Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (5 page)

In other parts of the interview, Byers alluded to interactions with local officials. When Ridge asked if he thought that the killer or killers might be rehabilitated, for instance, and ever “go back on the street again,” the answer Byers gave suggested that he already knew who the suspects were. “No,” he told Ridge, “because from what [deputy prosecutor] John Fogleman told me, these individuals—he couldn’t see how they could plead insanity ’cause they tried to cover up their crime. And he promised me in Gary Gitchell’s office, with the other fathers in there, that it didn’t matter what age they were, that he was going to prosecute ’em as an adult, and he would try for the death penalty.”

Similarly, when Sudbury asked Byers if there was anyone police should “talk to,” anyone “from Memphis, perhaps,” that Byers had “talked to OCU [the Organized Crime Unit] about,” Byers had responded with caution. “Who’s all going to hear that tape?” he asked.

“Only us investigators,” Ridge assured him. Byers then mentioned two men that he said he’d “worked with the city here on” in connection with illegal drugs.

As the interview neared its end, Ridge asked one more question. “Okay,” he began, “Well, what I want to say right now, and what I’m going to say is that, I may have information…This information suggests strongly that you have something to do with the disappearance of the boys. And ultimately of the murder. Okay. What is your response to that?”

Byers replied, “My first response is I can’t fathom where you would get that…”

Ridge: “Okay.”

Byers: “And it makes me so mad inside that I just kind of got to hold myself here in this chair…”

Ridge: “Okay. Who, of all the people you know, might make that kind of suggestion?”

Byers: “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”

Ridge: “Okay.”

Byers: “If I did, it would make me want to hit ’em. You know, it would make me mad to think that someone maybe has said something like that about me. It makes me mad.”

Ridge explained that these were questions he had to ask. “It was to get a response,” he said. “We want to know what your response is. And I’m not saying anybody made that accusation. Okay. But I had to evoke that response from you. I had to know what your response was. You understand that? Do you understand?”

Byers said, “I probably will. I don’t right now. It hurts.”

“It hurts me to have to ask it,” Ridge replied. “As much as I know it hurts you when I saw your response…”

“Just tell me one thing,” Byers said. “Man to man, you tell me, man to man—I don’t care, on the record or off the record—you know I didn’t have anything to do with the murder of my son and those other two boys.”

“Man to man,” Ridge assured him, “I know that.”

Two weeks had passed, and much of the investigation was an incoherent mess. The investigation of the families, such as it was, had not produced results, nor had the detectives’ pursuit of the numerous miscellaneous leads. Gitchell was floundering. The city was in a state of alarm—residents were even afraid to go shopping—and local officials were expecting arrests. Yet Gitchell still had not even received written reports on the autopsies. His hopes that the lab might help him narrow the scope of the sprawling investigation were rapidly diminishing. As the investigation approached the three-week mark, Gitchell was desperate. He phoned police in Indiana and asked them to question Ricky Lee Murray, Christopher’s biological father. But Murray had a sound alibi for his activities at the time of the murders.

On May 22, detectives questioned Melissa Byers. Some of what she said also contradicted what her husband had told the police. While he’d reported that Christopher had never disappeared from home before, Melissa said that Christopher had disappeared a few times recently, and that on a couple of those occasions he’d been gone for as much as two hours. One of the detectives also noted that “Melissa became concerned that maybe he had been molested.” When the detectives asked Melissa who she thought might have killed the boys, she said she didn’t know. But she added, “Whoever did this, the boys knew—at least one or all of the boys.”

