Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  About a year later, when we were all meeting in New York about the case, Peter and I got into a discussion about The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s exquisite and heartbreaking novel, which Peter was preparing to film. I went over some ideas with him about how the villain, a remorseless child killer, would behave. Knowing of my involvement with The Silence of the Lambs, he asked me to consult on the film. I ended up coaching actor Stanley Tucci on how to play this monster realistically. I was highly gratified when he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.

  But before that happened, I had this real-life case to pursue.

  CHAPTER 22

  FITTING THE PROFILE

  Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky released a second film in 2000. Paradise Lost 2: Revelations detailed the efforts of the Free the West Memphis Three Support Group and chronicled the thus-far unsuccessful appeals process. Burk Sauls, Kathy Bakken, Lisa Fancher and Grove Pashley all figure prominently in PL2, as does Lorri.

  The film brings up the curious death of Melissa Byers, in home and in bed, on March 26, 1996. Melissa had had a long-standing substance abuse problem, even before she and her husband, John Mark Byers, met. Her death cast further suspicion on him, and he didn’t seem to understand why a group of mainly West Coast agitators were coming in to support the three who had killed his stepson.

  “To me, it’s like a Jeffrey Dahmer fan club, Charles Manson fan club, Ted Bundy—you could name them all,” he told reporters. “Some people want to come to the rescue of a savage to get maybe their fifteen minutes of notoriety on TV.”

  Byers, who’d had previous run-ins with the law, hadn’t exactly kept his nose clean in the years between the two films. He had been accused of taking $20,000 worth of property from a neighbor’s home and pawning it; he reportedly held a gun on potential interveners while two teens in his neighborhood beat each other up. He later said in the stolen merchandise charge, he and Melissa were covering for his son Ryan and his friends.

  In 1999, while on probation after conviction for that crime, he was arrested for selling twenty tablets of the prescription tranquilizer Xanax to undercover narcotics officers. His court-appointed lawyer plea-bargained, but he ended up doing fifteen months of hard time in maximum-security institutions, even though he had never been a violent offender. The first day he was in prison, three inmates jumped him. That encounter left him with a concussion, broken nose, dislocated shoulder, four broken ribs and bruised kidneys. His description to us of getting to the point where you just tune out the screams of the other prisoners is remarkably similar to Damien’s.

  PL2 also shows how Dan Stidham, Jessie Misskelley Jr.’s attorney, brought in Brent Turvey, who calls himself a criminal profiler and “forensic generalist.” Stidham had wanted a profiler involved from the start, but he couldn’t afford it. During the appeals, Kathy Bakken got in touch with Turvey, who agreed to look into the case pro bono. After examining photos of the bodies and other crime scene evidence, Turvey concluded that the murders must have taken place elsewhere and that the creek area was only a dump site. In a long and detailed consultation, he also disagreed with Dr. Peretti about many of the wounds on the bodies, declaring they were not made with a knife, but rather were bite marks.

  “This is the single worst case of sexual mutilation I’ve ever seen,” Turvey declared, and suggested they might get closer to the true killer or killers if they could get dental impressions from the various suspects. A forensic odontologist subsequently ruled out all three defendants from the bite marks.

  Turvey also believed it would have been difficult for one offender to pull off the triple murder by himself, so there would probably have been two UNSUBs.

  When I came into the case, I disagreed with this analysis. First of all, I didn’t see any way there were separate abduction, murder and body disposal sites. I was certain it all happened in one location. It would be virtually impossible to abduct three active boys, control and keep them quiet while they were transported to a different location, kill them in a brutal manner, and then carry the bleeding bodies into the woods, all without being seen or noticed. If there were more than one offender, the difficulty would be multiplied. Anyone criminally experienced and sophisticated enough to pull off something like that would not undertake such a high-risk venture.

  But the possibility of more than one offender was low in my mind. When I was assuming this was a sexually based crime, it didn’t seem like the kind of scenario where two perverts would be partnering and watching each other. Later, when I knew more about the facts and changed my assessment, it seemed even less likely that two UNSUBs would be involved.

  His contention that the crime scene and dump site were different made no sense to me. I couldn’t visualize the offender carrying three victims’ contorted bodies, clothing and bicycles back into Robin Hood Hills, dropping the bikes in the water one place, placing the bodies elsewhere, and then hiding the clothing under the creek bed with sticks. Why wouldn’t he have just burned or thrown away the clothing? Turvey’s scenario just didn’t scan.

  None of these exotic theories made any sense to me. The crime had to be simpler and more straightforward.

  Between 2000, when PL2 leaves off, and 2006, when Lorri contacted me, in some ways a lot had happened and in others almost nothing had. The sum total was that life didn’t get any easier for some of the key figures in the case.

  While raising her and Damien’s son, Seth, Domini Teer married and divorced and married again. She ended up living in Arizona.

  Pam Hobbs left Terry in 2002 and divorced in 2004. That same year, Vicki Hutcheson recanted her testimony that she had accompanied Damien to an esbat, explaining, “He was just like any normal kid his age.”

