Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (3 page)

Byers’s financial situation looked grim in the year before Christopher’s murder, but his legal situation looked remarkably good. Charges—and even convictions—didn’t stick. By Christmas of 1992—five months before the murders—he was again under criminal suspicion, this time for felony theft. Again, a situation that could have landed Byers in prison was resolved to his advantage. And again, the people most closely involved with the investigation—the two West Memphis detectives and prosecuting attorney Brent Davis—would also figure heavily in the murder case ahead.

On December 8, 1992, a loss prevention agent for United Parcel Service notified Detective Bryn Ridge and Detective Sergeant Mike Allen at the West Memphis Police Department that a package containing two gold Rolex watches, valued at $11,000, had been delivered to Byers’s home, but that he now denied having received it. UPS suspected fraud. But when five months passed without progress by the West Memphis police, UPS took its concerns to the Arkansas State Police. That agency was still investigating the missing Rolex watches at the time of the three children’s murders.

W
ITHIN HOURS OF THE BODIES BEING DISCOVERED
, the investigation divided roughly along three lines. These were, essentially, that the children were killed by someone close to them; that they were killed by one or more strangers; or that they were killed, as Gitchell had already hinted, by members of a gang or cult. This unusual third prong of the investigation arose early and was the most sharply focused from the start, while detectives’ efforts in the other two directions often appeared chaotic.

Bumbling exacerbated the problem. Though the bodies were found at about 1:30
P.M
., the coroner was not called until nearly two hours later. By the time he arrived, fly larvae were starting to appear in the victims’ eyes and nostrils. By 3:58
P.M
., when the coroner pronounced the first of the three boys dead, the bodies had been lying in the open air for more than two and a half hours, covered for part of that time with plastic, in temperatures that approached the high eighties. The coroner reported that the water in the ditch was sixty degrees, but after the bodies were removed from it, the rate of their deterioration had been rapid. The coroner noted that it was difficult to assess the extent of rigor mortis due to the way the bodies were tied; that all three showed “signs of post-mortem staining on face and chest”; and that the bodies of Michael and Christopher showed signs that they “may have been sexually assaulted.”

For the next several weeks, the location and condition of the bodies as they were found on the afternoon of May 6 would constitute almost the entirety of what police knew about the murders. The sandbagging of the ditch had turned up nothing. Though detectives had scoured the muddy bottom, they’d found no missing body parts, no underwear, no apparent murder weapon. Their search of the area alongside the stream had provided little more. They’d found one fingerprint in the mud and one partially obliterated footprint, but they’d also found what struck them as a stunning lack of blood. Detectives made casts of the prints, but though dozens of fingerprints would be sent to the crime lab, no match was ever made. Aside from the bodies, the clothing, and the bikes, police took a minuscule amount of evidence from the scene. The absence of physical evidence was surprising, especially for a triple murder that had not involved a gun and in which one of the victims had clearly lost a lot of blood.

Confusion and disorganization compounded the detectives’ problems. Record keeping was unsystematic. Later, questions would be raised about the probe’s scientific integrity as well.
²⁷
The problems that would plague the investigation began to appear soon after the bodies were found. Sometime, apparently within the first day or two, an undated, unsigned “Summary Regarding the Investigation” was printed on police department stationery.
²⁸
The summary reported the names and ages of the victims, the approximate time the boys were last seen alive, and the fact that bicycles belonging to two of the victims had been found submerged “about fifty yards away.” But even that document was not reliable. It reported, for example, that “Moore”—rather than Byers—“had been obviously castrated.” The mistake was repeated again where the summary noted that “analysis has determined that a knife with a serrated edge was used to castrate Moore.”

Another key part of the report was oddly ambiguous. It read: “A crime scene search failed to locate any traces of blood or other evidence which would lead investigators to believe the victims had been murdered in the area where their bodies were located.” That seemed to suggest that detectives’ earliest suspicion was that the boys were murdered somewhere else. The document also noted that “a hammer or a round object was used to create trauma to the head of all three victims”; that “there is a possibility that Byers may have been injected by a hypodermic needle”; and that “the medical examiner also advised that evidence would tend to indicate that the victims had been struck with a belt containing studs or a raised surface.” This was interesting information, but in light of the statement’s obvious errors, its overall credibility had to be questioned.

