Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (35 page)

At 9:40
P.M
., a team of local and state investigators began a search of the Byerses’ house. While the search was being conducted, Byers stood outside the house with a woman who was identified in the state police reports as Mandy Beasley. One investigator videotaped the interior of the house while another took still photographs. The lead investigator dictated a careful description of the single-story wood-frame house, paying special attention to the bedroom where the ambulance workers had found Melissa. A third state police investigator prepared a diagram of the “crime scene.” In the bedroom, they seized as evidence three towels and a shirt, all found on the bed; “suspected marijuana and paraphernalia”; a couple of glasses, one of which was believed to contain peach schnapps; and “seven different types of prescription medication prescribed for Melissa Byers,” all of which the investigators listed.
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At midnight, the lead investigator was still at work, interviewing the neighbor who had called the ambulance.
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The neighbor told the investigator that Byers had called him a little after 5
P.M
. The neighbor said Byers “advised him that he could not wake up Melissa and asked him to come over and see if she had a pulse.” The neighbor said he asked Byers “why he didn’t call an ambulance” but that Byers had dismissed the question, insisting that he “come over—come through the kitchen door.”

According to the investigator’s report, the neighbor said that “he went immediately to the bedroom and saw that Melissa was totally naked, lying on the far side of the bed on her back. He advised her mouth was wide open, her eyes were closed, she was totally limp, and her arms were down by her side. [He] advised he checked for a pulse, lifted her eyelids, and looked at her eyes. He advised that he told John Mark to do CPR on her and he started it. He advised that she gurgled up some fluids, and he told Mark he was going to call EMS [emergency medical service].” After the neighbor placed the call, he saw that Mark and his stepson Ryan Clark, now sixteen, were trying to put pants on Melissa. The neighbor reported that when he asked Mark if Melissa was dead, Mark told him no, but that as Mark made the pronouncement, “Ryan had a funny, eerie look on his face.”

The neighbor also advised the officer “that Mark was not totally hysterical, but he was worried and concerned. He advised when the EMTs got to the residence, Mark kept telling them, ‘They’ve got to bring her back.’” Ryan, meanwhile, “kept mumbling something, and he did not seem coherent.” Ryan left the house before the ambulance arrived. The neighbor reported “that when he left, he almost flipped the car over, he left so fast, spinning gravel….”

The neighbor told the investigator for the state police that he followed the ambulance to the hospital, where he met with John Mark Byers. “He advised that at the hospital, Mark told him he was afraid Melissa had overdosed on a drug that is in the streets in Memphis.” The neighbor said “that Byers told him it could be bought for fifty dollars on the street. He told him the name of the drug. He could not remember it, but thought it started with the letter ‘D.’ [The neighbor] advised that John Mark Byers also told him he thought her death was a drug overdose and that they were going to accuse him of smothering her. He advised that Byers did not clarify who ‘they’ were.”

That same night, the state police investigator also had Byers outline in writing his activities in the hours preceding Melissa’s death. The statement was slim on detail. Byers said principally that he and his wife had taken a nap, and that when he’d gotten up, he’d found he could not wake her.
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The focus of the investigation into Melissa’s “possible homicide” shifted to the Arkansas Medical Examiner’s Office, where, it was hoped, an autopsy would explain the mysterious death. But just as Inspector Gitchell in West Memphis had spent weeks in frustration waiting for autopsy results, the state police investigator and the sheriff now waited for the medical examiner’s findings on Melissa. When five months had passed with no word from the state crime lab, the state police investigator called to inquire.
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The investigator finally received the autopsy report on September 30, 1996—a full six months after Melissa’s death.

But the report was of little help. And its conclusion—or more precisely, its failure to arrive at one—was unusual. Despite the fact that Melissa’s body had been taken to the crime lab immediately, the Arkansas medical examiner reported that his office had been unable to determine either the physical cause of her death or the legal manner of her death; that is, whether it had resulted from natural causes, or been an accident, a suicide, or a homicide. The sheriff issued a press release explaining that though drugs had been found in Melissa’s body, there were “not enough to be lethal.” Still, the sheriff said, the case would remain open—and the autopsy report would be sealed.

