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

by Greg Day

  The cigarette butts that Geiser collected from Hobbs were sent to the Serological Research Institute (SERI) in Richmond, California, for typing and comparison to a hair that had previously been profiled by Bode Laboratories in Lorton, Virginia. That earlier hair had been removed from the ligature binding Michael Moore’s hands and feet. Those cigarette butts provided the Echols defense team with what might have been its biggest break in the case. SERI extracted DNA from the “unburned end” of a total of six cigarette butts, two each from the front yard, the driveway, and an ashtray at Hobbs’s home. The DNA was “quantified and sequenced by PCR [polymerase chain reaction] using mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA] primers.”162 When compared to the hair fragment recovered from the ligature binding Michael Moore, the samples taken from the front yard and ashtray at Hobbs’s home could not exclude Terry Hobbs as the source of the hair. According to SERI, only 1.5 percent of the population could be expected to have the same mitochondrial DNA sequence matching that found on the cigarette butts. Not exactly a smoking gun, but a damaging piece of evidence nonetheless. At this point in time, it is something of a mystery as to how investigators began to focus on Hobbs.163 It is known that by the time John Douglas put his profile together for Lorri Davis, Lax had already informed Hobbs about the discovery of the hair. This was arguably a mistake. Douglas had experience interrogating and interviewing high-profile, elusive killers during his twenty-five years with the FBI and ten years in private consulting, and he had a grasp of the psychology necessary to give him the edge with a suspect. Douglas was never informed that Lax was going to confront Hobbs.

  The offices of Inquisitor Incorporated are located in a modern office building in downtown Memphis a few blocks east of the Mississippi River. Founded by Ron Lax to investigate allegations of insurance fraud, the firm claims to be “one of the largest, most respected investigative companies in the Southeast.”164 Since its inception in 1978, Inquisitor has branched out to include, among other areas, criminal defense investigations. It was in this latter capacity that Lax had initially volunteered investigative resources to the Damien Echols defense team in 1993, presumably in an effort to bolster Inquisitor’s portfolio in this area, but also with the prospect of some remuneration at a future date.165 On May 19, 2007, Terry Hobbs sat down with Lax and Rachel Geiser at their office. Why Hobbs agreed to the meeting isn’t clear. He later told a reporter that he “stayed awhile but didn’t cooperate,” and aside from the admission that Pam’s family still blamed him for the murders—hardly news to anyone following the case—he basically told Lax nothing.166 The purpose of the meeting was singular: Hobbs was going to be confronted with SERI’s finding that his DNA was a “match” for the hair shaft found in the Michael Moore ligature.

  Hobbs was not impressed. “So what?” he said. “Those boys played at my house all the time.” It was an innocent secondary transfer, he said, and the same was true of the hair possibly belonging to Hobbs’s good friend David Jacoby, which was found on a tree stump at the crime scene. That hair had also been typed and matched against cigarette butts, hair strands, and cheek swabs obtained from Jacoby. The results excluded all but 7 percent of the population. If Lax had been hoping for a bombshell, he had to have been disappointed. It didn’t surprise Hobbs at all that his hair had been found at the scene. It would have been surprising if some transference wasn’t evident. And transference, Hobbs said, is all it was. Even if it was his hair—and Hobbs had stated on numerous occasions that the police had never told him that it was—it couldn’t be proven to be so to the exclusion of all others.

  Hobbs’s in-laws were a little more forthcoming with information. Pam’s sisters, Judy Sadler and Jo Lyn McCaughey, told Geiser that they had found “several” knives at Hobbs’s house in 2003, one of which McCaughey claimed had belonged to Stevie. When this knife was shown to Stevie’s grandfather, the elder Hicks confirmed that it had been a gift from him to Stevie. As for Hobbs, he said of the knife that it could have been Stevie’s—he didn’t know. If it had been, he said he had probably taken it away from him. “I didn’t want a kid of mine to go around with a pocket knife—not a kid who was eight years old. Would you?” In fact, Pam had turned some “fourteen or fifteen” knives over to former Misskelley attorney Dan Stidham in 2002.

