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

by Greg Day

  A week later he called to ask her out. Jacki begged off, saying she was in the process of moving and just didn’t have the time. They spoke on the phone for several hours, Mark trying his hardest to impress her. At one point in the conversation, Mark blurted out, “I’ve been on TV.”

  Jacki shot back, “Yeah? Well if it was on Jerry Springer, we can stop talking now!” He told her something about his past, the murders, and the HBO documentaries. Then he offered to help her move. She declined. Jacki was an independent woman, and she’d handle things on her own as she always had.

  Several times over the next few weeks, Mark tried to coax Jacki into going out with him. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested; she was simply distracted. Eventually, however, as her arms began to wear out from moving boxes and Mark’s calls to her started tapering off, she gave in and called to ask for his help. Within thirty minutes, Mark was there. While she unpacked, they talked into the early hours; they both love to talk. During the move, Mark had accidentally broken her VCR and an ashtray. The next afternoon, he showed up with replacements for both. As they began to date steadily, Mark put the VCR to use by playing the Paradise Lost videos for Jacki, giving her the first glimpse into the reason people seemed to recognize him and so many regarded him with trepidation. Jacki’s initial assessment: “I saw a lot of underlying psychology and selective editing in the films that seemed to have no real point.” She saw little resemblance between the man she had been seeing and the out-of-control character in the films. To her, his grief was evident, as was the filmmakers’ efforts to make him entertaining (not that it was all that hard).

  One night, Mark randomly said to her, “You know, you love me, and one day you’re going to be my wife.” Jacki was only a little surprised. “My initial reaction was, ‘No, I don’t, and no, I’m not!’ That was part of the 5 percent of the time I have been wrong since we met.” On June 7, 2003, Mark and Jacki were married in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and moved into Mark’s Memphis-area home to start their new life.

  Not one to be easily intimidated, even Jacki was shocked by Mark’s ability to so quickly and completely self-destruct.

  The Cuckoo’s Nest

  The person who arguably knows Mark Byers better than anyone makes this assessment: “Mark is not one who does well with moderation. He is swimming fast and high or diving dark and deep. Over the years he has gotten better about balance.” His unsteadiness at times causes Jacki great concern. “But that is one characteristic that makes him Mark.” Mark’s life has been characterized by this dichotomy, and the years between his marriage to Jacki and his conversion to supporter of the West Memphis Three clearly reflects this.

  Mark and Jacki were doing well in the years following their marriage. The house painting business was steady, and Mark had a reliable crew of three to five men whom he kept very busy. He was making better money than he had in many years but was also working much harder. The work was tedious, and he was frequently away from home for weeks at a time. This in itself was enough to put a strain on any marriage, but the problem was exacerbated by Mark’s drinking. When he was busy, Mark prospered. And when he prospered, he partied—and partied hard. Crown Royal Canadian whiskey was his drink of choice, and he could, and often did, down considerable quantities. It seemed as though when Mark was working, he drank. When he was depressed, he drank. When he had headaches, he drank. Whatever the root causes of his drinking were didn’t much matter; he was once again heading for disaster.

  When Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005, Mark took his crew to Mississippi to work on the reconstruction of a friend’s home. He’d be gone for two weeks at a time, but whenever he returned home, he brought plenty of cash. After the work in Mississippi was completed, Mark landed a job in Missouri repainting more storm-damaged homes, these from a series of twisters that had roared through in the summer of 2006, including a massive supercell that had spawned some 105 tornadoes over four days in two states. This job also required time away from home, usually five days at a clip. The pattern at the job site was set early. He would party with the crew after work each day and continue upon returning home Friday evening. Sometimes he neglected to stop drinking long enough to drive home, drawing a DUI in the process. The fact that Mark was still on probation made this problematic. If his parole officer (PO) learned of this, he said nothing. Mark wasn’t always so lucky. A similar incident in Memphis did catch the attention of his PO, who decided not to revoke Mark’s parole. The two had always been on good terms. Mark never missed a parole meeting, always obtained permission before traveling out of the jurisdiction, passed all his urine analysis tests, and never gave the man anything to complain about. Although Mark was still reckless at times, he knew one thing for sure: he wasn’t going back to prison.

