Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [157]
The investigation into Melissa’s death was not the only matter relating to Byers and the law that was taking some unusual turns. On August 28, 1996, five months after Melissa’s death and a month before the medical examiner released her autopsy report, John Mark Byers appeared in court to face the residential burglary charge. He pleaded no contest to the charge, whereupon the prosecutor agreed to a deal that would allow Byers to stay out of prison.351Byers still had no visible means of support beyond his meager disability income. Nonetheless, the prosecutor announced that he had agreed not to send Byers to prison if he met two conditions: (1) that Byers pay $20,000 in restitution to the woman whose house he’d burgled, and (2) that Byers would leave town and never return. Specifically, Byers was ordered “not to remain, reside, or enter” any of the five counties that comprised the north Arkansas judicial district. Byers assured the judge that he would be moving, and the judge, in turn, warned Byers that his no-contest plea would be immediately changed to guilty if he ever returned to the district or was arrested again, in which case he could be charged as a habitual offender.352
The decision to banish Byers marked another odd episode in his highly atypical history with courts and prosecutors. The condition of banishment, or exile, is almost never imposed because the Arkansas constitution forbids it.353
“A Deep Story”
In December 1997, a year after Byers left the judicial district, a reporter for theArkansas Times looked further into his wife’s unexplained death. The investigation into it had stalled, though the case remained open. Although the medical examiner’s office and the local prosecutor refused to allow either the reporter or Jessie’s lawyer to see the autopsy report, the reporter obtained a copy from the state police. It noted that Melissa weighed 211 pounds at her death; that she had “Christopher” tattooed on her right upper back; and that, in addition to the puncture marks investigators noticed, both of her wrists bore “multiple, well-healed scars.” The toxicology lab reported finding no alcohol in her system and no opiates in her blood, though traces of some of her prescribed medications were detected. The report said her urine tested positive for marijuana and hydromorphone, the synthetic narcotic commonly known as Dilaudid. (Dilaudid is highly prized on the black market, and its street price at the time of Melissa’s death was about $50 per tablet.) Melissa did not have a prescription for Dilaudid.
The reporter noted with some surprise that in the autopsy report’s section for the examiner’s opinion, hydromorphone was not mentioned. Rather, the conclusions repeatedly identified a different drug, hydrocodone, as the one that was found in the urine. When contacted about the discrepancy, the state crime lab’s director blamed it on a typographical error.354When questioned about the numerous puncture wounds on Melissa’s body, he said that they might have resulted from medical intervention after the ambulance was called. According to the director, there was “not any way to tell if the wounds were two hours or six hours old” and the pathologist who’d performed the autopsy believed that “all those wounds were probably done at the hospital.”355
Interest in Melissa’s death rekindled briefly in late 1997, when state police investigators interviewed three people, all of whom had reported suspicions relating to John Mark Byers.356But little was heard from him. When theArkansas Times reporter contacted him in Jonesboro, where he had moved after his extraordinary (and apparently illegal) banishment from north-central Arkansas, he professed never to have known about Melissa “injecting any drugs.” He said she had died of “a broken heart,” and that “after Christopher passed away, she gave up her will to live.”
When asked about himself, Byers said that a brain