John Mark Byers: The West Memphis Three’s Most Controversial Figure

John Mark Byers was the stepfather and adoptive father of Christopher Byers, one of the three eight-year-old boys murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas, in May 1993. Loud, physically imposing, and carrying a long criminal record, he spent 14 years insisting the teenagers convicted of the killings were guilty, then publicly reversed himself and campaigned for their release. He died on June 18, 2020, at age 63, after a single-vehicle crash near Millington, Tennessee.¹

Christopher Byers and the West Memphis Murders

On May 5, 1993, Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore were reported missing in West Memphis. Their naked, hog-tied bodies were pulled the next day from a drainage ditch in the Robin Hood Hills area. Christopher had been mutilated, including castration. The other two boys died from a mix of drowning and blunt force trauma.²

Police built a satanic-ritual theory around three local teenagers: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. All three were convicted in early 1994 on the strength of a contested confession by Misskelley and testimony about the defendants’ music and clothing. Echols was sentenced to death, Baldwin to life without parole, and Misskelley to life plus 40 years.² No physical evidence tied them to the scene.³

Why Suspicion Attached to Byers

Almost from the start, a separate line of questions ran through Byers’s own household. A 9-inch serrated Kershaw knife belonging to him was found to carry human blood consistent with both his own type and Christopher’s. When police first asked about the knife in January 1994, Byers said it had never been used. Told about the blood, he changed his account and said he had cut deer meat with it. Asked how his stepson’s blood type could be on the blade, he answered, “Well, Gary, I don’t have any idea how it could be on there.”⁴

He later handed a knife to the producers of HBO’s Paradise Lost. That knife also contained blood. Byers testified the blood was his own, from a cut, an account that clashed with what he had told investigators earlier. Under cross-examination at the Echols and Baldwin trial, the state’s medical examiner acknowledged that Christopher’s wounds were as consistent with Byers’s serrated knife as with a knife recovered from a lake behind Echols’s home.⁵

Police never formally treated Byers as a suspect.⁶ Defense attorneys tried to put his history and the knife evidence in front of the jury, but most of that material was blocked by the trial judge.⁴

A Long Criminal Record

Byers’s legal troubles stretched back to his teens. In 1973, at 16, he was taken into custody in Marked Tree, Arkansas, after threatening his parents with a knife while demanding money for drugs.⁴

In 1987, he was convicted of terroristic threatening after police found his former wife on the floor while he brandished an electric shock device called a “Power Zapper.” He served three years of probation, and the conviction was expunged in May 1992. Around the same time, a neighbor reported him to child abuse authorities for allegedly whipping two-year-old Christopher severely enough that the neighbor feared for the child’s life.⁴

He was arrested in 1992 on felony cocaine and weapons charges and placed in federal custody before being released. Between 1992 and 1993, Arkansas State Police investigated him over a scam involving a shipment of Rolex watches; officers had expected to arrest him around the time of the murders, but restitution was made and no charges followed.⁴

In 1994, he was charged with residential burglary and theft involving roughly $20,000 in property from Cherokee Village, Arkansas, and separately with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after accompanying a teenager to a fight in Hardy, Arkansas, where his knife was used and he reportedly brandished a gun.⁴

Investigators also learned during the murder inquiry that Byers had been working as a confidential informant for Memphis and West Memphis narcotics authorities, including work on a case involving an illegal methamphetamine lab in Marion, Arkansas.⁴

The Death of Melissa Byers

In March 1996, Byers’s wife Melissa, Christopher’s mother, was found dead at age 40 in the couple’s Cherokee Village home. Byers called a neighbor around 5:00 p.m. saying he could not wake her. She was on the bed, nude and unresponsive. Investigators noted IV puncture marks on her feet, right wrist, and upper chest, some covered by Band-Aids.⁷

The Sharp County sheriff’s office and Arkansas State Police treated the death as a possible homicide. The associate medical examiner who performed the autopsy, Dr. Stephen Erickson, found no visible trauma and no physical sign of suffocation. He said he was “medically defeated” by the case and ruled both cause and manner of death undetermined.⁸ The state police investigator formally closed his file in December 1996, though the county sheriff reportedly kept his open. Byers was never charged, and there is no record he was formally cleared. During the investigation he told a neighbor he feared people would “accuse him of smothering her.”⁷

Paradise Lost and the Public Byers

Byers became a familiar face nationally through HBO’s Paradise Lost documentary trilogy, released in 1996, 2000, and 2011 and directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. He was most prominent in the second installment, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, which laid out his violent history and the knife evidence while Byers, on camera, kept insisting the convicted teenagers had killed his son.⁹

He later acknowledged that his behavior in the films fed the public suspicion of him. He called his appearances “outrageous rants” driven by grief. “I missed the day at school when they teach you how you’re supposed to act when your child’s murdered,” he said, adding that the filmmakers had used his condition against him: “I made a great sound bite because of the condition I was in at the time and they took advantage of that.”¹⁰

From Accuser to Advocate

For 14 years, Byers publicly held to the state’s theory. That changed in November 2007, after new defense forensic work suggested the injuries to the boys could have been inflicted by animals after death and that no DNA linked the defendants to the scene. In an interview with ABC News, Byers spoke directly to the three men he had once denounced.

“I hated you for years. I believed with all my heart you killed my son — and I’m sorry for that,” he said. “I am now convinced that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley did not kill my son.” He described the reversal in personal terms: “I didn’t want to see it. I felt like Benedict Arnold. I’m going against everything I believed for 14 years.”¹¹

He co-authored a book with Greg Day titled Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three, describing his shift from adversary to supporter of the defendants and pointing to DNA evidence that emerged around 2005 as what turned him. Critics accused him of profiting from the case. Byers replied that being called a “sellout” was “right there with being accused” of the murder itself.¹⁰

In August 2011, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley entered Alford pleas, were resentenced to time served, and walked out of prison after 18 years.²

Death in Millington

Byers died on the evening of June 18, 2020, at age 63, after a single-vehicle crash on Chambers Road near Shakerage Road in Millington, Tennessee, where he had been living. He was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead there. The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said the cause of the crash remained under investigation.¹²

He did not live to see the next round of testing in the case. On April 19, 2024, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that Echols could seek new DNA testing despite no longer being incarcerated.³¹³¹⁴

1
KAIT8. John Mark Byers Dies, Officials Say
2
Britannica. West Memphis Three
3
Innocence Project. Justice for the West Memphis Three
4
Arkansas Times. The Legal Troubles of Terry Hobbs and John Mark Byers
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Famous Trials. West Memphis Three
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Encyclopedia of Arkansas. West Memphis Three
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Arkansas Times. The Strange Demise of Melissa Byers
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Arkansas Times. Medically Defeated
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Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Paradise Lost Movies
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Action News 5. John Mark Byers Gives His West Memphis 3 Story in Untying the Knot
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ABC News. Father of Victim to Convicted Killer: I’m Here for You
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WREG. One Person Killed in Millington Crash
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KAIT8. Judge Orders DNA Testing on WM3 Evidence
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KATV. Evidence Sent for New DNA Testing as West Memphis Three Seek Exoneration