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

by Greg Day

  The Echols defense team had taken advantage of a 2001 Arkansas law that gave death-row inmates extensive access to DNA testing.147 DNA samples selected from a list agreed to by the defense and the state were received by Bode Laboratories in Springfield, Virginia, on July 7, 2004. These included the following:

  • fingernail scrapings

  • hair and tissue samples (including those later identified as possibly belonging to Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby)

  • ligatures (shoelaces)

  • blood samples

  • cuttings from victims’ clothing (to identify apparent staining)

  Eighteen months later, in December 2005, the results began to come back from Bode. Whatever the defense had been expecting, they couldn’t have been too disappointed with the findings. Among all the items tested, none tied Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, or Jessie Misskelley to the crime scene, though it was true that the defense had picked out the items to be tested.

  Tinsel Town and the Monster in the Shadows

  For Mark Byers, things just got stranger and stranger. In May 2006, Dimension Films, a production company owned by media mega-moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein, along with producer Liz Fowler, founder of Clear Pictures Entertainment, announced that they had acquired the rights to Devil’s Knot from Mara Leveritt. Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) were to write the screenplay, and Clark Peterson (producer of the Academy Award-winning Monster) would join in the production, which was scheduled to begin by the end of 2006. Dimension quickly set about obtaining life rights of people they believed were key players in the “True Story of the West Memphis Three.” Investigator Ron Lax, former juvenile officer Jerry Driver, and Pam and Terry Hobbs all reportedly signed deals with Dimension.148 Although arguably no one had received more attention in the book Devil’s Knot, or in either Paradise Lost film, than Mark Byers—with the exception of the WM3 themselves—Mark Byers wasn’t approached by anyone associated with the film.

  In May 2007, Mark got an unexpected visit from Ron Lax of Inquisitor, Inc. The blue jeans-clad private investigator was working for Damien Echols’s new attorney, Dennis Riordan, and wanted Mark’s help as they searched for alternate suspects. He mentioned that they were looking at a homeless man who frequented the woods near the interstate, but Mark didn’t believe him. Finding such an alternate suspect had always been at the top of the defense’s list—a list that had previously been headed by the likes of Mark Byers; there was a better than even chance that Lax still had him there.

  “Why should I help you?” Mark asked. “You said some pretty shitty things about me. You all but accused me of killing my son.”

  Lax replied, “I know, Mark. I’m sorry for that. I was just trying to do my job.” During the criminal trials in 1994, Lax had acknowledged having suspicions of Mark in connection with the murders even before the Kershaw knife was turned in by HBO.149 Now, he said, he was looking for some help. “Would you be willing to at least look at some of the results of my investigation and give me your opinion on it?” Mark said he would, but Lax never came back, most likely because after all these years, suspect-wise, Mark Byers was still a dead end, and Lax knew it. But there was another, much more significant reason that Lax didn’t revisit Mark: the defense had finally discovered an enormous omission in the 1993-1994 criminal investigation, something that went to the very core of the case. This discovery, involving investigative work so elementary in police procedure, could potentially unravel the entire case against the West Memphis Three. At that point, the defense was counting on it.

  Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Liz Fowler got back in touch with Mark in July 2007. Scott Derrickson was working on the screenplay, she said, and there were talks of what Mark’s portrayal in the film—which she said was assured—would be and what compensation would be offered. He should call back sometime in September, when plans would be more solidified. To handle contract negotiations, Mark retained Memphis attorney Ross Sampson, who was also representing Terry Hobbs in his deal with Dimension (and who later acted as Hobbs’s “spokesman” during his defamation suit against Natalie Maines in 2009). However, when Sampson, at Fowler’s direction, contacted attorneys at Dimension for details of the contract for his new client, they were mystified. “Give us your pitch,” they told Sampson.

  Pitch? What pitch? wondered Sampson. “I thought you’d be making us an offer,” he said sheepishly. Clearly, there was chaos in the studio’s camp, and it would take weeks and a new lawyer to straighten out the matter. Mark eventually retained another Memphis attorney, Claiborne Ferguson, and a contract was signed between Mark and Clear Pictures Entertainment.150 Mark would be paid an undisclosed sum for the right to portray him, with significant payment up-front.151 Fowler was hopeful that Dimension would go ahead with the film now that she had secured all the rights and at least some of the resources needed for production.

