Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (50 page)

332. In chat rooms, many supporters recalled their own isolation and even persecution as teenagers; painful experiences with exclusion that were based on nothing more than unconventionality. For some, the exclusion was based on poverty or their religious beliefs. For others, it was some physical or social distinction. Others recalled being shunned simply for harboring nonconformist tastes in clothes, literature, music, or art. Site cofounder Sauls said his own nephew had suffered harassment from “moral crusaders” in Florida, “who were simply punishing him for being different.” He said his response to the events in West Memphis almost certainly had been in reaction to the tragedy his own family suffered when his nephew had committed suicide at seventeen. Other supporters felt they too could have been blamed for crimes they did not commit, just because they did not adhere to local religious norms. “My background pretty much mirrors Damien’s,” one said. “I didn’t buy everything the religious people where I lived believed.” He said he’d been told he was going to hell. Others voiced concerns that money—or the defendants’ lack of it—had played a role in the verdicts; they said they’d joined the fight for the West Memphis Three because they saw the case as a symbol of poverty’s impact on justice. “This wouldn’t have happened if their parents were rich,” was an oft-repeated refrain. A similar one cited regionalism, the fear that, if justice in America related to money, it also might relate to place. Supporters new to the Web site often commented that “this would not have happened in” New York, Seattle, or any large city, rather than a rural community.

333. RAO Video on Main Street in Little Rock, Arkansas.

334. Comments from the founders of the Web site and its supporters quoted here are drawn from author interviews conducted between 1998 and 2001.

335. Issues surrounding the inmates’ mail would become a serious grievance for many supporters who tried to contact them. Letters to Damien, in particular, were frequently not delivered by staff at the maximum security unit. The problem, which cropped up repeatedly, was often temporarily solved only after the senders contacted United States postal officials.

336. In that 1996 interview with the author, Damien also said, “I’ve always had this extremely self-destructive streak, which coming here has somehow made me overcome.” He recognized that his behavior during the police investigation and at his trial was “stupid” and a form of “extreme vanity.” Asked why he had not moderated his behavior by, for instance, refusing to talk to the police, he answered, “I guess for the same reason that people dodge trains. It’s something to break the mundanity of their lives, something to give them some distraction.”

337. The episode of
The Maury Povich Show
was titled “Murder in a Small Town.” It aired in West Memphis and east Arkansas on August 2, 1994. By then, Pamela Hobbs, the mother of Stevie Branch, and her husband, Terry, had moved to Memphis. On November 6, 1994, eight months after deputies drove Damien and Jason to prison, police in Memphis received a report of a shooting at the Hobbs residence. A Memphis police officer later offered the following account: Pam Hobbs told investigators that Terry had beaten her with his fists earlier in the day. The officers noted having observed injuries to her face and the back of her head. Hobbs said that after the beating, she’d called a relative in Blytheville, Arkansas, to report that she believed Terry had broken her jaw. Hobbs had then gone to a hospital. While she was there, a group of her Arkansas relatives gathered and drove to Memphis, where they confronted Terry about the assault. According to the Memphis police, Terry Hobbs left the house when they arrived, went to a truck outside, and returned with a .357 Magnum pistol in his pocket. At that point, Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks, confronted Terry again. An investigating officer said it appeared that “Hicks passed the first lick,” and a fight ensued. Hicks reportedly had wrestled Terry Hobbs to the ground, when Hobbs reached into his pocket, pulled out the gun, and shot Hicks in the abdomen. Police said Hobbs then rose and pointed the gun at the other relatives, threatening to shoot them too. Police took Terry Hobbs into custody and charged him with assault on his wife and aggravated assault on his brother-in-law. Hicks survived, though he was hospitalized in critical condition. Tragedy also followed the parents of Michael Moore. In June 1995, eight months after the Hobbses’ altercation, Dana Moore struck and killed a pedestrian while driving on a rural road in Crittenden County, Arkansas. Newspapers quoted police as saying that Moore was charged with driving while intoxicated. Through her lawyer, Moore negotiated a plea of guilty. She was sentenced to sixty months probation, fined $250, and ordered to pay “restitution” of $2,500, an outcome that offended members of the dead woman’s family. The Moores, who of all the families had had the least contact with the media during the trials, grew even more private after them. Their main contact with the public was through a Web site, midsouthjustice.org, that had been created by a friend. The site contained a memorial for Michael, Christopher, and Stevie, which it called “the real West Memphis Three.” It expressed confidence in the police work that had been done and in the juries’ verdicts, and criticized those who were calling for a review of the case.

