GREG DAY

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Untying the Knot

John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three

Copyright © 2005, 2012 by Greg Day.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-1169-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-1171-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-1170-1 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 05/07/2012

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

Chapter 1

A Community in Shock

Chapter 2

I’m No Angel

Chapter 3

Melissa

Chapter 4

Paradise Lost

Chapter 5

Summer Camp

Chapter 6

Redemption and Revelations

Chapter 7

Jason and Jessie

Chapter 8

John Mark Byers, Damien Echols, and Terry Hobbs

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Endnotes

Dedicated to Christopher, Stevie, and Michael

“Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure

In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,

Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth

—T. S. Eliot

PREFACE

I first met John Mark Byers in 2005 when we were introduced by a mutual friend. I had been following the case of the three convicted killers—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr., who came to be known as the West Memphis Three—since 2000. Unlike other case watchers, I had seen neither Paradise Lost nor Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, the HBO movies that told the story of three Arkansas teenagers convicted of the murders of three eight-year-old boys—Byers’s son Christopher, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore—as part of a satanic ritual. The films created a wave of activism and controversy that no one, not even the filmmakers, could have predicted. The extensive media coverage, high-profile celebrity advocacy, and, perhaps most significantly, the explosion of the Internet kept the case of the West Memphis Three from getting lost in the back of the closet of closed cases.

Mark and I began talking about this project shortly after we met, and within a month I was writing. With few breaks, that writing went on for more than six years. During that time Mark opened his life to me, and I took notes. I made four trips to Arkansas, during which I attended two Baldwin/Misskelley hearings and the Arkansas State Supreme Court hearing in 2010, the proceeding that led to the eventual release of the West Memphis Three. On the eve of that hearing, I made a memorable trip to the Varner Supermax Unit, where I visited with a friend I had made while researching this book. During this visit I had a chance encounter with Damien Echols, whose wife’s visit coincided with mine. I spent hundreds of hours with Mark Byers and others involved in the case, in person, via e-mail, and on the phone. I tried to experience as much as I could about the region and the people who live there, to try to see things through the eyes of Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three. I came about as close as I could.

Over time much would change, and this book is a reflection of those changes and is also a serious attempt to capture them with a clear and objective eye. I had to catch up with the past, capture the present, and wait for the future to unfold, never really knowing what the “end” would be or when it would come. No sooner had I written something than it needed to be rewritten.

This book is meant to be different from other media. Here, facts are separated from opinion, though both are included. Where a confirmable record exists of a subject discussed in this book, the source is cited, as is the amount of weight I have given to that record. If, during my research, I have developed a theory that suggests anything other than what the records explicitly state and have included it here, it is identified as such—a theory. When the subject comes to Mark Byers, things get more complicated. Where facts could be verified, they were. Where no corroboration was available, I have made every attempt to make that fact obvious to the reader. In this book, I worked to take what we can verify about Mark Byers, combine it with stories from him and about him, and come out with a synthesis that is a close-to-accurate portrait of a very complex man with a very unusual life.

Some characters’ names were changed in the book as well—some at the individuals’ request and some at Mark’s or my discretion. Their identities are not important in some cases and are potentially dangerous in others. These changes are noted the first time they occur and have no factual impact on the story.

The supporters of the West Memphis Three became a very organized group in the years after the release of Paradise Lost, and now include Mark Byers among their ranks. As such they are mentioned repeatedly in the text, most often simply as “supporters.”

Many of the people quoted in this book speak with a distinct dialect based on the part of the country from which they hail. Rather than annotate instances of nonstandard or ungrammatical speech each time they occur (with the [sic] notation, for example), since they are so numerous, they are for the most part left to stand on their own.

Much of the information in this book came directly from court transcripts of the trials and appeals. Often these transcriptions were not the “official” versions—that is, they were transcribed by volunteers using recordings of the proceedings. Hundreds of individuals have gone over these transcriptions over many years, and I believe them to be quite reliable, though I do not discount the possibility of error.

I don’t believe that any other book will be able to put these elements together without the extensive access to Mark Byers and his friends and family that I was granted. Through my years of research and experience, I moved full circle through all the changes in the state of the case and have arrived back at my subjects, John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three.

FOREWORD

“I hate you. I hate you. Forever and a day shall I still hate you.” I remember vividly the day I spoke those words before the cameras of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofksy during the filming of Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. In those days, the hate in me was palpable from the minute I woke up until I fitfully slept each night. Their faces moved across the insides of my eyelids each night along with those of my son Christopher, along with those of Michael Moore and Stevie Branch. Their names hung in my mind until I fell into a hazy, often intoxicated sleep—Damien . . . Jason . . . Jessie. For years. I thought about little else.

It wasn’t actually coherent thought that drove me, but rather a raw emotional need to hate. I needed someone to hate. I needed it to focus, to shut everything else out, and to give me a reason to get up every day, as twisted as that may seem. The West Memphis Three were the convicted killers of my son; they were easy for me to hate.

People familiar with my appearances in the HBO movies, along with those who know me through my ranting on the Internet during the years following the release of Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 will recognize that I was often my own worst enemy, lashing out with the confrontational rage that characterized my life during that time. However I did not anticipate the backlash that followed. The viciousness of the attacks that would come my way as a result of my support for the verdicts seemed so out of proportion to what I had said and done. Despite the way I acted, I was still a victim’s parent. My little boy was dead, coldly, brutally murdered. People would understand that and side with me—wouldn’t they?

As it turned out, most people didn’t understand. The West Memphis Three had become a bona fide cause and I soon became as hated by others as I hated the West Memphis Three. My reaction was to turn to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime. This isn’t an excuse; it’s just the way it was.

I hit my personal rock bottom in August, 1999, and found myself locked up, sentenced to eight years for a long series of petty crimes committed during the aftermath of Christopher’s murder and the death of my wife Melissa.

I have taken an amazing journey through life, or maybe it has taken me, and I’ve learned that things are rarely what they seem to be. Five years ago if you told me that I’d be standing arm-in-arm with Damien Echols at the Sundance Film Festival for the screening of an unprecedented fourth movie about the murders, I’d say you were crazy. If not for those informal meetings with John Douglas at my home in Tennessee in 2007, I’d still believe that the right men were in prison, and I’d still be wishing that they rot in hell. How things have changed.

But as I said, things aren’t always as they seem. The state of the case has shifted. As most already know, I believe there is a killer on the loose. I also believe that I know who he is. My life since the loss of my son was spent defending the guilt of the West Memphis Three. I’m prepared to spend the rest of it proving their innocence.

JMB

February, 2012

CHAPTER 1

A Community in Shock

Who can truly understand the mind of a child killer? Who can fathom the power of berserk instinct unleashed on the innocent?

—Frederick Zugibe, former chief medical examiner

Rockland County, New York

West Memphis, Arkansas, is the kind of place one passes on the interstate and is aware of only because of the highway signs hanging overhead, proclaiming its existence. The town itself is a mile or so off the highway, but there’s nothing prompting anyone to stop. If people bothered to look closely, they might feel a faint, inexplicable sadness rising up inside, only to have it subside once the freeway exits are in the rearview mirror. To the traveler, it is a faceless, almost invisible place. Think of it as the Eleanor Rigby of towns.

Located on a bleak, flood-prone piece of earth between interstate highways 40 and 55, West Memphis is twenty-six square miles of barren farmland, small tract homes, trailer parks, and strip malls, crisscrossed by a system of water management drainage canals, runoff ponds, and bayous.

Naming the town West Memphis was the founders’ attempt to capitalize on its proximity to Memphis, which lies directly across the Mississippi, to attract investors who were paying premium prices for timber in the Memphis market. With rail and automobile bridges built in 1892 and 1917, respectively, West Memphis began to grow. Today, with a population of approximately twenty-eight thousand, it is the twelfth largest city in Arkansas. Whether the town was ever what could be called prosperous is debatable, but today West Memphis is a relatively poor town, with a median income 35 percent below the national average and per capita income well below the state average.

It is also a somewhat violent place. In West Memphis alone, between 2001 and 2006 there were 23 instances of murder or manslaughter, 88 forcible rapes, 375 robberies, and more than 900 aggravated assaults, along with a soaring rate of property crimes—nearly double the state average. Because of its location at the intersection of interstate highways 40 and 55, the West Memphis cargo inspection and weigh station is one of the busiest in the United States, with an estimated 3 million cargo trucks passing through each year. For drug traffickers, consisting mostly of Mexican criminal groups, but also including motorcycle gangs and local independents, the interstate highway system offers a superb network of distribution channels for drugs coming from the Southwest and bound for points throughout the state.

The state troopers are a busy lot, as are the locals. As recently as April 2010, “thirteen large bricks” of drugs were seized by West Memphis Police Department (WMPD) officers. Two months later, a pair of West Memphis police officers would be gunned down during a traffic stop of a father-and-son team of antigovernment activists.1 West Memphis experiences a seesaw of ennui versus action, however, and the residents’ interest in the freeway system is limited to its utility in getting back and forth to Memphis to the east or Little Rock to the west. Until 1993, no real national attention was paid to West Memphis; there simply wasn’t much to pay attention to. But in 1993, with the chilling discovery of the bodies of three eight-year-old boys in a wooded area of town near Interstate 40, West Memphis became the locus of a controversy that would last more than eighteen years.

“There’s Been a Homicide”

John Mark and Melissa Byers were the first to report their child missing. At approximately 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 5, Mark left his West Memphis home to pick up Melissa from her job at a jewelry supply company across the river in Memphis. During the ride home, Mark told Melissa that their son Christopher had not come home from school yet and that he had no idea where the boy was. He dropped Melissa off at their home at 1400 East Barton Avenue and headed back to the West Memphis Courthouse to pick up their other son, Ryan Clark, who had been called to testify as a witness to a motor vehicle incident. He turned left off of East Barton onto North Fourteenth Street and headed south toward Broadway. About halfway up Fourteenth, Mark spotted Christopher skateboarding down the street, toward the home of his friend Stevie Branch. Not only had Christopher left home without checking in with anyone, but he had also broken a standing rule about riding his skateboard on a busy street. Mark took Christopher back home and gave him “two or three licks” with a doubled belt, he later told police, for misbehaving. Christopher started up to his room to sulk, but Mark told the boy to grab a paper sack and work on cleaning up the carport until he returned from picking up Ryan. It was 5:30 p.m. when Mark again left for the courthouse. Melissa remained at home.

When Mark returned with Ryan at 6:15, he asked where Christopher was. “Well, he’s right outside,” Melissa said, interrupting the phone call she was on. “He’s come in and out a time or two, once to get, I think, a drink of water, or a cookie. He’s just right outside.” Only he wasn’t right outside. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere to be found, as his parents discovered after checking with a couple of neighbors and sending Ryan out to look for him around the neighborhood. Despite being given strict orders, supported by a whipping, to go nowhere until his father returned, Christopher had vanished. “I’m sure that after his punishment and working under the carport for a bit, he made a beeline to catch up with his friends,” Mark says today. Mark was irritated. The family had plans for dinner out that night, and now Christopher’s absence had put everything on hold until they could find him. Mark, Melissa, and Ryan hopped into the family’s 1985 Isuzu and started searching the neighborhood. Where had Christopher disappeared to so fast? One of the stops they made was at Robin Hood Hills, a tiny patch of woods located between Goodwin Avenue and the interstate. Not seeing any sign of Christopher or his friends from the street, the family continued to drive through the area in a sweeping circle, hoping to catch sight of him.

After an hour of searching, there was still no sign of Christopher. Spotting a patrol car idling in front of the Dollar General store on Broadway, Mark pulled alongside the cruiser to report that his son was missing. It was now 7:30, and the officer in the car advised Mark to wait a little while before calling it in to the police. “Most of the time dark will bring ’em home,” he said. Mark didn’t wait. Once the family reached home, Mark called the sheriff’s department, knowing they had a search and rescue squad; Denver Reed was the man to talk to. The dispatcher at the sheriff’s department told Mark essentially the same thing as the officer outside Dollar General, adding that they could take calls only directly from the police department. Mark then placed a call to the West Memphis Police to report his son missing. The call was dispatched to Officer Regina Meek, who arrived at the Byerses’ home at 8:10 p.m. to ask questions and take a statement. As Meek was finishing her report, a neighbor from across the street, Diane Moore, hurried over, meeting Mark, Melissa, and Meek under the carport. Diane—“Dana” to her friends—told them that her son Michael was also missing and that she had last seen him with Christopher and Stevie Branch at around 6:00 p.m. When Dana saw them, the three boys were riding on two bikes; Michael was riding solo, while Christopher rode passenger on Stevie’s bike, a recent gift from his grandfather. They were headed north on Fourteenth Street, about six houses down from the Moores’ house and just out of earshot, so Dana sent Michael’s older sister, ten-year-old Dawn Moore, to get Michael and bring him home for supper. Dana watched as the boys disappeared around a corner down the road. By the time Dawn rounded the corner, the boys had vanished. When asked later at the Misskelley trial what she did after Dawn came back without Michael, Dana said, “I went back home and waited for him to see if he would come back. He didn’t come back.”

Dana was relating what she knew to Officer Meek when Terry Hobbs, Steve Branch’s stepfather, drove up to the Byers residence. It was approximately 8:30, and Mark says this was “the first time [he] ever laid eyes on Terry Hobbs.”2 Their boys had been friends for some time, but Mark and Melissa had never met the Hobbses. Although Meek made no mention of Hobbs in her testimony at either trial, Mark is confident not only that was she still present when Hobbs rolled up, but that she took at least minimal information from Hobbs before she set out to look for the boys.

The initial searches didn’t begin until dark. Several small, informal search parties were formed, Mark Byers and Christopher’s brother Ryan Clark among the participants. Upon reaching the entrance to Robin Hood, Byers realized that the shorts and flip-flops he was wearing would not do for a woodland search. He walked the two blocks home for a change of clothes and returned wearing coveralls and boots. “I probably had them on for the next two or three days,” he told police. He made a few passes from the road down to the banks of the bayou and back again but was hampered by the rapidly fading daylight, and he was contemplating borrowing a flashlight from a neighbor when patrolman John Moore of the West Memphis Police Department pulled up. He and Byers entered the woods south of a large canal—Ten Mile Bayou—that separated the north and south sections of Robin Hood Hills. Together, using Moore’s flashlight to guide them, they began a tentative search of the darkening woods, starting with an area south and east of the pipe bridge. This “bridge” was the only way across the bayou to the area where the boys’ bodies eventually would be found, but Mark didn’t cross it that night.

While Mark and Officer John Moore searched the woods near the end of North Fourteenth Street, Ryan and three of his friends, Brit Smith, Robbie Young, and Ritchie Masters, fanned out along the bayou. Robbie and Ritchie crossed the pipe bridge and began searching the area north of the bayou, toward the Blue Beacon Truck Wash and the North Service Road, while Ryan and Britt stayed on the south side. After venturing east a short way and shouting Christopher’s name several times with no response, Ryan and Ritchie were startled by a series of splashing sounds, as well some rustling coming from the brush. Ryan claimed he heard a gunshot. Spooked, they ran out of the woods and up to the pipe bridge, where Robbie and Ritchie were waiting.3 Ryan and Britt arrived at Ten Mile Bayou, to the west of where Byers and Officer Moore were searching. At that point all four boys crossed the pipe bridge together and searched for an additional thirty minutes before calling it quits.

While the searches were getting underway at Robin Hood, Pam Hobbs, Steve Branch’s mother, was working the evening shift at Catfish Island, a local restaurant where she waited tables. She had told Stevie that he was to be home by 4:30 that afternoon so that she could see him before she left for work. By 4:50, Stevie still hadn’t come home. After taking a quick ride through the neighborhood, Terry had taken Pam to work, promising her that he would continue to look for Stevie. According to Pam, Terry returned to pick her up at 9:25 p.m. and gave her the news that Stevie was still missing. The police were called immediately, and Officer John Moore came to Catfish Island to take statements from Pam and Terry Hobbs.4 Terry told Pam that Stevie, Chris Byers, and Michael Moore were all together and that Mark Byers and Dana Moore had already spoken to police. Leaving Catfish Island, Terry and Pam began searching the neighborhoods, paying particular attention to Robin Hood Hills. According to Pam’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial, the Hobbses entered Robin Hood by the Fourteenth Street entrance at approximately 9:30 p.m. and worked their way up toward the West McAuley Drive entrance, but Pam never crossed the pipe bridge toward the area where the boys were eventually found. After searching the woods, the family rode “around town looking anywhere [they] could think of.” According to her testimony, Pam and her four-year-old daughter Amanda went back to the house at 1601 South McAuley while Terry, family friend David Jacoby, and Pam’s father, Jackie Hicks Sr., spent the entire night searching the woods and surrounding area.

Mark Byers and Officer Moore were concluding their nearly fruitless search of Robin Hood after circling the woods in a wide loop, covering much of the same ground earlier searched by Ryan and his friends. It was only “nearly” fruitless because the two did discover some bicycle tire tracks near the bayou, but no sign of any bikes. Could these tracks have been made by the boys’ bikes? Moore returned to his patrol car and headed back to the police station. It was time for an 11:00 p.m. shift change, and he would be going off-duty. Mark Byers returned home and contacted the sheriff’s office again, much more agitated this time because it was late at night, and as far as Mark could tell, no official police search had been mounted. Pam Hobbs later made the same complaint, saying, “I wish they would have started [searching] earlier than what they did.”

Mark and son Ryan drove over to the north side of Robin Hood, to the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. The truck wash was right off the interstate, and the two headed toward the back of the building, where they pointed the Isuzu’s headlights into the woods and began blowing the car horn and shouting Christopher’s name. Later, with the help of his friend Tony Hudson, Mark Byers checked vacant houses and buildings that the boys might have crawled into during the night. After this yielded nothing, they returned home, and Ryan went to bed. Mark and Melissa waited from about 3:00 a.m. on, waited because there was nothing else to do. A knock on the door at 6:00 a.m. roused Mark Byers; it was Terry Hobbs. The two headed back toward Robin Hood to continue the search. Todd Moore, who had just gotten off work from his trucking job, and Steve Branch Sr., little Stevie’s biological father, joined them. An hour or so later, Mark met up with Denver Reed of the search and rescue unit, and Reed gave Mark an idea of how they would conduct their search of the bayou.

There was a police briefing that morning at the West Memphis Police Department, and Inspector Gary Gitchell gave the news to the officers who were just arriving for duty: three small boys had been missing since about 6:00 p.m. and had last been seen heading toward the woods at Robin Hood Hills. All available personnel would be assigned to the search. Several detectives were to cover the streets in the northeast quadrant of West Memphis, canvasing door-to-door with a prepared questionnaire, while the rest returned to Robin Hood and the surrounding area for a thorough daylight search. Crews of neighbors joined the police in Robin Hood, and soon the area was buzzing with activity. A helicopter had been dispatched from Memphis to perform an aerial survey of Robin Hood Hills and the surrounding area. Search and rescue dropped their john boat into the bayou to eliminate the possibility that the boys had drowned, though this was unlikely; Christopher was a strong swimmer, and three boys drowning together in a drainage canal seemed doubtful.

Detective Bryn Ridge, a ten-year veteran of the West Memphis Police Department, was busy working his way through brush and vines, making a tedious and painstaking search of the undergrowth that covered the area east of the woods. Finding the going difficult and the search unproductive, Ridge went home to get his three-wheeler and moved his search to the west of the woods behind Walmart. He had been at it since 7:30 a.m., and it was nearing 1:30 p.m. when he got the call summoning him back to Robin Hood, about three miles east of the open fields on Airport Road where he was presently searching.

Detective Sergeant Mike Allen had been in law enforcement for twelve years, the last six with the West Memphis Police Department, and he knew the area well. He initially had been dispatched to survey the neighborhood in search of vacant houses that the boys could have gotten into overnight. Shortly after one o’clock, however, Allen received a call directing him to return to the woods right away; the searchers had found something. When Allen arrived at Robin Hood, he came to a pipe that ran about five to six feet above Ten Mile Bayou, a height that varied depending on rainfall. This was a popular entrance to the woods for the local children, and Allen proceeded carefully across the bridge, making his way uphill to an area where a small group of police officers and search and rescue workers were gathering. His attention was directed to an ominous sight: two small tennis shoes were floating in the murky water of a shallow drainage ditch. Finding an area from which he could access the water, Allen scrambled down a bank and lowered himself into the creek (actually, he slipped down the embankment and landed rather unceremoniously in the ditch). Allen started making his way toward the floating sneakers. As he reached for one of them, his foot struck an object in the creek. When he lifted his right foot, little Michael Moore’s body floated to the surface.

In an instant, the mode of the investigation switched gears. Chief Inspector Gitchell was called to the scene to take charge. Crime scene tape was unpacked and strung up around the pipe bridge area, and all entrances to the woods were blocked. One look at Michael Moore’s body, lifeless and beaten, with his wrists bound to his ankles, left no ambiguity about the cause of death; this was a homicide and, by all appearances, an especially vicious one. The area was now a bona fide crime scene and needed to be secured before any more evidence was rendered useless, though with dozens of people traipsing through the area the previous night and all through the day, there was a high probability that much critical evidence had been destroyed. Now two more boys needed to be found, but with the discovery of Michael Moore’s body, hope for a positive outcome all but vanished.

Detective Bryn Ridge volunteered for the grim task of continuing the search of the ditch. Having just arrived as Mike Allen discovered the Moore boy’s body, Ridge prepared for what was ahead. Slipping into the debris-laden creek, which was only about two feet deep, Ridge dropped to his knees and began moving toward the location where the first body had been found. Moving his hands along the mucky creek bottom, from bank to bank in a sweeping motion, he carefully felt around for what he expected would be another body. When he reached Michael’s body, floating face down in the water, he gently scooped up the boy and placed him on the nearest riverbank. The other officers looked on, stupefied; how could anyone, even a police officer, behold such a scene and not be forever changed?

Continuing his search of the creek bottom, Ridge started to find clothing that had been jammed down into the mud with sticks. Michael’s Cub Scout shirt and hat, more shoes, two pairs of trousers (turned inside out with the zippers fastened), shirts, underpants—all had been shoved into the muck in the same manner. About ten yards downstream from where Michael had been found, Ridge located the second body, that of Stevie Branch. He was positioned face down in the mud, having been beaten and bound in the same way as Michael—left wrist to left ankle, right wrist to right ankle. Shoelaces served as the binding. Stevie had an additional injury: the left side of his face was torn open in a grotesque, jagged wound. Next, not more than a few feet from where he found Stevie, Ridge came upon the body of Christopher Byers. As the boy’s body was lifted from the water, the searchers saw one final horror inflicted on the child: Christopher had been emasculated, his scrotum removed and most of his penis with it. The boys’ bodies were laid on the riverbank in approximation to where they had been found, with Michael alone and Christopher and Stevie together further downstream. A shaken and weary Bryn Ridge pulled himself out of the water and regained his composure before continuing his work. It was going to be a very long day, and the worst part was still to come: someone had to inform the parents.

Todd Moore, who lived right on the other side of East Barton Avenue at number 1398, alerted Mark Byers to a broadcast he’d heard on his police scanner: the searchers at Robin Hood had found something. The two fathers hopped into Todd’s truck and hurried over to the dead end on McCauley only to see the area being cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. As Mark rushed the thin barrier in an attempt to get to the scene, he was halted by police guarding the perimeter. Gary Gitchell was nearby and told the officers to let Mark past. Gitchell quickly related that they had found a tennis shoe, black and purple, at the scene. Mark’s heart sank; he had bought Christopher a pair of black and purple tennis shoes a few days earlier. Gitchell then managed to tell Mark that they had found the boys. “Did they drown?” Mark asked, the fear gripping him tighter.

Gitchell looked Mark level in the eye. “No, this is a homicide,” he said. “You need to tell your wife.”

Pam Hobbs was also at the scene. When the news spread through the crowd, she collapsed on the street. Among the other neighbors gathered at the police line were Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson. Little Aaron was trying to tell Mark about the clubhouse that he and Chris had in Robin Hood and how they used to play there, but Mark barely heard him.5 After being briefly consoled by another officer, Mark turned and headed for home, trying to figure out how he would tell Melissa that their son was dead.

The atmosphere at the Hobbs house had been chaotic from the time that Terry picked Pam up at work at the end of her shift. That night, before the bodies were found the next afternoon, Pam was becoming increasingly agitated, and Terry took her to David Jacoby’s house so that she could call her father, Jackie Hicks, who lived in Blytheville, Arkansas (the Hobbses allegedly had no phone, though years later Terry would insist that they did). It was normally an hour’s drive from Blytheville to West Memphis; according to Pam, her father made it in thirty minutes that night. Alternating between searches by foot and searches by car, the four—Terry, Pam, Jacoby, and Jackie Hicks—rode through the neighborhoods, again, and ended up at Robin Hood, which had become the focus of the search. The four entered the woods from the Blue Beacon entrance. When Pam surveyed the area by flashlight, she neared panic. “Lord have mercy, son. You’re not out here.” The woods, she said, were overgrown, mosquito-infested, and downright scary. She started calling his name. “Stevie,” she shouted, “you’re not in trouble. Come home!” In her heart she knew that he would never be out in this place at this time of night. “Stevie is afraid of the dark”, Pam later recalled. “He sleeps with a night light.”6

At one point, Pam found herself on a path deeper in the woods, when she felt a kind of fear she had never felt before. “The hair was standing up on my arms,” she said. She turned around and walked back to the truck. “I wanted to run,” she said. “Thinking back to when it happened and all that, I think maybe [who] might have done it [wasn’t completely] out of the woods, and was watching me.” At about 2:00 a.m. on May 6, Terry had a similar experience in the woods. “It was like an evil presence was out there. And you see people praying, casting evil spirits out. I’ve seen that done. It’s like that presence of evil.” Years later, in 2008, Terry was interviewed by Cathy Frye of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, at which time he repeated the story, this time adding more detail. “I couldn’t breathe. I froze. The hair started standing up.” Hobbs told Frye, for some strange reason, that he knew what blood smelled like from time he’d spent with his father, slaughtering and butchering animals, but that he hadn’t smelled it on the path that night. “I had to get out of there. Something just wasn’t right. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t remember if I told police.” He didn’t tell police. He finished his interview with Frye by saying that he was glad he hadn’t been the one to discover the bodies, adding, “They were buried underwater.”

The City Reacts

West Memphis was a community in shock. There had been gruesome murders in the past. There was the Ward triple homicide in 1985, in which fifteen-year-old Ronald Ward murdered two elderly sisters and their grandnephew. The city had also experienced the Gurvis “Buddy” Nichols homicides in 1960, in which two nine-year-old boys were shot to death. And there were the Barbara McCoy killings in 1988; McCoy and a female accomplice murdered and then burned McCoy’s two children in a bizarre spiritual ritual. West Memphis was clearly a very violent place, but somehow this new horror galvanized the community in a way that past killings had not. It seemed that everyone in West Memphis had a story about “cult” activity and strange goings-on with satanic and ritualistic overtones. Since the Charles Manson murders in California in 1969 and the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana in the fall of 1978, followed by the murderous rampage of “Nightstalker” Richard Ramirez in the mid-1980s—as well as the “satanic ritual abuse” scares of the late 1980s and early 90s—the public had been increasingly frightened by a perceived rise in bizarre, cult-like killings.

But there was more to it than that. Nothing takes hold of the emotions quite like the death of a child. Adam Walsh, JonBenét Ramsey, Amber Hagerman, Kimberly and Kristen McDonald, and more recently, Caylee Anthony—these stories force us to confront the potential for total depravity that exists in humankind. It’s also easy to empathize with grieving parents, particularly if one has children of one’s own. If it could happen here, in our town, to people we know; why not to us? The thought is terrifying. The murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore were, it seemed, totally random. And the children had not just been killed. The brutalization, abuse, and mutilation stood in sharp contrast to the almost orderly way they had been “disposed” of—neat little packages tied up, clothes submerged separately, the crime scene practically erased of evidence. How could so much hate and anger be unleashed on three eight-year-old boys?7 It was little wonder that the people of West Memphis were on edge and anxious during the period following the murders. The question is, how badly frightened were they? Frightened enough to hang the killings on the first viable suspect to be presented, to put reason and their sense of justice aside in exchange for swift vengeance? For many, mostly those outside of West Memphis, there would be reason in the coming months and years to question the judgment and motives of the police, the judges, the prosecutors, the juries, and almost anyone who became connected with the case. In a society besieged with violent crime, the case would nonetheless garner national attention and spread in notoriety in a way that few could have predicted.

The Investigation

With the publicity that a crime this gruesome was bound to generate came a predictable number of tips, accusations, and confessions. Add to this a reward fund that was growing daily—at one point reaching somewhere between thirty and forty thousand dollars—and the police soon had more leads than they could handle. Some were very promising.

There was the mysterious stranger who had paid a cab driver $390 to take him from West Memphis to Centerville, Tennessee, a distance of 210 miles, saying he needed to “get out of town.” There was a hitchhiker who had been picked up on Interstate 40 and dropped off near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash on the afternoon of the murders; the driver claimed that he had offered to drop the man off near a restaurant on the north side of the freeway, but the man insisted on being dropped off on the south side, near Robin Hood Hills.8 Neither one of these men was ever located.

Along with all the improbable and outright ridiculous tips that were received, there were the routine interviews and follow-ups that constitute the bulk of police investigative work. During the three weeks following the murders, the police requisitioned a list of customers from the Blue Beacon Truck Wash, checked out the ubiquitous “white van” present at virtually all crime scenes, and worked frantically to track down hundreds of other tips. They checked out the information gleaned from the Aaron Hutcheson interviews (discussed later), checked hospitals for Vietnam veterans with injuries to their penises, surveyed area carpet cleaners to see if any had cleaned up any blood lately, investigated a “doctor” who had been arrested for doing sex change operations without a license, and compiled descriptions of various vagrants, strangers, mental patients, loiterers, and hoboes.9 They investigated a man who was said to have made vulgar remarks to two young girls, and they followed up on tales of alleged animal torturers, all exhaustive work that produced zero results.10 The public was getting antsy, and the media was relentless. Did they have any suspects? Were the murders related to any other killings in other states? Was there a serial killer on the loose? What about devil worship and cult activity? As much as they wished otherwise, the police simply had no answers.

To add to their frustration, results from the state’s crime lab and medical examiner’s office were excruciatingly slow in coming, and Inspector Gitchell was losing his patience. He knew that the investigation could not proceed without hard scientific evidence from Little Rock. It was vital that Gitchell receive, as soon as possible, some specific information:

• What was the cause of death for the three boys?

• What was the time of death?

• Which clothing belonged to which boy?

• Were there any tears or punctures in the boys’ clothes?

• Were the boys sodomized?

Was any blood found on the children’s clothing, and if so, whose blood was it?

There were questions about any residue that might have existed under the boys’ fingernails, the presence of any fibers on the their clothing, which child was killed first—in short, was there anything Little Rock could tell the police that would help them to focus their efforts? Without this information, Gitchell complained, the police were “blindfolded” in their investigation. They needed a break in the case and needed it badly.

Damien

Were it not for Crittenden County’s chief juvenile officer Jerry Driver, it is possible that the police might not have come across the name Damien Echols. Driver had first come in contact with Echols more than a year before the murders, when a Marion, Arkansas, woman contacted him to complain that Echols, then seventeen, was threatening her fifteen-year-old daughter. The two had been involved in a relationship that the woman’s daughter had ended. Echols had begun harassing and threatening her, eventually saying that he would kill one of her male friends and “dump him in the front yard of her house, and then come back and take care of her, and burn the house down.”11 The two had run away together once, after which they were found half-dressed in an abandoned trailer, resulting in the arrest of the two teens. The girl’s family had also complained to Driver that Damien was trying to get their daughter into black magic and witchcraft. They wanted Damien Echols out of their daughter’s life. Driver considered himself something of an expert on the occult and made it his mission to keep watch over this boy who had threatened to kill several people, including Driver himself.

Damien Wayne Echols was a brooding, eighteen-year-old high school dropout living in a seedy trailer park located just south of Broadway, approximately two miles from Robin Hood Hills. His background was such that a run-in with juvenile authorities was practically inevitable. Born Michael Wayne Hutchison on December 11, 1974, Damien was the product of a bizarre and chaotic family life. His mother Pam married Joe Hutchison when she was fifteen and had Damien a year later. She suffered from severe nausea and other complications during her pregnancy and had lost fifty pounds by the time Damien was born by cesarean section. When Damien was eleven years old, Pam divorced Joe and married Andy “Jack” Echols a few days later. Jack quickly established himself as the alpha, the supreme authority over Damien and his younger sister Michelle, and Pam, because of her own tenuous mental health, seemed unable to do much about it. Jack and Damien fought almost from the beginning. Damien described his mother’s new husband as a “ghoul” and as “the most hateful individual [he’d] ever encountered.”12 Despite this alleged enmity Jack Echols adopted Michael and Michelle on October 31, 1990 whereupon Michael changed his name to “Damien.” 13

Jack Echols was also hopelessly poor. The first residence for his new family was a run-down apartment in a dilapidated building that had once served as a motel. There were two small bedrooms to accommodate Jack’s new family in addition to three of Jack’s own six children—seven people in all. Damien longed to return to his grandmother’s house, where the family had been living for a time. He had been relatively happy there, and it was the last time in his life that he would have anything resembling a normal home. The move to a new home also meant changing schools for Damien. He had enjoyed the school he was attending in the old neighborhood but was forced to transfer to Bragg Elementary (school motto:: “Where All Children Can Learn”). Damien hated Bragg for some unknown reason, except for, as he noted many years later, his perception that “all the kids had overly large heads.”14

Jack also insisted that Damien attend the Pentecostal church Jack belonged to, the Church of God. According to Echols’s 2005 book, Almost Home, he found it to be a “freak show” where people “spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor screaming when they got the spirit.” Damien detested this demonstrative form of Christianity, right down to the pastor, whom he described as “morbidly obese,” calling the church itself a “wasteland.” He despised everything about his new life, and this may have been the beginning of Damien’s antisocial behavior. It was, at the very least, a time during which that behavior crystallized, when the “seeds of hatred,” as he himself would later say, were first sown. Damien seemed to hold in contempt nearly everyone he met, learning as he grew up how to “spit bile and venom with increasing precision” at those he perceived as threatening to him.

The family next moved to what can only be described as a backwoods chamber of horrors. It was more of an enlarged tool shed than a house, and Damien would later reflect that death row was better than the “little slice of hell” that Jack had moved them into. According to Damien, $30 a month was the rent for four rooms with a tin roof, “no running water or electricity to speak of,” and no heat or air conditioning; the family roasted during the summer and froze in the winter. This was a real-life Tobacco Road, and it, along with Damien’s suffocating loneliness during this time, ushered in what would be the worst period of his young life. He would later say that “even death was preferable” to his new life with Jack Echols. Jack agreed: “Damien was about as miserable as a little boy could be.” Damien was also an unhealthy child, according to his adoptive father. “He was not able to go outside because he got really sick. He had a real hard time with his breathing because of all the crops outside the house. Sometimes his eyes and throat swelled up, and he could not swallow or see very good. I think the worst thing for Damien, though, were his headaches. From the time we moved into that house, he had terrible headaches.”

But mostly, Damien was sad. He would go days without sleeping, which brought on deep depressions that his family was unable to lift him out of. He would cry for reasons he couldn’t explain. “I could never figure out how someone could cry so hard and not know why they were sad,” Jack said. “It was really hard to watch Damien go through this.”15 By the time he was eighteen, Damien was deemed totally disabled by the Department of Social Security as a result of his declining mental health.

This was also the period during which Damien discovered the perfect companion and escape vehicles: reading and music. The two would be the only refuge he could find in a world in which he seemingly had no control. Although his musical taste had not yet been bent exclusively toward heavy metal (Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, and Fine Young Cannibals were still acceptable to him), his reading choices came from one genre only: horror. Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Anne Rice were favorites. More significant than this, though, was Damien’s discovery of the stories of the Christian Inquisition. These stories galvanized in Damien’s mind the belief that the world was a dangerous place for him, that it was possible to be demonized, even tortured and killed, “severed limb from limb,” because of the appearance of being different. Worse was his paralyzing fear that he would go to hell because of his increasingly hostile thoughts toward people. He was sure that someday the accusations of a modern-day inquisition would be made against him and that he would lose not only his life but his mortal soul as well.

As he grew, Damien’s emotional problems became chronic and debilitating, so much so that he required hospitalization in West Memphis and again in Little Rock, where he had been diagnosed as suicidal, homicidal, psychotic, delusional, drug abusive, and depressed. It was also noted that he was heavily interested in “magic” and “witchcraft.” In September 1992 he was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon, where the family lived with Joe Hutchison for a time after Jack Echols had been removed from the family’s home in West Memphis amid allegations of sexually abusing Michelle. Damien was reportedly threatening his family and abusing drugs. Joe and Pam also had “concerns regarding Satanism.”

His doctors believed that Damien’s spiritual philosophy was pathological, and as a result, a condition of his release from the Charter Behavioral Health System in Little Rock was that he would “not participate in occult beliefs.” But his condition was probably more serious than that. During the time leading up to May 5, 1993, Damien suffered hallucinations, believing, for example, that he had assumed the personality of one “Morpheus Sandman,” a “hybrid of a human being and a god.” Damien was sure that he was “something that was almost a supreme being that came from a place other people didn’t come from” and had “an entirely different bone structure that was not human.”16 His weight dropped to an alarming 116 pounds, and his nails were filed to a perfect one-and-a-half inches long. By all accounts, Damien was a very sick young man.

Ever since having Damien Echols arrested and hospitalized as a result of his running away with girlfriend Deanna Holcomb, juvenile officer Jerry Driver had been singularly obsessed in his pursuit of Damien. When the doctors at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Portland and his parents agreed that Damien should return to Arkansas for his mental health—he missed his friends and was not adjusting well in Portland—he returned to live with Jack Echols. Upon returning to Arkansas, where he was still on probation, he was picked up and taken to the Juvenile Detention Center in Jonesboro, where he reportedly sucked blood from a cut in another detainee’s arm and rubbed it on his face. His long fingernails—“talons,” Jerry Driver would call them—were filed to sharp points, and he had threatened to use them on another person at least once.17 Driver had him arrested almost immediately upon his return to West Memphis for the “terroristic threatening” and harassment of Deanna Holcombe and had him committed to Charter Hospital in Little Rock for what he believed should be long-term treatment. It was Driver’s subordinate, Steve Jones, who was on hand at the crime scene to indict Damien when Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were pulled out of the drainage ditch—“Looks like Damien has finally killed someone,” he said.18

Nearly 8 months before the murders, Damien was released from Charter after only a two-week stay. He went to live with Jack Echols in his dilapidated trailer in Lakeshore. Jack was less than thrilled to have Damien back and would have refused if Damien hadn’t been a minor whom he had legally adopted. Damien had no money and could not work and would remain penniless until his disability checks started coming. When his mother and father decided to return from Oregon in the fall of 1992, Damien was staying with his pregnant girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Domini Teer. Thrilled to get away from Jack, Damien now spent his time between Domini’s place and his parents’ home; all lived in Lakeshore. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than being in the hospital, in juvenile detention, or with Jack Echols. Best of all, he’d get to hang out again with his best friend Jason Baldwin, whom he had not seen or heard from since moving to Oregon.

Jason

At sixteen years old, Charles Jason Baldwin was a pretty unremarkable kid in most ways. He was of average intelligence, though he had an aptitude for art and did well in that subject in school. Even though Jason had the ability to accomplish his schoolwork, he lacked motivation. He would do what he had to do to get by, but no more. One of his teachers would describe him as an indifferent student, unwilling to put forth the effort to raise his grades above the “D” that was his norm.

Born to Larry and Angela Gail Baldwin on April 11, 1977, Jason’s early life was hectic and unstable. The family bounced around from house to house in the Memphis area, and Larry left the home for good when Jason was quite small. Gail’s second husband, Terry Grinnell, was the man around the house while Jason was growing up, though in reality, Terry wasn’t “around the house” all that much. Jason was often left alone to care for his younger brother, Matt.

Like many kids his age left to their own devices, he gravitated toward rock music and video games to occupy his time. Jason didn’t care too much for his stepfather, but Jason and Matt, along with their half-brother Terry Jr., got along fairly well. All things considered, Jason got into relatively little trouble. He was known around the Lakeshore trailer park as a polite boy, and his mother counted on him to do many of the chores around the house while she worked nights. Jason was once arrested for vandalism, after he and some friends were caught smashing a number of car windows at a vintage auto shop. This incident earned him probation and an order of restitution. There was also an arrest for shoplifting, a conviction that was expunged after a twelve-month diversion of judgment, but until Jason’s arrest in June 1993, he wasn’t regarded as much of a troublemaker.

Jason had been friends with Damien since the two were in junior high school, during their skateboarding phase. Despite living in the same trailer park—Lakeshore Estates—Damien and Jason hadn’t realized they were neighbors until Jason rode by one day on his bicycle. They began hanging out daily, listening to music, playing video games, and chasing girls. Jason’s younger brother Matt would often come with Jason. Matt was something of an entrepreneur in the trailer park, his specialty being the purveying of pornography culled from abandoned hobo hovels. He had an acerbic wit and fit right in with his brother and Damien. The boys had a good time together, Damien likening the friendship to a scene from Stand by Me. Were it not for that friendship with Damien Echols, Jason would not have had a bull’s-eye on his back.

Jessie

Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr. was another misfit teenager hanging around West Memphis. The son of a poverty-stricken, hard-drinking auto mechanic, Jessie Misskelley Sr., “Little Jessie” knew several “mothers” during his formative years. He was born on July 10, 1975. His mother and Big Jessie never married, and she took off to California when Jesse was very young, leaving Jesse’s father to raise him alone. By the time Jessie was four years old, Jessie Sr. had married a woman named Shelbia, and it was she who would later claim that Jessie suffered from chronic separation anxiety, throwing fits whenever she was out of his sight. When Big Jessie and Shelbia divorced, and Lee Rush entered the picture, she became mother number three.19 According to Jessie’s friend Dennis Carter, Jessie didn’t like Rush at all, saying she “stayed drunk all the time.” Once, Jessie had walked into the trailer and found her “passed out on the couch wearing nothing but her panties.”20 Both Shelbia and Lee Rush appeared in the film Paradise Lost. Shelbia was steadfast in her belief in Jessie’s innocence; Lee Rush seemed ready to throw him to the wolves.

Little Jessie’s unstable childhood was exacerbated by a mental handicap. He was borderline retarded, having been variously tested with an IQ of between 67 and 72.21 In his early years his handicap manifested itself in rage. In the fourth grade Jessie stabbed a classmate in the mouth with a pencil. He was an uncontrollable child who often took his frustration out on inanimate objects such as windows, as well as on other children. At age eleven he attacked a girl with a brick, knocking her to the ground. By the time he reached his teens, Jessie Misskelley could be considered downright mean when provoked. At five feet one inches tall, Jessie was decidedly small. This, combined with his explosive temper, gave him a reputation as a tough character, a little guy with something to prove. “I was fighting all the time,” Misskelley said in a 2001 prison interview.22 He was described by his teachers as belligerent and prone to outbursts, both verbal and physical. Psychological help had been recommended several times for Jessie, but the family finances would not allow it. He was a boy in desperate need of help, and the societal failure to treat him for his behavioral problems was quite literally a crime.

Jessie met Damien Echols through Jason Baldwin. “One day I knocked on Jason’s door,” Damien said, “and his mother answered. Before I even asked, Jason’s mom said ‘He’s at Jessie Misskelley’s,’ and I thought, Who is Jessie Misskelley?” He claimed that this was their first meeting and that he “never did see Jessie much.” He and Jason would run into Jessie here and there and hang out. Damien found Jessie to be an affable simpleton. “His antics could be amusing, worth a chuckle . . . he was very much like a child. He was harmless.”

The Investigation Part 2

Despite the local scuttlebutt about devil worship and cults, the animal carcasses that were allegedly found around town, and strange gatherings reported at Robin Hood and the abandoned cotton gin known as “Stonehenge,” West Memphis was totally unprepared for the tragedy of May 5, 1993. No one could have predicted it, except perhaps for Jerry Driver and his fellow juvenile officer Steve Jones, whose obsession with Echols was later referred to by defense attorneys and supporters as “Damien Echols tunnel vision.” Once Echols appeared on the investigators’ radar, supporters claimed, other viable suspects were ignored, and the investigation focused solely on Damien. This is not an entirely accurate assessment because the West Memphis police had been tracking down numerous leads, and they did have other suspects.

There was the black man who had appeared in a Bojangles chicken restaurant near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash on the night of the murders. He was mud-caked and apparently bloody and had one arm in a cast. He spent nearly an hour in the Bojangles ladies room before a female patron reported him to the manager, Marty King. King contacted the West Memphis police around 8:40 p.m. on May 5, and Officer Regina Meek responded to the call. Meek was part of the search effort for the missing eight-year-olds, and upon learning that the man had already left the restaurant, she told King that someone would be contacting him soon; she never got out of her patrol car. Someone did finally come to investigate at Bojangles—the next night, May 6—but by then the restroom had been cleaned, and all that was left was a pair of sunglasses found in the toilet and some tiny speckles of what appeared to be blood on the wall. Detective Bryn Ridge collected—and subsequently lost—some scrapings off the wall, and there the investigation ceased. “Mr. Bojangles” was never seen again.

But was Bojangles ever a viable suspect? The police didn’t think so. The scene of the murders had been meticulously cleaned, if indeed that was even the primary crime scene; at that point no one was sure. Despite what must have been a great deal of blood loss, only traces were discovered under luminol testing. Upon his arrival at the restaurant, Mr. Bojangles was covered in mud and blood. He was disoriented and couldn’t even choose the correct restroom. Could this man have single-handedly subdued, murdered, bound, and disposed of three little boys, leaving hardly a trace? Eliminating Bojangles from the list of suspects was a relatively simple matter of means: he had none. But does this mean that he wasn’t a witness? This disturbing possibility will haunt the case, in all probability, forever. If Bojangles did see something, he didn’t want anybody to know about it in 1993, and it isn’t hard to imagine why. Would a poor black man in the South come out of the woods covered in mud and blood, flag down police, and tell them that he had just witnessed the murders of three little white boys?

The authorities’ second suspect, other than Echols, was none other than John Mark Byers. The parents are normally the first people to be investigated and eliminated as suspects when a child is killed, yet Byers was not interviewed until May 19, two weeks after the murders. Although he was quickly cleared of suspicion by the police, this two-week period would be the subject of considerable suspicion for some who felt that Byers should have been higher on the list of suspects. There were several reasons for this. Byers had admitted to giving Christopher a “whipping” during what turned out to be the last time he would see the boy alive. Some felt that this spanking was the result of a rage that then drove Byers to kill his son and two others. This viewpoint was largely held by the “Free the West Memphis Three” camp, a support group for the killers that didn’t exist until after the release of Paradise Lost, some three years after the murders. They accused police of inadequately investigating Mark Byers, but a careful look at the investigation shows that Byers received much more scrutiny than either the Hobbses or the Moores. Not only did Mark give a thirty-four-page statement to police on May 19, but Terry Hobbs made no statement at all. Todd Moore’s comments were summarized in one line contained in a police interview summary report, though he was asked to produce receipts for gas purchased during his truck driving job. Mark was also the only parent whose profile was requested from the FBI. Further, of all the parents, apparently only Mark Byers’s criminal background was investigated.

When police interviewed Pam Hobbs five days after the murders, a note was made at the bottom of the interview notes: “Mr. Hobbs was not at home at this time.”23 Apparently, police felt no need to get Terry’s timeline for the day of the murders, something that would come back on the WMPD in ways they could not have foreseen.

Further investigation into Byers’s record would show that he had a history of violence. In 1987 he had been arrested and convicted for “terroristic threatening” following an incident involving his first wife, Sandra Sloane. An argument had erupted between the two early one morning when Mark arrived to pick up his children for a scheduled, court-approved visit. According to Mark, it was Sandra who first got violent—she spit in his face—and Byers responded by pouncing on her and threatening to use a stun gun to subdue her. The gun was never used, but Byers was sentenced to probation for the incident. In 1991 his record was expunged per an agreement made during sentencing.24

Byers had also had a conflict with Michael Moore’s parents, Todd and Dana Moore. The Moores lived at 1380 East Barton, directly across the street from the Byers family, and at one time had been frequent guests at the barbeques that Mark and Melissa hosted at their pool home. Byers had stopped inviting them over after deciding that they didn’t “fit in” with the other guests. After this, according to Mark, the Moores had called the police four times with complaints about noise and parking. Both families today say that their problems were minor and that no real animosity ever existed between them.

More interesting to many, however, was the work Mark Byers had done as an undercover informant, first in Memphis, and later on in West Memphis. Byers served the drug task forces in both cities by helping to set up sting operations for the police, two of which resulted in arrests and convictions. Police were interested in a possible retribution angle to the killings; had one of those convicted as a result of a Byers sting operation sought revenge though Christopher?

The police were able to easily eliminate Byers as a suspect, however. Besides having a very verifiable alibi—he had spent the night searching for Christopher with his family and friends and was never alone for any length of time—none of the suspicions police might have had stood up to scrutiny. Despite rare horror tales to the contrary, does a father spank his boy and then murder and mutilate him and two of his friends a few hours later? The minor friction between Mark and the Moores was an obviously insufficient motive. As for retribution by someone Mark had set up for the West Memphis Drug Task Force, it is within the realm of possibility that someone sentenced to five years’ probation at the hands of the Byerses might have sough revenge. But the idea of someone getting even by brutally murdering three eight-year-olds fails the smell test, and if the police ever considered it a possibility, it was quickly ruled out.

Improbabilities notwithstanding, during the May 19 interview with Mark, Detective Bryn Ridge got right down to business.

Ridge: I may have information. This information suggests strongly that you have something to do with the disappearance of the boys and ultimately of the murder. What is your response to that?

Byers: My first response is that I can’t fathom where you would get that . . . and it makes me so mad that I kind of got to hold myself here in this chair.

Ridge: Okay. Who, of all the people you know, might make that kind of suggestion?

Byers: I wouldn’t have the slightest idea. If I did, it would make me want to hit ’em. You know, it would make me mad to think that someone maybe has said something like that about me. It makes me mad.

Byers’s answer, and more importantly his reaction, satisfied Ridge, and Mark was crossed off the list of suspects, at least for the time being. In the years following the convictions of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley, no one would come under more intense public scrutiny than John Mark Byers. In some circles, he still does face this. The effort to try to link Byers with the murder of his son and to implicate him in the death of his second wife—Christopher’s mother—would at times border on the obsessive. If there was “Damien Echols tunnel vision” prior to the convictions, the post-conviction focus among Echols’s supporters would fall squarely on Mark Byers.

The remaining suspects on the investigators’ list were quickly eliminated. The former West Memphis ice cream vendor who blurted out during questioning in Oceanside, California, “I might have blacked out and killed the three kids!” was deemed an improbable suspect and was never linked to the crime. The suspected peeping Tom who made a statement to the effect that he had heard the children had been sexually mutilated was eliminated as well.25 James Martin, a convicted child molester from Marion, was brought in for questioning and gave police quite a bit of information, some of it quite disturbing, about how the killer or killers might have felt during the murders, where the children might have been killed (Martin subscribed to the “dump site” theory), and how and why they were tied up—in short, applying his own perverted mind to the crimes to help police find the perpetrator(s). Most of what Martin had to say didn’t square with what the police already knew, but he did offer this pearl of prescient wisdom: “If you have more [than] two people, somebody is going to talk.” And talk someone did.

Victoria Hutcheson

Thirty years old, tall, and slender with wavy red hair and green eyes, Victoria Hutcheson cut a striking figure. A self-described “poor little divorced woman whose husband just ran off . . . living in a little gross trailer park,” Vicki was to make an enormous impact on the case.26 Up until a month before the killings, she and her second husband, along with her eight-year-old son Aaron and his ten-year-old brother, lived just down the street from the Byers family on East Barton. In April 1993, the couple separated, and Vicki moved from West Memphis to Highland Trailer Park in nearby Marion. It was there that she would meet a tough but dim-witted teenager known around the trailer park as “Little Jessie.”

Jessie was seventeen at the time, and he and Vicki became close friends. Jessie dropped by her trailer frequently. She apparently lost track of her age because she often bought liquor for Jessie and even had him over for drinks. He spoke of another teen he knew over in Lakeshore Estates named Damien. This Damien was very “weird,” he said, into witchcraft, satanism, animal sacrifice, and blood drinking. Damien was involved in a “cult,” and Misskelley said that he himself belonged to this same group. There were up to twenty people, mostly teenagers, who would meet in the woods at night and kill dogs and cats, with new initiates being required to eat meat from the “sacrifices.” It was fantastic stuff, and Vicki wasn’t sure she bought any of it.

Aaron Hutcheson was the same age as Christopher Byers, and the two were classmates at Weaver Elementary School. They also spent a great deal of time together after school, some of it exploring the woods that surrounded Ten Mile Bayou, despite Christopher’s parents’ rule that Robin Hood was off-limits. The statements of Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson, wild and unbelievable at times, would nonetheless lead the police to Jessie Misskelley Jr. and the incredible confession he would eventually make.

Vicki Hutcheson had legal troubles of her own. She had a history of writing bad checks in Arkansas, so it was not really surprising that hours before the bodies of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch were discovered on May 6, Vicki was at the police station in Marion. She was being questioned regarding a $200 credit card overcharge at the truck stop where she worked, a job from which she was soon fired. Vicki had heard from a neighbor that two of Aaron’s playmates had gone missing the night before, so she had taken him out of school, stopped by the Moores’ house to see what was going on, and then headed to the Marion Police Department for a scheduled appointment.

During their May 6 meeting, Marion police detective Donald Bray struck up a conversation with Aaron and discovered that Aaron was “best friends” with the three boys from Weaver Elementary who had gone missing the night before. He and his friends, Aaron told Bray, had built a “tree house” in the woods at Robin Hood that they frequented after school and on weekends. Though Vicki said she was aware of this tree house and had even seen it a time or two, on this day she heard for the first time a tale of strange goings-on that took place in the woods.27 Aaron and his friends had been “spying” on five men who gathered in the woods. These men had knives and painted themselves black. The boys would watch them as the men sat around a fire speaking “Spanish” and singing “songs about the devil.” The men were often nude while dancing around the fire, and according to Aaron, they put “their ‘peters’ into each other’s butts.”

When Vicki was interviewed by Detective Bryn Ridge on May 28, she said that Aaron had told her he was actually present when his three playmates were murdered. Unfortunately, Aaron—and his mother as well, it so happened—had a vivid imagination, and he added more detail each time he told the story, even going as far as to say that he had not only witnessed the murder of his three playmates, but that he himself had been tied up by Misskelley and his friends too, only he had managed to escape. During interviews on three separate days—June 2, 8, and 9—it became clear that it was impossible to separate Aaron’s imaginings from reality. Nearly a month went by between Donald Bray’s first meeting with Aaron on May 6 and his second on June 2. Police were buried under the weight of the investigation, and this could account for the gap. It is more likely, however, that they simply didn’t believe him.

During her interviews with Bray, Vicki quickly made a connection between the murders and Damien Echols. With Bray’s blessing, she decided to “play detective” by using her new friend, Jessie Misskelley, to lure Echols into a relationship, through which she could learn more about his mysterious beliefs and activities and any knowledge he might have about the murders. Her motivation, she said, was that she “loved” the three little boys. “I wanted their killers caught.” That a substantial reward for information was being offered must also have entered her mind, though she would always deny it.28 Vicki began cruising Lakeshore Estates in hopes of catching a glimpse of Damien. By asking other kids around Lakeshore about Echols, she was able to spot him, which turned out to be rather easy; Echols, with his jet-black (his natural color) goth-styled hair, always wore black, including a long trench coat that he wore even during the sultry mid-South summers. She told Jessie that she’d seen Damien, thought he was “hot,” and would like to go out with him. Could Jessie arrange it? Misskelley was reluctant; Echols, he reminded her, was very weird, even “sick.” But Jessie relented and arranged for Echols to meet Vicki at her trailer.29

Once they met, their conversation turned quickly to the murders, with Damien freely admitting that the police had “accused” him of—not questioned him about—the killings on two separate occasions, with one interrogation lasting eight hours. When Vicki asked him why out of all the people to question, they would accuse him, he said, according to Vicki, “Because I’m evil.” Although it might have seemed reasonable at this point to back away from Echols, Vicki Hutcheson got in deeper. With Vicki leaving books on witchcraft and the occult lying around her trailer (books she had borrowed with Donald Bray’s library card), it wasn’t long before Damien acknowledged his interest in the subjects. When Vicki expressed an interest in becoming a “witch,” Damien invited Vicki to go with him to an “esbat”—which she described in her statement to police as an “occult satanic meeting”—that was being held in the woods in Turrell, some twenty miles to the north. She enthusiastically agreed, and the two drove up there the next night. When they arrived at the site, a bizarre scene was unfolding. Ten or so people, all teens, their faces and arms painted black, were taking off their clothes and “touching each other.” As the night progressed, Vicki became increasingly nervous and finally panicked. “I could see what was going to happen,” she said. She insisted that Damien take her home, and he readily agreed. Little Jessie, who had gone with them, stayed behind.

Vicki Hutcheson would prove to be one of the most controversial figures in the investigation. Her accounts of events didn’t square with the known facts. For example, she told police that Damien had driven her and Jessie Misskelley to the esbat in a red Ford Escort, though it was verified that the Echols family did not own a car matching Vicki’s description (the family owned a blue Dodge Aries) and that Damien didn’t drive. The police had hidden a recording device in Vicki’s home to record her conversations with Damien. “They put the recorder under the bed,” she said. “It was a fancy one with several reels of tape so that one would begin when the other was filled.” According to Hutcheson’s statements in a newspaper article in 2004, Damien said nothing incriminating. He said that his “weird” behavior was a “defense mechanism.” When Vicki asked what that meant, Echols replied, “It means leave me the fuck alone.” Although Vicki allegedly heard the tape and found the quality excellent—she said she could hear everyone in the room clearly—the police said the quality was unacceptable as evidence. According to Vicki, they later said they lost the tapes.30 She was unable to have her statement corroborated by anyone, and the kooky, ever-changing stories of little Aaron were too wild and inconsistent for police to rely on. In the end, most of Hutcheson’s “detective work” would be for naught. Although she was allowed to testify to her attendance at the esbat, anything that had gone on there—teenagers with faces painted black, touching each other, taking their clothes off—was determined by the judge to be prejudicial to Misskelley. Aaron never testified in open court; the prosecution just didn’t know what the boy would say next. It was also obvious that he was making up most, if not all, of his story, and he couldn’t be put on the stand only to perjure himself. It was a blow to the prosecution, given that Aaron’s story would have provided desperately needed corroboration for Misskelley’s confession. About the only thing that police would be able to use from Vicki or Aaron Hutcheson was the information that had led them to Jessie and a snippet of tape from Aaron’s statement that had evoked a strong reaction from Misskelley and led to his initial confession. As it turned out, the jury was able to accept Misskelley’s confession at face value.

The Confession

The police already had an interest in Damien Echols; Jerry Driver and Steve Jones had made sure of that. They also had the name of Jason Baldwin, who was a nearly constant companion of Echols and whose name had come up frequently as they questioned local teens about Damien. Now, thanks to Hutcheson, they were interested in Jessie Misskelley as well. He did not have Echols’s notoriety, but according to Jessie himself, the police knew him well. “They knew me since 1980, when I was five years old, ’cause that’s when I first started getting in trouble with the police. I got in trouble for stealing and fighting.”31 On June 3, Detective Mike Allen made the trip out to Highland to bring Misskelley in for questioning. He was not at home, according to Big Jessie’s current love interest, Lee Rush, who answered the door at Misskelley’s trailer. Rush sent Allen to see the boy’s father at Jim’s Diesel, where the senior Misskelley worked as a mechanic. After taking a short drive in his pickup truck, Big Jessie returned to Jim’s with his son and made no objection to the detective taking Little Jessie back to the police station for questioning, where they arrived at 10:00 a.m.

Misskelley again seemed more than willing to give up Damien Echols. He told the detectives right off the bat that he had heard that Damien and someone named Robert Burch had committed the murders. He gave police a mixed-up version of what he had told Vicki. Although he acknowledged that Damien drank blood and was suspected of involvement in the murders, he initially denied any knowledge of satanism or cult activity and also denied any knowledge of or involvement in the murders. It was at this point that Ridge and Allen, believing that Jessie was “not quite telling the truth,” decided to inform him of his rights and ask him whether he wanted to waive those rights; he said he did. They also wanted to get Jessie on the polygraph machine immediately. Because Jessie was only seventeen, they would need Big Jessie’s permission to administer the test, and the police quickly located him. Big Jessie had no problem with Little Jessie taking the polygraph and was not with his son during the interrogation by police; Jessie was no stranger to the system, and his father figured he’d be fine. He did, however, sign a “permission slip” giving his approval for Junior to submit to the polygraph.32 With Misskelley Sr.’s approval, the polygraph was administered to Jessie by Officer Bill Durham beginning at approximately 11:30 a.m. After asking some standard irrelevant questions, Durham got specific. “Have you ever sold dope?” This was a control question. The rest were all considered “relevant.” “Have you ever taken part in any devil worship?” “Have you ever been in Robin Hood Hills?” “Are you involved in the murder of those three boys?” “Do you know who killed those three boys?” After Misskelley answered all these questions in the negative, Durham informed Gary Gitchell of his interpretation of the polygraph results: “He’s lying his ass off!” Gitchell and Ridge took over from there; it was 12:40 p.m. In Gitchell’s words, “We were all fairly jubilant at that point.”

It took only an hour and forty minutes from that point for Misskelley to crack. He was told immediately after the polygraph was administered that he had failed. Detectives drew a circle, with dots on the inside and on the outside. “The people who killed those boys, Damien and Jason, are in here,” Jessie was told. “The police and anyone who is innocent are on the outside. Do you want to be on the inside or the outside?” Jessie knew he didn’t want to be inside the circle, and it is entirely possible that he thought placing himself outside the circle and telling them what they wanted to hear would mean not only an end to the interrogation, but also that he’d be able to go home. Detectives also played a section of their taped interview with Aaron Hutcheson, with Aaron claiming, in a small, remote voice, “Nobody knows what happened except me.” Finally, they showed Jessie a photograph of a much brutalized and very dead Christopher Byers. The effect of this strategy was dramatic, and any reluctance Jessie had felt to talk disappeared.

Jessie talked for forty-six taped minutes—several hours of the interrogation were not taped—and told his version of what had happened the night of May 5, 1993, in the darkening woods at Robin Hood Hills.33 During the first thirty-four minutes, Jessie led Gitchell and Ridge through a bizarre, rambling account of the killings, in which many of the details were incorrect and Misskelley’s complicity was minimized. The very wording of the statement made it clear that Misskelley and his questioners had been over this ground before actually turning on the tape recorder. For example, after establishing that Misskelley had been in Robin Hood that day, Gitchell asked, “Okay, what occurred while you were there?”

Misskelley blurted out, “When I was there, I saw Damien hit this one . . . [long pause] . . . hit this one boy real bad, and then, uh, and he started screwing them and stuff . . .” This sounded rehearsed, with Misskelley unsure of where he was supposed to begin his narrative. He also could not reliably identify the boy Echols had allegedly attacked, pointing to the picture of Chris Byers (whom he often referred to as “Myers”), but identifying him as Michael Moore. Jessie went on to claim that Damien had been watching the three victims for some time and had a picture of the three boys together. During the attack, he said, Damien was “screwin’ [Christopher Byers] up the ass.” He stated that Jason stuck “his in one of ’em’s mouth.”

The three had been drinking, Jessie said; he was drinking Evan Williams whiskey, and Jason and Damien were drinking beer. Echols and Baldwin appeared to Jessie to be intoxicated. When they heard the sound of the little boys “hollerin’” in the woods, Damien yelled to them, luring them toward where Damien, Jason, and Jessie were hiding. According to Jessie, Damien “jumped ’em.” Jason, he said, “turned around and hit Steve Branch.” As Michael Moore took off running, Jessie “chased him and grabbed him and hold him [sic] until they got there, and then [he] left.”34 Jessie said Jason Baldwin got “real close to [Chris Byers’s] penis and stuff, and [Jessie] saw some blood, and that’s when [he] took off.”

It was a very disjointed and error-laden statement, but Misskelley nonetheless provided police with details that they felt could not be known by someone who wasn’t present during the murders, details such as the presence of a gash on the left side of Steve Branch’s face and the castration of Chris Byers. In his statements, Jessie claimed that he had left the scene at differing points in the attacks, but Gitchell and Ridge were able to pin him down to saying that he had left the crime scene before Jason and Damien did, with Jessie adding, “They did more after I left.” This is in contradiction to his claim elsewhere in his statement that he had seen Jason and Damien place the boys’ bodies in their watery graves, leaving unanswered the question of how much “more” they could have done and how Jessie would have known. Jessie headed back to Highland, he said, throwing up and smashing the whiskey bottle on the way (in a subsequent statement, he claimed that he never threw up). He then headed off to wrestle in Dyess, some forty miles away. The next day, Jessie said, he received a call from Echols and Baldwin. “We did it! We did it!” Jason reportedly said. Jessie said he could hear Echols in the background saying, “What if someone saw us? What are we going to do?”

Jessie now told Gitchell and Ridge that he did know about the “satanic cult”, something he had earlier denied, and that pictures of the three boys had been passed around at one of their meetings. He told them about the animal sacrifices and “orgies” that took place at these meetings. He said that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were also in the cult.

But there were problems with the information Jessie provided. Jessie told the detectives that Jason Baldwin had called him the night before the murders, telling him to come to Robin Hood the next night; they were going to “get some boys and hurt them.”35 After initially telling Baldwin that he had to work Wednesday, Jessie eventually agreed to go with Jason and Damien to Robin Hood, though the timeline he gave was slippery. His whereabouts from early in the morning until around 1:00 p.m. were accounted for by Ricky Deese, his boss on a roofing job, yet Jessie first told police that he had arrived at Robin Hood “around 12:00.” He then inexplicably said the time was 9:00 a.m.36 “So your time period may not be exactly right, is what you’re saying,” Gitchell prompted.

“Right,” Jessie replied. Gitchell would have to interrogate Jessie a second time—extracting what would become known as the “clarification” statement—in order to place him at the crime scene at the time of the murders, and did so using a fair amount of suggestive interrogation. (It was brought out at the January 13, 1994, suppression hearing that prosecutor John Fogleman was outside the interrogation room feeding Gitchell questions to ask Misskelley.)

Gitchell: Jessie, uh, when you got with the boys and with Jason Baldwin, when you three were in the woods and then [the] little boys come up, about what time was it? When the boys come up to the woods?

Jessie: I would say it was about five or so, five or six.

Gitchell: [Did you] know . . . did you have your watch on at the time?

Jessie: Huh-uh [no].

Gitchell: You didn’t have your watch on?

Jessie: Huh-uh [no].

Gitchell: Uh, alright, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time is it?

Jessie: It was seven or eight.

Gitchell: Are you . . .

Jessie: It was starting to get dark.

Gitchell: Okay, it . . .

Jessie: I remember it was starting to get dark.

Gitchell: Okay, well, that clears it up. I didn’t know . . . that’s what I was wondering, was it getting dark or what?

Jessie: We got up there at six, and the boys come up, and it was starting to get dark.

Gitchell: Ok, so you and Jason and Baldwin . . . uh, Damien . . . you all got there right at six.

Gitchell managed to guide Jessie from nine in the morning to dusk simply by suggesting what the “right” time should be. The duration of time between this second twelve-minute-long statement and the first is not known, though Misskelley and Gitchell were apparently alone while the second statement was being taken; Ridge had stepped out for a moment. “We were at the verge of getting a good witness,” Ridge said. “And I wanted, I just decided it was time to take a break and I wanted to inform Sgt. Allen of this information.”

Misskelley’s confession was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case against him, and the defense went to great lengths to prevent it from being admitted. Once it was obtained, however, it was enough for the police to place Misskelley under arrest and to petition circuit court justice William P. “Pal” Rainey for a warrant to search the trailers of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Domini Teer.37 (Nothing incriminating was found during the searches, which left an unanswered question: Where was Damien Echols’s signature trench coat, the one he was never seen without? On the witness stand at his trial, Echols said that he figured his parents had it. He said it was “laying [sic] in the floor whenever the police came,” but it was not on the list of items seized from Echols’s home.)

Echols and Baldwin were arrested during nighttime raids on Thursday, June 3, and arraigned the following day. Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were charged with capital murder in the deaths of Christopher Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore. Armed with Misskelley’s confession and little else, the Crittenden County District Attorney’s Office began to prepare its case. Subsequently, circuit court judge David Burnett, who would be the trial judge, granted a severance motion for Jessie since he refused to testify against Damien and Jason, who were less fortunate; they were to be tried together. Misskelley would be tried in Corning, Arkansas, some 110 miles north of West Memphis in rural Clay County. Baldwin and Echols would be tried together in Jonesboro, 64 miles to the northwest, in Craighead County. Although neither trial would be held in West Memphis, the publicity surrounding the case was enormous, and leaks of information would make it nearly impossible to seat twenty-four jurors who hadn’t heard about the case. Though Judge Rainey had sealed the records from public access, critical information had already leaked, most notably the confession itself, which, after being shown to the defendants’ families by police, found its way into the local newspapers.38

But Jessie soon recanted his confession and provided alibi witnesses to account for his whereabouts on May 5. Jessie’s neighbor, Stephanie Dollar, told Marion police officer Stan Burch that Jessie and his girlfriend had been at her house babysitting until 5:15 p.m. on May 5. Several witnesses claimed that they had seen Jessie at Highland Trailer Park at 6:30 p.m. Big Jessie insisted that he had seen his son sometime around 7:15 p.m. and that he was going wrestling in Dyess with some friends. He was sure of the time, he said, because he had just come home from DWI (“driving while intoxicated”) school, which had let out early that day. When asked how his son got to the match, Big Jessie had to admit that he had never actually seen him leave.

Many believe that the Misskelley confession was coerced and false. It isn’t known how Jessie’s interview with police began because it wasn’t recorded. Inspector Gitchell, Detective Ridge, and Officer Bill Durham of the WMPD insist that Jessie wasn’t a suspect when he was brought in, but within an hour of arriving at the police station, Jessie was given a polygraph examination, one that, according to Durham, Misskelley failed.39 Prior to that examination, Misskelley presumably gave police some version of the wrestling story. After the exam, and after Jessie was told he had failed, the interrogators surely became more aggressive. Because Gitchell and Ridge knew that the murders had happened well after 5:00 p.m., they focused on Jessie’s timeline. Rather than risk recording the entire interview, police cherry-picked a total of forty-six minutes that made up the “confession” (thirty-four minutes from the first taping and approximately twelve minutes from the clarifying statement). The investigators got what they wanted, and once they cleared the suppression hearing in January 1994, the confession was in.

Some very troubling questions arise regarding the Misskelley confession. For example, did police know they were dealing with a mentally challenged youth? Were they trained in questioning suspects—particularly teens—with developmental handicaps? Considering that at one point they asked Jessie whether he knew what a “penis” was, it is difficult to imagine that they missed the characteristic signs of a significant lack of intelligence. Could they not see by his answers how easily led and eager to please his interrogators he was? He changed the time he arrived at the woods at least three times in order to “get it right.” Given the glaring inconsistencies contained in the confession, it is hard to fathom that Judge Rainey would hand down arrest warrants for the three youths, including nighttime search warrants, reserved for those cases where there is a likelihood of evidence being hidden or destroyed. But Gitchell and Ridge convinced Rainey that once the other “cult members” found out about Jessie’s arrest, word would spread to Damien and Jason. There was no probable cause for the arrests, no physical evidence linking the accused to the crime, and only the most questionable hearsay elicited from young people around town wanting to avoid trouble with the law. 40

Jessie Misskelley’s trial began on Wednesday, January 6, 1994. The Baldwin/Echols trial immediately followed on February 28. Incredible as it was, both trials resulted in convictions for all three defendants. Baldwin and Misskelley drew life sentences, and Damien Echols was sentenced to death. The trials were thought by most to be the end of the line for the West Memphis Three. For John Mark Byers and the spreading corps of “Free the West Memphis Three” supporters, things were just warming up.

CHAPTER 2

I’m No Angel

I’m no Angel, and I’m no stranger to the streets

And I’m half crazy, so I’ve got scars upon my cheek

—Greg Allman

He’s the missing link

The kitchen sink

Eleven on a scale of ten

Honey, let me introduce you to my redneck friend.

—Jackson Browne

Marked Tree, Arkansas—the name conjures up images of a frontier-type town planted in the middle of a land once populated by Native Americans, or maybe a wilderness outpost where pioneer types sold animal pelts and bought supplies. A brawny outback town where gold miners or oil-seekers set up temporary camps while plying their trade. A wilderness paradise, abundant with game for hunting, fish for fishing; a place populated with rough and ready pioneers trying to scratch a town out of the dirt. If you had these thoughts, you wouldn’t be far off.

