Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [106]
Byers
The question of how to treat John Mark Byers was vastly more complex. Since the appearance of Byers’s knife, additional bits of information about Byers’s past had come to light. Among the police records that were turned over to the defense was a tip from the television programAmerica’s Most Wanted, which had aired a segment on the West Memphis murders. An unidentified woman had called in to report that Byers had beaten his wife and children in the past, and that on the night the boys were missing, he and Melissa had argued and he’d hit her several times.244By the end of Jessie’s trial, Lax and the defense attorneys had also learned of Byers’s conviction for terroristic threatening. Lax located Byers’s ex-wife, Sandra Slone, who had remarried and now lived in Missouri.
She was cooperative but reserved when he telephoned her.245In his notes on the call, Lax wrote that when Byers’s ex-wife heard about the West Memphis murders, she’d said, “she immediately suspected Byers was responsible. She described him as extremely violent and said her children were deathly afraid of him. She stated he used to beat her and the children, but did so in a way which left no visible marks or bruises, when dressed.” Lax wrote that the woman told him she had reported her fears for herself and her children to Inspector Gary Gitchell, but that the detective had “assured her Byers was not a suspect and was not connected with the murders. He told her any problems with Byers were personal problems, with which she would have to deal and he could not help her further.”
Accustomed as he’d become to peculiarities in the case, Lax found the woman’s statement astonishing. Byers’s attack on her six years earlier had been proven in court, his stepson had been brutally murdered, his account of his activities on the night of the murders conflicted with accounts of other family members, and a knife belonging to him had recently turned up with blood on it that might have been Christopher’s. Yet here was Byers’s ex-wife saying that when she told Gitchell that she feared for herself and her children, her concerns had been rudely ignored.
The conversation illustrated what had become a fundamental dilemma for the defense—the question of how to handle Byers. His status as a police informant, combined with Gitchell’s delicate questioning of him about the bloodstained knife—and now Slone’s reported suspicion that he’d long had police “connections”—heightened Lax’s and the lawyers’ suspicions. But they shared the same concern that had dogged Stidham in Jessie’s trial—that if they even hinted that Byers was the killer, without hard evidence to prove it, they risked inflaming the jury.
One More Juvenile Witness
On the eve of the trial, Lax also tracked down another teenager who’d told police he’d heard Damien discussing the murders.246The sixteen-year-old was one of the witnesses Fogleman had subpoenaed to testify at the upcoming trial. After the boy admitted to Lax that what he’d told the police was “wrong,” Lax videotaped an interview with him and his mother. The woman said that she’d been asked to bring her son to the police station in September 1993, four months after the murders. She said Detective Bryn Ridge questioned him briefly, then had him take a polygraph test. After that, Ridge and Durham had questioned him again.247
The mother told Lax that though she went to the police station with her son, she’d been asked to sit in the hall. The woman said she did not know—and police did not tell her—that she had a right to be with her son while he was being questioned. Lax noted in his taped interview that statements the boy made to the police before he was polygraphed differed from those he made after. Lax asked him why that was. The teenager answered, “Because in the first part, I was telling the truth, that I didn’t know nothing. The second