Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (34 page)

Nearly twelve hours later, the emergency room doctor came out and informed Jacki that Mark’s blood pressure had stabilized and that he would soon be discharged. “You can’t send him home with me,” she said flatly. “He’ll just do the same thing, and I can’t stand to watch it anymore.” The doctor told her that he did not have sufficient grounds to have Mark committed. Jacki was resolute: “Mark doesn’t know that.” She told Mark that because of the level of drugs in his system, he could be committed against his will, but that it would be better for him if he committed himself. On that point the doctor concurred. Mark was pretty cavalier about it later. “I didn’t want to wind up at someplace like Charter [Behavioral] Hospital, so I figured three or four days of detox and rehab at Methodist North, with some R&R and decent food, would be just the ticket.” Unbeknownst to either Mark or Jacki, what they were doing was signing him into a psychiatric ward, where he would be held a virtual prisoner for the next eight days.

Still foggy from the massive amounts of drugs and alcohol he’d consumed, Mark woke up on the other side of the looking glass. During the early morning hours, while he was in an incoherent dream state, he had been transported the twelve miles from Methodist North Hospital to Methodist Mental Health Institute. As he began to come around, he became aware of a strange feeling taking hold of him, and he realized with relief what it was: he was hungry. He was given a cheeseburger, chips, and a Coke and sent to a semiprivate room. His roommate was a middle-aged black man who briefly acknowledged Mark before rolling over and going back to sleep. Mark had barely settled into his room when he was hustled out for more vitals and a blood draw. By 7:00 a.m. he was taken to the “day room,” where between twenty and thirty patients were sitting. What he saw there made his jaw drop. “These were things you’d only see in a horror movie. Old women walking around in those gowns with no backs, wide open. Looked like two shriveled-up old prunes. People talking to themselves, throwing things at each other—even feces They were fuckin’ crazy!” As a panic started building, Mark went into “prison mode”—act tough, don’t be afraid, blend in. “Crazy people will hurt you.” Then he called his wife.

“Get me the hell outta here
now
! This ain’t rehab; it’s a fuckin’ loony bin!”

Jacki had been sound asleep and was as surprised at this news as Mark was. “Don’t worry. I’ll do everything I can to get you out,” she said, though she had no intention of doing any such thing; he could have been in Leavenworth for all it mattered. “He needed a wake-up call, and I was willing to do what I had to in order to help my best friend and husband.” Two hours later, Mark called again, telling Jacki what she already knew: he would have to stay in the hospital until he was released by the doctor.

So on this first day of his stay, Mark struggled to settle into the routine of the hospital. After an early breakfast, the patients would gather at 10:00 a.m. for a group meeting with the doctor. Mark hated it. “After the meeting, it was smoke cigarettes and watch TV for the rest of the day. There was no ‘therapy’ or ‘treatment.’ This was a place where street people came after their welfare checks were spent. You could see that the place would be empty toward the beginning of the month. Then people would get their checks, spend it all, and check themselves in for ‘three hots and a cot’ until they got thrown out. It was pathetic.” Pathetic perhaps, but it was home for Mark Byers until the doctor decided he could leave. Jacki visited him twice during his stay, and the two spoke on the phone several times a day. “Make the best of it,” she told him. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”

Life in a psychiatric ward was an unearthly experience for Mark. “Some of the things I saw in there reminded me of prison; some were worse. People banging their heads against the wall, women taking their clothes off—I get nightmares from some of those images. People walking down the hall, crapping and peeing themselves like dogs. There were food fights every day. There was this one white lady—looked like a junkie, raggedy clothes, dirty hair, never spoke, just grunted and snarled like an animal, and they were letting her roam around. She’d eat other people’s food, vomit it up, and start throwing it at the other patients!” The “therapy” Mark was receiving was similar to the “rehabilitation” he’d received in prison. It was, to put it kindly, somewhat unstructured. “I got about forty-five seconds a day with the doctor—you know, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Doing okay today?’ and that was it. We did this for eight days, during which time I had a total of about five minutes of face time with the doctor. At the end of the eight days, I was released.” In Mark’s view, the operation at Methodist Mental Health Institute was geared toward profit; there was little pretense of therapy, treatment, or rehabilitation. It was just a matter of keeping the “patients” alive. Be that as it may, when Mark walked out of Methodist eight days after walking in, he was at least clean and sober.

