Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (17 page)

“Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death,” he began, “I shall fear no evil. And I’m not scared of the devil. I know who my comforter is. Thy rod and thy staff comfort me. And I thank you, Lord, for letting me be able to believe in that with all my heart.”

Apparently turning his attention from God to the defendants, Byers continued, as though addressing them directly, “I hope you all really believe in your master, the Satan, sleuth-foot devil himself, ’cause he’s not going to help you. He’s going to laugh at you, mock at you, and torture you. He doesn’t need your help. The devil’s got all the devils he needs.”
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At another point he railed: “Jessie Misskelley Jr., Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols, I hope your master the devil does take you soon. I want you to meet him real soon. And the day you die I’m going to praise God. And I make you a promise. The day you die, every year on May 5, I’m going to come to your graveside. I’m going to spit on you. I’m going to curse the day you were born. And I’m sure, while I’m standing there, I’m going to have to have other bodily functions let go on your grave. I promise you, as God is my witness, I’ll visit all three of your graves.”

Compared to the speech by Byers, what the families of the defendants said to the filmmakers sounded subdued. Jessie Misskelley Sr., weathered and wearing a work shirt, told them simply, “Little Jessie told me he didn’t do it, he didn’t have anything to do with it, he wasn’t there. And I believe him. I think the cops just can’t find who done it, and they’ve got to put it on somebody.”

Jason’s mother, Gail Grinnell, looked gaunt and nearly distracted as the camera rolled. “I want to tell the whole world my son is innocent,” she said, “because I know he is innocent. I know where he was, and I know he’s innocent, and I want to tell the world, and I want the world to know.”

Damien’s biological father, Joe Hutchison, said, “This boy is not capable of the crime he’s been arrested for. I’ve seen him take a little kitten and love it just like you’d love a little baby. It’s like a nightmare you can’t wake up from. Our son is innocent. We intend to prove it.”

But while most who had parts in the tragedy appeared anguished and subdued, John Mark Byers seemed to relish being in front of the cameras. Berlinger and Sinofsky filmed him seated in front of the pool in his backyard, expounding on angels and demons; at the pulpit of a local Baptist church, singing a hymn; and with his neighbor Todd Moore in a field shooting pumpkins with handguns. In that scene, Byers, wearing a cowboy hat, did most of the talking, as he loaded his gun. “There’s a few people I wouldn’t mind going on and shooting with it,” he said, “but hopefully, the courts and the justice system will take care of ’em.”
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B
Y THE SECOND WEEK OF
J
ANUARY
1994, reporters were gathering in Corning, Arkansas, where Jessie’s trial was about to begin. One of them asked prosecutor Fogleman about some of the questions that had been raised at the pretrial hearings. Citing professional ethics, he said he could not discuss the police investigation, the rumored lack of physical evidence, or attorney Stidham’s contention that Jessie’s statement had been coerced. “I can’t comment on specifics,” Fogleman said, “because I sincerely want these defendants to receive a fair trial.” He added, however, that he had “never seen a police department work any harder on a case” than the West Memphis police had worked on this one.
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On January 17, the day before jury selection was scheduled to begin, Fogleman released more documents to the defense attorneys. Most of them showed how the police had been working to bolster their case as the two trials drew near. Among other activities, the records indicated that as recently as New Year’s Eve, Fogleman, Ridge, and Bray had met for yet another interview of Aaron Hutcheson. No transcript of that meeting was produced or supplied to the defense, but according to notes taken by Ridge, Aaron reiterated his statement that he had watched his friends being killed, though some of the details he now offered differed again from prior accounts. When Ron Lax reviewed the material, he was surprised to see that the police and Fogleman were still trying to wrest a coherent statement from the child. But Lax was dumbfounded by two other reports contained in the latest batch of discovery materials. These were release forms signed by Dana Moore and John Mark Byers—forms dated December 20, 1993, granting the West Memphis police, along with staff from the Arkansas crime lab, permission to search their houses. No explanation accompanied the forms, but they raised a disturbing question for Lax. Why, on the very eve of Jessie’s trial, had the police suddenly decided to search two of the victims’ homes? What could they have been looking for, more than eight months after the murders—and nearly seven months after the arrests?

A possible explanation—or a hint of one—came in a phone call two days later. By then, Jessie’s jury had been seated. Damien’s lawyer Val Price telephoned Lax at home to report that Fogleman had just released more records from the West Memphis police. These last-minute records concerned a knife that the police said they’d received eleven days earlier, on January 8, 1994. Lax immediately made a note of what Price related in the call. “The knife had been Federal Expressed,” Lax wrote, “but the package had been discarded. The knife was eight and three-fourth inches in length and was sent to the Arkansas crime lab for analysis. The results reflect there was blood on the knife which was consistent with the blood of Chris Byers. The results also stated this blood was consistent with eight percent of the population. The knife was given exhibit number E178.”

