Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (10 page)

Sandra

Mark first met Sandra in 1976 while visiting his sister in Jackson. Sandra attended Flag Chapel Baptist Church as well, and she and Mark soon became friendly. When Mark returned to Jackson to live with his sister in early 1977, he rekindled his friendship with Sandra, and the two began dating. Six months later, on June 2, 1977, they were married. One could easily argue that Mark Byers was not prepared for marriage. He was barely twenty years old, and it had been only eight months since his overdose in Marked Tree. He had spent the year prior to that singing in a rock-and-roll band and selling pot, culminating in his abrupt banishment from Jonesboro. But ready or not, he and Sandra started their life together.

Sandra’s preparedness as a wife, mother, and homemaker was also questionable. She knew next to nothing about food preparation. On one occasion, when she decided to cook a ham dinner for Mark, she needed instruction as to how to prepare the meat. Mark told her, “Baste the meat in orange marmalade, place cloves all around, add spices, and cook it at 350 degrees for five hours.” Apparently, Sandra didn’t realize that ham was available in a form other than “cold cuts,” so she bought several pounds of sliced ham from the delicatessen. When Mark came home, the place had “the burnt smell of death.” Sandra had taken the thin slices of sandwich meat and cooked them per Mark’s instruction. “The inside of the oven looked like something had blown up and died in it.” She was inconsolable, unable to understand what she had done wrong. From that point on, Mark did most of the cooking.

Mark was an avid outdoorsman, having spent most of his life hunting and fishing in and around Marked Tree, and of course he wanted to bring Sandra into this world, where they could enjoy nature together. One summer the couple embarked on a fishing trip to Beaver Lake, Arkansas. An exceptionally beautiful location created by the damming of the White River, the lake is part of the Hobbs State Park Conservation Area. On a good day, anglers at Beaver Lake can expect to land Kentucky bass, walleye, white bass, and the occasional striper. This is exactly what Mark had in mind when he and Sandra packed up the car for a weekend outdoors; the reality was much different. Not only was Sandra
not
outdoorsy; she was downright dangerous in a boat. The first day out, she hadn’t gotten her sea legs yet and nearly capsized the boat. She also had difficulty keeping clear of Mark’s casting and managed to get hooked in the head with a lure. Panicking, she began to scream and soon drew the attention of the other fishermen on the lake, who came closer to see what was going on. Crowds of boats and screaming women do not attract fish, and they caught nothing.

Back at the cabin, Mark grilled some steaks while Sandra prepared some fried potatoes inside. Mark isn’t sure exactly how it transpired, but somehow Sandra managed to set the cabin ablaze.

Three years into the marriage, Mark and Sandra started their family. John Andrew was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on November 14, 1980, when Mark was working for Gordon’s Jewelers. Because Mark had been raised in a stable family and had learned parenting skills from “the best mother and father anyone could ask for,” his transition into fatherhood was fairly smooth. He enjoyed being a dad, and Sandra was a competent mother, though she still couldn’t do very much in the kitchen. Mark was doing well at Gordon’s, and the company soon promoted him into a position with more responsibility in Mobile, Alabama. The couple lived there for two and a half years, Mark working his way up in the company and Sandra making a home and raising “Andy.” Sandra was content with working at home, with two notable exceptions.

Sandra had decided that being a fry cook at McDonald’s was a pretty easy job and would offer her the chance to make a little money and also get out of the house for a little while during the day. For whatever reason, she soon lost the job, as was the case with a bank teller position she tried next. She decided to settle for making dried flower arrangements and selling them alongside Mark’s custom jewelry at flea markets and fairs on the weekends.

