Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (6 page)

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

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

Byers’s answer, and more importantly his
reaction
, satisfied Ridge, and Mark was crossed off the list of suspects, at least for the time being. In the years following the convictions of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley, no one would come under more intense public scrutiny than John Mark Byers. In some circles, he still does face this. The effort to try to link Byers with the murder of his son and to implicate him in the death of his second wife—Christopher’s mother—would at times border on the obsessive. If there was “Damien Echols tunnel vision” prior to the convictions, the post-conviction focus among Echols’s supporters would fall squarely on Mark Byers.

The remaining suspects on the investigators’ list were quickly eliminated. The former West Memphis ice cream vendor who blurted out during questioning in Oceanside, California, “I might have blacked out and killed the three kids!” was deemed an improbable suspect and was never linked to the crime. The suspected peeping Tom who made a statement to the effect that he had heard the children had been sexually mutilated was eliminated as well.
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James Martin, a convicted child molester from Marion, was brought in for questioning and gave police quite a bit of information, some of it quite disturbing, about how the killer or killers might have felt during the murders, where the children might have been killed (Martin subscribed to the “dump site” theory), and how and why they were tied up—in short, applying his own perverted mind to the crimes to help police find the perpetrator(s). Most of what Martin had to say didn’t square with what the police already knew, but he did offer this pearl of prescient wisdom: “If you have more [than] two people, somebody is going to talk.” And talk someone did.

Victoria
Hutcheson

Thirty years old, tall, and slender with wavy red hair and green eyes, Victoria Hutcheson cut a striking figure. A self-described “poor little divorced woman whose husband just ran off . . . living in a little gross trailer park,” Vicki was to make an enormous impact on the case.
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Up until a month before the killings, she and her second husband, along with her eight-year-old son Aaron and his ten-year-old brother, lived just down the street from the Byers family on East Barton. In April 1993, the couple separated, and Vicki moved from West Memphis to Highland Trailer Park in nearby Marion. It was there that she would meet a tough but dim-witted teenager known around the trailer park as “Little Jessie.”

Jessie was seventeen at the time, and he and Vicki became close friends. Jessie dropped by her trailer frequently. She apparently lost track of her age because she often bought liquor for Jessie and even had him over for drinks. He spoke of another teen he knew over in Lakeshore Estates named Damien. This Damien was very “weird,” he said, into witchcraft, satanism, animal sacrifice, and blood drinking. Damien was involved in a “cult,” and Misskelley said that he himself belonged to this same group. There were up to twenty people, mostly teenagers, who would meet in the woods at night and kill dogs and cats, with new initiates being required to eat meat from the “sacrifices.” It was fantastic stuff, and Vicki wasn’t sure she bought any of it.

Aaron Hutcheson was the same age as Christopher Byers, and the two were classmates at Weaver Elementary School. They also spent a great deal of time together after school, some of it exploring the woods that surrounded Ten Mile Bayou, despite Christopher’s parents’ rule that Robin Hood was off-limits. The statements of Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson, wild and unbelievable at times, would nonetheless lead the police to Jessie Misskelley Jr. and the incredible confession he would eventually make.

Vicki Hutcheson had legal troubles of her own. She had a history of writing bad checks in Arkansas, so it was not really surprising that hours before the bodies of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch were discovered on May 6, Vicki was at the police station in Marion. She was being questioned regarding a $200 credit card overcharge at the truck stop where she worked, a job from which she was soon fired. Vicki had heard from a neighbor that two of Aaron’s playmates had gone missing the night before, so she had taken him out of school, stopped by the Moores’ house to see what was going on, and then headed to the Marion Police Department for a scheduled appointment.

