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

by Greg Day

  These outages were hardly a surprise to the inmates; there were signs. The TV weather stations would show thunderstorms approaching, and it was a common occurrence to lose power. Moments before the lights went out, inmates could be seen preparing “ammunition.” When the lights flickered, the aggressors would upend their racks like garrisons from which to launch their assault. When the lights went out completely, it was on. The cons in wall racks were the ones most likely to launch an attack, and these assaults were often targeted. There was always some beef that needed to be settled, and an eight-second blackout was the ideal time to do it. The moment the lights went out, the air became filled with all manner of makeshift missiles—padlocks, D-size batteries, cans of Jack Mackerel fish, and bars of soap with embedded razor blades protruding from the sides like some perverted “Odd Job” bowler hat. The only safe place to be during those eight seconds was under a rack, where missiles could be heard careening off the bunks and walls and sometimes an unsuspecting inmate’s head—mere collateral damage. The target might have been hit, or maybe not, but someone was hit for sure, and often that was all that mattered. Fuck with the Man, fuck with the other inmates—it hardly mattered. Incarceration does funny things to a man, and in the joint there exists an endless cycle of violence and brutality, controlled by fear and intimidation, in a world that seemingly exists through the looking glass.

  It was the surrealistic quality of daily life in prison, the pervasive depravity and brutality that became commonplace, that helped to sustain a high level of fear among the inmates. “It was everyday stuff,” Mark recalls. “Just taking a shower, and you’d see four guys holding down another, a bar of soap shoved in his mouth while they were gang-raping him. It was getting up at night to take a leak and finding inmates having oral sex right out in the open, or seeing some inmate with a bottle of hot sauce shoved up his ass. Or coming up the stairs and seeing an inmate just standing there jacking off. Imagine getting up in the middle of the night and seeing that. This was an everyday occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary. You can’t imagine what it’s like when that kind of shit becomes normal.”

  On his first night at Dermott, for example, Mark was warned about an inmate known as “Fast Eddie 20.” Eddie ran a “store” of sorts, one that didn’t open for business until lights-out. Four or five inmates would slowly rise from their racks and one at a time make their way over to Eddie’s. His fee schedule was simple enough: five dollars for oral sex; two dollars and fifty cents per hand for a hand job; and ten dollars for anal sex, Eddie taking the role of the “catcher.” He could make twenty dollars fast. He was, of course, subject to the tariff imposed by the shot-caller for operations in his barracks. A fellow inmate of Mark’s, Dave Maas,****** confirms the prevalence of this type of activity, adding, “I’ve seen three men in the same bed with the blankets moving like there were snakes in it.”

  The manifestation of sex in prison is beyond bizarre. In Dermott, there is an activity that inmates refer to as being “on the window.” From certain vantage points, inmates could see the control booth where barracks activities are monitored by the guards. Some of the guards were female, and if inmates could catch even a glimpse of a female guard’s uncovered foot, it could trigger a full-scale autoerotic frenzy, with many inmates simultaneously masturbating. According to Dave Maas, “It doesn’t matter if the woman is fat, ugly, old as their grandmother. If the mood hits them, you’d better get out of their way (‘outta the gunline’), because if all they can see is their shoe, hand, leg, or other obscure body part, it’s going down, they’re going to jack off on it! It doesn’t matter if sixty-five other inmates are watching or not. They’re going to do it, just like the monkeys in the zoo. Sometimes there were so many inmates on the windows looking out on the hallway masturbating that you couldn’t tell if they’re doing it on each other, or on the woman’s shoe they see sticking out of the control booth across the hall.”

  “Welcome to Brickeys, Brother!”

