Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (4 page)

There was the mysterious stranger who had paid a cab driver $390 to take him from West Memphis to Centerville, Tennessee, a distance of 210 miles, saying he needed to “get out of town.” There was a hitchhiker who had been picked up on Interstate 40 and dropped off near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash on the afternoon of the murders; the driver claimed that he had offered to drop the man off near a restaurant on the north side of the freeway, but the man insisted on being dropped off on the south side, near Robin Hood Hills.
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Neither one of these men was ever located.

Along with all the improbable and outright ridiculous tips that were received, there were the routine interviews and follow-ups that constitute the bulk of police investigative work. During the three weeks following the murders, the police requisitioned a list of customers from the Blue Beacon Truck Wash, checked out the ubiquitous “white van” present at virtually all crime scenes, and worked frantically to track down hundreds of other tips. They checked out the information gleaned from the Aaron Hutcheson interviews (discussed later), checked hospitals for Vietnam veterans with injuries to their penises, surveyed area carpet cleaners to see if any had cleaned up any blood lately, investigated a “doctor” who had been arrested for doing sex change operations without a license, and compiled descriptions of various vagrants, strangers, mental patients, loiterers, and hoboes.
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They investigated a man who was said to have made vulgar remarks to two young girls, and they followed up on tales of alleged animal torturers, all exhaustive work that produced zero results.
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The public was getting antsy, and the media was relentless. Did they have any suspects? Were the murders related to any other killings in other states? Was there a serial killer on the loose? What about devil worship and cult activity? As much as they wished otherwise, the police simply had no answers.

To add to their frustration, results from the state’s crime lab and medical examiner’s office were excruciatingly slow in coming, and Inspector Gitchell was losing his patience. He knew that the investigation could not proceed without hard scientific evidence from Little Rock. It was vital that Gitchell receive, as soon as possible, some specific information:

• What was the cause of death for the three boys?

• What was the time of death?

• Which clothing belonged to which boy?

• Were there any tears or punctures in the boys’ clothes?

• Were the boys sodomized?

Was any blood found on the children’s clothing, and if so, whose blood was it?

There were questions about any residue that might have existed under the boys’ fingernails, the presence of any fibers on the their clothing, which child was killed first—in short, was there
anything
Little Rock could tell the police that would help them to focus their efforts? Without this information, Gitchell complained, the police were “blindfolded” in their investigation. They needed a break in the case and needed it badly.

Damien

Were it not for Crittenden County’s chief juvenile officer Jerry Driver, it is possible that the police might not have come across the name Damien Echols. Driver had first come in contact with Echols more than a year before the murders, when a Marion, Arkansas, woman contacted him to complain that Echols, then seventeen, was threatening her fifteen-year-old daughter. The two had been involved in a relationship that the woman’s daughter had ended. Echols had begun harassing and threatening her, eventually saying that he would kill one of her male friends and “dump him in the front yard of her house, and then come back and take care of her, and burn the house down.”
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The two had run away together once, after which they were found half-dressed in an abandoned trailer, resulting in the arrest of the two teens. The girl’s family had also complained to Driver that Damien was trying to get their daughter into black magic and witchcraft. They wanted Damien Echols out of their daughter’s life. Driver considered himself something of an expert on the occult and made it his mission to keep watch over this boy who had threatened to kill several people, including Driver himself.

Damien Wayne Echols was a brooding, eighteen-year-old high school dropout living in a seedy trailer park located just south of Broadway, approximately two miles from Robin Hood Hills. His background was such that a run-in with juvenile authorities was practically inevitable. Born Michael Wayne Hutchison on December 11, 1974, Damien was the product of a bizarre and chaotic family life. His mother Pam married Joe Hutchison when she was fifteen and had Damien a year later. She suffered from severe nausea and other complications during her pregnancy and had lost fifty pounds by the time Damien was born by cesarean section. When Damien was eleven years old, Pam divorced Joe and married Andy “Jack” Echols a few days later. Jack quickly established himself as the alpha, the supreme authority over Damien and his younger sister Michelle, and Pam, because of her own tenuous mental health, seemed unable to do much about it. Jack and Damien fought almost from the beginning. Damien described his mother’s new husband as a “ghoul” and as “the most hateful individual [he’d] ever encountered.”
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Despite this alleged enmity Jack Echols adopted Michael and Michelle on October 31, 1990 whereupon Michael changed his name to “Damien.
”
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Jack Echols was also hopelessly poor. The first residence for his new family was a run-down apartment in a dilapidated building that had once served as a motel. There were two small bedrooms to accommodate Jack’s new family in addition to three of Jack’s own six children—seven people in all. Damien longed to return to his grandmother’s house, where the family had been living for a time. He had been relatively happy there, and it was the last time in his life that he would have anything resembling a normal home. The move to a new home also meant changing schools for Damien. He had enjoyed the school he was attending in the old neighborhood but was forced to transfer to Bragg Elementary (school motto:: “Where All Children Can Learn”). Damien hated Bragg for some unknown reason, except for, as he noted many years later, his perception that “all the kids had overly large heads.”
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Jack also insisted that Damien attend the Pentecostal church Jack belonged to, the Church of God. According to Echols’s 2005 book,
Almost
Home
, he found it to be a “freak show” where people “spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor screaming when they got the spirit.” Damien detested this demonstrative form of Christianity, right down to the pastor, whom he described as “morbidly obese,” calling the church itself a “wasteland.” He despised everything about his new life, and this may have been the beginning of Damien’s antisocial behavior. It was, at the very least, a time during which that behavior crystallized, when the “seeds of hatred,” as he himself would later say, were first sown. Damien seemed to hold in contempt nearly everyone he met, learning as he grew up how to “spit bile and venom with increasing precision” at those he perceived as threatening to him.

