Terry Wayne Hobbs: DNA Match, 1994 Shooting, and Defamation Suit

Terry Wayne Hobbs is the stepfather of Stevie Branch, one of the three eight-year-old boys murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas, on May 5, 1993. He has never been charged in the killings, and police have never formally named him a suspect. But since 2007, a hair DNA match, contradicted alibi statements, sworn witness affidavits, and his own ex-wife’s public doubts have made him the person the defense teams for the West Memphis Three point to when they argue the wrong men went to prison.

His Connection to the Case

Stevie Branch was Hobbs’s stepson. On the afternoon and evening the three boys disappeared from Robin Hood Hills, Hobbs was at home in West Memphis with his wife Pam, Stevie’s mother. The bodies of Stevie, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers were found the next day in a drainage ditch, naked, beaten, and bound with their own shoelaces.¹

Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were arrested within a month and convicted in 1994. All three were released in 2011 under Alford pleas, which allowed them to maintain their innocence while the state kept its convictions.² Because the convictions stand on paper, no official investigation of anyone else has followed, and the murders remain unsolved.

The 2007 DNA Match

DNA testing conducted between December 2005 and September 2007 excluded Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley from every piece of evidence tested. A hair pulled from inside a shoelace used to bind Michael Moore was found to be consistent with Terry Hobbs.¹ A second hair, from a tree stump near where the bodies were found, was consistent with David Jacoby, the friend Hobbs named as his alibi for that evening.³

The match is not unique. The hair profile was reportedly also consistent with about 1.5 percent of the population.³ Still, it was the first physical evidence in the case that pointed away from the three convicted men and toward someone inside the victims’ own household. Attorney Patrick Benca, who has represented Echols, said police followed up by “literally” asking Hobbs “two or three questions” and telling him good day.⁴

Hobbs has consistently denied any involvement.

His Account of May 5, 1993, and the Witnesses Who Contradict It

In a videotaped deposition taken during his later defamation lawsuit, Hobbs testified under oath that he came home between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. on May 5, 1993, drove Pam to her shift at a restaurant called Catfish Island around 5:00 p.m., and later searched for the missing boys with Jacoby. He said repeatedly that he never saw the three boys that day.⁵ In a 2007 police interview and again under oath in July 2009, he affirmed: “No, I did not. No I never seen Stevie that day.”⁶

Three neighbors say otherwise. In October 2009, Jamie Clark Ballard, who lived three doors down, along with her mother and sister, filed sworn affidavits stating they saw Stevie, Michael, and Christopher playing in the Hobbs backyard and watched Hobbs hollering at the boys to come back to his house at around 6:30 p.m., shortly before they vanished. Ballard said she was “absolutely, completely and totally positive” about what she saw and that police had never interviewed her or her family after the murders.⁶

Jacoby, the alibi witness, has also backed off Hobbs’s version. In the documentary West of Memphis, filmmakers reported that Jacoby was uncertain about spending as much of that night with Hobbs as Hobbs claimed.³ In later statements he said he was not with Hobbs when the boys disappeared.⁷

Pam Hobbs, the Missing Knife, and Her Public Doubts

Pam Hobbs, Stevie’s mother, has become one of the more damaging voices against her ex-husband. During their 2002 separation she mailed a package of fourteen or fifteen knives from Terry’s belongings to a defense attorney. One of them, she said, was a pocket knife her father had given to Stevie as a gift. Stevie carried the knife constantly and would have had it on him the day he disappeared. It was not among his personal effects returned by police after the murders. Pam said she had always assumed the killer took it.⁸⁵

Terry told the Arkansas Times in 2007 that he collected knives casually, that he “bought some, and found some and Pam bought me some” and threw them in a drawer. About the specific pocket knife, he said: “I don’t know. It could have been. And it could have been it was in the drawer because we didn’t want him to have it.”⁸

Asked in November 2007 whether she thought Terry might have been involved, Pam answered: “Honestly in my heart… I have to be honest. Possibly.” She described their seventeen-year marriage as one defined by “manipulation,” said Terry was “not a loving step-father” despite how he presented himself in public, and described physical fights over his rough discipline of the children: “He’d hit me and I’d hit him back. I didn’t back down, you know. We would always get into it when Stevie was alive about him being a little bit too rough.”⁹

The 1994 Shooting

Roughly eighteen months after the murders, in November 1994, Memphis police were called to the Hobbs home on a domestic violence report. Pam told officers Terry had beaten her with his fists, and police noted injuries to her face and the back of her head. Her brother, Jackie Hicks Jr., the same man who had discovered the three boys’ bodies in May 1993, arrived with other relatives to confront Hobbs. A fight followed. Hobbs drew a .357 magnum pistol and shot Hicks in the abdomen, then pointed the gun at other family members and threatened to shoot them too, according to police reports. Hicks was hospitalized in critical condition and survived. Hobbs was arrested on charges of assault on his wife and aggravated assault on Hicks, and released on $20,000 bond.¹⁰

