From 2008: Some observations on the WM3

Ed.-I've written on this case several times and am always amazed at the comments my observations have generated. Have I been wrong about the case in the past? You bet, and so were many observers. Read the comments. Many of them are interesting, a few very illuminating. My deceased maternal grandparents were from Arkansas. I have some unique views on the place and its very backwards culture.

http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2008/01/west-memphis-3-update-terry-wayne-hobbs.html 

Songs from the Site Meter: DOJ returns over the West Memphis Three

WWW--This is pretty funny. These clowns kept coming around during the DC Madam scandal all the time, now they seem to have noticed the WM3 case for the first time. Check the link they read or bookmarked, I think I'm onto something with the fact that Terry Hobbs and Mark Byers (fathers of the murdered children dumped at what was Robin Hood Hills at the time in the early 1990s).

My take is that the kids were likely slaughtered because their parents were drug-addicts who turned informants, snitched on the wrong crowd, and the resulting murders became inevitable. There is more than smoke hovering around this thesis. Why the DOJ is reading it after having a few years is a matter of priority and competence. The war on drugs creates secondary crimes that are far more destructive than the original ones they're going after. Pathetic.

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Why did they know, and you did not?

I've written about my grandparents on here several times and what wonderful, homespun Populists they were, and not the wacky right wing kind either. That was for their siblings to take up, they're thickos.

My grandmother was literally from the dirt. Her Scotch-Irish parents were monsters who tried to pump their kids with religion, neglected them, and beat them. They were literally hillbillies living in the Ozarks in the 1920s-30s, and they were poor, very poor. I'm pretty certain that my grandmother had her religious beliefs, but she had a very interesting mistrust of "preachers," as she called them. She was an Ozarks Cinderella who went to a "seeing woman" to guess the sex of her one child, my mother, while she was pregnant.

"A preacher should get a real job," she would insist when we even casually talked about organized religion. Was it just her opinion that swayed me against all forms of organized religion? No, it was the experience of it and how inhuman, uncaring and revolting most of it is. I hate virtually all organized religion and look at it as an abomination before all humankind.

"The preacher man doesn't know any more than you do about what comes after this." she would often follow-up with. I couldn't have agreed more with her then or now. What's interesting is that this is a heretical belief, yet she thought of herself as a very religious and spiritual person; she just didn't trust people to do the right thing in groups, and she certainly didn't trust the preacher man. Neither do I, and never will. In fact, I see just about all of them as hopelessly deluded and corrupt, like most people when they're given just a smidgen of power, and ultimately, that's what this series of observations is all about, power and how it makes people who hold it and the people they hold it over to lose their ability to reason. Most of them came pre-damaged anyway and were budding authoritarians before any boss told them what to do. But others think for themselves, reject their upbringing, and grow-up and out of it.

My grandfather lived in rural Kansas. His father worked on the railroad as an engineer, and at one point, the family owned a hotel that burned down during the 1920s. His father was a patriarchal nimrod who rarely communicated with his children other than with his belt or his ring-festooned backhand. By the early 1930s, this idiot was fired from what was a very good-paying job at a time when there were almost none, and dragged his family to Arkansas to be...a dirt farmer, and at a time when family farms were failing. Father knows best. It was a disaster, but somehow he found other work. As far as I can tell, they were typically religious for the time, and he was a stern patriarch who isolated himself to his den and read all the time, the only thing I can give him credit for. Children were to be seen and not heard. As far as I can recall or ascertain, my grandfather finished high school while my grandmother did not.

What did they do for a living? My grandmother picked cotton to buy her wedding dress. They worked in factories for their entire working lives, first in munitions plants during WWII and the Korean War, then various other industrial occupations over the years. They worked very hard at work and at home and were very industrious people, but they weren't intellectuals and didn't have expansive educations. They were just working-class people who did the best they could and treated others as they would have liked to be treated; they followed the "golden rule" better than any other people I have or will ever know in my life. I was lucky: my immediate family on my mother's side weren't users, manipulators, or liars. But the rest of them were, so my grandparents left Kansas after WWII for the industrial North.

