Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (48 page)

It should also be noted that the notorious “twelve-hour interrogation” is something of a misnomer perpetuated by supporters and the media. Misskelley was brought into the station sometime around 10:00 a.m. and questioned prior to being considered a suspect. He was given a polygraph at 12:40 p.m. Given the time it must have taken to interpret the results, report back to Gitchell, and put Jessie under interrogation, it was probably no sooner than 1:00 p.m. that Misskelley was questioned in earnest. The time of the first part of the taped confession was 2:44 p.m., making the total time less than two hours.

³⁴
An almost identical detail was given by Aaron Hutcheson in his imaginative June 8 statement to Marion police detective Donald Bray. In it Aaron states that it was Steve Branch who “got away and got caught” by Jessie Misskelley, who was “chasing him.” Since it is highly unlikely that Aaron Hutcheson actually witnessed the events of May 5 as he claimed, one is left to wonder where Aaron came up with this. Was it just a coincidence? This detail from Misskelley was critical in the establishment of probable cause for obtaining search warrants against the three suspects.

³⁵
During Detective Bryn Ridge’s testimony on January 27 at the Misskelley trial, he gave conflicting details of the phone call that Jason Baldwin allegedly made to Misskelley. No effort was made by either the prosecution or the defense to clear up this discrepancy:

Ridge: [Misskelley] talked about some, uh, phone calls he had received, uh …

Fogleman: From who?

Ridge: From Jason Baldwin, where he says he heard the voice of Damien Echols in the ackground.

Fogleman: Alright, what did he tell you that … about those phone calls?

Ridge: Okay, there were three phone calls. One was in the day before the murders, he explained. One was the morning of the murders, he explained. One was the night after the murders that he explained.

Fogleman: And in the … did he say, what did he say, uh, that you recall about the phone call the day before the murders?

Ridge: Uh, something to the effect that
they were going to go somewhere and get some girls the next day
or something to that effect [emphasis added].

Fogleman: Alright, and do you have notes related to that phone call the day or night before the murders? [pause] I’m looking at the first page.

Ridge: Okay, stated that he had received a call from Jason Baldwin the night before the murders.

Fogleman: Okay, and what did he tell you?

Ridge: Okay,
at that time they were going to go out and get some boys and hurt them
[emphasis added].

Fogleman: Alright. And … and then what did he tell you, about Damien in the background?

Ridge: Alright, stated he received a call from Jason; Damien, in the background, wanted him to go with them. Said they planned something, heard Damien say that
Jason ought to tell [Jessie] that they were going to get some girls or something
[emphasis added].

³⁶
Misskelley’s June 3 confession contained many contradictions. Arriving at Robin Hood at 9:00 a.m. would have placed them in the woods nearly nine hours prior to the time witnesses say they saw the three victims headed toward Robin Hood. In his February 17, 1994, post-conviction statement, however, Misskelley stated that he had worked at West Memphis Roofing that morning, gotten off work at “dinner time,” and arrived at Robin Hood shortly before dark.

³⁷
Narlene Hollingsworth, Domini’s aunt, would testify that she and her husband, along with a carload of children, saw Damien and Domini walking along the service road by the Blue Beacon Truck Wash at about 9:30 p.m. the night of May 5. Anthony Hollingsworth testified that the pair looked “dirty.” The prosecution would allege that Narlene had mistaken Jason Baldwin for Domini; both had long, wavy, light-colored hair and wore similar clothing. Domini’s alibi checked out to the satisfaction of the police.

³⁸
In a case brought by the
Commercial Appeal
,
a Memphis newspaper, seeking to have the records opened to the public, a state judge upheld Rainey’s order, citing the “sensitive and inflammatory” nature of the case data.

³⁹
Warren Holmes, a nationally recognized polygraph expert, testified at Misskelley’s pretrial hearing in January 1994 that his interpretation of the Misskelley charts was exactly the opposite of Officer Durham’s. Where Durham interpreted the answers to pertinent questions to be deceptive—for example, “Have you ever been to Robin Hood Hills?” and “Have you ever took [
sic
] part in devil worship?”—Holmes thought the opposite. He also thought that the test itself was improper. A “peak of tension” test, Holmes testified, would help to isolate a subject’s truthfulness in a given answer. In Misskelley’s case, Holmes felt that the subject’s statement that the boys were tied up with “brown rope” rather than shoelaces was extremely significant and could have been key to ascertaining the truthfulness of the entire confession. Durham had administered a “zone of comparison” test, which uses control questions—those for which the response is presumed—mixed in with relevant questions. The answers are compared to each other to determine the truthfulness of the answers to the relevant questions.

⁴⁰
Jessie Misskelley’s alibi is significantly more complicated. Because he had previously confessed, he now needed to line up witnesses to testify to his whereabouts. Misskelley claimed to be wrestling in Dyess, some forty miles north of Marion, at the time of the murders. His alibi witnesses did not withstand cross-examination at trial.

