Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [9]
Other lawmen involved in the search—deputies and police alike—could have said the same. Several had attended parties at the Byerses’ house, drinking beer, grilling burgers, and playing in the backyard pool. They knew Melissa Byers. They’d met her children, Ryan and Christopher. That may have been why, after the bodies were found, Gitchell’s clasp of Byers at the edge of the woods had looked surprisingly personal. When the photo of that encounter appeared on the front page of the local paper, a spotlight fell on Byers that would shine for many months. But there were aspects of his past that it did not illuminate, although some of them were known to local officials.
Byers was born in 1957 in Marked Tree, Arkansas, about thirty miles north of West Memphis. He studied briefly in Texas to be a jeweler and, for a time after that, worked at a store in Memphis. But by 1984, he was back, living in Marion, Arkansas, a quiet farming community six miles north of West Memphis. Byers worked at flea markets in the Memphis–West Memphis area, performing on-the-spot jewelry repair until he and Melissa opened their own store, Byers Jewelry, in West Memphis in 1989. The store lasted less than a year, and when it closed, Byers filed for bankruptcy. A few months later he signed on as a partner in a pawn business that operated on the service road alongside the interstates, near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash. That venture ended quickly too, and toward the end of 1990, the disgruntled partner bought Byers out.
Byers’s personal life was running no more smoothly than his career. In 1987, when he married Melissa DeFir, a Memphis woman with a history of heroin addiction, he already had two children, a son and a daughter, from a previous marriage. His first wife had custody of the children.20When Melissa married Mark, she brought two children to the marriage: Ryan, a shy seven-year-old, and Christopher, who was then about three. But even after his marriage to Melissa, Byers retained a stormy relationship with his first wife, who lived in Marion.
In September 1987, Byers’s volatility toward his first wife had led to his arrest.21Shortly before 7A.M ., police in Marion received a call about “a woman screaming.” The caller also reported that “there were two small kids outside by themselves unattended.” That call was followed by a second, from another alarmed resident, who’d also heard the screams. The address the callers gave was that of Byers’s ex-wife and her children. An officer later reported that when he arrived, the older of the two children outside told him that “his mother and daddy were inside the trailer fighting.” Looking inside the door, the officer wrote, he could see “a white male and a white female on the floor. The white male appeared to have a black object pointing at the female who was crying and visibly upset.” When the officer entered the house, the man, who identified himself as Byers, “got off the floor immediately and became arrogant,” while the woman “was crying and begging this officer not to leave.”
The woman told the officer that Byers had come to the house at 6:45A.M ., demanding to take the children. He then “began to threaten her, telling her that he wanted full custody of the kids, that he was going to kill her, and that he had an electric shocker and kept acting like he was going to use it on her.” The officer’s notes of the incident continued: “Mr. Byers acted strange. A few minutes he would calm down and talk normal, but then all of a sudden he would get arrogant again, advising me that he was the father and he was going to take the kids. He also became upset when I advised him that I was going to keep the Power Zapper, which he wanted back. I could not smell any type of intoxicant on his