  Mark didn’t leave his drinking on the job; it was becoming a problem at home that was too big to ignore. “He was drinking heavily,” Jacki recalls, “and now had a doctor giving him a prescription for Xanax. For about three weeks it was Mark’s body here, falling over everything and nodding out. The husband I knew was not home.” The jobs—inside jobs that inundated his brain with paint fumes—were taxing to his health, causing severe headaches that were aggravated by the tumor still living in his brain.143 “I had migraines. I self-medicated,” he said. Self-medicating or not, he drank plenty and was also popping 1 mg Xanax without regard. Mark’s history of mental illness would seem to advocate the avoidance of alcohol, and the combination of alcohol and Xanax can be deadly. Both drugs are central nervous system depressants, and the combination not only increases the effects of alcohol but delivers a double-whammy to the brain and heart and can seriously impair respiration. If Mark was aware of any of this, it wasn’t reflected in his behavior. He often had to be guided to the bedroom or to the car after a day of drinking, unable to navigate on his own. He and Jacki had been thrown out of restaurants as a result of Mark’s drunkenness. “I was at the point where I dreaded his coming home. When he was home, I was so stressed, and when he was gone, I had peace.”

  Meanwhile, the company that was contracting Mark to do the painting in Missouri went bankrupt, owing Mark money. He still had to pay his crew for work they had already done and had also incurred legal fees and fines related to a drunk-driving arrest after an automobile accident. All of these expenses had to be paid out of Mark and Jacki’s personal savings.

  At the same time, Mark was in the middle of a stressful movie rights negotiation. The movie deal wasn’t a mere vanity issue. Mark and Jacki needed the money badly, and they had precious few ways of getting it. With chronic health problems herself, Jacki had been unable to work for many years. As the weeks and months of 2006 went by, Mark and Jacki’s savings dwindled, and the couple was once again plunged into poverty. Mark lost his truck and had to hock his modest bass boat for bill-paying and grocery money. Mark’s response was typical but unusually severe, even for him. A three-day booze and Xanax bender came to a head on a Sunday afternoon in February 2007. After consuming nearly a gallon of whiskey in three days (by his own reckoning), Mark staggered out of the bedroom and informed Jacki that he had also taken eight Xanax tablets. Jacki took his pulse, which was weak, and sent him back to bed. She called Mark’s brother and while talking to him heard a loud thump. She hung up the phone, immediately dialed 911, and then rushed into the bathroom. Mark, who had earlier fallen four times on a fifteen-foot trip to the bedroom, had fallen backward into the tub and appeared to be unconscious. The paramedics on the line told Jacki not to move him. Were his condition not so serious, the instruction might have been laughable—the thought of tiny, five-foot-two Jacki trying to move her 275-pound husband from the bathtub. By the time paramedics arrived, Mark had somehow managed to pull himself from the tub and was lying half-on and half-off the bed. His blood pressure was dangerously low—60/40—and he was in and out of consciousness. He was taken by ambulance to Methodist North Hospital in Memphis.

  Nearly twelve hours later, the emergency room doctor came out a
nd informed Jacki that Mark’s blood pressure had stabilized and that he would soon be discharged. “You can’t send him home with me,” she said flatly. “He’ll just do the same thing, and I can’t stand to watch it anymore.” The doctor told her that he did not have sufficient grounds to have Mark committed. Jacki was resolute: “Mark doesn’t know that.” She told Mark that because of the level of drugs in his system, he could be committed against his will, but that it would be better for him if he committed himself. On that point the doctor concurred. Mark was pretty cavalier about it later. “I didn’t want to wind up at someplace like Charter [Behavioral] Hospital, so I figured three or four days of detox and rehab at Methodist North, with some R&R and decent food, would be just the ticket.” Unbeknownst to either Mark or Jacki, what they were doing was signing him into a psychiatric ward, where he would be held a virtual prisoner for the next eight days.