  Fowler, according to Mark Byers, was prepared to produce a film that portrayed Damien Echols as a “psychopathic killer, nothing but evil inside.” Baldwin and Misskelley would be depicted as mere followers. The occult angle, bogus as most thought it was, was easy fodder for the screen version of Devil’s Knot, particularly considering Derrickson and Boardman’s earlier collaboration on The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005. Not only was this version of the case completely contrary to that given by Mara Leveritt, but it also unsurprisingly incurred the wrath of Lorri Davis, who was said to be furious that her husband would be maligned on the big screen when he was in the middle of legal appeals that could save his life. Davis expressed as much to Fowler, who said that the film would probably be done in the fashion of Emily Rose and that the audience would be “led” to the conclusion that the West Memphis Three were guilty. One has to wonder why good money would be paid for a book that the purchasers seemingly had no intention of actually using, save for the title. But that was before Damien Echols filed his petition in federal court and before Mark Byers’s famous “change of heart.”

  Terry Hobbs

  Mark Byers wasn’t the only one that defense team investigators were talking to. By the time Ron Lax came to see Mark that Memorial Day in 2007, the only true piece of physical evidence (with the exception of fiber evidence introduced at the Echols/ Baldwin trial) that linked anyone to the crime scene in Robin Hood Hills had been discovered.

  The list of people the police had named as credible suspects during the original investigation in 1993 was predictably large, consisting of some twenty-nine individuals who had blood and saliva samples taken for analysis by the Arkansas State Crime Lab. Some of the “suspects”—including Mark Byers, Todd Moore, and Terry Hobbs—also had hair samples taken, but none of these were “microscopically similar” to any hairs recovered from the victims’ bodies.152 Unlike Mark Byers and Todd Moore, however, Terry Hobbs was never interviewed by police. How many detectives, prosecutors, attorneys, investigators, and supporters had waded through the evidence files without noticing that an interview with Terry Hobbs, including an accounting of his time on the day of the murders, had never been conducted? Ron Lax himself had been an investigator on the Echols defense team in 1993. Why hadn’t he noticed then that Hobbs had never been interviewed by police? While focusing on Mark Byers, Lax, like everyone else, had glossed over the obvious. Just by rolling the dice, the police might have had a one-in-five chance that Mark Byers, Todd Moore, Terry Hobbs, Ricky Murray (Christopher’s biological father), or Steve Branch Sr. was responsible for the murders.153 If the defense were looking for an alternate suspect—and they were—they couldn’t have done much better than Terry Hobbs. Years later, Gary Gitchell would say that he could not recall whether Terry Hobbs had been interviewed back in 1993. If he was, there was no record of it. Hobbs himself has stated that he was never interviewed.154

  But what put Lax and his assistant investigator Rachel Geiser onto Hobbs in the first place? It is likely that the Echols defense team on the West Coast had its own investigators go over the files, particularly
the DNA reports when they started coming back in from Bode Labs in 2005. For example, in the December 2005 report, all the hair samples matched the victims except the Michael Moore ligature hair (sample 3Aa), the Christopher Byers ligature hair (15), the “negroid” hair found on a sheet used to cover the bodies (18A), hair from a scout cap (21B), dyed hair from the sheet used to cover Steve Branch, and a hair from a “tree stump” (Bode #2S04-114-23). All but two of these samples were never matched to a donor; the Moore ligature hair and the hair found on the tree stump were a different story.155

  Questioning Hobbs

  Defense team investigators suddenly became very interested in building evidence against Terry Hobbs. According to her report for the defense, investigator Rachel Geiser, an employee of Ron Lax’s firm, Inquisitor, Inc., retrieved two cigarette butts from the front yard of the home being rented by Terry Hobbs in Memphis.156 Three weeks later, on February 24, 2007 she and Lax interviewed Hobbs at his home, where they collected more cigarette butts from the ashtray in his living room. During the interview, Lax attempted to construct a timeline of Hobbs’s activities on the evening of the murders, the first time anyone had ever done so. Hobbs told Lax that he had searched his neighborhood for Stevie during the “late afternoon and evening” hours, accompanied by his four-year-old daughter, Amanda. He also stated that he had searched that night with David Jacoby and Pam’s father, Jackie Hicks Sr.

