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

by Greg Day

  John Douglas’s report was significant because it was able to bridge the gap between the DNA and other forensic evidence being presented in the writ and an actual personality type, or “profile.” “The person responsible for the crime on May 5, 1993, just didn’t wake up one morning and decide, ‘Today I’m going to go out and kill,’” Douglas said. There would be precipitating factors leading up to the crime, and the background of the offender, when checked, would show a history of violence, a failed marriage or two, and probably financial difficulties as well. “I did see these factors . . . [they were] very obvious to me,” Douglas said, speaking of Terry Hobbs. Although he softly attempted to qualify his statements as “not being specific,” they were very much so. Douglas met twice with Hobbs, once before conducting a background investigation and once after. He interviewed what he described as two different people in Hobbs, and he reiterated that for the press. He said of the WMPD, “Had the police back in 1993 done a background check and come to me or one of my colleagues and said, ‘So, what do you think about this guy?’ I would say, ‘Put him on the front burner.’” The biggest problem with Douglas’s report is that he was fully aware that Hobbs was a suspect (in the defense’s view) before he wrote it, and thus the objectivity is questionable. Although the rest of the defense team focused on the evidence and only indirectly implicated Hobbs, Douglas’s message was straight on: the police had made a major blunder by failing to interview Hobbs.

  Riordan, ever the defense attorney, did his best to rehabilitate Douglas’s blatant indictment of Hobbs. He cited the “rush to judgment” made by the West Memphis police in 1993 in telling the district attorney’s office that the crime was solved “without question, within hours of the Misskelley confession.” Riordan now cautioned, “No one is saying that we have developed in this case evidence that establishes the guilt, much less the guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, of anyone else.” It became evident throughout 2010, however, that if Riordan was not pursuing an alternate subject, just about everybody else on the defense team was. Without nuclear DNA, an unimpeachable eyewitness, a rock-solid confession, something proving the guilt of someone else and excluding Echols, Echols’s appeal would be an uphill battle all the way.

  The press conference was important and probably quite expensive. The question was, what would it accomplish? Riordan indicated that it was simply a way to consolidate the more than three hundred requests for information that they had received from various media. But was that all? It would certainly have no effect on the trial judge, David Burnett, who had stated publically that he “just wanted to get [the habeas hearings] over with.” Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel was already on edge about the publicity given the case, calling it a “misleading press campaign.” McDaniel saw no revelations in the petition and stood by the conclusions reached by Peretti and the prosecution in 1993-94. Riordan, however, emphasized that Brent Davis had been of a mind to agree to submit evidence to any testing requested because he wanted to be sure “they had the right man.” For the defense, that man was Terry Hobbs. But if Damien Echols—and Mark Byers as well—wanted Hobbs to take the fall for the murders, they had some fundamental problems to overcome, the most basic being that Hobbs was presumed innocent, and the police and prosecutors had no incentive to rock that boat. Hobbs, however, was getting sick of the accusations and innuendo and was preparing to make a move of his own.

  Brent Davis Answers

  On May 30, 2008, eight months after it was filed in federal court, the state responded to the Echols petition. Although the response went on for some ninety pages, the state’s position was tersely summarized in the opening paragraphs:

  [Echols’s] motion on accompanying exhibits rely [sic] in combination on three principal claims:

  1. Allegedly new forensic evidence that post-mortem animal predation caused some of the injuries to the victims, which, he argues, undermines the state’s trial proof

  2. DNA-testing results exclude him as the source for two hairs from the crime scene and perhaps from biological material from a victim, and do not exclude two other persons as a source of the hairs, and

  3. The jury’s verdicts were flawed by bias and misconduct.

  The state countered Echols’s charges on the grounds that they were “meritless,” urging Judge Burnett to deny Echols’s motion without a hearing. The two sides were scheduled for a showdown in the form of an evidentiary hearing in Jonesboro on September 8, 2008.

