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mechanic who often stayed at the Byerses’ house.35Taylor told the officers that Byers did, indeed, have a brain tumor, that he was currently on welfare, and that the Byers family had been having “a hard time financially.” He also reported that there were “hard feelings” between John Mark Byers and Todd Moore. “John Mark had some pool parties,” one of the detectives wrote, “and when his friends would park on his [Moore’s] grass, he [Moore] would call the police.” When asked what he knew about Byers’s whereabouts before the bodies were found, Taylor replied that his friend had searched on “both sides of the ditch—went behind Blue Beacon in the woods.”

The two officers then questioned Ryan Clark, Melissa’s thirteen-year-old son. Ryan said he had arrived home from school at “exactly 3:38P.M .” on the afternoon Christopher disappeared.36Chris was not at home. John Mark Byers took Ryan to his 4P.M . appearance in court, left, and returned to the courthouse at around 6P.M . to pick him up. On the way home, Byers told Ryan that Chris had broken a seal on the window to get into the house and that he was going to be grounded for a week. When they got home, his mother told him that they were going to go to a restaurant to eat, and to go upstairs to get Christopher. Ryan went upstairs but could not find him. The family then looked for Christopher outside.

Ryan said a neighbor told them that she’d seen Christopher on a skateboard with Stevie and Michael, who were on bikes. The neighbor said Christopher had hopped onto the back of Stevie’s bike, leaving his skateboard in the street. Ryan said he’d found a skateboard on the side of the street, about six houses from his own. But there was no sign of Christopher, and when the family could not find him, they’d gotten into the car to search.

That evening, Ryan said, he and three friends had joined the search in Robin Hood. Walking near the ditch, they’d heard “the grass and brush crackling” and “five real loud splashes.” Ryan told the detectives that after hearing the first two splashes he’d yelled, “Hello! Is anyone over there?” There was no answer, and after the third splash, he and his friends had taken off running. When they got to the pipe, he said, they’d heard a gunshot.

Ryan estimated that he and his friends were in the woods for about thirty minutes. They then searched the neighborhood. The detectives’ report on their interview concluded with Ryan’s statement that he “came home at midnight and his dad made him go to bed.” The next day, the two detectives interviewed Ryan’s friends. All three confirmed Ryan’s account.

Two weeks after the murders, Gitchell and his detectives called John Mark Byers to the station for a tape-recorded interview—his first formal interview by police. Detective Ridge, who had been asked to investigate Byers with regard to the missing shipment of Rolex watches, and Lieutenant James Sudbury, the narcotics detective who was himself under investigation by the Arkansas State Police, conducted the interview. It lasted seventy-eight minutes.

Byers described himself as a self-employed, disabled jeweler. He said he was thirty-six years old, stood six feet five inches tall, weighed 238 pounds, and was right-handed. He said he owned a blue-and-white Ford F-150 XLT truck and a silver Mark I Isuzu. Most of the interview focused on his whereabouts between the times when the boys were last seen alive and when their bodies were found in the ditch.

Byers’s report generally agreed with Ryan’s. He said that on the day the boys disappeared, he was at a clinic in Memphis being tested. He’d arrived home at 3:10P.M . By then, Christopher should have been home from school, but he wasn’t. Byers told the police that he and Melissa considered Christopher too young to carry a house key, so he had been instructed to wait in the carport if he got home and no one was there. Byers said he’d left the house at 3:50P.M . to take Ryan to court. He’d then driven to Memphis, picked up Melissa from work, dropped her off at the house, then headed back to downtown West Memphis, to pick up