21 Feb. 7th–Feb. 13th, 2019 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | Contents | FeeDBACK | oPInIon | neWs | FEATURE | nIght+DAy | CULtURe | FILm | CAFe | mUsIC | Two investigators on the Honken case flew to Colorado and met secretly with Byerly. He gave them the notes he’d made after his conversations with Honken, who was getting more paranoid by the day — with some justification. Steve Vest, a pris- oner who’d celled with Byerly and later with Honken, had also been one of Honk- en’s confidants, but he’d left Florence abruptly, supposedly for a court hearing in his case. Honken had heard from a source that Vest was actually in Iowa, singing to the grand jury. “Wayne, you’d better not suddenly have court, too,” he told Byerly. But Honken still trusted Byerly enough to read letters to him that he received from Johnson and share his plans for exacting revenge for his troubles. He was going to subpoena Byerly and other trusted fellow cons as witnesses in his case, he explained, so they could all bust out together from county jail in Iowa and wreak havoc. They would go to the home of Assistant U.S. At- torney Pat Reinert, who’d pursued Honken for years, and kill his kids in front of him. Then they’d load a Snap-On Tools truck with 55-gallon drums of nitro and blow up the DEA building in Chicago. “He said he was going to make the world forget Timothy McVeigh,” Byerly re- calls. “This wasn’t just fanciful thinking. He had detailed plans.” Byerly alerted Reinert’s office about Honken’s escape talk. He stole a letter that Honken had received from Johnson, copped it right out of Honken’s cell. His risk of exposure was increasing daily. But when the real trouble arrived, it came from a direction he hadn’t expected at all. In May 2001, the penitentiary was in lockdown for weeks after a stabbing inci- dent involving rival gang members. Inves- tigation into the dispute revealed that two high-ranking female staff members had been involved in sexual relationships with several prisoners, including a convicted cocaine dealer who apparently had en- joyed the favors of both women. The women resigned and eventually faced criminal charges. One of the two, unit manager Kellee Kissinger, was one of the few staffers who knew about Byerly’s work as an informant. Kissinger was also believed to be friendly with Neel Huffman, a prisoner who’d been Honken’s cellmate and close friend. An as- tute case manager, whom Byerly credits with saving his life, realized that Byerly’s cover could be blown at any moment. Be- fore the lockdown lifted, Byerly was roused at midnight and told to pack his property. Within hours he was on his way to a jail in Iowa, to await his own appointment with the Honken grand jury. A few weeks later, he received a letter from a buddy at Florence, telling him that Huffman, who’d been moved to another prison, had written to Honken to alert him that Byerly was an informant. “So now Dustin is convinced that you are a rat and has let everyone here know about it,” the man wrote. “If it is true, then I think I un- derstand your motivation. If it’s not true, well I guess it doesn’t matter because you’ve had the jacket hung on you anyway.” That fall, Byerly watched the 9/11 at- tacks on a television in the segregation unit of Iowa’s Linn County Correction Center, where he’d been placed after punching an inmate who’d tried to steal his property. Within a few weeks, he was accepted into Witsec and had his sentence cut drasti- cally. A few months after that, he was on supervised release, living under a new name in New Orleans. As it turned out, Byerly was never sum- moned to testify at Honken’s 2004 mur- der trial. The maestro of meth had bragged about killing his rats to so many prisoners that the prosecution had its pick of them. None of them thought it was a vi- olation of the convict code to rat on some- one who’d killed children. Byerly had been one of the first to come forward, but there was no need to drag him out of Wit- sec and risk exposing his new identity, not with so many other volunteers eager to give Honken the needle. Honken got the death penalty. In a sepa- rate trial, Johnson was also sentenced to death for her role in the 1993 murders, one of only two women on death row in the en- tire federal system. In 2014, after years of appeals, her sentence was amended to life without parole. Honken remains on federal death row at USP Terre Haute. No execution date has been set. Shortly after his sentencing, in an interview with the Cedar Rapids Ga- zette, he denounced the informant who’d obtained the map to the bodies as a “wea- sel” and expressed moral outrage at the snitch’s behavior. “He doesn’t care about anyone but him- self,” he said. THE PAYOFF T he Witsec people told him to lie low in New Orleans until his new iden- tity documents were ready. Good- bye, Wayne Byerly. Hello, Wayne Baxter. He took classes in computer science and obtained his GED. He had trouble sleeping. At Florence he’d tossed and turned, wondering when his luck would run out. He was no longer stuck in that abattoir, but the anxiety at- tacks continued. Night after night, when he did drift off, he had hyper-real night- mares about being stabbed. Sometimes it was Dustin Honken holding the knife. Sometimes it was Brad Leonard or some- one else. He would wake up feeling clammy, a puddle of cold sweat collected at his sternum. The only thing that seemed to help was marijuana. He tested positive for the drug nine times in less than two years, violating the terms of his release and exasperating his parole officer. He went to see therapists and psychologists, who told him he had post-traumatic stress disorder and was self-medicating. They suggested Prozac, Xanax, and other modern marvels, but nothing worked like weed. His continuing infractions didn’t sit Way from p 18 >> p 22
