Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [79]
explained that a DQ Alpha test is not a very powerful test; however it is a test which can be done very quickly and with very little quantity of blood. She stated the next step to more specifically determine if the blood belongs to a particular individual is called a DNA-RFLP test, but that test requires six to eight weeks and a significant quantity of blood. I asked her if a significant quantity would be an amount which could be found on the inside of a knife after it was folded. She stated what she would consider a significant amount of blood for that test would be if the knife had been covered with blood and not been wiped off.
To the defense teams, the situation was maddening. The quickness with which the police and Fogleman had been willing to dismiss not only the knife but Byers’s peculiar interview about it renewed long-simmering frustrations. If Byers had, in fact, owned the knife for a couple of years, and kept it in his bedroom, that meant that, in May 1993, when the West Memphis police had searched his home, they had failed to find a weapon marked with blood matching that of one of the victims. On the other hand, if the knife had not been in the bedroom, as Byers claimed, the questions raised were even more serious.
As Lax and the defense attorneys discussed Byers, Damien’s lawyer Val Price mentioned having heard that Byers had once been convicted of terroristic threatening after taking a stun gun to his ex-wife and threatening her life. This was the first Lax knew of the incident, and the news left him deeply disturbed. Only later would he learn that Fogleman had prosecuted the case against Byers and that Burnett had been the judge who’d ordered Byers’s conviction expunged.
The Prosecutor’s Suggestion
If Lax had known more at the time about officials’ handling of the Rolex case involving John Mark Byers, his concerns would have multiplied. That investigation had been handled quietly. No word of it had reached the media. The only mention of it that was included in the murder case file was Gitchell’s note that Byers had called to say he regretted the incident. The state police reports about their investigation of Byers were never made part of the file.207
If reports on the Rolex case had been included, Lax and the defense teams would have learned that Byers had confessed to the crime—and that Fogleman’s boss, prosecuting attorney Brent Davis, had suggested that he not be prosecuted.208Among the records relating to Byers that the defense teams never saw was a memo dated June 24, 1993—seven weeks after the murders—in which a state police investigator outlined a plan proposed by prosecutor Davis that would allow Byers to pay $7,400 in restitution in lieu of facing prosecution.209How Byers was expected to repay the money was a question. Davis had proposed the plan just a couple of weeks after Byers, who was bankrupt and years behind on his child support payments, had publicly appealed for money to help pay for Christopher’s funeral.
Chapter Fourteen
The First Trial
WHILE THE FUROR OVER THE BLOODSTAINED KNIFEplayed out behind the scenes in the Clay County Courthouse, the life-and-death drama of Jessie’s trial was unfolding in the courtroom. Heat in the building was cranked up high as the region coped with a rare winter storm. Outside the one-story cinder-block courthouse, the streets of Corning sparkled under a coating of ice. Usually, this corner of northeast Arkansas, nestled into the Missouri boot heel, didn’t experience severe winter weather. But this January of 1994 was an exception. Just before the trial began, bitter cold had swept through the Mississippi River valley, cracking trees and making travel hazardous. Even now, on January 18, as heavily armed sheriff’s deputies led Jessie, hunched and handcuffed,