Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three (32 page)

If one thing was obvious about Julie’s letters, it was that they were written by at least two different people. This was evident by the penmanship and style used. There seems to be no reason for the dual authorship. The letters were stylistically different, but the content was of a similar nature, though Julie #1 wrote more provocatively than Julie #2. Each “Julie” also sent a postcard, but the difference between the two was striking. The card Julie #1 sent featured a full-body shot of a bikini-clad blonde, her head tilted back seductively, with a caption reading, “Florida’s Hot!”
¹³⁹
By contrast, Julie #2 sent a card depicting the US Postal Service’s Pacific Coast Rain Forest collection of thirty-three-cent postage stamps, featuring images of birds, butterflies, reptiles, and fish. She wrote on the back, in different handwriting than the previous card, “Mr. Byers: Do you like postcards? I can send more if you like them. Hope you are having a nice day!! Julie Ann Eldridge.”

Julie’s roommate, “Norie,” also sent Mark at least two letters and sent photos of her computer-generated art for him to see. Her letters were pretty flat and chitchatty. One notable exception was yet another postcard Mark received showing a nude female bottom, adorned with black leather chaps, perched above an American flag. The caption read, “Made in the USA.” The handwriting and style were clearly that of a third person. Whoever Norie was, she wasn’t either “Julie.”

Mark’s last letter to Julie sounded optimistic. “I’ll be waiting to hear back from you,” he wrote, but he never heard from her again. The correspondence had lasted several months and then suddenly halted, just as Andrea’s had. Shortly thereafter, Mark’s letters to Julie were up for sale on the Internet at
www.supernaught.com
for forty dollars each.
¹⁴⁰
The seller revealed that the letters had been purchased from a woman in Tampa, Florida, who had written Mark while he was in prison. She said she needed the money. Because
Revelations:
Paradise
Lost
2
had premiered on HBO less than a month before the letters began, it could be speculated that these were a couple of young women looking for kicks and at the same time a few saleable souvenirs for their trouble.

Other letters were slightly less obvious in motive. Between July 1999 and January 2000, Mark exchanged a series of letters with Burk Sauls, co-founder of the “Free the West Memphis Three” support group and its companion website, WM3.org. Although Sauls adamantly insisted that he “never said [Mark was] guilty of anything, and never will,” he joined Mara Leveritt, Bruce Sinofsky, and Joe Berlinger and the other WM3.org members in promoting the stock and trade of that group, implication and innuendo, with an eye toward taking the focus off the West Memphis Three. This is evident by their repeated demands for bite mark impressions. “Prove your innocence” was the gist of Saul’s approach to Mark. If this were not so, what exactly was Saul’s interest in Mark? They certainly weren’t friends. For example, while documenting his experience at one of Damien Echols’s Rule 37 hearings in Jonesboro, the hearing immortalized on film in
Revelations:
Paradise
Lost
2
, Sauls paints a less than flattering picture of Mark as a shameless ham, someone who was play-acting for the cameras to get attention. On his website, Sauls wrote that as the day’s hearings came to a close, Mark had “miraculously located the only remaining camera and was busy pontificating in his inimitable style,” and that after he was finished with the news crew, he “headed toward [Sauls and his team], and more importantly, the only other camera still shooting footage on the property.” Sauls continued, “He seemed to be performing a rehearsed scene from an unpublished Tennessee Williams play or reciting free-form prose by William Faulkner.” Sauls was probably just playing before the home crowd with words designed to appeal to the sympathetic browsers of the WM3 website; it is difficult to picture Mark Byers “free-forming” Faulkner. In his letters to Mark, however, Sauls insisted that he, Kathy Bakken, and Grove Pashley enjoyed the “off camera chats” they had with him.

In one letter to Mark, Sauls wrote, “Joe and Bruce have shown me some of the footage for the sequel to
Paradise
Lost
and it looks good.” Contrast this with the reaction of Mark’s family upon their first viewing of
Revelations
: after a phone conversation with his sister, Mark wrote, “She said it makes me look real bad. Looks like those SOBs did a number on me.” Among many things, he was confused by the inclusion of Melissa in the second film, since she had died three months prior to the release of the
first
film and had been dead for more than a year before the second movie began filming. “I don’t understand. They have this [old] clip and don’t use it on the first one, but then bring it out for the second time around.”

Sauls wrote, somewhat unbelievably, “Do you think that Joe and Bruce are doing a good job on the new film? I really hope that they show things the way they truly are, and that they avoid sensationalizing it too much.” When one views Mark’s antics in the film, it is hard to imagine that there was any intent
but
to sensationalize the situation, though it’s always possible that Sauls was not shown these sections of the film. He suggests to Mark that maybe Berlinger and Sinofsky will make a movie about Mark’s predicament to “help [him] out.” Mark must have thought this was a great idea, knowing how much the first two movies had “helped him out.”

Sauls wrote that he and other WM3.org members found themselves defending Mark to other posters on their Internet discussion forum. He gave Mark a series of questions and suggested Mark “answer and elaborate” on them, giving his word that he would publish the answers without any editing. Following are some of those questions:

• Why do think so many people feel that you are guilty of murdering the children?

• During the first film,
Paradise
Lost
, you are seen firing a pistol. A few people have asked me if during this time you were on probation, and if this was your gun or someone elses [
sic
]. Someone told me that when they were on probation, they were unable to own or operate a firearm or [
sic
] any type. What are the laws concerning this in Arkansas?

• Has the film helped you or hurt you?

• When you were interviewed for the LEEZA show, was that a good experience? [See chapter 4 for a complete discussion of this “experience.”]

• There has been a lot of talk about you working for the West Memphis Police Department. Did you ever work for them as a drug informant or in any other capacity? For how long and when?

