Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (2 page)

Once begun, the gruesome search intensified. In quick succession the ditch yielded Michael’s Cub Scout cap and shirt, a pair of blue jeans, and the grim, forewarning sight of two more pairs of tennis shoes without laces. Reentering the water and resuming his search by hand, Ridge found more sticks stuck like pins into the muddy bottom. Twisted deliberately around them were other items of clothing. Before long, all the clothing listed on the three missing-person reports had been pulled out of the water, with the exception of a sock and two pairs of underpants. The detectives were especially intrigued by the trousers, two of which were inside out. Yet all three were zippered up and buttoned.

Ridge reentered the water farther downstream, and this time he felt what he had feared. Pulling against the mud’s suction, he released a second naked form.
¹¹
As it rose eerily to the surface, the detective and officers on the banks could see that this body was also naked and bent backward like the first, and like the first, its thin arms and ankles had been tied together with shoelaces. This was the body of Stevie Branch. He too showed signs of having been beaten, and the left side of his face bore other savage marks. It was hard to tell—the wounds were so deep—but on top of everything else, it looked like Stevie’s face may have been bitten.

Minutes later, Ridge found the body of Christopher Byers. Like the others it was submerged facedown in the mud. He was also naked and tied in the same manner as the others, but when detectives rolled him over in the water, they were assaulted by another shock. Christopher’s scrotum was gone and his penis had been skinned. Only a thin flap of flesh remained where his genitals should have been, and the area around the castration had been savagely punctuated with deep stab wounds. By now it was 3
P.M
.

Detectives found the two bicycles thirty yards away, also underwater. At 3:20
P.M
., nearly two hours after the first body was recovered, someone at the scene thought to call the county coroner. When the coroner arrived, he found all three of the bodies out of the water and lying on the bank.
¹²
He pronounced the boys dead at the scene, at approximately 4
P.M
.

What had begun as a search now became a murder investigation, with Gitchell still in charge. His officers photographed and videotaped the scene alongside the stream, where the three white bodies lay. By now, however, the bodies had been out of the water for so long that they were attracting flies and other insects. Gitchell ordered the stream sandbagged above where the bodies were found, and the section below it drained, in the hopes of recovering Christopher’s missing genitals, the missing underpants, and maybe a murder weapon or other evidence. Then he walked to the edge of the woods, where a large crowd had assembled. Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather, was ducking under the yellow police tape as Gitchell approached. Gitchell stopped Hobbs and gently reported the news. Yes, the boys’ bodies had been found. And yes, it was clear that they had been murdered. Hobbs crumpled to the ground and cried. His wife, Pam Hobbs, Stevie’s mother, fainted.

Gitchell spoke briefly to reporters. Then he walked over to John Mark Byers, whose stepson Chris had been mutilated. Byers was leaning against a police car. As a photographer for the
West Memphis Evening Times
aimed her camera and clicked the shutter, Gitchell held out a hand to Byers, as if to support or even embrace him. Byers, who stood almost a head taller than Gitchell, draped his arm over the detective’s shoulder. When a reporter approached, Byers shook his head in a gesture of bewilderment. He had searched that very site just the night before, he said. “I was out looking until four-thirty. I walked within ten or fifteen feet of where they were found,” he said, “and I didn’t see them.” The remark struck no one as odd. Many people had searched the area and seen no trace of the missing children. Byers then provided the reporter more information than Gitchell had divulged, information he said the detectives had given him. One of the boys had been hit above the eye, Byers said; another boy’s jaw was injured, and the assault on the third child had been even “worse than that.”

Eventually, onlookers saw a black hearse drive east on the service road and turn into the Blue Beacon Truck Wash, where it backed up to the edge of the lot. Police covered in dirt and sweat carried three body bags through the opening on the north edge of the woods, across a grassy field, and loaded them through the open rear door.

By then, reporters from Memphis, Little Rock, and Jonesboro, Arkansas, a city about twice the size of West Memphis sixty miles to the north, had converged on the scene. Though the reporters begged Gitchell for information, he told them he had nothing more to say. That night, however, reporters at the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
tuned in to their newsroom’s police scanner and picked up a broadcast from the Arkansas State Police. It contained details Gitchell had not revealed, news that made the front page of the next morning’s
Commercial Appeal.
The scoop established a dominance for that paper that would continue as the story unfolded.

The details the paper picked up from the state police report included references to how the boys were tied. It also said—incorrectly—that all three had been sexually mutilated.
¹³
When reporters questioned Gitchell about the sexual mutilation, the detective would not comment. He did, however, confirm that all of the victims had been bound hand to foot. He also remarked on the intensity of the search in the woods, noting, as if mystified, “That area where the boys were found was saturated hard and heavy that morning and even the evening before.”

