The lawyers particularly wanted to focus on the criminal history of Mark Byers a history that, according to police records, involved prior attacks on family members, and to which police apparently paid only slight attention. I think I introduced my dad to it because that was not his normal genre., Three Metallica songsOrion, Welcome Home (Sanitarium), and Call of Ktuluwould play throughout the documentary. He went to watch television with Amanda and then he said they went into his bedroom to listen to music. A year later, when the film Paradise Lost was shown on television and then released to theaters, John Mark and Melissa Byers were brought to national attention. Waser assisted in photographing Melissa at the hospital and bagging evidence. At the time of her youngest son's murder in May of 1993, Melissa was married to John Mark Byers. The results suggest that Melissa had not been using hydrocodone for an extended length of time; otherwise, the drug would have been in her blood and her liver. Byers was asked if he wanted an autopsy performed. "[7], At approximately 5:30pm, an ambulance responded to Cherokee Village where Melissa was reported as being unresponsive. Byers got up to get some milk and asked if Melissa wanted anything. Metz observed Ryan and his girlfriend on the couch, nude. I went to a Baptist school and I got accused of being a devil worshiper because I was trying to learn how to write hieroglyphics, says Sauls, today a screenwriter and VFX designer. Byers was later charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He advised he went and got a towel and told Mark to keep doing CPR and also told Ryan to take his girlfriend home and get back there. Melissa's return to the home coincided with her son's. how did melissa byers die. Byers stated that Melissa preferred to take Dilaudid. She was previously married to John Mark Byers. Nor were any opiates were found in her blood. The bruises on her arms and scalp were noted, but the medical examiners did not opine as to how they occurred. The specter of the church looms over Paradise Lost, best represented by an early scene in which Mark Byers leads his congregation in prayer and song. Melissa had older scars on her wrists. Melissa DeFir Byers was born on January 15, 1956. This article was updated after publication to add more context about the honorariums paid to the families of the victims and the West Memphis Three and also to correct the time frame in which Berlinger and Sinofsky informed HBO about the changing scope of the documentary. In April 1994, eleven months after the murders, John Mark and Melissa Byers and their surviving son, Ryan, moved to Cherokee Village. Recent injuries included: "three 1-inch blue-gray contusions on her right upper arm; six blue-gray contusions, ranging from 1/2 to 2 inches, were present on the anterior aspect of the left upper arm; four, 1/4 to 1 inch blue-gray contusions were present on the superior and anterior left upper shoulder. Waser described the subsequent events as follows: "After signing the request he apparently passed out and fell towards the counter. But officials at the Marshal s Service say Byers was released, and no record apparently exists showing to whom he was released or why. While police had focused on Echols and Baldwin in the intervening weeks because of their reputation, the arrests came largely because of a confession by Misskelley, which was leaked to the largest newspaper in the area, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and ran under the banner headline Teen describes cult torture of boys. At a press conference shortly after the arrests, the lead investigator was asked how confident he felt about the case on a scale of 1-10. (I also knew that Susan Smith killed her kids from her first interview pleading for the abductor to "bring back my baaaabies. At one point, Melissa looked into the camera declaring her hatred for the three accused teen-agers and the mothers that bore them. In another scene, John Mark and the father of one of the other murdered boys appeared shooting pumpkins which they pretended were the defendants. When he first approached the stage, I thought, "Wow! Email: [email protected] Phone Number: (636) 486-2669. . It noted that she had been 68 inches tall and weighed 211 pounds. Melissa A. He's in disguise!" As a reader of the Arkansas Times, you know were dedicated to bringing you tough, determined, and feisty journalism that holds the powerful accountable. Ryan gave his statement and said that Melissa's purse, which he said she had left in the backseat of the family car, was at his grandfather's house. In October, Melissa Byers was arrested once again and charged with aggravated assault, this time for pointing a rifle at carpet layers who refused to work in her home until the floors were cleaned. weaving supposedly anti-Christian and occult messages into their songs, he discovered her while Googling cold cases, funded an extensive private investigation, a November 2010 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling, biggest allies in the years before his 2020 death, acquitted of capital murder in 2018 after a 25-year legal saga. For Rollins, it was a moral imperative: Id find myself up at 3:30 a.m. thinking about Damien. Its headlined by not only the films directors, but also Sheila Nevins, its executive producer and winner of 32 individual Emmy awards, more than any other person in history. Witt arrived at the hospital about 35 minutes later. The shooting Tuesday led to an hours long standoff at the house in the 2300 block of Blue Ridge Boulevard. The