also by Damien Echols

almost home

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2012 by Damien Echols Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Echols, Damien.

Life after death / Damien Echols.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-59858-0

1. Echols, Damien. 2. Death row inmates—United States—Biography. 3. Prisoners—United States—Biography. 4. False imprisonment—United States. I. Title.

HV8700.E33A3 2012 2012026115

364.66092—dc23

[B]

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

for Lorri

Contents

Also by Damien Echols

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PREFACE

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

EPILOGUE

PHOTOGRAPHS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Appendix: the Case of the West Memphis Three

Silently I sit by

Watching men pace their cells

Like leopards

Biting their nails

With furrowed brows

The scene speaks for itself

—Damien Echols,

Varner Super Maximum Security Unit, Grady, Arkansas

AUTHOR’S NOTE

What you’re about to read is the result of many things I’ve written in the past twenty years, including parts of a short memoir self-published in 2005. I was sent to Death Row in 1994, and almost immediately I began keeping a journal. I didn’t date most of my writings, it was simply too painful to look at days, months, years slipping past, the reality outside just beyond my reach. Many of the journals I kept are gone, stolen or destroyed when guards raided the barracks—anything personal or creative is a prime target in a shakedown. I’ve included as much as I could of what remained, and I hope the subject or context of these entries is helpful in placing some of them. Others don’t need a time stamp. The conditions I have described in the prison system—the sadness, horror, and sheer absurdity that I’ve seen many human beings subjected to—will not have changed by the time you hold this book in your hands.

PREFACE

Saint Raymond Nonnatus, never was it known that anyone who implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. To you I come, before you I stand. Despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer me.”

Saint Raymond Nonnatus is one of my patron saints. I would be willing to bet that most people have no idea that he is the patron saint of those who have been falsely accused. I like to think that means I have a special place in his heart, because you can’t get much more falsely accused than I have been. So me and old Raymond have struck a bargain. If he helps me out of this situation, then I will travel to all the world’s biggest cathedrals and leave roses and chocolate at the feet of every one of his statues that I can find. You didn’t know saints liked chocolate? Well then, that’s one thing you’ve already learned, and we’re just getting started!

I have three patron saints in all. You may be wondering who the other two are, and how a foul-mouthed sinner such as myself was blessed with not one but three saints to watch over him. My second patron saint is Saint Dismas. He’s the patron saint of prisoners. So far he’s done his job and watched over me. I’ve got no complaints there. So, what deal do Saint Dismas and I have? Just that I do my part by going to Mass every week in the prison chapel, unless I have a damn good reason not to.

My third patron saint is one I’ve had reason to talk with many times in my life. Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate situations. I’d say being on Death Row for something I didn’t do is pretty desperate. And what does Saint Jude get? He just likes to watch and see what ridiculous predicament I find myself in next.

If I start to believe that the things I write cannot stand on their own merit, then I will lay down my pen. I’m often plagued by thoughts that people will think of me only as either someone on Death Row or someone who used to be on Death Row. I grow dissatisfied when I think of people reading my words out of a morbid sense of curiosity. I want people to read what I write because it means something to them—either it makes them laugh, or it makes them remember things they’ve forgotten and that once meant something to them, or it simply touches them in some way. I don’t want to be an oddity, a freak, or a curiosity. I don’t want to be the car wreck that people slow down to gawk at.

If someone begins reading because they want to see life from a perspective different from their own, then I would be content. If someone reads because they want to know what life looks like from where I stand, then I will be happy. It’s the ghouls that make me feel ill and uneasy—the ones who care nothing for me, but interest themselves only in things like people who are on Death Row. Those people give off the air of circling vultures, and there’s something unhealthy about them. They wallow in depression and their lives tend to follow a downward trend. Their spirits seem mostly dead, like larvae festering on summer-day roadkill. I want nothing to do with that energy. I want to create something of lasting beauty, not a grotesque freak show exhibit.

Writing these stories is also a catharsis for me. It’s a purge. How could a man be subjected to the things I have been and not be haunted? You can’t send a man to Vietnam and not expect him to have flashbacks, can you? This is the only means I have of clearing the trauma out of my psyche. There are no hundred-dollar-an-hour therapy sessions available for me. I have no need of Freud and his Oedipal theories; just give me a pen and paper.

I’ve witnessed things in this place that have made me laugh and things that have made me cry. The environment I live in is so warped that incidents that would become legends in the outside world are forgotten the next day. Things that would show up in newspaper headlines in the outside world are given no more than a passing glance behind these filthy walls. When I first arrived at the Tucker Maximum Security Unit located in Tucker, Arkansas, in 1994, it blew my mind. After being locked down for more than ten years, I’ve become “penitentiary old,” and the sights no longer impress me as much. To add the preface of “penitentiary” to another word redefines it. “Penitentiary old” can mean anyone thirty or older. “Penitentiary rich” means a man who has a hundred dollars or more. In the outside world a thirty-year-old man with a hundred dollars would be considered neither old nor rich—but in here it’s a whole ’nother story.

The night I arrived on Death Row I was placed in a cell between the two most hateful old bastards on the face of the earth. One was named Jonas, the other was Albert. Both were in their late fifties and had seen better days physically. Jonas had one leg, Albert had one eye. Both were morbidly obese and had voices that sounded like they had been eating out of an ashtray. These two men hated each other beyond words, each wishing death upon the other.

I hadn’t been here very long when the guy who sweeps the floor stopped to hand me a note. He was looking at me in a very odd way, as if he were going to say something but then changed his mind. I understood his behavior once I opened the note and began reading. It was signed “Lisa,” and it detailed all the ways in which “she” would make me a wonderful girlfriend, including “her” sexual repertoire. This puzzled me, as I was incarcerated in an all-male facility and had seen no one who looked like they would answer to the name of Lisa. There was a small line at the bottom of the page that read, “P.S. Please send me a cigarette.” I tossed the note in front of Albert’s cell and said, “Read this and tell me if you know who it is.” After less than a minute I heard a vicious explosion of cursing and swearing before Albert announced, “This is from that old whore, Jonas. That punk will do anything for a cigarette.” Thus Lisa turned out to be an obese fifty-six-year-old man with one leg. I shuddered with revulsion.

It proved true that Jonas would indeed do anything for cigarettes. He was absolutely broke, with no family or friends to send him money, so he had no choice but to perform tricks in order to feed his habits. He was severely deranged, and I believe he also liked the masochism it involved. For example, he once drank a sixteen-ounce bottle of urine for a single, hand-rolled cigarette. I’d be hard-pressed to say who suffered more—Jonas, or the people who had to listen to him gagging and retching as it went down. Another time he stood in the shower and inserted a chair leg into his anus as the entire barracks looked on. His reward was one cigarette. These weren’t even name-brand cigarettes, but generic, hand-rolled tobacco that cost about a penny each.

As I’ve hinted, Jonas was none too stable in the psychological department. This is a man whose false teeth were painted fluorescent shades of pink and purple, and who crushed up the lead in colored pencils in order to make eye shadow. The one foot he had left was ragged and disgusting, with nails that looked like corn chips. One of his favorite activities was to simulate oral sex with a hot sauce bottle. He once sold his leg (the prosthetic one) to another inmate, then told the guards that the inmate had taken it from him by force. The inmate got revenge by putting rat poison in Jonas’s coffee. The guards figured out something was wrong when Jonas was found vomiting blood. He was the single most reviled man on Death Row, hated and shunned by every other inmate. A veritable prince of the correctional system. You don’t encounter many gentlemen in here, but Jonas stood out even in this environment.

I do not wish to leave you with the impression that Albert was a gem, either. He was constantly scheming and scamming. He once wrote a letter to a talk show host, claiming that he would reveal where he had hidden other bodies if the host would pay him a thousand dollars. Being that he had already been sentenced to death in both Arkansas and Mississippi, he had nothing to lose. When he was finally executed, he left me his false teeth as a memento. He left someone else his glass eye.

For all the insanity that takes place inside the prison, it’s still nothing compared with the things you see and hear in the yard. In 2003, all Arkansas Death Row inmates were moved to a new “Super Maximum Security” prison in Grady, Arkansas. There really is no yard here. You’re taken, shackled of course, from your cell and walked through a narrow corridor. It leads to the “outside,” where without once actually setting foot outside the prison walls, you’re locked inside a tiny, filthy concrete stall, much like a miniature grain silo. There is one panel of mesh wire about two feet from the top of one wall that lets in the daylight, and you can tell the outdoors is beyond, but you can’t actually see any of it. There’s no interaction with other prisoners, and you’re afraid to breathe too deeply for fear of catching a disease of some sort. I went out there one morning, and in my stall alone there were three dead and decaying pigeons, and more feces than you can shake a stick at. The smell reminds me of the lion house at the Memphis Zoo, which I would visit as a child. When you first enter you have to fight against your gag reflex. It’s a filthy business, trying to get some exercise.

Before we moved here we had a real yard. You were actually outside, in the sun and air. You could walk around and talk to other people, and there were a couple of basketball hoops. Men sat around playing checkers, chess, dominoes, or doing push-ups. A few would huddle in corners smoking joints they bought from the guards.

I’d been there less than two weeks when one day on the yard my attention was drawn to another prisoner who had been dubbed “Cathead.” This unsavory character had gained the name because that’s exactly what he looked like. If you were to catch an old, stray tomcat and shave all the fur off its head you would be looking at the spitting image of this fellow. Cathead was sitting on the ground, soaking up the sun and chewing a blade of grass that dangled from the corner of his mouth. He was staring off into space as if absorbed in profound thought. I had been walking laps around the yard and taking in the scenery. As I passed Cathead for the millionth time he looked up at me (actually it was more like he was seeing some other place, but his head turned in my direction) and he asked, “You know how you keep five people from raping you?” I was caught off guard, as this was not a question I had ever much considered, or thought I’d ever be called upon to answer. I looked at this odd creature, waiting for the punch line to what I was hoping was a joke. He soon answered his own question: “Just tighten your ass cheeks and start biting.” I was horrified. He was dead serious, and seemed to think he was passing on a bit of incredibly well-thought-out wisdom. The only things going through my mind were What kind of hell have I been sent to? Is this what passes for conversation here? I quickly went back to walking laps and left Cathead to his ponderings.

Prison is a freak show. Barnum and Bailey have no idea what they’re missing out on. I will be your master of ceremonies on a guided tour of this small corner of hell. Prepare to be dazzled and baffled. If the hand is truly quicker than the eye, you’ll never know what hit you. I know I didn’t.

One

My name is Damien Echols, although it wasn’t always. At birth I was different in both name and essence. On December 11, 1974, when I came into the world, I was named Michael Hutchison at the insistence of my father, Joe Hutchison. My mother, Pam, had a different name in mind, but my father would hear none of it. They argued about it for years afterward.

The hospital where I was born still stands in the small run-down town of West Memphis, Arkansas. It’s the same hospital where my maternal grandmother, Francis Gosa, died twenty years later. As a child I was jealous of my sister, Michelle, who was lucky enough to be born, two years after me, across the bridge in Memphis, Tennessee. In my youth Memphis always felt like home to me. When we crossed the bridge into Tennessee I had the sensation of being where I belonged and thought it only right that I should have been the one born there. After all, my sister didn’t even care where she was born.

My mother and grandmother were both fascinated by the fact that after I had been delivered and the doctor had discharged my mother from the hospital, I was placed in a Christmas stocking for the short journey home. They kept the stocking for years, and I had to hear the story often. I found out later that hospitals all over the country do the same thing for every baby born in the month of December, but this fact seemed to be lost on my mother, and it marked the beginning of a lifetime of denial. After saving the stocking as if it were a valuable family heirloom for seventeen years, it was unceremoniously left behind in a move that was less than well planned.

Other than the stocking I had only one memento saved from childhood—a pillow. My grandmother gave it to me the day I left the hospital, and I slept on it until I was seventeen years old, when it was left behind in the same ill-fated move. I could never sleep without that pillow as a child, as it was my security blanket. By the end it was nothing more than a ball of stuffing housed in a pillowcase that was rapidly disintegrating.

