Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (40 page)

Two questions regarding Hobbs’s possible complicity in the murders continue to plague his story of how events transpired that night. First, where exactly
was
Hobbs during the four-and-a-half hours that Pam was at work? There are conflicting accounts. Second, why did Hobbs not keep his wife informed of the progress of the search during that time, given that the boy was already missing when Pam started work, and Catfish Island was practically within walking distance of the search area? Hobbs was interviewed by the West Memphis police on June 21, 2007, in order to get his version of his whereabouts on May 5, 1993. In the fourteen years since the murders, this would be the first time Hobbs had sat down with police. He was vague but not evasive.

Hobbs arrived home from his job at the Memphis Ice Cream company, where he was a “merchandiser”—he drove an ice cream truck, stocked stores, and sold ice cream—at approximately 3:30 the afternoon of May 5. Pam was cooking dinner. Terry asked where the kids were. “I always checked on the kids,” he said. Four-year-old Amanda, Terry and Pam’s daughter and Stevie’s half-sister, was in Stevie’s bedroom watching TV. Stevie, Pam told Terry, was out riding bikes with Michael Moore. Pam was a waitress at Catfish Island, a restaurant that was about a three-minute drive from their house on South McAuley. She worked the supper shift from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Despite having two cars, Terry usually drove Pam to work. “That’s the way we did it,” he told the interviewers. When 4:50 rolled around, Stevie still wasn’t home. Terry drove Pam the short distance to Catfish Island, telling her that he would find Stevie.

He drove off with Amanda and went back toward the Moores’ house on East Barton and began a street-by-street sweep of the area. Dana Moore wasn’t home when they went by her house, so Terry and Amanda just continued to drive. At one point they got out of the car and started walking the neighborhood. “We wanted to see if we could hear him behind the privacy fences,” he said. According to Terry, he and Amanda then returned to their home. Shortly thereafter, Dana Moore pulled up and asked if Terry knew where Stevie or Michael was. Hobbs told her that he and Amanda had been out looking but had seen no sign of the boys. Although Dana Moore’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial indicated that she had “looked around” near Hobbs’s house, there is no testimony stating that she actually saw or spoke to him. As to Hobbs’s claim that he spoke to ten-year-old Dawn Moore while he and Amanda were doing their “sweep,” this cannot be substantiated either, and it is here that Hobbs’s alibi begins to falter.

Hobbs went on to say that after Dana stopped by his house, he followed her back to her house, only to discover that the boys were not there either. He then stated, “While [Dana Moore and I] were standing there in the front yard talking, here comes this big bully-lookin’ dude, comes walkin’ across the street. I looked at him and said, ‘Who’s that?’ And of course it was Mark Byers, and that was the first time I met Mark Byers. He looked like the shaggy DA. Don’t tell him I said that.” The time, according to Terry, was about 6:00 p.m. Hobbs then told the interviewers that it was at this time that they figured out that Christopher, Stevie, and Michael were all together. He and Amanda left the Moores’ house and drove around the neighborhood for a bit and then went to the home of David Jacoby, who lived nearby. Jacoby’s wife, Bobby, was a friend of the Hicks family—Pam’s family—from back in Pam’s hometown of Blytheville, Arkansas. Terry asked Jacoby if he would come with him to look for Stevie, and Jacoby agreed. “We were together till two or three in the morning,” Hobbs said.

Jacoby told a different story. Terry had come to his house between 5:00 and 6:00 that day, he said. Hobbs stayed for somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, leaving between 6:00 and 6:30. He returned to Jacoby’s between 7:00 and 7:30, and it was at that point, according to Jacoby, that he and Hobbs began to search for Stevie, not earlier as Hobbs claimed. Jacoby said that although he and Hobbs had searched around the neighborhood together, he himself had never “crossed a bridge or pipe” into Robin Hood Hills, nor had he entered the woods by the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. Since there isn’t any other way to get to the crime scene—except to wade or swim across—Jacoby was apparently saying that he never entered the woods. This statement was significant because along with the hair in or on the ligature that “could not exclude” Hobbs, a second hair had been found that was similarly related to David Jacoby.
¹⁹¹
This hair had been found on the root of a large tree near the drainage ditch where the boys had been found. If Jacoby was telling the truth, then there was the possibility that
both
Hobbs’s and Jacoby’s hair had been left at the crime scene by Terry Hobbs, or by secondary transfer from one of the boys as Hobbs insisted. Of course, if David Jacoby was lying, it could put him at the scene of the crime with Hobbs.

