Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (39 page)

Brent
Davis
Answers

On May 30, 2008, eight months after it was filed in federal court, the state responded to the Echols petition. Although the response went on for some ninety pages, the state’s position was tersely summarized in the opening paragraphs:

[Echols’s] motion on accompanying exhibits rely [
sic
] in combination on three principal claims:

1. Allegedly new forensic evidence that post-mortem animal predation caused some of the injuries to the victims, which, he argues, undermines the state’s trial proof

2. DNA-testing results exclude him as the source for two hairs from the crime scene and perhaps from biological material from a victim, and do not exclude two other persons as a source of the hairs, and

3. The jury’s verdicts were flawed by bias and misconduct.

The state countered Echols’s charges on the grounds that they were “meritless,” urging Judge Burnett to deny Echols’s motion without a hearing. The two sides were scheduled for a showdown in the form of an evidentiary hearing in Jonesboro on September 8, 2008.

Trouble
with
the
Chicks

By late 2008, Terry Hobbs had just about had it with the disruption to his and his daughter’s life caused by those accusing him of Stevie’s murder. Every major newspaper and radio station in the Memphis area and around the state of Arkansas was printing the results of the DNA testing, naming him as a suspect in the murders, and regaling the public with stories of Hobbs’s past. No detail was too personal to print. Hobbs’s marital problems with Pam, his violent past (as when he shot and wounded Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks Jr.), and revelations about the alleged abuse of his first wife and child were being touted. The declaration of Mildred French in which she alleged to have been sexually assaulted by Hobbs was common knowledge to the public. With the exception of the DNA evidence, which was consistently mischaracterized as a “match,” all of the evidence against Hobbs was weak, circumstantial, and hearsay, to say nothing of the fact that most of it was very old information.

To make matters worse, big-name celebrities were getting in on the act. Hobbs was hearing his name uttered by the likes of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, and he didn’t much care for it. Maines was a latecomer to the supporter movement, but what she lacked in case knowledge, she made up for with her celebrity megaphone. On her band’s website, she posted an open letter to supporters containing the now-familiar accusations, most lifted directly from Echols’s habeas petition. The Moore ligature hair, the “stump” hair, and Stevie’s knife being found in Terry’s dresser drawer were not going to be enough to compel the state of Arkansas to open an investigation. But Maines added in the hearsay—and disputed—claims of Pam’s sister Jo Lyn McCaughey that on the night of May 5, 1993, Hobbs had “washed clothes and sheets at odd hours for no other reason than to hide evidence from the crimes.”

On November 25, 2008, Terry Hobbs filed suit in Pulaski County, Arkansas, alleging defamation of character against Natalie Maines individually and against the Dixie Chicks (Maines, Emily Robinson, and Martie Seidel) collectively. As specific claims, Hobbs listed (1) “defamation/libel,” (2) “intentional infliction of emotional distress/outrageous conduct,” and (3) “false light invasion of privacy.” These claims combined to “injure” Hobbs in his “person and business, and in his personal and business reputation.”
¹⁸⁷
The complaint contained a single exhibit, a copy of the open letter to supporters of the West Memphis Three that Maines had posted on the Dixie Chicks’ website. The letter was, in Maines’s words, “parroted” from a press release that summarized Echols’s petition. Maines claimed in her affidavit that the letter posted on her website “did not accuse Hobbs of the murders” but simply listed evidence pointing away from the West Memphis Three. Hobbs disagreed. He also accused Maines of making further statements damaging to his reputation at the December 2007 rally at the state capitol building in Little Rock. The suit alleged that Maines (being sued under her married name, Natalie Pasdar) “reiterated her position” about the DNA and forensic evidence making the case for the WM3 stronger and in the process “made other statements that amounted to a false and reckless claim that Plaintiff committed the murders of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore.” Hobbs was seeking unspecified damages, both punitive and compensatory, demanding that a jury provide the “just and proper relief to which he may be entitled.”

