Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (34 page)

As the three Californians obtained answers to their questions and dug up supporting material, they decided to publish their findings on the Internet. The Web site they founded, wm3.org, quickly became a clearinghouse for information and opinion on the case.
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A synergy developed between the documentary film and the Web site, as film viewers, intrigued by the same questions that had bothered the Web site’s founders, searched the Internet, found wm3.org, and in surprising numbers responded to its calls for action.

The Web site founders produced T-shirts featuring pictures of the three Arkansas inmates and the rallying cry “Free the West Memphis Three.” They urged supporters to write to Arkansas’s governor, Mike Huckabee, asking that he press for a reexamination of the case. A support fund was established to offset costs of maintaining the site.
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The site tried to personalize the inmates by publishing current photographs and offering glimpses into their lives in prison. In a neatly formatted 1996 “one-minute interview” with Damien, for instance, he responded to the question of what he’d like to do if he were released. “I would love to eventually own a secondhand bookstore,” he said. “I love to read, and it would be pretty peaceful.” Jason was reported to be working as an office clerk at his unit, while Jessie, like the majority of Arkansas inmates, worked outdoors on his unit’s hoe squad.

By 1997, the site reported that although the inmates’ direct appeals had failed, all three still had postconviction petitions pending before the Arkansas Supreme Court. As the Web site became increasingly sophisticated and its founders’ understanding of the legal processes deepened, documents from the case were posted, links to relevant Arkansas Supreme Court’s rulings were established, different discussion boards flourished (one for newcomers seeking information and another where the converted could discuss strategies), and an archive was developed.
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While officials in West Memphis dismissed both the documentary and the Web site as the work of misguided and misinformed would-be do-gooders from out of state—people who didn’t know what had
really
happened—the movement to “free the West Memphis Three” had struck an unusual chord in America. It hummed with reminiscences of ostracism, with passion for recognizable justices, and with a commitment to freedom of expression—whether it be artistic, intellectual, or religious.
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As
Paradise Lost
aired again on HBO, continued to play at small theaters, and moved to video, the interaction between viewers and the Web site expanded. In Arkansas, the public effect was muted, but personal responses were often intense. One video rental store in Little Rock allowed the film to be checked out for free, because the store’s owners believed Arkansans should see it.
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Almost the entire audience stayed for two hours after
Paradise Lost
was shown at the annual documentary film festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a discussion with the producers and some of the lawyers who’d represented the West Memphis teens. In 1998, a woman from Jonesboro who’d attended part of the second trial said that after she’d seen the film she’d gone straight to her computer. “I did a search,” she said. “I typed in a name and
bam,
there was the site. And I thought, ‘Damn, I didn’t think anybody would give a rip. And it amazed me no end that anybody besides myself would care.’”
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The three inmates at the heart of the mounting attention were not allowed to see
Paradise Lost
. E-mails flew back and forth about them, but they could not send or receive them. The case was discussed in newspapers, but the major media in Arkansas, and across the river in Memphis, paid it scant attention. For Damien, Jason, and Jessie, prison still consisted, day after day, of bad food, iron bars, and boredom. Still, the documentary and the Web site would affect their lives. For one thing, mail began to pour in.
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Among the letters sent to Jason was one from a seventeen-year-old high school student in Little Rock. Sara Cadwal lader later recalled, “I saw the documentary on HBO and knew I wanted to write to them. I guess I picked Jason because he was the youngest one.”

In an interview in 1996, Damien reported that among hundreds of other letters, he’d received one from Sister Helen Prejean, the author of
Dead Man Walking
. He recalled later that the letter said, “‘Choose life,’ whatever that means.” By then, Damien had come to see life—and especially his own—differently than he had before. “I came in here as a child,” he explained, “and a few years have passed, and in this type of environment, I think you might age a little more rapidly.”
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Damien’s world widened through contacts from people who’d seen the film and visited the Web site. Many sent him books, which he read voraciously. His reading tastes expanded to include major works of literature. And he too began a serious correspondence with a woman who’d seen the film and made the effort to contact him. Lorri Davis, a New York architect and film buff, had seen
Paradise Lost
when it premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She began sending Damien books, and when phone calls were allowed from death row, most of his were placed to her. He’d been off his antidepressant medication since his arrival on death row, and by the end of 1996, he acknowledged that “unfortunately” he’d grown “quite a bit more cheerful”—“unfortunately” because, as he put it, “I always feel like an idiot when I’m cheerful.”

L
IFE AFTER THE TRIALS
remained hard for the families of the victims, including little Aaron Hutcheson. Though he was not a direct victim, in that he had not been killed, his involvement in the investigation had certainly exposed him to the crime’s horrors. Even after the trials, his mother’s interest in the case continued, and thus so, to an extent, did his own.

After the trials concluded and the defendants had been locked away, Vicki Hutcheson contacted Ron Lax, the Memphis private investigator, several times to report that she was “bothered” about parts of the investigation. In April 1994, a few weeks after Damien and Jason were taken to prison, Lax paid a call on Hutcheson in the apartment where she now lived. During the visit, Lax later wrote in his notes, “Vicki turned to me and asked who had received the reward money. I told her I did not think anyone had and she stated she felt she should have since her son’s voice is what ‘broke the case.’ She then went on to tell me the police had interviewed Aaron on numerous occasions without her being present and that they had no right to do that and she intended to sue the city because their actions had caused Aaron severe mental problems.”