The place where the boys were last seen was just a few hundred yards from where their bodies had floated up. The site was a half mile due north of the corner where Christopher Byers and Michael Moore lived. When reporters knocked on the door of the Byerses’ house, Christopher’s mother, Melissa, answered. She was crying and had little to say. “I won’t let them tell me what happened to them,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to know.” Before closing the door, she added, “All I know is that my child is dead and so are the other two. I’m so sorry. I just don’t want to talk about gory details. I don’t know.”

West Memphis went into shock. On Friday, May 7, the day after the bodies were found, teachers at the elementary school the boys attended met to discuss their students’ fears.
¹⁴
“I think we can tell the children that the person who did this is very, very sick,” one of the counselors advised. Adults wanted to know more than that, but Gitchell was saying little. Faced with silence from the police, the media focused on the victims’ families. Of all the parents, John Mark Byers was the most willing to talk. As the weekend approached, he told reporters that besides the weight of his family’s grief, the murder posed a financial burden. He explained, “I’ve got to find a way to bury my son.”

Neighbors and sympathetic church groups began to organize collections. By Mother’s Day, which fell that weekend, donors had contributed nearly $25,000 to pay for the children’s funerals. And a reward fund had been started for information leading to the arrest of the murderer—or murderers. But by the weekend it was also becoming clear that this crime would not be quickly solved. On Monday, May 10, the fifth day of the ordeal, the optimistic headline in the
West Memphis Evening News
announced: “Police Still Confident They’ll Solve Murders.” Gitchell tried to reassure the paper’s readers. His officers were tired, he said, but he added, “We’re going to make it.”

Gitchell said little more for the next several days, though he did make one statement that caught the region’s attention. He noted that his detectives were considering a wide range of possibilities, including that the murders might have resulted from “gang or cult activity”—though he quickly added that he had seen no evidence of either. To outsiders it seemed a strange pronouncement, an acknowledgment that detectives were considering an unusual explanation for the murders, despite the fact that no evidence suggested it. But readers in West Memphis understood. Within hours after the discovery of the bodies, rumors attributing the killings to satanism had begun to circulate. Two women had already reported sounds of devil worshiping in the woods. Whatever had prompted Gitchell’s remark, it suggested that he and his detectives were taking the rumors seriously. Word that the case might have satanic overtones was prevalent enough that when the West Memphis Police Department assigned the case number 93-05-0666 to the murder file, reporters asked whether the last three digits had been deliberately chosen. Did the number 666 suggest a police theory of the crime? Did it refer to the Antichrist? Gitchell insisted that it did not. The assignment of that particular number, he said, had been entirely coincidental. He explained that cases were numbered according to the date the crime had occurred and the number of cases that had already been entered for the year. It was entirely by chance, he said, that this particular case, which occurred in the fifth month of 1993, just happened to be the 666th worked by the department so far. Years later, discovery of a report written by Detective Ridge and dated two days after the bodies were found would cast doubt on Gitchell’s contention. That report—which was among the earliest in the case—identified it as #93-05-0555.

W
ITHIN HOURS AFTER THE BODIES WERE FOUND
, Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, a former prosecuting attorney, contacted Gitchell to offer the assistance of the Arkansas State Police. The larger state police agency could have sent detectives from its Criminal Investigation Division into West Memphis to aid in what promised to be a difficult investigation. But Gitchell declined the offer, and though one state police officer did help conduct some interviews, the role of the state police in West Memphis was minimal.
¹⁵

Gitchell’s reluctance to involve the state police might have been sparked in part by the misinformation the agency had broadcast in the first hours of the case—information that had been picked up by the paper. Gitchell’s strategy, from the moment the three bodies had floated up from the muck, had been to keep a tight control on information. The less the public knew, he reasoned, the better he and his detectives could work. If no one but the killer or killers knew the exact nature of the wounds, for example, the questioning of suspects would be easier. But Gitchell’s attempt to control the information had been immediately undermined—by the very investigative agency that was now offering its assistance. Anyone who’d heard the police band broadcast would know how the boys’ hands had been tied and the significant, if overstated, fact that “their genitals had been removed.” The morning after the discovery of the bodies, when the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
published that information, Gitchell had been livid.

There may also have been another, darker reason for Gitchell’s coolness toward the state police. At the time the murders occurred, several officers in the West Memphis Police Department, along with officers in the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office, were themselves under investigation by none other than the Arkansas State Police. Gitchell himself had not been questioned, but much of the county’s law enforcement community had, and the relationship between the local police and the state police was, at the moment, severely strained. The incident that had brought state investigators into Crittenden County arose less than four months before the murders, and the investigation into it was not over yet. It centered on drugs. It suggested corruption. And it began with another murder. The victim this time was a deputy sheriff—an undercover narcotics investigator who, the state police discovered, had been pawning evidence seized in drug arrests to buy drugs for himself.
¹⁶

It was a tawdry story, but one that was only partly reported. The deputy was buried with honors. “He did his job,” the sheriff said at his funeral. “He did a good job for us.” Police in West Memphis never revealed the information, uncovered by the state police, about the slain deputy’s personal involvement with drugs or that he’d pawned an undercover police car and his service revolver to get them.

