Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [10]
That morning, Byers’s ex-wife drove to downtown Marion, where she reported the incident to John Fogleman, the city attorney. Years later, Fogleman too would play a key role in events following the murder of Christopher Byers and his two young friends. But that tragedy was still almost six years in the future. In 1987, in the hours after her assault, the former Mrs. Byers told Fogleman that her ex-husband had threatened to kill her or to have someone else kill her several times in the past; that she had sought a restraining order against him; and that because of his propensity toward violence, when he had shown up at her house that morning she had turned on a tape recorder. She handed Fogleman the tape.22It and the investigating officer’s report were convincing evidence. By the end of the day, Marion police had issued a warrant for Byers’s arrest, charging that he had terrorized his ex-wife by threatening to cause her death. Byers was convicted of the offense and sentenced to three years’ probation. All that was required of him was that he keep up his child support payments and remain gainfully employed.
Byers fulfilled neither requirement. Over the next few years, his first wife took him to court repeatedly seeking back child support, and twice, when Byers professed poverty, a local chancery judge reduced his court-ordered payments. Meanwhile, in 1989, Byers, now married to Melissa, bought the two-story house on Barton Street in West Memphis and moved into it with Ryan and Christopher. The house had three bedrooms, three baths, and an in-ground swimming pool. When the couple’s jewelry store failed the following year, neighbors wondered how the couple afforded the house. Melissa worked as a cleaning lady, and Byers worked out of their home, mostly selling jewelry at local flea markets.23
Something else that puzzled neighbors was Byers’s apparent chumminess with some members of the local police. One explanation for that emerged months after Christopher’s murder, when it was learned that Byers had worked as an undercover drug informant.24But there were other, deeper mysteries that were never fully explained. One was why, exactly one year before Christopher’s murder, the record of Byers’s felony conviction for terroristic threatening was formally expunged. Byers had not fulfilled the terms of his probation. He had neither kept up his child support payments nor remained gainfully employed. Yet on May 5, 1992, circuit judge David Burnett signed an order absolving Byers of all legal consequences arising from the assault and death threat on his ex-wife. A year later, Burnett would become another principal player in the murder case involving Byers’s stepson. But even in 1992, Burnett’s role in Byers’s life was important. The judge’s ruling allowed Byers to state “in any application form for employment, license, civil right, or privilege or in any appearance as a witness that he has not been convicted of the offense.”25
All of this, of course, went unreported in the local paper. Where Byers was known at all in West Memphis, it was as a failed jewelry store owner who worked at local flea markets. His ex-wife had moved away, taking her children with her, and now, even the record of Byers’s conviction for assaulting her had been ordered removed from the courthouse. But some records did still exist. One, on file in Memphis, reported that on a night in July 1992—nine months before the murders—Byers had been arrested in that city.26Sheriff’s deputies there charged him with conspiring to sell cocaine and with carrying a dangerous weapon. They booked him into the county jail. But sometime during the night, Byers was released, without explanation, into the custody of U.S. marshals. Byers was subsequently released, though—once again—records in the case were scarce. Representatives of