Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (31 page)

Mark mostly spent his days steering clear of trouble, writing letters home, working when that option was available, and finding diversions—any diversion—that would get him out of his barracks. Early on in Brickeys, Mark discovered the prison choir. They practiced three times a week for a couple of hours each session, and he got out of the barracks on Wednesdays and Sundays for chapel. He also took a course from the Institute of Biblical Studies during the summer of 1999, titled “The Biblical Approach to Alcohol and Drugs.” At one point he even took a course on anger management, which was required for inmates serving time for violent crimes but voluntary for other inmates. It not only improved your “jacket”—the complete record on an inmate kept on file by the prison—before the parole board but also was yet another way to “lay in” for the four weeks the course ran.

Inmates could also spend time in the day room, watch television, or play chess and other approved games (cards were not permitted). During times when he could not leave the barracks, Mark would read, especially the novels of Sydney Sheldon and Clive Cussler, which he had shipped in to him by relatives.

Racial tensions within the barracks were taking their toll on Mark. In a housing unit with almost ninety blacks and only a handful of whites, it was difficult to avoid racial harassment. Black inmates would taunt and attempt to provoke Mark and the other white inmates, knowing that in the event of a fight, their side of the story would be backed by the other black inmates in the barracks.

Mark dealt with the racial issue pragmatically, as any inmate wanting to survive needed to do. “The blacks ran the prison. That was just a fact. They outnumbered the whites. You needed to have as many associates—not necessarily friends—as possible, not just for peacekeeping and basic survival, but to get the okay to run any game you wanted to run.” For example, a friend of Mark’s in the kitchen hooked him up with some yeast one day, and Mark wanted to make a few dollars selling hooch in his barracks. He did what had to be done: he approached the barracks shot-caller, a black inmate; told him what he wanted to do; and asked what it would cost. “Three cups for me, and half your profits.” It wasn’t a negotiation. Life in prison is much like life in the mob: keep your mouth shut, pay tribute where it is due, and don’t take shit from anybody, and you just might survive.

Violence, racial or otherwise, could break out with amazing speed and a total lack of warning. A fight broke out in Mark’s barracks during the same month he was denied a reduction in his sentence.
¹³⁸
He wrote, “One white guy got his left eye poked out and face cut very bad. The black guy was thrown from the top level and busted his head open. It almost started an all-out war. There was so much blood. It was a very bad scene. Everyone was on edge for the rest of the night. It was a night where not too many people slept any. Brother, this place can
scare
the
hell
out of you.”

A recurring theme for Mark during his confinement was a deeply felt remorse for his actions and for the shame he believed he’d brought on his family. “I really let you down,” he wrote his brother from Brickeys. “I screwed up big time. I can’t ever tell you how much you truly mean to me. You have always been there for me . . . I’m very blessed to have you as my brother. The only way I can repay you is I’ll never come back [here], not in this life.”

“What a dumbass, hard headed, fool I’ve been,” Mark wrote from the Delta Regional Unit in Dermott (Dermott), the prison he was transferred to from Brickeys eight months into his sentence. “I wish I could blame it all on someone else, but I can’t. The truth is, I must stand up and pay the price for my actions.” As depressed as he was at times, Mark also wrote about hope. “At least I know there’s a day coming when I will get out.
Freedom
 . . . what a word! It’s truly something I won’t lose again.”

More often, though, what he felt was
fear
, the kind of fear that could keep a man awake at night, a fear of getting killed, of never getting out of prison alive. Sixty-six men to a barracks, sometimes more, all trying to protect the tiny speck of real estate that marked the only territory they had. Things that are barely noticed in the free world become major events in prison. Take a power failure, for example. During the summer thunderstorm season, the power at Brickeys would frequently go out. The time between when the power went out and the generator kicked in was about eight seconds, sometimes a little longer. If it happened at night, God help the inmate who wasn’t prepared.

