Hell Hounds

How a musical moral panic destroyed three young men.

Damon W. Root from the April 2003 issue

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As it turned out, Misskelley knew even less than the confession indicated. After a Christian group presented him with some soul-saving literature, Jessie had a question for his lawyer, Dan Stidham. "There I was, sitting in a jail cell with this confessed Satanic killer," Stidham later said, "and he's asking me who 'Satin' is."

The detectives seemed to ignore alternative avenues of investigation that will seem obvious to readers of Leveritt's book. John Mark Byers, stepfather of the castrated boy, was no stranger to law enforcement. A failed pawnbroker and jeweler, Byers was also a convicted drug dealer and undercover drug informant.

As a result, he knew several of the investigating officers personally. In 1987 Byers was convicted of terrorizing his ex-wife after threatening her with a stun gun. City attorney John Fogleman, who successfully prosecuted the West Memphis Three six years later, handled that case. Byers received a light sentence: three years of probation plus child support and gainful employment -- conditions he failed to fulfill. In 1992, without explanation, Crittenden County Circuit Judge David Burnett formally expunged Byers' record of this conviction. Burnett would go on to preside over the trial and conviction of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley.

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."

The prosecutors' linkage of rock with Satanism and murder has deep roots. Rock, like its predecessor the blues, has in many ways cultivated an evil reputation. Blues legend Robert Johnson, whose songs include "Hellhound on My Trail" and "Me and the Devil Blues," is said to have sold his soul for musical skills. The Beatles placed occult icon Aleister Crowley on the cover of their seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Rolling Stones solidified their bad boy image with the 1968 hit "Sympathy for the Devil." There's a huge catalog of more explicitly Satanic classics, such as Slayer's "Altar of Sacrifice," Morbid Angel's "Fall From Grace," Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast," and Venom's "In League With Satan."

It goes without saying, of course, that none of these artists actually wants to murder children or bury the world in brimstone. Rather, they wish to shock and delight audiences with dynamic music and the excitement of transgressive identities.

Yet while Leveritt clearly understands this, she fails in Devil's Knot to fully explore the gross misinterpretation of popular music at the heart of the case. Instead, Leveritt also plays to prejudice -- against Christians rather than pagans. She is all too willing to write off the police, prosecutors, and their witnesses as deluded by their religious beliefs. "The spiritual landscape was rigorously Christian," she intones, "and rigorously literal." Well, maybe. But the impulse to link young people's music and clothes with dangerous, unnatural forces is not a regional, or even religious, phenomenon. As the predictable responses to Columbine, Wayne Lo, Eminem, and raves show, such confusion is on display everywhere, and not restricted to Christians.

Of course, that such foolish, simplistic connections between music and criminality are readily drawn everywhere provides zero comfort to Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley. But their plight has at least not gone unnoticed. In 1996 HBO broadcast the documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Woods. Featuring music from Metallica and using trial footage, TV clips, and interviews, the film convinced many that the West Memphis Three were the victims of a modern day witch hunt. Roger Ebert declared, "Everybody in the town and in the courtroom and on the jury are all blinded by their fantasies about Satanic cults." The New York Times called the Emmy-winning film "true crime reporting at its most bitterly revealing." The sequel followed four years later, while benefit albums with musicians including Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, and Hank Williams III have also hit record store shelves. Three California residents, inspired by the film, started the Web site www.wm3.org. Visitors can download documents from the trials, find out the latest information, and purchase various products with the slogan "Free the West Memphis Three."

Yet as Edward Mallett, the attorney now handling Damien Echols' appeal, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year, "I don't think judges are favorably affected by young people's groups and Web sites." Indeed, except for the efforts of their attorneys, there may be little more anybody can do for the West Memphis Three. Several appeals are pending, including motions to retest evidence and secure a new judge, and family members are accepting donations for a legal defense fund. Otherwise, the wheels of justice are grinding exceedingly slowly.

Leveritt is ultimately convinced that Salem did in fact repeat itself. Most readers will be as well. Devil's Knot is a powerful cautionary tale about the awesome and frequently careless power of law enforcement and the damage it can do when informed by ignorant moral panics and unchecked by rational individuals.