Being born in the winter made me a child of the winter. I was truly happy only when the days were short, the nights were long, and my teeth were chattering. I love the winter. Every year I long for it, look forward to it, even though I always feel as if it’s turning me inside out. The beauty and loneliness of it hurts my heart and carries with it all the memories of every winter before. Even now, after having been locked in a cell for years, at the coming of winter I can still close my eyes and feel myself walking the streets as everyone else lies in bed asleep. I remember how the ice sounded as it cracked in the trees every time the wind blew. The air could be so cold that it scoured my throat with each breath, but I would not want to go indoors and miss the magick of it. I have two definitions for the word “magick.” The first is knowing that I can effect change through my own will, even behind these bars; and the other meaning is more experiential—seeing beauty for a moment in the midst of the mundane. For a split second, I realize completely and absolutely that the season of winter is sentient, that there is an intelligence behind it. There’s a tremendous amount of emotional pain that comes with the magick of winter, but I still mourn when the season ends, like I’m losing my best friend.

The first true memories I have of my life are of being with my grandmother Francis, whom I called Nanny. Her husband, Slim Gosa, had died about a year before. I recall him vaguely: he drove a Jeep, and I remember him being very nice to me. He died the day after my birthday. Nanny wasn’t my biological grandmother; Slim had had an affair with a Native American woman, who gave birth to my mother. My grandmother, unable to have her own children, raised my mother as her own. My parents, sister, and I had been living in different places in the Delta region—the corner where Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi meet. After my sister was born, my mother felt she couldn’t take care of two children. So Nanny and I lived in a small mobile home trailer in Senatobia, Mississippi. I remember the purple and white trailer sitting on top of a hill covered with pine trees. We had two large black dogs named Smokey and Bear, which we had raised from puppies. One of my earliest memories was of hearing the dogs barking and lunging against their chains like madmen as Nanny stood in the backyard with a pistol, shooting at a poisonous snake. She didn’t stop shooting, even as the snake slithered its way under the huge propane tank in the backyard. Only in hindsight, years later, did I realize she would have blown us all straight to hell if she had hit the tank. At the time I was so young that I viewed the entire scene with nothing but extreme curiosity. It was the first time I had ever seen a snake, and it was combined with the additional spectacle of my grandmother charging out the back door, blazing away like a gunslinger.

My grandmother worked as a cashier at a truck stop, so during the day she left me at a day care center. I can remember it only because it was horrific. I remember being dropped off so early in the morning that it was still dark, and being led to a room in which other children were sleeping on cots. I was given a cot and told that I should take a nap until Captain Kangaroo (my favorite television show) came on. The problem was that I could not, under any circumstances, go to sleep without my pillow and security blanket. I began to scream and cry at the top of my lungs, tears running down my face. It awakened and frightened every other child in the dark room, so that within a few seconds everyone was crying and screaming while frantic day care workers ran from cot to cot in an attempt to find out what was wrong. By the time they got everyone quiet and dried all the tears it was time for Captain Kangaroo and I was quickly absorbed into the epic saga of Mr. Green Jeans and a puppet moose that lived life in perpetual fear of being pelted with a storm of Ping-Pong balls. After that day, my grandmother never forgot to send my pillow with me.

She would recite the same rhyme every night as she tucked me into bed. She’d say, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” I had no idea what a bedbug was, but it seemed pretty obvious from the rhyme that they were capable of inflicting pain. As she closed the door and left me in total darkness, all I could think about were those nocturnal monster insects. I never formed a definite mental image of what they looked like, and somehow that vagueness only made the fear worse. The closest I could come to picturing them was something like stinkbugs with shifty eyes and an evil grin. No matter how tired I was when she tucked me in, the mention of those bugs would wake me up like a dose of smelling salts.

There was something else Nanny used to say that made my hair stand on end. Late at night we would be watching television with all of the lights in the house turned off. The only illumination was the flickering blue glow of the TV screen. She would turn to me and say, “What sound does a scarecrow make?” My eyes would bulge like Halloween caricatures as she looked at me grimly and said, “Hoo! Hoo!” I had no idea what it meant, or why a scarecrow would make the sound of an owl, but for the rest of my life I would never think of one without the other. Later in life those images began to feel like home to me and they brought me comfort. They became symbols of the purest kind of magick, and reminded me of a time when I was safe and loved. There’s something about it that can never be put into words, but the sight of a scarecrow now makes my heart swell. It makes me want to cry. The memory of those jovial October scarecrows on southerners’ front porches takes me to some other place. Now the scarecrow symbolizes a kind of purity.

*  *  *

Every so often, sitting here in solitary confinement, I need to become something else. I need to transform myself and gain a new perspective on reality. When I do, everything must change—emotions, reactions, body, consciousness, and energy patterns. I turned to Zen out of desperation. I had been through hell, traumatized, and sent to Death Row for a crime I did not commit. My anger and outrage were eating me alive. Hatred was growing in my heart because of the way I was being treated on a daily basis. The cleaner you are, the more light that can shine through you. Clear out all the bad, and the current will float through like light through a windowpane. It’s a process I have pushed myself through many times. Each day that I wake up means that I’m one day closer to new life. I can feel the years of accumulated programming and trauma melting away from my body, leaving behind a long-remembered cleanness. I usually have at least a vague idea of what I hope to accomplish or experience—create an art project, explore other realms of consciousness—but this time I’m blindly flowing to wherever the current carries me. I feel younger than I have in the past decade, and memories I had long forgotten are now once again within touching distance.

In the movies it’s always the other prisoners you have to watch out for. In real life, it’s the guards and the administration. They go out of their way to make your life harder and more stressful than it already is, as if being on Death Row were not enough. They can send a man to prison for writing bad checks and then torment him there until he becomes a violent offender. I didn’t want these people to be able to change me, to touch me inside and turn me as rotten and stagnant as they were. I tried out just about every spiritual practice and meditative exercise that might help me to stay sane over the years.

I’ve lost count of how many executions have taken place during my time served. It’s somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I believe. Some of those men I knew well and was close to. Others, I couldn’t stand the sight of. Still, I wasn’t happy to see any of them go the way they did.

Many people rallied to Ju San’s cause, begging the state to spare his life, but in the end it did no good. He had committed such a heinous crime. Frankie Parker had been a brutal heroin addict who killed his former in-laws and held his ex-wife hostage in an Arkansas police station. Over the years he had become Ju San, an ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest with many friends and supporters. On the night of his execution in 1996, shortly after he was pronounced dead, his teacher and spiritual adviser was allowed to walk down Death Row and greet the convicts. It was the first time that a spiritual adviser had been permitted to speak to inmates after an execution. He told us what Frankie’s last word was, what he ate for a last meal, and he described his execution to us.

I had been watching the news coverage of Ju San’s death when someone stepped in front of my door. I turned to see a little old bald man in a black robe and sandals, clutching a strand of prayer beads. He had these wild white eyebrows that were so out of control they looked like small horns. He practically had handlebar mustaches above his eyes. He seemed intense and concentrated as he introduced himself. A lot of Protestant preachers come through Death Row, but they all seem to think themselves better than us. You could tell it by the way most of them didn’t even bother to shake hands. Kobutsu wasn’t like that at all. He made direct, unwavering eye contact and seemed to be genuinely pleased to meet me. It had been his personal mission to do everything he could to help Ju San, and he was pretty torn up over the execution. Before he left, he said I should feel free to write to him at any time. I took him up on that offer.

He and I began corresponding, and I eventually asked him to become my teacher. He accepted. Kobutsu is a paradox: a Zen monk who chain-smokes, tells near-pornographic jokes, and always has an appreciative leer for the female anatomy. He’s a holy man, carnival barker, anarchist, artist, friend, and asshole all rolled up in one robe. I immediately took a shine to him.

Kobutsu would send me books about the old Zen masters, different Buddhist practices, and small cards to make shrines out of. He returned not long after Ju San’s execution to perform a refuge ceremony for another Death Row inmate, and I was allowed to participate in the ceremony. Refuge is the Buddhist equivalent of baptism. It’s like declaring your intention to follow this path, so that the world witnesses it. It was a beautiful ceremony that stirred something in my heart.

Under Kobutsu’s tutelage, I began sitting zazen meditation on a daily basis. Zazen meditation entails sitting quietly, focusing on nothing but your breath, moving in and out. At first it was agony to have to sit still and stare at the floor for fifteen minutes. Over time I became more accustomed to it, and managed to increase my sitting time to twenty minutes a day. I put away all reading material except for Zen texts and meditation manuals. I’d read nothing else for the next three years.

About six months after the other prisoner’s refuge ceremony, Kobutsu returned to perform it for me. The magick this ritual held within it increased my determination to practice tenfold. I started every day with a smile on my face, and not even the guards got to me. I think it was a little unsettling to them to strip-search a man who smiled at you through the whole ordeal.

Kobutsu and I continued to correspond through letters and also talked on the phone. His conversations were a mixture of encouragement, instruction, nasty jokes, and bizarre tales of his latest adventures. Through constant daily practice, my life was definitely improving. I even constructed a small shrine of paper Buddhas in my cell to give me inspiration. I was now sitting zazen meditation for two hours a day and still pushing myself. I’d not yet had that elusive enlightenment experience that I’d heard so much about, and I desperately wanted it.

One year after my refuge ceremony, Kobutsu decided it was time for my Jukai ceremony. Jukai is lay ordination, where one begins to take vows. It’s also where you are renamed, to symbolize taking on a new life and shedding the old one. Only the teacher decides when you are ready to receive Jukai.

My ceremony would be performed by Shodo Harada Roshi, one of the greatest living Zen masters on earth. He was the abbot of a beautiful temple in Japan, and would fly to Arkansas for this occasion. I anticipated the event for weeks beforehand, so much that I had trouble sleeping at night. The morning of the big event I was up before dawn, shaving my head and preparing to meet the master.

Kobutsu was first in line through the door. I could see the light reflecting off his freshly shaved pink head. I also noticed he had abandoned his usual Japanese sandals in favor of a pair of high-top Converse tennis shoes. It was odd to see a pair of sneakers protruding from under the hem of a monk’s robe. Behind him walked Harada Roshi. He wore the same style robe as Kobutsu, only it was in pristine condition. Kobutsu tended to have the occasional mustard stain on his, and didn’t seem to mind one bit.

Harada Roshi was small and thin, but had a very commanding presence. Despite his warm smile, there was something about him that was very formal in an almost military sort of way. I believe the first word that came to mind when I saw him was “discipline.” He seemed disciplined beyond anything a human could achieve, and it greatly inspired me. To this day I still strive to have as much discipline about myself as Harada Roshi. Beneath his warmth and friendliness was a will of solid steel.

We were all led into a tiny room that served as Death Row’s chapel. Harada Roshi talked about the difference between Japan and America, about his temple back home, and about how few Asians came to learn at the old temple now; it was mostly Americans who wanted to learn. His voice was low, raspy, and rapid-fire. Japanese isn’t usually described as a beautiful language, but I was entranced by it. I dearly wished I could make such poetic, elegant-sounding words come from my own mouth.

Harada Roshi set up a small altar to perform the ceremony. The altar cloth was white silk, and on it was a small Buddha statue, a canvas covered with calligraphy, and an incense burner. We all dropped a pinch of the exotic-smelling incense into the burner as an offering, and then opened our sutra books to begin the proper chants. Kobutsu had to help me turn the pages of my book because the guards made me wear chains on my hands and feet. During the course of the ceremony I was given the name Koson. I loved that name and all it symbolized, and scribbled it everywhere. I was also presented with my rakusu.

A rakusu is made of black cloth, and is suspended from your neck. It covers your hara, which is the energy center about two finger-widths below your belly button. It has two black cloth straps and a wooden ring/buckle. It’s sewn in a pattern that looks like a rice paddy would if viewed from the air. It represents the Buddha’s robe. This is the only part of my robe the administration would allow me to keep inside the prison. On the inside, Harada Roshi had painted beautiful calligraphy characters that said, “Great effort, without fail, brings great light.” It was my most prized possession until the day years later when the prison guards took it from me.

