Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [218]
358. Circuit judge Ralph Wilson.
359. Deputy prosecutor Stewart Lambert.
360. Arkansas State Police officer Brant Tosh testified at the hearing in which Byers’s probation was revoked. But when he later checked on the disposition of those cases he was surprised. Looking them up on the computer, he said, “This is not the typical disposition.” Tosh reported that Byers had been sentenced to sixty months for the residential burglary and sixty months for theft of property, plus twelve months on the charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Together, the sentences totaled 132 months, or eleven years—three years more than the eight years he was ultimately ordered to serve in prison. Prosecutor Brent Davis, citing pending appeals in the West Memphis murder case, declined to be interviewed for this book.
361. For most of his incarceration, Byers was held at the Delta Regional Unit, in Dermott, Arkansas.
362. Byers spoke about his first marriage but made no mention of his conviction for having threatened his first wife’s life. He said that after jewelry school, he’d risen quickly through the ranks of Gordon Jewelers, until 1981, when the chain’s management wanted him to move to Houston “to be a home-office supervisor over 168 stores.” He claimed his wife didn’t want to move to Houston, “and so being the good, Southern Baptist family man that I was raised up to be, I chose my family and resigned.” Byers said he’d “felt used” after that marriage failed, but insisted that he had “never hit a woman.” To the contrary, he insisted, “It takes a very small man to strike a woman.”
363. He said he’d described the dream in the presence of the filmmakers after Melissa had mentioned that she’d been raped. “She used that rape as part of her reason for why she did drugs,” he said. “I was telling her the story about the dream to help her see that that didn’t make sense. I told her, ‘If this had happened to me, like I had dreamed, would that give me an excuse to do drugs?’ But the filmmakers, they edited where I said this was a story. They left out that it was a dream.”
364. Byers quickly added, however, that he’s “never had a bad temper” and that he was, in fact, “a very mild-mannered person.” Nevertheless, he said, he’d taken a course in anger management in prison. He said that while some inmates were required to take the course, he had volunteered.
365. Author interview, November 2001.
366. Melissa’s parents were Dorris and Kilburn “Dee” DeFir.
367. “When they moved up there,” Dee DeFir said, “we paid for gas to heat the house and so Ryan could have hot water. They didn’t have a telephone, so I had a phone put in and the bill sent to me, just so Melissa and Ryan could call us. I paid the telephone bill and the gas bill. We brought groceries up there to them at least once a month.”
368. “Mark might have had something to do with it,” Dorris DeFir said. Her husband agreed, “We don’t want nothing to do with him.” Yet they express no interest—and see little point—in any future legal inquiry. “If he killed her and got away with it,” they say, “he’ll pay for it in the long run.”
369. Rick Murray was now living in Tennessee. In his letter to the Web site, which was posted in May 2000, he wrote: “I know the people who are close to this thing, and I know that people were mad about it, and they were wanting it to be solved quick. It got to the point where they weren’t thinking about the truth, they were only listening to what the police and the reporters were telling them.” He continued, “There was no evidence to convict the three who are in prison and everybody knows this. They just don’t want to see it this way because it’s easier to believe that the police got the right people.” In a subsequent interview, Murray said he had never signed papers to allow Byers to adopt Christopher and that Byers’s claims that the adoption had taken place were false. Murray is entitled to see Arkansas records