Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (12 page)

Mark had been dealing marijuana on and off for much of his life. He liked the money, of course; he often needed it to supplement the income of his jewelry store during slow periods. But he also liked the status that came with the territory, peeling off big bills from rolls of cash, always having “friends” around. It was seductive, and he liked it. His earliest deals with larger quantities of pot had begun in Marked Tree with a friend named Danny Overman.

Danny
Overman

Mark first met Danny Overman
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while the two were growing up in Marked Tree. Danny’s father owned a farm in nearby Dyess, about twenty miles to the northeast. Danny also worked for a man named Bob Kerr, who had a little farm of his own along the Mississippi not far from Dyess. Danny’s work was not farming, however. It was running moonshine for Kerr. Mark ran into Overman one day out at the Kerr place, and Danny showed him another business venture he was getting into: growing marijuana, lots of it. Mark would shove as much pot as he could fit into a garbage bag and pay Danny $120. He’d then break it up into ten-dollar “lids” and sell it to his friends. One day Danny told Mark that there would be high-quality Mexican weed coming into the farm and that Mark should check it out. Pretty soon, he and Danny had a nice marijuana business going, large enough to generate a modest income, but small enough to stay under the radar of the authorities.

This arrangement continued until Mark went off to college in Texas. After that, he didn’t see or hear from Danny for almost ten years. It wasn’t until after his marriage to Sandra ended, and he was married to Melissa, that Mark had occasion to meet up with Overman again. Mark and Melissa were living in West Memphis at the time. Melissa had just wrecked her car and received a $1,300 payment from the insurance company. “Want to turn that into $4,000?” Mark asked. Figuring correctly that Danny was still in the marijuana business, Mark looked him up. He bought five pounds of pot for $4,000-$1,300 down, $2,700 due; sold it at the usual markup (about 68 percent in this case); and then came back for more. “I was off to the races in the weed business,” he recalls. “I’d do this for several months out of the year.”

Mark lost touch with Danny again, this time until after Christopher’s murder. Mark was living in Cherokee Village and ran into Danny one day at a grocery store in nearby Hardy, and the two caught up on the past few years. Danny had, of course, heard about Christopher and gave Mark his condolences. Danny had spent the last few years working on a riverboat in Ohio and had been injured on the job. After receiving “several hundred thousand dollars” in settlement money, Danny and his wife Marci
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had moved up to the Ozarks to a development called Ozark Acres, some ten miles west of Cherokee Village. “Come on up and see me,” he told Mark. “It’s real nice.” It was nice all right; Danny was having Mexican reefer shipped right to his door via a commercial package carrier. He and Mark did a few deals together to make a little extra cash; the wives also struck up a friendship. Then came Tunica.

Tunica

Tunica, Mississippi, is home to a group of nine gaming establishments that operate under state laws allowing gambling on the Mississippi River. The casinos aren’t exactly
in
the Mississippi, like a riverboat might be. Rather, they are located
on
the river, huge, stationary barges connected to the shore by gangplanks. Mississippi approved “cruise vessel” gambling in 1989 in a complex series of rules called the Mississippi Gaming Control Act. Under the act, Tunica was one of fourteen riverfront counties approved for “dockside” gambling. Tunica is located an hour south of Memphis, Tennessee, and is a little over three hours by car from Cherokee Village. Flush with money from their marijuana business, Mark and Danny headed down to Tunica one day to blow a little cash at the slots and card tables. They did better than they expected, each pocketing between $5,000 and $6,000, at which point Mark was ready to leave; Danny wasn’t. Deciding not to wait, Mark took off, leaving Danny stranded. Danny had six grand in his pocket; he’d get home somehow.

Once he arrived at home, Mark found Danny’s wife Marci waiting with Melissa. “Where is he?” she demanded to know. When Mark told her that Danny had opted to stay behind, she exploded. “Did he have money? Did he have whores and girls all over him?”

“Well, I don’t know
what
he’s doing down there,” Mark said.

