Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (24 page)

The problem was that Mark had lost all his teeth in 1997. This was obviously suspicious to supporters, who reasoned that Mark had had his teeth removed to cover up complicity in the murders. The fact that he was initially evasive in this area did not help his cause He also sensationalized how he lost his teeth for whatever reason. Attention? To taunt supporters?

The truth is that Mark’s teeth had been deteriorating for years. Some were allegedly knocked out in fights. As noted previously, Byers claimed that he “self-destructed” after the murders and “got downright mean.” In one scene in
Revelations
, he tells viewers, “The pain they [Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley] caused me, physically and mentally, and all the fights and all I got into ’cause I went to lookin’ for ’em, and the bricks that hit me in the head, and the knives that cut these scars on my face, and”—he removes his dentures—“and the jerks that had the privilege of knocking teeth out of my mouth: well, that’s ’cause them three animals that provoked me so that cost me a whole set of teeth . . . and I can’t imagine why people want to say the things they say about me.”
¹¹⁶

The “whole set of teeth” remark cost him plenty in light of the subsequent statements he made about the cause of his lost teeth. Although he had lost a tooth or two in fights—including, according to Mark, a bashing in the mouth with the butt of a shotgun years before the murders—he didn’t lose the whole set at one time or for one reason, and he wouldn’t get a full set of dentures until long after Christopher’s death.

The information about Mark’s dental work, particularly considering that the filmmakers had Mark’s dental records by the time
Revelations
hit the screen, was probably pretty embarrassing to Bakken, Sauls and Pashley, considering the rude questioning they gave Mark at Echols’s Rule 37 hearing.

In essence, Bakken, Pashley, and Sauls tried to provoke Mark on camera. But considering the accusations that were hurled at him, Mark did a remarkable job keeping his composure (though at one point, not in the film, he accused Bakken of being a “bleached blonde,” a comment for which he later apologized). The following took place on the courthouse steps in Jonesboro in October 1998, and appeared in the film
Revelations
:

Byers
: Do you think that I’m guilty, that I had something to do with murdering my son?

Sauls
: I don’t know if you had anything to do with it; I wanna know that you didn’t, and that would rule yourself out for us.

Byers
: I’ve already been exonerated. What else do I have to do?

Sauls
: The public has been kind of suspicious of you.

Abruptly the line of questioning changed from bite marks to the death of Melissa Byers.

Bakken
: What happened to Melissa?

Byers
: I believe she died from a broken heart.

Bakken
: But you were there, so you saw something, right?

Byers
(louder): I was asleep, beside her, and woke up and found her passed away beside me. There were no bruises, abrasions, anything like that, [no signs] of any foul play whatsoever. I’ve been totally exonerated, all charges or suspicions of anything dropped.

Bakken
: Well, I do know there was a toxicology report, and they talked about actually quite a lot of lot of drugs that were in her system.

Byers
: Yes, a lot of prescription drugs that she was taking, sure did.

Bakken
: There were also some prescription drugs she wasn’t taking.

Byers
: She took like seven or eight different types of medication for being bipolar, manic depressive, posttraumatic syndrome [
sic
]. And as far as the other medication, I’m as puzzled about it as anyone.

Bakken
: I read in the newspaper—it was actually the
Arkansas
Times
—Mara Leveritt said that there were signs she was suffocated.

Byers
: There was [
sic
] no signs of suffocation, or struggle; she was lying right there on the bed when the paramedics and all came in.

The questioning returned to the subject of Mark’s teeth.

Byers
: Tell me what I have not done to prove that I have not been involved in any of it. I have no problem with a polygraph, sodium pentothal, being hypnotized, bite marks, or anything else . . . I have submitted to every test they’ve asked, every question they have asked, because I know my innocence.

Bakken
: But they had bite mark issues.

Sauls
: Did they take your bite mark impressions?

Byers
removes
dentures,
dripping
with
saliva.

Bakken
: You know, how could you give your bite impressions if you don’t have your teeth? Maybe that’s why you’re not so reluctant to do it.

Byers
: What if I told you that the teeth that I had before they were pulled, the teeth that I had during it—I know the oral surgeons and all that did the work; I would be glad to sign a release for them to send my X-rays.

Sauls
: Will you [give bite mark impressions] for us and send them to Dan Stidham?

Byers
: I won’t do a damn thing for you.

So what about the discrepancies? By blurting out her accusatory “What happened to Melissa?” comment on the courthouse steps, Bakken had blown any chance she’d had of getting a straight answer out of Byers. Watching the film closely, you can see his face change. The questioning in this scene changes from how and when he lost his teeth to how and when he allegedly murdered his wife. The notion that Mark was involved in Melissa’s death had been picked up by supporters during the two years between the release of the first HBO film and the Rule 37 hearings in 1998.
Arkansas
Times
reporter Mara Leveritt was one who reported on what many felt was the suspicious nature of Melissa’s death, “suggesting” that she was suffocated. Bakken confronts Byers with it, but Byers didn’t feel compelled to vindicate himself with the “Free the West Memphis Three” crowd, despite the remarks from Sauls.