The canvas on the altar was also given to me. Its calligraphy translates to “Moonbeams pierce to the bottom of the pools, yet in the water not a trace remains.” I proudly put it on display in my cell.

I ventured into the realm of Zen to gain a handle on my negative emotional states, which I had learned to control to a great extent, but I now approached my practice in a much more aggressive manner. Much like a weight lifter, I continued to pile it on. On weekends I was now sitting zazen meditation for five hours a day. My prayer beads were always in my hand as I constantly chanted mantras. I practiced hatha yoga for at least an hour a day. I became a vegetarian. Still, I did not have a breakthrough Kensho experience. Kensho is a moment in which you see reality with crystal-clear vision, what a lot of people refer to as “enlightenment.” I didn’t voice my thoughts out loud, but I was beginning to harbor strong suspicions that Kensho was nothing more than a myth.

A teacher of Tibetan Buddhism started coming to the prison once a week to instruct anyone interested. I attended these sessions, which were specifically tailored to be of use to those on Death Row. One practice I and another inmate were taught is called Phowa. It consists of pushing your energy out through the top of your head at the moment of death. It still did not bring about that life-changing moment I was in search of.

Two

My memory really starts to come together and form a narrative once I started school. I can still remember every teacher I ever had, from kindergarten through high school.

My parents, sister, and I moved into an apartment complex called Mayfair in 1979, as far as I recall. We had an upstairs apartment in a long line of identical doors. When I went out to play, I could find my way back home only by peeking in every window until I saw familiar furnishings. My grandmother also moved into an apartment in the complex, one row behind us. This was the year I started kindergarten, and I remember it well.

Mayfair was located in a run-down section of West Memphis, Arkansas, although not nearly as run-down as it would later become. We were in the worst school district in the city, and on the first day I saw that I was one of only two white kids in the entire class. The other was my best friend, Tommy, who also lived in Mayfair. Our teacher was a skinny black woman named Donaldson, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a more hateful adult. She wasn’t as bad to the girls, but seemed to harbor an intense hatred for all male children. I honestly don’t know how she ever became a teacher, as she seemed to spend all her time racking her brain to come up with new and innovative forms of punishment.

I was very quiet at this age, almost to the point of being invisible. I managed to avoid her wrath most of the time, but twice she noticed me. Once, for a reason I never understood, a girl told her that I had my eyes open during nap time. Every day after lunch we were to pull out our mats, lie on the floor, and sleep for half an hour while the teacher left us alone. No one knew where she went or why. For her it was not enough that we lay still, she wanted us to sleep, and expected us to do so on command. She would appoint one person to be the class snitch while she was gone, and whoever she chose got to sit at the teacher’s desk like a god and look out over everyone else sprawled facedown on the floor. The chosen person was always a girl—never a boy.

So one day after lunch I was on the floor as usual, breathing dust and hoping for no spiders. The teacher came back half an hour later and asked the girl at her desk for the daily report—who had and had not been sleeping. The girl pointed straight at me and said, “His eyes were open.”

I had not stirred from my mat or made a sound, yet this teacher made me stand before the class as she hit my hands with a ruler. It hurt my hands, true enough, and then there was the shame of having this done in front of the entire class, but the most frightening and traumatic part was the vengeance and hatred with which she carried it out. She was wild and furious, gritting her teeth and grunting with each smack of the accursed ruler. The one other time she noticed me I can’t remember what, if anything, I had done wrong. I do remember the punishment, though, and this time I was not alone. Once again I had to stand before the entire class, this time along with two other boys, and hold a stack of books over my head for half an hour. All three of us stood with our arms straight up in the air, shaking with effort as we held a stack of books aloft. During the entire punishment she howled at us in a rage, saying things like “You’re going to learn that I’m not playing a game with you!”

So much for kindergarten.

*  *  *

A couple of strange incidents occurred during this period of my life, both of which I remember vividly, but neither of which I can explain. The first happened while I was still living in the Mayfair apartments.

One evening as dusk approached, my mother told me not to leave the walkway right in front of our apartment door. Being the undisciplined heathen that I was, I beat a hasty departure the moment she was out of sight. I ran around to the very back of the complex, where a huge mound of sand was located, and proceeded to dig a hole with my bare hands. This was one of my favorite activities, in which I invested a huge amount of time as a child. I would get out of bed in the morning, have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, lick the spoon clean, and carry it outside with me. I spent the day digging, nonstop. The front yard looked like a nightmare, and my mother would always step out on the front porch and screech, “Boy, you fill in them holes ’fore somebody breaks an ankle.”

I looked up from my digging that evening only to realize it had become completely dark. I could see the streetlights on in the distance, and the night was deathly silent. No crickets chirping, people talking, or cars driving by. Nothing but the silence that comes once the movie is over and the screen goes blank. Knowing that I was now officially in trouble, I dusted myself off and started to make my way back to our apartment.

As I walked home I had to pass a place where two sections of the building came together to form a corner. The last time I had noticed this corner the apartment there was empty. Now it was dark, but the front door was open.

The inside of the apartment was as void of illumination as some sort of vacuum. Standing in the doorway, propped against the frame with his arms folded across his chest, was a man in black pants and no shirt. He had black shoulder-length hair and wore a shit-eating grin. His eyes followed my progress as I passed, until I stood right in front of him. “Where you goin’, boy?” he asked in a way that said he was amused, but didn’t really expect an answer. I said nothing, just stood looking up at him. “Your mamma’s looking for you. You know you’re going to get a whipping.”

After a moment I continued on my way. When I encountered my mother, she had a switch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I did indeed receive a whipping.

I didn’t think about this incident again until a day or so before I was arrested and put on trial for murder. I was eighteen years old, and the cops had been harassing me nonstop for weeks. My mother asked me one day after lunch, “Why don’t you take your shirt off and go in the backyard so I can take pictures? That way, if the cops beat you we’ll have some before-and-after photos.” Nodding my head, I made a trip to the bathroom, where I took my shirt off. When I looked in the mirror over the sink, it hit me that I looked exactly like the man I’d seen all those years before in the dark apartment.

When I was seven or eight, I saw a man shot in the head. We had moved recently to a two-family house in Memphis. One summer afternoon we left the front door open so a breeze could blow through the house. I was standing right at the threshold looking out at my father, who was standing in the front yard. His hands were in his pockets and he was staring at the ground but not really seeing it. I’d been watching him for a good amount of time and he’d never blinked even once. In his mind he was a million miles away, doing who-knows-what. He did this quite often, but it was different this time. Like an omen.

We heard a small, distant-sounding popping noise, nothing like the gunfire on television. My father later said he first thought it was a car backfiring on the next block. We both looked up at the same time to see a man crossing the street, coming toward us. His hands were holding his head and he was covered in blood.

My father turned toward me and started barking like a Marine drill instructor—“Go! Go! Go! Move your ass!” I retreated into the house with my father right behind me. No sooner had he closed and locked the door than the man hit it running full force. There was a tremendous impact, then nothing. All was quiet. My father stood looking at the door while my mother ran into the room with a scared but questioning look on her face. When he told her what had happened, they stood around trying to figure out what to do next.

We didn’t have a phone, so it was decided that my mother would run out the back door and over to the neighbors’ house where she would ask to use theirs. The only problem was that the neighbors wouldn’t answer the door. My mother stood on the porch hammering and yelling, “We need help! Please let me use your phone!” It was all to no avail, as the neighbors refused to respond. After the cops arrived, the neighbors said it was because they thought my mother had shot my father and was trying to get in to them.

In the meantime, the man smeared blood everywhere. By the time the cops showed up with an ambulance, the man had collapsed on our steps. There were bloody handprints all over the front door and all over our white station wagon. The ambulance drove away with the man in the back while the cops questioned my mom and dad. My paternal grandmother and grandfather, Doris and Ed Hutchison, arrived to take my sister and me away for the night, and tried to keep us from seeing as much of the mess as possible.

My young mind bounced back from the incident without a mark on it. The next day I was able to go back to playing childhood games with all the other kids. There was zero lasting trauma. However, if I were to undergo the exact same experience at my present age I would need counseling for the rest of my life. The nightmares would rob me of precious sleep, and my nerves would be frazzled.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to lose my flexibility, my ability to bounce back from an unsettling incident; I can only look back and see that it’s gone. Going on trial for a crime I didn’t commit screwed me up a bit, no doubt. But I survived it intact, more or less. Don’t get me wrong—my heart, soul, body, and mind all have scars that will never properly heal. Still, I survived. I’m not so sure I could do that if the whole thing had happened to me later in life. I believe it would have been entirely possible for me to drop dead of shock and trauma right in the courtroom.

If I hadn’t been sent to prison at such a young age there’s no way I could ever have adapted to it. Prison is bad enough, but it’s a million times worse when you know you did nothing to be here for. That fact magnifies and amplifies the shock and trauma. As it is, I grew up in this place. Perhaps that’s what robbed me of my inner flexibility.

I no longer approach each situation in life with an open heart, ready to learn. Instead I come like a wary old man scared of being knocked on his ass again. An old man knows that at his age those bruises don’t heal as quickly as they used to. I used to learn as a youth because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily even think about learning; it was more like being one of those baby animals you see on the nature shows. They almost learn by accident, just from being wide-eyed and playful. Now I hoard knowledge out of fear. I figure the more I know, the more I’ll be able to control a situation and keep from getting hurt again.

*  *  *

I hate it. I hate the signs and symptoms of age I see more and more in myself as each day passes. I’m now the same age that Hank Williams was when he died. Our situations and circumstances made us both old before our time. Don’t think me cynical, though. I believe it to be wholly reversible. I believe love can fix damn near anything. Love and iced tea. I just need larger doses of both than I can get in here. Perhaps soon someone will correct this injustice and rescue me from this nightmare. Until then I have no choice but to struggle on as I have been. “Saint Raymond Nonnatus, hear my prayer . . .”

Three

The year, the idea of a year, has become paper-thin. I can almost reach out and tear a hole through it with my fingernail. December is coming. I can feel it waking up. It brings me a haunted place to rest my head and a clearer vision of all I see. The whole world seems to be putting on its holiday trim, and every day that passes is another mile traveled through the ice-cold desert.

*  *  *

When I was in second grade, a friend of Nanny’s decided to rent the tiny three-room brick building in her backyard to my family, because her Social Security check wasn’t quite enough for her to survive on. In hindsight it strikes me as incredibly odd that someone would have had such a structure in the backyard of a small suburban home. It was more like a bomb shelter.

Someone had wired the place for electricity, and the water worked well enough, but there was no heat. Sometimes it would get so cold in there that the toilet would have ice in it. To keep from freezing to death my mother would turn the oven on as high as it would go and leave the door open. We had a small cat who would hop up onto the oven door and make herself at home by curling into a ball and sleeping.

After a while my mother and father managed to borrow a small portable heater. My mother would stand my sister and me in front of it as we dressed for school in the morning, so that we wouldn’t shiver ourselves to pieces. One day as we were getting dressed, my sister backed into the heater. You could hear her shrieking all down the street, a loud, wordless wail of pain. I can still see my mother on her knees, clutching my sister and rocking back and forth as they both sobbed. After things calmed down my mother examined my sister, and nothing looked to be seriously wrong, so we were sent off to school.

As we walked back home that afternoon, the back of my sister’s shirt and pants were soaking wet. The parts of her that had touched the heater had blistered during the day, and all the blisters had broken open. When my mother saw it, she started crying again. That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through.

There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging the men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.

My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.

In the end I think that’s part of what caused my parents’ marriage to begin falling apart. The stress of poverty. I usually think of these things around Christmastime. Probably because there was a bag of hard candy in the sacks of food the men brought us, and my grandmother always called it “Christmas candy.”

As I grew older I learned to be ashamed of being poor, too. It became humiliating, something I’d do everything I could to hide from the rest of the world. I developed an overwhelming sense of being excluded from everything. Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. That’s mostly during the teenage years.