As detectives would soon learn when they saw Christopher’s medical records, there was more to the child’s story than either of his parents was reporting.
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In 1990, when Christopher was only five, the Byerses had brought him to a pediatric neurologist in Memphis for evaluation of behavioral problems.
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The doctor noted in his report, “The mother is ‘at her wit’s end.’” The doctor prescribed medication and saw Christopher several times in the next three years. The last time was in January 1993, less than four months before the murders. Christopher had not improved, and the neurologist wrote that he was “in a quandary” as to why.
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Detectives filed the information away, with little apparent interest. Nor, apparently, was their interest in Byers heightened when the Arkansas State Police reported conclusive evidence that Byers had lied about the Rolex watches. UPS officials had reported their suspicions to West Memphis police six months earlier. But they’d also put their own company investigator on the case and notified the Arkansas State Police. Now the fraud case had been solved. About three weeks after the murders, the state police informed police in West Memphis that contrary to what Byers had claimed, he had indeed received the watches—and sold them to a chiropractor in Jonesboro, Arkansas, about sixty miles north of West Memphis. The chiropractor had produced two canceled checks for the watches. The checks, totaling $9,050, were made out to—and had been endorsed by—Byers. The chiropractor and the jeweler who’d shipped the watches were willing to testify against Byers.
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When it became clear that Byers could be prosecuted for another felony, he placed a call to Gitchell, saying he’d “made a mistake.” Gitchell noted briefly that Byers had said “he wanted to be truthful and up-front about it. Hoping it would not interfere with the investigation.”

By May 26, twenty days after the bodies were found, Gitchell still had not received the written autopsy reports. He was growing frantic. He typed a letter to crime lab officials, expressing his exasperation. He raised several questions in the letter, the answers to which, he said, were “vital” to his investigation.
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What were the times of death? What were the causes of death? He pointed out that he still did not know. Could he get a diagram of the boys’ wounds? Had “any tears or blood or punctures” been found in their clothes? Had a stick that was sent to the lab been used upon the children? Had the lab found “anything” that would indicate the involvement of a black male? Was there evidence that the boys had been forced to perform oral sex? Had they been sodomized?

The letter mentioned what was supposed to have been one of the department’s most closely guarded secrets. Gitchell wrote that Dr. Frank Peretti, the associate medical examiner who had performed the autopsies on the boys, had “mentioned finding urine” in the stomachs of two of the boys. Peretti had asked that the police send “water samples” to the lab. Gitchell had done as Peretti requested, but so far the department had not been informed of any results. “What has been determined in regards to the urine?” Gitchell demanded. “Can the urine, if that is what it is, be used to eliminate any suspects—or develop any?” Additionally, he wanted to know, “Can you tell us which kid was killed first?” And, “Were the kids dragged?” Gitchell concluded: “Anything you can think to give us would be greatly appreciated. We need information from the crime lab desperately…without [it] our hands are tied…We feel as though we are walking blind-folded through this case.”

Two days later, Gitchell wrote another frustrated letter, this one to John Fogleman, now the district’s deputy prosecuting attorney.
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Gitchell complained that he and his staff were “severely handicapped” by the lack of communication from the medical examiner’s office. He specifically cited his need of the autopsy reports, which he had still not received. Gitchell reported that under the circumstances, he had been surprised to learn that Fogleman and another deputy prosecutor had recently driven to Little Rock to meet with crime lab officials.
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The visit was extraordinary in at least two respects: first, as Fogleman later acknowledged, prosecutors do not normally involve themselves to such an extent in ongoing police investigations;
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and second, the visit had been conducted without Gitchell’s knowledge. “Maybe,” Gitchell fumed, “you can learn something” from the medical examiner’s office “to assist us”—something, he said, that the police, “for some unknown reason,” had been unable to learn directly.

The prosecutors’ unusual visit and the detective’s testiness were signs of how the nerves of officials were fraying as the city prepared to observe the passage of a month since the murders. The triple murder case seemed to be going nowhere. And the moon was nearing full again.

Holy men tell us life is a mystery.

They embrace that concept happily.

But some mysteries bite and bark,

And come to get you in the dark.

A rain of shadows, a storm, a squall,

Daylight retreats, night swallows all.

If Good is bright, if Evil’s gloom,

High evil walls the World entombs.