The investigation into Melissa’s death was not the only matter relating to Byers and the law that was taking some unusual turns. On August 28, 1996, five months after Melissa’s death and a month before the medical examiner released her autopsy report, John Mark Byers appeared in court to face the residential burglary charge. He pleaded no contest to the charge, whereupon the prosecutor agreed to a deal that would allow Byers to stay out of prison.
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Byers still had no visible means of support beyond his meager disability income. Nonetheless, the prosecutor announced that he had agreed not to send Byers to prison if he met two conditions: (1) that Byers pay $20,000 in restitution to the woman whose house he’d burgled, and (2) that Byers would leave town and never return. Specifically, Byers was ordered “not to remain, reside, or enter” any of the five counties that comprised the north Arkansas judicial district. Byers assured the judge that he would be moving, and the judge, in turn, warned Byers that his no-contest plea would be immediately changed to guilty if he ever returned to the district or was arrested again, in which case he could be charged as a habitual offender.
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The decision to banish Byers marked another odd episode in his highly atypical history with courts and prosecutors. The condition of banishment, or exile, is almost never imposed because the Arkansas constitution forbids it.
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In December 1997, a year after Byers left the judicial district, a reporter for the
Arkansas Times
looked further into his wife’s unexplained death. The investigation into it had stalled, though the case remained open. Although the medical examiner’s office and the local prosecutor refused to allow either the reporter or Jessie’s lawyer to see the autopsy report, the reporter obtained a copy from the state police. It noted that Melissa weighed 211 pounds at her death; that she had “Christopher” tattooed on her right upper back; and that, in addition to the puncture marks investigators noticed, both of her wrists bore “multiple, well-healed scars.” The toxicology lab reported finding no alcohol in her system and no opiates in her blood, though traces of some of her prescribed medications were detected. The report said her urine tested positive for marijuana and hydromorphone, the synthetic narcotic commonly known as Dilaudid. (Dilaudid is highly prized on the black market, and its street price at the time of Melissa’s death was about $50 per tablet.) Melissa did not have a prescription for Dilaudid.

The reporter noted with some surprise that in the autopsy report’s section for the examiner’s opinion, hydromorphone was not mentioned. Rather, the conclusions repeatedly identified a different drug, hydrocodone, as the one that was found in the urine. When contacted about the discrepancy, the state crime lab’s director blamed it on a typographical error.
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When questioned about the numerous puncture wounds on Melissa’s body, he said that they might have resulted from medical intervention after the ambulance was called. According to the director, there was “not any way to tell if the wounds were two hours or six hours old” and the pathologist who’d performed the autopsy believed that “all those wounds were probably done at the hospital.”
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Interest in Melissa’s death rekindled briefly in late 1997, when state police investigators interviewed three people, all of whom had reported suspicions relating to John Mark Byers.
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But little was heard from him. When the
Arkansas Times
reporter contacted him in Jonesboro, where he had moved after his extraordinary (and apparently illegal) banishment from north-central Arkansas, he professed never to have known about Melissa “injecting any drugs.” He said she had died of “a broken heart,” and that “after Christopher passed away, she gave up her will to live.”

When asked about himself, Byers said that a brain tumor had left him “100 percent disabled” and that he suffered “terrible migraine headaches” because of it. At times, he said, his head “felt like a medicine ball, like there are sirens going off in my ears, and like a camera’s going off in my face.” He said he was “living below the poverty level” and that, because of his financial condition, he hadn’t had to pay the woman who’d been burglarized. “I’m judgment-proof,” he said. “I’m indigent.”