  Still foggy from the massive amounts of drugs and alcohol he’d consumed, Mark woke up on the other side of the looking glass. During the early morning hours, while he was in an incoherent dream state, he had been transported the twelve miles from Methodist North Hospital to Methodist Mental Health Institute. As he began to come around, he became aware of a strange feeling taking hold of him, and he realized with relief what it was: he was hungry. He was given a cheeseburger, chips, and a Coke and sent to a semiprivate room. His roommate was a middle-aged black man who briefly acknowledged Mark before rolling over and going back to sleep. Mark had barely settled into his room when he was hustled out for more vitals and a blood draw. By 7:00 a.m. he was taken to the “day room,” where between twenty and thirty patients were sitting. What he saw there made his jaw drop. “These were things you’d only see in a horror movie. Old women walking around in those gowns with no backs, wide open. Looked like two shriveled-up old prunes. People talking to themselves, throwing things at each other—even feces They were fuckin’ crazy!” As a panic started building, Mark went into “prison mode”—act tough, don’t be afraid, blend in. “Crazy people will hurt you.” Then he called his wife.

  “Get me the hell outta here now! This ain’t rehab; it’s a fuckin’ loony bin!”

  Jacki had been sound asleep and was as surprised at this news as Mark was. “Don’t worry. I’ll do everything I can to get you out,” she said, though she had no intention of doing any such thing; he could have been in Leavenworth for all it mattered. “He needed a wake-up call, and I was willing to do what I had to in order to help my best friend and husband.” Two hours later, Mark called again, telling Jacki what she already knew: he would have to stay in the hospital until he was released by the doctor.

  So on this first day of his stay, Mark struggled to settle into the routine of the hospital. After an early breakfast, the patients would gather at 10:00 a.m. for a group meeting with the doctor. Mark hated it. “After the meeting, it was smoke cigarettes and watch TV for the rest of the day. There was no ‘therapy’ or ‘treatment.’ This was a place where street people came after their welfare checks were spent. You could see that the place would be empty toward the beginning of the month. Then people would get their checks, spend it all, and check themselves in for ‘three hots and a cot’ until they got thrown out. It was pathetic.” Pathetic perhaps, but it was home for Mark Byers until the doctor decided he could leave. Jacki visited him twice during his stay, and the two spoke on the phone several times a day. “Make the best of it,” she told him. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”

  Life in a psychiatric ward was an unearthly experience for Mark. “Some of the things I saw in there reminded me of prison; some were worse. People banging their heads against the wall, women taking their clothes off—I get nightmares from some of those images. People walking down the hall, crapping and peeing themselves like dogs. There were food fights every day. There was this one white lady—looked like a junkie, raggedy clothes, dirty hair, never spoke, just grunted and snarled like an animal, and they were letting her roam around. She’d eat other people’s food, vomit it up, and start throwing it at the other patients!” The “therapy” Mark was receiving was similar to the “rehabilitation” he’d received in prison. It was, to put it kindly, somewhat unstructured. “I got about forty-five seconds a day with the doctor—you know, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Doing okay today?’ and that was it. We did this for eight days, during which time I had a total of about five minutes of face time with the doctor. At the end of the eight days, I was released.” In Mark’s view, the operation at Methodist Mental Health Institute was geared toward profit; there was little pretense of therapy, treatment, or rehabilitation. It was just a matter of keeping the “patients” alive. Be that as it may, when Mark walked out of Methodist eight days after walking in, he was at least clean and sober.