Now comes the end, the drear darkfall.
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W
HILE
G
ITCHELL WAS FEELING BLINDFOLDED
and standard approaches to the case, including investigation of the families and pursuit of tips and leads, had not produced a suspect, interest in Gitchell’s suggestion regarding a “gang or cult” was expanding to fill the void. Adherents to that theory focused their attention on a teenager from Marion who’d written the lines above. While some who read those lines might see in them Gothic influences, such as those that inspired Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King, and others might detect psychological depression or despair, law enforcement officials in Marion and West Memphis concluded that the poem suggested involvement in the occult. Though “the occult” would remain a vague term, a belief that occult, or satanic, activities were dangerously afoot in the county was already well established among some law enforcement officials by the time the murders occurred. That belief could be attributed to the efforts of Jerry Driver, a county juvenile officer, who was seen by police as the local expert on how the occult and crime converged.

Driver was not a police officer. After a career as a commercial airline pilot, he and his wife had opened a housecleaning service. When that venture failed, Driver, then in his early fifties, had taken a job with Crittenden County as a juvenile probation officer. He was supposed to keep track of kids who had gotten into trouble with the law. By the time of the murders, Driver was the county’s chief juvenile officer. Steve Jones, the juvenile probation officer who’d spotted the telltale floating shoe, worked as Driver’s assistant.

The murders shocked but did not surprise Driver. He’d been telling people for months that he expected something dire to happen. When it did, his first thought was of Damien Echols, a troubled kid whom Driver had been watching for about a year. From that moment on, this third aspect of the murder investigation had a clearly identified focus—something the other two approaches did not. In the weeks that followed, that focus would only grow sharper.

The boy had come to Driver’s attention more than a year before the murders, when a woman called the Marion police to report that he was threatening her daughter. Damien, a high school dropout who lived in Marion’s Lakeshore Estates trailer park, was seventeen at the time; Deanna Jane Holcomb was fifteen. Deanna’s mother told police that her daughter had been dating Damien but that the two had ended their relationship earlier in the week. When police arrived at the Holcombs’ house, Deanna reported that since she and Damien had broken up, he had been harassing her and one of her male friends. According to the police report, Deanna claimed that Echols—“five-eleven, one hundred sixty pounds, brown eyes, dark hair”—said he was going to kill the other boy “and dump him in the front yard of her house, and then come back and take care of her, and then burn the house down.”
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The girl’s mother told the officer “that she was in fear for her daughter’s life.” Later, Driver would recall that the girl’s family told him that Damien was “trying to get their daughter into black magic and this type of thing.”
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Lakeshore was one of the poorest neighborhoods in a county that ranked among the nation’s poorest 10 percent. While many homes there were neatly kept, with gardens and cheerful wind chimes, others slumped in neglect and dreary dilapidation. Most residents of Lakeshore Estates subsisted on some form of state and federal assistance, and the Echols family was no exception. Damien lived with his sister, mother, grandmother, and stepfather in a small two-bedroom trailer. Tensions in the household were simmering. The investigating officer drove to the trailer, and when the dark-haired teenager answered the door, the officer warned him to stay away from Deanna and her family.

But problems of the Echols family had also come to the attention of social workers. Exactly a year before the murders—on the same day, as it happened, that Judge David Burnett ordered the terroristic threatening conviction of John Mark Byers expunged—a mental health worker visited the Echolses and concluded that both Damien and his sister, Michelle, needed help. A report on the visit described the family’s problems as being “severe.”

Damien and Michelle’s mother, Pam, was thirty-four years old, twenty years younger than her second husband, Andy “Jack” Echols, who’d adopted her two children. In 1992, a caseworker assigned to the family saw it as verging on the breaking point. Damien’s breakup with Deanna, which he said had come at the insistence of her parents, exacerbated the tension. Within a month after the first incident, Deanna’s mother again called the police, this time to report that her daughter had begun to see Damien again.
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An officer responded to the Holcombs’ house, and while he was taking the woman’s report, Deanna arrived home, accompanied by Damien. Her mother yelled at Damien to get off her property and to stay away from Deanna. The girl yelled back that she wanted to be with Damien. The officer reported, “Damien advised that he had just walked her home” after Deanna had become sick at school. But Deanna’s mother was furious. The officer warned Damien once again to stay away from Deanna. He wrote in his report that the girl’s mother said she was going to take her daughter to a psychiatrist.

