Devils knot, p.35
Devil's Knot, page 35
wm3.org
Many filmgoers assumed that since release of the documentary, all three defendants had appealed, and that if the problems revealed in the film were real, they were now being corrected and the teenagers would soon walk free. But three friends in Los Angeles—writer Burk Sauls, graphic artist Kathy Bakken, and photographer Grove Pashley—were not content to assume. They wanted to know more about what had happened in the case, but found it hard to get information. Sauls later explained that after seeing the documentary, “I felt like I’d missed that part where they show why they thought these teenagers were responsible for the murders.” Bakken was equally perplexed. “I felt like I was hanging,” she said. “It was a horrible feeling. I hoped that something was going on, but just to make sure, I wrote to the lawyers and what I found out was that the guys were still languishing in prison.”
In October 1996, the three traveled to Arkansas, trekked through the woods where the bodies were found, drove to three different prisons, and met with Damien, Jason, and Jessie. They also met with Jessie’s lawyer Dan Stidham, the only one of the defense attorneys still committed to proving his client’s innocence. As they later recalled, they found “not a single thing” that supported the idea that the three teenagers had committed the murders. Equally troubling was the sense that “no one was out there helping them, and they had just been abandoned.”
The three began to view what happened in West Memphis as amodern-day version of the infamous Salem witch trials, in which rumors and hysteria had supplanted reason, and resulted in executions. As they often later explained, they also became convinced that just as an uncritical media had promulgated the view of the defendants as evil, a forum for a more rational discussion of what had actually taken place might introduce some of the objectivity that only the passage of time had been able to bring to Salem—in that case, many years too late for the unjustly convicted.328
As the three Californians obtained answers to their questions and dug up supporting material, they decided to publish their findings on the Internet. The Web site they founded, wm3.org, quickly became a clearinghouse for information and opinion on the case.329 A synergy developed between the documentary film and the Web site, as film viewers, intrigued by the same questions that had bothered the Web site’s founders, searched the Internet, found wm3.org, and in surprising numbers responded to its calls for action.
The Web site founders produced T-shirts featuring pictures of the three Arkansas inmates and the rallying cry “Free the West Memphis Three.” They urged supporters to write to Arkansas’s governor, Mike Huckabee, asking that he press for a reexamination of the case. A support fund was established to offset costs of maintaining the site.330 The site tried to personalize the inmates by publishing current photographs and offering glimpses into their lives in prison. In a neatly formatted 1996 “one-minute interview” with Damien, for instance, he responded to the question of what he’d like to do if he were released. “I would love to eventually own a secondhand bookstore,” he said. “I love to read, and it would be pretty peaceful.” Jason was reported to be working as an office clerk at his unit, while Jessie, like the majority of Arkansas inmates, worked outdoors on his unit’s hoe squad.
By 1997, the site reported that although the inmates’ direct appeals had failed, all three still had postconviction petitions pending before the Arkansas Supreme Court. As the Web site became increasingly sophisticated and its founders’ understanding of the legal processes deepened, documents from the case were posted, links to relevant Arkansas Supreme Court’s rulings were established, different discussion boards flourished (one for newcomers seeking information and another where the converted could discuss strategies), and an archive was developed.331
While officials in West Memphis dismissed both the documentary and the Web site as the work of misguided and misinformed would-be do-gooders from out of state—people who didn’t know what had really happened—the movement to “free the West Memphis Three” had struck an unusual chord in America. It hummed with reminiscences of ostracism, with passion for recognizable justices, and with a commitment to freedom of expression—whether it be artistic, intellectual, or religious.332
As Paradise Lost aired again on HBO, continued to play at small theaters, and moved to video, the interaction between viewers and the Web site expanded. In Arkansas, the public effect was muted, but personal responses were often intense. One video rental store in Little Rock allowed the film to be checked out for free, because the store’s owners believed Arkansans should see it.333 Almost the entire audience stayed for two hours after Paradise Lost was shown at the annual documentary film festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a discussion with the producers and some of the lawyers who’d represented the West Memphis teens. In 1998, a woman from Jonesboro who’d attended part of the second trial said that after she’d seen the film she’d gone straight to her computer. “I did a search,” she said. “I typed in a name and bam, there was the site. And I thought, ‘Damn, I didn’t think anybody would give a rip. And it amazed me no end that anybody besides myself would care.’”334
Fame in Prison
The three inmates at the heart of the mounting attention were not allowed to see Paradise Lost. E-mails flew back and forth about them, but they could not send or receive them. The case was discussed in newspapers, but the major media in Arkansas, and across the river in Memphis, paid it scant attention. For Damien, Jason, and Jessie, prison still consisted, day after day, of bad food, iron bars, and boredom. Still, the documentary and the Web site would affect their lives. For one thing, mail began to pour in.335 Among the letters sent to Jason was one from a seventeen-year-old high school student in Little Rock. Sara Cadwal lader later recalled, “I saw the documentary on HBO and knew I wanted to write to them. I guess I picked Jason because he was the youngest one.”
