Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three

by Greg Day

  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) c
ould 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.’”

  Rather than relying on corporal punishment, George preferred to “talk things out” with his kids, especially Mark, possibly due to some “mellowness” George had acquired with age, but more likely because he knew his son would learn more from the talk than the whipping. “You’d beg him, ‘Please, hit me. Hit me and get it over with,’ and he’d say, ‘No, we’re goin’ to talk this out, and I’m goin’ to make sure you know what you did wrong, and why it was wrong.’” Infrequent whippings notwithstanding, Mark is characteristically sentimental about his childhood. “I was raised in the South, had a great upbringing. I had an exceptional mother and father. My mother devoted her life to her husband and children. My father devoted his life to his wife and children. My brother and sisters are the product of the two most exceptional parents you could have. My daddy was a man with an eighth-grade education, a self-educated, self-made man. He knew how you should live; he knew how you should treat people. He knew how you should be as a person; he was a man’s man.”

  If George was reserved and somewhat strict, Auvergne was amiable and outgoing. “She never met a stranger,” Mark says. She would talk to just about anyone and had an easy, forthcoming way that people found charming. Auvergne worked as the cafeteria director for both schools in Marked Tree, as had her mother before her. She had been a Sunday school teacher at the Baptist Church for as long as anyone could remember and was an active member of the Eastern Star (the women’s corollary to the Masons). As with her husband, if you lived in Marked Tree, you had to know Auvergne Byers. The only thing that might betray her sunny disposition was the fierce protectiveness she had for her children. She would be the first one to take after them if they had misbehaved—the Byers code of conduct was rigid—but also the first to stand up for them. A loving mother who truly enjoyed her role in family life, Auvergne was also outspoken and opinionated and could hold her own in any conversation. Paradoxically, perhaps, she put her husband first, the children second, and herself last. From his father Mark learned a particular set of values, represented by a few simple rules for living: When you give your word, keep it. Take care of your family without complaining. Make a few good friends and keep them close; keep your enemies, if you have them, even closer. From his mother and grandmother, he learned how to cook, clean, and take care of himself.

  It would seem that Mark Byers was well equipped to enter the world with the confidence and skills to succeed. He had been brought up in a morally upright, small-town environment by the “best parents anyone ever had.” So what happened? How did things go so horribly wrong?

  Setting Out

  As a teenager, Mark hung around the co-op with George and gravitated toward the different tools, machines, and welding equipment in the back of the shop. It was George who first mentioned jeweler’s school to Mark, and so it was that Mark applied to and was accepted at Paris Junior College (PJC) in Paris, Texas, where he enrolled in their jewelry technology program. PJC recruiting literature boasts that “since 1943 the program has attracted students from across the US and from around the globe, drawn to the North Texas campus by the institution’s reputation for excellence within the industry, as well as its affordability.” For Mark, PJC was it, the place where he would learn the trade that he was to ply for the next fifteen years. He did well academically, though he did have at least one conduct problem. For the first six months of school, he lived in one of the student dormitories. This particular dorm was also the dorm that housed the basketball, football, and baseball team members; by special permission, the jewelry students were allowed to live there also (which must have been interesting). One night, Mark was coming into the dorm with a “case of Coors and two gallons of wine” and was confronted by the baseball coach. “We got into it, and I smacked him in the nose, and I ended up in the dean’s office.” Mark was booted from the dorm and took up residence at a farmhouse twenty-one miles outside of town, where he lived with three friends. The rest of his tenure at PJC was more sedate, and Mark was able to complete a certificate program in horology (fine jewelry and watch repair, precious metals, and gemstones). The year was 1976.

  Cashing in on PJC’s claim of “100 percent job placement,” Mark took a job with Dale’s Professional Jewelers in Shreveport, Louisiana, rather than return to Marked Tree. There he repaired jewelry that was fed into the repair shop by six other stores that Dale’s owned in the Shreveport area. Mark worked for Dale’s for six months, before the job abruptly came to an end. The first of Mark’s serious brushes with the law would signal the end of his tenure at Dale’s, as well as his residence in the state of Louisiana.

  After six months at Dale’s, Mark had decided that he needed a trip home to visit with his family. At the airport, as he passed through the metal detector in the departure area, the alarm sounded. After he removed some change, a watch, his belt, and some other metallic items, the device continued to sound off. A handheld wand pinpointed the problem area as the left inside pocket of his suit jacket. Mark removed a ball point pen. No dice. When he was asked to empty the contents of the pocket, he removed a plastic bag containing several cigarette papers, enough marijuana to roll about three joints, and one tiny metal roach clip.

  Possession in Louisiana was a felony at the time, punishable by anywhere from five to ninety-nine years in prison. The police proposed a deal. If Mark would work with them on making larger narcotics arrests, they would hold his arrest paperwork—and the evidence against him—in abeyance, and Mark could continue to work at Dale’s; his employer
would not have to know. If his work produced results, the charges would disappear. The alternative to this offer was a trip to the Louisiana State Prison (more commonly known as Angola), which is to say there was no alternative at all. Over the following weeks Mark made a few half-hearted attempts to arrange a bust for the narcs, but nothing panned out. As part of his deal with the police, he had to make weekly, in-person reports on anything he was working on. During one of these visits, Mark was left alone, and in one spur-of-the-moment decision, he snatched the arrest paperwork and the small quantity of pot that made up the evidence against him and hightailed it out of the police station. He had the entire case against him stashed down the front of his pants. His elation was temporary. Within hours, Mark was startled by a knock on the door at his apartment. He found himself face-to-face with two very pissed-off Shreveport detectives. Mark admitted to nothing, prompting the detectives to bounce him around the room a little before taking him back to the station. Once there, he was assured that the full force of Louisiana law would be brought to bear against him if he insisted on reneging on their deal. He was jailed and given time to think about it.

  After being locked up for three days, Mark hooked up with a lawyer who was visiting his cellmate, and the lawyer agreed to check out the charges against him. The attorney arranged a meeting with Mark and the arresting officers to evaluate the case against his new client. When the officers went to the filing cabinet to retrieve the file, they found out what Mark already knew: there was nothing there. After politely declining to press charges against the Shreveport Police Department for false arrest—a suggestion made by his attorney—Mark made a swift departure as the detectives warned him to leave the state forever, something he didn’t have to be told twice. He quickly packed his belongings and bolted back to Arkansas. He had taken an enormous chance by rolling the dice with the Shreveport police for huge stakes—hard time at Angola—and had come out unscathed. This type of luck with the law would continue for a good many years before grinding to a halt in 1999, the year his marker was finally called in.