With Jessie on trial for his life, his attorneys, Stidham and Crow, were focused on events in the courtroom. But now the remarkable news of the FedExed knife became a serious distraction. As the lawyers waded into the trial, Lax worked outside of court, trying to learn what he could about the mysterious knife. Bit by bit, he managed to find out that it had been sent to Gitchell by the New York filmmakers Sinofsky and Berlinger. The two later explained how the knife had come into their possession—and why they’d sent it to the West Memphis police. It was a remarkable tale.

“A few days before Christmas,” they wrote,

The sudden appearance of a knife—one owned by John Mark Byers and bearing traces of blood that was consistent with Christopher’s—was the most significant development in the case since Jessie Misskelley’s contorted confession. Its connection to people related to the crime was clear. Unlike the knife police said they’d taken from the lake, which they claimed linked two of the defendants to the murders, this knife had indisputably belonged to the father of one of the victims. And blood on it was consistent with the blood of his murdered stepson.

For the defense attorneys and Lax, the timing of the knife’s appearance could hardly have been worse. The knife cast serious suspicion on Byers. But until now, no one on the defense had ever focused on him as a suspect. That was partly because of the size and condition of what they called “the discovery mess.” It was partly because, despite Fogleman’s assurances to Judge Burnett that “everything” would be turned over to the defense by the end of August, notes of the interview detectives had conducted on May 19 with Byers had not been released until the middle of November. And it was partly because other records, such as those concerning Byers’s activities as a drug informant and his conviction for threatening to kill his ex-wife, had never been released at all. Now, faced with the startling appearance of the bloodstained knife, Lax and the defense lawyers felt handicapped by all they did not know about the stepfather of the castrated victim.

For Stidham and Crow, who were already deep into Jessie’s trial, the situation was especially acute. They had to decide whether to introduce the knife, in an attempt to suggest that there was reasonable doubt that Jessie was the killer. At the time, the defense attorneys did not even have a clear idea about how the police had reacted to the knife’s appearance. Only gradually, and amid the pressures of the trial, were they able to fill in some critical details.

According to the filmmakers, Byers had presented the knife to a member of their crew six days before Christmas, on December 19,1993.
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The next day, December 20, police had conducted the search of Byers’s house and of the Moores’ house, across the street. It looked to Lax as if the two events were probably related. His suspicion was strengthened when he spoke with Sinofsky and Berlinger, who told him, as he wrote, that they had “spoken with Fogleman and Gitchell in December 1993…and apparently provided them with details of the knife.”
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No record of that discussion was supplied by the West Memphis police. The knife’s existence was not reported to the defense attorneys until almost a full month later—after Jessie’s trial had already started. And the FedEx packaging in which the knife had been sent, which would have confirmed the date, had reportedly been discarded.

Gitchell said the knife was received on January 8 and that he sent it out the same day to a North Carolina laboratory for testing.
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Gitchell sent a memo with the knife noting that it had what might be blood and another unknown substance in the fold. (It would later be learned that the other substance was a red fiber.) Gitchell asked that the lab test the knife and compare any results with DNA from the victims. The lab had returned its results just as Jessie’s trial was beginning. That’s when Fogleman had informed the defense attorneys about the knife’s existence—and that the blood on it was consistent with that of Christopher Byers.

Jessie’s lawyers wanted Byers questioned immediately—and by someone other than Inspector Gary Gitchell. But the West Memphis police were reticent. “State police CID [Criminal Investigation Division] officers were present,” Stidham later recalled. “I begged Judge Burnett to have one of them interrogate Byers, but Judge Burnett refused.”
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Finally, the judge instructed that Byers would be questioned—but only by the West Memphis police. Since Gitchell, Ridge, and Byers were already at Corning to attend Jessie’s trial, an interview was hastily arranged. It took place on Wednesday January 26—with Jessie’s trial now already in its second week—in a room at the county sheriff’s office. The interview, which was recorded, lasted forty-five minutes.

It began with Gitchell reading Byers his rights and advising him that anything he said could be used against him in court. Byers said that he understood and waived his right to a lawyer. He then told Gitchell that, yes, he had owned a Kershaw knife—“You know, it’s got like a serrated edge, like a Ginsu knife”—which he had given to a member of the film crew “as a Christmas gift.” Byers said he believed that had been in November.
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He told Gitchell that he had never used that knife for hunting; that, in fact, “that knife had not been used at all”—and that no one in his family had ever been cut with it. He said, “No one’s been cut with the Kershaw.”