Later still, I developed a fierce sense of pride at having come from such situations and circumstances. I look at the people who have done horrible things to me, who have lied about me, abused me, and tried to take my life, and I know they would never have been able to rise above the things that I have. They would have died inside.

I’ve talked to some of the other guys on Death Row about our lives as children, and they laugh at my poor childhood. I laugh along with them. One guy will say he was poor because he grew up in the projects, and I become outraged. “Poor? You had water! You had heat! You were wearing shoes that cost a hundred dollars! That’s not poor! Let me tell you what we had. . . .” Everyone snickers when they hear that certain areas of the trailer park were considered to be where the “rich people” lived. Now that I can look back on it all, it’s funny to me, too. I didn’t always see the humor in it, though. It’s no laughing matter when you have to fight with the roaches to see who gets the cornflakes.

Now I believe my parents just weren’t meant to be together. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be with anyone, as my father has now been married and divorced several times, and my mother follows closely behind in her number of failed relationships. The trouble between them began when I was in second grade.

Nanny had gotten remarried to a respectable man named Ivan Haynes. He’s the one I always remember as being my grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. He could be a real asshole sometimes. I could always expect to hear his amused chuckle anytime he witnessed my pain and misfortune. Upon hearing tales of my childhood, some people have speculated that perhaps he didn’t like me so much. I don’t believe that. There was much love between him and me; he was just doing what comes naturally to members of my family. Laughing and teasing others helps take your mind off your own troubles.

I remember one sunny afternoon when I was about seven years old, and Ivan was sitting on our front porch in a lawn chair, drinking a can of beer. I saw him drink only once or twice a year, and he never consumed anything stronger than Budweiser. For some reason he always dumped a couple spoons of salt into the can before he drank it. He once gave me a tiny sip from his can, and I could taste nothing but salt.

I was playing out in the front yard wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. I was open for attack. “Hey, boy,” Ivan called out, blinking like a cat in the sunshine. “Bring me that board over there.” He pointed to a piece of plywood lying across the road.

I picked it up unsuspectingly and started to make my way back to the front porch. When the pain came, it seemed to inflame every part of my body at once. I began to shriek and flail about wildly. The pain was so intense that it short-circuited my logic. I spun in circles, slapping myself and stomping my feet, giving voice to one unending scream. The board had been sitting atop a nest of fire ants. This wasn’t the first time I’d been bitten, nor would it be the last, although it was the worst and most painful.

What was my grandfather doing while I was going into a frenzy? Sipping his beer and watching me in a half-interested way. My mother came running out of the house and grabbed me up. She already knew what the problem was, and she carried me in to the bathtub to pour cold water over me. As we crossed the porch and passed my grandfather, I heard him chuckle.

I heard that maddening chuckle again after one of his trips to an auction, which he loved. He would go through people’s garbage, show up bright and early at every garage sale listed in the local paper, and bid on ungodly amounts of junk at auctions all over the state. He took this rubbish and fixed it up, then sold it at his booth in the flea market.

One day he came home with a box of odds and ends that contained a pair of swim fins, or swimming flippers. They weren’t pliant and flexible the way professional-quality fins are. These were as hard as bricks, like petrified frog feet. They would have broken before they bent. My grandfather tossed them to me and said, “Put ’em on and try ’em out.”

I carried them out into the backyard, where a four-foot-deep pool had sat for a couple of years. It had never been drained or cleaned since its initial setup, so the water was dark green and disturbing. Odd-looking bugs skimmed along the surface, looking for someone to bite. I did not relish the thought of having to splash about in that muck.

I sat on the rickety ladder and attached the flippers tightly to my feet. Standing on the ladder, I launched myself out into the middle of the pool and began kicking. My efforts were futile, and I quickly found myself thrashing around on the bottom. I began to wonder if perhaps these flippers were made for imaginary swimming and not intended for actual water wear. Whatever the case, I thought, To hell with this, and decided to get out. The problem was that I couldn’t stand up. The rock-hard plastic flippers made it impossible for me to get my feet under me. Frantic, I managed to get my head above the water one time for what I believed to be my final gasp of air. What sight did I behold as I was drowning? My grandfather, hands on hips, chuckling. Next to him stood my sister, also giggling, as she squinted against the sun. My terror evaporated in the face of the rage that swept through my small body, and I managed to get a hand on the ladder and pull myself up.

For a few moments I could do nothing but cough, sputter, and try to expel the water from my nose, which was making the inside of my head burn like fire. When I could speak, I snatched off the flippers and began to shriek in outrage, putting the finger of accusation on them both. “Stupid! You’re both stupid! I’m telling Mom!” I shot into the house like a scalded cat, my grandfather shouting after me, “Don’t you drip that water on the rug!”

I found my mother inside folding clothes. In a rush I spit out the entire sordid story, my bare foot stomping in fury. After hearing that my sister and grandfather had stood by laughing as I nearly drowned, she simply continued to fold clothes. Brow furrowed, she lit a cigarette and expelled a stream of noxious gray smoke into the air before suggesting, “Don’t put the flippers back on, then.” I was dumbfounded and my feelings were hurt. I had expected to be fussed over. Instead, no one took my trauma seriously.

Sometimes my grandfather would pass on bits of strange and highly suspect information to me, often involving the nature of feet. He had lots of time to think on these mysteries, as he spent most of his days sitting quietly in the flea market, waiting for someone to come and offer him a deal on some of his wares. He once obtained several large boxes of socks, which he proceeded to put on display. I hated those socks. There was nothing even remotely interesting about them. I strolled through the flea market inspecting all the other booths, which always held strange and fantastical devices. When you came to my grandfather’s booth there was nothing but a bunch of boring socks.

I was eating my usual summertime lunch of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and washing it down with a Scramble soda, when I started to suspect that all white people were as disdainful of those socks as I was. Every white person who approached the booth seemed to show no interest in the socks, and would almost turn their nose up if my grandfather attempted to draw their attention to his discount hosiery. I also noticed that almost every black person who happened past would buy at least one pair, sometimes several. This struck me as highly peculiar.

“How come only black people are buying the socks?” I asked Ivan in between bites of sandwich. He eyed me over the rim of his cup as he took a sip of coffee. “Because they don’t want their feet to get cold,” he answered eventually. There seemed to be some deep mystery to me here. Was there some special reason they were being protective of their feet? Did white people not care if their feet got cold? I know that I myself was opposed to cold feet, yet I had no desire to purchase flea market socks.

“Why?” I blurted in frustration. “Why don’t they want their feet to get cold?” He looked at me as if I had gone insane, frowned, and shook his head before answering with “Because if their feet get cold they die.” This was a stunning revelation. Now I was getting to the bottom of this thing. I was amazed, and wondered why no one had bothered to teach me this fact of life in school. I had one last question. “Will white people die if their feet get cold?” He chuckled, turned his back to me, and went about the business of trying to draw more customers. This conversation stuck with me for many years. I even told a guy on Death Row about it, and it became a running joke. When he was getting ready to go out into the yard on cold winter mornings, I’d yell over and remind him, “Make sure you’ve got your socks on. You know what happens when your feet get cold.” He’d laugh and say, “You and your old racist granddaddy ain’t going to trick me.”

There was one other incident in my youth that involved my grandfather and socks. For some reason I couldn’t sleep without socks on. It just didn’t feel right. I would put on my pajama bottoms and tuck them into my socks. The socks had to be pulled up almost to my knees so that it looked like a bizarre superhero’s costume. The problem was that I often didn’t change the socks for three or four days at a time. I would howl in outrage if anyone caught me and forcibly pulled them off.

This changed when my grandfather told me that sleeping with my socks on could cause my feet to burst open, because they weren’t getting any air. In my head I saw my toes exploding like kernels of popcorn. It actually caused me to have bad dreams, all of which contained bursting feet. He was always telling me something crazy, and seeming to believe it himself. I now tell my sister’s children bizarre tales, which they swear by. At least I can say I’m not sending them into a den of fire ants. Ivan was a nice man, in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. There’s not a hell of a lot more to say about him, other than that I grew to love him over time and cried like a baby when he died a few years later.

After the wedding Nanny moved from her apartment to Ivan’s house, which was in the nicer, middle-class section of West Memphis. They hadn’t been living together long when we moved in with them. By “we,” I mean me, my parents, and my sister. It was supposed to be a short-term arrangement while my father found us another place. We had hopped from place to place, and for roughly two years we lived in six states before finally crashing to a halt with my grandparents.

My mother and father slept on the bed in the guest room while my sister and I slept on the floor next to them. I remember my father’s strong arms picking me up off the floor on more than one occasion when he had been awakened by the sound of me gasping for breath, having an asthma attack. He’d carry me to the emergency room, which I despised because I knew many needles awaited my arrival. Now I actually look back on those days with a warm feeling in my heart, and I miss them. Times were simpler then.

I once asked my father how fish get into a previously empty pond, and he told me in all sincerity that they ride the rain. He believed that when water was evaporated from a lake, the fish were evaporated with it. Somehow the fish survived the process, and when it began to rain, the fish came back down with the water. There was no question in his mind about the truthfulness of the statement. Of course he also believed that you would die if you were to toss your hat onto a bed. When I asked him why fish didn’t rain down everywhere, he said they sometimes did. He told me that once when he was a kid he saw fish flapping on the highway after a rainstorm. He refused to eat them because it would bring bad luck. He was uneasy just talking about it.

After we had been there for a few months my mother and father began to fight, though I still to this day do not know what they fought about. Perhaps it was the usual strain of being broke and on hard times. Whatever the reason, my father moved out and into a motel.

They tried to work through it at first, seeing each other a couple of times a week and maintaining a relationship, sort of like dating. My father would come pick us all up on weekends and take us out to eat, or to a drive-in movie to watch the latest horror release and fill up on hot dogs and popcorn. We always watched horror movies. As a child I remember sitting up into the early hours of the morning watching horror movies with my father. I still watch horror movies and read horror novels because they remind me of “home.” Nostalgia, you could say.

At any rate, it didn’t work. I knew things between my parents were finished when I was walking home from a friend’s house one day and saw my father’s car in the driveway. As I approached I saw that the driver’s-side door was open and my father was sitting on the seat. One leg was on the ground, the other was in the car, and his face was hidden behind his hands as he cried so hard that his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he may have been laughing, until I looked up at my mother. She was standing outside the car next to him, with bloodshot eyes. When I got within arm’s length, my father grabbed me and held me while he continued to cry. It scared the hell out of me, and I had no idea what to do.

My mother gave me a saccharine-sweet explanation of how my father wasn’t going to be living with us anymore, but that he’d still come by to see my sister and me on weekends. And he did for a while. He’d come get us and take us to visit my aunt or grandparents on his side of the family. It all came to an end soon enough, though.

Four

It wasn’t long before my mother met someone else. I would have been in third grade at the time. His name was Jack Echols and he was twenty years older than my mother, though you wouldn’t guess it by looking at her. A steady diet of greasy fried food, cigarettes, no exercise, and a dead-end life had all come together to give my mother the look of years she didn’t yet own by the age of twenty-five or so when they were married. I’ve never encountered a single person in my life who had anything good to say about Jack. He was a hateful bastard who only grew worse with age.

After breaking up with my father, my mother started going to a Protestant church not far from our house. This is where she met Jack, who had been attending services there for an eternity, or at least since Jesus, the carpenter, built the place with his very own hands.

I can still close my eyes and see the first time I noticed him. Church had just come to an end, and I rushed out into the parking lot to play a quick game of tag with all the other little heathens when I looked up to see Jack walking out the front door with his arm around my mom. My mind snapped to attention like a dog’s ears standing up at a strange sound. It interested me only for a moment; then I went back to what I was doing. I felt a great deal of resentment toward her, and I clearly recall one day when she found me crying and asked me what was wrong.

