Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (37 page)

Herot spoke with Hobbs’s sister, Cindy Hobbs, and his mother Raylene, as well as brothers Michael and Joe Hobbs Jr. The family allegedly told Herot tales of terror from Terry’s past. As a youth, they said, Hobbs had been beaten mercilessly by his father, a butcher and itinerant Pentecostal preacher. His beatings were so frequent and intense that Hobbs grew immune to them and would laugh at his father to deny him the satisfaction of inflicting pain. He became desensitized to violence. The work he did in his father’s slaughterhouse as a youth further served to make Hobbs nonreactive to the sight of blood and gore.

Long after she spoke with Herot, Cindy Hobbs denied that her brother could have any complicity in Stevie’s death. “Terry was a wonderful dad to Stevie,” Cindy told
Memphis
Commercial
Appeal
reporter Beth Warren. She had lived with Pam and Terry briefly and had seen a “joyful Stevie jumping off his stepfather’s shoulders into a swimming pool.”
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According to Cathy Frye of the
Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette
, Hobbs said that his father had had a “redhead’s temper” but was “a good dad.”
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Many of Hobbs’s statements in the article were paraphrased, not quoted, and the context is often ambiguous, but one thing came through loud and clear: Hobbs wanted to get his message out. “I want them to hear it from me . . . You’ve all heard the lowdown about me, but it ain’t all lowdown.” There were few, aside from Mark Byers, who would go on record as saying that they thought Hobbs guilty of the murders, though John Douglas—among many others—surely had his doubts.

With this new information in hand, Douglas and Herot interviewed Hobbs for the second time in a week, this time at the hotel where Douglas was staying. “This interview needed to be on our turf,” Douglas said. Instead of the friendly atmosphere of the Chase Galleria Mall food court—the site of the first interview—the second interview took place in Douglas’s hotel room among piles of file boxes and folders, giving the impression that a full-scale investigation was underway; this time, the conversation would be all business. Confronted with the evidence of his past violence and criminal record—an assault on his brother-in-law with a handgun, possession of marijuana and an alleged sexual assault against a neighbor in Hot Springs, Arkansas—Hobbs became agitated. At times, he was downright angry, though he didn’t deny anything. “So what?” he would say. “What does that prove?” When Douglas revealed that he knew about a molestation incident (discussed in further detail later in this chapter) in Hot Springs, Hobbs was visibly shaken—angered actually. “I thought he was going to knock the soda can out of my hand,” Douglas recalled. Clearly, Terry had thought no one knew about that.

Douglas thought that if he had been able to interview Hobbs before Lax dropped the bomb, he could have gotten more out of Hobbs. Of course, anyone trying to get Terry Hobbs to confess to a seventeen-year-old, triple child murder would have to be some kind of super-cop. They would also need facts. District attorneys don’t open investigations on long-solved cases without overwhelming evidence, and the Echols defense team, despite piles of new test data, ancient eyewitness affidavits, and grumblings of ex-family members, had come way short of convincing the state of Arkansas to take any action. WMPD detective Mike Allen said, “In 1993 Terry Hobbs wasn’t a suspect, and he isn’t a suspect in 2007.”

Revelations

As the defense team kept digging, they discovered some very interesting information about Terry Hobbs. It was revealed that Hobbs had been married once prior to Pam, to one Angela Hancock, and that the couple had had a son together.
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Terry and Angela split when the boy was two years old, and their short marriage had allegedly been a violent one. In 1982, Hobbs was living in an apartment in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Angela and their toddler son, Bryan. According to his neighbor, a middle-aged woman named Mildred French, she heard a ruckus coming from the Hobbs residence one day, sounds indicating that Hobbs was beating his wife, his child, or both. Alarmed, French ran down to their apartment and repeatedly rang the doorbell until Hobbs answered. With “disgust in his voice,” Hobbs glared at her and asked, “What do you want?” She told him that if he ever struck his wife or child again, she would call the police. French also recalled that on more than one occasion, she had observed Hobbs standing outside her window, peering in.

