by Greg Day
The Blame Game
Jason Baldwin’s defense team had the same desire as the Echols team to link Mark Byers to the crime but thought better of it. Accusing a grieving parent of murdering his child without solid evidence could easily alienate the jury. A scene in Paradise Lost, however, has Dr. James Rasicot, the Baldwin defense team’s psychologist (who never testified at trial), giving the following monologue to attorneys Paul Ford and Robin Wadley:
[Byers] has the motive. His son, who he’s upset with, his son was the only one who is mutilated; the other two weren’t mutilated. He’s got knowledge about the area; he knows when the search is over with. He’s big enough to carry the boys over and throw them in. He’s a jeweler; he’s precise enough to have committed that mutilation. All of the pieces fit together with somebody in a different location . . . killing the boys in a different location because there’s no mosquito bites on them, so we know that after the boys were killed, and during, they weren’t outside. It had to be inside because there were no mosquito bites on them. So that means they were carried from a death scene someplace, unconscious, and brought down to the river and had to be killed shortly before they got down there because they all died within a short period of time. So after they were bled to death, after they were bludgeoned and unconscious, somebody had to take those three, take ’em to the scene and dump ’em. In order to do that, you gotta be physically strong enough to carry a[n] unconscious kid, who’s hog-tied. Jason couldn’t a done it. In his best day, he couldn’t carry a little baby, with those skinny arms of his.
This scene constitutes one of the most blatantly contrived moments of the film in its attack on Byers. With logic as fallacious as this, it’s hard to believe this scene wasn’t left on the cutting room floor. Considering that this is from Paradise Lost, the film that was originally to be something less than a total advocacy film, the inclusion of Dr. Rasicot’s musings reinforces the notion of the filmmakers as dramatists rather than reporters. The points Rasicot raises in his monologue in this scene range from insensitive to inane. Nobody in the room really believes that Byers committed the crime, and Rasicot’s points are easy to dispute:
• The idea that spanking a child twice on a covered behind with a doubled belt for leaving the house without permission and riding his skateboard down the street constitutes motive is absurd on its face. These guys are lawyers; they know this.
• The claim that Byers had knowledge of the area was false. Prior to the evening of May 5, Mark had never set foot in Robin Hood Hills. Having knowledge of his neighborhood, if that’s what Rasicot was implying, applied to many people, including the defendants.
• “He’s a jeweler; he’s precise enough to have committed that mutilation.” Ford also led Dr. Frank Peretti down that path. Peretti, the medical examiner who performed the autopsies on the boys’ bodies, testified that it would be difficult for him, a surgeon, to perform the mutilation of Christopher Byers, under the best of conditions. Yet somehow, Mark Byers, as a jeweler, could pull it off. Regardless, Ford never tried to link this speculation to Mark Byers. If he had done so, it almost surely would have backfired with the jury, and Ford knew it. Again, the filmmakers had no such worries; they could control their jury—the public—with editing and theatrics.
• The “disposal site” theory rears its ugly head again, only this time it’s Mark Byers doing the disposing. Rasicot’s reasoning here is generic; anybody could have committed the crime in this manner, but Rasicot ties it to Byers because he is big and strong. Jason may have been no Charles Atlas, but Echols and Misskelley could have held their own. It’s irrelevant, of course, because the police had ample evidence that the murders were committed in Robin Hood Hills on the creek bank near where the bodies were recovered.
Rasicot closes his soliloquy, “So when we look at this whole thing, all the pieces that they try to put together, none of it fits with Jason, and just about all of it fits toward someone like Byers.” Unless one rewinds the scene and studies the dialogue, it isn’t obvious just how false this statement is. None of it fits Mark Byers, and Rasicot is careful to hedge his accusation by inserting the modifier “like” in front of “Byers.”