  Trouble with the Chicks

  By late 2008, Terry Hobbs had just about had it with the disruption to his and his daughter’s life caused by those accusing him of Stevie’s murder. Every major newspaper and radio station in the Memphis area and around the state of Arkansas was printing the results of the DNA testing, naming him as a suspect in the murders, and regaling the public with stories of Hobbs’s past. No detail was too personal to print. Hobbs’s marital problems with Pam, his violent past (as when he shot and wounded Pam’s brother, Jackie Hicks Jr.), and revelations about the alleged abuse of his first wife and child were being touted. The declaration of Mildred French in which she alleged to have been sexually assaulted by Hobbs was common knowledge to the public. With the exception of the DNA evidence, which was consistently mischaracterized as a “match,” all of the evidence against Hobbs was weak, circumstantial, and hearsay, to say nothing of the fact that most of it was very old information.

  To make matters worse, big-name celebrities were getting in on the act. Hobbs was hearing his name uttered by the likes of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, and he didn’t much care for it. Maines was a latecomer to the supporter movement, but what she lacked in case knowledge, she made up for with her celebrity megaphone. On her band’s website, she posted an open letter to supporters containing the now-familiar accusations, most lifted directly from Echols’s habeas petition. The Moore ligature hair, the “stump” hair, and Stevie’s knife being found in Terry’s dresser drawer were not going to be enough to compel the state of Arkansas to open an investigation. But Maines added in the hearsay—and disputed—claims of Pam’s sister Jo Lyn McCaughey that on the night of May 5, 1993, Hobbs had “washed clothes and sheets at odd hours for no other reason than to hide evidence from the crimes.”

  On November 25, 2008, Terry Hobbs filed suit in Pulaski County, Arkansas, alleging defamation of character against Natalie Maines individually and against the Dixie Chicks (Maines, Emily Robinson, and Martie Seidel) collectively. As specific claims, Hobbs listed (1) “defamation/libel,” (2) “intentional infliction of emotional distress/outrageous conduct,” and (3) “false light invasion of privacy.” These claims combined to “injure” Hobbs in his “person and business, and in his personal and business reputation.”187 The complaint contained a single exhibit, a copy of the open letter to supporters of the West Memphis Three that Maines had posted on the Dixie Chicks’ website. The letter was, in Maines’s words, “parroted” from a press release that summarized Echols’s petition. Maines claimed in her affidavit that the letter posted on her website “did not accuse Hobbs of the murders” but simply listed evidence pointing away from the West Memphis Three. Hobbs disagreed. He also accused Maines of making further statements damaging to his reputation at the December 2007 rally at the state capitol building in Little Rock. The suit alleged that Maines (being sued under her married name, Natalie Pasdar) “reiterated her position” about the DNA and forensic evidence making the case for the WM3 stronger and in the process “made other statements that amounted to a false and reckless claim that Plaintiff committed the murders of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore.” Hobbs was seeking unspecified damages, both punitive and compensatory, demanding that a jury provide the “just and proper relief to which he may be entitled.”

  Because of geography—the “Chicks” all claimed residency in Texas, Hobbs lived and worked in Tennessee, and the rally that had caused all the hoopla had taken place in Arkansas—the suit was moved from Pulaski County to a federal court. Depositions for th
e suit began in the law offices of one of Maines’s attorneys, John Moore, in Little Rock on July 21, 2009. Over a period of two days, Hobbs was grilled by attorneys representing the Dixie Chicks and Natalie Maines.188 They asked Hobbs about anything and everything. They asked about Mark Byers, Sharon Nelson, and other people who had claimed that Hobbs was responsible for the murders. Why wasn’t he suing them? The implication was clear enough. Although Hobbs repeatedly answered that what he wanted was “justice,” which he defined as “whatever the court deems necessary,” Maines’s attorneys pressed Hobbs to admit that he had gone after the Dixie Chicks for their deep pockets and no other reason. It also came to light that Hobbs’s attorney, Cody Hilander, was working on a contingency basis, and this was obvious by the case Hobbs put on, which was essentially none. There was no money to depose Maines, the Dixie Chicks, or any other witnesses. Hobbs’s was a very low-budget case. In December 2009, US district judge Brian S. Miller dismissed the case, and the following April, he ordered Hobbs to pay more than $17,000 in legal fees.

