Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (28 page)

“I’m interested in buying the stuff,” Tosh said, “but I’m busy with a girl and really can’t make it tonight. Is it okay if I send someone else to pick it up?”

“Who would you send?” Mark asked.

“Do you remember Jeff? I introduced him to you today.”

“I think so,” Mark said. “What does he look like?”

Tosh replied, “About five feet ten inches tall, brown hair, kind of stocky.”

As if this entire dialogue wasn’t warning enough that something was awry, Tosh then asked Mark for
directions
to
his
house
. This was nothing short of incredible. Leon had been to Mark’s house that very day, yet Mark was supposed to believe that he had forgotten how to get there? There was no Jeff, and the man Mark was talking to was not Leon. How could he not have known this? He had successfully moved many pounds of marijuana over the years, and yet he was breaking a cardinal rule of the drug business:
never
do business with someone you don’t know. He was taking this risk for a measly eighty dollars. How could he have been so careless? Regardless of these clearly sounding alarms, Mark gave Tosh/Leon directions and waited for “Jeff” to arrive.

“And you had better not do Jeff wrong,” Tosh added, apparently to add some credibility to the call, though it was hardly needed; Mark was completely clueless about what was really going on.

“I won’t,” Mark replied. “It will all be there. It was all there this morning, wasn’t it?”

And so it went. “Jeff,” who was in reality drug task force (DTF) investigator Bob Andrews, withdrew five twenty-dollar bills from department funds, grabbed a mini-cassette recorder, and headed out to 1609B Stone Street with DTF investigator Rick Harmon. If Mark was suspicious about Jeff arriving with another male in tow, he said nothing. Mark greeted the agents, made the exchange, and was promptly placed under arrest (though not before asking the agents for a ride to a friend’s house to buy some pot). One can only imagine the amusement on the faces of Andrews and Harmon when Mark asked, with a totally straight face, “Since I’m under arrest, can I have my pills back?”

For this offense, Mark was looking at three to ten years in state prison. He was taken to the Jonesboro police station, where his mug shot and fingerprints were taken. He was then transported to the Craighead County Jail, where he spent the next two nights. At the arraignment, Mark was formally charged with delivery of a controlled substance and held on $1,000 bond, which he posted the following Monday. He was to appear in court on February 26 before Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. Mark applied for, and was granted, the services of public defender Bill Howard to represent him in court; prosecutor Chuck Easterling would be representing the state. Howard and Easterling negotiated a guilty plea on Mark’s behalf, and on April 19, 1999, Judge Wilson accepted the plea and sentenced Mark to five years of supervised probation. Further, he was to pay $211 in court costs, a monthly $20 probation fee, and $250 to cover the cost of his court-appointed attorney; payments were to be made in monthly installments of fifty dollars. Mark was to make monthly visits to his parole officer, submit to drug testing, and curiously, “work faithfully at suitable employment.” Mark was completely disabled at the time; one can only assume this parole condition was part of a boilerplate form and had been mistakenly included.

Disaster had once again been averted, but for how long? Unbeknownst to Mark, Sharp County was already after him. On April 9, 1999, ten days before his sentence was imposed in Craighead County for the Xanax sale, prosecutors in Sharp County filed a petition for the revocation of the suspended sentences Mark had received in 1996 and ordered him to appear in court on May 26. Prosecutor Stewart K. Lambert had decided that it was time for Mark Byers to ante up for his crimes. (“I hated that bastard,” Mark said of Lambert in a letter from prison, “and he hated me.”) Despite what others—notably Mara Leveritt—have said about Mark leading a charmed life when it came to avoiding prosecution, he didn’t feel so confident entering the courtroom that morning. In fact, he was “scared shitless.”

