Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (17 page)

Mark and Melissa had left West Memphis with a string of bad checks trailing behind both of them. They were eventually charged separately under the Arkansas Hot Check Law. Mark’s bad checks totaled less than $200, according to Mark, and had been written primarily to grocery stores and pharmacies. Melissa’s checks came to considerably more and were largely written for cash. Whatever the funds had been used for, the couple had no means of paying the money back, and Melissa once again went to her father for help.
⁸¹
Between Mark and Melissa, they were facing two Class B felonies and several misdemeanor charges. When Mark finally went to court for these charges, he knew that he’d be facing jail time.

For her part, Melissa managed to get herself into trouble without any help from her husband. Aside from being named as a codefendant in the Atwood burglary, she was arrested for assault for holding a shotgun on two linoleum installers who refused to complete an installation at 75 Skyline Drive. During the incident in the summer of 1995, Mark was sitting outside the house reading a book—
Blood
of
Innocents
, oddly enough—when he heard a commotion coming from the kitchen. When he got there, things had already escalated to a screaming match. The installers were leaving, they said, and not returning until an area underneath the refrigerator was cleaned. Mark insisted that they install the flooring. Things got nasty, and the installers went back to their truck, saying they were coming back with “a couple of claw hammers” to settle things. As they approached the house, Melissa came barreling out of the front door, loaded twelve-gauge shotgun in hand. She pointed it at the rapidly retreating workers and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the safety was on, and she couldn’t figure out how to unlock it. As the truck sped off, Melissa was still trying to free the safety and get off a shot. Sheriff Sonny Powell arrived shortly afterward to arrest Melissa for aggravated assault, a felony. She wouldn’t live long enough to stand trial for that crime either.

Life in Cherokee Village was like a bad episode of the
Dukes
of
Hazzard
. Drunken hillbillies were settling their differences with drive-by shootings, fisticuffs, and hastily sought restraining orders. The law was frequently an afterthought, and in the case of the Byerses and the Kingsburys, it was like open feuding between the Hatfields and McCoys.

On September 20, 1994, Melissa filed a complaint with the Sharp County Sheriff’s Department against John Kingsbury for, of all things, “terroristic threatening.” In the complaint, Melissa alleged that between 5:00 and 5:30 that afternoon, John Kingsbury had “kicked in the door and threatened to kill” Ryan Clark. Ryan had lent a slingshot to Kingsbury’s son, Adam, and later asked for it back. Neighbor Bonnie Webster and her sixty-five-year-old mother, Barbara Luff, both gave statements to Cherokee Village police officer Ted Tipton supporting Melissa’s account of the incident. Mark was home at the time but was sleeping and just caught the sight of Kingsbury walking away from the house. Melissa did not press charges. According to Tipton, Melissa simply “wanted [the police] to know.”

For his part, John Kingsbury claimed that he had knocked on the door and was invited in by Melissa. There, he said, they had a very cordial conversation, in which Kingsbury told Ryan that he had given the slingshot to his son and that it “wasn’t very nice” to ask for it back. At that time, Kingsbury said, Melissa asked him “out to the road.” Once there, he said, Melissa started berating him for “being the reason that they [Mark and Melissa] might go to prison” and saying that although Kingsbury had “put them in a hole,” they were going to “put him in a hole he couldn’t get out of.” According to Kingsbury, Melissa added, “You can’t watch your kids twenty-four hours a day.”

Four days later, Kingsbury struck back. At 10:34 p.m. on September 24, Kingsbury filed a complaint with Officer Joe Black stating that gunfire had been directed at his house. What follows can best be described as a grotesque caricature of life at Cherokee Village; for the Byerses, it was just another day.

Officer Black, along with officers Buddy Smith and Bill Slayton, went out to investigate, arriving at Kingsbury’s house at 10:40 p.m. Slayton interviewed Kingsbury while Black and Smith canvassed the neighborhood. Kingsbury told Slayton that a car had driven by and fired at his house; he believed it was intended to scare him. Neighbors confirmed that a car had been driving up and down the street, revving the engine and discharging what sounded like a gun. The noises were described by one witness as “one loud gunshot followed by several quieter shots from a semiautomatic.” Black and Smith were suddenly called back to Baseheart station; Mark, Melissa, and Ryan were there and wanted to make a statement.