Again, these weren't really well-educated people at all, but they were sharp and smart, and they knew the score when they saw it. They were staunch unionists, and they were generally progressive. This wasn't atypical. The fact is that they were--and still are in their death--mainstream America. This is the real America, the good side. From the 1970s when I was a little kid reading about the Great Depression thanks to a childhood illness and a curiosity for human history, my grandparents continued the same mantra until their deaths during this current decade: "You watch: these dummies [most voting Americans] are going to vote the Republicans back in [as a majority], and we're going to have another Depression all over again, they'll make it happen again, you'll see." So they have, so they have.

My earliest memory of my grandmother saying this comes from 1978. Think about that for a minute. This wasn't an economist saying it, this was an ordinary working-class person who actually lived through the Great Depression (for real, the hard side of it) as a child, and therefore, knew what she was talking about. Why would she understand what caused it (lack of proper regulations, as she often told me herself many times) when she never lived with electricity or running-water as a little mountain girl? She bore witness to her era as her husband, and they didn't have dust in their eyes or shit in their ears, they didn't miss much, if anything. They stayed civically and politically engaged their entire adult lives because they knew that if they didn't, catastrophe for future generations was all-but-inevitable since the business jackapes are always waiting at the gates to abuse government. But their kids weren't carrying their share of the load after them and most were ignorant of how things had been before the New Deal and the accomplishments of organized labor. They were critical even of the "union bosses," but had good words for labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the UAW, of which they were both members.

They understood that you must be eternally vigilant against corruption in all its forms, especially political, since the government at least is theoretically capable of being held accountable, while corporations are not without that reasonably clean and strong government. Yes indeed, they supported the New Deal. If you ask--and you'd better do it fast now--anyone with sense who lived through that era (and I mean really lived through it and can remember it) and they'll tell you what an "idiot" Republican President Herbert Hoover was for his inaction during the worst years of the Depression, and it was common currency with these folks. Most of them used far less polite words for him, even decades later.

Why do you think it took five decades to create a "Republican majority" (that rapidly imploded)?

Why, then, did my grandparents "get" it--that you don't blindly accept authority at its word and that another Great Depression was coming when so many others claim not to have? First off, many of these people today--these "experts"--were part of the corruption on Wall Street, in Congress, the White House, and in our Courts, so they're either lying or were too close to it to see anything except dollar-signs. My grandparents were just working-class people who saw the reality on the ground and knew bullshit when they read, heard, or saw it, and the GOP was always bullshit to them. They learned the lessons of their time. The truth is that the baby boomers lived through unprecedented prosperity and forgot these lessons and were slow learners when it came to constructively taking on an oligopoly that's running this nation into the ground while simultaneously destroying its soul, its spirit. Like any generation, they've overstated their accomplishments.

It didn't take a genius to see all of this coming. The cheap credit, the wholesale deregulation of the business and financial sectors by both major parties, and a runaway corporate crime spree and war profiteering, made the mess we're in inevitable. Only a ten-year-old or someone very old could have seen it--at least someone who wasn't or isn't an old fool. The rest tend to be a glob of self-serving, brainwashed turds. It takes a good education to become indoctrinated by a bad system, just ask the Einsatzgruppen units that slaughtered Slavs and Jews on the Eastern Front during WWII (but do it quick). Most of them were college educated. A fool with a degree is a still a fool, and an criminal sociopath will always be a criminal sociopath regardless of how much you shave and primp them and put them in a nice, new suit. But there are good people in this world. Not only were my grandparents warm and kind to me and my family, they were smart and actually gave a damn about their neighbors and society. This is why democracy works. The average person is smarter than the leadership and the loud-mouths they rook in to drown everyone else out. They are the real threat to America, forget terrorism.