The birthplace of John Mark Byers was incorporated in the 1880s, and its business at the time was steel—the laying of railroad tracks to be precise. The men laying tracks for what became the Frisco railroad built mobile camps, providing workers with living quarters and facilities as construction of the railroad moved forward from the west. The camps and the construction operation through these parts were run by Jonathan C. Edwards. When the section of the railroad that ran through Marked Tree was completed in 1883—the town was called “Edwards” at the time—Edwards left the camp with the first train to Memphis and advised those who chose to remain that they should decide on a name for the town and petition Washington, DC, for a post office so they would continue to receive mail.

Geographically speaking, Marked Tree is located at the Arkansas end of the 150-mile-long New Madrid fault, in a part of the state known locally as the “delta.” West of the Mississippi River, one will find the low-lying area of eastern Arkansas, stretching all the way from the northern Missouri border to the state of Louisiana to the south. The Mississippi “Alluvial Delta,” as eastern Arkansas is known geologically, was formed by deposits left by the Mississippi and numerous other rivers, including the Saint Francis and Little Rivers, over a period of millions of years. Thus, the soil is rich and deep, and it is here where some of Arkansas’ most productive farmland lies. Arkansas contains some 43 percent of the nation’s rice acreage and is a major exporter of rice and rice byproducts. It also produces its fair share of cotton, soybean, and milo.

Running track through the area proved to be difficult. The land itself had sunken anywhere from three to nine feet as a result of its proximity to the epicenters of the four massive New Madrid (Missouri) earthquakes occurring between 1811 and 1813, and the area was, and is, susceptible to frequent flooding. Only a system of levees made the area passable at all. The soon-to-be town, however, was smack in the middle of a direct line between St. Louis and Memphis, so the earth was shored up, trestles were built, and construction of the railway moved forward.

But why “Marked Tree”? There are two prevailing stories. As speculated earlier, the area was indeed home to an indigenous people, in this case the Osage and Cherokee Indian tribes, and they had discovered a wonderful geographical feature of the area. At one point in the current location of Marked Tree, the Saint Francis and Little Rivers are separated by only one-fourth of a mile of land. This meant that if a traveler wanted to navigate between rivers, eight miles of paddling could be eliminated by simply carrying his canoe across a narrow strip of land. The Indians spotted an old oak tree on the Saint Francis side of the future town and, in order to identify this crossing, “marked” it for easy identification.

There is also another, more sinister possibility. The John A. Murrell gang, an infamous clan of murderers and robbers, specializing in horse and slave theft, had several hideouts in Helena, Arkansas, in the White Swamps about one hundred miles south of Marked Tree. This was an especially terrifying group of thugs. Murrell himself took to the practice of stealing and reselling slaves, killing the new buyers, and selling the slaves again, doing this until the slaves had been sold often enough to be recognized. At this point, he would disembowel them, fill their abdominal cavities with stones, and sink them down into in the water, never to be seen again.41 The gang would often rendezvous at a certain point along the river, at a tree marked with a large “M.” Speculation about Murrell and the town’s name abounds, and no one can say with any authority exactly how Marked Tree was named, but one thing is for certain: there is no other town in the world so named, and that distinction is a source of pride for the residents of the tiny hamlet.

A few other things about Marked Tree can be determined without ever setting foot there.

• It is relatively hot. Marked Tree averages fifty-three days a year over ninety degrees.

• With a listed population of 2,800, it is very small, although it is the second-largest town in Poinsett County. (Only the town of Truman—population 6,889—is larger).

• It is located at an altitude of 224 feet above sea level and a distance of thirty-seven miles northwest of Memphis, Tennessee.

• It is situated some 1,100 miles west of New York City and 1,800 miles east of Los Angeles, which probably suits the locals just fine.

• There are twenty Protestant churches listed in Marked Tree, one Catholic Church, and one Kingdom Hall for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but no Mormon temples or Jewish synagogues.

Marked Tree is also at the center of a sportsman’s paradise. It is fifteen miles from Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge, a 1,230-acre wildlife management area (WMA). The lake that gives the WMA its name was formed during the New Madrid earthquakes. The area is thick with tupelo, willow, buttonbush, and cypress, as well as large quantities of various hardwoods. Here one will find an abundance of waterfowl, mostly ducks, and hunting is, of course, permitted. In addition to ducks, hunters can go after deer as well as squirrels, rabbits, and other “fur-bearers,” but because of frequent flooding, only ducks are a sure thing. With the plethora of mosquitoes and biting flies present throughout the area, many hunters choose to lodge in nearby Blytheville rather than rough it in a tent.

There’s a nice public library in Marked Tree; a very small campus of Arkansas State University; and a public school system consisting of one elementary school, which houses kindergarten through sixth grade, and one high school (“Home of the Indians,” for whom Mark Byers played football and basketball) for grades seven through twelve. Mark attended these schools from kindergarten through his senior year. If one were to walk the hallways of Marked Tree High School, one would see the senior class pictures of all the graduating classes from 1938 to the present. These classes vary in size from fifteen graduates to perhaps sixty. In perusing these photos, it becomes evident that Mark’s family had been in Marked Tree for quite some time; his brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins are all represented along the sides of the main hall. The class sizes peaked sometime around the middle of the baby boom and then began to dwindle, illustrating another characteristic of the town: it’s the kind of place where people don’t stay. Between 1990 and 2007, the town’s population declined by three hundred people. Today, as is the case with many families, there are no kin to the Byerses living in Marked Tree.

George Washington Byers and Auvergne Dye were married on January 19, 1938. John Mark Byers was born some nineteen years later on March 8, 1957, the fifth and last child to be born to the family.42 He was brought directly from the hospital in Memphis to 612 Saint Francis Street in Marked Tree, where he would spend the next eighteen years. Growing up in Marked Tree wasn’t much different than growing up in most small towns; everybody knew each other, and there wasn’t much to do. It was also difficult to get away with anything; a boy growing up in a small town has many pairs of eyes on him. The residents of Marked Tree were good people, and the roots that were put down and nurtured here, and the values instilled in Mark by his parents and family, even when he appeared to be acting to the contrary, were what sustained Mark through his worst trials. Mark’s parents remained together for fifty-two years, until George passed away on September 9, 1990, from prostate cancer. Auvergne, a diabetic with chronic arthritis, succumbed to heart failure on December 3, 1990, passing three months after her husband. Their marriage was by all accounts a close and happy one.

George Byers has been described by those who knew him as honest, strong, and hardworking, possessing a stoicism that is not evident in his youngest son (although it is clearly present in his eldest). It wasn’t that he was humorless—far from it. But life was hard, and a certain amount of grit was necessary to take care of a large family in that area during those times. During the mid-1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, George, only seventeen at the time, took up bare-knuckles boxing to earn extra money. These brutal and illegal matches took place in barns, the back rooms of taverns, open fields, and just about anywhere a crude rink (which was often just a circle of raucous observers) could be constructed. At five feet ten inches tall and 175 pounds, George wasn’t particularly imposing, but what he lacked in size, he made up for in tenacity. A good fighter could earn $2 or $3 a match, and George won his fair share. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, he took part in local fights when he could find them, but by the time of his marriage to Auvergne, his boxing “career” was over.

Better times brought more lucrative work, and eventually George took control of an agricultural cooperative, the lifeblood of a farming community. These nonprofit business organizations pool resources to provide seed, feed, fuel, and equipment to the farming community at affordable prices. If you lived in Poinsett County, the odds were that you were a farmer or were somehow tied to the farming industry, and consequently, you knew George Byers. He ran a no-nonsense type of business but was characteristically paternal when it came to those who could not afford supplies such as heating oil, providing very favorable payment terms. “There were many families in Poinsett County who would have had unheated homes if my father hadn’t brought kerosene out to their houses in the winter,” Mark recalls. The co-op was George’s work for thirty years before he retired in 1983.

George was strict with his children, providing them with a firm set of rules by which to live, and he made sure that they obeyed those rules. Mark remembers this trait well. At the age of fifteen, Mark was earning money working for a neighbor picking cotton. Cotton picking is hard work, and Mark figured that he could cut a few corners by dropping a watermelon or two into a couple of those bags and covering them with cotton. They’d weigh about the same, and he’d be finished with his job earlier. George Byers was smarter than that. When he discovered that Mark was doing this, his response was typical: Mark worked for three or four weeks for free, much more than was necessary to make restitution. George believed that if you tried to cheat someone, you paid it back with interest. As the youngest of four children, Mark admits to being what he considers “pampered” by his parents. “Was I a spoiled brat? Yes. They were probably more lenient with me than they were with my brother and sisters. I got maybe four whippings from my daddy and maybe two from my mother that I can remember.” Pampered or not, an old family friend recalls how George Byers handled child rearing. When he decided that it was time to rid toddler Mark of his pacifier, George’s response was characteristic. “While riding in the car one day,” the friend said, “George took it out of Mark’s mouth and tossed it out the window into the river, saying, ‘That takes care of that.’”

Rather than relying on corporal punishment, George preferred to “talk things out” with his kids, especially Mark, possibly due to some “mellowness” George had acquired with age, but more likely because he knew his son would learn more from the talk than the whipping. “You’d beg him, ‘Please, hit me. Hit me and get it over with,’ and he’d say, ‘No, we’re goin’ to talk this out, and I’m goin’ to make sure you know what you did wrong, and why it was wrong.’” Infrequent whippings notwithstanding, Mark is characteristically sentimental about his childhood. “I was raised in the South, had a great upbringing. I had an exceptional mother and father. My mother devoted her life to her husband and children. My father devoted his life to his wife and children. My brother and sisters are the product of the two most exceptional parents you could have. My daddy was a man with an eighth-grade education, a self-educated, self-made man. He knew how you should live; he knew how you should treat people. He knew how you should be as a person; he was a man’s man.”

If George was reserved and somewhat strict, Auvergne was amiable and outgoing. “She never met a stranger,” Mark says. She would talk to just about anyone and had an easy, forthcoming way that people found charming. Auvergne worked as the cafeteria director for both schools in Marked Tree, as had her mother before her. She had been a Sunday school teacher at the Baptist Church for as long as anyone could remember and was an active member of the Eastern Star (the women’s corollary to the Masons). As with her husband, if you lived in Marked Tree, you had to know Auvergne Byers. The only thing that might betray her sunny disposition was the fierce protectiveness she had for her children. She would be the first one to take after them if they had misbehaved—the Byers code of conduct was rigid—but also the first to stand up for them. A loving mother who truly enjoyed her role in family life, Auvergne was also outspoken and opinionated and could hold her own in any conversation. Paradoxically, perhaps, she put her husband first, the children second, and herself last. From his father Mark learned a particular set of values, represented by a few simple rules for living: When you give your word, keep it. Take care of your family without complaining. Make a few good friends and keep them close; keep your enemies, if you have them, even closer. From his mother and grandmother, he learned how to cook, clean, and take care of himself.

It would seem that Mark Byers was well equipped to enter the world with the confidence and skills to succeed. He had been brought up in a morally upright, small-town environment by the “best parents anyone ever had.” So what happened? How did things go so horribly wrong?

Setting Out

As a teenager, Mark hung around the co-op with George and gravitated toward the different tools, machines, and welding equipment in the back of the shop. It was George who first mentioned jeweler’s school to Mark, and so it was that Mark applied to and was accepted at Paris Junior College (PJC) in Paris, Texas, where he enrolled in their jewelry technology program. PJC recruiting literature boasts that “since 1943 the program has attracted students from across the US and from around the globe, drawn to the North Texas campus by the institution’s reputation for excellence within the industry, as well as its affordability.” For Mark, PJC was it, the place where he would learn the trade that he was to ply for the next fifteen years. He did well academically, though he did have at least one conduct problem. For the first six months of school, he lived in one of the student dormitories. This particular dorm was also the dorm that housed the basketball, football, and baseball team members; by special permission, the jewelry students were allowed to live there also (which must have been interesting). One night, Mark was coming into the dorm with a “case of Coors and two gallons of wine” and was confronted by the baseball coach. “We got into it, and I smacked him in the nose, and I ended up in the dean’s office.” Mark was booted from the dorm and took up residence at a farmhouse twenty-one miles outside of town, where he lived with three friends. The rest of his tenure at PJC was more sedate, and Mark was able to complete a certificate program in horology (fine jewelry and watch repair, precious metals, and gemstones). The year was 1976.

Cashing in on PJC’s claim of “100 percent job placement,” Mark took a job with Dale’s Professional Jewelers in Shreveport, Louisiana, rather than return to Marked Tree. There he repaired jewelry that was fed into the repair shop by six other stores that Dale’s owned in the Shreveport area. Mark worked for Dale’s for six months, before the job abruptly came to an end. The first of Mark’s serious brushes with the law would signal the end of his tenure at Dale’s, as well as his residence in the state of Louisiana.

After six months at Dale’s, Mark had decided that he needed a trip home to visit with his family. At the airport, as he passed through the metal detector in the departure area, the alarm sounded. After he removed some change, a watch, his belt, and some other metallic items, the device continued to sound off. A handheld wand pinpointed the problem area as the left inside pocket of his suit jacket. Mark removed a ball point pen. No dice. When he was asked to empty the contents of the pocket, he removed a plastic bag containing several cigarette papers, enough marijuana to roll about three joints, and one tiny metal roach clip.

Possession in Louisiana was a felony at the time, punishable by anywhere from five to ninety-nine years in prison. The police proposed a deal. If Mark would work with them on making larger narcotics arrests, they would hold his arrest paperwork—and the evidence against him—in abeyance, and Mark could continue to work at Dale’s; his employer would not have to know. If his work produced results, the charges would disappear. The alternative to this offer was a trip to the Louisiana State Prison (more commonly known as Angola), which is to say there was no alternative at all. Over the following weeks Mark made a few half-hearted attempts to arrange a bust for the narcs, but nothing panned out. As part of his deal with the police, he had to make weekly, in-person reports on anything he was working on. During one of these visits, Mark was left alone, and in one spur-of-the-moment decision, he snatched the arrest paperwork and the small quantity of pot that made up the evidence against him and hightailed it out of the police station. He had the entire case against him stashed down the front of his pants. His elation was temporary. Within hours, Mark was startled by a knock on the door at his apartment. He found himself face-to-face with two very pissed-off Shreveport detectives. Mark admitted to nothing, prompting the detectives to bounce him around the room a little before taking him back to the station. Once there, he was assured that the full force of Louisiana law would be brought to bear against him if he insisted on reneging on their deal. He was jailed and given time to think about it.

After being locked up for three days, Mark hooked up with a lawyer who was visiting his cellmate, and the lawyer agreed to check out the charges against him. The attorney arranged a meeting with Mark and the arresting officers to evaluate the case against his new client. When the officers went to the filing cabinet to retrieve the file, they found out what Mark already knew: there was nothing there. After politely declining to press charges against the Shreveport Police Department for false arrest—a suggestion made by his attorney—Mark made a swift departure as the detectives warned him to leave the state forever, something he didn’t have to be told twice. He quickly packed his belongings and bolted back to Arkansas. He had taken an enormous chance by rolling the dice with the Shreveport police for huge stakes—hard time at Angola—and had come out unscathed. This type of luck with the law would continue for a good many years before grinding to a halt in 1999, the year his marker was finally called in.

All the Way to Memphis

But before his world collapsed in the eight years between 1991 and 1999, Mark returned to Arkansas from Louisiana to look for a new job. He found work in Memphis as a manufacturing jeweler, doing repairs and design work. Shortly after returning to the Memphis, Tennessee area, he met a man named Ray Sellers, a realtor from Jonesboro who had money to invest and who saw talent and ambition in the nineteen-year-old from Marked Tree. Sellers agreed to fund him, and Mark suggested that they open a jewelry store. Thus Mark started his first business, Byers and Sellers Custom Jewelers, in Spanish Mall, on Caraway Road in Jonesboro. It was a successful venture, with Mark making custom jewelry and doing repairs for the local shops that had no repair department of their own.

Also during this time, Mark reunited with some old friends and rekindled his love of music. He began singing with a rock band, Home Grown, playing gin mills and honky-tonks in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was during this venture that Mark had his second brush with the law, for the same crime: possession of marijuana. The band was playing a gig at a bar called Winks in Paragould, Arkansas. In between sets, Mark and a friend, Kevin, along with the girls they were seeing at the time, headed out to Mark’s car to get high. Almost immediately after lighting the joint, they were spotted by a conveniently patrolling police officer. As Mark rolled down the car window, a cloud of marijuana smoke wafted up at the officer, and the four were removed from the car. A pat-down of the group yielded nothing, but when the police searched the car, they found one half-ounce of pot that Kevin had stuffed in the glove box. Mark, as the owner of the vehicle, was arrested and charged with possession. Bail was set at $187, which Mark did not have, so he did the next best thing. Using his one phone call, he called Winks and informed the employees that the lead singer of the band had just been arrested for possession of marijuana. The hat was passed around the bar, $187 was raised, and Mark was bailed out, returning to the bar in time to finish the next set. He was eventually convicted and fined $187. This was the first criminal charge—a misdemeanor—that appeared on Mark’s record.43

Although the jewelry store in Jonesboro had been doing well, the business nonetheless had to close in late December 1976. Mark’s girlfriend was—inconveniently, to say the least—the daughter of a narcotics officer assigned to the drug task force covering northeast Arkansas. One day the girl’s father approached Mark and told him that some of his officers had bought pot from Mark and members of the band and that Mark was going to be arrested. Mark listened in disbelief as he was told that since the detective’s daughter was smitten with him, he would be allowed to simply get out of town and leave the girl alone for good. Although Mark’s attachment to the girl was limited, he had little choice but to close the store and return once again to Marked Tree and his parents.

Descent

Mark’s return home signaled the first major failure of his young life. In the two years since leaving Marked Tree for college, he had been arrested twice for marijuana possession, driven from two homes (Shreveport and Jonesboro), forced to close his business, and forbidden to see his girlfriend ever again. His response was to sink into depression and step up his drug usage. These events set something of a pattern for Mark, given that in the future he would often use his own misfortunes or those of others to justify his drug abuse.

Whatever the specific events leading up to the situation were, the fact is that one day Mark began taking what he thought was THC—the active ingredient in marijuana—but which turned out to be PCP, or horse tranquilizer; added some amphetamines to the mix; and didn’t stop taking pills until he fell into unconsciousness.44 The paramedics arrived at his home, stabilized him, and determined that he did not require hospitalization. He recovered quickly, but his parents were frightened. They had never experienced anything like this before and were unsure of what the next step should be. After some very scary nights, during which his parents kept close watch on him, George and Auvergne called a family conference to discuss what to do about Mark. This was a family matter, and no one would have considered involving outsiders. Eventually, Mark’s sister in Jackson, Mississippi, offered a solution: “Send him to us, and we’ll try to help him.” Her husband was a Baptist preacher, and the family agreed that this environment would be the best one for Mark to assess his life and straighten himself out. Starting over for Mark meant first renewing his relationship with God. Having been raised as a Southern Baptist, he felt that he had strayed from his religion’s teachings to the extent that he no longer had any control over his life. He needed to take a hard look, he said, at his life, the things he had done, and the people he had hurt, especially his parents. He grabbed a pen and pad from an airport store, and on the flight to Jackson, he started writing. “I just started talking to God,” he says today. “I asked Him to change my life, to help me be a better person.”

Mark was met at the airport by his brother-in-law, the preacher, who was shocked at what he saw. Mark was gaunt, eyes dark and sunken, and he carried himself like a man who was holding on for dear life. He felt, in his words, “like a piece of shit.” He had let down his parents, whom he loved dearly. His business was gone, his girlfriend was gone, and he had overdosed on illegal drugs. It was devastating to have hurt his family so, but it was the hurt that he had done to himself that would prove the hardest to atone for. His brother-in-law spent time with him, providing the counsel and guidance that Mark needed desperately, getting him involved in the church. In 1977, Mark was baptized into the Baptist faith.45 He began his new life refreshed and was eventually ready to take his first tenuous steps back into the world. He soon found work managing a jewelry store with Ford Jewelers in Jackson, doing custom jewelry creation and jewelry repair. He was generally enjoying his work and feeling better than he had in a long time. It was during this time that he dated and eventually married Sandra Summerall.

Sandra

Mark first met Sandra in 1976 while visiting his sister in Jackson. Sandra attended Flag Chapel Baptist Church as well, and she and Mark soon became friendly. When Mark returned to Jackson to live with his sister in early 1977, he rekindled his friendship with Sandra, and the two began dating. Six months later, on June 2, 1977, they were married. One could easily argue that Mark Byers was not prepared for marriage. He was barely twenty years old, and it had been only eight months since his overdose in Marked Tree. He had spent the year prior to that singing in a rock-and-roll band and selling pot, culminating in his abrupt banishment from Jonesboro. But ready or not, he and Sandra started their life together.

Sandra’s preparedness as a wife, mother, and homemaker was also questionable. She knew next to nothing about food preparation. On one occasion, when she decided to cook a ham dinner for Mark, she needed instruction as to how to prepare the meat. Mark told her, “Baste the meat in orange marmalade, place cloves all around, add spices, and cook it at 350 degrees for five hours.” Apparently, Sandra didn’t realize that ham was available in a form other than “cold cuts,” so she bought several pounds of sliced ham from the delicatessen. When Mark came home, the place had “the burnt smell of death.” Sandra had taken the thin slices of sandwich meat and cooked them per Mark’s instruction. “The inside of the oven looked like something had blown up and died in it.” She was inconsolable, unable to understand what she had done wrong. From that point on, Mark did most of the cooking.

Mark was an avid outdoorsman, having spent most of his life hunting and fishing in and around Marked Tree, and of course he wanted to bring Sandra into this world, where they could enjoy nature together. One summer the couple embarked on a fishing trip to Beaver Lake, Arkansas. An exceptionally beautiful location created by the damming of the White River, the lake is part of the Hobbs State Park Conservation Area. On a good day, anglers at Beaver Lake can expect to land Kentucky bass, walleye, white bass, and the occasional striper. This is exactly what Mark had in mind when he and Sandra packed up the car for a weekend outdoors; the reality was much different. Not only was Sandra not outdoorsy; she was downright dangerous in a boat. The first day out, she hadn’t gotten her sea legs yet and nearly capsized the boat. She also had difficulty keeping clear of Mark’s casting and managed to get hooked in the head with a lure. Panicking, she began to scream and soon drew the attention of the other fishermen on the lake, who came closer to see what was going on. Crowds of boats and screaming women do not attract fish, and they caught nothing.

Back at the cabin, Mark grilled some steaks while Sandra prepared some fried potatoes inside. Mark isn’t sure exactly how it transpired, but somehow Sandra managed to set the cabin ablaze.

Three years into the marriage, Mark and Sandra started their family. John Andrew was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on November 14, 1980, when Mark was working for Gordon’s Jewelers. Because Mark had been raised in a stable family and had learned parenting skills from “the best mother and father anyone could ask for,” his transition into fatherhood was fairly smooth. He enjoyed being a dad, and Sandra was a competent mother, though she still couldn’t do very much in the kitchen. Mark was doing well at Gordon’s, and the company soon promoted him into a position with more responsibility in Mobile, Alabama. The couple lived there for two and a half years, Mark working his way up in the company and Sandra making a home and raising “Andy.” Sandra was content with working at home, with two notable exceptions.

Sandra had decided that being a fry cook at McDonald’s was a pretty easy job and would offer her the chance to make a little money and also get out of the house for a little while during the day. For whatever reason, she soon lost the job, as was the case with a bank teller position she tried next. She decided to settle for making dried flower arrangements and selling them alongside Mark’s custom jewelry at flea markets and fairs on the weekends.

The thirty-two Gordon’s stores that Mark managed in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida were consistently profitable, and the company wanted to promote him to a position with more responsibility. In 1981, Mark was offered a promotion to a larger region. Gordon’s wanted him to relocate to Houston to take control of 128 stores at a higher salary. However, another manager was being moved into Mark’s current position, and if Mark refused the transfer and opted instead to remain in Mobile, he would have to accept a demotion to store manager. For Mark, this was a no-brainer, but Sandra would have none of it.46 She didn’t want to be any farther away than she already was from her mother in Jackson. So once again, the couple moved, this time to Memphis, where Mark had contacts in the jewelry business and would be able to set up a repair service in an established store. He worked in a jewelry store on Summer Street in Memphis for several months until he had raised enough money to go freelance, going from store to store collecting jewelry for repair and returning it when it was finished. This proved to be a profitable arrangement, and Mark and Sandra, if not exactly prosperous, were getting by comfortably enough to support another child. This time Sandra gave birth to a daughter, Natalie Jane Byers, on June 29, 1983.

The Byerses’ marriage was not a particularly passionate one, neither great nor terrible, and life droned on predictably for several years until one day in the fall of 1986, when Mark walked into a restaurant and found Sandra having lunch with a neighbor, a married man with four children. From their demeanor, it was obvious to Mark that the meeting was romantic in nature. When he confronted her, she pleaded for another chance, swearing that it would not happen again. Mark seriously considered giving his marriage a second chance. He had been raised on the belief that marriage was for life. Sandra claims that it was Mark who did the begging, but one thing is certain: after finding a love letter from Sandra to the neighbor, Mark knew he’d never be able to trust her again.47 A heart-to-heart conversation with a friend convinced him that Sandra would cheat again and that there was no future for the marriage. Despite the pain of breaking up their family, Mark felt that he had no choice and moved out of their home. He rented a three-bedroom house at 1605 Goodwin Avenue in West Memphis, Arkansas.

Despite having given Mark a Father’s Day card the previous year saying that she loved him as much the day they were married and that he was a “wonderful father, a good provider, and a great husband,” Sandra filed for divorce on February 11, 1987, in Craighead County, Arkansas. “She beat me to the lawyer’s office,” Mark says. In the decree of divorce, Sandra was granted custody of John Andrew and Natalie. By April, however, Mark had filed a petition to modify the decree on several grounds. Shortly after Mark moved out of the house, Russell Good, the neighbor Mark had seen Sandra with in the restaurant, had moved in with Sandra. The petition alleged that Sandra was openly sleeping with Good and that he was permitted to bathe the children (who were four and seven years old at the time).

Mark alleged that the children were not being taken care of properly while Sandra worked the weekend flea markets and that they were routinely kept up until late at night. Most potentially incriminating of all, the petition stated that John Andrew and Natalie had “conveyed information to their father” that had prompted Mark to take them to a pediatrician in Memphis for examination. The pediatrician, Dr. James Sanford, had notified the Crittenden County Office of Social Services that he suspected the children were victims of sexual abuse, and as a result of that notification, they had opened an investigation. In the petition, Mark requested that he be granted custody of the children, that Sandra be enjoined from moving them out of Crittenden County, and that a child psychologist be permitted to examine the children upon order of the court.48 Mark was represented in this matter by attorney—and later judge—Pal Rainey.49 There is no record indicating whether the children were ever examined by a psychologist.

In June 1987, Mark again petitioned the court, this time to request summer visitation with the children, which would grant him custody for six weeks, from July 1 until August 10. During that time, Sandra would have the children every other weekend and on Wednesday mornings “during breakfast hours.” He had repeatedly asked for such custody, only to have Sandra reject the idea. The petition also stated that Sandra continued to cohabitate with Russell Good. In an order issued by the court that same month, Mark was finally granted the summer visitation rights that he had requested. In September, however, Mark slapped Sandra with a petition for contempt, alleging that she generally did not comply with the liberal visitation; that she specifically had denied him visitation on two consecutive Wednesdays, August 27 and September 2; and that she in fact had the children in Jackson County, Mississippi, a direct violation of the settlement agreement. Finally, on September 16, Sandra was ordered to appear before the court to show cause as to why she should not be charged with contempt for her continued violation of the court-approved visitation schedule.

Sandra was also awarded a schedule of child support, which would eventually become the subject of a May 2001 court action. In Crittenden County, Arkansas, the Office of Child Support Enforcement intervened on Sandra’s behalf to recover unpaid child support from Mark Byers. Many, including Mara Leveritt in her 2003 book, Devil’s Knot, would claim that Mark had not met his financial obligations to his children. The action of the court proves this claim to be baseless. In February 1993 Mark had become physically disabled due to a “right frontal” brain tumor originally detected in 1990. As a result, child support payments, which up until 1993 had been drawn from Mark’s paychecks, were subsequently made directly by the Social Security Administration to Sandra Sloane. The court documents reflect that instead of the $22,630 that John and Natalie would have received from Mark’s court-ordered payments, they received $45,160 in direct payments from Mark’s Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Natalie’s later claim that she never saw any of the money is indicative of deceit on the part of her mother; the court records show that the payments were made.50

Sandra married twice after the divorce from Mark. The first marriage was to Russell Good, but this marriage didn’t last. She soon divorced her second husband and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with her mother. While living there, she met yet another man whom she soon married. When her new husband was hired as a professor at the Kemper Military Academy in Boonville, Missouri, in 1992, the couple relocated, and Mark lost track of her. Although Mark has seen Natalie in the not-too-distant past, and that meeting, at least according to Mark, was amicable, he has not seen or heard from John Andrew in many years.

Melissa

In the course of Mark’s jewelry travels, he had occasion to meet a young woman named Sharon Melissa DeFir, a divorced mother of two who was living with her parents, Kilborn and Dorris, in Germantown, Tennessee. Her oldest child, Ryan Clark, was seven; his half-brother Christopher Murray, eight. During the period following his divorce from Sandra, Mark began to date Melissa, and the two were married on May 9, 1987; his divorce from Sandra was barely three months old. At this point, Mark was still plying his trade as a custom jeweler and repair person, eventually settling into a shop in the back of a Germantown jeweler. Mark’s business volume soon exceeded that of the store’s owner, so Mark was politely asked to move to his own shop. During this same time, Mark and Melissa moved from 1605 Goodwin to a nice pool home at 1400 East Barton Avenue in West Memphis, just around the corner from the Goodwin house. After they plunked down a $4,000 down payment, the house was theirs.

In August 1988, Mark and Melissa opened “Byers Jewelry” in the Holiday Plaza Mall (actually just a small shopping-center strip) in West Memphis. Mark and his father worked hectically for ten days prior to the opening of the store, building benches and interior walls, to make everything ready for opening day. Though the store actually opened for business on August 1, the official “Grand Opening” was held on Friday, December 16, 1988.51 Mark and Melissa ran the store together, and it seemed as though their life was on solid ground.

There was, however, a dark cloud hanging over the Byerses’ apparent success. After marrying Melissa, Mark had learned of her history of drug abuse. This was not the pot-smoking and whiskey-drinking variety that Mark had indulged in, or even the PCP type that had led to his overdose in 1977. Rather, Melissa was abusing narcotics, specifically Dilaudid.52 Though she occasionally took the drug orally, Melissa preferred injecting the drug, usually under the watchband on her left hand, on the top of her hand, or on the underside of either forearm. Though she was apparently clean during the time they were dating, Melissa soon took up with some of her old friends, and she was using again within a few months of their marriage.

The first time Mark checked Melissa into rehab was nine months after their wedding. When he confronted her with her drug use, Melissa was extremely remorseful and wanted to get clean and save the marriage. Mark checked her into Methodist Outreach, a drug rehab center in Memphis, where she remained for thirty days. She stayed clean for a while but eventually slipped back into the old patterns. Soon, jewelry was missing from the store, and both their personal and business accounts were being drained. Financial records for the store are not available for examination, so it is not possible to determine whether the business failed because of poor sales, mismanagement, Melissa’s drug habit or some combination of the two. Ultimately, however, the store was forced to close, and in 1991, three years after the grand opening, Byers Jewelry was officially out of business.

Mark briefly partnered with Daniel Hatchett, who operated a pawn shop just off Ingram Boulevard near Southland Greyhound Park in West Memphis. Mark built out the store to accommodate both the jewelry and pawn businesses. He also sold Hatchett the jewelry cases, alarm system, and safe from Byers Jewelry for $3,800. Mark did his jewelry repair in the back of the store. It soon became apparent to Mark that Hatchett was not the person he represented himself to be, such as the false claim that he was an attorney. When confronted with this, Hatchett said he was in the federal witness protection program. Mark decided it would be wise to move his business elsewhere.53 A woman named McNamara, who ran a jewelry store in Jonesboro, offered Mark a salaried job in her shop. She also put Melissa on the payroll to do counter sales. This arrangement also lasted only a few months, ending when Ms. McNamara abruptly closed the shop. Her partner, a man named Bruce Barnes, notified Mark that he was going in to remove any jewelry and equipment that belonged to him and advised Mark to do the same. Mark removed jewelry that he was working on and all his tools as well. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of it; not so for Ms. McNamara.

She claimed that $65,000 worth of merchandise was missing from the store, but there was insufficient evidence for a criminal case, so the matter was taken up in civil court. She filed suit against Bruce and Linda Barnes and, at least initially, John Mark Byers, for wrongly entering a business. Because Mark had insufficient tangible assets to attach in the event of a judgment against him, he moved himself into the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court. As a result of this move and because it was evident that Mark had taken only the property that belonged to him, he was dropped as a defendant in the case and became a defense witness for the Barneses. McNamara lost the suit. Mara Leveritt makes note of this matter in Devil’s Knot by pointing out that Damien Echols’s trial counsel Val Price “didn’t question Byers about the allegation that he had committed a burglary of a jewelry store and the taking of property, which would have been a serious felony if prosecuted” [emphasis added]. But the district attorney never believed that there was enough evidence to prosecute Mark Byers, and this is what is relevant, not “allegations” of wrongdoing. Further, because Byers was dropped as a defendant and testified on behalf of his former codefendants, the court’s belief that he was not complicit in any “serious felony” was evident.

Shortly after Mark moved his tools and stock out of the store he ran with McNamara, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in the frontal lobe. Although the tumor was determined to be benign, it caused him dizzy spells and terrible migraine headaches. To Mark, it felt like “a medicine ball, like there were sirens going off in my ears, and like a camera’s going off in my face.”54 His doctor prescribed the drugs Tegritol and Dilantin to alleviate the symptoms. The drugs helped considerably, and he was able to continue his jewelry work. In mid-1992, Mark bought a prefabricated shed from a dealer on Broadway in West Memphis and had it moved to the backyard at 1400 East Barton. From here he did his repair work during most of 1992-1993. It was essentially a subsistence living, and the couple was financially just getting by. In 1992, Mark was unexpectedly presented with an opportunity to improve the situation; some might even say he was entrapped.

Tables Turned

Mark Byers’s account of this 1992 incident is such that even without much corroboration, it merits consideration. When asked about it, he is surprisingly blunt: “The ATF and DEA agents screwed up.” In this sting-gone-bad, federal agents baited Mark into a conspiracy to broker a cocaine deal, but because of procedural blundering on their part, they were unable to make the arrest stick. Had they been able to, Mark’s prison time would have begun much sooner than it did, and the sentence would have been harsh—twenty years, perhaps more. The details of Mark’s involvement in this incident are not publically available. The federal agencies involved will not comment for obvious reasons. All the record shows is that on July 28, 1992, at 11:43 p.m., Mark Byers was arrested on drug and weapons charges by the sheriff’s office of Shelby County, Tennessee, and released at 9:26 a.m. the next day. The record does not reflect to whom he was released, but what little information can be independently verified supports his account.

During the 1980s, Mark had become acquainted with a man named John McFarland, with whom he conducted jewelry trading for several years. Mark lost track of McFarland by the latter part of the decade, until he suddenly resurfaced in the summer of 1992. Upon his return, McFarland contacted Mark regarding a potentially lucrative drug transaction with which he wanted Mark’s assistance. McFarland had been working as a safety inspector for an operation that conducted the unloading of barges at various foreign and domestic ports of call. This work took him to South America, where he had met some people who could supply him with cheap cocaine, for $12,000 per kilo. Since both Byers and McFarland knew that the street price in the United States for cocaine was more than twice that amount, they entered into a deal to move at least one kilo in Memphis for $28,000 and split the profits. Since Mark’s jewelry business had soured, and he was facing mounting debt, he agreed to make a connection with some of his former jewelry customers in Memphis whom he knew to be in the drug trade. Since neither McFarland nor Mark had sufficient cash to buy the kilo, McFarland was to arrange to have the seller present at a local hotel. The plan was that Mark would take the cocaine from the hotel to the buyers at a prearranged meeting spot, and McFarland would stay at the hotel with the sellers until Mark’s return.

The two arranged a meeting time at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza hotel in Memphis, where the middlemen and the seller would transact the deal. If Mark was suspicious when McFarland, a married man, said he would be bringing his “girlfriend,” he did not acknowledge it. Mark arrived at the hotel room, expecting to find McFarland and the drug supplier waiting. As it turned out, only McFarland and the girlfriend were in the room. McFarland told Mark that the seller did not want to be directly involved with anyone other than him and that he was waiting in another room in the hotel where the cash would be delivered once the transaction was complete. McFarland had with him a package that Byers described as “about the size of a football, only flatter,” wrapped in silver duct tape, with the word “Rolex” stamped across the top in red print; the package weighed slightly more than 2.2 pounds. He asked Mark if he wanted to sample the drug; Mark declined. “I’m a pothead,” he told McFarland. “I don’t do cocaine.” McFarland assured him of the drug’s quality and then told Mark that the arrangements had changed; the seller did not want the coke to leave the hotel until he had cash in hand, and the buyers would have to meet them at the hotel. When Mark informed the buyers of this, they refused the change in plans: either the exchange would take place at the originally planned meeting spot, or the deal was off.

Sensing the collapse of the sale, Mark left the hotel to meet with the buyers to try to convince them that they should come to the hotel to consummate the deal. Again they refused. Mark returned to the hotel to an enraged John McFarland, who became “belligerent,” complaining that the buyers weren’t for real and that he knew Mark wasn’t going to be able to set the deal up; he was generally “gettin’ all crazy.” At this point, Mark lied and told McFarland that the buyers had shown him a shoe box full of cash and were simply protesting the change in plans. McFarland was furious and continued to berate Mark. By this time, Mark had been away from home for much longer than Melissa expected. She was fully aware of the deal and would be nervous if Mark was gone too long. McFarland said he was going to have to go down the hall and apprise the seller of the situation. At that point, Mark picked up the phone, dialed home, and began to explain to his wife what was going on. Then all hell broke loose.

While sitting on the bed with his back to the door, talking to Melissa, Mark heard a very light knock on the door. McFarland, who had not yet left the room, opened the door, and what seemed like an army rushed in—DEA and ATF agents, all with guns drawn as they screamed, “Drop the phone, you son of a bitch! Drop the phone! Don’t move, or we’ll shoot!”55 Mark could hear his wife screaming on the other end of the phone as the agents hung up the receiver. Mark said, “The agents began bouncing me around the room, shouting, ‘We got this all on tape; we’ve arrested the buyers.’ This one big guy from the DEA starts hitting me with a phone book, shouting, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the money?’ I said, ‘What money?’ They said, ‘Twenty-eight thousand dollars—where is it?’ ‘I don’t know nothing about twenty eight thousand dollars.’ They said, ‘We got it all on tape; we got it filmed! We’ve got your buyers pulled over, and we’re arrestin’ ’em right now.’ So I said, ‘Well, if you got me, then you got me. I ain’t got nothin’ to say.’” Mark was searched, at which time the police discovered a full clip of .45 caliber ammunition in his back pocket. The agents demanded to know where the gun was. The irony of the situation was that although Mark had fully trusted McFarland, he was less comfortable with the would-be buyers and had taken the precaution of borrowing a .45 caliber automatic pistol from longtime friend and retired St. Francis County sheriff Dallas Brogden, a licensed gun dealer. Drug dealers—especially cocaine dealers—are always armed. Because the only time Mark felt he would be threatened was while exchanging the cocaine with the buyers, he had left the unloaded pistol and two clips in the trunk of the car; he had neglected to remove a third clip from his pocket when entering the hotel.

Mark was handcuffed and led by the agents outside to a black “panel van,” where he saw that the buyers, “two black dudes,” were seated inside, casting Mark hateful glances; they naturally assumed that he had set them up. Mark then led the agents to his car, gave them the keys, and directed them to the trunk, where they located the Colt 45. He was booked for conspiracy to sell cocaine and for the illegal possession of a firearm and was told that he was being bound over to the US Marshals Service.

Needless to say, there was no “seller” in the hotel, and Mark never saw John McFarland again. Mark has always assumed that McFarland was caught up on a federal charge and had “flipped” to avoid prosecution. He must have convinced the feds that Mark was a much bigger fish than he actually was, possibly out of fear of setting up someone who was truly dangerous. The mystery woman, McFarland’s “girlfriend,” was a DEA agent. Mark saw her only once again, while he was being interrogated prior to being locked up. Agents had tailed Mark to his initial rendezvous with the buyers, who were also taken into custody and charged with conspiracy to buy and distribute cocaine. Mark was taken to the Shelby County jail at 201 Poplar and held in the lockup overnight. At 9:26 the following morning, Mark and the others were “marched across the street” to the US Marshals office at 167 North Main Street, where they were held for seven hours until they faced the federal magistrate who would formally charge the men and set bail. The DEA and ATF agents were present. The first thing they discovered after checking the gun’s serial number was that the weapon belonged to Brogden, who, when contacted by agents, not only denied knowing why Mark had borrowed the gun (he didn’t know) but also demanded its return.

The federal agents made two charges against Mark. The first was the illegal possession of a firearm, the Colt .45 automatic found in the trunk of Mark’s car. But there is no federal law against having an unloaded firearm in the trunk of a car. There is also no law against carrying a clip of ammunition. As such, the charge was dismissed. The second charge was for conspiracy to commit a felony—that is, the brokering of the cocaine sale. The magistrate was satisfied that Mark had not tasted the drug and had not even touched the package. He was also confident that neither Mark nor the buyers had adequate funds to consummate the sale. (Between Mark and the buyers, they had something less than twenty dollars when they were arrested. The magistrate asked, “Is that what a kilo of cocaine sells for today?”) Thus, this charge was dropped as well, and Mark was released.

As it turned out, the buyers lived about two blocks from where the deal was supposed to go down and were planning on getting the money after they saw the cocaine. When agents heard Mark say that he had seen the money, they were sure that the conspiracy charge would stick. What they wound up with was an embarrassing waste of time and money. No one will ever find out what really happened, at least not from the federal agencies involved. Considerable time and resources must have been spent to set up Mark Byers, and the agencies’ true objective may never be known. Were they really so anxious to take out Mark Byers, a small-time pot pusher, that they would go to such great lengths to entrap him? Whatever the case was, this brush with federal law enforcement easily could have landed Mark in a federal prison for a very long time.

This was not Mark’s first foray into the world of drug dealing. There were several periods in his life when bought and sold marijuana in moderate quantities, sometimes ten pounds or more. He had run pot from Texas to Arkansas, sometimes by car, sometimes by plane. In one deal in the summer of 1990, Melissa had put Mark on a plane in Little Rock, bound for Houston, where he was to pick up ten pounds of Mexican marijuana from his connection there. The handoff went smoothly. Mark tightly wrapped the shipment in plastic film, doused it with cologne, packed it securely into his suitcase, and checked it for the return flight to Arkansas. Another of Mark’s Houston connections, Peter Walden,* knew of Mark’s trip and its purpose and decided it would be amusing to have Mark paged at the airport. Drug dealers tend to be a jumpy lot, so when the paging system at the William P. Hobby airport blared out, “Mark Byers, report to the Delta ticket counter!” he nearly lost it. After ducking into the men’s room to compose himself and then hearing his name paged again, Mark finally made his way to the Delta counter, where Walden was waiting. Seeing the terrified, pale-faced form of Mark Byers coming toward him was more than Walden could take; he doubled up in laughter. Even after Walden revealed his “joke,” Mark was so shaken that he sat frozen at the baggage claim in Little Rock, waiting until the last possible minute to claim the bag. With Melissa at his side, he watched and waited as the lone suitcase went around and around on the carousel, only getting up to grab it when he faced the inevitable fact that if he didn’t, it would soon be with the other unclaimed bags.

Mark had been dealing marijuana on and off for much of his life. He liked the money, of course; he often needed it to supplement the income of his jewelry store during slow periods. But he also liked the status that came with the territory, peeling off big bills from rolls of cash, always having “friends” around. It was seductive, and he liked it. His earliest deals with larger quantities of pot had begun in Marked Tree with a friend named Danny Overman.

Danny Overman

Mark first met Danny Overman[**] while the two were growing up in Marked Tree. Danny’s father owned a farm in nearby Dyess, about twenty miles to the northeast. Danny also worked for a man named Bob Kerr, who had a little farm of his own along the Mississippi not far from Dyess. Danny’s work was not farming, however. It was running moonshine for Kerr. Mark ran into Overman one day out at the Kerr place, and Danny showed him another business venture he was getting into: growing marijuana, lots of it. Mark would shove as much pot as he could fit into a garbage bag and pay Danny $120. He’d then break it up into ten-dollar “lids” and sell it to his friends. One day Danny told Mark that there would be high-quality Mexican weed coming into the farm and that Mark should check it out. Pretty soon, he and Danny had a nice marijuana business going, large enough to generate a modest income, but small enough to stay under the radar of the authorities.

This arrangement continued until Mark went off to college in Texas. After that, he didn’t see or hear from Danny for almost ten years. It wasn’t until after his marriage to Sandra ended, and he was married to Melissa, that Mark had occasion to meet up with Overman again. Mark and Melissa were living in West Memphis at the time. Melissa had just wrecked her car and received a $1,300 payment from the insurance company. “Want to turn that into $4,000?” Mark asked. Figuring correctly that Danny was still in the marijuana business, Mark looked him up. He bought five pounds of pot for $4,000-$1,300 down, $2,700 due; sold it at the usual markup (about 68 percent in this case); and then came back for more. “I was off to the races in the weed business,” he recalls. “I’d do this for several months out of the year.”

Mark lost touch with Danny again, this time until after Christopher’s murder. Mark was living in Cherokee Village and ran into Danny one day at a grocery store in nearby Hardy, and the two caught up on the past few years. Danny had, of course, heard about Christopher and gave Mark his condolences. Danny had spent the last few years working on a riverboat in Ohio and had been injured on the job. After receiving “several hundred thousand dollars” in settlement money, Danny and his wife Marci[***] had moved up to the Ozarks to a development called Ozark Acres, some ten miles west of Cherokee Village. “Come on up and see me,” he told Mark. “It’s real nice.” It was nice all right; Danny was having Mexican reefer shipped right to his door via a commercial package carrier. He and Mark did a few deals together to make a little extra cash; the wives also struck up a friendship. Then came Tunica.

Tunica

Tunica, Mississippi, is home to a group of nine gaming establishments that operate under state laws allowing gambling on the Mississippi River. The casinos aren’t exactly in the Mississippi, like a riverboat might be. Rather, they are located on the river, huge, stationary barges connected to the shore by gangplanks. Mississippi approved “cruise vessel” gambling in 1989 in a complex series of rules called the Mississippi Gaming Control Act. Under the act, Tunica was one of fourteen riverfront counties approved for “dockside” gambling. Tunica is located an hour south of Memphis, Tennessee, and is a little over three hours by car from Cherokee Village. Flush with money from their marijuana business, Mark and Danny headed down to Tunica one day to blow a little cash at the slots and card tables. They did better than they expected, each pocketing between $5,000 and $6,000, at which point Mark was ready to leave; Danny wasn’t. Deciding not to wait, Mark took off, leaving Danny stranded. Danny had six grand in his pocket; he’d get home somehow.

Once he arrived at home, Mark found Danny’s wife Marci waiting with Melissa. “Where is he?” she demanded to know. When Mark told her that Danny had opted to stay behind, she exploded. “Did he have money? Did he have whores and girls all over him?”

“Well, I don’t know what he’s doing down there,” Mark said.

Marci sent Danny’s brother down to Tunica to pick him up, and when Danny came home, Marci gave him a slightly enhanced version of what Mark had actually said. “I hear you’ve been out whoring and drinking and carrying on.” The two didn’t exactly have the perfect marriage to begin with; this wasn’t going to make things any better.

Shortly after the Tunica incident, Mark got a call from Danny. “I have ten pounds of good weed. Do you want it?”

“Sure I do.”

In a bizarre setup, Danny told Mark, “I’m going to leave it in a cooler down the road from my house, near a cattle crossing, just past the gate. It’ll be there just before dark.”

Perhaps Mark should have been suspicious, but he had known Danny for years, and the two had dealt a lot of pot together. Mark headed out and quickly found the cattle crossing but did not see the cooler. He headed over to Danny’s house to see if he was there; he wasn’t. He decided to wait. “I wasn’t going to leave while the cooler was still missing.” Within fifteen minutes, Danny’s Cadillac pulled into the driveway; his nephew Dwayne**** was with him.

“It’s in the trunk of my car,” Danny explained. “Let’s go around by the woods for a little privacy.” Danny pulled the Caddy around back, with Mark following in his Toyota pickup truck. When they stopped, all three got out of the cars. Danny opened the trunk of the Cadillac and pulled out a twelve-gauge shotgun, pointing it squarely at Mark.

Mark looked at Danny closely for the first time and could plainly see that he was “all geeked out” on crystal methedrine; he looked like he was out of his mind. Danny started ranting about how Mark had caused him all sorts of trouble by telling his wife he was whoring around in Tunica that night, and now he was going to kill him. Danny shoved him back against the hood of the Toyota and smacked him a couple of times with the butt of the shotgun, splitting Mark’s lip and chipping a few teeth in the process. Danny shoved the barrel of the shotgun, which had been sawed off to eighteen inches, into Mark’s mouth, saying, “Beg me not to kill you.” Mark managed to say, “Dude, I ain’t beggin’ you not to kill me. People know you’re out here looking for me. People know I’m out here; Melissa knows where I am. So if I come up dead, you’re going to be the number one suspect.”

Danny wasn’t listening. He backed up fifteen to twenty feet and pulled the trigger; all Mark remembers is seeing the muzzle flash, hearing the glass in his truck’s windshield shatter, and hearing pellets ricochet off the hood of the Toyota. Somehow, Danny had missed his target. He racked up another shell and another and finally hit Mark with the third shot, in the knee. Not having anticipated that he would miss a target Mark’s size three times, Danny had only three rounds with him. “He came up and hit me across the head with the butt of the shotgun,” Mark says, “and kinda knocked me goofy, but I can remember him saying, ‘Well, I’m going to go back to the house, and then I’m goin’ to come back and kill ya.’ Well, as soon as him and his nephew left, I wandered off into the woods, and sure enough, ten or fifteen minutes later, he comes back and shot up the truck, ten or twelve times, it seemed. And there was a lot of cussin’ and hollerin’ out there in the woods, there’s buckshot flyin’ off into the woods, and then he left. I hitchhiked back into town and bought me a handgun, and I had every intention next time I saw him of shootin’ his ass. Well, I never saw him again . . . till I saw him in the penitentiary.”

The Calm

Between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 1993, Melissa cleaned up her act considerably. She was drug-free, and she and Mark were going to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings together. She had started going to church and was baptized at the Second Street Baptist Church in West Memphis.56 For the first time in years, she was feeling good and looking good. Despite the family’s continuing financial troubles, things were starting to look up. By the time of Christopher’s murder, Melissa had been clean for nearly eight months.

Christopher

On Wednesday morning, May 5, 1993, Christopher Byers went off to Weaver Elementary School for what should have been just another day in second grade. Weaver was a neighborhood school, and all of the students were “walkers.” Nothing special was planned in school that day, and Christopher was looking forward to spending time with his friends, Steve Branch, Aaron Hutcheson, and Michael Moore. Christopher, Steve, and Aaron were all in Miss Jones’s class together, and Michael was in Miss Miller’s. It was a going to be a nice warm day in West Memphis, sunny and about seventy-five degrees, and all four boys were anxious to get out of school so they could play. Stevie had a new bike that he wanted to break in—a gift from his grandfather—and it was perfect riding weather. Michael was also anxious to get on his bike, and Christopher was planning on doing some skateboarding. What could be better than to be eight years old on a sunny spring day?

Things hadn’t always been easy for Christopher, whose birth had been difficult. He was born Christopher Lee Murray on June 24, 1984, at Lebonheur Hospital in Memphis and was extremely premature, weighing only a few pounds. He remained in the hospital for several months while surgery was performed on his stomach and intestines. Still, once he came home from the hospital, his development was normal, though he would always be slight in build. At the time of his death, he was a very healthy four feet tall and weighed fifty-two pounds. He was rarely sick, and during his life, he’d had no major illnesses or injuries. His biggest problem was that he had far more energy than he knew what to do with.

Although Christopher didn’t excel academically, he did manage to maintain a “C” average. He was an active boy, hyperactive even, and it was nearly impossible for him to sit still at school. Mark and Melissa didn’t know that anything was wrong with Christopher, other than the difficulty they had getting him to sleep at night. “Before I realized that Christopher actually had a problem,” Mark says, “I used to be pretty hard on him. When he wouldn’t go to sleep, I would sometimes spank him or punish him for not listening to me.” By the time Christopher was in the second grade, it was obvious to his parents that he was more than just rambunctious and a little hard to handle. They took him to see Memphis neurologist Dr. Donald Eastmead, who examined him for his behavioral problems at home and in school. Eastmead determined that Christopher suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and that his symptoms were on the severe side of the scale, with incidents of “very low frustration tolerance,” “anger outbursts,” and refusal to follow directions. Dr. Eastmead prescribed Ritalin, later changing the prescription to Dexedrine instead. He also prescribed Tegratol, an anti-seizure medication. Although Eastmead claimed that Christopher was “a difficult child who [might] require in-hospital treatment to gain control of his behavior,” Christopher responded well to the medication change, according to Mark, and hospitalization was never required. His last visit to Eastmead was on January 4, 1993.

Christopher’s biological father, Ricky Lee Murray, might have been a more negative influence in Christopher’s life had he been more involved. It was probably fortunate for Christopher that Melissa divorced Murray in 1986, when Christopher was three. Murray was living in Indiana at the time of Christopher’s murder and hadn’t seen Christopher or spoken with Melissa in at least five years. He was on probation for a burglary in Scottsville, Kentucky, at the time of Christopher’s death and had to get special permission from his probation officer, Denise Ware, to leave Indiana.57 Absentee parenting notwithstanding, Murray claimed that he had never given up his parental rights and that Christopher had not been adopted by Mark Byers. (See photo section for a copy of Christopher’s adoption certificate.)

Christopher’s friends and relatives weren’t concerned with any behavioral issues he might have had at school. “He was a real extrovert,” Mark says. “Friends of mine would come over to the house, and Christopher would be there on their laps, asking questions, wanting to show them things from his room. He loved people and loved it when we had company.” His mother described him as “loving and giving.” Mark concurs. “Christopher was the kind of kid who, if he had one cookie, he’d give half of it to someone else.”

Family friend Andy Taylor has similar recollections. “He was the kind of little kid who could climb in your lap and make you feel good right off the bat.” Christopher was at least as curious as any eight-year-old. “He was very inquisitive, and I think along with that comes creativity,” Taylor said. “He always asked a thousand questions. ‘Why do you drive that kind of car?’ ‘Why are you doing that?’” Christopher was only six years old when his grandparents, George and Auvergne Byers, died, but both had adored him. When he visited his grandparents in Marked Tree, his grandmother would put him up on the counter and allow him to sample whatever she was baking. George would show him his workshop and all the different things he was working on. Christopher visited his grandparents often, as well as his aunts, uncles, and cousins in nearby Jonesboro. The Byerses had a tight extended family, and Christopher knew the security of having people around who loved him.

During the period that Mark and Melissa had Byers Jewelry open, Christopher often was with them in the store after school. Mark recalls one afternoon near Christmas time when Christopher was five years old. Mark was negotiating the sale of a ring with a particularly demanding customer. “She was the kind of customer who wanted something for nothing.” When they finally agreed on a price, Mark went into the back of the store to size the ring. Leaning over to Melissa, he whispered, “Ya know, I really stuck it to that old bitch!” It was maybe not the nicest thing to say, but he’d said it privately to his wife, or so he thought. Looking from the back of the store a few moments later, Mark was horrified to see Christopher, who’d been standing between Mark and Melissa while Mark was sizing the ring, now addressing the customer. “My daddy says, you old bitch, he stuck it to you!” Mark lost the sale.

Friends of the family called Christopher “The Worm” because of his constant fidgeting. So pervasive was this nickname that Mark made Christopher a 14k gold ring with an embossed worm on it, a ring he was allowed to wear only on special occasions. Christopher was able to release some of his energy in the family pool, however, and did so whenever time and weather allowed. “During the summer, you couldn’t keep him out of the pool,” Andy Taylor recalls. Christopher shared a bedroom with his thirteen-year-old half-brother Ryan Clark, and though five years and different fathers separated the two boys, they were fairly close. All things considered, Christopher was a happy little boy with good friends and a good life.

The question of how Christopher’s life might have been affected by Melissa’s drug use—and Mark’s, for that matter—invariably arises, and to this there is no definitive answer. There was surely at least an adequate amount of love and attentiveness toward Christopher in the home. Mark and Melissa took him to the doctor to have his behavioral problems addressed, and they had regular conferences with the school to monitor his progress. Christmases and birthdays were enthusiastically celebrated. There were pets in the family to hug, toys to play with, and books to read. Still, Melissa was an addict, and her children were exposed to the realities of her drug use, though it was arguably Ryan who would have been affected more than Christopher. Christopher’s acting out in school consisted largely of being disruptive, talking, and not paying attention during class, and it was these things that most often brought Mark and Melissa to school for conferences.

According to Ryan, the only really “weird” thing that he recalled Christopher doing was defecating behind Weaver Elementary with a few of his friends one day, after which they started throwing the feces. Though this was important enough to be noted by Christopher’s physician, Dr. Eastmead, Ryan claims it was an isolated incident. When Christopher did get into trouble, more often than not, it was when he was with Michael Moore. According to Stevie Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs, Michael was a “natural leader,” whereas Stevie could sometimes be shy. Christopher was more the adventurous type. One day, for example, Michael and Christopher slipped into Weaver Elementary after school one day after discovering an unlocked door. What the boys were doing in the school is uncertain, but they were taken into custody and were sitting in the backseat of a squad car when their parents came for them—handcuffed, no less.58

The Moores lived at 1398 East Barton, across Fourteenth Street from the Byerses (the street name sounds impressive, but in reality it’s a neighborhood lane barely wide enough for two cars to pass). Eight-year-old Michael and ten-year-old Dawn lived with their parents, Todd and Dana. Todd and Dana were also friends with Mark and Melissa, often attending the barbeques and parties that the Byerses held at their pool home. Being such close neighbors virtually assured that the boys would become friends, and they spent most afternoons after school together, riding bikes, skateboarding, and exploring their surroundings. This included trips to the area surrounding Ten Mile Bayou known as Robin Hood Hills, even though both sets of parents had forbidden their boys to play there. It wasn’t far—only a few minutes by bike from their houses, just at the end of McAuley Drive, behind the Mayfair Apartments—but there was often enough water in the bayou for an eight-year-old to drown in and enough tree cover to allow the older kids and transients to do what those types of people do when no one can see them. The woods’ close proximity to Interstate 40 also made it a magnet for hobos and other undesirables, and it was directly opposite the Mayfair Apartments, which was known to house unsavory types such as paroled drug and sex offenders. The boys’ parents were adamant about the rule against playing in Robin Hood. Sometimes the boys minded their parents. Sometimes they didn’t.

Mark Byers says he had “never laid eyes on” Steve Branch’s mother and stepfather, Terry and Pam Hobbs, before May 5, 1993.59 Stevie had been around the Byers house often enough, and Christopher had spent time at Stevie’s as well, but Christopher had always maintained to his parents that Stevie lived somewhere down East Barton, close to home. In reality, the Hobbses lived at 1601 South McAuley Drive, nearly half a mile away. Christopher knew his parents wouldn’t let him go that far alone, so he had “misled” them about where his friend lived. It wasn’t until the night of Christopher’s disappearance that Mark learned where Terry and Pam Hobbs actually lived.60 Regardless, the boys spent an enormous amount of time together, along with Michael Moore, so it was not unusual to see the three boys roaming through the neighborhood, doing the things that eight-year-old boys do.61 But May 5, 1993, was different. Somewhere between 5:30 and 6:15 p.m., Christopher left his house without telling his parents where he was going and hooked up with Michael and Stevie. The three boys never came home.62

Real Monsters

The period between the murders on May 5, 1993, and the beginning of the trials in late January 1994 was one of surreal anguish for the victims’ families. How could any parents know what to do and how to behave after the sudden and violent death of their child? Along with the total loss they felt without Christopher in their lives, Mark and Melissa had to confront the incomprehensible fact that three local teenagers, boys from their own community, were allegedly responsible for the murders. The viciousness and apparent frenzy of the killings was simply too much for the families to take in. They were obviously in a deep state of shock, as were Todd and Dana Moore. In the film Paradise Lost, Dana Moore asked “Was he conscious or unconscious?” “Did he watch the other two being . . . cut?” Her husband Todd wondered aloud whether Michael might have been calling out for his father and how long he had been left on the ditch bank to die. “They were really being killed by real monsters.”

The grief that the community felt was beyond measure. Out of a school of 335 students, only 44 were in second grade. Everyone knew the boys personally, and students and faculty alike were devastated. One guidance counselor, Lila S. Lovely, said, “The children were crying and I was crying, and I just told ’em, ‘Y’all go ahead and cry.’” 63 Their classmates decorated the boys’ desks with little “memorials,” drawings made with crayons and construction paper, paper chains, and Valentine’s hearts. The children expressed their emotions, which ranged from sadness and fear to anger, to the grief counselors who had been sent to the school. “We’re going to make the counseling available for as many days as needed,” said Gary Adams, the assistant superintendent for elementary schools in West Memphis. Within a few weeks of the murders, the local Cub Scouts were planning the erection of a memorial “reading grove” in the school yard near the Weaver Elementary School library.

Christopher’s funeral took place at the Ingram Boulevard Baptist Church exactly one week after his murder.64 The service was conducted by Mark’s brother-in-law, Pastor Sonny Simpson. The police video surveillance cameras caught images of all those attending, as is standard procedure in homicide cases. Mark could be seen literally holding Melissa up as they made their way into the church. The media were lined up on the street like piranha, waiting for an attention-grabbing video clip for the evening news. It was the same at the other boys’ funerals. Todd Moore said, “The reporters would be watching, and if someone came out and they looked okay, they’d ignore them, but if they were crying, the cameras would rush them. It was disgusting.”

Although they were trying to deal privately with their loss, the Byerses experienced a full-on media onslaught. Everywhere they went, they were confronted with cameras and microphones and reporters whose need for a quote outweighed any privacy concerns they might have had for the victims’ families. Relatives and friends helped where they could, sitting with the couple and bringing meals for example, but the media was relentless, and it was impossible to escape their presence. This was becoming a national story, and the attention paid to Mark Byers in particular initially repelled him. Ultimately, however, he held it in a kind of perverse embrace until it threatened to swallow him whole, and it was this dance with the media, among other things, that would sully his reputation for the foreseeable future—perhaps permanently.

If Mark became enamored with the publicity, he had plenty of help, most of it coming from two young filmmakers from New York, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. Already minor celebrities in the world of documentary filmmaking, largely because of the success of their film Brother’s Keeper, the pair were savvy in their craft and well prepared to enter the world of the West Memphis Three. Upon hearing about the bizarre murder case in Arkansas, with its satanic overtones and themes of “devil worship,” the New York filmmakers descended on West Memphis. Armed with a budget from HBO—one that would grow considerably over the coming year, though never approaching “feature film” proportions—Berlinger and Sinofsky were granted an unprecedented level of access to the courtroom proceedings. They also had access to a grieving and cash-strapped John Mark Byers, and they leveraged this advantage to the hilt. Berlinger and Sinofsky sensed early on that once Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were taken out of the equation, Mark Byers was going to be their star draw.

Mark and Melissa were living in almost total seclusion at the East Barton Street house when Berlinger and Sinofsky first contacted them sometime in late June or early July 1993, just a few months after the murders. The filmmakers pulled up in front of the Byerses’ house and sat there for a moment. Suddenly, they heard a low, menacing growl from behind their ears. “What’re you doin’ here? What do y’all want?” When they turned to look, they saw a couple of scary-looking dudes—John Mark Byers and Andy Taylor—standing outside the car. A local reporter who had led the filmmakers to the Byers residence hurriedly assured Mark that Sinofsky and Berlinger were “alright.”65 The filmmakers informed Mark that they would be doing a documentary on the trial and that they wanted his permission to film him. They promised to pay a total of $7,500 for Mark and Melissa’s appearances in the film. The Hobbses and the Moores had been given similar “honoraria” for their participation, as had the families of the West Memphis Three.66 Mark thought that this would be an opportunity to vent his rage at the tragedy that had befallen his family, but there was also a practical concern: the Byerses were broke. Since the murders, Mark had effectively closed his shop out in the backyard, so there was no money coming into the house, aside from his paltry disability check. The money from HBO wouldn’t be much, but it might keep them from losing their home. Mark ended up overplaying his hand in the film, but it would be three years later before the world would get their first glimpse of John Mark Byers in full performance mode.

Getaway

With the funeral and the initial police investigation behind them, Mark and Melissa scraped together what little money they had and took Ryan for a short vacation to the Gulf Coast during the summer of 1994. With all that had happened since May 5, everyone was emotionally drained, and Mark felt it would do everybody good to get away for a while. The family drove to the Gulfport-Biloxi area in Mississippi and hit the beaches. Ryan was thirteen at the time, and the sun and surf seemed to be just what he needed. They hoped that he might be able to forget the world that had fallen apart around him, if only for a short time. Mark and Melissa felt hollow and empty inside; they were just going through the motions. Even in this setting, seemingly so far removed from the madness still going on in West Memphis, Mark could not escape notice by the public. During a day trip to Ship Island, a barrier island boasting the finest beaches on the Mississippi Gulf coast, for example, Mark was lazing on an inflatable raft, letting the breeze and surf push him around while being warmed by the summer sun. A tourist floated up next to him—he turned out to be an attorney from St. Louis—and said, “Hey, aren’t you that fella from America’s Most Wanted?” There was simply no place to hide.

After spending a few days on the Mississippi coast, the family drove east to Pensacola, Florida, and spent several days there. They did more of the same, sunning, floating, trying to forget. Soon, however, the money ran out, and they needed to return to West Memphis. It hadn’t been much, but Mark and Melissa felt that any small respite from the hellish existence they faced back in Arkansas was worth a try.

Thanksgiving 1993 was the first major holiday following Christopher’s murder, and the family didn’t quite know how they were going to approach it. It was Mark’s sister in Little Rock, the same sister who had taken Mark in after his drug overdose in 1977, who insisted that the family come to her house for the holiday. Mark was relieved, but Melissa had one condition: the stress would be too much for her to face straight, she said. Although she had not used in almost a year, she drove into Memphis and scored several Dilaudids to take to Little Rock. The dinner, partly because of Melissa’s highly drugged state, was a disaster. When Christmas came around, the couple didn’t even bother to put up a tree.

The Misskelley Trial

On January 26, 1994, the trial of Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr. officially began in Corning, Arkansas. Dan Stidham, Misskelley’s attorney, and the defense attorneys for Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin had won change of venue motions for their clients because of the extensive publicity the case was receiving. Misskelley’s trial had been moved 110 miles north of West Memphis, but there probably wasn’t a locale in the state where a jury who had heard nothing about the case could be impaneled. The leaks to the press had been rampant, including the most damaging evidence against Misskelley, the thirty-four-minute taped confession. Judge Pal Rainey’s order sealing the affidavits that had been filed was not enough to halt the leeching of information to the press. The court, however, decided that between the change of venue, the voir dire process, and the judge’s instructions to the jury, a fair trial would be possible. High-profile cases were tried all the time in America, and trial judge David Burnett declared that his courtroom would be one of order and the rule of law, though many would come to question the latter.

After a number of pretrial hearings to determine his mental capacity and the validity of his confession, as well as to make the determination that he could face a death sentence if convicted, Misskelley was finally going to stand trial for the murders, nearly eight months after his arrest. The media attention took on a new sense of urgency, and the assaults on anyone who had anything to do with the case resumed. The families of the victims were already emotionally fragile, and it was all they could do to hold each other up as they sat in the courtroom day after day.67

The trial was supposed to begin on Monday, January 24. Two weeks prior to the planned start of the trial, however, Inspector Gary Gitchell received a Federal Express package from Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The package contained a folding Kershaw hunting knife. It was smooth and sharp at the very tip and serrated the rest of the way down. Nine inches long unfolded, with a pistol-type grip on the bottom edge of the handle, it also came with a nifty Velcro case so that it could be worn on a belt. The knife had one other very interesting feature: it had blood on it—human blood, in fact, blood that was consistent with Christopher Byers’s blood and, curiously, Mark Byers’s blood as well.68 It was also consistent with about 9 percent of the population, or an estimated 24 million other people in America.69 Not exactly a smoking gun, but obviously a major concern to the police and the district attorney. In a case with so little physical evidence, the emergence of the knife was potential dynamite for both the defense and the prosecution.

The knife had been given to HBO cameraman Doug Cooper one night while the crew was having dinner at the Byers home around Christmas time, during the filming of Paradise Lost.70 Mark had become friendly with Cooper and at one point noticed that Cooper was carrying a pocket knife, a “dinky little thing, dull and sorta useless.” Cooper said he used the knife to cut cables and such in his camera work, so Mark showed him the Kershaw. Cooper liked it, so Mark gave it to him. It had been a birthday present from Melissa, and Mark had never liked it much. The serrated edge made cutting meat difficult, and it was impossible to keep sharp, so he wasn’t able to use it for hunting. When Cooper, along with Berlinger and Sinofsky, noticed that there were traces of what appeared to be blood down in the hinged portion where the blade folded up into the handle, they sent it to Gary Gitchell. Gitchell received the knife on January 9 and immediately sent it to Genetic Design, a DNA forensics lab in North Carolina, for testing. The police received the results on January 26, the first day of the Misskelley trial. Mark was not present for that first day; he was at the Clay County sheriff’s office being interviewed by Gitchell and Detective Bryn Ridge. The thoroughness of the interview was vital. Once the knife was made available to the defense, Mark would be subjected to questioning where it mattered most: on the witness stand.

At 9:45 a.m. on January 26, at the Clay County sheriff’s office, Gitchell began his questioning of Mark Byers.

Gitchell: What kind of knives do you have?

Byers: Uh, it’s uh, Case double-edge, and it’s a hunting knife; it’s got a narrow blade about a one-half-inch wide on it. My brother bought it for me when I was eight years old, for my birthday.

Gitchell: Okay.

Byers: I had one other knife—it’s called a Kershaw; you know, it’s got like a serrated edge, like a Ginsu.

Gitchell: Right.

Byers: And, uh, one of the men on the film crew from New York City—I think his name is Coop [HBO cameraman Doug Cooper], the one that had the camera—I don’t know if he’s here or not, but one day when he was here, we were talking about knives, and he was real friendly to me, and as a Christmas gift I gave it to him. You know, that’s all there was to it. If you ever want to see it or anything, he’s in possession of it. I gave it to him as a Christmas gift.

More important than how the knife came into Cooper’s possession, however, is the question of what significance, if any, this discovery had. For Dan Stidham it was the culmination of months of frustration that all three defense teams were experiencing during the discovery phase (the period prior to trial during which defense attorneys are able to examine all the evidence the state has against their clients). In a meeting held in the chambers of Judge David Burnett on the day before the scheduled start of the Misskelley trial, Stidham complained that he had insufficient time to evaluate the significance of the knife, or to decide how or even if he would use it at trial. Although he referred to the knife having “some sort of exculpatory information” was he actually considering using this information to accuse Mark Byers, on the stand, of committing the murders of his son and two other little boys? Why would any defense attorney want to take that kind of chance with a jury? How well would accusing the parents of one of the victims go over? Stidham already had Misskelley’s taped confession to deal with, and the knife would be superfluous unless he was able to neutralize that evidence. The Kershaw was never introduced at the Misskelley trial, and Mark Byers did not testify.

Most of the testimony at the Misskelley trial consisted of defense attempts to establish alibi witnesses for Jessie’s whereabouts. The prosecution was able to nullify the testimony of these witnesses on cross-examination, and even with the lack of physical evidence, they were able to obtain a conviction. Misskelley’s own words during his confession to police on June 3, 1993, sealed his fate.

Ridge: What did he [Echols] hit him [Christopher Byers] with?

Jessie: He hit him with his fist and bruised him all up real bad, and then Jason turned around and hit Steve Branch.

Ridge: Okay.

Jessie: And started doing the same thing. Then the other one took off—Michael Moore took off running—so I chased him and grabbed him and hold him, until they got there, and then I left.

Using the imagery evoked by the confession, prosecutor Brent Davis drilled home the significance of Misskelley’s statement in his summation to the jury:

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll never know [if Michael Moore’s escape would have caused Echols and Baldwin to abandon the attack and flee] because Jessie Misskelley Jr. didn’t let Michael Moore get away. He chased him down like an animal and brought him back, and as a result of his action, Michael Moore’s dead, Stevie Branch is dead, Chris Byers is dead. And there’s no getting around it.

The taped portion of the confession—two segments totaling forty-six minutes—was played in open court in the presence of the jury. Misskelley would confess again, post-conviction, and against the strongest possible objection from attorneys Dan Stidham and Greg Crow.71 Misskelley must have been considering making a deal for a reduction in his sentence in exchange for his testimony against Echols and Baldwin. Much later, it was rumored that the state was prepared to offer Jessie fifty years in exchange for his testimony against Echols and Baldwin, but it will never be known for certain, since no deal was ever made. On February 4, 1994, Misskelley was sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of Michael Moore and to twenty years each for the second-degree murders of Steve Branch and Christopher Byers. All sentences were to run consecutively.