The thirty-two Gordon’s stores that Mark managed in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida were consistently profitable, and the company wanted to promote him to a position with more responsibility. In 1981, Mark was offered a promotion to a larger region. Gordon’s wanted him to relocate to Houston to take control of 128 stores at a higher salary. However, another manager was being moved into Mark’s current position, and if Mark refused the transfer and opted instead to remain in Mobile, he would have to accept a demotion to store manager. For Mark, this was a no-brainer, but Sandra would have none of it.
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She didn’t want to be any farther away than she already was from her mother in Jackson. So once again, the couple moved, this time to Memphis, where Mark had contacts in the jewelry business and would be able to set up a repair service in an established store. He worked in a jewelry store on Summer Street in Memphis for several months until he had raised enough money to go freelance, going from store to store collecting jewelry for repair and returning it when it was finished. This proved to be a profitable arrangement, and Mark and Sandra, if not exactly prosperous, were getting by comfortably enough to support another child. This time Sandra gave birth to a daughter, Natalie Jane Byers, on June 29, 1983.

The Byerses’ marriage was not a particularly passionate one, neither great nor terrible, and life droned on predictably for several years until one day in the fall of 1986, when Mark walked into a restaurant and found Sandra having lunch with a neighbor, a married man with four children. From their demeanor, it was obvious to Mark that the meeting was romantic in nature. When he confronted her, she pleaded for another chance, swearing that it would not happen again. Mark seriously considered giving his marriage a second chance. He had been raised on the belief that marriage was for life. Sandra claims that it was Mark who did the begging, but one thing is certain: after finding a love letter from Sandra to the neighbor, Mark knew he’d never be able to trust her again.
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A heart-to-heart conversation with a friend convinced him that Sandra would cheat again and that there was no future for the marriage. Despite the pain of breaking up their family, Mark felt that he had no choice and moved out of their home. He rented a three-bedroom house at 1605 Goodwin Avenue in West Memphis, Arkansas.

Despite having given Mark a Father’s Day card the previous year saying that she loved him as much the day they were married and that he was a “wonderful father, a good provider, and a great husband,” Sandra filed for divorce on February 11, 1987, in Craighead County, Arkansas. “She beat me to the lawyer’s office,” Mark says. In the decree of divorce, Sandra was granted custody of John Andrew and Natalie. By April, however, Mark had filed a petition to modify the decree on several grounds. Shortly after Mark moved out of the house, Russell Good, the neighbor Mark had seen Sandra with in the restaurant, had moved in with Sandra. The petition alleged that Sandra was openly sleeping with Good and that he was permitted to bathe the children (who were four and seven years old at the time).

Mark alleged that the children were not being taken care of properly while Sandra worked the weekend flea markets and that they were routinely kept up until late at night. Most potentially incriminating of all, the petition stated that John Andrew and Natalie had “conveyed information to their father” that had prompted Mark to take them to a pediatrician in Memphis for examination. The pediatrician, Dr. James Sanford, had notified the Crittenden County Office of Social Services that he suspected the children were victims of sexual abuse, and as a result of that notification, they had opened an investigation. In the petition, Mark requested that he be granted custody of the children, that Sandra be enjoined from moving them out of Crittenden County, and that a child psychologist be permitted to examine the children upon order of the court.
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Mark was represented in this matter by attorney—and later judge—Pal Rainey.
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There is no record indicating whether the children were ever examined by a psychologist.

In June 1987, Mark again petitioned the court, this time to request summer visitation with the children, which would grant him custody for six weeks, from July 1 until August 10. During that time, Sandra would have the children every other weekend and on Wednesday mornings “during breakfast hours.” He had repeatedly asked for such custody, only to have Sandra reject the idea. The petition also stated that Sandra continued to cohabitate with Russell Good. In an order issued by the court that same month, Mark was finally granted the summer visitation rights that he had requested. In September, however, Mark slapped Sandra with a petition for contempt, alleging that she generally did not comply with the liberal visitation; that she specifically had denied him visitation on two consecutive Wednesdays, August 27 and September 2; and that she in fact had the children in Jackson County, Mississippi, a direct violation of the settlement agreement. Finally, on September 16, Sandra was ordered to appear before the court to show cause as to why she should not be charged with contempt for her continued violation of the court-approved visitation schedule.

