by Greg Day
All the Way to Memphis
But before his world collapsed in the eight years between 1991 and 1999, Mark returned to Arkansas from Louisiana to look for a new job. He found work in Memphis as a manufacturing jeweler, doing repairs and design work. Shortly after returning to the Memphis, Tennessee area, he met a man named Ray Sellers, a realtor from Jonesboro who had money to invest and who saw talent and ambition in the nineteen-year-old from Marked Tree. Sellers agreed to fund him, and Mark suggested that they open a jewelry store. Thus Mark started his first business, Byers and Sellers Custom Jewelers, in Spanish Mall, on Caraway Road in Jonesboro. It was a successful venture, with Mark making custom jewelry and doing repairs for the local shops that had no repair department of their own.
Also during this time, Mark reunited with some old friends and rekindled his love of music. He began singing with a rock band, Home Grown, playing gin mills and honky-tonks in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was during this venture that Mark had his second brush with the law, for the same crime: possession of marijuana. The band was playing a gig at a bar called Winks in Paragould, Arkansas. In between sets, Mark and a friend, Kevin, along with the girls they were seeing at the time, headed out to Mark’s car to get high. Almost immediately after lighting the joint, they were spotted by a conveniently patrolling police officer. As Mark rolled down the car window, a cloud of marijuana smoke wafted up at the officer, and the four were removed from the car. A pat-down of the group yielded nothing, but when the police searched the car, they found one half-ounce of pot that Kevin had stuffed in the glove box. Mark, as the owner of the vehicle, was arrested and charged with possession. Bail was set at $187, which Mark did not have, so he did the next best thing. Using his one phone call, he called Winks and informed the employees that the lead singer of the band had just been arrested for possession of marijuana. The hat was passed around the bar, $187 was raised, and Mark was bailed out, returning to the bar in time to finish the next set. He was eventually convicted and fined $187. This was the first criminal charge—a misdemeanor—that appeared on Mark’s record.43
Although the jewelry store in Jonesboro had been doing well, the business nonetheless had to close in late December 1976. Mark’s girlfriend was—inconveniently, to say the least—the daughter of a narcotics officer assigned to the drug task force covering northeast Arkansas. One day the girl’s father approached Mark and told him that some of his officers had bought pot from Mark and members of the band and that Mark was going to be arrested. Mark listened in disbelief as he was told that since the detective’s daughter was smitten with him, he would be allowed to simply get out of town and leave the girl alone for good. Although Mark’s attachment to the girl was limited, he had little choice but to close the store and return once again to Marked Tree and his parents.
Descent
Mark’s return home signaled the first major failure of his young life. In the two years since leaving Marked Tree for college, he had been arrested twice for marijuana possession, driven from two homes (Shreveport and Jonesboro), forced to close his business, and forbidden to see his girlfriend ever again. His response was to sink into depression and step up his drug usage. These events set something of a pattern for Mark, given that in the future he would often use his own misfortunes or those of others to justify his drug abuse.
Whatever the specific events leading up to the situation were, the fact is that one day Mark began taking what he thought was THC—the active ingredient in marijuana—but which turned out to be PCP, or horse tranquilizer; added some amphetamines to the mix; and didn’t stop taking pills until he fell into unconsciousness.44 The paramedics arrived at his home, stabilized him, and determined that he did not require hospitalization. He recovered quickly, but his parents were frightened. They had never experienced anything like this before and were unsure of what the next step should be. After some very scary nights, during which his parents kept close watch on him, George and Auvergne called a family conference to discuss what to do about Mark. This was a family matter, and no one would have considered involving outsiders. Eventually, Mark’s sister in Jackson, Mississippi, offered a solution: “Send him to us, and we’ll try to help him.” Her husband was a Baptist preacher, and the family agreed that this environment would be the best one for Mark to assess his life and straighten himself out. Starting over for Mark meant first renewing his relationship with God. Having been raised as a Southern Baptist, he felt that he had strayed from his religion’s teachings to the extent that he no longer had any control over his life. He needed to take a hard look, he said, at his life, the things he had done, and the people he had hurt, especially his parents. He grabbed a pen and pad from an airport store, and on the flight to Jackson, he started writing. “I just started talking to God,” he says today. “I asked Him to change my life, to help me be a better person.”
Mark was met at the airport by his brother-in-law, the preacher, who was shocked at what he saw. Mark was gaunt, eyes dark and sunken, and he carried himself like a man who was holding on for dear life. He felt, in his words, “like a piece of shit.” He had let down his parents, whom he loved dearly. His business was gone, his girlfriend was gone, and he had overdosed on illegal drugs. It was devastating to have hurt his family so, but it was the hurt that he had done to himself that would prove the hardest to atone for. His brother-in-law spent time with him, providing the counsel and guidance that Mark needed desperately, getting him involved in the church. In 1977, Mark was baptized into the Baptist faith.45 He began his new life refreshed and was eventually ready to take his first tenuous steps back into the world. He soon found work managing a jewelry store with Ford Jewelers in Jackson, doing custom jewelry creation and jewelry repair. He was generally enjoying his work and feeling better than he had in a long time. It was during this time that he dated and eventually married Sandra Summerall.