  She suggested that it was her only way of getting out of her own legal difficulties, and apparently the ploy worked. She also said the police brought up the possibility that the authorities would take away her son if she did not cooperate. The theft charges were never brought against her and she kept her child. “I testified to it, but I lied on the stand,” she said.

  Dana and Todd Moore divorced. There had long been local talk about the couple’s problems with alcohol. Just a year after the murders, Dana had struck and killed a pedestrian while driving on a rural road in Crittenden County. She was charged with driving under the influence, but her lawyer had pled the charge down. She was fined, put on probation, and ordered to pay restitution.

  Michael Carson moved out to California, continued to get in trouble with the law, and continued to ply his trade as a jailhouse snitch. Eventually he, too, would call into question his testimony that Jason Baldwin had confessed the murders to him. “I was really in a bad state,” he reflected. “They [the prosecutors] knew the drugs I was taking.” Essentially, he said he couldn’t remember whether Jason confessed, merely told Michael what he had been accused of, or that he heard it from somewhere else. Since his assertions were so bizarre, my own conclusion is that he made them up in his drug-induced haze.

  Meanwhile, the appeals were going nowhere. Judge Burnett turned down every new motion the defense brought before him, and the Arkansas Supreme Court consistently upheld each of his rulings.

  The only ray of hope was a new state statute in 2001 that allowed the new scientific capabilities of DNA analysis to be raised in support of actual innocence.

  Studying the victimology, I found nothing in the three victims’ behavior that would categorize them as high-risk.

  On the other hand, Robin Hood Hills itself was potentially a high-risk area because it was isolated and densely wooded. Cries for help would be difficult to hear. For the same reason, it was relatively low-risk for the offender. Eight-year-olds would be vulnerable targets, though three boys together would decrease their chances for harm. It would be difficult to control three victims at once unless there was more than one offender, as the prosecution put forth, or if a single offender had a gun or knew the victims and therefore could assert verbal authority over them.

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nbsp; A significant behavioral consideration was the location, nature, and severity of injuries and their intended lethality. The offender was very methodical about the killings. He made all three victims remove their clothing. This tactic, as an M.O., had been observed in other cases where the offender not only intended to instill fear into the minds of victims by removing their clothing, but also to cause embarrassment and vulnerability to the point where victims would not want to run out totally naked into a public area. The offender knew this tactic would be an effective means to control young victims.

  Another controlling technique that I had never seen before in other violent crimes was using shoelaces from the victims’ tennis shoes to hog-tie them. According to the reports, Chris Byers was tied by half hitch and double half hitch knots; Stevie Branch was tied in a similar fashion and the knots were all half hitches. Michael Moore was bound with square knots on his left wrist and ankle and half hitch knots on his right wrist and ankle.

  I saw several possibilities for the different knots used in the Moore bindings:

  • Multiple offenders.

  • The offender himself used two styles of knots familiar to him.

  • The offender had one of the victims help him bind Michael.

  Having victims tie one another has been observed in previous cases. But what couldn’t be concluded from this one aspect of the case was whether there was more than one offender involved. A forensic expert for the prosecution testified during the trial about the types of knots utilized by the offender, but never gave an opinion as to the significance of the difference.

  The offender was criminally clever to utilize the shoelaces as bindings. The question, though, is why did he want to hog-tie the victims? If the intent was to kill the boys, why tie them up?

  Behavior reflects personality and the behavior exhibited by the offender at the crime scene reveals his personality characteristics. The method and manner in which this offender perpetrated this crime would be indicative of who he is and what he is like as a person. The commission of a violent crime involves the personal attributes of what we recognize as an individual’s “normal” behavior. Such normal behavior is unique to that individual.

  In addition to the uniqueness revealed by how and with what the victims were hog-tied, other behavioral indicators reflected on the offender as well. Postoffense behavior reflects that he felt the need to hide the victims’ clothing at the scene. He did so by sticking small branches he found at the scene into the clothing and pushing it under the muddy water and out of view. The victims were also hidden from view. As a final act, the offender felt the need to toss the two bikes into the bayou drainage ditch and out of sight.

  Once I had studied and absorbed all of the case materials, I set out to create a profile and analysis.

  Before you can deal with the specific personality of the UNSUB, you have to figure out what kind of murder it is. We break down intentional homicides into four broad categories:

  1. Criminal Enterprise entails murder committed for profit or material gain such as money, goods, territory or favors.

  2. Group Cause, in which two or more people with a common ideology sanction an act committed by one or more of its members that results in death. Gangs and religious and hate groups would fall under this heading.

  3. Sexual Homicide involves a sexual element or activity as the basis for the sequence of acts leading to death. Performance and meaning of this sexual element vary with the offender. The act may range from actual rape involving penetration—either before or after death—to a symbolic sexual assault, such as insertion of foreign objects into the victim’s body.

  4. Personal Cause Homicide is an act of interpersonal aggression that results in the death of a person or persons who may or may not be known to the offender. The homicide is not motivated by material gain or sex and is not sanctioned by a group. It is the result of an underlying emotional conflict that propels the offender to kill.