But French’s most damning allegation was that Hobbs had sexually assaulted her while she was in her apartment. According to French (who was eighty-one years old at the time she was tracked down by the Echols defense team), as she was climbing out of the shower and putting on her housecoat, Hobbs appeared in the bathroom, held her, and “grabbed [her] breast.” French started screaming, “Get out! Get out!” and Hobbs fled the apartment. French called police, who, she believed, “filed an incident report on the matter.” She said, “At the time, I was afraid that Terry would rape, harm, or even kill me.”
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She approached Angela’s mother and suggested therapy for Hobbs, a man she said was “sick,” but his strict Pentecostal in-laws said that there would be no therapy for Terry. At a meeting arranged by the landlord of the apartment complex, Hobbs denied any wrongdoing, saying, “It never happened.” No arrest was ever made, although French claims that the Hobbses were thrown out of their apartment as a result of the incident. She also claims to have appeared in court on the matter, at which time she says Hobbs was ordered to undergo some type of counseling. Shortly after they left the apartment, Terry and Angela were divorced.
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Presumably, West Memphis police would have discovered this information as well had they bothered to interview and investigate Hobbs as they did with Mark Byers.

The
Petition

Finally, on October 29, 2007, after three years of preparation by Dennis Riordan and his legal, investigative, and forensics teams, Damien Echols filed his second amended writ of habeas corpus with the Eastern Arkansas District Federal Court. Here is where hundreds of thousands of dollars—perhaps millions—had been spent and where he could finally present to the court evidence in support of his claim of actual innocence. He would assert that for the past fourteen years, he had been wrongfully imprisoned for the murders of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore. The DNA results were back from the lab at last, the forensic experts and investigators had submitted their reports, and the lawyers had assembled their case. The petition, officially titled
Echols
v.
Norris
, made the sweeping claim that “every iota of the state’s evidence is destroyed or gravely weakened by the new evidence presented in support of this petition.”

Unlike many habeas corpus petitions, Echols was petitioning the court with a claim of “actual innocence.” He would not be arguing his case from the standpoint of procedural error on the part of the lower courts, resulting in a violation of his constitutional rights, but rather with the assertion that the evidence collected by the defense would show that he was actually innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted. Stated another way, presented with this new evidence—along with all of the old evidence, it turned out—a jury of reasonable men and women would be unlikely to convict him were he to be retried. Dennis Riordan called this a “quirk” of federal appellate law, a filing based on a claim of actual innocence. Quirk or not, it represented Echols’s best chance to date of obtaining a new trial. The petition itself ran to some two hundred pages with more than fifty exhibits, five of which were sealed affidavits from jurors and others giving testimony regarding the most damaging of the claims, those of jury misconduct.

Summary
of
the
Evidence

First, a mistrial should have been declared, Echols claimed, because, “despite the importance of insulating the Echols-Baldwin proceeding from any taint of the Misskelley statement . . . a reference to the [Jessie Misskelley] statement was injected into the Echols trial through a prosecution witness, Detective Bryn Ridge.”

In the original trial, Ridge was questioned by Echols’s attorney Val Price regarding the recovery of the “sticks” that the state had introduced into evidence as possible murder weapons. These sticks had not been recovered from the crime scene until after Misskelley’s June 3, 1993, confession to police, when he stated that Echols and Baldwin had hit the victims with “sticks and stuff.” This had caused police to return to Robin Hood Hills and search the crime scene again. When Price asked Ridge if he had put the sticks into evidence at the time the
bodies
were recovered, Ridge answered, “No, sir. I didn’t take this stick into evidence until the statement of Jessie Misskelley in which he said a stick . . .”

At this point Price jumped from his seat and shouted, “Your Honor! Move for a mistrial!” Over strenuous objections from Price and Paul Ford, Judge Burnett denied the motion, declaring that an admonishment to the jury to disregard the statement would be sufficient. This would become a part of the jury misconduct allegations, though it is possible that Price’s cross-examination was deliberately designed to evoke the damning statement by Ridge. Whatever Price’s intentions were—the judge believed that the question had “invited” the response—Burnett refused to grant both defense motions for a mistrial trial, stating, “I don’t think there’s a soul up on that jury or in this courtroom that doesn’t know that Mr. Misskelley made a statement.”