Sandra
Mark first met Sandra in 1976 while visiting his sister in Jackson. Sandra attended Flag Chapel Baptist Church as well, and she and Mark soon became friendly. When Mark returned to Jackson to live with his sister in early 1977, he rekindled his friendship with Sandra, and the two began dating. Six months later, on June 2, 1977, they were married. One could easily argue that Mark Byers was not prepared for marriage. He was barely twenty years old, and it had been only eight months since his overdose in Marked Tree. He had spent the year prior to that singing in a rock-and-roll band and selling pot, culminating in his abrupt banishment from Jonesboro. But ready or not, he and Sandra started their life together.
Sandra’s preparedness as a wife, mother, and homemaker was also questionable. She knew next to nothing about food preparation. On one occasion, when she decided to cook a ham dinner for Mark, she needed instruction as to how to prepare the meat. Mark told her, “Baste the meat in orange marmalade, place cloves all around, add spices, and cook it at 350 degrees for five hours.” Apparently, Sandra didn’t realize that ham was available in a form other than “cold cuts,” so she bought several pounds of sliced ham from the delicatessen. When Mark came home, the place had “the burnt smell of death.” Sandra had taken the thin slices of sandwich meat and cooked them per Mark’s instruction. “The inside of the oven looked like something had blown up and died in it.” She was inconsolable, unable to understand what she had done wrong. From that point on, Mark did most of the cooking.
Mark was an avid outdoorsman, having spent most of his life hunting and fishing in and around Marked Tree, and of course he wanted to bring Sandra into this world, where they could enjoy nature together. One summer the couple embarked on a fishing trip to Beaver Lake, Arkansas. An exceptionally beautiful location created by the damming of the White River, the lake is part of the Hobbs State Park Conservation Area. On a good day, anglers at Beaver Lake can expect to land Kentucky bass, walleye, white bass, and the occasional striper. This is exactly what Mark had in mind when he and Sandra packed up the car for a weekend outdoors; the reality was much different. Not onl
y was Sandra not outdoorsy; she was downright dangerous in a boat. The first day out, she hadn’t gotten her sea legs yet and nearly capsized the boat. She also had difficulty keeping clear of Mark’s casting and managed to get hooked in the head with a lure. Panicking, she began to scream and soon drew the attention of the other fishermen on the lake, who came closer to see what was going on. Crowds of boats and screaming women do not attract fish, and they caught nothing.
Back at the cabin, Mark grilled some steaks while Sandra prepared some fried potatoes inside. Mark isn’t sure exactly how it transpired, but somehow Sandra managed to set the cabin ablaze.
Three years into the marriage, Mark and Sandra started their family. John Andrew was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on November 14, 1980, when Mark was working for Gordon’s Jewelers. Because Mark had been raised in a stable family and had learned parenting skills from “the best mother and father anyone could ask for,” his transition into fatherhood was fairly smooth. He enjoyed being a dad, and Sandra was a competent mother, though she still couldn’t do very much in the kitchen. Mark was doing well at Gordon’s, and the company soon promoted him into a position with more responsibility in Mobile, Alabama. The couple lived there for two and a half years, Mark working his way up in the company and Sandra making a home and raising “Andy.” Sandra was content with working at home, with two notable exceptions.
Sandra had decided that being a fry cook at McDonald’s was a pretty easy job and would offer her the chance to make a little money and also get out of the house for a little while during the day. For whatever reason, she soon lost the job, as was the case with a bank teller position she tried next. She decided to settle for making dried flower arrangements and selling them alongside Mark’s custom jewelry at flea markets and fairs on the weekends.
The thirty-two Gordon’s stores that Mark managed in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida were consistently profitable, and the company wanted to promote him to a position with more responsibility. In 1981, Mark was offered a promotion to a larger region. Gordon’s wanted him to relocate to Houston to take control of 128 stores at a higher salary. However, another manager was being moved into Mark’s current position, and if Mark refused the transfer and opted instead to remain in Mobile, he would have to accept a demotion to store manager. For Mark, this was a no-brainer, but Sandra would have none of it.46 She didn’t want to be any farther away than she already was from her mother in Jackson. So once again, the couple moved, this time to Memphis, where Mark had contacts in the jewelry business and would be able to set up a repair service in an established store. He worked in a jewelry store on Summer Street in Memphis for several months until he had raised enough money to go freelance, going from store to store collecting jewelry for repair and returning it when it was finished. This proved to be a profitable arrangement, and Mark and Sandra, if not exactly prosperous, were getting by comfortably enough to support another child. This time Sandra gave birth to a daughter, Natalie Jane Byers, on June 29, 1983.
