Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (36 page)

While he was in prison, Byers was never housed at a unit where Damien, Jason, or Jessie was being held.
³⁶¹
But Byers took the opportunity to berate them during a prison interview by a reporter in June2000. In a small conference room at the minimum security unit in south Arkansas where he was held, Byers, now wearing his own prison whites, referred to the three as “the sorry bastards” who’d murdered his “son,” and he gloated that while he would soon be walking free, they were “going to die in prison.”

His biggest complaint about prison life was that cigarettes had recently been banned. Interrupting himself occasionally to express a wish for one, he talked willingly about his life. His account, while very specific on some details, was vague and contradictory on others. Some episodes, such as illegal activity in West Memphis, were entirely omitted. Rather, Byers claimed that he’d had “a spotless record” until his recent troubles. He expressed bewilderment that police in northern Arkansas had made such a big deal of his involvement in the teenagers’ “little” fight. He said he was innocent of the burglary and blamed his no-contest plea on “bad advice” from his lawyer. He never acknowledged that he’d sold drugs, but he did admit to having abused them, though only
after
Melissa’s death. He called his decision to turn to drugs a “mistake” brought on by “self-pity” in the wake of Melissa’s death, and he lauded his incarceration as “probably the best thing that ever happened” to him because it had snapped him out of a downward spiral.

Though Byers vowed that he would never “say anything bad” about his late wife, he noted that she’d begun abusing drugs long before they’d met. She’d had a heroin and Dilaudid habit, he said, which he’d tried to help her break. In fact, Byers said, his first call to the West Memphis police—the one that led to their use of him as a confidential drug informant—had been to report some of Melissa’s suppliers. But Byers’s account of events shifted during the four-hour interview. At another point, when his status as an informant was mentioned, he down-played this and offered a different version of his initial contact with the police. “I saw someone dealing in an area close to where I lived,” he said. “I saw an individual on the street corner making transactions to school students that, in my opinion, appeared to be selling drugs. I called Crime Stoppers. They used my house for an observation. The West Memphis police filmed some transactions from my home. As far as I know, there weren’t but, like, two arrests ever made. And that is the alpha and the omega of my drug informant status. John Gotti I am not.”

Asked about his arrest in Memphis a year before the murders, when he was booked on drugs and weapons charges, Byers looked blank, as though trying without success to remember such an incident. He suggested that the John Mark Byers who was taken out of the Memphis jail and released to the custody of U.S. marshals must have been someone else, and he emphasized that until his recent troubles, he’d had “
no, no
criminal record; no felony arrests—no trouble with the police.”
³⁶²

In fact, Byers said, he’d been “pretty much an all-American” boy. He’d been “a pretty well-rounded teenager,” he said, “an average student” who’d enjoyed “a very happy childhood” with the “greatest parents who ever lived.” When asked about the incident he’d described to the filmmakers, in which he said that once, when he was a teenager, he himself had been sexually attacked and left in a ditch, Byers launched into a convoluted explanation. “That was a dream,” he said, “a dream that I was telling Melissa. It was fiction, not fact.”
³⁶³
Byers characterized his decision to cooperate with the filmmakers as having been motivated solely by public service. He said he’d wanted people to know that “there are such sick individuals out there in the world that will sodomize and kill your children.”

After the murders of Christopher and his friends, Byers said, he recalled “sitting in the office with Gary Gitchell” as Gitchell related the news that one of the boys’ testicles had been removed. “We asked which child it was,” Byers said. “He told us Michael Moore. Then two or three days later, Gitchell came by our house and said it was Christopher.” In the months that followed, Byers said he knew that some people suspected him of having committed the murders—a situation that had caused him “pain on top of pain.” But he said he didn’t worry about the rumors because “my timeline on May 5 makes O. J. Simpson’s look like Swiss cheese. From seven o’clock that morning of May 5 and for the next three days, almost every minute of my time was documented.”

Just as he had complained about the failure of police in West Memphis to search for the boys on the night they disappeared, he complained about the treatment Melissa had received at the hands of medics on the afternoon she died. “They only did the paddles and shocked her once,” he said. “They did not try to save her life.”