The initial part of Jessie’s alibi came from his girlfriend, Susie Brewer, then fifteen years old. She claimed that Jessie was at the home of a mutual friend in Highland named Stephanie Dollar, babysitting Stephanie’s children, and that he was still in the trailer park at 7:00 p.m., when he headed for home. Jessie Misskelley Sr. testified that Little Jessie left Highland Trailer Park on the night of May 5 with his friends Keith Johnson, Johnny Hamilton, Freddy Revelle, Josh Darby, Dennis Carter, and “some other guy, Bill something or other” (probably Bill Cox). This purportedly occurred around 7:30. The police and prosecution, however, brought out several things that tended to impeach Jessie’s testimony:

• It was noted that Stephanie Dollar had been around the trailer park handing out copies of the police report of the “slapping incident” involving a neighbor, Connie Molden, thereby giving witnesses a chance to get the times straight, possibly in an attempt to provide an alibi for Misskelley.

• Big Jessie’s frame of reference for May 5 was his attendance at DWI school, yet he could not remember details of any other dates or times he attended these classes.

• Jessie Sr. had initially told reporters that his son “could’ve been there,” meaning the murder scene, but that he hadn’t taken part in any of the killing, thus directly contradicting Jessie Jr.’s alleged timeline. Big Jessie said at trial, however, “That was before I found out; that was before I went to work on the case and found out that he was not there [at the crime scene].” This perhaps indicated that he’d made his early statements before he’d had a chance to “compare notes” with other neighbors and friends. Or perhaps he simply mixed up his times.

• Crittenden County sheriff’s deputy James Dollahite, Marion Police Department corporal Joe McCafferty, and Marion Police Department patrolman Jason Oliver, all of whom responded to Stephanie Dollar’s call for help regarding the Connie Molden slapping incident (Molden had allegedly slapped Dollar’s child), declared under oath that none had seen Little Jessie Misskelley at the scene, despite Dollar’s testimony that she had “taken” Jessie to within “five yards” of the police cars so he could hear what Molden was saying and report it back to Dollar.

Numerous inconsistencies were brought out in the cross-examinations of Jessie’s wrestling buddies who claimed they could vouch for his whereabouts on the night of May 5. For example, Miskelley’s cousin Charles “Bubba” Ashley Jr. was also questioned, and he testified that his mother had received one of the police reports Stephanie Dollar was handing out, but that he personally hadn’t read it. Prosecutor Brent Davis was attempting to establish that Ashley’s time frame for last seeing Jessie had been given to him by Dollar.

⁴¹
B. A. Botkin,
A Treasury of American Folklore
(New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1944).

⁴²
Another boy, Murray Estes Byers, was born in 1941 and died a year later from a “heart problem that could have been fixed today,” according to Mark’s sister.

⁴³
Home Grown, prior to disbanding in 1977, won an Arkansas “Battle of the Bands” contest, which won them a trip to the 1976 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington. There the band was allowed to perform on stage, just ahead of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Mark jokes that they were “the warm-up band for the Choir.”

⁴⁴
Phencyclidine
was developed in the 1950s as an intravenous tranquilizer but was discontinued for use by humans because it caused patients to become agitated, delusional, and even suicidal.

⁴⁵
Mark was actually baptized three times. He was baptized at age nine while attending vacation bible school and then again at sixteen, but there was no real “heart change.” “I guess you could say that I was under the water so much the fishes knew my name,” he says.

⁴⁶
In
Devil’s Knot
, Leveritt relates a different version of the events leading to the couple’s move from Mobile to Memphis in 1981. Echols defense team investigator Ron Lax of Memphis told a story he allegedly received from a “cooperative but reserved” Sandra Sloane; according to Lax, Sloane told him that after a two-week business trip, Mark had come home saying that he had quit his job and that they were moving to Memphis, which they hastily did two days later. Though there is no hard evidence to support this version, Leveritt accepted Sloane’s account of this incident, as well as others, as though it were verified fact. P205 endnote 245

⁴⁷
The letter was apparently not delivered and in fact was not even finished. It read in part,

Darling,

I wish I could talk to you, since I can’t I thought I would try to write.

Mark wanted to get into a long discussion tonight about repairing our marriage. When I would talk he got on the defensive, telling me how I had done him wrong, and never appreciated the jewelry he made. Anyway, to make a long story short, I realize it’s to [
sic
] easy for him to talk me into things I don’t want to do. So as I tried to tell you twice yesterday, I am going to get some legal advice or at lest [
sic
] make an appointment for next week. No, you are not pushing me and maybe I am moving to [
sic
] fast, but if I don’t it may be a [
sic
] late …”

⁴⁸
The psychologist was Dr. Roland Lee of Memphis, who was reputed to be an expert in the area of child sexual abuse.

⁴⁹
Judge Rainey was the justice who issued the search and arrest warrants for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley in June 1993 and also the gag order for the cases of all three defendants.

⁵⁰
Mark was required to file paperwork changing the way the payments were made. He was not aware of this at first, so initial payments to the children may have been late.