The medical examiner’s reference to the possibility that the children had been struck by a belt might have focused attention on John Mark Byers, since Byers had acknowledged when he’d reported Christopher missing that he’d given the boy “a few licks” with a belt just before he disappeared. But for two weeks detectives appeared to be disinclined to seriously question Byers. If they checked with the local child abuse agency to see if it had a record on Byers, no report of such an inquiry was ever placed into the file.

While that most logical prong of the investigation, the one looking at family members, was receiving scant attention, and the most unusual one—the possibility that a “gang or cult” had committed the murders—had already been announced to the media, detectives devoted hundreds of hours to examining a third possibility. This was that someone completely unknown to the children—someone not in a gang or a cult, but not in their families either—had mutilated and murdered the children.

As police questioned residents who lived near the woods, news of what kind of questions they were asking spread quickly by word of mouth. Although Gitchell vowed to maintain tight control over information pertaining to the case, information leaked all over. It was no secret, for instance, that detectives had requisitioned a list of customers who’d washed trucks at the Blue Beacon. And after residents reported seeing an unfamiliar white van in the area, it was widely known that police were investigating all vans in the area, white and otherwise. Descriptions of the driver had varied—some witnesses described a middle-aged white male with gray hair; others, a young white male with blond hair—and ultimately the lead had led nowhere.

Alarmed citizens called the police reporting hundreds of tips and leads. Detectives worked frantically, if utterly unsystematically, to follow up most of them. No voice was considered too small to be heard, no suggestion too absurd. On Friday, May 7, the day after the bodies were found, Aaron Hutcheson, an eight-year-old classmate of the victims, told police that he’d seen Michael Moore talking after school to a black man in a maroon car.
²⁹
According to Aaron, the man was tall, had yellow teeth, and wore a T-shirt with “writing on it.” Aaron reported that the man told Michael that his mother had asked him to bring Michael home, and that Michael had climbed into the car and ridden off with the man. Though no tall black man with yellow teeth and a maroon car was ever located, the report was a perplexing one. Aaron was a close friend of Michael’s and could reasonably have been with him immediately after school. The boy’s details were specific. And there seemed no reason for him to have concocted such a story. On the other hand, police knew that Michael’s mother, Dana Moore, had sent no one to pick up her son. And why would she have? The Moores’ house was on the lot next to the school. She told police that Michael had come immediately home. Aaron’s report sounded like the product of a child’s frightened imagination, and the police soon dismissed it. But as the detectives’ frustrations mounted, they would visit young Aaron again—and in later interviews they would take his accounts more seriously.

For now, Gitchell’s detectives cast a wide and imaginative net in their search for the killer or killers. When someone suggested that the way the boys were tied—wrists-to-ankles, behind their backs—was like the way some American soldiers had been tied when captured in Vietnam, the police checked hospitals for reports of veterans in the area who might have been treated for injuries to their penises. They checked area carpet cleaners, looking for any who had cleaned up bloodstains. They investigated a man who had once been arrested for performing surgical sex change operations without a medical license. They compiled descriptions of vagrants, strangers, mental patients, loiterers, and hoboes. They investigated one man who was said to have made “vulgar remarks” to two young girls, another who had reportedly drilled holes through his apartment wall to spy on his neighbors, and another who had aroused suspicion by failing to attend church for the past few weeks. They filed reports on men who were said to have tortured and killed animals, or who had confided having murderous fantasies, or who were said to be into child pornography, or whom a tipster had described as “brutal.” They also saw to it that the outline of the crime—which was pretty much all they knew—was reported on the television show
America’s Most Wanted
. As news of the murders spread, police across the nation tried to help by relaying information about hundreds of cases that they thought might be related.

