I find this also very interesting. Why would he A/ only get probation, when this was pattern behaviour? and B/ be granted a clear slate after committing such a violent assault?
--from Devil's Knot, Mara Levitt, p. 32:
In September 1987, Byers’s volatility toward his first wife had led to his arrest.21Shortly before 7A.M ., police in Marion received a call about “a woman screaming.” The caller also reported that “there were two small kids outside by themselves unattended.” That call was followed by a second, from another alarmed resident, who’d also heard the screams. The address the callers gave was that of Byers’s ex-wife and her children. An officer later reported that when he arrived, the older of the two children outside told him that “his mother and daddy were inside the trailer fighting.” Looking inside the door, the officer wrote, he could see “a white male and a white female on the floor. The white male appeared to have a black object pointing at the female who was crying and visibly upset.” When the officer entered the house, the man, who identified himself as Byers, “got off the floor immediately and became arrogant,” while the woman “was crying and begging this officer not to leave.”
The woman told the officer that Byers had come to the house at 6:45A.M ., demanding to take the children. He then “began to threaten her, telling her that he wanted full custody of the kids, that he was going to kill her, and that he had an electric shocker and kept acting like he was going to use it on her.” The officer’s notes of the incident continued: “Mr. Byers acted strange. A few minutes he would calm down and talk normal, but then all of a sudden he would get arrogant again, advising me that he was the father and he was going to take the kids. He also became upset when I advised him that I was going to keep the Power Zapper, which he wanted back. I could not smell any type of intoxicant on his breath, but he appeared to have been either on some type of medication or intoxicant by the manner in which he was acting.” The officer confiscated the electric shocker and escorted the woman and her children to a friend’s home, where she could “feel safe.”
That morning, Byers’s ex-wife drove to downtown Marion, where she reported the incident to John Fogleman, the city attorney. Years later, Fogleman too would play a key role in events following the murder of Christopher Byers and his two young friends. But that tragedy was still almost six years in the future. In 1987, in the hours after her assault, the former Mrs. Byers told Fogleman that her ex-husband had threatened to kill her or to have someone else kill her several times in the past; that she had sought a restraining order against him; and that because of his propensity toward violence, when he had shown up at her house that morning she had turned on a tape recorder. She handed Fogleman the tape.22It and the investigating officer’s report were convincing evidence. By the end of the day, Marion police had issued a warrant for Byers’s arrest, charging that he had terrorized his ex-wife by threatening to cause her death. Byers was convicted of the offense and sentenced to three years’ probation. All that was required of him was that he keep up his child support payments and remain gainfully employed.
Byers fulfilled neither requirement. Over the next few years, his first wife took him to court repeatedly seeking back child support, and twice, when Byers professed poverty, a local chancery judge reduced his court-ordered payments. Meanwhile, in 1989, Byers, now married to Melissa, bought the two-story house on Barton Street in West Memphis and moved into it with Ryan and Christopher. The house had three bedrooms, three baths, and an in-ground swimming pool. When the couple’s jewelry store failed the following year, neighbors wondered how the couple afforded the house. Melissa worked as a cleaning lady, and Byers worked out of their home, mostly selling jewelry at local flea markets.23
Something else that puzzled neighbors was Byers’s apparent chumminess with some members of the local police. One explanation for that emerged months after Christopher’s murder, when it was learned that Byers had worked as an undercover drug informant.24But there were other, deeper mysteries that were never fully explained. One was why, exactly one year before Christopher’s murder, the record of Byers’s felony conviction for terroristic threatening was formally expunged. Byers had not fulfilled the terms of his probation. He had neither kept up his child support payments nor remained gainfully employed. Yet on May 5, 1992, circuit judge David Burnett signed an order absolving Byers of all legal consequences arising from the assault and death threat on his ex-wife. A year later, Burnett would become another principal player in the murder case involving Byers’s stepson. But even in 1992, Burnett’s role in Byers’s life was important. The judge’s ruling allowed Byers to state “in any application form for employment, license, civil right, or privilege or in any appearance as a witness that he has not been convicted of the offense.”
