Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (8 page)

Jessie Misskelley’s trial began on Wednesday, January 6, 1994. The Baldwin/Echols trial immediately followed on February 28. Incredible as it was, both trials resulted in convictions for all three defendants. Baldwin and Misskelley drew life sentences, and Damien Echols was sentenced to death. The trials were thought by most to be the end of the line for the West Memphis Three. For John Mark Byers and the spreading corps of “Free the West Memphis Three” supporters, things were just warming up.

CHAPTER 2 

I’m No Angel 

I’m
no
Angel,
and
I’m
no
stranger
to
the
streets

And
I’m
half
crazy,
so
I’ve
got
scars
upon
my
cheek

—Greg Allman

He’s
the
missing
link

The
kitchen
sink

Eleven
on
a
scale
of
ten

Honey,
let
me
introduce
you
to
my
redneck
friend.

—Jackson Browne

Marked Tree, Arkansas—the name conjures up images of a frontier-type town planted in the middle of a land once populated by Native Americans, or maybe a wilderness outpost where pioneer types sold animal pelts and bought supplies. A brawny outback town where gold miners or oil-seekers set up temporary camps while plying their trade. A wilderness paradise, abundant with game for hunting, fish for fishing; a place populated with rough and ready pioneers trying to scratch a town out of the dirt. If you had these thoughts, you wouldn’t be far off.

The birthplace of John Mark Byers was incorporated in the 1880s, and its business at the time was steel—the laying of railroad tracks to be precise. The men laying tracks for what became the Frisco railroad built mobile camps, providing workers with living quarters and facilities as construction of the railroad moved forward from the west. The camps and the construction operation through these parts were run by Jonathan C. Edwards. When the section of the railroad that ran through Marked Tree was completed in 1883—the town was called “Edwards” at the time—Edwards left the camp with the first train to Memphis and advised those who chose to remain that they should decide on a name for the town and petition Washington, DC, for a post office so they would continue to receive mail.

Geographically speaking, Marked Tree is located at the Arkansas end of the 150-mile-long New Madrid fault, in a part of the state known locally as the “delta.” West of the Mississippi River, one will find the low-lying area of eastern Arkansas, stretching all the way from the northern Missouri border to the state of Louisiana to the south. The Mississippi “Alluvial Delta,” as eastern Arkansas is known geologically, was formed by deposits left by the Mississippi and numerous other rivers, including the Saint Francis and Little Rivers, over a period of millions of years. Thus, the soil is rich and deep, and it is here where some of Arkansas’ most productive farmland lies. Arkansas contains some 43 percent of the nation’s rice acreage and is a major exporter of rice and rice byproducts. It also produces its fair share of cotton, soybean, and milo.

Running track through the area proved to be difficult. The land itself had sunken anywhere from three to nine feet as a result of its proximity to the epicenters of the four massive New Madrid (Missouri) earthquakes occurring between 1811 and 1813, and the area was, and is, susceptible to frequent flooding. Only a system of levees made the area passable at all. The soon-to-be town, however, was smack in the middle of a direct line between St. Louis and Memphis, so the earth was shored up, trestles were built, and construction of the railway moved forward.

But why “Marked Tree”? There are two prevailing stories. As speculated earlier, the area was indeed home to an indigenous people, in this case the Osage and Cherokee Indian tribes, and they had discovered a wonderful geographical feature of the area. At one point in the current location of Marked Tree, the Saint Francis and Little Rivers are separated by only one-fourth of a mile of land. This meant that if a traveler wanted to navigate between rivers, eight miles of paddling could be eliminated by simply carrying his canoe across a narrow strip of land. The Indians spotted an old oak tree on the Saint Francis side of the future town and, in order to identify this crossing, “marked” it for easy identification.

There is also another, more sinister possibility. The John A. Murrell gang, an infamous clan of murderers and robbers, specializing in horse and slave theft, had several hideouts in Helena, Arkansas, in the White Swamps about one hundred miles south of Marked Tree. This was an especially terrifying group of thugs. Murrell himself took to the practice of stealing and reselling slaves, killing the new buyers, and selling the slaves again, doing this until the slaves had been sold often enough to be recognized. At this point, he would disembowel them, fill their abdominal cavities with stones, and sink them down into in the water, never to be seen again.
⁴¹
The gang would often rendezvous at a certain point along the river, at a tree marked with a large “M.” Speculation about Murrell and the town’s name abounds, and no one can say with any authority exactly how Marked Tree was named, but one thing is for certain: there is no other town in the world so named, and that distinction is a source of pride for the residents of the tiny hamlet.

A few other things about Marked Tree can be determined without ever setting foot there.

• It is relatively hot. Marked Tree averages fifty-three days a year over ninety degrees.

• With a listed population of 2,800, it is very small, although it is the second-largest town in Poinsett County. (Only the town of Truman—population 6,889—is larger).

• It is located at an altitude of 224 feet above sea level and a distance of thirty-seven miles northwest of Memphis, Tennessee.

• It is situated some 1,100 miles west of New York City and 1,800 miles east of Los Angeles, which probably suits the locals just fine.

• There are twenty Protestant churches listed in Marked Tree, one Catholic Church, and one Kingdom Hall for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but no Mormon temples or Jewish synagogues.