• Just to clear it up, once and for all, when did you lose your teeth, and how?

Mark never answered this letter or any others from Sauls.

Mark also received a letter from Bruce Sinofsky, co-producer of the HBO documentaries, dated August 5, 1999, asking how Mark was doing and requesting that Mark “drop him a note.” Mark didn’t respond to Sinofsky’s letter either. According to what he wrote to his brother, he felt that he’d been tricked by the filmmakers.

What I truly don’t understand is no matter what I did or didn’t say, it still doesn’t change the facts of this crime!! Whatever I did in my past had nothing to do with May 5, ’93. This seems like a very bad dream and I’m in the middle again!! NY told me the second one was to be about all six families and their life after the trials. Our sister said that the Hobbses and Moores weren’t even in it, just ME.

This claim—that he had been told the other families would be participating in the films—was one that Mark would make frequently after his release from prison, with no one seeming to listen. That he was angry, as well as worried about the impact the film might have, is evidenced by this excerpt from the same letter:

Right now it’s probably good that I’m in the ADC so I can’t get to NY because I don’t know what I would do. I know what I would like to say to them. All I can think about now is how much harder this is going to make it on me. From the way our sister talked, it’s going to be hard to live in Jonesboro after this. I just don’t know what to do. After I talked to our sister I’ve been really freaked out and tore up. It’s driving me nuts. It makes me very mad to know they took my words and used them against me. From what our sister said, I’ve HUNG MYSELF. I’m never, never going to say anything else about this crap. As for the NY assholes, they need to leave me alone. I hope I never hear or see them again. I would like to call them at [xxx-xxx-xxxx] and tell them what I think or write a letter, but I’m not. They would use that against me too. Never again.

Despite this resolution, Mark agreed to participate in the third installment,
Paradise
Lost
3:
Purgatory
, ten years later. In this film, viewers saw a man who was much more in control of his emotions and with a different message entirely. Besides, by then the producers had a new alternate suspect.

Because he had been attacked in the Jonesboro nightclub even before the second film was released, his concern about living there after the film aired was probably justified. After talking to some of the guards who had seen the movie, Mark felt a little better. “They say they don’t think I had anything to do with it, and the WM3 are still guilty as far as they’re concerned. They say they will never get out or get a new trial. So things here are ok for now.” One of the prison staff members said she would try to get a copy of the video for Mark to watch, but it never happened. Mark’s copy of
Revelations
was shipped to his brother in Memphis; Mark would not view the film until after his release from prison on August 29, 2000.

Dermott

After almost seven months in Brickeys, Mark was transferred to the Delta Regional Unit in Dermott, Arkansas, where he would serve the remainder of his sentence. Dermott is classified as a minimum/medium-security facility, as opposed to Brickeys medium/maximum-security classification. Although it is nicknamed the “Dirty D,” Dermott is a definite step up from Brickeys for most inmates; the food is better—as it tends to be in the smaller institutions—and overall, there is less violence. Still, it’s prison. On his first or second night there, while in intake barracks #4, Mark spotted an inmate sitting on his rack, just staring at him. He had a satanic Bible open on his lap and a pentagram suncatcher (though, of course, there was no sun) hanging over his head. He eyed Mark and said, “I know who you are,” ostensibly recognizing him from the news, or perhaps from
Paradise
Lost
, or maybe just because the information was already out on the wire.

Mark just shrugged. “So what?”

“Nothing. I just know who you are, that’s all.” For whatever reason—perhaps he took issue with Mark’s comments in the film regarding evil and devil worship—the inmate soon snitched on Mark for eating chocolate in the barracks; the pettiness in prison is sometimes incomprehensible. When Mark heard what had happened, he parked himself on his rack and started staring the other inmate down.

“What are you looking at?” the inmate snapped.

“Oh, nothing,” Mark calmly replied. “I’m just going to sit here and wait until you’re asleep, and then I’m going to kill you.” Visibly agitated, the inmate nonetheless managed to fall asleep. At around one o’clock in the morning he awoke to find Mark sitting on his rack, drinking coffee and eating a chocolate bar, just staring at him.

He immediately began shouting. “Guard! Guard! Guard!” Over and over, nearing panic, he called for the hacks. The guards arrived and superficially tossed the barracks, but nothing was found, and no problem was detected; Mark was lying peacefully on his rack. “That guy is trying to kill me! I want out! Put me in PC.” The guards did him one better; after keeping him in protective custody for several days, they shipped him back to Brickeys.

Though Mark had now been received into Dermott, he hadn’t gotten out of Brickeys scot-free. A truism in prison, as Mark would write in his letters home, is that if you’re not careful, you can get into trouble and not even know why. On the bus ride from Brickeys to Dermott, Mark was not careful. He and another inmate, an old-timer who had lived in the barracks across the hall from Mark in Brickeys, were talking, just passing time, and the old man told Mark a story about someone in his barracks at Brickeys, a guy named Green. It seemed that Green had gone to commissary one day, stashed his goodies in the locker on his rack, and then been promptly ripped off by his barracks-mates after leaving his rack unattended. It was nothing, just a story. It happened to inmates all the time; it had happened to Mark. Where Mark was careless, however, was in his retelling of this story to another inmate at Dermott. And what Mark didn’t know was that Green had also been transferred from Brickeys to Dermott, and he soon caught wind of the fact that Mark, whom he didn’t even know, was chatting him up to other inmates. Green didn’t want the inmates at Dermott to regard him as ripe for a shakedown, to know that he’d been “punked” by another inmate, and he surely didn’t want anyone to think that it was okay to randomly spread stories about him. Word started going around the yard that Green was pissed off and that he had plans to find Mark and “bust him up.” One afternoon on the prison softball field, he got his chance.