• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It looked like Byers was going to avoid prison again. But this time, the prosecutor359who’d accepted the banishment deal decided that something had to be done. Upon learning of the Jonesboro drug conviction, he made good on the promise to change Byers’s plea of no contest in the residential burglary case to a plea of guilty. On May 26, 1999—five weeks after his misplaced phone call—sheriff’s deputies drove Byers to the state prison unit at Pine Bluff, to begin serving an eight-year sentence.

For the first time in his criminal career—a career that included a conviction for felony terroristic threatening, admitted guilt in the $20,000 Rolex fraud, drug and weapons arrests, hot-check convictions, and a conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor—Byers was behind bars. But though a drug conviction had precipitated Byers’s trip to prison, no reference to that conviction would appear in his prison records. Instead, records at the Arkansas Department of Correction would indicate that Byers was serving time only on his burglary and theft convictions from the judicial district where he’d been living with Melissa before she died. Byers still had not served a day in prison for any crime from prosecutor Brent Davis’s district—or for any crime relating to drugs.360

The “Story” About the “Dream”

While he was in prison, Byers was never housed at a unit where Damien, Jason, or Jessie was being held.361But Byers took the opportunity to berate them during a prison interview by a reporter in June2000. In a small conference room at the minimum security unit in south Arkansas where he was held, Byers, now wearing his own prison whites, referred to the three as “the sorry bastards” who’d murdered his “son,” and he gloated that while he would soon be walking free, they were “going to die in prison.”

His biggest complaint about prison life was that cigarettes had recently been banned. Interrupting himself occasionally to express a wish for one, he talked willingly about his life. His account, while very specific on some details, was vague and contradictory on others. Some episodes, such as illegal activity in West Memphis, were entirely omitted. Rather, Byers claimed that he’d had “a spotless record” until his recent troubles. He expressed bewilderment that police in northern Arkansas had made such a big deal of his involvement in the teenagers’ “little” fight. He said he was innocent of the burglary and blamed his no-contest plea on “bad advice” from his lawyer. He never acknowledged that he’d sold drugs, but he did admit to having abused them, though onlyafter Melissa’s death. He called his decision to turn to drugs a “mistake” brought on by “self-pity” in the wake of Melissa’s death, and he lauded his incarceration as “probably the best thing that ever happened” to him because it had snapped him out of a downward spiral.

Though Byers vowed that he would never “say anything bad” about his late wife, he noted that she’d begun abusing drugs long before they’d met. She’d had a heroin and Dilaudid habit, he said, which he’d tried to help her break. In fact, Byers said, his first call to the West Memphis police—the one that led to their use of him as a confidential drug informant—had been to report some of Melissa’s suppliers. But Byers’s account of events shifted during the four-hour interview. At another point, when his status as an informant was mentioned, he down-played this and offered a different version of his initial contact with the police. “I saw someone dealing in an area close to where I lived,” he said. “I saw an individual on the street corner making transactions to school students that, in my opinion, appeared to be selling drugs. I called Crime Stoppers. They used my house for an observation. The West Memphis police filmed some transactions from my home. As far as I know, there weren’t but, like, two arrests ever made. And that is the alpha and the omega of my drug informant status. John Gotti I am not.”

Asked about his arrest in Memphis a year before the murders, when