338. Acting on a tip, police had obtained permission to search the Byerses’ house. There they found three Oriental rugs, which were among the items that had been reported stolen. An officer noted that “Mrs. Byers told us that she had purchased them from a flea market, but she couldn’t remember when, where or produce any receipts.” Other items stolen from the house were recovered from pawnshops in the area.

339. Accepting the plea was Sharp County circuit judge Harold Erwin. After the hearing, the Byerses’ attorney, Larry Kissee, told reporters that he would be filing a civil suit on their behalf against the West Memphis Police Department, for the department’s failure to launch a search for the missing boys until the morning after they disappeared. The lawsuit was not filed.

340. The incident occurred in the town of Hardy, Arkansas. Hardy police chief Ernie Rose reported that Byers had goaded a boy who had been riding with him in his car to fight another boy, who had reportedly hollered a taunt at Byers’s passenger. According to other teenagers who witnessed the fight, Byers had stopped his car, gotten out, and advised his rider, “Take it over in the shade and settle it like a man.” Byers reportedly told Hardy’s police chief, Ernie Rose, that as the fight ensued, he’d stood by his car with a .22 bolt-action rifle pointed at the ground in order to assure that the fight was “fair.” Byers acknowledged that he’d also instructed his passenger to get a pocketknife out of his car and fight with it, holding it closed in his fist. The boy reported to Chief Rose that, when he’d closed his hand around the knife, Byers had told him, “That’s the way to do it.” Witnesses said they wanted to stop the fight, but that anytime they moved to do so, Byers had warned them to “stay put.” A highway department employee working nearby did rush to intervene. He told Rose that by the time he arrived at the site, the fight was over and Byers and his friend were leaving. The highway worker said Byers had told him, “Some smart-ass kid got his ass kicked. He got what he deserved.” When Rose arrived at the scene, he found one boy who needed to be taken to a hospital. The remaining boys offered a description of the man who’d insisted on the fight. They described him as “dirty, with a blond beard and sunglasses, 230 to 250 pounds, wearing ‘like a flag shirt’ with blue jeans, thirty-five to forty years old, with brownish black hair.” Rose later recalled that when he telephoned police in Cherokee Village and read them the description, “they told me who I was looking for.”

341. According to an affidavit filed by the neighbors, John and Donna Kingsbury, Melissa Byers said “that we had put them in a hole and they would put us in a hole we wouldn’t get out of.” The statement said that the Kingsburys’ children were afraid of the Byerses and that Melissa had warned the parents, “You can’t watch your family twenty-four hours a day.” Much of the reporting about the Byerses’ troubles in Cherokee Village was done by Angelia Roberts, of the local paper, the
News.
John Kingsbury told Roberts that there were bullet holes in the side of his house. “I cannot prove how they got there,” he said, “but they are there.” Donna Kingsbury added, “They say they are victims, but we are victims too. No friends of our children are allowed to come to our house because of all the trouble we’ve had.”

342. Byers grew up in the town of Marked Tree, Arkansas. The
Arkansas Times
reporter who uncovered the story of the early knife attack was this author. Her source was former Poinsett County sheriff’s deputy C. L. Carter. When questioned about the attack on Byers’s parents, Carter recalled, “Mark had a knife after them. He wanted them to give him money to buy dope with.” The former deputy said he cornered Mark in a closet and ordered him to throw down the knife. Carter said he vividly recalled that, as he was putting handcuffs on Byers, the teenager looked at him and vowed, “I’ll cut your throat.”

343. Val Price declined to be interviewed for this book, citing Damien’s pending appeals.

344. “The court feels in this society that a dispute under the shade tree is not necessary,” Judge Kevin King told Byers, “and that, as an adult, you could have stopped the altercation instead of encouraging it.”

345. Melissa was taken to Eastern Ozarks Regional Hospital. When staff there saw her condition they notified Sonny Powell, the sheriff of Sharp County.

346. Arkansas State Police investigator Stan Witt headed the investigation.

347. The list included alprazolam, 1 mg.; lithium capsules, 300 mg.; Paxil tablets, 30.mg.; Lithonate capsules, 300 mg.; Desyrel, 150 mg.; and Paxil, 20 mg., plus Midol and other nonprescription medications.