  Of course, these categories can overlap based on the offender’s particular psychopathology. Sedley Alley’s murder of Suzanne Collins, for example, was a mixed presentation. It was primarily a personal cause homicide because it was motivated by anger and aggression, but it certainly had sexual overtones, displaced onto Suzanne from other problems in his life.

  After laying out the topics to be dealt with, I always begin by explaining just what Criminal Investigative Analysis is. As I wrote in my report:

  Criminal Investigative Analysis is a process whereby crimes are reviewed in their totality from both a behavioral and investigative perspective. It involves reviewing and assessing the facts of a criminal act; interpreting offender behavior before, during, and after the criminal act; developing strategies; profile of unknown offender(s); assessment of suspects; interview and interrogation strategies; search warrant information based on research, prosecutive and trial assistance, and expert testimony in the areas of motive, MO, and signature (ritual) analysis.

  The purpose of Criminal Investigative Analysis is to generate potential leads, as well as suspects who, based on past case experience and research, would most likely perpetrate the type of crime being investigated (i.e. homicide, rape, arson, kidnapping, etc.). In most cases an analysis is requested in order to provide investigative direction when the perpetrator’s motive and intent are unknown. An analysis may “reinforce” the course or direction of the investigation or may in fact “redirect” an investigation if it appears the investigation has been somehow misdirected or maligned. From prior investigative experience, cases have been misdirected by misinformation relative to eyewitness testimony; lack of investigative experience; false confessions; contamination at the crime scene; and/or the mishandling of evidence during the collection and preservation of the scene.

  Regarding the Cameron Todd Willingham supposed arson case in Texas, I have expressed concern that my FBI unit might have gotten it wrong if we had analyzed it, due to inaccurate scientific information that came from local practitioners.

  In other words, to explain the murders of the three victims it is important not only to analyze the crime with respect to what is observed behaviorally, but also to integrate that analysis with known facts through investigative interviews and forensic evaluation of evidence.

  The situation turned out to be similar here in West Memphis.

  When initially reviewing the case materials, my first impression was that the case was a lust murder, a subcategory of sexual homicide, with Chris Byers being the primary target. This was based in large part on the findings of medical examiner Frank Peretti, who opined that Chris was emasculated by use of a sharp instrument. Recall that he testified the emasculation was so surgically precise that even he would have had difficulty performing such precise surgical acts even under the best operative conditions. I later found out that Dr. Peretti had never been board certified, and as I would soon learn, much of his analysis was out-and-out wrong.

  We define “lust murder” as any case in which the assailant cuts, stabs, pierces or mutilates the sexual organs of a victim. A distinguishing characteristic of the lust murder involves extreme mutilation and body dismemberment. The attack is frenzied in appearance, but it is primarily focused on the genital areas of the victim. The lust murderer often bites victims in the breasts, buttocks, abdomen, thighs and/or genitals.

  The most common method of killing for the lust murderer is strangulation, blunt-force trauma or stabbing with a sharp instrument. The crime may display overkill: excessive trauma or injury beyond what is necessary to cause death. Dr. Peretti described Chris’s wounds as having the appearance of gouging, bite marks, cutting and blunt-force trauma. While he stated that the cutting wounds were caused by a knife, he did not address the cause for the gouging and bite marks.

  The more I looked at the crime scene photographs and studied the reports, the more I was convinced something was not right about this. Lust murders tend to be disorganized, and in nearly every case the offender does not know the victim or victims. But t
he evidence here told me just the opposite. The crime was not only organized, but it showed a strong degree of what we call criminal creativity or flexibility. That is, the killer did not come to the scene with ropes, so he was not planning on binding anyone. Rather, when he decided to do so, he utilized what he found at the scene—the boys’ own shoelaces.

  Also, he had the presence of mind—the need, in fact—to hide the clothing and bicycles, something he would not have needed to do if he were a stranger who could get out of the area quickly.

  Then there was the fact that the genitals were only mutilated on one of the three victims. That also didn’t square with a lust murder of three individuals. Clearly, from the binding, he wanted to control all three, but only emasculated one. No, that didn’t make sense, either. And even though the bodies were found in water, I would have expected to see some evidence of blood in the surrounding area. No, there had to be another reason or explanation for the castration.

  This was not lust. This was personal cause between the UNSUB and at least one of the three boys.

  Not trusting the evaluation of Dr. Frank Peretti, the defense team enlisted Dr. Werner Spitz, one of America’s foremost forensic and anatomic pathologists, and author of the standard text Medicolegal Investigation of Death, then in its fourth edition, and Dr. Jon Nordby, a Ph.D. in forensic sciences.

  They examined the evidence just as I did, with only the promise of an objective and dispassionate analysis, regardless of whether it helped or hurt the defense effort. Their conclusions were stunning.

  Both experts independently concluded that most of the injuries, other than blunt-force trauma to all three bodies, including the horrific genital wounds on Chris Byers, were the result not of a meticulous castration and skinning of the penis as Dr. Peretti had testified, or to lacerations with a serrated knife on the others, but to postmortem animal predation.