The story of forbidden love might have ended there. But during a thunderstorm six nights later, Deanna’s mother called the police again, this time to report that Deanna had run away from home—presumably with Damien. Officers headed for Lakeshore Estates, where they found the teenagers, both “partially nude from the waist down,” in an uninhabited mobile home.
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Damien’s friend Jason Baldwin was with them. Damien and Deanna acknowledged that they had planned to run away. But since neither Damien nor Deanna owned a car—or even drove one, for that matter—they had sought refuge in the trailer to wait out the storm. Nothing was reported stolen, but police charged the pair nonetheless with burglary and sexual misconduct. Damien and Deanna were taken to the county jail, and Driver was notified. Someone from the juvenile office went to the Echolses’ trailer and asked to search Damien’s room. Pam Echols granted her permission, and the juvenile officer walked out with notebooks containing Damien’s writings and drawings. Pam said she was told that they would be returned, but that they never were. The notebooks, which included the poem above, were placed into Damien’s juvenile record. Driver considered them evidence that the boy was veering dangerously toward an interest in the occult.

Deputy prosecutor Fogleman filed charges against Damien for the incident at the trailer.
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While Deanna was released to her parents, Damien was ordered to be held in a juvenile detention center about an hour north of West Memphis. Though Damien obeyed the center’s rules and, according to records, treated its staff with “the utmost respect,” word circulated that he and Deanna had intended to conceive a child and that after its birth, the child was to be sacrificed in a satanic ritual. When Driver heard the rumors, he contacted a psychiatric hospital in Little Rock and drove Damien there himself.

For Driver, it was a relief to have Damien in a hospital more than a hundred miles away. Driver didn’t know if the rumors about Damien were true, but Damien’s own statements had been enough to convince him that the boy was headed down a dangerous path. For starters, Damien had told Driver that he was a witch. “I think his claim was that he was a Wiccan,” Driver later said, “and he worshiped goddesses.” The boy also dressed mostly in black. To Driver, “he looked like one of the slasher-movie-type guys—boots, coat, long, stringy black hair, though he cut it short sometimes.” As Driver saw it, Damien was part of an alarming trend in the county, one that was drawing not just Damien Echols but many teenagers toward Satan.

Even with Damien hospitalized, Driver noted with growing concern that “his modus operandi continued” in Crittenden County. Driver concluded that Damien was a leader or central figure in a group devoted to what Driver termed “occult-related activity.” Driver and Jones found pentagrams and other “cult-related” graffiti under railroad bridges, on fortifications alongside the interstates, and in an abandoned cotton gin east of Marion that kids had nicknamed Stonehenge.
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Driver knew that some of the goings-on could be chalked up to adolescent mischief. He recognized that “a lot of this devil worship stuff was an excuse to drink and have sex” and that some of the kids who were involved were “dabbling, doing it as a lark.” But others, like Damien, appeared to Driver to have gone beyond mere dabbling. Driver’s concerns were not uncommon at that time.
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By the late 1980s, interest in the suspected prevalence of satanic ritual abuse, or SRA, as it became known, had grown so intense in the United States that the subject was discussed in settings as diverse as psychological conferences, religious tent revivals, police training seminars,
Ms
. magazine, and television talk shows, where the words “satanic,” “occult,” “ritualistic,” and “paganism” were often ill defined or used interchangeably. Fantasy role-playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, as well as certain kinds of rock and roll music—especially heavy metal—were described as gateways to a dark world that could lead to ritual abuse. At worst, specialists in the new field of SRA warned, teenagers who started out innocently playing with Ouija boards or reading books on paganism and magic could be drawn into rites involving the use of dangerous symbols, and from there into vandalism, animal mutilations, ritualistic abuse of children, and suicide, or even murder.