I told her that I wanted to live with my father, to which she responded, “Well, he doesn’t want you to.” I knew he had never said any such thing, but it still hurt to hear it. She couldn’t imagine the depth to which such a remark wounded me; she informed me that she had already told my father that she would soon be getting remarried, and I had better start getting used to the idea. At any rate, the moment she said that, I felt as if there were no comfort to be found anywhere in the world. I felt so cold inside, and there was nowhere to turn. By the look on her face I could tell she took pleasure in informing me of this. It wasn’t a happy or gleeful expression—it seemed more defiant than anything. I felt like Jekyll and Hyde—part of me still wanted to seek some sort of comfort from her, for her to tell me that everything was going to be okay. The other part wanted to say things that would go straight to her heart and hurt her the way I was hurting.

*  *  *

At home I used to walk through emotional wastelands where the lines on craggy faces were so deep that the wind whistled through them. People fell in and out of my life, but it was the places that really mattered. Even now I can feel them tugging at my sleeve and spinning around in my head. All the old stories have it wrong, because it’s not the ghost that haunts the house; it’s the house that haunts the ghost. I feel lost out here, and everything reminds me that I’m not quite real. In the end it’s always home that damns us.

My days have somehow become as rich and twisted as the kudzu vines that grew around my grandmother’s house back home. It’s almost too much to take, and my heart is on the verge of breaking. I’m overwhelmed with things I can’t even articulate. I’m haunted by the way overhanging leaves used to cast reflections on asphalt puddles. I want to go home. Never have I wanted anything so badly. Ghosts are using my head for a neon disco, and I want to go home. My heart is a haunted house that I cannot leave behind. Everything here vibrates slower than mud, and no one has a soul.

Time spoils quickly in here, and it smells like rotten meat. Every day adds a little more weight, barely noticeable at first, but eventually it will crush you to death. In this place your life can be measured by how long you can keep fighting. The ghouls can sense it if you have any life behind your eyes, and they move in to extinguish it. The guards, the prisoners, the administration—the energy spirals downward forever, creating a hellish staircase that leads nowhere. The most frightening part is how they’re all too thick to realize what they’re doing. They seem to believe that if they keep digging in the same hole, they’ll eventually reach heaven.

My exhaustion is beyond bone-deep. It has seeped into my soul, and every day it robs me of a little more of what I once was. Of what I was meant to be. There is no rest here, and there is no life. When I try to look ahead the light seems a little farther away each day. There is despair on my breath and no savior in sight. They say it’s death only if you accept it, but more and more these days I’m feeling like I don’t have a choice. I keep saying to myself, “I will not stop. I will not stop.” If for no other reason than that I will it to be so. If everything else fails, I will keep moving ahead on willpower alone. There has to be some magick in something, somewhere.

I caught a glimpse of my shadow today. It’s usually so hard to see because it always hides behind me. It’s so much easier to see everyone else’s.

*  *  *

My mother and Jack never did go out on dates more than a handful of times, and it seemed that most of their conversations took place in that cursed parking lot. After church my grandmother would arrive to pick us up, being smart enough to avoid the place herself. My mother, sister, and I would all get in the car, then Jack would come dragging out at the end of the herd and cut a path straight to us. My mother would roll down her window and he would stand there talking to her until every other car had left the lot and our brains were cooking in our heads from the heat of the brutal summer sun. Years later when I heard the teachings on purgatory, that’s what I imagined it to be like—not quite hell, but bad enough to make you curse the bastard hanging on to the window and forcing you to grow old in this desolate place.

Jack was bald on top, but he practiced the art of the comb-over. He had a ring of hair that grew around his ears, and he would comb it over the top of his head, which was as bald as an egg. Most of his teeth were missing, and the few he had left were yellow and crooked like old tombstones. His skin had been cooked to the texture of leather by the sun, and his stomach was bloated with ulcers. I wondered what appealed to my mother about such a creature, but the answer is quite simple. Jack Echols was the very first man to pay attention to my mother after my father left, and that’s all it took. She was striving for attention, and he gave it to her.

Jack had forced us to start attending services at a place called The Church of God. It was a real freak show where people spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor screaming when they “had the spirit.” The minister was a morbidly obese man whom you could hear breathing from across the room.

Twice every Sunday, once in the morning and once at night, he would preach about how the end of the world was at hand. Before leaving he always got out a bottle of olive oil and asked if anyone had any infirmities that needed to be healed. Anyone who stepped forward would have olive oil smeared on their face before being shoved to the ground amid a flurry of shouting while a horde of rabid believers waved their hands in the air and howled at the ceiling.

This made quite an impression on my young, fourth-grade mind, and I gave quite a bit of thought to all the miracles I could perform if only I had that bottle of magick oil. My sister went up to be “healed” many times, because she had been very hard of hearing since she was a baby and always had to have some sort of tubes inserted into her ears. She never fell on the floor quivering, and never could hear any better.

My mother’s wedding to Jack was nice enough as far as white-trash shindigs go. The wedding ceremony was in an old church that stood next to the highway. Our family came, Jack’s family came, and any observer could point out who belonged on each side. Jack had six kids, the oldest of whom was only a year or two younger than my mother. He had four sons and two daughters, all older than me, ages seventeen to about twenty-four. His daughter Sharon and son Barney lived with us at this time. There was no music, no flowers, and not much of a reception afterward. My mother wore a blue gauzy dress and Jack was in his shirtsleeves. He didn’t even put on a tie. The ceremony was incredibly short, and after Jack slipped the minister ten dollars for his trouble, everyone climbed back into their cars.

Jack was pretty bad at this point, but not nearly as bad as he would later become. He forced us to go to this church three times a week, giving us no choice in the matter. He was one of the most hateful people I’ve ever encountered, yet he was always in church. Now I know this is nothing unusual, that it’s more the rule than the exception, but back then I couldn’t comprehend it. He stood guard every night as he made my sister and me kneel down next to the bed and pray. We had a small dog, a Chihuahua named Pepper, and I once saw him punch the dog with a closed fist because she dared to hop up on the bed while he was praying.

After making us go to this ghoul’s wasteland of a church for several months, he announced that we would be moving into the church itself. The place we moved to almost defies description, because it was neither house nor apartment. The back rooms of the church had been converted into a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room, so that it could be rented out to bring in more money for the church. It wasn’t bad, really. Only the kitchen and bathroom had windows, so the rest of the place was dark and cool like a cave. At least we had more room than in the apartment, and I was in a new school closer to where I considered home to be.

Jack only ever committed two acts of undisguised violence against me, and both were around this point in time. The first happened in the kitchen one Saturday morning. I was sitting at the table looking over my sticker collection, which I had recently become a fanatic about. I coveted stickers more than anything else on earth and had quite the little album of them. My mother was cooking, and Jack stood blocking the doorway. I got up and tried to squeeze past him, with the intention of going to watch cartoons. I could feel the rage in him as he shoved me across the kitchen and into the refrigerator door, where the handle gouged my back. I lost my balance and fell to the floor.

When I started to cry, my mother looked up with no real sense of urgency and asked, “Why did you do that?”

He bellowed, “He has to learn he can’t bully his way around here!”

I had no idea what he was talking about, which only served to scare me. It’s frightening to be punished when you have no idea what you’ve done wrong.

The second act of violence was a “spanking.” I can’t remember what it concerned, but I had been arguing and pleading with my mother, attempting to get her to change her mind about something she had forbidden me to do or have. I can no longer remember what the argument was about, but I remember Jack’s reaction as though it were yesterday. He grabbed me and slammed me down on the bed with such force that I bounced off and landed on the floor. He slung me back onto the bed and began hitting me with rage. The most frightening part was the way he went into a frenzy, cursing (this is the only time I ever heard him curse) and turning blood-red.

My mother did nothing. As long as he continued to feed her the attention she desperately craved, she didn’t care what atrocities he performed. Before, I had merely disliked him. Now the seed of hatred bloomed.

I said these were the only undisguised acts of violence, because he did so many other things—pinched me until I turned purple with bruises, bent my fingers backward, jerked on my arms, and twisted my ankles—but all of these activities were only “playing” with me. If he managed to make me cry, which was less and less often as time went by, his excuse was that he was trying to “toughen me up.” The only thing that grew tough was my heart. Perhaps he was reminded of my father when he looked at me, and resented me for it. I never knew what caused his behavior, and now I no longer care. Over time I became crafty and learned to avoid him altogether.

I allowed Jack to legally adopt me because my mother explained to me that if I did, my father wouldn’t be punished for being unable to pay child support. If my sister and I were adopted, then he would be free of this monetary obligation. My mother was gung ho about it because she wanted us to be seen as one big happy family, and she wanted to erase any and all traces of my father. She even made us call Jack “Dad.” When I protested that I did not wish to give him such a title, my mother went into a veritable rage. I finally gave in and did as she demanded because the stress and the pressure wore me down. It’s a form of torture to have to sit at the dinner table while no one speaks and an aura of anger hangs over everything like a cloud. They wouldn’t even look at me. It’s impossible even to eat in such circumstances, and a child can’t bear such psychological pressures. I relented, though I felt a sense of betrayal by my mother that I’ve never gotten over, and every time I had to say “Dad” it was ashes in my mouth.

My mother denied later that they treated me like this. She has a very convenient way of forgetting and rearranging the past to fit whatever view she currently wishes to promote, much like the history changers in George Orwell’s 1984. She now knows very little about me, but makes up stories so as to seem closer to me than she truly is. It gains her more attention.

The only thing that could soothe and calm me during this era was music. That’s continued to be true throughout my life. My mother would put my sister and me to bed and turn on the radio to sing us to sleep. There was something very comforting about being in a dark, cold room with Prince, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, or Madonna playing quietly. I didn’t have to think about anything—the music took me away from myself and I got lost in it. I needed it like a drug. I felt disconnected and alone, and I realized around this time that things would never get better. It got so bad that I would pretend to be sick at school just so I could come home and lie in bed listening to music. It was like being adrift on the ocean at night. I still have trouble falling asleep without music now.

*  *  *

Our next house, right outside the city limits of Marion, Arkansas, was beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst place I ever lived, and it ushered me into the most miserable period of my life. Jack obtained this prime piece of real estate for the price of thirty dollars a month, and still he paid too much. This was an honest-to-God shack, made of old clapboard that would have collapsed in a strong wind; it was built on an old Indian burial mound. The entire house consisted of four rooms covered with an aluminum roof. There was no running water or electricity to speak of, no heat or air conditioner, and half of the front porch had caved in on itself. Looking at it you would believe that such structures were inhabited only in third-world countries.

During the summer you felt that you were being cooked in your skin. The sun beating down on that metal roof made the place so hot that you’d literally think you were going to lose your mind and go stark raving mad. At night I would lie in bed sweating and being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

The winter wasn’t much better, as the only source of heat was a small wood-burning stove, which filled the house with more smoke than heat. Our eyes always burned and our clothes always smelled of soot. My feet got so cold that I wanted to cry. No one could stay awake all night to constantly feed wood into the stove, so the fire was guaranteed to go out right when the temperature reached its coldest point. In the morning, the temperature in the house was only slightly higher than the freezing air outside. The house always gave me the creeps, and I despised it with a passion. When we decided (were forced) to move there, it was literally filled with knee-high garbage. Trash, sticks, broken tractor parts—it was all one big ocean of garbage, and the rats swam through it, delighted with their lot in life. There were no flushing toilets, and our drinking water came from a well that the crop dusters regularly sprayed with pesticide. It was fucking misery. I remember times when my entire family had to bathe in the same water. My stepfather would drag a big steel tub into the kitchen while my mother boiled pots of water to fill it up. There’s nothing like marinating in a lukewarm pool of other people’s filth to make you feel clean.

The shack was situated on top of a raised platform of earth in the middle of several miles of field that was used for farming. It was a stereotypical sharecropper’s shanty. Someone probably thought that putting it on the isolated lump of higher ground would keep the rains from washing it away during a flood. That seemed to work, but there were still times when we had to use a fishing boat to reach dry land (the highway, which ran alongside the property) if the nearby swamp overflowed. It turned the only road to town into a small lake so that cars couldn’t get in or out.

