Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [77]
It began with Gitchell reading Byers his rights and advising him that anything he said could be used against him in court. Byers said that he understood and waived his right to a lawyer. He then told Gitchell that, yes, he had owned a Kershaw knife—“You know, it’s got like a serrated edge, like a Ginsu knife”—which he had given to a member of the film crew “as a Christmas gift.” Byers said he believed that had been in November.204He told Gitchell that he had never used that knife for hunting; that, in fact, “that knife had not been used at all”—and that no one in his family had ever been cut with it. He said, “No one’s been cut with the Kershaw.”
Detective Ridge asked Byers, “Did you use the knife?”
“I never used it,” Byers replied. “I would have used it. Hopefully, I was going to use it for deer hunting—that’s all I do is deer hunt—but I never had an opportunity to use it on a deer.” He told the detectives that the knife had “stayed put up” in the top drawer of his chifforobe.
Gitchell: “Did, um, any of your kids, Ryan or Chris, know where that knife may have been at? I mean, could they have gotten it out?”
Byers: “No sir. I don’t think they could have….”205
Gitchell then showed Byers the knife that had been sent from New York. He described it as a Kershaw knife with a nine-inch blade, a Pachmayr grip, and an inscription that read “Cannon City.” Byers identified it as the knife he had given to the cinematographer, a knife that, he said, his wife, Melissa, had given to him a few years before as a Christmas present.
“Okay,” Gitchell said. “Let me explain a problem we had, and you need to answer this for me: we have found blood on this knife.”
Byers: “I can tell you where I might assume it might have come from.”
Gitchell: “All right.”
Byers: “Uh, I got a deer this year, and I was cutting it up to make some beef jerky and I had a filleting knife, a Ginsu filleting knife, and I thought of that knife, and I tried to cut some of the deer as thin as possible, and when I found out that it wouldn’t cut as thin as the skinning knife was, I put it up. But that would be the only time it’s been around anything bloody…. I was cutting some deer meat at home.”
Neither Gitchell nor Ridge asked Byers to explain why, only a few minutes before, he had stated that he had “never used” the knife and, even more specifically, that he’d “never had an opportunity to use it on a deer.” Instead, Gitchell proceeded, almost deferentially, to point out another “problem.”
“Okay,” he told Byers, “let me, let me go a little bit further and say there’s a problem with that. I mean, I’m not saying that’s not true. The problem is we have sent this knife off and had it examined, and it has the blood type of Chris on it.”
Suddenly Byers began addressing the detective by his first name. “Well, Gary,” he responded, “I don’t have any idea how it could be on there.”
“That’s our problem,” said Gitchell.
Byers: “I have no idea how it’s on there.”
Gitchell: “Why? Why would this knife have blood on it?”
Byers: “I have no idea, Gary.”
Gitchell: “That’s what scares me.”
When Lax and the defense attorneys saw a transcript of the interview, they were appalled by the tenor of the exchange. Byers was in an extremely compromising situation. Blood consistent with that of his mutilated son had been found on his own knife, a knife he’d said had never been used and that he’d given away to someone who was leaving the state. Yet when this was pointed out to Byers and he had no good explanation, the chief detective on the case had remarked thathe was scared.
Byers,