arrests of the two stepfathers of the murdered children at West Memphis tend to underscore questions raised months ago by attorneys for defendants in the triple slaying case particularly about the adequacy of the investigation that led to the arrests of three local teenagers, none of whom had a record of prior violence. By the time the Byerses had been in Cherokee Village six months, police had been summoned to their residence at least eight times. Ryan stated he knocked on the door to his parents' room and both answered him. The 19 Unnamed Hawkins Residents melted by the Mind Flayer stems from the newspaper article about the Starcourt Mall's fire seen in ". In February, Netflix released Berlingers Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, a docuseries that looked at the 2013 death of Elisa Lam, a Canadian student who died while vacationing in Los Angeles. Then there's the mysterious circumstances of his wife's death. Before she went to the hospital. More than 2,500 people attended and the story dominated the local press for days. The idea of killer teens in the Christian South, not any greater sense of purpose, was mainly what intrigued Sheila Nevins, then the head of HBOs documentary division, when she spotted a story about the case on the inside pages of The New York Times. You need corroborating evidence.. (Shortly after Villegass acquittal, Baldwin had something of a full-circle moment with his client: He took him to a Metallica show in El Paso, Texas, where they hung out backstage on the invitation of Lars Ulrich.). They found marijuana in a closet of the master bedroom and on a night stand in the other bedroom. According to Houston. Going by what was said in the article about the ME not being able to determine cause of death, we can safely assume it wasn't a natural death caused by something like a heart attack or massive cerebral hemmorage, both of which leave definite signs. He had been expecting a visitation, but was instead led to the prison chapel office, where inmates were typically brought only if someone close to them had died. Arkansas Times reports that Byers was in a single-car crash on Chambers John Mark Byers and Melissa Byers. Ryan said Byers then began CPR on Melissa. She died of undetermined causes on March 29, 1996. But most of defense lawyers efforts to bring that information before the jury never got out of the judges chambers. Years of solitary confinement and the abuse he said he suffered at the hands of prison guards had taken its toll. There he met with local law enforcement officers and with John Mark Byers, Melissa's husband. When we were driving in the car a lot, wed play a lot of the Metallica album Master of Puppets, says Alex Sinofsky, who became a doctor instead of getting behind the camera himself. At the time of her youngest son's murder in May of 1993, Melissa was married to John Mark Byers. Misskelley and Echols were 36; Baldwin was 34. A heavy metal test was conducted and none were found. Buried in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. According to Dan Stidham, the attorney for Misskelley, that money became essential for the cash-strapped defense teams, who needed to pay for expert witnesses and other expenses. They werent connected in any direct way, Bakken says. American actress, TV director, producer, politician, and former president of the Screen Actors Guild, Melissa Gilbert's cause of death is spreading as a rumor since reports claimed she passed away on October 27, 2022. "[25], Mandy concluded her statement by discussing how Byers told her that he burned down Brenda Atwood's trailer. Her body was sent for autopsy to the office of the medical examiner at the Arkansas Crime Laboratory in Little Rock. When he was released in 2011, he met John Hardin, who worked with the West Memphis Three support group Arkansas Take Action, and the two bonded over a desire to do for others what had just been done for Baldwin. But it wasnt in the ways its directors had hoped. But Berlinger also believes that the sequel is important for documenting the power of citizen activism. By getting to the story quickly, the directors were able to document the post-arrest period and two trials that followed in painstaking detail. The murder charge was filed after the child told a school counselor on Nov. 29, 2017, that she saw her mothers body in the basement of the familys home in the 2400 block of College Avenue. By 1987, Byers had been married, fathered two children, been divorced, and remarried. He was last seen wearing blue jeans, dark shoes, and a . There is a lot of suspicion surrounding him, especially in light of what's happened to his stepfamily in these past 3 years. Hopefully Will won't be a casualty in Season 5, but this data has been accurate in the past. She also described seeing lots of blood in the home and seeing the body in the basement with what she thought was a stab in the back. He said that he and Melissa spent the afternoon in bed, beginning at 12pm. "She advised he told her a cigarette made a excellent fuse, that you could light it, and due to slow burning, it would give you time to get away. That was on May 5, a year to the day before the three boys murders. But inside, he was just another prisonerBaldwin didnt know who he could trust. But he wasn't, and they made him take off those sunglasses. But on the subject of Paradise Lost, he speaks emphatically: He understands how important the movies were in helping him, Echols, and Misskelley walk free 10 years ago this August. John Mark called to Ryan twice. 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