Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [160]
In fact, Byers said, he’d been “pretty much an all-American” boy. He’d been “a pretty well-rounded teenager,” he said, “an average student” who’d enjoyed “a very happy childhood” with the “greatest parents who ever lived.” When asked about the incident he’d described to the filmmakers, in which he said that once, when he was a teenager, he himself had been sexually attacked and left in a ditch, Byers launched into a convoluted explanation. “That was a dream,” he said, “a dream that I was telling Melissa. It was fiction, not fact.”363Byers characterized his decision to cooperate with the filmmakers as having been motivated solely by public service. He said he’d wanted people to know that “there are such sick individuals out there in the world that will sodomize and kill your children.”
After the murders of Christopher and his friends, Byers said, he recalled “sitting in the office with Gary Gitchell” as Gitchell related the news that one of the boys’ testicles had been removed. “We asked which child it was,” Byers said. “He told us Michael Moore. Then two or three days later, Gitchell came by our house and said it was Christopher.” In the months that followed, Byers said he knew that some people suspected him of having committed the murders—a situation that had caused him “pain on top of pain.” But he said he didn’t worry about the rumors because “my timeline on May 5 makes O. J. Simpson’s look like Swiss cheese. From seven o’clock that morning of May 5 and for the next three days, almost every minute of my time was documented.”
Just as he had complained about the failure of police in West Memphis to search for the boys on the night they disappeared, he complained about the treatment Melissa had received at the hands of medics on the afternoon she died. “They only did the paddles and shocked her once,” he said. “They did not try to save her life.”
As for his own health, Byers raised a hand to his forehead and pointed to a spot above his right eye. That’s where his brain tumor was, he said, “right here, in the front lobe.” As he described it, the tumor distorted his depth perception, weakened “the grip and feeling” in his left hand, blurred the vision in his left eye, and partially deafened his left ear. He said seizures could be triggered by overexertion, “or if I get real angry, real mad, that will cause me to have one—or if I get real anxious. Sometimes I will wake up on the floor retching. I lose bowel control. There’s gritting of teeth. Then, for three or four days, all my muscles will hurt from cramping.”364To control the seizures, Byers said that he’d been prescribed Dilantin and Tegretol, and that one of the medications had caused deterioration of his gums, or periodontal disease. In April 1997, he said, the gum disease had prompted him to have all of his teeth removed by a dentist in Shreveport, Louisiana. But as with other topics, his story of what happened to his teeth was not clear. At another point in the interview, he explained his decision to have his teeth pulled without mentioning his gums. “I had several fillings that had come out, several teeth that had been chipped and broken from accidents,” he said. “My teeth were just giving me a whole lot of trouble. They had been for years.”
Only when he spoke of the three convicted killers did Byers’s congenial demeanor change. “I don’t think they were born rotten,” he said. “But they are the guilty three. They were found guilty because of what they did. And they did what they did, in my opinion, because of the things they were reading and putting into their minds. It’s like people get into that game, Dungeons and Dragons. Only they took their fantasy to the