Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [162]
Melissa’s father told the story, apparently unaware of the light it cast on Byers’s account. He and his wife knew little more than the general public about the investigation into the children’s murders. And they had not attended the trials. “Melissa told us not to,” her mother explained. “She said it would only upset us.” Once the trials concluded, they believed, along with most of the public, that justice had been done. After all, they asked, echoing a widespread opinion, who would confess to a crime like that if he didn’t commit it? “Misskelley may be retarded,” Melissa’s father said, “but he ain’t that retarded.”
Their grief was compounded in the months after the trials by concerns about Melissa and Ryan, who were now living farther away, in north-central Arkansas. Melissa’s parents said they’d given Mark and Melissa money to put down on a house because they knew that, now that Melissa was no longer working, the family was subsisting entirely on Mark’s disability check. But the money seemed to disappear. They said Ryan would call and report that he was having to take cold showers before school, and come home to an unheated house where there often was not enough food.367
But the couple’s concerns had intensified in the days just before Melissa’s death. “She’d called up and said, ‘Daddy, I need $200. I’m broke.’ I sent her the money,” the father said. “I sent her $200 on Monday and she died on Friday. They said she had $3 in her purse.” But the couple said Melissa was also worried about more than money that week. They said her marriage to Mark was on the verge of collapse. “We knew he was shenaniganin’,” her mother said. “He was foolin’ with a woman up there. Melissa said she was going to divorce him. She told him she was going to leave him. But he said he wasn’t going to divorce another woman.”
Melissa’s parents said that shortly before Melissa died, she’d told them that she was coming home to stay with them for a couple of days. They expected her on Friday. When she hadn’t arrived by midafternoon, “We called the house to see if she was coming, and Mark said, ‘No, she’s not feeling good and she’s asleep.’ Later on that night the phone rang. Mark just laid it out: ‘Melissa’s dead.’ That’s all he said.”
Her mom, who’d answered, remembers stammering, “Melissa’s what?”
“We wanted to go up there,” Melissa’s father recalled. “But Mark said there wasn’t no need because the police had seized her body.”
As after Christopher’s murder, the couple said they were not contacted by police after Melissa’s unusual death, either. But this time, they said, doubts about the circumstances surrounding Melissa’s death caused them to sever their relationship with Byers.368
The couple’s other former son-in-law, Christopher’s biological father, held a different opinion of the case. In a letter posted on the wm3.org Web site, he proclaimed his belief that the teenagers convicted of killing Christopher, Michael, and Stevie had not committed the crime.369“I want to know who murdered my son,” he wrote, “and I want to know that they will be caught and punished for what they did. I don’t want three innocent people to suffer for something they didn’t do.”
On August 29, 2000, Byers was released from the Arkansas Department of Correction. Having served fifteen months of his eight-year sentence, he was placed on parole until May 2007.370
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Public
IN1997, PAMHOBBS, the mother of Stevie Branch, filed a $10 million