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

by Greg Day

  Jessie met Damien Echols through Jason Baldwin. “One day I knocked on Jason’s door,” Damien said, “and his mother answered. Before I even asked, Jason’s mom said ‘He’s at Jessie Misskelley’s,’ and I thought, Who is Jessie Misskelley?” He claimed that this was their first meeting and that he “never did see Jessie much.” He and Jason would run into Jessie here and there and hang out. Damien found Jessie to be an affable simpleton. “His antics could be amusing, worth a chuckle . . . he was very much like a child. He was harmless.”

  The Investigation Part 2

  Despite the local scuttlebutt about devil worship and cults, the animal carcasses that were allegedly found around town, and strange gatherings reported at Robin Hood and the abandoned cotton gin known as “Stonehenge,” West Memphis was totally unprepared for the tragedy of May 5, 1993. No one could have predicted it, except perhaps for Jerry Driver and his fellow juvenile officer Steve Jones, whose obsession with Echols was later referred to by defense attorneys and supporters as “Damien Echols tunnel vision.” Once Echols appeared on the investigators’ radar, supporters claimed, other viable suspects were ignored, and the investigation focused solely on Damien. This is not an entirely accurate assessment because the West Memphis police had been tracking down numerous leads, and they did have other suspects.

  There was the black man who had appeared in a Bojangles chicken restaurant near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash on the night of the murders. He was mud-caked and apparently bloody and had one arm in a cast. He spent nearly an hour in the Bojangles ladies room before a female patron reported him to the manager, Marty King. King contacted the West Memphis police around 8:40 p.m. on May 5, and Officer Regina Meek responded to the call. Meek was part of the search effort for the missing eight-year-olds, and upon learning that the man had already left the restaurant, she told King that someone would be contacting him soon; she never got out of her patrol car. Someone did finally come to investigate at Bojangles—the next night, May 6—but by then the restroom had been cleaned, and all that was left was a pair of sunglasses found in the toilet and some tiny speckles of what appeared to be blood on the wall. Detective Bryn Ridge collected—and subsequently lost—some scrapings off the wall, and there the investigation ceased. “Mr. Bojangles” was never seen again.

  But was Bojangles ever a viable suspect? The police didn’t think so. The scene of the murders had been meticulously cleaned, if indeed that was even the primary crime scene; at that point no one was sure. Despite what must have been a great deal of blood loss, only traces were discovered under luminol testing. Upon his arrival at the restaurant, Mr. Bojangles was covered in mud and blood. He was disoriented and couldn’t even choose the correct restroom. Could this man have single-handedly subdued, murdered, bound, and disposed of three little boys, leaving hardly a trace? Eliminating Bojangles from the list of suspects was a relatively simple matter of means: he had none. But does this mean that he wasn’t a witness? This disturbing possibility will haunt the case, in all probability, forever. If Bojangles did see something, he didn’t want anybody to know about it in 1993, and it isn’t hard to imagine why. Would a poor black man in the South come out of the woods covered in mud and blood, flag down police, and tell them that he had just witnessed the murders of three little white boys?

  The authorities’ second suspect, other than Echols, was none other than John Mark Byers. The parents are normally the first people to be investigated and eliminated as suspects when a child is killed, yet Byers was not interviewed until May 19, two weeks after the murders. Although he was quickly cleared of suspicion by the police, this two-week period would be the subject of considerable suspicion for some who felt that Byers should have been higher on the list of suspects. There were several reasons for this. Byers had admitted to giving Christopher a “whipping” during what turned out to be the last time he would see the boy alive. Some felt that this spanking was the result of a rage that then drove Byers to kill his son and two others. This viewpoint was largely held by the “Free the West Memphis Three” camp, a support group for the killers that didn’t exist until after the release of Paradise Lost, some three years after the murders. They accused police of inadequately investigating Mark Byers, but a careful look at the investigation shows that Byers received much more scrutiny than either the Hobbses or the Moores. Not only did Mark give a thirty-four-page statement to police on May 19, but Terry Hobbs made no statement at all. Todd Moore’s comments were summarized in one line contained in a police interview summary report, though he was asked to produce receipts for gas purchased during his truck driving job. Mark was also the only parent whose profile was requested from the FBI. Further, of all the parents, apparently only Mark Byers’s criminal background was investigated.

  When police interviewed Pam Hobbs five days after the murders, a note was made at the bottom of the interview notes: “Mr. Hobbs was not at home at this time.”23 Apparently, police felt no need to get Terry’s timeline for the day of the murders, something that would come back on the WMPD in ways they could not have foreseen.

  Further investigation into Byers’s record would show that he had a history of violence. In 1987 he had been arrested and convicted for “terroristic threatening” following an incident involving his first wife, Sandra Sloane. An argument had erupted between the two early one morning when Mark arrived to pick up his children for a scheduled, court-approved visit. According to Mark, it was Sandra who first got violent—she spit in his face—and Byers responded by pouncing on her and threatening to use a stun gun to subdue her. The gun was never used, but Byers was sentenced to probation for the incident. In 1991 his record was expunged per an agreement made during sentencing.24

  Byers had also had a conflict with Michael Moore’s parents, Todd and Dana Moore. The Moores lived at 1380 East Barton, directly across the street from the Byers family, and at one time had been frequent guests at the barbeques that Mark and Melissa hosted at their pool home. Byers had stopped inviting them over after deciding that they didn’t “fit in” with the other guests. After this, according to Mark, the Moores had called the police four times with complaints about noise and parking. Both families today say that their problems were minor and that no real animosity ever existed between them.

  More interesting to many, however, was the work Mark Byers had done as an undercover informant, first in Memphis, and later on in West Memphis. Byers served the drug task forces in both cities by helping to set up sting operations for the police, two of which resulted in arrests and convictions. Police were interested in a possible retribution angle to the killings; had one of those convicted as a result of a Byers sting operation sought revenge though Christopher?

  The police were able to easily eliminate Byers as a suspect, however. Besides having a very verifiable alibi—he had spent the night searching for Christopher with his family and friends and was never alone for any length of time—none of the suspicions police might have had stood up to scrutiny. Despite rare horror tales to the contrary, does a father spank his boy and then murder and mutilate him and two of his friends a few hours later? The minor friction between Mark and the Moores was an obviously insufficient motive. As for retribution by someone Mark had set up for the West Memphis Drug Task Force, it is within the realm of possibility that someone sentenced to five years’ probation at the hands of the Byerses might have sough revenge. But the idea of someone getting even by brutally murdering three eight-year-olds fails the smell test, and if the police ever considered it a possibility, it was quickly ruled out.

  Improbabilities notwithstanding, during the May 19 interview with Mark, Detective Bryn Ridge got right down to business.

  Ridge: I may have information. This information suggests strongly that you have something to do with the disappearance of the boys and ultimately of the murder. What is your response to that?

  Byers: My first response is that I can’t fathom where you would get that . . . and it makes me so mad that I kind of got to hold myself here in this
chair.

  Ridge: Okay. Who, of all the people you know, might make that kind of suggestion?

  Byers: I wouldn’t have the slightest idea. If I did, it would make me want to hit ’em. You know, it would make me mad to think that someone maybe has said something like that about me. It makes me mad.

  Byers’s answer, and more importantly his reaction, satisfied Ridge, and Mark was crossed off the list of suspects, at least for the time being. In the years following the convictions of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley, no one would come under more intense public scrutiny than John Mark Byers. In some circles, he still does face this. The effort to try to link Byers with the murder of his son and to implicate him in the death of his second wife—Christopher’s mother—would at times border on the obsessive. If there was “Damien Echols tunnel vision” prior to the convictions, the post-conviction focus among Echols’s supporters would fall squarely on Mark Byers.

  The remaining suspects on the investigators’ list were quickly eliminated. The former West Memphis ice cream vendor who blurted out during questioning in Oceanside, California, “I might have blacked out and killed the three kids!” was deemed an improbable suspect and was never linked to the crime. The suspected peeping Tom who made a statement to the effect that he had heard the children had been sexually mutilated was eliminated as well.25 James Martin, a convicted child molester from Marion, was brought in for questioning and gave police quite a bit of information, some of it quite disturbing, about how the killer or killers might have felt during the murders, where the children might have been killed (Martin subscribed to the “dump site” theory), and how and why they were tied up—in short, applying his own perverted mind to the crimes to help police find the perpetrator(s). Most of what Martin had to say didn’t square with what the police already knew, but he did offer this pearl of prescient wisdom: “If you have more [than] two people, somebody is going to talk.” And talk someone did.

  Victoria Hutcheson

  Thirty years old, tall, and slender with wavy red hair and green eyes, Victoria Hutcheson cut a striking figure. A self-described “poor little divorced woman whose husband just ran off . . . living in a little gross trailer park,” Vicki was to make an enormous impact on the case.26 Up until a month before the killings, she and her second husband, along with her eight-year-old son Aaron and his ten-year-old brother, lived just down the street from the Byers family on East Barton. In April 1993, the couple separated, and Vicki moved from West Memphis to Highland Trailer Park in nearby Marion. It was there that she would meet a tough but dim-witted teenager known around the trailer park as “Little Jessie.”

  Jessie was seventeen at the time, and he and Vicki became close friends. Jessie dropped by her trailer frequently. She apparently lost track of her age because she often bought liquor for Jessie and even had him over for drinks. He spoke of another teen he knew over in Lakeshore Estates named Damien. This Damien was very “weird,” he said, into witchcraft, satanism, animal sacrifice, and blood drinking. Damien was involved in a “cult,” and Misskelley said that he himself belonged to this same group. There were up to twenty people, mostly teenagers, who would meet in the woods at night and kill dogs and cats, with new initiates being required to eat meat from the “sacrifices.” It was fantastic stuff, and Vicki wasn’t sure she bought any of it.

  Aaron Hutcheson was the same age as Christopher Byers, and the two were classmates at Weaver Elementary School. They also spent a great deal of time together after school, some of it exploring the woods that surrounded Ten Mile Bayou, despite Christopher’s parents’ rule that Robin Hood was off-limits. The statements of Vicki and Aaron Hutcheson, wild and unbelievable at times, would nonetheless lead the police to Jessie Misskelley Jr. and the incredible confession he would eventually make.

  Vicki Hutcheson had legal troubles of her own. She had a history of writing bad checks in Arkansas, so it was not really surprising that hours before the bodies of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch were discovered on May 6, Vicki was at the police station in Marion. She was being questioned regarding a $200 credit card overcharge at the truck stop where she worked, a job from which she was soon fired. Vicki had heard from a neighbor that two of Aaron’s playmates had gone missing the night before, so she had taken him out of school, stopped by the Moores’ house to see what was going on, and then headed to the Marion Police Department for a scheduled appointment.

  During their May 6 meeting, Marion police detective Donald Bray struck up a conversation with Aaron and discovered that Aaron was “best friends” with the three boys from Weaver Elementary who had gone missing the night before. He and his friends, Aaron told Bray, had built a “tree house” in the woods at Robin Hood that they frequented after school and on weekends. Though Vicki said she was aware of this tree house and had even seen it a time or two, on this day she heard for the first time a tale of strange goings-on that took place in the woods.27 Aaron and his friends had been “spying” on five men who gathered in the woods. These men had knives and painted themselves black. The boys would watch them as the men sat around a fire speaking “Spanish” and singing “songs about the devil.” The men were often nude while dancing around the fire, and according to Aaron, they put “their ‘peters’ into each other’s butts.”

  When Vicki was interviewed by Detective Bryn Ridge on May 28, she said that Aaron had told her he was actually present when his three playmates were murdered. Unfortunately, Aaron—and his mother as well, it so happened—had a vivid imagination, and he added more detail each time he told the story, even going as far as to say that he had not only witnessed the murder of his three playmates, but that he himself had been tied up by Misskelley and his friends too, only he had managed to escape. During interviews on three separate days—June 2, 8, and 9—it became clear that it was impossible to separate Aaron’s imaginings from reality. Nearly a month went by between Donald Bray’s first meeting with Aaron on May 6 and his second on June 2. Police were buried under the weight of the investigation, and this could account for the gap. It is more likely, however, that they simply didn’t believe him.

  During her interviews with Bray, Vicki quickly made a connection between the murders and Damien Echols. With Bray’s blessing, she decided to “play detective” by using her new friend, Jessie Misskelley, to lure Echols into a relationship, through which she could learn more about his mysterious beliefs and activities and any knowledge he might have about the murders. Her motivation, she said, was that she “loved” the three little boys. “I wanted their killers caught.” That a substantial reward for information was being offered must also have entered her mind, though she would always deny it.28 Vicki began cruising Lakeshore Estates in hopes of catching a glimpse of Damien. By asking other kids around Lakeshore about Echols, she was able to spot him, which turned out to be rather easy; Echols, with his jet-black (his natural color) goth-styled hair, always wore black, including a long trench coat that he wore even during the sultry mid-South summers. She told Jessie that she’d seen Damien, thought he was “hot,” and would like to go out with him. Could Jessie arrange it? Misskelley was reluctant; Echols, he reminded her, was very weird, even “sick.” But Jessie relented and arranged for Echols to meet Vicki at her trailer.29

  Once they met, their conversation turned quickly to the murders, with Damien freely admitting that the police had “accused” him of—not questioned him about—the killings on two separate occasions, with one interrogation lasting eight hours. When Vicki asked him why out of all the people to question, they would accuse him, he said, according to Vicki, “Because I’m evil.” Although it might have seemed reasonable at this point to back away from Echols, Vicki Hutcheson got in deeper. With Vicki leaving books on witchcraft and the occult lying around her trailer (books she had borrowed with Donald Bray’s library card), it wasn’t long before Damien acknowledged his interest in the subjects. When Vicki expressed an interest in becoming a “witch,” Damien invited Vicki to go with him to an “esbat”
—which she described in her statement to police as an “occult satanic meeting”—that was being held in the woods in Turrell, some twenty miles to the north. She enthusiastically agreed, and the two drove up there the next night. When they arrived at the site, a bizarre scene was unfolding. Ten or so people, all teens, their faces and arms painted black, were taking off their clothes and “touching each other.” As the night progressed, Vicki became increasingly nervous and finally panicked. “I could see what was going to happen,” she said. She insisted that Damien take her home, and he readily agreed. Little Jessie, who had gone with them, stayed behind.

  Vicki Hutcheson would prove to be one of the most controversial figures in the investigation. Her accounts of events didn’t square with the known facts. For example, she told police that Damien had driven her and Jessie Misskelley to the esbat in a red Ford Escort, though it was verified that the Echols family did not own a car matching Vicki’s description (the family owned a blue Dodge Aries) and that Damien didn’t drive. The police had hidden a recording device in Vicki’s home to record her conversations with Damien. “They put the recorder under the bed,” she said. “It was a fancy one with several reels of tape so that one would begin when the other was filled.” According to Hutcheson’s statements in a newspaper article in 2004, Damien said nothing incriminating. He said that his “weird” behavior was a “defense mechanism.” When Vicki asked what that meant, Echols replied, “It means leave me the fuck alone.” Although Vicki allegedly heard the tape and found the quality excellent—she said she could hear everyone in the room clearly—the police said the quality was unacceptable as evidence. According to Vicki, they later said they lost the tapes.30 She was unable to have her statement corroborated by anyone, and the kooky, ever-changing stories of little Aaron were too wild and inconsistent for police to rely on. In the end, most of Hutcheson’s “detective work” would be for naught. Although she was allowed to testify to her attendance at the esbat, anything that had gone on there—teenagers with faces painted black, touching each other, taking their clothes off—was determined by the judge to be prejudicial to Misskelley. Aaron never testified in open court; the prosecution just didn’t know what the boy would say next. It was also obvious that he was making up most, if not all, of his story, and he couldn’t be put on the stand only to perjure himself. It was a blow to the prosecution, given that Aaron’s story would have provided desperately needed corroboration for Misskelley’s confession. About the only thing that police would be able to use from Vicki or Aaron Hutcheson was the information that had led them to Jessie and a snippet of tape from Aaron’s statement that had evoked a strong reaction from Misskelley and led to his initial confession. As it turned out, the jury was able to accept Misskelley’s confession at face value.