We had fourteen large dogs that lived underneath the house. We didn’t mean to have that many originally; they just kept breeding. People who have never known the hunger of being dirt poor always ask why we didn’t have the dogs spayed or neutered. As if the money to do that was just lying around, waiting on us to pick it up. We couldn’t afford a trip to the doctor ourselves, much less for the dogs. More often than not, we had trouble scraping the rent together. The farmer who owned the house didn’t mind if we were a little late with the payment, because he knew we’d eventually come up with it, even if we had to cash in aluminum cans to do so.

Strange things were always hovering at the periphery of my family life, but none so much as during our years in that house. There was just a bad feeling around the place. The house felt malevolent. I could never escape the feeling that the entire place wished me ill. It was the sort of place where, if you lived long enough, a doctor would eventually inform you that your insides were black with cancer and you had only days left to live. It was unpleasant in every regard, and the entire house had the aura of the inside of a body bag. It always felt dark, even on the sunniest summer days. There were odd drawings left on the walls by whoever had lived there before us—things like a grandfather clock with a single eye where the face should have been. They looked like the sorts of things an insane person with a great degree of artistic talent would have created. We painted over most of them, but ran out of paint before we got to the clock. It was worse at night, when you could feel it staring at the back of your head.

That place was never quiet at night. I would lie in bed listening as the dogs dragged strange things to and fro beneath the floor. Inside the house was as dark as an oil slick, so you couldn’t see anything moving in the room but you could sense it. It was the same sort of sensation you would experience if a closet door were to swing silently open behind your back. Later I learned a term to describe that sensation—air displacement. What I was sensing was air being displaced by something moving from one spot to another. Sometimes late at night I would be overwhelmed with the feeling that someone was standing by the bed, leaning over me, so close they could have brushed their lips across mine if they’d so desired. The breath would pass from its lips to my lips like the taste of something unmentionable. It wasn’t like a ghost or anything; it was just a feeling the house itself radiated, like an aura. My eyes would bulge and strain like an animal’s, fiercely trying to penetrate the darkness.

Eventually we were told to move, and the house was torn down. The suburbs around Marion were expanding, and people who lived in the houses that cost a quarter of a million dollars did not want a tin-roof shack standing on a bone hill in their line of sight. Something like that tends to lower the property values.

Before the shack was torn down, it drew someone else’s attention. All of us used to go to the bank with my stepfather on Friday afternoon to cash his paycheck, especially in the summer. It was the rare few minutes when we could sit inside an air-conditioned building. We probably didn’t smell very nice, because we were sweating twenty-four hours a day. We poured into the bank like a carload of Vikings and tried not to mess anything up.

Every week I would walk around the bank looking at things I’d examined a hundred times before. There wasn’t much else to do. I was taken aback when we walked in one week to see an art display in the lobby. It consisted of a folding wall, almost like a room divider, and it held about twenty paintings. A laminated sheet of paper attached to the display informed the reader that the paintings had been produced by the art class at the local high school. I moved down the line, examining each piece in turn. Most were nothing to write home about. A few were outright bizarre and even a little scary. When I reached the end of the line I stopped dead in my tracks and held my breath. I was witnessing something both miraculous and cruel. Someone, some high school kid, had painted our house. Here it was displayed to the world in all its squalor. It had been rendered in perfect detail. One side of the porch was dilapidated and had caved in on itself. There were wild roses growing over all the ruins. The flesh prickled along my spine and I looked around, as if perhaps the artist were standing nearby and watching to see my reaction. There were no customers in the bank except us. The teller didn’t even glance in my direction.

I stood in the bank staring at this painting of our house with its collapsing front porch, surrounded by cotton fields, when my mother walked up behind me and asked, “Is that our house?” Her brow furrowed in concentration before exclaiming to herself in a low voice, “Oh, wow.” When my stepfather came over to see what we were looking at, she said, “Look, it’s our house.” He put on his glasses and leaned forward to study it intently. Finally he said, “Maybe. It might be some other house, though.”

I knew my stepfather wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, but this was pushing it even for him. I pointed out the details, elaborating. “Look. Half the porch done fell in. It’s ours.” He dug his heels in, stubbornly. “That don’t mean nothin’. The porch fell in on other houses, too.” I knew better than to try to argue with him. When you proved he was wrong he’d just make your life miserable for the next week.

I wish I had that painting now. I’d keep it locked away somewhere, and take it out every year or so, just to remind myself where I came from. I’d show it to my wife and son, and try to tell them how hard life was out there, and the effect it had on me. That never works, though. I learned a long time ago that you have to experience something for yourself or you never really comprehend it.

Looking back, the worst part about the shack wasn’t the poverty, the heat, the cold, or even the humiliation of living in such circumstances; it was the absolute and utter loneliness. For many years in that old house, I didn’t have a friend in the world to keep me company. It was far out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but fields. No kids or neighbors to even speak to you. I was so lonely that I thought even death was preferable. If not for my small battery-powered radio, perhaps I would have died inside.

Years later, I read a book by Nick Cave called And the Ass Saw the Angel. It struck me because of how close he comes to catching the feel of life in that lonely shack. None of the more well-known southern writers like Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor have done it for me. It’s like they may have witnessed life, but never lived it. Nick Cave comes damn close, though. More so than anyone else.

Books helped me to survive out there. The only places close enough to walk to were the courthouse and the library. I had no interest in reading anything but horror at this age, so I read the few tattered paperbacks housed there numerous times. I read Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels more times than Billy Graham read his Bible. They kept me company on many a long and maddening summer day.

Later I discovered the ultimate horror—the Inquisition. The first time I stumbled across this atrocity was in a book by some demented adult that was titled something like The Children’s Book of Devils and Fiends. It was filled with tales (and woodcuts) of witches having orgies, standing in line to kiss the devil’s arse, eating children, and cursing people so that they went into convulsions. The book didn’t explain that all these things were nothing more than the fevered dreams and insane concoctions of religious zealots that the educated world now knows them to be. It put them forth as being true, much as they were originally published during the Inquisition itself. Then there was the additional horror of people being tortured and burned at the stake simply because someone accused them of being witches. It explained how they were strangled, burned, cut, drowned, and dismembered in an effort to make them confess to flying on broomsticks to attend secret meetings.

It’s not possible to overstate the impact all this had on my young mind. I would lie in bed at night scared to move, while my imagination conjured up horrific images. I had already had scenes of hell and damnation drilled into my head by Jack and his wonderful church-folk friends, and these new discoveries did nothing to ease my terror. If I would have known then that in just a few short years I would be subjected to the same kind of witch hunt, that I would have some of the same accusations made against me, and that the same merciless zealots would imprison me and sentence me to death, then my heart probably would have burst of fright right on the spot. Who would have thought you could see the future by reading a book about the past?

I was miserable and under tremendous pressure, believing I would burn in hell for all eternity because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking bad things about people—not to mention the fact that I was entering puberty and knew with absolute certainty that my uncontrollable lust was earning me a one-way trip to the Lake of Fire. I had recently discovered masturbation and applied myself to the act with the utmost diligence. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, and afterward would pray to God, begging his forgiveness. I had no idea that it was normal to have such urges, for no one ever explained such things to me.

There was a nonstop war going on inside me—I wanted to be “good,” but couldn’t quite seem to manage it. My sexual appetite was insatiable, and as a typical adolescent, I thought most people were morons. I was on my way to the devil’s playground, all right. It all seems so ridiculous now, but back then it was the most deadly serious thing in the world.

Oddly enough, that same children’s book was where I first encountered Aleister Crowley. Now I know it was all propaganda, but at that young age I was amazed that someone could be so brazenly hedonistic and “sinful.” I’ve read much about this man and his life’s work over the years, and it’s incredible how people have misunderstood him. One of my favorite examples is his “How to Succeed / How to Suck Eggs” wordplay. It comes from chapter sixty-nine (wordplay: get it?), in which he talks about sexual practices; anyone not reading closely won’t pick up on the “suck seed” reference. His words have been misconstrued, twisted, taken out of context, and misunderstood continuously. If you don’t know the key with which to decipher him, then you’ll never understand what you’re reading. Others don’t even want to understand, and would rather use his name or image to sway and scare the ignorant, just as the prosecutor did during my trial.

Our financial situation continued its steadily downward spiral, and the tension continued to build. We started trying to grow our own food, and it was hot, backbreaking labor. We had no irrigation system, not even a hose and running water, so we had to haul water by the bucketful to our “garden.” Everything was done manually. Some days you’d go up one row of cucumbers or potatoes and down another with hoe in hand, busting up the dry, cracked ground. Other days you’d spend hours hunched over, pulling weeds from between plants with bare hands. That task was especially hazardous, as you had to constantly be on the lookout for poisonous snakes, bumblebees, and wasps. If you let the monotony of the task lull your mind into a stupor you’d often receive a nasty surprise. After all the hard work, only about half the food would be edible. The bugs and animals would have gotten some of it, while other areas couldn’t be saved from rot.

The only thing we didn’t have to do ourselves was crop-dusting. Our house was in the middle of the field the plane flew back and forth over, and it gave us a healthy dose of poison every time it passed overhead. If you didn’t run for cover when you heard him coming, you’d get dusted, too. During that time, I inhaled enough pesticides to put a small country out of action. My mom’s and Jack’s advice? “Don’t look up at the plane, and try not to breathe deeply until he gets a little ways past.” I developed allergies so bad that my mother had to start giving me injections at home. She had no bedside manner and wielded that syringe in an entirely unpleasant way.

You had to be certain you had all the food out of the garden by the end of summer or there was a chance the fire would destroy it. Every year after the final harvest, farmers would ride through the fields surrounding our house and set them ablaze with instruments that looked like flamethrowers. This was so all the burned and leftover vegetation would fertilize the ground for the next year’s crop. I don’t know what prevented the house from burning, because the flames would come to a halt only a few feet away. If the wind changed direction you would nearly suffocate on thick, black smoke.

The house did nearly burn to the ground one time because the wood-burning stove started a fire in the ceiling. The fire department had to come and spray the place down. Unfortunately, the trucks arrived in time to put it out. As I watched, I desperately prayed that the entire shack would burn so I’d never have to see it again. It survived with little damage.

Jack was a roofer by trade, and he started taking small jobs on the side, repairing residential homes to bring in a little extra cash. I started going with him, learning the process. I was only about thirteen, so mostly what I did was clean up the area when he was finished, and he’d give me a few dollars.

Perhaps up until this point I’ve painted a completely unsympathetic portrait of Jack. He wasn’t an absolute monster any more than anyone else is. He was just a man, both good and bad. I believe he did care about both my sister and me, in his own way. He could be generous. He would stop to help every single person whose car was broken down on the side of the road, and he always gave hitchhikers a ride. He was also more tolerant of any form of self-expression I chose than any other parent would have been. I was free to dress however I pleased and listen to whatever music I liked. He had no problem with things like me wearing earrings, and I heard him tell my mother more than once, “He’s just trying to find himself.”

My mother was also a more complicated character than she may seem. She always made certain we had enough to eat (even though it was usually junk food), she always went to Open House Night at school to meet my teachers, and she made sure we got Easter baskets with chocolate rabbits. She tried to take care of us when we were sick, although sometimes her idea of taking care was to sit next to the bed as I struggled with bronchitis and keep watch while smoking generic cigarettes.

I’m now at a point in my life where I look back on both of them with mingled feeling of love, disgust, affection, resentment, and sometimes hatred. There’s too much betrayal to ever be completely forgiven. I am not like my mother, who may argue with you one day and go back to life as usual the next. The best I can do is say that their good deeds may have softened the blow of the bad ones.

Five

Being in prison and having a case as well-known as mine puts me in an odd position. In a way, complete strangers come to feel that they know me just because they’ve watched me on television or read about me. It takes away their inhibitions when they approach me. I don’t mind it at all; it keeps my days interesting. Sometimes it provokes a great deal of thought, and sometimes it leaves me flabbergasted.