Jacki had her own health issues. After being diagnosed with diabetes at age five, she spent the next twenty-two years living the way diabetics live, with daily insulin injections and a persistent dread of complications—hypoglycemia, diabetic coma, heart failure, kidney failure, and potential blindness. In April 1994, she underwent a successful kidney and pancreas transplant that allowed her thirteen years of freedom from the disease that had plagued her most of her life. Free from cancer for many years, Jacki had been worried as early as November 2006 that she was relapsing. “With all that was going on, I didn’t want to deal with it. I knew that it would have been another excuse for Mark to stay in a stupor.” When Mark came home from the hospital, however, she told him that she was probably going to need major surgery. An examination by her doctor confirmed her fears, and on May 5, 2007, she underwent surgery to remove the cancer. Though the surgery was successful, and her recovery went very well, she was back in the hospital six months later to have a gallstone removed. While there, she learned that her inflamed bladder had caused acute pancreatitis, and she was once again diabetic. She was successfully treated and once again had her illness under control. With any luck, things around the Byers house would return to normal.

The
More
Things
Change

In the eighteen-year history of the case of the West Memphis Three, the years 2006-2008 were pivotal. Money from celebrity supporters—whose ranks, as noted previously, had grown to include Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Johnny Depp, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, director Peter Jackson, Margaret Cho, and Marilyn Manson—was pouring into the fund managed by Echols’s wife, a landscape architect from New York named Lorri Davis. Echols and Davis had been married in 1999 in a prison ceremony presided over by a Buddhist priest. The defense fund used Davis’s Arkansas Take Action’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for financial reporting purposes. Although the group doesn’t publically disclose the amount taken in from donors, it is said to total well over one million dollars, perhaps closer to two million. In June 2008, Eddie Vedder, who was just coming off the production of his Grammy award-winning soundtrack for the film
Into
the
Wild
, was doing a limited-engagement solo tour, his first ever, on the West Coast. A portion of the proceeds went directly to the Damien Echols Defense Fund. Through ticket and hotel room package auctions—five pairs of “premium” tickets per show were auctioned—the tour may have raised up to $100,000 for Echols. Other celebrities used different vehicles for donations, though it is doubtful that any raised as much for Echols as Vedder.
¹⁴⁴
“Eddie has been with us for six years,” Davis told author Mara Leveritt in 2004. “We simply wouldn’t be where we are without him.”
¹⁴⁵

Davis had been putting the money to good use, making calls and writing letters and e-mails to various attorneys and experts, retaining people she felt could help her husband. Dennis Riordan, a San Francisco attorney with extensive experience in federal appellate law, was hired as lead counsel. High-profile rent-an-expert Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner of New York City and current chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, was retained to examine photographs of the victims of the West Memphis homicides. Baden’s forensic skills had been previously sought for the O. J. Simpson, Claus Von Bulow, and Phil Spector murder cases. Dr. Werner Spitz, former chief medical examiner for the city of Detroit, who had been a consultant for the Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), Phil Spector, Robert Chambers (the “Preppy Murder”), and JonBenét Ramsey cases, was brought in to examine autopsy and crime scene photographs. Both Baden and Spitz were of the opinion that the three murdered children’s injuries were inflicted not by knives, as was alleged by the prosecution during the 1994 trials, but by postmortem “animal predation” by “large carnivores.” Dr. Vincent Di Maio, who had provided expert testimony for the Scott Peterson and Phil Spector trials, was also retained to examine the photographs. Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic odontologist from Coral Gables, Florida, whose testimony had driven the nail into Ted Bundy’s coffin for the 1978 murders of Florida State University co-eds Lisa Levy (whose left buttock Bundy had bitten) and Margaret Bowman, was tapped to search the victims’ photographs for any bite mark activity. John Douglas, the “mind hunter” who inspired the “Jack Crawford” character in the 1991 film
Silence
of
the
Lambs
and who headed the FBI’s Investigative Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia, for twenty-five years, was retained to develop a profile of an alternate, unknown subject (UNSUB), someone other than Mark Byers, who was a dead horse beaten for fourteen years already.
¹⁴⁶