In an interview in 1996, Damien reported that among hundreds of other letters, he’d received one from Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking. He recalled later that the letter said, “‘Choose life,’ whatever that means.” By then, Damien had come to see life—and especially his own—differently than he had before. “I came in here as a child,” he explained, “and a few years have passed, and in this type of environment, I think you might age a little more rapidly.”336 Damien’s world widened through contacts from people who’d seen the film and visited the Web site. Many sent him books, which he read voraciously. His reading tastes expanded to include major works of literature. And he too began a serious correspondence with a woman who’d seen the film and made the effort to contact him. Lorri Davis, a New York architect and film buff, had seen Paradise Lost when it premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She began sending Damien books, and when phone calls were allowed from death row, most of his were placed to her. He’d been off his antidepressant medication since his arrival on death row, and by the end of 1996, he acknowledged that “unfortunately” he’d grown “quite a bit more cheerful”—“unfortunately” because, as he put it, “I always feel like an idiot when I’m cheerful.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Drug Informant
LIFE AFTER THE TRIALS remained hard for the families of the victims, including little Aaron Hutcheson. Though he was not a direct victim, in that he had not been killed, his involvement in the investigation had certainly exposed him to the crime’s horrors. Even after the trials, his mother’s interest in the case continued, and thus so, to an extent, did his own.
After the trials concluded and the defendants had been locked away, Vicki Hutcheson contacted Ron Lax, the Memphis private investigator, several times to report that she was “bothered” about parts of the investigation. In April 1994, a few weeks after Damien and Jason were taken to prison, Lax paid a call on Hutcheson in the apartment where she now lived. During the visit, Lax later wrote in his notes, “Vicki turned to me and asked who had received the reward money. I told her I did not think anyone had and she stated she felt she should have since her son’s voice is what ‘broke the case.’ She then went on to tell me the police had interviewed Aaron on numerous occasions without her being present and that they had no right to do that and she intended to sue the city because their actions had caused Aaron severe mental problems.”
But those were not her only concerns. According to Lax’s notes, Hutcheson also “stated she had never signed a release to have the tape recorder installed in her trailer and that Gitchell was lying on the stand when he said there was a release”; she reported “that Bryn Ridge told her they would take care of the hot checks in return for her testimony, but Ridge cautioned her not to tell anyone about that”; and when Lax told her that Damien did not drive, she said, “Well, maybe I dreamed that.”
Three months later, in July 1994, Hutcheson called Lax to ask if anything new had developed. “When I told her we were still working on Damien’s appeal,” Lax wrote, “she began telling me of her experience in New York on The Maury Povich Show. According to Vicki, the Hobbses were present, as were Mark and Melissa Byers and Mr. Hicks, Pam Hobbs’s father. Vicki stated Mark Byers was out of control and the full tape of his comments and actions should be viewed.”337
In the following month, Hutcheson called Lax’s office four more times. The first time, Lax was unavailable, and she asked to speak to Glori Shettles. Shettles later wrote, “I asked Vicki what her three biggest concerns and issues were presently, to which she responded: One, why is Mark Byers on the street? Two, why is most of the West Memphis Police Department quitting? And three, why are three boys behind bars when police had much more evidence on Mark Byers than the three?” Hutcheson called Shettles again the next day, and again two days later. “She stated she was thinking of calling Channel 13 News in Memphis to advise she had, in fact, perjured herself,” Shettles wrote after the second conversation. “She went on to say she did not lie, but she wanted to ‘get out of it.’” Four days after that, she called and had another rambling conversation with Shettles. After this one Shettles wrote, “Needless to say, Vicki is experiencing many pressures and frustrations. She desperately wants to ‘know the truth’ and realizes she cannot trust the police.”
In light of the calls, Lax arranged for Hutcheson to come to his office in Memphis, so that he and Jessie’s attorney, Dan Stidham, could formally interview her. She agreed, and on August 17, 1994, the investigator and the attorney tape-recorded a session with Hutcheson. It lasted for five and a half hours. Lax and Stidham were particularly interested in the part of the interview where Hutcheson discussed the esbat. Lax wrote in his summary:
Vicki feels that she went, but she was drunk and is not sure with whom she went. She had broken up with her boyfriend that day at around 2 or 3 P.M. and went to the liquor store and bought two fifths of Wild Turkey. She drank one bottle by herself and then went to this meeting in the area around Turrell, Arkansas. She still recalls what the area looked like, but cannot recall if Damien and Jessie went with her or not. When we tried to get her to recall how arrangements were made for her to go to this meeting, she was at a loss to do so. She recalled seeing the people painted black and realized they were undressing and stated she had to get out of there and someone took her away; however, she does not remember anything afterward and woke up the next morning, lying on the ground in her front yard with a whiskey bottle. She was alone at this time and she has no recollection of anything else.