The scene also demonstrates some callousness that should have turned off the audience. Rasicot talks about the children as if they were garbage when he says, “After they were bled to death, after they were bludgeoned and unconscious, somebody had to take those three, take ’em to the scene and dump ’em.”115 Rasicot bills his time out these days as a jury consultant.
The Rule 37 Hearings
Between May 1998 and March 1999, Damien Echols brought his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel (Arkansas Rule 37) before the court. Though it may seem counterintuitive, in Arkansas this appeal is presided over by the trial judge rather than held in an appellate court. Judge David Burnett would face Echols for the second time. This hearing was Echols’s legal challenge alleging that his public defenders had made critical errors in arguing his case in 1994, ultimately leading to his conviction. He had raised enough money through his defense fund to hire a specialist in appellate law, Edward Mallett of Houston, Texas, to represent him.
Revelations covers the hearings and introduces the audience to the groups of supporters that had now officially formed and were out in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to support Echols.
A Rule 37 motion in Arkansas is restricted to the issues of ineffective assistance of counsel and the introduction of new evidence, evidence that could not have been reasonably known to exist at the time of trial. The ineffective assistance of counsel claims consisted of various trial strategy decisions, a conflict of interest claim regarding a contract between Echols’s attorneys and HBO, Val Price’s failure to impeach Michael Carson, and inadequate voir dire during jury selection. There was also a renewed motion for Judge Burnett to recuse himself from the hearings. But it was the new evidence that would capture the attention of the Revelations audience.
For many supporters one of the most significant issues addressed by Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 involved Mark Byers’s loss of teeth and the “bite mark” evidence introduced at Echols’s Rule 37 hearing. Profiler Brent Turvey was the first person to officially pronounce that Stevie Branch had human bite marks on his body, particularly one dome-shaped, “patterned abrasion” wound on his forehead. In the film, Turvey tries to convince the audience, contrary to the opinions of medical examiner Dr. Frank Peretti and two other doctors who examined the bodies, that the marks on the face of Stevie Branch were human bite marks. Turvey, who readily admitted on the stand that he was not qualified to identify a human bite mark, nonetheless claims on-screen—out of court—that this is “cold hard evidence that someone else has committed these crimes.”
He also states, “If you were to show this [autopsy photo of Steve Branch’s face] to an emergency room pathologist who’d seen a lot of these, he would arrest the mom because [the wound] is more typically the type that’s involved in cases of child abuse.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that ER pathologists are not empowered to make arrests, which mom is Turvey talking about? Not the mom of the victim with the “bite mark.” Former Misskelley attorney Dan Stidham gives us a hint. “We have a mother of a victim who’s no longer alive. Melissa Byers has been dead since March 1996. I don’t see why her autopsy should still be sealed”, he says in a scene from the movie Revelations. Although Stidham no longer represented Misskelley, he was the only attorney willing to stay involved in the case post-conviction. When WM3 Support Group co-founder Kathy Bakken took online forensic science classes from Turvey and found that he was willing to work on the case (pro bono), she referred him to Stidham. “They claim that they’re still conducting a criminal investigation”, Stidham continues, “but you know, how long does it take to . . .”
“In this particular case,” Turvey interrupts, “since what you’ve told me is that the death is undetermined, they can keep it open as long as they want. If they’re keeping it open, that means they don’t know if it’s a
suicide or a homicide. I’d like to know if there’s a connection. I’d like to see her wounds and see if there’s any connection between this case and that. And if at any point you get a forensic odontologist in here, they can yank her teeth and see if they match any of these bite mark impressions” [emphasis added].
