Read Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three for Free Online Page A

simpleton. “His antics could be amusing, worth a chuckle . . . he was very much like a child. He was harmless.”
    The Investigation Part 2
    Despite the local scuttlebutt about devil worship and cults, the animal carcasses that were allegedly found around town, and strange gatherings reported at Robin Hood and the abandoned cotton gin known as “Stonehenge,” West Memphis was totally unprepared for the tragedy of May 5, 1993. No one could have predicted it, except perhaps for Jerry Driver and his fellow juvenile officer Steve Jones, whose obsession with Echols was later referred to by defense attorneys and supporters as “Damien Echols tunnel vision.” Once Echols appeared on the investigators’ radar, supporters claimed, other viable suspects were ignored, and the investigation focused solely on Damien. This is not an entirely accurate assessment because the West Memphis police had been tracking down numerous leads, and they did have other suspects.
    There was the black man who had appeared in a Bojangles chicken restaurant near the Blue Beacon Truck Wash on the night of the murders. He was mud-caked and apparently bloody and had one arm in a cast. He spent nearly an hour in the Bojangles ladies room before a female patron reported him to the manager, Marty King. King contacted the West Memphis police around 8:40 p.m. on May 5, and Officer Regina Meek responded to the call. Meek was part of the search effort for the missing eight-year-olds, and upon learning that the man had already left the restaurant, she told King that someone would be contacting him soon; she never got out of her patrol car. Someone did finally come to investigate at Bojangles—the next night, May 6—but by then the restroom had been cleaned, and all that was left was a pair of sunglasses found in the toilet and some tiny speckles of what appeared to be blood on the wall. Detective Bryn Ridge collected—and subsequently lost—some scrapings off the wall, and there the investigation ceased. “Mr. Bojangles” was never seen again.
    But was Bojangles ever a viable suspect? The police didn’t think so. The scene of the murders had been meticulously cleaned, if indeed that was even the primary crime scene; at that point no one was sure. Despite what must have been a great deal of blood loss, only traces were discovered under luminol testing. Upon his arrival at the restaurant, Mr. Bojangles was covered in mud and blood. He was disoriented and couldn’t even choose the correct restroom. Could this man have single-handedly subdued, murdered, bound, and disposed of three little boys, leaving hardly a trace? Eliminating Bojangles from the list of suspects was a relatively simple matter of means: he had none. But does this mean that he wasn’t a witness? This disturbing possibility will haunt the case, in all probability, forever. If Bojangles did see something, he didn’t want anybody to know about it in 1993, and it isn’t hard to imagine why. Would a poor black man in the South come out of the woods covered in mud and blood, flag down police, and tell them that he had just witnessed the murders of three little white boys?
    The authorities’ second suspect, other than Echols, was none other than John Mark Byers. The parents are normally the first people to be investigated and eliminated as suspects when a child is killed, yet Byers was not interviewed until May 19, two weeks after the murders. Although he was quickly cleared of suspicion by the police, this two-week period would be the subject of considerable suspicion for some who felt that Byers should have been higher on the list of suspects. There were several reasons for this. Byers had admitted to giving Christopher a “whipping” during what turned out to be the last time he would see the boy alive. Some felt that this spanking was the result of a rage that then drove Byers to kill his son and two others. This viewpoint was largely held by the “Free the West Memphis Three”