Kim Floresca

&nbsp Kim Floresca was described as a "Marion teen" who informed reporters at the Commercial Appeal that Jessie Misskelley had confessed to participating in the murders of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Chris Byers.

An excerpt from the article read as follows:

Floresca said Misskelley told her and other students the day before he was arrested that he participated in the killings.

A group of students were driving last Wednesday after school to a friend's house to go swimming when Misskelley began telling his bizarre tale, she said.

"He was saying he hit the little boy and the little boy ran off and he was taking him back to where Damien and the other boy were," she said. According to Misskelley's story, Echols had already killed the two other boys, she said

Floresca said she didn't believe Misskelley at the time.[1]

Kim Floresca never testified at either of the two trials. An official police statement recording the above-referenced confession has not been identified or located. The article in the Commercial Appeal as well as the reference to Floresca in Blood of Innocents, written by the same authors as the newspaper article, is the only known documentation of this confession by Misskelley. None of the other teenagers in the car have ever been publicly identified.

Counterarguments against Statement

Though the reference to the confession by Misskelley exists via copies of the original June 7th, 1993 newspaper article, supporters of the West Memphis Three question the veracity of the article's contents. Mara Leveritt claimed in her novel pertaining to the case, Devil's Knot, that "a television news director reported that a woman called his station the day after the arrests, offering to sell a copy for several hundred dollars" (Leveritt, 2002, p. 98). A subsequent footnote in the same book identifies the director as Bruce Whittaeker of WMC-TV, Channel 5, in Memphis.