Hutcheson’s account of her role in the case would remain ambiguous. In the late 1990s, writer Burk Sauls posted on the wm3.org Web site the transcipt of an interview he’d conducted with her. It remained on the site until Hutcheson, citing fears of her safety, asked the site’s managers to take it off. In the interview she’s described Jessie Misskelley as having been “like a little brother” to her. “What is you story about that time?” Sauls had asked Hutcheson. “Well,” she’d replied, “I’m really concerned about legal issues right now with it. But basically I said what the West Memphis police wanted me to say. And that was that I went to the meeting. The esbat meeting. It was all their stories.” She characterized the police investigation as having been “just an overreaction.” At one point she told Sauls, “You know what I want to say more than anything? I want to say that I’m sorry. I just want to tell Jessie and Jason and Damien that I’m sorry.”
A Knife Fight and a Restraining Order
Shortly after the trials, during about the same period that Vicki Hutcheson was calling Lax and Shettles, the investigators were also receiving calls from Ricky Murray, Christopher Byers’s biological father. Shettles wrote for the agency’s files that Murray “had been very disturbed recently, while watching The Maury Povich Show, as Mark Byers had stated that on the date of the murders, he picked up his wife from work and had an airtight alibi. Rick had spoken with Mark Byers at Chris Byers’s funeral. At that time, Mark did not say he had picked up Melissa at work, only that he had been at court that day.” Lax noted that Murray also stated that “Melissa Byers has been a heroin addict since age twelve. She was using heroin before she smoked marijuana.” Finally, Shettles noted that Murray “also stated he never gave up parental rights and that Chris had not been adopted by Mark Byers.”
But by then, calls from Melissa’s ex-husband to the Memphis private investigators were the least of the Byerses’ problems. After the trials, they had moved away from West Memphis, leaving a string of hot checks behind, and settled into a house in Cherokee Village, a planned community in north-central Arkansas near the Missouri line. Though they told their new neighbors that they wanted to live quietly and be granted privacy in their grief, they quickly attracted police attention. In September 1994, both Mark and Melissa were jailed by officials in Sharp County, after investigators concluded that they were responsible for the theft of antiques worth more than $20,000 from a residence near their new home.338 Police charged Mark and Melissa Byers with residential burglary and theft of property. They posted bond of $5,000 each to be released from jail. If convicted, a judge told them at their arraignment, they faced sentences of three to ten years in prison and fines of up to $10,000 each. They both pleaded not guilty.339
Within two weeks, Mark Byers was arrested again. This time he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor. The charged stemmed from an incident the previous July in which a teenager had been seriously injured in a knife fight that Byers had instigated, encouraged, and supervised.340 The police chief who arrested Byers recalled, “He kept asking me, ‘What is your opinion?’ He said, ‘I think they ought to have fought it out, don’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. That’s one of the reasons I’m arresting you.’”
By the end of October 1994, seven months after Damien and Jason’s trial, the area’s newspaper was reporting that the Byerses faced “criminal charges, restraining orders, and a feud” that involved the Byerses’ next-door neighbors. Police were called to settle differences between the two couples eight times in one month. Mark Byers told a reporter for the local paper that his relationship with his neighbors had turned sour when he had swatted their five-year-old son with a flyswatter. The neighbors complained that the swatting had been hard enough to leave bruises. In another incident, the neighbors told police that Melissa had stood in the road outside their house and yelled that if she and Mark were sent to prison, it would be the neighbors’ fault.341
When a local reporter went to interview the two couples, she noted that the Byerses, who were living on Mark’s disability income, had “no phone, no gas for hot water, and little, if any, cash on hand.” Seated at the family’s kitchen table, Mark Byers told her that he and his wife were being persecuted because of accusations that had been made against him at the trials. “We are the victims turned into villains,” he told the reporter. But before long, yet another incident brought the Byerses into the news again. A motor home belonging to the woman whose house they’d been charged with burglarizing mysteriously exploded and burned in her driveway. The woman, who was out of town at the time, told authorities that the vehicle’s propane tanks had been empty.
Spurred by the stories about the Byerses’ latest troubles, a reporter for the Arkansas Times decided to look into John Mark Byers’s background. She contacted a retired deputy sheriff from Marked Tree, the town in eastern Arkansas where Byers had grown up. The former deputy recalled that in 1973, when Byers was just sixteen, his parents had called police to their house, claiming that their son was threatening them with a butcher knife.342 The Times reporter also learned about a more recent, though less violent, incident in Jonesboro. The owners of a jewelry store there said that Mark and Melissa had worked for them briefly in October 1990, during which time jewelry valued at $65,000 had been stolen from the store. When the police failed to make an arrest, the owners filed a civil lawsuit against the Byerses and another couple. The case, which was heard in a Jonesboro court in April 1991, resulted in the Byerses’ two codefendants being ordered to return the items. The attorney who represented the Byerses’ two codefendants in that case was Val Price, the Jonesboro lawyer who was later appointed to defend Damien.343