  Over the years, Pam had been stuck in a kind of pendulum pattern, never knowing quite what to believe. The West Memphis Three were guilty. They were innocent. Terry killed the boys. No, he didn’t. Whether she was angry at Terry for not finding Stevie that night while she was at work, or for not telling her until five hours later that he still hadn’t found him, or for shooting her brother in 1994, or maybe for slapping her around from time to time, one thing was certain: the entire ordeal was taking its toll on her. When she appeared for interviews, she was always carefully groomed, but her shaky voice and sad eyes belied the pain that she lived with every day.

  It is also possible that she was in denial, not willing to face the possibility that her ex-husband had killer her son. Not only did she frequently accuse all comers of being guilty of murder; she also had quite a temper of her own. In November 2007, Pam and her daughter Amanda were arrested for assault after Pam attacked her elderly mother, inciting a brawl in which her sister, Sheila Muse, was tased by police and also bruised from Hobbs’s attack. What the argument was about is unknown, but Muse claimed that both Pam and Amanda were on drugs. “The person who was doing this stuff last night was not my sister. Not the way my sister normally acts, but she was definitely under the influence of something, her and Amanda both.”167 The family refused to bond her out of jail, saying that she needed help.168

  The Mind-Hunter Cometh

  The revelation that Terry Hobbs’s DNA—or mitochondrial DNA similar to his—had been found at the crime scene sent a shockwave through case-watchers to be sure, but aside from the convicted men themselves, its most extraordinary effect was on Mark Byers. He had been approached as early as November 17, 2003, by Fred Herot,******* an investigator working for the Echols defense team. Herot was parked in Mark’s driveway waiting for him to roll up in his blue Nissan pickup truck after a day of house painting. Clad in a spattered pair of painter’s overalls, Mark climbed out of the truck and approached Herot, who sat in his rental car. Mark didn’t particularly want to talk to him and told him so. Mark kept Herot outside for more than an hour, and though he was courteous, he essentially told him nothing. Herot never really made the reason for his visit clear, except to say that he was working for the defense team. Mark didn’t see him again until he returned with John Douglas nearly four years later.

  John Douglas can be an incredibly persuasive man. He possesses a lightning-quick mind, and his halting way of speaking leaves one with the impression that his speech is engaged in a constant struggle to keep pace with his thoughts. As a former special agent at the FBI Investigative Services Unit in Quantico, Virginia, he is a legend, having developed, along with his associates, the nation’s first and preeminent how-to manual for investigating and classifying violent crimes, primarily by identifying the motive of the perpetrator. He has spent more than three-and-a-half decades fine-tuning his interrogation techniques by interviewing hundreds of subjects, including some of the most notorious killers America has ever produced, criminals such as Charles Manson; Richard Ramirez; Sirhan Sirhan; Richard Speck; John Wayne Gacy; David Berkowitz (Son of Sam); James Earl Ray; and more recently, Dennis Rader, the BTK (bind, torture, kill) killer. Douglas’s business is criminal profiling. He wrote the book—or more accurately, books—on violent crime in America, with focuses on serial murder and sexual homicide.169 His job on this case, as it has been on so many others, was to study the case files, including crime scene photographs, physical evidence, and autopsy photographs and reports, in order to evaluate the risk level of the victims (“victimology”) and develop a profile of the killer or killers.

  In August of 2007—during “Elvis Week” it turned out—Douglas laid out for Mark the reasons for his belief that not only were the WM
3 innocent, but that Terry Hobbs was at the very least a person to be “put on the front burner” as a suspect.170 Systematically and methodically, he presented Mark with information that must have churned up painful feelings from the past, casting shadows of doubt on everything Mark thought he knew about how his son had died and who had killed him; Douglas’s presentation to Mark was very powerful. The profile he had done at the behest of Lorri Davis and the Echols defense team made one point perfectly clear: Douglas didn’t believe for a minute that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley had had anything to do with this murder. The people Mark hated for having killed his son fourteen years earlier were innocent, Douglas said, and he began to outline why he was so sure of that. Whereas the other defense team forensic experts had addressed the physical and pathological aspects of the forensic evidence, Douglas’s forte was crime scene analysis, crime classification, and criminal profiling. In plain language, he told Mark that whoever had committed the homicides on May 5, 1993, was someone who knew the boys, that it was what Douglas termed a “personal cause” homicide. Although it was impossible to determine from the available evidence whether multiple offenders had been involved, Douglas was certain that the killer or killers were male and that they were not teenagers at the time of the crime. Further, the UNSUB was of the “organized” type, meaning several things:

  • He commits his crimes inside a “comfort zone”—that is, close to where he lives or works.