  However badly the case turned out for Terry Hobbs, the Echols defense team was elated. Though they themselves would not have the opportunity to personally question Hobbs, any information that Maines’s attorneys had been able to get out of him—under oath—could now be used, and there was much information to be had. For example, through the deposition they were able to get Hobbs on record omitting the fact that he went directly from dropping Pam off at work to David Jacoby’s house to play guitar. This contradicted his statement to West Memphis Police on June 21, 2007 that he continued his search for Stevie after taking his wife to work. This was important because Jacoby had given a sworn statement to defense investigators in 2007 stating that he and Hobbs had played guitar for an hour or so right after Terry dropped Pam off at work. According to Jacoby, Terry went out—and stayed out—for more than an hour before coming back to ask Jacoby’s help in searching for Stevie. By Jacoby’s reckoning, that happened close to 7:30 p.m.

  A second example, as Riordan made reference to on Larry King Live, was that during the deposition Hobbs stated that he had not seen Stevie at all that day. This was critical because Riordan had obtained sworn statements from Hobbs’s neighbors saying they had seen the boys with Terry, at his house, shortly before their disappearance that afternoon. One must wonder why these witnesses—thirteen-year-old Jamie Ballard; her sister Brandy, eleven; and her mother Deborah—waited so long before coming forward. They claimed that because police hadn’t canvassed their block, they weren’t aware that the information was valuable until years later when Hobbs’s claims were made public. Their mother said that the two girls went to a church group meeting every Wednesday and that they were waiting for their ride to arrive when they saw the boys. How certain were they that it was Wednesday, May 5, that they were remembering? According to Jamie, Ryan Clark had told her that afternoon that Christopher was late for dinner and if she saw him, to send him home. She said that she met Ryan in school the next day, and it was then that she found out the boys were dead.189 Ryan was extremely upset with her, asking her why she hadn’t sent Christopher home. She said she did try to send him home, but that he wouldn’t go. As for Hobbs’s claim that he didn’t see the boys that day, “If he says he did not see them, he’s not telling the truth,” Ballard told Erin Moriarty on the September 17, 2011, episode of 48 Hours: Mystery. “He saw them. He was out there with them. He called them to his house.” When asked if the women were mistaken, Hobbs replied, “They’re lying.”

  The Pasdar deposition also included a slew of declarations from the Hicks family—Pam, her mother, and two of her three sisters. Sour grapes among in-laws can be notoriously unreliable, but if Pam’s sisters were telling lies, they were whoppers. Jo Lynn McCaughey, for example, claimed that it was she who had witnessed Terry doing laundry on the night of the murders. She said that Hobbs not only washed “dirty laundry,” curtains, and bed linens, but was even “taking clothes out of dresser drawers and washing those too.” McCaughey was appalled that Terry was doing laundry at such a “horrible” time, she said. She also took the opportunity to repeat the stories about Terry’s fledgling book—or books—that he claims to have kept since May 5, 1993; the books allegedly comprise a narrative of the events that occurred between the murders, including Hobbs’s personal timeline, and the shooting of Jackie Hicks Jr. during an altercation in November 1994. McCaughey repeated what she had told police detective Lt. Ken Mitchell and Sgt. Chuck Noles about the fourteen knives she had discovered at Pam’s house and turned over to attorney Dan Stidham in 2002, one of which was a knife that Stevie’s grandfather, Jackie Hicks Sr., identified as a knife he had given to the boy as a gift.

  For her part, Judy Hicks Sadler declared that Hobbs was a child molester and wife abuser. She claimed that Terry would make Stevie and Amanda watch pornography and that Terry would have Amanda on his lap while they were watching. Sadler said that Terry would force Stevie to watch him masturbate and also have Stevie “sexually molest” Amanda. How this molestation was done by an eight-year-old to his four-year-old sister, Sadler didn’t make clear, but if all this was happening, and Sadler knew it, why didn’t she tell anyone? “I wish I had told people about what Terry was doing to Stevie and Amanda. I knew it was wrong. But Stevie was scared and made me promise not to tell. Additionally, I was a child myself [she was fifteen] and was scared about what would happen to my family if I did tell.”

  Marie Hicks, Hobbs’s former mother-in-law, was less acerbic in her attack on Terry, sticking to the “facts,” such as the stories about Amanda being abused and Stevie being punished for his “accidents.” Her account of the alleged physical evidence against Hobbs was one of only a few that acknowledged that the hairs found at the crime scene could only “possibly” have come from Terry Hobbs and David Jacoby; according to most sources, the hairs were “a match.”