On September 26, 2007, Mark spent the day feeling tense and agitated. He’d invited Terry Hobbs to come over for a couple of drinks and to talk about all the people who were sniffing around Memphis, digging up dirt on Hobbs. Having been a suspect in the eyes of the public for so long himself, as well as a parent of one of the victims, Mark was a natural confidant for Hobbs, and the two spoke from time to time. Now he was going to be stopping by for a visit. The difference this time was that Mark would be entertaining the man he now felt murdered his son. The objective of this visit was simple: get Hobbs’s palm prints for forensic experts to compare with the long-overlooked partial print that had been left in the mud near the ditch bank at the murder scene, the same print that Tony Anderson had photographed in 1993. During this visit, Hobbs would be asked to help Jacki with one of her craft projects. This particular project involved pressing down on a rectangular piece of plexiglass, a near-perfect surface for collecting prints. When it was time, Terry and Jacki brought the glass over to a surface where it needed to be pressed down for adhesion; Hobbs left two perfect palm prints.

Once the evening’s objectives were achieved, most of the talk centered around the defense’s most recent efforts to get a new trial for Echols and Hobbs’s belief that any success they might be having was coming at his expense. He blamed Pam’s family for always disliking him and the new defense team for persecuting him based on a single hair. He had already been interviewed twice by Herot and Douglas, twice by Lax and Geiser, and also by the WMPD. He spoke in conspiratorial overtones. “It ain’t over with you either,” he told Mark. “Don’t think it is. They’re trying to play us—and probably got Todd [Moore] in it too. They’re trying to play me and you right now, hoping to get a rise out of us, which I ain’t gonna give ’em the thrill.” Even so, he was confident that he was in the clear. “If there was anything to worry about, it wouldn’t take the state fourteen years to figure it out,” he told Mark during a phone call one night. He also said, “If [prosecutor] Brent Davis called me up and said, ‘Come here; I’ve got something to show you,’ I’d go.”

Hobbs was calm and conversational the rest of the evening, until the subject turned to his timeline, and thus his alibi, for the night of the murders. It has long been established and verified by official police documents that the first call to the West Memphis Police to report the boys missing was made by Mark and Melissa Byers and that Officer Regina Meek was the first to respond to the call. She arrived at the Byerses’ residence around 8:10 p.m. and met with Mark and Melissa. After the Byerses had given Meek the essential information, the three walked outside the house and were standing in the carport where Christopher had last been seen. At that point, Dana Moore walked over from across the street. She told them that she had seen Christopher with Michael and Stevie Branch shortly after 6:00 p.m
.
and that they had been headed down Fourteenth Street in the direction of Robin Hood Hills. Meek took off in search of the boys.

During the night of September 26, 2007, when Hobbs came over and left his palm prints on Jacki’s “art project,” Mark mentioned to Hobbs that the first time he had met him was out in the carport at around 8:30 on the night of the murders. Hobbs’s face reddened, and his voice rose. “It was 6:00, goddamn it!” he shouted. The dual nature of Hobbs’s personality was showing, according to Byers, just as it had with John Douglas.

At the end of the evening, immediately after Hobbs left his house, Mark delivered the set of Hobbs’s prints to Memphis attorney Gerald Skahan per a prior arrangement, and Skahan told Mark they would be sent out for comparison. Of course, they had only a poor-quality photograph of a partial print in the mud to compare it to. Maybe Anderson was right; maybe it would take a miracle. At the date of this writing, no official statement has ever been made regarding any comparisons of the print.

Following the November 2007 “DNA Conference” in Little Rock, where Dennis Riordan laid out his case for the news media, the heat beneath Hobbs increased dramatically. Hobbs lawyered up and was in all likelihood told to keep his mouth shut.
¹⁹²
He didn’t. In early 2008, Hobbs met with
Arkansas
Democrat
Gazette
reporter Cathy Frye in Memphis to tell his side of the story. “I want people to know I haven’t done nothing wrong,” he told her. “I want them to hear it from me.” Hobbs told Frye that during his search of Robin Hood Hills the night of the boys’ disappearance, he had gone down the path toward the ditch where the boys were later found but turned back after getting a bad feeling. “I couldn’t breathe. I froze. The hair started standing up.” He also told her that he didn’t remember whether he had told the police about it. He hadn’t, of course—they’d never asked him. Officer Stan Burch of the West Memphis Police Department did interview Pam Hobbs on May 10, four days after the boys’ bodies were discovered, but Terry was not home. Neither Burch nor anyone else from the police department ever followed up.

