Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  So I needed to get a definitive answer to this if I could.

  At the time of the murders, both David and Terry worked for the Memphis Ice Cream Company and lived close to each other, so they got together frequently. He verified that Terry came over to his house shortly after he dropped off Pam at work, which would have made it about 5:15. He had his daughter Amanda with him, and David’s wife Bobby was home with him. Terry came over frequently in those days to play guitars with David, which was what they did that evening.

  I asked David to think carefully about what happened after that. He said it had been a long time ago and the evening was clouded in his memory by the trauma of the tragedy, which he said accounted for some of his confusion. But as he thought about it, he recalled Terry saying that he’d better get home and see if Stevie was there, because he hadn’t been home when Terry left with Pam. He told David that Stevie knew he wasn’t supposed to be out after dark. This would have been some time between 6:00 and 6:15 p.m. He couldn’t remember if Terry had left Amanda with him when he went back home, but thought he probably did, which is what he had told Rachel when she interviewed him.

  David also recalled that when he had opened the front door to let Terry in, he saw two boys on bicycles and one on a skateboard. He was pretty sure that one of the boys was Stevie. If that were the case, I noted, it contradicted Terry’s longstanding statement that he had left the house to go to work while Stevie was still sleeping and had not seen him all day.

  It was about an hour later when Terry returned. He asked David and Bobby whether Stevie had come by. When they both said no, Terry and David decided to go out and look for him. He was pretty sure they took Amanda with them.

  Their first stop was the Mayfair Apartments, where they asked if anyone had seen Stevie or his two friends, Michael and Chris. They then drove to the area south of Ten Mile Bayou, but didn’t see anything. Then they drove back to David’s house, where Terry dropped him off. He thought they were out for about fifteen or twenty minutes.

  David and Bobby were alone in the house until Pam came over, which would have had to be some time after nine when Terry picked her up from her restaurant shift. She drove over in her own car and Terry came just afterward in his truck. She was hysterical, saying that Stevie was still missing and she wanted to go out looking for him. He didn’t think she was in any shape to drive, so he convinced her to let him take her around to some of the locations Stevie frequented, like the cub scout meeting place, which he thought was either a local church or school. They returned without finding the boy.

  Sometime after that, he went back out searching with Terry and Jackie Hicks, Sr., Pam’s father. At some point they came across Mark Byers and Dana Moore, also looking for the boys. When they approached the drainpipe crossing, he noticed bicycle tracks, and also muddy footprints small enough to be children’s on the pipe itself.

  As they got close to what turned out to be the murder scene, Terry reported to David that he heard something that sounded “evil.” He had a bad feeling about the place, so he turned around and they went the other direction. David thought this was odd because he was looking for Stevie and wouldn’t want to think he was in that “evil” place, but he didn’t say anything.

  I had the same reaction. If you are afraid for your son and you sense something bad, a parent’s natural instinct would be to go toward it to protect him, not recoil from it.

  They were out looking until about 3:00 A.M., at which point David went home to get some sleep.

  By the time David got back home the next afternoon, about 3:30, the boys’ bodies had been found.

  I listened to all of this calmly and made sure my outward gestures were matter-of-fact. But the whole time I’m realizing, My God, Terry doesn’t have an alibi for the entire evening! The apparent time discrepancy was real and there was a window of opportunity when he wasn’t with David. David was so forthcoming with me, as he had been with Rachel, I could only conclude that no one from the police had asked him for his version, or he certainly would have told them. This fit right in with no one having formally interviewed Terry just after the crime as they had Mark Byers. I couldn’t—and still can’t—figure out why.

  I explained the dynamics of the crime to David and why I thought the offender had to be someone who knew the children. He had to control three children at once, and even if he were threatening them with a gun, it would have been virtually impossible to keep at least one from running away. So it was most likely someone they would naturally listen to. I told him I believed the offender had seen the bikes, crossed over into Robin Hood Hills, and found the children. His first reaction was anger, so he tried to punish them in some way. When he lost control and the situation got out of hand, he felt he had no recourse but to kill them. Otherwise, his life and reputation would be ruined.

  We discussed the area together and I showed him that if it had been a stranger, he most likely would have both come in and gone out the truck wash side of the woods rather than the neighborhood side, and we knew from the position of the bikes in the water that he had either entered or left through the neighborhood—probably both.

  David was visibly shaken as I departed. He was specifically upset that he hadn’t looked into the crime more closely on his own before this.

  The first time I tried to talk to Pam Hobbs, she wouldn’t let me in. It took Ron Lax calling and convincing her I was not out to “get anyone” or make her look bad to get her to talk to me. By the time she agreed to see me, the investigative team and I had been able to probe deeper into her ex-husband’s background and I felt more prepared.

  We met at her mother’s place, a small brick house on a corner lot about a half-hour drive from West Memphis. There was a FOR SALE sign on the front lawn. Several members of her family sat in on the conversation around the dining-room table.

  I told them I had spent most of my career working for the prosecution, but here they had gotten it wrong. At first, like Mark Byers, they were resistant, and who could blame them? After I went through the steps of the case and my analysis, I asked, “Am I describing anyone to you?”

