Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [202]
198.Commercial Appeal, January 16, 1994.
199. From “A Conversation with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky,” in a press release prepared by the producers, issued in 1996.
200. This from a handwritten statement and three pages of handwritten notes compiled by the West Memphis police on January 24, 1994, in the midst of Misskelley’s trial. These notes were not turned over to the defense teams until February 15, a week before the scheduled start of Echols and Baldwin’s trial. The member of the film crew who’d been given the knife was reported to have been Doug Cooper, a cinematographer.
201. These statements were also dated January 24 and not released until February 15.
202. The laboratory’s name was Genetic Design.
203. Author interview, May 2001.
204. Byers’s mother-and father-in-law, Kilburn and Dorris DeFir, also recalled the transfer of the knife as having been in November. Specifically, they said that Byers presented the knife to the member of the film crew at a Thanksgiving dinner given at the Byerses’ house, which the DeFirs and the film crew attended. In an interview at the DeFirs’ home in Memphis in April 2001, Kilburn DeFir said, “We were there. I saw Mark hand him the knife.”
205. Byers’s statements were clear and unequivocal. “No one” had been cut with the knife, and he himself had “never used it.” But at this point, Ridge proposed a possibility. “Is there a period of time,” Ridge asked, “that this knife may have been kept in the den by your chair?” Byers answered, “It seems like when I first got it, I trimmed on my fingernails some with it, right there under the lamp.”
Ridge: “Now, you say ‘when you first got it.’ Is that just that particular day it may have been there, or could it have been there for a period of time?”
Byers: “Possibly a day or two…”
Ridge: “Were you there with that knife that entire time? Was there ever a time that anybody, or a youngster, could have gotten to that knife without your knowing about it?”
Byers: “Well, I guess that I could have been to the bathroom or something, and I wasn’t in the room. It’s possible. But I never saw any evidence or signs that they had, and there was never any signs that they cut theirself with it…”
206. According to Lax’s notes, he spoke with Jonathan Karpa and Charlene Blum at the National Center for Forensic Science, which was a division of Maryland Medical Laboratory, Inc., located in Baltimore.
207. It was notable that no mention of Byers’s conviction for terroristic threatening had been placed into the murder file. Though the record had recently been expunged, the attack had taken place in nearby Marion; Fogleman, obviously, had been aware of it; and many police reports had been placed in the file relating to possible suspects with far less connection to the murders. It was, perhaps, even more odd that reports from the state police about their investigation of Byers with regard to the Rolex scam were not included in the file. This was particularly true since word had leaked that records of the police investigation into the burglary a year before the murders, in which the dog was stomped to death, had been included in the murder file. When asked why reports of that incident had been included in the file, Gitchell had explained, “This whole case is