Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (4 page)

So too were notes from early interviews of Christopher’s mother and stepfather. Despite the enormity of the crime, none of the early interviews with any of the parents were recorded. According to Gitchell’s single page of handwritten notes, John Mark Byers had reported that his ex-wife and his two children from that marriage were now living in Missouri, but no record of the assault on her was included in the file. The report said that Christopher was John Mark Byers’s “stepson,” although it added that Byers had adopted Christopher when the boy was about four.
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Nevertheless, Byers was questioned more closely than the other two sets of parents. According to Gitchell’s notes, Byers reported that he had arrived home from a medical appointment at 3:10
P.M
. on May 5,1993. At 3:50, he took his thirteen-year-old stepson, Ryan, to the police department for an appearance in municipal court, where Ryan was to testify as a witness in a traffic dispute. After leaving Ryan at the courthouse, Byers said, he drove to Memphis to pick up his wife, Melissa, at work.
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He stated that he returned to the house with her, and at 5:30 left home again to pick up Ryan at court. Byers told Gitchell that at 6:15, when he returned with Ryan, Christopher was not at home, and that by 6:20 the family had begun its search. That was the extent of Gitchell’s notes from the first reported interview with Byers.

However, two other related reports were also recorded that day. Lieutenant Sudbury, the codirector of the drug task force, interviewed a woman who had a child at the elementary school. The woman had called the police department soon after the bodies were found, saying that she had information about the Byerses. When Detective Sudbury followed up on the call, the woman told him that near the end of 1992, she had attended a parent-teacher event in the school auditorium. While there, she said, she had overheard the school’s principal talking to John Mark and Melissa Byers, who were seated behind her. According to the woman, the principal was advising them “that Chris had to be put out of class that day for causing a disturbance,” and that the Byerses’ reply to the principal was “that they had done all they could do and thought they would send Chris away.” When the principal left, the woman said she’d heard the couple continue to discuss how they needed “to get rid of Chris.” Sudbury wrote that he contacted the principal, who told him that she did not remember the conversation. And that was the end of that. No records indicated that either of the Byerses were ever asked about the alleged conversation.

Another person called the police on May 8 to report “something about drugs” relating to John Mark Byers. Whoever took the call noted it not on a standard police form, but on a pharmaceutical company notepad. When a detective contacted the source, the investigator was told that “Byers is in drug re-hab in Memphis and on methadone” and may have “a brain tumor.” Beneath that notation someone in the department had written “OLD NEWS” and underlined the comment twice. The entry suggested that police were more familiar with John Mark Byers than their official reports reflected.

While police were not tape-recording, much less videotaping, interviews at this stage of the investigation, they did make use of a few modern tools. One was the polygraph, or lie-detector test, administered by Detective Bill Durham. During the course of the investigation, Durham would polygraph forty-one subjects. But Durham never polygraphed any of the victims’ relatives. The police also fingerprinted more than four dozen subjects, hoping that one of the prints might match the one found in the woods. But no match was ever found. And of course, they waited for information from the state’s crime laboratory. In the weeks immediately following the murders, the department submitted hundreds of items to the lab for evaluation, among them eighteen knives, three wooden sticks, one tire billy, one ice axe, three hammers, a hook, a rope, hair samples from forty-one people, blood and urine samples from eleven, footprint impressions, shoes, boxes of clothing, and a Mason jar filled with water, accompanied by a request that the water in the jar be tested to see if it matched the water found inside the children’s bodies. Hair from relatives of all of the victims was submitted for analysis, as were blood and urine samples from Todd Moore and John Mark Byers.

Police briefly checked another person who was close to the Byers family. On May 11, two detectives questioned Andrew Gipson Taylor, a thirty-four-year-old mechanic who often stayed at the Byerses’ house.
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Taylor told the officers that Byers did, indeed, have a brain tumor, that he was currently on welfare, and that the Byers family had been having “a hard time financially.” He also reported that there were “hard feelings” between John Mark Byers and Todd Moore. “John Mark had some pool parties,” one of the detectives wrote, “and when his friends would park on his [Moore’s] grass, he [Moore] would call the police.” When asked what he knew about Byers’s whereabouts before the bodies were found, Taylor replied that his friend had searched on “both sides of the ditch—went behind Blue Beacon in the woods.”