Marci sent Danny’s brother down to Tunica to pick him up, and when Danny came home, Marci gave him a slightly enhanced version of what Mark had actually said. “I hear you’ve been out whoring and drinking and carrying on.” The two didn’t exactly have the perfect marriage to begin with; this wasn’t going to make things any better.

Shortly after the Tunica incident, Mark got a call from Danny. “I have ten pounds of good weed. Do you want it?”

“Sure I do.”

In a bizarre setup, Danny told Mark, “I’m going to leave it in a cooler down the road from my house, near a cattle crossing, just past the gate. It’ll be there just before dark.”

Perhaps Mark should have been suspicious, but he had known Danny for years, and the two had dealt a lot of pot together. Mark headed out and quickly found the cattle crossing but did not see the cooler. He headed over to Danny’s house to see if he was there; he wasn’t. He decided to wait. “I wasn’t going to leave while the cooler was still missing.” Within fifteen minutes, Danny’s Cadillac pulled into the driveway; his nephew Dwayne
****
was with him.

“It’s in the trunk of my car,” Danny explained. “Let’s go around by the woods for a little privacy.” Danny pulled the Caddy around back, with Mark following in his Toyota pickup truck. When they stopped, all three got out of the cars. Danny opened the trunk of the Cadillac and pulled out a twelve-gauge shotgun, pointing it squarely at Mark.

Mark looked at Danny closely for the first time and could plainly see that he was “all geeked out” on crystal methedrine; he looked like he was out of his mind. Danny started ranting about how Mark had caused him all sorts of trouble by telling his wife he was whoring around in Tunica that night, and now he was going to kill him. Danny shoved him back against the hood of the Toyota and smacked him a couple of times with the butt of the shotgun, splitting Mark’s lip and chipping a few teeth in the process. Danny shoved the barrel of the shotgun, which had been sawed off to eighteen inches, into Mark’s mouth, saying, “Beg me not to kill you.” Mark managed to say, “Dude, I ain’t beggin’ you not to kill me. People know you’re out here looking for me. People know I’m out here; Melissa knows where I am. So if I come up dead, you’re going to be the number one suspect.”

Danny wasn’t listening. He backed up fifteen to twenty feet and pulled the trigger; all Mark remembers is seeing the muzzle flash, hearing the glass in his truck’s windshield shatter, and hearing pellets ricochet off the hood of the Toyota. Somehow, Danny had missed his target. He racked up another shell and another and finally hit Mark with the third shot, in the knee. Not having anticipated that he would miss a target Mark’s size three times, Danny had only three rounds with him. “He came up and hit me across the head with the butt of the shotgun,” Mark says, “and kinda knocked me goofy, but I can remember him saying, ‘Well, I’m going to go back to the house, and then I’m goin’ to come back and kill ya.’ Well, as soon as him and his nephew left, I wandered off into the woods, and sure enough, ten or fifteen minutes later, he comes back and shot up the truck, ten or twelve times, it seemed. And there was a lot of cussin’ and hollerin’ out there in the woods, there’s buckshot flyin’ off into the woods, and then he left. I hitchhiked back into town and bought me a handgun, and I had every intention next time I saw him of shootin’ his ass. Well, I never saw him again . . . till I saw him in the penitentiary.”

The
Calm

Between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 1993, Melissa cleaned up her act considerably. She was drug-free, and she and Mark were going to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings together. She had started going to church and was baptized at the Second Street Baptist Church in West Memphis.
⁵⁶
For the first time in years, she was feeling good and looking good. Despite the family’s continuing financial troubles, things were starting to look up. By the time of Christopher’s murder, Melissa had been clean for nearly eight months.

Christopher

On Wednesday morning, May 5, 1993, Christopher Byers went off to Weaver Elementary School for what should have been just another day in second grade. Weaver was a neighborhood school, and all of the students were “walkers.” Nothing special was planned in school that day, and Christopher was looking forward to spending time with his friends, Steve Branch, Aaron Hutcheson, and Michael Moore. Christopher, Steve, and Aaron were all in Miss Jones’s class together, and Michael was in Miss Miller’s. It was a going to be a nice warm day in West Memphis, sunny and about seventy-five degrees, and all four boys were anxious to get out of school so they could play. Stevie had a new bike that he wanted to break in—a gift from his grandfather—and it was perfect riding weather. Michael was also anxious to get on his bike, and Christopher was planning on doing some skateboarding. What could be better than to be eight years old on a sunny spring day?

