As the modern, TV recording equipped auditorium filled with more than 120 high school students (only one of whom was late), the room started buzzing with anticipation. They’d been waiting over two months to hear the speaker, and few knew exactly what to expect. They’d seen the films. They’d studied the case. Now they were going to meet the man. The house lights went down, and all eyes were focused on the big screen on stage. The images, so familiar to anyone who has followed the case for any length of time, began to fill the stage with scenes that made the speaker a household name among the faithful. The "Pumpkin Shoot," the flag-draped evangelist, bible in hand, sitting in front of his Jonesboro apartment ("I hate you. Forever and a day, shall I hate you"), the "Grave Stomping." A parade images showcasing the man at his flamboyant best raced across the screen to a fixated crowd of impressionable youths. Then, the booming audio fades, the lights go up, and Blackman High School (Murfreesboro, TN) Criminal Justice teacher Rich Kimberly takes center stage. "Ladies and Gentlemen", he announces dramatically, "John Mark Byers." Like a contestant on The Price is Right, Mark comes bounding down the steps, grabs the microphone, and begins to talk. And lord knows he can talk.

"Who out there believes, or ever believed, that I killed my son?", he asked, unsmiling. Nervous glances were exchanged, but Kimberly reassured them. "It’s ok", he said. Pretty soon a group of students began to grin, all pointing to one poor soul who suddenly felt very alone.

"C’mon up here, son", Mark called out. The student was soon on the stage facing a suddenly huge John Mark Byers. "It’s ok, buddy. I forgive you." After an awkward silence, Mark breaks out laughing, and bear-hugs the startled student. Slapping him on the back, Mark gives the boy a "Free the West Memphis Three" bumper sticker and mouse pad, and says, "From now on don’t go believing everything you hear!"

The November 19^th - 21^st (2008) round of the Rule 37 hearings for Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley - covered in another article - were attended by Kimberly and a handful of very curious high school students. The class had watched Paradise Lost in their Criminal Justice class, and six of the brightest students had been selected to make the 250 mile trek to Jonesboro to observe the hearings. They had quite a day. After bumping into Judge John Fogelman, and having an impromptu Q&A with Burk Sauls of the WM3 support group, they eventually found themselves face-to-face with the towering figure of John Mark Byers. "We were hoping we’d get to see him", said Kimberly, "but we weren’t even sure he was coming." Mark and Kimberly went to lunch together, and the students were treated to a private debriefing with the man who had made such an impression on them during their study of the case of the West Memphis Three. The lunch ended too soon, and Kimberly had to head back to Murfreesboro right after court. "I asked Mark if he’d be willing to speak to my class back in Tennessee, and he said he would."

The students in Kimberly’s Criminal Justice I and II classes had not only viewed the Paradise Lost films, but had also gone over, "line by line", Damien Echols’s Second Amended Writ of Habeas Corpus. The writ was submitted to Arkansas’s Second Circuit Court in October of 2007, a subsequently dismissed without a hearing. "Almost all my students were convinced of the innocence of the West Memphis Three after viewing Paradise Lost", Kimberly said, "but they weren’t sure what to make of Byers." Many in the class believed that Mark had something to do with the murders. (Now why does this all sound so familiar? Is there anyone who comes away from a viewing of the HBO movies with a different opinion?) And shoulders shrugged across the board when the topic came to Terry Hobbs. "They didn’t know quite what to think."

Mark spent the better part of three and a half hours taking the students through his odyssey, with particular emphasis on his changed beliefs regarding the innocense of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. He also talked about Terry Hobbs, and the recent evidence that has been identified regarding Hobbs’s DNA being found at the crime scene, culminating with a showing of the video of Hobbs’s June 2007 interview with the West Memphis Police Department. He talked about his time in prison, and the years he spent under a cloud of suspicion that he has to shake every time a new wave of believers are indoctrinated, always by a viewing of Paradise Lost, into a case that simply won’t go away.

When asked if he had viewed, or gone over with his class, the State’s Response to Echols’s habeas petition (5/30/08), or Echols’s Reply in Support of his Motion for a New Trial (8/12/08), Kimberly said, "I didn’t know they were out there."