Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [17]
Ridge responded, “I understand.”
Byers said he instructed Christopher to clean up the carport, then left the house again to get Ryan. But when he and Ryan returned home, Christopher was gone again. His description of the search that ensued matched Ryan’s. Byers said he reported Christopher missing, shortly before 8P.M ., because Christopher had “never gone off anywhere, you know, for any amount of time.” He said he began searching in the woods by about 8:30P.M . “It had got dark,” he said. “Well, I had on a pair of shorts and a pair of flip-flops, so I run back to the house and changed clothes and put me on some coveralls and boots that I had on probably for the next two or three days. And I went back out there and I made a pass…Well, I didn’t have a flashlight, or anything with me, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to go borrow a flashlight…’ So as I came out, I see a police car pull up.” He said he and the officer searched briefly together, using the officer’s light.37
Ridge and Sudbury did not question Byers’s report that he’d driven across the river to midtown Memphis and back, at the height of rush hour, in just an hour and ten minutes. They did not press for details about the times Byers had been alone in the vicinity of where the bodies were discovered. They did not ask why he’d entered the woods in the dark to search without a flashlight. And they did not question Byers about a critical difference between his account and Ryan’s of what had happened around midnight that night.
Byers stated that when he returned home from searching the woods, “it was right at eleven.” He said he’d then placed two telephone calls: first, to the West Memphis police to ask “what the situation was,” and next, to the sheriff’s office to ask “why the search-and-rescue squad won’t come out here and help me look for my boy.” According to Byers, it was approaching midnight when he completed the calls. This was about the time that Ryan had told detectives that his stepfather had sent him to bed. But the account Byers gave was vastly different.
“We just went back looking,” he said. “As a matter of fact, my son Ryan and I got in the car and we drove around there to Blue Beacon, and went into Blue Beacon Truck Wash.” When they reached the truck wash, Byers said, he told the workers there, “Look, we got three boys missing…I want to go back here behind y’all’s property and holler and yell in these woods, but I wanted you to know why my car’s back there.” He continued, “So we pulled our little silver car back there and Ryan, he’s honking the horn and I’m out hollering and yelling around the edge of the woods, and he kind of drove the car around.” He said the two of them “hollered and yelled there for a while” and that he had then walked toward the woods, still calling for the boys. But since he didn’t have a light, he said, he had not gone all the way in. “So we hollered and yelled around there for quite a while,” Byers told the detectives. “Then we went back.”
Neither Ridge nor Sudbury mentioned Ryan’s statement to detectives that he’d been sent to bed at midnight. Neither asked Byers why Ryan might have omitted such a major episode in his account of the night. Ryan was never questioned about the discrepancy. There is no record that police ever questioned anyone who was working the late shift at the Blue Beacon that night, nor that the issue was ever addressed at all.38
That was not the only opportunity for closer questioning of Byers that Ridge and Sudbury missed. During the May 19 interview, Byers told them that on the morning of the search, he’d asked officers when they were going to put a boat into the ditch, explaining,