by Greg Day
In August 1988, Mark and Melissa opened “Byers Jewelry” in the Holiday Plaza Mall (actually just a small shopping-center strip) in West Memphis. Mark and his father worked hectically for ten days prior to the opening of the store, building benches and interior walls, to make everything ready for opening day. Though the store actually opened for business on August 1, the official “Grand Opening” was held on Friday, December 16, 1988.51 Mark and Melissa ran the store together, and it seemed as though their life was on solid ground.
There was, however, a dark cloud hanging over the Byerses’ apparent success. After marrying Melissa, Mark had learned of her history of drug abuse. This was not the pot-smoking and whiskey-drinking variety that Mark had indulged in, or even the PCP type that had led to his overdose in 1977. Rather, Melissa was abusing narcotics, specifically Dilaudid.52 Though she occasionally took the drug orally, Melissa preferred injecting the drug, usually under the watchband on her left hand, on the top of her hand, or on the underside of either forearm. Though she was apparently clean during the time they were dating, Melissa soon took up with some of her old friends, and she was using again within a few months of their marriage.
The first time Mark checked Melissa into rehab was nine months after their wedding. When he confronted her with her drug use, Melissa was extremely remorseful and wanted to get clean and save the marriage. Mark checked her into Methodist Outreach, a drug rehab center in Memphis, where she remained for thirty days. She stayed clean for a while but eventually slipped back into the old patterns. Soon, jewelry was missing from the store, and both their personal and business accounts were being drained. Financial records for the store are not available for examination, so it is not possible to determine whether the business failed because of poor sales, mismanagement, Melissa’s drug habit or some combination of the two. Ultimately, however, the store was forced to close, and in 1991, three years after the grand opening, Byers Jewelry was officially out of business.
Mark briefly partnered with Daniel Hatchett, who operated a pawn shop just off Ingram Boulevard near Southland Greyhound Park in West Memphis. Mark built out the store to accommodate both the jewelry and pawn businesses. He also sold Hatchett the jewelry cases, alarm system, and safe from Byers Jewelry for $3,800. Mark did his jewelry repair in the back of the store. It soon became apparent to Mark that Hatchett was not the person he represented himself to be, such as the false claim that he was an attorney. When confronted with this, Hatchett said he was in the federal witness protection program. Mark decided it would be wise to move his business elsewhere.53 A woman named McNamara, who ran a jewelry store in Jonesboro, offered Mark a salaried job in her shop. She also put Melissa on the payroll to do counter sales. This arrangement also lasted only a few months, ending when Ms. McNamara abruptly closed the shop. Her partner, a man named Bruce Barnes, notified Mark that he was going in to remove any jewelry and equipment that belonged to him and advised Mark to do the same. Mark removed jewelry that he was working on and all his tools as well. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of it; not so for Ms. McNamara.
She claimed that $65,000 worth of merchandise was missing from the store, but there was insufficient evidence for a criminal case, so the matter was taken up in civil court. She filed suit against Bruce and Linda Barnes and, at least initially, John Mark Byers, for wrongly entering a business. Because Mark had insufficient tangible assets to attach in the event of a judgment against him, he moved himself into the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court. As a result of this move and because it was evident that Mark had taken only the property that belonged to him, he was dropped as a defendant in the case and became a defense witness for the Barneses. McNamara lost the suit. Mara Leveritt makes note of this matter in Devil’s Knot by pointing out that Damien Echols’s trial counsel Val Price “didn’t question Byers about the allegation that he had committed a burglary of a jewelry store and the taking of property, which would have been a serious felony if prosecuted” [emphasis added]. But the district attorney never believed that there was enough evidence to prosecute Mark Byers, and this is what is relevant, not “allegations” of wrongdoing. Further, because Byers was dropped as a defendant and testified on behalf of his former codefendants, the court’s belief that he was not complicit in any “serious felony” was evident.
Shortly after Mark moved his tools and stock out of the store he ran with McNamara, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in the frontal lobe. Although the tumor was determined to be benign, it caused him dizzy spells and terrible migraine headaches. To Mark, it felt like “a medicine ball, like there were sirens going off in my ears, and like a camera’s going off in my face.”54 His doctor prescribed the drugs Tegritol and Dilantin to alleviate the symptoms. The drugs helped considerably, and he was able to continue his jewelry work. In mid-1992, Mark bought a prefabricated shed from a dealer on Broadway in West Memphis and had it moved to the backyard at 1400 East Barton. From here he did his repair work during most of 1992-1993. It was essentially a subsistence living, and the couple was financially just getting by. In 1992, Mark was unexpectedly presented with an opportunity to improve the situation; some might even say he was entrapped.
Tables Turned
Mark Byers’s account of this 1992 incident is such that even without much corroboration, it merits consideration. When asked about it, he is surprisingly blunt: “The ATF and DEA agents screwed up.” In this sting-gone-bad, federal agents baited Mark into a conspiracy to broker a cocaine deal, but because of procedural blundering on their part, they were unable to make the arrest stick. Had they been able to, Mark’s prison time would have begun much sooner than it did, and the sentence would have been harsh—twenty years, perhaps more. The details of Mark’s involvement in this incident are not publically available. The federal agencies involved will not comment for obvious reasons. All the record shows is that on July 28, 1992, at 11:43 p.m., Mark Byers was arrested on drug and weapons charges by the sheriff’s office of Shelby County, Tennessee, and released at 9:26 a.m. the next day. The record does not reflect to whom he was released, but what little information can be independently verified supports his account.
During the 1980s, Mark had become acquainted with a man named John McFarland, with whom he conducted jewelry trading for several years. Mark lost track of McFarland by the latter part of the decade, until he suddenly resurfaced in the summer of 1992. Upon his return, McFarland contacted Mark regarding a potentially lucrative drug transaction with which he wanted Mark’s assistance. McFarland had been working as a safety inspector for an operation that conducted the unloading of barges at various foreign and domestic ports of call. This work took him to South America, where he had met some people who could supply him with cheap cocaine, for $12,000 per kilo. Since both Byers and McFarland knew that the street price in the United States for cocaine was more than twice that amount, they entered into a deal to move at least one kilo in Memphis for $28,000 and split the profits. Since Mark’s jewelry business had soured, and he was facing mounting debt, he agreed to make a connection with some of his former jewelry customers in Memphis whom he knew to be in the drug trade. Since neither McFarland nor Mark had sufficient cash to buy the kilo, McFarland was to arrange to have the seller present at a local hotel. The plan was that Mark would take the cocaine from the hotel to the buyers at a prearranged meeting spot, and McFarland would stay at the hotel with the sellers until Mark’s return.
The two arranged a meeting time at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza hotel in Memphis, where the middlemen and the seller would transact the deal. If Mark was suspicious when McFarland, a married man, said he would be bringing his “girlfriend,” he did not acknowledge it. Mark arrived at the hotel room, expecting to find McFarland and the drug supplier waiting. As it turned out, only McFarland and the girlfriend were in the room. McFarland told Mark that the seller did not want to be directly involved with anyone other than him and that he was waiting in another room in the hotel where the cash would be delivered once the transacti
on was complete. McFarland had with him a package that Byers described as “about the size of a football, only flatter,” wrapped in silver duct tape, with the word “Rolex” stamped across the top in red print; the package weighed slightly more than 2.2 pounds. He asked Mark if he wanted to sample the drug; Mark declined. “I’m a pothead,” he told McFarland. “I don’t do cocaine.” McFarland assured him of the drug’s quality and then told Mark that the arrangements had changed; the seller did not want the coke to leave the hotel until he had cash in hand, and the buyers would have to meet them at the hotel. When Mark informed the buyers of this, they refused the change in plans: either the exchange would take place at the originally planned meeting spot, or the deal was off.
Sensing the collapse of the sale, Mark left the hotel to meet with the buyers to try to convince them that they should come to the hotel to consummate the deal. Again they refused. Mark returned to the hotel to an enraged John McFarland, who became “belligerent,” complaining that the buyers weren’t for real and that he knew Mark wasn’t going to be able to set the deal up; he was generally “gettin’ all crazy.” At this point, Mark lied and told McFarland that the buyers had shown him a shoe box full of cash and were simply protesting the change in plans. McFarland was furious and continued to berate Mark. By this time, Mark had been away from home for much longer than Melissa expected. She was fully aware of the deal and would be nervous if Mark was gone too long. McFarland said he was going to have to go down the hall and apprise the seller of the situation. At that point, Mark picked up the phone, dialed home, and began to explain to his wife what was going on. Then all hell broke loose.
While sitting on the bed with his back to the door, talking to Melissa, Mark heard a very light knock on the door. McFarland, who had not yet left the room, opened the door, and what seemed like an army rushed in—DEA and ATF agents, all with guns drawn as they screamed, “Drop the phone, you son of a bitch! Drop the phone! Don’t move, or we’ll shoot!”55 Mark could hear his wife screaming on the other end of the phone as the agents hung up the receiver. Mark said, “The agents began bouncing me around the room, shouting, ‘We got this all on tape; we’ve arrested the buyers.’ This one big guy from the DEA starts hitting me with a phone book, shouting, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the money?’ I said, ‘What money?’ They said, ‘Twenty-eight thousand dollars—where is it?’ ‘I don’t know nothing about twenty eight thousand dollars.’ They said, ‘We got it all on tape; we got it filmed! We’ve got your buyers pulled over, and we’re arrestin’ ’em right now.’ So I said, ‘Well, if you got me, then you got me. I ain’t got nothin’ to say.’” Mark was searched, at which time the police discovered a full clip of .45 caliber ammunition in his back pocket. The agents demanded to know where the gun was. The irony of the situation was that although Mark had fully trusted McFarland, he was less comfortable with the would-be buyers and had taken the precaution of borrowing a .45 caliber automatic pistol from longtime friend and retired St. Francis County sheriff Dallas Brogden, a licensed gun dealer. Drug dealers—especially cocaine dealers—are always armed. Because the only time Mark felt he would be threatened was while exchanging the cocaine with the buyers, he had left the unloaded pistol and two clips in the trunk of the car; he had neglected to remove a third clip from his pocket when entering the hotel.
Mark was handcuffed and led by the agents outside to a black “panel van,” where he saw that the buyers, “two black dudes,” were seated inside, casting Mark hateful glances; they naturally assumed that he had set them up. Mark then led the agents to his car, gave them the keys, and directed them to the trunk, where they located the Colt 45. He was booked for conspiracy to sell cocaine and for the illegal possession of a firearm and was told that he was being bound over to the US Marshals Service.
Needless to say, there was no “seller” in the hotel, and Mark never saw John McFarland again. Mark has always assumed that McFarland was caught up on a federal charge and had “flipped” to avoid prosecution. He must have convinced the feds that Mark was a much bigger fish than he actually was, possibly out of fear of setting up someone who was truly dangerous. The mystery woman, McFarland’s “girlfriend,” was a DEA agent. Mark saw her only once again, while he was being interrogated prior to being locked up. Agents had tailed Mark to his initial rendezvous with the buyers, who were also taken into custody and charged with conspiracy to buy and distribute cocaine. Mark was taken to the Shelby County jail at 201 Poplar and held in the lockup overnight. At 9:26 the following morning, Mark and the others were “marched across the street” to the US Marshals office at 167 North Main Street, where they were held for seven hours until they faced the federal magistrate who would formally charge the men and set bail. The DEA and ATF agents were present. The first thing they discovered after checking the gun’s serial number was that the weapon belonged to Brogden, who, when contacted by agents, not only denied knowing why Mark had borrowed the gun (he didn’t know) but also demanded its return.
The federal agents made two charges against Mark. The first was the illegal possession of a firearm, the Colt .45 automatic found in the trunk of Mark’s car. But there is no federal law against having an unloaded firearm in the trunk of a car. There is also no law against carrying a clip of ammunition. As such, the charge was dismissed. The second charge was for conspiracy to commit a felony—that is, the brokering of the cocaine sale. The magistrate was satisfied that Mark had not tasted the drug and had not even touched the package. He was also confident that neither Mark nor the buyers had adequate funds to consummate the sale. (Between Mark and the buyers, they had something less than twenty dollars when they were arrested. The magistrate asked, “Is that what a kilo of cocaine sells for today?”) Thus, this charge was dropped as well, and Mark was released.
As it turned out, the buyers lived about two blocks from where the deal was supposed to go down and were planning on getting the money after they saw the cocaine. When agents heard Mark say that he had seen the money, they were sure that the conspiracy charge would stick. What they wound up with was an embarrassing waste of time and money. No one will ever find out what really happened, at least not from the federal agencies involved. Considerable time and resources must have been spent to set up Mark Byers, and the agencies’ true objective may never be known. Were they really so anxious to take out Mark Byers, a small-time pot pusher, that they would go to such great lengths to entrap him? Whatever the case was, this brush with federal law enforcement easily could have landed Mark in a federal prison for a very long time.
This was not Mark’s first foray into the world of drug dealing. There were several periods in his life when bought and sold marijuana in moderate quantities, sometimes ten pounds or more. He had run pot from Texas to Arkansas, sometimes by car, sometimes by plane. In one deal in the summer of 1990, Melissa had put Mark on a plane in Little Rock, bound for Houston, where he was to pick up ten pounds of Mexican marijuana from his connection there. The handoff went smoothly. Mark tightly wrapped the shipment in plastic film, doused it with cologne, packed it securely into his suitcase, and checked it for the return flight to Arkansas. Another of Mark’s Houston connections, Peter Walden,* knew of Mark’s trip and its purpose and decided it would be amusing to have Mark paged at the airport. Drug dealers tend to be a jumpy lot, so when the paging system at the William P. Hobby airport blared out, “Mark Byers, report to the Delta ticket counter!” he nearly lost it. After ducking into the men’s room to compose himself and then hearing his name paged again, Mark finally made his way to the Delta counter, where Walden was waiting. Seeing the terrified, pale-faced form of Mark Byers coming toward him was more than Walden could take; he doubled up in laughter. Even after Walden revealed his “joke,” Mark was so shaken that he sat frozen at the baggage claim in Little Rock, waiting until the last possible minute to claim the bag. With Melissa at his side, he watched and waited as the lone suitcase went around and around on the carousel, only getting up to grab it when he faced the inevitabl
e fact that if he didn’t, it would soon be with the other unclaimed bags.
Mark had been dealing marijuana on and off for much of his life. He liked the money, of course; he often needed it to supplement the income of his jewelry store during slow periods. But he also liked the status that came with the territory, peeling off big bills from rolls of cash, always having “friends” around. It was seductive, and he liked it. His earliest deals with larger quantities of pot had begun in Marked Tree with a friend named Danny Overman.
Danny Overman
Mark first met Danny Overman** while the two were growing up in Marked Tree. Danny’s father owned a farm in nearby Dyess, about twenty miles to the northeast. Danny also worked for a man named Bob Kerr, who had a little farm of his own along the Mississippi not far from Dyess. Danny’s work was not farming, however. It was running moonshine for Kerr. Mark ran into Overman one day out at the Kerr place, and Danny showed him another business venture he was getting into: growing marijuana, lots of it. Mark would shove as much pot as he could fit into a garbage bag and pay Danny $120. He’d then break it up into ten-dollar “lids” and sell it to his friends. One day Danny told Mark that there would be high-quality Mexican weed coming into the farm and that Mark should check it out. Pretty soon, he and Danny had a nice marijuana business going, large enough to generate a modest income, but small enough to stay under the radar of the authorities.
This arrangement continued until Mark went off to college in Texas. After that, he didn’t see or hear from Danny for almost ten years. It wasn’t until after his marriage to Sandra ended, and he was married to Melissa, that Mark had occasion to meet up with Overman again. Mark and Melissa were living in West Memphis at the time. Melissa had just wrecked her car and received a $1,300 payment from the insurance company. “Want to turn that into $4,000?” Mark asked. Figuring correctly that Danny was still in the marijuana business, Mark looked him up. He bought five pounds of pot for $4,000-$1,300 down, $2,700 due; sold it at the usual markup (about 68 percent in this case); and then came back for more. “I was off to the races in the weed business,” he recalls. “I’d do this for several months out of the year.”