  The Lee County jail is situated right next to the EARU. Inmates who have committed offenses in Lee County are frequently sentenced to the EARU to do their prison time. They can be seen marching down the hallway to the infirmary, clad in their bright orange jumpsuits, to receive their physical examination prior to being received into the prison. On one particular day, Mark was walking down one side of the hallway—yellow lines dictated where inmates were allowed to walk—and a group of fish from Lee County jail were being led down the other side. As he scanned their faces, one stood out in stark contrast to the others; it was none other than Danny Overman, the Sharp County drug connection who had blasted Mark’s knee with a shotgun some ten years earlier. As soon as he saw Mark in the hallway, Overman tried to blend in with the wall, but it was too late. Danny had apparently caught a parole violation in Lee County and was now being brought into Brickeys to finish his sentence. “I see him comin’ down the hall,” said Mark, “and I’m like, ‘Hey Danny! How are ya? Good to see ya, brother!’ He just about shit.” The question of how to deal with Danny Overman didn’t require much thought since Mark had mulled it over often during the time that his shot-up knee was healing. He quickly made his way down the hallway to the counting office and approached the inmate there.

  “There’s a fish coming in on a PV,” Mark told him. “How much to get him transferred to Little Saigon?”

  “Ten dollars commissary will do it,” the inmate answered.

  “When will he be assigned there?”

  The inmate smiled. “As soon as I get that ten dollars.”

  Overman was in Little Saigon by 10:00 the next morning. Mark then paid a visit to Big Chuck and told him about Overman. “I’d like to see him welcomed properly,” Mark said. Chuck said there would be no problem, and Mark knew there wouldn’t be. For twenty dollars commissary, Danny Overman was heading for the infirmary—within twenty-four hours, as it turned out. How bad was he hurt? “He was hurt,” Mark says. Along with the beating Overman received, he was relieved of the few meager possessions he had come in with. During pill call a couple of days later, Mark had the opportunity to visit Overman in the infirmary.

  “Hey, Danny! Welcome to Brickeys. You feel like shootin’ me again?” Overman was apparently in no mood for conversation and simply moaned. Mark saw Overman one or two times after that at chow call but never spoke to him. Overman was still serving his sentence at Brickeys when Mark was transferred to Dermott. “I never saw him again, and I hope I never do.”

  Mail Call

  It is true that in prison, unless an inmate has visitors coming, mail is the high point of his day. Not all inmates receive mail, and despite the publicity surrounding Paradise Lost and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 and the growing presence of WM3.org on the Internet, Mark received surprisingly little mail. The mail that he did get was mostly from family. He received a few letters from WM3 supporters, some expressing real or feigned sympathy, others simply pumping Mark for information. There were also letters from young women with apparent ulterior motives. Men tend to be easily plied by even the slightest hint of sexual favors or romantic interest; magnify that pliability a hundred fold, and you’re talking about a man in prison. Three women wrote to Mark during his time in Dermott, all within a three-month span. The first woman, writing under the name of Andrea Timmons, never quite revealed her motive, though it was rumored that she was a well-known “poster” to the WM3.org message boards and that she was trying to manipulate Mark into admitting complicity in the West Memphis homicides or perhaps in the death of his wife. If this was true, it was not evident in her letters. They consisted mostly of sympathetic comments to Mark regarding the loss of his son, her belief in the guilt of the West Memphis Three, and expressions of hope that he was coping well with prison life. She occasionally became flirtatious, as when she wrote this on August 19, 2000: “I knew that you were tall, but my gosh, 6 feet 8 inches? My, my, you are a big boy, aren’t you? That can always be a good thing! Wink! From what you wrote you sound like a big old teddy bear if I may
say so. A big old stuffed teddy bear.” After several letters back and forth, Andrea simply disappeared.