  • He is careful to leave no evidence at the scene that may be linked to him.

  • He is “very methodical in his everyday activities,” so as not to draw attention to himself. In other words, he walks among us undetected.

  Douglas also stated in his report that this type of offender would tend to be “overly cooperative” with authorities, since he lived or worked in the area and would likely be questioned. That may be true. If so, it is a nearly criminal coincidence that the suspect Douglas named—and the only person ever linked to the crime by DNA evidence—wasn’t questioned by police until fourteen years after the murders. “You’re talking about a saint,” Douglas said of Hobbs, “the all-American father, a great husband. And then there’s the rest of the story. We are talking about two different people.” Douglas had interviewed Hobbs twice during one week in Memphis in 2007, and on the second interview he encountered Terry Hobbs’s “dark side,” a side that was most revealing.171 It seemed that this was the first time that much of the public had taken its focus off of Mark Byers as a viable alternate suspect.

  Since being retained by Lorri Davis, Douglas had kept himself as insulated from bias as possible. He wasn’t familiar with the case when Davis first contacted him, and he wanted all evidence to be new to him, allowing him to work without preconceptions. He had not seen either Paradise Lost film, had not read Devil’s Knot, had not followed the case in the press, and had not interviewed the convicted men.172 “I wanted to look at the case without bias, study the victimology, [and] review the police reports, autopsy photographs, aerial crime scene pictures, as someone looking at them for the first time.”173 By starting fresh, Douglas was able to analyze this case as he had analyzed hundreds of other violent crimes, though one of the most obvious things he noted didn’t require twenty-five years with the FBI to figure out: Terry Hobbs, stepfather of Stevie Branch, had never been interviewed by police.

  According to Douglas, he and Herot immediately set out to speak with the family of Terry Hobbs. The Hicks family—Pam’s relatives and Terry’s former in-laws—flat out refused to talk. “They threw us off their property,” Douglas says.174 “I really didn’t want to talk to Hobbs before talking to his family, but since the Hicks family wasn’t willing to talk, we decided to talk to Hobbs while we were tracking down his family. When we spoke to Hobbs for the first time, we didn’t have any of his background.” According to Douglas, Hobbs was the picture of congeniality. “He loved everyone, everyone loved him, [and] everything was great. He was very convincing. I thought, ‘If he’s lying, he’s a great liar.’” The first interview led Douglas to consider that they might be tracking the wrong man. “After about two hours I told [Herot], ‘Jeez, I don’t know about this guy.’” During the following week, however, Herot looked up Hobbs’s family—his mother, sister, and two brothers—and traveled to Indiana to meet with them. These interviews revealed someone who was the polar opposite of the man he and Douglas had spoken with a few days earlier.

  Herot spoke with Hobbs’s sister, Cindy Hobbs, and his mother Raylene, as well as brothers Michael and Joe Hobbs Jr. The family allegedly told Herot tales of terror from Terry’s past. As a youth, they said, Hobbs had been beaten mercilessly by his father, a butcher and itinerant Pentecostal preacher. His beatings were so frequent and intense that Hobbs grew immune to them and would laugh at his father to deny him the satisfaction of inflicting pain. He became desensitized to violence. The work he did in his father’s slaughterhouse as a youth further served to make Hobbs nonreactive to the sight of blood and gore.

