Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (23 page)

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.