  The second woman had what appeared to be a combination of thrill-seeking and financial gain as her motive. She went by the name of Julie Ann Eldridge, and her letters were mailed from Tampa, Florida. She made advances, hinting at the possibility of a romantic relationship (“who knows what the future may hold?”), and this appealed to Mark. She sent photos of herself—so she said; the authenticity cannot be verified—seated in a convertible, looking absolutely lovely. In several of her letters she asked Mark to autograph things that he was sending her—a friendship bracelet, envelope art, and so on—but would keep him at arm’s length when he told her he wanted to see her after he was released from prison. “Let’s get to know each other first,” she said. Many of the letters Julie sent were written on stationary adorned with the images of scantily clad models. “Those made their way around the barracks,” Mark recalls. She also asked Mark if he was allowed to receive “nude shots, topless pictures, or a Playboy magazine.” Although Julie claimed in her letters to be thirty years old, the picture she sent Mark showed two girls clearly of college age at most. She signed her name with little hearts drawn around it. She said that she was a “nail technician” and that her life was “boring.” She gave Mark her phone number and told him to call her in the evening. On several occasions he did just that, but the collect calls were never accepted.

  If one thing was obvious about Julie’s letters, it was that they were written by at least two different people. This was evident by the penmanship and style used. There seems to be no reason for the dual authorship. The letters were stylistically different, but the content was of a similar nature, though Julie #1 wrote more provocatively than Julie #2. Each “Julie” also sent a postcard, but the difference between the two was striking. The card Julie #1 sent featured a full-body shot of a bikini-clad blonde, her head tilted back seductively, with a caption reading, “Florida’s Hot!”139 By contrast, Julie #2 sent a card depicting the US Postal Service’s Pacific Coast Rain Forest collection of thirty-three-cent postage stamps, featuring images of birds, butterflies, reptiles, and fish. She wrote on the back, in different handwriting than the previous card, “Mr. Byers: Do you like postcards? I can send more if you like them. Hope you are having a nice day!! Julie Ann Eldridge.”

  Julie’s roommate, “Norie,” also sent Mark at least two letters and sent photos of her computer-generated art for him to see. Her letters were pretty flat and chitchatty. One notable exception was yet another postcard Mark received showing a nude female bottom, adorned with black leather chaps, perched above an American flag. The caption read, “Made in the USA.” The handwriting and style were clearly that of a third person. Whoever Norie was, she wasn’t either “Julie.”

  Mark’s last letter to Julie sounded optimistic. “I’ll be waiting to hear back from you,” he wrote, but he never heard from her again. The correspondence had lasted several months and then suddenly halted, just as Andrea’s had. Shortly thereafter, Mark’s letters to Julie were up for sale on the Internet at www.supernaught.com for forty dollars each.140 The seller revealed that the letters had been purchased from a woman in Tampa, Florida, who had written Mark while he was in prison. She said she needed the money. Because Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 had premiered on HBO less than a month before the letters began, it could be speculated that these were a couple of young women looking for kicks and at the same time a few saleable souvenirs for their trouble.

  Other letters were slightly less obvious in motive. Between July 1999 and January 2000, Mark exchanged a series of letters with Burk Sauls, co-founder of the “Free the West Memphis Three” support group and its companion website, WM3.org. Although Sauls adamantly insisted that he “never said [Mark was] guilty of anything, and never will,” he joined Mara Leveritt, Bruce Sinofsky, and Joe Berlinger and the other WM3.org members in promoting the stock and trade of that group, implication and innuendo, with an eye toward taking the focus off the West Memphis Three. This is evident by their repeated demands for bite mark impressions. “Prove your innocence” was the gist of Saul’s approach to Mark. If this were not so, what exactly was Saul’s interest in Mark? They certainly weren’t friends. For example, while documenting his experience at one of Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearings in Jonesboro, the hearing immortalized on film in Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, Sauls paints a less than flattering picture of Mark as a shameless ham, someone who was play-acting for the cameras to get attention. On his website, Sauls wrote that as the day’s hearings came to a close, Mark had “miraculously located the only remaining camera and was busy pontificating in his inimitable style,” and that after he was finished with the news crew, he “headed toward [Sauls and his team], and more importantly, the only other camera still shooting footage on the property.” Sauls continued, “He seemed to be performing a rehearsed scene from an unpublished Tennessee Williams play or reciting free-form prose by William Faulkner.” Sauls was probably just playing before the home crowd with words designed to appeal to the sympathetic browsers of the WM3 website; it is difficult to picture Mark Byers “free-forming” Faulkner. In his letters to Mark, however, Sauls insisted that he, Kathy Bakken, and Grove Pashley enjoyed the “off camera chats” they had with him.