Yet that murder had opened a can of worms for police in Crittenden County—especially for officers on the county’s drug task force. While state police investigators were sorting through the deputy’s affairs, they discovered that he was not the only narcotics detective who’d been misusing official property. Guns seized in drug arrests were found to be missing from the evidence locker. Questions were also raised about drugs and money that had been seized and not accounted for. In the months that immediately preceded the eight-year-olds’ murders, the state police probe into the deputy’s murder had expanded into an investigation of other officers—from both the sheriff’s office and the West Memphis Police Department—who served on the county’s drug task force. On March 3, 1993, two months before the children’s murders, the
West Memphis Evening Times
reported mildly that the local drug task force had become “the object of an investigation by the Arkansas State Police over firearms and drugs that may be missing.”

In a systematic probe, state police investigators began to polygraph members of the county’s drug task force, asking each member about the missing guns and drugs.
¹⁷
During the ten weeks immediately preceding the triple murder in May, fourteen employees of the county drug task force, including four detectives from the West Memphis Police Department, were questioned by the state police.
¹⁸
Several officers, including three from the West Memphis Police Department, admitted to having taken guns from the evidence locker. One deputy told investigators that it had become common practice for members of the drug task force to help themselves to guns that were reported to the courts as having been destroyed.

The most serious statements were those made by and about Lieutenant James Sudbury, a West Memphis narcotics detective. Though Sudbury was the second-ranking officer on the county’s drug task force, he would play a pivotal role in the investigation of the children’s murders. Shortly before those murders occurred, however, Sudbury admitted to state police investigators that he had taken personal possession of at least four weapons that had been seized by the drug task force as evidence. Other members of the task force reported that Sudbury had taken several other items as well. All of this was reported to Brent Davis, the district’s prosecuting attorney. But Davis, who would also play a key role in the forthcoming triple murder case, opted not to prosecute Sudbury or the other officers involved.
¹⁹

In early May, after the discovery of the three boys’ bodies, few people in West Memphis were aware of the tensions that had been building between police in Crittenden County and the state police. Oddly, one of the few people who may have understood the situation was the stepfather of one of the children found dead in Robin Hood.

Byers occupied an unusual position in the West Memphis community. He was a pawnbroker, a jeweler by trade, a drug dealer, a friend of police, and a confidential informant for the Crittenden County Drug Task force. The day after the three eight-year-olds’ bodies were found, Byers simultaneously praised the West Memphis police for their efforts in the search for the boys and complained about what he regarded as the sheriff’s delayed response. The sheriff responded that the search had not been in his jurisdiction and that the county’s search-and-rescue unit had been dispatched as soon as the West Memphis police requested it. Besides, the sheriff added, there was no reason, other than protocol, why he would have declined Byers’s request, since he knew Byers and considered him a friend.

Other lawmen involved in the search—deputies and police alike—could have said the same. Several had attended parties at the Byerses’ house, drinking beer, grilling burgers, and playing in the backyard pool. They knew Melissa Byers. They’d met her children, Ryan and Christopher. That may have been why, after the bodies were found, Gitchell’s clasp of Byers at the edge of the woods had looked surprisingly personal. When the photo of that encounter appeared on the front page of the local paper, a spotlight fell on Byers that would shine for many months. But there were aspects of his past that it did not illuminate, although some of them were known to local officials.

Byers was born in 1957 in Marked Tree, Arkansas, about thirty miles north of West Memphis. He studied briefly in Texas to be a jeweler and, for a time after that, worked at a store in Memphis. But by 1984, he was back, living in Marion, Arkansas, a quiet farming community six miles north of West Memphis. Byers worked at flea markets in the Memphis–West Memphis area, performing on-the-spot jewelry repair until he and Melissa opened their own store, Byers Jewelry, in West Memphis in 1989. The store lasted less than a year, and when it closed, Byers filed for bankruptcy. A few months later he signed on as a partner in a pawn business that operated on the service road alongside the interstates, near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. That venture ended quickly too, and toward the end of 1990, the disgruntled partner bought Byers out.

Byers’s personal life was running no more smoothly than his career. In 1987, when he married Melissa DeFir, a Memphis woman with a history of heroin addiction, he already had two children, a son and a daughter, from a previous marriage. His first wife had custody of the children.
²⁰
When Melissa married Mark, she brought two children to the marriage: Ryan, a shy seven-year-old, and Christopher, who was then about three. But even after his marriage to Melissa, Byers retained a stormy relationship with his first wife, who lived in Marion.