One Down, Two to Go—the Echols/Baldwin Trial

With the Misskelley trial behind them, Mark and Melissa were preparing themselves to relive, yet again, the events of May 5, 1993, at the Echols/Baldwin trial, which began on February 28, 1994, three weeks after the Misskelley verdict. Something that attorneys for both defendants were interested in exploiting was the issue of the Kershaw knife. Mark’s statement to Gary Gitchell and Bryn Ridge on January 26 was convoluted and difficult to follow. He had stated that he had no idea how blood came to be on the knife, yet at the Echols/Baldwin trial, under direct examination by Val Price, he said he had cut his thumb while using the knife to trim venison. The decision to put Mark Byers on the stand was a difficult one for the defense to make. In one of their “strategy sessions” shown in Paradise Lost, they make the call. “Obviously, we thought long and hard about mentioning a father as a possible suspect,” Val Price said. Ron Lax added, “You know, we had suspicions even before the knife showed up.” What was the best way to get that information to the jury? Price, co-counsel Scott Davidson, and Lax all agreed: put Byers on the stand.

That there was a communication problem between the investigators and Mark, as well as between Mark and Price, was obvious, and this caused more confusion than it cleared up when Price questioned Mark about the knife on the witness stand. Val Price, a stocky man with a bulldog-like face, tried to appear as if he was in control of his witness, but Mark proved very difficult to pin down. Price’s bluster and feigned disgust with Byers and the responses he gave did little to help. Price plowed ahead into territory that Dan Stidham, Greg Crow (attorney for Misskelley), and Paul Ford and Robin Wadley (attorneys for Baldwin) had avoided. The chief question among the defense had been, “How do we handle Mark Byers?” Recklessly, Price waded in.

Price: Alright, do you remember giving the answer [to Inspector Gitchell], “I think Coop. No, that knife had not been used at all; it has just been kept up—put in my dresser—and I didn’t use it, and the reason why was because of the serrated edges.” Do you recall giving that answer to Inspector Gitchell on the 26th [of January]?

Byers: No, sir, I don’t recall giving him that exact answer. I’m sure his question wouldn’t have been asked exactly like your question was.

Price was trying to get Mark to testify that he had contradicted himself during the interview with Gitchell and Ridge, but that interview was almost a month in the past. Mark was also heavily medicated during the trials—as were other family members, friends, and witnesses (notably Vicki Hutcheson)—which further affected his memory, as well as his ability to articulate his thoughts. Getting him to commit to an answer was next to impossible, and Price’s frustration was mounting.

Price: Okay. Alright, do you remember Gitchell asking you, “Ryan did not cut himself with the Kershaw?” And do you remember answering that question, “Correct, no one’s been cut with the Kershaw”? Do you recall giving that response to Inspector Gitchell?

Byers: Seems like my response would have been, no one had been cut with it—you know, that I would have known about—and he was referring to my two sons or my wife, I guess.

Price: I asked you a few moments ago if you ever used the knife, and you said on one occasion you trimmed some veni—you attempted to trim some venison with it. You remember giving that response?

Byers: Yes, sir.

Price: Okay, do you remember being asked by Gitchell—this is on page 4—“Did you use the knife?” and giving the answer, “I never used it—I would have; hopefully I was going to use it for deer hunting; that’s all I do, deer hunt—but I never had an opportunity to use it on a deer”? Do you remember giving . . . being asked that question by Gitchell and giving that response?

Byers: I don’t remember if Inspector Gitchell ever asked me in a conversation, did I ever hunt with it or did I ever use it for any other purpose like you asked me.

Mark testified that he had taken the context of Gitchell’s question to be hunting, which was not exactly what Gitchell was after. Mark’s answer to Price as to why he told Gitchell that he had never used the knife was this: “I never had an opportunity to use it on a deer ’cause I never hunted with it. It didn’t mean that at some time I didn’t have some venison in my home and try to use it to cut the venison, and he wasn’t asking me that.” He said he cut venison with the knife and cut himself with the knife, and Price couldn’t prove otherwise, despite pages and pages of direct examination.72 He couldn’t establish a clear contradiction in any of Mark’s statements to Gitchell and Ridge. If there were some inconsistencies in some of Mark’s answers, they probably fell on deaf ears in the jury box. The argument itself was almost silly: why would someone try to get rid of a murder weapon by giving it to someone who was filming a documentary about the crime? Why not simply toss it in the Mississippi River?

Price abandoned this line of questioning and began to probe the issue of Mark’s search of Robin Hood Hills on the night of the murders, insinuating that there were problems with his timeline. For example, he repeatedly asked Mark whether or not he left his house at 8:30 p.m., right after Officer Regina Meek left to begin her search for the boys (he did). Price also questioned Mark about the presence of mosquitoes that night in the area around Ten Mile Bayou. Price asked, “And at the time you left at 8:30, were the mosquitoes getting real bad at that point?” Mark answered, “Not that I remember.”

This was significant because Meek had testified that she had attempted to mount a search of Robin Hood Hills very close to the time that Mark Byers was doing the same. It was, she said, “well on its way to dark,” and she found the area to be so infested with mosquitoes that she was unable to continue. Meek testified, “The mosquitoes were tremendous. I was breathing in mosquitoes it was so bad. And I decided at that time that three eight-year-old boys would not be staying in the woods with mosquitoes that bad.”73 Although Val Price and others since then have tried to impeach Mark’s testimony based on Meek’s statement, no other searcher who entered the woods that night made any mention of mosquito infestation.74

Price shifted gears by attempting to put Mark’s timeline into question, though he couldn’t have been happy with the results. The failure of this line of questioning to yield any incriminating information was so complete that the prosecution didn’t even cross-examine him. Perhaps it was Price’s lack of skill in questioning witnesses, but his attempt to unnerve Mark was not having much affect.

Price: Alright, my question is, when you left at 8:30, did you go to the area of the bayou?

Byers: The area of the bayou—where are you referring to?

Price: Wait, let me back up. At the time you left, about 8:30, had it gotten dark?

Byers: It was getting dark.

Price: Alright, do you recall, read the top line on page 4, where it says, “It’s now probably 8:30.”

Byers: [reading] “It was probably 8:30; it had got dark.”

Price: “It was probably 8:30; it had got dark.” Alright. At the time you left there at 8:30, it was, it already got dark. Did you take a flashlight with you at that point?

Byers: No, sir.

Price: Okay. Did you go back to the house later to get a flashlight?

Byers: I went back to look for one.

Price: Okay, about what time did you go back to the house looking for a flashlight?

Byers: [sigh] I don’t remember exactly what time it was because we worked our way down to the street; we worked our way down 14th looking for [Christopher], Ryan and I.

Price: Alright, when you went out looking at 8:30, were you looking in the area of the bayou?

Byers: We had been told that they were seen down by where the concrete is pushed in the ditch.

Price: Alright. Now, answer my question. When you left at 8:30, were you looking in the area of the bayou?

Byers: We went down and looked down on this end. I don’t know what you’re referring to, you know, what you would consider the area of the bayou. The bayou’s ten miles long.

Price: Alright, so you’re saying that you were looking in the area of the bayou at 8:30?

Byers: I don’t understand your question, counselor.

If Price thought that asking the same question over and over would shake Mark Byers up, he was mistaken. Furthermore, his lack of knowledge about the various locations surrounding the crime scene made his questions impossible to answer. Finally, Price questioned Mark about the “whipping” he had given Christopher on the afternoon he disappeared. This subject, like so many others in the case, was blown so far out of proportion to its relevance that it continues to spark debate today. Devil’s Knot author Mara Leveritt and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations “star” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist, were among the more vocal proponents of a link between the spanking and Christopher’s death. Price continued his direct examination along these lines.

Price: Alright. Earlier that afternoon, had you given Chris a whipping?

Byers: Approximately around 5:30.

Price: Okay, this was around 5:30, and was this with a belt?

Byers: Yes, sir.

Price: Okay, and approximately how many times did you hit him with a belt?

Byers: I spanked him two or three times.

Price: And what part of the body did you spank him?

Byers: It would have been just on his behind.

Price: Okay. Was his . . . was he wearing his pants, or did you have him pull his pants down?

Byers: No, he had on blue jeans.

In evoking the preceding testimony, Price was weakly attempting to establish that Mark Byers had a motive for the crime (the whipping), something that his client Damien Echols seemingly lacked. In his closing argument to the jury on March 17, Price suggested that Mark was trying to obfuscate a timeline that would have allowed him the opportunity to commit the murders and that the knife gave him the means. “First of all, we have . . . we brought forth the existence of other suspects,” Price began. He continued,

And the reason we did that is because the existence of other suspects could be reasonable doubt. One of the things we brought forth is testimony concerning John Mark Byers. This is not an attempt on behalf of the defense to go after anybody without any basis. But we brought forth evidence that this particular knife here, defendant’s E-6—we had testimony from Dr. Peretti that some of the injuries on Christopher Byers were consistent with this type of knife.

We also had the testimony that there was blood, which later tested to be DNA, and that was consistent with Chris Byers and also John Mark Byers. Now where was that blood; where was that DNA? Was it on the blade part that could have been easily wiped off? No. The blood was back . . . the testimony was, back in the hinge. And it was real hard to get to. We also had the testimony . . . was that the only evidence about this knife? No. There was the testimony where Dr. Peretti said he saw a red fiber in this knife. Was that red fiber ever tested by the crime lab? No. In addition, we have the testimony of Dr. Peretti that some—from this witness stand up here—some of the injuries on Chris Byers were consistent with a knife of this type. That was the testimony of Dr. Peretti. We also asked John Mark Byers about statements that he’d given the police. When he testified on the stand, he testified that he injured his thumb while making beef jerky back at Thanksgiving. Okay, and then we asked him about the previous statements he gave the police on two different occasions. There’s times [that] the police interviewed him back in May, right after the bodies were found. Officer Ridge said, “We have evidence that you’re involved; we think you’re a suspect,” and they asked him about it. In addition, all the way—January, middle part of January—they again asked him about this specific knife. And what did Mr. Byers say at that time? Mr. Byers said, “There’s no way my blood could be on that knife. There’s no way Christopher’s blood could be on that knife. I have no idea how any blood could be on that knife.”

Price then tried to establish opportunity:

In addition, we have the testimony of Mr. Byers’s whereabouts that evening. He testified he left about . . . that at one time he left to try to find Christopher, came back, and then he left about 8:30. Of course, he testified it was dark at 8:30. So what’s he do when he leaves the house at 8:30? He leaves, still wearing shorts, still wearing flip-flops, still without a flashlight. Course he leaves, and it’s dark, and then he says later on he went back. I think the questionable whereabouts of John Mark Byers is important.

Price stopped short of trying to convince the jury in his closing argument that the “whipping” Christopher had received was sufficient motive for Mark to kill and mutilate his son and the two other boys, despite having questioned Mark about it on direct examination. It left him with a void, however.75 Although neither the defense nor the prosecution is required to establish motive, it would be tremendously difficult to convince twelve jurors that a father would commit a crime such as this without at least suggesting a reason and more difficult still to convince them that the motive was related to a spanking given to his son earlier in the day. Price was hoping that the jury would infer motive during their deliberations.

On March 18, after only a day and a half of deliberation, the jury found Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Christopher Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore. It took a little over two hours for the sentences to be fixed at death for Echols and life without parole for Baldwin.

On March 22, 1994, the Byerses received a letter from prosecutor Brent Davis:

Dear Mark and Melissa,

I am writing to commend you on your cooperation and participation in the trials of Misskelley, Echols, and Baldwin. You and your family showed a phenomenal amount of strength and perseverance.

We realize that there is nothing that we could have done that would have made your pain subside, but we are extremely happy that justice has been served in this case. We most definitely could not have provided the proper legal assistance without your help and support.

If there is anything that we can do for you in the future, please let us know. We will never forget your son and hope that the judgment of the court will allow you to begin the process of healing and remembering him without the frustration of the murder trials. We wish you the best.

Sincerely,

Brent Davis

Prosecuting Attorney

2 Judicial District

Ironically, it was Brent Davis who five years later charged Mark with the crime that eventually sent him to prison.

The end of the trials brought little peace for Mark and Melissa Byers. On the contrary, the verdicts brought a wave of terror over the couple that forced them to abandon their West Memphis home for higher ground. The friends and families of the convicted killers were not content to let the verdicts stand on their own. They too needed a target to lash out at, and Mark and Melissa Byers provided a big bull’s-eye. Although Mark was relatively subdued after the verdicts were read, Melissa’s hostility and anger were ignited anew.

After the Misskelley verdict, a reporter said to her, “Melissa, it must be mixed emotions for you because you have the guilty verdict, but you still have the loss to deal with.”

“This doesn’t change anything,” Melissa began, her temper slowly rising. “Christopher’s dead, and he was tortured to death by three murdering bastards on a ditch bank. He was eight years old. Guilty is guilty, and I hope the little sucker, when he hits Cummins [prison], they get his ass right off the bat. ’Cause he deserves to be tortured and punished for the rest of his life for murdering three eight-year-old children. Prison’s not a safe place, Jessie, sweetie.” Pausing slightly, she added, “I’m gonna mail him a skirt.”

Melissa also had this to say: “If I had the chance to speak to Damien Echols, I would tell him that I hope he bust hell wide open. Period. And that if I could get my hands on him, I would eat the skin off of his face.” And this: “I hate them for it. I never hated anyone in my life, and I hate these three.” Furrowing her brow deeply and stabbing the table with her finger for emphasis, Melissa snarled, “And the mothers who bore them.” 76

Before the Echols/Baldwin trial, Mark was filmed for Paradise Lost making this claim: “They found my son’s testicles in a jar of alcohol in Damien Echols’s house, with his finger prints on the jar. Now how do you dispute that?”77 Comments such as these were what aroused the ire of the friends and families of the newly convicted killers, and it is safe to say that out of the three sets of grieving parents, the Byerses had been the most animated. The backlash was immediate. According to Mark, the months following the Echols and Baldwin convictions were hellacious; a dead cat was tossed into their swimming pool, a chicken “with its neck wrung” was left in the back of Mark’s pickup, and a dog was eviscerated and left at the couple’s front door. “I knew we had to get out of town before something bad happened to somebody”, Mark said. If it struck anyone as ironic that the family of one of the victims was being made a target of terrorism, no one said a word. After court one day, reporters asked Mark, “We heard you are moving. Why?” Mark answered, “Well, if this had happened to you, would you want to stay?” With few options open to them, Mark and Melissa packed up the house at 1400 East Barton, essentially letting the bank take it. They couldn’t afford to keep up the payments on the house, given that there was no income other than Mark’s disability payments. They looked for a place to escape to where the people wouldn’t associate them with the sensational murders in West Memphis. In this, they would be singularly unsuccessful.

Cherokee Village

Auntie Em: Help us out today and find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble.

Dorothy: A place where there isn’t any trouble . . . do you suppose there is such a place, Toto?

One hundred thirty miles to the northwest of West Memphis lies the planned community of Cherokee Village. Nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in rural Sharp County, it sits some twenty miles south of the Missouri border. A scenic, wooded locale, Cherokee Village boasts thirteen thousand acres of recreational opportunities, including two eighteen-hole golf courses, seven lakes, two major rivers—the Spring and the South Fork—tennis courts, swimming pools, and not surprisingly, a gun club. The population is purported to include 4,468 “permanent” residents. It is also advertised as the home of “the happiest, friendliest, most worry-free people in all of Arkansas.” Mark and Melissa Byers would find that final claim implausible at best.

It was to this community that Mark and Melissa chose to relocate immediately following the Echols/Baldwin trial. On April 4, 1994, Mark, Melissa, and Ryan moved to Cherokee Village to escape the hostility they were experiencing in West Memphis and to get away from the place that they would forever associate with the nightmare of Christopher’s murder. They sold whatever belongings they could to raise the $3,500 down payment for the home in Cherokee Village, with the owner willing to hold the rest of the mortgage. They had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, and a combination kitchen/dining area covering about 1,200 square feet. The house wasn’t much, and they were poor enough that they were constantly short on cash, but at least it was quiet. The tranquility wouldn’t last.

Trouble started almost immediately. Mark and Melissa had become friendly with their next-door neighbors, John and Donna Kingsbury, who lived right around the corner on 46 Choctaw Drive. Depending on whose version you believe, one day either Mark took Kingsbury or Kingsbury took Mark to a house located at 25 Osage Drive, a little over half a mile away.78 The house belonged to Brenda Atwood, who was living in Texas at the time. According to Kingsbury, he and Mark were looking the house over to see if they could earn some extra money cleaning up the house and yard. The house was not occupied and was filled with furnishings and such, some of which appeared to be valuable. Mark Byers remembers it differently. “It was Kingsbury that first showed me the Atwood house. I’d only been in Cherokee Village a short time. There was no front or rear door on the house, and most of the windows were busted out,” he said, despite Atwood’s later claims that the house was locked up tight. The two didn’t waste any time in helping themselves to some of the contents of the house. Mark sold several items, an antique Prussian miniature sled and a life-sized cigar store Indian among them, for a total of more than $1,200 at the Cotham Auction Barn in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas.

How the investigation led to Byers is similarly unclear. The official version has it that Atwood’s neighbor, Greg Deckard, spotted a mid-1980s, blue and white or red and white pickup truck in Atwood’s driveway sometime between June 15 and July 15, 1994. Deckard stated that he saw two men and a woman loading “furniture and personal belongings” into the back of the truck. In his statement to police, Billy Chrisco, a friend of Ryan Clark, stated that Ryan told him that he and his father and mother had gone to Atwood’s and removed and subsequently sold some furniture.

Sharp County sheriff’s deputy Dale Weaver also took a statement from John Kingsbury, who pointed the finger at Mark Byers. Kingsbury told Weaver that he had witnessed Byers spreading a rug out in his front yard for cleaning and then moving it into the house; Kingsbury said he believed the rug belonged to Brenda Atwood. This story should arouse suspicion; a superficial look beneath the surface shows that John Kingsbury had more than sufficient incentive to lie. If, as Byers contends, Kingsbury was guilty of helping himself to some of the contents at 25 Osage Drive, covering up his involvement by accusing Byers made perfect sense. Also, since Kingsbury had recently obtained a restraining order against Byers for thwacking his son on the ass with a fly swatter—the famous “abuse of a neighbor’s child” incident that West Memphis Three supporters often used as further proof of Byers’s propensity for violence against children—he was surely holding a grudge.79 Weaver apparently ignored Kingsbury’s impeachability and possible complicity and searched only the Byerses’ house, after obtaining permission from Melissa.

Byers’s account of events unsurprisingly differs from Kingsbury’s. Brenda Atwood returned to Cherokee Village from her home in Texas to find that her house had been robbed. Not only were the rugs, sled, and Indian missing; other items had been taken as well, including a china cabinet and some dishes. Seeing her RV in the driveway, Greg Deckard approached her and told her that he’d seen the pickup truck in her driveway. Atwood got into her RV—the same RV that some would suspect Mark Byers of blowing up shortly thereafter—and proceeded to search the neighborhood for a truck matching the description she had gotten from Deckard. Spotting Byers’s truck in the driveway of 75 Skyline Drive, she stopped the RV in front of the house. Feigning engine trouble, she asked Byers if she could use his phone to call for help. Once inside, she instantly spotted the rugs and notified police.

Why Dale Weaver’s report omits Atwood’s subterfuge and instead credits John Kingsbury’s “eyewitness” account as what led to the arrest of Mark and Melissa Byers is difficult to say. Somewhat mysteriously, Weaver’s report also makes reference to a “cooperating individual” who claimed to have observed Ryan Clark drive his parents to the Atwood residence and to have seen Mark and Melissa load up the aforementioned rug, along with “an Indian statue, sleigh, china cabinet, [and] set of plates [with a] white and tan colored design.” This witness, referred to by Weaver simply as “he or she,” also incredibly saw the Byerses transfer the contents of the pickup truck to a trailer. Consequently, on September 2, 1994, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Mark and Melissa Byers. Since Weaver’s “cooperating individual” implicated Ryan Clark in the heist, it is not clear why the deputy chose not to charge Ryan as an accomplice. Mark maintains that it is because, contrary to the witness’s account, Ryan was not involved.

Within days of his arrest for residential burglary and theft of property, Mark was arrested again, this time charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a Class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail. The charge stemmed from a fight between two juveniles—Marty Kerr, a friend of Ryan Clark, and John Shaver Jr.—that Mark witnessed and prevented bystanders, allegedly at gunpoint, from interfering with.80 Slowly, but inexorably, the noose was tightening around the neck of John Mark Byers. By the time the three cases came to trial—residential burglary, theft of property, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor—Melissa Byers would be dead.

During the years 1994-96, life plodded on aimlessly for the Byerses in Cherokee Village. Melissa’s drug use wasn’t getting any better; if anything, it was worsening. She continued to abuse Dilaudid as regularly as she could scare up the money. In addition to her thirty-day stay at Methodist Outreach in 1987, Melissa also spent a month in rehab in West Plains, Missouri, in 1994 after overdosing on Dilaudid. She was subsequently treated for drug abuse at the Sharp County Mental Health Department as an outpatient. Four months after her overdose—determined by the authorities to be a suicide attempt—Melissa applied for and received Social Security disability benefits, and this, along with Mark’s disability checks, were what the family subsisted on: $1,000 a month, well below the poverty line for a family of three. The family was on Medicaid and had no prescription drug coverage. Although Mark recalls Melissa calling her father once for money—he sent them “a couple of hundred dollars” for a heating bill—the family was on their own. Despite the direness of their situation, Mark claims that there was always food in the house, his father-in-law’s allegations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Mark and Melissa had left West Memphis with a string of bad checks trailing behind both of them. They were eventually charged separately under the Arkansas Hot Check Law. Mark’s bad checks totaled less than $200, according to Mark, and had been written primarily to grocery stores and pharmacies. Melissa’s checks came to considerably more and were largely written for cash. Whatever the funds had been used for, the couple had no means of paying the money back, and Melissa once again went to her father for help.81 Between Mark and Melissa, they were facing two Class B felonies and several misdemeanor charges. When Mark finally went to court for these charges, he knew that he’d be facing jail time.

For her part, Melissa managed to get herself into trouble without any help from her husband. Aside from being named as a codefendant in the Atwood burglary, she was arrested for assault for holding a shotgun on two linoleum installers who refused to complete an installation at 75 Skyline Drive. During the incident in the summer of 1995, Mark was sitting outside the house reading a book—Blood of Innocents, oddly enough—when he heard a commotion coming from the kitchen. When he got there, things had already escalated to a screaming match. The installers were leaving, they said, and not returning until an area underneath the refrigerator was cleaned. Mark insisted that they install the flooring. Things got nasty, and the installers went back to their truck, saying they were coming back with “a couple of claw hammers” to settle things. As they approached the house, Melissa came barreling out of the front door, loaded twelve-gauge shotgun in hand. She pointed it at the rapidly retreating workers and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the safety was on, and she couldn’t figure out how to unlock it. As the truck sped off, Melissa was still trying to free the safety and get off a shot. Sheriff Sonny Powell arrived shortly afterward to arrest Melissa for aggravated assault, a felony. She wouldn’t live long enough to stand trial for that crime either.

Life in Cherokee Village was like a bad episode of the Dukes of Hazzard. Drunken hillbillies were settling their differences with drive-by shootings, fisticuffs, and hastily sought restraining orders. The law was frequently an afterthought, and in the case of the Byerses and the Kingsburys, it was like open feuding between the Hatfields and McCoys.

On September 20, 1994, Melissa filed a complaint with the Sharp County Sheriff’s Department against John Kingsbury for, of all things, “terroristic threatening.” In the complaint, Melissa alleged that between 5:00 and 5:30 that afternoon, John Kingsbury had “kicked in the door and threatened to kill” Ryan Clark. Ryan had lent a slingshot to Kingsbury’s son, Adam, and later asked for it back. Neighbor Bonnie Webster and her sixty-five-year-old mother, Barbara Luff, both gave statements to Cherokee Village police officer Ted Tipton supporting Melissa’s account of the incident. Mark was home at the time but was sleeping and just caught the sight of Kingsbury walking away from the house. Melissa did not press charges. According to Tipton, Melissa simply “wanted [the police] to know.”

For his part, John Kingsbury claimed that he had knocked on the door and was invited in by Melissa. There, he said, they had a very cordial conversation, in which Kingsbury told Ryan that he had given the slingshot to his son and that it “wasn’t very nice” to ask for it back. At that time, Kingsbury said, Melissa asked him “out to the road.” Once there, he said, Melissa started berating him for “being the reason that they [Mark and Melissa] might go to prison” and saying that although Kingsbury had “put them in a hole,” they were going to “put him in a hole he couldn’t get out of.” According to Kingsbury, Melissa added, “You can’t watch your kids twenty-four hours a day.”

Four days later, Kingsbury struck back. At 10:34 p.m. on September 24, Kingsbury filed a complaint with Officer Joe Black stating that gunfire had been directed at his house. What follows can best be described as a grotesque caricature of life at Cherokee Village; for the Byerses, it was just another day.

Officer Black, along with officers Buddy Smith and Bill Slayton, went out to investigate, arriving at Kingsbury’s house at 10:40 p.m. Slayton interviewed Kingsbury while Black and Smith canvassed the neighborhood. Kingsbury told Slayton that a car had driven by and fired at his house; he believed it was intended to scare him. Neighbors confirmed that a car had been driving up and down the street, revving the engine and discharging what sounded like a gun. The noises were described by one witness as “one loud gunshot followed by several quieter shots from a semiautomatic.” Black and Smith were suddenly called back to Baseheart station; Mark, Melissa, and Ryan were there and wanted to make a statement.

Mark told the officers that he had been awakened at about 10:30 p.m. by the sound of a car sitting in his driveway revving the engine. The occupants, he said, were “screaming and cursing. They said they were going to kill us.” When he looked out the window, he saw a “silver or gray” Ford Taurus in the driveway. Melissa was even more specific: she saw Dave and Karla Windsor in her front yard. The Ford “squealed the tires” and raced up Choctaw Drive toward Hiawatha, turned around, and came roaring back down the street, firing at the Byerses’ house as it went by. Mark and Melissa immediately drove over to 11 Sequoyah Ridge, where the Windsors lived. The house was less than a mile away. Once there, Mark jumped out of the car and felt the hood of the Windsor’s Ford; it was still warm. Dave and Karla came out of the house—“drunk on their asses”—and an argument ensued. Karla Windsor told police that Mark went to his car and removed something that “appeared to be a gun.” When Karla threatened to go inside and get her own gun, the Byerses left.

After giving their statement, the Byerses left the police station, but Mark returned within fifteen minutes. He had recovered several shell casings from the road near his house, recently fired by the way they smelled. Karla Windsor admitted to riding up and down the street firing her .25 caliber automatic into the air, emptying an entire clip in the process. When the smoke cleared, there were twelve bullet holes in the Byerses’ house; no arrests were ever made.

What was Dave and Karla Windsor’s beef with the Byerses? According to Karla’s statement, she believed that her son Mike was being harassed by Melissa and some of Ryan’s friends for “snitching” about something, though she never said about what. It may have had something to do with the Atwood incident; is it possible that Mike Windsor was the “cooperating individual” that Dale Weaver interviewed on August 10, the person who implicated Ryan and Mark in the Atwood burglary, the one Weaver referred to as “he or she” in his report? And what was John Kingsbury’s part in this incident? Did he believe that Mark Byers was responsible for the shooting? Who did Kingsbury think was trying to “frighten” him, and why?

A month later, on October 27, it was Mark Byers who filed a complaint on behalf of Ryan Clark. Ryan had allegedly been threatened at school by a boy named John Shores. Shores had told Ryan that his uncle from Illinois was coming down in two days to kill Mark Byers and possibly the entire family. Why? Apparently, Shores was under the misapprehension that Mark and Melissa were parents of one of the convicted killers, rather than parents of one of the victims. There is no indication that any action was taken on this complaint, just as no action was taken on any of the other complaints filed in Cherokee Village.

At this point in time, Mark and Melissa had three felony charges hanging over their heads for the Atwood burglary. Mark also had the misdemeanor charge for the Kerr/Shavers incident to deal with, and Melissa was facing the terroristic threatening charges stemming from the assault on the floor installers. The Byers family spent the next year in a state of mere existence; for all of them, it was a year marked by abject poverty and emotional emptiness, but the toll was especially great on Melissa. The loss of Christopher combined with her escalating legal and financial problems, as well as her continued drug use, pushed her deeper into a depression from which she never recovered, leading to the almost inevitable 1994 suicide attempt. But somehow, she managed to hang on for another seventeen months.

Moving out of West Memphis in the weeks following the verdicts in the Echols/Baldwin trial had not provided the peace that Mark and Melissa sought. Neither the death of her son nor the conviction of his killers had done much to curb Melissa’s drug use. Their legal troubles mounted, their existence was on a subsistence level, and the couple’s relations were severely strained. Ryan had been getting into trouble with his friends in the neighborhood, eventually resulting in his temporarily being sent to his grandparents to live. That the stressors on Melissa were monumental, and still mounting, was undeniable. On March 29, 1996, less than three months before the release of Paradise Lost, Melissa Byers took an afternoon nap with her husband and never woke up.

CHAPTER 3

Melissa

Knowing many, loving none

Bearing sorrow, having fun

But back home he’ll always run

To sweet Melissa

—Greg Allman/Steve Alaimo

Loneliness . . . is the central
and inevitable fact of human existence.

—Thomas Wolfe

Melissa DeFir Byers died at 6:25 p.m. on March 29, 1996; she was forty years old. She and Mark had spent the earlier part of that day cruising Memphis trying to score Dilaudid for Melissa. The question invariably arises as to why Mark would participate in this. “To try to keep her safe and get her back home,” he answers. “If I didn’t take her, she would stay gone for days. I was scared for her safety.”

Mark and Melissa were living on their disability checks. They both required prescription drugs, some of which could be obtained as samples from the Sharp County Mental Health Clinic; others had to be purchased. How was Melissa able to afford her Dilaudid? “We didn’t have much money. She would trade her pills for cash, then buy what she wanted: K4s” (4 mg Dilaudid, generically known as hydromorphone). “Times when she left and was gone by herself, I don’t know how she got drugs. Money from her parents? Sale of her pills? I don’t know for sure.” According to one source, Melissa’s father had sent her $200 on Monday of that week, which may explain how they managed to score that day.82 Regardless of how they got the money, on the morning of March 29, they bought four K4s from a man Melissa knew in Memphis, after which they headed back to Cherokee Village, arriving home at about 10:00 a.m. Melissa got high shortly after getting home, and both she and Mark went to bed at approximately 12:00 p.m. They had sex and talked for a while and then drifted off to sleep at about 2:30 p.m.83

At about 3:20 p.m. Ryan woke both Mark and Melissa to ask if he could have a friend spend the night. This was nothing unusual; Ryan had friends over all the time, and his parents didn’t think to ask who it was. If they had asked, they might have found out that the friend was Ryan’s new girlfriend, Amanda Swindle, but it didn’t much matter. Mark said, “Sure, no problem.” Melissa was a bit out of it and asked whether that was Ryan who had been knocking on the door, and Mark said that it was. They rolled over and went back to sleep. As of 3:20 p.m., Melissa Byers was still alive.

Mark woke up again after a couple more hours and trudged into the kitchen for a glass of milk. He returned to the bedroom and tried to wake Melissa to find out what she wanted for supper. After several attempts, he was unable to wake her. He darted out the back door to ask his neighbor to come over and check Melissa. Norm Metz had been a medic in the military, and Mark wanted someone to help Melissa immediately; it was literally ten paces from Metz’s house to the Byerses’. Metz found her unresponsive and instructed Mark to start CPR. Metz immediately called 911. Police officers Fred Waser, Bill Slayton, and Hardy police chief Ernie Rose responded to the call, as did paramedics. Accompanied by her husband, Melissa was transported by ambulance to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Ash Flat, about nine miles southwest of Cherokee Village.

When Melissa arrived at the hospital at 6:00 p.m., she was still unresponsive. She was “shocked” twice at increasing levels, given oxygen therapy, and intubated. She was also given intravenous doses of calcium chloride (presumably to counteract the high level of potassium in her blood); epinephrine (to stimulate heart activity); suprel (isoproterenol, for respiration); and sodium bicarbonate, a buffer to neutralize acidity in the blood.84 While she was treated with drugs, the advanced cardiac life support protocol was also administered. Despite these efforts, medical personnel were never able to detect a pulse, and Melissa was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m., twenty-five minutes after her arrival.85 Not quite three years after the death of her youngest son, Melissa was gone too.

The lab report stated that Melissa’s blood contained a number of prescription medications—some prescribed to her and some not—as well as positive indicators for opiates and cannabinoids, but because none of the drugs were present in sufficient quantity to have a lethal effect, they were deemed not to be the cause of death. There were no signs of a struggle and no exterior marks except for some small bruises on her upper arms and left shoulder and “multiple needle puncture wounds” on her right groin, on her left anterior (palm side) wrist, on the tops of both feet, and in the crooks of both arms. Most of these marks were from places where paramedics had made “sticks” for the injection of intravenous fluids. Some, however, were self-inflicted because Melissa was still injecting Dilaudid regularly. Much has been made of the medical examiner’s inability to determine the cause of Melissa’s death. Even more has been made of the case being regarded as a “possible homicide” investigation. In a death with no immediately identifiable cause—the case with some 2,500 deaths per year—it is standard police procedure to treat the case as a possible homicide investigation.86 It is also true that the spouse of the victim is put at the very top of the list of suspects, though in this case, Mark Byers was, and is, the list. It is arguable that if Mark Byers weren’t Mark Byers, the mandatory investigation would have been very brief.

Mark doesn’t believe that the paramedics made much of an effort to revive his wife that day. “When the paramedics came in, they jerked her off the bed and onto the floor. They didn’t shock her with the paddles but one time. That kind of bothered me. They kind of acted like they didn’t care, like, ‘Well, good. She’s dead. Maybe now he’ll leave.’ I just felt like they didn’t care if she died or not.”

Many believe this is just paranoid thinking; maybe it is. But considering that Mark was eventually “exiled” from a five-county area, including Sharp County, the old adage may be appropriate: even paranoids have real enemies. Sharp County sheriff Dale Weaver believes to this day that Mark was responsible for Melissa’s death, though he is unable to point to a single shred of evidence to support his suspicions. The Arkansas State Police closed their investigation shortly after Melissa’s death. Weaver could also close his but stubbornly refuses to do so. When contacted recently, Weaver said, “If he [Byers] was to have said something to someone in prison, or somewhere else, and that person was to come forward, that would be the kind of thing we are looking for.” It’s the “wish-upon-a-star” method of investigation that rarely bears fruit. “To close it, it would have to end in an arrest,” Weaver said. “In ten years’ time, things change; people change; life relationships change. That is the thing that we were hoping to find—someone he has been locked up with in prison, you know, affiliate[d] with in some illegal way or had some personal relationship [with] or whatever, that he’s boasted to someone about what he’d done.”87

Although the official cause of Melissa’s death has never been determined, the autopsy report suggests many possibilities other than homicide, given that there were “abnormalities that have been associated with sudden unexpected death,” such as the following:

• Enlargement of the heart

• Narrowing of the artery supplying blood to the atrioventricular node of the heart

• Fatty liver

• Elevated glucose, at 431 mg/dL. The American Diabetes Association labels a fasting glucose level of anything over 130 mg/dL as “diabetic.” This number is elevated during digestion, but Melissa had not eaten for at least six hours prior to blood being drawn, though she may have had a small quantity of peach schnapps before her nap.

• Presence of hydrocodone, a “potent narcotic” and a drug that is “dangerous even in therapeutic levels,” in the urine.88 The drug’s presence in the urine indicates the possibility that there was a “delay between a toxic reaction and death, allowing clearance of the drug into the urine.”

• High triglycerides (364 mg/dL, normal level being 35-160)

• High potassium level (5.9 mmol/L, normal level being 3.6-5.0)

Despite his inability to determine what had caused Melissa Byers’s death, the medical examiner was at least confident of what was not the cause: she had not been stabbed, shot, strangled, suffocated, beaten, or poisoned. On the other hand, there were many other, nonhomicidal possibilities. Her health was poor. She was obese. Her blood sugar, potassium, and triglyceride levels were all very high. Her heart was enlarged, and there was a 50 percent arteriosclerotic narrowing (hardening) in her right coronary artery. She was a long-term narcotics abuser with a litany of drugs present in her system. She smoked, ate poorly, and exercised little. She was severely stressed over her impending criminal trial, stressed over how to pay the bills each month, and in a constant state of agitation toward everyone from the linoleum installers to her neighbors. She was still severely depressed over the loss of her son, was being prescribed antidepressants, and had tried to commit suicide. She was, in short, an accident waiting to happen.

Profiler Brent Turvey implied that there was a tremendous amount of information requiring “further investigation” in the Melissa Byers autopsy report. In his Equivocal Death Analysis of Case Evidence for Melissa Byers (done for unknown reasons), Turvey asserts that the medical examiner should have taken into consideration Melissa’s past drug use and other “environmental” factors, stating, “Her history of drug use and abuse, her criminal history, and her family history are not factored in to the opinions given in this report. That kind of history is important information to include should drugs be considered potential contributing causal elements, as they were in this case.”

He gives no indication of how Melissa’s “family history” should be “factored” into the report, unless one considers her upcoming court dates and the stress they were causing her. Turvey highlights other injuries that were noted in the autopsy report but were, as he puts it, “uninvestigated and unelucidated” elsewhere in the document. Such injuries, including some minor contusions to the scalp and upper arms, were not listed as a possible result of medical handling during the emergency. The absence of these injuries from the list of possible contributors to Melissa’s death indicates that in the opinion of the medical examiner, they were not relevant to the cause of her death. Turvey also stated that the scene was “staged” by Mark Byers, presumably because Mark tried to put a shirt and a pair of sweatpants on his nude wife before the paramedics arrived. This is nonsense, and Turvey should know this.

The first thing police wanted was to have an autopsy done. “Considering everything that’s happened in your family,” Officer Waser told Mark, “and the press you have received in the last three years, it would benefit you if you requested the autopsy.” Mark agreed. This is a point that is almost never emphasized by others when discussing Melissa’s death. Mark Byers requested that an autopsy be performed for the simple reason that he too wanted to know what had killed his wife.

As the evening of March 29 droned on, the shock of his wife’s death finally hit home; as he was signing the papers for the autopsy, Mark collapsed on the hospital floor and was attended to by medical staff. Meanwhile, the investigation was just getting started, and the police would waste no time. Fred Waser conferred with Sharp County sheriff T. J. “Sonny” Powell, and it was agreed that Waser would ask Mark to consent to a search of his residence. Again, Mark agreed. State police officer Stan Witt, who was now heading the investigation, told Waser that he and state police officers Bobby Walker, Steve Dozier, and Steve Huddleston would be heading out to the Byers place as soon as possible to conduct the search and requested that Sharp County sheriff’s deputies secure 75 Skyline Drive until Witt and his team arrived. Mark had already left the hospital with Norm Metz and was home, sitting in his carport with Mark and Melissa’s friend and neighbor Mandy Beasley, when the search team arrived.89 Family friend James Lawrence from Marked Tree drove up shortly thereafter, and the three just sat there talking as the officers performed the search.90 Police videotaped the search of the Byers residence and seized a number of items, including two bath towels and one hand towel retrieved from the master bedroom; a blue, long-sleeved pullover shirt that was in the bed; and several medications prescribed to Melissa, including the following:

• alprazolam (Xanax), 1 mg (antianxiety)

• lithium and lithonate, 300 mg (for bipolar and depressive disorder)

• Paxil capsules, 20 mg and 30 mg (antidepressant)

• Desyrel, 150 mg (trazadone, sedative/antidepressant)

Police also seized a small quantity of marijuana and paraphernalia, which Mark had told them they would find, and the contents of two glasses, one containing milk and the other peach schnapps. The search produced no clues that would be useful in determining how or why Melissa Byers had died. The autopsy was equally unproductive; on September 30, 1996, the medical examiner’s office ruled that the cause and manner of Melissa’s death was undetermined. They simply did not know exactly what had killed her, though as mentioned previously, there were some possibilities. Officer Stan Witt conceded that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone with any crime, and on October 15, 1996, he requested that the case be designated as “inactive.”

In December 1997, nearly two years after Melissa’s death, state police interviewed one James Biby, an inmate at the Varner Unit, the prison facility where Jason Baldwin was housed at the time. Biby had been brought to the attention of state police by a confidential informant. Biby claimed that before he was incarcerated, he had been friends with Ryan “Byers” at Highland High School in Cherokee Village. Biby told Witt that he knew that Mark Byers had killed Melissa, that Byers had fed her pills and alcohol on the day she died. Biby said he knew this because he was there on the day she died. He further stated that Ryan had told him that his stepfather had been “in on” the killings of his stepbrother and two other little boys in West Memphis. Why Biby waited almost four years after Christopher’s murder and almost two years after Melissa’s death to come forward is obvious: he was lying and was surely looking to “deal away” some jail time. Curiously, Biby also told police that he had given a signed affidavit including these claims to be used in “some kind of documentary.” He said he had spoken to reporters and had also given the information to Jason Baldwin. Witt then had the following exchange with Biby:

Q. Have you ever seen Mark Byers give Melissa Byers illegal drugs?

A. Yes.

Q. What kind?

A. Pills, unknown, but I’ve took all kinds of pills with them. Valium, Xanax, Dilaudid, and Talwin pills.

Q. Have you ever seen Mark Byers force Melissa Byers to take any type of pills?

A. No.

Q. Why would he want to kill her?

A. I don’t know.

Q. How do you know what she died of?

A. I heard what the police said.

Q. Can you really say he killed her?

A. No, I cannot, but I believe he did in my mind.

Q. How long had it been since you saw Melissa Byers before she died?

A. I could not put a date on it. Maybe a few days or a few weeks.

Obviously, Biby was dismissed out of hand as having no reliable or verifiable information, and no action was taken. But police also interviewed one other person who seemed to think that Mark Byers was involved with the death of his wife.

Mandy Beasley

Following Melissa’s death, Mandy Beasley and Mark started spending time together. The two had known each other since high school, and Beasley was no stranger to the Byerses’ house, having become friendly with Melissa after they all wound up as neighbors. At some point, Mark ended their relationship and lost touch with her. In December 1997—twenty-one months after Melissa’s death—Beasley gave a statement to state police investigator Stan Witt. In the statement, Beasley implicated Mark not only in Melissa’s death but also in the Atwood burglary and in the fire that had destroyed Atwood’s recreational vehicle. She also told police that there had been three syringes stashed in a dresser drawer at 75 Skyline Drive the night of Melissa’s death, but that police had failed to discover them during their search. She said that Mark later put the syringes in a can and tossed them in the trash. Although she stopped short of saying that there was a connection between the syringes and Melissa’s death, Beasley claimed that Mark had threatened to kill her if she told anyone about them.

We won’t ever know what went on between the two, but why Mark would threaten to kill Beasley over a couple of unused syringes is unclear. The police knew about Melissa’s drug use, and she’d been dead almost two years. Why would Mark care if Beasley told someone that a long time ago he had thrown some needles in the garbage? Beasley went on to say that Mark had told her he’d blown up Brenda Atwood’s RV by pouring gasoline around it and making a gas “fuse” leading to the road, where he had ignited it with a cigarette. What would Mark have had to gain from blowing up Brenda Atwood’s RV? Having been arrested for burglarizing her house, wouldn’t he have been the first suspect in the RV fire? Beasley added that she believed Mark to be a “pathological liar.” As far as “confessing” the Atwood burglary to Beasley, Mark had been convicted for that crime in August 1996, long before Beasley made her statement. As far as anyone knows, nothing was ever gained as a result of the Beasley statement.

Mandy Lou Beasley died of natural causes in Hardy, Arkansas, on July 26, 2002.

Melissa Byers is buried in Memphis, Tennessee, only a few feet from Christopher. Her tombstone reads,

Melissa DeFir Byers

January 16, 1956-March 29, 1996

May She Rest In Peace

Beloved Brother Dennis

Beloved Mother of Christopher and Ryan

Beloved Daughter of Kilborn and Dorris

Note that there is no mention of her being the “beloved wife of John Mark.” That there was animosity between the DeFirs and Mark is evident here as elsewhere. Mara Leveritt used this fact to support her thesis in Devil’s Knot. Kilborn “Dee” DeFir, Melissa’s father, believed Mark to be lazy and claimed that he, Kilborn, had made monthly visits to Cherokee Village to bring groceries, according to Leveritt. He claimed to have paid for the telephone installation as well as the monthly bill. Dorris believes that Mark “may have had something to do with” Melissa’s death. Leveritt further quotes the DeFirs as saying, “If he killed her and got away with it, he’ll pay for it in the long run.” Kilborn and Dorris were, Leveritt says, worried about their daughter and Ryan after the move to Cherokee Village, which was so far away. Why, one wonders, if the DeFirs were so concerned with their daughter’s well-being, did they not visit her during her two stints in rehab? Since Mark claims he informed Melissa’s parents each time she was institutionalized for drug abuse, how could they deny that she did indeed have a problem? The DeFirs felt that Melissa had married poorly, for the second time (she had never married Ryan’s father, Jimmy Clark), and that Mark was not a good provider. If they believed this, it is hard to understand why, at least according to Mark, when he and Melissa opened Byers Jewelers in West Memphis, Kilborn cosigned a $10,000 loan for tools, equipment, and operating capital, all of which was paid back with interest. Despite X-rays and Social Security disability checks that proved otherwise, the DeFirs were convinced that Mark was faking his brain tumor.

In any event, Mark was now alone in Cherokee Village with an impending court date to face misdemeanor and felony charges, with his wife and son gone and Ryan living God knows where.

Ryan

Often lost in the shuffle of events, both in the movement to overturn the convictions of the West Memphis Three and in the focus on the lives of Mark, Melissa, and Christopher Byers, is the existence of other victims. Ryan Clark often bore the brunt of life alone, having to grow up faster than other boys his age. He grew up with drugs all around him. His mother had been an abuser since the boy was born, and his further exposure during his years with Mark and Melissa is well documented. What is less obvious is what affect the traumas of his youth might have had on Ryan in the years after Mark last saw him.

Ryan was born Shawn Ryan Clark in Memphis in June 1979, to Jimmy Clark and Melissa DeFir; the two were never married. There was nothing remarkable about Ryan’s youngest years, the exception being the extent to which Ryan might have been exposed to drug usage as he was growing up. Considering that the onset of Melissa’s drug use predated her marriage to Mark Byers—Ricky Murray, her first husband, claimed that Melissa shot heroin before she smoked marijuana—it is safe to say that Ryan was vulnerable to the effects of a family drug abuse problem from at least age six and possibly earlier. All things considered, however, Ryan grew up relatively normally and had no noteworthy behavioral problems. Jimmy Clark and Melissa parted ways after only a few years, and Clark paid periodic visits to Ryan. He worked at a frozen food processing plant near Memphis and was steadily employed during his time with Melissa. Ryan continued to spend time with his father on occasion, including a period that ended two weeks prior to his mother’s death.

While he was a student at Weaver Elementary School in West Memphis—the same school that Christopher, Stevie, and Michael attended—it was discovered that he suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as dyslexia. He was put on Ritalin to help with his hyperactivity, and Melissa took him to special summer classes in Memphis to deal with his dyslexia. His grades in school improved markedly once his learning disabilities were addressed. By the time Ryan was thirteen, he no longer needed the Ritalin. He and Christopher got along well, having the normal skirmishes that brothers five years apart in age are likely to have. In family photos, Ryan can be seen smiling, mugging for the camera, hugging one of the family cats, lying on the couch with Christopher, or splashing around in the family’s in-ground pool. “He was a good kid,” Mark says, as were the kids he hung around, notably Ritchie Masters and Brit Smith, both of whom lived down the street. Ritchie’s father owned Masters’ Jewelry in West Memphis, so Mark knew Ritchie fairly well. Brit and Ritchie were also with Ryan searching for Christopher on the night he disappeared.

Ryan was an apparently happy child right up until the time of Christopher’s murder. Although he was exposed to drug use by both his parents—Mark was a regular pot smoker—and his parents’ undercover work and ongoing money troubles introduced elements of stress, there was also a considerable amount of family time, and Ryan had many friends and relatives with whom he enjoyed spending time. The pool home on 1400 East Barton was the site of many happy birthday parties and holiday barbecues where the children could be seen swimming, eating cake, and opening gifts. Mark’s two children from his previous marriage to Sandra, John Andrew and Natalie, were frequent visitors and shared Christmas time with Mark and Melissa and their half-siblings. In one photograph, Ryan and “Andy” can be seen posing in their Christmas “cammys,” gifts from Mark for the hunting trips they were planning together. The summertime birthdays of Ryan, Christopher, and Natalie were close enough together so that they were celebrated en masse with a sumptuous barbecue and pool party with mobs of squealing kids and partying friends and neighbors. Despite the pictures painted by the media, Paradise Lost, and Devil’s Knot, much of the Byerses’ family life was very ordinary, at least for that place and at that time.

During the summers, the family would visit with Melissa’s uncles in Dermott, Arkansas, where they owned a catfish farm. Ryan and Christopher would spend hours exploring the farm, with Ryan and the older boys riding three-wheeled ATVs. In season, Ryan would hunt deer with the adults. It was an idyllic setting for a young boy, and it was Ryan’s favorite place to be. He also enjoyed time with both sets of grandparents. At George and Auvergne’s house, Ryan would tinker in the garage with his grandfather; he was a natural with all things mechanical. George and Ryan would also mow the lawn and do other chores together. Melissa’s father, Kilborn, bought Ryan a John Deere tractor/mower when the family moved to Cherokee Village. This was not only extravagant but patently unnecessary: the Byerses had virtually no lawn. But this didn’t stop Ryan from removing the mower and using the tractor as an off-roader.

The move to Cherokee Village, eleven months after Christopher’s murder and one month after the end of the Echols/Baldwin trial, marked the beginning of a very troubled period for Ryan. His brother’s death had come at a critical point in his young life, when he had just reached puberty. When the family moved to Cherokee Village, it was a disaster in the making. The majority of the population lives there on a part-time basis. Those who remain year-round include a number of what Mark Byers terms “crazy, inbred hillbillies.” Relocating to Cherokee Village, he says, “was not a great move on my part.” The parts of Cherokee Village seen on advertising brochures and TV commercials are not those that attract the average year-round resident; cheap housing and reclusive living are what most are seeking. Mark had been looking for an affordable escape from the nightmare back in West Memphis; what he found instead was a world of trouble. The cracks that had been forming for years in the family’s foundation, and which had been deepened by Christopher’s murder, finally split wide open when they were subjected to the virtually lawless environment of Cherokee Village.

Ryan’s new friends—Marty Kerr, Justin Copeland, and Johnny McMann among them—were products of that environment. There wasn’t much to do, and the abundance of unoccupied houses, particularly the boathouses on the lakes, was too much of a temptation for the teenagers to resist. Much like the adult residents, Ryan and his friends helped themselves to just about anything they could get their hands on: fishing rods and reels, outboard motors, tackle boxes, life vests, canoes; anything that wasn’t nailed down they took. And as hard as it may be to fathom, when Mark found this swag—some hidden underneath the porch at his house—he trucked it up to Mammoth Spring and sold it at auction. With the family living in abject poverty, it is likely that Mark saw this course of action as a pragmatic one. After all, he and John Kingsbury had looted their share, so he was not above stealing to make ends meet. Ryan was collateral damage in much of the family’s trouble, and by the time his mother died, he had reached his breaking point.

During the period between September 1995 and March 1996, Ryan was living with his father, Jimmy Clark, because he’d been “running wild” in Cherokee Village, and his mother and stepfather were unable to control him. Two or three weeks prior to Melissa’s death, Ryan called Melissa and asked if he could come home. Once there, he told Mark that he had been smoking pot with his father and was generally uncomfortable there. It is likely that he also missed his friends back in Cherokee Village. After his return home, Melissa was, according to neighbor Norm Metz, “irritable” and had a “bad attitude,” though Metz added that he never asked her about it.

On Friday, March 29, 1996, when Ryan walked into his parents’ bedroom and saw Mark trying to revive Melissa, it was more than he could stand. He took off from the house in the family’s 1985 Dodge Omni with his girlfriend, Amanda Swindle, before the police or paramedics arrived. He was almost certainly in a state of shock. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” he told Officer Fred Waser. He and Amanda stopped at a local gas station and picked up five dollars’ worth of gas, and after stopping briefly at Amanda’s house and finding nobody home, the two drove around for a while until dark. Not sure where to go, Ryan finally decided to go down to Kilborn and Dorris DeFir’s house in Memphis, arriving there shortly after midnight on March 30. His uncle, Dennis DeFir, Melissa’s brother, was a police officer in Greenville, Mississippi, and made the three-hour drive up to Memphis to talk to Ryan and to be with Kilborn and Dorris. At 12:30 p.m. that day, Dennis and Kilborn drove Ryan back up to Cherokee Village. Strangely, when Dennis DeFir arrived at 75 Skyline Drive, he told Mark that he should come clean with police about Melissa’s recurring drug habit. How was it that Melissa’s brother, a police officer, knew about her drug use but her parents did not?

Ryan returned to Memphis that same day with his grandparents, while Mark headed off with James Lawrence to Marked Tree. Several days later, Melissa’s body was released by the medical examiner, and the family attended her funeral in Memphis. Ryan returned to Cherokee Village with Mark and lived at 75 Skyline Drive for about a month. Ryan had some remaining legal problems involving an incident in which he was accused of acting as a “lookout” for some friends who had burglarized a house. Once he was cleared of any wrongdoing, he headed back to Memphis to live with his grandparents. Amanda Swindle was out of the picture by this time; Anneleise Beasley was in. One of Ryan’s friends from his West Memphis days took Ryan back to Cherokee Village, where Anneleise snuck out through her bedroom window, and Ryan and Anneleise hid out together in the DeFirs’ garage for some six or seven months; according to Mark, Kilborn and Dorris never even knew she was there, and neither did her mother. One day, Mandy called Mark looking for her. Mark told her that he didn’t know where she was but that Ryan probably “had her hid out” somewhere. Kilborn had stumbled upon Anneleise in the house on one occasion during her stay there, but Ryan had convinced him that she was just one of the neighborhood girls. Soon enough, however, Anneleise tired of life at the DeFirs’ and called her mother to come and pick her up. There may have been another reason Anneleise wanted to go home: she was five or six months pregnant with Ryan’s child. As of this writing, Mark hasn’t seen Ryan since Melissa’s funeral.

Exile

With Melissa gone and Ryan having moved out, Mark had his own legal problems to deal with. On August 28, 1996, Mark entered guilty pleas before Judge Harold S. Erwin of the Sharp County Circuit Court on one count each of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and residential burglary, both class B felonies. He received a sentence of sixty months for each of the felonies and twelve months for the misdemeanor, all suspended. He was ordered to pay court costs of $100 and a $250 fine. He was further ordered to make restitution to Brenda Atwood in the amount of $20,000 and reimburse John Shavers for medical expenses in the amount of $1,962.19.91 If he failed to meet any of the conditions of the suspended sentence, he would be subject to a minimum of seven and a maximum of twenty-one years in state prison, as well as a maximum fine of $21,000. One final and most curious condition of the plea agreement, negotiated by attorney Larry Dean Kissee, appears somewhat inconspicuously at the bottom of the document under “other conditions”: “Defendant is prohibited from entering and remaining or residing in Fulton County, or any county in the Third Judicial District.” This would include Lawrence, Randolph, and Jackson counties as well as Sharp. Although it has been argued that this last condition is a violation of the Arkansas State Constitution, Mark Byers was in no position to argue.

Mark had assumed that he would be given a reasonable amount of time to settle his affairs prior to vacating the district. He was wrong. A little more than a week after the order to vacate his house was issued, police visited 75 Skyline Drive to find Mark Byers still living there. He was told that if he wasn’t gone in twenty-four hours, he would be arrested. Mark protested that his car was not registered and in fact would not pass inspection. He was assured by police that no one would bother him in the Third Judicial District; once he got beyond that boundary, he was on his own. The next day, he fit whatever he could into his car and took off.

With no other place to go, Mark stayed with his sister in Jonesboro for a short time. His life, however, was quickly spiraling down. His mental state, which had been increasingly precarious, had become even more desperate since Melissa’s death. He would alternate his time between his sister’s house in Jonesboro and Marked Tree, where he stayed with James Lawrence. His life was a blur, tempered with liberal amounts of booze, pot, and prescription medications. The more he self-medicated, the more morose his outlook became, and he soon sank into a deep depression. Finally, in December 1996, Mark checked himself into the George W. Jackson medical center in Jonesboro for treatment for his growing depression and frequent thoughts of suicide. He remained in rehab for two weeks and was released on December 24, Christmas Eve, whereupon he returned to his sister’s. By late February or early March 1997, Mark’s cousins Joe and David Bingham, who owned several rental units in the area, had hooked Mark up with a small efficiency apartment, and he lived there until the fall of 1997, at which time he returned once again to his sister’s house. On New Year’s Eve, a church member and friend of his sister rented Mark a small studio apartment in Jonesboro, where he lived until sometime in March 1998. It was in this apartment that Mark’s good friends James Lawrence and Willie Burns were interviewed for Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, in which they can be seen sitting in the living room discussing Mark’s notoriety as a suspect in the murders.

From this apartment, Mark made one final move, this one very short. A larger unit in the same complex was vacated, and Mark snapped it up. It was from this location, 1609 Stone Street, Apartment B, in Jonesboro, that Mark made a deal to sell eighty-five dollars’ worth of Xanax to an undercover police officer. If John Mark Byers had ever been Teflon-coated—and in truth, he had dodged some pretty formidable bullets, both literally and figuratively—his streak came to a screeching halt on the evening of January 9, 1999. Between 1993 and 1999, Mark had lost everything: his son, his wife, his work, two houses, and his health.

Soon he would lose the only thing he had left to lose—his freedom.

CHAPTER 4

Paradise Lost

I kind of enjoy it because now even after I die
people are gonna remember me forever. They’re gonna talk about me for years. People in West Memphis will tell their kids stories. It’ll kind of be like I’m the West Memphis boogeyman.

—Damien Echols, 1994

Mark Byers may be one of the most amazing characters
ever to be put on film.

—Bruce Sinofsky

When they were first alerted to the story, documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky of New York wasted no time getting their film crew down to West Memphis, Arkansas, for what they hoped would be a repeat of Brother’s Keeper, the pair’s award-winning 1992 documentary of the trial of Delbert Ward, an illiterate farmer who was tried and acquitted for the murder of his brother in their Munnsville, New York, home.92 Berlinger and Sinofsky’s plan was to use the same style of documentary for Paradise Lost, in which they would “let the story unfold” rather than narrate the action. The unparalleled access they gained to the accused killers, the victims’ families, and the courtroom proceedings—while they were happening—was a first for many of the principals, including presiding judge David Burnett. “I’d have to say that the making of the film Paradise Lost was a new situation for the court and, I’m sure, for all the lawyers involved,” he said on camera in Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. “I think I indicated to the producers earlier that if either the defense or the prosecution had objected, there wouldn’t have been any filming.” The effect of their not objecting was palpable. Without cameras in the courtroom, there would have been no Paradise Lost. Without the film, there would have been no “Free the West Memphis Three” movement. And without the movement, not only would the three young men have sat in prison without the benefit of decent legal representation during their appeals, but perhaps—perhaps—Mark Byers would have been left to grieve in peace as well. But what would have been will never be known because the film was made. Paradise Lost premiered on HBO in June 1996, and the state of the case—and the life of John Mark Byers—would never be the same.

Televised trials often give viewers the illusion that they are part of the process, perhaps even a member of the jury. According to Bruce Sinofsky, this was one of the filmmakers’ intentions in making Paradise Lost. But trying to place the viewing audience in the jury box was problematic, primarily because of the existence of two trials, one that the jury saw and one that the public saw. Jurors are often not present in the courtroom when motions are being heard, for example, or potential witnesses are being qualified, but the cameras in this case were still rolling. In the case of Paradise Lost, the fact that the trials were not shown in real time, or in chronological order, didn’t negate the possibility of objectivity, but it surely impeded it. The way the film was shot and edited, with multiple camera angles, slow-motion video, and the evocative music of Metallica tugging at viewers’ emotions, left the audience feeling, among other things, directed. Indeed, Berlinger states as much regarding Paradise Lost 2: “If people come away from the next film not believing that the three are innocent, I would tell them that they are wrong.”93 Paradise Lost is a very moving film, but those expecting objectivity would be disappointed in any documentary, according to Berlinger. “I don’t recognize the idea of pure cinematic objectivity in the first place,” he said after the making of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster in 2004.94

That the HBO films entertained is hard to deny. And if the producers wanted more entertainment, if other lawyers or witnesses were “too boring and dull,” they could always turn to the cutting room (exclusion) or John Mark Byers (inclusion) to spice things up a bit.95 Because it was not a live broadcast, as was the case in the O. J. Simpson and the first Menendez trial, for example, the filmmakers were able to cut back and forth between courtroom testimony, backroom “strategy sessions,” interviews with interesting characters, and crime scene footage to generally keep things moving on the screen.

Paradise Lost

The public’s awareness of the case of the West Memphis Three made a quantum leap in 1996 when Paradise Lost premiered on HBO. Rarely has a documentary film captured audiences in quite the way that this movie did. The intensity and intimacy with which the camera followed the lives of the families of the victims, as well as the families of those on trial, set it apart from similar documentaries. Paradise Lost struck a chord with a vocal segment of viewers, many of whom related to the defendants. Most felt that the motive of satanic ritual murder alleged by the prosecution played all too well with the two conservative Southern juries that convicted Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin with virtually no physical evidence. Movie reviewers relentlessly repeated what was quickly becoming the film’s tag line: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were three teenagers convicted of murder because they were weird, wore black, and listened to Metallica.96 The film also introduced viewers to such phrases as “satanic panic” and “Salem Witch Trials,” expressions that would soon become a mainstay in the sympathizers’ lexicon, as well as on the tips of scores of journalists’ pens. Many viewers also became convinced that if the trial had been held in Los Angeles or New York, instead of in the so-called American Bible Belt, the verdicts would have been different.

But early evidence of a predisposition toward the defendants in Paradise Lost is reflected by Berlinger’s own remarks. “I think by the end of the film, on a personal basis, we had much more sympathy for the accused’s families than we did for the victims’ families,” he said in a 1996 interview.97 This did not surprise anybody, with the possible exception of the victims’ families themselves, who say that they were told that the filmmakers would be advocates for the victims. In the Paradise Lost DVD commentary, Berlinger admits that the families thought they’d be participating in a “pro-prosecution film.” Mark Byers says that he believed they wanted him to be heavily involved so that the victims’ stories would be told without compromise, but how did that jibe with the filmmakers’ intent? “Sometimes,” says Berlinger, “as a human being you feel awful about what you are witnessing or what you are filming; you have empathy, or you have guilt, or whatever. But as a filmmaker, you’re excited because you’re getting great stuff, and I’m always aware of the contradiction.”98

There was some disagreement among reviewers about how evident the film’s agenda was, though Berlinger himself estimates that 80 percent of the viewing audience thought the three were innocent. “I thought it should be 100 percent,” he said. What is clear from the first frame is that Paradise Lost is a purpose-driven film and is focused, as one reviewer said, on “allowing the viewer to realize, in his own time, that the trial and conviction is based on two things: the accused looked ‘weird’ and the evidence is totally circumstantial” [emphasis added].99 “In his own time” is debatable, but rare is the viewer who doesn’t come to that same conclusion, for one simple reason: it is, for the most part, true. Prosecutor John Fogleman and Judge David Burnett have long protested that the films are biased and don’t fairly represent the state’s case.100 However, a careful review of the police reports, trial and hearings transcripts, legal filings, and other evidence reveals a procedure that is strongly suggestive of a verdict reached on something other than the merits of the case. The intention of this chapter, though, is to analyze the effect the films had on John Mark Byers and determine to what extent he contributed to a portrayal that left many believing that he was not only a suspect in the murders of his son and two friends but also one crazy son of a bitch.

When Paradise Lost premiered, Berlinger was asked whether he thought the convicted killers were guilty. “There is a chance they killed them,” he admitted. “But it certainly was not proven in that courtroom in due process.” However, in an interview with Salon.com, he said of his first meeting with Echols, “Within five minutes of talking to him, not only did I feel he was innocent, but all that evil that I had projected on him washed away. I walked away from that first hour-long interview . . . convinced of his innocence.” In the same interview Berlinger said, “I had fallen for the trap . . . and it was such a lesson for me, and I saw how the whole community had bought into the media hype.”101 Whether the filmmakers realized the irony of using “media hype”—their own film—to disprove the impression that had been created by earlier media hype isn’t clear, but it hardly mattered. Paradise Lost appeared to be a weapon in a media war that was waged too late. The verdicts were more than two years old when the film was released, and appellate courts don’t use documentary films, books, or the opinions of celebrity activists to render their decisions. The damage had been done by what Berlinger termed “a lethal brew of Bible-thumping fundamentalism, combined with shoddy local journalism, bad police work, and a narcissistic defendant [Echols] who seemed to enjoy being in the spotlight.”102

Although the filmmakers claim not to be “agitprop” (agitation propaganda) producers, it appears that Paradise Lost was meant to be just that. “I totally acknowledge that this film is very subjective”, Berlinger told Salon.com. “Hopefully, what the film is doing, and why I feel okay about the subjectivity, is that we’re going for a higher emotional truth.” Sinofsky one-ups that claim, stating, “We only paid attention to and focused on six families, along with law enforcement and the judicial system, and I don’t think we made any attempt to make anyone look different than they were.”103 In Mark Byers’s case, that is an unsettling possibility. It isn’t hard to imagine the theatrical Mark Byers setting up scenes, whether he’s blasting pumpkins, complete with .44 round ball revolver, cowboy boots, and black Stetson hat, or burning mock graves of those on trial for murdering his son. The question is, to what extent was he encouraged? Did he even need the encouragement? Regardless, the collaboration between a character—because we are, after all, talking about a character—and the director was cinematic gold. Other than Damien Echols, the name that most often comes up after viewers have seen the films is that of John Mark Byers. The films, or rather Mark’s behavior in them, almost single-handedly put his name on the suspects list in the court of public opinion, not because of any evidence against him—he had, more than anyone, an airtight alibi—but because of what he had displayed on camera. The film’s objectivity aside, without Paradise Lost, the national support group that sprung up in its wake would not exist, nor would a persistent public suspicion about the role of Mark Byers in the murders.

The Red Carpet

Paradise Lost premiered on HBO in June 1996. The film covered the trial of Jessie Misskelley Jr. in January 1994 and the subsequent trial of Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin the following month. Misskelley’s trial had been severed from that of his codefendants because of his refusal to testify against them, rendering his confession inadmissible in that proceeding. All three defense attorneys were able to obtain changes of venue for their clients. Misskelley was tried in Corning, a tiny hamlet of 3,500 souls, 110 miles north of West Memphis, near the Missouri state line. The combined Echols/Baldwin trial was held in Jonesboro, Craighead County’s largest city (population 59,000), some 65 miles northwest of the crime scene. The enormous pretrial publicity made the impaneling of an impartial jury all but impossible, but as is customary in high-profile trials, the judge had little choice but to rely on the voir dire of the jury and instructions from the bench to ferret out any juror bias.

In addition to their expectation of an advocacy film for the victims, there may have been a more ordinary motivation for the participation of the victims’ families in Paradise Lost. The filmmakers paid the Byers, Moore, and Hobbs families, as well as the families of the convicted men, an “honorarium” of $7,500 for their participation in the film. Getting access to the courtroom was easier; Judge David Burnett, as is permissible under Arkansas law, agreed to let the proceedings be filmed. Lead prosecutor John Fogleman said, “Because of the high interest in the area, the state, the nation, we felt like it would be appropriate to have cameras in the courtroom to record the proceedings, rather than have them outside the courtroom and hundreds of them just hovering around everyone who goes in and out.” The defense’s motive for accepting was obvious; these were indigent defendants, and they were court-appointed attorneys. There was no money to hire investigators and expert witnesses, and the honoraria, placed in trust for the defendants, were to be used to offset some of these expenses.104

Critics were divided in their opinions, though for the most part they took the film at face value, ignoring the possibility of prejudicial editing, and reviewed it as a stereotypical story of hayseed Southern justice in which redneck sheriffs had railroaded hapless hippies, which was partly true. However, the filmmakers’ “enmeshing” themselves in the lives of their subjects, much as they did in Brother’s Keeper, allowed the film to take on a breadth and depth that goes far beyond such superficiality.105

WM3.org

By the time Paradise Lost opened before the American audience in 1996, the West Memphis Three had been in prison for three years. They most likely would have stayed there, despite the success of the film, were it not for the actions of three Californians. Even before the HBO premiere, Kathy Bakken was busy in her ad agency office creating promotional material, or “key art,” for the film. She and photographer friend Grove Pashley had viewed the film “three or four months before it actually aired” and immediately turned it over to mutual friend Burk Sauls, a prop maker and “colorist” for the film industry. Based solely on a viewing of the film, Sauls decided, “Oh my god, these boys are innocent.” He then went on a self-described “crusade” to collect any scrap of information available; Bakken and Pashley did the same, eventually publishing their findings on a website to which they granted the public access. They and others on their behalf began to copy official documents—court transcripts, police reports, autopsy reports—and post them on the Internet. The die was cast. These boys were innocent, and if the WMPD had “Damien Echols tunnel vision,” the newly formed WM3.org had it in reverse. Between Mr. Bojangles and John Mark Byers, Bakken, Pashley, and Sauls figured they had their “West Memphis Boogeyman.” The difference was that Mark Byers was there, big as life; Bojangles had vanished into thin air.

Paradise Lost was a critical success, but the aspect of the film that would garner much of the spotlight for critics and viewers alike was undeniably the larger-than-life presence of John Mark Byers. Less of a character and more of a caricature, Mark Byers lit up the screen like an Appalachian Archie Bunker, the star of his own Southern-fried soap opera, personifying the stereotype of a gun-totin’, Bible-thumpin’, boot-scootin’ redneck that young liberals love to hate. To them, he signified the anti-Metallica. Viewers reacted viscerally to Byers’s theatrical performances—which were often fueled by some combination of grief, anger, booze, and drugs—before the ever-rolling cameras of Berlinger and Sinofsky. Here are just a few reactions from the public to Mark Byers:

• “The belligerent, mullet-headed oaf whose comic self- incriminations are lost on the Keystone Kops at the West Memphis Police Department” (www.laweekly.com).

• “After seeing the first one, I was a bit ambivalent about getting involved [in a fundraiser for Damien Echols],” said artist Emmeric James Konrad of Los Angeles. “After watching the second film, I called Chad [Robertson] up and said ‘I am in . . . Byers is a motherfucker.’”106

• “The massive bastard offspring of John Brown and Leatherface” (The Village Voice).

• “He’s a freak, he looks like a character from a Rob Zombie movie” (YouTube comment).

• “A pathological religioso “(brightlightsfilm.com).

• “A fascinating character; equal parts genial and terrifying, a brittle man seemingly made of fire and brimstone, and he does some hypnotically odd, and often disturbing, things” (24framez.blogspot.com).

• “The tall, creepy, angry, sunken-eyed, hellfire-Christian adoptive father of one of the victims, [who] may have been the killer” (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly, September 14, 2011).

• “One of the most amazing characters ever to be put on film” (Bruce Sinofsky).

The last remark by co-producer Bruce Sinofsky is most telling, coming as it did from commentary added to the DVD release of Paradise Lost in 2005. The practice of adding voice-over commentaries was not possible with VHS; hence, the commentary on Paradise Lost was recorded some ten or eleven years after the film was made and added to the DVD release. The passage of time only increased the filmmakers’ belief in the innocence of the West Memphis Three and their suspicions about Mark Byers.

In an August 2006 interview appearing in Los Angeles CityBeat, Sinofsky said, “We thought we were going there to make a real-life River’s Edge [Tim Hunter, 1987], and that these kids were guilty.” He continued, “We wanted to look into why they would commit such a heinous crime. When we realized they were innocent we went back to HBO and let them know it had gone in a different direction. We said we were kind of thinking the stepfather John Mark Byers did it. He was a fighting kind of guy and one time he even said to us, ‘Just remember boys, it all started here.’”107

By December 2007, Sinofsky hadn’t changed his opinion of Mark Byers. “Mark Byers presented himself in the light he wanted to present himself. If it was interpreted that he looked guilty, it was by his own hand.” He continued, “In the second film we gave him every opportunity to confront his accusers, which he did, and if people saw the second film and thought he looked bad . . .” Sinofksy shrugged.108

It is that sort of feigned naivety that frustrates attempts to assess the films fairly. Mark Byers says of the films, “They could have edited it to show that, here’s a dad that’s lost everything, including his mind, because of this tragedy . . . that would have been the truth too. But let’s sensationalize it and put all the question marks we can toward this man. Look how crazy he is; look how wild he’s acting. Look at all his different faces; he’s a chameleon. He’s got long hair, short hair, no hair, beard, no beard . . . he’s crazy.” If Berlinger and Sinofsky did not intend for Mark Byers to appear somehow guilty, why is it that the mass majority of viewers came away with precisely this conclusion?

