True Crime Cases

The West Memphis Three (Part 4)

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Appeals and New Evidence

In May of 1994, the three defendants appealed their convictions for the first time and they were upheld on direct appeal. In June of 1996, Misskelley's lawyer was preparing an appeal to take to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2007, Echols petitioned for a retrial based on a statute permitting post-conviction testing of DNA evidence due to technological advances made since the time of their original convictions. The petition failed when the original trial judge, David Burnett, disallowed presentation of this information in his court. This ruling was in turn thrown out by the Arkansas Supreme Court as to all three defendants on November 4th, 2010.

John Mark Byers, the adoptive father of victims Christopher Byers, gave a knife to cameraman Doug Cooper, who was working with documentary makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky while filming the first Paradise Lost feature. The knife was a folding hunting knife manufactured by Kershaw. According to the statements given by Berlinger and Sinofsky, Cooper had informed them of his receipt of the knife on December 19th 1993. After the documentary crew returned to New York, Berlinger and Sinofsky were reported to have discovered what appeared to be blood on the knife and were ordered by HBO executives to return the knife to the WMPD. The knife was not received at the department until January 8th, 1994. Byers initially claimed that the knife had never been used, however, after the blood was found on the knife Byers stated that he had used it only once to cut deer meat. When told the blood matched both his and Chris' blood type, Byers said he had no idea how that blood might have gotten on the knife. During an interrogation, West Memphis police suggested to Byers that he may have cut his thumb, but further tests of the knife produced inconclusive results about the possible source of the blood. Uncertainty remained due to the small amount of blood and because both John Mark Byers and Chris Byers had the same HLA-DQa genotype. Byers agreed to and passed a polygraph test about the murders during the filming of Paradise Lost 2, but the documentary indicated that Byers was under the influence of several psychoactive prescription medications that could have affected the test results.

Following their convictions, Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin submitted imprints of their teeth that were then compared to the alleged bite marks on Stevie Branch's forehead. John Mark Byers had his teeth removed in 1997, after the original tried but before and imprint could have been made. His stated reasons for the removal are very contradictory. He had first claimed that his seizure medication had caused periodontal disease and then he claimed that he planned removal because of other kinds of dental problems that had troubled him for years. After an expert examined autopsy photos and noted what he thought might be the imprint of a belt buckle on Byers' corpse, the elder Byers revealed to the police that he had spanked his stepson shortly before the boy disappeared.

In 2007, DNA collected from the crime scene was tested and none of it was found to have matched DNA from Echols, Misskelley, or Baldwin. A hair that was not inconsistent with Stevie Branch's stepfather, Terry Hobbs, was found tied into the knots used to bind one of the victims. The prosecutors, while conceding that no DNA evidence tied the accused to the scene, said "The State stands behind its convictions of Echols and his codefendants". Pamela Hobbs' May 5th 2009 declaration in the United States District Court indicates that 'one hair was consistent with the hair of Terry's friend David Jacoby'. Pamela also said that shortly after the murders her sister, Jo Lynn McCauhey, and her had found a knife that Stevie carried with him constantly in Terry's nightstand drawer. In 2013, written statements from two men, Billy Wayne Stewart and Bennie Guy, were introduced in the court. They both claimed to have had information on the case linking Terry Hobbs to the murders, but were ignored by police initially.