Detective Ridge asked Byers, “Did you use the knife?”

“I never used it,” Byers replied. “I would have used it. Hopefully, I was going to use it for deer hunting—that’s all I do is deer hunt—but I never had an opportunity to use it on a deer.” He told the detectives that the knife had “stayed put up” in the top drawer of his chifforobe.

Gitchell: “Did, um, any of your kids, Ryan or Chris, know where that knife may have been at? I mean, could they have gotten it out?”

Byers: “No sir. I don’t think they could have….”
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Gitchell then showed Byers the knife that had been sent from New York. He described it as a Kershaw knife with a nine-inch blade, a Pachmayr grip, and an inscription that read “Cannon City.” Byers identified it as the knife he had given to the cinematographer, a knife that, he said, his wife, Melissa, had given to him a few years before as a Christmas present.

“Okay,” Gitchell said. “Let me explain a problem we had, and you need to answer this for me: we have found blood on this knife.”

Byers: “I can tell you where I might assume it might have come from.”

Gitchell: “All right.”

Byers: “Uh, I got a deer this year, and I was cutting it up to make some beef jerky and I had a filleting knife, a Ginsu filleting knife, and I thought of that knife, and I tried to cut some of the deer as thin as possible, and when I found out that it wouldn’t cut as thin as the skinning knife was, I put it up. But that would be the only time it’s been around anything bloody…. I was cutting some deer meat at home.”

Neither Gitchell nor Ridge asked Byers to explain why, only a few minutes before, he had stated that he had “never used” the knife and, even more specifically, that he’d “never had an opportunity to use it on a deer.” Instead, Gitchell proceeded, almost deferentially, to point out another “problem.”

“Okay,” he told Byers, “let me, let me go a little bit further and say there’s a problem with that. I mean, I’m not saying that’s not true. The problem is we have sent this knife off and had it examined, and it has the blood type of Chris on it.”

Suddenly Byers began addressing the detective by his first name. “Well, Gary,” he responded, “I don’t have any idea how it could be on there.”

“That’s our problem,” said Gitchell.

Byers: “I have no idea how it’s on there.”

Gitchell: “Why? Why would this knife have blood on it?”

Byers: “I have no idea, Gary.”

Gitchell: “That’s what scares me.”

When Lax and the defense attorneys saw a transcript of the interview, they were appalled by the tenor of the exchange. Byers was in an extremely compromising situation. Blood consistent with that of his mutilated son had been found on his own knife, a knife he’d said had never been used and that he’d given away to someone who was leaving the state. Yet when this was pointed out to Byers and he had no good explanation, the chief detective on the case had remarked that
he
was scared.

Byers, meanwhile, was reduced to stammering. “I have no idea, I have no idea, how it could have any human’s blood type on it at all,” he said. “I don’t even remember nicking myself with it, cutting the deer meat or anything.”

Finally, hesitantly, almost apologetically, Gitchell asked Byers the central question. And now he too was stammering. “I got to, I got to ask you point-blank, I’ve got to ask you point-blank, Mark,” he said, “I’ve got to ask you point-blank: were you around or participated in these deaths of these boys?”

“No,” Byers responded. “Not in any shape, form, or fashion…Absolutely not. Positively not. Unequivocally not. No. Not at all.”

“Well,” Gitchell said, “there are other tests being run on this knife, and we should, may have the results right now. We’ve been waiting on them the last several days.” Gitchell added that blood had recently been taken from Melissa and Ryan, and that since a sample of Mark’s blood had been taken in May, tests were being run to see if any matched the blood on the knife. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do,” Gitchell explained, “is see if it could have been…if you have similar blood. We don’t know. We don’t know if there’s a similarity. We don’t know.”

It seemed to Lax that Gitchell sounded worried in the interview and almost apologetic. Gitchell had certainly not been as confrontational as in the interview with Jessie Misskelley, when Gitchell had demanded of Jessie, “Now tell us the truth.” But if Gitchell had, indeed, been worried that his case might suddenly implode, he was reassured later that day when further results came in from the lab. Fogleman’s report on the findings left the defense teams stunned. The amount of blood on the knife was small, Fogleman said, and because of that, only a limited analysis could be performed on it. The science of DNA testing was relatively new in 1994, but working within the constraints of the small sample and the emerging science, the lab had conducted what tests it could. Its results indicated that while the blood was consistent with Christopher’s, it was consistent with that of Christopher’s stepfather, John Mark Byers, as well.