As for his own health, Byers raised a hand to his forehead and pointed to a spot above his right eye. That’s where his brain tumor was, he said, “right here, in the front lobe.” As he described it, the tumor distorted his depth perception, weakened “the grip and feeling” in his left hand, blurred the vision in his left eye, and partially deafened his left ear. He said seizures could be triggered by overexertion, “or if I get real angry, real mad, that will cause me to have one—or if I get real anxious. Sometimes I will wake up on the floor retching. I lose bowel control. There’s gritting of teeth. Then, for three or four days, all my muscles will hurt from cramping.”
³⁶⁴
To control the seizures, Byers said that he’d been prescribed Dilantin and Tegretol, and that one of the medications had caused deterioration of his gums, or periodontal disease. In April 1997, he said, the gum disease had prompted him to have all of his teeth removed by a dentist in Shreveport, Louisiana. But as with other topics, his story of what happened to his teeth was not clear. At another point in the interview, he explained his decision to have his teeth pulled without mentioning his gums. “I had several fillings that had come out, several teeth that had been chipped and broken from accidents,” he said. “My teeth were just giving me a whole lot of trouble. They had been for years.”

Only when he spoke of the three convicted killers did Byers’s congenial demeanor change. “I don’t think they were born rotten,” he said. “But they are the guilty three. They were found guilty because of what they did. And they did what they did, in my opinion, because of the things they were reading and putting into their minds. It’s like people get into that game, Dungeons and Dragons. Only they took their fantasy to the ultimate level, the level of human sacrifice.

“You reap what you sow,” he added sternly. “If you dwell on good thoughts, you’re going to be a pretty good person. If you put poison into your system, you’re going to be poisoned.”

He blamed Damien, Jason, and Jessie not only for the murders, but for most of the grief in his life. “They killed my son. They contributed to the loss of my business. They were a factor in my wife’s death. And I believe they were a contributing factor to my being in the penitentiary. I have been searching my mind and heart to try to find a way to forgive them. However, to this day and time, I have not achieved that. I feel like I could come closer to forgiving them for their actions if they could ever be man enough to stand up and admit what they did. But it appears they can’t do that, and I really can’t have sympathy for a coward.”

He added, as the interview concluded, “If I had one hope, it would be that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley would be man enough to stand up and say, ‘Yes, I did that. I wasn’t in my right mind. I’m sorry that I did that. Could those families ever forgive me?’” Then, as though realizing what he’d described was impossible, he added, “But there’s a slim chance of that. They probably don’t have the intestinal fortitude.”

The only point on which Byers expressed regret during the interview while he was in prison concerned his relationship with his other stepson. Sixteen-year-old Ryan Clark left home on the afternoon his mother died, and Byers said he had not heard from him for years. “I acknowledge that I was not a perfect father,” he said, wiping away a few tears. “There are no perfect fathers. Even my dad had a few shortcomings. But I still love Ryan and I want nothing but good for him. I can only say that I hope he’s done well.”

Ryan was more reserved. When contacted in 2001, he was twenty-two—and reluctant to speak about the deaths of his brother and mother.
³⁶⁵
He said that he believes they are both “in heaven,” that talking will not bring them back, and that he would like to be left alone. He asked that he be left alone to “be just another person in the world.”

Melissa’s parents were not as reticent.
³⁶⁶
Interviewed at their home in Memphis, they spoke freely about the anguish that followed the deaths of first Christopher and then Melissa. They reminisced about their love for Christopher, whom they’d helped to raise before Melissa’s marriage to John Mark. They denied any knowledge of Melissa’s involvement with drugs, voiced confidence that the three convicted West Memphis teenagers were in fact guilty of their grandson’s murder, and said they didn’t see much point in reexamining either the boy’s death or that of their daughter. “It ain’t going to help,” her father said.