The family next moved to what can only be described as a backwoods chamber of horrors. It was more of an enlarged tool shed than a house, and Damien would later reflect that death row was better than the “little slice of hell” that Jack had moved them into. According to Damien, $30 a month was the rent for four rooms with a tin roof, “no running water or electricity to speak of,” and no heat or air conditioning; the family roasted during the summer and froze in the winter. This was a real-life
Tobacco
Road
, and it, along with Damien’s suffocating loneliness during this time, ushered in what would be the worst period of his young life. He would later say that “even death was preferable” to his new life with Jack Echols. Jack agreed: “Damien was about as miserable as a little boy could be.” Damien was also an unhealthy child, according to his adoptive father. “He was not able to go outside because he got really sick. He had a real hard time with his breathing because of all the crops outside the house. Sometimes his eyes and throat swelled up, and he could not swallow or see very good. I think the worst thing for Damien, though, were his headaches. From the time we moved into that house, he had terrible headaches.”

But mostly, Damien was sad. He would go days without sleeping, which brought on deep depressions that his family was unable to lift him out of. He would cry for reasons he couldn’t explain. “I could never figure out how someone could cry so hard and not know why they were sad,” Jack said. “It was really hard to watch Damien go through this.”
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By the time he was eighteen, Damien was deemed totally disabled by the Department of Social Security as a result of his declining mental health.

This was also the period during which Damien discovered the perfect companion and escape vehicles: reading and music. The two would be the only refuge he could find in a world in which he seemingly had no control. Although his musical taste had not yet been bent exclusively toward heavy metal (Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, and Fine Young Cannibals were still acceptable to him), his reading choices came from one genre only: horror. Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Anne Rice were favorites. More significant than this, though, was Damien’s discovery of the stories of the Christian Inquisition. These stories galvanized in Damien’s mind the belief that the world was a dangerous place for him, that it was possible to be demonized, even tortured and killed, “severed limb from limb,” because of the appearance of being different. Worse was his paralyzing fear that he would go to hell because of his increasingly hostile thoughts toward people. He was sure that someday the accusations of a modern-day inquisition would be made against him and that he would lose not only his life but his mortal soul as well.

As he grew, Damien’s emotional problems became chronic and debilitating, so much so that he required hospitalization in West Memphis and again in Little Rock, where he had been diagnosed as suicidal, homicidal, psychotic, delusional, drug abusive, and depressed. It was also noted that he was heavily interested in “magic” and “witchcraft.” In September 1992 he was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon, where the family lived with Joe Hutchison for a time after Jack Echols had been removed from the family’s home in West Memphis amid allegations of sexually abusing Michelle. Damien was reportedly threatening his family and abusing drugs. Joe and Pam also had “concerns regarding Satanism.”

His doctors believed that Damien’s spiritual philosophy was pathological, and as a result, a condition of his release from the Charter Behavioral Health System in Little Rock was that he would “not participate in occult beliefs.” But his condition was probably more serious than that. During the time leading up to May 5, 1993, Damien suffered hallucinations, believing, for example, that he had assumed the personality of one “Morpheus Sandman,” a “hybrid of a human being and a god.” Damien was sure that he was “something that was almost a supreme being that came from a place other people didn’t come from” and had “an entirely different bone structure that was not human.”
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His weight dropped to an alarming 116 pounds, and his nails were filed to a perfect one-and-a-half inches long. By all accounts, Damien was a very sick young man.

Ever since having Damien Echols arrested and hospitalized as a result of his running away with girlfriend Deanna Holcomb, juvenile officer Jerry Driver had been singularly obsessed in his pursuit of Damien. When the doctors at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Portland and his parents agreed that Damien should return to Arkansas for his mental health—he missed his friends and was not adjusting well in Portland—he returned to live with Jack Echols. Upon returning to Arkansas, where he was still on probation, he was picked up and taken to the Juvenile Detention Center in Jonesboro, where he reportedly sucked blood from a cut in another detainee’s arm and rubbed it on his face. His long fingernails—“talons,” Jerry Driver would call them—were filed to sharp points, and he had threatened to use them on another person at least once.
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Driver had him arrested almost immediately upon his return to West Memphis for the “terroristic threatening” and harassment of Deanna Holcombe and had him committed to Charter Hospital in Little Rock for what he believed should be long-term treatment. It was Driver’s subordinate, Steve Jones, who was on hand at the crime scene to indict Damien when Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were pulled out of the drainage ditch—“Looks like Damien has finally killed someone,” he said.
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Nearly 8 months before the murders, Damien was released from Charter after only a two-week stay. He went to live with Jack Echols in his dilapidated trailer in Lakeshore. Jack was less than thrilled to have Damien back and would have refused if Damien hadn’t been a minor whom he had legally adopted. Damien had no money and could not work and would remain penniless until his disability checks started coming. When his mother and father decided to return from Oregon in the fall of 1992, Damien was staying with his pregnant girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Domini Teer. Thrilled to get away from Jack, Damien now spent his time between Domini’s place and his parents’ home; all lived in Lakeshore. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than being in the hospital, in juvenile detention, or with Jack Echols. Best of all, he’d get to hang out again with his best friend Jason Baldwin, whom he had not seen or heard from since moving to Oregon.