None of this is to suggest that learning is bad. Quite-the-opposite. But you had better learn where you come from if you want to know where you're going. How can you know where you are, when you don't know where you've been? It's not hard to understand why children are so troubled about having an identity: we're not giving them one, we're not transmitting the lessons of the past to them enough. People must know who they are and where they come from to be whole, to be reasonably at peace with themselves. In these areas, we're failing our children again, and again, and again, in our assembly line educational system. We can always do better, and we should always keep trying to make a better world for the babies as well as the adults. What is a society for if not for us all to band together to help each other survive? To suggest, for example, that there's no need for a safety-net for the unemployed is antisocial, sociopathic, so it must come from the business community and high finance. Find yourselves and where you have really been.

My favorite photo, and the turning of the wheel...

This is a photograph of my mother and grandfather. He'd just returned from WWII, from the European theater, having served under that nut General George "Blood and Guts" Patton. My mother looks so thrilled to see her daddy coming home. WWII was necessary.

Military-style fascism had to be crushed in Germany and Japan and all of the occupied territories. But this same fascism still infects America, and it must be crushed. Luckily, it's extinguishing itself.

My grandfather never fully recovered from his experiences in the war. For the rest of his life, he was very nervous man with a hair-trigger temper. He couldn't connect very well with my mother because she had been born in 1944, after he'd left to serve in the Army. He wasn't a dumbass, he was drafted, he didn't enlist. I respect him for this greatly. He had sense. When he came back, the economy was far worse than it is right now (just wait). What can I say? He was a good man who found it hard to express his feelings to his family, but we loved him just the same.

Today, I dug-out some of these old photos to show to my three-year-old niece, Zofia, to show her what her grandma looked like as a baby (exactly like Zofia, since we have non-recessive genes). She's a precocious little baby with a big heart and a mostly peaceful temperment. She rarely cries. She's a joy. When I showed her this and other photos and told her "This is grandma," she said, "No--this is Zofia!"

Rollie and Billie, father and daughter, finally united--it was 1946, and the Cold War had yet to be invented by the politicians (mainly the utterly corrupt GOP). When the wars have ended, when tyranny has been smashed, when people finally learn to live amongst one another in relative peace, and when we realize that we're all a family, we'll have the same moment of love that Rollie and Billie lived 62-years-ago. That moment was--and is--love. Love for ourselves and each other, because it really is that simple. The circle is unbroken.

JOHN MARK BYERS & THE WEST MEMPHIS 3

"Just remember boys, it all started here."
--John Mark Byers, to documentarians Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, early 1990s

Arkansas --The West Memphis Three, remember them? They've been in prison for 13-years now. I don't personally think that Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols, or Jason Baldwin committed the murders. For a good overview, check some of the links below, and watch both Paradise Lost documentaries (and do a few searches of your own).

Make up you own mind. "Paradise Lost 3" is being released this year [Ed., 11.18.2008--I assume it's going to be released sometime in 2009 with the recent developments in the case.], and a movie based on Mara Leveritt's investigative book, "Devil's Knot " is being made into a major motion picture. Who did it? I think--in my own humble opinion--that it was John Mark Byers with some unknown accomplice(s). It's even possible that one-or-more of the WM3 know the details of some of it, though if this was so one would think we would know the truth by now. Byers has a criminal record, and some members of the West Memphis community have alleged he was a drug informant working for Tennessee Police [Ed., 11.18.2008--Correction, The West Memphis PD.]

He sure acts like one:

In July 1994, Byers was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allegedly instigating a knife fight between two youngsters [Ed.-At-gunpoint.]. That same month, he was arrested for burglary. During that summer, neighbors filed restraining orders against Byers for allegedly whipping their sons with the metal handle of a flyswatter, and firing shots at their home. Byers was on probation when he was arrested for selling Xanax to a narc in 1999. He served 18 months. (lacitybeat.com)

Both Melissa and John Mark Byers had a long history of drug abuse and criminality. With so many different-takes on the murders at Robin Hood Hills, and constantly changing his story, John Mark Byers presents a great picture of the guilty who are yearning to confess their numerous-crimes. Many individuals with a personality disorder tend to incriminate-themselves subconsciously, but most people have this tendency towards confession.