Next, under a new Arkansas law, Echols introduced DNA evidence that he claimed excluded himself, Baldwin, and Misskelley from the list of possible donors of samples taken from the crime scene. Echols had begun this process back in July 2002 with the filing of a motion for forensic DNA testing that would compel the court to have DNA samples previously tested with RFLP and PCR methods retested with newer technology using the current STR (short tandem repeat) testing. Some of the evidence was tested for mtDNA, which could exclude Echols from the group of potential donors. Among the items to be retested were hairs recovered from the victims, fingernail scrapings, articles of clothing from the victims that were stained with what was thought to be semen, and perhaps most importantly, hair samples found at the crime scene. The original motion to have evidence subjected to DNA testing was filed on behalf of Echols by attorneys Barry Scheck of New York (working with the Innocence Project), Edward Mallett of Houston, and Al Schay of Little Rock. The order to have the selected samples of DNA tested was finally issued in June 2004. As stated previously, the mtDNA testing could not exclude Terry Hobbs from the hair found in the ligature binding Michael Moore or David Jacoby from the hair found on the tree stump. Most importantly to Echols, however, was the fact that all evidence tested
did
exclude him, Baldwin, and Misskelley as donors.

Perhaps most significant were the findings of the pathologists that
postmortem
animal predation had caused the wounds to the victims, rather than knives, as the prosecution alleged at trial. The animal predation theory, if accurate, destroyed the Misskelley confession. If there were no knife wounds present on any of the victims, then Misskelley could not have witnessed the killings in which he implicated himself, Baldwin, and Echols. How could the original pathology team who performed the autopsies on the three boys have mistaken animal bites for knife wounds? Of course, the original team had access to the actual bodies, whereas the new defense experts had to make do with pathology reports and photographs. Still, these men, along with pediatric pathology consultant Janice Ophoven, an expert hired by the Baldwin team, represented some of the best and most experienced in their fields. Could they
all
be mistaken or—dare we ask—bought? All the forensic experts, to a person, agreed with the animal predation theory. Spitz said, “When these [autopsy photographs] first came to me, I couldn’t understand what this issue was all about because it was so obvious that these are animal product . . . It took maybe seconds [for me] to make that observation.” He also noted that animal claw marks were “obvious” and not consistent with a knife or any other weapon.

Possibly the most startling claim, and most damning to the prosecution’s case, was the determination by Dr. Robert Woods, supported by Spitz, that the genital mutilation suffered by Christopher Byers—the penile skin “degloving” from the shaft, with the complete removal of the testes—was due to animal predation as well. The Misskelley confession had made very specific reference to this injury, allegedly inflicted by Jason Baldwin. At trial, Frank Peretti had brazenly asserted that the injuries had been made with superhuman surgical precision, admitting that he himself would have had difficulty simulating the injury in operating room conditions. It must have required a suspension of belief for the juries to accept the means and motive for this mutilation; why “surgically” deglove the skin of a victim’s very small penis when, according to the Misskelley confession, there was so much chaos going on? Why—and how—would three teenagers perform such a difficult yet meaningless act? The trial jury also apparently bought into some loosely knit motive involving ritual killing that included genital mutilation.

Dr. Richard Souviron was of the same opinion as Spitz regarding the nature of the injuries. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see [that] these are animal bites and that they occurred postmortem.” When he addressed the injuries allegedly made by the “lake knife,” or a knife like it, Souviron was blistering in his attack on Peretti and the prosecution. “[How can you] look at the serrations on the back of that knife and see these marks [on the victims’ bodies] and say that the back end of that knife made these marks? I mean, give me a break. That is the most ridiculous statement that I have ever heard anybody make, and to sell that to a jury is unconscionable.”
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