Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (16 page)

On March 22, 1994, the Byerses received a letter from prosecutor Brent Davis:

Dear Mark and Melissa,

I am writing to commend you on your cooperation and participation in the trials of Misskelley, Echols, and Baldwin. You and your family showed a phenomenal amount of strength and perseverance.

We realize that there is nothing that we could have done that would have made your pain subside, but we are extremely happy that justice has been served in this case. We most definitely could not have provided the proper legal assistance without your help and support.

If there is anything that we can do for you in the future, please let us know. We will never forget your son and hope that the judgment of the court will allow you to begin the process of healing and remembering him without the frustration of the murder trials. We wish you the best.

Sincerely,

Brent Davis

Prosecuting Attorney

2 Judicial District

Ironically, it was Brent Davis who five years later charged Mark with the crime that eventually sent him to prison.

The end of the trials brought little peace for Mark and Melissa Byers. On the contrary, the verdicts brought a wave of terror over the couple that forced them to abandon their West Memphis home for higher ground. The friends and families of the convicted killers were not content to let the verdicts stand on their own. They too needed a target to lash out at, and Mark and Melissa Byers provided a big bull’s-eye. Although Mark was relatively subdued after the verdicts were read, Melissa’s hostility and anger were ignited anew.

After the Misskelley verdict, a reporter said to her, “Melissa, it must be mixed emotions for you because you have the guilty verdict, but you still have the loss to deal with.”

“This doesn’t change anything,” Melissa began, her temper slowly rising. “Christopher’s dead, and he was tortured to death by three murdering bastards on a ditch bank. He was eight years old. Guilty is guilty, and I hope the little sucker, when he hits Cummins [prison], they get his ass right off the bat. ’Cause he deserves to be tortured and punished for the rest of his life for murdering three eight-year-old children. Prison’s not a safe place, Jessie, sweetie.” Pausing slightly, she added, “I’m gonna mail him a skirt.”

Melissa also had this to say: “If I had the chance to speak to Damien Echols, I would tell him that I hope he bust hell wide open. Period. And that if I could get my hands on him, I would eat the skin off of his face.” And this: “I hate them for it. I never hated anyone in my life, and I hate these three.” Furrowing her brow deeply and stabbing the table with her finger for emphasis, Melissa snarled, “And the mothers who bore them.”
⁷⁶

Before the Echols/Baldwin trial, Mark was filmed for
Paradise
Lost
making this claim: “They found my son’s testicles in a jar of alcohol in Damien Echols’s house, with his finger prints on the jar. Now how do you dispute that?”
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Comments such as these were what aroused the ire of the friends and families of the newly convicted killers, and it is safe to say that out of the three sets of grieving parents, the Byerses had been the most animated. The backlash was immediate. According to Mark, the months following the Echols and Baldwin convictions were hellacious; a dead cat was tossed into their swimming pool, a chicken “with its neck wrung” was left in the back of Mark’s pickup, and a dog was eviscerated and left at the couple’s front door. “I knew we had to get out of town before something bad happened to somebody”, Mark said. If it struck anyone as ironic that the family of one of the victims was being made a target of terrorism, no one said a word. After court one day, reporters asked Mark, “We heard you are moving. Why?” Mark answered, “Well, if this had happened to you, would you want to stay?” With few options open to them, Mark and Melissa packed up the house at 1400 East Barton, essentially letting the bank take it. They couldn’t afford to keep up the payments on the house, given that there was no income other than Mark’s disability payments. They looked for a place to escape to where the people wouldn’t associate them with the sensational murders in West Memphis. In this, they would be singularly unsuccessful.

Cherokee
Village

Auntie
Em:
Help
us
out
today
and
find
yourself
a
place
where
you
won’t
get
into
any
trouble.

Dorothy:
A
place
where
there
isn’t
any
trouble
 
.
 
.
 
.
do
you
suppose
there
is
such
a
place,
Toto?

One hundred thirty miles to the northwest of West Memphis lies the planned community of Cherokee Village. Nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in rural Sharp County, it sits some twenty miles south of the Missouri border. A scenic, wooded locale, Cherokee Village boasts thirteen thousand acres of recreational opportunities, including two eighteen-hole golf courses, seven lakes, two major rivers—the Spring and the South Fork—tennis courts, swimming pools, and not surprisingly, a gun club. The population is purported to include 4,468 “permanent” residents. It is also advertised as the home of “the happiest, friendliest, most worry-free people in all of Arkansas.” Mark and Melissa Byers would find that final claim implausible at best.

It was to this community that Mark and Melissa chose to relocate immediately following the Echols/Baldwin trial. On April 4, 1994, Mark, Melissa, and Ryan moved to Cherokee Village to escape the hostility they were experiencing in West Memphis and to get away from the place that they would forever associate with the nightmare of Christopher’s murder. They sold whatever belongings they could to raise the $3,500 down payment for the home in Cherokee Village, with the owner willing to hold the rest of the mortgage. They had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, and a combination kitchen/dining area covering about 1,200 square feet. The house wasn’t much, and they were poor enough that they were constantly short on cash, but at least it was quiet. The tranquility wouldn’t last.

