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Nevertheless, Byers was questioned more closely than the other two sets of parents. According to Gitchell’s notes, Byers reported that he had arrived home from a medical appointment at 3:10P.M . on May 5,1993. At 3:50, he took his thirteen-year-old stepson, Ryan, to the police department for an appearance in municipal court, where Ryan was to testify as a witness in a traffic dispute. After leaving Ryan at the courthouse, Byers said, he drove to Memphis to pick up his wife, Melissa, at work.34He stated that he returned to the house with her, and at 5:30 left home again to pick up Ryan at court. Byers told Gitchell that at 6:15, when he returned with Ryan, Christopher was not at home, and that by 6:20 the family had begun its search. That was the extent of Gitchell’s notes from the first reported interview with Byers.

However, two other related reports were also recorded that day. Lieutenant Sudbury, the codirector of the drug task force, interviewed a woman who had a child at the elementary school. The woman had called the police department soon after the bodies were found, saying that she had information about the Byerses. When Detective Sudbury followed up on the call, the woman told him that near the end of 1992, she had attended a parent-teacher event in the school auditorium. While there, she said, she had overheard the school’s principal talking to John Mark and Melissa Byers, who were seated behind her. According to the woman, the principal was advising them “that Chris had to be put out of class that day for causing a disturbance,” and that the Byerses’ reply to the principal was “that they had done all they could do and thought they would send Chris away.” When the principal left, the woman said she’d heard the couple continue to discuss how they needed “to get rid of Chris.” Sudbury wrote that he contacted the principal, who told him that she did not remember the conversation. And that was the end of that. No records indicated that either of the Byerses were ever asked about the alleged conversation.

Another person called the police on May 8 to report “something about drugs” relating to John Mark Byers. Whoever took the call noted it not on a standard police form, but on a pharmaceutical company notepad. When a detective contacted the source, the investigator was told that “Byers is in drug re-hab in Memphis and on methadone” and may have “a brain tumor.” Beneath that notation someone in the department had written “OLD NEWS” and underlined the comment twice. The entry suggested that police were more familiar with John Mark Byers than their official reports reflected.

While police were not tape-recording, much less videotaping, interviews at this stage of the investigation, they did make use of a few modern tools. One was the polygraph, or lie-detector test, administered by Detective Bill Durham. During the course of the investigation, Durham would polygraph forty-one subjects. But Durham never polygraphed any of the victims’ relatives. The police also fingerprinted more than four dozen subjects, hoping that one of the prints might match the one found in the woods. But no match was ever found. And of course, they waited for information from the state’s crime laboratory. In the weeks immediately following the murders, the department submitted hundreds of items to the lab for evaluation, among them eighteen knives, three wooden sticks, one tire billy, one ice axe, three hammers, a hook, a rope, hair samples from forty-one people, blood and urine samples from eleven, footprint impressions, shoes, boxes of clothing, and a Mason jar filled with water, accompanied by a request that the water in the jar be tested to see if it matched the water found inside the children’s bodies. Hair from relatives of all of the victims was submitted for analysis, as were blood and urine samples from Todd Moore and John Mark Byers.

Police briefly checked another person who was close to the Byers family. On May 11, two detectives questioned Andrew Gipson Taylor, a thirty-four-year-old