Byers illustrates plenty of examples of this in "Paradise Lost 2"--so-much so that it becomes unsettling. One of them has a chilling resonance with the occult, namely the graveyard footage in both documentaries that have the shadow of a Christmas star throwing a pentagram (inverted) onto Byer's forehead. One could call it poetic. I noticed this image in the first Paradise Lost, and Berlinger and Sinofsky put emphasis on it in the second film. It's a Jungian moment that is absolutely breathtaking, and I can recall nearly falling out of my chair when it hit me. But just listen to his statements on nearly everything--almost all of it is about hurting or punishing someone, something, and how much of a "man" he is. He plays the victim well, but not the innocent. His voice sucks too, by the way. The man cannot sing.

Aaron Hutcheson is an overlooked-aspect in the WM3 case--he might have actually witnessed the murders (he was nine, so he's not even certain today), but was pressured and coached by West Memphis Police into never mentioning he felt Byers was at the scene of the murders, and was the murderer of the three children. Rumors were also rampant in the public and the media and fear gripped West Memphis.

It was known that John Mark Byers had younger associates who he would use to harass other children for him as part of his abusive M.O. Again, this pattern resurfaces in the charges against him from the 1994-incident when he was alleged to have forced two young men into a knife fight at gunpoint.

Hutcheson seems to hint at some kind of knowledge of this type of behavior exhibited by Byers:

Aaron, who is now 19, is convinced the three boys were killed by Christopher Byers’ stepfather, Mark Byers. West Memphis officials have acknowledged that Byers, a former drug informant, once was considered a suspect. He was never charged. Aaron contends Mark Byers hated kids. Aaron is sure he told the police in the first interviews about Mark Byers. (Arkansas Times, 10.07.2004)

Aaron's mother was told by West Memphis Police Detective Gary Gitchell "... and Marion police officer Donald Bray [to] sign an "affidavit of silence" pledging themselves never to mention that Aaron had named Mark Byers." There is no such thing, and it's a telling example of the lack of police procedure surrounding the Robin Hood Hills murder case. The detectives were assuming that most of the people they interrogated/interviewed were completely ignorant and would simply capitulate under pressure to their version of events, just as Jessie Misskelley did in his forced confession.

They had already decided where the case was going, and became angered when they got answers that didn't conform with this preconception. It's possible they also succumbed to the rumors about the murders. Many of them bizarrely suggested a "Satanic panic." This doesn't even qualify as an investigation in this light. Why the Marion policeman was asked to sign the phony-document is unclear, though it could have been a good cop/bad cop approach on the part of Gitchell and Officer Bray. This is all very peculiar procedure. Yet, why didn't the prosecution and investigators look-into the fact that Byers told them early-on that he felt the murders "...might be retaliation for his work as an undercover drug informant. His wife would name two pawnbrokers as possible suspects." (Commercial Appeal, 04.21.2002) In what could be a connected event, around 9:30 pm (some sources cite 8:42 pm) on what must have been the night of the murders, Bojangles restaurant manager Marty King was informed by a female patron that a Black man was in the women's restroom covered in blood, cleaning himself.

According to King: "I found a black gentleman sitting in the women's restroom on the commode with his head in his lap. He was about 5'8" or 5'9", 165 lbs, real thin man. He had his head in his lap and there was blood dripping off of his forearm." West Memphis Police Detectives Bryn Ridge and Mike Allen scraped blood off of the walls of the women's bathroom...and promptly lost the evidence. Nobody was ever punished for this, not even a verbal-warning or forced leave without pay. Nothing. There is no physical evidence linking the West Memphis Three to the murders of the three eight-year-olds, and we can thank the local Police that there is none whatsoever.