  It seemed as if every person around the table exchanged a glance with every other person before they all agreed: Terry.

  “Why is that?” I probed.

  They described the physical and emotional abuse Pam had received from Terry. They said he had also hit his first wife, Angela. They described the times Terry had beaten Stevie, treating him very differently from Amanda, his natural daughter with Pam. Pam said that two weeks before the murder, Stevie asked her to leave Terry. “ ‘He loves Amanda,’ ” she quoted him as saying, “ ‘but he doesn’t love me.’ ”

  The family also suggested that Terry’s relationship with the girl did not seem normal and may have been inappropriate, or worse. They confirmed my information that Terry’s father had been a Fundamentalist minister, who was often brutal with him.

  The most significant violence in Terry’s past involved family. In November 1994, Pam and Terry got into one of their frequent disputes, which ended with Terry striking Pam across the face with the back of his hand. Pam called her family, and her brother Jackie Hicks Jr., with whom Terry had clashed before, rushed over. When Jackie started fighting with him, Terry pulled out a .357 Magnum he had loaded with hollow-point bullets and shot him in the gut. Terry said he had used the gun in self-defense; he served six months in prison for aggravated assault. Jackie underwent surgery and lived for another ten years, but he died from a clot released during a follow-up surgery.

  As I listened, the family recalled other incidents and tried to put them together. For example, they reminded Pam that when Terry dropped her off that evening at five at the Catfish Island Restaurant, where she worked, they couldn’t be sure where he was until he picked her up at 9:00 P.M. There had been a sighting of him with the kids around 6:30 P.M., which he had denied. When he did pick her up, he behaved strangely. Without saying anything, he walked right past her into the restaurant and called the police
. What had he been doing the previous four hours? If he was so concerned about Stevie being missing that he went looking for him in the woods, why didn’t he call Pam at work to share his concerns? They also told me they all believed that the stress of Stevie’s murder and Jackie Jr.’s shooting had caused Jackie Sr.’s death.

  Interestingly, one source of the tension between Terry and Pam was his continuing insistence that she “get over” the murder and get on with life. I try to remain as objective and dispassionate as possible in what I do, but when I hear anyone, however well meaning, tell a close survivor to get over it, my blood starts to boil.

  By the time I left, Pam no longer believed the West Memphis Three were guilty of the murder of her son. And she was ready to say so publicly.

  CHAPTER 24

  TWO STEPFATHERS

  I purposely had not watched either of the Paradise Lost films until after I did my analysis so I would not be influenced in my evaluation. But I did watch them before I went down to Arkansas and knew that Mark Byers had come across as the prime alternative suspect in the second film. The first had laid the groundwork, in which he seemed a wild, Deliverance-type character, ready to blow off someone’s head or pick a fight at the least provocation. But this, I already knew, was an illusion, a caricature.

  In fact, by the time I reached the front porch of his trailer in a community in Millington, Tennessee, fourteen miles north of Memphis, I already had some pretty firm ideas about him that didn’t fit in with my profile.

  Byers was an extrovert, with no history of personal violence beyond punishing his children with a belt. His lawbreaking had been nonviolent and primarily examples of criminal enterprise: jewelry fraud, drugs and petty theft. He also had some experience as a drug informant. But he was known to be friendly with and well liked by neighborhood children. When you hear this, if there is anything improper in any of the relationships, you generally hear at least an innuendo from someone. There was none of this in the reports about Byers. Also, I had studied the timeline of the night of the murder, and he could be accounted for the entire time.

  When he answered his door, I introduced myself amidst the barking of dogs. This guy really is big, I thought. Mark is an intimidating presence. He seemed extremely wary and had clearly had enough of lawmen, even retired lawmen like me. Having seen the HBO film, I also knew he’d be aware of how I was likely to perceive him.

  “What do you want?” he demanded. “Who approached you to come here? You’re that former FBI guy. Get off my property!”

  As he stood in the door frame, I said, “Mr. Byers, I’m not here to point a finger at you. I don’t consider you a suspect, but I would like to talk to you because it’s my strong belief that the three people in prison did not kill your son Chris.”

  “They got the right guys, Goddamn it!” he insisted.

  He came out onto the porch, but he didn’t invite me in. In my white dress shirt and dark slacks, I was sweating like crazy in the heat. You could feel the oppressiveness every time you breathed in.

  He told me that Damien Echols was the lead killer and that the motive was satanic.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I replied. “And I’d like you to give me an opportunity to go through my analysis with you.”

  I heard his wife, Jackie, who was standing by the screen door. “Mark, we need to hear what he has to say.”

  Mark and Jackie had met in a bookstore in 2001, five years after the death of Melissa, Chris’s mother. Jackie had tripped over her shoelace and fallen. Mark was the only one who came to her aid. They married the next year. Interestingly, she had never heard of him and knew nothing about the case; so before they got engaged, he insisted she watch the two Paradise Lost films to “know what you’re getting into.”