In September 1987, Byers’s volatility toward his first wife had led to his arrest.
²¹
Shortly before 7
A.M
., police in Marion received a call about “a woman screaming.” The caller also reported that “there were two small kids outside by themselves unattended.” That call was followed by a second, from another alarmed resident, who’d also heard the screams. The address the callers gave was that of Byers’s ex-wife and her children. An officer later reported that when he arrived, the older of the two children outside told him that “his mother and daddy were inside the trailer fighting.” Looking inside the door, the officer wrote, he could see “a white male and a white female on the floor. The white male appeared to have a black object pointing at the female who was crying and visibly upset.” When the officer entered the house, the man, who identified himself as Byers, “got off the floor immediately and became arrogant,” while the woman “was crying and begging this officer not to leave.”

The woman told the officer that Byers had come to the house at 6:45
A.M
., demanding to take the children. He then “began to threaten her, telling her that he wanted full custody of the kids, that he was going to kill her, and that he had an electric shocker and kept acting like he was going to use it on her.” The officer’s notes of the incident continued: “Mr. Byers acted strange. A few minutes he would calm down and talk normal, but then all of a sudden he would get arrogant again, advising me that he was the father and he was going to take the kids. He also became upset when I advised him that I was going to keep the Power Zapper, which he wanted back. I could not smell any type of intoxicant on his breath, but he appeared to have been either on some type of medication or intoxicant by the manner in which he was acting.” The officer confiscated the electric shocker and escorted the woman and her children to a friend’s home, where she could “feel safe.”

That morning, Byers’s ex-wife drove to downtown Marion, where she reported the incident to John Fogleman, the city attorney. Years later, Fogleman too would play a key role in events following the murder of Christopher Byers and his two young friends. But that tragedy was still almost six years in the future. In 1987, in the hours after her assault, the former Mrs. Byers told Fogleman that her ex-husband had threatened to kill her or to have someone else kill her several times in the past; that she had sought a restraining order against him; and that because of his propensity toward violence, when he had shown up at her house that morning she had turned on a tape recorder. She handed Fogleman the tape.
²²
It and the investigating officer’s report were convincing evidence. By the end of the day, Marion police had issued a warrant for Byers’s arrest, charging that he had terrorized his ex-wife by threatening to cause her death. Byers was convicted of the offense and sentenced to three years’ probation. All that was required of him was that he keep up his child support payments and remain gainfully employed.

Byers fulfilled neither requirement. Over the next few years, his first wife took him to court repeatedly seeking back child support, and twice, when Byers professed poverty, a local chancery judge reduced his court-ordered payments. Meanwhile, in 1989, Byers, now married to Melissa, bought the two-story house on Barton Street in West Memphis and moved into it with Ryan and Christopher. The house had three bedrooms, three baths, and an in-ground swimming pool. When the couple’s jewelry store failed the following year, neighbors wondered how the couple afforded the house. Melissa worked as a cleaning lady, and Byers worked out of their home, mostly selling jewelry at local flea markets.
²³

Something else that puzzled neighbors was Byers’s apparent chumminess with some members of the local police. One explanation for that emerged months after Christopher’s murder, when it was learned that Byers had worked as an undercover drug informant.
²⁴
But there were other, deeper mysteries that were never fully explained. One was why, exactly one year before Christopher’s murder, the record of Byers’s felony conviction for terroristic threatening was formally expunged. Byers had not fulfilled the terms of his probation. He had neither kept up his child support payments nor remained gainfully employed. Yet on May 5, 1992, circuit judge David Burnett signed an order absolving Byers of all legal consequences arising from the assault and death threat on his ex-wife. A year later, Burnett would become another principal player in the murder case involving Byers’s stepson. But even in 1992, Burnett’s role in Byers’s life was important. The judge’s ruling allowed Byers to state “in any application form for employment, license, civil right, or privilege or in any appearance as a witness that he has not been convicted of the offense.”
²⁵

All of this, of course, went unreported in the local paper. Where Byers was known at all in West Memphis, it was as a failed jewelry store owner who worked at local flea markets. His ex-wife had moved away, taking her children with her, and now, even the record of Byers’s conviction for assaulting her had been ordered removed from the courthouse. But some records did still exist. One, on file in Memphis, reported that on a night in July 1992—nine months before the murders—Byers had been arrested in that city.
²⁶
Sheriff’s deputies there charged him with conspiring to sell cocaine and with carrying a dangerous weapon. They booked him into the county jail. But sometime during the night, Byers was released, without explanation, into the custody of U.S. marshals. Byers was subsequently released, though—once again—records in the case were scarce. Representatives of the U.S. Marshals Service later acknowledged that records did not indicate who had ordered Byers’s release or why.