Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [156]
At midnight, the lead investigator was still at work, interviewing the neighbor who had called the ambulance.348The neighbor told the investigator that Byers had called him a little after 5P.M . The neighbor said Byers “advised him that he could not wake up Melissa and asked him to come over and see if she had a pulse.” The neighbor said he asked Byers “why he didn’t call an ambulance” but that Byers had dismissed the question, insisting that he “come over—come through the kitchen door.”
According to the investigator’s report, the neighbor said that “he went immediately to the bedroom and saw that Melissa was totally naked, lying on the far side of the bed on her back. He advised her mouth was wide open, her eyes were closed, she was totally limp, and her arms were down by her side. [He] advised he checked for a pulse, lifted her eyelids, and looked at her eyes. He advised that he told John Mark to do CPR on her and he started it. He advised that she gurgled up some fluids, and he told Mark he was going to call EMS [emergency medical service].” After the neighbor placed the call, he saw that Mark and his stepson Ryan Clark, now sixteen, were trying to put pants on Melissa. The neighbor reported that when he asked Mark if Melissa was dead, Mark told him no, but that as Mark made the pronouncement, “Ryan had a funny, eerie look on his face.”
The neighbor also advised the officer “that Mark was not totally hysterical, but he was worried and concerned. He advised when the EMTs got to the residence, Mark kept telling them, ‘They’ve got to bring her back.’” Ryan, meanwhile, “kept mumbling something, and he did not seem coherent.” Ryan left the house before the ambulance arrived. The neighbor reported “that when he left, he almost flipped the car over, he left so fast, spinning gravel….”
The neighbor told the investigator for the state police that he followed the ambulance to the hospital, where he met with John Mark Byers. “He advised that at the hospital, Mark told him he was afraid Melissa had overdosed on a drug that is in the streets in Memphis.” The neighbor said “that Byers told him it could be bought for fifty dollars on the street. He told him the name of the drug. He could not remember it, but thought it started with the letter ‘D.’ [The neighbor] advised that John Mark Byers also told him he thought her death was a drug overdose and that they were going to accuse him of smothering her. He advised that Byers did not clarify who ‘they’ were.”
That same night, the state police investigator also had Byers outline in writing his activities in the hours preceding Melissa’s death. The statement was slim on detail. Byers said principally that he and his wife had taken a nap, and that when he’d gotten up, he’d found he could not wake her.349
Banished
The focus of the investigation into Melissa’s “possible homicide” shifted to the Arkansas Medical Examiner’s Office, where, it was hoped, an autopsy would explain the mysterious death. But just as Inspector Gitchell in West Memphis had spent weeks in frustration waiting for autopsy results, the state police investigator and the sheriff now waited for the medical examiner’s findings on Melissa. When five months had passed with no word from the state crime lab, the state police investigator called to inquire.350The investigator finally received the autopsy report on September 30, 1996—a full six months after Melissa’s death.
But the report was of little help. And its conclusion—or more precisely, its failure to arrive at one—was unusual. Despite the fact that Melissa’s body had been taken to the crime lab immediately, the Arkansas medical examiner reported that his office had been unable to determine either the physical cause of her death or the legal manner of her death; that is, whether it had resulted from natural causes, or been an accident, a suicide, or a homicide. The sheriff issued a press release explaining that though