Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (54 page)

BOOK: Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three

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²⁰⁵Nelson told defense attorneys that Hobbs had first used the phrase “buried under water” in a conversation with her and that he became “annoyed” or “bored” whenever the subject of Stevie’s death came up. According to Nelson, Hobbs told her that he had discovered the bodies before police did but didn’t say why he’d never told anybody. Nelson claimed that she had only recently discovered that Hobbs had not told Pam that Stevie was still missing while she was at work and that he had not told police that he had discovered the bodies.

²⁰⁶Jared, “Boy’s Mother Recalls Fateful Day, Part 4”.July 6, 2010, as reprinted at
http://wm3org.typepad.com/blog/2010/07/boys-mother-recalls-fateful-day-part-4-2.html

²⁰⁷Damien Echols’s direct appeal for a rehearing had been denied by the ASSC on February 24, 2005.

²⁰⁸Worth Sparkman, “Arkansas Supreme Court Oral Arguments to Be Broadcast Online,”
ArkansasBusiness.com
,
September 14, 2010.

²⁰⁹None of the footage of the exchange was used in
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
. Video filmed by another cameraman not associated with HBO or Creative Thinking was at one time viewable on youtube.com. It has since been removed without explanation. The introduction to the video contained text accusing Mr. Byers of drug use and may have been removed for legal reasons.

²¹⁰Leveritt wrote the following passage in
Devil’s Knot
:

[The author’s 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.”

This author (Greg Day) interviewed May Carter in February 2007 when she was ninety-seven years old. May and her husband Carol “C. R.” (not C.L.) Carter (101 years old) were in the Woodbriar Nursing Home in Marked Tree. Deputy Carter was unable to come to the phone at the time, but his wife had a near-perfect memory, and without any prompting, she recalled the incident with Mark Byers in the same detail as her husband had to Leveritt when he was interviewed for
Devil’s Knot
. Mark has said that Deputy Carter—and his wife—may be remembering Danny or Larry
Myers
, brothers he said were in trouble all the time, or perhaps Duane
Byars
, another youth in town known to cause trouble. Larry Myers was declared a fugitive on April 23, 1997, after he gunned down one Poinsett County sheriff’s deputy and wounded another during a traffic stop just south of Marked Tree. Myers killed himself before he could be captured. Myers was born in 1951, which would have made him approximately twenty-two years old at the time Carter investigated the call. Both the Marked Tree police and the Poinsett County Sheriff’s offices claim that they do not keep records dating back to the time of the incident. Friends and family members interviewed by this author gave this story no credibility at all. Whoever Carter remembered arresting, it wasn’t Mark Byers. Not only did Mark love his parents dearly, but the idea of sixteen-year-old Mark holding George Byers hostage with anything less than a howitzer was laughable. Leveritt has acknowledged that she sought no corroboration for her story since she had obtained it from a “former public official” and that the story was obtained “long before” she wrote her book, according to e-mail exchanged between Leveritt and the author in March 2007.

²¹¹Jill Zeman Bleed, “New Hearing Ordered for 3 in Ark. Scout’s Death,”
Associated Press
, November 4, 2010.

²¹²Mara Leveritt, “Briefs Set for West Memphis Three Hearings,”
Arkansas Times
, January 4, 2011. Although the hearings were public, some of the information in this chapter was gleaned from Leveritt’s articles in the
Times
.

²¹³Mara Leveritt, “The Big Ask,”
Arkansas Times
, August 24, 2011.

²¹⁴From a March 21, 2012 e-mail from Mr. Braga to the author.

²¹⁵Allison D. Redlich and Asil Ali
O
zdogru, “Alford Pleas in the Age of Innocence,”
Behavioral Science and the Law
(
2009).

²¹⁶Stephanos Bibas, “Harmonizing Substantive Criminal Law Values and Criminal Procedure: The Case of Alford and Nolo Contendere Pleas.”
Frontline
website, PBS. (Originally published in the
Cornell Law Review
88, no. 6 [July 2003].)

²¹⁷Damien Echols,
Almost Home
. Lincoln, NE iUniverse 2005

²¹⁸From Heather Crawford’s two-part interview that aired on October 29 and November 2, 2011, on WKAT-ABC TV, Little Rock.

²¹⁹Sharon Waxman, “Out of Prison, West Memphis 3 Ex-Con Seeks Justice,”
The Wrap
(Reuters), January 12, 2011.

²²⁰Qtd. in Suzi Parker, “West Memphis Three now must learn how to live as free men”
Christian Science Monitor
, August 2011.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0820/West-Memphis-Three-now-must-learn-how-to-live-as-free-men

*
Not his real name.

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Not his real name.

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Not her real name.

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Not his real name.

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Not his real name.

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Not his real name.

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Not his real name.

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