These outages were hardly a surprise to the inmates; there were signs. The TV weather stations would show thunderstorms approaching, and it was a common occurrence to lose power. Moments before the lights went out, inmates could be seen preparing “ammunition.” When the lights flickered, the aggressors would upend their racks like garrisons from which to launch their assault. When the lights went out completely, it was on. The cons in wall racks were the ones most likely to launch an attack, and these assaults were often targeted. There was always some beef that needed to be settled, and an eight-second blackout was the ideal time to do it. The moment the lights went out, the air became filled with all manner of makeshift missiles—padlocks, D-size batteries, cans of Jack Mackerel fish, and bars of soap with embedded razor blades protruding from the sides like some perverted “Odd Job” bowler hat. The only safe place to be during those eight seconds was under a rack, where missiles could be heard careening off the bunks and walls and sometimes an unsuspecting inmate’s head—mere collateral damage. The target might have been hit, or maybe not, but someone was hit for sure, and often that was all that mattered. Fuck with the Man, fuck with the other inmates—it hardly mattered. Incarceration does funny things to a man, and in the joint there exists an endless cycle of violence and brutality, controlled by fear and intimidation, in a world that seemingly exists through the looking glass.

It was the surrealistic quality of daily life in prison, the pervasive depravity and brutality that became commonplace, that helped to sustain a high level of fear among the inmates. “It was everyday stuff,” Mark recalls. “Just taking a shower, and you’d see four guys holding down another, a bar of soap shoved in his mouth while they were gang-raping him. It was getting up at night to take a leak and finding inmates having oral sex right out in the open, or seeing some inmate with a bottle of hot sauce shoved up his ass. Or coming up the stairs and seeing an inmate just standing there jacking off. Imagine getting up in the middle of the night and seeing that. This was an everyday occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary. You can’t imagine what it’s like when that kind of shit becomes
normal
.”

On his first night at Dermott, for example, Mark was warned about an inmate known as “Fast Eddie 20.” Eddie ran a “store” of sorts, one that didn’t open for business until lights-out. Four or five inmates would slowly rise from their racks and one at a time make their way over to Eddie’s. His fee schedule was simple enough: five dollars for oral sex; two dollars and fifty cents per hand for a hand job; and ten dollars for anal sex, Eddie taking the role of the “catcher.” He could make twenty dollars
fast
. He was, of course, subject to the tariff imposed by the shot-caller for operations in his barracks. A fellow inmate of Mark’s, Dave Maas,
******
confirms the prevalence of this type of activity, adding, “I’ve seen three men in the same bed with the blankets moving like there were snakes in it.”

The manifestation of sex in prison is beyond bizarre. In Dermott, there is an activity that inmates refer to as being “on the window.” From certain vantage points, inmates could see the control booth where barracks activities are monitored by the guards. Some of the guards were female, and if inmates could catch even a glimpse of a female guard’s uncovered foot, it could trigger a full-scale autoerotic frenzy, with many inmates simultaneously masturbating. According to Dave Maas, “It doesn’t matter if the woman is fat, ugly, old as their grandmother. If the mood hits them, you’d better get out of their way (‘outta the gunline’), because if all they can see is their shoe, hand, leg, or other obscure body part, it’s going down, they’re going to jack off on it! It doesn’t matter if sixty-five other inmates are watching or not. They’re going to do it, just like the monkeys in the zoo. Sometimes there were so many inmates on the windows looking out on the hallway masturbating that you couldn’t tell if they’re doing it on each other, or on the woman’s shoe they see sticking out of the control booth across the hall.”

“Welcome
to
Brickeys,
Brother!”

The Lee County jail is situated right next to the EARU. Inmates who have committed offenses in Lee County are frequently sentenced to the EARU to do their prison time. They can be seen marching down the hallway to the infirmary, clad in their bright orange jumpsuits, to receive their physical examination prior to being received into the prison. On one particular day, Mark was walking down one side of the hallway—yellow lines dictated where inmates were allowed to walk—and a group of fish from Lee County jail were being led down the other side. As he scanned their faces, one stood out in stark contrast to the others; it was none other than Danny Overman, the Sharp County drug connection who had blasted Mark’s knee with a shotgun some ten years earlier. As soon as he saw Mark in the hallway, Overman tried to blend in with the wall, but it was too late. Danny had apparently caught a parole violation in Lee County and was now being brought into Brickeys to finish his sentence. “I see him comin’ down the hall,” said Mark, “and I’m like, ‘Hey Danny! How are ya? Good to see ya, brother!’ He just about shit.” The question of how to deal with Danny Overman didn’t require much thought since Mark had mulled it over often during the time that his shot-up knee was healing. He quickly made his way down the hallway to the counting office and approached the inmate there.

