• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 718 0

toxicology results were completed, and the case was still in toxicology.” Witt then asked to be transferred to the toxicology section. “Personnel in toxicology advised this investigator that the case was not in toxicology,” he wrote, “and their tests had been completed for quite some time. They advised they didn’t know where the case was at this time, and redirected this investigator back to the medical examiner’s section…. Personnel in the medical examiner’s section…advised they didn’t know what the status of the case was, but they would research it.” About thirty minutes later, Witt wrote, “personnel advised this investigator that the case was currently in the trace evidence section, where tests were being performed for arsenic and other types of poisoning.”

351. The plea agreement was approved by Stewart Lambert, deputy prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’s Third Judicial District. Officiating in the case was circuit judge Harold Erwin.

352. The deputy prosecutor was Stewart Lambert; the venue, Sharp County Circuit Court.

353. Article 2, Section 21 of the state constitution is titled “Life, liberty and property—Banishment prohibited.” In comments made to the author in December 1997. Stewart Lambert, the deputy prosecutor who arranged the deal, said, “Our understanding on that type of condition is that if it’s by agreement with counsel and the defendant, a condition like that is legal. We don’t have a right just to tell someone to leave the county, but if it’s agreed upon, we understand it’s okay. We didn’t just get together at a corner of the courthouse and say, ‘Get out of town.’” Two years later, however, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued a ruling reiterating the constitutional ban on exile under any terms (Reeves v. State, #CR98-872).

354. The crime lab’s director was Jim Clark.

355. Stephen A. Erickson, M.D., an associate medical examiner, was the pathologist of record.

356. A prison inmate serving time for drugs told investigators in a written statement that he had known the Byerses. “I can remember Mark giving her pills and other drugs on more than one occasion,” he wrote. A seventeen-year-old from Cherokee Village told Witt that, on the day Melissa died, he had been “partying” with the Byerses at their residence, “drinking Crown Royal and taking Valium and Xanax, and that he saw Mark Byers with a sandwich baggie of K-4 Dilaudid.” The third person interviewed was Mandy Beasley, the woman who’d been at the Byerses’ house when Witt and other officers conducted their search. In December 1997. Beasley told Witt that on that night, “Byers told her that he had three syringes in the bottom drawer of the chef robe [sic ] dresser in their bedroom that he hoped the police didn’t find. She advised that Byers did not tell her whether or not the syringes had anything in them, and that police did not find the syringes, and later on that night Byers threw them away.” Beasley also told Witt that she lived with Byers for two months following Melissa’s death. She said that during that time, “he threatened her life if she ever told anyone about the syringes.” Attorney Dan Stidham later interviewed Beasley, as did this author. Beasley told both that she had been having an affair with Byers, that Melissa had found out, and that on the day she died, Melissa had told Mark she was going to divorce him.

357. In an author interview in January 2002, former Arkansas State Police trooper Brant Tosh reported that he was a bit surprised when he learned that his caller was John Mark Byers. Tosh had been a deputy sheriff in Craighead County when the West Memphis murders occurred, and in the months after the arrests, he’d encountered all three of the defendants. “I transported Damien Echols to Tucker Max twice,” he recalled. “And I had to baby-sit Jason Baldwin there in the detention center after his conviction. I also drove Jessie Misskelley to a meeting in Clay County one night.” Asked about that trip, which led to Jessie’s controversial interrogation by prosecutor Davis, Tosh reflected, “I was a young officer back then. I just remember that