During their May 6 meeting, Marion police detective Donald Bray struck up a conversation with Aaron and discovered that Aaron was “best friends” with the three boys from Weaver Elementary who had gone missing the night before. He and his friends, Aaron told Bray, had built a “tree house” in the woods at Robin Hood that they frequented after school and on weekends. Though Vicki said she was aware of this tree house and had even seen it a time or two, on this day she heard for the first time a tale of strange goings-on that took place in the woods.
²⁷
Aaron and his friends had been “spying” on five men who gathered in the woods. These men had knives and painted themselves black. The boys would watch them as the men sat around a fire speaking “Spanish” and singing “songs about the devil.” The men were often nude while dancing around the fire, and according to Aaron, they put “their ‘peters’ into each other’s butts.”

When Vicki was interviewed by Detective Bryn Ridge on May 28, she said that Aaron had told her he was actually present when his three playmates were murdered. Unfortunately, Aaron—and his mother as well, it so happened—had a vivid imagination, and he added more detail each time he told the story, even going as far as to say that he had not only witnessed the murder of his three playmates, but that he himself had been tied up by Misskelley and his friends too, only he had managed to escape. During interviews on three separate days—June 2, 8, and 9—it became clear that it was impossible to separate Aaron’s imaginings from reality. Nearly a month went by between Donald Bray’s first meeting with Aaron on May 6 and his second on June 2. Police were buried under the weight of the investigation, and this could account for the gap. It is more likely, however, that they simply didn’t believe him.

During her interviews with Bray, Vicki quickly made a connection between the murders and Damien Echols. With Bray’s blessing, she decided to “play detective” by using her new friend, Jessie Misskelley, to lure Echols into a relationship, through which she could learn more about his mysterious beliefs and activities and any knowledge he might have about the murders. Her motivation, she said, was that she “loved” the three little boys. “I wanted their killers caught.” That a substantial reward for information was being offered must also have entered her mind, though she would always deny it.
²⁸
Vicki began cruising Lakeshore Estates in hopes of catching a glimpse of Damien. By asking other kids around Lakeshore about Echols, she was able to spot him, which turned out to be rather easy; Echols, with his jet-black (his natural color) goth-styled hair, always wore black, including a long trench coat that he wore even during the sultry mid-South summers. She told Jessie that she’d seen Damien, thought he was “hot,” and would like to go out with him. Could Jessie arrange it? Misskelley was reluctant; Echols, he reminded her, was very weird, even “sick.” But Jessie relented and arranged for Echols to meet Vicki at her trailer.
²⁹

Once they met, their conversation turned quickly to the murders, with Damien freely admitting that the police had “accused” him of—not questioned him about—the killings on two separate occasions, with one interrogation lasting eight hours. When Vicki asked him why out of all the people to question, they would accuse him, he said, according to Vicki, “Because I’m evil.” Although it might have seemed reasonable at this point to back away from Echols, Vicki Hutcheson got in deeper. With Vicki leaving books on witchcraft and the occult lying around her trailer (books she had borrowed with Donald Bray’s library card), it wasn’t long before Damien acknowledged his interest in the subjects. When Vicki expressed an interest in becoming a “witch,” Damien invited Vicki to go with him to an “esbat”—which she described in her statement to police as an “occult satanic meeting”—that was being held in the woods in Turrell, some twenty miles to the north. She enthusiastically agreed, and the two drove up there the next night. When they arrived at the site, a bizarre scene was unfolding. Ten or so people, all teens, their faces and arms painted black, were taking off their clothes and “touching each other.” As the night progressed, Vicki became increasingly nervous and finally panicked. “I could see what was going to happen,” she said. She insisted that Damien take her home, and he readily agreed. Little Jessie, who had gone with them, stayed behind.