Marked Tree is also at the center of a sportsman’s paradise. It is fifteen miles from Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge, a 1,230-acre wildlife management area (WMA). The lake that gives the WMA its name was formed during the New Madrid earthquakes. The area is thick with tupelo, willow, buttonbush, and cypress, as well as large quantities of various hardwoods. Here one will find an abundance of waterfowl, mostly ducks, and hunting is, of course, permitted. In addition to ducks, hunters can go after deer as well as squirrels, rabbits, and other “fur-bearers,” but because of frequent flooding, only ducks are a sure thing. With the plethora of mosquitoes and biting flies present throughout the area, many hunters choose to lodge in nearby Blytheville rather than rough it in a tent.

There’s a nice public library in Marked Tree; a very small campus of Arkansas State University; and a public school system consisting of one elementary school, which houses kindergarten through sixth grade, and one high school (“Home of the Indians,” for whom Mark Byers played football and basketball) for grades seven through twelve. Mark attended these schools from kindergarten through his senior year. If one were to walk the hallways of Marked Tree High School, one would see the senior class pictures of all the graduating classes from 1938 to the present. These classes vary in size from fifteen graduates to perhaps sixty. In perusing these photos, it becomes evident that Mark’s family had been in Marked Tree for quite some time; his brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins are all represented along the sides of the main hall. The class sizes peaked sometime around the middle of the baby boom and then began to dwindle, illustrating another characteristic of the town: it’s the kind of place where people don’t stay. Between 1990 and 2007, the town’s population declined by three hundred people. Today, as is the case with many families, there are no kin to the Byerses living in Marked Tree.

George Washington Byers and Auvergne Dye were married on January 19, 1938. John Mark Byers was born some nineteen years later on March 8, 1957, the fifth and last child to be born to the family.
⁴²
He was brought directly from the hospital in Memphis to 612 Saint Francis Street in Marked Tree, where he would spend the next eighteen years. Growing up in Marked Tree wasn’t much different than growing up in most small towns; everybody knew each other, and there wasn’t much to do. It was also difficult to get away with anything; a boy growing up in a small town has many pairs of eyes on him. The residents of Marked Tree were good people, and the roots that were put down and nurtured here, and the values instilled in Mark by his parents and family, even when he appeared to be acting to the contrary, were what sustained Mark through his worst trials. Mark’s parents remained together for fifty-two years, until George passed away on September 9, 1990, from prostate cancer. Auvergne, a diabetic with chronic arthritis, succumbed to heart failure on December 3, 1990, passing three months after her husband. Their marriage was by all accounts a close and happy one.

George Byers has been described by those who knew him as honest, strong, and hardworking, possessing a stoicism that is not evident in his youngest son (although it is clearly present in his eldest). It wasn’t that he was humorless—far from it. But life was hard, and a certain amount of grit was necessary to take care of a large family in that area during those times. During the mid-1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, George, only seventeen at the time, took up bare-knuckles boxing to earn extra money. These brutal and illegal matches took place in barns, the back rooms of taverns, open fields, and just about anywhere a crude rink (which was often just a circle of raucous observers) could be constructed. At five feet ten inches tall and 175 pounds, George wasn’t particularly imposing, but what he lacked in size, he made up for in tenacity. A good fighter could earn $2 or $3 a match, and George won his fair share. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, he took part in local fights when he could find them, but by the time of his marriage to Auvergne, his boxing “career” was over.

Better times brought more lucrative work, and eventually George took control of an agricultural cooperative, the lifeblood of a farming community. These nonprofit business organizations pool resources to provide seed, feed, fuel, and equipment to the farming community at affordable prices. If you lived in Poinsett County, the odds were that you were a farmer or were somehow tied to the farming industry, and consequently, you knew George Byers. He ran a no-nonsense type of business but was characteristically paternal when it came to those who could not afford supplies such as heating oil, providing very favorable payment terms. “There were many families in Poinsett County who would have had unheated homes if my father hadn’t brought kerosene out to their houses in the winter,” Mark recalls. The co-op was George’s work for thirty years before he retired in 1983.

George was strict with his children, providing them with a firm set of rules by which to live, and he made sure that they obeyed those rules. Mark remembers this trait well. At the age of fifteen, Mark was earning money working for a neighbor picking cotton. Cotton picking is hard work, and Mark figured that he could cut a few corners by dropping a watermelon or two into a couple of those bags and covering them with cotton. They’d weigh about the same, and he’d be finished with his job earlier. George Byers was smarter than that. When he discovered that Mark was doing this, his response was typical: Mark worked for three or four weeks for free, much more than was necessary to make restitution. George believed that if you tried to cheat someone, you paid it back with interest. As the youngest of four children, Mark admits to being what he considers “pampered” by his parents. “Was I a spoiled brat? Yes. They were probably more lenient with me than they were with my brother and sisters. I got maybe four whippings from my daddy and maybe two from my mother that I can remember.” Pampered or not, an old family friend recalls how George Byers handled child rearing. When he decided that it was time to rid toddler Mark of his pacifier, George’s response was characteristic. “While riding in the car one day,” the friend said, “George took it out of Mark’s mouth and tossed it out the window into the river, saying, ‘That takes care of that.’”