The two officers then questioned Ryan Clark, Melissa’s thirteen-year-old son. Ryan said he had arrived home from school at “exactly 3:38
P.M
.” on the afternoon Christopher disappeared.
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Chris was not at home. John Mark Byers took Ryan to his 4
P.M
. appearance in court, left, and returned to the courthouse at around 6
P.M
. to pick him up. On the way home, Byers told Ryan that Chris had broken a seal on the window to get into the house and that he was going to be grounded for a week. When they got home, his mother told him that they were going to go to a restaurant to eat, and to go upstairs to get Christopher. Ryan went upstairs but could not find him. The family then looked for Christopher outside.

Ryan said a neighbor told them that she’d seen Christopher on a skateboard with Stevie and Michael, who were on bikes. The neighbor said Christopher had hopped onto the back of Stevie’s bike, leaving his skateboard in the street. Ryan said he’d found a skateboard on the side of the street, about six houses from his own. But there was no sign of Christopher, and when the family could not find him, they’d gotten into the car to search.

That evening, Ryan said, he and three friends had joined the search in Robin Hood. Walking near the ditch, they’d heard “the grass and brush crackling” and “five real loud splashes.” Ryan told the detectives that after hearing the first two splashes he’d yelled, “Hello! Is anyone over there?” There was no answer, and after the third splash, he and his friends had taken off running. When they got to the pipe, he said, they’d heard a gunshot.

Ryan estimated that he and his friends were in the woods for about thirty minutes. They then searched the neighborhood. The detectives’ report on their interview concluded with Ryan’s statement that he “came home at midnight and his dad made him go to bed.” The next day, the two detectives interviewed Ryan’s friends. All three confirmed Ryan’s account.

Two weeks after the murders, Gitchell and his detectives called John Mark Byers to the station for a tape-recorded interview—his first formal interview by police. Detective Ridge, who had been asked to investigate Byers with regard to the missing shipment of Rolex watches, and Lieutenant James Sudbury, the narcotics detective who was himself under investigation by the Arkansas State Police, conducted the interview. It lasted seventy-eight minutes.

Byers described himself as a self-employed, disabled jeweler. He said he was thirty-six years old, stood six feet five inches tall, weighed 238 pounds, and was right-handed. He said he owned a blue-and-white Ford F-150 XLT truck and a silver Mark I Isuzu. Most of the interview focused on his whereabouts between the times when the boys were last seen alive and when their bodies were found in the ditch.

Byers’s report generally agreed with Ryan’s. He said that on the day the boys disappeared, he was at a clinic in Memphis being tested. He’d arrived home at 3:10
P.M
. By then, Christopher should have been home from school, but he wasn’t. Byers told the police that he and Melissa considered Christopher too young to carry a house key, so he had been instructed to wait in the carport if he got home and no one was there. Byers said he’d left the house at 3:50
P.M
. to take Ryan to court. He’d then driven to Memphis, picked up Melissa from work, dropped her off at the house, then headed back to downtown West Memphis, to pick up Ryan at court. On the way, he said, he’d spotted Christopher, belly-down on his skateboard, on the street. He drove the boy back home, made him hold on to the bar in the kitchen, and “gave him two or three licks.” Byers said, “And I have, you know, if I could have took whipping him back, I’d a done it a million times. But I was just trying to keep him safe. I was just trying, you know, to keep from something like this happening.”

Ridge responded, “I understand.”