Just how did Mark Byers fare in Paradise Lost? According to Berlinger, Byers was simply “too weird [for us] to be able to stage anything,” Again we are stonewalled with the same obstinate refusal by the filmmakers to admit that they were able to, and in fact did, manipulate the film to put Byers in the perfect role as a suspect. Given that they confessed to making advocacy films to advance their cause, and given the public opinion of Byers resulting from the film, how are we to believe that they were not at the very least using Byers as a decoy?

Todd Moore also had problems with Paradise Lost. In an August 9, 1999, letter to Shelia Nevins, the executive producer of the Paradise Lost series at HBO, Todd accused the filmmakers of omitting information from the finished cut of the film, such as Misskelley’s post-conviction confession at attorney Joe Calvin’s office in Rector, Arkansas, on February 17, 1994. Berlinger and Sinofsky excluded this “pertinent fact,” Todd said, and thus “spun a tale that suggests that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley are the victims of deceit and inequity.” The film, he said, was edited in such a way that viewers “may come away with the opinion that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley were unfairly convicted for [Moore’s] son’s murder.”

The families of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley never expressed any dissatisfaction with the final production, and Pam Echols was adamant in her belief that the film helped her son. In the commentary added to Paradise Lost in 2001, Berlinger said, “Our belief is that the wrong people are in jail. And as we explained to these people in numerous phone conversations after the film came out, we never intended to hurt anybody. Our goal was to cover the story. I understand the parents’ position. When we make a film demonstrating that the wrong people are in prison, they are not allowed to achieve closure” [emphasis added].

It is too tedious to cover the films frame by frame, but certain sequences demonstrate more than others the clear intention of the filmmakers to convey a specific message. There is nothing “unfolding” in these scenes.

At Graveside with Christopher

It was Christmas time in Arkansas, and Mark and Melissa were making the trip across the Mississippi River to the Memphis area cemetery where Christopher is buried. Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger had been with the Byerses sharing some Christmas leftovers and had asked if they could tag along. In their DVD commentary, Sinofsky and Berlinger initially let the scene stand on its own, as a depiction of grieving parents visiting their son’s grave, their first Christmas after his death. Then suddenly, the filmmakers begin describing an “incredibly powerful moment of bonding” between themselves and the Byerses. “This was an incredibly moving and odd scene,” Berlinger begins. “This incredible moment of a pentagram—you know, the star from the Christmas tree [there is a miniature Christmas tree topped with a star sitting on Christopher’s grave marker]—is creating this upside down shadow [on Mark’s forehead], and an upside down pentagram is the sign of the devil. And here this guy who has been preaching fire and brimstone and who has been talking about Heaven and Hell and who some people have questioned as maybe possibly being involved—all of a sudden, you know, the end-of-day sun, after the day had been an overcast day, at this precise moment, the sun peeks through the clouds and sends this upside down pentagram on his forehead. It’s just one of these weird things that happened, where you feel like something bigger than what you’re doing is happening while you’re making a film.”

“Was it a message from God?” Sinofsky blurts out. And he’s serious. The filmmakers now appear to believe that their film is under the influence of the Divine.

This dialogue segues into a discussion of Mark’s potential as a suspect in the murders. Berlinger says that he wouldn’t dream of doing to Mark what was done to Echols and then proceeds to do precisely that. He declares that “such a strong case could have been made against [Byers] that we were disappointed that the police had such tunnel vision with regard to trying to pin this on Damien Echols.” It should be noted that while Berlinger and Sinofsky are bloviating about messages from the Supreme

On the left is a pagan, or Wiccan pentagram (points down), and is the same image that was “miraculously” formed by a shadow on Byers’s forehead. The image on the right is a satanic pentagram with points facing upward, resembling a goat’s head with horns.

being, Mark Byers is on-screen sobbing, “Oh God, why did you let this happen? Please help us through this.”

As for the technical aspect of this “message from God,” the description is flawed. The alleged “upside down pentagram” was, in fact, not upside down; the geometric shape is defined merely as a five-pointed figure drawn with five connecting lines, all crossing at the center. Although the orientation of the symbol may be varied indiscriminately, neopagan groups such as the Wiccans generally depict the pentagram with the single point facing up. When the star is turned upside down, the two points face upward and at adjacent angles, forming a shape similar to a goat’s head, an often-used symbol for Satan. The directors’ uncurbed use of the phrase “satanic panic” in the years following the film’s release calls into question this misinterpretation of the symbolism. Oddly, at the time of his trial, Damien Echols claimed to practice Wicca and in fact attracted the attention of a Wiccan “coven” that appeared in Paradise Lost 2.

The image on the right is the so-called satanic pentagram, with the two points facing up. The image on the left is a pagan-style pentagram, with the single point facing upward. The image on the left is the shadow image that miraculously “formed” on Byers’s forehead. For what it’s worth, in the film it also looks suspiciously like the camera is being maneuvered so that the shadow lands squarely on Byers’s forehead.109

The two expressed amazement that anyone could believe in a “literal” Heaven and Hell even though it is a foundation for many mainstream religions. Furthermore, they believe that this conviction is peculiar to the South. “Only in this part of the country is it possible for the prosecution to offer this kind of fantastical defense of people to just not question it because of deeply held religious beliefs”, Berlinger says. “If this trial was held anywhere else, it would be thrown out.” They offer no proof of these assertions, and the remarks lend a further air of bias to the films. They have such obvious contempt for Southerners—excepting those convicted of the crime—that had their true feelings been known, it is doubtful than anyone in town would have talked to them. Indeed, by the time the shooting of Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 began, few would. By that time, the filmmakers were dependent on WM3.org, the convicted men and their families, and Mark Byers for color commentary.

The Devil Made Them Do It

Based on the confession of Jessie Misskelley, information gained from Vicki Hutcheson, and talk among the local teens of cult activities, the police decided early on that the motive for the crime was occult in nature, and they went strictly from that premise forward to gather “evidence.” There were police interviews with teens who claimed that witchcraft was being practiced and that “esbats,” or satanic meetings, were being held in secret locations. Pentagrams and other satanic symbols were being found around town. An abandoned cotton gin the kids called “Stonehenge” was alleged to have been a center of occult activity, including the killing and eating of animals. Dog and cat carcasses were found in the area, animals that Jessie Misskelley claimed he and his mates had killed, skinned, cooked on a bonfire, and eaten. Misskelley said this was part of an initiation for new members. The new member would have to eat the leg of a dog, for example. “If he can’t eat it, he don’t get in.” And there was sex, of course; where there are teens, there will be sex. Aside from chatter around town, however, Jessie Misskelley was the only person (except Vicki Hutcheson) to place himself at these meetings.

Juvenile officer Jerry Driver, whose attention had been drawn to Damien Echols in May 1992 when Echols was arrested for trying to run away with then-girlfriend Deanna Holcomb, told WMPD detective Bill Durham that Echols described himself as a “gray” witch, something short of a devil worshipper, but nonetheless deeply involved in the occult. Driver hinted at Holcomb’s involvement in witchcraft, but Echols’s girlfriend—and mother of his child—was more direct. “She’s a kook,” said Domini Teer. “She’s the one that’s obviously involved in witchcraft and stuff because of the way she talks about it.”

When Echols took the stand in his own defense—a disastrous trial strategy as it turned out—he admitted to practicing Wicca (“white” witchcraft) and to reading about, but not practicing, “black” witchcraft, or satanism. He was asked about his tattoos—one of an Egyptian ankh, another of a pentagram, and a tattoo across his fingers that spelled “EVIL.” He also admitted to “doodling” the name “Aleister Crowley,” some Metallica song lyrics, and strange symbols he was “practicing” in a notebook he kept while in jail.110 Alone, this may have meant little, but for some reason Echols lied about it on the stand, claiming he had written these things before being arrested, when in fact he had done so after.

The prosecution made a weak case at trial regarding the satanic ritual killing motive of which they wished to convince the jury. “Dr.” Dale Griffis was their sole “expert” witness, and it is hard to imagine a jury being swayed by his testimony. Indeed, the juror flip charts from the Echols/Baldwin trial show that the jury was clearly unimpressed with Dr. Griffis’s testimony. On the one hand they found him “knowledgeable,” but on the other they found him “biased toward occult findings” and thought that his “delivery” was “poor” and, most curiously, that he was possessed of “low self-esteem.” Griffis claimed that the number three was significant to cultists, as was the moon, which had been full the night of the murders. The crime also had been committed within a few days of a pagan holiday, Beltane, which is celebrated on May 1 and commemorates the start of summer. Griffis testified that the alleged sucking of blood from Christopher Byers’s penis (the only “proof” of which came from prosecution “snitch” Michael Carson who was briefly incarcerated with Baldwin while he was awaiting trial), or at the very least his emasculation, was related to the phallic symbol the “May pole” associated with the holiday “May Day.”

Griffis testified that the blood of the young held a powerful “life force” and that the occurrence of the murders near water held significance, though this probably was hardly occult-related. The location likelier had been chosen not only because it was secluded, but also because there was water available to wash up with after the crime. Although he maintained that the location of the murders, near water, had helped him to reach the conclusion that these were possibly satanic murders, Griffis never gave any other reason for the claim.

There was more. Griffis made much of Echols’s minor interest in Aleister Crowley. The pampered son of devout Christian parents, Crowley was born and raised in Victorian England. He was an esoteric poet and mystic who developed his own school of occultism which he called “magick.” 111 Crowley is notorious for his occult rituals, saturated with the use of sex and drugs. He is best remembered as “the Great Beast”, a moniker Crowley claims was fostered by his mother, who truly thought her son to be the Anti-Christ. But Crowley was also an accomplished mountain climber, and made aggressive assaults on Tibet’s K2 and Kangchenjunga, the second and third highest peaks in the world respectively (though he didn’t reach the summits, he did exceed 20,000 feet on both climbs). Teacher, sexual deviant, drug addict, and magician, Crowley’s legend would exceed his accomplishments, though the mere mention of this man who biographer Lawrence Sutin called a “frightening mixture of egomania and self-loathing” tends to evoke a strong reaction.112

The fact that the attorneys, judge, and probably a good number of jurors didn’t know who Crowley was—Griffis himself was shaky on the facts—didn’t stop Brent Davis from hammering Echols’s on his knowledge of Crowley.

Davis: Aleister Crowley is a guy that based on his writings believes in human sacrifice, doesn’t he?

Echols: He also believed he was God so . . .

Davis: He also had writings that indicated that children were the best type of human sacrifice, right?

Echols: Yes, sir.

That Echols apparently believed that Crowley advanced the notion of human sacrifice, was strong evidence the youngster was essentially clueless about the belief system of Aleister Crowley, a system that was complex and probably beyond the scope of Echols’s understanding at the time. In his 1993 book The Magick of Aleister Crowley (Red Wheel/Wesier, York Beach, ME), longtime Crowley student and biographer Lon Milo Duquette was emphatic that Crowley “Did not—I repeat did—perform or advocate human sacrifice.” In a hearing outside the jury where Griffis was to be qualified as an “expert”, he stated that in “Crowley’s writings” it was stated that in order to preserve the “magical power” during a sacrifice, sex must be had with children before they reached the age of nine. This was significant to the state’s case because according to Jessie Misskelley, at least one of the victims had been sexually abused (though the autopsies were never able to confirm this). Sex with children, however, was at odds with Crowley’s beliefs.

Griffis also contended that there was evidence of “overkill”—multiple stab wounds; severe, probably fatal head traumas; and the castration of Christopher Byers—and that this also had the “trappings” of the occult, but again he could not be precise.

Griffis had been grilled by defense attorneys Val Price and Paul Ford in Burnett’s chambers for hours prior to his testifying. His credentials were suspect. Griffis had retired from the police department after twenty-six years, having reached the rank of captain. When it came to expertise on the occult and cult activities, he was largely self-educated, having obtained a PhD from a mail-order diploma mill in California.113 His thesis, Mind Control Cults and Their Effects on the Objectives of Law Enforcement, a two-hundred-page paper he coauthored with another PhD candidate, was the sole qualification for his doctorate. Griffis defended his record, stating that he had been qualified as an expert in three courts in three different states and that he received more than fifty calls per week regarding “nontraditional groups,” or cults. That was good enough for Judge Burnett.

All things considered, the occult aspect of the trial was small, though the media focused on it extensively. Satan sells. But if the jurors believed that satanism was a motive, it wasn’t at the top of their list. Their notes indicated that they considered the following about Echols (Baldwin was just along for the ride):

• Echols was “dishonest, manipulative and weird.”

• He was a “satanic follower” of Anton LaVey [founder, Church of Satan], and Aleister Crowley.

• They believed Ridge’s testimony to be incriminating.

• They felt that Echols was lying when he said he had never been to Robin Hood Hills.114

• He “blew kisses” to the victims’ parents, in court.

• He carried knives.

• He had stated that he would “eat [Joe Hutcheson] alive” while the family was living in Oregon.

• Wax was found on a book and shirt when Echols’s house was searched, wax that Dale Griffis said was indicative of satanic activity.

The most significant item on the juror charts was actually not on the charts at all, or rather was blacked out. One juror’s personal notes, recovered years later, showed the items scratched out to be notations regarding Jessie Misskelley’s confession, which was not to be considered in the Echols/Baldwin trial. Evidence that it had been considered would constitute a critical part of Echols’s habeas petition years later.

Paradise Lost Revisions

Berlinger and Sinofsky decided to really take the gloves off for Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. Berlinger has readily admitted that Paradise Lost 2 was strictly “an advocacy film.” Although he claimed that he wanted viewers to independently evaluate the evidence, Berlinger said, “If people come away from the next film not believing that the three are innocent, I would tell them that they are wrong, that they have fallen prey to the very same prejudice that the prosecutors were able to bring to this community.” What happened to “letting the story unfold” and believing that “the truth would come bubbling up to the surface”? All pretense of objectivity was stripped away with the release of Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, a film that delivered its propaganda straight-up. In case for some incomprehensible reason viewers hadn’t gotten the message after watching the first film, Berlinger and Sinofsky directed Revelations to be as subtle as a spear through the head. The very fact that this was a sequel to a documentary was enough to make the film unusual. Revelations, however, was unprecedented. The movie single-handedly indoctrinated thousands of new believers, helped to expand one of the largest movements of its type, and created media personalities out of ordinary people.

Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 chronicles the rise of WM3.org and the progress of Damien Echols’s appeals through the legal system. It also introduces us to journalist Mara Leveritt, who two years after the release of Revelations would publish her book, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three. The book was derived from her experience covering the murders as a reporter with the Arkansas Times, and it received a tremendous boost from the legions of supporters who took the HBO films as gospel. Prior to the March 2000 release of Revelations, Paradise Lost aired a second time on HBO, and the reaction was dramatic, driving even more truth-seekers to the Internet for information on the case. When Revelations was released, the WM3.org website was reporting some 133,000 hits per day, which gives credibility to Prosecutor John Fogleman’s declaration that the film was an “infomercial for the West Memphis Three.” Springing from this website were discussion forums where supporters of the three could share information and where those on the opposing side could challenge them in their beliefs. It isn’t possible to calculate the exact number of those who truly believe in the innocence of the three convicts, but the movement attracted a number of high-profile celebrities to their cause, including Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam; Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks; Johnny Depp; Winona Ryder; Henry Rollins; Metallica; comedienne Margaret Cho; and a number of punk-era band members, such as Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Michale Graves (Misfits), and Eddie Spaghetti (Supersuckers). It is axiomatic that without the HBO films created by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the three young men who once were sitting in prison for the murders of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore would be languishing anonymously in the obscurity of the Arkansas penal system.

The second film was also an opportunity to fine-tune the public’s perception of John Mark Byers. Mark was at his cinematic best, and if he felt that he hadn’t hammed it up enough for the first film, he made up for it in the second.

What was the true motive for the murders? The police filled the void with satanic ritualistic homicide; Berlinger and Sinofsky and WM3.org filled it with Mark Byers. The filmmakers had already made it clear in the first film that they believed the three to be innocent—“within five minutes of talking to [Echols] I [felt] he was innocent”—and they set out to make Revelations with a clear, unabashed agenda. Berlinger said, “Most people in Arkansas were pissed off at us. The Moores would have nothing to do with us. Pam Hobbs tried to sue us. Brent Davis wouldn’t talk to us. That left pretty much Mark Byers. He was more than willing to appear on camera, and we put him front and center.” Mara Leveritt was more direct in Devil’s Knot. “Byers was more than ‘front and center,’” she wrote. “He was the film’s target” [emphasis added].

So many ask, “Why was Mark Byers the only victim’s parent to appear in Revelations?” In answer to this question, and getting to the heart of the matter, Byers had more than enough reason to participate in the making of the second film. For one, with Christopher and Melissa gone, along with Ryan, who’d gone to live with his grandparents, Mark’s life was so desolate and lonely that by his own admission, he wasn’t in full control of his life. “I went out lookin’ for fights and self-destructed” after the murders, he said, and particularly after Melissa’s death. Being considered a suspect by the public may have pushed him over the edge, and his behavior grew erratic and sometimes violent. He was filled with rage and hate and needed to feel like he was doing something. Berlinger and Sinofsky suggested that participating in the second film would be the only way to present the victims’ side of the story, the same line used on him and the other families during the filming of the first movie. According to Mark, the filmmakers told him that both the Moores and the Hobbses were participating in the film. Joe Berlinger denies this, but when Revelations was released in 2000, Mark was still in prison, and he states that he learned from his sister during a phone call that only he was in the film.

As was so often the case, however, Mark was motivated by pragmatism. “I had just moved to Jonesboro, Arkansas,” he said. “I had nothing. No phone, no car, very little food. Then they tell me this will be my time to tell my side, and I can tell the world how wrong they are about me.” Is that what they had in mind? In part, yes. But there was more. “The thing is Byers was just too weird for us to be able to stage anything,” Berlinger said. “We just turned on the camera, and he did his thing.” Since they had filmed Mark extensively for Paradise Lost, they knew exactly what his “thing” would be. Mark never met a camera he didn’t like, and the cameras were ever-rolling in Revelations, where they picked up footage that would sear the images of his antics on the minds of anyone who might have somehow missed them in the first film. If one of the intentions of Revelations was to overshadow the convictions of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley with the crazed behavior of John Mark Byers, for most viewers the tactic worked. While acknowledging the film to be “ethically ambiguous” and a “queasy balance between sensationalist propagandizing and unblinking activist journalism,” Jessica Winter, in an August 2000 article for the Village Voice, also took square aim at Berlinger and Sinofsky’s leading man. “The massive bastard offspring of John Brown and Leatherface,” she wrote, “John Mark Byers enacts a Bible-thumping circus sideshow of grief for the filmmakers, who give every indication that he’s shedding crocodile tears for his stepson and his wife (her mysterious 1996 death was ruled ‘undetermined’). The festering layers of perversion and delusion reach no bottom here.” Winters concedes that the film is “cheap and suspect” but believes that it’s justified as “advocacy.” In Revelations the ends seem to have justified the means.

At different points throughout the film, screens of text are displayed that serve to segue between scenes. One such screen appears in Revelations to introduce the “John Mark Byers knife” to viewers.

Mark Byers, stepfather of Chris Byers, gave the makers of this film a used hunting knife as a Christmas gift three weeks before the Misskelley trial was set to begin.

The knife appeared to have blood on it, so it was turned over to the police.

Since Mark Byers and his stepson have the same DNA type, the test results were inconclusive. Therefore, the defense focuses on pre-trial statements that Byers made about the knife.

Mark Byers could not be excluded from having used this knife based on the blood test that was performed. A “DQ Alpha” test showed that the blood was consistent with Christopher’s and John Mark Byers’s blood, as well as 9 percent of the Caucasian population. The filmmakers also state that the test had destroyed the amount of blood available, making further testing impossible. The more powerful DNA-RFLP test would have required an amount of blood enormously greater than the amount available to the lab. Neither the Byers knife nor the “lake knife” found behind Jason Baldwin’s trailer could be conclusively identified as the murder weapon, though it should also be noted that no actual murder weapon was ever identified. Dr. Frank Peretti noted similarities between the John Mark Byers knife, the lake knife, and the wounds inflicted on the boys but came short of being able to identify either knife as the murder weapon. Domini Teer, in her statement to police, said that Damien had owned a knife very similar to the lake knife, but that his had a compass on the handle. The distributor of the knife, James Parker, said that the lake knife, a “Special Forces Survival II,” came with a compass on the handle but was missing from the knife in evidence.

The Blame Game

Jason Baldwin’s defense team had the same desire as the Echols team to link Mark Byers to the crime but thought better of it. Accusing a grieving parent of murdering his child without solid evidence could easily alienate the jury. A scene in Paradise Lost, however, has Dr. James Rasicot, the Baldwin defense team’s psychologist (who never testified at trial), giving the following monologue to attorneys Paul Ford and Robin Wadley:

[Byers] has the motive. His son, who he’s upset with, his son was the only one who is mutilated; the other two weren’t mutilated. He’s got knowledge about the area; he knows when the search is over with. He’s big enough to carry the boys over and throw them in. He’s a jeweler; he’s precise enough to have committed that mutilation. All of the pieces fit together with somebody in a different location . . . killing the boys in a different location because there’s no mosquito bites on them, so we know that after the boys were killed, and during, they weren’t outside. It had to be inside because there were no mosquito bites on them. So that means they were carried from a death scene someplace, unconscious, and brought down to the river and had to be killed shortly before they got down there because they all died within a short period of time. So after they were bled to death, after they were bludgeoned and unconscious, somebody had to take those three, take ’em to the scene and dump ’em. In order to do that, you gotta be physically strong enough to carry a[n] unconscious kid, who’s hog-tied. Jason couldn’t a done it. In his best day, he couldn’t carry a little baby, with those skinny arms of his.

This scene constitutes one of the most blatantly contrived moments of the film in its attack on Byers. With logic as fallacious as this, it’s hard to believe this scene wasn’t left on the cutting room floor. Considering that this is from Paradise Lost, the film that was originally to be something less than a total advocacy film, the inclusion of Dr. Rasicot’s musings reinforces the notion of the filmmakers as dramatists rather than reporters. The points Rasicot raises in his monologue in this scene range from insensitive to inane. Nobody in the room really believes that Byers committed the crime, and Rasicot’s points are easy to dispute:

• The idea that spanking a child twice on a covered behind with a doubled belt for leaving the house without permission and riding his skateboard down the street constitutes motive is absurd on its face. These guys are lawyers; they know this.

• The claim that Byers had knowledge of the area was false. Prior to the evening of May 5, Mark had never set foot in Robin Hood Hills. Having knowledge of his neighborhood, if that’s what Rasicot was implying, applied to many people, including the defendants.

• “He’s a jeweler; he’s precise enough to have committed that mutilation.” Ford also led Dr. Frank Peretti down that path. Peretti, the medical examiner who performed the autopsies on the boys’ bodies, testified that it would be difficult for him, a surgeon, to perform the mutilation of Christopher Byers, under the best of conditions. Yet somehow, Mark Byers, as a jeweler, could pull it off. Regardless, Ford never tried to link this speculation to Mark Byers. If he had done so, it almost surely would have backfired with the jury, and Ford knew it. Again, the filmmakers had no such worries; they could control their jury—the public—with editing and theatrics.

• The “disposal site” theory rears its ugly head again, only this time it’s Mark Byers doing the disposing. Rasicot’s reasoning here is generic; anybody could have committed the crime in this manner, but Rasicot ties it to Byers because he is big and strong. Jason may have been no Charles Atlas, but Echols and Misskelley could have held their own. It’s irrelevant, of course, because the police had ample evidence that the murders were committed in Robin Hood Hills on the creek bank near where the bodies were recovered.

Rasicot closes his soliloquy, “So when we look at this whole thing, all the pieces that they try to put together, none of it fits with Jason, and just about all of it fits toward someone like Byers.” Unless one rewinds the scene and studies the dialogue, it isn’t obvious just how false this statement is. None of it fits Mark Byers, and Rasicot is careful to hedge his accusation by inserting the modifier “like” in front of “Byers.”

The scene also demonstrates some callousness that should have turned off the audience. Rasicot talks about the children as if they were garbage when he says, “After they were bled to death, after they were bludgeoned and unconscious, somebody had to take those three, take ’em to the scene and dump ’em.”115 Rasicot bills his time out these days as a jury consultant.

The Rule 37 Hearings

Between May 1998 and March 1999, Damien Echols brought his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel (Arkansas Rule 37) before the court. Though it may seem counterintuitive, in Arkansas this appeal is presided over by the trial judge rather than held in an appellate court. Judge David Burnett would face Echols for the second time. This hearing was Echols’s legal challenge alleging that his public defenders had made critical errors in arguing his case in 1994, ultimately leading to his conviction. He had raised enough money through his defense fund to hire a specialist in appellate law, Edward Mallett of Houston, Texas, to represent him.

Revelations covers the hearings and introduces the audience to the groups of supporters that had now officially formed and were out in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to support Echols.

A Rule 37 motion in Arkansas is restricted to the issues of ineffective assistance of counsel and the introduction of new evidence, evidence that could not have been reasonably known to exist at the time of trial. The ineffective assistance of counsel claims consisted of various trial strategy decisions, a conflict of interest claim regarding a contract between Echols’s attorneys and HBO, Val Price’s failure to impeach Michael Carson, and inadequate voir dire during jury selection. There was also a renewed motion for Judge Burnett to recuse himself from the hearings. But it was the new evidence that would capture the attention of the Revelations audience.

For many supporters one of the most significant issues addressed by Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 involved Mark Byers’s loss of teeth and the “bite mark” evidence introduced at Echols’s Rule 37 hearing. Profiler Brent Turvey was the first person to officially pronounce that Stevie Branch had human bite marks on his body, particularly one dome-shaped, “patterned abrasion” wound on his forehead. In the film, Turvey tries to convince the audience, contrary to the opinions of medical examiner Dr. Frank Peretti and two other doctors who examined the bodies, that the marks on the face of Stevie Branch were human bite marks. Turvey, who readily admitted on the stand that he was not qualified to identify a human bite mark, nonetheless claims on-screen—out of court—that this is “cold hard evidence that someone else has committed these crimes.”

He also states, “If you were to show this [autopsy photo of Steve Branch’s face] to an emergency room pathologist who’d seen a lot of these, he would arrest the mom because [the wound] is more typically the type that’s involved in cases of child abuse.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that ER pathologists are not empowered to make arrests, which mom is Turvey talking about? Not the mom of the victim with the “bite mark.” Former Misskelley attorney Dan Stidham gives us a hint. “We have a mother of a victim who’s no longer alive. Melissa Byers has been dead since March 1996. I don’t see why her autopsy should still be sealed”, he says in a scene from the movie Revelations. Although Stidham no longer represented Misskelley, he was the only attorney willing to stay involved in the case post-conviction. When WM3 Support Group co-founder Kathy Bakken took online forensic science classes from Turvey and found that he was willing to work on the case (pro bono), she referred him to Stidham. “They claim that they’re still conducting a criminal investigation”, Stidham continues, “but you know, how long does it take to . . .”

“In this particular case,” Turvey interrupts, “since what you’ve told me is that the death is undetermined, they can keep it open as long as they want. If they’re keeping it open, that means they don’t know if it’s a suicide or a homicide. I’d like to know if there’s a connection. I’d like to see her wounds and see if there’s any connection between this case and that. And if at any point you get a forensic odontologist in here, they can yank her teeth and see if they match any of these bite mark impressions” [emphasis added].

Forgetting for the moment that there is a third possibility in the death of Melissa Byers—that it was an accident—Turvey wants to exhume the body of Melissa Byers and “yank” her teeth, all before stopping to think of what an absurd scenario he is suggesting: Melissa and Mark kill the three boys—for whatever reason—and then Mark castrates Christopher, and Melissa inexplicably bites the face of Stevie Branch. It seems almost as though Turvey doesn’t even remember which victim belongs to which parent; why would Melissa Byers’s teeth marks be on Stevie Branch’s forehead? In his Equivocal Death Analysis and Criminal Profile, Turvey makes it clear that he believes the true perpetrators of the crime to be one or two of the parents of the victims, to wit:

The wound patterns inflicted on these victims are punishment oriented . . . the type of injuries inflicted (i.e., the bite marks and the evident anger) pointedly indicate a custodial type homicide. In this examiner’s opinion, this classification is the most consistent with the physical evidence, crime scene and victimological presentation in this case. To a greater extent the parents, and to a lesser extent the guardians, relatives and anyone else who was allowed frequent, trusted access to these children, should be thoroughly investigated as suspects in this case.

Turvey also states in his report that the attack on Christopher Byers was “the most overtly sexual” of the three, yet in the film he states that the attack was not sexual but driven by rage. Turvey had been disqualified as a defense witness for all but the most general testimony, but that didn’t stop the filmmakers from devoting several minutes of film to Turvey feigning expertise on the subject, as well as subjecting viewers to more gruesome photographs of Stevie Branch’s mangled face. Once again, it comes down to a question of inclusion: given the implausibility of Turvey’s premises, why was he featured so prominently in the film, unless, perhaps, there was a dearth of footage rebutting the prosecution’s case?

In the end, the court decided in favor of the state, not only on the bite mark issue but on the entire claim of ineffectiveness of counsel, and the petition was denied.

The supporter community, led by activists Kathy Bakken, Burk Sauls, and Grove Pashley, were key in bringing the possibility of the existence of human bite marks on the victims to Echols’s appeals. If the (alleged) bite marks didn’t match the convicted (they didn’t), then whoever they did match must be the killer. Because early attention had been focused on Mark Byers as a suspect, getting Byers’s bite mark impressions was critical. The film Paradise Lost 2: Revelations was solely responsible for perpetuating the suspicion against Byers in this regard by not only giving voice to the unfounded musings of Brent Turvey, but by staging scenes in the film (such as the one discussed below) to keep the issue of bite marks front and center, and there was good reason for this: it was the only new “evidence” the defense had.

The problem was that Mark had lost all his teeth in 1997. This was obviously suspicious to supporters, who reasoned that Mark had had his teeth removed to cover up complicity in the murders. The fact that he was initially evasive in this area did not help his cause He also sensationalized how he lost his teeth for whatever reason. Attention? To taunt supporters?

The truth is that Mark’s teeth had been deteriorating for years. Some were allegedly knocked out in fights. As noted previously, Byers claimed that he “self-destructed” after the murders and “got downright mean.” In one scene in Revelations, he tells viewers, “The pain they [Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley] caused me, physically and mentally, and all the fights and all I got into ’cause I went to lookin’ for ’em, and the bricks that hit me in the head, and the knives that cut these scars on my face, and”—he removes his dentures—“and the jerks that had the privilege of knocking teeth out of my mouth: well, that’s ’cause them three animals that provoked me so that cost me a whole set of teeth . . . and I can’t imagine why people want to say the things they say about me.”116

The “whole set of teeth” remark cost him plenty in light of the subsequent statements he made about the cause of his lost teeth. Although he had lost a tooth or two in fights—including, according to Mark, a bashing in the mouth with the butt of a shotgun years before the murders—he didn’t lose the whole set at one time or for one reason, and he wouldn’t get a full set of dentures until long after Christopher’s death.

The information about Mark’s dental work, particularly considering that the filmmakers had Mark’s dental records by the time Revelations hit the screen, was probably pretty embarrassing to Bakken, Sauls and Pashley, considering the rude questioning they gave Mark at Echols’s Rule 37 hearing.

In essence, Bakken, Pashley, and Sauls tried to provoke Mark on camera. But considering the accusations that were hurled at him, Mark did a remarkable job keeping his composure (though at one point, not in the film, he accused Bakken of being a “bleached blonde,” a comment for which he later apologized). The following took place on the courthouse steps in Jonesboro in October 1998, and appeared in the film Revelations:

Byers: Do you think that I’m guilty, that I had something to do with murdering my son?

Sauls: I don’t know if you had anything to do with it; I wanna know that you didn’t, and that would rule yourself out for us.

Byers: I’ve already been exonerated. What else do I have to do?

Sauls: The public has been kind of suspicious of you.

Abruptly the line of questioning changed from bite marks to the death of Melissa Byers.

Bakken: What happened to Melissa?

Byers: I believe she died from a broken heart.

Bakken: But you were there, so you saw something, right?

Byers (louder): I was asleep, beside her, and woke up and found her passed away beside me. There were no bruises, abrasions, anything like that, [no signs] of any foul play whatsoever. I’ve been totally exonerated, all charges or suspicions of anything dropped.

Bakken: Well, I do know there was a toxicology report, and they talked about actually quite a lot of lot of drugs that were in her system.

Byers: Yes, a lot of prescription drugs that she was taking, sure did.

Bakken: There were also some prescription drugs she wasn’t taking.

Byers: She took like seven or eight different types of medication for being bipolar, manic depressive, posttraumatic syndrome [sic]. And as far as the other medication, I’m as puzzled about it as anyone.

Bakken: I read in the newspaper—it was actually the Arkansas Times—Mara Leveritt said that there were signs she was suffocated.

Byers: There was [sic] no signs of suffocation, or struggle; she was lying right there on the bed when the paramedics and all came in.

The questioning returned to the subject of Mark’s teeth.

Byers: Tell me what I have not done to prove that I have not been involved in any of it. I have no problem with a polygraph, sodium pentothal, being hypnotized, bite marks, or anything else . . . I have submitted to every test they’ve asked, every question they have asked, because I know my innocence.

Bakken: But they had bite mark issues.

Sauls: Did they take your bite mark impressions?

Byers removes dentures, dripping with saliva.

Bakken: You know, how could you give your bite impressions if you don’t have your teeth? Maybe that’s why you’re not so reluctant to do it.

Byers: What if I told you that the teeth that I had before they were pulled, the teeth that I had during it—I know the oral surgeons and all that did the work; I would be glad to sign a release for them to send my X-rays.

Sauls: Will you [give bite mark impressions] for us and send them to Dan Stidham?

Byers: I won’t do a damn thing for you.

So what about the discrepancies? By blurting out her accusatory “What happened to Melissa?” comment on the courthouse steps, Bakken had blown any chance she’d had of getting a straight answer out of Byers. Watching the film closely, you can see his face change. The questioning in this scene changes from how and when he lost his teeth to how and when he allegedly murdered his wife. The notion that Mark was involved in Melissa’s death had been picked up by supporters during the two years between the release of the first HBO film and the Rule 37 hearings in 1998. Arkansas Times reporter Mara Leveritt was one who reported on what many felt was the suspicious nature of Melissa’s death, “suggesting” that she was suffocated. Bakken confronts Byers with it, but Byers didn’t feel compelled to vindicate himself with the “Free the West Memphis Three” crowd, despite the remarks from Sauls.

Aside from those teeth knocked out in fights, Mark maintained to WM3.org that medication-induced periodontal disease caused the majority of his tooth loss. Mark was on anti-seizure medication for quite some time—Tegratol, he told the filmmakers—and he stated that the drug caused periodontal disease. A notice appears on-screen during Revelations informing viewers that the makers of Tegratol do not list periodontal disease as a possible side effect of the drug. But another similar drug that Mark took—Dilantin—does have this side effect.117 Mark had taken both drugs and frequently confused the two. Whatever the causes of his dental problems—and there were several combined (heavy cigarette smoking and poor dental hygiene can’t be ruled out)—Mark had all his teeth replaced in April 1997 by an oral surgeon who was a friend of the family in Louisiana.118

Suffice it to say that there were more stories going around about Byers’s teeth than were worth dealing with when one considers there were never any bite marks on the boys to begin with, but it didn’t end there for the defense. Misskelley’s former attorney Dan Stidham called the bite mark report “exciting,” saying it “excludes the three defendants who’ve been convicted of this crime.” The effect of Brent Turvey’s opinion is dramatic on film because he is presented as an expert, and there is no rebuttal. It isn’t court; it’s a movie. It’s up to the viewer to decide what weight to give to his opinion. Since he had testified that he was not an expert on human bite marks (also not shown in the movie), one wonders why he got the podium again. Maybe it’s because Turvey was willing to make statements like this on-screen: “The bottom line here is that this is not legal trickery; this is hard, physical evidence of somebody else committing this crime.” Unless, of course, it wasn’t a bite mark.

The Rule 37 hearings, spread over ten months and two courthouses, concluded on March 19, 1999, thus ending Damien Echols’s petition for relief due to ineffective assistance of counsel. It would be six months before Judge Burnett would render his decision: petition denied.

The Leeza Deal

In December 1998, Mark Byers traveled to Hollywood to tape an episode of Leeza, the talk show hosted by Leeza Gibbons. Pam Echols; Gail Grinnell; Brent Turvey; Richard Ofshe, a nationally recognized expert on false confessions; and Dan Stidham followed a few days behind for a separate taping. Echols and Grinnell refused to appear in the studio with Mark Byers. Mark’s taping was in an essentially empty studio; only cameramen and other crew members were present. Things were different in the West Memphis 3 supporter camp. Some of the audience members for that taping were previous converts, according to Bakken, whereas others were fresh meat. Berlinger and Sinofsky were there to capture the events for Revelations.

The panel of guests, starting with the mothers of Echols and Baldwin and finishing with the experts, were interviewed by Leeza, with snippets of the Byers segment shown on video screens at various times during the taping. They saw him, but he never saw them or heard any of what they said.

It was apparent during a post-taping get-together filmed for Revelations that all on the supporter side felt that the taping had gone well and that they had converted everyone in the audience. Bakken is shown holding court on the deck of a hillside Los Angeles area home (hers?), with Stidham and Turvey appearing to hang on her every word. “Oh, I think it went really well,” she gushes. “You could hear people in the background who didn’t know anything about the case; you could hear them coming along as they presented stuff. Like the first—well, the mothers were out there, and you could hear them talking, and no one was sure whether to believe it or not, and then as more and more came out, and you guys were talking more, you could hear people starting to get angry.” The conversation continues.

Stidham: What was the audience reaction when they learned that all three defendants had been excluded from making the bite marks?

Bakken: It’s like, match the bite mark, find the killer. I think everybody got that. It was like, okay, so the kids [convicts] don’t match the bite marks; that means that the guy . . .

Turvey: The kid shouldn’t have a bite mark on his face. He didn’t leave home with a big fat bite mark on his face [laughing].

Bakken: If they missed that, what else did they miss?

Turvey then adds without a hint of relevancy that Byers wasn’t wearing his teeth at the interview. “What happened to his teeth, do you know?” he asks.

“Well,” Stidham volunteers, “there are several versions of what happened. The first version I heard was that he got ’em knocked out in a fight.” At this point, Bakken and Turvey start going through ancient history about how Mark came to have dentures in the first place, which is obviously not the question here. Dan finally explains that Sauls and Pashley told him that Byers claimed to have lost his teeth somewhere and didn’t have them for the taping. These teeth are more famous than George Washington’s.

The last story—that Mark had lost his teeth before the taping—is, in fact, what happened. He had inadvertently left them at a restaurant the night before, and they had subsequently been thrown out when his table was cleared. The restaurant was closed when the limo came to pick him up for the show, so he had to do the taping without his dentures.

He ended up having to dumpster-dive for them after the show. After all that he’d been through, after all his sister had done for him, after all the controversy that had arisen regarding alleged bite marks, he damned sure wasn’t leaving Los Angeles without those teeth He eventually found them, but not before an LAPD patrol car pulled up and watched in amazement as the six-foot-six Byers, dressed in a three-piece suit and cowboy boots, climbed out of the dumpster.

“Good god, what are you doing in there?” the patrolman asked. “Where are you from?”

“Arkansas,” Mark answered, “and I’m lookin’ for my teeth.” He gave the officer the whole story, about how he’d lost his teeth, the Leeza taping, and the plane he had to catch. “That’s my limo waiting out front.”

The patrolman glanced skeptically toward the black Lincoln and shook his head, saying, “Please be gone when I get back!”

The Leeza show, which was supposed to air in January 1999, never did, and no one seems to know why. What is known is that the transcript from Mark Byers’s taping has been available all over the Internet for years. Since no one has come forward with the transcript of the second taping, it is easy to speculate that something happened in the studio that the network didn’t like—a legal issue, perhaps—and that it was quashed. Leeza went off the air sometime in 2000, and the WM3 segment was supposed to air after Leeza went into reruns. Attorney Dan Stidham was allegedly told by the show’s producers that the taped material was too graphic for daytime television and needed to be edited to suit its intended audience. It is also possible that the show was not as riveting as Bakken’s review would indicate and that the producers decided not to air it for quality reasons. As with so many aspects of the case, the answer may never be known.119

As part of an attempt to convince Revelations viewers that he had no part in the murders of his wife and son, Byers volunteered for a polygraph examination, which he passed. Whether or not the producers were disappointed with the result—after all, they’d spent a considerable amount of time making him appear to be a suspect—they felt the need to qualify the exam for viewers. The following message appears on-screen:

Mark Byers is taking the following mood-altering medications during this test:

Xanax, Zoloft, Sinequan, Halodol, Depakote

But the filmmakers fail to inform the audience that the polygraph examiner had been made aware of which drugs Mark was taking ahead of time, and the test was interpreted accordingly. This is common practice in the industry, and it is hard to imagine that the filmmakers were ignorant of this, given that the test was conducted at their expense. Is it possible that they didn’t want anyone to think Mark Byers was telling the truth?

Bruce Sinofsky, Joe Berlinger, Mara Leveritt, Kathy Bakken, Burk Sauls, Grove Pashley, Dan Stidham, Brent Turvey—it seems that an inordinate number of people were trying to cast aspersion on one man. Was it necessary to their stated goal of advocacy? Just as Berlinger and Sinofsky postulate in the commentary, on film Dan Stidham suggests that perhaps the prosecution has gone too far to admit that they’ve made a mistake. There is nothing particularly insightful or prescient about this. What district attorney would admit reversible error, particularly in a triple child murder case that has withstood eighteen years of intense scrutiny by all manner of people, professional and otherwise, as well as the dismissal of multiple appeals?

A third installment of the series, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, was created because the state of the case demanded it. The film made the film festival circuit and finally aired on HBO on January 12, 2012. Berlinger and Sinofsky have said it’s their last. If, however, as HBO producer Shelia Nevins believes, there is a fourth documentary to make, it would be refreshing if the fourth film were to use a more factual and less theatric method of getting the filmmakers’ point across, and if they could do it without besmirching another innocent man. Given recent developments in the case, there may be a new lamb to sacrifice.

Joe Berlinger once told Chris Champion of Telegraph Magazine that he denied any negative impact of his films. “I am acutely aware that [the victims’ families] were expecting a film that confirmed the guilt of these kids. I feel bad for them emotionally that they believe the wrong thing. But I feel even worse when someone is put to death for a crime that they didn’t do. But I think that is the collateral damage one must accept as a journalist if you feel like there’s a greater injustice happening” [emphasis added].120 Collateral damage. In the Paradise Lost films it appears as if one life is being traded for three others. Perhaps the filmmakers believed that it benefited the greater good to sacrifice the reputation of Mark Byers for the cause of liberating the West Memphis Three, and who’s to say they were wrong? But was it their decision to make? Perhaps. But they appear to be practicing a form of mob justice and trampling on the law. Berlinger’s assertion that he is a “journalist” may be valid, but is it ethical to accept “collateral damage,” particularly in a case involving three eight-year-old victims?

It is beyond question that the films of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky had the intended effect on their audience; the rise of the Free the West Memphis Three movement is testament to that, and the most recent events would seem to vindicate their activism.

In the final scene in Revelations, Mark Byers is sitting alone at the kitchen table of his efficiency apartment in Jonesboro. There is a small stereo cassette player on the table, and as he presses the “play” button, he begins to semi-lip-synch the lyrics to a recording he made of himself singing a spiritual song that begins,

Amazing Grace will always be my song of praise

For it was Grace that bought my liberty

I do not know just why He came to love me so

He looked beyond my hope and saw my need

As Mark finishes his song, he lights up a smoke and kicks back, and one final text screen appears:

Mark Byers was arrested on June 2, 1999 for selling prescription drugs to an undercover narcotics officer. Sentenced to 8 years in an Arkansas Corrections Facility, he is eligible for parole in October 2000.

According to Mark’s criminal record, he was arrested on January 9, 1999, for the sale of a controlled substance, the antianxiety drug Xanax. Mark was on probation at the time of his arrest; it was revoked on May 26, 1999, and off he went to the East Arkansas Regional Unit at Brickeys to begin serving his eight-year sentence. He was still incarcerated when Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 premiered on HBO in March 2000.

Map of Robin Hood Hills and surrounding neighborhood

Christopher’s second grade class picture.

Happier times at the grill at 1400 East Barton.

Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie
Misskelley, June 3, 1993

Mark’s parents died within three months of each other after fifty-two years of marriage and are buried in Marked Tree, Arkansas.

The tool shed at 1400 East Barton where Mark was doing jewelry repair until Christopher’s murder. His store in West Memphis had closed three years earlier.

Christopher’s Decree of Adoption. Christopher’s biological father, Ricky Lee Murray would claim that he never gave his consent to the adoption, and journalist Mara Leveritt suggested that the boy had been buried under an ‘illegal’ name, which, she said, was a “felony.”

Dana Moore stood in this spot and watched Michael, Stevie and Christopher disappear around this bend heading north on 14th Street. They couldn’t hear her calling after them. She never saw Michael alive again.

Todd and Dana Moore sit with West Memphis Police Inspector Gary Gitchell (right) as the guilty verdict is read in the murder trial of Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr. The Moores have never wavered in their belief that the West Memphis Three killed their son.

Police surveillance photo of Terry Wayne Hobbs at Stevie’s funeral. May 13, 1993

January 23, 2008. Terry Hobbs in reflection. When asked by a reporter in 2007 how he thought Hobbs might feel, Mark Byers said, “I can’t imagine what it would feel like knowing you’re guilty of killing three children and that the hounds are on your tail.”

Christopher’s grave near Memphis, Tennessee. After he adopted the boy, Mark gave him his own middle name.

Melissa is buried just a few feet from Christopher, dying only three years after her son. The absence of Mark’s name on the grave marker testifies to the animosity that existed between Mark and his in-laws.

The contrast between Mark’s intake photo for the Arkansas Department of Corrections (top) and his parole ID card (bottom) fifteen months later couldn’t be more stark.

Byers speaks to the media at the August, 2009, Rule 37 hearings of Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley.

Supporters outside the 2nd Circuit Courthouse in Jonesboro holding signs that proclaimed the newfound stranglehold Lorri Davis and her team had on the court. Despite all the forensic testimony from renowned experts, in the end it would be strong allegations of juror misconduct that forced the state’s hand.

Damien’s sister, Michelle and her daughter Stormy outside the Arkansas State Supreme Court September 30, 2010. Michelle has not seen her brother in many years, and not at all since his release from prison. Stormy wasn’t born when her infamous uncle was arrested and has only met him once when she was very young.

“This is a travesty!” John Mark Byers was on hand in Jonesboro the day the West Memphis Three were released. He was furious that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley had to plead guilty to murdering his son in order to be freed from prison.

Damien Echols and wife Lorri Davis at the premier of West of Memphis at Sundance in 2012. The film was backed by Sir Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), directed by Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil), and produced by Echols and Davis. In many ways the film overshadowed the concurrent release of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofky’s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.

Mark finally greets Damien Echols at Sundance, the first time Mark has actually seen him since the Rule 37 hearings in 1999.

Weaver Elementary School Memorial Reading Grove. The commemoration on the plaque is heart wrenching in its brevity. “Do your Best.” Their memory has often taken a back seat in the effort to Free the West Memphis Three

CHAPTER 5

Summer Camp

Justice is the constant and perpetual will to allot to every man his due.

—Domitus Ulpian, Roman jurist (100-228 CE)

Prison saved my life.

—John Mark Byers

By the end of 1998, Mark Byers’s life was teetering precariously on the verge of collapse. He was living alone in a small rented apartment with nothing but his thoughts. In many ways, he had not been allowed to move normally through the grieving process. The film Paradise Lost not only had made life difficult for Mark in and around Jonesboro, but its not-so-subtle innuendo regarding his possible complicity in the murders had left him an emotional mess as well. Melissa was gone, Ryan was gone, and his family was left to helplessly watch him deteriorate mentally, emotionally, and physically. Unable to cope with the past and what had become of his life, he tried, without much success, to deaden the pain with pills, booze, and pot. If he could just feel nothing, that would be better than what was happening inside him. His trip to rehab in 1996, along with all the medication that had been prescribed to him upon his release, had temporarily relieved any overt suicidal tendencies along with the crippling depression symptoms he’d been suffering. Left in the place of such feelings, however, was a hollow, emotional void, interrupted by periods of blatant self-destructive behavior. From day to day, and in between disability checks, Mark Byers simply existed.

Things in Jonesboro had become very monotonous. By 1997 Mark had lost his car and driver’s license, and his world suddenly became very small. He walked everywhere he went, and aside from the time he spent hanging out with James Lawrence in Marked Tree, there wasn’t a thing going on in his life. His stay in rehab had come only six months after the release of Paradise Lost and only three months after moving from Cherokee Village, and after his release from the George W. Jackson center, he had quickly resumed the booze, pill, and pot lifestyle he had been living prior to his stay there.121

If people didn’t recognize Mark from the extensive TV and newspaper coverage of the trials—the Echols/Baldwin trial had been held in Jonesboro, after all—they were sure to spot him after the premiere of the HBO film. The repercussions of his prominent role in the documentary were varied and sometimes violent. Once, while visiting a “private club” across the street from his apartment, Mark was attacked in the men’s room by four men ranging in age from late teens to early twenties. “We know who you are,” one said just as Mark was backing away from the urinal. “You’re that baby killer.”122 Without further warning, two of the men landed sucker-punches to Mark’s head and face, dropping him to the bathroom floor. When he came to, the men were gone, but upon a quick survey of the club, he found two of them hanging around shooting pool. Grabbing a pool cue off the wall, Mark hotly strode toward the table. Before he got there, however, two bouncers collared him and dragged him to the door. By this time his eye was swelling shut, and his split lip was bleeding profusely down the front of his shirt. The police were called, but by then the attackers were gone.

Without a car, Mark had little hope of getting a job, though it is questionable how successful he would have been at maintaining any kind of steady employment. He had also completely lost touch with Ryan and was virtually alone, and when Mark was alone, he “self-medicated.” It was in this zombie-like semiconscious state that Mark participated in the filming of Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. To be sure, there were periods of lucidity, and these can be seen in the film. Appearing in front of his Stone Street efficiency, decked out in his signature American flag shirt, Mark is clear-eyed and coherent. A scene filmed inside his apartment, as he hangs out with friends Willie Burns and James Lawrence, reveals a Mark Byers arguably in control of himself. In other scenes—the confrontation with the Free the West Memphis Three organizers on the courthouse steps, for example—he appears bloated and puffy-eyed, slurring his speech and mixing up his words. In October 1998, during the first round of Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearings, Mark was filmed on the sidewalks of Jonesboro, his eyes bleary and stance unsteady, as Echols was led into the courthouse. “You ain’t goin’ to be no boogeyman in West Memphis,” he slurred, “’cause you’re goin’ to be dead in hell!” At this, he cocked his thumb and forefinger in a mock-shooting pose, pointing straight at Echols. His posture, despite his hulking form, was somehow weak, unbalanced. He was bloated from months of poor nutrition, heavy drinking, and drug use.

Mark has often been described as “scary.” To those who knew him well, he looked pitiful at this point. The contrast between his physical appearance six months earlier, when he was filmed singing at the table in his Jonesboro studio apartment, and that of the haggard inebriate at the Rule 37 hearing is startling.123 He seemed unaware at this point that he was being set up. “They keep wantin’ to find someone else to blame to get their three off. That’s their job. Draw suspicion, do their thing,” he told a reporter on camera. “But the world knows who’s guilty and who’s innocent.” By now, Mark was well aware that the suspicions they were “drawing” were aimed squarely at him. The knowing glances between Kathy Bakken and Burk Sauls as Mark strode off toward the courthouse after a somewhat heated on-camera exchange provide some evidence that they knew as well. It didn’t matter. If Mark was aware of what was happening, he probably would have waded right in anyway, as he has done so often, like a prize-fighter in the late rounds after taking one too many punches.

By the time Creative Thinking International and HBO Productions packed up and rolled out of Arkansas, and the last of the Rule 37 hearings wound down in March 1999, Mark had gotten himself into a world of trouble. His depression had returned. His lifelong friend James Lawrence had died in 1998. He saw his family only sporadically; it was difficult for them to watch him fall apart. “My brother says today that [the family] was just waiting to hear that I was dead,” Mark recalls.

In August 1998, after sitting by the side of the road, “waiting for an eighteen-wheeler” and contemplating suicide, Mark once again checked himself in for medical treatment, this time at St. Bernard’s Behavioral Health Center in Jonesboro. He was again diagnosed with major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and alcohol dependence, which at the time he denied. According to his doctors, he “became angry and threatened the physician” when substance abuse treatment was recommended. At the time he was admitted, he was taking many prescription medications, including Zoloft and trazadone (for depression), Depakote (for seizures related to his brain tumor), Xanax (for anxiety), and propranolol (for migraines and anxiety). The doctors took note of his medical history, which included a right frontal lobe brain tumor, a seizure disorder, a hiatal hernia, gastroesophageal (GE) reflux, and “chronic losses”—the deaths of family and friends.124 Not surprisingly, they attributed his depressed state to those factors, as well as to alcohol abuse. They also noted a “facial asymmetry” and “abnormal gait” and recommended a repeat CT scan.

Mark “continued to remain on the outer fringe of the therapeutic milieu [group therapy],” according to his doctors, and was “not engaging in treatment initially, continuing to be distractible.” The reasons for this were apparent: “[Mark] did continue to ruminate over the death of his son, and voiced resentment and anger toward the individuals who murdered his son.” His contemplation of suicide suggests the truth of what is said of grieving parents: they don’t choose to live; they just don’t choose to die.125

The doctors noted with some satisfaction that toward the end of his treatment, Mark was beginning to “process his grief issues.” On August 9, 1998, after a few medication adjustments and two weeks of therapy, Mark was discharged. He was given a lengthy list of prescriptions to fill, including Xanax, Depakote, Gabitril (seizures), Pepcid (GE reflux), Inderal (headaches), Vicodin (headaches), Desyrel (insomnia), and Zoloft. He was instructed to have magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) testing done on both his brain and neck as an outpatient. He was also instructed to attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings nightly for “aftercare and support treatment.” But he “left rehab, went straight to the drugstore, got [his] prescriptions filled, and bought a six-pack of beer at the Stop ’n’ Go,” Mark said. “I went home, drank the six-pack, ate a hand full of pills, smoked a big, fat joint, and never looked back.”

Paying the Piper

For all the bullets he took, Mark had unquestionably dodged his share too. As noted earlier, shortly after graduating jewelry school, he had been arrested in Louisiana for possession of marijuana. The evidence “disappeared” before trial, and he was more or less forced to flee the state. His 1987 arrest and conviction for the terroristic threatening of Sandra Sloane resulted in his being placed on probation for three years. Although this was a misdemeanor charge, a violation of the probation could have resulted in up to a year of imprisonment. The 1992 Rolex watch incident could—and some would say should—have led to felony charges, had the district attorney decided to prosecute.126

There was also the botched 1992 sting operation where Mark briefly faced federal drug and weapons charges, from which a ten—to twenty-year prison sentence easily could have resulted. In February 1993, just three months prior to Christopher’s murder, Mark was arrested after police seized a pound of marijuana from the trunk of his car. He had a court date set, but after Christopher’s murder, the local prosecutor dropped the charges without explanation. And of course, there were the original convictions for residential burglary, theft of property, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor in Sharp County in 1996, which earned him two concurrent five-year sentences and one twelve-month sentence—all suspended—and banishment from the Arkansas Third Judicial District. These last three convictions were what eventually became his undoing.

Wrong Number

The events of January 9, 1999—like those of May 5, 1993, and March 29, 1996—drove home to Mark just how quickly and profoundly life can change. For all his misdeeds and all the slippery slopes he had negotiated, his downfall came not from any coordinated police action or as the result of a targeted criminal investigation, but by his own hand or, more accurately, his fingers. Many of the details of his arrest in Jonesboro on that winter’s day are drawn directly from the police reports. For his part, Mark doesn’t remember exactly what happened. “It could have gone down that way,” he said when first asked about the incident. “I’m not saying it didn’t. I’m just saying I’m not sure.”

Earlier on that chilly Saturday, Mark had sold twenty of his prescription Xanax pills to a friend of a friend, Leon Burgess,***** for three dollars each. All of Mark’s income at the time was coming from his disability check, so selling his prescriptions brought in cash, though there is evidence that this instance was simply intended to be an exchange of drugs; Mark was selling his Xanax in order to buy some marijuana. Apparently, Leon had not paid the full sixty dollars for his purchase that morning because at around five o’clock in the afternoon, Mark called the young man on his cell phone and reminded him of his debt and also asked if he wanted to buy the remaining twenty pills.127 There was a problem, however. The number that Mark dialed was off by one digit. Instead of calling Leon, he had dialed the cell phone of Arkansas state trooper Brent Tosh, who was on duty and in the middle of a routine traffic stop when he received the call. Tosh told Mark that he would have to call him back. He took Mark’s phone number and immediately called Sergeant Roger Vickers at the Arkansas State Police, Troop C, to see if he could do a reverse lookup on the phone number to get an address.128 When Vickers told Tosh that he could not perform such a lookup, Tosh called Mark back.

“I’m interested in buying the stuff,” Tosh said, “but I’m busy with a girl and really can’t make it tonight. Is it okay if I send someone else to pick it up?”

“Who would you send?” Mark asked.

“Do you remember Jeff? I introduced him to you today.”

“I think so,” Mark said. “What does he look like?”

Tosh replied, “About five feet ten inches tall, brown hair, kind of stocky.”

As if this entire dialogue wasn’t warning enough that something was awry, Tosh then asked Mark for directions to his house. This was nothing short of incredible. Leon had been to Mark’s house that very day, yet Mark was supposed to believe that he had forgotten how to get there? There was no Jeff, and the man Mark was talking to was not Leon. How could he not have known this? He had successfully moved many pounds of marijuana over the years, and yet he was breaking a cardinal rule of the drug business: never do business with someone you don’t know. He was taking this risk for a measly eighty dollars. How could he have been so careless? Regardless of these clearly sounding alarms, Mark gave Tosh/Leon directions and waited for “Jeff” to arrive.

“And you had better not do Jeff wrong,” Tosh added, apparently to add some credibility to the call, though it was hardly needed; Mark was completely clueless about what was really going on.

“I won’t,” Mark replied. “It will all be there. It was all there this morning, wasn’t it?”

And so it went. “Jeff,” who was in reality drug task force (DTF) investigator Bob Andrews, withdrew five twenty-dollar bills from department funds, grabbed a mini-cassette recorder, and headed out to 1609B Stone Street with DTF investigator Rick Harmon. If Mark was suspicious about Jeff arriving with another male in tow, he said nothing. Mark greeted the agents, made the exchange, and was promptly placed under arrest (though not before asking the agents for a ride to a friend’s house to buy some pot). One can only imagine the amusement on the faces of Andrews and Harmon when Mark asked, with a totally straight face, “Since I’m under arrest, can I have my pills back?”

For this offense, Mark was looking at three to ten years in state prison. He was taken to the Jonesboro police station, where his mug shot and fingerprints were taken. He was then transported to the Craighead County Jail, where he spent the next two nights. At the arraignment, Mark was formally charged with delivery of a controlled substance and held on $1,000 bond, which he posted the following Monday. He was to appear in court on February 26 before Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. Mark applied for, and was granted, the services of public defender Bill Howard to represent him in court; prosecutor Chuck Easterling would be representing the state. Howard and Easterling negotiated a guilty plea on Mark’s behalf, and on April 19, 1999, Judge Wilson accepted the plea and sentenced Mark to five years of supervised probation. Further, he was to pay $211 in court costs, a monthly $20 probation fee, and $250 to cover the cost of his court-appointed attorney; payments were to be made in monthly installments of fifty dollars. Mark was to make monthly visits to his parole officer, submit to drug testing, and curiously, “work faithfully at suitable employment.” Mark was completely disabled at the time; one can only assume this parole condition was part of a boilerplate form and had been mistakenly included.

Disaster had once again been averted, but for how long? Unbeknownst to Mark, Sharp County was already after him. On April 9, 1999, ten days before his sentence was imposed in Craighead County for the Xanax sale, prosecutors in Sharp County filed a petition for the revocation of the suspended sentences Mark had received in 1996 and ordered him to appear in court on May 26. Prosecutor Stewart K. Lambert had decided that it was time for Mark Byers to ante up for his crimes. (“I hated that bastard,” Mark said of Lambert in a letter from prison, “and he hated me.”) Despite what others—notably Mara Leveritt—have said about Mark leading a charmed life when it came to avoiding prosecution, he didn’t feel so confident entering the courtroom that morning. In fact, he was “scared shitless.”

He showed up in court that day looking like a condemned man. He also showed up without an attorney, and the public defender was out of town. Because Mark had successfully petitioned the court to proceed in forma pauperis (literally, “in the manner of a pauper”), circuit judge Harold S. Erwin assigned attorney Larry Dean Kissee, who happened to be in the courtroom on another case, to represent Mark. Kissee had also represented Mark in 1996 when he was convicted of the original felony and misdemeanor charges in Sharp County. Mark must have been overjoyed to see him again. (“He was a real asshole. Floated me down the river.”129)

From the bench, the judge peered down at Mark. “You’re looking at twenty years, Mr. Byers,” Erwin said flatly. “I think you had better talk with your attorney, and I’ll see you back in court in thirty minutes.”

Kissee disappeared into Lambert’s office and came out with two words: “Eight years.” Mark recalls, “Eight sounded a whole lot better than twenty, so I took it.” Erwin signed a judgment and commitment order and turned Mark over to the Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADC), and just like that, it was done; John Mark Byers was going to prison.

Summer Camp

From the courthouse in Ash Flat that day, May 26, 1999, Mark was escorted across the parking lot to the city jail. The usual routine for newly convicted prisoners is to spend anywhere from several days to several months—or more—in a city or county facility before being transported to the Diagnostics Unit at Pine Bluff. Time spent in jail is credited toward an inmate’s sentence. For Mark Byers, as was the case with so many things, a different procedure was followed. Rather than wait for the sheriff’s office to come for him, someone called in a deputy on his day off to drive Mark to Pine Bluff; he spent less than an hour in the Ash Flat city jail. Why the departure from the norm? “They hated me. They wanted me out as soon as possible,” Mark said. If this sounds paranoid, we need only remember that, contrary to the provisions of the Arkansas State Constitution, and upheld by a later court ruling, Mark had been “exiled” from the five-county area that includes Cherokee Village and Ash Flat.130 Further, Sharp County sheriff’s deputy Dale Weaver’s firm belief that Mark was involved in Melissa’s death lends credibility to the position that Sharp County had a beef with Mark Byers.

After having his belt, shoes, and shoelaces taken at the city jail, he was quickly hustled down to Pine Bluff.

The Diagnostic Unit at Pine Bluff lies approximately forty miles south of Little Rock and about a three-and-a-half-hour car ride from Ash Flat. In comparison to anything Mark had ever seen, this was the Big House. “When I first laid eyes on Pine Bluff, I just about shit. It was all I could do to keep from running or showing how scared and afraid I was. It freaked me out.” Mark arrived at ten minutes past five on the afternoon of May 26, just hours after being sentenced. He was fingerprinted—again—photographed, deloused, and issued the standard orange prison jump suit, which he, like other inmates, would wear until being shipped out after diagnostics. He was then marched down the center of the unit to the taunts of the inmates hanging around. Because of the ponytail he wore at the time, he heard jeers such as “We got ourselves a Jesus here!” He was led to a large steel door, which the guard ordered to be opened. Mark was pointed down the cell block and told, “Last one on your right. Welcome to your new home.” Completely alone, Mark navigated his way toward his cell. Above him were two additional tiers of cells. As he made his way down the block, inmates from the two tiers above began pelting him with all manner of debris and garbage—anything they could get their hands on—all the while mocking and insulting him, letting him know what they were going to do to him later. Despite being on knees that felt like water, Mark managed to get into his cell, and the door mercifully clanged shut behind him.

The cell itself contained the usual prison furnishings: steel cot, steel toilet (no seat), and a steel sink. The sink would be Mark’s only source of water for the next thirty-six hours. Because the faucet only dribbled water even when wide open, he first tried putting his head in the sink under the faucet to catch the meager flow but was eventually forced to form a makeshift cup out of an empty toilet paper roll. He used this until it disintegrated.

There were two five-inch square windows in the cell, and it was through these portals that Mark got his first look at the prison yard. Because he was in a ground-level cell, the inmates out in the yard also got a good look inside at the newest guest, though it felt more like he was in a zoo on display. He slept—if you could call it that—fitfully that first night, hearing the sounds of other inmates screaming while enduring a beating or rape, crying for their mothers, or cussing and fighting with men on different tiers. It’s never quiet in prison, and it’s never dark; there’s always a light on somewhere. In the morning, Mark was called out of his cell. “Now the prison is alive,” Mark recalls. He had no idea where he was going or why, but he soon found out that this was “pill call,” where he would be given the medications that were listed on his intake form, less those that had been removed by the prison doctor, who deemed them unnecessary. Seeing how the pills were dispensed, Mark had one thought: “I’ve got to somehow take that pill cup back with me.” Since he couldn’t exactly ask for it, he committed his first offense on the inside: he “palmed” the cup after it was set down, and smuggled it back to his cell. At least one problem was solved; he now had something to drink out of. The next step in the intake process was to have his hair cut and be issued his prison photo ID. One need only look at the face looking back on Mark’s prison identification photo to see what he was thinking: “I am totally fucked.”

The Diagnostic Unit near Pine Bluff is exactly what its name implies. Upon sentencing, inmates are brought here for classification and assignment to their new prison “homes.” After a four-day stay in his private cell, Mark was moved into a barracks with 125 other men. There he listened to the other inmates, many of whom had previously done time, talk about which prisons they might be sent to. Various prison names were batted around, but one name consistently came up as somewhere you didn’t want to go: Brickeys. Mark had been assured by his lawyer that he would do his time in a minimum—to medium-security prison, such as the North Central Unit (NCU) at Calico Rock. NCU is home to the ADC’s pre-release program, and as such there is comparatively little trouble there. Many inmates there are “short-timers” and aren’t interested in jeopardizing their impending parole hearings. Because all of the charges against Mark had been for nonviolent offenses, he had a reasonable expectation that he would be sent to a minimum-security facility. He was wrong. On the eighth day of his confinement at Pine Bluff, Mark’s name was called out, and he was given new prison “whites” and a sack: he was moving. He and some other men were cuffed, shackled, and sent packing. The bus that transported Mark from Pine Bluff was a typical prison bus. It was essentially a converted school bus, but the windows were caged so they couldn’t be opened, and forget about air conditioning. The oppressive heat and humidity inside the bus were unbearable, and minutes traveling seemed like hours, hours like days. There were two inmates to each seat, one handcuffed to the other, with their paper sacks tucked between their legs. Anything left of their old life not deemed contraband was contained in those bags. After one hundred miles or so up Arkansas Route 79, the bus took a dog-leg turn onto Route 131 and then bounced along a gravel road for half a mile before pulling up to the sally port at the Eastern Arkansas Regional Unit (EARU) at Brickeys. Home sweet home.

Brickeys

The EARU, near Brickeys, Arkansas, is a menacing looking place, set in the middle of farm country near the Mississippi River in east-central Arkansas. Located some fifty miles southwest of Memphis, the prison itself is situated on 2,500 hot, dusty acres surrounded on three sides by a muddy bayou. It is the archetypal maximum-security prison, an undisguised fortress consisting of a series of sprawling one—and two-story red brick buildings, surrounded by twenty-foot razor wire fences (lethal electrified fences for ADC prisons were approved in 1997, though in Brickeys they hadn’t been installed) and gun towers at each corner. Sitting at the end of a short gravel road, its location is symbolic to many of the facility’s 1,200 inmates: this is the end of the line. Although there are prisons in Arkansas with higher security levels—the Supermax Unit at the Varner Unit, for example—Brickeys has a reputation for toughness and is one of the least desired destinations among inmates in the system, and not only because of the other inmates. “It seemed like the ADC was just putting uniforms on gangbangers and sending them to Brickeys,” one former inmate says of the guards there. “They were beating inmates left and right there. If they got mad at someone, they’d say ’fuck you; you don’t get to eat today.’” The food, the same inmate says, was horrible even by prison standards (he has done time in four prisons in the ADC). Spoiled vegetables and milk were common, as was food containing dirt and insects. “You know that it’s dirty when you get a piece of chicken and it has feathers on it.” The cuisine at Varner Supermax, he says, is a close second.

Brickeys has a high population of class III and class IV inmates—long-timers and lifers—who have little incentive to behave. The inmate population at Brickeys has been on the rise since it was opened in 1992.131 Its initial capacity was reported to be two hundred inmates. In 1993, capacity increased by four hundred. An additional four hundred beds were added in 1997. In 1998, over four hundred more beds were added, more than half of those for maximum-security inmates.

Twenty-five years ago, racial segregation officially still existed in the ADC. The Tucker Unit, for example, held only white inmates, and the Cummins Unit held blacks. Today Arkansas reports a racial mix in the state prison system of 51 percent white and 46 percent black.132 That ratio doesn’t hold across the board, however. For example, Calico Rock had a 60 percent white population until racial tensions in 2006 forced the ADC to relocate some thirty inmates. At the same time, the rise of prison gangs had become one of the most pressing problems facing the corrections system. ADC officials estimate that some 1,750 prisoners statewide, some 13 percent of the total prison population, are gang members, and this is probably a low estimate. “We have the same problems everyone else does,” said Sgt. Wallace McNary, who tracks prison gangs at Brickeys. “They’re not going to change their behavior because they’re locked up.”133 Gangs in Arkansas prisons include Bloods, Crips, Nazi Low Riders, Black Guerilla Family, Latin Kings, and the Hispanic-based Surreno 13. There are also several white supremacist gangs, including the ultra-violent Aryan Brotherhood and spinoff associates such as the Dirty White Boys. Although necessarily denied by the ADC, among inmates it is well known that just as blacks are disciplined by a trip to Calico Rock—said to be a predominantly white-staffed and white-populated prison—whites are given the same treatment by being transferred to Brickeys, where black officers, administrators, and inmates dominate.134 The upshot of this policy is that Brickeys is a place where the racial scales, at least in the eyes of the inmates, are tilted toward black inmates. A recent search of the ADC website, however, reveals a black majority only by 6 percent. Of course, this is now, and that was then; things have most likely changed. Regardless of what the numbers show, in prison, race matters.

Along the front row of an elliptical driveway are Brickeys’ inmate barracks, twelve buildings containing twenty barracks holding anywhere between sixty and more than one hundred men. When the bus carrying Mark Byers pulled into the sally port around the back of the intake building, the doors closed securely behind it. The men were hustled off the bus two by two, to the shouts of the guards—“Let’s go! Get in line! Move your asses!” The men were eyeballed by the few inmates working intake or laundry detail. They sized everyone up, whistling at the weaker-looking “fish”—new inmates—while trying to stare down others. Mark knew the drill. “My look to them said, ‘Eat shit.’” The new arrivals were told to line up against the wall to wait for their number to be called by one of two guards seated at a long table. “115446!” Mark’s new identity since arriving at Pine Bluff some eight days ago, and all he would ever be to the ADC, was called out. He dumped the contents of his sack onto the table to be inventoried and was sent back to stand against the wall. When the last man had been inventoried, the inmates were sent for a “squat and cough”—a strip search for contraband—and then down a long hallway to a receiving desk, where they showed their “cut slip” and were issued barracks and rack assignments. Mark was sent to barracks number 8.

The barracks at Brickeys resemble a split-level home in build. Inside the entrance to the barracks, the “day room”—the only social area for inmates, since Brickeys has no “yard”—is up front, and there is a wall down the center of the room with sinks and commodes located along its length. Also in the center of the room are two flights of stairs, one going up, another going down. Located at the end of these staircases are the actual sleeping quarters. If you were housed in a “sixty-six,” there would be thirty-three “racks”—beds—upstairs and thirty-three downstairs. The beds themselves were hard and confining, located in narrow rows less than three feet apart, “close enough to reach out and touch someone”, according to Mark. It’s not hard to imagine how the tension can build in such an environment, where each man’s personal territory is so precious, hotly contested, and defended. Mark often had difficulty writing letters without having them previewed by the prying eyes that were all around him, but such is life in the barracks.

It was also an environment permeated by unpredictable terror as well as totalitarian control. During his first seven days at Brickeys, while he was still in the “fish tank,” Mark had a rigid routine to follow. Meals had to be eaten in three minutes. Batons and pepper spray were used on those inmates who weren’t quick enough to obey an order. “They didn’t take any shit; you were in their house now.” Mark witnessed things that, even with his somewhat jaded outlook, left him speechless. For example, shortly after he was received into Brickeys, a fight broke out in one of the barracks. Mark happened to be in the main hallway at the time. Suddenly, guards were flooding the hallway, screaming, “Everybody, up against the wall! Now!” As Mark pressed his nose against the wall—standard protocol to control a hallway filled with inmates—he managed to turn his head in time to see a stretcher racing past holding an injured inmate. What he saw was so grotesque that at first it didn’t even register. What the hell? he thought. The inmate on the stretcher had a broomstick handle poking out of his abdomen. Almost immediately behind him was a second stretcher, holding another inmate, this one also seriously wounded; one entire side of his head appeared to be caved in. As horrible as these incidents were, they were not at all unusual and came with little or no warning.