  As he stood there looking down skeptically at me, I explained who I was and what kind of work I did in the FBI. Jackie came out on the porch and listened with interest, although she didn’t say anything at first. They were both smoking, which made it seem like there was even less air to breathe.

  I took them through what the steps of the crime would have been and why I believed that Satanism or ritual violence did not fit into the scenario. I tried to show them that when you stripped away all of the preconceptions and emotional overlays and looked strictly at the physical and behavioral evidence, you were left with a personal cause homicide situation. And it was one that didn’t even involve a knife—his, Damien’s or anyone else’s. I showed them why Jessie Misskelley Jr.’s confession made no sense and how the police must have known it.

  I told him that the killer knew his stepson.

  I think I’d been there talking for about a half hour when Mark told me to sit down. That was the first time I thought maybe I was getting through. Before long, they invited me inside. There were several photographs of Christopher. Three friendly dogs circled around me on the soft sofa I sank into.

  Almost right away, I could tell that this guy was not the out-of-control hillbilly I’d seen in the two Paradise Lost films. He was introspective and clearly intelligent and well informed. Jackie proved herself to be widely read on criminal justice and the kind of work I did. Her questions were incisive. I had already met many dysfunctional couples down here, but these two—he on his third marriage and she on her second—seemed like a genuine, emotionally strong and committed team. “She has been a big part of the stability in my life,” he commented. “I tell people she is the glue that has kept me stuck together.”

  One of the first things I raised was how Mark came across in the films. I asked him why he thought he had come across so negatively.

  He didn’t shy away from responding at the time, and confirmed it later for Mark Olshaker and me. “I was trying to take care of Melissa. I was trying to take care of Ryan. I really didn’t have time for myself to mourn and grieve, and I was extremely angry because someone had murdered my son. But I was trying to keep my family together.

  “Then in the second film, Melissa had passed away, Ryan was gone. I’d been all by myself. I’d tried to commit suicide once. I’d committed myself twice into rehab just because I couldn’t handle it anymore. I’d had a lot of suicidal thoughts and was deeply depressed.”

  This is important because it gets to the heart of the mistakes in the case and an overarching theme throughout this book. If we go on first impressions and appearances, if we apply stereotypes and conventional wisdom, we run the terrible risk of misjudging people. The West Memphis Three were misjudged by the entire legal system, and Mark Byers was later misjudged by the wider court of public opinion. Notwithstanding the self-proclaimed practitioners who pop up on every TV talk show and the clichés that are so easy to parody, behavioral profiling gets below these surface judgments to find the real factors that cause people to do what they do. That was how I was able to get past the cartoon image to the real John Mark Byers.

  “I was nervous just being around him,” Byers later recalled of his first encounter with me, “thinking he was profiling me. He said he’d done that a long time ago.”

  Once inside, I found it even more difficult to breathe in the close environment, but Mark and Jackie seemed more comfortable now. Describing the crime scene and motivation, I went through my analysis : The murders were not the work of a complete stranger, drifter or sexual pervert; the incident had started out as an attempt to taunt and punish the victims, not as a murder, but the perpetrator had lost control and couldn’t risk being identified; no weapons or implements that could be used to commit the crime were brought to the scene, such as binding rope or cord; while the UNSUB may not have committed murder or any other serious crime before, he had a violent past and, if left unchecked, a violent future; hiding the clothing with sticks and throwing the bicycles in the water showed criminal sophistication beyond the level of a teen; this individual lived in the area and had a psychopathic personality; he could look you straight in the eye and tell you he didn’t do it.

  How could one person tie up three kids? Jackie wanted to know.

>   Because they knew him and either respected or feared his authority, I explained. It was also possible that he may have ordered one boy to bind another. From what I knew of Chris’s personality, he may have stood up to this vicious bully, his defiance causing the situation to get out of hand.

  Mark Byers listened thoughtfully. At last, he said, “You’re describing someone like Terry Hobbs.”

  He admitted that he had had unanswered questions ever since the trial and that his suspicions about Terry had been strong enough that he decided to try an experiment. “Gitchell had told us that he recovered a briefcase with some pictures in it, a knife, a gun and some drugs. But he didn’t ever produce it. Well, I said to Terry, ‘You remember seeing that picture of Damien on your couch?’

  “And he goes, ‘Yeah, I remember seeing it. Pam must have took it.’ And here in our house, he told Jackie and me he’d always suspected Pam was messing around with Damien. So he started adding to this picture story that I totally fabricated.”

  Mark also described glancing at Terry during the trial when Michael Carson was testifying about Jason’s supposed confession to him. “You could just see him, like it was almost too good to be true.”

  The turning point, I think, was when I told them what David Jacoby had said about Terry having seen the children that evening, while Terry had claimed consistently that he hadn’t seen any of them, including Stevie, the entire day. “That’s when I freaked out. That was a lightbulb moment for me above all others,” Mark Byers later told us.

  I asked him if he thought Christopher might have been the one who rebelled against the offender and caused him to lose control. “I do think it’s a strong possibility,” Mark replied. “I have spent many hours wondering exactly what did happen. And as things have unfolded, I still don’t have the answers.”