Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [78]
Finally, hesitantly, almost apologetically, Gitchell asked Byers the central question. And now he too was stammering. “I got to, I got to ask you point-blank, I’ve got to ask you point-blank, Mark,” he said, “I’ve got to ask you point-blank: were you around or participated in these deaths of these boys?”
“No,” Byers responded. “Not in any shape, form, or fashion…Absolutely not. Positively not. Unequivocally not. No. Not at all.”
“Well,” Gitchell said, “there are other tests being run on this knife, and we should, may have the results right now. We’ve been waiting on them the last several days.” Gitchell added that blood had recently been taken from Melissa and Ryan, and that since a sample of Mark’s blood had been taken in May, tests were being run to see if any matched the blood on the knife. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do,” Gitchell explained, “is see if it could have been…if you have similar blood. We don’t know. We don’t know if there’s a similarity. We don’t know.”
It seemed to Lax that Gitchell sounded worried in the interview and almost apologetic. Gitchell had certainly not been as confrontational as in the interview with Jessie Misskelley, when Gitchell had demanded of Jessie, “Now tell us the truth.” But if Gitchell had, indeed, been worried that his case might suddenly implode, he was reassured later that day when further results came in from the lab. Fogleman’s report on the findings left the defense teams stunned. The amount of blood on the knife was small, Fogleman said, and because of that, only a limited analysis could be performed on it. The science of DNA testing was relatively new in 1994, but working within the constraints of the small sample and the emerging science, the lab had conducted what tests it could. Its results indicated that while the blood was consistent with Christopher’s, it was consistent with that of Christopher’s stepfather, John Mark Byers, as well.
Lax and the attorneys wondered, could the DNA of two people who were not biologically related be utterly indistinguishable? Or—the thought arose—was John Mark Byers actually Christopher’s biological father? Was that why he’d always claimed to have “adopted” the boy, but not Christopher’s half brother, Ryan? Those questions would hang over the case, unresolved, for years to come.
But with Jessie’s trial under way and another trial soon to start, there was no time for speculation. And soon after Gitchell received the ambiguous lab results, Fogleman notified the defense teams that upon reflection, and despite his earlier statements to the contrary, Byers now recalled that he had, after all, cut himself with the knife.
Ignoring the Knife—and the Stun Gun
This knife, with its uncanny traces of blood and Byers’s self-contradictory statements, related more closely to the crime than any piece of evidence the police had recovered so far. Yet without further question, Gitchell and Fogleman accepted Byers’s final statement. Lax viewed the decision as another example of the investigators picking and choosing which statements to believe. They’d done it with Aaron—ignoring his contradictions while accepting his claims of having witnessed wild satanic activities in the woods. They’d done it with Jessie—ignoring his contradictions while accepting any statements he made that implicated Damien, Jason, and himself. And now, with the blood evidence rendered inconclusive, they were doing it with Byers—ignoring his contradictions while accepting only his statements that made the knife appear less suspicious. Rather than reopening their investigation, they seemed relieved to believe that Byers had, as he now remembered, cut himself with the Kershaw knife.
Lax hurried to consult with experts in DNA evidence. He contacted a forensic science lab and tried to explain what had happened.206As he later noted, “I also explained we had been