In this setting, it didn’t take long for Mark to face his first test—it took six hours, to be exact. While he was still settling into his rack, three black inmates approached him. “No point getting comfortable,” they said. “We’re going to take all your stuff anyway.” The one doing the talking, who also happened to be the biggest, went down so quickly that the other two just stood staring.

“I’ve seen what fear did to people,” Mark said. “I had to act like I wasn’t afraid.” A hard right hand to the head had quickly disposed of the would-be thief. The other two inmates jumped Mark, but someone immediately yelled “Guard!” and the men quickly fell out to their racks. Though he would always be on the lookout for retaliation, this was an important precedent for a fish to set. “I had to show them that that shit was not going to fly. I wasn’t going to be anybody’s punk.” Although he had presented the fearless image he was shooting for, afterward Mark’s hands were shaking so badly that he could hardly roll a smoke. “I dropped two of them before finally getting one rolled.”

A new inmate’s survival depended on the reputation he made for himself and the alliances he forged. The highest priority for a fish in the general population was to earn the respect of his fellow inmates, and he would quickly be tested by the other cons to see if he would back down from a confrontation. Failure in this area would identify an inmate as a “punk,” someone from whom money could be extorted, favors extracted, and in the worst case, sexual services demanded. Cons prey on the weak; Mark’s encounter with the three men on his first day in Brickeys made it clear that if anyone tried to take anything from him, it was going to hurt.

Another way for an inmate to bolster his reputation was to demonstrate that he was a “stand-up” guy, one who wouldn’t snitch on his fellow cons. Conflicts between inmates were to be settled by inmates. Guards—also known as COs (corrections officers), hacks, or the “police”—were not included in inmate disputes. They couldn’t be trusted any more than most of the inmates, often less. For example, the altercation between Mark and the three black men in his barracks was covered up by the other cons. Trouble for one meant trouble for all. Nobody wanted to go into lockdown, where the inmates’ freedom of movement could be restricted or commissary privileges suspended, or both. Mark’s days as an informant for the drug task force held a certain irony now that he was in prison, where that kind of behavior could get him killed. Snitches ended up in protective custody (PC), in the infirmary, or in the ground. That didn’t mean Mark’s acts would be forgotten. Nothing in prison is forgotten.

Connections were also vital in the system. It wasn’t uncommon for inmates who had gone through diagnostics together at Pine Bluff to meet up at their new prison assignment; Mark’s friend and envelope artist “Bad News”—a tough Native American bank robber—was one such inmate. Another was an inmate in barracks 8 to whom Mark had traded some of his Xanax for cigarettes and coffee while he was in Pine Bluff. The word quickly spread in the barracks at Brickeys, and Mark soon was being approached by other cons looking for drugs. Mark had none and took none; drugs are serious business in prison, an infraction that could bring “free world” criminal charges and new sentencing. It did, however, improve Mark’s reputation as someone who could get things, and that, in combination with his straightening out of the three black inmates, earned him a measure of respect.135 This respect manifested itself in different and often very subtle ways. For example, when he left Pine Bluff, he had on a nice new set of prison whites; keeping them was another story. On his second day at Brickeys, his barracks and three others were sent for shower call. Here, up to two hundred inmates stripped, gave their whites to a trustee in charge of laundry, and hit the showers (“I’ve seen enough asses to last me a lifetime,” Mark observed in one letter home). When an inmate surrenders his whites, he doesn’t get them back. The next set on the shelf of that approximate size is issued to him, regardless of condition; some sets were pretty shabby. Mark was already missing his nice, new whites when, a day or so later, he returned to his barracks to find the shirt that he had come in with, washed, starched, and marked with his name on the label, lying on his rack. That’s respect in prison.

He also made a fortuitous connection in the form of a prison official who had been a family friend back in Marked Tree. This man—code named “Monster Man” in the letters Mark sent home—was able to call Mark out of his barracks at almost any time to shoot the breeze, share some information on the games that cons play, and give Mark pointers on what to do and not do to maximize his “good time” credits. As a class I inmate—a status not attainable until at least sixty days into an inmate’s sentence—Mark could lop one day off his sentence for each day served with no disciplinary incidents. This is much harder than it sounds. An incident such as that which occurred on Mark’s first day, had the hacks gotten there in time, would have meant a sure thirty days in the hole, in addition to thirty days of lost good time.

Monster Man was also able to influence barracks assignments, which was a big bat to swing around the joint. At Brickeys, barracks 1 through 4—“Little Saigon”—largely consisted of class III and IV inmates with little or no eligibility for sentence reductions or parole. In short, Little Saigon was filled with men who had little to lose and therefore was no place for an inmate who just wanted to do his time. It was a place where trouble was almost impossible to avoid and a place where a con just trying to ride it out could find himself slapped with sanctions, including a trip to the hole, loss of good time credit, and loss of visitation and commissary or some combination of privileges. Fights and contraband were the two easiest ways to “catch” a violation. Contraband was dealt with by a disciplinary committee, as were many infractions. Some offenses, such as attacks on a guard, were adjudicated on the outside—so-called free-world offenses—and could result in new criminal charges and a fresh sentence, one usually imposed to run consecutively with the inmate’s existing sentence. The objective in prison was to keep one step ahead of trouble.

Hoedown

The EARU at Brickeys lists the prison operations as “field crops, education, jail operations, leash dog program, and substance abuse.” Its annual report states that the prison harvests soybean, rice, cotton, and other “cash crops.” The report doesn’t mention another “crop” that is harvested: Johnson grass. This tenacious weed can be found in all but four American states and has virtually no agricultural use. Growing up to eight feet tall, it is a choking, unsightly weed and is extremely difficult to eradicate; the preferred method is to simply rip it out by its roots. This makes for a perfect prison industry: a useless and labor-intensive task, designed to break—and sometimes kill—any inmate who has the misfortune of performing this task during the warmer months. At Brickeys, this labor is the mainstay of the “hoe squads,” gangs of inmates who hack at the roots with a hoe—not a homeowner’s garden hoe, but a long, heavy, industrial tool with a steel head mounted to a thick hardwood handle—and rake it back into piles, where it ends up rooting itself for future squads to remove. It is physically exhausting work, exacerbated by the counting of the number of hoe strikes an inmate makes into the hard soil. Poor performance can lead to solitary confinement, disciplinary write-ups, and worst of all, loss of good time credit. Excellent performance can lead to death by heat stroke. If during an inmate’s diagnostic time at Pine Bluff, he is deemed fit for duty on the hoe squad, he can expect to be out in the fields on his first full day at Brickeys. This was not the case for Mark Byers; he had no work boots issued to him and had to wait for them before he could do any field work. Sadly, within two weeks he had his boots, and at first light on June 7, 1999, he joined the squad.

There are actually two variations of the hoe squad at Brickeys. One is called a “field utility unit,” and the timetable it follows is simple: fifty minutes at the hoe, ten minutes for rest and water, and pack it in after four hours in the field. The second type of squad is for inmates who have been acclimated to the heat by previous time on a field utility squad and who can presumably work longer with fewer breaks. These men work for four hours straight and then take thirty minutes for lunch—the ubiquitous prison-issue baloney sandwich and an apple, or some variant. They are put back to work until 3:00 p.m. and are then marched back to their barracks.

Mark was on a field utility squad. During the squad’s ten-minute water breaks, small cups hanging from a long chain were emptied one at a time by the first group of cons. After an inmate finished his cup of water, he would go to the back of the line till he came around for another cup. When the ten minutes were up, whatever water he had gotten was all he was going to get, and he was put back to work. Four hours of this, and the inmate was returned to his barracks, if he made it through the shift without “falling out.” On his first—and only—day out, Mark Byers didn’t make it.

At 6:00 a.m., immediately following roll call, Mark’s number was called out, and he and the rest of the squad were lined up by twos and marched out to the field. They were guarded by horse-mounted bosses with shotguns, rifles, handguns, or some combination of the three. Each boss was responsible for a particular squad. These bosses were a special breed, with a cruel streak and twisted sense of humor. One day the kitchen workers reported to inmates on hoe squad duty (there aren’t very many secrets in prison) that the riding bosses ran a betting scheme within the group. The first riding boss who could drive his squad hard enough to make an inmate fall out would win the pool. This process could be accelerated by the practice of assigning the ablest inmate as the squad lead, forcing other, less fit inmates to keep pace with him. If the heat and the humidity were right, the boss would be able to drop an inmate within an hour or two.

Hoe squad workers always walked the one—to five-mile distance to the work site, following ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) that pulled trailers filled with hoes, food, and water. As the sun rose that day, the temperature rose quickly, well on its way to the near ninety degrees it would hit that afternoon. With the relative humidity hovering at around 68 percent, it would feel more like ninety-five degrees. The hoe squads were huge, often numbering several hundred men, all being taunted, timed, harassed, and mentally abused by the riding bosses. The choking dust, blinding sun, and crippling heat and humidity were de rigueur for the southeast Arkansas summer in the fields. These conditions also tended to make the inmates a little testy. Despite the heavy security detail, inmates decided from time to time to hack at each other with their hoes instead of the Johnson grass. That, of course, earned them a month or two in the hole, along with the usual complement of sanctions imposed on inmates who misbehaved.

After his third hour of work that day, Mark succumbed to the heat and humidity, falling out with what he described as a seizure—probably heat exhaustion—and didn’t wake up until he was in the infirmary. He had no idea how he’d gotten there, but he was painfully aware of the throbbing in his head, a combination of the headache that accompanies hypothermia and the lump forming around the gash in his head that had taken four stitches to close. Whether he’d hit his head on a rock or a hoe or something else, he wasn’t sure. He was covered with blood and cold towels, his blood pressure critically low at ninety over forty-five. Mark’s experience on the hoe squad was not unique. Inmates who fall out are unceremoniously dragged by the collar and dumped onto the beds of pickup trucks until they can be hauled off for medical care. There isn’t much consideration given to their comfort or safety. Other inmates had and have succumbed to the crippling conditions, some even dying after a stint in the field.136

After his falling out on the hoe squad, it was discovered that Mark had been incorrectly classified at Pine Bluff as “M4” (okay for all labor, full-time), instead of “M2” (light inside work, part-time). No more hoe squad for Mark Byers.

Was Brickeys a violent place? Because prison officials in general are publicity-averse and understate the true number of assaults at any given facility, it would be difficult to determine the extent of the violence. ADC spokesperson Dina Tyler said, “We’re not going to tell [the press] about every scuffle. We have fights every shift at every unit.”

Moving On Up

Another inescapable fact of prison life is that much like the military, prison populations are frequently on the move. Sometimes the reasons are logical—inmates make parole, are found with contraband, or are charged with a disciplinary infraction. More often, however, the reasons are elusive, at least to the inmate or inmates being moved. Within a couple weeks of his falling out on the hoe squad, Mark was moved to barracks 13, where there were more class I and II inmates. For Mark, this was a mostly agreeable move; the inmates Mark had fought with on his first night were still looming around the fifty-bed barracks from which he had been moved, as well as some class III and IV inmates with major attitude issues. Changing barracks, however, presented its own set of problems. “You have to size people up all over again. You must be very careful who you talk to. In here, the strong survive; the weak are consumed. See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. Mind your own business.” Mark’s own classification would remain class II for a minimum of sixty days, at which time he would be eligible for reclassification. Barracks 13 turned out to be fine, which must have been why he was inexplicably moved to barracks 10. Shortly thereafter, barracks 10 was raided, and ten people, including Bad News, were moved out to points undisclosed. Mark was moved to barracks 3, one of the Little Saigon barracks, which put his class I status in serious jeopardy. Barracks 3 was a one-hundred-rack facility, and by Mark’s reckoning, eighty-seven of those racks held black cons, nearly all of whom were class III or class IV inmates.

Before his trip to Little Saigon, Bad News had been learning chess from Mark. One of the prison activities Mark was involved in was woodworking. With a little money sent from home, he had been able to buy the materials needed to craft a nice chess set, which he immediately put to use. Mark had been playing for years, and Bad News was no match for him. “Every now and then I let him win,” Mark wrote. “It was good PR.” On July 16, Bad News delivered his last piece of envelope art to Mark, one depicting a wild turkey. The bird has its legs tucked under its rotund torso, and the whole image is set against a skyscape dotted with puffy clouds. Wild turkeys can fly at an impressive forty-five miles per hour and can maintain level flight for up to one mile, a feat usually accomplished while fleeing a predator. This was the image captured by the artist, the bird’s attacker not shown in the frame.

Mark’s rather elite cadre of friends in Brickeys included a gentle but potentially dangerous giant named “Kool Aid.” Kool Aid was a “big ol’ dumb country boy” who was serving time for running supplies and paraphernalia for a methamphetamine lab. He was a match in strength for Bad News, and the two men would arm wrestle for cigarettes, often to a draw. Kool Aid had been in three fights that Mark could recall, each consisting of only one punch. When Mark first met Kool Aid and realized that he could neither read nor write much beyond a second-grade level, he asked Bad News whether he thought it would be okay to cautiously approach Kool Aid and offer to write letters for him and read his legal paperwork to him when needed. Bad News thought this was a good idea, and so did Kool Aid. “People would see me with Bad News and Kool Aid and they knew not to fuck with me.” He shared these thoughts in another letter home. “Life in here is very cheap,” he wrote to his brother. “You walk very carefully. Thank God I met a couple of men that have helped me.” In the dangerous world they lived in, a world in which men are easily slighted, and personal and corporate vendettas are commonplace, the trust they had between them was often the difference between life and death. Although Mark had seen jail before and had his share of “street smarts,” he was not prepared for prison and needed the protection and tutelage of the few men he could trust.

The raid on barracks 10 unfortunately sent Bad News to Little Saigon. Affirming his nickname shortly after he arrived there, Bad News sent two inmates to the infirmary with broken bones and was given a free ticket to the hole. Mark never saw him again.

In many prisons, association between races is a good way for someone to get shanked. Although prisons are no longer officially segregated, in the ADC racial separation is rigidly enforced by the cons themselves. An inmate obviously cannot choose his “cellies,” or the other inmates housed in his barracks, but he is expected to show allegiance to his own race and choose the right side when the “shit jumps off” (a fight or riot breaks out). Eating or associating with other races while in the day room or other common areas can also be problematic. If there is any disrespect shown, no matter how slight, the inmates generally show solidarity with their race, at least in public. Mark was highly aware of this code when he “rolled it up”—moved his belongings—to barracks 3. It took only fifteen minutes for trouble to find him. As he settled into his rack on his first day in Little Saigon, two black inmates approached. Words were exchanged. The words themselves were less important than the way they were said; any nuance of delivery, even subtle, that hinted at disrespect could provoke a reaction. Fortunately, it didn’t go that far. The guards heard the commotion and cut the confrontation short. The peace wouldn’t last.

Less than a week passed before Mark had another run-in with his barracks-mates. That particular day happened to be a commissary day. Mark had picked up his goodies and stashed them in his locker, a small steel enclosure welded to the rack. Later, he returned to find that his locker had been broken into. He went off, screaming epithets, curses, and accusations at anyone and everyone within earshot. The other inmates reacted, forming a circle around him. No one was going to call for a guard this time. Mark sized up the closest inmate, and before anyone knew what was happening, the larger of the two was leveled by a right hand to the face. He quickly dropped to the floor, and the other black inmates in the barracks jumped Mark.

Abruptly, the crowd of inmates parted, and a colossal figure, some six feet eight inches tall and over four hundred pounds, came through the crowd. His name was Big Chuck (inmates are often known by their prison nicknames; Mark was “Little John”). As he surveyed the scene, a slightly amused look crossed his face. There was Mark in a sea of black inmates, holding his now-throbbing right hand, looking for all the world like a man who was about to die. “I know who you are,” he said to Mark. “I got kids too.” Big Chuck pulled out pictures of his two daughters and his son—“Little Chuck”—to show to Mark. Looking around at the others, he said, “Give him back his shit—all of it!” Everything was passed back to Mark, including a half-empty can of Coke. Not one inmate questioned the order. Big Chuck was the chief “shot-caller” in the barracks, and his power was absolute. “You’re one crazy white boy,” he told Mark, “and you have balls. You won’t have any more trouble in here.” And he didn’t. The two became friends, and it was a friendship based on the most important measure of power in prison: respect. As an example of the regard Big Chuck had for him, Mark was one of the few people Big Chuck let sit on his rack. Sitting on another inmate’s rack without permission could get you killed, especially in a place such as Little Saigon.

When the guards finally arrived the day Big Chuck and Mark met, they saw the injured inmate lying on his bed with his eye swollen shut, “looking like someone had just kicked his ass,” and nobody said a word. Big Chuck had crossed the racial line because he’d taken a liking to Mark or possibly because he felt a kinship as a father that transcended race. Also, he said, Mark was “pretty cool for a white boy.” But mostly he did it because he could. Not only did Big Chuck save Mark from a trip to the infirmary—or worse—but by keeping the guards away, he helped preserve Mark’s upcoming class I status and current good time credits.137

Passing Time

The days tend to run together in prison. The significance that the free world assigns to days of the week and months of the year diminishes when all the days seem the same. The only practical significance that time has is in its relationship to an inmate’s sentence—time remaining till a parole hearing, good time credits, and so on—or when counting down time in the hole. All inmates develop their own mechanisms for passing time. It is all they have, and they have plenty of it. There are various ways to transcend the physical constraints of the days, weeks, and months in the joint. Sleeping up to eighteen hours a day (sleep time is easy time!), doing drugs, getting drunk (a substance known as “pruno” or “home brew” can be made with fruits and bread or bought from one of the prison’s enterprising merchants), attempting suicide (usually to gain a ticket to the infirmary), and maybe even attempting an escape or two are all ways to get from one day to the next. And of course, all depends on the sentence being served. An inmate doing twenty years will likely be more willing to experiment than a short-time class I or II inmate like Mark Byers.

Mark mostly spent his days steering clear of trouble, writing letters home, working when that option was available, and finding diversions—any diversion—that would get him out of his barracks. Early on in Brickeys, Mark discovered the prison choir. They practiced three times a week for a couple of hours each session, and he got out of the barracks on Wednesdays and Sundays for chapel. He also took a course from the Institute of Biblical Studies during the summer of 1999, titled “The Biblical Approach to Alcohol and Drugs.” At one point he even took a course on anger management, which was required for inmates serving time for violent crimes but voluntary for other inmates. It not only improved your “jacket”—the complete record on an inmate kept on file by the prison—before the parole board but also was yet another way to “lay in” for the four weeks the course ran.

Inmates could also spend time in the day room, watch television, or play chess and other approved games (cards were not permitted). During times when he could not leave the barracks, Mark would read, especially the novels of Sydney Sheldon and Clive Cussler, which he had shipped in to him by relatives.

Racial tensions within the barracks were taking their toll on Mark. In a housing unit with almost ninety blacks and only a handful of whites, it was difficult to avoid racial harassment. Black inmates would taunt and attempt to provoke Mark and the other white inmates, knowing that in the event of a fight, their side of the story would be backed by the other black inmates in the barracks.

Mark dealt with the racial issue pragmatically, as any inmate wanting to survive needed to do. “The blacks ran the prison. That was just a fact. They outnumbered the whites. You needed to have as many associates—not necessarily friends—as possible, not just for peacekeeping and basic survival, but to get the okay to run any game you wanted to run.” For example, a friend of Mark’s in the kitchen hooked him up with some yeast one day, and Mark wanted to make a few dollars selling hooch in his barracks. He did what had to be done: he approached the barracks shot-caller, a black inmate; told him what he wanted to do; and asked what it would cost. “Three cups for me, and half your profits.” It wasn’t a negotiation. Life in prison is much like life in the mob: keep your mouth shut, pay tribute where it is due, and don’t take shit from anybody, and you just might survive.

Violence, racial or otherwise, could break out with amazing speed and a total lack of warning. A fight broke out in Mark’s barracks during the same month he was denied a reduction in his sentence.138 He wrote, “One white guy got his left eye poked out and face cut very bad. The black guy was thrown from the top level and busted his head open. It almost started an all-out war. There was so much blood. It was a very bad scene. Everyone was on edge for the rest of the night. It was a night where not too many people slept any. Brother, this place can scare the hell out of you.”

A recurring theme for Mark during his confinement was a deeply felt remorse for his actions and for the shame he believed he’d brought on his family. “I really let you down,” he wrote his brother from Brickeys. “I screwed up big time. I can’t ever tell you how much you truly mean to me. You have always been there for me . . . I’m very blessed to have you as my brother. The only way I can repay you is I’ll never come back [here], not in this life.”

“What a dumbass, hard headed, fool I’ve been,” Mark wrote from the Delta Regional Unit in Dermott (Dermott), the prison he was transferred to from Brickeys eight months into his sentence. “I wish I could blame it all on someone else, but I can’t. The truth is, I must stand up and pay the price for my actions.” As depressed as he was at times, Mark also wrote about hope. “At least I know there’s a day coming when I will get out. Freedom . . . what a word! It’s truly something I won’t lose again.”

More often, though, what he felt was fear, the kind of fear that could keep a man awake at night, a fear of getting killed, of never getting out of prison alive. Sixty-six men to a barracks, sometimes more, all trying to protect the tiny speck of real estate that marked the only territory they had. Things that are barely noticed in the free world become major events in prison. Take a power failure, for example. During the summer thunderstorm season, the power at Brickeys would frequently go out. The time between when the power went out and the generator kicked in was about eight seconds, sometimes a little longer. If it happened at night, God help the inmate who wasn’t prepared.

These outages were hardly a surprise to the inmates; there were signs. The TV weather stations would show thunderstorms approaching, and it was a common occurrence to lose power. Moments before the lights went out, inmates could be seen preparing “ammunition.” When the lights flickered, the aggressors would upend their racks like garrisons from which to launch their assault. When the lights went out completely, it was on. The cons in wall racks were the ones most likely to launch an attack, and these assaults were often targeted. There was always some beef that needed to be settled, and an eight-second blackout was the ideal time to do it. The moment the lights went out, the air became filled with all manner of makeshift missiles—padlocks, D-size batteries, cans of Jack Mackerel fish, and bars of soap with embedded razor blades protruding from the sides like some perverted “Odd Job” bowler hat. The only safe place to be during those eight seconds was under a rack, where missiles could be heard careening off the bunks and walls and sometimes an unsuspecting inmate’s head—mere collateral damage. The target might have been hit, or maybe not, but someone was hit for sure, and often that was all that mattered. Fuck with the Man, fuck with the other inmates—it hardly mattered. Incarceration does funny things to a man, and in the joint there exists an endless cycle of violence and brutality, controlled by fear and intimidation, in a world that seemingly exists through the looking glass.

It was the surrealistic quality of daily life in prison, the pervasive depravity and brutality that became commonplace, that helped to sustain a high level of fear among the inmates. “It was everyday stuff,” Mark recalls. “Just taking a shower, and you’d see four guys holding down another, a bar of soap shoved in his mouth while they were gang-raping him. It was getting up at night to take a leak and finding inmates having oral sex right out in the open, or seeing some inmate with a bottle of hot sauce shoved up his ass. Or coming up the stairs and seeing an inmate just standing there jacking off. Imagine getting up in the middle of the night and seeing that. This was an everyday occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary. You can’t imagine what it’s like when that kind of shit becomes normal.”

On his first night at Dermott, for example, Mark was warned about an inmate known as “Fast Eddie 20.” Eddie ran a “store” of sorts, one that didn’t open for business until lights-out. Four or five inmates would slowly rise from their racks and one at a time make their way over to Eddie’s. His fee schedule was simple enough: five dollars for oral sex; two dollars and fifty cents per hand for a hand job; and ten dollars for anal sex, Eddie taking the role of the “catcher.” He could make twenty dollars fast. He was, of course, subject to the tariff imposed by the shot-caller for operations in his barracks. A fellow inmate of Mark’s, Dave Maas,****** confirms the prevalence of this type of activity, adding, “I’ve seen three men in the same bed with the blankets moving like there were snakes in it.”

The manifestation of sex in prison is beyond bizarre. In Dermott, there is an activity that inmates refer to as being “on the window.” From certain vantage points, inmates could see the control booth where barracks activities are monitored by the guards. Some of the guards were female, and if inmates could catch even a glimpse of a female guard’s uncovered foot, it could trigger a full-scale autoerotic frenzy, with many inmates simultaneously masturbating. According to Dave Maas, “It doesn’t matter if the woman is fat, ugly, old as their grandmother. If the mood hits them, you’d better get out of their way (‘outta the gunline’), because if all they can see is their shoe, hand, leg, or other obscure body part, it’s going down, they’re going to jack off on it! It doesn’t matter if sixty-five other inmates are watching or not. They’re going to do it, just like the monkeys in the zoo. Sometimes there were so many inmates on the windows looking out on the hallway masturbating that you couldn’t tell if they’re doing it on each other, or on the woman’s shoe they see sticking out of the control booth across the hall.”

“Welcome to Brickeys, Brother!”

The Lee County jail is situated right next to the EARU. Inmates who have committed offenses in Lee County are frequently sentenced to the EARU to do their prison time. They can be seen marching down the hallway to the infirmary, clad in their bright orange jumpsuits, to receive their physical examination prior to being received into the prison. On one particular day, Mark was walking down one side of the hallway—yellow lines dictated where inmates were allowed to walk—and a group of fish from Lee County jail were being led down the other side. As he scanned their faces, one stood out in stark contrast to the others; it was none other than Danny Overman, the Sharp County drug connection who had blasted Mark’s knee with a shotgun some ten years earlier. As soon as he saw Mark in the hallway, Overman tried to blend in with the wall, but it was too late. Danny had apparently caught a parole violation in Lee County and was now being brought into Brickeys to finish his sentence. “I see him comin’ down the hall,” said Mark, “and I’m like, ‘Hey Danny! How are ya? Good to see ya, brother!’ He just about shit.” The question of how to deal with Danny Overman didn’t require much thought since Mark had mulled it over often during the time that his shot-up knee was healing. He quickly made his way down the hallway to the counting office and approached the inmate there.

“There’s a fish coming in on a PV,” Mark told him. “How much to get him transferred to Little Saigon?”

“Ten dollars commissary will do it,” the inmate answered.

“When will he be assigned there?”

The inmate smiled. “As soon as I get that ten dollars.”

Overman was in Little Saigon by 10:00 the next morning. Mark then paid a visit to Big Chuck and told him about Overman. “I’d like to see him welcomed properly,” Mark said. Chuck said there would be no problem, and Mark knew there wouldn’t be. For twenty dollars commissary, Danny Overman was heading for the infirmary—within twenty-four hours, as it turned out. How bad was he hurt? “He was hurt,” Mark says. Along with the beating Overman received, he was relieved of the few meager possessions he had come in with. During pill call a couple of days later, Mark had the opportunity to visit Overman in the infirmary.

“Hey, Danny! Welcome to Brickeys. You feel like shootin’ me again?” Overman was apparently in no mood for conversation and simply moaned. Mark saw Overman one or two times after that at chow call but never spoke to him. Overman was still serving his sentence at Brickeys when Mark was transferred to Dermott. “I never saw him again, and I hope I never do.”

Mail Call

It is true that in prison, unless an inmate has visitors coming, mail is the high point of his day. Not all inmates receive mail, and despite the publicity surrounding Paradise Lost and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 and the growing presence of WM3.org on the Internet, Mark received surprisingly little mail. The mail that he did get was mostly from family. He received a few letters from WM3 supporters, some expressing real or feigned sympathy, others simply pumping Mark for information. There were also letters from young women with apparent ulterior motives. Men tend to be easily plied by even the slightest hint of sexual favors or romantic interest; magnify that pliability a hundred fold, and you’re talking about a man in prison. Three women wrote to Mark during his time in Dermott, all within a three-month span. The first woman, writing under the name of Andrea Timmons, never quite revealed her motive, though it was rumored that she was a well-known “poster” to the WM3.org message boards and that she was trying to manipulate Mark into admitting complicity in the West Memphis homicides or perhaps in the death of his wife. If this was true, it was not evident in her letters. They consisted mostly of sympathetic comments to Mark regarding the loss of his son, her belief in the guilt of the West Memphis Three, and expressions of hope that he was coping well with prison life. She occasionally became flirtatious, as when she wrote this on August 19, 2000: “I knew that you were tall, but my gosh, 6 feet 8 inches? My, my, you are a big boy, aren’t you? That can always be a good thing! Wink! From what you wrote you sound like a big old teddy bear if I may say so. A big old stuffed teddy bear.” After several letters back and forth, Andrea simply disappeared.

The second woman had what appeared to be a combination of thrill-seeking and financial gain as her motive. She went by the name of Julie Ann Eldridge, and her letters were mailed from Tampa, Florida. She made advances, hinting at the possibility of a romantic relationship (“who knows what the future may hold?”), and this appealed to Mark. She sent photos of herself—so she said; the authenticity cannot be verified—seated in a convertible, looking absolutely lovely. In several of her letters she asked Mark to autograph things that he was sending her—a friendship bracelet, envelope art, and so on—but would keep him at arm’s length when he told her he wanted to see her after he was released from prison. “Let’s get to know each other first,” she said. Many of the letters Julie sent were written on stationary adorned with the images of scantily clad models. “Those made their way around the barracks,” Mark recalls. She also asked Mark if he was allowed to receive “nude shots, topless pictures, or a Playboy magazine.” Although Julie claimed in her letters to be thirty years old, the picture she sent Mark showed two girls clearly of college age at most. She signed her name with little hearts drawn around it. She said that she was a “nail technician” and that her life was “boring.” She gave Mark her phone number and told him to call her in the evening. On several occasions he did just that, but the collect calls were never accepted.

If one thing was obvious about Julie’s letters, it was that they were written by at least two different people. This was evident by the penmanship and style used. There seems to be no reason for the dual authorship. The letters were stylistically different, but the content was of a similar nature, though Julie #1 wrote more provocatively than Julie #2. Each “Julie” also sent a postcard, but the difference between the two was striking. The card Julie #1 sent featured a full-body shot of a bikini-clad blonde, her head tilted back seductively, with a caption reading, “Florida’s Hot!”139 By contrast, Julie #2 sent a card depicting the US Postal Service’s Pacific Coast Rain Forest collection of thirty-three-cent postage stamps, featuring images of birds, butterflies, reptiles, and fish. She wrote on the back, in different handwriting than the previous card, “Mr. Byers: Do you like postcards? I can send more if you like them. Hope you are having a nice day!! Julie Ann Eldridge.”

Julie’s roommate, “Norie,” also sent Mark at least two letters and sent photos of her computer-generated art for him to see. Her letters were pretty flat and chitchatty. One notable exception was yet another postcard Mark received showing a nude female bottom, adorned with black leather chaps, perched above an American flag. The caption read, “Made in the USA.” The handwriting and style were clearly that of a third person. Whoever Norie was, she wasn’t either “Julie.”

Mark’s last letter to Julie sounded optimistic. “I’ll be waiting to hear back from you,” he wrote, but he never heard from her again. The correspondence had lasted several months and then suddenly halted, just as Andrea’s had. Shortly thereafter, Mark’s letters to Julie were up for sale on the Internet at www.supernaught.com for forty dollars each.140 The seller revealed that the letters had been purchased from a woman in Tampa, Florida, who had written Mark while he was in prison. She said she needed the money. Because Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 had premiered on HBO less than a month before the letters began, it could be speculated that these were a couple of young women looking for kicks and at the same time a few saleable souvenirs for their trouble.

Other letters were slightly less obvious in motive. Between July 1999 and January 2000, Mark exchanged a series of letters with Burk Sauls, co-founder of the “Free the West Memphis Three” support group and its companion website, WM3.org. Although Sauls adamantly insisted that he “never said [Mark was] guilty of anything, and never will,” he joined Mara Leveritt, Bruce Sinofsky, and Joe Berlinger and the other WM3.org members in promoting the stock and trade of that group, implication and innuendo, with an eye toward taking the focus off the West Memphis Three. This is evident by their repeated demands for bite mark impressions. “Prove your innocence” was the gist of Saul’s approach to Mark. If this were not so, what exactly was Saul’s interest in Mark? They certainly weren’t friends. For example, while documenting his experience at one of Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearings in Jonesboro, the hearing immortalized on film in Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, Sauls paints a less than flattering picture of Mark as a shameless ham, someone who was play-acting for the cameras to get attention. On his website, Sauls wrote that as the day’s hearings came to a close, Mark had “miraculously located the only remaining camera and was busy pontificating in his inimitable style,” and that after he was finished with the news crew, he “headed toward [Sauls and his team], and more importantly, the only other camera still shooting footage on the property.” Sauls continued, “He seemed to be performing a rehearsed scene from an unpublished Tennessee Williams play or reciting free-form prose by William Faulkner.” Sauls was probably just playing before the home crowd with words designed to appeal to the sympathetic browsers of the WM3 website; it is difficult to picture Mark Byers “free-forming” Faulkner. In his letters to Mark, however, Sauls insisted that he, Kathy Bakken, and Grove Pashley enjoyed the “off camera chats” they had with him.

In one letter to Mark, Sauls wrote, “Joe and Bruce have shown me some of the footage for the sequel to Paradise Lost and it looks good.” Contrast this with the reaction of Mark’s family upon their first viewing of Revelations: after a phone conversation with his sister, Mark wrote, “She said it makes me look real bad. Looks like those SOBs did a number on me.” Among many things, he was confused by the inclusion of Melissa in the second film, since she had died three months prior to the release of the first film and had been dead for more than a year before the second movie began filming. “I don’t understand. They have this [old] clip and don’t use it on the first one, but then bring it out for the second time around.”

Sauls wrote, somewhat unbelievably, “Do you think that Joe and Bruce are doing a good job on the new film? I really hope that they show things the way they truly are, and that they avoid sensationalizing it too much.” When one views Mark’s antics in the film, it is hard to imagine that there was any intent but to sensationalize the situation, though it’s always possible that Sauls was not shown these sections of the film. He suggests to Mark that maybe Berlinger and Sinofsky will make a movie about Mark’s predicament to “help [him] out.” Mark must have thought this was a great idea, knowing how much the first two movies had “helped him out.”

Sauls wrote that he and other WM3.org members found themselves defending Mark to other posters on their Internet discussion forum. He gave Mark a series of questions and suggested Mark “answer and elaborate” on them, giving his word that he would publish the answers without any editing. Following are some of those questions:

• Why do think so many people feel that you are guilty of murdering the children?

• During the first film, Paradise Lost, you are seen firing a pistol. A few people have asked me if during this time you were on probation, and if this was your gun or someone elses [sic]. Someone told me that when they were on probation, they were unable to own or operate a firearm or [sic] any type. What are the laws concerning this in Arkansas?

• Has the film helped you or hurt you?

• When you were interviewed for the LEEZA show, was that a good experience? [See chapter 4 for a complete discussion of this “experience.”]

• There has been a lot of talk about you working for the West Memphis Police Department. Did you ever work for them as a drug informant or in any other capacity? For how long and when?

• Just to clear it up, once and for all, when did you lose your teeth, and how?

Mark never answered this letter or any others from Sauls.

Mark also received a letter from Bruce Sinofsky, co-producer of the HBO documentaries, dated August 5, 1999, asking how Mark was doing and requesting that Mark “drop him a note.” Mark didn’t respond to Sinofsky’s letter either. According to what he wrote to his brother, he felt that he’d been tricked by the filmmakers.

What I truly don’t understand is no matter what I did or didn’t say, it still doesn’t change the facts of this crime!! Whatever I did in my past had nothing to do with May 5, ’93. This seems like a very bad dream and I’m in the middle again!! NY told me the second one was to be about all six families and their life after the trials. Our sister said that the Hobbses and Moores weren’t even in it, just ME.

This claim—that he had been told the other families would be participating in the films—was one that Mark would make frequently after his release from prison, with no one seeming to listen. That he was angry, as well as worried about the impact the film might have, is evidenced by this excerpt from the same letter:

Right now it’s probably good that I’m in the ADC so I can’t get to NY because I don’t know what I would do. I know what I would like to say to them. All I can think about now is how much harder this is going to make it on me. From the way our sister talked, it’s going to be hard to live in Jonesboro after this. I just don’t know what to do. After I talked to our sister I’ve been really freaked out and tore up. It’s driving me nuts. It makes me very mad to know they took my words and used them against me. From what our sister said, I’ve HUNG MYSELF. I’m never, never going to say anything else about this crap. As for the NY assholes, they need to leave me alone. I hope I never hear or see them again. I would like to call them at [xxx-xxx-xxxx] and tell them what I think or write a letter, but I’m not. They would use that against me too. Never again.

Despite this resolution, Mark agreed to participate in the third installment, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, ten years later. In this film, viewers saw a man who was much more in control of his emotions and with a different message entirely. Besides, by then the producers had a new alternate suspect.

Because he had been attacked in the Jonesboro nightclub even before the second film was released, his concern about living there after the film aired was probably justified. After talking to some of the guards who had seen the movie, Mark felt a little better. “They say they don’t think I had anything to do with it, and the WM3 are still guilty as far as they’re concerned. They say they will never get out or get a new trial. So things here are ok for now.” One of the prison staff members said she would try to get a copy of the video for Mark to watch, but it never happened. Mark’s copy of Revelations was shipped to his brother in Memphis; Mark would not view the film until after his release from prison on August 29, 2000.

Dermott

After almost seven months in Brickeys, Mark was transferred to the Delta Regional Unit in Dermott, Arkansas, where he would serve the remainder of his sentence. Dermott is classified as a minimum/medium-security facility, as opposed to Brickeys medium/maximum-security classification. Although it is nicknamed the “Dirty D,” Dermott is a definite step up from Brickeys for most inmates; the food is better—as it tends to be in the smaller institutions—and overall, there is less violence. Still, it’s prison. On his first or second night there, while in intake barracks #4, Mark spotted an inmate sitting on his rack, just staring at him. He had a satanic Bible open on his lap and a pentagram suncatcher (though, of course, there was no sun) hanging over his head. He eyed Mark and said, “I know who you are,” ostensibly recognizing him from the news, or perhaps from Paradise Lost, or maybe just because the information was already out on the wire.

Mark just shrugged. “So what?”

“Nothing. I just know who you are, that’s all.” For whatever reason—perhaps he took issue with Mark’s comments in the film regarding evil and devil worship—the inmate soon snitched on Mark for eating chocolate in the barracks; the pettiness in prison is sometimes incomprehensible. When Mark heard what had happened, he parked himself on his rack and started staring the other inmate down.

“What are you looking at?” the inmate snapped.

“Oh, nothing,” Mark calmly replied. “I’m just going to sit here and wait until you’re asleep, and then I’m going to kill you.” Visibly agitated, the inmate nonetheless managed to fall asleep. At around one o’clock in the morning he awoke to find Mark sitting on his rack, drinking coffee and eating a chocolate bar, just staring at him.

He immediately began shouting. “Guard! Guard! Guard!” Over and over, nearing panic, he called for the hacks. The guards arrived and superficially tossed the barracks, but nothing was found, and no problem was detected; Mark was lying peacefully on his rack. “That guy is trying to kill me! I want out! Put me in PC.” The guards did him one better; after keeping him in protective custody for several days, they shipped him back to Brickeys.

Though Mark had now been received into Dermott, he hadn’t gotten out of Brickeys scot-free. A truism in prison, as Mark would write in his letters home, is that if you’re not careful, you can get into trouble and not even know why. On the bus ride from Brickeys to Dermott, Mark was not careful. He and another inmate, an old-timer who had lived in the barracks across the hall from Mark in Brickeys, were talking, just passing time, and the old man told Mark a story about someone in his barracks at Brickeys, a guy named Green. It seemed that Green had gone to commissary one day, stashed his goodies in the locker on his rack, and then been promptly ripped off by his barracks-mates after leaving his rack unattended. It was nothing, just a story. It happened to inmates all the time; it had happened to Mark. Where Mark was careless, however, was in his retelling of this story to another inmate at Dermott. And what Mark didn’t know was that Green had also been transferred from Brickeys to Dermott, and he soon caught wind of the fact that Mark, whom he didn’t even know, was chatting him up to other inmates. Green didn’t want the inmates at Dermott to regard him as ripe for a shakedown, to know that he’d been “punked” by another inmate, and he surely didn’t want anyone to think that it was okay to randomly spread stories about him. Word started going around the yard that Green was pissed off and that he had plans to find Mark and “bust him up.” One afternoon on the prison softball field, he got his chance.

Mark was sitting on a bench at the edge of the field watching the game. At one point, he stood up to stretch his legs, handing his sunglasses to a friend as he rose. Without warning, he was struck squarely in the face with a clenched fist, sending him sprawling backward over the bench and onto the ground. This was what the inmates referred to as a “creeping.” When he stood up, inmates were scattering, and the whistle was blowing to call in the yard. Mark’s nose had been bashed in—broken, as X-rays would later confirm—and blood was flowing freely down the front of his whites. Still seeing stars, Mark staggered back into the barracks with the other inmates. Chow call was twenty minutes away, and Mark cleaned himself up as well as he was able to, considering that his nose now looked like a pound of raw hamburger. News of the fight spread rapidly through the barracks, and by the time Mark came off the chow line and started to eat his lunch, the sergeant was standing at his table. “Cap’n wants to see you right now.”

When Mark walked into the captain’s office, Green was already there. During the twenty minutes between the attack and chow call, Green had learned a couple of things about Mark, the most significant being Mark’s affiliation with the prison gang Dirty White Boys (DWB), a spin-off from the larger and far more violent Aryan Brotherhood.141 Although DWB did not practice the “blood in, blood out” policy of its parent gang, it did have a reputation to maintain. An assault against a member had to be avenged. Immediately upon returning to his barracks, Green had started getting threats screamed at him from another barracks. “You’re a dead man, Green!” DWB had also been passing “kites”—notes tied to a string and tossed to another barrack—informing Mark that they were aware of the situation and were ready to retaliate. Although Green didn’t have a plan yet for how to deal with DWB, he knew that he at least had to get to the captain before Mark in order to try to clear himself of any charges Mark might bring against him.

“So what happened, Byers?” the captain asked.

“Well, I was sittin’ on the bench, not paying attention, and got hit with a foul ball.”

“Green?”

“I didn’t see nothin’. I just looked up and saw people were taking off, so I did too.”

Rules are rules. Nobody snitches.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” the captain said. “If anything happens to Byers, I’m coming after Green first. If anything happens to Green, I’m coming after Byers.”

With one problem taken care of, Green now began to worry about DWB. But with less than six months until his parole hearing, Mark wanted no part of an attack against another inmate, which would result in the loss of his good time credits, so he pleaded with DWB to let him handle the matter himself. Although they agreed in principle, it would be only a matter of time before they got tired of waiting for Mark and took matters into their own hands. There was, however, a solution. Mark had an inmate friend at the counting office who was responsible for coordinating the movement of cons between prisons. For twenty-five dollars, this inmate would place another inmate’s name on a transfer list and have him moved to another facility, which is exactly what he did to Mr. Green. For good measure, Mark had his friend tack twelve months onto Green’s parole hearing date, a mistake that was not rectified for six months.142

As for the broken nose, Mark thinks he got off easy. “I was just glad it wasn’t a shank.” As it was, it took several weeks to get him down to Cummins Unit, where the nearest ADC X-ray machine was located. By that time, Mark had had his nose “set” by a fellow inmate. “He stuck two pencils up my nose—one in each nostril—wrapped them in tissue paper, and yanked. I heard the sound—just like you can hear your teeth grinding in your head—and that was the last thing I heard before I passed out. I woke up with a wet towel on my face and in a whole lot of pain.”

One of the privileges of being a class I inmate was that you were given a job to pass the time. It didn’t pay, but it was a chance to break the routine and spend more time out of the barracks. Mark worked at one of Dermott’s prison industries, Janitorial Products. Here inmates manufacture soap products, including liquid dish detergent, oven cleaner, floor wax, and floor wax stripper, all made exclusively for ADC use. Mark ran a machine called the wet platform. (“At least I stay clean and smell as good as possible in this hell hole!”)

Preparing for Reentry

As his experience and prison smarts increased, Mark learned that although life inside involved one hazard after another, there were four especially dangerous times for an inmate: induction (while still a “fish”), chow call, pill call, and the time immediately following the receipt of your parole date. It was this last pitfall that Mark had to negotiate now, and it would prove to be one of the most slippery.

As Mark’s time grew short, his anxiety heightened. Short-timers in prison face the most abuse from the class III and class IV inmates. During this time, lifers and other long-timers were most likely to mess with an inmate who was on his way out, for no other reason than cheap thrills and petty jealousy. Lifers derived great satisfaction from getting a short-timer to go off, thus jeopardizing his parole status. Mark steered clear of them to the extent that he could, but it was not always possible. During his stay at the ADC, he had been “stomped” to the point of passing blood in his urine for several days and had sustained three or four broken ribs, several black eyes, a total of eight stitches in his head, and one broken nose. “I thought I got out pretty easy.” Easy, perhaps, but medical care was not always immediately forthcoming in the ADC. After the aforementioned stomping, where three inmates had kicked, punched, and “slocked” him (hit him with a padlock stuffed inside a sock) for several minutes, Mark had great difficulty getting in to see the prison doctors. He finally had to file a grievance in order to be seen and even then waited two weeks; he was given two extra-strength Tylenol and sent back to his barracks. The likelihood of these types of attacks only increased as word got around that he was paroling out.

As June approached, he began to prepare for his parole hearing. Because of the high stakes—freedom—and the risk of something, anything, going wrong, this is an extremely stressful time for a prospective parolee. A parole plan must be submitted by the inmate, detailing where he wants to live and with whom, where he plans on working, and how he plans to spend his free time. If he does not have a relative or approved friend to live with, he must find a halfway house or other interim housing where he can stay until he finds a place of his own. Also, a judge from the judicial district where the inmate was convicted—Sharp County, in Mark’s case—must approve the parole plan and agree to allow the parolee to reside in that county. Since Mark was requesting to parole out to Craighead County, a judge from that district also had to approve the plan. Fortunately for Mark, his sister in Jonesboro was willing to let him parole out to her, though her agreement had not always been a sure thing, particularly after the release of Revelations. “Brother, please don’t leave me,” Mark wrote after a telephone conversation with his sister, who had just viewed the film. “From the way our sister talked, you are all I have. I don’t even know if she’s going to let me parole out to her. Even that would be only a short time thing. She sounded really mad at me, like I planned this all out to happen. I don’t know what to do if I don’t parole out to Jonesboro. An out of state plan takes five or six months longer. I was told I will see the parole board the first week of June and should catch the EPA [Emergency Powers Act, designed to reduce overcrowding] and get out somewhere before Oct 6th. If I parole out to our sister in Jonesboro, all I have to do is tell my parole officer that I got my own place [and] then move to wherever. I’m now thinking about a CAVE or under a BIG ROCK. From the way she talked, when I get out I need to go hide somewhere. I just don’t know what to think or do. Please, please, HELP ME. Brother, right now I feel DEAD inside. I can’t even think straight. Things have gone to shit. I guess it’s my fault because I trusted the jerks in NY. What a dumbass I’ve been. Never again.”

Avoiding trouble—and troublemakers—was Mark’s number one priority in his last few weeks at Dermott. “People would fuck with you just because they could,” he said. An inmate whose parole date is coming up first learns to keep that information to himself as long as possible, though sooner or later, word gets out. Mark recalls, “There were lots of guys I knew who got close to their dates and went off on someone who was harassing them.” If an inmate makes it to the day of his release without catching a violation, he is wise to clear out his stuff and leave his barracks as soon as possible. On his release date, Mark stood nearly eight hours at the control booth waiting to be processed, during which time he was catcalled, elbowed by passers-by, spat on, and taunted to the point of such aggravation that he nearly lost control. Determined, he kept his composure, and on August 29, 2000, Mark Byers was a free man. Today, he is convinced that prison did indeed save his life. Perhaps, as expressed in the biblical gospels, it is necessary to lose one’s life in order to save it, and if so, Mark’s loss of his freedom to the ADC for fifteen months—plus six-and-a-half years of supervised parole—was what he needed to apply the brakes to a life that was careening out of control and set it straight.

“I’m working on my plans to start over,” Mark said after being released, “this time the right way, the only way.” After a successful parole hearing, Mark Byers was granted his freedom that day in August, with a supervised parole period ending May 26, 2007, marking the termination of his eight-year debt to the state of Arkansas. He has thus far made good on his vow never to return.

CHAPTER 6

Redemption and Revelations

I wish I was a messenger, and all the news was good.

—Eddie Vedder

Good people are always so sure they’re right.

—Last words of convicted killer Barbara Graham upon her execution in June 1955

When Mark Byers walked out of prison in Dermott, Arkansas, on August 29, 2000, he had a typical ex-con’s list of things to do. “After I get out,” he wrote just prior to his release, “I’m looking at the Mississippi side of the bridge at the Grand Helena Casino, some Crown Royal, and the first good looking woman I find. After that, I don’t know; that’ll do for starters.” In truth, his dominant thoughts involved getting as far away from Dermott as he could.

It is safe to say that Mark Byers looked only forward, not back, though to say that he left prison a free man is only a half-truth. He still owed six-and-a-half years to the state of Arkansas in the form of supervised parole. Although it may seem like a simple matter for a parolee to stay out of trouble and meet the conditions of his parole, the reality is much different for many. Mark was no exception, but with a little common sense (and sometimes a little is all he could muster), a good dose of support from his family, and a lot of luck, he managed to make it. Since his parole plan specified that he parole out to his sister in Jonesboro, it was there that he went on the day of his release, though his true desire was to get the hell out of Arkansas forever.

Mark’s sister’s home is a single-level brick house sitting on an immaculately manicured suburban half-acre, and it was here that Mark began the fresh start that most ex-cons aspire to but often don’t achieve. He had no job, no car, no money, and no female companionship. His only real commitment was a monthly date with his parole officer. At age forty-three, he had before him a lifetime to figure out what to do with and a past that he might never let go of. During his time with his sister, Mark picked up work painting houses. He did a job for a friend of his brother, and word caught on that he was dependable and did good work. He bought a 1984 gold Buick Riviera from a friend, paying it off in installments. He had one objective, and that was to stay out of trouble for the next six-and-a-half years. At times it was all he could handle.

In 2002 Mark’s brother once again came through for him by hooking him up with a mobile home that, though needing renovation and a place to park, would provide Mark with the first home of his own since Cherokee Village. After gaining approval from the Arkansas Department of Parole, Mark located an empty lot in Millington, Tennessee, five minutes down the road from his brother, and spent the next year gutting the place and making it livable. By the beginning of 2003, he was finally home. He was doing pretty well painting and was living near family, and with the exception of his monthly visits to his parole officer, he had been able to put Brickeys and Dermott far behind him. Still, he was alone.

Jacki

Jacki Sizemore is a crafter—wood, glass, all types of mediums. She loved to work with her hands. Stained glass, edging glass, dollhouses and dollhouse furniture made from polymer clay—she loved them all. Not only did the work bring her great pleasure and satisfaction; it sustained her during some very tough times. Her health was often fragile. She had had two kidney transplants, a pancreas transplant, and an ongoing battle with diabetes, all while trying to raise a child. During the time that Mark was trying to cope with the loss of his son in May 1993, Jacki was on dialysis, trying to hold on until a compatible donor was located. “I didn’t pay attention to the world of news around me; I didn’t care. I remember a few years later watching a movie on HBO, thinking it was about the book Paradise Lost [the 1667 work by John Milton]. I obviously didn’t read the information before clicking on it. I was so bored in the first five minutes that I changed channels.” So it was that years later she didn’t recognize the hulking giant of a man who offered to help her off the floor after she tripped over her own shoelaces in a Memphis bookstore. “I had an armload of crafting books—eight or nine of them—and as I went sprawling across the floor, this towering man offered me a hand up. I had no idea who he was; he was just a gentleman.” They spent about twenty minutes together over coffee before going their separate ways, though not before Mark asked for her phone number.

A week later he called to ask her out. Jacki begged off, saying she was in the process of moving and just didn’t have the time. They spoke on the phone for several hours, Mark trying his hardest to impress her. At one point in the conversation, Mark blurted out, “I’ve been on TV.”

Jacki shot back, “Yeah? Well if it was on Jerry Springer, we can stop talking now!” He told her something about his past, the murders, and the HBO documentaries. Then he offered to help her move. She declined. Jacki was an independent woman, and she’d handle things on her own as she always had.

Several times over the next few weeks, Mark tried to coax Jacki into going out with him. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested; she was simply distracted. Eventually, however, as her arms began to wear out from moving boxes and Mark’s calls to her started tapering off, she gave in and called to ask for his help. Within thirty minutes, Mark was there. While she unpacked, they talked into the early hours; they both love to talk. During the move, Mark had accidentally broken her VCR and an ashtray. The next afternoon, he showed up with replacements for both. As they began to date steadily, Mark put the VCR to use by playing the Paradise Lost videos for Jacki, giving her the first glimpse into the reason people seemed to recognize him and so many regarded him with trepidation. Jacki’s initial assessment: “I saw a lot of underlying psychology and selective editing in the films that seemed to have no real point.” She saw little resemblance between the man she had been seeing and the out-of-control character in the films. To her, his grief was evident, as was the filmmakers’ efforts to make him entertaining (not that it was all that hard).

One night, Mark randomly said to her, “You know, you love me, and one day you’re going to be my wife.” Jacki was only a little surprised. “My initial reaction was, ‘No, I don’t, and no, I’m not!’ That was part of the 5 percent of the time I have been wrong since we met.” On June 7, 2003, Mark and Jacki were married in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and moved into Mark’s Memphis-area home to start their new life.

Not one to be easily intimidated, even Jacki was shocked by Mark’s ability to so quickly and completely self-destruct.

The Cuckoo’s Nest

The person who arguably knows Mark Byers better than anyone makes this assessment: “Mark is not one who does well with moderation. He is swimming fast and high or diving dark and deep. Over the years he has gotten better about balance.” His unsteadiness at times causes Jacki great concern. “But that is one characteristic that makes him Mark.” Mark’s life has been characterized by this dichotomy, and the years between his marriage to Jacki and his conversion to supporter of the West Memphis Three clearly reflects this.

Mark and Jacki were doing well in the years following their marriage. The house painting business was steady, and Mark had a reliable crew of three to five men whom he kept very busy. He was making better money than he had in many years but was also working much harder. The work was tedious, and he was frequently away from home for weeks at a time. This in itself was enough to put a strain on any marriage, but the problem was exacerbated by Mark’s drinking. When he was busy, Mark prospered. And when he prospered, he partied—and partied hard. Crown Royal Canadian whiskey was his drink of choice, and he could, and often did, down considerable quantities. It seemed as though when Mark was working, he drank. When he was depressed, he drank. When he had headaches, he drank. Whatever the root causes of his drinking were didn’t much matter; he was once again heading for disaster.

When Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005, Mark took his crew to Mississippi to work on the reconstruction of a friend’s home. He’d be gone for two weeks at a time, but whenever he returned home, he brought plenty of cash. After the work in Mississippi was completed, Mark landed a job in Missouri repainting more storm-damaged homes, these from a series of twisters that had roared through in the summer of 2006, including a massive supercell that had spawned some 105 tornadoes over four days in two states. This job also required time away from home, usually five days at a clip. The pattern at the job site was set early. He would party with the crew after work each day and continue upon returning home Friday evening. Sometimes he neglected to stop drinking long enough to drive home, drawing a DUI in the process. The fact that Mark was still on probation made this problematic. If his parole officer (PO) learned of this, he said nothing. Mark wasn’t always so lucky. A similar incident in Memphis did catch the attention of his PO, who decided not to revoke Mark’s parole. The two had always been on good terms. Mark never missed a parole meeting, always obtained permission before traveling out of the jurisdiction, passed all his urine analysis tests, and never gave the man anything to complain about. Although Mark was still reckless at times, he knew one thing for sure: he wasn’t going back to prison.

Mark didn’t leave his drinking on the job; it was becoming a problem at home that was too big to ignore. “He was drinking heavily,” Jacki recalls, “and now had a doctor giving him a prescription for Xanax. For about three weeks it was Mark’s body here, falling over everything and nodding out. The husband I knew was not home.” The jobs—inside jobs that inundated his brain with paint fumes—were taxing to his health, causing severe headaches that were aggravated by the tumor still living in his brain.143 “I had migraines. I self-medicated,” he said. Self-medicating or not, he drank plenty and was also popping 1 mg Xanax without regard. Mark’s history of mental illness would seem to advocate the avoidance of alcohol, and the combination of alcohol and Xanax can be deadly. Both drugs are central nervous system depressants, and the combination not only increases the effects of alcohol but delivers a double-whammy to the brain and heart and can seriously impair respiration. If Mark was aware of any of this, it wasn’t reflected in his behavior. He often had to be guided to the bedroom or to the car after a day of drinking, unable to navigate on his own. He and Jacki had been thrown out of restaurants as a result of Mark’s drunkenness. “I was at the point where I dreaded his coming home. When he was home, I was so stressed, and when he was gone, I had peace.”

Meanwhile, the company that was contracting Mark to do the painting in Missouri went bankrupt, owing Mark money. He still had to pay his crew for work they had already done and had also incurred legal fees and fines related to a drunk-driving arrest after an automobile accident. All of these expenses had to be paid out of Mark and Jacki’s personal savings.

At the same time, Mark was in the middle of a stressful movie rights negotiation. The movie deal wasn’t a mere vanity issue. Mark and Jacki needed the money badly, and they had precious few ways of getting it. With chronic health problems herself, Jacki had been unable to work for many years. As the weeks and months of 2006 went by, Mark and Jacki’s savings dwindled, and the couple was once again plunged into poverty. Mark lost his truck and had to hock his modest bass boat for bill-paying and grocery money. Mark’s response was typical but unusually severe, even for him. A three-day booze and Xanax bender came to a head on a Sunday afternoon in February 2007. After consuming nearly a gallon of whiskey in three days (by his own reckoning), Mark staggered out of the bedroom and informed Jacki that he had also taken eight Xanax tablets. Jacki took his pulse, which was weak, and sent him back to bed. She called Mark’s brother and while talking to him heard a loud thump. She hung up the phone, immediately dialed 911, and then rushed into the bathroom. Mark, who had earlier fallen four times on a fifteen-foot trip to the bedroom, had fallen backward into the tub and appeared to be unconscious. The paramedics on the line told Jacki not to move him. Were his condition not so serious, the instruction might have been laughable—the thought of tiny, five-foot-two Jacki trying to move her 275-pound husband from the bathtub. By the time paramedics arrived, Mark had somehow managed to pull himself from the tub and was lying half-on and half-off the bed. His blood pressure was dangerously low—60/40—and he was in and out of consciousness. He was taken by ambulance to Methodist North Hospital in Memphis.

Nearly twelve hours later, the emergency room doctor came out and informed Jacki that Mark’s blood pressure had stabilized and that he would soon be discharged. “You can’t send him home with me,” she said flatly. “He’ll just do the same thing, and I can’t stand to watch it anymore.” The doctor told her that he did not have sufficient grounds to have Mark committed. Jacki was resolute: “Mark doesn’t know that.” She told Mark that because of the level of drugs in his system, he could be committed against his will, but that it would be better for him if he committed himself. On that point the doctor concurred. Mark was pretty cavalier about it later. “I didn’t want to wind up at someplace like Charter [Behavioral] Hospital, so I figured three or four days of detox and rehab at Methodist North, with some R&R and decent food, would be just the ticket.” Unbeknownst to either Mark or Jacki, what they were doing was signing him into a psychiatric ward, where he would be held a virtual prisoner for the next eight days.

Still foggy from the massive amounts of drugs and alcohol he’d consumed, Mark woke up on the other side of the looking glass. During the early morning hours, while he was in an incoherent dream state, he had been transported the twelve miles from Methodist North Hospital to Methodist Mental Health Institute. As he began to come around, he became aware of a strange feeling taking hold of him, and he realized with relief what it was: he was hungry. He was given a cheeseburger, chips, and a Coke and sent to a semiprivate room. His roommate was a middle-aged black man who briefly acknowledged Mark before rolling over and going back to sleep. Mark had barely settled into his room when he was hustled out for more vitals and a blood draw. By 7:00 a.m. he was taken to the “day room,” where between twenty and thirty patients were sitting. What he saw there made his jaw drop. “These were things you’d only see in a horror movie. Old women walking around in those gowns with no backs, wide open. Looked like two shriveled-up old prunes. People talking to themselves, throwing things at each other—even feces They were fuckin’ crazy!” As a panic started building, Mark went into “prison mode”—act tough, don’t be afraid, blend in. “Crazy people will hurt you.” Then he called his wife.

“Get me the hell outta here now! This ain’t rehab; it’s a fuckin’ loony bin!”

Jacki had been sound asleep and was as surprised at this news as Mark was. “Don’t worry. I’ll do everything I can to get you out,” she said, though she had no intention of doing any such thing; he could have been in Leavenworth for all it mattered. “He needed a wake-up call, and I was willing to do what I had to in order to help my best friend and husband.” Two hours later, Mark called again, telling Jacki what she already knew: he would have to stay in the hospital until he was released by the doctor.

So on this first day of his stay, Mark struggled to settle into the routine of the hospital. After an early breakfast, the patients would gather at 10:00 a.m. for a group meeting with the doctor. Mark hated it. “After the meeting, it was smoke cigarettes and watch TV for the rest of the day. There was no ‘therapy’ or ‘treatment.’ This was a place where street people came after their welfare checks were spent. You could see that the place would be empty toward the beginning of the month. Then people would get their checks, spend it all, and check themselves in for ‘three hots and a cot’ until they got thrown out. It was pathetic.” Pathetic perhaps, but it was home for Mark Byers until the doctor decided he could leave. Jacki visited him twice during his stay, and the two spoke on the phone several times a day. “Make the best of it,” she told him. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”

Life in a psychiatric ward was an unearthly experience for Mark. “Some of the things I saw in there reminded me of prison; some were worse. People banging their heads against the wall, women taking their clothes off—I get nightmares from some of those images. People walking down the hall, crapping and peeing themselves like dogs. There were food fights every day. There was this one white lady—looked like a junkie, raggedy clothes, dirty hair, never spoke, just grunted and snarled like an animal, and they were letting her roam around. She’d eat other people’s food, vomit it up, and start throwing it at the other patients!” The “therapy” Mark was receiving was similar to the “rehabilitation” he’d received in prison. It was, to put it kindly, somewhat unstructured. “I got about forty-five seconds a day with the doctor—you know, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Doing okay today?’ and that was it. We did this for eight days, during which time I had a total of about five minutes of face time with the doctor. At the end of the eight days, I was released.” In Mark’s view, the operation at Methodist Mental Health Institute was geared toward profit; there was little pretense of therapy, treatment, or rehabilitation. It was just a matter of keeping the “patients” alive. Be that as it may, when Mark walked out of Methodist eight days after walking in, he was at least clean and sober.

Jacki had her own health issues. After being diagnosed with diabetes at age five, she spent the next twenty-two years living the way diabetics live, with daily insulin injections and a persistent dread of complications—hypoglycemia, diabetic coma, heart failure, kidney failure, and potential blindness. In April 1994, she underwent a successful kidney and pancreas transplant that allowed her thirteen years of freedom from the disease that had plagued her most of her life. Free from cancer for many years, Jacki had been worried as early as November 2006 that she was relapsing. “With all that was going on, I didn’t want to deal with it. I knew that it would have been another excuse for Mark to stay in a stupor.” When Mark came home from the hospital, however, she told him that she was probably going to need major surgery. An examination by her doctor confirmed her fears, and on May 5, 2007, she underwent surgery to remove the cancer. Though the surgery was successful, and her recovery went very well, she was back in the hospital six months later to have a gallstone removed. While there, she learned that her inflamed bladder had caused acute pancreatitis, and she was once again diabetic. She was successfully treated and once again had her illness under control. With any luck, things around the Byers house would return to normal.

The More Things Change

In the eighteen-year history of the case of the West Memphis Three, the years 2006-2008 were pivotal. Money from celebrity supporters—whose ranks, as noted previously, had grown to include Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Johnny Depp, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, director Peter Jackson, Margaret Cho, and Marilyn Manson—was pouring into the fund managed by Echols’s wife, a landscape architect from New York named Lorri Davis. Echols and Davis had been married in 1999 in a prison ceremony presided over by a Buddhist priest. The defense fund used Davis’s Arkansas Take Action’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for financial reporting purposes. Although the group doesn’t publically disclose the amount taken in from donors, it is said to total well over one million dollars, perhaps closer to two million. In June 2008, Eddie Vedder, who was just coming off the production of his Grammy award-winning soundtrack for the film Into the Wild, was doing a limited-engagement solo tour, his first ever, on the West Coast. A portion of the proceeds went directly to the Damien Echols Defense Fund. Through ticket and hotel room package auctions—five pairs of “premium” tickets per show were auctioned—the tour may have raised up to $100,000 for Echols. Other celebrities used different vehicles for donations, though it is doubtful that any raised as much for Echols as Vedder.144 “Eddie has been with us for six years,” Davis told author Mara Leveritt in 2004. “We simply wouldn’t be where we are without him.”145

Davis had been putting the money to good use, making calls and writing letters and e-mails to various attorneys and experts, retaining people she felt could help her husband. Dennis Riordan, a San Francisco attorney with extensive experience in federal appellate law, was hired as lead counsel. High-profile rent-an-expert Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner of New York City and current chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, was retained to examine photographs of the victims of the West Memphis homicides. Baden’s forensic skills had been previously sought for the O. J. Simpson, Claus Von Bulow, and Phil Spector murder cases. Dr. Werner Spitz, former chief medical examiner for the city of Detroit, who had been a consultant for the Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), Phil Spector, Robert Chambers (the “Preppy Murder”), and JonBenét Ramsey cases, was brought in to examine autopsy and crime scene photographs. Both Baden and Spitz were of the opinion that the three murdered children’s injuries were inflicted not by knives, as was alleged by the prosecution during the 1994 trials, but by postmortem “animal predation” by “large carnivores.” Dr. Vincent Di Maio, who had provided expert testimony for the Scott Peterson and Phil Spector trials, was also retained to examine the photographs. Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic odontologist from Coral Gables, Florida, whose testimony had driven the nail into Ted Bundy’s coffin for the 1978 murders of Florida State University co-eds Lisa Levy (whose left buttock Bundy had bitten) and Margaret Bowman, was tapped to search the victims’ photographs for any bite mark activity. John Douglas, the “mind hunter” who inspired the “Jack Crawford” character in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs and who headed the FBI’s Investigative Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia, for twenty-five years, was retained to develop a profile of an alternate, unknown subject (UNSUB), someone other than Mark Byers, who was a dead horse beaten for fourteen years already.146

The Echols defense team had taken advantage of a 2001 Arkansas law that gave death-row inmates extensive access to DNA testing.147 DNA samples selected from a list agreed to by the defense and the state were received by Bode Laboratories in Springfield, Virginia, on July 7, 2004. These included the following:

• fingernail scrapings

• hair and tissue samples (including those later identified as possibly belonging to Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby)

• ligatures (shoelaces)

• blood samples

• cuttings from victims’ clothing (to identify apparent staining)

Eighteen months later, in December 2005, the results began to come back from Bode. Whatever the defense had been expecting, they couldn’t have been too disappointed with the findings. Among all the items tested, none tied Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, or Jessie Misskelley to the crime scene, though it was true that the defense had picked out the items to be tested.

Tinsel Town and the Monster in the Shadows

For Mark Byers, things just got stranger and stranger. In May 2006, Dimension Films, a production company owned by media mega-moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein, along with producer Liz Fowler, founder of Clear Pictures Entertainment, announced that they had acquired the rights to Devil’s Knot from Mara Leveritt. Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) were to write the screenplay, and Clark Peterson (producer of the Academy Award-winning Monster) would join in the production, which was scheduled to begin by the end of 2006. Dimension quickly set about obtaining life rights of people they believed were key players in the “True Story of the West Memphis Three.” Investigator Ron Lax, former juvenile officer Jerry Driver, and Pam and Terry Hobbs all reportedly signed deals with Dimension.148 Although arguably no one had received more attention in the book Devil’s Knot, or in either Paradise Lost film, than Mark Byers—with the exception of the WM3 themselves—Mark Byers wasn’t approached by anyone associated with the film.

In May 2007, Mark got an unexpected visit from Ron Lax of Inquisitor, Inc. The blue jeans-clad private investigator was working for Damien Echols’s new attorney, Dennis Riordan, and wanted Mark’s help as they searched for alternate suspects. He mentioned that they were looking at a homeless man who frequented the woods near the interstate, but Mark didn’t believe him. Finding such an alternate suspect had always been at the top of the defense’s list—a list that had previously been headed by the likes of Mark Byers; there was a better than even chance that Lax still had him there.

“Why should I help you?” Mark asked. “You said some pretty shitty things about me. You all but accused me of killing my son.”

Lax replied, “I know, Mark. I’m sorry for that. I was just trying to do my job.” During the criminal trials in 1994, Lax had acknowledged having suspicions of Mark in connection with the murders even before the Kershaw knife was turned in by HBO.149 Now, he said, he was looking for some help. “Would you be willing to at least look at some of the results of my investigation and give me your opinion on it?” Mark said he would, but Lax never came back, most likely because after all these years, suspect-wise, Mark Byers was still a dead end, and Lax knew it. But there was another, much more significant reason that Lax didn’t revisit Mark: the defense had finally discovered an enormous omission in the 1993-1994 criminal investigation, something that went to the very core of the case. This discovery, involving investigative work so elementary in police procedure, could potentially unravel the entire case against the West Memphis Three. At that point, the defense was counting on it.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Liz Fowler got back in touch with Mark in July 2007. Scott Derrickson was working on the screenplay, she said, and there were talks of what Mark’s portrayal in the film—which she said was assured—would be and what compensation would be offered. He should call back sometime in September, when plans would be more solidified. To handle contract negotiations, Mark retained Memphis attorney Ross Sampson, who was also representing Terry Hobbs in his deal with Dimension (and who later acted as Hobbs’s “spokesman” during his defamation suit against Natalie Maines in 2009). However, when Sampson, at Fowler’s direction, contacted attorneys at Dimension for details of the contract for his new client, they were mystified. “Give us your pitch,” they told Sampson.

Pitch? What pitch? wondered Sampson. “I thought you’d be making us an offer,” he said sheepishly. Clearly, there was chaos in the studio’s camp, and it would take weeks and a new lawyer to straighten out the matter. Mark eventually retained another Memphis attorney, Claiborne Ferguson, and a contract was signed between Mark and Clear Pictures Entertainment.150 Mark would be paid an undisclosed sum for the right to portray him, with significant payment up-front.151 Fowler was hopeful that Dimension would go ahead with the film now that she had secured all the rights and at least some of the resources needed for production.

Fowler, according to Mark Byers, was prepared to produce a film that portrayed Damien Echols as a “psychopathic killer, nothing but evil inside.” Baldwin and Misskelley would be depicted as mere followers. The occult angle, bogus as most thought it was, was easy fodder for the screen version of Devil’s Knot, particularly considering Derrickson and Boardman’s earlier collaboration on The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005. Not only was this version of the case completely contrary to that given by Mara Leveritt, but it also unsurprisingly incurred the wrath of Lorri Davis, who was said to be furious that her husband would be maligned on the big screen when he was in the middle of legal appeals that could save his life. Davis expressed as much to Fowler, who said that the film would probably be done in the fashion of Emily Rose and that the audience would be “led” to the conclusion that the West Memphis Three were guilty. One has to wonder why good money would be paid for a book that the purchasers seemingly had no intention of actually using, save for the title. But that was before Damien Echols filed his petition in federal court and before Mark Byers’s famous “change of heart.”

Terry Hobbs

Mark Byers wasn’t the only one that defense team investigators were talking to. By the time Ron Lax came to see Mark that Memorial Day in 2007, the only true piece of physical evidence (with the exception of fiber evidence introduced at the Echols/ Baldwin trial) that linked anyone to the crime scene in Robin Hood Hills had been discovered.