Mark told the officers that he had been awakened at about 10:30 p.m. by the sound of a car sitting in his driveway revving the engine. The occupants, he said, were “screaming and cursing. They said they were going to kill us.” When he looked out the window, he saw a “silver or gray” Ford Taurus in the driveway. Melissa was even more specific: she saw Dave and Karla Windsor in her front yard. The Ford “squealed the tires” and raced up Choctaw Drive toward Hiawatha, turned around, and came roaring back down the street, firing at the Byerses’ house as it went by. Mark and Melissa immediately drove over to 11 Sequoyah Ridge, where the Windsors lived. The house was less than a mile away. Once there, Mark jumped out of the car and felt the hood of the Windsor’s Ford; it was still warm. Dave and Karla came out of the house—“drunk on their asses”—and an argument ensued. Karla Windsor told police that Mark went to his car and removed something that “appeared to be a gun.” When Karla threatened to go inside and get her own gun, the Byerses left.

After giving their statement, the Byerses left the police station, but Mark returned within fifteen minutes. He had recovered several shell casings from the road near his house, recently fired by the way they smelled. Karla Windsor admitted to riding up and down the street firing her .25 caliber automatic into the air, emptying an entire clip in the process. When the smoke cleared, there were twelve bullet holes in the Byerses’ house; no arrests were ever made.

What was Dave and Karla Windsor’s beef with the Byerses? According to Karla’s statement, she believed that her son Mike was being harassed by Melissa and some of Ryan’s friends for “snitching” about something, though she never said about what. It may have had something to do with the Atwood incident; is it possible that Mike Windsor was the “cooperating individual” that Dale Weaver interviewed on August 10, the person who implicated Ryan and Mark in the Atwood burglary, the one Weaver referred to as “he or she” in his report? And what was John Kingsbury’s part in this incident? Did he believe that Mark Byers was responsible for the shooting? Who did Kingsbury think was trying to “frighten” him, and why?

A month later, on October 27, it was Mark Byers who filed a complaint on behalf of Ryan Clark. Ryan had allegedly been threatened at school by a boy named John Shores. Shores had told Ryan that his uncle from Illinois was coming down in two days to kill Mark Byers and possibly the entire family. Why? Apparently, Shores was under the misapprehension that Mark and Melissa were parents of one of the convicted killers, rather than parents of one of the
victims
. There is no indication that any action was taken on this complaint, just as no action was taken on any of the other complaints filed in Cherokee Village.

At this point in time, Mark and Melissa had three felony charges hanging over their heads for the Atwood burglary. Mark also had the misdemeanor charge for the Kerr/Shavers incident to deal with, and Melissa was facing the terroristic threatening charges stemming from the assault on the floor installers. The Byers family spent the next year in a state of mere existence; for all of them, it was a year marked by abject poverty and emotional emptiness, but the toll was especially great on Melissa. The loss of Christopher combined with her escalating legal and financial problems, as well as her continued drug use, pushed her deeper into a depression from which she never recovered, leading to the almost inevitable 1994 suicide attempt. But somehow, she managed to hang on for another seventeen months.

Moving out of West Memphis in the weeks following the verdicts in the Echols/Baldwin trial had not provided the peace that Mark and Melissa sought. Neither the death of her son nor the conviction of his killers had done much to curb Melissa’s drug use. Their legal troubles mounted, their existence was on a subsistence level, and the couple’s relations were severely strained. Ryan had been getting into trouble with his friends in the neighborhood, eventually resulting in his temporarily being sent to his grandparents to live. That the stressors on Melissa were monumental, and still mounting, was undeniable. On March 29, 1996, less than three months before the release of
Paradise
Lost
, Melissa Byers took an afternoon nap with her husband and never woke up.

CHAPTER 3 

Melissa 

Knowing
many,
loving
none

Bearing
sorrow,
having
fun

But
back
home
he’ll
always
run

To
sweet
Melissa

—Greg Allman/Steve Alaimo

Loneliness
 
.
 
.
 
.
is
the
central
and
inevitable
fact
of
human
existence.

—Thomas Wolfe

Melissa DeFir Byers died at 6:25 p.m
.
on March 29, 1996; she was forty years old. She and Mark had spent the earlier part of that day cruising Memphis trying to score Dilaudid for Melissa. The question invariably arises as to why Mark would participate in this. “To try to keep her safe and get her back home,” he answers. “If I didn’t take her, she would stay gone for days. I was scared for her safety.”

Mark and Melissa were living on their disability checks. They both required prescription drugs, some of which could be obtained as samples from the Sharp County Mental Health Clinic; others had to be purchased. How was Melissa able to afford her Dilaudid? “We didn’t have much money. She would trade her pills for cash, then buy what she wanted: K4s” (4 mg Dilaudid, generically known as hydromorphone). “Times when she left and was gone by herself, I don’t know how she got drugs. Money from her parents? Sale of her pills? I don’t know for sure.” According to one source, Melissa’s father had sent her $200 on Monday of that week, which may explain how they managed to score that day.
⁸²
Regardless of how they got the money, on the morning of March 29, they bought four K4s from a man Melissa knew in Memphis, after which they headed back to Cherokee Village, arriving home at about 10:00 a.m. Melissa got high shortly after getting home, and both she and Mark went to bed at approximately 12:00 p.m. They had sex and talked for a while and then drifted off to sleep at about 2:30 p.m.
⁸³