Trouble started almost immediately. Mark and Melissa had become friendly with their next-door neighbors, John and Donna Kingsbury, who lived right around the corner on 46 Choctaw Drive. Depending on whose version you believe, one day either Mark took Kingsbury or Kingsbury took Mark to a house located at 25 Osage Drive, a little over half a mile away.
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The house belonged to Brenda Atwood, who was living in Texas at the time. According to Kingsbury, he and Mark were looking the house over to see if they could earn some extra money cleaning up the house and yard. The house was not occupied and was filled with furnishings and such, some of which appeared to be valuable. Mark Byers remembers it differently. “It was Kingsbury that first showed me the Atwood house. I’d only been in Cherokee Village a short time. There was no front or rear door on the house, and most of the windows were busted out,” he said, despite Atwood’s later claims that the house was locked up tight. The two didn’t waste any time in helping themselves to some of the contents of the house. Mark sold several items, an antique Prussian miniature sled and a life-sized cigar store Indian among them, for a total of more than $1,200 at the Cotham Auction Barn in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas.

How the investigation led to Byers is similarly unclear. The official version has it that Atwood’s neighbor, Greg Deckard, spotted a mid-1980s, blue and white or red and white pickup truck in Atwood’s driveway sometime between June 15 and July 15, 1994. Deckard stated that he saw two men and a woman loading “furniture and personal belongings” into the back of the truck. In his statement to police, Billy Chrisco, a friend of Ryan Clark, stated that Ryan told him that he and his father and mother had gone to Atwood’s and removed and subsequently sold some furniture.

Sharp County sheriff’s deputy Dale Weaver also took a statement from John Kingsbury, who pointed the finger at Mark Byers. Kingsbury told Weaver that he had witnessed Byers spreading a rug out in his front yard for cleaning and then moving it into the house; Kingsbury said he believed the rug belonged to Brenda Atwood. This story should arouse suspicion; a superficial look beneath the surface shows that John Kingsbury had more than sufficient incentive to lie. If, as Byers contends, Kingsbury was guilty of helping himself to some of the contents at 25 Osage Drive, covering up his involvement by accusing Byers made perfect sense. Also, since Kingsbury had recently obtained a restraining order against Byers for thwacking his son on the ass with a fly swatter—the famous “abuse of a neighbor’s child” incident that West Memphis Three supporters often used as further proof of Byers’s propensity for violence against children—he was surely holding a grudge.
⁷⁹
Weaver apparently ignored Kingsbury’s impeachability and possible complicity and searched only the Byerses’ house, after obtaining permission from Melissa.

Byers’s account of events unsurprisingly differs from Kingsbury’s. Brenda Atwood returned to Cherokee Village from her home in Texas to find that her house had been robbed. Not only were the rugs, sled, and Indian missing; other items had been taken as well, including a china cabinet and some dishes. Seeing her RV in the driveway, Greg Deckard approached her and told her that he’d seen the pickup truck in her driveway. Atwood got into her RV—the same RV that some would suspect Mark Byers of blowing up shortly thereafter—and proceeded to search the neighborhood for a truck matching the description she had gotten from Deckard. Spotting Byers’s truck in the driveway of 75 Skyline Drive, she stopped the RV in front of the house. Feigning engine trouble, she asked Byers if she could use his phone to call for help. Once inside, she instantly spotted the rugs and notified police.

Why Dale Weaver’s report omits Atwood’s subterfuge and instead credits John Kingsbury’s “eyewitness” account as what led to the arrest of Mark and Melissa Byers is difficult to say. Somewhat mysteriously, Weaver’s report also makes reference to a “cooperating individual” who claimed to have observed Ryan Clark drive his parents to the Atwood residence and to have seen Mark and Melissa load up the aforementioned rug, along with “an Indian statue, sleigh, china cabinet, [and] set of plates [with a] white and tan colored design.” This witness, referred to by Weaver simply as “he or she,” also incredibly saw the Byerses transfer the contents of the pickup truck to a trailer. Consequently, on September 2, 1994, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Mark and Melissa Byers. Since Weaver’s “cooperating individual” implicated Ryan Clark in the heist, it is not clear why the deputy chose not to charge Ryan as an accomplice. Mark maintains that it is because, contrary to the witness’s account, Ryan was not involved.

Within days of his arrest for residential burglary and theft of property, Mark was arrested again, this time charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a Class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail. The charge stemmed from a fight between two juveniles—Marty Kerr, a friend of Ryan Clark, and John Shaver Jr.—that Mark witnessed and prevented bystanders, allegedly at gunpoint, from interfering with.
⁸⁰
Slowly, but inexorably, the noose was tightening around the neck of John Mark Byers. By the time the three cases came to trial—residential burglary, theft of property, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor—Melissa Byers would be dead.

During the years 1994-96, life plodded on aimlessly for the Byerses in Cherokee Village. Melissa’s drug use wasn’t getting any better; if anything, it was worsening. She continued to abuse Dilaudid as regularly as she could scare up the money. In addition to her thirty-day stay at Methodist Outreach in 1987, Melissa also spent a month in rehab in West Plains, Missouri, in 1994 after overdosing on Dilaudid. She was subsequently treated for drug abuse at the Sharp County Mental Health Department as an outpatient. Four months after her overdose—determined by the authorities to be a suicide attempt—Melissa applied for and received Social Security disability benefits, and this, along with Mark’s disability checks, were what the family subsisted on: $1,000 a month, well below the poverty line for a family of three. The family was on Medicaid and had no prescription drug coverage. Although Mark recalls Melissa calling her father once for money—he sent them “a couple of hundred dollars” for a heating bill—the family was on their own. Despite the direness of their situation, Mark claims that there was always food in the house, his father-in-law’s allegations to the contrary notwithstanding.