  Pam testified at trial that Terry had dropped her off at work at 5:00 p.m. and that she hadn’t learned that Stevie was missing until Terry picked her up from work at 9:25 p.m. The boy was supposed to have been home before Pam left for work—it was a house rule—and she and Terry had driven around the neighborhood looking for him briefly before Terry dropped her off at Catfish Island. The police logs show that a call was taken from Terry Hobbs for a missing juvenile at 9:26 p.m. The call was made from Pam’s work by Terry immediately upon his arrival there. The question is obvious: why did Terry wait four-and-a-half hours to inform his wife that their eight-year-old son was still missing? Mark Byers had called police at 8:00 p.m., and both Mark and Dana Moore had told police that Christopher, Michael, and Stevie were together, so it is understandable that Hobbs had failed to formally report Stevie missing earlier. But to not tell his wife? Many people found this very difficult to fathom.

  That isn’t the only thing he didn’t tell her, or anyone else, apparently. Rather than continue to search for Stevie after dropping Pam off at work, Hobbs had gone to visit his friend David Jacoby, and the two played guitar for approximately one hour, according to Jacoby in an interview with Rachel Geiser on May 26, four months after Geiser had spoken with Hobbs. Although Hobbs had mentioned Jacoby in his interview in February, it was in the context of the search the two men had made of Robin Hood Hills later that evening with and without Jackie Hicks Sr. He said nothing of seeing Jacoby prior to that time. Jacoby told Geiser that Hobbs left somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., allegedly to go back to his own house to see if Stevie had come home yet. He returned one hour later, at which time Hobbs asked Jacoby if he would help him search for Stevie. Hobbs and Jacoby lived two blocks—thirty-five seconds by car—from each other. What was Hobbs doing for the rest of his hour-long absence? Neither Hobbs nor Jacoby is sure whether Amanda went with Terry on this short trip, but one thing is apparent: Hobbs didn’t breathe a word of his visit with Jacoby until his interview with WMPD on June 21, 2007, three months after his interview with Geiser. Because neither Hobbs nor Jacoby was interviewed by police until fourteen years after the murders, the issue of memory has to be considered. One school of thought says that no one can be expected to remember details of their activities that far in the past. Another says that on a day with such significance, no one forgets the details (where were you when JFK—or John Lennon—was shot?).

  In his May 2007 interview with Geiser, Jacoby described his search for Stevie in very general terms, saying only that somewhere around 7:00 or 7:30 p.m., he and Terry had gone to a bridge “over the big bayou south of Ten Mile Bayou” and looked around some. (The “big bayou” is another flood control canal that runs around the neighborhood. The bridge they looked over was probably on Fourteenth Street.) At that time, Geiser requested and obtained six strands of Jacoby’s hair and a cheek swab. Then, in a June 2007 phone interview with WMPD detective Ken Mitchell, Jacoby added detail to his earlier statement to Geiser, saying that he had crossed the pipe bridge over Ten Mile Bayou (he actually called it a “ditch,” though it is clear from the context he is talking about the bayou) and had also entered Robin Hood Hills with Hobbs, Mark Byers, and Jackie Hicks Sr. He told Mitchell that he had seen “muddy footprints” on the bridge and “bicycle tire tracks” going down to the ditch. During an October 2007 interview, again with Geiser, he said the opposite of what he had told Ken Mitchell, telling Geiser that he had never crossed the pipe bridge and had not entered the woods from the Blue Beacon Truck Wash either. Why had he changed his story? To complicate matters further, in July 2009 Jacoby gave a declaration to Natalie (Maines) Pasdar’s attorneys as part of a defamation lawsuit Hobbs had brought against her. In this statement, Jacoby stuck with the version he had given Rachel Geiser in October 2007—that is, that he had “never crossed a bridge or pipe into the woods” or entered the woods at all. His declaration to Pasdar stated that he was “not in Robin Hood Hills searching for Stevie or other missing children on May 5, 1993, alone or with Terry Hobbs at 6:00 p.m. or 6:30 p.m.,” further claiming that any search he was involved in was after dark. This statement contradicted that given to Detective Mitchell in June 2007 but supported his October 2007 statement to Rachel Geiser. In essence, David Jacoby told one version of the events of May 5 to police—that he crossed the bridge into the woods and saw footprints and bicycle tracks—and another version to everyone else.