The list of people the police had named as credible suspects during the original investigation in 1993 was predictably large, consisting of some twenty-nine individuals who had blood and saliva samples taken for analysis by the Arkansas State Crime Lab. Some of the “suspects”—including Mark Byers, Todd Moore, and Terry Hobbs—also had hair samples taken, but none of these were “microscopically similar” to any hairs recovered from the victims’ bodies.152 Unlike Mark Byers and Todd Moore, however, Terry Hobbs was never interviewed by police. How many detectives, prosecutors, attorneys, investigators, and supporters had waded through the evidence files without noticing that an interview with Terry Hobbs, including an accounting of his time on the day of the murders, had never been conducted? Ron Lax himself had been an investigator on the Echols defense team in 1993. Why hadn’t he noticed then that Hobbs had never been interviewed by police? While focusing on Mark Byers, Lax, like everyone else, had glossed over the obvious. Just by rolling the dice, the police might have had a one-in-five chance that Mark Byers, Todd Moore, Terry Hobbs, Ricky Murray (Christopher’s biological father), or Steve Branch Sr. was responsible for the murders.153 If the defense were looking for an alternate suspect—and they were—they couldn’t have done much better than Terry Hobbs. Years later, Gary Gitchell would say that he could not recall whether Terry Hobbs had been interviewed back in 1993. If he was, there was no record of it. Hobbs himself has stated that he was never interviewed.154

But what put Lax and his assistant investigator Rachel Geiser onto Hobbs in the first place? It is likely that the Echols defense team on the West Coast had its own investigators go over the files, particularly the DNA reports when they started coming back in from Bode Labs in 2005. For example, in the December 2005 report, all the hair samples matched the victims except the Michael Moore ligature hair (sample 3Aa), the Christopher Byers ligature hair (15), the “negroid” hair found on a sheet used to cover the bodies (18A), hair from a scout cap (21B), dyed hair from the sheet used to cover Steve Branch, and a hair from a “tree stump” (Bode #2S04-114-23). All but two of these samples were never matched to a donor; the Moore ligature hair and the hair found on the tree stump were a different story.155

Questioning Hobbs

Defense team investigators suddenly became very interested in building evidence against Terry Hobbs. According to her report for the defense, investigator Rachel Geiser, an employee of Ron Lax’s firm, Inquisitor, Inc., retrieved two cigarette butts from the front yard of the home being rented by Terry Hobbs in Memphis.156 Three weeks later, on February 24, 2007 she and Lax interviewed Hobbs at his home, where they collected more cigarette butts from the ashtray in his living room. During the interview, Lax attempted to construct a timeline of Hobbs’s activities on the evening of the murders, the first time anyone had ever done so. Hobbs told Lax that he had searched his neighborhood for Stevie during the “late afternoon and evening” hours, accompanied by his four-year-old daughter, Amanda. He also stated that he had searched that night with David Jacoby and Pam’s father, Jackie Hicks Sr.

Pam testified at trial that Terry had dropped her off at work at 5:00 p.m. and that she hadn’t learned that Stevie was missing until Terry picked her up from work at 9:25 p.m. The boy was supposed to have been home before Pam left for work—it was a house rule—and she and Terry had driven around the neighborhood looking for him briefly before Terry dropped her off at Catfish Island. The police logs show that a call was taken from Terry Hobbs for a missing juvenile at 9:26 p.m. The call was made from Pam’s work by Terry immediately upon his arrival there. The question is obvious: why did Terry wait four-and-a-half hours to inform his wife that their eight-year-old son was still missing? Mark Byers had called police at 8:00 p.m., and both Mark and Dana Moore had told police that Christopher, Michael, and Stevie were together, so it is understandable that Hobbs had failed to formally report Stevie missing earlier. But to not tell his wife? Many people found this very difficult to fathom.

That isn’t the only thing he didn’t tell her, or anyone else, apparently. Rather than continue to search for Stevie after dropping Pam off at work, Hobbs had gone to visit his friend David Jacoby, and the two played guitar for approximately one hour, according to Jacoby in an interview with Rachel Geiser on May 26, four months after Geiser had spoken with Hobbs. Although Hobbs had mentioned Jacoby in his interview in February, it was in the context of the search the two men had made of Robin Hood Hills later that evening with and without Jackie Hicks Sr. He said nothing of seeing Jacoby prior to that time. Jacoby told Geiser that Hobbs left somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., allegedly to go back to his own house to see if Stevie had come home yet. He returned one hour later, at which time Hobbs asked Jacoby if he would help him search for Stevie. Hobbs and Jacoby lived two blocks—thirty-five seconds by car—from each other. What was Hobbs doing for the rest of his hour-long absence? Neither Hobbs nor Jacoby is sure whether Amanda went with Terry on this short trip, but one thing is apparent: Hobbs didn’t breathe a word of his visit with Jacoby until his interview with WMPD on June 21, 2007, three months after his interview with Geiser. Because neither Hobbs nor Jacoby was interviewed by police until fourteen years after the murders, the issue of memory has to be considered. One school of thought says that no one can be expected to remember details of their activities that far in the past. Another says that on a day with such significance, no one forgets the details (where were you when JFK—or John Lennon—was shot?).

In his May 2007 interview with Geiser, Jacoby described his search for Stevie in very general terms, saying only that somewhere around 7:00 or 7:30 p.m., he and Terry had gone to a bridge “over the big bayou south of Ten Mile Bayou” and looked around some. (The “big bayou” is another flood control canal that runs around the neighborhood. The bridge they looked over was probably on Fourteenth Street.) At that time, Geiser requested and obtained six strands of Jacoby’s hair and a cheek swab. Then, in a June 2007 phone interview with WMPD detective Ken Mitchell, Jacoby added detail to his earlier statement to Geiser, saying that he had crossed the pipe bridge over Ten Mile Bayou (he actually called it a “ditch,” though it is clear from the context he is talking about the bayou) and had also entered Robin Hood Hills with Hobbs, Mark Byers, and Jackie Hicks Sr. He told Mitchell that he had seen “muddy footprints” on the bridge and “bicycle tire tracks” going down to the ditch. During an October 2007 interview, again with Geiser, he said the opposite of what he had told Ken Mitchell, telling Geiser that he had never crossed the pipe bridge and had not entered the woods from the Blue Beacon Truck Wash either. Why had he changed his story? To complicate matters further, in July 2009 Jacoby gave a declaration to Natalie (Maines) Pasdar’s attorneys as part of a defamation lawsuit Hobbs had brought against her. In this statement, Jacoby stuck with the version he had given Rachel Geiser in October 2007—that is, that he had “never crossed a bridge or pipe into the woods” or entered the woods at all. His declaration to Pasdar stated that he was “not in Robin Hood Hills searching for Stevie or other missing children on May 5, 1993, alone or with Terry Hobbs at 6:00 p.m. or 6:30 p.m.,” further claiming that any search he was involved in was after dark. This statement contradicted that given to Detective Mitchell in June 2007 but supported his October 2007 statement to Rachel Geiser. In essence, David Jacoby told one version of the events of May 5 to police—that he crossed the bridge into the woods and saw footprints and bicycle tracks—and another version to everyone else.

Another thing that Terry Hobbs told Rachel Geiser during their interview was particularly intriguing. According to Geiser, Hobbs told her that on the night of the murders he was searching for Stevie in Robin Hood with Jacoby and Jackie Hicks Sr. He stated, according her report, that at one point during the search, he had split from Jacoby and Hicks and “approached,” but “didn’t arrive at, the ditch where the bodies of the victims were later found.” This statement, conveniently or not, provided an explanation for any evidence that might be found, such as a footprint, fingerprint, or hair shaft, and that might link Hobbs to the crime scene. There was, in fact, a finger, thumb, or partial palm print—WMPD fingerprint expert Tony Anderson was never sure which—that has never been identified.157 Anderson found the print in the mud on the ditch bank “five to ten feet” from where the body of Michael Moore was found. The print, he said, was at a forty-five-degree angle to the ditch, which told him that whoever made it had to have been standing in the water, facing the bank. Anderson said he ran the print against “hundreds” of print samples, including those of the victims, the suspects, all the police who were at the crime scene, and many who weren’t, and couldn’t make a match.158 He stated that with only “seven or eight” points to compare with, matching it with anyone would have been “a miracle.”159 Add to that the fact that only a photograph of the print existed, and the difficulty in matching it was compounded. One set of prints not checked was that of Terry Hobbs. Although Hobbs’s fingerprints should have been on file—he had several arrests on his record—they didn’t compare the prints to his.

Following Lax and Geiser’s first interview with Terry Hobbs on February 24, he became increasingly paranoid. He called Mark in March, saying that Pam had called him and said she had heard that Mark was dead. He asked Mark if he could come over, and Hobbs stayed at the Byerses’ home from about 1:00 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. He rambled on for hours about his life with Pam and how she was becoming “crazy.” He jumped from one subject to another, most related to his stormy relationship with his ex-wife, who he now said was trying to kill him. He said that he believed Pam knew Echols, that Echols had been in their house, and that maybe she had smoked pot with him—maybe she had even slept with him—and it was for this reason she had become “so crazy” after Stevie’s death. He also brought up the subject of an alleged photograph of Damien Echols sitting on Hobbs’s couch with Chris and Mike or Stevie and Mike. Mark had heard of this phantom photo before. Hobbs wanted to know, did Mark remember seeing it? Mark wasn’t sure. Both he and Terry at times had claimed to have seen it, and they both thought that Gary Gitchell had it, but as of this writing, Mark is sure he didn’t see it, and Hobbs says that he thinks he might have just “heard about it” from Gary Gitchell.160 Whatever the source of the rumor, no verifiable connection has ever been made between any of the victims and the convicted men.

Hobbs related to Mark that he had overheard Pam discussing a “meth deal” with her sister while Pam was living in Memphis and that he had “ratted her out” to the apartment manager. He claimed that a DEA agent had contacted him about it, but that he didn’t know whatever became of it. He told Mark about the day he shot Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks Jr., after an argument with Pam during which Terry slapped her (Pam told her brother that Terry had broken her jaw).161 He also related the same story he would tell to the West Memphis police in June 2007 about the time he had caught Pam and one of her coworkers in their kitchen “making out” during a party they were having prior to Stevie’s death. Everyone was drunk, he said, and people were just sleeping all over the house so that they didn’t have to drive home. When he saw Pam and “this Mexican guy she worked with” embracing in the kitchen, he “beat the dog out of him.” When he told the police about it, though, he left out some “color commentary” that he shared with Mark, where he added that the kitchen walls and ceiling were splattered with blood.

The cigarette butts that Geiser collected from Hobbs were sent to the Serological Research Institute (SERI) in Richmond, California, for typing and comparison to a hair that had previously been profiled by Bode Laboratories in Lorton, Virginia. That earlier hair had been removed from the ligature binding Michael Moore’s hands and feet. Those cigarette butts provided the Echols defense team with what might have been its biggest break in the case. SERI extracted DNA from the “unburned end” of a total of six cigarette butts, two each from the front yard, the driveway, and an ashtray at Hobbs’s home. The DNA was “quantified and sequenced by PCR [polymerase chain reaction] using mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA] primers.”162 When compared to the hair fragment recovered from the ligature binding Michael Moore, the samples taken from the front yard and ashtray at Hobbs’s home could not exclude Terry Hobbs as the source of the hair. According to SERI, only 1.5 percent of the population could be expected to have the same mitochondrial DNA sequence matching that found on the cigarette butts. Not exactly a smoking gun, but a damaging piece of evidence nonetheless. At this point in time, it is something of a mystery as to how investigators began to focus on Hobbs.163 It is known that by the time John Douglas put his profile together for Lorri Davis, Lax had already informed Hobbs about the discovery of the hair. This was arguably a mistake. Douglas had experience interrogating and interviewing high-profile, elusive killers during his twenty-five years with the FBI and ten years in private consulting, and he had a grasp of the psychology necessary to give him the edge with a suspect. Douglas was never informed that Lax was going to confront Hobbs.

The offices of Inquisitor Incorporated are located in a modern office building in downtown Memphis a few blocks east of the Mississippi River. Founded by Ron Lax to investigate allegations of insurance fraud, the firm claims to be “one of the largest, most respected investigative companies in the Southeast.”164 Since its inception in 1978, Inquisitor has branched out to include, among other areas, criminal defense investigations. It was in this latter capacity that Lax had initially volunteered investigative resources to the Damien Echols defense team in 1993, presumably in an effort to bolster Inquisitor’s portfolio in this area, but also with the prospect of some remuneration at a future date.165 On May 19, 2007, Terry Hobbs sat down with Lax and Rachel Geiser at their office. Why Hobbs agreed to the meeting isn’t clear. He later told a reporter that he “stayed awhile but didn’t cooperate,” and aside from the admission that Pam’s family still blamed him for the murders—hardly news to anyone following the case—he basically told Lax nothing.166 The purpose of the meeting was singular: Hobbs was going to be confronted with SERI’s finding that his DNA was a “match” for the hair shaft found in the Michael Moore ligature.

Hobbs was not impressed. “So what?” he said. “Those boys played at my house all the time.” It was an innocent secondary transfer, he said, and the same was true of the hair possibly belonging to Hobbs’s good friend David Jacoby, which was found on a tree stump at the crime scene. That hair had also been typed and matched against cigarette butts, hair strands, and cheek swabs obtained from Jacoby. The results excluded all but 7 percent of the population. If Lax had been hoping for a bombshell, he had to have been disappointed. It didn’t surprise Hobbs at all that his hair had been found at the scene. It would have been surprising if some transference wasn’t evident. And transference, Hobbs said, is all it was. Even if it was his hair—and Hobbs had stated on numerous occasions that the police had never told him that it was—it couldn’t be proven to be so to the exclusion of all others.

Hobbs’s in-laws were a little more forthcoming with information. Pam’s sisters, Judy Sadler and Jo Lyn McCaughey, told Geiser that they had found “several” knives at Hobbs’s house in 2003, one of which McCaughey claimed had belonged to Stevie. When this knife was shown to Stevie’s grandfather, the elder Hicks confirmed that it had been a gift from him to Stevie. As for Hobbs, he said of the knife that it could have been Stevie’s—he didn’t know. If it had been, he said he had probably taken it away from him. “I didn’t want a kid of mine to go around with a pocket knife—not a kid who was eight years old. Would you?” In fact, Pam had turned some “fourteen or fifteen” knives over to former Misskelley attorney Dan Stidham in 2002.

Over the years, Pam had been stuck in a kind of pendulum pattern, never knowing quite what to believe. The West Memphis Three were guilty. They were innocent. Terry killed the boys. No, he didn’t. Whether she was angry at Terry for not finding Stevie that night while she was at work, or for not telling her until five hours later that he still hadn’t found him, or for shooting her brother in 1994, or maybe for slapping her around from time to time, one thing was certain: the entire ordeal was taking its toll on her. When she appeared for interviews, she was always carefully groomed, but her shaky voice and sad eyes belied the pain that she lived with every day.

It is also possible that she was in denial, not willing to face the possibility that her ex-husband had killer her son. Not only did she frequently accuse all comers of being guilty of murder; she also had quite a temper of her own. In November 2007, Pam and her daughter Amanda were arrested for assault after Pam attacked her elderly mother, inciting a brawl in which her sister, Sheila Muse, was tased by police and also bruised from Hobbs’s attack. What the argument was about is unknown, but Muse claimed that both Pam and Amanda were on drugs. “The person who was doing this stuff last night was not my sister. Not the way my sister normally acts, but she was definitely under the influence of something, her and Amanda both.”167 The family refused to bond her out of jail, saying that she needed help.168

The Mind-Hunter Cometh

The revelation that Terry Hobbs’s DNA—or mitochondrial DNA similar to his—had been found at the crime scene sent a shockwave through case-watchers to be sure, but aside from the convicted men themselves, its most extraordinary effect was on Mark Byers. He had been approached as early as November 17, 2003, by Fred Herot,******* an investigator working for the Echols defense team. Herot was parked in Mark’s driveway waiting for him to roll up in his blue Nissan pickup truck after a day of house painting. Clad in a spattered pair of painter’s overalls, Mark climbed out of the truck and approached Herot, who sat in his rental car. Mark didn’t particularly want to talk to him and told him so. Mark kept Herot outside for more than an hour, and though he was courteous, he essentially told him nothing. Herot never really made the reason for his visit clear, except to say that he was working for the defense team. Mark didn’t see him again until he returned with John Douglas nearly four years later.

John Douglas can be an incredibly persuasive man. He possesses a lightning-quick mind, and his halting way of speaking leaves one with the impression that his speech is engaged in a constant struggle to keep pace with his thoughts. As a former special agent at the FBI Investigative Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia, he is a legend, having developed, along with his associates, the nation’s first and preeminent how-to manual for investigating and classifying violent crimes, primarily by identifying the motive of the perpetrator. He has spent more than three-and-a-half decades fine-tuning his interrogation techniques by interviewing hundreds of subjects, including some of the most notorious killers America has ever produced, criminals such as Charles Manson; Richard Ramirez; Sirhan Sirhan; Richard Speck; John Wayne Gacy; David Berkowitz (Son of Sam); James Earl Ray; and more recently, Dennis Rader, the BTK (bind, torture, kill) killer. Douglas’s business is criminal profiling. He wrote the book—or more accurately, books—on violent crime in America, with focuses on serial murder and sexual homicide.169 His job on this case, as it has been on so many others, was to study the case files, including crime scene photographs, physical evidence, and autopsy photographs and reports, in order to evaluate the risk level of the victims (“victimology”) and develop a profile of the killer or killers.

In August of 2007—during “Elvis Week” it turned out—Douglas laid out for Mark the reasons for his belief that not only were the WM3 innocent, but that Terry Hobbs was at the very least a person to be “put on the front burner” as a suspect.170 Systematically and methodically, he presented Mark with information that must have churned up painful feelings from the past, casting shadows of doubt on everything Mark thought he knew about how his son had died and who had killed him; Douglas’s presentation to Mark was very powerful. The profile he had done at the behest of Lorri Davis and the Echols defense team made one point perfectly clear: Douglas didn’t believe for a minute that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley had had anything to do with this murder. The people Mark hated for having killed his son fourteen years earlier were innocent, Douglas said, and he began to outline why he was so sure of that. Whereas the other defense team forensic experts had addressed the physical and pathological aspects of the forensic evidence, Douglas’s forte was crime scene analysis, crime classification, and criminal profiling. In plain language, he told Mark that whoever had committed the homicides on May 5, 1993, was someone who knew the boys, that it was what Douglas termed a “personal cause” homicide. Although it was impossible to determine from the available evidence whether multiple offenders had been involved, Douglas was certain that the killer or killers were male and that they were not teenagers at the time of the crime. Further, the UNSUB was of the “organized” type, meaning several things:

• He commits his crimes inside a “comfort zone”—that is, close to where he lives or works.

• He is careful to leave no evidence at the scene that may be linked to him.

• He is “very methodical in his everyday activities,” so as not to draw attention to himself. In other words, he walks among us undetected.

Douglas also stated in his report that this type of offender would tend to be “overly cooperative” with authorities, since he lived or worked in the area and would likely be questioned. That may be true. If so, it is a nearly criminal coincidence that the suspect Douglas named—and the only person ever linked to the crime by DNA evidence—wasn’t questioned by police until fourteen years after the murders. “You’re talking about a saint,” Douglas said of Hobbs, “the all-American father, a great husband. And then there’s the rest of the story. We are talking about two different people.” Douglas had interviewed Hobbs twice during one week in Memphis in 2007, and on the second interview he encountered Terry Hobbs’s “dark side,” a side that was most revealing.171 It seemed that this was the first time that much of the public had taken its focus off of Mark Byers as a viable alternate suspect.

Since being retained by Lorri Davis, Douglas had kept himself as insulated from bias as possible. He wasn’t familiar with the case when Davis first contacted him, and he wanted all evidence to be new to him, allowing him to work without preconceptions. He had not seen either Paradise Lost film, had not read Devil’s Knot, had not followed the case in the press, and had not interviewed the convicted men.172 “I wanted to look at the case without bias, study the victimology, [and] review the police reports, autopsy photographs, aerial crime scene pictures, as someone looking at them for the first time.”173 By starting fresh, Douglas was able to analyze this case as he had analyzed hundreds of other violent crimes, though one of the most obvious things he noted didn’t require twenty-five years with the FBI to figure out: Terry Hobbs, stepfather of Stevie Branch, had never been interviewed by police.

According to Douglas, he and Herot immediately set out to speak with the family of Terry Hobbs. The Hicks family—Pam’s relatives and Terry’s former in-laws—flat out refused to talk. “They threw us off their property,” Douglas says.174 “I really didn’t want to talk to Hobbs before talking to his family, but since the Hicks family wasn’t willing to talk, we decided to talk to Hobbs while we were tracking down his family. When we spoke to Hobbs for the first time, we didn’t have any of his background.” According to Douglas, Hobbs was the picture of congeniality. “He loved everyone, everyone loved him, [and] everything was great. He was very convincing. I thought, ‘If he’s lying, he’s a great liar.’” The first interview led Douglas to consider that they might be tracking the wrong man. “After about two hours I told [Herot], ‘Jeez, I don’t know about this guy.’” During the following week, however, Herot looked up Hobbs’s family—his mother, sister, and two brothers—and traveled to Indiana to meet with them. These interviews revealed someone who was the polar opposite of the man he and Douglas had spoken with a few days earlier.

Herot spoke with Hobbs’s sister, Cindy Hobbs, and his mother Raylene, as well as brothers Michael and Joe Hobbs Jr. The family allegedly told Herot tales of terror from Terry’s past. As a youth, they said, Hobbs had been beaten mercilessly by his father, a butcher and itinerant Pentecostal preacher. His beatings were so frequent and intense that Hobbs grew immune to them and would laugh at his father to deny him the satisfaction of inflicting pain. He became desensitized to violence. The work he did in his father’s slaughterhouse as a youth further served to make Hobbs nonreactive to the sight of blood and gore.

Long after she spoke with Herot, Cindy Hobbs denied that her brother could have any complicity in Stevie’s death. “Terry was a wonderful dad to Stevie,” Cindy told Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter Beth Warren. She had lived with Pam and Terry briefly and had seen a “joyful Stevie jumping off his stepfather’s shoulders into a swimming pool.”175 According to Cathy Frye of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Hobbs said that his father had had a “redhead’s temper” but was “a good dad.”176 Many of Hobbs’s statements in the article were paraphrased, not quoted, and the context is often ambiguous, but one thing came through loud and clear: Hobbs wanted to get his message out. “I want them to hear it from me . . . You’ve all heard the lowdown about me, but it ain’t all lowdown.” There were few, aside from Mark Byers, who would go on record as saying that they thought Hobbs guilty of the murders, though John Douglas—among many others—surely had his doubts.

With this new information in hand, Douglas and Herot interviewed Hobbs for the second time in a week, this time at the hotel where Douglas was staying. “This interview needed to be on our turf,” Douglas said. Instead of the friendly atmosphere of the Chase Galleria Mall food court—the site of the first interview—the second interview took place in Douglas’s hotel room among piles of file boxes and folders, giving the impression that a full-scale investigation was underway; this time, the conversation would be all business. Confronted with the evidence of his past violence and criminal record—an assault on his brother-in-law with a handgun, possession of marijuana and an alleged sexual assault against a neighbor in Hot Springs, Arkansas—Hobbs became agitated. At times, he was downright angry, though he didn’t deny anything. “So what?” he would say. “What does that prove?” When Douglas revealed that he knew about a molestation incident (discussed in further detail later in this chapter) in Hot Springs, Hobbs was visibly shaken—angered actually. “I thought he was going to knock the soda can out of my hand,” Douglas recalled. Clearly, Terry had thought no one knew about that.

Douglas thought that if he had been able to interview Hobbs before Lax dropped the bomb, he could have gotten more out of Hobbs. Of course, anyone trying to get Terry Hobbs to confess to a seventeen-year-old, triple child murder would have to be some kind of super-cop. They would also need facts. District attorneys don’t open investigations on long-solved cases without overwhelming evidence, and the Echols defense team, despite piles of new test data, ancient eyewitness affidavits, and grumblings of ex-family members, had come way short of convincing the state of Arkansas to take any action. WMPD detective Mike Allen said, “In 1993 Terry Hobbs wasn’t a suspect, and he isn’t a suspect in 2007.”

Revelations

As the defense team kept digging, they discovered some very interesting information about Terry Hobbs. It was revealed that Hobbs had been married once prior to Pam, to one Angela Hancock, and that the couple had had a son together.177 Terry and Angela split when the boy was two years old, and their short marriage had allegedly been a violent one. In 1982, Hobbs was living in an apartment in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Angela and their toddler son, Bryan. According to his neighbor, a middle-aged woman named Mildred French, she heard a ruckus coming from the Hobbs residence one day, sounds indicating that Hobbs was beating his wife, his child, or both. Alarmed, French ran down to their apartment and repeatedly rang the doorbell until Hobbs answered. With “disgust in his voice,” Hobbs glared at her and asked, “What do you want?” She told him that if he ever struck his wife or child again, she would call the police. French also recalled that on more than one occasion, she had observed Hobbs standing outside her window, peering in.

But French’s most damning allegation was that Hobbs had sexually assaulted her while she was in her apartment. According to French (who was eighty-one years old at the time she was tracked down by the Echols defense team), as she was climbing out of the shower and putting on her housecoat, Hobbs appeared in the bathroom, held her, and “grabbed [her] breast.” French started screaming, “Get out! Get out!” and Hobbs fled the apartment. French called police, who, she believed, “filed an incident report on the matter.” She said, “At the time, I was afraid that Terry would rape, harm, or even kill me.”178 She approached Angela’s mother and suggested therapy for Hobbs, a man she said was “sick,” but his strict Pentecostal in-laws said that there would be no therapy for Terry. At a meeting arranged by the landlord of the apartment complex, Hobbs denied any wrongdoing, saying, “It never happened.” No arrest was ever made, although French claims that the Hobbses were thrown out of their apartment as a result of the incident. She also claims to have appeared in court on the matter, at which time she says Hobbs was ordered to undergo some type of counseling. Shortly after they left the apartment, Terry and Angela were divorced.179 Presumably, West Memphis police would have discovered this information as well had they bothered to interview and investigate Hobbs as they did with Mark Byers.

The Petition

Finally, on October 29, 2007, after three years of preparation by Dennis Riordan and his legal, investigative, and forensics teams, Damien Echols filed his second amended writ of habeas corpus with the Eastern Arkansas District Federal Court. Here is where hundreds of thousands of dollars—perhaps millions—had been spent and where he could finally present to the court evidence in support of his claim of actual innocence. He would assert that for the past fourteen years, he had been wrongfully imprisoned for the murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore. The DNA results were back from the lab at last, the forensic experts and investigators had submitted their reports, and the lawyers had assembled their case. The petition, officially titled Echols v. Norris, made the sweeping claim that “every iota of the state’s evidence is destroyed or gravely weakened by the new evidence presented in support of this petition.”

Unlike many habeas corpus petitions, Echols was petitioning the court with a claim of “actual innocence.” He would not be arguing his case from the standpoint of procedural error on the part of the lower courts, resulting in a violation of his constitutional rights, but rather with the assertion that the evidence collected by the defense would show that he was actually innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted. Stated another way, presented with this new evidence—along with all of the old evidence, it turned out—a jury of reasonable men and women would be unlikely to convict him were he to be retried. Dennis Riordan called this a “quirk” of federal appellate law, a filing based on a claim of actual innocence. Quirk or not, it represented Echols’s best chance to date of obtaining a new trial. The petition itself ran to some two hundred pages with more than fifty exhibits, five of which were sealed affidavits from jurors and others giving testimony regarding the most damaging of the claims, those of jury misconduct.

Summary of the Evidence

First, a mistrial should have been declared, Echols claimed, because, “despite the importance of insulating the Echols-Baldwin proceeding from any taint of the Misskelley statement . . . a reference to the [Jessie Misskelley] statement was injected into the Echols trial through a prosecution witness, Detective Bryn Ridge.”

In the original trial, Ridge was questioned by Echols’s attorney Val Price regarding the recovery of the “sticks” that the state had introduced into evidence as possible murder weapons. These sticks had not been recovered from the crime scene until after Misskelley’s June 3, 1993, confession to police, when he stated that Echols and Baldwin had hit the victims with “sticks and stuff.” This had caused police to return to Robin Hood Hills and search the crime scene again. When Price asked Ridge if he had put the sticks into evidence at the time the bodies were recovered, Ridge answered, “No, sir. I didn’t take this stick into evidence until the statement of Jessie Misskelley in which he said a stick . . .”

At this point Price jumped from his seat and shouted, “Your Honor! Move for a mistrial!” Over strenuous objections from Price and Paul Ford, Judge Burnett denied the motion, declaring that an admonishment to the jury to disregard the statement would be sufficient. This would become a part of the jury misconduct allegations, though it is possible that Price’s cross-examination was deliberately designed to evoke the damning statement by Ridge. Whatever Price’s intentions were—the judge believed that the question had “invited” the response—Burnett refused to grant both defense motions for a mistrial trial, stating, “I don’t think there’s a soul up on that jury or in this courtroom that doesn’t know that Mr. Misskelley made a statement.”

Next, under a new Arkansas law, Echols introduced DNA evidence that he claimed excluded himself, Baldwin, and Misskelley from the list of possible donors of samples taken from the crime scene. Echols had begun this process back in July 2002 with the filing of a motion for forensic DNA testing that would compel the court to have DNA samples previously tested with RFLP and PCR methods retested with newer technology using the current STR (short tandem repeat) testing. Some of the evidence was tested for mtDNA, which could exclude Echols from the group of potential donors. Among the items to be retested were hairs recovered from the victims, fingernail scrapings, articles of clothing from the victims that were stained with what was thought to be semen, and perhaps most importantly, hair samples found at the crime scene. The original motion to have evidence subjected to DNA testing was filed on behalf of Echols by attorneys Barry Scheck of New York (working with the Innocence Project), Edward Mallett of Houston, and Al Schay of Little Rock. The order to have the selected samples of DNA tested was finally issued in June 2004. As stated previously, the mtDNA testing could not exclude Terry Hobbs from the hair found in the ligature binding Michael Moore or David Jacoby from the hair found on the tree stump. Most importantly to Echols, however, was the fact that all evidence tested did exclude him, Baldwin, and Misskelley as donors.

Perhaps most significant were the findings of the pathologists that postmortem animal predation had caused the wounds to the victims, rather than knives, as the prosecution alleged at trial. The animal predation theory, if accurate, destroyed the Misskelley confession. If there were no knife wounds present on any of the victims, then Misskelley could not have witnessed the killings in which he implicated himself, Baldwin, and Echols. How could the original pathology team who performed the autopsies on the three boys have mistaken animal bites for knife wounds? Of course, the original team had access to the actual bodies, whereas the new defense experts had to make do with pathology reports and photographs. Still, these men, along with pediatric pathology consultant Janice Ophoven, an expert hired by the Baldwin team, represented some of the best and most experienced in their fields. Could they all be mistaken or—dare we ask—bought? All the forensic experts, to a person, agreed with the animal predation theory. Spitz said, “When these [autopsy photographs] first came to me, I couldn’t understand what this issue was all about because it was so obvious that these are animal product . . . It took maybe seconds [for me] to make that observation.” He also noted that animal claw marks were “obvious” and not consistent with a knife or any other weapon.

Possibly the most startling claim, and most damning to the prosecution’s case, was the determination by Dr. Robert Woods, supported by Spitz, that the genital mutilation suffered by Christopher Byers—the penile skin “degloving” from the shaft, with the complete removal of the testes—was due to animal predation as well. The Misskelley confession had made very specific reference to this injury, allegedly inflicted by Jason Baldwin. At trial, Frank Peretti had brazenly asserted that the injuries had been made with superhuman surgical precision, admitting that he himself would have had difficulty simulating the injury in operating room conditions. It must have required a suspension of belief for the juries to accept the means and motive for this mutilation; why “surgically” deglove the skin of a victim’s very small penis when, according to the Misskelley confession, there was so much chaos going on? Why—and how—would three teenagers perform such a difficult yet meaningless act? The trial jury also apparently bought into some loosely knit motive involving ritual killing that included genital mutilation.

Dr. Richard Souviron was of the same opinion as Spitz regarding the nature of the injuries. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see [that] these are animal bites and that they occurred postmortem.” When he addressed the injuries allegedly made by the “lake knife,” or a knife like it, Souviron was blistering in his attack on Peretti and the prosecution. “[How can you] look at the serrations on the back of that knife and see these marks [on the victims’ bodies] and say that the back end of that knife made these marks? I mean, give me a break. That is the most ridiculous statement that I have ever heard anybody make, and to sell that to a jury is unconscionable.”180

All the experts agreed not only on the likelihood of postmortem animal predation causing most of the wounds to the skin but also that there was no indication of sexual abuse—no forced oral or anal sex—to any of the three victims. This latter assertion was also important, since in his confession Jessie Misskelley had made allegations of rape (“Damien and Jason was screwin’ ’em and stuff”) and forced oral sex, and the opinions of the experts rendered those allegations false. Dr. Peretti had stated at trial that anal penetration of one or more of the victims was “possible,” which was contradicted by the findings of Bode Laboratories, which found no trace of semen—or blood—on any of the boys’ clothing. The absence of blood was significant because Misskelley had stated that the attacks on the boys had begun before their clothes had been removed. If this were true, some amount of blood should have been present on the boys’ clothes. Echols’s petition made it clear that Misskelley’s confession was what defense expert Dr. Richard Ofshe had called it years earlier—false and coerced.

As far as the state’s theory of motive—satanic ritual homicide—John Douglas had this to say in his report: “In all my twenty-five years of investigative experience in the FBI, and after eleven years as a private consultant to prosecutors and defense attorneys in a variety of cases, I have yet to see a single homicide case which was determined to be a satanic ritual homicide. Perhaps this will be my first.” Dr. Spitz concurred. He saw no element present that would indicate ritualistic homicide of any kind. The writ took exception with the lower court’s acceptance of Dr. Dale Griffis as an expert in the area of the occult. Griffis’s degree had been obtained without any classes actually being taken, and Echols claimed that absent any reliable evidence that he was an expert, Griffis should not have been allowed to testify.

The issue of excessive pretrial publicity, particularly the printing of the Misskelley statement in the press, had loomed large over both trials, and it was addressed now in Echols’s petition.181 Although West Memphis municipal judge William P. “Pal” Rainey had ordered all court documents sealed—an order challenged unsuccessfully by the Memphis Commercial Appeal—much damage in this area had been done, so much so that the writ claimed it could not be adequately set aside by a simple “admonition limiting the statement’s admissibility to [Misskelley] alone.”182 There was also the issue of Detective Gary Gitchell’s press conference statement, where he publically and knowingly exaggerated the strength of the case against the suspects. The case against the three, he told reporters, was “eleven” on a scale of one to ten, when Gitchell knew this was far from the truth.183

Echols also raised several charges of juror misconduct, asserting that the voir dire process had been ineffective in assuring Echols of twelve unbiased jurors. During their deliberations, the Echols/Baldwin jury used a “T-chart” display board as a visual aid in their deliberations. Among the items or factors considered by the jury were such pieces of evidence as the lake knife found behind Baldwin’s trailer, the statement of the “softball girls” (who allegedly overheard Echols make an admission of guilt), the fact that the defendants “wore black t-shirts,” and an item that had been blacked out. Years later, Tom Quinn, an investigator for the Baldwin team, located a juror (Juror 7) who had taken “compendious” notes, including an unadulterated facsimile of the original display pages. Toward the bottom of the juror’s notes, the item that had been crossed out on the Echols side of the chart was “Jessie Misskelley Test Led to Arrest.” On the Baldwin side, the chart read, “J. Misk. State.” The petition further identified specific problems with individual jurors. One juror stated that his father had given him details of the case during the trials and that the juror believed that there were supporters in the gallery capable of killing him. Another juror claimed that she had decided the guilt of the defendants prior to closing arguments.

One of the more serious allegations of jury misconduct, however, centered on its foreman, a Jonesboro realtor named Kent Arnold. In 2005, Arnold had a conversation with a TV reporter from Little Rock, during which he admitted—or was “tricked” into saying, as he claims—that he and his fellow jurors had considered and discussed the confession of Jessie Misskelley during their deliberations. The reporter, Lyndall Stout, entered an affidavit that was promptly sealed by the court because it mentioned Arnold—“juror number four”—by name. Another affidavit was entered by a nonjuror, Lloyd Warford, who acted as Arnold’s business attorney.184 Warford said that Arnold had discussed the case with him before, during, and after the trial, and this affidavit was also sealed. Echols’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, which the lower court (Judge Burnett again) had denied under Arkansas Rule 37 back in 2001, was raised again. Among the conflicts listed was Echols’s contract with HBO, which he claimed he had entered into at Price’s urging. Price wanted to “get the trial over with” prior to the release of the film, fearing the impact it would have on the jury were they to inadvertently view it or hear of it from others. (The fact that the trial was the film made this an unlikely claim. The trial would necessarily have to end in order for the film to be completed. At the trial’s conclusion, however, the producers agreed to wait until September—six months—to release the film, presumably to allow for post-trial hearings to be heard.)

Two issues with prosecution witness Michael Carson were raised: first, that his testimony, which was based on allegedly false and uncorroborated statements made to him by Baldwin, was unduly prejudicial toward Echols, and second, that Carson had been previously represented by Val Price in a juvenile matter. Price had not disclosed this representation to his client and did not cross-examine Carson at trial, thus denying Echols the chance of adequately confronting—and discrediting—his accuser, since Price would have had knowledge of Carson’s criminal history.

Echols further claimed that Price was laboring under another conflict of interest in that Price had once represented a business partner of John Mark Byers in a civil matter. The petition held that although Price had questioned Byers on the stand, his “divided loyalties” had prevented him from “actively and zealously questioning and impeaching Byers [at Echols’s trial] on all relevant matters, including the full history of Byers’s criminal past and violent conduct; Byers’s medical condition, including his affliction with brain tumors which, as trial counsel knew, could be associated with violent and criminal conduct; and Byers’s involvement in the civil case in which counsel represented Byers’s co-defendant.” This claim was probably the weakest one in the petition, and the state didn’t even respond to it.

The remainder of Echols’s claims of ineffective assistance of counsel were related to Price’s failure to hire expert witnesses, failure to seek a second change of venue, failure to move for a continuance (to allow publicity to die down, as if it ever would have), and failure to adequately discredit occult “expert” Dale Griffis and his unreasonable introduction of testimony at sentencing from defense expert Dr. James Moneypenny, who testified during the penalty phase as to the mental health of Damien Echols.185

There were other issues involving the jury. According to the defense, sealed affidavits filed with the petition proved that at least seven of the sitting jurors had admitted during voir dire that they had heard, seen on TV, or read in the newspapers details of the case, including specifics of Jessie Misskelley’s statement. Moreover, the accepted jurors had been further influenced by the statements of those who were excused, most of whom were rejected due to their exposure to excessive pretrial publicity. Since voir dire is normally not conducted individually, even if a prospective juror had not heard details of the case—which was next to impossible—he or she would have gotten an earful from those who were excused for cause, and this was another issue put forth in the writ.

Meet the Press

What had to rank as one of the most significant events for the Free the West Memphis Three movement—save for the convicts’ eventual release from prison—took place on November 2, 2007, when San Francisco attorneys Dennis Riordan and Don Horgan hosted a press conference in Little Rock to lay out the new evidence in the case for the media.

The victims’ families had been brought together several days earlier in Memphis at the offices of Inquisitor, Inc., to be given a briefing prior to the press conference (which only Mark Byers and Pam Hobbs attended). At the private meeting, Echols’s attorneys and forensic experts sought to sell their theory of the crime to a group of potentially nonsympathetic listeners, though as it turns out, by the time of the Memphis meeting, Mark Byers was convinced. Pam Hobbs was waffling at the time. Todd and Dana Moore had believed in the guilt of the three since the convictions, and nothing was going to change their minds. Their absence from the meeting surprised no one, nor was the absence of Terry Hobbs unexpected.

The media press conference was held right on the heels of the filing of the Echols habeas petition and just prior to other media events devised to raise awareness and garner support for the expensive forensic, investigative, and administrative work needed to file and ultimately argue Echols’s case before the court. Present at the conference were representatives of each technical area of the petition. Riordan and Horgan presented the overview, replete with multiple assertions of Damien Echols’s “actual innocence.” Thomas Fedor of SERI explained the findings of the DNA analysis done on hair samples obtained from Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby, also emphasizing, as Riordan had, that none of the evidence tested linked Echols, Baldwin, or Misskelley to the crime scene. Forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz and forensic odontologist Dr. Richard Souviron both addressed the numerous lacerations and other injuries found on all three victims. The prosecution, via medical examiner Dr. Frank Peretti, had insisted in 1993, and still maintained, that the cuts were knife wounds, possibly from the “lake knife” recovered by divers behind Jason Baldwin’s trailer.186 But Spitz and Souviron reaffirmed their opinions that the wounds were instead the result of “post-mortem animal predation.”

John Douglas’s report was significant because it was able to bridge the gap between the DNA and other forensic evidence being presented in the writ and an actual personality type, or “profile.” “The person responsible for the crime on May 5, 1993, just didn’t wake up one morning and decide, ‘Today I’m going to go out and kill,’” Douglas said. There would be precipitating factors leading up to the crime, and the background of the offender, when checked, would show a history of violence, a failed marriage or two, and probably financial difficulties as well. “I did see these factors . . . [they were] very obvious to me,” Douglas said, speaking of Terry Hobbs. Although he softly attempted to qualify his statements as “not being specific,” they were very much so. Douglas met twice with Hobbs, once before conducting a background investigation and once after. He interviewed what he described as two different people in Hobbs, and he reiterated that for the press. He said of the WMPD, “Had the police back in 1993 done a background check and come to me or one of my colleagues and said, ‘So, what do you think about this guy?’ I would say, ‘Put him on the front burner.’” The biggest problem with Douglas’s report is that he was fully aware that Hobbs was a suspect (in the defense’s view) before he wrote it, and thus the objectivity is questionable. Although the rest of the defense team focused on the evidence and only indirectly implicated Hobbs, Douglas’s message was straight on: the police had made a major blunder by failing to interview Hobbs.

Riordan, ever the defense attorney, did his best to rehabilitate Douglas’s blatant indictment of Hobbs. He cited the “rush to judgment” made by the West Memphis police in 1993 in telling the district attorney’s office that the crime was solved “without question, within hours of the Misskelley confession.” Riordan now cautioned, “No one is saying that we have developed in this case evidence that establishes the guilt, much less the guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, of anyone else.” It became evident throughout 2010, however, that if Riordan was not pursuing an alternate subject, just about everybody else on the defense team was. Without nuclear DNA, an unimpeachable eyewitness, a rock-solid confession, something proving the guilt of someone else and excluding Echols, Echols’s appeal would be an uphill battle all the way.

The press conference was important and probably quite expensive. The question was, what would it accomplish? Riordan indicated that it was simply a way to consolidate the more than three hundred requests for information that they had received from various media. But was that all? It would certainly have no effect on the trial judge, David Burnett, who had stated publically that he “just wanted to get [the habeas hearings] over with.” Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel was already on edge about the publicity given the case, calling it a “misleading press campaign.” McDaniel saw no revelations in the petition and stood by the conclusions reached by Peretti and the prosecution in 1993-94. Riordan, however, emphasized that Brent Davis had been of a mind to agree to submit evidence to any testing requested because he wanted to be sure “they had the right man.” For the defense, that man was Terry Hobbs. But if Damien Echols—and Mark Byers as well—wanted Hobbs to take the fall for the murders, they had some fundamental problems to overcome, the most basic being that Hobbs was presumed innocent, and the police and prosecutors had no incentive to rock that boat. Hobbs, however, was getting sick of the accusations and innuendo and was preparing to make a move of his own.

Brent Davis Answers

On May 30, 2008, eight months after it was filed in federal court, the state responded to the Echols petition. Although the response went on for some ninety pages, the state’s position was tersely summarized in the opening paragraphs:

[Echols’s] motion on accompanying exhibits rely [sic] in combination on three principal claims:

1. Allegedly new forensic evidence that post-mortem animal predation caused some of the injuries to the victims, which, he argues, undermines the state’s trial proof

2. DNA-testing results exclude him as the source for two hairs from the crime scene and perhaps from biological material from a victim, and do not exclude two other persons as a source of the hairs, and

3. The jury’s verdicts were flawed by bias and misconduct.

The state countered Echols’s charges on the grounds that they were “meritless,” urging Judge Burnett to deny Echols’s motion without a hearing. The two sides were scheduled for a showdown in the form of an evidentiary hearing in Jonesboro on September 8, 2008.

Trouble with the Chicks

By late 2008, Terry Hobbs had just about had it with the disruption to his and his daughter’s life caused by those accusing him of Stevie’s murder. Every major newspaper and radio station in the Memphis area and around the state of Arkansas was printing the results of the DNA testing, naming him as a suspect in the murders, and regaling the public with stories of Hobbs’s past. No detail was too personal to print. Hobbs’s marital problems with Pam, his violent past (as when he shot and wounded Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks Jr.), and revelations about the alleged abuse of his first wife and child were being touted. The declaration of Mildred French in which she alleged to have been sexually assaulted by Hobbs was common knowledge to the public. With the exception of the DNA evidence, which was consistently mischaracterized as a “match,” all of the evidence against Hobbs was weak, circumstantial, and hearsay, to say nothing of the fact that most of it was very old information.

To make matters worse, big-name celebrities were getting in on the act. Hobbs was hearing his name uttered by the likes of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, and he didn’t much care for it. Maines was a latecomer to the supporter movement, but what she lacked in case knowledge, she made up for with her celebrity megaphone. On her band’s website, she posted an open letter to supporters containing the now-familiar accusations, most lifted directly from Echols’s habeas petition. The Moore ligature hair, the “stump” hair, and Stevie’s knife being found in Terry’s dresser drawer were not going to be enough to compel the state of Arkansas to open an investigation. But Maines added in the hearsay—and disputed—claims of Pam’s sister Jo Lyn McCaughey that on the night of May 5, 1993, Hobbs had “washed clothes and sheets at odd hours for no other reason than to hide evidence from the crimes.”

On November 25, 2008, Terry Hobbs filed suit in Pulaski County, Arkansas, alleging defamation of character against Natalie Maines individually and against the Dixie Chicks (Maines, Emily Robinson, and Martie Seidel) collectively. As specific claims, Hobbs listed (1) “defamation/libel,” (2) “intentional infliction of emotional distress/outrageous conduct,” and (3) “false light invasion of privacy.” These claims combined to “injure” Hobbs in his “person and business, and in his personal and business reputation.”187 The complaint contained a single exhibit, a copy of the open letter to supporters of the West Memphis Three that Maines had posted on the Dixie Chicks’ website. The letter was, in Maines’s words, “parroted” from a press release that summarized Echols’s petition. Maines claimed in her affidavit that the letter posted on her website “did not accuse Hobbs of the murders” but simply listed evidence pointing away from the West Memphis Three. Hobbs disagreed. He also accused Maines of making further statements damaging to his reputation at the December 2007 rally at the state capitol building in Little Rock. The suit alleged that Maines (being sued under her married name, Natalie Pasdar) “reiterated her position” about the DNA and forensic evidence making the case for the WM3 stronger and in the process “made other statements that amounted to a false and reckless claim that Plaintiff committed the murders of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore.” Hobbs was seeking unspecified damages, both punitive and compensatory, demanding that a jury provide the “just and proper relief to which he may be entitled.”

Because of geography—the “Chicks” all claimed residency in Texas, Hobbs lived and worked in Tennessee, and the rally that had caused all the hoopla had taken place in Arkansas—the suit was moved from Pulaski County to a federal court. Depositions for the suit began in the law offices of one of Maines’s attorneys, John Moore, in Little Rock on July 21, 2009. Over a period of two days, Hobbs was grilled by attorneys representing the Dixie Chicks and Natalie Maines.188 They asked Hobbs about anything and everything. They asked about Mark Byers, Sharon Nelson, and other people who had claimed that Hobbs was responsible for the murders. Why wasn’t he suing them? The implication was clear enough. Although Hobbs repeatedly answered that what he wanted was “justice,” which he defined as “whatever the court deems necessary,” Maines’s attorneys pressed Hobbs to admit that he had gone after the Dixie Chicks for their deep pockets and no other reason. It also came to light that Hobbs’s attorney, Cody Hilander, was working on a contingency basis, and this was obvious by the case Hobbs put on, which was essentially none. There was no money to depose Maines, the Dixie Chicks, or any other witnesses. Hobbs’s was a very low-budget case. In December 2009, US district judge Brian S. Miller dismissed the case, and the following April, he ordered Hobbs to pay more than $17,000 in legal fees.

However badly the case turned out for Terry Hobbs, the Echols defense team was elated. Though they themselves would not have the opportunity to personally question Hobbs, any information that Maines’s attorneys had been able to get out of him—under oath—could now be used, and there was much information to be had. For example, through the deposition they were able to get Hobbs on record omitting the fact that he went directly from dropping Pam off at work to David Jacoby’s house to play guitar. This contradicted his statement to West Memphis Police on June 21, 2007 that he continued his search for Stevie after taking his wife to work. This was important because Jacoby had given a sworn statement to defense investigators in 2007 stating that he and Hobbs had played guitar for an hour or so right after Terry dropped Pam off at work. According to Jacoby, Terry went out—and stayed out—for more than an hour before coming back to ask Jacoby’s help in searching for Stevie. By Jacoby’s reckoning, that happened close to 7:30 p.m.

A second example, as Riordan made reference to on Larry King Live, was that during the deposition Hobbs stated that he had not seen Stevie at all that day. This was critical because Riordan had obtained sworn statements from Hobbs’s neighbors saying they had seen the boys with Terry, at his house, shortly before their disappearance that afternoon. One must wonder why these witnesses—thirteen-year-old Jamie Ballard; her sister Brandy, eleven; and her mother Deborah—waited so long before coming forward. They claimed that because police hadn’t canvassed their block, they weren’t aware that the information was valuable until years later when Hobbs’s claims were made public. Their mother said that the two girls went to a church group meeting every Wednesday and that they were waiting for their ride to arrive when they saw the boys. How certain were they that it was Wednesday, May 5, that they were remembering? According to Jamie, Ryan Clark had told her that afternoon that Christopher was late for dinner and if she saw him, to send him home. She said that she met Ryan in school the next day, and it was then that she found out the boys were dead.189 Ryan was extremely upset with her, asking her why she hadn’t sent Christopher home. She said she did try to send him home, but that he wouldn’t go. As for Hobbs’s claim that he didn’t see the boys that day, “If he says he did not see them, he’s not telling the truth,” Ballard told Erin Moriarty on the September 17, 2011, episode of 48 Hours: Mystery. “He saw them. He was out there with them. He called them to his house.” When asked if the women were mistaken, Hobbs replied, “They’re lying.”

The Pasdar deposition also included a slew of declarations from the Hicks family—Pam, her mother, and two of her three sisters. Sour grapes among in-laws can be notoriously unreliable, but if Pam’s sisters were telling lies, they were whoppers. Jo Lynn McCaughey, for example, claimed that it was she who had witnessed Terry doing laundry on the night of the murders. She said that Hobbs not only washed “dirty laundry,” curtains, and bed linens, but was even “taking clothes out of dresser drawers and washing those too.” McCaughey was appalled that Terry was doing laundry at such a “horrible” time, she said. She also took the opportunity to repeat the stories about Terry’s fledgling book—or books—that he claims to have kept since May 5, 1993; the books allegedly comprise a narrative of the events that occurred between the murders, including Hobbs’s personal timeline, and the shooting of Jackie Hicks Jr. during an altercation in November 1994. McCaughey repeated what she had told police detective Lt. Ken Mitchell and Sgt. Chuck Noles about the fourteen knives she had discovered at Pam’s house and turned over to attorney Dan Stidham in 2002, one of which was a knife that Stevie’s grandfather, Jackie Hicks Sr., identified as a knife he had given to the boy as a gift.

For her part, Judy Hicks Sadler declared that Hobbs was a child molester and wife abuser. She claimed that Terry would make Stevie and Amanda watch pornography and that Terry would have Amanda on his lap while they were watching. Sadler said that Terry would force Stevie to watch him masturbate and also have Stevie “sexually molest” Amanda. How this molestation was done by an eight-year-old to his four-year-old sister, Sadler didn’t make clear, but if all this was happening, and Sadler knew it, why didn’t she tell anyone? “I wish I had told people about what Terry was doing to Stevie and Amanda. I knew it was wrong. But Stevie was scared and made me promise not to tell. Additionally, I was a child myself [she was fifteen] and was scared about what would happen to my family if I did tell.”

Marie Hicks, Hobbs’s former mother-in-law, was less acerbic in her attack on Terry, sticking to the “facts,” such as the stories about Amanda being abused and Stevie being punished for his “accidents.” Her account of the alleged physical evidence against Hobbs was one of only a few that acknowledged that the hairs found at the crime scene could only “possibly” have come from Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby; according to most sources, the hairs were “a match.”

Not surprisingly, John Mark Byers also gave a declaration to Maines’s attorneys. He stated categorically, “I believe that Terry Hobbs was involved in the murders. Some of the reasons I believe Hobbs was involved are set forth below.” Mark Byers described the publicity the case had generated as “almost unbelievable,” citing Hobbs’s appearance with Pam in 1994 on the Geraldo show (along with Jackie Hicks Sr. and Jessie Misskelley Sr.), as well as coverage in national newspapers such as the New York Times. He spoke of the errors in Hobbs’s timeline as given to WMPD in 2007.190 Hobbs claimed that he had met Mark and Dana Moore at Dana Moore’s house somewhere between 6:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on the night of the murders. According to Mark, this was false; the first time he met Hobbs—ever—was at 8:30 p.m., two hours later, just as Officer Regina Meek was leaving the Byerses’ house to search for the boys. If Hobbs was there, Meek made no note of it. Byers’s declaration listed a number of inconsistencies related to statements Hobbs had made, such as Hobbs telling Mark that he lived in a different house than he actually lived in at the time of the murders, that the injuries to Stevie were different than they actually were and that he had searched Robin Hood Hills with Officer Meek that night at 6:00 p.m. Finally, Mark claimed in his declaration that Hobbs had made up a story about seeing a black man coming from the direction of the crime scene on the morning after the murders “to deflect attention from himself.”

Mark had also personally spoken to David Jacoby; according to Byers, Jacoby told him that Hobbs had shown up at his house at 5:00, which would have been immediately after dropping Pam off at work. Jacoby told Mark that Hobbs stayed for an hour or so, leaving between 6:00 and 6:30 to see if Stevie had come home yet. Oddly, Jacoby also reportedly told Mark that when Hobbs had first come over, as Hobbs opened the front door, Jacoby spotted several boys riding bikes and skateboards on the street, and one of them was Stevie. In his declaration Mark also restated the odd fact, one that Hobbs does not dispute, that Hobbs had not notified his wife that Stevie was still missing during the four hours she was at work.

The Hobbs Alibi

Two questions regarding Hobbs’s possible complicity in the murders continue to plague his story of how events transpired that night. First, where exactly was Hobbs during the four-and-a-half hours that Pam was at work? There are conflicting accounts. Second, why did Hobbs not keep his wife informed of the progress of the search during that time, given that the boy was already missing when Pam started work, and Catfish Island was practically within walking distance of the search area? Hobbs was interviewed by the West Memphis police on June 21, 2007, in order to get his version of his whereabouts on May 5, 1993. In the fourteen years since the murders, this would be the first time Hobbs had sat down with police. He was vague but not evasive.

Hobbs arrived home from his job at the Memphis Ice Cream company, where he was a “merchandiser”—he drove an ice cream truck, stocked stores, and sold ice cream—at approximately 3:30 the afternoon of May 5. Pam was cooking dinner. Terry asked where the kids were. “I always checked on the kids,” he said. Four-year-old Amanda, Terry and Pam’s daughter and Stevie’s half-sister, was in Stevie’s bedroom watching TV. Stevie, Pam told Terry, was out riding bikes with Michael Moore. Pam was a waitress at Catfish Island, a restaurant that was about a three-minute drive from their house on South McAuley. She worked the supper shift from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Despite having two cars, Terry usually drove Pam to work. “That’s the way we did it,” he told the interviewers. When 4:50 rolled around, Stevie still wasn’t home. Terry drove Pam the short distance to Catfish Island, telling her that he would find Stevie.

He drove off with Amanda and went back toward the Moores’ house on East Barton and began a street-by-street sweep of the area. Dana Moore wasn’t home when they went by her house, so Terry and Amanda just continued to drive. At one point they got out of the car and started walking the neighborhood. “We wanted to see if we could hear him behind the privacy fences,” he said. According to Terry, he and Amanda then returned to their home. Shortly thereafter, Dana Moore pulled up and asked if Terry knew where Stevie or Michael was. Hobbs told her that he and Amanda had been out looking but had seen no sign of the boys. Although Dana Moore’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial indicated that she had “looked around” near Hobbs’s house, there is no testimony stating that she actually saw or spoke to him. As to Hobbs’s claim that he spoke to ten-year-old Dawn Moore while he and Amanda were doing their “sweep,” this cannot be substantiated either, and it is here that Hobbs’s alibi begins to falter.

Hobbs went on to say that after Dana stopped by his house, he followed her back to her house, only to discover that the boys were not there either. He then stated, “While [Dana Moore and I] were standing there in the front yard talking, here comes this big bully-lookin’ dude, comes walkin’ across the street. I looked at him and said, ‘Who’s that?’ And of course it was Mark Byers, and that was the first time I met Mark Byers. He looked like the shaggy DA. Don’t tell him I said that.” The time, according to Terry, was about 6:00 p.m. Hobbs then told the interviewers that it was at this time that they figured out that Christopher, Stevie, and Michael were all together. He and Amanda left the Moores’ house and drove around the neighborhood for a bit and then went to the home of David Jacoby, who lived nearby. Jacoby’s wife, Bobby, was a friend of the Hicks family—Pam’s family—from back in Pam’s hometown of Blytheville, Arkansas. Terry asked Jacoby if he would come with him to look for Stevie, and Jacoby agreed. “We were together till two or three in the morning,” Hobbs said.

Jacoby told a different story. Terry had come to his house between 5:00 and 6:00 that day, he said. Hobbs stayed for somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, leaving between 6:00 and 6:30. He returned to Jacoby’s between 7:00 and 7:30, and it was at that point, according to Jacoby, that he and Hobbs began to search for Stevie, not earlier as Hobbs claimed. Jacoby said that although he and Hobbs had searched around the neighborhood together, he himself had never “crossed a bridge or pipe” into Robin Hood Hills, nor had he entered the woods by the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. Since there isn’t any other way to get to the crime scene—except to wade or swim across—Jacoby was apparently saying that he never entered the woods. This statement was significant because along with the hair in or on the ligature that “could not exclude” Hobbs, a second hair had been found that was similarly related to David Jacoby.191 This hair had been found on the root of a large tree near the drainage ditch where the boys had been found. If Jacoby was telling the truth, then there was the possibility that both Hobbs’s and Jacoby’s hair had been left at the crime scene by Terry Hobbs, or by secondary transfer from one of the boys as Hobbs insisted. Of course, if David Jacoby was lying, it could put him at the scene of the crime with Hobbs.

On September 26, 2007, Mark spent the day feeling tense and agitated. He’d invited Terry Hobbs to come over for a couple of drinks and to talk about all the people who were sniffing around Memphis, digging up dirt on Hobbs. Having been a suspect in the eyes of the public for so long himself, as well as a parent of one of the victims, Mark was a natural confidant for Hobbs, and the two spoke from time to time. Now he was going to be stopping by for a visit. The difference this time was that Mark would be entertaining the man he now felt murdered his son. The objective of this visit was simple: get Hobbs’s palm prints for forensic experts to compare with the long-overlooked partial print that had been left in the mud near the ditch bank at the murder scene, the same print that Tony Anderson had photographed in 1993. During this visit, Hobbs would be asked to help Jacki with one of her craft projects. This particular project involved pressing down on a rectangular piece of plexiglass, a near-perfect surface for collecting prints. When it was time, Terry and Jacki brought the glass over to a surface where it needed to be pressed down for adhesion; Hobbs left two perfect palm prints.

Once the evening’s objectives were achieved, most of the talk centered around the defense’s most recent efforts to get a new trial for Echols and Hobbs’s belief that any success they might be having was coming at his expense. He blamed Pam’s family for always disliking him and the new defense team for persecuting him based on a single hair. He had already been interviewed twice by Herot and Douglas, twice by Lax and Geiser, and also by the WMPD. He spoke in conspiratorial overtones. “It ain’t over with you either,” he told Mark. “Don’t think it is. They’re trying to play us—and probably got Todd [Moore] in it too. They’re trying to play me and you right now, hoping to get a rise out of us, which I ain’t gonna give ’em the thrill.” Even so, he was confident that he was in the clear. “If there was anything to worry about, it wouldn’t take the state fourteen years to figure it out,” he told Mark during a phone call one night. He also said, “If [prosecutor] Brent Davis called me up and said, ‘Come here; I’ve got something to show you,’ I’d go.”

Hobbs was calm and conversational the rest of the evening, until the subject turned to his timeline, and thus his alibi, for the night of the murders. It has long been established and verified by official police documents that the first call to the West Memphis Police to report the boys missing was made by Mark and Melissa Byers and that Officer Regina Meek was the first to respond to the call. She arrived at the Byerses’ residence around 8:10 p.m. and met with Mark and Melissa. After the Byerses had given Meek the essential information, the three walked outside the house and were standing in the carport where Christopher had last been seen. At that point, Dana Moore walked over from across the street. She told them that she had seen Christopher with Michael and Stevie Branch shortly after 6:00 p.m. and that they had been headed down Fourteenth Street in the direction of Robin Hood Hills. Meek took off in search of the boys.

During the night of September 26, 2007, when Hobbs came over and left his palm prints on Jacki’s “art project,” Mark mentioned to Hobbs that the first time he had met him was out in the carport at around 8:30 on the night of the murders. Hobbs’s face reddened, and his voice rose. “It was 6:00, goddamn it!” he shouted. The dual nature of Hobbs’s personality was showing, according to Byers, just as it had with John Douglas.

At the end of the evening, immediately after Hobbs left his house, Mark delivered the set of Hobbs’s prints to Memphis attorney Gerald Skahan per a prior arrangement, and Skahan told Mark they would be sent out for comparison. Of course, they had only a poor-quality photograph of a partial print in the mud to compare it to. Maybe Anderson was right; maybe it would take a miracle. At the date of this writing, no official statement has ever been made regarding any comparisons of the print.

Following the November 2007 “DNA Conference” in Little Rock, where Dennis Riordan laid out his case for the news media, the heat beneath Hobbs increased dramatically. Hobbs lawyered up and was in all likelihood told to keep his mouth shut.192 He didn’t. In early 2008, Hobbs met with Arkansas Democrat Gazette reporter Cathy Frye in Memphis to tell his side of the story. “I want people to know I haven’t done nothing wrong,” he told her. “I want them to hear it from me.” Hobbs told Frye that during his search of Robin Hood Hills the night of the boys’ disappearance, he had gone down the path toward the ditch where the boys were later found but turned back after getting a bad feeling. “I couldn’t breathe. I froze. The hair started standing up.” He also told her that he didn’t remember whether he had told the police about it. He hadn’t, of course—they’d never asked him. Officer Stan Burch of the West Memphis Police Department did interview Pam Hobbs on May 10, four days after the boys’ bodies were discovered, but Terry was not home. Neither Burch nor anyone else from the police department ever followed up.

All the Democrat-Gazette interview accomplished, it seemed, was to provide an outlet for Terry to tell more stories about Pam and her family accusing him of killing Stevie, about how the defense was trying to frame him by “stealing” cigarette butts from his front yard and ashtray, and about how he and Pam would have violent arguments (one of which, for some reason, had been videotaped at a local bar). He also told Frye that in March 2008—four months after the DNA conference—he had suffered an “emotional breakdown,” sold the contents of his house, and moved with his fifteen-year-old daughter into his pickup truck, where they spent the next few months. Why would a person just named as a “potential new suspect” do something so obviously irrational and suspicious? “These are things men don’t like to talk about,” he cryptically told Cathy Frye. He was writing a book at the time, he said, and speculated that his reaction had to do with the fact that he was “reliving” the events of the past. This bizarre turn of events seemed to be of little interest to the WMPD, which was still not pursuing Hobbs as a suspect.

Further Revelations

“It doesn’t add up.” After fourteen years of being surrounded by death, drugs, alcohol, hospitals, and prison, Mark Byers felt that he was finally able to sweep the fog away and look objectively not only at the new evidence, but also at the facts of the case as they were already known. With hindsight and a heightened perspective, ignited by his talks with John Douglas and Fred Herot, he began to believe that the evidence pointing toward the innocence of the West Memphis Three was powerful, and he wanted the world to know what he now felt was the truth about who killed his son.

It wasn’t going to be easy announcing to the public this “change of heart,” as it came to be known, and Mark knew it. “I’m not that crazy hillbilly they made me out to be,” he told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in late 2007. Indeed, many were thrilled to have such a high-profile detractor change sides. Some lauded his “moral courage.” The image had changed too. Out were the bib overalls and rubber boots; in were the Armani suit and leather loafers. Instead of the shaggy beard and ponytail he’d sported in Paradise Lost, he appeared on camera with a smoothly shaved head and neatly trimmed goatee. Not everyone, however, was ready to let the old Mark Byers go. The attitude of some toward Mark Byers just prior to—and even after—his announcement was as hostile and accusatory as ever, almost surely as a result of continued exposure to the case via the HBO films and Devil’s Knot. For example, a MySpace page opened by someone other than Mark Byers in his name showed some interesting comments directed toward him: “I drove through West Memphis last week . . . I thought about the three little boys. I also thought about what a piece of shit you are,” said one person. “I know this isn’t your real profile, but you’re a piece of shit scumbag who killed three kids,” said another.

Amanda Hobbs, Terry’s daughter with Pam, said on Larry King Live in 2007, “It makes me sick. It really does. It’s just crazy, you know? It’s like Mark Byers has been in these shoes for fourteen years, and now he wants to try to put my father in those shoes?”193

Mark’s longtime nemesis, Mara Leveritt, was still gunning for him as late as February 2007. On her blog, she posted an article rehashing one of the public’s favorite slurs against Mark Byers, his alleged culpability in the death of his wife Melissa in 1996. In an effort thinly veiled as an “investigation,” Leveritt dredged up ancient hearsay from Sharp County sheriff Dale Weaver, who simply refuses, against all logic, to close his investigation. She claims that the impetus for the article was a refusal by the prosecuting attorney to release the Melissa Byers file to her under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, stating that the investigation was still open. The Arkansas State Police closed its investigation in 1996, but Weaver claims to have “lingering questions” over the death of Melissa. Of course, one has to wonder why Leveritt was still trying to implicate Mark Byers in the death of his wife at such a late date. Why exactly did she want the file on Melissa Byers? She unconvincingly tried to tie the article to two investigative pieces she was working on that examined undercover police operations in general and to her belief in the corruption inherent in such work. As her link between those articles and Mark Byers, she cited the fact that Mark and Melissa had done short stints working as informants for the Memphis and West Memphis police departments’ drug task forces and even wove in the word “occult” in an apparent effort to integrate the West Memphis Three story. Enough people questioned her motives for writing the article that she posted another some four months later, titled “Why I Wrote about Byers, the Confidential Informant.”

There was no love lost between Byers and the Hicks clan either. Pam Hobbs’s sister, Jo Lynn McCaughey, got into a shouting match with Mark at the briefing held prior to the November 2007 press conference, which resulted in McCaughey being asked by authorities to leave. “They asked me to leave the room because Mark Byers and I got into an argument.” What were they arguing about? “About his whereabouts and him falsely using my father [Jackie Hicks Sr.] as an alibi.” It seems that the Hicks family, as previously noted, would accuse anyone at arm’s length of killing Stevie. If there were hard feelings between Pam and Mark, however, they were not evident; they both suspected Terry Hobbs of complicity in Stevie’s death.

Alice Leeds, formerly a press agent for the Free the West Memphis Three support group, was blunt: “I don’t like Mark Byers. Any change in him is all on the surface. He looks like a gangster.” She was particularly miffed about Mark’s possible attendance at a demonstration by supporters at the state capitol building in Little Rock. The event was planned to be a major publicity opportunity, climaxing with the presentation of letters and postcards in support of the three convicts to Governor Mike Bebe by Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines.194

Mark’s publicist, Kalisa Hyman, wanted in. “What would Mark Byers’s role be in all this?” Hyman asked Leeds.

“Role? What role?” Leeds replied. “He’d be a private citizen showing his support for a cause he believes in.” That wasn’t what Hyman—or Byers—had in mind. He didn’t show up. He did, however, begin to make the media circuit.

“The Price of Justice Is Eternal Publicity”

Mark Byers’s presence tends to evoke a visceral reaction from people. The epithets used to describe him, cited elsewhere in this book, range from religious slurs and murderous accusations to attacks on his Southern heritage and even his size and hairstyle (“mullet-headed oaf”). In the latter part of 2007, Mark embarked on a mission to alter the public’s perception of him, integrating his new cause with a softened version of the preachy, evangelical style that had attracted so much media attention—and public ire—in the past. With a new contract in hand from Clear Pictures Entertainment, a new lawyer, and even a publicist, Mark was ready to unleash himself on an unsuspecting public. Knowing the damage he had done to himself with his performances in the Paradise Lost films, Clear Pictures didn’t want to take any chances that their man was going to sabotage a public relations effort for a film that had not yet been sold. Thus, all requests for interviews were routed through his attorney, Claiborn Ferguson, and approved—or not—by Clear Pictures.195

For possibly the first time in his life, Mark became Mister “No Comment,” unless he was advised otherwise by the studio or his lawyer, with a good dose of monitoring by Jacki. Thanks to some “media training” by a public relations firm, when he did speak to the media, his speech was measured, his demeanor composed, and his appearance impeccable, including “Free the West Memphis Three” garb when appropriate.

On December 5, 2007, Mark appeared on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet in New York along with Dr. Michael Baden, who appeared via remote feed. There he told hosts Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy that he had been swayed by “satanic panic” into believing that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were guilty of murdering his son. “They were three throwaway teenagers. Everything that the state brought out—that they were devil worshippers, that our children were sacrificed to the devil—that’s what we were told.” Specifically, what had changed his mind? “It was the DNA evidence and the fact that the crime scene does not match the confession.”

After showing a clip of one Mark’s hateful tirades from Paradise Lost, Juliet asked, “Is this [the murders] something you think about every day?”

Mark answered, “Yes. I’ve had questions about it since day one. But I needed someone to hate. I needed someone to hate to survive.”

Michael Baden, after giving his opinion as to the real cause of most of the injuries to the victims—postmortem animal predation—said, “I am very impressed with Mr. Byers’s opinion,” surely meaning, “He’s on our side now.” When the two men met face-to-face two years later at the Baldwin/Misskelley Rule 37 hearing, they embraced and shared some private words, most having to do with Mark’s surprise testimony given that day in Jonesboro.

Later that same month, Mark appeared via satellite on Larry King Live, a show that also featured a remote feed from death row at the Varner Unit in Grady, Arkansas. From there, Damien Echols appeared frail and nervous, the telltale pasty-white death-row pall evident on his face. Echols told King about the social climate in Arkansas that had led to his conviction in 1994. “West Memphis is pretty much like a second Salem. I mean, you know, because everything that happens there, every problem, no matter what it is, it’s blamed on satanism.” With insight coming from fifteen years in prison with nothing to do but think, Echols said he knew exactly why he was still on death row. “A lot of people have built their careers off of this case.” He spoke of his wife, Lorri Davis, and the efforts of the celebrities whose financial contributions had made the filing of the habeas petition possible. When asked if he thought that he’d ever be free, Echols said, “I believe that, yes. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”

From a remote studio in Memphis, Mark Byers sat listening. At one point King asked, “If the West Memphis Three are innocent, as Damien Echols’ supporters claim, then someone had to have murdered the three boys.”

Mark didn’t even let the host finish the question. “Terry Hobbs. I don’t have any problem with saying his name. In my opinion, yes, I believe he is the perpetrator of this crime.” As to what he thought about Damien Echols’s fifteen years on death row, Mark said, “It’s the worst nightmare you could ever imagine. I know the nightmare that the three in prison feel, to be wrongly accused.”

When King asked Echols to comment on Mark’s support, Echols said, “I really do appreciate that. I appreciate everything he’s been expressing lately. I’ve heard him make comments like that several times on different local news stations, and I’ve heard people repeat that to me. And I really, really do appreciate that. It means a great deal.”

Mark was also interviewed by several local reporters for TV stations in Memphis, Little Rock, and Jonesboro, as well as by numerous newspapers. In one television interview with Stephanie Scurlock of CBS affiliate WREG in Memphis, he and Jacki appeared on the front porch of their home sporting brand new “Free the West Memphis Three” t-shirts. He told Scurlock that although it had taken him quite a while to reach his conclusion, “by looking at the evidence, and the facts that were presented to [him], [he had] no doubt that the West Memphis Three are innocent.” In an apparent inconsistency, Mark stated that although he’d had “question marks” for fourteen years, he had also truly believed that the three in prison were the ones responsible for the crime. He taunted, not for the first time, that he knew something that the media didn’t. “I believe it will be the story of the twenty-first century when this crime is totally uncovered . . . when you know what I know.” When asked if he could relate to “another name that has surfaced” in connection with the murders, Mark said, “I can’t imagine what it would feel like knowing you’re guilty of killing three children and that the hounds are on your tail.”

Mark’s transformation from a staunch believer in the guilt of the West Memphis Three to a hard-core supporter seemed rife with contradictions. Mark was claiming that he had “always had problems” with the trials and had had “question marks for fourteen years.” If that was true, he’d kept those questions to himself. No one who had heard Mark Byers speak over the years would have gotten the impression that he questioned anything. He was known for being the most outspoken of the victims’ parents when it came to the guilt of the three and had been involved in some very heated and public discussions with WM3 supporters over the years. He had nothing but praise for the police investigators and the prosecution team, believing that the right people had gone to trial and ultimately been convicted. He told a reporter outside the courtroom right after the Misskelley conviction, “It’s hard to think of how it would have gone any other way, but you never can tell with a jury of twelve that they could have found a verdict of not guilty.” Yet in interviews fourteen years later, he maintained that he had always stated that if the three were ever proven innocent, he would be one of the first to greet them as they were released from prison. In 2008 he said, “Melissa and I walked out of both those trials back in 1994 wondering how they were able to get convictions,” but in 1994, after the Misskelley verdict, Melissa had said that the WM3 were “three murdering bastards,” with Mark concluding, “One down, two to go.” Be that as it may, Mark took on the role of nouveau spokesperson for the Free the West Memphis Three movement. Likening himself to “an F5 tornado, a force of nature that cannot be controlled,” he said, “I am going full speed ahead for the freedom of the West Memphis Three.” Whatever their private feelings were, publically supporters welcomed Mark to their ranks, at least initially. Having a victim’s parent on their side was a nice plum to bring to the public, and Mark was at least more consistent than Pam Hobbs.