  Long after she spoke with Herot, Cindy Hobbs denied that her brother could have any complicity in Stevie’s death. “Terry was a wonderful dad to Stevie,” Cindy told Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter Beth Warren. She had lived with Pam and Terry briefly and had seen a “joyful Stevie jumping off his stepfather’s shoulders into a swimming pool.”175 According to Cathy Frye of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Hobbs said that his father had had a “redhead’s temper” but was “a good dad.”176 Many of Hobbs’s statements in the article were paraphrased, not quoted, and the context is often ambiguous, but one thing came through loud and clear: Hobbs wanted to get his message out. “I want them to hear it from me . . . You’ve all heard the lowdown about me, but it ain’t all lowdown.” There were few, aside from Mark Byers, who would go on record as saying that they thought Hobbs guilty of the murders, though John Douglas—among many others—surely had his doubts.

  With this new information in hand, Douglas and Herot interviewed Hobbs for the second time in a week, this time at the hotel where Douglas was staying. “This interview needed to be on our turf,” Douglas said. Instead of the friendly atmosphere of the Chase Galleria Mall food court—the site of the first interview—the second interview took place in Douglas’s hotel room among piles of file boxes and folders, giving the impression that a full-scale investigation was underway; this time, the conversation would be all business. Confronted with the evidence of his past violence and criminal record—an assault on his brother-in-law with a handgun, possession of marijuana and an alleged sexual assault against a neighbor in Hot Springs, Arkansas—Hobbs became agitated. At times, he was downright angry, though he didn’t deny anything. “So what?” he would say. “What does that prove?” When Douglas revealed that he knew about a molestation incident (discussed in further detail later in this chapter) in Hot Springs, Hobbs was visibly shaken—angered actually. “I thought he was going to knock the soda can out of my hand,” Douglas recalled. Clearly, Terry had thought no one knew about that.

  Douglas thought that if he had been able to interview Hobbs before Lax dropped the bomb, he could have gotten more out of Hobbs. Of course, anyone trying to get Terry Hobbs to confess to a seventeen-year-old, triple child murder would have to be some kind of super-cop. They would also need facts. District attorneys don’t open investigations on long-solved cases without overwhelming evidence, and the Echols defense team, despite piles of new test data, ancient eyewitness affidavits, and grumblings of ex-family members, had come way short of convincing the state of Arkansas to take any action. WMPD detective Mike Allen said, “In 1993 Terry Hobbs wasn’t a suspect, and he isn’t a suspect in 2007.”

  Revelations

  As the defense team kept digging, they discovered some very interesting information about Terry Hobbs. It was revealed that Hobbs had been married once prior to Pam, to one Angela Hancock, and that the couple had had a son together.177 Terry and Angela split when the boy was two years old, and their short marriage had allegedly been
a violent one. In 1982, Hobbs was living in an apartment in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Angela and their toddler son, Bryan. According to his neighbor, a middle-aged woman named Mildred French, she heard a ruckus coming from the Hobbs residence one day, sounds indicating that Hobbs was beating his wife, his child, or both. Alarmed, French ran down to their apartment and repeatedly rang the doorbell until Hobbs answered. With “disgust in his voice,” Hobbs glared at her and asked, “What do you want?” She told him that if he ever struck his wife or child again, she would call the police. French also recalled that on more than one occasion, she had observed Hobbs standing outside her window, peering in.

  But French’s most damning allegation was that Hobbs had sexually assaulted her while she was in her apartment. According to French (who was eighty-one years old at the time she was tracked down by the Echols defense team), as she was climbing out of the shower and putting on her housecoat, Hobbs appeared in the bathroom, held her, and “grabbed [her] breast.” French started screaming, “Get out! Get out!” and Hobbs fled the apartment. French called police, who, she believed, “filed an incident report on the matter.” She said, “At the time, I was afraid that Terry would rape, harm, or even kill me.”178 She approached Angela’s mother and suggested therapy for Hobbs, a man she said was “sick,” but his strict Pentecostal in-laws said that there would be no therapy for Terry. At a meeting arranged by the landlord of the apartment complex, Hobbs denied any wrongdoing, saying, “It never happened.” No arrest was ever made, although French claims that the Hobbses were thrown out of their apartment as a result of the incident. She also claims to have appeared in court on the matter, at which time she says Hobbs was ordered to undergo some type of counseling. Shortly after they left the apartment, Terry and Angela were divorced.179 Presumably, West Memphis police would have discovered this information as well had they bothered to interview and investigate Hobbs as they did with Mark Byers.