Sandra was also awarded a schedule of child support, which would eventually become the subject of a May 2001 court action. In Crittenden County, Arkansas, the Office of Child Support Enforcement intervened on Sandra’s behalf to recover unpaid child support from Mark Byers. Many, including Mara Leveritt in her 2003 book,
Devil’s
Knot
, would claim that Mark had not met his financial obligations to his children. The action of the court proves this claim to be baseless. In February 1993 Mark had become physically disabled due to a “right frontal” brain tumor originally detected in 1990. As a result, child support payments, which up until 1993 had been drawn from Mark’s paychecks, were subsequently made directly by the Social Security Administration to Sandra Sloane. The court documents reflect that instead of the $22,630 that John and Natalie would have received from Mark’s court-ordered payments, they received $45,160 in direct payments from Mark’s Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Natalie’s later claim that she never saw any of the money is indicative of deceit on the part of her mother; the court records show that the payments were made.
⁵⁰

Sandra married twice after the divorce from Mark. The first marriage was to Russell Good, but this marriage didn’t last. She soon divorced her second husband and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with her mother. While living there, she met yet another man whom she soon married. When her new husband was hired as a professor at the Kemper Military Academy in Boonville, Missouri, in 1992, the couple relocated, and Mark lost track of her. Although Mark has seen Natalie in the not-too-distant past, and that meeting, at least according to Mark, was amicable, he has not seen or heard from John Andrew in many years.

Melissa

In the course of Mark’s jewelry travels, he had occasion to meet a young woman named Sharon Melissa DeFir, a divorced mother of two who was living with her parents, Kilborn and Dorris, in Germantown, Tennessee. Her oldest child, Ryan Clark, was seven; his half-brother Christopher Murray, eight. During the period following his divorce from Sandra, Mark began to date Melissa, and the two were married on May 9, 1987; his divorce from Sandra was barely three months old. At this point, Mark was still plying his trade as a custom jeweler and repair person, eventually settling into a shop in the back of a Germantown jeweler. Mark’s business volume soon exceeded that of the store’s owner, so Mark was politely asked to move to his own shop. During this same time, Mark and Melissa moved from 1605 Goodwin to a nice pool home at 1400 East Barton Avenue in West Memphis, just around the corner from the Goodwin house. After they plunked down a $4,000 down payment, the house was theirs.

In August 1988, Mark and Melissa opened “Byers Jewelry” in the Holiday Plaza Mall (actually just a small shopping-center strip) in West Memphis. Mark and his father worked hectically for ten days prior to the opening of the store, building benches and interior walls, to make everything ready for opening day. Though the store actually opened for business on August 1, the official “Grand Opening” was held on Friday, December 16, 1988.
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Mark and Melissa ran the store together, and it seemed as though their life was on solid ground.

There was, however, a dark cloud hanging over the Byerses’ apparent success. After marrying Melissa, Mark had learned of her history of drug abuse. This was not the pot-smoking and whiskey-drinking variety that Mark had indulged in, or even the PCP type that had led to his overdose in 1977. Rather, Melissa was abusing narcotics, specifically Dilaudid.
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Though she occasionally took the drug orally, Melissa preferred injecting the drug, usually under the watchband on her left hand, on the top of her hand, or on the underside of either forearm. Though she was apparently clean during the time they were dating, Melissa soon took up with some of her old friends, and she was using again within a few months of their marriage.

The first time Mark checked Melissa into rehab was nine months after their wedding. When he confronted her with her drug use, Melissa was extremely remorseful and wanted to get clean and save the marriage. Mark checked her into Methodist Outreach, a drug rehab center in Memphis, where she remained for thirty days. She stayed clean for a while but eventually slipped back into the old patterns. Soon, jewelry was missing from the store, and both their personal and business accounts were being drained. Financial records for the store are not available for examination, so it is not possible to determine whether the business failed because of poor sales, mismanagement, Melissa’s drug habit or some combination of the two. Ultimately, however, the store was forced to close, and in 1991, three years after the grand opening, Byers Jewelry was officially out of business.