Arrests After Murders Bring Little Peace : Three 8-year-olds are killed; three teen-age suspects held. An Arkansas town faces nightmare of a trial.

Children are playing in Robin Hood Park again, racing bicycles and popping wheelies along a bog that is thick with weeds and brush. It’s as if the yellow crime scene tape stretched between the trees isn’t there anymore.

It was just a month ago that police and sheriff’s officers fanned out across the area in a search for three missing 8-year-old boys, who vanished May 5 while riding bicycles together. Their bodies were found the next day, beaten and bound, in a drainage ditch at the park.

The state medical examiner’s office determined that the second-graders--Christopher Byers, Steve Branch and Michael Moore--died of blows to the head.

Police arrested three teen-agers last Friday and charged them with murder. Many residents in this city of 28,000 expressed a sense of relief. But the arrests have brought little peace to the parents of the victims.

“People think the worst is over because they made the arrests, but for me the nightmare is in that courtroom, knowing I’ll have to listen to how my son was murdered,” says Melissa Byers, 37, the mother of one victim.

Byers says she has turned to her deep religious faith for comfort, although the nights are difficult. She paces the floor, chain-smoking cigarillos and reading the hundreds of condolence letters from strangers across the country.

“I know Christopher is in heaven. I know that, but, oh I miss him. I miss him, I miss him,” she says.

On the other side of Crittenden County, Lee Rush, 49, is experiencing a different type of anguish. Her stepson, 17-year-old Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., is one of the three facing murder charges.

“My stepson is innocent,” she says, her eyes swollen from tears and a lack of sleep. “I feel terrible for the parents of those children, but people shouldn’t convict someone until they’ve been proven guilty. I walk around thinking, ‘This can’t be happening. No.’

“People say emotions will die down. But things are going to get ugly at the trial, the hatred is going to explode. Nothing will be the same.”

Two of the suspects, Charles Jason Baldwin, 16, and Misskelley, live in a trailer park in Marion, six miles from town. The other suspect, Michael Wayne Echols, 18, lives in West Memphis.

Almost immediately after they were arrested, rumors of cults and satanic rituals arose. Police refused to comment, but on Monday the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn., printed excerpts from a 27-page statement Misskelley reportedly made to police, saying the boys were murdered as part of a cult ritual. Misskelley reportedly told police he watched as his friends choked the boys unconscious, raped one and sexually mutilated another.

West Memphis police Inspector Gary Gitchell would not comment on the statement, but did say he is certain the right suspects had been arrested. “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” Gitchell said.

The suspects were arraigned in a packed courtroom Friday. From his seat in the gallery, 36-year-old Mark Byers, Christopher’s father, stared at them and silently mouthed “animal, animal, animal,” until a sheriff’s deputy told him to stop.

Melissa Byers recoiled at “breathing the same air as them,” but said she wanted to “look them in the eye and have them see what they’ve destroyed.”

At their two-story brick house in West Memphis, she pulls out Christopher’s school photo and points to his big brown eyes. “Do you see how innocent he was?” she asks. “He was a baby. He was a little lamb of God. And they slaughtered him.”

Mark Byers sits quietly at the kitchen table holding a pair of Christopher’s blue jeans that had just been washed. “I made an oath to my son at his casket,” Byers says. If the killers are executed, “I will stand there and watch until the angel of death takes them to hell.”

The Byers plan to move from the neighborhood. Although the family is getting counseling, they worry about Christopher’s 13-year-old brother, Ryan. The first night that Ryan slept alone after the murder, his parents heard noises coming from his bedroom. They opened the door and found him scrubbing the walls with bathroom cleanser, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t sleep with Chris’ handprints on the wall,” he said.

In her trailer in Marion, Lee Rush says she is adjusting to the idea of her hometown turning against her family.

There are phone calls from strangers who hiss “child killer”; there are jeers from passing cars. “What are ya’ll doing, sacrificing a cat?” one taunts. And there is the deep conviction that Little Jessie, as he is called, is innocent and being railroaded by police desperate to make an arrest.

“We’re tearing the world apart to get evidence to show he is innocent,” Rush says. “We have witnesses who say they saw him somewhere else that day. He wasn’t in the woods.”

The parents of the other two suspects also claim their sons were not at the park at the time of the murders. Rush has no explanation for Misskelley’s statement to police. “We haven’t been able to talk to him since last Thursday. They’re going to have to give his dad a chance to ask him, ‘Did you do this, son?’ We want to hear it from him.”

A sheriff’s deputy knocks on the door with a letter from Misskelley, the first since he was led away for questioning. “I hope ya’ll don’t hate me because I did not do it,” he wrote in neat block print. “I was ruffin (roofing). . . . Please get me out. I will die in here.”