Hell Hounds: How a musical moral panic destroyed three young men

Reason, April, 2003 by Damon W. Root

Given his violent past and the ' killer or killers' emphasis on his stepson, John Mark Byers certainly warranted attention. "But if the West Memphis police followed up on this lead;' Leveritt writes, "they entered no record of it in the file."

In fact, Byers was never pressed on several key discrepancies concerning the boys' disappearance. According to Christopher's 13-year-old brother, Ryan Clark (Byers adopted only Christopher), Ryan had searched the Robin Hood Hills woods with two friends until close to midnight, then gone home to bed. Byers, however, told police that Ryan joined him in another round of searching after midnight. Furthermore, Byers claimed to have searched the woods alone without a flashlight. Again, the police "did not press for details about the times Byers had been alone in the vicinity of where the bodies were discovered."

During an interview that appeared in the 2000 HBO documentary Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, Byers chillingly described how the trials brought back memories of his own "torture" as a child. "It was like they were reading off what happened to me;' he stated.

Almost three years after her son's Murder, Byers' wife, Melissa, also died under suspicious circumstances, a "possible homicide" that remains unsolved. Perhaps the most alarming facts arrayed against John Mark Byers, however, concern a hunting knife he gave the makers of the HBO documentary for Christmas. In December 1993, eight months after the murders, West Memphis police searched the Byers and Moore homes, an extremely unusual move with three suspects already set for trial. Conveniently, Byers presented his gift just one day before the search.

The knife, which matched police descriptions of the murder weapon, contained blood consistent with that of both the slain boy and his stepfather. Byers' statements only compounded this mystery. Although he originally told police the knife "had not been used at all," Byers later testified that he had, probably, cut his finger on it.

In November 2000, Dan Stidham, Jessie Misskelley's lawyer, filed a motion with Judge Burnett requesting new DNA tests of several items, including Byers' bloody knife. "Additional testing with new, more sensitive, and more discriminating tests;' Stidham wrote, "may help resolve previously inconclusive test results." To date, Stidham has received no response.

Ultimately, black clothes, heavy metal music, and weird beliefs outweighed improper procedures, false testimony, and reasonable doubt. "I have personally observed people wearing black fingernails, having their hair painted black, wearing black T-shirts, black dungarees," testified Dale Griffis, the prosecution's "occult expert." Although the defense argued that Griffis' mail-order Ph.D. from "Columbia Pacific University" did not qualify him as an expert, Burnett disagreed. The prosecution also introduced the cover of Metallica's Master of Puppets album, the fact that Echols practiced Wicca and enjoyed books by Stephen King and Anne Rice, and testimony "that eleven black T-shirts had been found in Jason's home."