On Wednesday, May 12, six days after the bodies were found, Gitchell’s detectives belatedly tested the site by the ditch for blood. They sprayed Luminol, a product that glows luminescent in the dark in places where it has interacted with blood. Results of the test were sketchy—and minimal.
³⁰
By the end of the first week, police found themselves struggling to separate information from the tide of rumor and speculation being phoned in by the public. A woman reported that on the evening the boys disappeared, while driving along the service road in the vicinity of the Blue Beacon between 6 and 6:30
P.M
., she’d seen all three of the victims riding on two bicycles. If that report was true, it would place the boys at the opposite entrance to the woods from the one where other reports had placed them last. But some reports were more credible than others. A narcotics detective in Memphis reported that both John Mark and Melissa Byers had worked as confidential informants for both the Memphis police and the sheriff’s department in Shelby County, where Memphis was located. The information was potentially important—if, indeed, the West Memphis police did not know it already. It suggested that the mother and stepfather of the most seriously brutalized child were involved, some way or another, with criminal activity. But if the West Memphis police followed up on this lead, they entered no record of it in the file.

Another interesting tip also pointed to Memphis—and to a connection with drugs. A week and a half after the murders, police in West Memphis were told that four days after the bodies were found, two young Memphis men, Chris Morgan and Brian Holland, had left town abruptly and had moved to Oceanside, California. When West Memphis police checked on the two they learned that Morgan’s parents and his former girlfriend lived in West Memphis, near where the victims lived, and that he had once had an ice cream route in the victims’ neighborhood. Detectives asked police in Oceanside to pick up the two for questioning. The officers in California complied, and on May 17, Morgan and Holland were given polygraph examinations. The tests indicated that both men were deceptive in their answers to questions about the murders. Oceanside police reported that at one point, after several hours of questioning, Morgan had become upset, blurted out that he had been hospitalized for alcohol and drug abuse, and stated that he might have committed the murders. He’d then immediately recanted the statement. The Oceanside police sent blood and urine samples from both men to the West Memphis police. But there the matter seemed to have ended. There was little further investigation of Morgan and Holland. The file would contain no explanation as to why such an apparently serious lead had been dropped.

Gitchell, meanwhile, was demanding more information from the state’s crime laboratory and the medical examiner’s office. But he was frustrated there, as well. An associate medical examiner performed autopsies on the boys the day after their bodies were found, but weeks passed and Gitchell did not receive the reports. Analysts at the crime lab provided a little more help. After examining the shoestrings binding the bodies, analyst Lisa Sakevicius sent Gitchell a report indicating that the knots used to tie Christopher and Michael were all “the same,” while those used on Stevie were “all dissimilar to each other and to the other two.” Sakevicius added that she had found skin, and possibly cuticles, in one of the ligatures and that there was a strong chance that this skin was “not that of the boys.” But no further information was forthcoming about whose skin it might be. There was, however, this: Sakevicius reported that a fragment of “Negroid hair” had been found in the sheet that was wrapped around Christopher’s body.

Though detectives had not approached the boys’ families as the starting point of their investigation, they had at least two important reasons to talk with the relatives. First, the families were valuable sources of information. And second, they were—or should have been—prime suspects.
³¹
Of the victims’ three sets of natural parents, only Todd and Dana Moore were still married to each other. The Moores had one other child, a ten-year-old daughter, Dawn. On May 8, three days after the murders, Detective Ridge questioned the Moores. They had little to add to the mystery of the murders. But a friend of Dawn’s told Ridge that she had seen Stevie and Michael going into Robin Hood on the evening they disappeared.
³²
She said she saw their bicycles parked by the road at the entrance to the woods. Ridge wrote in his notes that the girl had stated “that she never saw Christopher that day.”

Stevie’s parents, Pam and Steve Branch, had divorced when Stevie was one year old. The divorce decree awarded custody of Stevie to Pam and allowed Steve Branch to visit the boy only when she was present. Steve Branch had been ordered to pay $250 per month in child support, but by the time little Stevie was seven, his father was $13,000 in arrears. Branch’s wages were being garnisheed, and at the time of Stevie’s murder, the state of Arkansas was also after him to collect some back taxes. Branch had once been charged with theft, though the charge was later dropped at the victim’s request. But none of this background on Stevie’s family was included in the murder investigation file, and notes of police interviews with Branch, or Pam, or Pam’s new husband, Terry Hobbs, were minimal.