CHAPTER 7

Jason and Jessie

Then I saw Damien hit this one boy real bad.

—Jessie Misskelley’s confession

I’m innocent.

—Jason Baldwin to Judge David Burnett after being sentenced to life in prison

All but forgotten by the public during the hoopla surrounding the filing of Damien Echols’s habeas petition was the fact that the two other men who made up the West Memphis Three were languishing in the ADC. Echols was on death row, and his future was dire compared to the others. Also, the celebrity donations flowing into Echols’s support fund, though benefitting all three convicts, tended to highlight Echols in the public eye. But because Baldwin and Misskelley had filed direct appeals in a timely manner, they were still eligible to file appeals under Rule 37, charging their trial attorneys with ineffective assistance of counsel. Since all the evidence collected by the Echols defense team was “new,” they were able to use all of it in their own appeals. Finally, beginning in 2008, the two men had their day in court.

The courthouse at 511 South Main Street in Jonesboro is a new building, situated directly across from the building where Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were tried and convicted in 1994. The old courthouse, built on the former site of the Malone Theater and dedicated in 1935, is still operating, a genuine Arkansas Historical Site, and proceedings there are often presided over by former prosecutor and now judge John Fogleman. A plaque outside the courthouse ominously quotes scripture, reminding visitors of the source of the court’s authority:

“For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4).

With the exception of one day in September 2008, all of Baldwin and Misskelley’s Rule 37 hearings were held in the new courthouse—referred to as the “annex”—in Courtroom A, on the fourth floor. Foregoing wood paneling, the courtroom is instead bright, simple, and somewhat institutional. The walls are carpeted in light gray fabric, and at three quarters up the wall, a six-inch-wide dark gray stripe runs completely around the room. It’s a small room—ten hardwood benches seating about six or seven people each. The business side of the bar is tight for space, and the defense tables are clumped together in a way that often forces attorneys to cross the bar and travel through the gallery to get from the jury box to the podium on the other side. The limited floor space is often cluttered with boxes of evidence, audio and video equipment, easels for drawing or presenting evidence, and all manner of wires, cables, and plugs. This was to be the setting for the Rule 37 hearings of Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, originally scheduled for September 24-26 and September 29-October 1, 2008. In actuality, there ended up being four groups of hearings. In a case involving four defense attorneys, two assistants, and two investigators, as well as a bevy of high-profile expert witnesses—not to mention the state’s own docket of cases—scheduling conflicts were inevitable. Thus, the hearings were heard in multiple sessions between September 2008 and October 2009.

Unlike Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearings conducted in 1998-99, the appeals for Baldwin and Misskelley were being heard together, despite their having been tried separately in 1994. As they were escorted into court—the first time either of them had been in court or seen each other in fifteen years—the difference in their demeanor was striking. Misskelley looked already beaten, downcast, and at least on the first day, nonresponsive to reporters’ inquiries or the calls from well-wishers on either side of the sally port (there were no hecklers). He was heavier than one would expect, given his fifteen-year incarceration (“the food [at Varner Unit] is pretty good,” he said). His head was clean-shaven, showcasing a circular tattoo acquired during his stay in prison.196 Baldwin, on the other hand, was smiling, standing straight—he had grown several inches in prison—and nodding at supporters. He replied to a question called out from the small crowd, saying only, “I’m feeling pretty good. Feeling hopeful.”

The first group of hearings was designed to get at the heart of the matter—that is, the lack of criminal defense experience the defense attorneys had when they were tapped for the case and their failure to provide competent representation for their clients. Both Dan Stidham (attorney for Misskelley) and Paul Ford (attorney for Baldwin) took the stand, one contrite, the other defiant. As Jessie’s court-appointed trial attorney, Stidham had originally taken the case believing that he was handling a plea agreement. The Arkansas Public Defenders Commission has minimum requirements for the lead chair in a capital case. Among them are that the attorney must “have prior experience as lead counsel in no fewer than five jury trials of serious and complex cases where tried to completion, as well as prior experience as lead counsel or co-counsel in at least one case in which the death penalty was sought.” Neither Stidham nor Ford met those guidelines.

Stidham first attacked the state for its handling of his former client in trying to get a confession. He told the court that his client would say anything anybody wanted him to say, particularly when interacting with anyone he perceived as an authority figure. Stidham testified as to Misskelley’s suggestibility and said that whenever Jessie provided a detail that was inconsistent with the known facts of the case (as defined by detectives Gitchell and Ridge), they would stop the questioning and start over until they were able to record a confession without contradictions, though even the short portion that was taped had its share.

Stidham’s co-counsel, Greg Crow, testified that prosecutor Brent Davis pressured Misskelley to testify against Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin at their upcoming trial and did so without Misskelley’s attorneys present. (This situation eventually had led Stidham and Crow to file a motion that alleged, among other things, prosecutorial misconduct; Judge Burnett dismissed the motion on February 22, 1994.) Although it had been generally known that the state was trying to work a deal with Misskelley to testify against Baldwin and Echols in exchange for a sentence reduction, a specific number wasn’t made public because Misskelley eventually had refused to testify. Both Stidham and Crow testified at the hearing that there was a verbal agreement that Jessie would receive fifty years and that the state would not object when he came up for parole. In the end Jessie refused to testify. Stidham was particularly critical of his own cross-examination of state witnesses, especially of Vicki Hutcheson and medical examiner Frank Peretti. “When I look back on it, my crosses were poor.”

When asked by Brent Davis if he thought he had been “incompetent” in his defense of Misskelley, Stidham replied, “I never felt incompetent, only ineffective.”

Paul Ford had a different take on how he had represented his client. “I did the best I could,” Ford said. His reason for not putting on alibi witnesses for Baldwin—one of the principal complaints about his representation—was that he had felt they were “weak” and would not withstand cross-examination. His strategy had been to offer no alibi at all. “As much as I wanted to see Jason go free, I cannot imagine I would not have put on a witness if I thought it would help his alibi.”

Jason Baldwin remembers it differently. “I remember always telling them I was innocent. I would tell [the lawyers] every time, ‘There are people who know where I was on May 5th and May 6th,’” he said from the stand, but “they just kept shrugging me off.”

Jason had also wanted to testify on his own behalf at trial, but his attorneys wouldn’t allow it. Fourteen years later—much too late for it to do him any good—Jason was able to take the stand in his own defense. He complained about his attorneys trying to pin blame on Damien. “They always asked me about Damien. It was like they thought he was guilty, and I was not.” There is little doubt that this is exactly what the trial strategy was. At trial Ford had called a single witness for Jason, fiber expert Charles Linch, who was put on the stand to unsuccessfully rebut the state’s witness, Lisa Sakevicius.197 In the film Paradise Lost, Ford is filmed essentially telling his client that Echols committed the crime alone and that he should be glad Ford never put him on the stand. In his zeal to separate his client from Damien Echols, Ford failed to take advantage of some of the resources Echols had, such as the pro bono services of Ron Lax and Inquisitor, Inc. That the investigators turned up nothing useful for Echols didn’t excuse Ford from cooperating with them, or so Jason Baldwin claimed in his appeal.

On August 13, 2009, Jason’s mother, Gail Grinnell, was called to testify, the purpose being to establish the alibi for Jason that Paul Ford had not presented at the criminal trial. She looked like she had aged thirty years in the past fifteen. Her hair hung limp on her face, and her eyes darted back and forth suspiciously. She appeared to be terrified. Although she had been present in court for a good part of the day, Judge Burnett allowed her to testify. Today, Jason’s mother would finally get to tell the court where her son was when the three eight-year-old boys were being murdered. She told essentially the same story that police had heard in 1993—that after being in school all day, Jason had come home to check on his brothers, gone over to mow his uncle’s lawn, played video games at Wal-Mart with a friend, and come home for the night by 9:00 p.m.

But Gail was in no shape to testify. She tried to answer attorney John Philipsborn’s questions but often acted as if she didn’t hear them, staring off into space and then finally managing to squeeze out, “Excuse me?” This pattern repeated over and over again, along with her tendency to look to Jason before answering almost every question. She would give random answers to questions not asked. “He had a Nintendo.” “When he was arrested, he was my height.” The only time she really seemed to light up was when she talked about her former job. “I did data entry for a transportation company in Memphis, answered the phone, worked in offices, sent out parts.” By the time of the hearing, she hadn’t been able to work in years.

Like Ford, Grinnell tried to distance her son from Damien Echols, claiming he had not been Jason’s “best friend,” an unbelievable statement in that this was one of the few things about the entire case that had never seemed to be in question. In his 2005 book Almost Home, Echols himself states that shortly after the two met, they were nearly inseparable. They were together nearly every day after school, and every weekend, one would sleep over at the other’s house. Summers were spent fishing, playing video games, and sneaking out at night with Jason’s brother Matt (“Sometimes I think I miss Matt almost as much as I miss Jason,” Echols said). On the stand, Gail could remember only one of Jason’s other friends by name, one Kenneth Watkins, the boy Jason had allegedly played video games with early in the evening on May 5. She looked off into space from the witness stand, repeating, “He had other friends . . . other friends . . .” and looked around the room, as if she might see some familiar faces in the gallery. She looked like the ghost of Paul Ford, still trying to disassociate Jason from Damien.

For Gail, this was her chance to finally tell the court about the boy she knew, her son, the one who would take care of his two younger brothers, feeding them dinner after Gail left for work, getting them ready for bed. The young boy who had loved animals and whose pet green snake was the top attraction in the neighborhood. The teenager she had tried to protect from the police after his arrest by telling him not to talk until she could somehow get him a lawyer. Her oldest son, whose innocence she had never doubted. “We just want Jason to come home.” But words seemed to elude her. After so many years of waiting to be allowed to address the court, she struggled to concentrate. “What I’m tryin’ to say,” she managed to get out, “is that we prayed that they would find out who killed those kids. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that he would be arrested.” When she was asked by the state if she had been hospitalized for mental illness, her face hardened. “That was a long time ago.” As she stepped down from the stand and walked past her son, she leaned in and meekly asked, “Was I all right?”

Many of the experts retained by the Echols defense team got their turn at bat: Drs. Werner Spitz, Michael Baden, Richard Souviron, and Janice Ophoven all gave their opinions as to the nature of the injuries to the victims, contradicting the opinion of the medical examiner, Dr Frank Peretti. For the state, Dr. Peretti took the stand, as did WMPD detectives Allen and Ridge (now assistant chief and detective sergeant, respectively). As expected, their stories were utterly unchanged from 1994.

There were two surprise witnesses. On Tuesday, August 11, after an impromptu hallway meeting, Michael Burt decided to call John Mark Byers to the stand in order to get it into the record that the types of carnivores that Baden had testified were responsible for most of the injuries to the victims—primarily large turtles—were common to the area of Robin Hood Hills. Mark testified that he had often found snapping turtles in the pool at his home on East Barton, a few blocks from the crime scene. He would fish the turtles out of the pool with a net and put them down storm drains.

But by far the biggest buzz of the hearings began Friday morning, with speculation that none other than Vicki Hutcheson was going to take the stand. As the person who had arguably set the wheels in motion leading to Damien Echols’s arrest, Vicki had been the focus of case-watcher folklore for years. Her role in “playing detective” to entrap Damien Echols; her criminal record—four prison stints for drugs and writing bad checks; her Christian conversion; and her revelation in 2004 that everything she’d said at the trial “was a lie” combined to make Vicki one of the most enigmatic figures in the case of the West Memphis Three. It was assumed that on this day she was going to testify that she had lied about almost everything she’d testified to in 1994, apparently out of some crisis of conscience.

All eyes were on her as she was finally called. She was wearing a breezy, light green chiffon pantsuit, her long, reddish-blonde hair flowing behind her as she floated down the aisle. After being sworn in, she confidently took the stand, and with her chin slightly raised, she gave her full name to the court. Because she was to be a witness for Jessie Misskelley, Michael Burt began the questioning. “Your honor, before we can continue, Ms. Hutcheson has a question for the court. Go ahead and ask the judge, Vicki.” The question she asked stunned the gallery. What, she wanted to know, was the statute of limitations on perjury in Arkansas? This prompted an immediate bench conference, followed by a ten-minute recess to find out what the statute actually was.

Ten minutes later, public defender at her side, Vicki was advised that there was no statute of limitations on perjury and that she could be prosecuted for past false testimony. Her “lawyer” advised the court that he was recommending that Vicki invoke her right against self-incrimination unless the court was willing to offer some kind of immunity. “I’m not giving her immunity,” Judge Burnett snapped. Without a grant of immunity, her testimony is unlikely to be heard. And if she ever does testify, who is going to believe her?

Mark Byers spent most of the hearings quietly observing the proceedings. During breaks, spectators were allowed extraordinary access to the prisoners, whose handcuffs had been removed. Mark spoke with both Baldwin (when he wasn’t canoodling with an attractive young blonde visitor) and Misskelley, again offering his support and encouragement. He mingled with the attorneys and defense experts and made new friends among supporters, many of whom had traveled great distances to be there.198 Outside the courtroom he took his usual position in front of cameras and microphones, telling anyone and everyone who would listen that the West Memphis Three were innocent. No matter how many times he said it, the media dutifully reported it, and it usually had the intended effect. Mark’s voice was loud, his presence commanding, and he was hard to ignore. One evening after court, Mark treated a group of supporters, including Burk Sauls and Grove Pashley, to a Southern buffet, complete with frog’s legs, chicken, and catfish (all fried of course); hush puppies; and bottomless glasses of sweet tea.

The hearings officially closed on October 2, 2009, with Judge Burnett asking for briefs within sixty days. In a December 28 article in the Jonesboro Sun, Burnett said that he would make his ruling sometime in 2010. On January 20, 2010, he did just that: no new trials. In a sixteen-page decision, Burnett ruled against Baldwin and Misskelley solely on the grounds of their claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. All the forensic experts hired by the defense constituted a “sideshow,” he said, and Burnett would not even grant them consideration, save to say that Frank Peretti was also a “turtle expert” and said the wounds were ante-mortem and not caused by turtles.

There was some controversy in Burnett’s participation as a “special judge” in the Baldwin/Misskelley Rule 37 proceedings because the judge had announced his plans to run for a state senate seat in 2010. In response to a motion filed by the defense requesting that Burnett recuse himself from the case, he said that although he would “love to drop this [case] in someone else’s lap,” he felt that it was his “burden to bear.” Since he had not actually filed the necessary paperwork to run for public office, he said he had broken no laws and denied a motion to recuse himself. He does, however, have plenty to say about the case he adjudicated, his last before retiring. Burnett rightly placed the responsibility for all the post-trial polemics squarely on the makers of the HBO documentaries. “The producers of the film were very one-sided, and it was a mistake” to let them film the proceedings, Burnett said.199 With the ruling on the Baldwin/Misskelley appeals, and his May 2010 election to the Arkansas State Senate (District 15), Judge David Burnett’s seventeen-year stranglehold on the case of the West Memphis Three finally came to a close. Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin would have to once more put their hopes in Damien Echols’s appeal to the Arkansas State Supreme Court.

CHAPTER 8

John Mark Byers, Damien Echols,
and Terry Hobbs

What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate

And courage never to submit or yield

—Satan to Beelzebub
(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

After Judge David Burnett dismissed Damien Echols’s second amended petition of habeas corpus in the Second District Court of Arkansas without an evidentiary hearing, the petition went to the Arkansas State Supreme Court (ASSC) for consideration. The court set a date for oral arguments, September 30, 2010. Should his appeal be denied by the ASSC, the way would be cleared to refile in the federal District Court of Eastern Arkansas, where the motion was originally filed in October 2007, at which time the federal court had informed Echols that he had failed to exhaust all of his state remedies. And thus the case had been remanded to Burnett, whose dismissal pushed the case up one level to the ASSC. If this all seems complicated and somewhat convoluted, it merely represents the sometimes random, sometimes circular route that a case follows through the appellate courts. The right to a speedy trial may be guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, but there is no such right to a speedy appeal. “How long do I have to sit here?” Echols rhetorically asked in an interview with the Jonesboro Sun.200 According to an Associated Press wire story, a spokesman for Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel said “as litigation goes, this process will take months, possibly years”, and there was every reason to believe he was right.201

As Echols’s case wound its way through the courts, what could possibly cause the state of Arkansas to reopen the case against the West Memphis Three? Echols and Davis’s statements to George Jared of the Jonesboro Sun in early 2000 that they expected Damien to be free within a year seemed to be more groundless optimism. Without the capture and conviction of the “real” killer or killers, all the Echols defense had was the opinions of forensic experts-for-hire and two lone hairs. Any suspect singled out would need to have information known only to him and the police and further be willing to credibly confess that information. After seventeen years of avoiding detection, why would anyone come forward now? In reality, Dennis Riordan would have to convince the judges of the Supreme Court that Echols deserved to have his new evidence heard at the Circuit Court of the Second District, the court that had just denied him.

Lorri Davis

Although it was unquestionably the HBO films that sparked the movement to free the West Memphis three and the WM3.org that gave it legs, it was New Yorker Lorri Davis who galvanized those responsible for the defense fund to use their rapidly growing war chest to hire top legal and forensic talent for her husband’s defense. She has stood at the helm of Echols’s defense effort for the last ten years or so but remains something of an enigma herself. What is really known about her, and what motivated her to leave her friends, job, and home—“the city I loved,” she said—to marry a man convicted of such a ghastly crime? Women who love or marry condemned men are not unheard of, or even uncommon. Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, the Menendez brothers, Ted Bundy, and Gary Gilmore all had female admirers, marriage proposals, and the like. Davis is different. Raised in West Virginia by conservative, religious parents, she cannot simply be branded as a woman who suffers from some kind of bizarre, long-distance hybristophilia.202 She’s pretty, educated, and articulate. She also fully believes in her husband’s innocence and remained convinced that he would eventually be released from prison as the appeals process continued. (“I believe in him,” she said. “He’s going to get out someday. And we will have a life together.”) Indeed, there isn’t a hint of any aberrance visible in this immaculately groomed, intelligent, and attractive woman, her brilliantly white, easily drawn smile gleaming for the cameras. She is irresistibly charming and irrepressibly positive. She has been referred to in the media as “well-traveled” and “career oriented,” yet she left her life in New York City to marry Echols in December 1999.203 But Davis is also an intensely private person, which is something of a dichotomy in someone who has led a very public campaign. She garnered money and support from some very high-profile people (music and film stars) in order to purchase the advice and expertise of some other very high-profile people (legal and forensic experts) to the tune of what had to be well over $1 million. Clearly, there is a link missing in the chain.

So what caused Davis to leave her job in New York and marry Damien Echols in a Buddhist ceremony on Arkansas’ death row? She says she fell in love. “He’s a fascinating person, so kind and thoughtful,” she told reporter Erin Moriarty on CBS’s 48 Hours Mystery in an interview aired on February 27, 2010. She continued, “He’s a pretty handsome guy.”

Moriarty expressed disbelief at Davis’s decision to marry Echols. “That’s a tough decision . . .” she said.

Davis shook her head vigorously, flashing that smile again. “Ah, hmm-mmm. No. It wasn’t a tough decision at all. And there’s never been a moment of doubt about it.” She said that the decision to leave New York and her job as an architect had been easy. But what, she was asked, if he never got out? “He’ll get out,” she said, adding that she never even entertained the other possibility. She added that her parents, who had been understandably reluctant to accept her choices, were now supportive of her decision and had gotten to know the “real” Damien Echols. If Davis is hiding something up her sleeve, it hasn’t shown. Mysterious and baffling as she may be, if there’s a chink in her armor, no interviewer has been able to expose it, though the fact that she grants interviews sparingly serves as a warning to those she speaks with to tread with care when asking questions. “My personal life is my personal life,” she has cautioned.204

48 Hours

On February 27, 2010, CBS aired a segment of the show 48 Hours Mystery called “A Cry for Innocence,” and it was dedicated to the case of the West Memphis Three. Appearing before cameras for the first time as a WM3 supporter was actor Johnny Depp. Though his name had been batted around for quite some time, the actor hadn’t made any public statement indicating even his awareness—let alone his support—of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley’s case. The producers of Paradise Lost say that they have been in touch with Depp for years. “I’ve gotten an e-mail from Johnny probably once or twice a year since ’96 wanting updates on the case,” said Joe Berlinger in a recent interview. “He was one of the first people to say, ‘These guys aren’t still in prison, are they?’ He was blown away by the movie when it first came out, and he couldn’t believe that nothing had changed.”

But until 48 Hours, few in the general public knew of the depth of Depp’s involvement in the case, although Lorri Davis claimed, “[Depp] knows this case inside and out.” The West Memphis Three had been convicted, Depp said, out of a need for “swift justice,” and “every single piece of evidence points to their innocence, not to their guilt.” “My biggest fear,” Depp declared on 48 Hours, “is that justice is not served, not only for those three innocent men in prison, but for three little innocent boys.” How did Depp suggest justice be served? “People need to stand up and say, ‘Yeah, let’s find the real killers.’” So despite Dennis Riordan’s emphatic assertion at the DNA press conference in 2007 that there would be no “rush to judgment” against anyone in order to clear his client, that Echols would be cleared by the evidence alone, it was clear that many believed the forensic evidence alone was not going to be enough to clear the West Memphis Three.

Invariably, the show turned to the subject of Mark Byers. From the very beginning, reporter Moriarty said, “some” (most?) supporters of the West Memphis Three had suspected Mark’s involvement in the crime. There was a quick recap of the “shooting pumpkins” scene from Paradise Lost to demonstrate how Mark Byers had become a suspect in the eye of the public. Byers, Moriarty said, was “volatile” and “acted oddly” in the film. In her interview with him, she predictably confronted Mark with the “terroristic threatening” assault of his first wife, Sandra Sloane. “Don’t you have some violence in your past? Your first wife accused you of assault.”

Mark, of course, admitted to the assault, as he has all along. In case viewers missed the innuendo, Moriarty made sure to add the non sequitur regarding the untimely death of Melissa Byers from “undetermined causes.” There was a recap of Mark’s downhill spiral that had culminated in his stay with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. “I brought it mostly on myself because of the rage and anger,” he told her. “When I got up in the morning, I was mad, and when I went to sleep, I was mad.” Asked how he regarded Echols’s behavior at trial in 1994, Byers said Damien was “arrogant, like it was a big game to him.” The show segued into the DNA analysis of the two hairs found at the crime scene, which until 2006-2007 had gone untested. Byers, she said, was “eliminated.”

The subject of Terry Hobbs was introduced to the show through Inquisitor, Inc.’s Rachel Geiser. Lax had been retained by the defense team in 2007 (or possibly earlier) to reinvestigate the fourteen-year-old crime. For reasons not stated—perhaps because of the persistent rants of the Hicks clan accusing Hobbs of murder, or maybe because Dan Stidham had spoken up about the knives Pam Hobbs had sent him several years earlier—Hobbs had shown up on someone’s radar. Lax sent Geiser to the home Hobbs was renting in Memphis, where she collected several cigarette butts from the front yard. During a personal interview with Hobbs some three weeks later, the first such interview ever conducted with Hobbs, Geiser grabbed a few more butts from an ashtray inside the house. These were all sent out for analysis and compared with hair recovered from the crime scene in 1993. “I was immediately floored,” Geiser told Moriarty, speaking of the test results, “and a lot of everything from then on turned to Terry.”

When Moriarty asked Hobbs how the hair had come to be at the crime scene, he said, as he has since their discovery, “[The boys] played in our homes; it got there by transfer, and that’s how it happened . . . if it was even my hair. The police have never told me it was my hair.”

Moriarty then discussed the interview Hobbs gave to West Memphis police in June 2007, during which Hobbs told police that he had first gone into Robin Hood Hills to look for Stevie somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. on the night the boys had gone missing and that David Jacoby was with him. Moriarty seized the moment to confront Hobbs about inconsistencies.

Moriarty: Do you know that David Jacoby says that you went off by yourself?

Hobbs: I went off with David. David left with me.

Moriarty: Is he then lying when he says that?

Hobbs: David didn’t say that.

Moriarty: So you say you were never by yourself?

Hobbs: Correct.

Pam Hobbs figured prominently in the show, which is no surprise, given that over the last few years she had dominated the local media among the families of the victims. Perhaps she was featured simply because she is a mother, and mothers tend to elicit a more sympathetic response from the public. It is more likely, however, that her accusations against her ex-husband as a killer, as well as her own antics and those of her sisters, are what keep her in the media. Most importantly to the show’s producers, who appeared to be overwhelmingly supportive of the West Memphis Three, Pam was also the only victim’s mother who believed—depending on when you asked her—in the possibility that the wrong men were in prison. “I want the truth,” she told Moriarty, “and maybe then I can sleep a little easier.” She was also crystal clear on one point: she didn’t trust her ex-husband as far as she could throw him. When asked by Moriarty whether she thought Terry Hobbs was an honest man, Pam fired back, “No . . . I’ve caught him in quite a few lies over the years.” Pam also told of “whoopins” given frequently by Terry to both Stevie and his younger half-sister, Amanda. Terry denied the frequency—every other night, according to Pam—but acknowledged that the children were spanked with a belt.

And then, in a déjà vu of years past (when it was highlighted that Mark Byers had hit Christopher with a belt on what would turn out to be the last time he saw his son alive), Moriarty asked Pam, “Do you think that Terry is capable, or was capable, of killing your son?”

“It’s a possibility,” Pam answered.

So did the defense’s case rely on finding the “real” killer? The answer, according to Lorri Davis and Dennis Riordan was yes and no. “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt against Terry Hobbs?” Riordan asked rhetorically. “Perhaps not. Proof that would absolutely lead to the acquittal of these defendants at their trial? Absolutely. Absolutely.” The absence of any DNA belonging to the WM3, Riordan said, proved that his client could not have abused the victims in the manner described in the Misskelley confession. Davis waffled in weak support of the “finding the real killer” scenario. “It’s not our job as a legal team to prove who committed these murders,” she said, “but I want to know who did it. I think everybody does.” For Damien Echols, the answer was much more succinct. “The fact that I’m not guilty,” he told Larry King in 2007, “means that a child murderer has been allowed to walk the streets for sixteen years.”

The show was extremely well produced and was essentially a summary of what was in Damien’s second amended habeas petition, with some “persuasive” steering by Erin Moriarty and plenty of celebrity name-dropping. Mark Byers was shown at the Rule 37 hearings for Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, greeting demonstrators from the Arkansas Take Action group in a show of solidarity and support. “I’m here strictly for the truth,” he told them. Pam Hobbs stood firm when she said, “Arkansas will never admit that they made a mistake. They’re gonna stand on ‘they did it’ [and] ‘we got the right ones,’ and that’s the way it is. I want the truth and nothing but, and once the truth and nothing but is known, I think I can rest a little easier.” But courts are not persuaded by all these things. They are persuaded by the law, by evidence, and by precedent, although Pam Hobbs might have had it right when she suggested the likelihood of some good old-fashioned ass-covering by the state of Arkansas. It seemed likely to many that the petition would meet the same fate in the ASSC as it had in the Second District Court presided over by Judge David Burnett, but the court’s decision caught many off-guard, particularly attorney general Dustin McDaniel.

Voices for Justice

No event since the so-called DNA press conference in November 2007 received more hype than the “Voices for Justice” rally held on August 28, 2010, in Little Rock. Initially, an announcement was made that the rally and concert benefitting the West Memphis Three would be held in a small Methodist church. Headliners Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines were to appear before some seven hundred people; tickets were going for ninety-five dollars apiece—$500 for “VIP” tickets. Several days later, allegedly because of “technical and sound issues” at the church, the venue was changed to the Robinson Center Music Hall, and ticket prices dropped to twenty-five dollars each, presumably because of the increased seating capacity (the hall holds some 2,600 people; according to the Arkansas Times, the event sold out).

There were teasers in press releases of possible appearances by “special guests” such as ex-Guns ‘n’ Roses frontman Axl Rose and shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, but the final line-up was a little more sedate and, with the possible exception of Patti Smith, a lot more talented. The man Lorri Davis said “knows this case inside out,” Johnny Depp himself, took center stage. Eddie Vedder, a constant presence among Echols’s celebrity supporters, was accompanied by a crew cut-sporting Natalie Maines. Performances were also given by Lisa Blount and Ben Harper and Fistful of Mercy (featuring Dhani Harrison, son of the late George Harrison).

The event was sponsored by Arkansas Take Action. “We are incredibly honored to have Eddie and Natalie lend their voices to this important evening,” co-founder Capi Peck said. “Their willingness to join us for Voices for Justice will help raise even more awareness about the profound injustice that continues to occur. We will not rest until our political and judicial leaders hear our voices and do the right thing.” This would be the movement’s final push for publicity prior to the September 30 hearings before the Arkansas State Supreme Court, along with the attendant demonstration planned for outside the capitol.

Along with performing a number of solo songs and backing up on others, Vedder read from letters written to him by Echols. From one such letter he read the following passage, one that seems to heavily reflect Echols’s past association with Buddhism.

One thing I’d dearly love to have is an hour glass, or a collection of them, some that measure minutes, some that measure hours, some that measure the whole day. And grandfather clocks, and pocket watches. The thing I like most about time is that it’s not real. It’s all in the head. Sure, it’s a useful trick if you want to meet somebody at a specific place in the universe for tea or coffee, but that’s all it is. There’s no such thing as the past: it exists only in the memory. There’s no such thing as the future: it’s only in our imagination. If our watches were truly accurate, the only thing they would ever say is “now.”

It was now Depp’s turn to read, and after asking the audience to close their eyes and imagine this writing was their own, he delivered this passage from Echols’s journal:

Today, the guards made me bleed again. They chained my feet so tight I could barely move. I bleed through my socks. Last month it was my left ankle; today it was the right. When I wash the sole, it burns like fire. I’m going to have to keep my ankles clean, because I don’t have any alcohol or peroxide to kill the bacteria, or infections, and this place is filthy. I can’t remember what it’s like to walk as a human being anymore. My cell is so small I can only take two steps. Anytime I’m brought out, no matter how briefly or infrequently, I have chains on my hands and feet, as well as guards hanging on me. It’s been well over sixteen years since I’ve actually walked anywhere. Sometimes I still can’t wrap my mind around that. I’m working on my seventeenth year now. There were times when I thought surely, someone is going to put a stop to this. Surely someone is going to do something. But they never do. Time just rolls on; it’s insanity. I’m truly amazed at what they’ve been allowed to get away with, and for how long. It does no good to dwell on it. Either I focus my energy on things I cannot change, or conserve it, and apply it to small things I can change. That’s what the I Ching calls, “the taming power of the small.” Every great victory is made up of many smaller victories.

This was perhaps the most poignant moment in the show. It allowed the listeners to feel, if just for the moment, the reality of life on death row. If we had hearts at all, we knew this man was suffering greatly. Guilty or innocent, Echols was in pain. For some that was as it should be; for others, it was unbearable.

More on Film

Bruce Sinofksy and Joe Berlinger weren’t the only ones planning to capitalize on the current status of the case of the WM3; Paradise Lost 3 had some competition. Filmmaker Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil), backed by director Peter Jackson, had been busy trying to put a film together, though she was meeting with many closed doors. For example, Sharon Nelson, Terry Hobbs’s former girlfriend, gave an affidavit to the defense as part of Jason Baldwin’s appeal but rebuffed attempts by Berg to get her on film.205 Berg has stated that her film will “tell the truth of this very complex tragic story,” the “truth” being that the WM3 were wrongly convicted. Indeed, it is difficult to find any form of media that believes otherwise.

Amy Berg had recently begun taking Amanda Hobbs around to various doctors and hospitals in the Memphis area. Amanda told her father that Berg was giving her money, money that she desperately needed. Terry wasn’t buying it. “It’s as lowdown as it can be. That Lorri Davis is behind all this,” he told George Jared of the Jonesboro Sun.206

Larry King Live, Part 2

On Wednesday, September 1, 2010, less than a month before Damien Echols’s attorneys were to make oral arguments before the ASSC, CNN aired a second episode of Larry King Live devoted to the case of the West Memphis Three. The first, discussed previously, had been shown in December 2007. This show was presented in panel format, with King in his studio and his guests sitting against the backdrop of the stage at the Robinson Music Center in Little Rock. Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines, Lorri Davis, and attorney Dennis Riordan sat in director’s chairs, answering questions posed by King.

King asked whether Vedder and Maines were “100 percent” convinced of the innocence of the WM3 or were just saying there was reasonable doubt. Although Vedder seemed to equivocate, the truth was that he had always believed in the innocence of the West Memphis Three. “This is a tragic crime, and there were three young kids that were killed. I really wanted to be sensitive to the crime that was committed and the victims and their families,” he said. “At one point I had to look [Echols] in the eye and ask him straight ahead, and I was completely satisfied with his answer.”

Dennis Riordan explained to King how DNA evidence was used to exonerate convicted men. “If you are tried and convicted [of a serious charge], it is virtually impossible to win your case on appeal, but once your direct appeal is over, as it was in the Arkansas Supreme Court, the legal system really assumes that there can be no validity for a further appeal or challenge.”207

King turned his attention to Lorri Davis and her marriage to Damien Echols in December 1999. “It’s been a journey,” Davis said. She giggled somewhat nervously when King told her how “talented,” “bright,” and “very beautiful” she was. Maines giggled too, though she didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the occasion. Vedder and Riordan maintained the somber look of two men attending a funeral, which was perhaps more appropriate, given the topic.

“Why subject yourself to a marriage in which you don’t touch your husband?” King asked Davis.

“Yes, it’s difficult, and yes, I would much rather it be different, but it will be,” she answered. Unbelievably, King asked her if there were conjugal visits in Arkansas. “No,” she answered, clearly embarrassed. “There are not.”

King could be a remarkably insensitive buffoon at times, and he was notorious for doing little or no research on his guests before their appearances. Unless he had interviewed a guest previously—he could lob softballs at Bill Maher in his sleep—the show was likely to be a little thin on substance.

The subject then came around to the Maines-Hobbs defamation suit. “I never expected it,” Maines said, trying to sound confused about why someone who was being accused of murder with little evidence would try to sue a well-heeled celebrity. But she was happy about it. “It’s been awesome. It’s been great for the case, and hopefully that gentleman will regret it [laughing], and everyone else will benefit from it.” She and Davis continued giggling. “Bring it on. I’m not scared,” Maines continued, “when I believe wholeheartedly in what I’m doing, and I felt confident in my case in that instance, and in Dennis’s case.”

Possibly the most curious and surprising aspect of the supporters, the various celebrities, Lorri Davis, Mark Byers, and Echols himself, was the incredible confidence and hope they had in the eventual exoneration of the West Memphis Three. They all claimed to be well educated on the case, and though Riordan had probably prepared them for the worst, they chose to remain amazingly optimistic about the outcome. Vedder’s comments on Larry King Live were almost shocking given his (perhaps inaccurate) reputation as a “grunge” rebel. “You have to have faith in the justice system. It’s part of our country; it’s part of the fabric of our flag to believe in justice.” Vedder appeared to be the most thoughtful of the group and was genuinely troubled, filled with fear and empathy for a man he called his friend, a man who was condemned to die.

September 30, 2010

Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel said of the case, “Our office knows that there are concerns about this case, but be assured that we take the utmost care in handling the appeals of death sentences handed down by Arkansas jurors. We are committed to fairness and justice not just for the three inmates, but also for the three little boys who didn’t live to see middle school.” If that statement, read on Larry King Live, wasn’t heard as an omen, perhaps McDaniel’s political message was missed. It wasn’t just political posturing; McDaniel wasn’t much different from most states’ attorneys general when it came to upholding convictions. Most believe in the integrity and accuracy of the justice system in their state, the system Eddie Vedder said he too had much faith in. This was a triple homicide involving eight-year-old children, and there was nothing in the defense’s case that could not be refuted by the state. As Riordan stated during Larry King Live, the defense had to prove that were the case to be tried today, there would be a reasonable probability that a jury would acquit.

The exposure of the case expanded when the ASSC announced that during the summer of 2010, cameras and software had been installed and tested and would make the court’s oral arguments available to viewers over the Internet. After 48 Hours Mystery, Voices for Justice, and Larry King Live, as well as the announcement of the soon-to-be-released Paradise Lost 3, the court needed to prepare for extra demands on its available bandwidth.208 Chief Justice Jim Hannah said, “The judiciary, as an institution, has a history of not looking forward to change, and we do not do change well.” He relented, however, and said that he and his fellow justices were “proud to be using this technology” by providing live streaming video of oral arguments.

At the lectern at the ASSC that Thursday morning in Little Rock, Dennis Riordan, accompanied by second chair Donald Horgan, gave a powerful argument, one that wasn’t explicit in the writ, but one that he would pound home to the bench for the bulk of the twenty minutes allotted to him. The case for a new hearing would require that all evidence, old and new, be considered, Riordan argued. The so-called DNA statutes (Ark Code 116 sections 201-208) had been incorrectly interpreted by Judge David Burnett when he denied Echols’s appeal. Riordan, referring to the state’s brief to the circuit court, told the justices, “It may seem that that would be hyperbolic on my part, to say that the state’s taken a position that no one could ever prevail under these [statutes]. But I quote from their brief in the circuit court: ‘The state does not shrink from Echols’s charge that relief may never be granted under this view of the statute, but embraces it out of confidence that the Arkansas criminal justice system does not convict the innocent.’” The ASSC found this ludicrous. The court’s justices seemed to be favorably disposed toward Echols from the beginning of Riordan’s argument. Associate Justice Elana Cunningham Wills had recused herself, possibly because she had spent twenty-two years in the attorney general’s office. Her replacement, Little Rock attorney Jeff Priebe, seemed as open to a wide interpretation of the statute in question as did his fellow justices. This exchange between Priebe and Assistant Attorney General David Raupp is a case in point:

Priebe: Counselor, what harm is there in allowing [Echols] to introduce evidence from the last seventeen years?

Raupp: Well, the harm is in the finality of the criminal judgment that is not demonstrated to have any constitutional or procedural defect, and just to try it again. It sounds to me, Justice Priebe, as though you’re suggesting that every fifteen or seventeen years or so, we ought to try cases again to reestablish guilt, and I suppose a legislative judgment could be made to that effect . . . The harm is to the criminal justice system’s interest in finality and the work that gets done in evaluating whether justice has been served . . . The question is now, can he demonstrate his own innocence?

Raupp, like Burnett, was apparently tired of this case.

After the hearing, Mark Byers had the opportunity to do something he’d waited ten years to do: outside the courthouse that day, he confronted author Mara Leveritt with the things she had written about him in Devil’s Knot. Leveritt was covering the ASSC hearing and was chatting amiably outside the courthouse with director Joe Berlinger. Mark was nearby, signing autographs and visiting with supporters. He approached Leveritt, and the two shook hands. Berlinger scrambled to get his cameraman in position.209 Leveritt asked Mark for his phone number, and Mark told her, as he tells everyone, that he’s listed in the phone book under his own name; he has never been hard to find. Her next request was a jaw-dropper: “Would you sign my book?” The question hung in the air like a boulder in one of those old Road Runner cartoons.

“Would you apologize for the things you said about me in your book that were untrue?” he finally asked.

She feigned surprise. “Like what?”

Mark began with the account in Devil’s Knot in which Leveritt had accused Mark of holding his parents at knifepoint for drug money when he was a teenager in Marked Tree.210 After a discourse on his criminal record and the case made against him by Leveritt and other supporters, Mark got down to the heart of the matter, at least for him. “It has hurt to lose my wife, and it has hurt to lose my son. But I want to tell you what tears my heart apart more than anything is to be blamed for it, to be spit on and asked to leave restaurants, to go into church and have the pastor say, ‘We’re glad you’ve come, but you’re too controversial; don’t come back.’” Leveritt weakly attacked Mark for his treatment of the West Memphis Three during the months leading up to the trials in 1994, but the attempt fell flat. A disassociated journalist was no match for a then-grieving parent.

Mark tried to explain to Leveritt why Terry Hobbs should have been investigated as thoroughly as he himself was. “If he had been, we wouldn’t be here today,” he said. But Leveritt wouldn’t let it go. She continued to hammer Mark on his criminal record, particularly the 1987 conviction that she covered in excruciating detail in Devil’s Knot and the subsequent expunging of that conviction.

“Why was it expunged?” Leveritt asked, something she hadn’t asked Mark prior to writing Devil’s Knot, as was the case with almost everything else she had written about him. Mark attempted to explain to her the facts of the situation—that it was expunged per a prior agreement with the court—but she wasn’t interested. She stuck to the accusations of cronyism that characterized nearly all of her writing.

“Now what was it you wanted me to sign?” he asked.

“My book.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to do that because I don’t endorse it. You’ve badgered me and bad-mouthed me long enough and had many people say bad things about me because of what you wrote, so as far as endorsing anything you’ve got? I wouldn’t endorse it. I do appreciate your apology. It shows that you are a woman of integrity to apologize. However, my hypocrisy goes only so far. And to sign your book? No way.”

The ASSC Returns a Surprise Decision

Priebe and his six colleagues on the bench didn’t buy Raupp’s argument. According to the sixteen-page opinion issued on November 4, 2010, “Echols was entitled to an evidentiary hearing under this subsection [of the law] before the motion for a new trial was ruled upon.” This time, and in accordance with the statute, the high court ruled that Echols’s hearing was to include “all evidence,” whether or not that evidence was introduced at the original trial in 1994. This would include the evidence of juror misconduct that his defense team felt would be among the strongest in obtaining a new trial. The thrust of Dennis Riordan’s argument during his twenty minutes before the court had focused on these points, and his victory, after seventeen years of rejection, was nothing less than stunning. In his opinion, Associate Justice Ronald L. Sheffield wrote, “It is clear that each of the alternative reasons for denying Echols’ motion [by Judge Burnett] for a new trial rests, in part, on the circuit court’s [erroneous] interpretation of the DNA testing statutes.”

Shortly after the ASSC rendered its decision ordering the lower court to “promptly set an early hearing for the petition and response,” Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel responded, saying that he “respect[ed] the decision” of the ASSC but that his office also “intend[ed] to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to defend the jury verdicts in this case.” McDaniel was simply doing what he was paid to do, but the state’s high court had determined that Echols must be allowed to present his case virtually unfettered by further legal obstacles. Echols’s life was at stake, and someone had finally acknowledged it.

If the lower court were to decide that new trials—or a new trial, singular, for all three defendants—were justified, Echols would be hard to beat. The high visibility of the case and the changing social mores that would be alluded to by Judge Burnett, combined with Echols’s high-powered defense team, might be enough to establish reasonable doubt. Echols and Lorri Davis made the “helpful suggestion” that the hearing be skipped and the proceedings move straight to the trial phase. It would save time and money, they said, since, should they prevail at the hearing, a jury trial would have to be held where they would present essentially the same case. Having the hearing waived was unlikely, but it showed the confidence that Echols and his supporters were gaining. A date for the hearing would soon be set for December 4, 2011, in Jonesboro in the former courtroom of the Honorable David Burnett. This time, however, there would be a new face at the bench, and Echols felt good about his chances with Judge David Laser, as indicated by an interview he gave to KATV reporter Heather Crawford.

Reporter: If you do get a new trial and it goes before a new jury, there’s always that chance the jury could say guilty as charged. Do you think about that happening? Do you think that could happen?

Echols: No, I don’t. I don’t think after they hear everything we’ve collected over the past seventeen years—I don’t think there is any chance [at] all of that happening.

Reporter: How confident are you that you will get a new trial?

Echols: 100 percent.

Echols sounded supremely confident, and indeed, it would seem he had reason to be. This was, after all, the biggest break in his quest for freedom since his arrest in 1993. But was the state just going through the motions of justice in order to prevent being reversed upon further appeal? If Echols were to lose in the lower court this time, his appeal would be heard by the US District Court of Appeals where he had originally filed his habeas petition. Who knew how long that would take or what the outcome would be? The granting of an evidentiary hearing by the ASSC could simply be the court acknowledging what most people already suspected: Judge David Burnett had been ready to hightail it from the bench to grab a state senate seat, and he wasn’t going to let the case he was so “tired of” get in his way. Naturally, he denied this. “I made my opinion and they made theirs. That’s the way the system works. I did what I thought was appropriate at the time. Times change and circumstances change, and I guess they had a different view than I did.”211

Little Rock KATV reporter Heather Crawford conducted her fourth interview with Echols on November 17, 2010, to get his reaction to the unanimous decision (7-0) by the ASSC. “I suspected it would [be] sent back. I didn’t think it would be unanimous. That in itself was a huge confidence booster, that every single judge on the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed that this evidence should be heard, and they sent it back to be heard. That in itself felt like almost a miracle to me.” Indeed, unanimous decisions are relatively rare, but the WM3 supporter community has often been characterized by unwarranted optimism, and it probably didn’t surprise them at all. “We are ecstatic and hopeful,” Lorri Davis said when she got the news.

There would be no smoking gun in this case when it came to solving the crime itself. There was no more crime scene DNA to examine, at least nothing that had been disclosed by either side. Proof of juror misconduct would nullify the process, but not the substance. The forensic and circumstantial evidence—with the exception of two hairs—did nothing to identify the killer(s). In anticipation of the evidentiary hearing, the defense was busy searching every avenue for additional evidence to introduce.

On May 17, Dustin McDaniel made it official: the state of Arkansas would not fight the introduction of evidence of juror misconduct at the evidentiary hearing. Another major hurdle in the case had been cleared.

Reviewing the Evidence

So what exactly was the evidence to be presented at the hearing in December? A partial list might include the following:

1. Forensic expert testimony that proved animal predation, not knives, was the cause of the wounds sustained by the victims.

2. DNA evidence excluding the defendants but not Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby.

3. Evidence of juror misconduct, particularly in the case of Kent Arnold.

4. The Misskelley confession. When allowed to be examined with respect to all three defendants and given the critical expert examination it should have had at trial, the confession, or confessions, could crumble. This represented the entire case against Jessie Misskelley, and its secret, inadmissible entry into both the trial and the jury deliberations at the Echols/Baldwin trial was sufficient cause for a mistrial, something that was moved for, but dismissed by Burnett.

There would likely be more evidence presented, but the most critical factor was probably not in the case at all, but in the jury box. If jurors had been influenced by excessive publicity in the 1994 trials, as they surely were, how much more so would they be influenced now, with sixteen years—beginning with the 1996 release of Paradise Lost—of overwhelmingly sympathetic press? The state had a problem. They were facing the very real possibility that the West Memphis Three not only would be granted new trials but even would win. The unanimous decision of the ASSC must have been weighing heavily on the district attorney and attorney general’s minds with December 4 approaching.

Florid Delirium

Judge David Laser of the Second Judicial District held a meeting with the WM3 attorneys in January of 2011 to decide how to proceed with the evidentiary hearing ordered by the ASSC the previous November. One of the more pressing issues had to do with the preservation of any evidence left that might be subjected to DNA or other lab testing. The state had done some testing on its own—in secret, according to Baldwin counsel John Philipsborn. That, Philipsborn said, had to stop. Laser agreed and ordered that all testing be done “above the table.”212 Some basic groundwork was laid, and Laser ordered that the attorneys submit briefs to him within forty-five days. On February 18, 2011, briefs were submitted, and Laser set the hearing date for all three appellants for December 4, 2011. Those hearings would never happen.

“Immediately” after the [ASSC] ruling that remanded the case of the WM3 to the lower court, Lorri Davis and Damien Echols “startled” supporters by disclosing that they had “replaced” San Francisco lead attorney Dennis Riordan with Washington, DC, lawyer Stephen L. Braga.213 Braga himself says that Riordan was not replaced, rather that his role simply changed. “Dennis stayed on as a member of the team”, Braga said. “In fact, at my request he thereafter briefed the juror misconduct issues for the Echols team in the proceedings before Judge [David] Laser.”214 Braga had actually first taken on the case in the spring of 2009, becoming Echols’s lead counsel in the winter of 2011. Shortly thereafter, Arkansas co-counsel Deborah Sallings resigned. She was replaced with Little Rock attorney Patrick Benca. Both of the attorneys were working pro bono. Davis and Braga admitted that they’d had trouble finding an attorney willing to represent Echols at the evidentiary hearing in Jonesboro. But was it Damien Echols that attorneys had a problem with or the paycheck? It was no secret to anybody that the defense fund had been hauling it in. Why should the attorneys work for free?

Braga says it was out of principle. “The case presented significant issues of importance to the criminal justice system, not the least of which was the potential execution of an innocent man.” As it turned out, the defense was also running out of cash because remaining funds had all been earmarked for “experts, DNA testing and expenses.”

Benca was interviewed by Braga and Lorri Davis, who both felt he would be a good fit for the team. It was a good case for an up-and-coming lawyer like Benca to have on his résumé; Benca himself said that he didn’t understand why other attorneys had turned it down.

There was also the relationship that Benca had with Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. The two had gone through college and law school together at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. This relationship was pivotal to the case because it paved the way for a meeting between the West Memphis Three attorneys and District Attorney Scott Ellington of the Second District, a meeting McDaniel had said he did not have the authority to arrange. In January Benca set up such a meeting, and the parties began to hammer out a deal.

North Carolina v. Alford

Henry C. Alford was an illiterate black man with a criminal record living in North Carolina at the height of the civil rights movement, and his first-degree murder case was said to be “fraught with racial overtones.”215 One night Alford went to a bar to visit with a prostitute. While he was there, he had an argument with another man. Alford left the bar, went back to his room, and told witnesses that he was going to kill the other man. He retrieved a shotgun, went to the bar, and shot and killed the victim. He then returned to his room and stated that he had carried out the killing. Alford was indicted for first-degree murder. His lawyer interviewed the witnesses involved and was convinced of his client’s guilt. With Alford’s long criminal history taken into account as well—including a previous murder conviction—the case against him was strong.

North Carolina law at that time carried a penalty of death for first-degree murder. Alford’s attorney told him that if he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, he would be sentenced to thirty years. While continuing to proclaim his innocence, he told the court that after conferring with his attorneys and his family, he felt it was in his best interests to take the deal. The court accepted his plea, but Alford immediately appealed, claiming that he had been coerced into accepting it. The case was ultimately heard before the United States Supreme Court. The court ruled that if there had been no more evidence against Alford than his plea of guilty, then that plea would have been invalid, but because there was other evidence—chiefly the statements he had made to witnesses—the court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the Constitution did not prohibit a defendant from entering a guilty plea while proclaiming innocence. Today, forty-seven out of fifty states allow the use of the so-called Alford plea at some level.

On August 18, Mark Byers received a call from District Attorney Scott Ellington in Jonesboro. He asked Mark to pay close attention to what he was about to tell him. Mark’s stomach churned. Now what? The attorneys for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Ellington began, had reached an agreement with the state. This agreement, he said, would allow the men to be freed from prison the next day. In order for that to happen, however, the three would have to plead guilty to the murders, while being allowed to proclaim their innocence. Although the arrangement would preclude them from bringing any kind of wrongful imprisonment suit against the state, it would allow the three to pursue and introduce new evidence of actual innocence at a later time—the Alford plea in action. Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley would plead guilty to three counts each of first-degree murder. “Do I have any say in this?” Mark asked.

“No,” Ellington told him. “This is a courtesy call.” The state felt that they had the right men and stood by the convictions. Ellington conceded, however, that with the introduction of evidence of juror misconduct expected at the evidentiary hearing, Judge Laser would have no choice but to order new trials. Ellington also felt that it would be “impossible to put on a proper case against the defendants,” given eighteen years of “extended litigation,” as well as the fact that “two of the victims’ families [had] joined forces with the defense.”

Mark should have been overjoyed that the state was considering his efforts as part of the reason for the freeing of the West Memphis Three. But he wasn’t. “I felt like I’d been used, like I looked like an idiot for putting myself out there. I’m still a suspect in some people’s eyes, and Terry Hobbs is sitting there laughing his ass off. He can never be prosecuted.” The freeing of the three might be uppermost in most people’s minds, but Mark Byers still had his sights set on Terry Hobbs, perhaps now more than ever.

The following day, August 19, 2011, there was a hearing at the circuit courthouse annex in Jonesboro. Papers were shuffled, lawyers murmured, the press scribbled, and then the three most celebrated convicts in recent history gave their guilty pleas to the judge. The pleas were accepted, and the three were convicted and sentenced to time served plus ten years’ suspended sentences, during which time any violation would result in twenty-one years in prison.

A press conference was held where only Jason Baldwin was smiling. “I’ve been smiling so much my face hurts,” he would say that night, but it was a smile that belied a deep bitterness. Baldwin was clearly the least satisfied with the outcome. Fully realizing that his chances at a new trial were good, he had wanted to roll the dice and clear his name. He’d been in for eighteen years. He could do another year. “This was not justice,” Baldwin said at the press conference. “At the very beginning we told them nothing but the truth, and they put us in prison for the rest of our lives for it. And then we had to come here, and the only thing the state would do for us is say, ‘Hey, we’ll let you go only if you admit guilt,’ and that’s not justice no matter how you look at it. They’re not out there trying to find who really murdered those boys, and I did not want to take the deal from the get-go. However, they are trying to kill Damien, and sometimes you just got to bite the gun to save somebody.”

Echols then thanked Jason—they don’t even know each other anymore—and the two men embraced. The moment seemed extremely awkward for Misskelley, who was seated in between the two. If he had not confessed, this scene would not have been taking place. Jason seemed to notice the look on Jessie’s face and put an arm around him and shook him a little. “It’s okay, Jessie,” he seemed to be saying. Misskelley looked appropriately sheepish and sat mute during the press conference.

Echols looked as dark and unhappy as ever. His chalk-white skin tone was slightly offset by a red cold sore at the corner of his mouth and a pair of blue-tinted glasses. “I’m still in shock,” he said, explaining that after having been in solitary confinement for the past ten years, he wasn’t used to being around people, “especially this many.” Asked about the deal he had taken, he said, “It’s not perfect by any means, but it brings closure to some aspects.” He believes that it will be easier for him to assist in clearing his name from outside prison. He also acknowledged that being out gives him access to better nutrition and medical care. “I’ve lost a great deal of my eyesight,” Echols told CNN’s Piers Morgan a month later. “Whenever you’re in a confined space, you never get to see anything far away, so I gradually started to lose my ability to see anything further than a couple of inches away.” He added, “I haven’t seen sunlight in ten years.” In Amy Berg’s newly released documentary West of Memphis, Echols, now thirty-seven said “It’s odd now when they tell me things like, ‘You’ve got arthritis’, or when I see my hairline is receding and my hair is thinning.” Others were no less somber, but for different reasons. Steve Branch Sr. had to be removed from the courtroom, much as he had back in 1994. Before a judge slapped a gag order on him the night before the hearing, Branch was fuming. “Just because you have a high-priced lawyer, a lot of money, and a few celebrities that say you’re not [guilty], that doesn’t make you innocent. They’re still guilty. Twelve people found them guilty; they’re guilty.”

Terry Hobbs preferred to issue a long rambling statement, filled with religious overtones, stating clearly that he was moving on, “leaving this part of the nightmare as part of the past.” He continued, “From this point on I will talk about my love for Stevie, what he has always and will continue to mean to me, and look forward to seeing him again in heaven, where there will only be peace and joy and love forever.”

Mark Byers was, as usual, loud and clear outside the courthouse after the three men were freed, a crowd of supporters and the media surrounding him. “It’s a travesty,” he told the press, Jacki at his side. “The people of Arkansas need to stand up and raise hell because three innocent men are going to have to claim today that they’re guilty for a crime they didn’t know, and that’s bullshit!” Choking up a little, Mark told reporters that he was looking for the families of the recently freed men so he could hug them. “They got their sons back. Maybe I couldn’t get mine back, but they got theirs.” As far as Mark was concerned, the entire case had been “botched” by “corruption of the highest degree.” When asked who he thought the killer was, he immediately replied, “Terry Wayne Hobbs. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it.”

The deal was indeed far from perfect; Alford pleas never are, and attorneys tend to hate them.216 Such pleas have been decried as undercutting the process of “conviction, repentance, and closure” for victims, their families, and the public at large, and they further risk innocent defendants pleading guilty. The Alford plea also risks the encouragement of coerced pleas as pressure is applied to vulnerable defendants. For the West Memphis Three it was their chance for immediate freedom. All they had to do was admit they’d killed three eight-year-old boys 1993—a Hobson’s choice.

On the night of their first day back in the free world, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley attended a party thrown by Eddie Vedder on the rooftop of a Memphis hotel. Celebrities, Kathy Bakken, Grove Pashley, and Burk Sauls of the WM3 Support Group, Mara Leveritt, and the attorneys—all were there feeling vindicated. In the weeks following their release, the three men returned to life on the outside, a world that looked nothing like the one they had left in 1993. There were cell phones, iPods, HDTV, the Internet—for Damien, Jason, and Jessie, these things must have seemed magical. It’s a big world out there, and time will tell how well they adjust.

Damien

Echols arguably has the best support system in place. He is married to a “walking, talking miracle in human form,” a woman who fought tirelessly for her husband, a man she married while the world thought of him as a child killer.217 In an exclusive television interview with KATV, Little Rock, Lorri Davis was cautious in her responses. “I didn’t know what to expect; I didn’t know how he was going to transition, how long it was going to take . . . He was very calm and grounded, but I couldn’t even imagine what was going on in his head.”

Echols described his walking out of prison in surreal terms. “It was almost like the mirror reverse of whenever we were arrested,” he said of the crowds of supporters waiting outside the Craighead County Courthouse that Friday afternoon in August. “People back then were lining up condemning us, calling us names, damning us.”

After the rooftop party, Damien jetted to Seattle, his first time on a plane, and then to New York, where he and Lorri stayed with friends while she showed him the city she had left to be with him. Although professing a desire to see the people who had supported him all these years, as well as his family, Damien said he “just couldn’t stay in Arkansas while things were still raging.” He has since gone to New Zealand to spend time with his longtime but silent supporter Sir Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings). Jackson had to go to bat for Echols with New Zealand’s immigration service to allow Echols into the country, and there were rumors that Echols was doing movie work with Jackson that would be hampered by Echols’s lack of a work visa. Those problems were apparently ironed out. Amy Berg premiered the film West of Memphis, produced by Peter Jackson, on January 20, 2012, at the Sundance Film Festival. The film listed Damien Echols and Lorri Davis as producers.

Echols described a “really bizarre bond” between the WM3, the murdered children, and the families of both the convicted men and the victims. Echols told Heather Crawford that the lives of all involved were totally “destroyed,” adding, “The pain in this case is like someone threw a rock into a pond, and the ripples went on forever.” While acknowledging the importance of his case, he said, “To me the spotlight isn’t even about this case. You still have innocent people on Arkansas’ death row right now.”218 Nobody is sure how he knows that, or who those innocents are, but he nonetheless said that he had no doubt that the state would repeat what had been done to him. With the exception of the moment he walked out of the Craighead County Courthouse a free man, Damien Echols has rarely been photographed smiling.

Jason

Jason Baldwin also attended the rooftop party thrown by Eddie Vedder and made a few media appearances. He was the lone attendee representing the Three at the screening of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory in Memphis on November 6, 2011. Jason has allegedly taken a construction job in Seattle, for the time being at least. It is also said that he is “living off the donations of supporters” and will start soon at community college “on a full scholarship.”219 He has appeared with Joe Berlinger numerous times, including during a trip to the 2011 International Film Festival in Amsterdam.

Damien, Jason, and Jessie were all invited to attend the premier of Purgatory at the New York Film Festival on October 10, 2011. As the 121-minute documentary drew to a close—the final chapter, the filmmakers say—the spotlight dramatically shone on the West Memphis Three, who had been watching from the balcony. The theater predictably erupted in applause. Later, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were onstage for questions and answers; Jessie Misskelley, who had been uncomfortable with the publicity from the beginning, remained in the balcony.

Gail Grinnell, Jason’s mother, was photographed in New York when she joined Jason for the film festival. Grinnell, who had looked like a ghost when she testified at Jason’s Rule 37 hearing in August 2009, looked like a different person, smiling inside and out, alive. Nobody knows how she was feeling, but she had her son back, the son she loved and had never lost hope for. “We just want Jason to come home,” she had said back in 2009.

Jessie

Jessie Misskelley’s future is perhaps the least certain. He has the fewest resources on which to rely, and the possibility of a run-in with the law is probably greater. Even without the events of May 5, 1993, Jessie was looking at a limited future. His IQ is low, and he seems to be the one least able to capitalize on his “fame” by using contacts to open doors. Granted, those prospective doors are small; Jessie at one point said he wanted to be a mechanic. He also says he’s enrolling in community college, and his criminal record shouldn’t stop him from doing that. But nobody is rushing to his aid. Is it because he confessed to the crime? Even though he’s been told that it wasn’t his fault—Echols himself said so in a prison interview some ten years ago and has repeated it to Piers Morgan—is Jessie being punished? Or does he just want to be left alone?

What happened to Jessie Misskelley—the coercion of a false confession—has been happening with increasing frequency since 1936, when the Supreme Court banned torture and physical abuse to extract confessions (Brown v. Mississippi). The police have resorted to powerful psychological tactics that are more subtle but no less effective than the pre-Brown beatings and whippings.

The newer techniques, which continue to grow more sophisticated, are particularly effective on juveniles and the mentally handicapped; Jessie Misskelley was definitely one and arguably both. Because so much of what Misskelley told police was not recorded, we won’t ever know what he said before those fateful forty-eight minutes of the taped statement, or in the intervals when the tape was not rolling. But since his release, it seems as though he wants to distance himself from the others as quickly as possible and head back to the trailer park in Marion where his life was based prior to May 5, 1993. During a Labor Day celebration at his father’s, Jessie announced that he was already engaged to his high school sweetheart Susie Brewer, who at age fifteen was filmed for Paradise Lost on the telephone with Jessie while he was in jail being held for trial. “We’re looking at dresses now,” he said. Where they will settle down isn’t known. Jessie said that he planned to get together with Echols and Baldwin soon, but the smart money says he’ll never see them socially again.

Jessie had a setback in December 2011 when child services forced him to leave the place he was temporarily sharing with Susie Brewer and a friend who had custody of his young son. His future is very much in the air.

In an echo of what she had told Erin Moriarty a few years earlier, Lorri Davis told Piers Morgan upon the release of her husband, “We want to know who did this; that’s the most important thing.” Indeed. A pardon won’t cut it, she said, and she’s right. Even an acquittal in the second Sam Sheppard trial never took suspicion away from him; no one-armed man was ever located. Davis and Echols may have it easier; they at least have a target, someone who left the only identifiable physical evidence at the crime scene, someone to whom a motive, however weird, might be ascribed. But two hairs and a bad memory don’t make much of a case and certainly wouldn’t be enough to convince Scott Ellington, reassuring words aside, to reopen the case. It requires absolutely nothing for the state of Arkansas to keep the case closed; it would require a supernova to reopen it. If their current target fizzles, the hopes of solving this case will plummet.

Where does all this leave Mark Byers? Although the release of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory in late 2011 “exonerated” Mark and cast at least a suspicious eye toward Terry Hobbs, it’s a long way from suspicion to apprehension. Almost nineteen years have passed since Christopher, Stevie, and Michael were pulled from the ditch in Robin Hood Hills, and with the release of the West Memphis Three, the trail may be impossible to follow. But the release of the three in and of itself was enough of a shock to convince skeptics that in this case, anything is possible. For now at least, Mark and Jacki and any who will follow will continue their crusade by website, the use of the media, and any other means available. Mark’s message board will be dedicated to finding the killer of his son. He doesn’t mince words and clearly has “Terry Hobbs tunnel vision.” “If there’s any doubt as to where I stand on this,” he told a reporter the day the West Memphis Three were released, “there shouldn’t be.”

EPILOGUE

The West Memphis Three are free. It’s a qualified freedom for sure, but it beats life in prison and is light-years ahead of death row. They have to make a living though, and no one knows how the so-called Son of Sam laws, present in many states in one form or another, will affect their ability to sell their stories. Baldwin and Misskelley have expressed no interest in this area, but Damien Echols has signed with Signet Books to publish his memoirs.

There are new books due out, including Mara Leveritt’s follow-up on the case, Justice Knot. The long-awaited theatrical production of Devil’s Knot, now finally boasting legitimacy by the hiring of veteran director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat, Adoration), is set to begin filming in spring 2012.

Without a doubt the most significant post-Alford happening was the release of Amy Berg’s West of Memphis, a documentary that was the result of five years of investigative journalism funded by Lord of the Rings titan Sir Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh. West of Memphis opened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival to enthusiastic audiences that had been left hungry after the rather bland Paradise Lost 3. Damien Echols and Lorri Davis are listed as producers of the Berg film and were on hand in New Zealand during the editing. The film’s target is no surprise; ever since DNA evidence linked him to the crime scene in 2007, supporters have had Terry Hobbs in their sights. He is their White Whale.

In West of Memphis, Berg reports that three witnesses recently came forward and gave sworn statements alleging that many years ago, they had heard from Hobbs’s nephew that his uncle had confessed to the murders. Reportedly, Michael Hobbs Jr., the son of Terry’s brother Michael Hobbs Sr., told his friends that his Uncle Terry had murdered the three children, that it was the “Hobbs family secret.” According to KTLO.com, Michael Hobbs Sr. said that his brother never made any incriminating statements. When Michael Hobbs Jr. was reached at the school he attends in Florida, he too denied ever making any statements. The witnesses allegedly came forward after seeing an episode of 48 Hours: Mystery that implicated Terry Hobbs as a suspect. The three men have taken and passed polygraph examinations. Berg turned the film over to District Attorney Scott Ellington with a request that he reopen the case. As of this writing, there has been no public response.

On hand for the premiere of West of Memphis were many familiar faces. Mark and Jacki Byers, Damien Echols and Lorri Davis, Sir Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Echols’s lead attorney Stephen Braga, Pam Hobbs and her sister Shelia Muse, John Douglas, and Dennis Riordan were all living high in Park City. The scene was bizarre: they came from movie studios, courtrooms, trailers, and prison cells to the red carpet to celebrate their cinematic closing argument, with thousands of flashes of light going off in their faces. Mark Byers sat in awe as he was taken by a huge cable car high into the Wasatch Mountains to gorge on a six-course dinner with Jackson and Walsh, Berg, Echols and Davis, and others from the Sundance elite. “I’m a country boy, like you,” Jackson told Byers, “only from New Zealand.” A country boy titled “Sir.”

During this second aftermath—the first being the period after the trials in 1994—the public will hear about the hellish conditions of death row from Damien Echols in his book. The famous supporters will continue to be heard—some of them, at least. Eddie Vedder, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh will try to make official what they believe in their hearts: that the West Memphis Three are innocent. Attorneys Stephen Braga and Patrick Benca are in it for the long haul. And of course, John Mark Byers will be heard. Byers is always heard.

What won’t be heard about much are the three dead children who were once Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore. They died alone in the woods at the hands of one or more depraved lunatics. And the reason they won’t be spoken of is the same reason they have been marginalized all along: supporters of the West Memphis Three recognize them as inflammatory reminders that the WM3 still stand convicted of murder, and three dead Cub Scouts are bad for business. Sadly, the West Memphis Three may be innocent of the murders, and proving it could be impossible.

The odds are against Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley adjusting well on the outside, particularly Damien Echols. He was by all accounts not mentally stable when he entered prison in 1994, and seventeen years on death row—the last ten of them in solitary confinement—could have only worsened his condition, however lucid and articulate he appears. He will require not only a strong support system, which he seems to have in Lorri Davis, but also an incredibly strong will, as well as a gifted psychiatrist. Echols already seems to be morphing into a type of Johnny Depp-styled, tattooed hipster, and the tremendous amount of attention paid to him in the surreal world of celebrity will only delay his acclimation to the outside world. But like everything else in this case, all this conventional wisdom could be stood on its head.

Such an abrupt release from prison after so many years of incarceration can also create serious problems. Dr. Frederic G. Reamer, a professor at the School of Social Work at Rhode Island College in Providence, observes, “It’s disconcerting when an inmate leaves the system so abruptly.” Normally, inmates are processed out with a parole plan and know well in advance when they will be released. “There hasn’t been enough time to construct the scaffolding that an ex-offender absolutely needs after entering society.”220

On the day Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were released from prison, Mark Byers was asked by a reporter if he thought justice would be ever be done. “As crazy as this case is, I don’t know. Today seems like the day the state closes the door and sweeps everything under the rug.”

Earlier in 2011, Pam Hobbs had told Heather Crawford of KATV, Little Rock, that once the three men were freed, she “might be able to sleep at night,” but when the WM3 were released on August 19, 2011, she was crestfallen. “I said once those guys are out, there will be closure,” said Hobbs. “But there is not.” The release of the evidence in West of Memphis pointing further to her ex-husband’s complicity in the crime doesn’t give her peace. She’s convinced of the innocence of the West Memphis Three, but as has been the case in the past, she equivocates on the matter of her ex-husband’s guilt. “I don’t know what to think about Terry,” she told WREG-TV in Memphis. “I’m scared. I’m fearful.” She reminds viewers that the three witnesses passed polygraph tests. “Why would they lie?” One could—and should—ask the same thing about jailhouse snitch Michael Carson, who was also dug up for West of Memphis and who claimed he was taking LSD at the time he testified against Jason Baldwin. Carson had passed a polygraph before testifying in 1994. Jessie Misskelley’s polygraph indicated that he was lying when he said he wasn’t involved in the murders and didn’t know who was. Suddenly, polygraphs are the new gold standard, even though their admittance in court is still generally prohibited.

Todd Moore, as he has been since the convictions in 1994, was unwavering in his condemnation of the support given to the West Memphis Three. In a letter to WMC-TV, Memphis, he wrote, in part,

Our son was brutally murdered by those men known as the West Memphis Three. We have supported these convictions from the beginning. We are pleased that those convictions were upheld and that those men confirmed that with their plea of guilty yesterday before the judge and the world. They can say they are innocent all they want but the fact remains that they themselves confirmed their guilt.

When Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory was nominated for an Oscar in 2012, Todd reacted again, this time in concert with his ex-wife, Terry Hobbs, and Steve Branch Sr. The four sent a joint letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences urging them to rescind the nomination. “This film should be exposed as a fraud, not rewarded with an Academy Award nomination.”

Weaver Elementary School, where Christopher, Michael, and Stevie attended second grade, looks much like other schools of its type elsewhere in the United States. A flat, brick building, it has a semicircular driveway in the front for morning and afternoon student drop-off/pickup, a parking lot off to the right for teachers and visitors, and a flagpole planted in the midst of it all. Out back, there is a colorful plastic gym set, with ladders and slides and tunnels. Next to it is a dome-shaped climbing set, which in earlier times might have been called “monkey bars.” In the foreground of all that equipment stands a five-sided structure with low walls and a few benches built onto the sides. The pitched roof is of asphalt shingle construction, and quite a few of the shingles are loose. There is a weather vane on the peak sporting the Boy Scouts of America symbol. The steel arrow that is meant to indicate wind direction is lying on the roof, snapped off from the shaft of the instrument. But is has been painted in the not-too-distant past and shows signs of at least minimal maintenance. This is the “Memorial Reading Grove” dedicated to Christopher, Stevie, and Michael by their friends at school. The slab of stone inside is engraved with the words “Do Your Best”—the Cub Scout motto. It doesn’t seem like enough to say about three lives, regardless of their brevity. Do your best. Do your duty. God and country. Their legacy won’t be nearly as prominent as that of the West Memphis Three, but life isn’t fair. Maybe Mark Byers said it best: “They got their sons back. I’ll never get my son back, but at least they’ll get theirs.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Putting together this project was a huge undertaking, and my personal resources were limited, so I feel a debt to those who made this book possible.

For reasons that should be obvious, Mark Byers’s name is at the top of that list. While undergoing crises of his own—a not-uncommon occurrence—he kept me informed of every detail over the six years it took to write this book. To the very best of my knowledge, he was always truthful with me, even when it meant I had to write something unflattering. Getting into someone’s head is scary, and Mark made it less so with his openness and trust.

Mark’s sister Beth helped me with proofreading early on in the project and gave me feedback that was vital for the book. She also welcomed me into her home at a time when Mark’s experiences with the media were mostly negative. She allowed me to share in an amazing home-cooked meal and private family gathering and reserved her judgment of me. Mark’s sister Marilee was graceful and friendly during that same dinner, as was her husband Sonny, whose influence on Mark in his younger years was crucial. Mark’s brother George was not only a great guy to hang out with but was also, I’ve been told, the closest I could get to knowing Mark’s late father. I extend my thanks for the meal ticket in Tunica, George, and a weekend on the farm I won’t forget. These are good and decent folks, and I’m glad to have made their acquaintance.

Special thanks to Lisa O’Brien, who handled several FOIA requests for me from the state of Arkansas and who also shared a wealth of electronic data that contributed to this book.