Aside from those teeth knocked out in fights, Mark maintained to WM3.org that medication-induced periodontal disease caused the majority of his tooth loss. Mark was on anti-seizure medication for quite some time—Tegratol, he told the filmmakers—and he stated that the drug caused periodontal disease. A notice appears on-screen during
Revelations
informing viewers that the makers of Tegratol do not list periodontal disease as a possible side effect of the drug. But another similar drug that Mark took—Dilantin—does have this side effect.
¹¹⁷
Mark had taken both drugs and frequently confused the two. Whatever the causes of his dental problems—and there were several combined (heavy cigarette smoking and poor dental hygiene can’t be ruled out)—Mark had all his teeth replaced in April 1997 by an oral surgeon who was a friend of the family in Louisiana.
¹¹⁸

Suffice it to say that there were more stories going around about Byers’s teeth than were worth dealing with when one considers there were never any bite marks on the boys to begin with, but it didn’t end there for the defense. Misskelley’s former attorney Dan Stidham called the bite mark report “exciting,” saying it “excludes the three defendants who’ve been convicted of this crime.” The effect of Brent Turvey’s opinion is dramatic on film because he is presented as an expert, and there is no rebuttal. It isn’t court; it’s a
movie
. It’s up to the viewer to decide what weight to give to his opinion. Since he had testified that he was not an expert on human bite marks (also not shown in the movie), one wonders why he got the podium again. Maybe it’s because Turvey was willing to make statements like this on-screen: “The bottom line here is that this is not legal trickery; this is hard, physical evidence of somebody else committing this crime.” Unless, of course, it wasn’t a bite mark.

The Rule 37 hearings, spread over ten months and two courthouses, concluded on March 19, 1999, thus ending Damien Echols’s petition for relief due to ineffective assistance of counsel. It would be six months before Judge Burnett would render his decision: petition denied.

The
Leeza
Deal

In December 1998, Mark Byers traveled to Hollywood to tape an episode of
Leeza
, the talk show hosted by Leeza Gibbons. Pam Echols; Gail Grinnell; Brent Turvey; Richard Ofshe, a nationally recognized expert on false confessions; and Dan Stidham followed a few days behind for a separate taping. Echols and Grinnell refused to appear in the studio with Mark Byers. Mark’s taping was in an essentially empty studio; only cameramen and other crew members were present. Things were different in the West Memphis 3 supporter camp. Some of the audience members for that taping were previous converts, according to Bakken, whereas others were fresh meat. Berlinger and Sinofsky were there to capture the events for
Revelations
.

The panel of guests, starting with the mothers of Echols and Baldwin and finishing with the experts, were interviewed by Leeza, with snippets of the Byers segment shown on video screens at various times during the taping. They saw him, but he never saw them or heard any of what they said.

It was apparent during a post-taping get-together filmed for
Revelations
that all on the supporter side felt that the taping had gone well and that they had converted everyone in the audience. Bakken is shown holding court on the deck of a hillside Los Angeles area home (hers?), with Stidham and Turvey appearing to hang on her every word. “Oh, I think it went really well,” she gushes. “You could hear people in the background who didn’t know anything about the case; you could hear them coming along as they presented stuff. Like the first—well, the mothers were out there, and you could hear them talking, and no one was sure whether to believe it or not, and then as more and more came out, and
you
guys were talking more, you could hear people starting to get angry.” The conversation continues.

Stidham
: What was the audience reaction when they learned that all three defendants had been excluded from making the bite marks?

Bakken
: It’s like, match the bite mark, find the killer. I think everybody got that. It was like, okay, so the kids [convicts] don’t match the bite marks; that means that the guy . . .

Turvey
: The kid shouldn’t have a bite mark on his face. He didn’t leave home with a big fat bite mark on his face [laughing].

Bakken
: If they missed that, what else did they miss?

Turvey then adds without a hint of relevancy that Byers wasn’t wearing his teeth at the interview. “What happened to his teeth, do you know?” he asks.

“Well,” Stidham volunteers, “there are several versions of what happened. The first version I heard was that he got ’em knocked out in a fight.” At this point, Bakken and Turvey start going through ancient history about how Mark came to have dentures in the first place, which is obviously
not
the question here. Dan finally explains that Sauls and Pashley told him that Byers claimed to have lost his teeth somewhere and didn’t have them for the
taping
. These teeth are more famous than George Washington’s.