“There’s a fish coming in on a PV,” Mark told him. “How much to get him transferred to Little Saigon?”

“Ten dollars commissary will do it,” the inmate answered.

“When will he be assigned there?”

The inmate smiled. “As soon as I get that ten dollars.”

Overman was in Little Saigon by 10:00 the next morning. Mark then paid a visit to Big Chuck and told him about Overman. “I’d like to see him welcomed properly,” Mark said. Chuck said there would be no problem, and Mark knew there wouldn’t be. For twenty dollars commissary, Danny Overman was heading for the infirmary—within twenty-four hours, as it turned out. How bad was he hurt? “He was hurt,” Mark says. Along with the beating Overman received, he was relieved of the few meager possessions he had come in with. During pill call a couple of days later, Mark had the opportunity to visit Overman in the infirmary.

“Hey, Danny! Welcome to Brickeys. You feel like shootin’ me again?” Overman was apparently in no mood for conversation and simply moaned. Mark saw Overman one or two times after that at chow call but never spoke to him. Overman was still serving his sentence at Brickeys when Mark was transferred to Dermott. “I never saw him again, and I hope I never do.”

Mail
Call

It is true that in prison, unless an inmate has visitors coming, mail is the high point of his day. Not all inmates receive mail, and despite the publicity surrounding
Paradise
Lost
and
Revelations:
Paradise
Lost
2
and the growing presence of WM3.org on the Internet, Mark received surprisingly little mail. The mail that he did get was mostly from family. He received a few letters from WM3 supporters, some expressing real or feigned sympathy, others simply pumping Mark for information. There were also letters from young women with apparent ulterior motives. Men tend to be easily plied by even the slightest hint of sexual favors or romantic interest; magnify that pliability a hundred fold, and you’re talking about a man in prison. Three women wrote to Mark during his time in Dermott, all within a three-month span. The first woman, writing under the name of Andrea Timmons, never quite revealed her motive, though it was rumored that she was a well-known “poster” to the WM3.org message boards and that she was trying to manipulate Mark into admitting complicity in the West Memphis homicides or perhaps in the death of his wife. If this was true, it was not evident in her letters. They consisted mostly of sympathetic comments to Mark regarding the loss of his son, her belief in the guilt of the West Memphis Three, and expressions of hope that he was coping well with prison life. She occasionally became flirtatious, as when she wrote this on August 19, 2000: “I knew that you were tall, but my gosh, 6 feet 8 inches? My, my, you are a big boy, aren’t you? That can always be a good thing! Wink! From what you wrote you sound like a big old teddy bear if I may say so. A big old stuffed teddy bear.” After several letters back and forth, Andrea simply disappeared.

The second woman had what appeared to be a combination of thrill-seeking and financial gain as her motive. She went by the name of Julie Ann Eldridge, and her letters were mailed from Tampa, Florida. She made advances, hinting at the possibility of a romantic relationship (“who knows what the future may hold?”), and this appealed to Mark. She sent photos of herself—so she said; the authenticity cannot be verified—seated in a convertible, looking absolutely lovely. In several of her letters she asked Mark to autograph things that he was sending her—a friendship bracelet, envelope art, and so on—but would keep him at arm’s length when he told her he wanted to see her after he was released from prison. “Let’s get to know each other first,” she said. Many of the letters Julie sent were written on stationary adorned with the images of scantily clad models. “Those made their way around the barracks,” Mark recalls. She also asked Mark if he was allowed to receive “nude shots, topless pictures, or a Playboy magazine.” Although Julie claimed in her letters to be thirty years old, the picture she sent Mark showed two girls clearly of college age at most. She signed her name with little hearts drawn around it. She said that she was a “nail technician” and that her life was “boring.” She gave Mark her phone number and told him to call her in the evening. On several occasions he did just that, but the collect calls were never accepted.