Extra special mention goes to Christian Hansen, who constructed the “Callahan” website, the largest repository of West Memphis Three case data on the Internet. With the addition of an excellent search engine, Calli’s is truly the best on the net. Christian credits Greg and Monte as co-creators, and though I have never spoken with Greg, Monte provided assistance for the photo section. Christian has been at it for ten years, and when I first became interested in the case, the website didn’t exist. Without it, neither would this book. Thanks a million, Christian.

I’d also like to thank Dana Moore for letting me into her home and socializing a little bit. We didn’t talk about Michael or the case much, but being with her made me feel a little closer to Michael. Bless you, Dana. Todd Moore also shared a little information with me about his life, including a mini-history of the house his father built, the same house they were living in when Michael went missing, at 1398 East Barton.

So much information would have been unavailable without the local media, and I’d like to call out a few. The Memphis Commercial Appeal and WREG-TV out of Memphis and the Arkansas Times, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, KARK-TV, and KATV-TV out of Little Rock all covered the story extensively, as did the Jonesboro Sun. There are some particular local reporters who have covered the case as well and whose work I have relied on to some degree, such as Stephanie Scurlock, Janice Broach, Heather Crawford, Beth Warren, George Jared, and Mara Leveritt, to name but a few. Erin Moriarty of CBS, Aphrodite Jones, and Larry King also provided useful national media coverage.

Thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the Internet.

I’d also like to acknowledge Pam and Michelle Echols and Stormy Wells—Damien’s mother, sister, and niece, respectively—for being gracious and helpful during what must have been a time of tremendous stress.

A very special thank you goes to my dear friend Jacki Byers, who wears many hats, not the least of which is that of peacemaker when required. She also came up with the main title for the book and shared so much information with me. Though we didn’t always see eye to eye, we had a common goal, which was to work toward making this a better book. I love ya, Jacki.

I need to thank my friend John Douglas for putting up with all my pestering when he really didn’t have time. He shared with me as much information as he could about his involvement in the case without violating confidentiality, and for that I am truly grateful.

Lorri Davis, who officially declined to be interviewed for this book, nonetheless shared a tidbit or two with me that gave a little more insight into what makes her tick, but not very much. She’ll always be something of a mystery, I think. Anywhere her words are quoted, they came from public interviews and appearances.

My love and gratitude goes to my old friend Nikki, who sleeps in a little bed under my desk. She makes a lot of noise while she sleeps, and it helped me to feel less alone during these years of writing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

At age twelve, author Greg Day read his first true-crime book, The Boston Strangler, by Gerald Frank. More than thirty years later, he still has the bug. His personal library contains some two hundred volumes on crime, criminal justice, the death penalty, and the penal system, and he has read and researched many others.

Day spent some fifteen years in lay prison ministry in association with Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, writing to and visiting inmates in his home state of Virginia, including two men condemned to death. One of these capital cases, Mickens v. Taylor, was heard before the United States Supreme Court. His employment with the United States Department of Justice in Washington, DC, gave him access to the court, simply by proximity, and he was thus able to attend and study one of a handful of capital cases heard by the court.

The second death-row inmate Day connected with was thirty-year-old Brian Lee Cherrix of Chincoteague, Virginia. Cherrix had been convicted of luring a twenty-three-year-old mother of two to an abandoned house where she was to deliver a pizza. There she was forcibly sodomized and shot once behind each ear. His last meal wasn’t published at his request, but when Day spoke with him an hour or so before his execution, he giggled a little and said, “I ordered a pizza.” Day never visited the row again.

Day’s interest in crime and justice, however, never waned, and he was eventually led to the case of the West Memphis Three in the year 2000. When he was introduced to John Mark Byers five years later, he was presented with the opportunity to report on one of the most complex and controversial criminal cases in modern history from the inside. After a short time, the two men agreed to embark on a project that neither could have predicted would last almost seven years. Untying the Knot is the result of that alliance.

A native of Long Island, New York, Day, who has three grown children, has lived in the Washington, DC, area since 1990 with his wife of thirty-one years.

ENDNOTES

1 “Debt consultant” Jerry Kane, forty-five, and his sixteen-year-old son Joe were pulled over for driving an apparently unregistered van on I-40 in West Memphis on May 20, 2010. Kane opened fire on West Memphis police officers Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both men. Kane and his son were stopped ninety minutes later in a Walmart parking lot, and a shootout ensued. Both Kane and his son were killed. Two sheriff’s deputies were injured.

2 Hobbs would claim during an interview with Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman, who were doing the screenplay of Devil’s Knot for Dimension Films, that his first meeting with Mark Byers took place at Dana Moore’s house somewhere between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on May 5. Mark Byers steadfastly maintains that it was between 8:20 and 8:30 when he first met Hobbs and that West Memphis police officer Regina Meek was there along with Melissa Byers and Dana Moore. When Meek was asked by prosecutor John Fogleman whether she had had “contact with any other parents” while she was at the Byers residence, she replied, “Yes, sir, Mrs. Moore came and knocked on the door while I was taking a report from Mr. and Mrs. Byers and told me that her son was with the Byers boy, and also Steve Branch was with them.” Meek further stated that she “had been told” that Stevie’s parents were already out searching.

3 Here there is a discrepancy between Ryan’s statements immediately following the murders and his testimony in court some nine months later. His statements had been “summarized” by WMPD officers and were not recorded. There were several statements taken. One referred to Ryan hearing a gunshot, something he said nothing of in court (nor was he asked). In another statement, Ryan is alleged to have said that at one point all four boys crossed the pipe bridge during the search. During his testimony at the Misskelley trial, he emphatically stated that he had never crossed the bridge to the north side of the bayou but had waited on the south side with Britt while Ritchie and Robbie crossed over.

4 Officer Moore’s call log shows that he was dispatched to Catfish Island at 9:21 p.m. and arrived at 9:26. Terry Hobbs’s arrival time at Catfish Island was taken from Pam Hobbs’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial and must be regarded as an approximation. Regina Meek testified that the call dispatchers didn’t always record the calls when they were received, and therefore, their times must be taken with that caveat in mind.

5 The subject of the tree house was debated in some circles, given that no fort was ever found. Mark believes that if Aaron Hutcheson was telling the truth—which is debatable—the tree house may have existed on the south side of the bayou, opposite the area where the boys’ bodies were discovered. The woods there have long since been destroyed.

6 Qtd. in Pam and Terry Hobbs interview with Dimension Films as presented in Exhibit 17, p34 of Hobbs v Pasdar, Terry’s defamation suit against the Dixie Chicks, filed in the Federal Court, Eastern District of Arkansas, and summarily dismissed on December 1, 2009.

7 Mark Byers would later say that it looked like the children had been killed “two or three times” (Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, Paradise Lost, HBO Films, 1996).

8 Guy Reel, Marc Perrusquia, and Bartholomew Sullivan, Blood of Innocents (New York, NY: Kensington, 1995).

9 The Vietnam veteran “tip” was most likely triggered by an informal profile done for police by FBI profiler Tom Salp, though it was never clear why the suggestion had been made. Salp did not review case data, visit the crime scene, or view autopsy photographs or reports, but probably gave police an opinion formed by what he had been told about the murders over the phone.

10 Mara Leveritt, Devil’s Knot (New York, NY: Atria Books, 2002).

11 Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 41.

12 Echols, Damien, Almost Home iUniverse Lincoln, NE: 2005.

13 Though he would later maintain that the name was chosen to reflect his admiration for the Catholic priest Father Damien de Veuster, the patron saint remembered for his work with lepers in Hawaii, others would insist that he was taking the name of the antichrist child in the 1976 film The Omen by director Richard Donner.

14 Ibid. Many of Damien’s remarks in this book can be written off as an attempt at some type of literary effect, but much can also be gleaned from this unedited autobiographical account of Echols’s first thirty years of life.

15 “Declaration of Andy Jack Echols,” September 4, 2000. Reprinted at http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/a_j_echols_declaration.html.

16 Affidavit submitted to the court by Dr. George Woods on February 9, 2001. The affidavit was part of Damien’s petition for writ of error coram nobis, asserting that Echols was not competent to stand trial due to the state of his mental health.

17 Jerry Driver, Statement to West Memphis Police Department (WMPD) detective Bill Durham, December 13, 1993.

18 Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan, Blood of Innocents, p. 93. Jones was at the crime scene, and according to the authors, Jones told others that his fears had come true: Damien Echols had finally killed someone. This statement has been widely circulated on the Internet and among case watchers but cannot be verified. E-mails to two of the book’s authors went unanswered. The book also incorrectly lists Echols’s residence as Lakeshore, when he was actually living in Broadway trailer park with his parents at the time of the murders, and it was this residence that was searched on the night of June 3, 1993.

19 Ibid.

20 Interview with Dennis Carter by Marion Police Department lieutenant Diane Hester, June 6, 1993. This interview took place three days after Jessie’s arrest in connection with the murders.

21 According to Mara Leveritt in Devil’s Knot, defense psychologist William Wilkins tested Misskelley at 70, but an elementary school test conducted on Jessie in 1983—the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—had scored the seven-year-old Misskelley at just 67.

22 Leveritt, Devil’s Knot. The prison interview was conducted by Leveritt.

23 Report by WMPD Officer Stan Burch, May 10, 1993.

24 This would create even more suspicion among the WM3 supporters. Because of Mark and Melissa’s undercover work with the police of both Memphis, Tennessee, and West Memphis, Arkansas, supporters believed that Mark was getting special treatment from the police. This was utter nonsense, but making the claim stick among the supporters was an easy task. This topic is covered more thoroughly in other chapters.

25 May 1993 notes from the WMPD show that Richard Cummings Jr. used to walk his dog at Robin Hood Hills. A next-door neighbor, Mary Ann Bledsoe, had complained to the building superintendent that a hole in her apartment wall could possibly be a peep hole used by Cummings, and she related this to police. Cummings had a number of items seized from his apartment, including a couple of knives, a photo album, and for some reason, a Garth Brooks poster. During interviews with police, Cummings, when asked what he knew about the murders, stated that he had heard that the boys—plural—had been sexually mutilated. Police questioned the timing of his statement, believing it to be before such information was available to the public (even though the information was not accurate). He was quickly deemed to have no connection to the murders.

26 Exhibit C Jason Baldwin Petition for Relief Under Rule 37. Transcript of Sworn Statement of Victoria Hutcheson June 24, 2004 taken by defense team investigator Nancy Pemberton

27 At the scene of the murders on the afternoon of May 6, when the bodies were found, Aaron and Vicki were present, and Aaron said to Mark, “Mr. Mark! Chris and I play in the woods, and we have a tree house in there.” Despite numerous trips back into Robin Hood, Mark never did see any fort or tree house, and neither did the police when Aaron brought them to the woods. Aaron claimed to have put some of the boards into the tree by using another board as a hammer to drive through nails that he had found on the scene.

28 The reward fund eventually swelled to somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000. Neither Vicki Hutcheson nor anyone else would ever claim it, though Jessie Misskelley, on his way to make what would turn out to be his confession, joked with Detective Mike Allen that he would use the reward money to buy his father a new truck. Big Jessie’s boss confirmed that this conversation took place in his auto shop, but Allen said he didn’t recall it. Misskelley and Allen were at Jim’s Auto Repair to get the senior Misskelley’s permission for his son to take a polygraph examination.

29 Mara Leveritt, in Devil’s Knot, claimed that it was “common knowledge” around West Memphis that Damien was a person of interest in connection with the murders (p. 66). In her May 28, 1993, statement to police, however, Vicki stated that it was through her friendship with Misskelley that she first heard about Echols and became suspicious of him.

30 Tim Hackler, “Complete Fabrication,” Arkansas Times, October 24, 2004.

31 Leveritt, Devil’s Knot 67 and endnote 94. Prison interview with Mara Leveritt, February 2001.

32 Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan, Blood of Innocents, p. 167.

33 Jessie actually gave four statements regarding the events of May 5. His first was to police at the West Memphis Police Department on June 3, leading to his arrest, along with those of Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin. After his conviction on February 4, 1994, Jessie allegedly confessed again to the sheriff’s department deputies who were transporting him from the county jail to the state prison at Pine Bluff, Arkansas. No recording was made of this statement. Jessie gave a third, post-conviction statement to Dan Stidham at attorney Joe Calvin’s office on February 8, 1994. Prosecutors were trying to make a deal with Jessie to testify in the upcoming Echols/Baldwin trial, and Stidham forced Jessie to make this statement with his hand on a Bible (this would become known as the “Bible confession”). Misskelley tried to rehabilitate himself from earlier statements—for example, correcting himself by saying the boys had been tied up with shoelaces, not “brown rope” as he had earlier stated—but the statement was still riddled with inconsistencies and lacked the sound of authenticity. Finally, and against the advice of his attorneys, Jessie made a fourth statement on the eve of the Echols/Baldwin trial, apparently looking for a deal through which he would testify for a reduced sentence. All four statements were similar in style, though some of the details varied. It is very difficult, if not impossible, based on these statements, to determine whether Jessie Misskelley was ever at the crime scene and what, if anything, he saw or did. It is interesting to note, however, that although Jessie agreed to go to the scene with the police to point out the exact location of the murders, he was never taken to Robin Hood Hills. Inspector Gary Gitchell cited “security” concerns as the reason the trip was never made.

It should also be noted that the notorious “twelve-hour interrogation” is something of a misnomer perpetuated by supporters and the media. Misskelley was brought into the station sometime around 10:00 a.m. and questioned prior to being considered a suspect. He was given a polygraph at 12:40 p.m. Given the time it must have taken to interpret the results, report back to Gitchell, and put Jessie under interrogation, it was probably no sooner than 1:00 p.m. that Misskelley was questioned in earnest. The time of the first part of the taped confession was 2:44 p.m., making the total time less than two hours.

34 An almost identical detail was given by Aaron Hutcheson in his imaginative June 8 statement to Marion police detective Donald Bray. In it Aaron states that it was Steve Branch who “got away and got caught” by Jessie Misskelley, who was “chasing him.” Since it is highly unlikely that Aaron Hutcheson actually witnessed the events of May 5 as he claimed, one is left to wonder where Aaron came up with this. Was it just a coincidence? This detail from Misskelley was critical in the establishment of probable cause for obtaining search warrants against the three suspects.

35 During Detective Bryn Ridge’s testimony on January 27 at the Misskelley trial, he gave conflicting details of the phone call that Jason Baldwin allegedly made to Misskelley. No effort was made by either the prosecution or the defense to clear up this discrepancy:

Ridge: [Misskelley] talked about some, uh, phone calls he had received, uh …

Fogleman: From who?

Ridge: From Jason Baldwin, where he says he heard the voice of Damien Echols in the ackground.

Fogleman: Alright, what did he tell you that … about those phone calls?

Ridge: Okay, there were three phone calls. One was in the day before the murders, he explained. One was the morning of the murders, he explained. One was the night after the murders that he explained.

Fogleman: And in the … did he say, what did he say, uh, that you recall about the phone call the day before the murders?

Ridge: Uh, something to the effect that they were going to go somewhere and get some girls the next day or something to that effect [emphasis added].

Fogleman: Alright, and do you have notes related to that phone call the day or night before the murders? [pause] I’m looking at the first page.

Ridge: Okay, stated that he had received a call from Jason Baldwin the night before the murders.

Fogleman: Okay, and what did he tell you?

Ridge: Okay, at that time they were going to go out and get some boys and hurt them [emphasis added].

Fogleman: Alright. And … and then what did he tell you, about Damien in the background?

Ridge: Alright, stated he received a call from Jason; Damien, in the background, wanted him to go with them. Said they planned something, heard Damien say that Jason ought to tell [Jessie] that they were going to get some girls or something [emphasis added].

36 Misskelley’s June 3 confession contained many contradictions. Arriving at Robin Hood at 9:00 a.m. would have placed them in the woods nearly nine hours prior to the time witnesses say they saw the three victims headed toward Robin Hood. In his February 17, 1994, post-conviction statement, however, Misskelley stated that he had worked at West Memphis Roofing that morning, gotten off work at “dinner time,” and arrived at Robin Hood shortly before dark.

37 Narlene Hollingsworth, Domini’s aunt, would testify that she and her husband, along with a carload of children, saw Damien and Domini walking along the service road by the Blue Beacon Truck Wash at about 9:30 p.m. the night of May 5. Anthony Hollingsworth testified that the pair looked “dirty.” The prosecution would allege that Narlene had mistaken Jason Baldwin for Domini; both had long, wavy, light-colored hair and wore similar clothing. Domini’s alibi checked out to the satisfaction of the police.

38 In a case brought by the Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, seeking to have the records opened to the public, a state judge upheld Rainey’s order, citing the “sensitive and inflammatory” nature of the case data.

39 Warren Holmes, a nationally recognized polygraph expert, testified at Misskelley’s pretrial hearing in January 1994 that his interpretation of the Misskelley charts was exactly the opposite of Officer Durham’s. Where Durham interpreted the answers to pertinent questions to be deceptive—for example, “Have you ever been to Robin Hood Hills?” and “Have you ever took [sic] part in devil worship?”—Holmes thought the opposite. He also thought that the test itself was improper. A “peak of tension” test, Holmes testified, would help to isolate a subject’s truthfulness in a given answer. In Misskelley’s case, Holmes felt that the subject’s statement that the boys were tied up with “brown rope” rather than shoelaces was extremely significant and could have been key to ascertaining the truthfulness of the entire confession. Durham had administered a “zone of comparison” test, which uses control questions—those for which the response is presumed—mixed in with relevant questions. The answers are compared to each other to determine the truthfulness of the answers to the relevant questions.

40 Jessie Misskelley’s alibi is significantly more complicated. Because he had previously confessed, he now needed to line up witnesses to testify to his whereabouts. Misskelley claimed to be wrestling in Dyess, some forty miles north of Marion, at the time of the murders. His alibi witnesses did not withstand cross-examination at trial.

The initial part of Jessie’s alibi came from his girlfriend, Susie Brewer, then fifteen years old. She claimed that Jessie was at the home of a mutual friend in Highland named Stephanie Dollar, babysitting Stephanie’s children, and that he was still in the trailer park at 7:00 p.m., when he headed for home. Jessie Misskelley Sr. testified that Little Jessie left Highland Trailer Park on the night of May 5 with his friends Keith Johnson, Johnny Hamilton, Freddy Revelle, Josh Darby, Dennis Carter, and “some other guy, Bill something or other” (probably Bill Cox). This purportedly occurred around 7:30. The police and prosecution, however, brought out several things that tended to impeach Jessie’s testimony:

• It was noted that Stephanie Dollar had been around the trailer park handing out copies of the police report of the “slapping incident” involving a neighbor, Connie Molden, thereby giving witnesses a chance to get the times straight, possibly in an attempt to provide an alibi for Misskelley.

• Big Jessie’s frame of reference for May 5 was his attendance at DWI school, yet he could not remember details of any other dates or times he attended these classes.

• Jessie Sr. had initially told reporters that his son “could’ve been there,” meaning the murder scene, but that he hadn’t taken part in any of the killing, thus directly contradicting Jessie Jr.’s alleged timeline. Big Jessie said at trial, however, “That was before I found out; that was before I went to work on the case and found out that he was not there [at the crime scene].” This perhaps indicated that he’d made his early statements before he’d had a chance to “compare notes” with other neighbors and friends. Or perhaps he simply mixed up his times.

• Crittenden County sheriff’s deputy James Dollahite, Marion Police Department corporal Joe McCafferty, and Marion Police Department patrolman Jason Oliver, all of whom responded to Stephanie Dollar’s call for help regarding the Connie Molden slapping incident (Molden had allegedly slapped Dollar’s child), declared under oath that none had seen Little Jessie Misskelley at the scene, despite Dollar’s testimony that she had “taken” Jessie to within “five yards” of the police cars so he could hear what Molden was saying and report it back to Dollar.

Numerous inconsistencies were brought out in the cross-examinations of Jessie’s wrestling buddies who claimed they could vouch for his whereabouts on the night of May 5. For example, Miskelley’s cousin Charles “Bubba” Ashley Jr. was also questioned, and he testified that his mother had received one of the police reports Stephanie Dollar was handing out, but that he personally hadn’t read it. Prosecutor Brent Davis was attempting to establish that Ashley’s time frame for last seeing Jessie had been given to him by Dollar.

41 B. A. Botkin, A Treasury of American Folklore (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1944).

42 Another boy, Murray Estes Byers, was born in 1941 and died a year later from a “heart problem that could have been fixed today,” according to Mark’s sister.

43 Home Grown, prior to disbanding in 1977, won an Arkansas “Battle of the Bands” contest, which won them a trip to the 1976 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington. There the band was allowed to perform on stage, just ahead of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Mark jokes that they were “the warm-up band for the Choir.”

44 Phencyclidine was developed in the 1950s as an intravenous tranquilizer but was discontinued for use by humans because it caused patients to become agitated, delusional, and even suicidal.

45 Mark was actually baptized three times. He was baptized at age nine while attending vacation bible school and then again at sixteen, but there was no real “heart change.” “I guess you could say that I was under the water so much the fishes knew my name,” he says.

46 In Devil’s Knot, Leveritt relates a different version of the events leading to the couple’s move from Mobile to Memphis in 1981. Echols defense team investigator Ron Lax of Memphis told a story he allegedly received from a “cooperative but reserved” Sandra Sloane; according to Lax, Sloane told him that after a two-week business trip, Mark had come home saying that he had quit his job and that they were moving to Memphis, which they hastily did two days later. Though there is no hard evidence to support this version, Leveritt accepted Sloane’s account of this incident, as well as others, as though it were verified fact. P205 endnote 245

47 The letter was apparently not delivered and in fact was not even finished. It read in part,

Darling,

I wish I could talk to you, since I can’t I thought I would try to write.

Mark wanted to get into a long discussion tonight about repairing our marriage. When I would talk he got on the defensive, telling me how I had done him wrong, and never appreciated the jewelry he made. Anyway, to make a long story short, I realize it’s to [sic] easy for him to talk me into things I don’t want to do. So as I tried to tell you twice yesterday, I am going to get some legal advice or at lest [sic] make an appointment for next week. No, you are not pushing me and maybe I am moving to [sic] fast, but if I don’t it may be a [sic] late …”

48 The psychologist was Dr. Roland Lee of Memphis, who was reputed to be an expert in the area of child sexual abuse.

49 Judge Rainey was the justice who issued the search and arrest warrants for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley in June 1993 and also the gag order for the cases of all three defendants.

50 Mark was required to file paperwork changing the way the payments were made. He was not aware of this at first, so initial payments to the children may have been late.

51 “Hometown Boy Makes Good in Jeweler Trade,” Tri-City Tribune, December 15, 1988.

52 According to www.pdrhealth.com, Dilaudid (pronounced dye-LAW-did) is “a narcotic analgesic [that] is prescribed for the relief of moderate to severe pain such as that due to Biliary colic (pain caused by an obstruction in the gallbladder or bile duct), burns, cancer, heart attack, injury (soft tissue and bone), renal colic (sharp lower back and groin pain usually caused by the passage of a stone through the ureter), and surgery.” On the street, the drug is a valued opiate and sells for approximately $50 for a 4 mg tablet (called “K-4s”). At one time, if she could locate and afford it, Melissa would take up to 16 mgs intravenously per day.

53 Daniel Hatchett and his partner (who was also his nephew), Dustin “Dusty” Charles Boyle, were interviewed during the investigation into the murder of Christopher Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore. They were asked to provide alibis and fingerprints. Boyle was asked to submit to a polygraph examination, to which he agreed. According to examiner Bill Durham, Boyle answered all questions with no deception detected. It is unclear why only Boyle was asked to take the polygraph.

54 Leveritt, Devil’s Knot.

55 The ATF was brought in because John McFarland had convinced them that Byers was also running guns.

56 This church was featured in the film Paradise Lost as the church that Damien Echols had visited once, at which time he told their youth pastor that he was “beyond saving” and had “a pact with the Devil.”

57 Murray was down on his luck and broke during a cold winter, and his fiancée’s car was in the process of being repossessed. Murray broke into a shed and stole unspecified merchandise that he intended to sell. He was convicted of third-degree burglary and sentenced to three years’ probation. Because he was living in Indiana at the time, his probation was transferred there.

58 This information was provided by Todd Moore in a phone conversation with the author.

59 Not only had he never met the Hobbses, but he had also never met or even heard of the convicted killers. Only Pam Hobbs ever alleged having any contact with any of the teens. In WMPD inspector Gary Gitchell’s June 9, 1993, interview notes, he states that Pam “remembers Damien as a younger person, and hates to think that he would/could have done this to her son.”

60 Mara Leveritt made much of this fact in Devil’s Knot (pp. 34-35). In order to bolster her case for police ineptitude, she points to the failure by the police to question Mark further about his not knowing where Stevie Branch lived. First, Mark thought that he did know where the Hobbses lived. Second, the irrelevancy of the information was obvious to police. Dana Moore had already told police that she had seen Michael and Stevie together, later joined by Christopher. Even conceding that Mark didn’t know exactly where Stevie lived, what possible difference would that have made to the investigation?

61 Neighbor Debra O’Tinger lived at 1309 Goodwin Avenue, just across the street from Robin Hood Hills. She testified at both trials that she had seen Christopher, Stevie, and Michael cut across her yard between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m. on May 5.

62 Aaron Hutcheson was invited to go with the boys to Robin Hood that day, but his mother, Victoria, wouldn’t allow it, according to an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 13, 1993.

63 Memphis Commercial Appeal, “Counselors Help School Deal With Its Grief” May 8, 1993.

64 Stevie Branch’s funeral was held on May 13 at Bradshaw’s German-Aumon Funeral Home in Steele, Missouri, and presided over by Reverends Leon Brassfield and J. D. Hobbs, Terry Hobbs’s father. Michael Moore’s services were held on May 11 at the Holy Cross Episcopal Church in West Memphis, with the Reverend Fred Tinsley officiating.

65 This is Mark Byers’s account of the incident. Joe Berlinger was contacted by this author and asked to verify this account but could not or would not do so. Berlinger initially said he was inclined to grant an interview but eventually declined.

66 A panel discussion was hosted by the Arkansas Times at the Argenta Theater on June 1, 2011, following a screening of the film Paradise Lost. The panel consisted of Joe Berlinger, Devil’s Knot author Mara Leveritt, Arkansas Take Action co-founder and restaurateur Capi Peck, and the wife of Damien Echols, Lorri Davis. An audience member posed a question to Berlinger regarding the “honorarium” paid specifically to Mark Byers, and Berlinger answered that all six families had received $7,500 for the first film. Only Mark Byers had been willing to participate in the second film. Berlinger then stated that he had never paid for participation in his previous films, nor would he do so in future documentary films. However, Mark Byers claims that he was paid in three installments, amounts unspecified, for granting five appearances in Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. There are unsubstantiated rumors that Terry Hobbs was paid for his appearance in the film as well. Berlinger was asked by this author about these payments but did not respond, as was the case with all questions posed to him. Curiously, there is a disclaimer at the end of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory to the effect that certain people—not named—were paid for their participation in the film.

67 Melissa’s parents, Delores and Kilbourn DeFir, were not present. “Melissa said it would only upset us,” her mother said, according to an interview granted with Mara Leveritt and appearing in Devil’s Knot.

68 Though this similarity was certainly pertinent—it actually caused a delay in the start of Misskelley’s trial—little use could be made of the discovery. Because there wasn’t enough blood on the knife to perform a more narrowing DNA test—the sample was only sufficient in quantity for DQ Alpha testing—it was impossible to identify exactly whose blood was really on that knife. But Leveritt seemed to believe that because the blood type was common to both Mark and Christopher, it added credibility to her insinuation that Christopher’s adoption by Mark might not be legitimate. Although early in Devil’s Knot, she lends credence to Ricky Murray’s claim that Mark never adopted Christopher, she later uses the DNA results to suggest that Mark might be Christopher’s biological father. She wrote,

“Lax and the attorneys wondered, could the DNA of two people who were not biologically related be utterly indistinguishable [by DQ Alpha testing]? Or—the thought arose—was John Mark Byers actually Christopher’s biological father? Was that why he’d always claimed to have “adopted” the boy, but not Christopher’s half-brother Ryan? Those questions would hang over the case, unresolved, for years to come.”

This was an incredibly convoluted assertion. In whose opinion would those questions “hang over the case”? If it is a question regarding Christopher’s adoption, there never was any ambiguity. Mark adopted Christopher on February 21, 1991, according to papers filed in the Crittenden County Clerk’s office, and renamed him “Christopher Mark Byers.” The filing of the petition was handled by West Memphis attorney Jan Thomas. Any interested parties had six months from the date of the temporary decree of adoption to file any objection. No such objection was received. Ricky Lee Murray, who feigned outrage by saying he had never given his permission for the adoption, was notable for his absence, a trait he had displayed often during his short marriage to Melissa. According to Mark, Melissa had told him that Murray was drunk in a bar the night Christopher was born.

69 This information is contained in a lab report from Genetic Design in Greensboro, North Carolina, dated January 27, 1994.

70 When Cooper was interviewed by police at a Ramada Inn in Memphis, he said that he didn’t know why Mark had given him the knife, and that he hadn’t wanted it. He also stated that Mark told him, “I want you to keep it in your car,” “we have something between us,” and “I want you to think of me if you should ever use it.” The interview with Cooper was recorded by hand on yellow lined paper and has no investigator’s name or signature on it.

71 There was initially much disagreement between Stidham and co-counsel Greg Crowe on whether Misskelley should cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for leniency in sentencing. In the end, though, they both agreed that he should remain silent, apparently to take his chances on appeal, should Echols or Baldwin prevail in their upcoming trial.

72 Mark has since stated numerous times, including to this author, that he had surely cut his thumb while trimming venison with the knife, though he acknowledged that the knife wasn’t very well suited for it. Thirteen years later, the knife was sent out for more stringent testing using technology not available in 1994. As of this writing, it has been returned, but no results have been revealed.

73 The issue of mosquito presence would also play a role in Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearing, conducted between May 1998 and March 1999. There had long been concern among supporters that the absence of mosquito bites on the victims’ bodies was proof that they had been killed elsewhere and disposed of at Robin Hood Hills. Prosecution expert witnesses testified that because there is a span of time between a mosquito bite and the accompanying swelling of tissue, the victims could have died before the bites became visible. Dr. Neal Haskell, in particular, testified that tiny pinpricks could be present on a body that were indicative of mosquitoes feeding, but that the lack of blood pressure in the body would prevent them from getting food and thereby keep a typical “mosquito bite” from forming.

74 Anyone who spends much time outdoors, however, can attest to the fact that the presence of mosquitoes ebbs and flows over the course of an evening.

75 The Baldwin defense team was considering how to weave this “motive” into their defense. In the HBO film Paradise Lost, Baldwin defense attorneys Paul Ford and Robin Wadley discuss this very topic with Dr. James Rasicot, listed as the defense team psychologist. Rasicot not only believes that Mark had the means and opportunity but also offers what he thinks is proof of motive. “[Byers] has got the motive. His son, who he’s upset with—his son is the only one who is mutilated; the other two weren’t mutilated.” He adds, “All the pieces fit together.” Rasicot never gave testimony at trial.

76 From the film Paradise Lost

77 At the time, Mark believed this information to be accurate, though he later found out that it was a rumor. Berlinger and Sinofsky decided to leave the scene in Paradise Lost anyway, presumably because it demonstrated that false allegations about the defendants were making their way around West Memphis.

78 When police interviewed John Kingsbury on August 5, 1994, Kingsbury told Officer Dale Weaver that it was Byers who had taken him to Brenda Atwood’s house on Osage Drive; Mark says it was Kingsbury who took him.

79 John and Donna Kingsbury had two boys, approximately ten and seven years old. The older boy, though younger than Ryan by a few years, was still old enough that the two spent some time together. According to Mark’s account, the older Kingsbury son was over in Mark’s yard with Ryan and a few other boys. The younger Kingsbury boy came over to the Byerses’ house and began throwing rocks at the other boys and generally being “belligerent,” refusing to leave when the other boys told him to. After one of the rocks struck a window on the house, Mark came to the door and told the rock-throwing boy to go home. He refused. Mark finally went over and “dusted the britches” of the boy with the plastic end of a flyswatter and sent him home crying. Shortly thereafter, John Kingsbury came storming over, shouting, “Why’d you hit my boy? Who do you think you are?” The two argued back and forth until things got ugly, at which point Mark suggested to Kingsbury that he get the hell off his property before he “beat a mudhole right in his ass.” Although many, including KAIT TV News in Jonesboro, as well as Mara Leveritt in Devil’s Knot, reported that the Kingsburys sought and were granted a restraining order against Mark Byers, they neglected to mention that there were two restraining orders granted that day; Mark also requested and was granted a restraining order against John Kingsbury, preventing him from coming onto the Byerses’ property.

80 After a day of house painting, Mark had promised Ryan that he’d take him and his friends fishing on Lake Thunderbird in Cherokee Village. While Ryan stayed at the house to clean up and wait for a friend, Justin Copeland, to arrive, Mark went into town to pay a propane gas bill and to have a gunsmith take a look at a .22 caliber rifle that he was considering buying; the firing pin was broken, and Mark wanted to know whether it was worth fixing. Fourteen-year-old Marty Kerr and his younger cousin had gone along with Mark. On the way, they passed a group of Kerr’s schoolmates walking along the road. Kerr and one of the boys were adversaries, and the boys had been engaging in typical teenage boy behavior, the rival insulting Kerr’s mother and hitting on his girlfriend. The boys shouted taunts at Kerr as the car passed by, and Kerr insisted that Mark turn the car around. Mark told him to ignore it. Kerr said he’d just come back later on his scooter if Mark didn’t stop now, so Mark turned around and brought the car to a stop. Kerr leapt out of the car, grabbing a four-inch-long jackknife from the console of the Isuzu and palming it in the closed position, and headed toward the group of boys. Mark stepped out of the car next. From the backseat, Kerr’s young cousin scrambled out, kicking onto the ground the .22 caliber bolt-action rifle that had been lying on the floor of the car. Mark picked it up off the ground, held it at his side, and then watched as the brief fight ensued nearby. Kerr evidently got the best of the fight; the other boy, John Shaver Jr., was treated and released from the local hospital with, according to Byers, a “broken nose and a black eye.” Local news stories would say Shaver suffered a concussion. In either case, Mark and the boys picked up Ryan and Copeland and continued on to their fishing trip. When they returned at the end of the day, Hardy police chief Ernie Rose was waiting for them on the dock.

81 Melissa’s father, Kilborn A. DeFir, died on March 2, 2005, at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

82 Leveritt, Devils Knot, p. 313.

83 This is Mark’s recollection. The autopsy report of Melissa Byers reveals no indication of sexual activity. Perhaps the examiner didn’t check.

84 George Mateljan, World’s Healthiest Foods: The Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating. http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=90 Melissa’s potassium level was measured at 5.9 mmol/L (millimoles per liter). High potassium levels have been associated with sudden cardiac arrest. According to Mateljan, “elevated blood levels of potassium can be toxic, and may cause an irregular heartbeat or even heart attack. Under most circumstances, the body maintains blood levels of potassium within a tight range, so it is not usually possible to produce symptoms of toxicity through intake of potassium-containing foods and/or supplements.”

85 From the Baptist Memorial Hospital resuscitation record prepared by Linda Krepps, RN, on March 29, 1996. The attending physician was Dr. David Kauffman.

86 Center for Disease Control (CDC), 2003. Jim Clark, director of the state crime lab in Arkansas, pegs the number at between 4 and 8 percent of people die of undetermined causes in the United States, according to Mara Leveritt in a December 1997 article, “The Strange Demise of Melissa Byers,” on prisonpotpourri.com.

87 Telephone conversation with author, February 12, 2007.

88 As noted in Brent Turvey’s autopsy analysis, the words “hydromorphone” (Dilaudid) and “hydrocodone” (Vicodin) are both used. It seems most likely, given Melissa’s habit of injecting K4, that the references to hydrocodone were typographical errors. The Arkansas State Crime Lab, where the autopsy was performed, identified the substance as hydromorphone and further stated that it had passed to the urine and was negative in the blood.

89 Mandy Lou Beasley was Mark’s schoolmate when he was growing up in Marked Tree. When Mark and Melissa moved to Cherokee Village, they ran into Beasley at Sharp County Circuit Court. Beasley was there with her boyfriend, who was facing a DUI charge. It turned out that Beasley was living around the corner from the Byerses on Hiawatha Drive. Melissa struck up a friendship with Beasley, and the two often discussed getting Ryan and Beasley’s daughter, Anneleise, together, saying the two would make “beautiful babies.” Beasley became one of the neighborhood “party people,” and she and the Byerses would often party down by the Spring River. When the ambulance and police cars descended on Skyline Drive during the late afternoon of March 29, Beasley saw the commotion and came by to see what was going on, and she was there when Mark returned from the hospital. Although witness Fern Moyer told police that Beasley was Mark’s “girlfriend,” there was nothing to suggest that there was any relationship between the two prior to Melissa’s death.

90 James “Jimmy” Lawrence may be remembered as one of two friends in Mark’s Jonesboro apartment who were filmed for Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. Lawrence made such notable remarks as “You can get mean. When mean gets mean, you can get mean” on camera. He and Mark had been friends since the two were kids in Marked Tree. James Lawrence died of heart failure in 1998; Mark was a pallbearer at his funeral.

91 None of the restitution was ever paid.

92 Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother’s Keeper (IFC Films, 1992), DVD. Sinofsky said he read about the West Memphis murders in an article in the New York Times. According to Joe Berlinger, in his book Metallica: This Monster Lives, HBO producer Shelia Nevins had seen the story in the Times and suggested that there “could be a documentary here” and that “HBO might be interested.”

93 Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, DVD commentary, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Creative Thinking International, 1996). Released in “Collector’s Edition” with commentary on Paradise Lost, 2008.

94 Joe Berlinger and Greg Milner, Metallica: This Monster Lives (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), p. 89.

95 Vincent Bugliosi, Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (New York, NY: Norton, 2008 p83). Bugliosi, the prosecutor for the 1970 case State of California v Charles Manson, et. al., commented that the televising of trials, though ostensibly done for the purpose of keeping the public informed, is all about entertainment:

The media’s only motivation, though not an improper one, is commercial. Although televising trials may indeed educate the public, that obviously is not the principal reason why people watch trials such as the Menendez and Simpson cases on television. It’s a form of entertainment for them, pure and simple. Televise a breach of contract or automobile collision lawsuit and see how many people watch. The entertainment aspect of the Simpson trial became so ludicrous that time and time again, the talking heads, and those who called in on these shows, actually complained that certain lawyers and witnesses, as well as certain evidence, were too boring and dull for their tastes—which is to say they wanted, were almost demanding, better and more scintillating entertainment.

96 Metallica donated all the music for Paradise Lost and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 and would develop a relationship with the filmmakers that led to the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Paramount Films, 2004; DVD, 2005).

97 Urban Desires, “The Interview” (1996), http://desires.com/2.4/Performance/Reviews/Paradise/Docs/interview.html.

98 Ibid.

99 The Movie Review Show with Robin and Laura Clifford, Show 136 (http://www.reelingreviews.com/reel136.htm).

100 George Jared, “WM3 Judge Says Decision in Case Coming,” Jonesboro Sun, January 16, 2010.

101 Jennie Yabroff “American Gothics” Salon.com, as reprinted in Industry Central, http://www.industrycentral.net/director_interviews/JOBE01.HTM

102 Berlinger and Milner, Metallica: This Monster Lives.

103 Rich Rosell “Staring at the Underbelly: An Interview with Documentary Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky” Digitally Obsessed.com http://www.digitallyobsessed.com/showinterview.php3?ID=51&

104 The attorneys’ fees for each defendant were deducted from the honoraria when the court finally ordered payment to the defense lawyers.

105 The film won awards at the Kansas City Film Festival, received a Peabody Award, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. Paradise Lost also won the “Golden Apple” award from the National Educational Media Network, USA, as well as the National Board of Review’s “Best Documentary” award for 1996.

106 Konrad painted the atrocious “RIP,” a painting depicting Byers as the killer, and auctioned off at a WM3 benefit show.

107 Annette Starke, “Life after Death,” Los Angeles CityBeat, August 2006.

108 Comments made at the West Memphis Three support rally in Little Rock in December 2007. This is the same rally where Natalie Maines spoke and where Terry Hobbs claimed he was defamed by remarks she made.

109 A list of questions was submitted to Joe Berlinger, including a question seeking his response to the commentary on this scene. He declined to answer.

110 Next to Crowley’s name, Echols had also written the names of Jason Baldwin and Echols’s son, Damien Seth Azariah Echols, who was born while Damien was in jail awaiting trial.

111 In his biography Almost Home, Damien Echols uses this spelling of the word over 20 times.

112 Lawrence Sutin Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley New York: St. Martins Press 2000

113 Columbia Pacific University was closed between 1995 and 2000 for dormitory violations, failure of its PhD programs to meet standards, awarding excessive credit for life experiences, and failing to hire “duly qualified” professors. In a defense challenge to allowing Griffis to testify as an expert, Judge Burnett ruled that there was no law in Arkansas requiring that an expert witness have a degree to be so qualified.

114 Their notes said, “travel crime scene [sic] 200 times—2 years … Lied.”

115 Author Ann Rule, in her book Green River, Running Red, (New York: Simon and Schuster 2004) which chronicles the hunt for the Green River Killer, referred to the use of the phrase “dump site” as “crass … an unfortunate way to describe where human beings had been left.” I couldn’t agree more.

116 Since Byers usually sports some facial hair, it is difficult to tell, but there do not appear to be any noticeable scars on his face.

117 Dilantin is the trade name of the generic drug phenytoin. The manufacturer advises to “brush and floss your teeth as directed to reduce the risk of gum disease while taking Dilantin.” This is to reduce the side effect of “swollen or tender gums.” Cerner Multum, Inc., Version 5.01. Revised May 13, 2003.

118 According to the American Academy of Periodontology, “tobacco use may be one of the most significant risk factors in the development and progression of periodontal disease.” Additionally, following periodontal treatment or any type of oral surgery, [tobacco use] “can slow down the healing process and make the treatment results less predictable.”

119 An e-mail was sent to the producers of Leeza in December 2008 and again in September 2009. Neither was answered.

120 Chris Champion, “Delta Witch Trials,” Telegraph Magazine, June 4, 2005.

121 George W. Jackson Community Mental Health Center is now the Mid-South Health Center. Medical records from that facility were not available at the time of this writing.

122 The fact that Mark was wearing the black cowboy hat that he had donned for the famous “pumpkin shooting” scene in Paradise Lost virtually assured that he’d be recognized by someone eventually. Could this have been what he wanted?

123 This scene was filmed six months prior to the Rule 37 hearings in Jonesboro, even though in the film it appears at the end.

124 Such was his state of mind at that time that he told the doctors at St. Bernard’s that he had no family, that they were all dead.

125 Ann K. Finkbeiner, After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years (New York, NY, Simon and Schuster,1996).

126 The Rolex deal was conceived in mid-1992 as a rather simple-minded attempt to make some quick money. As it turns out, it was a little too simple. The plan was that Mark would use his relationship with a Dallas jewelry broker to have two Rolex watches, valued at $11,000, delivered to his West Memphis home on consignment; have someone other than himself sign for them; and then deny having ever received them. The watches would then be sold and the profits split between Byers and the person signing for the package. But the broker didn’t fall for it; proof was provided that the package was delivered to Byers’s home address, and nobody cared who’d signed for it. When the broker was unable to get payment from Byers, Gary Gitchell and Bryn Ridge of the WMPD were called in. The broker wanted his money and would not press charges if he was paid. So Byers confessed and paid. How? It was well known that Byers’s financial situation was dire; he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know how he would find the money to bury his son. Now he had to come up with $10,000 for the watches or face prosecution. The Rolex case was eventually “solved” about three weeks after the murders of Christopher, Stevie, and Michael a year later. The townspeople, mostly through local churches, had started a fund drive for the families of the boys to offset funeral expenses and later to pay for the time that the families would spend in court both in Corning and in Jonesboro. Mark Byers was forced to use $7,400 given to him from this fund to reimburse the Dallas jewelry broker and avoid prosecution for fraud.

127 There is some discrepancy here. Tosh wrote in his official report that Mark actually had tried to sell him some “pot, good stuff.” Mark didn’t have any pot, though he was planning on buying some for his personal use with the money he made from selling the Xanax.

128 Vickers has since been promoted to lieutenant.

129 August 1, 1999, letter from Mark to his brother.

130 The court ruling is contained in Arkansas State Supreme Court case no. CR98-872, Reeves v. State, which reiterates the constitutional ban that provides that “no person, under any circumstances, shall be exiled from the state; banishment or exile has been defined as an order that compels a person to quit a city, place, or county for a specific period of time, or for life.”

131 Incarceration rates nationally have increased an average of 3 percent in the last ten years, though in Arkansas, a decline of 2.1 percent was reported in 2005 due to a lack of funds for prison expansion; inmates not previously eligible were given early parole.

132 Arkansas Department of Correction Annual Report FY 2010 http://adc.arkansas.gov/resources/Documents/Annual_Report_FY2010.pdf.

133 Charlie Frago “13% of State’s Inmates also Gang Members, Officials say” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 14, 2005.

134 Charlie Frago, “Prison Seen as a Powder Keg,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 23, 2006. Frago also says, “Prison officials haven’t noted publicly the connection between the riots [at Calico Rock] and a transfer policy that disciplines black inmates by sending them to this medium-security lockup.” In this article, Frago cites Johnson v. California, a case that was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the Court instructed the California state penal system to cease the practice of segregating inmates by race. Frago quotes former Calico Rock corrections officer Captain Elmer Bolia as saying, “They say you can’t segregate by race. They also say you have to protect an inmate’s safety. Those two things aren’t possible … not together. Not at Calico Rock.”

135 The fact that Mark’s eight-year-old son had been murdered in a highly publicized case no doubt helped. Child killing is at the absolute bottom of crimes in the cons’ estimation, and there probably was a small measure of sympathy afforded to Mark as a result.

136 In 1998, Steven Anthony Mays died from heat exhaustion after working one morning on the hoe squad. It was an early November day, with the temperature reported at seventy-two degrees. His estate claims that prison guards ignored his complaints of being ill that day.

137 A class II inmate earns a one-half-day credit for every day served without a write-up. When—and if—his class I status is approved, he starts earning one full day of credit for each day served.

138 In the summer of 1999, Mark mounted an effort to have his sentence reduced, pursuant to a provision of Arkansas state law, and on August 5, he filed a “Petition for Reduction of Sentence.” Essentially, the petition requested relief from the courts in the form of a sentence reduction from eight years down to four. In the suit, Mark asserted that the court had unfairly and inequitably imposed his sentence for the original burglary and theft charges in Sharp County on several grounds. First, since Mark was receiving benefits from Social Security, and his benefits would be halted in the event that he was incarcerated for more than one year, he claimed that it should not have been the court’s intent to “harm this petitioner’s only means of support.” The petition further stated that there should have been more consideration given to time Mark had spent in jail awaiting trial. Finally, Mark made an issue of the fact that he was depressed, had bipolar disorder, and suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. The suit does not specifically state how this last issue affected Mark’s sentencing, though it can be assumed that despite being declared fit to stand trial, Mark was claiming that he was not competent to enter his plea of nolo contendre, or “no contest.” Three weeks later, on August 26, the court rejected the petition on the grounds that first, the trial court had no legal authorization to reduce a valid sentence, and second, Mark had not shown cause that the sentence should be judged anything but valid. It should have been no surprise to Mark; it had been a long shot to begin with. Still, the prospect of eight years in Brickeys did not sit well. That he was less than happy is evident by his September 1 letter home, in which he stated, “Well, today SUCKS!!! I got my results back from Sharp County and the S.O.B. shot me down.”

139 The back of the card read, “This is not me, but I thought you might like it! Your friend, Julie Ann Eldridge.”

140 This author bought one of these letters in September 2005. As of June 2007, no more letters were listed for sale on the website.

141 Edward Lewis “Selenski Wanted to Be a Dirty White Boy,” The Citizen’s Voice (Wilkes Barre, PA), June 23, 2003. The article quotes prison gang and security consultant Robert Walker as saying that the DWB “are not primarily known as a white supremacy group, but they are known to associate with the Aryan Brotherhood, the Texas syndicate and, possibly, the Mexican mafia. They have some white supremacy philosophies, but they’re not out there dealing death to any non-white group.”

142 According to Dave Maas, although it is still possible to have another inmate—or even yourself—transferred to another facility, the price has gone up considerably; it now costs about $300 “green”, or cash. This kind of transaction can’t be arranged by bartering commissary.

143 Marc Perrusquia, “West Memphis Three Dad Puts on a New Face,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 26, 2007. According to Perrusquia, Byers told him he had nicknamed his tumor “Harvey.” Perrusquia was one of the authors of the 1995 book Blood of Innocents, the first book published on the murders.

144 Director Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame didn’t disclose his involvement in the case until 2011, and the amount of any money contributed has not been disclosed. His pockets are likely deeper than Vedder’s, however, and his financial contributions may have been much more extensive, though much lower-profile, than Vedder’s.

145 Mara Leveritt, “The Damien I Know—The Architect and the Inmate,” Arkansas Times, January 9, 2004. This was the first interview in which Davis agreed to discuss her wedding to Echols.

146 Something of a profile had been given to the West Memphis Police Department in 1993 by FBI Special Agent Tom Salp, although it appears to have been “unofficial” and probably done over the phone. For some reason, Salp told them they should be looking for a Vietnam veteran. According to John Douglas, the prosecution had also contacted FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, who had written a paper in 1992 titled “Satanic Ritual Abuse.” Lanning stated in the paper that he had not seen a single case—not one—of a so-called satanic ritual killing. He further told the prosecution that they should not consider using satanism as a motive unless they wanted to be “laughed out of the courtroom.” He never heard back from them.

147 Arkansas Act 1708 16-112-201. This act, like others adopted by different states, was inspired by the case of Earl Washington in Virginia, a mentally challenged inmate who had come within nine days of execution in 1985. Although Washington’s sentence was commuted to life in 1994 by Governor Douglas Wilder, Washington had DNA evidence that excluded him as a suspect as early as 1993. Under Virginia’s draconian “21 day rule,” however, he was not able to have that evidence considered. Washington was pardoned by Governor James Gilmore on the capital murder charges in October 2000 and was released from prison on February 12, 2001, after spending almost seventeen years in prison.

148 According to Terry Hobbs in his June 21, 2007, interview with the West Memphis Police Department, he and Pam were paid $25,000 for “life rights,” and since the couple had divorced some time in 2003, they split the payment evenly between them.

149 In what is most likely a recreated scene in Paradise Lost, the following dialogue takes place between Lax and Echols’s attorneys Val Price and Scott Davidson:

Price: Ron, how do you think this has gone so far, with the Mark Byers aspect? Obviously, we thought long and hard about mentioning a father as a possible suspect.

Lax: I hate having to do that, but the way the circumstances are, it’s just coming out whether we really want to or not. I mean, you know, we had suspicions even before the knife showed up.

Price: Do you think anybody realizes the reason for the three-day delay in Jessie’s trial, waiting on the DNA to come back on that Byers knife?

Davidson: I doubt it.

Lax: And even after the results came back, and it showed that it could be Mark’s blood as well as Chris’s blood, that doesn’t alleviate the fact that he said no one had ever cut themselves on the knife … and it shouldn’t have had blood on it at all.

Price: [What] do you think [about] the theory, or the argument at least, that it wasn’t that the blood was on the blade that could easily be wiped off, but it was back in the hinges, where you wouldn’t think, if you were wiping off the blood—you wouldn’t think the blood would be inside the hinges—and that’s where they found that particular blood?

Davidson: How do we get that in?

Price: Well …

Davidson: Just ask Gitchell?

Price: Ask Byers. I mean, we could put Byers up on the stand.

Davidson: I think the jury expects to see him now. They want to see him up there, see what he has to say. [To Lax] Don’t you think so?

Lax: I think so. Yes.

150 Among other matters, the contract stipulated that “Clear Pictures Ent. agrees that Bruce Sinofsky/Joe Berlinger will have no involvement in this production.”

151 Although the up-front money was paid, the contract, after being renewed once, was eventually allowed to expire in 2009 while the fate of the film was up in the air. Communications between Mark and Liz Fowler have been sporadic, and as of this writing, media outlets have been reporting that the film will begin filming in spring 2012, under the supervision of veteran director Atom Egoyan.

152 According to the state crime lab in Little Rock, “hairs do not possess a sufficient number of unique microscopic characteristics to be positively identified as having originated from a particular item to the exclusion of all other similar items.”

153 According to the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the years 1976-1994, children between five and fourteen years of age who were victims of a homicide had a 22.6 percent chance of suffering death at the hands of a family member. Further, less the 3 percent of all persons incarcerated for violent crimes against children are female.

154 While the “new evidence” obtained by the Echols defense team, including the Hobbs and Jacoby hairs, was being evaluated, Echols successfully petitioned to have his existing appeals held in abeyance while his habeas petition was being prepared. Echols’s motion states, “It has previously been established that Hobbs was never questioned by police during the original investigation of the crimes, despite the fact that the lead detective in the investigation of the murders has conceded that when a child homicide occurs, police should always consider the parents of the child as potential suspects”, and that it is “statistically proven that homicide victims are usually the result [sic] of family, close friends, [and] known acquaintances.”

However, in his 2009 deposition in his lawsuit alleging defamation on the part of Dixie Chicks singer Natalie (Maines) Pasdar, the following exchange took place between Hobbs and Pasdar’s attorney, D’Leslie Davis:

Q. You were not interviewed by the West Memphis Police Department in 1993, correct?

A. I was.

Q. Okay. And it was a formal interview?

A. Right.

Q. Do you know if they recorded it?

A. I don’t remember that

Q. Did they read you your rights?

A. No.

Q. Do you recall which police officer interrogated you?

A. No.

Q. Do you recall where the interview happened?

A. West Memphis Police Department.

Q. And did they call you down there to interview you?

A. They did.

Q. Were you alone or with anyone else?

A. Me and Pam went.

Q. So the two of you were interviewed together?

A. Maybe separate, but we went together.

Q. Other than that one interview in 1993, do you recall any other interviews with West Memphis Police Department in 1993?

A. I can’t recall any.

Q. Can you recall any in 1994?

A. Not really.

155 In the January 4, 1994, report from the Arkansas State Crime Lab, no mention is made of any hair in or on the ligature binding Michael Moore. There is also no mention of ligature hair in Echols’s 2002 motion for forensic DNA testing, though there is mention of the ligature itself. In the 2005 report from Bode Laboratories in Springfield, Virginia, an item labeled “Hair from M. Moore ligature” was received and tested. This was the hair that “could not exclude” Terry Hobbs as the donor, meaning the mitochondrial DNA found in the sample matched that of Hobbs. In the case of the Hobbs sample, the lab states that all but 7 percent (although this number seems to vary) of the population can be excluded.

156 Ron Lax refused to provide any information regarding any subject to this author. I was referred to Echols’s attorney, Dennis Riordan, who was under a gag order by Judge David Burnett, as were the other attorneys involved in the case.

157 Interview of retired Officer Tony Anderson with Captain Ken Mitchell and Lt. Chuck Noles, June 22, 2007. Although Anderson says that all he had was a photograph—he couldn’t recall what kind of camera was used—he didn’t mention the existence of a mud cast. On May 13, 1993, Kathy Healey of the WMPD released evidence to the state crime lab described as “1 box w/a fingerprint in mud.” It was received by the lab and given lab case number 9305716.

158 Ibid. Mitchell asked rather sheepishly if Anderson had compared the print with his own. “I sure did,” Anderson replied.

159 David Ashbaugh, Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1999), cited in John D. Clark, “ACE-V: Is It Scientifically Reliable and Accurate?” http://www.latent-prints.com/ACE-V.htm#_ftn1. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint. The FBI hasn’t used a system of fixed points—also known as “Galton points”—for identification in many years. Rather, the fingerprint analyst evaluates the print in its totality to determine whether it matches a reference sample. This system, known as ACE-V (analyze, compare, evaluate, then verify), is based on a system developed by David Ashbaugh of the Canadian Mounted Police more than twenty years ago. Still, the Galton points serve as a basis for beginning the analysis, which includes three levels of detail for comparison. It is also significant that since many latent prints found at a crime scene are partials, using ACE-V makes obtaining a match more likely than does evaluating Galton points alone.

160 Interview of Hobbs by WMPD, June 21, 2007.

161 He told detectives Ken Mitchell and Chuck Noles the same story. According to Terry, he received a fifty-dollar fine for the incident.

162 Serological Research Institute (SERI) report to attorney Michael Burt in San Francisco, May 11, 2007. Burt is an attorney who represented Jason Baldwin in his appeals. The report reads, in part, “A search of the FBI’s Mitochondrial DNA Database of 4839 samples (consisting of 1674 Caucasians, 686 Hispanics, 848 Asians, 326 Native Americans, 1305 Africans and African Americans) showed three (0.06%) to have the same mitochondrial sequence as the cigarette butts [taken from the front yard and ashtray at Terry Hobbs’ residence in Memphis].” At a press conference in Little Rock in November 2007, Thomas Fedor from SERI said that the hair would exclude all but 1.5 percent of the population but would not be enough for a positive identification.

163 Douglas claims that it was he who discovered that Hobbs had never been interviewed by police. Ron Lax would not comment.

164 Inquisitor Inc. website, www.inquisitorinc.com.

165 According to court records, Lax was paid $1.19 per hour to testify for the state at Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearing in either 1997 or 1998. It is doubtful that he ever received any direct payment for his work in the original investigation; there simply wasn’t any to be had.

166 The reporter was Cathy Frye of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

167 Stephanie Scurlock “Mother of Young West Memphis Three Victim Arrested” WREG news, Memphis. Originally posted November 11, 2007.

168 Hobbs was subsequently bailed out of jail by a “business acquaintance.”

169 Along with Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess, and Robert K. Ressler, Douglas authored Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes, now in its second edition (San Francisco, CA: Wiley, 2006). He also coauthored Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives with Ressler and Ann W. Burgess. Both are tools for law enforcement to aid in the development of offender profiles and to assist in crime scene investigation and interrogation of suspects.

170 John Douglas “Triple Homicide Analysis” as presented in Damien Echols’s October 29, 2007, second amended petition for writ of habeas corpus, exhibit “UU.”

171 Cathy Frye, “Reputation Is Ruined, Says Stepdad of Boy Killed in ’93,” NWAnews.com, Arkansas Democrat Gazette Online, February 3, 2008.

172 For John Douglas, that was a near-perfect scenario, the only downside being that he knew that a suspect was presently being looked at and in fact had already interviewed him twice before putting together his profile.

173 In their Crime Classification Manual, 2nd ed., Douglas, Burgess, Burgess, and Ressler define victimology as “the complete history of the victim.” They ask, “Was the victim known to the killer? What were the chances of the victim becoming a target for violent crime? What risk did the offender take in perpetrating this crime?” The relationship between the offender and the victim is a critical component of the analysis of the crime and is a key aspect of solving it.

174 According to Hobbs in a conversation with this author in October 2010, it was the Hobbs family who refused to talk with Douglas and Herot, not the Hickses. Both Douglas and Herot verified that Herot spoke with Hobbs’s sister, mother, and two brothers in Kokomo, Indiana, in September 2007. Either Hobbs was misinformed by his family, or he was lying. There is a third possibility, of course—that both Herot and Douglas were being untruthful.

175 Beth Warren, “Top Court to Hear Damien Echols’ Plea Today for New Trial in ‘West Memphis Three’ Case,” The Commercial Appeal, September 30, 2010. Ms. Warren couldn’t recall the exact dates of her interview with Cindy Hobbs but was sure it was well after Herot had spoken with her.

176 Cathy Frye, “Reputation Is Ruined.”

177 Declaration of Pamela Marie Hobbs, Hobbs v. Pasdar, US District Court, Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division, filed August 21, 2009. Pam said that Terry’s first wife’s name was Angela Timms.

178 Declaration of Mildred French, Hobbs v. Pasdar.

179 In her 2009 declaration in the matter of Hobbs v. Pasdar, Pam Hobbs would say that she’d seen Terry’s divorce papers and that his ex-wife had accused him of “sexually molesting” their son, Bryan.

180 The so-called lake knife was a large survival knife found behind the home of Jason Baldwin in Lakeshore Trailer Park, submerged in the mud at the bottom of the lake that gives the “park” its name. Police divers recovered this knife in November 1993, six months after the murders. The knife was never linked in any way to either the suspects or the victims, with the exception of the testimony of medical examiner Dr. Frank Peretti, who said that it was “possible” that the knife had caused some of the injuries. Prosecutor John Fogleman, in his closing argument to the Echols/Baldwin jury, used a grapefruit to show jurors how cuts to the fruit by the lake knife “matched” some of the injuries to the victims. In Echols’s habeas petition, forensic odontologist Dr. Robert Wood stated, “Grapefruit is not a recognized analog for human skin. To my knowledge it has never been used as a model for skin injury, in any court, anywhere … the difference in damage inflicted by a knife to these two substrates are as different as chalk and cheese.”

181 The Memphis Commercial Appeal, for example, printed much of the statement verbatim in a June 7, 1993, article by Bartholomew Sullivan, “Teen Describes ‘Cult’ Torture of Boys: Defendant Misskelley Tells Police of Sex Mutilation.”

182 In between the Misskelley and Echols/Baldwin trials, prosecutors Brent Davis and John Fogleman told the families of the victims that without Misskelley’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial, they would have only a “50/50” chance of obtaining convictions against the two. He apparently underestimated the jury, who convicted the defendants on all counts and sent Echols to death row.

183 When Gary Gitchell was asked by attorney D’Leslie Davis during the Hobbs v. Pasdar depositions if he would make the same statement—that the case against the three teens was eleven on a scale of one to ten—Gitchell replied, “Probably not.”

184 Warford was originally retained by Arnold on behalf of his brother, Gerald Arnold, who was facing allegations that he had raped his four-year-old daughter during a planned visitation. Warford pled him out.

185 In 2001, Moneypenny, a privately practicing psychologist in Little Rock, signed an affidavit stating that he had been retained “solely for the purpose of determining what, if any, mitigating factors were present that could be presented at the penalty phase of his trial, if [Echols] were to be found guilty of capital murder.” He felt pressured to give the evaluation, despite a very short (two days, February 20-21, 1994) time frame, but because of his belief that all defendants are entitled to an “impartial and competent evaluation where mental health issues are relevant to the proceedings,” he gave it his best shot. Echols’s writ maintains that “trial counsel unreasonably introduced testimony from defense expert James Moneypenny concerning petitioner’s mental health history; unreasonably failed to object to cross-examination of Moneypenny concerning excerpts drawn from Echols’s mental health records; and unreasonably failed to seek a limiting instruction as to the use of the Moneypenny testimony.”

186 Corporal Joel Mullins of the state police dive team recovered the knife in the lake behind Jason Baldwin’s trailer on November 17, 1993. Mullins had been called by investigators of the WMPD to search this area. Staff writer Kathy Burt of the West Memphis Evening Times was on hand with her camera just in time to snap a photo of Mullins popping his head up out of the water, knife in hand. Much was made about how reporters knew to be there during the search. The easy answer is that the property owner, James T. Ellison, who consented to allow state police to cross his property, notified reporters during the “several hours” divers were searching. According to Ellison, once the knife was found, police left, saying, “We got what we want. Let’s go.”

187 Indeed, Hobbs was receiving unwanted visitors at his place of business, one going so far as to come in with a camcorder, posing as a tourist from another country in order to get Hobbs on film.

188 Maines was represented by D’Leslie Davis and Dan Davison with the law firm Fulbright and Jaworski. She was further represented by John Moore and Melissa Bandy. The Dixie Chicks were represented by Bob Wellenberger with Thompson, Coe, Cousins & Irons. Hobbs was represented by Cody Hiland and Ted Thomas.

189 It seems odd that Ryan would have been in school that day with his little brother still missing. He himself had been out till midnight searching. For Mark’s part, with all the activity going on at the time, he says he doesn’t remember whether Ryan went to school or not.

190 Most of Mark Byers’s statements were taken directly from his declaration to attorneys in the Hobbs v. Pasdar case.

191 The Serological Research Institute (SERI) in Richmond, California, did the DNA testing on the Jacoby and Hobbs samples and then cross-referenced them to the reports of Bode Laboratories, which had received evidence for testing from the Arkansas State Crime Lab. According to SERI analyst Thomas Fedor, regarding the cigarette butts taken from the front yard and ashtray at Terry Hobbs’s residence by Rachel Geiser of Inquisitor, “The person who left DNA on the cigarette butts #8 and #10 (or anyone in his/their maternal lineage) are not excluded as the source of the ligature hair [Bode #2S04-114-03a.” This was the hair recovered from the ligature that bound victim Michael Moore. The same comment was made regarding the analysis of a cigarette butt and hair sample obtained from David Jacoby as it related to Bode #2S04-114-23, “hair from tree stump.” Jacoby also could not be excluded as the source.

192 Actually, Hobbs had already retained Memphis attorney Ross Sampson as his “entertainment lawyer.” Sampson was now pulling double duty, deflecting questions from the media related to any alleged involvement of Hobbs in the murders.

193 Larry King Live, December 19, 2007.

194 The governor was not available. Maines delivered the letters to an assistant.

195 This setup didn’t last long. Mark was soon making his own decisions about whom he would be interviewing with, once his contract with Clear Pictures had expired, and he didn’t need approval to grant interviews. He also felt that he was savvy enough at this point to handle his own publicity.

196 According to Misskelley, the tattoo is a clock with no hands. He said he would have the tattoo completed with the time of his release upon being freed from prison.

197 Since deceased.

198 The hearings were reminiscent of scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These people were drawn to the hearings, and it didn’t seem like anything could keep them away. They were always peaceful, polite, and orderly. Most, but not all, were young and for the most part well informed. Their main fault was that they were perhaps overly reliant on the HBO movies for information.

199 George Jared “WM3 judge says decision in case coming in 2010” Jonesboro Sun December 27, 2009

200 George Jared, “Boy’s Mother Recalls Fateful Day, Part 4,” Jonesboro Sun, July 6, 2010.

201 Jon Gambrell “Arkansas Attorney General’s Office statement on recent federal court filing of Damien Echols Associated Press, October 30, 2007, as reprinted at http://wm3org.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/index.html. The spokesman’s name was Gabe Holstrom.

202 Also known as the “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome,” this condition describes women who are attracted to men who have committed heinous crimes Though this disorder is not currently cataloged in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV), it is nonetheless recognized by psychologists as a recurring paraphilia, though little is actually known about it since “sufferers” don’t normally seek treatment.

203 Reporter Stephanie Scurlock from WREG TV Memphis interviewed Davis in February 2010.

204 Mara Leveritt, “The Damien I Know,” The Arkansas Times, January 9, 2004.

205 Nelson told defense attorneys that Hobbs had first used the phrase “buried under water” in a conversation with her and that he became “annoyed” or “bored” whenever the subject of Stevie’s death came up. According to Nelson, Hobbs told her that he had discovered the bodies before police did but didn’t say why he’d never told anybody. Nelson claimed that she had only recently discovered that Hobbs had not told Pam that Stevie was still missing while she was at work and that he had not told police that he had discovered the bodies.

206 Jared, “Boy’s Mother Recalls Fateful Day, Part 4”.July 6, 2010, as reprinted at http://wm3org.typepad.com/blog/2010/07/boys-mother-recalls-fateful-day-part-4-2.html

207 Damien Echols’s direct appeal for a rehearing had been denied by the ASSC on February 24, 2005.

208 Worth Sparkman, “Arkansas Supreme Court Oral Arguments to Be Broadcast Online,” ArkansasBusiness.com, September 14, 2010.

209 None of the footage of the exchange was used in Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. Video filmed by another cameraman not associated with HBO or Creative Thinking was at one time viewable on youtube.com. It has since been removed without explanation. The introduction to the video contained text accusing Mr. Byers of drug use and may have been removed for legal reasons.

210 Leveritt wrote the following passage in Devil’s Knot:

[The author’s source] was former Poinsett County sheriff’s deputy C. L. Carter. When questioned about the attack on Byers’s parents, Carter recalled, “Mark had a knife after them. He wanted them to give him money to buy dope with.” The former deputy said he cornered Mark in a closet and ordered him to throw down the knife. Carter said he vividly recalled that, as he was putting handcuffs on Byers, the teenager looked at him and vowed, “I’ll cut your throat.”

This author (Greg Day) interviewed May Carter in February 2007 when she was ninety-seven years old. May and her husband Carol “C. R.” (not C.L.) Carter (101 years old) were in the Woodbriar Nursing Home in Marked Tree. Deputy Carter was unable to come to the phone at the time, but his wife had a near-perfect memory, and without any prompting, she recalled the incident with Mark Byers in the same detail as her husband had to Leveritt when he was interviewed for Devil’s Knot. Mark has said that Deputy Carter—and his wife—may be remembering Danny or Larry Myers, brothers he said were in trouble all the time, or perhaps Duane Byars, another youth in town known to cause trouble. Larry Myers was declared a fugitive on April 23, 1997, after he gunned down one Poinsett County sheriff’s deputy and wounded another during a traffic stop just south of Marked Tree. Myers killed himself before he could be captured. Myers was born in 1951, which would have made him approximately twenty-two years old at the time Carter investigated the call. Both the Marked Tree police and the Poinsett County Sheriff’s offices claim that they do not keep records dating back to the time of the incident. Friends and family members interviewed by this author gave this story no credibility at all. Whoever Carter remembered arresting, it wasn’t Mark Byers. Not only did Mark love his parents dearly, but the idea of sixteen-year-old Mark holding George Byers hostage with anything less than a howitzer was laughable. Leveritt has acknowledged that she sought no corroboration for her story since she had obtained it from a “former public official” and that the story was obtained “long before” she wrote her book, according to e-mail exchanged between Leveritt and the author in March 2007.

211 Jill Zeman Bleed, “New Hearing Ordered for 3 in Ark. Scout’s Death,” Associated Press, November 4, 2010.

212 Mara Leveritt, “Briefs Set for West Memphis Three Hearings,” Arkansas Times, January 4, 2011. Although the hearings were public, some of the information in this chapter was gleaned from Leveritt’s articles in the Times.

213 Mara Leveritt, “The Big Ask,” Arkansas Times, August 24, 2011.

214 From a March 21, 2012 e-mail from Mr. Braga to the author.

215 Allison D. Redlich and Asil Ali Ozdogru, “Alford Pleas in the Age of Innocence,” Behavioral Science and the Law (2009).

216 Stephanos Bibas, “Harmonizing Substantive Criminal Law Values and Criminal Procedure: The Case of Alford and Nolo Contendere Pleas.” Frontline website, PBS. (Originally published in the Cornell Law Review 88, no. 6 [July 2003].)

217 Damien Echols, Almost Home. Lincoln, NE iUniverse 2005

218 From Heather Crawford’s two-part interview that aired on October 29 and November 2, 2011, on WKAT-ABC TV, Little Rock.

219 Sharon Waxman, “Out of Prison, West Memphis 3 Ex-Con Seeks Justice,” The Wrap (Reuters), January 12, 2011.

220 Qtd. in Suzi Parker, “West Memphis Three now must learn how to live as free men” Christian Science Monitor, August 2011. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0820/West-Memphis-Three-now-must-learn-how-to-live-as-free-men

* Not his real name.

** Not his real name.

*** Not her real name.

**** Not his real name.

***** Not his real name.

****** Not his real name.

******* Not his real name.

Table of Contents

Untying the Knot

Contents

Preface

Foreword

Chapter 1

A Community in Shock

“There’s Been a Homicide”

The City Reacts

The Investigation

Damien

Jason

Jessie

The Investigation Part 2

Victoria Hutcheson

The Confession

Chapter 2

I’m No Angel

Setting Out

All the Way to Memphis

Descent

Sandra

Melissa

Tables Turned

Danny Overman

Tunica

The Calm

Christopher

Real Monsters

Getaway

The Misskelley Trial

One Down, Two to Go—the Echols/Baldwin Trial

Cherokee Village

Chapter 3

Melissa

Mandy Beasley

Ryan

Exile

Chapter 4

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

The Red Carpet

WM3.org

At Graveside with Christopher

The Devil Made Them Do It

Paradise Lost Revisions

The Blame Game

The Rule 37 Hearings

The Leeza Deal

Chapter 5

Summer Camp

Paying the Piper

Wrong Number

Summer Camp

Brickeys

Hoedown

Moving On Up

Passing Time

“Welcome to Brickeys, Brother!”

Mail Call

Dermott

Preparing for Reentry

Chapter 6

Redemption and Revelations

Jacki

The Cuckoo’s Nest

The More Things Change

Tinsel Town and the Monster in the Shadows

Terry Hobbs

Questioning Hobbs

The Mind-Hunter Cometh

Revelations

The Petition

Summary of the Evidence

Meet the Press

Brent Davis Answers

Trouble with the Chicks

The Hobbs Alibi

Further Revelations

“The Price of Justice Is Eternal Publicity”

Chapter 7

Jason and Jessie

Chapter 8

John Mark Byers, Damien Echols, and Terry Hobbs

Lorri Davis

48 Hours

Voices for Justice

More on Film

Larry King Live, Part 2

September 30, 2010

The ASSC Returns a Surprise Decision

Reviewing the Evidence

Florid Delirium

North Carolina v. Alford

Damien

Jason

Jessie

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Endnotes