Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [8]
It was a tawdry story, but one that was only partly reported. The deputy was buried with honors. “He did his job,” the sheriff said at his funeral. “He did a good job for us.” Police in West Memphis never revealed the information, uncovered by the state police, about the slain deputy’s personal involvement with drugs or that he’d pawned an undercover police car and his service revolver to get them.
Yet that murder had opened a can of worms for police in Crittenden County—especially for officers on the county’s drug task force. While state police investigators were sorting through the deputy’s affairs, they discovered that he was not the only narcotics detective who’d been misusing official property. Guns seized in drug arrests were found to be missing from the evidence locker. Questions were also raised about drugs and money that had been seized and not accounted for. In the months that immediately preceded the eight-year-olds’ murders, the state police probe into the deputy’s murder had expanded into an investigation of other officers—from both the sheriff’s office and the West Memphis Police Department—who served on the county’s drug task force. On March 3, 1993, two months before the children’s murders, theWest Memphis Evening Times reported mildly that the local drug task force had become “the object of an investigation by the Arkansas State Police over firearms and drugs that may be missing.”
In a systematic probe, state police investigators began to polygraph members of the county’s drug task force, asking each member about the missing guns and drugs.17During the ten weeks immediately preceding the triple murder in May, fourteen employees of the county drug task force, including four detectives from the West Memphis Police Department, were questioned by the state police.18Several officers, including three from the West Memphis Police Department, admitted to having taken guns from the evidence locker. One deputy told investigators that it had become common practice for members of the drug task force to help themselves to guns that were reported to the courts as having been destroyed.
The most serious statements were those made by and about Lieutenant James Sudbury, a West Memphis narcotics detective. Though Sudbury was the second-ranking officer on the county’s drug task force, he would play a pivotal role in the investigation of the children’s murders. Shortly before those murders occurred, however, Sudbury admitted to state police investigators that he had taken personal possession of at least four weapons that had been seized by the drug task force as evidence. Other members of the task force reported that Sudbury had taken several other items as well. All of this was reported to Brent Davis, the district’s prosecuting attorney. But Davis, who would also play a key role in the forthcoming triple murder case, opted not to prosecute Sudbury or the other officers involved.19
In early May, after the discovery of the three boys’ bodies, few people in West Memphis were aware of the tensions that had been building between police in Crittenden County and the state police. Oddly, one of the few people who may have understood the situation was the stepfather of one of the children found dead in Robin Hood.
John Mark Byers
Byers occupied an unusual position in the West Memphis community. He was a pawnbroker, a jeweler by trade, a drug dealer, a friend of police, and a confidential informant for the Crittenden County Drug Task force. The day after the three eight-year-olds’ bodies were found, Byers simultaneously praised the West Memphis police for their efforts in the search for the boys and complained about what he regarded as the sheriff’s delayed response. The sheriff