The Echols defense team had taken advantage of a 2001 Arkansas law that gave death-row inmates extensive access to DNA testing.
¹⁴⁷
DNA samples selected from a list agreed to by the defense and the state were received by Bode Laboratories in Springfield, Virginia, on July 7, 2004. These included the following:

• fingernail scrapings

• hair and tissue samples (including those later identified as possibly belonging to Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby)

• ligatures (shoelaces)

• blood samples

• cuttings from victims’ clothing (to identify apparent staining)

Eighteen months later, in December 2005, the results began to come back from Bode. Whatever the defense had been expecting, they couldn’t have been too disappointed with the findings. Among all the items tested, none tied Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, or Jessie Misskelley to the crime scene, though it was true that the defense had picked out the items to be tested.

Tinsel
Town
and
the
Monster
in
the
Shadows

For Mark Byers, things just got stranger and stranger. In May 2006, Dimension Films, a production company owned by media mega-moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein, along with producer Liz Fowler, founder of Clear Pictures Entertainment, announced that they had acquired the rights to
Devil’s
Knot
from Mara Leveritt. Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman (
The
Exorcism
of
Emily
Rose
) were to write the screenplay, and Clark Peterson (producer of the Academy Award-winning
Monster
) would join in the production, which was scheduled to begin by the end of 2006. Dimension quickly set about obtaining life rights of people they believed were key players in the “True Story of the West Memphis Three.” Investigator Ron Lax, former juvenile officer Jerry Driver, and Pam and Terry Hobbs all reportedly signed deals with Dimension.
¹⁴⁸
Although arguably no one had received more attention in the book
Devil’s
Knot
, or in either
Paradise
Lost
film, than Mark Byers—with the exception of the WM3 themselves—Mark Byers wasn’t approached by anyone associated with the film.

In May 2007, Mark got an unexpected visit from Ron Lax of Inquisitor, Inc. The blue jeans-clad private investigator was working for Damien Echols’s new attorney, Dennis Riordan, and wanted Mark’s help as they searched for alternate suspects. He mentioned that they were looking at a homeless man who frequented the woods near the interstate, but Mark didn’t believe him. Finding such an alternate suspect had always been at the top of the defense’s list—a list that had previously been headed by the likes of Mark Byers; there was a better than even chance that Lax still had him there.

“Why should I help you?” Mark asked. “You said some pretty shitty things about me. You all but accused me of killing my son.”

Lax replied, “I know, Mark. I’m sorry for that. I was just trying to do my job.” During the criminal trials in 1994, Lax had acknowledged having suspicions of Mark in connection with the murders even before the Kershaw knife was turned in by HBO.
¹⁴⁹
Now, he said, he was looking for some help. “Would you be willing to at least look at some of the results of my investigation and give me your opinion on it?” Mark said he would, but Lax never came back, most likely because after all these years, suspect-wise, Mark Byers was still a dead end, and Lax knew it. But there was another, much more significant reason that Lax didn’t revisit Mark: the defense had
finally
discovered an enormous omission in the 1993-1994 criminal investigation, something that went to the very core of the case. This discovery, involving investigative work so elementary in police procedure, could potentially unravel the entire case against the West Memphis Three. At that point, the defense was counting on it.