The Nephew Statements and Trailer-Park Affidavits

In January 2012, Echols’s legal team announced that three witnesses had signed declarations under penalty of perjury saying Terry Hobbs’s nephew, Michael Hobbs Jr., had told them his uncle killed the three boys. One quoted the nephew as saying: “My Uncle Terry murdered the three little boys,” and referring to it as “The Hobbs Family Secret.” A second recounted a similar statement made while playing pool. A third said he overheard, through floorboards, a conversation between Michael Hobbs Sr. and another man in which one said, “I am sorry, I regret it,” and the other replied, “You are in the clear. No one thinks you are a suspect.”¹¹ The defense team said all three passed polygraph examinations and submitted the material to District Attorney Scott Ellington.¹²

Separately, in February 2013, Billy Wayne Stewart and Bennie Guy signed affidavits alleging that two local teenagers, Buddy Lucas and L.G. Hollingsworth, had confessed to being with Hobbs and Jacoby the night of the killings. According to Stewart, Lucas told him in 1995 that when the three boys appeared, Hobbs shouted at the group to grab them. Guy’s affidavit described a similar account he said Hollingsworth gave him in the Crittenden County Jail in 1995. Both men said they had tried to report what they heard, Stewart to a police investigator and Guy by letter to the prosecutor, and neither got a response.³

The affidavits have credibility problems. Stewart was described as an admitted drug dealer and Guy as a convicted felon. Todd Moore, father of victim Michael Moore, publicly defended Hobbs in a 2012 Jonesboro Sun editorial: “Terry Hobbs did not murder my son.” A writer in The Atlantic called the allegations in West of Memphis “reckless.”³ Hobbs has never been charged in relation to any of these accounts.

The Defamation Lawsuit He Filed and Lost

In 2007, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks posted a letter on the band’s website and spoke at a Little Rock rally implying that Hobbs was involved in the murders. Hobbs sued her for defamation in U.S. District Court in Little Rock.¹³

U.S. District Judge Brian Miller dismissed the case on December 1, 2009, ruling that Hobbs could not establish actual malice and that he had “voluntarily injected himself into a public controversy” over the wrongful-conviction claims.¹³ In April 2010, Miller ordered Hobbs to pay Maines $17,590 in legal costs.¹⁴

In the deposition taken during that suit, Hobbs described himself as “a pretty good man,” said the accusations had “ruined his reputation and caused him to have a nervous breakdown,” dismissed the defense investigation as a “circus,” and told the lawyers: “I am not a child killer. . . . I haven’t done anything wrong and everybody knows that.” He also said he was writing a book manuscript of 300 to 400 pages and that someone in Hollywood had expressed interest.¹⁵

Where the Case Stands

Because Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley pleaded out under Alford pleas in August 2011 rather than being exonerated, the state’s convictions remain in place and the murders are officially closed. Prosecutor Ellington publicly maintained that he still believed the three men were guilty.²

That may change. In April 2024, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that state law does not restrict post-conviction DNA testing to incarcerated defendants, opening the door for Echols’s team to retest crime-scene evidence.¹⁶ On August 1, 2025, Crittenden County Circuit Judge Tonya Alexander ordered advanced testing on ligatures and hairs from the case, with all three defense teams and the prosecuting attorney signing an agreed order. The evidence was sent to Bode Laboratories in Virginia for M-Vac testing, a wet-vacuum method able to pull biological material from fabric that traditional swabbing cannot reach. The M-Vac company’s CEO noted that knots in the shoelaces may have protected skin cells from decades of degradation.¹⁷

Evidence was transferred to Bode in late 2025.¹⁸ As of June 2026, results are expected by the end of July 2026. A spokesperson for Echols said that if the testing produces a DNA match, the legal team will ask authorities to reopen the case.¹⁹

1
Britannica. West Memphis Three
2
CBS News. Unusual Plea That Freed West Memphis 3
3
Famous Trials. Who Killed the Three Boys
4
KATV. New DNA Testing in West Memphis 3 Case
5
AY Magazine. Murder Mystery: The West Memphis Child Murders Conclusion
6
WestMemphis3.org. New Eyewitnesses: Three Boys Last Seen Alive With Terry Hobbs
7
Talk Business. Evidence Testing in West Memphis Three Case Could Be Completed by End of July
8
Arkansas Times. New Evidence in West Memphis Murders
9
KAIT. Pam Hobbs Speaks Out Part 3
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Arkansas Times. The Legal Troubles of Terry Hobbs and John Mark Byers
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Action News 5. WM3 Attorneys: New Evidence Points to Real Killer
12
Deadline. West of Memphis Unveils New Witnesses in Murder Case
13
Action News 5. Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Dixie Chicks
14
NBC News Today. Victim’s Stepdad Told to Pay Singer’s Legal Costs
15
WEHCO Media. Hobbs v. Maines Court Document
16
Innocence Project. Justice for the West Memphis Three
17
Talk Business. New DNA Testing Ordered for West Memphis 3 Evidence
18
Talk Business. Evidence in West Memphis Three Case Sent to Lab
19
Action News 5. West Memphis 3 DNA Test Results Expected Next Month