Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (2 page)

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.”