Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [154]
Within two weeks, Mark Byers was arrested again. This time he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor. The charged stemmed from an incident the previous July in which a teenager had been seriously injured in a knife fight that Byers had instigated, encouraged, and supervised.340The police chief who arrested Byers recalled, “He kept asking me, ‘What is your opinion?’ He said, ‘I think they ought to have fought it out, don’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. That’s one of the reasons I’m arresting you.’”
By the end of October 1994, seven months after Damien and Jason’s trial, the area’s newspaper was reporting that the Byerses faced “criminal charges, restraining orders, and a feud” that involved the Byerses’ next-door neighbors. Police were called to settle differences between the two couples eight times in one month. Mark Byers told a reporter for the local paper that his relationship with his neighbors had turned sour when he had swatted their five-year-old son with a flyswatter. The neighbors complained that the swatting had been hard enough to leave bruises. In another incident, the neighbors told police that Melissa had stood in the road outside their house and yelled that if she and Mark were sent to prison, it would be the neighbors’ fault.341
When a local reporter went to interview the two couples, she noted that the Byerses, who were living on Mark’s disability income, had “no phone, no gas for hot water, and little, if any, cash on hand.” Seated at the family’s kitchen table, Mark Byers told her that he and his wife were being persecuted because of accusations that had been made against him at the trials. “We are the victims turned into villains,” he told the reporter. But before long, yet another incident brought the Byerses into the news again. A motor home belonging to the woman whose house they’d been charged with burglarizing mysteriously exploded and burned in her driveway. The woman, who was out of town at the time, told authorities that the vehicle’s propane tanks had been empty.
Spurred by the stories about the Byerses’ latest troubles, a reporter for theArkansas Times decided to look into John Mark Byers’s background. She contacted a retired deputy sheriff from Marked Tree, the town in eastern Arkansas where Byers had grown up. The former deputy recalled that in 1973, when Byers was just sixteen, his parents had called police to their house, claiming that their son was threatening them with a butcher knife.342TheTimes reporter also learned about a more recent, though less violent, incident in Jonesboro. The owners of a jewelry store there said that Mark and Melissa had worked for them briefly in October 1990, during which time jewelry valued at $65,000 had been stolen from the store. When the police failed to make an arrest, the owners filed a civil lawsuit against the Byerses and another couple. The case, which was heard in a Jonesboro court in April 1991, resulted in the Byerses’ two codefendants being ordered to return the items. The attorney who represented the Byerses’ two codefendants in that case was Val Price, the Jonesboro lawyer who was later appointed to defend Damien.343
By the end of 1994, the year of the murder trials, the Byerses faced twelve misdemeanor charges in West Memphis for more than $600 worth of hot checks; their neighbors had a restraining order against them; they faced charges for residential burglary; Mark faced charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; he and Melissa both were suspects in the explosion of the motor home; and Melissa faced charges of aggravated