But those were not her only concerns. According to Lax’s notes, Hutcheson also “stated she had never signed a release to have the tape recorder installed in her trailer and that Gitchell was lying on the stand when he said there was a release”; she reported “that Bryn Ridge told her they would take care of the hot checks in return for her testimony, but Ridge cautioned her not to tell anyone about that”; and when Lax told her that Damien did not drive, she said, “Well, maybe I dreamed that.”

Three months later, in July 1994, Hutcheson called Lax to ask if anything new had developed. “When I told her we were still working on Damien’s appeal,” Lax wrote, “she began telling me of her experience in New York on
The Maury Povich Show
. According to Vicki, the Hobbses were present, as were Mark and Melissa Byers and Mr. Hicks, Pam Hobbs’s father. Vicki stated Mark Byers was out of control and the full tape of his comments and actions should be viewed.”
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In the following month, Hutcheson called Lax’s office four more times. The first time, Lax was unavailable, and she asked to speak to Glori Shettles. Shettles later wrote, “I asked Vicki what her three biggest concerns and issues were presently, to which she responded: One, why is Mark Byers on the street? Two, why is most of the West Memphis Police Department quitting? And three, why are three boys behind bars when police had much more evidence on Mark Byers than the three?” Hutcheson called Shettles again the next day, and again two days later. “She stated she was thinking of calling Channel 13 News in Memphis to advise she had, in fact, perjured herself,” Shettles wrote after the second conversation. “She went on to say she did not lie, but she wanted to ‘get out of it.’” Four days after that, she called and had another rambling conversation with Shettles. After this one Shettles wrote, “Needless to say, Vicki is experiencing many pressures and frustrations. She desperately wants to ‘know the truth’ and realizes she cannot trust the police.”

In light of the calls, Lax arranged for Hutcheson to come to his office in Memphis, so that he and Jessie’s attorney, Dan Stidham, could formally interview her. She agreed, and on August 17, 1994, the investigator and the attorney tape-recorded a session with Hutcheson. It lasted for five and a half hours. Lax and Stidham were particularly interested in the part of the interview where Hutcheson discussed the esbat. Lax wrote in his summary:

Hutcheson’s account of her role in the case would remain ambiguous. In the late 1990s, writer Burk Sauls posted on the wm3.org Web site the transcipt of an interview he’d conducted with her. It remained on the site until Hutcheson, citing fears of her safety, asked the site’s managers to take it off. In the interview she’s described Jessie Misskelley as having been “like a little brother” to her. “What is you story about that time?” Sauls had asked Hutcheson. “Well,” she’d replied, “I’m really concerned about legal issues right now with it. But basically I said what the West Memphis police wanted me to say. And that was that I went to the meeting. The esbat meeting. It was all their stories.” She characterized the police investigation as having been “just an overreaction.” At one point she told Sauls, “You know what I want to say more than anything? I want to say that I’m sorry. I just want to tell Jessie and Jason and Damien that I’m sorry.”

Shortly after the trials, during about the same period that Vicki Hutcheson was calling Lax and Shettles, the investigators were also receiving calls from Ricky Murray, Christopher Byers’s biological father. Shettles wrote for the agency’s files that Murray “had been very disturbed recently, while watching
The Maury Povich Show,
as Mark Byers had stated that on the date of the murders, he picked up his wife from work and had an airtight alibi. Rick had spoken with Mark Byers at Chris Byers’s funeral. At that time, Mark did not say he had picked up Melissa at work, only that he had been at court that day.” Lax noted that Murray also stated that “Melissa Byers has been a heroin addict since age twelve. She was using heroin before she smoked marijuana.” Finally, Shettles noted that Murray “also stated he never gave up parental rights and that Chris had not been adopted by Mark Byers.”

But by then, calls from Melissa’s ex-husband to the Memphis private investigators were the least of the Byerses’ problems. After the trials, they had moved away from West Memphis, leaving a string of hot checks behind, and settled into a house in Cherokee Village, a planned community in north-central Arkansas near the Missouri line. Though they told their new neighbors that they wanted to live quietly and be granted privacy in their grief, they quickly attracted police attention. In September 1994, both Mark and Melissa were jailed by officials in Sharp County, after investigators concluded that they were responsible for the theft of antiques worth more than $20,000 from a residence near their new home.
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Police charged Mark and Melissa Byers with residential burglary and theft of property. They posted bond of $5,000 each to be released from jail. If convicted, a judge told them at their arraignment, they faced sentences of three to ten years in prison and fines of up to $10,000 each. They both pleaded not guilty.
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Within two weeks, Mark Byers was arrested again. This time he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor. The charged stemmed from an incident the previous July in which a teenager had been seriously injured in a knife fight that Byers had instigated, encouraged, and supervised.
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The police chief who arrested Byers recalled, “He kept asking me, ‘What is your opinion?’ He said, ‘I think they ought to have fought it out, don’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. That’s one of the reasons I’m arresting you.’”

