Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [11]
Byers’s financial situation looked grim in the year before Christopher’s murder, but his legal situation looked remarkably good. Charges—and even convictions—didn’t stick. By Christmas of 1992—five months before the murders—he was again under criminal suspicion, this time for felony theft. Again, a situation that could have landed Byers in prison was resolved to his advantage. And again, the people most closely involved with the investigation—the two West Memphis detectives and prosecuting attorney Brent Davis—would also figure heavily in the murder case ahead.
On December 8, 1992, a loss prevention agent for United Parcel Service notified Detective Bryn Ridge and Detective Sergeant Mike Allen at the West Memphis Police Department that a package containing two gold Rolex watches, valued at $11,000, had been delivered to Byers’s home, but that he now denied having received it. UPS suspected fraud. But when five months passed without progress by the West Memphis police, UPS took its concerns to the Arkansas State Police. That agency was still investigating the missing Rolex watches at the time of the three children’s murders.
Chapter Three
The Police Investigation: Part 1
WITHIN HOURS OF THE BODIES BEING DISCOVERED, the investigation divided roughly along three lines. These were, essentially, that the children were killed by someone close to them; that they were killed by one or more strangers; or that they were killed, as Gitchell had already hinted, by members of a gang or cult. This unusual third prong of the investigation arose early and was the most sharply focused from the start, while detectives’ efforts in the other two directions often appeared chaotic.
Bumbling exacerbated the problem. Though the bodies were found at about 1:30P.M ., the coroner was not called until nearly two hours later. By the time he arrived, fly larvae were starting to appear in the victims’ eyes and nostrils. By 3:58P.M ., when the coroner pronounced the first of the three boys dead, the bodies had been lying in the open air for more than two and a half hours, covered for part of that time with plastic, in temperatures that approached the high eighties. The coroner reported that the water in the ditch was sixty degrees, but after the bodies were removed from it, the rate of their deterioration had been rapid. The coroner noted that it was difficult to assess the extent of rigor mortis due to the way the bodies were tied; that all three showed “signs of post-mortem staining on face and chest”; and that the bodies of Michael and Christopher showed signs that they “may have been sexually assaulted.”
For the next several weeks, the location and condition of the bodies as they were found on the afternoon of May 6 would constitute almost the entirety of what police knew about the murders. The sandbagging of the ditch had turned up nothing. Though detectives had scoured the muddy bottom, they’d found no missing body parts, no underwear, no apparent murder weapon. Their search of the area alongside the stream had provided little more. They’d found one fingerprint in the mud and one partially obliterated footprint, but they’d also found what struck them as a stunning lack of blood. Detectives made casts of the prints, but though dozens of fingerprints would be sent to the crime lab, no match was ever made. Aside from the bodies, the clothing, and the bikes, police took a minuscule amount of evidence from the scene. The absence of physical evidence was surprising, especially for a triple murder that had not involved a gun and in which one of the victims had clearly lost a lot of blood.
Confusion and disorganization compounded the detectives’ problems. Record keeping was unsystematic. Later, questions would be raised about the probe’s scientific integrity as well.27The problems that would plague the investigation began to appear soon after the bodies were found. Sometime, apparently within the first day or two, an undated,