Vicki Hutcheson would prove to be one of the most controversial figures in the investigation. Her accounts of events didn’t square with the known facts. For example, she told police that Damien had driven her and Jessie Misskelley to the esbat in a red Ford Escort, though it was verified that the Echols family did not own a car matching Vicki’s description (the family owned a blue Dodge Aries) and that Damien didn’t drive. The police had hidden a recording device in Vicki’s home to record her conversations with Damien. “They put the recorder under the bed,” she said. “It was a fancy one with several reels of tape so that one would begin when the other was filled.” According to Hutcheson’s statements in a newspaper article in 2004, Damien said nothing incriminating. He said that his “weird” behavior was a “defense mechanism.” When Vicki asked what that meant, Echols replied, “It means leave me the fuck alone.” Although Vicki allegedly heard the tape and found the quality excellent—she said she could hear everyone in the room clearly—the police said the quality was unacceptable as evidence. According to Vicki, they later said they lost the tapes.
³⁰
She was unable to have her statement corroborated by anyone, and the kooky, ever-changing stories of little Aaron were too wild and inconsistent for police to rely on. In the end, most of Hutcheson’s “detective work” would be for naught. Although she was allowed to testify to her attendance at the esbat, anything that had gone on there—teenagers with faces painted black, touching each other, taking their clothes off—was determined by the judge to be prejudicial to Misskelley. Aaron never testified in open court; the prosecution just didn’t know what the boy would say next. It was also obvious that he was making up most, if not all, of his story, and he couldn’t be put on the stand only to perjure himself. It was a blow to the prosecution, given that Aaron’s story would have provided desperately needed corroboration for Misskelley’s confession. About the only thing that police would be able to use from Vicki or Aaron Hutcheson was the information that had led them to Jessie and a snippet of tape from Aaron’s statement that had evoked a strong reaction from Misskelley and led to his initial confession. As it turned out, the jury was able to accept Misskelley’s confession at face value.

The
Confession

The police already had an interest in Damien Echols; Jerry Driver and Steve Jones had made sure of that. They also had the name of Jason Baldwin, who was a nearly constant companion of Echols and whose name had come up frequently as they questioned local teens about Damien. Now, thanks to Hutcheson, they were interested in Jessie Misskelley as well. He did not have Echols’s notoriety, but according to Jessie himself, the police knew him well. “They knew me since 1980, when I was five years old, ’cause that’s when I first started getting in trouble with the police. I got in trouble for stealing and fighting.”
³¹
On June 3, Detective Mike Allen made the trip out to Highland to bring Misskelley in for questioning. He was not at home, according to Big Jessie’s current love interest, Lee Rush, who answered the door at Misskelley’s trailer. Rush sent Allen to see the boy’s father at Jim’s Diesel, where the senior Misskelley worked as a mechanic. After taking a short drive in his pickup truck, Big Jessie returned to Jim’s with his son and made no objection to the detective taking Little Jessie back to the police station for questioning, where they arrived at 10:00 a.m.

Misskelley again seemed more than willing to give up Damien Echols. He told the detectives right off the bat that he had heard that Damien and someone named Robert Burch had committed the murders. He gave police a mixed-up version of what he had told Vicki. Although he acknowledged that Damien drank blood and was suspected of involvement in the murders, he initially denied any knowledge of satanism or cult activity and also denied any knowledge of or involvement in the murders. It was at this point that Ridge and Allen, believing that Jessie was “not quite telling the truth,” decided to inform him of his rights and ask him whether he wanted to waive those rights; he said he did. They also wanted to get Jessie on the polygraph machine immediately. Because Jessie was only seventeen, they would need Big Jessie’s permission to administer the test, and the police quickly located him. Big Jessie had no problem with Little Jessie taking the polygraph and was not with his son during the interrogation by police; Jessie was no stranger to the system, and his father figured he’d be fine. He did, however, sign a “permission slip” giving his approval for Junior to submit to the polygraph.
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With Misskelley Sr.’s approval, the polygraph was administered to Jessie by Officer Bill Durham beginning at approximately 11:30 a.m. After asking some standard irrelevant questions, Durham got specific. “Have you ever sold dope?” This was a control question. The rest were all considered “relevant.” “Have you ever taken part in any devil worship?” “Have you ever been in Robin Hood Hills?” “Are you involved in the murder of those three boys?” “Do you know who killed those three boys?” After Misskelley answered all these questions in the negative, Durham informed Gary Gitchell of his interpretation of the polygraph results: “He’s lying his ass off!” Gitchell and Ridge took over from there; it was 12:40 p.m. In Gitchell’s words, “We were all fairly jubilant at that point.”