The letters I receive from people come from a variety of mental and emotional planes. I see the entire spectrum of human life. I’m like a bartender without a bar; people just tell me their stories. Some of them just want to get something off their chests, as if they just need to tell someone. Others look at me as some sort of oracle, and ask me questions about major life decisions. People going through divorces, people losing their children, people considering abortions—they all write and tell me their personal business. Others write and ask me about mine. I’ve even met a few of them in prison.

Years ago I was often visited by a religious couple. They were devoutly Pentecostal and much older than I was, though with almost no life experience. They had never been out of Arkansas or ever associated with people who were outside their own walk of life. They didn’t really know what to make of me but kept returning. I must admit that I enjoyed shocking them. In some ways they were as alien to me as I was to them.

More often than not they would bring the conversation around to sex. They truly had no idea that people practiced any sort of sex other than intercourse in a missionary position. When I informed them that there were indeed other positions, and that it could even be done orally, they looked like they were about to go into shock. They couldn’t comprehend it and eventually delivered the verdict that only extreme deviants would conceive of or engage in such acts. They stated that there was no way that a normal person could enjoy such a thing, although they seemed to enjoy discussing it.

Hate mail is the term used to describe the letters from people who haven’t actually stopped to learn the facts of my case and never get past their initial knee-jerk reaction. As a matter of fact I could count the non-supportive letters I’ve received on one hand, whereas I could build a small mountain out of the letters I’ve received from people expressing support and wanting to know how they can help.

Most people who spew hatred aren’t very intelligent or motivated. They tend to be lazy, and if for some reason they are coaxed into picking up a pen, their messages are mostly incoherent and largely illiterate. Their spelling and sentence structure tends to be atrocious, so it’s hard to take offense at anything they’d say even when they do write. After all, if they’re not motivated or intelligent enough to research the simple spelling of a word in a dictionary, then you know they certainly aren’t going to take the time to research the case. Still, all in all, hateful people just don’t seem to like writing, I guess. Either that or there simply aren’t many people in the world who wish me anything but good fortune.

There is one odd thing that happens every now and then, though. I think of it as a drive-by preaching. Occasionally I’ll receive a plain white envelope in the mail, with no return address. This alone makes the item suspect, because people usually want me to write back, so a return address is prominently displayed. When I get one of these anonymous missives I lay it aside to be inspected after I finish with the rest of the day’s mail.

When I get around to opening it, it’s always the same thing: a load of religious tracts and pamphlets. There’s no letter, no message, just a bunch of John 3:16s and Turn or Burns. I always get the feeling these things are sent in the same spirit with which the perpetrator would fling a flaming bag of dog shit at my front door. I picture an overweight housewife with dishwater-colored hair licking the envelope with a look of smug satisfaction on her face. It seems that the messages printed on these greasy, creased pieces of paper must have gone right over the sender’s head. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t think Jesus’ words were meant to be tied to a brick and chunked through your neighbor’s window at midnight. Anytime you drop a picture of Christ in the mailbox while muttering a self-righteous “This’ll teach ’em,” something has gone terribly wrong.

Preachers visit Death Row all the time, including Baptist ministers who try to convince us that death is preferable to life. Some go so far as to tell us that we should even drop our appeals and voluntarily allow the state to kill us. When someone is executed, these vultures make comments like “He’s in a better place now.” Somehow I doubt that even they themselves believe this. I think they’d be pretty quick to seek medical attention if they had a problem. They say the Bible tells them that death is more wonderful than life. I’ve read it, and I see a different picture. If death is so great, then why did Jesus raise the dead? Why did he call Lazarus back to life? That in itself causes me to believe there must be something wholly unpleasant about that particular condition. They know it, too. They just get high on watching people die. It’s the only thing left for them to get off on.

I cannot explain it, the way everything in my soul shrieks and gibbers for some sort of closure. How do you make someone understand what it means or how it feels to be torn in half? Not many people know this desperate need to be put back together again. I have been split like the atom, and the effect on my psyche was just as powerful. Part of me is missing, even if it can’t be seen with the naked eye. A coin is not complete without both heads and tails.

All of the negativity and unsavory characters in this environment only serve to make the exceptions shine all the more brightly. It causes you to appreciate kindness and consideration even more. When those with an inner beauty make their way into this hellish reality it shines forth like a beacon, and we denizens swarm to it like bugs to a zapper. In a very real way we’re starving to death, and these bright spots in the darkness are the only thing that can fill the hole.

On an average day there is nothing kind, generous, caring, or sensitive within these walls. The energy directed at you is hatred, rage, disgust, stupidity, ignorance, and brutality. It affects you in mind, body, and soul, much like a physical beating. The pressure is relentless and unending. Soon you walk with your shoulders slumped and your head down, like a beast that’s used to being kicked. You never make eye contact, and you constantly cringe mentally. That’s encouraged and enforced every day. The prison staff does not look at you as human, and they go out of their way to let you know it. The message that you are inferior and worthless is hammered in at every conceivable turn.

Take, for example, the way in which we are fed. On more than one occasion I have found insects such as grasshoppers and crickets that were boiled in my broccoli or greens. That’s because after it was picked no one even bothered to wash it. If the meat is starting to go bad, just smother it in generic barbeque sauce to cover the taste. Often the food is mixed together in inedible combinations, due to lack of care—pickled beets dumped in the applesauce, or a soggy roll floating in the boiled squash. The fat- and gristle-laden meat is never fully cooked, while vegetables are boiled to the point of disintegration. The only time a decent meal is prepared by the kitchen is when a tour or inspection is sent through by some outside agency. This happens a handful of times every year.

Every inmate in prison is assigned an account that family and friends can deposit money into, which inmates use for basic necessities. Everything in prison must be paid for. Most of the food I eat is bought with donations from supporters and friends. That alone enables me to avoid a great deal of the prison fare. Most aren’t so fortunate.

It used to be that the greatest time for prisoners was Christmas. This was because many local churches, both Protestant and Catholic, along with the Buddhist center, the ACLU, and many independent donors, would spend their time and money putting together what were commonly called “Christmas sacks.” These sacks contained fresh fruit (Christmas is the only time of year you get it), candy, homemade cookies, pairs of socks, a couple of stamped envelopes, and various other goodies. (In prison these snacks are called “zoo-zoos” and “wham-whams.”) People would talk about these sacks, anticipating them, for many weeks ahead of time. There was excitement in the air. This was the only thing that made Christmas different from any other day. Until the year that the prison administration decided they would no longer allow the volunteers to do this. They would not be allowed in to sing Christmas carols or donate fresh food. We would receive nothing, and Christmas would be just another day, unless you count the perceptible stench of depression in the air as a difference. No one knows why this tradition was suddenly banned, other than that our overseers arrogantly declared “because I say so.” No one explains themselves to inferior creatures.

One of the people who helped put together the Christmas sacks every year was a lady named Anna. She was from the local Buddhist center, and she visited the prison once a week to hold an hour-long meditation session. She told stories, gave teachings, and taught the inmates all sorts of Tibetan meditation practices. The number of people who could fit into the small room to attend her classes was extremely limited, so afterward she would walk from cell to cell, talking to anyone who wanted to chat or discuss a problem. She gave blessings and recited prayers, never turning anyone away. The inmates all behaved as if she were the Dalai Lama himself. You would know when she had arrived because word would spread like wildfire down the halls and through the barracks—“Anna’s here! Anna’s here!” Buddhists, Christians, Muslims—she welcomed all. She cut through the darkness like a spotlight, and for that reason the guards hated her. They did everything within their power to keep her out, but nothing worked. She would stand patiently outside the door for hours at a time until they finally had no choice but to let her in.

Sadly enough, failing health has put a severe cramp in her lifestyle, so we no longer get to see her. I believe part of the problem was that she spread herself so thin. No matter how valiant the effort, a single person cannot lift all this darkness. So many needed her that there just wasn’t enough of her to go around. She would have had to live here twenty-four hours a day and give up sleeping in order to talk to everyone. One candle cannot illuminate the entire universe, and not many people are interested in the job.

One other person the guards couldn’t seem to dissuade, no matter how much effort they put into the enterprise, was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church named Father Charles. He was unlike any priest I’ve ever known, before or since.

Father Charles always arrived at the prison, as he did everywhere else, on his motorcycle. He loved that thing and rode it everywhere. It’s odd to see a man in a priest’s collar sitting atop such a machine, and sometimes the mind finds it difficult to accept such a sight until it grows accustomed.

The first thing you noticed about Father Charles’s appearance was a bald head. His skull was shaved as slick as Kojak’s or Mr. Clean’s, and the light reflected off it as he crossed the barracks. Framing his mouth and chin was a Fu Manchu mustache and goatee, which seemed to be a perfect complement to the bald head. The only thing about his appearance that was traditional was his black suit and white collar.

It wasn’t only his appearance that deviated from the norm, as he had all sorts of interesting quirks and habits, one of which was that he brewed and bottled his own beer in his garage. After much practice he believed he’d stumbled upon the perfect recipe, and was quite proud of it. Also in his garage was a giant pet boa constrictor, which he confided to me he’d once watched swallow a chicken whole. He said this with awe in his voice, as if amazed by the intricacies of God’s creatures. In his spare time he played violin and was accomplished enough to tackle the works of Paganini.

Father Charles was one of the most gentle and intelligent people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. His eyes were alight with life, and even the non-Catholics on Death Row loved and wanted to talk to him. He was a very enlightened individual, and often told me to think of God more like “the Force” in the Star Wars movies. I don’t believe his approach was always popular with the bishop, but it appealed to me.

Over the years I had gradually drifted away from the Catholic Church, because the experiences I’d been through had left me bitter. I blamed Christianity in general as being a huge part of the reason I was sitting on Death Row for a crime I didn’t commit. It was Christians who had labeled me “satanic” and condemned me to death. It was hard for me to get past that, so I sought a new home in Zen Buddhism to help me deal with the anger and resentment. More than likely it saved my life, by preventing all the negativity from eating me alive. Some Christians would have frowned on my interest in Buddhism. Father Charles did not. He thought it was great.

It was Father Charles who lured me back into attending Mass in the small prison chapel as a complement to my Buddhist training. It’s the beauty of the Catholic Church that has always caused me to fall in love with it. It still does. I later learned that I wasn’t the only one to embrace both practices. Jesuit priests at certain churches have started teaching Buddhist meditation techniques to their congregations as a valid approach to dealing with life situations. Interestingly enough, I had wanted nothing more than to become a Jesuit priest in my youth. It was the whole celibacy thing I couldn’t handle.

Unfortunately, Father Charles was eventually transferred to another parish. He didn’t want to leave, and we didn’t want him to, but the decision was in someone else’s hands. Now, years later, people on Death Row still write to him, and he to them. People respect him and the advice that he gives. No one since has been capable of taking his place.

*  *  *

I have the shape of a dead man on the wall of my cell. It was left behind by the last occupant. He stood against the wall and traced around himself with a pencil, then shaded it in. It looks like a very faint shadow, and it’s barely noticeable until you see it. It took me nearly a week to notice it for the first time, but once you see it you can’t un-see it. I find myself lying on my bunk and looking at it several times a day. It just seems to draw the eyes like a magnet. God only knows what possessed him to do such a thing, but I can’t bring myself to wash it off. Since they executed him, it’s the only trace of him left. He’s been in his grave almost five years now, yet his shadow still lingers. He was no one and nothing. All that remains of him is a handful of old rape charges and a man-shaped pencil sketch. Perhaps it’s just superstition, but I can’t help but feel that erasing it would be like erasing the fact that he ever existed. That may not be such a bad thing, all things considered, but I won’t be the one to do it.

At one point I entertained thoughts that perhaps the living inmates weren’t the only ones trapped on Death Row. After all, if places really are haunted, then wouldn’t Death Row be the perfect stomping ground? At some time or another it’s crossed the mind of everyone here. Some make jokes about it, like whistling to yourself as you pass the cemetery. Others don’t like to speak about it at all, and it can be a touchy subject. Who wants to think about the fact that you’re sleeping on the mattress that three or four executed men also claimed as their resting place? Imagine looking into the mirror every day and wondering how many dead men had looked at their own reflections in it. When anything odd happens, some men blame whoever was executed last.

