Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [155]
In January 1995, the local municipal judge found Mark Byers guilty on the charge relating to the boys’ fight.344The judge ordered Byers to pay half of the injured boy’s medical expenses, a sum of $2,000. (The offending teenager was ordered to pay the other half.) The judge also sentenced Byers to one year in jail, but Byers posted an appeal bond of $1,000, which allowed him to remain free. How Byers secured the money for the appeal bond, when it was known that he faced hot-check charges and that as recently as three months earlier, he and his family had been living without a telephone, heat, or hot water, apparently did not concern the court.
The couple kept a low profile for the next several months. The other charges against them were still pending, and the third anniversary of Christopher’s murder was drawing near, when police were again called to investigate a tragedy involving the Byerses. This time, however, the call came not from neighbors but from the local hospital, where doctors had just pronounced Melissa Byers dead.
Melissa’s Unexplained Death
The date was March 29, 1996. The hospital staff told the sheriff that an ambulance had been called to the Byerses’ house at 5:20P.M . Melissa was unconscious when the medics arrived.345She was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour and ten minutes later. But the doctors were perplexed. They told the sheriff that they could find no evidence of trauma on her body, and could not readily determine what had led to her sudden death. In contrast to Inspector Gitchell’s decision after discovery of the eight-year-olds’ murders, the sheriff immediately called for help from the Arkansas State Police. Within two hours of the call for an ambulance, a team of state police investigators had gathered at the hospital. The state police investigated the death as a “possible homicide.”346
Observing Melissa’s nude body, investigators noted the presence of “IV puncture marks on the top of both her feet, on the inside of her right wrist, and on her upper right thoracic area.” The right thoracic puncture mark and the right wrist puncture mark were both covered by Band-Aids, suggesting that they might have resulted from efforts to revive Melissa at the hospital. But other puncture marks were not bandaged. The investigators took fourteen photographs of the body, which they identified by number in their report. The report itself was three pages long, but even in that short amount of space it conveyed more information than was recorded in any report by the West Memphis police after the discovery of the murdered boys’ bodies. The investigator noted that the county coroner had arrived “at approximately 8:10P.M . to obtain possession of the body for the state medical examiner’s office.”
By that time, however, the investigators were already interviewing a witness who’d called police after hearing the news of Melissa’s death. As the lead investigator later wrote in his notes, the witness reported that “Melissa and Mark were having family troubles lately, and that Mark had a girlfriend by the name of Mandy…. She also said that she believes that Melissa has been taking Dilaudids [sic] and Zanex [sic].”
At 9:40P.M ., a team of local and state investigators began a search of the Byerses’ house. While the search was being conducted, Byers stood outside the house with a woman who was identified in the state police reports as Mandy Beasley. One investigator videotaped the interior of the house while another took still photographs. The lead investigator dictated a careful description of the single-story wood-frame house, paying special attention to the bedroom where the ambulance workers had found Melissa. A third state police investigator prepared a diagram of the “crime scene.” In the bedroom, they seized as evidence three towels and a shirt, all found on the bed; “suspected marijuana and paraphernalia”; a couple of glasses, one of which was believed to