  Another thing that Terry Hobbs told Rachel Geiser during their interview was particularly intriguing. According to Geiser, Hobbs told her that on the night of the murders he was searching for Stevie in Robin Hood with Jacoby and Jackie Hicks Sr. He stated, according her report, that at one point during the search, he had split from Jacoby and Hicks and “approached,” but “didn’t arrive at, the ditch where the bodies of the victims were later found.” This statement, conveniently or not, provided an explanation for any evidence that might be found, such as a footprint, fingerprint, or hair shaft, and that might link Hobbs to the crime scene. There was, in fact, a finger, thumb, or partial palm print—WMPD fingerprint expert Tony Anderson was never sure which—that has never been identified.157 Anderson found the print in the mud on the ditch bank “five to ten feet” from where the body of Michael Moore was found. The print, he said, was at a forty-five-degree angle to the ditch, which told him that whoever made it had to have been standing in the water, facing the bank. Anderson said he ran the print against “hundreds” of print samples, including those of the victims, the suspects, all the police who were at the crime scene, and many who weren’t, and couldn’t make a match.158 He stated that with only “seven or eight” points to compare with, matching it with anyone would have been “a miracle.”159 Add to that the fact that only a photograph of the print existed, and the difficulty in matching it was compounded. One set of prints not checked was that of Terry Hobbs. Although Hobbs’s fingerprints should have been on file—he had several arrests on his record—they didn’t compare the prints to his.

  Following Lax and Geiser’s first interview with Terry Hobbs on February 24, he became increasingly paranoid. He called Mark in March, saying that Pam had called him and said she had heard that Mark was dead. He asked Mark if he could come over, and Hobbs stayed at the Byerses’ home from about 1:00 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. He rambled on for hours about his life with Pam and how she was becoming “crazy.” He jumped from one subject to another, most related to his stormy relationship with his ex-wife, who he now said was trying to kill him. He said that he believed Pam knew Echols, that Echols had been in their house, and that maybe she had smoked pot with him—m
aybe she had even slept with him—and it was for this reason she had become “so crazy” after Stevie’s death. He also brought up the subject of an alleged photograph of Damien Echols sitting on Hobbs’s couch with Chris and Mike or Stevie and Mike. Mark had heard of this phantom photo before. Hobbs wanted to know, did Mark remember seeing it? Mark wasn’t sure. Both he and Terry at times had claimed to have seen it, and they both thought that Gary Gitchell had it, but as of this writing, Mark is sure he didn’t see it, and Hobbs says that he thinks he might have just “heard about it” from Gary Gitchell.160 Whatever the source of the rumor, no verifiable connection has ever been made between any of the victims and the convicted men.

  Hobbs related to Mark that he had overheard Pam discussing a “meth deal” with her sister while Pam was living in Memphis and that he had “ratted her out” to the apartment manager. He claimed that a DEA agent had contacted him about it, but that he didn’t know whatever became of it. He told Mark about the day he shot Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks Jr., after an argument with Pam during which Terry slapped her (Pam told her brother that Terry had broken her jaw).161 He also related the same story he would tell to the West Memphis police in June 2007 about the time he had caught Pam and one of her coworkers in their kitchen “making out” during a party they were having prior to Stevie’s death. Everyone was drunk, he said, and people were just sleeping all over the house so that they didn’t have to drive home. When he saw Pam and “this Mexican guy she worked with” embracing in the kitchen, he “beat the dog out of him.” When he told the police about it, though, he left out some “color commentary” that he shared with Mark, where he added that the kitchen walls and ceiling were splattered with blood.