Things hadn’t always been easy for Christopher, whose birth had been difficult. He was born Christopher Lee Murray on June 24, 1984, at Lebonheur Hospital in Memphis and was extremely premature, weighing only a few pounds. He remained in the hospital for several months while surgery was performed on his stomach and intestines. Still, once he came home from the hospital, his development was normal, though he would always be slight in build. At the time of his death, he was a very healthy four feet tall and weighed fifty-two pounds. He was rarely sick, and during his life, he’d had no major illnesses or injuries. His biggest problem was that he had far more energy than he knew what to do with.

Although Christopher didn’t excel academically, he did manage to maintain a “C” average. He was an active boy, hyperactive even, and it was nearly impossible for him to sit still at school. Mark and Melissa didn’t know that anything was wrong with Christopher, other than the difficulty they had getting him to sleep at night. “Before I realized that Christopher actually had a problem,” Mark says, “I used to be pretty hard on him. When he wouldn’t go to sleep, I would sometimes spank him or punish him for not listening to me.” By the time Christopher was in the second grade, it was obvious to his parents that he was more than just rambunctious and a little hard to handle. They took him to see Memphis neurologist Dr. Donald Eastmead, who examined him for his behavioral problems at home and in school. Eastmead determined that Christopher suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and that his symptoms were on the severe side of the scale, with incidents of “very low frustration tolerance,” “anger outbursts,” and refusal to follow directions. Dr. Eastmead prescribed Ritalin, later changing the prescription to Dexedrine instead. He also prescribed Tegratol, an anti-seizure medication. Although Eastmead claimed that Christopher was “a difficult child who [might] require in-hospital treatment to gain control of his behavior,” Christopher responded well to the medication change, according to Mark, and hospitalization was never required. His last visit to Eastmead was on January 4, 1993.

Christopher’s biological father, Ricky Lee Murray, might have been a more negative influence in Christopher’s life had he been more involved. It was probably fortunate for Christopher that Melissa divorced Murray in 1986, when Christopher was three. Murray was living in Indiana at the time of Christopher’s murder and hadn’t seen Christopher or spoken with Melissa in at least five years. He was on probation for a burglary in Scottsville, Kentucky, at the time of Christopher’s death and had to get special permission from his probation officer, Denise Ware, to leave Indiana.
⁵⁷
Absentee parenting notwithstanding, Murray claimed that he had never given up his parental rights and that Christopher had not been adopted by Mark Byers. (See photo section for a copy of Christopher’s adoption certificate.)

Christopher’s friends and relatives weren’t concerned with any behavioral issues he might have had at school. “He was a real extrovert,” Mark says. “Friends of mine would come over to the house, and Christopher would be there on their laps, asking questions, wanting to show them things from his room. He loved people and loved it when we had company.” His mother described him as “loving and giving.” Mark concurs. “Christopher was the kind of kid who, if he had one cookie, he’d give half of it to someone else.”

Family friend Andy Taylor has similar recollections. “He was the kind of little kid who could climb in your lap and make you feel good right off the bat.” Christopher was at least as curious as any eight-year-old. “He was very inquisitive, and I think along with that comes creativity,” Taylor said. “He always asked a thousand questions. ‘Why do you drive that kind of car?’ ‘Why are you doing that?’” Christopher was only six years old when his grandparents, George and Auvergne Byers, died, but both had adored him. When he visited his grandparents in Marked Tree, his grandmother would put him up on the counter and allow him to sample whatever she was baking. George would show him his workshop and all the different things he was working on. Christopher visited his grandparents often, as well as his aunts, uncles, and cousins in nearby Jonesboro. The Byerses had a tight extended family, and Christopher knew the security of having people around who loved him.