Because of geography—the “Chicks” all claimed residency in Texas, Hobbs lived and worked in Tennessee, and the rally that had caused all the hoopla had taken place in Arkansas—the suit was moved from Pulaski County to a federal court. Depositions for the suit began in the law offices of one of Maines’s attorneys, John Moore, in Little Rock on July 21, 2009. Over a period of two days, Hobbs was grilled by attorneys representing the Dixie Chicks and Natalie Maines.
¹⁸⁸
They asked Hobbs about anything and everything. They asked about Mark Byers, Sharon Nelson, and other people who had claimed that Hobbs was responsible for the murders. Why wasn’t he suing them? The implication was clear enough. Although Hobbs repeatedly answered that what he wanted was “justice,” which he defined as “whatever the court deems necessary,” Maines’s attorneys pressed Hobbs to admit that he had gone after the Dixie Chicks for their deep pockets and no other reason. It also came to light that Hobbs’s attorney, Cody Hilander, was working on a contingency basis, and this was obvious by the case Hobbs put on, which was essentially none. There was no money to depose Maines, the Dixie Chicks, or any other witnesses. Hobbs’s was a very low-budget case. In December 2009, US district judge Brian S. Miller dismissed the case, and the following April, he ordered Hobbs to pay more than $17,000 in legal fees.

However badly the case turned out for Terry Hobbs, the Echols defense team was elated. Though they themselves would not have the opportunity to personally question Hobbs, any information that Maines’s attorneys had been able to get out of him—under oath—could now be used, and there was much information to be had. For example, through the deposition they were able to get Hobbs on record omitting the fact that he went directly from dropping Pam off at work to David Jacoby’s house to play guitar. This contradicted his statement to West Memphis Police on June 21, 2007 that he continued his search for Stevie after taking his wife to work. This was important because Jacoby had given a sworn statement to defense investigators in 2007 stating that he and Hobbs had played guitar for an hour or so right after Terry dropped Pam off at work. According to Jacoby, Terry went out—and stayed out—for more than an hour before coming back to ask Jacoby’s help in searching for Stevie. By Jacoby’s reckoning, that happened close to 7:30 p.m.

A second example, as Riordan made reference to on
Larry
King
Live
, was that during the deposition Hobbs stated that he had not seen Stevie at all that day. This was critical because Riordan had obtained sworn statements from Hobbs’s neighbors saying they had seen the boys with Terry, at his house, shortly before their disappearance that afternoon. One must wonder why these witnesses—thirteen-year-old Jamie Ballard; her sister Brandy, eleven; and her mother Deborah—waited so long before coming forward. They claimed that because police hadn’t canvassed their block, they weren’t aware that the information was valuable until years later when Hobbs’s claims were made public. Their mother said that the two girls went to a church group meeting every Wednesday and that they were waiting for their ride to arrive when they saw the boys. How certain were they that it was Wednesday, May 5, that they were remembering? According to Jamie, Ryan Clark had told her that afternoon that Christopher was late for dinner and if she saw him, to send him home. She said that she met Ryan in school the next day, and it was then that she found out the boys were dead.
¹⁸⁹
Ryan was extremely upset with her, asking her why she hadn’t sent Christopher home. She said she did try to send him home, but that he wouldn’t go. As for Hobbs’s claim that he didn’t see the boys that day, “If he says he did not see them, he’s not telling the truth,” Ballard told Erin Moriarty on the September 17, 2011, episode of
48
Hours:
Mystery
. “He saw them. He was out there with them. He called them to his house.” When asked if the women were mistaken, Hobbs replied, “They’re lying.”