Byers said he instructed Christopher to clean up the carport, then left the house again to get Ryan. But when he and Ryan returned home, Christopher was gone again. His description of the search that ensued matched Ryan’s. Byers said he reported Christopher missing, shortly before 8
P.M
., because Christopher had “never gone off anywhere, you know, for any amount of time.” He said he began searching in the woods by about 8:30
P.M
. “It had got dark,” he said. “Well, I had on a pair of shorts and a pair of flip-flops, so I run back to the house and changed clothes and put me on some coveralls and boots that I had on probably for the next two or three days. And I went back out there and I made a pass…Well, I didn’t have a flashlight, or anything with me, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to go borrow a flashlight…’ So as I came out, I see a police car pull up.” He said he and the officer searched briefly together, using the officer’s light.
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Ridge and Sudbury did not question Byers’s report that he’d driven across the river to midtown Memphis and back, at the height of rush hour, in just an hour and ten minutes. They did not press for details about the times Byers had been alone in the vicinity of where the bodies were discovered. They did not ask why he’d entered the woods in the dark to search without a flashlight. And they did not question Byers about a critical difference between his account and Ryan’s of what had happened around midnight that night.

Byers stated that when he returned home from searching the woods, “it was right at eleven.” He said he’d then placed two telephone calls: first, to the West Memphis police to ask “what the situation was,” and next, to the sheriff’s office to ask “why the search-and-rescue squad won’t come out here and help me look for my boy.” According to Byers, it was approaching midnight when he completed the calls. This was about the time that Ryan had told detectives that his stepfather had sent him to bed. But the account Byers gave was vastly different.

“We just went back looking,” he said. “As a matter of fact, my son Ryan and I got in the car and we drove around there to Blue Beacon, and went into Blue Beacon Truck Wash.” When they reached the truck wash, Byers said, he told the workers there, “Look, we got three boys missing…I want to go back here behind y’all’s property and holler and yell in these woods, but I wanted you to know why my car’s back there.” He continued, “So we pulled our little silver car back there and Ryan, he’s honking the horn and I’m out hollering and yelling around the edge of the woods, and he kind of drove the car around.” He said the two of them “hollered and yelled there for a while” and that he had then walked toward the woods, still calling for the boys. But since he didn’t have a light, he said, he had not gone all the way in. “So we hollered and yelled around there for quite a while,” Byers told the detectives. “Then we went back.”

Neither Ridge nor Sudbury mentioned Ryan’s statement to detectives that he’d been sent to bed at midnight. Neither asked Byers why Ryan might have omitted such a major episode in his account of the night. Ryan was never questioned about the discrepancy. There is no record that police ever questioned anyone who was working the late shift at the Blue Beacon that night, nor that the issue was ever addressed at all.
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That was not the only opportunity for closer questioning of Byers that Ridge and Sudbury missed. During the May 19 interview, Byers told them that on the morning of the search, he’d asked officers when they were going to put a boat into the ditch, explaining, “You know, if they’ve drowned, you know, let’s get a boat in the bayou.” Neither detective asked why he suspected the three might have drowned.

Another area that Ridge and Sudbury might have explored more fully concerned Christopher’s friends. Byers said that Christopher had liked to play with a “little boy named Aaron” but that Stevie Branch was his closest friend. He admitted, however, that he had not known where Stevie lived until the night that Christopher disappeared. Neither detective asked why Byers had not known where Christopher’s best friend lived. Nor did they ask him about what others had reported, namely, that Michael, across the street, had been Christopher’s closest friend. Byers did not even mention Michael. And it seemed he did not want to discuss the Moores. When asked about them, he said that he and Melissa “didn’t have a lot to do” with them. He explained that during the past summer, the Moores had complained to police four times about parties he and Melissa had thrown at their house, including one honoring a former sheriff.
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Even when Byers seemed to catch himself in a lie, the detectives did not press. That happened when Ridge asked Byers about Christopher’s biological father. Byers blurted out, “I don’t even know his name.” He then quickly amended the statement. “He came to the funeral,” he said. “His name is Ricky Lee Murray.”

No one raised the subject of Byers’s assault on his ex-wife. Ridge simply asked, “Anybody in your family that has a history of abuse?”

“No sir,” Byers replied. With that, the topic was dropped.
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