348. Police reports identified the neighbor as Norm Metz.

349. Angelia Roberts, the reporter from the local
News,
who’d interviewed the Byerses about their problems, eulogized Melissa, after a fashion. “When I first heard that Melissa Byers was dead,” she wrote, “sadly, I was not surprised. From my first encounter with John Mark and Melissa Byers, it seemed that trouble wasn’t even their middle name, but came first, with a capital T.” She noted that Christopher was dead, that now Melissa was dead, and that “for John Mark Byers, there will always be a perpetual dark cloud hanging over his head because, for many, there are still too many unanswered questions that began during the investigation of the West Memphis killings.”

350. Investigator Stan Witt reported being advised “that the autopsy report could not be completed until the toxicology results were completed, and the case was still in toxicology.” Witt then asked to be transferred to the toxicology section. “Personnel in toxicology advised this investigator that the case was not in toxicology,” he wrote, “and their tests had been completed for quite some time. They advised they didn’t know where the case was at this time, and redirected this investigator back to the medical examiner’s section…. Personnel in the medical examiner’s section…advised they didn’t know what the status of the case was, but they would research it.” About thirty minutes later, Witt wrote, “personnel advised this investigator that the case was currently in the trace evidence section, where tests were being performed for arsenic and other types of poisoning.”

351. The plea agreement was approved by Stewart Lambert, deputy prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’s Third Judicial District. Officiating in the case was circuit judge Harold Erwin.

352. The deputy prosecutor was Stewart Lambert; the venue, Sharp County Circuit Court.

353. Article 2, Section 21 of the state constitution is titled “Life, liberty and property—Banishment prohibited.” In comments made to the author in December 1997. Stewart Lambert, the deputy prosecutor who arranged the deal, said, “Our understanding on that type of condition is that if it’s by agreement with counsel and the defendant, a condition like that is legal. We don’t have a right just to tell someone to leave the county, but if it’s agreed upon, we understand it’s okay. We didn’t just get together at a corner of the courthouse and say, ‘Get out of town.’” Two years later, however, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued a ruling reiterating the constitutional ban on exile under any terms (
Reeves v. State,
#CR98-872).

354. The crime lab’s director was Jim Clark.

355. Stephen A. Erickson, M.D., an associate medical examiner, was the pathologist of record.

356. A prison inmate serving time for drugs told investigators in a written statement that he had known the Byerses. “I can remember Mark giving her pills and other drugs on more than one occasion,” he wrote. A seventeen-year-old from Cherokee Village told Witt that, on the day Melissa died, he had been “partying” with the Byerses at their residence, “drinking Crown Royal and taking Valium and Xanax, and that he saw Mark Byers with a sandwich baggie of K-4 Dilaudid.” The third person interviewed was Mandy Beasley, the woman who’d been at the Byerses’ house when Witt and other officers conducted their search. In December 1997. Beasley told Witt that on that night, “Byers told her that he had three syringes in the bottom drawer of the chef robe [
sic
] dresser in their bedroom that he hoped the police didn’t find. She advised that Byers did not tell her whether or not the syringes had anything in them, and that police did not find the syringes, and later on that night Byers threw them away.” Beasley also told Witt that she lived with Byers for two months following Melissa’s death. She said that during that time, “he threatened her life if she ever told anyone about the syringes.” Attorney Dan Stidham later interviewed Beasley, as did this author. Beasley told both that she had been having an affair with Byers, that Melissa had found out, and that on the day she died, Melissa had told Mark she was going to divorce him.

357. In an author interview in January 2002, former Arkansas State Police trooper Brant Tosh reported that he was a bit surprised when he learned that his caller was John Mark Byers. Tosh had been a deputy sheriff in Craighead County when the West Memphis murders occurred, and in the months after the arrests, he’d encountered all three of the defendants. “I transported Damien Echols to Tucker Max twice,” he recalled. “And I had to baby-sit Jason Baldwin there in the detention center after his conviction. I also drove Jessie Misskelley to a meeting in Clay County one night.” Asked about that trip, which led to Jessie’s controversial interrogation by prosecutor Davis, Tosh reflected, “I was a young officer back then. I just remember that he talked all the way. It just seemed he had the mind of a seven-year-old. It struck me that he seemed very childish, like way behind his age.”