He showed up in court that day looking like a condemned man. He also showed up without an attorney, and the public defender was out of town. Because Mark had successfully petitioned the court to proceed
in
forma
pauperis
(literally, “in the manner of a pauper”), circuit judge Harold S. Erwin assigned attorney Larry Dean Kissee, who happened to be in the courtroom on another case, to represent Mark. Kissee had also represented Mark in 1996 when he was convicted of the original felony and misdemeanor charges in Sharp County. Mark must have been overjoyed to see him again. (“He was a real asshole. Floated me down the river.”
¹²⁹
)

From the bench, the judge peered down at Mark. “You’re looking at twenty years, Mr. Byers,” Erwin said flatly. “I think you had better talk with your attorney, and I’ll see you back in court in thirty minutes.”

Kissee disappeared into Lambert’s office and came out with two words: “Eight years.” Mark recalls, “Eight sounded a whole lot better than twenty, so I took it.” Erwin signed a judgment and commitment order and turned Mark over to the Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADC), and just like that, it was done; John Mark Byers was going to prison.

Summer
Camp

From the courthouse in Ash Flat that day, May 26, 1999, Mark was escorted across the parking lot to the city jail. The usual routine for newly convicted prisoners is to spend anywhere from several days to several months—or more—in a city or county facility before being transported to the Diagnostics Unit at Pine Bluff. Time spent in jail is credited toward an inmate’s sentence. For Mark Byers, as was the case with so many things, a different procedure was followed. Rather than wait for the sheriff’s office to come for him, someone called in a deputy on his day off to drive Mark to Pine Bluff; he spent less than an hour in the Ash Flat city jail. Why the departure from the norm? “They hated me. They wanted me out as soon as possible,” Mark said. If this sounds paranoid, we need only remember that, contrary to the provisions of the Arkansas State Constitution, and upheld by a later court ruling, Mark had been “exiled” from the five-county area that includes Cherokee Village and Ash Flat.
¹³⁰
Further, Sharp County sheriff’s deputy Dale Weaver’s firm belief that Mark was involved in Melissa’s death lends credibility to the position that Sharp County had a beef with Mark Byers.

After having his belt, shoes, and shoelaces taken at the city jail, he was quickly hustled down to Pine Bluff.

The Diagnostic Unit at Pine Bluff lies approximately forty miles south of Little Rock and about a three-and-a-half-hour car ride from Ash Flat. In comparison to anything Mark had ever seen, this was the Big House. “When I first laid eyes on Pine Bluff, I just about shit. It was all I could do to keep from running or showing how scared and afraid I was. It freaked me out.” Mark arrived at ten minutes past five on the afternoon of May 26, just hours after being sentenced. He was fingerprinted—again—photographed, deloused, and issued the standard orange prison jump suit, which he, like other inmates, would wear until being shipped out after diagnostics. He was then marched down the center of the unit to the taunts of the inmates hanging around. Because of the ponytail he wore at the time, he heard jeers such as “We got ourselves a Jesus here!” He was led to a large steel door, which the guard ordered to be opened. Mark was pointed down the cell block and told, “Last one on your right. Welcome to your new home.” Completely alone, Mark navigated his way toward his cell. Above him were two additional tiers of cells. As he made his way down the block, inmates from the two tiers above began pelting him with all manner of debris and garbage—anything they could get their hands on—all the while mocking and insulting him, letting him know what they were going to do to him later. Despite being on knees that felt like water, Mark managed to get into his cell, and the door mercifully clanged shut behind him.

The cell itself contained the usual prison furnishings: steel cot, steel toilet (no seat), and a steel sink. The sink would be Mark’s only source of water for the next thirty-six hours. Because the faucet only dribbled water even when wide open, he first tried putting his head in the sink under the faucet to catch the meager flow but was eventually forced to form a makeshift cup out of an empty toilet paper roll. He used this until it disintegrated.