  Jacki had her own health issues. After being diagnosed with diabetes at age five, she spent the next twenty-two years living the way diabetics live, with daily insulin injections and a persistent dread of complications—hypoglycemia, diabetic coma, heart failure, kidney failure, and potential blindness. In April 1994, she underwent a successful kidney and pancreas transplant that allowed her thirteen years of freedom from the disease that had plagued her most of her life. Free from cancer for many years, Jacki had been worried as early as November 2006 that she was relapsing. “With all that was going on, I didn’t want to deal with it. I knew that it would have been another excuse for Mark to stay in a stupor.” When Mark came home from the hospital, however, she told him that she was probably going to need major surgery. An examination by her doctor confirmed her fears, and on May 5, 2007, she underwent surgery to remove the cancer. Though the surgery was successful, and her recovery went very well, she was back in the hospital six months later to have a gallstone removed. While there, she learned that her inflamed bladder had caused acute pancreatitis, and she was once again diabetic. She was successfully treated and once again had her illness under control. With any luck, things around the Byers house would return to normal.

  The More Things Change

  In the eighteen-year history of the case of the West Memphis Three, the years 2006-2008 were pivotal. Money from celebrity supporters—whose ranks, as noted previously, had grown to include Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Johnny Depp, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, director Peter Jackson, Margaret Cho, and Marilyn Manson—was pouring into the fund managed by Echols’s wife, a landscape architect from New York named Lorri Davis. Echols and Davis had been married in 1999 in a prison ceremony presided over by a Buddhist priest. The defense fund used Davis’s Arkansas Take Action’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for financial reporting purposes. Although the group doesn’t publically disclose the amount taken in from donors, it is said to total well over one million dollars, perhaps closer to two million. In June 2008, Eddie Vedder, who was just coming off the production of his Grammy award-winning soundtrack for the film Into the Wild, was doing a limited-engagement solo tour, his first ever, on the West Coast. A portion of the proceeds went directly to the Damien Echols Defense Fund. Through ticket and hotel room package auctions—five pairs of “premium” tickets per show were auctioned—the tour may have raised up to $100,000 for Echols. Other celebrities used different vehicles for donations, though it is doubtful that any raised as much for Echols as Vedder.144 “Eddie has been with us for six years,” Davis told author Mara Leveritt in 2004. “We simply wouldn’t be where we are without him.”145

  Davis had been putting the money to good use, making calls and writing letters and e-mails to various attorneys and experts, retaining people she felt could help her husband. Dennis Riordan, a San Francisco attorney with extensive experience in federal appellate law, was hired as lead counsel. High-profile rent-an-expert Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner of New York City and current chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, was retained to examine photographs of the victims of the West Memphis homicides. Baden’s forensic skills had been previously sought for the O. J. Simpson, Claus V
on Bulow, and Phil Spector murder cases. Dr. Werner Spitz, former chief medical examiner for the city of Detroit, who had been a consultant for the Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), Phil Spector, Robert Chambers (the “Preppy Murder”), and JonBenét Ramsey cases, was brought in to examine autopsy and crime scene photographs. Both Baden and Spitz were of the opinion that the three murdered children’s injuries were inflicted not by knives, as was alleged by the prosecution during the 1994 trials, but by postmortem “animal predation” by “large carnivores.” Dr. Vincent Di Maio, who had provided expert testimony for the Scott Peterson and Phil Spector trials, was also retained to examine the photographs. Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic odontologist from Coral Gables, Florida, whose testimony had driven the nail into Ted Bundy’s coffin for the 1978 murders of Florida State University co-eds Lisa Levy (whose left buttock Bundy had bitten) and Margaret Bowman, was tapped to search the victims’ photographs for any bite mark activity. John Douglas, the “mind hunter” who inspired the “Jack Crawford” character in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs and who headed the FBI’s Investigative Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia, for twenty-five years, was retained to develop a profile of an alternate, unknown subject (UNSUB), someone other than Mark Byers, who was a dead horse beaten for fourteen years already.146