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“You reap what you sow,” he added sternly. “If you dwell on good thoughts, you’re going to be a pretty good person. If you put poison into your system, you’re going to be poisoned.”

He blamed Damien, Jason, and Jessie not only for the murders, but for most of the grief in his life. “They killed my son. They contributed to the loss of my business. They were a factor in my wife’s death. And I believe they were a contributing factor to my being in the penitentiary. I have been searching my mind and heart to try to find a way to forgive them. However, to this day and time, I have not achieved that. I feel like I could come closer to forgiving them for their actions if they could ever be man enough to stand up and admit what they did. But it appears they can’t do that, and I really can’t have sympathy for a coward.”

He added, as the interview concluded, “If I had one hope, it would be that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley would be man enough to stand up and say, ‘Yes, I did that. I wasn’t in my right mind. I’m sorry that I did that. Could those families ever forgive me?’” Then, as though realizing what he’d described was impossible, he added, “But there’s a slim chance of that. They probably don’t have the intestinal fortitude.”

Melissa’s Parents

The only point on which Byers expressed regret during the interview while he was in prison concerned his relationship with his other stepson. Sixteen-year-old Ryan Clark left home on the afternoon his mother died, and Byers said he had not heard from him for years. “I acknowledge that I was not a perfect father,” he said, wiping away a few tears. “There are no perfect fathers. Even my dad had a few shortcomings. But I still love Ryan and I want nothing but good for him. I can only say that I hope he’s done well.”

Ryan was more reserved. When contacted in 2001, he was twenty-two—and reluctant to speak about the deaths of his brother and mother.365He said that he believes they are both “in heaven,” that talking will not bring them back, and that he would like to be left alone. He asked that he be left alone to “be just another person in the world.”

Melissa’s parents were not as reticent.366Interviewed at their home in Memphis, they spoke freely about the anguish that followed the deaths of first Christopher and then Melissa. They reminisced about their love for Christopher, whom they’d helped to raise before Melissa’s marriage to John Mark. They denied any knowledge of Melissa’s involvement with drugs, voiced confidence that the three convicted West Memphis teenagers were in fact guilty of their grandson’s murder, and said they didn’t see much point in reexamining either the boy’s death or that of their daughter. “It ain’t going to help,” her father said.

Nonetheless, they did speak, and much of what they had to say centered on their former son-in-law John Mark Byers. “He was a good jeweler, but he was lazy,” Melissa’s father said. Her mother interjected that “he was supposed to have a brain tumor.” But Melissa’s father stuck to his harsher view. “He’s sick,” he said, “and a liar.” Byers “beat Melissa up more than once; he blackened her eye,” the father said, adding that whenever something like that happened, Byers would “blame everybody but himself.”

Seated in their living room, surrounded by family pictures, Melissa’s parents said that the West Memphis police had never questioned them after Christopher’s murder. They still knew very little about the investigation. But if detectives had questioned the pair, they would have heard a disconcerting vignette—one that might have raised questions about the period of time just after Christopher had gotten out of school on the day he disappeared. While Byers had told police that he’d gone to a clinic in Memphis that day and had not been able to find Christopher when he’d returned home at around 3:10P.M ., Melissa’s father recalled a markedly different version of the afternoon’s events.

He said that Melissa had arranged with him to come to the house and stay with Christopher after school,