Mara Leveritt (1947–)

Author Mara Leveritt is known for her investigative reporting on legal proceedings in Arkansas that have become widely seen as miscarriages of justice. Her books include Profiles, Real Arkansas Characters (1980), The Boys on the Tracks: Death, Denial, and a Mother’s Crusade to Bring Her Son’s Killers to Justice (1999), Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (2002), Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence (2014), and All Quiet at Mena: A Reporter’s Memoir of Buried Investigations (2021). Leveritt is often categorized as a true-crime writer but has said she prefers to think of her work as “the corner where politics and crime collide.”

Margaret Mary Blyth was born on February 17, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois. She was one of six children born to Mary Ruth James Blyth, who was a bookkeeper, and Robert Patrick Blyth, a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Most other relatives were either teachers or police officers. In 1952, the family moved to Denver, Colorado, where she later attended Marycrest High School, graduating in 1965.

In 1967, while a student at the University of Colorado Denver, she married D. Michael Arnold and adopted his last name. In 1968, the couple moved to Duncan, Oklahoma, where their two children were born. In 1970, when the family moved to North Little Rock (Pulaski County), she enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), majoring in journalism. While writing for the Forum, the university’s student newspaper, she also briefly edited Essence, the campus’s alternative weekly.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communication from UALR in 1974, she worked at the Arkansas Democrat, first on the copy desk and then as a reporter. During that time, she approached managing editor Jerry McConnell about the paper’s style of referring to women on second reference with honorifics denoting their marital status. McConnell agreed that the style was outmoded, and it was dropped. After a divorce in 1976, she worked briefly for the Arkansas Times and then became a feature writer at the Arkansas Gazette. There, she again raised the issue of honorifics, and again, the style was changed.

In 1980, Ted Parkhurst, founder of August House Publishers, asked her to write a book that was subsequently published as Profiles, Real Arkansas Characters. It showcased her appreciation of personal stories and included one in which Governor Bill Clinton discussed his dream of becoming president.

She married Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt in 1980. Using the name Mara Leveritt, she returned to the Arkansas Times three years later to work as an investigative reporter, senior editor, and columnist. Max Brantley, who edited the Arkansas Times for thirty-two years, described her as the paper’s “co-founder, godmother, senior editor, award-winner and still conscience.”

In 1991, the Arkansas Times featured Mara Leveritt’s article “Blood Money,” a report about the international sale of blood plasma drawn from Arkansas prisoners, highlighting concerns about inadequate disease screening in the concealed activity—what eventually became known as the Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. That exposure led to investigations that uncovered corruption among prison officials. Disease-tainted blood from Arkansas inmates that was sent to Canada, Europe, and Asia led to thousands of cases of hepatitis or HIV/AIDS in recipients. The investigation resulted in Leveritt being named “Journalist of the Year” by UALR.

Mara and Alan Leveritt divorced in 1996, whereupon she left newspaper work to write in greater depth about some troubling cases she had encountered in her reporting. This led to publication of The Boys on the Tracks: Death, Denial, and a Mother’s Crusade to Bring Her Son’s Killers to Justice by St. Martin’s Press in 1999. The book, which examines a series of infamous, unsolved murders in Saline County, has been called one of the most important examples of investigative journalism in modern Arkansas history. It was awarded the Booker Worthen Prize by the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) in 2000.

Leveritt, who opposes state-sanctioned executions, was honored as Abolitionist of the Year in 1999 by the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. In public appearances, she called for criminal interrogations and trials to be electronically recorded and for prosecutors who abuse their powers to face prosecution themselves.

In 2002, Leveritt’s best-known work, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, was published by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. That book examines the case against three teenagers from West Memphis (Crittenden County) who were convicted in 1994 of murdering three eight-year-old boys. The only evidence appeared to be what prosecutors said was an interest in the occult by the teens, whom media later dubbed the West Memphis Three. Devil’s Knot was awarded the Booker Worthen Prize in 2002. The New York Times later listed it among fifty classic accounts of murder in the United States. In 2011, the West Memphis Three were released from prison after agreeing to plead guilty to the murders while maintaining that they were innocent.

North Little Rock’s Laman Library awarded Leveritt its Laman Writers Fellowship in 2012. In 2013, a feature film adaptation of Devil’s Knot starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon premiered in Toronto. That same year, Leveritt was inducted into the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame. When accepting recognition of her work, Leveritt frequently acknowledged her editor, Linda Bessette, to whom all of her books are dedicated and with whom she formed Bird Call Press. The two married in 2014. That same year, Bird Call Press published Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence, which focused upon Jason Baldwin, the youngest of the West Memphis Three.

Leveritt had intended Dark Spell to be the second book in a trilogy about the West Memphis case. But in 2015, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System, asked her to record what was known about controversial state and federal investigations of Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal, the convicted international drug smuggler who ran part of his operation out of the regional airport at Mena (Polk County) during the 1980s. Leveritt contracted to write the book, to be called The Mena File, and it was soon reported that Penguin Random House planned to publish an audio version. The following month, however, CALS officials sought to cancel their contract for The Mena File, citing unspecified “deep concerns” about its content. Leveritt spoke of the episode during a keynote address to the Arkansas Historical Association’s annual meeting in 2025. “I scarcely knew how to react,” she said. “Having worked with publishers all my career, I’d never had one back away from a project—and refuse even to have the book fact-checked.” She agreed to rescind the contract and rewrote the book, retaining all her original work, while incorporating a first-person account of her investigative process. In 2021 the book, now titled All Quiet at Mena, was published by Bird Call Press. In 2022, the Arkansas State Library honored it as an “Arkansas Gem.”

Leveritt moved to Olympia, Washington, in 2023.

For additional information:
“The Art of True Crime Writing: A Panel Discussion with Gene Lyons and Mara Leveritt.” Hendrix College. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev8XpvcyS6U (accessed October 10, 2025). [see Related Web Video in sidebar]

“Author Mara Leveritt.” Arkansas Money & Politics. https://armoneyandpolitics.com/author/mleveritt/ (accessed October 10, 2025).

Brantley, Max. “Make That Dr. Mara Leveritt. UALR Honors a Famous Grad.” Arkansas Times, May 17, 2014. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2014/05/17/make-that-dr-mara-leveritt-ualr-honors-a-famous-grad (accessed October 10, 2025).

Campbell, Matt. “The West Memphis Three, 30 Years Later: A Q&A with Mara Leveritt.” Arkansas Times, April 6, 2024. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/06/the-west-memphis-three-30-years-later-a-qa-with-mara-leveritt (accessed October 10, 2025).

Leveritt, Mara. All Quiet at Mena: A Reporter’s Memoir of Buried Investigations. Little Rock: Bird Call Press, 2021.

———. The Boys on the Tracks: Death, Denial, and a Mother’s Crusade to Bring Her Son’s Killers to Justice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

———. Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three. New York: Atria Books, 2003.

Leveritt, Mara, and Jason Baldwin. Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence. Little Rock: Bird Call Press, 2014.

Mara Leveritt: Investigative Reporter. https://www.maraleveritt.com/ (accessed October 10, 2025).

“Meet The Author: Mara Leveritt ‘The Boys on the Tracks.’” North Little Rock Public Library System. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2x7Shp56dQ (accessed October 10, 2025). [see Related Web Video in sidebar]

White, Mel. Interview with Mara Leveritt. Arkansas Democrat Project. David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. https://pryorcenter.uark.edu/project.php?thisProject=1 (accessed October 10, 2025).