At about 3:20 p.m. Ryan woke both Mark and Melissa to ask if he could have a friend spend the night. This was nothing unusual; Ryan had friends over all the time, and his parents didn’t think to ask who it was. If they had asked, they might have found out that the friend was Ryan’s new girlfriend, Amanda Swindle, but it didn’t much matter. Mark said, “Sure, no problem.” Melissa was a bit out of it and asked whether that was Ryan who had been knocking on the door, and Mark said that it was. They rolled over and went back to sleep. As of 3:20 p.m., Melissa Byers was still alive.

Mark woke up again after a couple more hours and trudged into the kitchen for a glass of milk. He returned to the bedroom and tried to wake Melissa to find out what she wanted for supper. After several attempts, he was unable to wake her. He darted out the back door to ask his neighbor to come over and check Melissa. Norm Metz had been a medic in the military, and Mark wanted someone to help Melissa immediately; it was literally ten paces from Metz’s house to the Byerses’. Metz found her unresponsive and instructed Mark to start CPR. Metz immediately called 911. Police officers Fred Waser, Bill Slayton, and Hardy police chief Ernie Rose responded to the call, as did paramedics. Accompanied by her husband, Melissa was transported by ambulance to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Ash Flat, about nine miles southwest of Cherokee Village.

When Melissa arrived at the hospital at 6:00 p.m., she was still unresponsive. She was “shocked” twice at increasing levels, given oxygen therapy, and intubated. She was also given intravenous doses of calcium chloride (presumably to counteract the high level of potassium in her blood); epinephrine (to stimulate heart activity); suprel (isoproterenol, for respiration); and sodium bicarbonate, a buffer to neutralize acidity in the blood.
⁸⁴
While she was treated with drugs, the advanced cardiac life support protocol was also administered. Despite these efforts, medical personnel were never able to detect a pulse, and Melissa was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m., twenty-five minutes after her arrival.
⁸⁵
Not quite three years after the death of her youngest son, Melissa was gone too.

The lab report stated that Melissa’s blood contained a number of prescription medications—some prescribed to her and some not—as well as positive indicators for opiates and cannabinoids, but because none of the drugs were present in sufficient quantity to have a lethal effect, they were deemed not to be the cause of death. There were no signs of a struggle and no exterior marks except for some small bruises on her upper arms and left shoulder and “multiple needle puncture wounds” on her right groin, on her left anterior (palm side) wrist, on the tops of both feet, and in the crooks of both arms. Most of these marks were from places where paramedics had made “sticks” for the injection of intravenous fluids. Some, however, were self-inflicted because Melissa was still injecting Dilaudid regularly. Much has been made of the medical examiner’s inability to determine the cause of Melissa’s death. Even more has been made of the case being regarded as a “possible homicide” investigation. In a death with no immediately identifiable cause—the case with some 2,500 deaths per year—it is standard police procedure to treat the case as a possible homicide investigation.
⁸⁶
It is also true that the spouse of the victim is put at the very top of the list of suspects, though in this case, Mark Byers was, and
is
, the list. It is arguable that if Mark Byers weren’t Mark Byers, the mandatory investigation would have been very brief.

Mark doesn’t believe that the paramedics made much of an effort to revive his wife that day. “When the paramedics came in, they jerked her off the bed and onto the floor. They didn’t shock her with the paddles but one time. That kind of bothered me. They kind of acted like they didn’t care, like, ‘Well, good. She’s dead. Maybe now he’ll leave.’ I just felt like they didn’t care if she died or not.”

Many believe this is just paranoid thinking; maybe it is. But considering that Mark was eventually “exiled” from a five-county area, including Sharp County, the old adage may be appropriate: even paranoids have real enemies. Sharp County sheriff Dale Weaver believes to this day that Mark was responsible for Melissa’s death, though he is unable to point to a single shred of evidence to support his suspicions. The Arkansas State Police closed their investigation shortly after Melissa’s death. Weaver could also close his but stubbornly refuses to do so. When contacted recently, Weaver said, “If he [Byers] was to have said something to someone in prison, or somewhere else, and that person was to come forward, that would be the kind of thing we are looking for.” It’s the “wish-upon-a-star” method of investigation that rarely bears fruit. “To close it, it would have to end in an arrest,” Weaver said. “In ten years’ time, things change; people change; life relationships change. That is the thing that we were hoping to find—someone he has been locked up with in prison, you know, affiliate[d] with in some illegal way or had some personal relationship [with] or whatever, that he’s boasted to someone about what he’d done.”
⁸⁷

Although the official cause of Melissa’s death has never been determined, the autopsy report suggests many possibilities other than homicide, given that there were “abnormalities that have been associated with sudden unexpected death,” such as the following:

• Enlargement of the heart

• Narrowing of the artery supplying blood to the atrioventricular node of the heart

• Fatty liver

• Elevated glucose, at 431 mg/dL. The American Diabetes Association labels a fasting glucose level of anything over 130 mg/dL as “diabetic.” This number is elevated during digestion, but Melissa had not eaten for at least six hours prior to blood being drawn, though she may have had a small quantity of peach schnapps before her nap.

