Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [14]
Gitchell, meanwhile, was demanding more information from the state’s crime laboratory and the medical examiner’s office. But he was frustrated there, as well. An associate medical examiner performed autopsies on the boys the day after their bodies were found, but weeks passed and Gitchell did not receive the reports. Analysts at the crime lab provided a little more help. After examining the shoestrings binding the bodies, analyst Lisa Sakevicius sent Gitchell a report indicating that the knots used to tie Christopher and Michael were all “the same,” while those used on Stevie were “all dissimilar to each other and to the other two.” Sakevicius added that she had found skin, and possibly cuticles, in one of the ligatures and that there was a strong chance that this skin was “not that of the boys.” But no further information was forthcoming about whose skin it might be. There was, however, this: Sakevicius reported that a fragment of “Negroid hair” had been found in the sheet that was wrapped around Christopher’s body.
Byers and Other Relatives
Though detectives had not approached the boys’ families as the starting point of their investigation, they had at least two important reasons to talk with the relatives. First, the families were valuable sources of information. And second, they were—or should have been—prime suspects.31Of the victims’ three sets of natural parents, only Todd and Dana Moore were still married to each other. The Moores had one other child, a ten-year-old daughter, Dawn. On May 8, three days after the murders, Detective Ridge questioned the Moores. They had little to add to the mystery of the murders. But a friend of Dawn’s told Ridge that she had seen Stevie and Michael going into Robin Hood on the evening they disappeared.32She said she saw their bicycles parked by the road at the entrance to the woods. Ridge wrote in his notes that the girl had stated “that she never saw Christopher that day.”
Stevie’s parents, Pam and Steve Branch, had divorced when Stevie was one year old. The divorce decree awarded custody of Stevie to Pam and allowed Steve Branch to visit the boy only when she was present. Steve Branch had been ordered to pay $250 per month in child support, but by the time little Stevie was seven, his father was $13,000 in arrears. Branch’s wages were being garnisheed, and at the time of Stevie’s murder, the state of Arkansas was also after him to collect some back taxes. Branch had once been charged with theft, though the charge was later dropped at the victim’s request. But none of this background on Stevie’s family was included in the murder investigation file, and notes of police interviews with Branch, or Pam, or Pam’s new husband, Terry Hobbs, were minimal.
So too were notes from early interviews of Christopher’s mother and stepfather. Despite the enormity of the crime, none of the early interviews with any of the parents were recorded. According to Gitchell’s single page of handwritten notes, John Mark Byers had reported that his ex-wife and his two children from that marriage were now living in Missouri, but no record of the assault on her was included in the file. The report said that Christopher was John Mark Byers’s “stepson,” although it added that