The Byerses’ marriage was not a particularly passionate one, neither great nor terrible, and life droned on predictably for several years until one day in the fall of 1986, when Mark walked into a restaurant and found Sandra having lunch with a neighbor, a married man with four children. From their demeanor, it was obvious to Mark that the meeting was romantic in nature. When he confronted her, she pleaded for another chance, swearing that it would not happen again. Mark seriously considered giving his marriage a second chance. He had been raised on the belief that marriage was for life. Sandra claims that it was Mark who did the begging, but one thing is certain: after finding a love letter from Sandra to the neighbor, Mark knew he’d never be able to trust her again.47 A heart-to-heart conversation with a friend convinced him that Sandra would cheat again and that there was no future for the marriage. Despite the pain of breaking up their family, Mark felt that he had no choice and moved out of their home. He rented a three-bedroom house at 1605 Goodwin Avenue in West Memphis, Arkansas.
Despite having given Mark a Father’s Day card the previous year saying that she loved him as much the day they were married and that he was a “wonderful father, a good provider, and a great husband,” Sandra filed for divorce on February 11, 1987, in Craighead County, Arkansas. “She beat me to the lawyer’s office,” Mark says. In the decree of divorce, Sandra was granted custody of John Andrew and Natalie. By April, however, Mark had filed a petition to modify the decree on several grounds. Shortly after Mark moved out of the house, Russell Good, the neighbor Mark had seen Sandra with in the restaurant, had moved in with Sandra. The petition alleged that Sandra was openly sleeping with Good and that he was permitted to bathe the children (who were four and seven years old at the time).
Mark alleged that the children were not being taken care of properly while Sandra worked the weekend flea markets and that they were routinely kept up until late at night. Most potentially incriminating of all, the petition stated that John Andrew and Natalie had “conveyed information to their father” that had prompted Mark to take them to a pediatrician in Memphis for examination. The pediatrician, Dr. James Sanford, had notified the Crittenden County Office of Social Services that he suspected the children were victims of sexual abuse, and as a result of that notification, they had opened an investigation. In the petition, Mark requested that he be granted custody of the children, that Sandra be enjoined from moving them out of Crittenden County, and that a child psychologist be permitted to examine the children upon order of the court.48 Mark was represented in this matter by attorney—and later judge—Pal Rainey.49 There is no record indicating whether the children were ever examined by a psychologist.
In June 1987, Mark again petitioned the court, this time to request summer visitation with the children, which would grant him custody for six weeks, from July 1 until August 10. During that time, Sandra would have the children every other weekend and on Wednesday mornings “during breakfast hours.” He had repeatedly asked for such custody, only to have Sandra reject the idea. The petition also stated that Sandra continued to cohabitate with Russell Good. In an order issued by the court that same month, Mark was finally granted the summer visitation rights that he had requested. In September, however, Mark slapped Sandra with a petition for contempt, alleging that she generally did not comply with the liberal visitation; that she specifically had denied him visitation on two consecutive Wednesdays, August 27 and September 2; and that she in fact had the children in Jackson County, Mississippi, a direct violation of the settlement agreement. Finally, on September 16, Sandra was ordered to appear before the court to show cause as to why she should not be charged with contempt for her continued violation of the court-approved visitation schedule.
Sandra was also awarded a schedule of child support, which would eventually become the subject of a May 2001 court action. In Crittenden County, Arkansas, the Office of Child Support Enforcement intervened on Sandra’s behalf to recover unpaid child support from Mark Byers. Many, including Mara Leveritt in her 2003 book, Devil’s Knot, would claim that Mark had not met his financial obligations to his children. The action of the court proves this claim to be baseless. In February 1993 Mark had become physically disabled due to a “right frontal” brain tumor originally detected in 1990. As a result, child support payments, which up until 1993 had been drawn from Mark’s paychecks, were subsequently made directly by the Social Security Administration to Sandra Sloane. The court documents reflect that instead of the $22,630 that John and Natalie would have received from Mark’s court-ordered payments, they received $45,160 in direct payments from Mark’s Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Natalie’s later claim that she never saw any of the money is indicative of deceit on the part of her mother; the court records show that the payments were made.50
Sandra married twice after the divorce from Mark. The first marriage was to Russell Good, but this marriage didn’t last. She soon divorced her second husband and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with her mother. While living ther
e, she met yet another man whom she soon married. When her new husband was hired as a professor at the Kemper Military Academy in Boonville, Missouri, in 1992, the couple relocated, and Mark lost track of her. Although Mark has seen Natalie in the not-too-distant past, and that meeting, at least according to Mark, was amicable, he has not seen or heard from John Andrew in many years.
Melissa
In the course of Mark’s jewelry travels, he had occasion to meet a young woman named Sharon Melissa DeFir, a divorced mother of two who was living with her parents, Kilborn and Dorris, in Germantown, Tennessee. Her oldest child, Ryan Clark, was seven; his half-brother Christopher Murray, eight. During the period following his divorce from Sandra, Mark began to date Melissa, and the two were married on May 9, 1987; his divorce from Sandra was barely three months old. At this point, Mark was still plying his trade as a custom jeweler and repair person, eventually settling into a shop in the back of a Germantown jeweler. Mark’s business volume soon exceeded that of the store’s owner, so Mark was politely asked to move to his own shop. During this same time, Mark and Melissa moved from 1605 Goodwin to a nice pool home at 1400 East Barton Avenue in West Memphis, just around the corner from the Goodwin house. After they plunked down a $4,000 down payment, the house was theirs.