  In one letter to Mark, Sauls wrote, “Joe and Bruce have shown me some of the footage for the sequel to Paradise Lost and it looks good.” Contrast this with the reaction of Mark’s family upon their first viewing of Revelations: after a phone conversation with his sister, Mark wrote, “She said it makes me look real bad. Looks like those SOBs did a number on me.” Among many things, he was confused by the inclusion of Melissa in the second film, since she had died three months prior to the release of the first film and had been dead for more than a year before the second movie began filming. “I don’t understand. They have this [old] clip and don’t use it on the first one, but then bring it out for the second time around.”

  Sauls wrote, somewhat unbelievably, “Do you think that Joe and Bruce are doing a good job on the new film? I really hope that they show things the way they truly are, and that they avoid sensationalizing it too much.” When one views Mark’s antics in the film, it is hard to imagine that there was any intent but to sensationalize the situation, though it’s always possible that Sauls was not shown these sections of the film. He suggests to Mark that maybe Berlinger and Sinofsky will make a movie about Mark’s predicament to “help [him] out.” Mark must have thought this was a great idea, knowing how much the first two movies had “helped him out.”

  Sauls wrote that he and other WM3.org members found themselves defending Mark to other posters on their Internet discussion forum. He gave Mark a series of questions and suggested Mark “answer and elaborate” on them, giving his word that he would publish the answers without any editing. Following are some of those questions:

  • Why do think so many people feel that you are guilty of murdering the children?

  • During the first film, Paradise Lost, you are seen firing a pistol. A few people have asked me if during this time you were on probation, and if this was your gun or someone elses [sic]. Someone told me that when they were on probation, they were unable to own or operate a firearm or [sic] any type. What are the laws concerning this in Arkansas?

  • Has the film helped you or hurt you?

  • When you were interviewed for the LEEZA show, was that a good experience? [See chapter 4 for a complete discussion of this “experience.”]

  • There has been a lot of talk about you working for the West Memphis Police Department. Did you ever work for them as a drug informant or in any other capacity? For how long and when?

  • Just to clear it up, once and for all, when did you lose your teeth, and how?

  Mark never answered this letter or any others from Sauls.

  Mark also received a letter from Bruce Sinofsky, co-producer of the HBO documentaries, dated August 5, 1999, asking how Mark was doing and requesting
that Mark “drop him a note.” Mark didn’t respond to Sinofsky’s letter either. According to what he wrote to his brother, he felt that he’d been tricked by the filmmakers.

  What I truly don’t understand is no matter what I did or didn’t say, it still doesn’t change the facts of this crime!! Whatever I did in my past had nothing to do with May 5, ’93. This seems like a very bad dream and I’m in the middle again!! NY told me the second one was to be about all six families and their life after the trials. Our sister said that the Hobbses and Moores weren’t even in it, just ME.

  This claim—that he had been told the other families would be participating in the films—was one that Mark would make frequently after his release from prison, with no one seeming to listen. That he was angry, as well as worried about the impact the film might have, is evidenced by this excerpt from the same letter:

  Right now it’s probably good that I’m in the ADC so I can’t get to NY because I don’t know what I would do. I know what I would like to say to them. All I can think about now is how much harder this is going to make it on me. From the way our sister talked, it’s going to be hard to live in Jonesboro after this. I just don’t know what to do. After I talked to our sister I’ve been really freaked out and tore up. It’s driving me nuts. It makes me very mad to know they took my words and used them against me. From what our sister said, I’ve HUNG MYSELF. I’m never, never going to say anything else about this crap. As for the NY assholes, they need to leave me alone. I hope I never hear or see them again. I would like to call them at [xxx-xxx-xxxx] and tell them what I think or write a letter, but I’m not. They would use that against me too. Never again.