All the
Democrat-Gazette
interview accomplished, it seemed, was to provide an outlet for Terry to tell more stories about Pam and her family accusing him of killing Stevie, about how the defense was trying to frame him by “stealing” cigarette butts from his front yard and ashtray, and about how he and Pam would have violent arguments (one of which, for some reason, had been videotaped at a local bar). He also told Frye that in March 2008—four months after the DNA conference—he had suffered an “emotional breakdown,” sold the contents of his house, and moved with his fifteen-year-old daughter into his pickup truck, where they spent the next few months. Why would a person just named as a “potential new suspect” do something so obviously irrational and suspicious? “These are things men don’t like to talk about,” he cryptically told Cathy Frye. He was writing a book at the time, he said, and speculated that his reaction had to do with the fact that he was “reliving” the events of the past. This bizarre turn of events seemed to be of little interest to the WMPD, which was still not pursuing Hobbs as a suspect.

Further
Revelations

“It doesn’t add up.” After fourteen years of being surrounded by death, drugs, alcohol, hospitals, and prison, Mark Byers felt that he was finally able to sweep the fog away and look objectively not only at the
new
evidence, but also at the facts of the case as they were already known. With hindsight and a heightened perspective, ignited by his talks with John Douglas and Fred Herot, he began to believe that the evidence pointing toward the innocence of the West Memphis Three was powerful, and he wanted the world to know what he now felt was the truth about who killed his son.

It wasn’t going to be easy announcing to the public this “change of heart,” as it came to be known, and Mark knew it. “I’m not that crazy hillbilly they made me out to be,” he told the
Memphis
Commercial
Appeal
in late 2007. Indeed, many were thrilled to have such a high-profile detractor change sides. Some lauded his “moral courage.” The image had changed too. Out were the bib overalls and rubber boots; in were the Armani suit and leather loafers. Instead of the shaggy beard and ponytail he’d sported in
Paradise
Lost
, he appeared on camera with a smoothly shaved head and neatly trimmed goatee. Not everyone, however, was ready to let the old Mark Byers go. The attitude of some toward Mark Byers just prior to—and even after—his announcement was as hostile and accusatory as ever, almost surely as a result of continued exposure to the case via the HBO films and
Devil’s
Knot
. For example, a MySpace page opened by someone other than Mark Byers in his name showed some interesting comments directed toward him: “I drove through West Memphis last week . . . I thought about the three little boys. I also thought about what a piece of shit you are,” said one person. “I know this isn’t your real profile, but you’re a piece of shit scumbag who killed three kids,” said another.

Amanda Hobbs, Terry’s daughter with Pam, said on
Larry
King
Live
in 2007, “It makes me sick. It really does. It’s just crazy, you know? It’s like Mark Byers has been in these shoes for fourteen years, and now he wants to try to put my father in those shoes?”
¹⁹³

Mark’s longtime nemesis, Mara Leveritt, was still gunning for him as late as February 2007. On her blog, she posted an article rehashing one of the public’s favorite slurs against Mark Byers, his alleged culpability in the death of his wife Melissa in 1996. In an effort thinly veiled as an “investigation,” Leveritt dredged up ancient hearsay from Sharp County sheriff Dale Weaver, who simply refuses, against all logic, to close his investigation. She claims that the impetus for the article was a refusal by the prosecuting attorney to release the Melissa Byers file to her under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, stating that the investigation was still open. The Arkansas State Police closed its investigation in 1996, but Weaver claims to have “lingering questions” over the death of Melissa. Of course, one has to wonder why Leveritt was still trying to implicate Mark Byers in the death of his wife at such a late date. Why exactly did she want the file on Melissa Byers? She unconvincingly tried to tie the article to two investigative pieces she was working on that examined undercover police operations in general and to her belief in the corruption inherent in such work. As her link between those articles and Mark Byers, she cited the fact that Mark and Melissa had done short stints working as informants for the Memphis and West Memphis police departments’ drug task forces and even wove in the word “occult” in an apparent effort to integrate the West Memphis Three story. Enough people questioned her motives for writing the article that she posted another some four months later, titled “Why I Wrote about Byers, the Confidential Informant.”