By 1991, law enforcement interest in “bizarre cults and human sacrifice” had grown so intense that the FBI undertook a search of national records to determine just how widespread it was.
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That year, an FBI specialist concluded that “after all the hype and hysteria is put aside, the realization sets in that most Satanic or occult activity involves the commission of
no
crimes, and that which does, usually involves the commission of relatively minor crimes such as trespassing, vandalism, cruelty to animals, or petty thievery.” But that unsensational point of view had a hard time competing against accounts of mind control, sadism, and slaughter committed in the service of Satan. Driver was one of thousands of public officials who considered it their legal and moral duty to be on the alert for suspicious activity that might signify greater, albeit hidden, evil. So while Damien Echols was in the Little Rock psychiatric hospital, Driver contacted a consultant who lectured on crime and the occult.
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The consultant came to West Memphis armed with photographs of graffiti and cult-related paraphernalia, which Driver recognized as similar to what he had been seeing in Crittenden County. Driver also attended seminars in Texas and Tennessee on the subject of crime and the occult, and he led seminars of his own.
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Yet despite Driver’s vigilance and Damien’s absence, it seemed to Driver that the cult-related activity in his area was escalating. He kept hearing rumors that some “bad things were going to happen,” and felt that the situation was headed, as he later put it, “toward some sort of crescendo.”

Psychiatrists assessing Damien were not, however, so alarmed. They reported the teenager’s beliefs, but only as part of a broader psychological profile.
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And at least some of the staff was willing to acknowledge certain distinctions. A psychiatrist carefully noted that Damien “indicates he is not involved with Satanism, but witchcraft.” The doctor also observed that Damien smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, had a history of asthma, and wore a “crude, rudimentary, self-inflicted tattoo” in the “shape of a scientific symbol representing the female sex” on his left upper arm. Damien’s diagnosis was major depression. A psychological examiner raised the possibility of a bipolar, or manic-depressive, disorder. Whatever the cause, Damien’s immediate problems were listed as “extreme physical aggression toward others, suicidal ideation and intent, depressed mood, and bizarre and unusual thinking.”

He remained hospitalized for three weeks. Upon his release, the hospital notified Driver that doctors had prescribed Imipramine to treat Damien’s depression. The report to Driver also noted that although Damien had drawn “numerous pictures of witchcraft type symbols” and written “some very unusual poems,” he was no longer considered to be a danger, either to himself or to others. It also notified Driver that Pam Echols, Damien’s mother, intended to move with him and Michelle away from Arkansas. The psychiatrist informed Driver that he had spoken with Fogleman, the prosecuting attorney, “who was in agreement with Damien’s leaving the state.”

In July 1992—the month that John Mark Byers was arrested on drugs and weapons charges in Memphis and released to federal marshals in the middle of the night—Damien and Michelle Echols moved with their mother to Aloha, Oregon. There, Pam reunited with Joe Hutchison, her children’s biological father. Joe managed a BP gas station in Aloha, where he was able to put Damien to work. It was an ironic occupation for a teenager who had never driven a car.
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Aloha, Oregon, was two thousand miles from West Memphis, but Driver’s interest in Damien followed the teenager there. Pam Echols and her children had barely settled into Joe Hutchison’s little apartment when Driver contacted juvenile authorities in Oregon, asking that they provide “courtesy supervision” of Damien for as long as he remained on probation. An Oregon juvenile counselor wrote that in his referral on Damien, Driver had “made the following comments: a) Damien and several others of his associates are involved in a Satanic cult; b) Damien and his girlfriend were both placed in a psychiatric hospital; c) Damien threatened to kill his girlfriend’s parents; d) Damien claims he is a witch; e) Damien and his girlfriend were planning to have a child, so that they could offer it as a sacrifice to Satan; and f) the authorities in Arkansas suspect that Damien’s parents are involved in this Satanic belief system.”
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