There were two five-inch square windows in the cell, and it was through these portals that Mark got his first look at the prison yard. Because he was in a ground-level cell, the inmates out in the yard also got a good look inside at the newest guest, though it felt more like he was in a zoo on display. He slept—if you could call it that—fitfully that first night, hearing the sounds of other inmates screaming while enduring a beating or rape, crying for their mothers, or cussing and fighting with men on different tiers. It’s never quiet in prison, and it’s never dark; there’s always a light on somewhere. In the morning, Mark was called out of his cell. “Now the prison is
alive
,” Mark recalls. He had no idea where he was going or why, but he soon found out that this was “pill call,” where he would be given the medications that were listed on his intake form, less those that had been removed by the prison doctor, who deemed them unnecessary. Seeing how the pills were dispensed, Mark had one thought: “I’ve got to somehow take that pill cup back with me.” Since he couldn’t exactly ask for it, he committed his first offense on the inside: he “palmed” the cup after it was set down, and smuggled it back to his cell. At least one problem was solved; he now had something to drink out of. The next step in the intake process was to have his hair cut and be issued his prison photo ID. One need only look at the face looking back on Mark’s prison identification photo to see what he was thinking: “I am totally
fucked
.”

The Diagnostic Unit near Pine Bluff is exactly what its name implies. Upon sentencing, inmates are brought here for classification and assignment to their new prison “homes.” After a four-day stay in his private cell, Mark was moved into a barracks with 125 other men. There he listened to the other inmates, many of whom had previously done time, talk about which prisons they might be sent to. Various prison names were batted around, but one name consistently came up as somewhere you didn’t want to go: Brickeys. Mark had been assured by his lawyer that he would do his time in a minimum—to medium-security prison, such as the North Central Unit (NCU) at Calico Rock. NCU is home to the ADC’s pre-release program, and as such there is comparatively little trouble there. Many inmates there are “short-timers” and aren’t interested in jeopardizing their impending parole hearings. Because all of the charges against Mark had been for nonviolent offenses, he had a reasonable expectation that he would be sent to a minimum-security facility. He was wrong. On the eighth day of his confinement at Pine Bluff, Mark’s name was called out, and he was given new prison “whites” and a sack: he was moving. He and some other men were cuffed, shackled, and sent packing. The bus that transported Mark from Pine Bluff was a typical prison bus. It was essentially a converted school bus, but the windows were caged so they couldn’t be opened, and forget about air conditioning. The oppressive heat and humidity inside the bus were unbearable, and minutes traveling seemed like hours, hours like days. There were two inmates to each seat, one handcuffed to the other, with their paper sacks tucked between their legs. Anything left of their old life not deemed contraband was contained in those bags. After one hundred miles or so up Arkansas Route 79, the bus took a dog-leg turn onto Route 131 and then bounced along a gravel road for half a mile before pulling up to the sally port at the Eastern Arkansas Regional Unit (EARU) at Brickeys. Home sweet home.

Brickeys

The EARU, near Brickeys, Arkansas, is a menacing looking place, set in the middle of farm country near the Mississippi River in east-central Arkansas. Located some fifty miles southwest of Memphis, the prison itself is situated on 2,500 hot, dusty acres surrounded on three sides by a muddy bayou. It is the archetypal maximum-security prison, an undisguised fortress consisting of a series of sprawling one—and two-story red brick buildings, surrounded by twenty-foot razor wire fences (
lethal
electrified fences for ADC prisons were approved in 1997, though in Brickeys they hadn’t been installed) and gun towers at each corner. Sitting at the end of a short gravel road, its location is symbolic to many of the facility’s 1,200 inmates: this is the end of the line. Although there are prisons in Arkansas with higher security levels—the Supermax Unit at the Varner Unit, for example—Brickeys has a reputation for toughness and is one of the least desired destinations among inmates in the system, and not only because of the other inmates. “It seemed like the ADC was just putting uniforms on gangbangers and sending them to Brickeys,” one former inmate says of the guards there. “They were beating inmates left and right there. If they got mad at someone, they’d say ’fuck you; you don’t get to eat today.’” The food, the same inmate says, was horrible even by prison standards (he has done time in four prisons in the ADC). Spoiled vegetables and milk were common, as was food containing dirt and insects. “You know that it’s dirty when you get a piece of chicken and it has feathers on it.” The cuisine at Varner Supermax, he says, is a close second.