There is something more to this. Something that includes a convergence of incompetence and criminality on the part of the West Memphis Police Department, and maybe even the Sheriff's Department. It's as if they are protecting John Mark Byers to hide their own sins. I really wish there was no Paradise Lost 3 being made, I really do. Free these men, but at the very least, give them another trial that includes this new DNA evidence. [Ed., 11.18.2008--No dice so far.]

Byers now lives in Tennessee. Expect more news about him, this guy loves attention. I would expect him to be in the new documentary. You think he ever watched Robert Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter"? I do. If it proves anything, it's that Arkansas is brimming with incredibly stupid citizens who don't qualify to sit on a jury. My grandparents left there for a reason, and they never looked back.

"John Mark Byers" on Myspace (Adult Swim):
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=19690619

An Update on the Death of Melissa Byers:
http://www.maraleveritt.com/categories/?pg=3&c=cases

A Medical Report on Melissa Byers:
http://www.arwar.org/wm6caseinformation/deathofmbyers.html

A Recent LA City Beat Article on the WM3:
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4287&IssueNum=169

John Mark Byers' Criminal-Background:http://www.prisonpotpourri.com/JUVENILES/WESTMEMPHISTHREE.damienechols/The%20strange%20demise%20of%20Melissa%20Byers%20-%20By%20Mara%20Leveritt%20-%20December%2026,%201997.html

Aaron Hutcheson:
http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=2707a60b-b5d2-42d3-999e-0577590f8a9a

The "Bojangles Incident":
http://www.wm3.org/live/trialshearings/abstracts.php?abstract_Id=37&page=2
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/cda/article_print/1,1983,MCA_437_1094800_ARTICLE-DETAIL-PRINT,00.html

My Mother's Father (1922-2003) Part I

My grandfather was such a good man, but he was troubled by the world that he lived through. He never found a good way to express this until the very end of his life, which I find sad. His was a life that is no more and an America that is long-gone.

In many respects, this is a good thing, but it's impossible to say that I don't miss him or the generation he was a part of, now receding into the twilight. I won't say that my grandfather's generation was the " greatest [American] generation"--it wasn't. Most of the racists who beat civil rights activists, and even murdered them, were of the WWII generation. They were as wrong as one can be, but they weren't the whole story.

There were and are many shades of racism, and it's a part of our basic anthropology, almost innate to us. This isn't to say that people cannot overcome it, but it's a tendency within all of us as human beings. I think of racism as the greatest tragedy of the human experience. Were it not for the fact that I was shunted into the worst classes with the Black kids, I might not understand this. I understand discrimination well, and Black Americans have my admiration and empathy for the crap they have to put-up-with. I hate most White Americans myself, they're generally pigs. That said, it doesn't excuse reverse-discrimination or a racist response.

My grandfather was bigoted to-a-point, and I lament this fact, but he still saw Black Americans (and other so-called minorities) as people. God, the times he would bait me with racial-comments--he was a teaser, he loved to pick. But he didn't hate Black people, and he was a friendly man for the most part. He worked with them at his factory job at a ball-bearing plant (Torrington) for decades and had a few Black acquaintances. For someone like Rollie, this was a very big step indeed.

His job was building the equipment and tools for the machinists, and he did it for about twenty years. Before that, he and my grandmother worked in other factories and munitions-plants like many in their generation. Interestingly, he was discriminated against at his job for a variety-of-reasons (some due to his personality!). South Bend is a town that is almost predominantly Polish and Hungarian, with the rest falling-off from there. However, with the influx of Hispanics, it's changing rapidly as it is in many places in the United States. Most of these ethnic groups had (and have) one thing in-common: Catholicism, and the cold, cruel, Old world exclusionary version of it. America is a very primitive and tribally oriented place. Tribalism is for the birds and needs to go the way of organized religion. It needs to die. If that's community, you can have it, and I'm glad that the modern world is crushing it.