Nonetheless, they did speak, and much of what they had to say centered on their former son-in-law John Mark Byers. “He was a good jeweler, but he was lazy,” Melissa’s father said. Her mother interjected that “he was supposed to have a brain tumor.” But Melissa’s father stuck to his harsher view. “He’s sick,” he said, “and a liar.” Byers “beat Melissa up more than once; he blackened her eye,” the father said, adding that whenever something like that happened, Byers would “blame everybody but himself.”

Seated in their living room, surrounded by family pictures, Melissa’s parents said that the West Memphis police had never questioned them after Christopher’s murder. They still knew very little about the investigation. But if detectives had questioned the pair, they would have heard a disconcerting vignette—one that might have raised questions about the period of time just after Christopher had gotten out of school on the day he disappeared. While Byers had told police that he’d gone to a clinic in Memphis that day and had not been able to find Christopher when he’d returned home at around 3:10
P.M
., Melissa’s father recalled a markedly different version of the afternoon’s events.

He said that Melissa had arranged with him to come to the house and stay with Christopher after school, in case Mark wasn’t back from the clinic. The child’s grandfather said that he had driven to West Memphis as planned, but when he got there—shortly before Christopher was to get out of school—Mark was already home. “I was on my way up to the schoolhouse,” Melissa’s father said, “which was right near their house, you know, when Mark saw me and told me he was going to pick up Chris by himself. He told me not to get him. He said he’d take care of it. So I just went on my way. I’ve thought about it a hundred times. I wish I’d went ahead and got Chris. They called me that night and told me he was missing.”

Melissa’s father told the story, apparently unaware of the light it cast on Byers’s account. He and his wife knew little more than the general public about the investigation into the children’s murders. And they had not attended the trials. “Melissa told us not to,” her mother explained. “She said it would only upset us.” Once the trials concluded, they believed, along with most of the public, that justice had been done. After all, they asked, echoing a widespread opinion, who would confess to a crime like that if he didn’t commit it? “Misskelley may be retarded,” Melissa’s father said, “but he ain’t that retarded.”

Their grief was compounded in the months after the trials by concerns about Melissa and Ryan, who were now living farther away, in north-central Arkansas. Melissa’s parents said they’d given Mark and Melissa money to put down on a house because they knew that, now that Melissa was no longer working, the family was subsisting entirely on Mark’s disability check. But the money seemed to disappear. They said Ryan would call and report that he was having to take cold showers before school, and come home to an unheated house where there often was not enough food.
³⁶⁷

But the couple’s concerns had intensified in the days just before Melissa’s death. “She’d called up and said, ‘Daddy, I need $200. I’m broke.’ I sent her the money,” the father said. “I sent her $200 on Monday and she died on Friday. They said she had $3 in her purse.” But the couple said Melissa was also worried about more than money that week. They said her marriage to Mark was on the verge of collapse. “We knew he was shenaniganin’,” her mother said. “He was foolin’ with a woman up there. Melissa said she was going to divorce him. She told him she was going to leave him. But he said he wasn’t going to divorce another woman.”

Melissa’s parents said that shortly before Melissa died, she’d told them that she was coming home to stay with them for a couple of days. They expected her on Friday. When she hadn’t arrived by midafternoon, “We called the house to see if she was coming, and Mark said, ‘No, she’s not feeling good and she’s asleep.’ Later on that night the phone rang. Mark just laid it out: ‘Melissa’s dead.’ That’s all he said.”

Her mom, who’d answered, remembers stammering, “Melissa’s what?”

“We wanted to go up there,” Melissa’s father recalled. “But Mark said there wasn’t no need because the police had seized her body.”

As after Christopher’s murder, the couple said they were not contacted by police after Melissa’s unusual death, either. But this time, they said, doubts about the circumstances surrounding Melissa’s death caused them to sever their relationship with Byers.
³⁶⁸

The couple’s other former son-in-law, Christopher’s biological father, held a different opinion of the case. In a letter posted on the wm3.org Web site, he proclaimed his belief that the teenagers convicted of killing Christopher, Michael, and Stevie had not committed the crime.
³⁶⁹
“I want to know who murdered my son,” he wrote, “and I want to know that they will be caught and punished for what they did. I don’t want three innocent people to suffer for something they didn’t do.”