, the height of incompetence! Way to go, wmpd!

Oh, one other thing. Some years back, someone thought that the "green vegetable matter" found in SB's stomach might have been algae from a pool. Just remembered that and thought I'd throw it out there.

CR, thank you for this important information, and that’s very decent of you to ask around. I don’t have a swimming pool, not even a bathtub to call my own, so what would „covered in scum“ mean ? Would this mean the water was covered with algae, or there was a cover on the pool, and that was covered with scum ? That’s also a very interesting thought about the green matter. Do you know if snakes would possibly reside in the pool ?

As far as searching the pool goes, the wmpd would have required a search warrant. Here are the search warrants I found for the parents.

The Byers home on the 20th of December ‘93

http://callahan.8k.com/images/jmb/jmbconsent.jpg

The Moores home on the 20th of December ’93

http://callahan.8k.com/images/moore_d_search_consent.jpg

The Hobbs home was not searched.

As we know the Hobbs pool, and the Byers pool were both „dug“ out by the FBI, many years later. (Can’t find the links at the moment, if anyone requires them, I will start a search).

 

[Cher Lockhomes]

It's an interesting question: why were the bodies in the place they were in? Why weren't they thrown in the Mississippi river? If that was done so they could be found, that begs another question: why did the perpetrator want the bodies to be found? And that brings me back to something I read in John Douglas' book Mindhunter: people who kill their own relatives have a tendency to stage their crime. That's what happened in this case, IMO. The bodies were placed close to the Blue Beacon truck wash to make it seem like it had been a random (sex) crime. The bodies were tied this way to make it seem like there was a sexual element to the crime and the perpetrator was a pedophile. That's my theory about why the bodies were in that location and in that manner.

I agree with this LM, and I think many others do. I think the bindings served another purpose too, which I've already talked about. The person who staged it to look like a sexual motive forgot to leave a few of the typical characteristics of a sexually motivated murder, unless of course he was responsible for the degloving. The traces of sexual abuse on two of the boys were not inflicted at the time of the murders, which made a sexual motive possible, but subordinate. If a paedophile who was looking for sexual gratification had committed these murders, the signs would have been of a more explicit nature.

 

[Lethalmatthew]

I agree with this LM, and I think many others do. I think the bindings served another purpose too, which I've already talked about. The person who staged it to look like a sexual motive forgot to leave a few of the typical characteristics of a sexually motivated murder, unless of course he was responsible for the degloving. The traces of sexual abuse on two of the boys were not inflicted at the time of the murders, which made a sexual motive possible, but subordinate. If a paedophile who was looking for sexual gratification had committed these murders, the signs would have been of a more explicit nature.

I agree that a pedophile would have left a different crime scene than the one in this case. That's why I always have trouble with the theory that JKM was the perp. Yes, he knew quite a lot about the crime scene, but I just don't see him killing three boys and leave their bodies with no evidence of sexual assault whatsoever. Btw, which two traces of sexual abuse are you referring to? I know about the abrasion on SB's genitals, but I don't know of any other.

 

[Userid]

Not if you were part of the search effort and knew where people were searching and when they were searching. That would make your concealment task much easier, IMO.

Even so, I don't think an ordinary citizen/searcher would have a good enough pulse on the multiple search parties that were deployed to know when the area would be completely clear. Remember, this guy has to dispose of 3 bodies, 2 bikes, and clothes (which he stuck in the ditch with sticks). All of this takes an immense amount of time.

Perhaps if this particular searcher was actually a law enforcement official, then I can agree with you -- but if he's just an ordinary citizen, it's still extremely risky; and it's a risk worth not taking.

 

[Justiceseeker35]

Not if you were part of the search effort and knew where people were searching and when they were searching. That would make your concealment task much easier, IMO.

I tend to agree the person had to have been involved with the search to know for certain if a particular area had been cleared of the boys and would be able to go back there later on and place the bodies and belongings without being caught.

 

[Justiceseeker35]

True but in light of the MF incident TH is an extreme risk taker. In this situation he'd be very desperate. If it had been him he'd be extremely time constrained. Has to pick up PH from work, has to go back for AH at the friends house. Has to clean up and dispose without being seen and during a time at which his absence from home would not be suspect. It's doable but a person in that situation would be a risk taker.

 

[Lethalmatthew]

Even so, I don't think an ordinary citizen/searcher would have a good enough pulse on the multiple search parties that were deployed to know when the area would be completely clear. Remember, this guy has to dispose of 3 bodies, 2 bikes, and clothes (which he stuck in the ditch with sticks). All of this takes an immense amount of time.

Perhaps if this particular searcher was actually a law enforcement official, then I can agree with you -- but if he's just an ordinary citizen, it's still extremely risky; and it's a risk worth not taking.

Well, I don't think it was that risky. After about 3 AM the search effort was pretty much over for the night. I don't think anyone was looking between that time and dawn, so TH could have pretty easily disposed of the bodies and the bikes in that time frame. There was a full moon that night, so he could see where he was going. I think that during the initial search, he went multiple times to the 'discovery ditch' to figure out how he would place the bodies there. JMB said that TH went to that area at about 20:30, and TH left PH between 22:40 and 23:30, I believe, for unknown reasons. Even if TH would have been caught carrying a body, he could have yelled something like: 'I found the bodies', and people would believe him (I think).