Like in most American cities that have ethnic enclaves, each group really just takes care of its own. South Bend has been, and is, no different in this. Each group tended to discriminate, especially when one wasn't Catholic. In truth, my family has probably been discriminated-against on this basis more than we'll ever know. This is ironic, since I was baptised a Catholic! My grandparents weren't very active religiously, which I still admire. They taught me from an early-age, "Don't ever trust the preacherman, he doesn't know anymore than you do. He just wants your money." This is pure prairie Populism, a tradition I am more-than-proud-of. After being forced to attend congregationalist churches with my father, this belief was only reinforced, what hollow, meaningless-crap. If Jesus showed-up, they would turn him away because he would be in-rags, they wouldn't recognize him if he was glowing.

My grandparents didn't trust authority of any kind, a lesson for us all, because they saw authority abused during their lives. I believe that the time has come again for prairie Populism's resurrection, only this time it won't be agrarian, and just a simple expression of the will of the people in different times. What could be more beautiful and sacred than the unprompted assertion of humanity by ordinary people? My family comes from this tradition, and our familial culture extends-back to our Anabaptist ancestors in Germany and possibly Switzerland. Somehow, it survived organically within our family's culture.

The Anabaptists were the first religious group in Western Europe to call for a separation of Church and State. I suspect we've always been anti-clerical, and anti-war (excepting defensive wars of survival) in some ways, but WWII was necessary. Few would argue this, and fascism had to be stopped. It really was the good war to my mind. It was the aftermath that the politicians and big businessmen screwed-up, and keeping them in-check is the role of the people. The "world's greatest generation" tried to do this, but I believe the postwar economic-boom caused many of them to lapse into forgetfulness--they forgot who the enemy really was, namely concentrated wealth.

My grandfather was from Kansas, while my grandmother was from Arkansas. Her family were literally dirt-farmers, and she was a mountain-girl, and such a lovely and warm woman. She was a real-life Cinderella. When she died, I nearly went with her, the shock was so overwhelming. She was literally my second mother. My grandfather's family moved to Arkansas (Marshall, I believe) during the late-1920s, and this is how they met.

His father was insane--he was both a Freemason (Masonry teaches universal brotherhood!) and a member of the KKK during the 1920s (probably because of the movie "The Birth of a Nation"), and one of the earliest Jehovah's witnesses. He'd had a good-paying job with the railroad as an engineer, but he was basically an abusive asshole who felt he was always right. So, he quit his job, and moved his family to start a farm during worst period in American history to start one (except now), right before the Great Depression! I was told many stories about the dustbowl and the dust storms that blanketed parts of the South, Southwest, and plains states, as a child.

They were stories of an apocalypse, a wall of death that smothered everything. Entire families were found suffocated-to-death in their shacks and farm houses according to my grandparents and the historical record. The Bloughs nearly starved-to-death, and eventually the hothead had to get another job. He was also a physically-abusive man, and rarely spoke to his children.

Things got better for them, gradually, in Arkansas. My grandfather was one of the only young men in his town with a car (a 1929 model A Ford with a rumble seat--I've ridden in a rumble seat! Fun!). My grandparents met at a dance that could have been out of a John Steinbeck novel, and they knew the life he wrote about intimately. They were poor, but luckier than many. They had food. My grandparents met at a public dance in Arkansas in the late-1930s.

There wasn't much work to be had, so my grandfather joined the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, public works jobs provided by the New Deal). He always talked fondly about his experiences with the CCC and said that we should do it again as a nation. This was no Leftist firebrand, no radical, but a unionized worker who slaved his entire life. He was no fool, which is what America has been overpopulated with for some time.

I heartily agree with his sentiments about public service, and I think that it should be compulsory in our society, and mandatory for all economic strata. This goes for war. The draft should be reinstated as a first-step towards ending our love affair with overseas meddling, and our bloated military budgets must be slashed for all time. The time for beating our swords into plowshares has come. We should look to past wars as they're instructive of what not to do.

The invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 dragged the world into a global conflict. The world was aflame. This takes us to 1940 in the lives of my grandparents...

Revised 10.13.2008