John Mark Byers derided his former neighbors in the mountainous north Arkansas region, calling them “backward,” “narrow-minded,” and “banjo-picking hillbillies.” He said, “I was railroaded up there.” But mostly Byers bemoaned the loss of his wife and child and the good life he said he’d once had. “This is a deep story,” he said. “I was a thirty-second-degree Mason. I went from my big fine home and being a respectable citizen to feeling like I’m just an outcast thrown to the bottom of a pit.” More than once he reminded the reporter, “I am the victim here. Let’s not forget that.” As for the murders of Christopher, Michael, and Stevie, Byers had this to say: “Anyone that takes anyone’s life has got to be someone that’s very depraved and very twisted. Not retarded sick, mean sick. They must have some type of problem that’s deeper than I can imagine.”

Byers’s tale of woe soon grew longer, however. Just as trouble followed him from West Memphis to Cherokee Village, it followed him to Jonesboro. There, in June 1998, in the same courthouse where Judge Burnett had sentenced Damien and Jason, another judge convicted Byers on a misdemeanor hot-check charge. But again, no punishment ensued. According to court records, Byers received only a twelve-month suspended sentence, despite the assurance he’d been given upon his banishment from the adjoining district that he’d face prosecution as a habitual offender if he committed another crime.

It appeared that Byers was not only “judgment-proof,” as he claimed, but incarceration-proof as well. But then, on April 19, 1999, Byers dialed a wrong number.

At about 9:20
P.M
., an Arkansas State Police trooper was standing beside a car he’d stopped, issuing a citation, when his personal cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the caller’s voice, but he became intrigued when the caller invited him to “come by his house and buy some more stuff.” The trooper later said he thought it was one of his buddies “messing” with him, but he was cautious enough to ask, “What kind of stuff?”

“Pot,” the caller replied. “Good stuff.” Now the trooper was certain that the caller had no idea whose number he had dialed. But by the same token, the trooper had no idea who the caller was. According to the trooper’s report, he was able to find out the caller’s address by claiming that he was “busy with a girl” at the moment and couldn’t come himself; he asked if he could send a friend, a guy by the name of Jeff. The caller chuckled and agreed. Then, feigning a bad memory, the trooper said he couldn’t remember the name of the streets that led to the caller’s house, which he’d need to give Jeff directions. The caller helpfully outlined the route to his door. The trooper said Jeff would be right over. He hung up, then contacted undercover narcotics officers working in Jonesboro. A few minutes later, they showed up at the address. Byers was waiting outside. One of the officers, who introduced himself as Jeff, later reported that he’d “made a purchase of narcotics from the subject,” after which Byers was promptly arrested. The trooper said that after hustling Byers to the police station, the officer called him back. The trooper laughed. “He said, ‘You should have seen the look on his face when we told him who he’d called.’”
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Byers was charged with selling Xanax, a controlled prescription drug. He appeared again in circuit court, where, once again, he was convicted. This time he was sentenced to five years in prison. But as usual, he was not sent to prison. According to the circuit clerk’s records, the judge
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suspended the five-year sentence. Byers was placed on twenty months probation, and ordered to pay a fine.

It looked like Byers was going to avoid prison again. But this time, the prosecutor
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who’d accepted the banishment deal decided that something had to be done. Upon learning of the Jonesboro drug conviction, he made good on the promise to change Byers’s plea of no contest in the residential burglary case to a plea of guilty. On May 26, 1999—five weeks after his misplaced phone call—sheriff’s deputies drove Byers to the state prison unit at Pine Bluff, to begin serving an eight-year sentence.

For the first time in his criminal career—a career that included a conviction for felony terroristic threatening, admitted guilt in the $20,000 Rolex fraud, drug and weapons arrests, hot-check convictions, and a conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor—Byers was behind bars. But though a drug conviction had precipitated Byers’s trip to prison, no reference to that conviction would appear in his prison records. Instead, records at the Arkansas Department of Correction would indicate that Byers was serving time only on his burglary and theft convictions from the judicial district where he’d been living with Melissa before she died. Byers still had not served a day in prison for any crime from prosecutor Brent Davis’s district—or for any crime relating to drugs.
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