Forgetting for the moment that there is a third possibility in the death of Melissa Byers—that it was an accident—Turvey wants to exhume the body of Melissa Byers and “yank” her teeth, all before stopping to think of what an absurd scenario he is suggesting: Melissa and Mark kill the three boys—for whatever reason—and then Mark castrates Christopher, and Melissa inexplicably bites the face of Stevie Branch. It seems almost as though Turvey doesn’t even remember which victim belongs to which parent; why would Melissa Byers’s teeth marks be on Stevie Branch’s forehead? In his Equivocal Death Analysis and Criminal Profile, Turvey makes it clear that he believes the true perpetrators of the crime to be one or two of the parents of the victims, to wit:
The wound patterns inflicted on these victims are punishment oriented . . . the type of injuries inflicted (i.e., the bite marks and the evident anger) pointedly indicate a custodial type homicide. In this examiner’s opinion, this classification is the most consistent with the physical evidence, crime scene and victimological presentation in this case. To a greater extent the parents, and to a lesser extent the guardians, relatives and anyone else who was allowed frequent, trusted access to these children, should be thoroughly investigated as suspects in this case.
Turvey also states in his report that the attack on Christopher Byers was “the most overtly sexual” of the three, yet in the film he states that the attack was not sexual but driven by rage. Turvey had been disqualified as a defense witness for all but the most general testimony, but that didn’t stop the filmmakers from devoting several minutes of film to Turvey feigning expertise on the subject, as well as subjecting viewers to more gruesome photographs of Stevie Branch’s mangled face. Once again, it comes down to a question of inclusion: given the implausibility of Turvey’s premises, why was he featured so prominently in the film, unless, perhaps, there was a dearth of footage rebutting the prosecution’s case?
In the end, the court decided in favor of the state, not only on the bite mark issue but on the entire claim of ineffectiveness of counsel, and the petition was denied.
The supporter community, led by activists Kathy Bakken, Burk Sauls, and Grove Pashley, were key in bringing the possibility of the existence of human bite marks on the victims to Echols’s appeals. If the (alleged) bite marks didn’t match the convicted (they didn’t), then whoever they did match must be the killer. Because early attention had been focused on Mark Byers as a suspect, getting Byers’s bite mark impressions was critical. The film Paradise Lost 2: Revelations was solely responsible for perpetuating the suspicion against Byers in this regard by not only giving voice to the unfounded musings of Brent Turvey, but by staging scenes in the film (such as the one discussed below) to keep the issue of bite marks front and center, and there was good reason for this: it was the only new “evidence” the defense had.
The problem was that Mark had lost all his teeth in 1997. This was obviously suspicious to supporters, who reasoned that Mark had had his teeth removed to cover up complicity in the murders. The fact that he was initially evasive in this area did not help his cause He also sensationalized how he lost his teeth for whatever reason. Attention? To taunt supporters?
The truth is that Mark’s teeth had been deteriorating for years. Some were allegedly knocked out in fights. As noted previously, Byers claimed that he “self-destructed” after the murders and “got downright mean.” In one scene in Revelations, he tells viewers, “The pain they [Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley] caused me, physically and mentally, and all the fights and all I got into ’cause I went to lookin’ for ’em, and the bricks that hit me in the head, and the knives that cut these scars on my face, and”—he removes his dentures—“and the jerks that had the privilege of knocking teeth out of my mouth: well, that’s ’cause them three animals that provoked me so that cost me a whole set of teeth . . . and I can’t imagine why people want to say the things they say about me.”116
The “whole set of teeth” remark cost him plenty in light of the subsequent statements he made about the cause of his lost teeth. Although he had lost a tooth or two in fights—including, according to Mark, a bashing in the mouth with the butt of a shotgun years before the murders—he didn’t lose the whole set at one time or for one reason, and he wouldn’t get a full set of dentures until long after Christopher’s death.
The information about Mark’s dental work, particularly considering that the filmmakers had Mark’s dental records by the time Revelations hit the screen, was probably pretty embarrassing to Bakken, Sauls and Pashley, considering the rude questioning they gave Mark at Echols’s Rule 37 hearing.
In essence, Bakken, Pashley, and Sauls tried to provoke Mark on camera. But considering the accusations that were hurled at him, Mark did a remarkable job keeping his composure (though at one point, not in the film, he accused Bakken of being a “bleached blonde,” a comment for which he later apologized). The following took place on the courthouse steps in Jonesboro in October 1998, and appeared in the film Revelations:
Byers: Do you think that I’m guilty, that I had something to do with murdering my son?
