by Greg Day
How the investigation led to Byers is similarly unclear. The official version has it that Atwood’s neighbor, Greg Deckard, spotted a mid-1980s, blue and white or red and white pickup truck in Atwood’s driveway sometime between June 15 and July 15, 1994. Deckard stated that he saw two men and a woman loading “furniture and personal belongings” into the back of the truck. In his statement to police, Billy Chrisco, a friend of Ryan Clark, stated that Ryan told him that he and his father and mother had gone to Atwood’s and removed and subsequently sold some furniture.
Sharp County sheriff’s deputy Dale Weaver also took a statement from John Kingsbury, who pointed the finger at Mark Byers. Kingsbury told Weaver that he had witnessed Byers spreading a rug out in his front yard for cleaning and then moving it into the house; Kingsbury said he believed the rug belonged to Brenda Atwood. This story should arouse suspicion; a superficial look beneath the surface shows that John Kingsbury had more than sufficient incentive to lie. If, as Byers contends, Kingsbury was guilty of helping himself to some of the contents at 25 Osage Drive, covering up his involvement by accusing Byers made perfect sense. Also, since Kingsbury had recently obtained a restraining order against Byers for thwacking his son on the ass with a fly swatter—the famous “abuse of a neighbor’s child” incident that West Memphis Three supporters often used as further proof of Byers’s propensity for violence against children—he was surely holding a grudge.79 Weaver apparently ignored Kingsbury’s impeachability and possible complicity and searched only the Byerses’ house, after obtaining permission from Melissa.
Byers’s account of events unsurprisingly differs from Kingsbury’s. Brenda Atwood returned to Cherokee Village from her home in Texas to find that her house had been robbed. Not only were the rugs, sled, and Indian missing; other items had been taken as well, including a china cabinet and some dishes. Seeing her RV in the driveway, Greg Deckard approached her and told her that he’d seen the pickup truck in her driveway. Atwood got into her RV—the same RV that some would suspect Mark Byers of blowing up shortly thereafter—and proceeded to search the neighborhood for a truck matching the description she had gotten from Deckard. Spotting Byers’s truck in the driveway of 75 Skyline Drive, she stopped the RV in front of the house. Feigning engine trouble, she asked Byers if she could use his phone to call for help. Once inside, she instantly spotted the rugs and notified police.
Why Dale Weaver’s report omits Atwood’s subterfuge and instead credits John Kingsbury’s “eyewitness” account as what led to the arrest of Mark and Melissa Byers is difficult to say. Somewhat mysteriously, Weaver’s report also makes reference to a “cooperating individual” who claimed to have observed Ryan Clark drive his parents to the Atwood residence and to have seen Mark and Melissa load up the aforementioned rug, along with “an Indian statue, sleigh, china cabinet, [and] set of plates [with a] white and tan colored design.” This witness, referred to by Weaver simply as “he or she,” also incredibly saw the Byerses transfer the contents of the pickup truck to a trailer. Consequently, on September 2, 1994, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Mark and Melissa Byers. Since Weaver’s “cooperating individual” implicated Ryan Clark in the heist, it is not clear why the deputy chose not to charge Ryan as an accomplice. Mark maintains that it is because, contrary to the witness’s account, Ryan was not involved.
Within days of his arrest for residential burglary and theft of property, Mark was arrested again, this time charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a Class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail. The charge stemmed from a fight between two juveniles—Marty Kerr, a friend of Ryan Clark, and John Shaver Jr.—that Mark witnessed and prevented bystanders, allegedly at gunpoint, from interfering with.80 Slowly, but inexorably, the noose was tightening around the neck of John Mark Byers. By the time the three cases came to trial—residential burglary, theft of property, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor—Melissa Byers would be dead.
During the years 1994-96, life plodded on aimlessly for the Byerses in Cherokee Village. Melissa’s drug use wasn’t getting any better; if anything, it was worsening. She continued to abuse Dilaudid as regularly as she could scare up the money. In addition to her thirty-day stay at Methodist Outreach in 1987, Melissa also spent a month in rehab in West Plains, Missouri, in 1994 after overdosing on Dilaudid. She was subsequently treated for drug abuse at the Sharp County Mental Health Department as an outpatient. Four months after her overdose—determined by the authorities to be a suicide attempt—Melissa applied for and received Social Security disability benefits, and this, along with Mark’s disability checks, were what the family subsisted on: $1,000 a month, well below the poverty line for a family of three. The family was on Medicaid and had no prescription drug coverage. Although Mark recalls Melissa calling her father once for money—he sent them “a couple of hundred dollars” for a heating bill—the family was on their own. Despite the direness of their situation, Mark claims that there was always food in the house, his father-in-law’s allegations to the contrary notwithstanding.
Mark and Melissa had left West Memphis with a string of bad checks trailing behind both of them. They were eventually charged separately under the Arkansas Hot Check Law. Mark’s bad checks totaled less than $200, according to Mark, and had been written primarily to grocery stores and pharmacies. Melissa’s checks came to considerably more and were largely written for cash. Whatever the funds had been used for, the couple had no means of paying the money back, and Melissa once again went to her father for help.81 Between Mark and Melissa, they were facing two Class B felonies and several misdemeanor charges. When Mark finally went to court for these charges, he knew that he’d be facing jail time.
For her part, Melissa managed to get herself into trouble without any help from her husband. Aside from being named as a codefendant in the Atwood burglary, she was arrested for assault for holding a shotgun on two linoleum installers who refused to complete an installation at 75 Skyline Drive. During the incident in the summer of 1995, Mark was sitting outside the house reading a book—Blood of Innocents, oddly enough—when he heard a commotion coming from the kitchen. When he got there, things had already escalated to a screaming match. The installers were leaving, they said, and not returning until an area underneath the refrigerator was cleaned. Mark insisted that they install the flooring. Things got nasty, and the installers went back to their truck, saying they were coming back with “a couple of claw hammers” to settle things. As they approached the house, Melissa came barreling out of the front door, loaded twelve-gauge shotgun in hand. She pointed it at the rapidly retreating workers and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the safety was on, and she couldn’t figure out how to unlock it. As the truck sped off, Melissa was still trying to free the safety and get off a shot. Sheriff Sonny Powell arrived shortly afterward to arrest Melissa for aggravated assault, a felony. She wouldn’t live long enough to stand trial for that crime either.
Life in Cherokee Village was like a bad episode of the Dukes of Hazzard. Drunken hillbillies were settling their differences with drive-by shootings, fisticuffs, and hastily sought restraining orders. The law was frequently an afterthought, and in the case of the Byerses and the Kingsburys, it was like open feuding between the Hatfields and McCoys.
On September 20, 1994, Melissa filed a complaint with the Sharp County Sheriff’s Department against John Kingsbury for, of all things, “terroristic threatening.” In the complaint, Melissa alleged that between 5:00 and 5:30 that afternoon, John Kingsbury had “kicked in the door and threatened to kill” Ryan Clark. Ryan had lent a slingshot to Kingsbury’s son, Adam, and later asked for it back. Neighbor Bonnie Webster and her sixty-five-year-old mother, Barbara Luff, both gave statements to Cherokee Village police officer Ted Tipton supporting Melissa’s account of the incident. Mark was home at the time but was sleeping and just caught the sight of Kingsbury walking away from the house. Melissa did not press charges. According to Tipton, Melissa simply “wanted [
the police] to know.”
For his part, John Kingsbury claimed that he had knocked on the door and was invited in by Melissa. There, he said, they had a very cordial conversation, in which Kingsbury told Ryan that he had given the slingshot to his son and that it “wasn’t very nice” to ask for it back. At that time, Kingsbury said, Melissa asked him “out to the road.” Once there, he said, Melissa started berating him for “being the reason that they [Mark and Melissa] might go to prison” and saying that although Kingsbury had “put them in a hole,” they were going to “put him in a hole he couldn’t get out of.” According to Kingsbury, Melissa added, “You can’t watch your kids twenty-four hours a day.”
Four days later, Kingsbury struck back. At 10:34 p.m. on September 24, Kingsbury filed a complaint with Officer Joe Black stating that gunfire had been directed at his house. What follows can best be described as a grotesque caricature of life at Cherokee Village; for the Byerses, it was just another day.
Officer Black, along with officers Buddy Smith and Bill Slayton, went out to investigate, arriving at Kingsbury’s house at 10:40 p.m. Slayton interviewed Kingsbury while Black and Smith canvassed the neighborhood. Kingsbury told Slayton that a car had driven by and fired at his house; he believed it was intended to scare him. Neighbors confirmed that a car had been driving up and down the street, revving the engine and discharging what sounded like a gun. The noises were described by one witness as “one loud gunshot followed by several quieter shots from a semiautomatic.” Black and Smith were suddenly called back to Baseheart station; Mark, Melissa, and Ryan were there and wanted to make a statement.
Mark told the officers that he had been awakened at about 10:30 p.m. by the sound of a car sitting in his driveway revving the engine. The occupants, he said, were “screaming and cursing. They said they were going to kill us.” When he looked out the window, he saw a “silver or gray” Ford Taurus in the driveway. Melissa was even more specific: she saw Dave and Karla Windsor in her front yard. The Ford “squealed the tires” and raced up Choctaw Drive toward Hiawatha, turned around, and came roaring back down the street, firing at the Byerses’ house as it went by. Mark and Melissa immediately drove over to 11 Sequoyah Ridge, where the Windsors lived. The house was less than a mile away. Once there, Mark jumped out of the car and felt the hood of the Windsor’s Ford; it was still warm. Dave and Karla came out of the house—“drunk on their asses”—and an argument ensued. Karla Windsor told police that Mark went to his car and removed something that “appeared to be a gun.” When Karla threatened to go inside and get her own gun, the Byerses left.
After giving their statement, the Byerses left the police station, but Mark returned within fifteen minutes. He had recovered several shell casings from the road near his house, recently fired by the way they smelled. Karla Windsor admitted to riding up and down the street firing her .25 caliber automatic into the air, emptying an entire clip in the process. When the smoke cleared, there were twelve bullet holes in the Byerses’ house; no arrests were ever made.
What was Dave and Karla Windsor’s beef with the Byerses? According to Karla’s statement, she believed that her son Mike was being harassed by Melissa and some of Ryan’s friends for “snitching” about something, though she never said about what. It may have had something to do with the Atwood incident; is it possible that Mike Windsor was the “cooperating individual” that Dale Weaver interviewed on August 10, the person who implicated Ryan and Mark in the Atwood burglary, the one Weaver referred to as “he or she” in his report? And what was John Kingsbury’s part in this incident? Did he believe that Mark Byers was responsible for the shooting? Who did Kingsbury think was trying to “frighten” him, and why?
A month later, on October 27, it was Mark Byers who filed a complaint on behalf of Ryan Clark. Ryan had allegedly been threatened at school by a boy named John Shores. Shores had told Ryan that his uncle from Illinois was coming down in two days to kill Mark Byers and possibly the entire family. Why? Apparently, Shores was under the misapprehension that Mark and Melissa were parents of one of the convicted killers, rather than parents of one of the victims. There is no indication that any action was taken on this complaint, just as no action was taken on any of the other complaints filed in Cherokee Village.
At this point in time, Mark and Melissa had three felony charges hanging over their heads for the Atwood burglary. Mark also had the misdemeanor charge for the Kerr/Shavers incident to deal with, and Melissa was facing the terroristic threatening charges stemming from the assault on the floor installers. The Byers family spent the next year in a state of mere existence; for all of them, it was a year marked by abject poverty and emotional emptiness, but the toll was especially great on Melissa. The loss of Christopher combined with her escalating legal and financial problems, as well as her continued drug use, pushed her deeper into a depression from which she never recovered, leading to the almost inevitable 1994 suicide attempt. But somehow, she managed to hang on for another seventeen months.
Moving out of West Memphis in the weeks following the verdicts in the Echols/Baldwin trial had not provided the peace that Mark and Melissa sought. Neither the death of her son nor the conviction of his killers had done much to curb Melissa’s drug use. Their legal troubles mounted, their existence was on a subsistence level, and the couple’s relations were severely strained. Ryan had been getting into trouble with his friends in the neighborhood, eventually resulting in his temporarily being sent to his grandparents to live. That the stressors on Melissa were monumental, and still mounting, was undeniable. On March 29, 1996, less than three months before the release of Paradise Lost, Melissa Byers took an afternoon nap with her husband and never woke up.
CHAPTER 3
Melissa
Knowing many, loving none
Bearing sorrow, having fun
But back home he’ll always run
To sweet Melissa
—Greg Allman/Steve Alaimo
Loneliness . . . is the central
and inevitable fact of human existence.
—Thomas Wolfe
Melissa DeFir Byers died at 6:25 p.m. on March 29, 1996; she was forty years old. She and Mark had spent the earlier part of that day cruising Memphis trying to score Dilaudid for Melissa. The question invariably arises as to why Mark would participate in this. “To try to keep her safe and get her back home,” he answers. “If I didn’t take her, she would stay gone for days. I was scared for her safety.”
Mark and Melissa were living on their disability checks. They both required prescription drugs, some of which could be obtained as samples from the Sharp County Mental Health Clinic; others had to be purchased. How was Melissa able to afford her Dilaudid? “We didn’t have much money. She would trade her pills for cash, then buy what she wanted: K4s” (4 mg Dilaudid, generically known as hydromorphone). “Times when she left and was gone by herself, I don’t know how she got drugs. Money from her parents? Sale of her pills? I don’t know for sure.” According to one source, Melissa’s father had sent her $200 on Monday of that week, which may explain how they managed to score that day.82 Regardless of how they got the money, on the morning of March 29, they bought four K4s from a man Melissa knew in Memphis, after which they headed back to Cherokee Village, arriving home at about 10:00 a.m. Melissa got high shortly after getting home, and both she and Mark went to bed at approximately 12:00 p.m. They had sex and talked for a while and then drifted off to sleep at about 2:30 p.m.83
At about 3:20 p.m. Ryan woke both Mark and Melissa to ask if he could have a friend spend the night. This was nothing unusual; Ryan had friends over all the time, and his parents didn’t think to ask who it was. If they had asked, they might have found out that the friend was Ryan’s new girlfriend, Amanda Swindle, but it didn’t much matter. Mark said, “Sure, no problem.” Melissa was a bit out of it and asked whether that was Ryan who had been knocking on the door, and Mark said that it was. They rolled over and went back to sleep. As of 3:20 p.m., Melissa Byers was still a
live.
Mark woke up again after a couple more hours and trudged into the kitchen for a glass of milk. He returned to the bedroom and tried to wake Melissa to find out what she wanted for supper. After several attempts, he was unable to wake her. He darted out the back door to ask his neighbor to come over and check Melissa. Norm Metz had been a medic in the military, and Mark wanted someone to help Melissa immediately; it was literally ten paces from Metz’s house to the Byerses’. Metz found her unresponsive and instructed Mark to start CPR. Metz immediately called 911. Police officers Fred Waser, Bill Slayton, and Hardy police chief Ernie Rose responded to the call, as did paramedics. Accompanied by her husband, Melissa was transported by ambulance to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Ash Flat, about nine miles southwest of Cherokee Village.
When Melissa arrived at the hospital at 6:00 p.m., she was still unresponsive. She was “shocked” twice at increasing levels, given oxygen therapy, and intubated. She was also given intravenous doses of calcium chloride (presumably to counteract the high level of potassium in her blood); epinephrine (to stimulate heart activity); suprel (isoproterenol, for respiration); and sodium bicarbonate, a buffer to neutralize acidity in the blood.84 While she was treated with drugs, the advanced cardiac life support protocol was also administered. Despite these efforts, medical personnel were never able to detect a pulse, and Melissa was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m., twenty-five minutes after her arrival.85 Not quite three years after the death of her youngest son, Melissa was gone too.