True Detective season 3: The real-life cases that inspired HBO crime series

The show imagines the case of 12 and 10-year-old siblings Will and Julie Purcell, who disappeared while riding their bikes in their hometown of West Fingers, Arkansas

Clarisse Loughrey
Monday 14 January 2019 09:07 GMT
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True Detective Season 3 - trailer

A new season of True Detective means a new crime to solve – and someone new to solve them.

For season three, Mahershala Ali plays detective Wayne Hays, determined to uncover the truth behind the case of 12 and 10-year-old siblings Will and Julie Purcell, who disappeared while riding their bikes in their hometown of West Fingers, Arkansas.

As Vanity Fair has pointed out, the Satanic references and rural Arkansas setting suggests the new season draws from the “West Memphis Three”, a 1993 case where three teenagers – Jessie Misskelley, 17; Jason Baldwin, 16; and Damien Echols, 18 – were convicted of the murder of three eight-year-old boys.

The “West Memphis Three” case erupted at the height of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, with investigators at the time suggesting the murders had “cult” overtones, with Echols expressing an interest in the occult. However, in 2007, DNA and forensic tests revealed no physical evidence at the crime scene that linked the teens to the murders and the trio were eventually released from prison.

The first episode sees two teenagers – Freddy Burns (Rhys Wakefield) and Ryan Peters (Brandon Flynn) – interrogated by police, with the latter forced to defend his Black Sabbath t-shirt when questioned if it’s Satanic.

True Detective season three has also established parallels with the murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in St Joseph, Minnesota in October 1989. Wetterling was abducted along with his brother and a friend when the three were riding their bikes home, although the other two boys were later set free. The case sparked the spread of “stranger danger” attitudes and inspired a sex offender registration act. In 2016, Danny Heinrich, a long-time person of interest in the case, revealed Wetterling’s remains to the authorities.

Another inspiration could be the murders of 17-year-old Kevin Ives and 16-year-old Don Henry, who, in 1987, were found dead on the train tracks in Alexander, Arkansas. Although the autopsy alleged the boys had fallen asleep on the tracks, the case has since attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists, who claim the boys were killed after stumbling on a drug-related government operation.

The entire series of True Detective is available to watch on NOW TV, with new episodes airing on Sky Atlantic in the UK.

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