• Presence of hydrocodone, a “potent narcotic” and a drug that is “dangerous even in therapeutic levels,” in the urine.
⁸⁸
The drug’s presence in the urine indicates the possibility that there was a “delay between a toxic reaction and death, allowing clearance of the drug into the urine.”

• High triglycerides (364 mg/dL, normal level being 35-160)

• High potassium level (5.9 mmol/L, normal level being 3.6-5.0)

Despite his inability to determine what had caused Melissa Byers’s death, the medical examiner was at least confident of what was not the cause: she had not been stabbed, shot, strangled, suffocated, beaten, or poisoned. On the other hand, there were many other, nonhomicidal possibilities. Her health was poor. She was obese. Her blood sugar, potassium, and triglyceride levels were all very high. Her heart was enlarged, and there was a 50 percent arteriosclerotic narrowing (hardening) in her right coronary artery. She was a long-term narcotics abuser with a litany of drugs present in her system. She smoked, ate poorly, and exercised little. She was severely stressed over her impending criminal trial, stressed over how to pay the bills each month, and in a constant state of agitation toward everyone from the linoleum installers to her neighbors. She was still severely depressed over the loss of her son, was being prescribed antidepressants, and had tried to commit suicide. She was, in short, an accident waiting to happen.

Profiler Brent Turvey implied that there was a tremendous amount of information requiring “further investigation” in the Melissa Byers autopsy report. In his
Equivocal
Death
Analysis
of
Case
Evidence
for
Melissa
Byers
(done for unknown reasons), Turvey asserts that the medical examiner should have taken into consideration Melissa’s past drug use and other “environmental” factors, stating, “Her history of drug use and abuse, her criminal history, and her family history are not factored in to the opinions given in this report. That kind of history is important information to include should drugs be considered potential contributing causal elements, as they were in this case.”

He gives no indication of how Melissa’s “family history” should be “factored” into the report, unless one considers her upcoming court dates and the stress they were causing her. Turvey highlights other injuries that were noted in the autopsy report but were, as he puts it, “uninvestigated and unelucidated” elsewhere in the document. Such injuries, including some minor contusions to the scalp and upper arms, were not listed as a possible result of medical handling during the emergency. The absence of these injuries from the list of possible contributors to Melissa’s death indicates that in the opinion of the medical examiner, they were not relevant to the cause of her death. Turvey also stated that the scene was “staged” by Mark Byers, presumably because Mark tried to put a shirt and a pair of sweatpants on his nude wife before the paramedics arrived. This is nonsense, and Turvey should know this.

The first thing police wanted was to have an autopsy done. “Considering everything that’s happened in your family,” Officer Waser told Mark, “and the press you have received in the last three years, it would benefit you if you requested the autopsy.” Mark agreed. This is a point that is almost never emphasized by others when discussing Melissa’s death. Mark Byers
requested
that an autopsy be performed for the simple reason that he too wanted to know what had killed his wife.

As the evening of March 29 droned on, the shock of his wife’s death finally hit home; as he was signing the papers for the autopsy, Mark collapsed on the hospital floor and was attended to by medical staff. Meanwhile, the investigation was just getting started, and the police would waste no time. Fred Waser conferred with Sharp County sheriff T. J. “Sonny” Powell, and it was agreed that Waser would ask Mark to consent to a search of his residence. Again, Mark agreed. State police officer Stan Witt, who was now heading the investigation, told Waser that he and state police officers Bobby Walker, Steve Dozier, and Steve Huddleston would be heading out to the Byers place as soon as possible to conduct the search and requested that Sharp County sheriff’s deputies secure 75 Skyline Drive until Witt and his team arrived. Mark had already left the hospital with Norm Metz and was home, sitting in his carport with Mark and Melissa’s friend and neighbor Mandy Beasley, when the search team arrived.
⁸⁹
Family friend James Lawrence from Marked Tree drove up shortly thereafter, and the three just sat there talking as the officers performed the search.
⁹⁰
Police videotaped the search of the Byers residence and seized a number of items, including two bath towels and one hand towel retrieved from the master bedroom; a blue, long-sleeved pullover shirt that was in the bed; and several medications prescribed to Melissa, including the following: