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

by Greg Day

  Ryan was an apparently happy child right up until the time of Christopher’s murder. Although he was exposed to drug use by both his parents—Mark was a regular pot smoker—and his parents’ undercover work and ongoing money troubles introduced elements of stress, there was also a considerable amount of family time, and Ryan had many friends and relatives with whom he enjoyed spending time. The pool home on 1400 East Barton was the site of many happy birthday parties and holiday barbecues where the children could be seen swimming, eating cake, and opening gifts. Mark’s two children from his previous marriage to Sandra, John Andrew and Natalie, were frequent visitors and shared Christmas time with Mark and Melissa and their half-siblings. In one photograph, Ryan and “Andy” can be seen posing in their Christmas “cammys,” gifts from Mark for the hunting trips they were planning together. The summertime birthdays of Ryan, Christopher, and Natalie were close enough together so that they were celebrated en masse with a sumptuous barbecue and pool party with mobs of squealing kids and partying friends and neighbors. Despite the pictures painted by the media, Paradise Lost, and Devil’s Knot, much of the Byerses’ family life was very ordinary, at least for that place and at that time.

  During the summers, the family would visit with Melissa’s uncles in Dermott, Arkansas, where they owned a catfish farm. Ryan and Christopher would spend hours exploring the farm, with Ryan and the older boys riding three-wheeled ATVs. In season, Ryan would hunt deer with the adults. It was an idyllic setting for a young boy, and it was Ryan’s favorite place to be. He also enjoyed time with both sets of grandparents. At George and Auvergne’s house, Ryan would tinker in the garage with his grandfather; he was a natural with all things mechanical. George and Ryan would also mow the lawn and do other chores together. Melissa’s father, Kilborn, bought Ryan a John Deere tractor/mower when the family moved to Cherokee Village. This was not only extravagant but patently unnecessary: the Byerses had virtually no lawn. But this didn’t stop Ryan from removing the mower and using the tractor as an off-roader.

  The move to Cherokee Village, eleven months after Christopher’s murder and one month after the end of the Echols/Baldwin trial, marked the beginning of a very troubled period for Ryan. His brother’s death had come at a critical point in his young life, when he had just reached puberty. When the family moved to Cherokee Village, it was a disaster in the making. The majority of the population lives there on a part-time basis. Those who remain year-round include a number of what Mark Byers terms “crazy, inbred hillbillies.” Relocating to Cherokee Village, he says, “was not a great move on my part.” The parts of Cherokee Village seen on advertising brochures and TV commercials are not those that attract the average year-round resident; cheap housing and reclusive living are what most are seeking. Mark had been looking for an affordable escape from the nightmare back in West Memphis; what he found instead was a world of trouble. The cracks that had been forming for years in the family’s foundation, and which had been deepened by Christopher’s murder, finally split wide open when they were subjected to the virtually lawless environment of Cherokee Village.

  Ryan’s new friends—Marty Kerr, Justin Copeland, and Johnny McMann among them—were products of that environment. There wasn’t much to do, and the abundance of unoccupied houses, particularly the boathouses on the lakes, was too much of a temptation for the teenagers to resist. Much like the adult residents, Ryan and his friends helped themselves to just about anything they could get their hands on: fishing rods and reels, outboard motors, tackle boxes, life vests, canoes; anything that wasn’t nailed down they took. And as hard as it may be to fathom, when Mark found this swag—some hidden underneath the porch at his house—he trucked it up to Mammoth Spring and sold it at auction. With the family living in abject poverty, it is likely that Mark saw this course of action as a pragmatic one. After all, he and John Kingsbury had looted their share, so he was not above stealing to make ends meet. Ryan was collateral damage in much of the family’s trouble, and by the time his mother died, he had reached his breaking point.

  During the period between September 1995 and March 1996, Ryan was living with his father, Jimmy Clark, because he’d been “running wild” in Cherokee Village, and his mother and stepfather were unable to control him. Two or three weeks prior to Melissa’s death, Ryan called Melissa and asked if he could come home. Once there, he told Mark that he had been smoking pot with his father and was generally uncomfortable there. It is likely that he also missed his friends back in Cherokee Village. After his return home, Melissa was, according to neighbor Norm Metz, “irritable” and had a “bad attitude,” though Metz added that he never asked her about it.

  On Friday, March 29, 1996, when Ryan walked into his parents’ bedroom and saw Mark trying to revive Melissa, it was more than he could stand. He took off from the house in the family’s 1985 Dodge Omni with his girlfriend, Amanda Swindle, before the police or paramedics arrived. He was almost certainly in a state of shock. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” he told Officer Fred Waser. He and Amanda stopped at a local gas station and picked up five dollars’ worth of gas, and after stopping briefly at Amanda’s house and finding nobody home, the two drove around for a while until dark. Not sure where to go, Ryan finally decided to go down to Kilborn and Dorris DeFir’s house in Memphis, arriving there shortly after midnight on March 30. His uncle, Dennis DeFir, Melissa’s brother, was a police officer in Greenville, Mississippi, and made the three-hour drive up to Memphis to talk to Ryan and to be with Kilborn and Dorris. At 12:30 p.m. that day, Dennis and Kilborn drove Ryan back up to Cherokee Village. Strangely, when Dennis DeFir arrived at 75 Skyline Drive, he told Mark that he should come clean with police about Melissa’s recurring drug habit. How was it that Melissa’s brother, a police officer, knew about her drug use but her parents did not?

  Ryan returned to Memphis that same day with his grandparents, while Mark headed off with James Lawrence to Marked Tree. Several days later, Melissa’s body was released by the medical examiner, and the family attended her funeral in Memphis. Ryan returned to Cherokee Village with Mark and lived at 75 Skyline Drive for about a month. Ryan had some remaining legal problems involving an incident in which he was accused of acting as a “lookout” for some friends who had burglarized a house. Once he was cleared of any wrongdoing, he headed back to Memphis to live with his grandparents. Amanda Swindle was out of the picture by this time; Anneleise Beasley was in. One of Ryan’s friends from his West Memphis days took Ryan back to Cherokee Village, where Anneleise snuck out through her bedroom window, and Ryan and Anneleise hid out together in the DeFirs’ garage for some six or seven months; according to Mark, Kilborn and Dorris never even knew she was there, and neither did her mother. One day, Mandy called Mark looking for her. Mark told her that he didn’t know where she was but that Ryan probably “had her hid out” somewhere. Kilborn had stumbled upon Anneleise in the house on one occasion during her stay there, but Ryan had convinced him that she was just one of the neighborhood girls. Soon enough, however, Anneleise tired of life at the DeFirs’ and called her mother to come and pick her up. There may have been another reason Anneleise wanted to go home: she was five or six months pregnant with Ryan’s child. As of this writing, Mark hasn’t seen Ryan since Melissa’s funeral.

  Exile

  With Melissa gone and Ryan having moved out, Mark had his own legal problems to deal with. On August 28, 1996, Mark entered guilty pleas before Judge Harold S. Erwin of the Sharp County Circuit Court on one count each of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and residential burglary, both class B felonies. He received a sentence of sixty months for each of the felonies and twelve months for the misdemeanor, all suspended. He was ordered to pay court costs of $100 and a $250 fine. He was further ordered to make restitution to Brenda Atwood in the amount of $20,000 and reimburse John Shavers for medical expenses in the amount of $1,962.19.91 If he failed to meet any of the conditions of the suspended sentence, he would be subject to a minimum of seven and a maximum of twenty
-one years in state prison, as well as a maximum fine of $21,000. One final and most curious condition of the plea agreement, negotiated by attorney Larry Dean Kissee, appears somewhat inconspicuously at the bottom of the document under “other conditions”: “Defendant is prohibited from entering and remaining or residing in Fulton County, or any county in the Third Judicial District.” This would include Lawrence, Randolph, and Jackson counties as well as Sharp. Although it has been argued that this last condition is a violation of the Arkansas State Constitution, Mark Byers was in no position to argue.

  Mark had assumed that he would be given a reasonable amount of time to settle his affairs prior to vacating the district. He was wrong. A little more than a week after the order to vacate his house was issued, police visited 75 Skyline Drive to find Mark Byers still living there. He was told that if he wasn’t gone in twenty-four hours, he would be arrested. Mark protested that his car was not registered and in fact would not pass inspection. He was assured by police that no one would bother him in the Third Judicial District; once he got beyond that boundary, he was on his own. The next day, he fit whatever he could into his car and took off.

  With no other place to go, Mark stayed with his sister in Jonesboro for a short time. His life, however, was quickly spiraling down. His mental state, which had been increasingly precarious, had become even more desperate since Melissa’s death. He would alternate his time between his sister’s house in Jonesboro and Marked Tree, where he stayed with James Lawrence. His life was a blur, tempered with liberal amounts of booze, pot, and prescription medications. The more he self-medicated, the more morose his outlook became, and he soon sank into a deep depression. Finally, in December 1996, Mark checked himself into the George W. Jackson medical center in Jonesboro for treatment for his growing depression and frequent thoughts of suicide. He remained in rehab for two weeks and was released on December 24, Christmas Eve, whereupon he returned to his sister’s. By late February or early March 1997, Mark’s cousins Joe and David Bingham, who owned several rental units in the area, had hooked Mark up with a small efficiency apartment, and he lived there until the fall of 1997, at which time he returned once again to his sister’s house. On New Year’s Eve, a church member and friend of his sister rented Mark a small studio apartment in Jonesboro, where he lived until sometime in March 1998. It was in this apartment that Mark’s good friends James Lawrence and Willie Burns were interviewed for Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, in which they can be seen sitting in the living room discussing Mark’s notoriety as a suspect in the murders.

  From this apartment, Mark made one final move, this one very short. A larger unit in the same complex was vacated, and Mark snapped it up. It was from this location, 1609 Stone Street, Apartment B, in Jonesboro, that Mark made a deal to sell eighty-five dollars’ worth of Xanax to an undercover police officer. If John Mark Byers had ever been Teflon-coated—and in truth, he had dodged some pretty formidable bullets, both literally and figuratively—his streak came to a screeching halt on the evening of January 9, 1999. Between 1993 and 1999, Mark had lost everything: his son, his wife, his work, two houses, and his health.

  Soon he would lose the only thing he had left to lose—his freedom.

  CHAPTER 4

  Paradise Lost

  I kind of enjoy it because now even after I die

  people are gonna remember me forever. They’re gonna talk about me for years. People in West Memphis will tell their kids stories. It’ll kind of be like I’m the West Memphis boogeyman.

  —Damien Echols, 1994

  Mark Byers may be one of the most amazing characters

  ever to be put on film.

  —Bruce Sinofsky

  When they were first alerted to the story, documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky of New York wasted no time getting their film crew down to West Memphis, Arkansas, for what they hoped would be a repeat of Brother’s Keeper, the pair’s award-winning 1992 documentary of the trial of Delbert Ward, an illiterate farmer who was tried and acquitted for the murder of his brother in their Munnsville, New York, home.92 Berlinger and Sinofsky’s plan was to use the same style of documentary for Paradise Lost, in which they would “let the story unfold” rather than narrate the action. The unparalleled access they gained to the accused killers, the victims’ families, and the courtroom proceedings—while they were happening—was a first for many of the principals, including presiding judge David Burnett. “I’d have to say that the making of the film Paradise Lost was a new situation for the court and, I’m sure, for all the lawyers involved,” he said on camera in Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. “I think I indicated to the producers earlier that if either the defense or the prosecution had objected, there wouldn’t have been any filming.” The effect of their not objecting was palpable. Without cameras in the courtroom, there would have been no Paradise Lost. Without the film, there would have been no “Free the West Memphis Three” movement. And without the movement, not only would the three young men have sat in prison without the benefit of decent legal representation during their appeals, but perhaps—perhaps—Mark Byers would have been left to grieve in peace as well. But what would have been will never be known because the film was made. Paradise Lost premiered on HBO in June 1996, and the state of the case—and the life of John Mark Byers—would never be the same.

  Televised trials often give viewers the illusion that they are part of the process, perhaps even a member of the jury. According to Bruce Sinofsky, this was one of the filmmakers’ intentions in making Paradise Lost. But trying to place the viewing audience in the jury box was problematic, primarily because of the existence of two trials, one that the jury saw and one that the public saw. Jurors are often not present in the courtroom when motions are being heard, for example, or potential witnesses are being qualified, but the cameras in this case were still rolling. In the case of Paradise Lost, the fact that the trials were not shown in real time, or in chronological order, didn’t negate the possibility of objectivity, but it surely impeded it. The way the film was shot and edited, with multiple camera angles, slow-motion video, and the evocative music of Metallica tugging at viewers’ emotions, left the audience feeling, among other things, directed. Indeed, Berlinger states as much regarding Paradise Lost 2: “If people come away from the next film not believing that the three are innocent, I would tell them that they are wrong.”93 Paradise Lost is a very moving film, but those expecting objectivity would be disappointed in any documentary, according to Berlinger. “I don’t recognize the idea of pure cinematic objectivity in the first place,” he said after the making of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster in 2004.94

  That the HBO films entertained is hard to deny. And if the producers wanted more entertainment, if other lawyers or witnesses were “too boring and dull,” they could always turn to the cutting room (exclusion) or John Mark Byers (inclusion) to spice things up a bit.95 Because it was not a live broadcast, as was the case in the O. J. Simpson and the first Menendez trial, for example, the filmmakers were able to cut back and forth between courtroom testimony, backroom “strategy sessions,” interviews with interesting characters, and crime scene footage to generally keep things moving on the screen.

  Paradise Lost

  The public’s awareness of the case of the West Memphis Three made a quantum leap in 1996 when Paradise Lost premiered on HBO. Rarely has a documentary film captured audiences in quite the way that this movie did. The intensity and intimacy with which the camera followed the lives of the families of the victims, as well as the families of those on trial, set it apart from similar documentaries. Paradise Lost struck a chord with a vocal segment of viewers, many of whom related to the defendants. Most felt that the motive of satanic ritual murder alleged by the prosecution played all too well with the two conservative Southern juries that convicted Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin with virtually no physical evidence. Movie reviewers relentlessly repeated what was quickly becoming the film’s tag line: Damien Echols, Jason Bald
win, and Jessie Misskelley were three teenagers convicted of murder because they were weird, wore black, and listened to Metallica.96 The film also introduced viewers to such phrases as “satanic panic” and “Salem Witch Trials,” expressions that would soon become a mainstay in the sympathizers’ lexicon, as well as on the tips of scores of journalists’ pens. Many viewers also became convinced that if the trial had been held in Los Angeles or New York, instead of in the so-called American Bible Belt, the verdicts would have been different.

  But early evidence of a predisposition toward the defendants in Paradise Lost is reflected by Berlinger’s own remarks. “I think by the end of the film, on a personal basis, we had much more sympathy for the accused’s families than we did for the victims’ families,” he said in a 1996 interview.97 This did not surprise anybody, with the possible exception of the victims’ families themselves, who say that they were told that the filmmakers would be advocates for the victims. In the Paradise Lost DVD commentary, Berlinger admits that the families thought they’d be participating in a “pro-prosecution film.” Mark Byers says that he believed they wanted him to be heavily involved so that the victims’ stories would be told without compromise, but how did that jibe with the filmmakers’ intent? “Sometimes,” says Berlinger, “as a human being you feel awful about what you are witnessing or what you are filming; you have empathy, or you have guilt, or whatever. But as a filmmaker, you’re excited because you’re getting great stuff, and I’m always aware of the contradiction.”98