  Not surprisingly, John Mark Byers also gave a declaration to Maines’s attorneys. He stated categorically, “I believe that Terry Hobbs was involved in the murders. Some of the reasons I believe Hobbs was involved are set forth below.” Mark Byers described the publicity the case had generated as “almost unbelievable,” citing Hobbs’s appearance with Pam in 1994 on the Geraldo show (along with Jackie Hicks Sr. and Jessie Misskelley Sr.), as well as coverage in national newspapers such as the New York Times. He spoke of the errors in Hobbs’s timeline as given to WMPD in 2007.190 Hobbs claimed that he had met Mark and Dana Moore at Dana Moore’s house somewhere between 6:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on the night of the murders. According to Mark, this was false; the first time he met Hobbs—ever—was at 8:30 p.m., two hours later, just as Officer Regina Meek was leaving the Byerses’ house to search for the boys. If Hobbs was there, Meek made no note of it. Byers’s declaration listed a number of inconsistencies related to statements Hobbs had made, such as Hobbs telling Mark that he lived in a different house than he actually lived in at the time of the murders, that the injuries to Stevie were different than they actually were and that he had searched Robin Hood Hills with Officer Meek that night at 6:00 p.m. Finally, Mark claimed in his declaration that Hobbs had made up a story about seeing a black man coming from the direction of the crime scene on the morning after the murders “to deflect attention from himself.”

  Mark had also personally spoken to David Jacoby; according to Byers, Jacoby told him that Hobbs had shown up at his house at 5:00, which would have been immediately after dropping Pam off at work. Jacoby told Mark that Hobbs stayed for an hour or so, leaving between 6:00 and 6:30 to see if Stevie had come home yet. Oddly, Jacoby also reportedly told Mark that when Hobbs had first come over, as Hobbs opened the front door, Jacoby spotted several boys riding bikes and skateboards on the street, and one of them was Stevie. In his declaration Mark also restated the odd fact, one that Hobbs does not dispute, that Hobbs had not notified his wife that Stevie was still missing during the four hours she was at work.

  The Hobbs Alibi

  Two questions regarding Hobbs’s po
ssible complicity in the murders continue to plague his story of how events transpired that night. First, where exactly was Hobbs during the four-and-a-half hours that Pam was at work? There are conflicting accounts. Second, why did Hobbs not keep his wife informed of the progress of the search during that time, given that the boy was already missing when Pam started work, and Catfish Island was practically within walking distance of the search area? Hobbs was interviewed by the West Memphis police on June 21, 2007, in order to get his version of his whereabouts on May 5, 1993. In the fourteen years since the murders, this would be the first time Hobbs had sat down with police. He was vague but not evasive.

  Hobbs arrived home from his job at the Memphis Ice Cream company, where he was a “merchandiser”—he drove an ice cream truck, stocked stores, and sold ice cream—at approximately 3:30 the afternoon of May 5. Pam was cooking dinner. Terry asked where the kids were. “I always checked on the kids,” he said. Four-year-old Amanda, Terry and Pam’s daughter and Stevie’s half-sister, was in Stevie’s bedroom watching TV. Stevie, Pam told Terry, was out riding bikes with Michael Moore. Pam was a waitress at Catfish Island, a restaurant that was about a three-minute drive from their house on South McAuley. She worked the supper shift from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Despite having two cars, Terry usually drove Pam to work. “That’s the way we did it,” he told the interviewers. When 4:50 rolled around, Stevie still wasn’t home. Terry drove Pam the short distance to Catfish Island, telling her that he would find Stevie.

  He drove off with Amanda and went back toward the Moores’ house on East Barton and began a street-by-street sweep of the area. Dana Moore wasn’t home when they went by her house, so Terry and Amanda just continued to drive. At one point they got out of the car and started walking the neighborhood. “We wanted to see if we could hear him behind the privacy fences,” he said. According to Terry, he and Amanda then returned to their home. Shortly thereafter, Dana Moore pulled up and asked if Terry knew where Stevie or Michael was. Hobbs told her that he and Amanda had been out looking but had seen no sign of the boys. Although Dana Moore’s testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial indicated that she had “looked around” near Hobbs’s house, there is no testimony stating that she actually saw or spoke to him. As to Hobbs’s claim that he spoke to ten-year-old Dawn Moore while he and Amanda were doing their “sweep,” this cannot be substantiated either, and it is here that Hobbs’s alibi begins to falter.