Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [153]
In light of the calls, Lax arranged for Hutcheson to come to his office in Memphis, so that he and Jessie’s attorney, Dan Stidham, could formally interview her. She agreed, and on August 17, 1994, the investigator and the attorney tape-recorded a session with Hutcheson. It lasted for five and a half hours. Lax and Stidham were particularly interested in the part of the interview where Hutcheson discussed the esbat. Lax wrote in his summary:
Vicki feels that she went, but she was drunk and is not sure with whom she went. She had broken up with her boyfriend that day at around 2 or 3P.M . and went to the liquor store and bought two fifths of Wild Turkey. She drank one bottle by herself and then went to this meeting in the area around Turrell, Arkansas. She still recalls what the area looked like, but cannot recall if Damien and Jessie went with her or not. When we tried to get her to recall how arrangements were made for her to go to this meeting, she was at a loss to do so. She recalled seeing the people painted black and realized they were undressing and stated she had to get out of there and someone took her away; however, she does not remember anything afterward and woke up the next morning, lying on the ground in her front yard with a whiskey bottle. She was alone at this time and she has no recollection of anything else.
Hutcheson’s account of her role in the case would remain ambiguous. In the late 1990s, writer Burk Sauls posted on the wm3.org Web site the transcipt of an interview he’d conducted with her. It remained on the site until Hutcheson, citing fears of her safety, asked the site’s managers to take it off. In the interview she’s described Jessie Misskelley as having been “like a little brother” to her. “What is you story about that time?” Sauls had asked Hutcheson. “Well,” she’d replied, “I’m really concerned about legal issues right now with it. But basically I said what the West Memphis police wanted me to say. And that was that I went to the meeting. The esbat meeting. It was all their stories.” She characterized the police investigation as having been “just an overreaction.” At one point she told Sauls, “You know what I want to say more than anything? I want to say that I’m sorry. I just want to tell Jessie and Jason and Damien that I’m sorry.”
A Knife Fight and a Restraining Order
Shortly after the trials, during about the same period that Vicki Hutcheson was calling Lax and Shettles, the investigators were also receiving calls from Ricky Murray, Christopher Byers’s biological father. Shettles wrote for the agency’s files that Murray “had been very disturbed recently, while watchingThe Maury Povich Show, as Mark Byers had stated that on the date of the murders, he picked up his wife from work and had an airtight alibi. Rick had spoken with Mark Byers at Chris Byers’s funeral. At that time, Mark did not say he had picked up Melissa at work, only that he had been at court that day.” Lax noted that Murray also stated that “Melissa Byers has been a heroin addict since age twelve. She was using heroin before she smoked marijuana.” Finally, Shettles noted that Murray “also stated he never gave up parental rights and that Chris had not been adopted by Mark Byers.”
But by then, calls from Melissa’s ex-husband to the Memphis private investigators were the least of the Byerses’ problems. After the trials, they had moved away from West Memphis, leaving a string of hot checks behind, and settled into a house in Cherokee Village, a planned community in north-central Arkansas near the Missouri line. Though they told their new neighbors that they wanted to live quietly and be granted privacy in their grief, they quickly attracted police attention. In September 1994, both Mark and Melissa were jailed by officials