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By Root 549 0

U.S. Department of Justice named the West Memphis–Crittenden County Drug Task Force the best in Arkansas, and one of the top rural drug task forces in the nation. The honor was awarded, in part, because of where West Memphis was located—at the juncture of Interstates 40 and 55. With a level of truck traffic at least twice that of its nearest competitor, West Memphis liked to boast of being the truck stop capital of the world. For the police that offered the opportunities—for both enforcement and corruption—of a huge flow of drugs through the county. The location of Memphis, the eighteenth largest city in the United States, directly across the river, contributed to the illegal milieu. With the federal Drug Enforcement Administration estimating that one in every eighty-five vehicles on the interstates carried illegal drugs or drug money, property seized from vehicles had become a major source of income for rural Crittenden County. In 1992, the county drug task force seized, in addition to a wealth of drugs, more than a million dollars in cash, seventy-four vehicles, thirty-seven guns, and assorted other property. The seizures bulged the coffers—as well as the evidence locker—of a county with just fifty thousand residents, one-fourth of whom lived at or below the federal poverty level.

18. Details of the drug task force investigation from Arkansas State Police files.

19. While information about the state police investigation of the Crittenden County Drug Task Force did not make it into the West Memphis paper, theEvening News that spring did report information from another state agency that the rate of child abuse in the county was one of the highest in the state.

20. Byers’s first wife’s name was Sandra; their children were John Andrew and Natalie Jane.

21. Accounts of the arrest and conviction for terroristic threatening were found in the records of the Crittenden County clerk’s office that were apparently overlooked when Byers’s conviction was expunged.

22. Records of the request for a restraining order are from Crittenden County Court. In an author interview in April 2001, Fogleman acknowledged that he’d heard the tape but said he did not know where it ended up.

23. Author interview with Melissa’s parents, Dorris and Kilburn DeFir, April 2001.

24. In an author interview in 2001, Byers said he’d volunteered to work as a drug informant out of a sense of “a civic responsibility.” He said, “I did what America needs a lot of citizens to do.” But if he was reporting on drug activity strictly for altruistic reasons, he was an exception to the rule. Most drug informants agree to assume that dangerous role only after having been arrested, in a plea bargain arranged with prosecutors.

25. Usually, records are expunged for people who were young at the time of their offenses. Byers was thirty when he was charged and convicted, and thirty-five when the record was expunged.

26. The arrest was made and recorded by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.

27. For example, detectives said they placed the clothes taken from the water into paper grocery sacks, and the clothes were brought back to the police station to dry. These items were then said to have been repackaged—reportedly in the original sacks—and sent to the state crime lab. But the sacks received by the crime lab showed no water marks or other signs of having been wet. Other concerns focused on the quality and completeness of the investigative record. Later reviews of the file would show that officers took notes but left many undated and unsigned. In some instances they added names and addresses to the case file without indicating the significance of the names or why they had been filed. They filed copies of fingerprints, sometimes without attaching a name. They conducted interviews in a variety of fashions with no apparent policy or consistency of approach. Notes were taken of some interviews and not of others; some interviews were tape-recorded, some were videotaped, and others were recorded only in part. Officers showed people photo lineups in their search for suspects