By the end of October 1994, seven months after Damien and Jason’s trial, the area’s newspaper was reporting that the Byerses faced “criminal charges, restraining orders, and a feud” that involved the Byerses’ next-door neighbors. Police were called to settle differences between the two couples eight times in one month. Mark Byers told a reporter for the local paper that his relationship with his neighbors had turned sour when he had swatted their five-year-old son with a flyswatter. The neighbors complained that the swatting had been hard enough to leave bruises. In another incident, the neighbors told police that Melissa had stood in the road outside their house and yelled that if she and Mark were sent to prison, it would be the neighbors’ fault.
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When a local reporter went to interview the two couples, she noted that the Byerses, who were living on Mark’s disability income, had “no phone, no gas for hot water, and little, if any, cash on hand.” Seated at the family’s kitchen table, Mark Byers told her that he and his wife were being persecuted because of accusations that had been made against him at the trials. “We are the victims turned into villains,” he told the reporter. But before long, yet another incident brought the Byerses into the news again. A motor home belonging to the woman whose house they’d been charged with burglarizing mysteriously exploded and burned in her driveway. The woman, who was out of town at the time, told authorities that the vehicle’s propane tanks had been empty.

Spurred by the stories about the Byerses’ latest troubles, a reporter for the
Arkansas Times
decided to look into John Mark Byers’s background. She contacted a retired deputy sheriff from Marked Tree, the town in eastern Arkansas where Byers had grown up. The former deputy recalled that in 1973, when Byers was just sixteen, his parents had called police to their house, claiming that their son was threatening them with a butcher knife.
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The
Times
reporter also learned about a more recent, though less violent, incident in Jonesboro. The owners of a jewelry store there said that Mark and Melissa had worked for them briefly in October 1990, during which time jewelry valued at $65,000 had been stolen from the store. When the police failed to make an arrest, the owners filed a civil lawsuit against the Byerses and another couple. The case, which was heard in a Jonesboro court in April 1991, resulted in the Byerses’ two codefendants being ordered to return the items. The attorney who represented the Byerses’ two codefendants in that case was Val Price, the Jonesboro lawyer who was later appointed to defend Damien.
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By the end of 1994, the year of the murder trials, the Byerses faced twelve misdemeanor charges in West Memphis for more than $600 worth of hot checks; their neighbors had a restraining order against them; they faced charges for residential burglary; Mark faced charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; he and Melissa both were suspects in the explosion of the motor home; and Melissa faced charges of aggravated assault, stemming from an incident in which she’d held a gun on a carpet installer who’d refused to work in her house until the floors were cleaned.

In January 1995, the local municipal judge found Mark Byers guilty on the charge relating to the boys’ fight.
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The judge ordered Byers to pay half of the injured boy’s medical expenses, a sum of $2,000. (The offending teenager was ordered to pay the other half.) The judge also sentenced Byers to one year in jail, but Byers posted an appeal bond of $1,000, which allowed him to remain free. How Byers secured the money for the appeal bond, when it was known that he faced hot-check charges and that as recently as three months earlier, he and his family had been living without a telephone, heat, or hot water, apparently did not concern the court.

The couple kept a low profile for the next several months. The other charges against them were still pending, and the third anniversary of Christopher’s murder was drawing near, when police were again called to investigate a tragedy involving the Byerses. This time, however, the call came not from neighbors but from the local hospital, where doctors had just pronounced Melissa Byers dead.

The date was March 29, 1996. The hospital staff told the sheriff that an ambulance had been called to the Byerses’ house at 5:20
P.M
. Melissa was unconscious when the medics arrived.
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She was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour and ten minutes later. But the doctors were perplexed. They told the sheriff that they could find no evidence of trauma on her body, and could not readily determine what had led to her sudden death. In contrast to Inspector Gitchell’s decision after discovery of the eight-year-olds’ murders, the sheriff immediately called for help from the Arkansas State Police. Within two hours of the call for an ambulance, a team of state police investigators had gathered at the hospital. The state police investigated the death as a “possible homicide.”
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Observing Melissa’s nude body, investigators noted the presence of “IV puncture marks on the top of both her feet, on the inside of her right wrist, and on her upper right thoracic area.” The right thoracic puncture mark and the right wrist puncture mark were both covered by Band-Aids, suggesting that they might have resulted from efforts to revive Melissa at the hospital. But other puncture marks were not bandaged. The investigators took fourteen photographs of the body, which they identified by number in their report. The report itself was three pages long, but even in that short amount of space it conveyed more information than was recorded in any report by the West Memphis police after the discovery of the murdered boys’ bodies. The investigator noted that the county coroner had arrived “at approximately 8:10
P.M
. to obtain possession of the body for the state medical examiner’s office.”

By that time, however, the investigators were already interviewing a witness who’d called police after hearing the news of Melissa’s death. As the lead investigator later wrote in his notes, the witness reported that “Melissa and Mark were having family troubles lately, and that Mark had a girlfriend by the name of Mandy…. She also said that she believes that Melissa has been taking Dilaudids [
sic
] and Zanex [
sic
].”