Devil’s Knot by Mara Leveritt Page B

Byers the knife that had been sent from New York. He described it as a Kershaw knife with a nine-inch blade, a Pachmayr grip, and an inscription that read “Cannon City.” Byers identified it as the knife he had given to the cinematographer, a knife that, he said, his wife, Melissa, had given to him a few years before as a Christmas present.
    “Okay,” Gitchell said. “Let me explain a problem we had, and you need to answer this for me: we have found blood on this knife.”
    Byers: “I can tell you where I might assume it might have come from.”
    Gitchell: “All right.”
    Byers: “Uh, I got a deer this year, and I was cutting it up to make some beef jerky and I had a filleting knife, a Ginsu filleting knife, and I thought of that knife, and I tried to cut some of the deer as thin as possible, and when I found out that it wouldn’t cut as thin as the skinning knife was, I put it up. But that would be the only time it’s been around anything bloody…. I was cutting some deer meat at home.”
    Neither Gitchell nor Ridge asked Byers to explain why, only a few minutes before, he had stated that he had “never used” the knife and, even more specifically, that he’d “never had an opportunity to use it on a deer.” Instead, Gitchell proceeded, almost deferentially, to point out another “problem.”
    “Okay,” he told Byers, “let me, let me go a little bit further and say there’s a problem with that. I mean, I’m not saying that’s not true. The problem is we have sent this knife off and had it examined, and it has the blood type of Chris on it.”
    Suddenly Byers began addressing the detective by his first name. “Well, Gary,” he responded, “I don’t have any idea how it could be on there.”
    “That’s our problem,” said Gitchell.
    Byers: “I have no idea how it’s on there.”
    Gitchell: “Why? Why would this knife have blood on it?”
    Byers: “I have no idea, Gary.”
    Gitchell: “That’s what scares me.”
    When Lax and the defense attorneys saw a transcript of the interview, they were appalled by the tenor of the exchange. Byers was in an extremely compromising situation. Blood consistent with that of his mutilated son had been found on his own knife, a knife he’d said had never been used and that he’d given away to someone who was leaving the state. Yet when this was pointed out to Byers and he had no good explanation, the chief detective on the case had remarked that he was scared.
    Byers, meanwhile, was reduced to stammering. “I have no idea, I have no idea, how it could have any human’s blood type on it at all,” he said. “I don’t even remember nicking myself with it, cutting the deer meat or anything.”
    Finally, hesitantly, almost apologetically, Gitchell asked Byers the central question. And now he too was stammering. “I got to, I got to ask you point-blank, I’ve got to ask you point-blank, Mark,” he said, “I’ve got to ask you point-blank: were you around or participated in these deaths of these boys?”
    “No,” Byers responded. “Not in any shape, form, or fashion…Absolutely not. Positively not. Unequivocally not. No. Not at all.”
    “Well,” Gitchell said, “there are other tests being run on this knife, and we should, may have the results right now. We’ve been waiting on them the last several days.” Gitchell added that blood had recently been taken from Melissa and Ryan, and that since a sample of Mark’s blood had been taken in May, tests were being run to see if any matched the blood on the knife. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do,” Gitchell explained, “is see if it could have been…if you have similar blood. We don’t know. We don’t know if there’s a similarity. We don’t know.”
    It seemed to Lax that Gitchell sounded worried in the interview and almost apologetic. Gitchell had certainly not been as confrontational as in the interview with Jessie Misskelley, when Gitchell had demanded of Jessie, “Now tell us