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

by Greg Day

  Hobbs went on to say that after Dana stopped by his house, he followed her back to her house, only to discover that the boys were not there either. He then stated, “While [Dana Moore and I] were standing there in the front yard talking, here comes this big bully-lookin’ dude, comes walkin’ across the street. I looked at him and said, ‘Who’s that?’ And of course it was Mark Byers, and that was the first time I met Mark Byers. He looked like the shaggy DA. Don’t tell him I said that.” The time, according to Terry, was about 6:00 p.m. Hobbs then told the interviewers that it was at this time that they figured out that Christopher, Stevie, and Michael were all together. He and Amanda left the Moores’ house and drove around the neighborhood for a bit and then went to the home of David Jacoby, who lived nearby. Jacoby’s wife, Bobby, was a friend of the Hicks family—Pam’s family—from back in Pam’s hometown of Blytheville, Arkansas. Terry asked Jacoby if he would come with him to look for Stevie, and Jacoby agreed. “We were together till two or three in the morning,” Hobbs said.

  Jacoby told a different story. Terry had come to his house between 5:00 and 6:00 that day, he said. Hobbs stayed for somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, leaving between 6:00 and 6:30. He returned to Jacoby’s between 7:00 and 7:30, and it was at that point, according to Jacoby, that he and Hobbs began to search for Stevie, not earlier as Hobbs claimed. Jacoby said that although he and Hobbs had searched around the neighborhood together, he himself had never “crossed a bridge or pipe” into Robin Hood Hills, nor had he entered the woods by the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. Since there isn’t any other way to get to the crime scene—except to wade or swim across—Jacoby was apparently saying that he never entered the woods. This statement was significant because along with the hair in or on the ligature that “could not exclude” Hobbs, a second hair had been found that was similarly related to David Jacoby.191 This hair had been found on the root of a large tree near the drainage ditch where the boys had been found. If Jacoby was telling the truth, then there was the possibility that both Hobbs’s and Jacoby’s hair had been left at the crime scene by Terry Hobbs, or by secondary transfer from one of the boys as Hobbs insisted. Of course, if David Jacoby was lying, it could put him at the scene of the crime with Hobbs.

  On September 26, 2007, Mark spent the day feeling tense and agitated. He’d invited Terry Hobbs to come over for a couple of drinks and to talk about all the people who were sniffing around Memphis, digging up dirt on Hobbs. Having been a suspect in the eyes of the public for so long himself, as well as a parent of one of the victims, Mark was a natural confidant for Hobbs, and the two spoke from time to time. Now he was going to be stopping by for a visit. The difference this time was that Mark would be entertaining the man he now felt murdered his son. The objective of this visit was simple: get Hobbs’s palm prints for forensic experts to compare with the long-overlooked partial print that had been left in the mud near the ditch bank at the murder scene, the same print that Tony Anderson had photographed in 1993. During this visit, Hobbs would be asked to help Jacki with one of her craft projects. This particular project involved pressing down on a rectangular piece of plexiglass, a near-perfect surface for collecting prints. When it was time, Terry and Jacki brought the glass over to a surface where it needed to be pressed down for adhesion; Hobbs left two perfect palm prints.

  Once the evening’s objectives were achieved, most of the talk centered around the defense’s most recent efforts to get a new trial for Echols and Hobbs’s belief that any success they might be having was coming at his expense. He blamed Pam’s family for always disliking him and the new defense team for persecuting him based on a single hair. He had already been interviewed twice by Herot and Douglas, twice by Lax and Geiser, and also by the WMPD. He spoke in conspiratorial overtones. “It ain’t over with you either,” he told Mark. “Don’t think it is. They’re trying to play us—and probably got Todd [Moore] in it too. They’re trying to play me and you right now, hoping to get a rise out of us, which I ain’t gonna give ’em the thrill.” Even so, he was confident that he was in the clear. “If there was anything to worry about, it wouldn’t take the state fourteen years to figure it out,” he told Mark during a phone call one night. He also said, “If [prosecutor] Brent Davis called me up and said, ‘Come here; I’ve got something to show you,’ I’d go.”

  Hobbs was calm and conversational the rest of the evening, until the subject turned to his timeline, and thus his alibi, for the night of the murders. It has long been established and verified by official police documents that the first call to the West Memphis Police to report the boys missing was made by Mark and Melissa Byers and that Officer Regina Meek was the first to respond to the call. She arrived at the Byerses’ residence around 8:10 p.m. and met with Mark and Melissa. After the Byerses had given Meek the essential information, the three walked outside the house and were standing in the carport where Christopher had last been seen. At that point, Dana Moore walked over from across the street. She told them that she had seen Christopher with Michael and Stevie Branch shortly after 6:00 p.m. and that they had been headed down Fourteenth Street in the direction of Robin Hood Hills. Meek took off in search of the boys.

  During the night of September 26, 2007, when Hobbs came over and left his palm prints on Jacki’s “art project,” Mark mentioned to Hobbs that the first time he had met him was out in the carport at around 8:30 on the night of the murders. Hobbs’s face reddened, and his voice rose. “It was 6:00, goddamn it!” he shouted. The dual nature of Hobbs’s personality was showing, according to Byers, just as it had with John Douglas.

  At the end of the evening, immediately after Hobbs left his house, Mark delivered the set of Hobbs’s prints to Memphis attorney Gerald Skahan per a prior arrangement, and Skahan told Mark they would be sent out for comparison. Of course, they had only a poor-quality photograph of a partial print in the mud to compare it to. Maybe Anderson was right; maybe it would take a miracle. At the date of this writing, no official statement has ever been made regarding any comparisons of the print.

  Following the November 2007 “DNA Conference” in Little Rock, where Dennis Riordan laid out his case for the news media, the heat beneath Hobbs increased dramatically. Hobbs lawyered up and was in all likelihood told to keep his mouth shut.192 He didn’t. In early 2008, Hobbs met with Arkansas Democrat Gazette reporter Cathy Frye in Memphis to tell his side of the story. “I want people to know I haven’t done nothing wrong,” he told her. “I want them to hear it from me.” Hobbs told Frye that during his search of Robin Hood Hills the night of the boys’ disappearance, he had gone down the path toward the ditch where the boys were later found but turned back after getting a bad feeling. “I couldn’t breathe. I froze. The hair started standing up.” He also told her that he didn’t remember whether he had told the police about it. He hadn’t, of course—they’d never asked him. Officer Stan Burch of the West Memphis Police Department did interview Pam Hobbs on May 10, four days after the boys’ bodies were discovered, but Terry was not home. Neither Burch nor anyone else from the police department ever followed up.

  All the Democrat-Gazette interview accomplished, it seemed, was to provide an outlet for Terry to tell more stories about Pam and her family accusing him of killing Stevie, about how the defense was trying to frame him by “stealing” cigarette butts from his front yard and ashtray, and about how he and Pam would have violent arguments (one of which, for some reason, had been videotaped at a local bar). He also told Frye that in March 2008—four months after the DNA conference—he had suffered an “emotional breakdown,” sold the contents of his house, and moved with his fifteen-year-old daughter into his pickup truck, where they spent the next few months. Why would a person just named as a “potential new suspect” do something so obviously irrational and suspicious? “These are things men don’t like to talk about,” he cryptically told Cathy Frye. He was writing a book at the time, he said, and speculated that his reaction had to do with the fact that he was “reliving” the events
of the past. This bizarre turn of events seemed to be of little interest to the WMPD, which was still not pursuing Hobbs as a suspect.

  Further Revelations

  “It doesn’t add up.” After fourteen years of being surrounded by death, drugs, alcohol, hospitals, and prison, Mark Byers felt that he was finally able to sweep the fog away and look objectively not only at the new evidence, but also at the facts of the case as they were already known. With hindsight and a heightened perspective, ignited by his talks with John Douglas and Fred Herot, he began to believe that the evidence pointing toward the innocence of the West Memphis Three was powerful, and he wanted the world to know what he now felt was the truth about who killed his son.

  It wasn’t going to be easy announcing to the public this “change of heart,” as it came to be known, and Mark knew it. “I’m not that crazy hillbilly they made me out to be,” he told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in late 2007. Indeed, many were thrilled to have such a high-profile detractor change sides. Some lauded his “moral courage.” The image had changed too. Out were the bib overalls and rubber boots; in were the Armani suit and leather loafers. Instead of the shaggy beard and ponytail he’d sported in Paradise Lost, he appeared on camera with a smoothly shaved head and neatly trimmed goatee. Not everyone, however, was ready to let the old Mark Byers go. The attitude of some toward Mark Byers just prior to—and even after—his announcement was as hostile and accusatory as ever, almost surely as a result of continued exposure to the case via the HBO films and Devil’s Knot. For example, a MySpace page opened by someone other than Mark Byers in his name showed some interesting comments directed toward him: “I drove through West Memphis last week . . . I thought about the three little boys. I also thought about what a piece of shit you are,” said one person. “I know this isn’t your real profile, but you’re a piece of shit scumbag who killed three kids,” said another.

  Amanda Hobbs, Terry’s daughter with Pam, said on Larry King Live in 2007, “It makes me sick. It really does. It’s just crazy, you know? It’s like Mark Byers has been in these shoes for fourteen years, and now he wants to try to put my father in those shoes?”193

  Mark’s longtime nemesis, Mara Leveritt, was still gunning for him as late as February 2007. On her blog, she posted an article rehashing one of the public’s favorite slurs against Mark Byers, his alleged culpability in the death of his wife Melissa in 1996. In an effort thinly veiled as an “investigation,” Leveritt dredged up ancient hearsay from Sharp County sheriff Dale Weaver, who simply refuses, against all logic, to close his investigation. She claims that the impetus for the article was a refusal by the prosecuting attorney to release the Melissa Byers file to her under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, stating that the investigation was still open. The Arkansas State Police closed its investigation in 1996, but Weaver claims to have “lingering questions” over the death of Melissa. Of course, one has to wonder why Leveritt was still trying to implicate Mark Byers in the death of his wife at such a late date. Why exactly did she want the file on Melissa Byers? She unconvincingly tried to tie the article to two investigative pieces she was working on that examined undercover police operations in general and to her belief in the corruption inherent in such work. As her link between those articles and Mark Byers, she cited the fact that Mark and Melissa had done short stints working as informants for the Memphis and West Memphis police departments’ drug task forces and even wove in the word “occult” in an apparent effort to integrate the West Memphis Three story. Enough people questioned her motives for writing the article that she posted another some four months later, titled “Why I Wrote about Byers, the Confidential Informant.”

  There was no love lost between Byers and the Hicks clan either. Pam Hobbs’s sister, Jo Lynn McCaughey, got into a shouting match with Mark at the briefing held prior to the November 2007 press conference, which resulted in McCaughey being asked by authorities to leave. “They asked me to leave the room because Mark Byers and I got into an argument.” What were they arguing about? “About his whereabouts and him falsely using my father [Jackie Hicks Sr.] as an alibi.” It seems that the Hicks family, as previously noted, would accuse anyone at arm’s length of killing Stevie. If there were hard feelings between Pam and Mark, however, they were not evident; they both suspected Terry Hobbs of complicity in Stevie’s death.

  Alice Leeds, formerly a press agent for the Free the West Memphis Three support group, was blunt: “I don’t like Mark Byers. Any change in him is all on the surface. He looks like a gangster.” She was particularly miffed about Mark’s possible attendance at a demonstration by supporters at the state capitol building in Little Rock. The event was planned to be a major publicity opportunity, climaxing with the presentation of letters and postcards in support of the three convicts to Governor Mike Bebe by Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines.194

  Mark’s publicist, Kalisa Hyman, wanted in. “What would Mark Byers’s role be in all this?” Hyman asked Leeds.

  “Role? What role?” Leeds replied. “He’d be a private citizen showing his support for a cause he believes in.” That wasn’t what Hyman—or Byers—had in mind. He didn’t show up. He did, however, begin to make the media circuit.

  “The Price of Justice Is Eternal Publicity”

  Mark Byers’s presence tends to evoke a visceral reaction from people. The epithets used to describe him, cited elsewhere in this book, range from religious slurs and murderous accusations to attacks on his Southern heritage and even his size and hairstyle (“mullet-headed oaf”). In the latter part of 2007, Mark embarked on a mission to alter the public’s perception of him, integrating his new cause with a softened version of the preachy, evangelical style that had attracted so much media attention—and public ire—in the past. With a new contract in hand from Clear Pictures Entertainment, a new lawyer, and even a publicist, Mark was ready to unleash himself on an unsuspecting public. Knowing the damage he had done to himself with his performances in the Paradise Lost films, Clear Pictures didn’t want to take any chances that their man was going to sabotage a public relations effort for a film that had not yet been sold. Thus, all requests for interviews were routed through his attorney, Claiborn Ferguson, and approved—or not—by Clear Pictures.195

  For possibly the first time in his life, Mark became Mister “No Comment,” unless he was advised otherwise by the studio or his lawyer, with a good dose of monitoring by Jacki. Thanks to some “media training” by a public relations firm, when he did speak to the media, his speech was measured, his demeanor composed, and his appearance impeccable, including “Free the West Memphis Three” garb when appropriate.

  On December 5, 2007, Mark appeared on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet in New York along with Dr. Michael Baden, who appeared via remote feed. There he told hosts Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy that he had been swayed by “satanic panic” into believing that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were guilty of murdering his son. “They were three throwaway teenagers. Everything that the state brought out—that they were devil worshippers, that our children were sacrificed to the devil—that’s what we were told.” Specifically, what had changed his mind? “It was the DNA evidence and the fact that the crime scene does not match the confession.”

  After showing a clip of one Mark’s hateful tirades from Paradise Lost, Juliet asked, “Is this [the murders] something you think about every day?”

  Mark answered, “Yes. I’ve had questions about it since day one. But I needed someone to hate. I needed someone to hate to survive.”

  Michael Baden, after giving his opinion as to the real cause of most of the injuries to the victims—postmortem animal predation—said, “I am very impressed with Mr. Byers’s opinion,” surely meaning, “He’s on our side now.” When the two men met face-to-face two years later at the Baldwin/Misskelley Rule 37 hearing, they embraced and shared some private words, most having to do with Mark’s surprise testimony given that day in Jonesboro.

  Later that same month, Mark appeared
via satellite on Larry King Live, a show that also featured a remote feed from death row at the Varner Unit in Grady, Arkansas. From there, Damien Echols appeared frail and nervous, the telltale pasty-white death-row pall evident on his face. Echols told King about the social climate in Arkansas that had led to his conviction in 1994. “West Memphis is pretty much like a second Salem. I mean, you know, because everything that happens there, every problem, no matter what it is, it’s blamed on satanism.” With insight coming from fifteen years in prison with nothing to do but think, Echols said he knew exactly why he was still on death row. “A lot of people have built their careers off of this case.” He spoke of his wife, Lorri Davis, and the efforts of the celebrities whose financial contributions had made the filing of the habeas petition possible. When asked if he thought that he’d ever be free, Echols said, “I believe that, yes. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”