Sauls: I don’t know if you had anything to do with it; I wanna know that you didn’t, and that would rule yourself out for us.
Byers: I’ve already been exonerated. What else do I have to do?
Sauls: The public has been kind of suspicious of you.
Abruptly the line of questioning changed from bite marks to the death of Melissa Byers.
Bakken: What happened to Melissa?
Byers: I believe she died from a broken heart.
Bakken: But you were there, so you saw something, right?
Byers (louder): I was asleep, beside her, and woke up and found her passed away beside me. There were no bruises, abrasions, anything like that, [no signs] of any foul play whatsoever. I’ve been totally exonerated, all charges or suspicions of anything dropped.
Bakken: Well, I do know there was a toxicology report, and they talked about actually quite a lot of lot of drugs that were in her system.
Byers: Yes, a lot of prescription drugs that she was taking, sure did.
Bakken: There were also some prescription drugs she wasn’t taking.
Byers: She took like seven or eight different types of medication for being bipolar, manic depressive, posttraumatic syndrome [sic]. And as far as the other medication, I’m as puzzled about it as anyone.
Bakken: I read in the newspaper—it was actually the Arkansas Times—Mara Leveritt said that there were signs she was suffocated.
Byers: There was [sic] no signs of suffocation, or struggle; she was lying right there on the bed when the paramedics and all came in.
The questioning returned to the subject of Mark’s teeth.
Byers: Tell me what I have not done to prove that I have not been involved in any of it. I have no problem with a polygraph, sodium pentothal, being hypnotized, bite marks, or anything else . . . I have submitted to every test they’ve asked, every question they have asked, because I know my innocence.
Bakken: But they had bite mark issues.
Sauls: Did they take your bite mark impressions?
Byers removes dentures, dripping with saliva.
Bakken: You know, how could you give your bite impressions if you don’t have your teeth? Maybe that’s why you’re not so reluctant to do it.
Byers: What if I told you that the teeth that I had before they were pulled, the teeth that I had during it—I know the oral surgeons and all that did the work; I would be glad to sign a release for them to send my X-rays.
Sauls: Will you [give bite mark impressions] for us and send them to Dan Stidham?
Byers: I won’t do a damn thing for you.
So
what about the discrepancies? By blurting out her accusatory “What happened to Melissa?” comment on the courthouse steps, Bakken had blown any chance she’d had of getting a straight answer out of Byers. Watching the film closely, you can see his face change. The questioning in this scene changes from how and when he lost his teeth to how and when he allegedly murdered his wife. The notion that Mark was involved in Melissa’s death had been picked up by supporters during the two years between the release of the first HBO film and the Rule 37 hearings in 1998. Arkansas Times reporter Mara Leveritt was one who reported on what many felt was the suspicious nature of Melissa’s death, “suggesting” that she was suffocated. Bakken confronts Byers with it, but Byers didn’t feel compelled to vindicate himself with the “Free the West Memphis Three” crowd, despite the remarks from Sauls.
Aside from those teeth knocked out in fights, Mark maintained to WM3.org that medication-induced periodontal disease caused the majority of his tooth loss. Mark was on anti-seizure medication for quite some time—Tegratol, he told the filmmakers—and he stated that the drug caused periodontal disease. A notice appears on-screen during Revelations informing viewers that the makers of Tegratol do not list periodontal disease as a possible side effect of the drug. But another similar drug that Mark took—Dilantin—does have this side effect.117 Mark had taken both drugs and frequently confused the two. Whatever the causes of his dental problems—and there were several combined (heavy cigarette smoking and poor dental hygiene can’t be ruled out)—Mark had all his teeth replaced in April 1997 by an oral surgeon who was a friend of the family in Louisiana.118