The Pasdar deposition also included a slew of declarations from the Hicks family—Pam, her mother, and two of her three sisters. Sour grapes among in-laws can be notoriously unreliable, but if Pam’s sisters were telling lies, they were whoppers. Jo Lynn McCaughey, for example, claimed that it was she who had witnessed Terry doing laundry on the night of the murders. She said that Hobbs not only washed “dirty laundry,” curtains, and bed linens, but was even “taking clothes out of dresser drawers and washing those too.” McCaughey was appalled that Terry was doing laundry at such a “horrible” time, she said. She also took the opportunity to repeat the stories about Terry’s fledgling book—or books—that he claims to have kept since May 5, 1993; the books allegedly comprise a narrative of the events that occurred between the murders, including Hobbs’s personal timeline, and the shooting of Jackie Hicks Jr. during an altercation in November 1994. McCaughey repeated what she had told police detective Lt. Ken Mitchell and Sgt. Chuck Noles about the fourteen knives she had discovered at Pam’s house and turned over to attorney Dan Stidham in 2002, one of which was a knife that Stevie’s grandfather, Jackie Hicks Sr., identified as a knife he had given to the boy as a gift.

For her part, Judy Hicks Sadler declared that Hobbs was a child molester and wife abuser. She claimed that Terry would make Stevie and Amanda watch pornography and that Terry would have Amanda on his lap while they were watching. Sadler said that Terry would force Stevie to watch him masturbate and also have Stevie “sexually molest” Amanda. How this molestation was done by an eight-year-old to his four-year-old sister, Sadler didn’t make clear, but if all this was happening, and Sadler knew it, why didn’t she tell anyone? “I wish I had told people about what Terry was doing to Stevie and Amanda. I knew it was wrong. But Stevie was scared and made me promise not to tell. Additionally, I was a child myself [she was fifteen] and was scared about what would happen to my family if I did tell.”

Marie Hicks, Hobbs’s former mother-in-law, was less acerbic in her attack on Terry, sticking to the “facts,” such as the stories about Amanda being abused and Stevie being punished for his “accidents.” Her account of the alleged physical evidence against Hobbs was one of only a few that acknowledged that the hairs found at the crime scene could only “possibly” have come from Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby; according to most sources, the hairs were “a match.”

Not surprisingly, John Mark Byers also gave a declaration to Maines’s attorneys. He stated categorically, “I believe that Terry Hobbs was involved in the murders. Some of the reasons I believe Hobbs was involved are set forth below.” Mark Byers described the publicity the case had generated as “almost unbelievable,” citing Hobbs’s appearance with Pam in 1994 on the
Geraldo
show (along with Jackie Hicks Sr. and Jessie Misskelley Sr.), as well as coverage in national newspapers such as the
New
York
Times
. He spoke of the errors in Hobbs’s timeline as given to WMPD in 2007.
¹⁹⁰
Hobbs claimed that he had met Mark and Dana Moore at Dana Moore’s house somewhere between 6:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on the night of the murders. According to Mark, this was false; the first time he met Hobbs—ever—was at 8:30 p.m., two hours later, just as Officer Regina Meek was leaving the Byerses’ house to search for the boys. If Hobbs was there, Meek made no note of it. Byers’s declaration listed a number of inconsistencies related to statements Hobbs had made, such as Hobbs telling Mark that he lived in a different house than he actually lived in at the time of the murders, that the injuries to Stevie were different than they actually were and that he had searched Robin Hood Hills with Officer Meek that night at 6:00 p.m. Finally, Mark claimed in his declaration that Hobbs had made up a story about seeing a black man coming from the direction of the crime scene on the morning after the murders “to deflect attention from himself.”

Mark had also personally spoken to David Jacoby; according to Byers, Jacoby told him that Hobbs had shown up at his house at 5:00, which would have been immediately after dropping Pam off at work. Jacoby told Mark that Hobbs stayed for an hour or so, leaving between 6:00 and 6:30 to see if Stevie had come home yet. Oddly, Jacoby also reportedly told Mark that when Hobbs had first come over, as Hobbs opened the front door, Jacoby spotted several boys riding bikes and skateboards on the street, and one of them was Stevie. In his declaration Mark also restated the odd fact, one that Hobbs does not dispute, that Hobbs had not notified his wife that Stevie was still missing during the four hours she was at work.

The
Hobbs
Alibi