Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [1]
Outside the state, however, news of the unusual trials began to attract attention. A documentary released in 1996 raised widespread concern. A Web site was dedicated to the case, and its founders unfurled the phrase “Free the West Memphis Three.”
Arkansas officials dug in. As criticism mounted, police and state officials insisted that the film had been misleading. They pointed out that twenty-four jurors had sat through the trials, had heard and seen all the evidence, and had found the teenagers guilty. They said that anyone who bothered to examine what “really” had happened in the case, rather than form opinions based on movies and a Web site, would conclude, as had the jurors, that justice had been served.
As an Arkansas reporter focusing on crime and the courts, I began to see this as a historic case. The dispute needed to be resolved. Either the out-of-state critics were wrong, in which case the “Free the West Memphis Three” crowd could all get on with their lives, or something similar to what happened at Salem had indeed occurred again—during my lifetime and in my own state.
I decided to take my state’s officials up on their challenge. I would look at what “really” had happened. I would interview participants, read thousands of pages of transcripts, touch every piece of evidence in storage, and report faithfully on what I found, regardless of whom it supported. And if what I found in West Memphis resembled what had happened in Salem, I was prepared to look further. We assume that secularism, as well as advances in science and law, distances us from colonial America. If it appeared, as critics of the West Memphis case charged, that presumably rational processes had given way to satanic allusions, it was fair to ask bothhow andwhy such a thing had happened.
Part One
The Investigation
Chapter One
The Murders
AT7:41P.M. ON MAY5, 1993, a full moon rose behind the Memphis skyline. Its light glinted across the Mississippi River and fell onto the midsized Arkansas town aspiringly named West Memphis. Sometime between the rising of that moon and its setting the next morning, something diabolical would happen in West Memphis. Three eight-year-old boys would vanish, plucked off the streets of their neighborhood by an unseen, murderous hand. Under the glare of the next day’s sun, police would discover three young bodies. They would be pulled—naked, pale, bound, and beaten—from a watery ditch in a patch of woods alongside two of America’s busiest highways. But the investigation would unfold in shadow. Why had one of the boys been castrated? How to account for the absence of blood? Why did the banks of the stream look swept clean? The police would stumble for weeks without clues—until the moon itself became one.
John Mark Byers, an unemployed jeweler, was the first parent to report a child missing.1At 8P.M ., with the full moon on the rise, Byers telephoned the West Memphis police. Ten minutes later, a patrol officer responded.2She drove her cruiser down East Barton Street, in a working-class neighborhood. At the corner where Barton intersected Fourteenth Street, the officer stopped in front of the Byerses’ three bedroom house. Byers, an imposing man, six feet five inches tall, weighing more than two hundred pounds, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, met her at the door. Behind him stood his wife, Melissa, five feet six, somewhat heavyset, with long hair and hollow eyes. Mark Byers did most of the talking. The officer listened and took notes. “The last time the victim was seen, he was cleaning the yard at 5:30P.M .” That would have been an hour and twenty minutes before sunset. The Byerses described Christopher as four feet four inches tall, weighing fifty pounds, with hair and eyes that were both light brown. He was eight years old.
The officer left the Byerses’ house, and within minutes