Once for a period of several months at Tucker Max, I had the privilege of having an entire floor of the Death Row barracks to myself. Recent executions had opened up cells on the first two floors, so the guards thought it a good idea to move people from the third floor down to the first and second, to fill the empty slots. They were hoping to be able to get out of walking up to the third floor altogether. The problem was that they were one short, so I was the only one to be left up there with another seventeen empty cells.

There were a lot of benefits to the situation, so I didn’t complain. For one thing, I had a television all to myself. No arguing about what to watch. I also had my own phone, and no longer had to wait for anyone else to get off it. There was no one above me to stomp on the floor and annoy me, and no one next to me. I could sit in meditation for as long as I liked without fear of interruption. I was up high enough in the air that I could look out of my slit of a window and see a field of horses. I used to watch them playing for hours at a time. Even better than the horses was the field itself, especially when it snowed during the winter. Looking at that snowy field and a ring of leafless, gray trees made my heart ache like you can’t believe. Nothing makes me wail with heartache and homesickness more than the winter. Sometimes the cold wind feels like it’s blowing right through a hole in my chest. It hurts, folks. It hurts like hell and reminds me of how long I’ve been here.

I did have a tiny cellmate for a short time—a little white-haired, blue-eyed kitten. I don’t believe she was even old enough to be away from her mother yet, as you could cradle her in the palm of one hand. I’ve absolutely no idea where she originally came from or where she eventually went, but she was being passed around so the guards wouldn’t find her. When it was time for her to be passed on she’d be placed in a stocking cap and sent down the line.

The kitty didn’t seem to want to do anything but sleep. The problem was that she was much like a fussy baby and wanted to be held as she slept. She would lie on your chest, curled into a small white ball, and sleep forever. The moment you put her down, the tiny blue eyes would pop open and she would begin to give voice to her outrage. Tiny but high-pitched meows could soon be heard from a considerable distance. It was amazing that such a minuscule creature could be heard from so far away. Perhaps it was the fact that the sound was so alien to the environment. No amount of talk would console her. “Shhh! Hush, you little monster, or they shall discover our plot.” She paid no heed to my warnings.

Her only other fault was that a steady diet of tuna and milk caused her to leave long, brown kitty puddles on the floor. She knew herself to be the queen of Death Row and had no doubt that it was my honor and privilege to clean up after her. Once my tour of duty came to an end she went on to her next residence and I never saw her again.

The kitten wasn’t the only pet to ever be kept on Death Row. The most common are mice and rats, but I’ve also seen spiders, a couple snakes, and even a bird. The mice and rats were bred for the purpose of serving as pets. A guy would manage to catch two wild ones, and every time a litter was born he’d give the babies out to whoever wanted one. They grow up with you and won’t bite or scratch. The snakes would wander into the yard and suddenly find themselves stuffed into someone’s pants and smuggled indoors.

The biggest rat I’ve ever seen in my life was raised by a guy here. It was as big as a Chihuahua, and he even fashioned a collar for it. It was as tame as any household pet and slept in the same bed as the guy who had trained it.

His pet rat was not the only thing that made the prisoner seem out of the ordinary. He was nicknamed “Butterfly,” even though calling him that made him angry enough to strangle someone. This name spread like wildfire, along with the rumor that had started it. It was said that this gentleman had a giant tattoo of a butterfly on his rear end—one wing tattooed on each cheek—and that by doing a certain dance he could make it appear as if the butterfly were flapping its wings. As revolting as the thought was, it was still fodder for a great deal of humor. The only one not laughing was Butterfly.

The bird belonged to a prisoner I knew named Earl. Earl had gotten his pet bird from the yard. Every year when the weather begins to turn warm the birds build nests and lay eggs in the razor wire surrounding the yard. Inevitably, baby birds will tumble out. Earl smuggled one in and kept it in his cell. You would hear it every morning before sunrise, chirp-chirp-chirping like mad. This would be met with a volley of curses from the prisoners it had awakened.

Earl was an interesting character. He was about five feet eight inches tall and weighed about 160 pounds. His hair had turned prematurely gray. Earl never cracked a joke and spoke only if he had something important to say or a question to ask. He never raised his voice or argued with anyone. Earl was on Death Row but had never actually killed anyone. He had escaped from prison with another guy, and the other guy had shot and killed someone. Since Earl had been with him, they were both given the death penalty. I believe he was one of the few people here with enough intelligence to comprehend the full horror of his predicament. When they set an execution date for him he became violently ill and couldn’t keep anything in his stomach until they killed him. For some reason Earl haunts me more than anyone else they’ve killed. Perhaps it’s because I knew that, like me, he hadn’t taken anyone’s life.

They led Earl out to the Death House with the guy who had actually done the shooting. They were both executed at the same time. As they took them out I was standing at my cell door to say good-bye. It was four o’clock in the morning. The other guy passed me first, and he was chewing a piece of gum as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He nodded in my direction and uttered a nonchalant “Catch you later.” I nodded back to him. When Earl came down next there were tears in his eyes. He struggled to keep his voice under control. “Damien,” he said, and nodded once. “Earl,” I said, and returned the nod.

The guards later said he couldn’t even finish his last meal, because he was continuously vomiting. Now, years later, I still feel something in my stomach turn over every time I think of him. He left me nearly everything he owned before he was executed—his books, a leather belt, all his drawing pens, and some origami paper. I couldn’t keep them, because it bothered me too much. I gave everything away.

Where was I? Ah, yes. All alone on the third floor. It was just me and seventeen other dark, empty cells. One night, from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement in one of the vacant domiciles. My head snapped in that direction and the hair on my neck and arms stood on end. I stood staring, body taut, like a gunslinger at high noon. There was no repeat performance that night. Over time you grow accustomed to such things and no longer pay them any mind. Sometimes you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and feel like you were awakened by someone speaking, but there’s no one around and it’s as quiet as a crypt.

The silence on Death Row is something that seems to unnerve guards when they first get assigned here. That’s because every other barracks sounds like a madhouse. There are people screaming at the top of their lungs twenty-four hours a day. It never stops for a moment. Screams of anger and rage, begging, threatening, cursing—it sounds like the din of some forgotten hell. These are the “regular” prisoners. As soon as you step through the door of Death Row it stops. More than once I’ve heard a new guard say, “My God—you can hear a pin drop in here!”

The only time I even register the silence is late at night, when I would sit up to watch the midnight movie, keeping my fingers crossed that it would be a horror flick.

Horror movies were a family tradition in our house. I remember when I was a child, still in kindergarten, I would sit up and watch back-to-back horror movies—Godzilla, the mummy, vampires, werewolves, or a disembodied hand that somehow made its way around town in search of its victim. I would stare wide-eyed and unmoving at the flickering screen until I fell asleep, then my dad would carry me to bed.

I’d remember those times as I sat in the silent barracks watching a cheaply made horror movie. It filled me with nostalgia and made me want to go back in time to a place where I was safe and had no doubt that my mom and dad would take care of everything.

At one time I lived in a cell next to a guy who got a little nervous in the silence. One night as I was watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the guy in the next cell whispered my name every few minutes, to be certain I hadn’t fallen asleep and left him alone. Finally I said, “Man, if this movie scares you that much you should quit watching it.” Others who overheard started laughing. He swore at me, stung because I’d leaked his secret. Moments later he crept back to the door to watch some more. I don’t believe he slept at all that night.

Six

In 1986 came the joys of junior high school. Many significant events and rites of passage took place during the time I inhabited the halls of this repugnant example of our educational system. It was beyond rural; there were probably about a thousand students in the entire school. I had my first taste of beer and my first look at pornography, I took up skateboarding, and I met Jason Baldwin.

The beer and pornography were compliments of my stepbrother Keith Echols, who was actually a pretty decent guy despite having a drinking problem. He gave me the first of only two experiences I’ve ever had behind the wheel of a vehicle. He drove an old pickup truck with a jacked-up rear end and super-wide back tires. One day as I sat in the passenger seat listening to Alice Cooper on the radio, he tossed out the empty beer can he’d been holding between his legs, looked at me with bleary eyes, and asked, “Wanna drive?”

I responded with the phrase every southerner uses on a regular basis: “Hell yeah.”

He pulled over and exchanged places with me, then instructed me on how to drive the last couple of miles to his house. Keith was extremely laid-back (out in the middle of nowhere there’s not much to crash into) and told me repeatedly, “You can go faster.”

By this time all of Jack’s kids had long since moved off on their own, but Keith, along with his wife and infant daughter, were forced to move into the tin-roof shack with us after their house and all they owned burned to the ground. While there he taught me many practical skills, such as how to shoot and take care of your gun and how to replace the engine in your car, all while maintaining a beer buzz. I never did develop a taste for the stuff and have never been able to drink an entire bottle. He’d hand me his girlie magazines while belching, “Don’t tell Dad I showed you these.” All in all, he was a pretty fun guy to be around, even though his tact was sometimes questionable (once, years later, when witnessing a neighborhood girl flirting with me, he called out a cheerful, “You better get on that, boy!”). I looked up to him then, but haven’t seen or heard from him since I was imprisoned.

*  *  *

My first year of junior high I befriended a mildly retarded and majorly weird kid named Kevin. I was most likely the only friend he’d ever had, and you couldn’t make him shut up. It was as if he’d been saving up conversations his whole life. He could talk about literally anything for hours at a time—a cartoon he’d watched the previous afternoon, a magazine he’d looked at in the grocery store, or a new stuffed animal he’d acquired. This kid was a freak when it came to stuffed animals, and he had a huge collection—it’s where every cent of his money went. I never had to say much of anything; he’d carry the entire conversation. He couldn’t even make himself stop talking during class. Everyone else did their best to avoid him, so we had our own table every day at lunch.

I believe the reason I didn’t extend myself or try to make other friends is that I couldn’t compete. We were dirt poor, so I didn’t have the latest sneakers, I had no idea what videos were playing on MTV, I hadn’t seen the latest movies, and I didn’t own a single article of trendy clothing. I didn’t have to compete with Kevin. I could be wearing sackcloth and no shoes for all he cared, as long as I listened to him talk about his stuffed animal collection and nodded every now and then. Other than that, there were no expectations. I think pretty much everyone else in the world abused and made fun of him, but as long as I let him hang around, he didn’t care. In hindsight, I also believe some part of me had given up. By the age of twelve or thirteen, I had decided life was hopeless.

I had to repeat my first year of junior high because I failed. I don’t remember completing a single assignment during the entire year, and it showed when report cards were handed out—I had an F in every single subject. I didn’t pass anything, and I didn’t care. As the school year came to a close, I was looking at another long, brutal, lonely summer in what my family still refers to as “the white house.” This year I would carry an extra piece of darkness home with me. Right before we were released for vacation, another thirteen-year-old tried to commit suicide by hanging himself.

Joseph was in three or four of my classes. He even sat right in front of me during one of them. He was never without a large duffel bag full of books, paper, colored pencils, protractors, and anything else you could possibly need to navigate your way through the seventh-grade world. He was no friend of mine, but I knew who he was. A couple of weeks before the end of the year he stopped showing up at school. Soon the entire student body knew he’d tried to hang himself. He survived, but spent the next few months in a mental institution. The image would haunt me all summer long with a power that nothing before had. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Late at night I’d lie in bed with my ear pressed to my little radio so that no one else could hear it. If Jack heard the slightest hint of music he would throw a fit and claim that I had kept him awake all night. I would lie there wondering if perhaps Joseph had been listening to music when he decided life was no longer worth the effort. Did he wait until nightfall, or did he do it in the daylight? What did he tie the rope to? Did he jump off a chair? Why didn’t he succeed? If I had said anything to him, would it have made a difference? It drove me to tears more than once. Lying in bed covered in sweat and staring at the darkness, I didn’t even feel the mosquitoes biting me as I replayed the scenes I’d imagined over and over. I thought that if anyone knew how lonely and miserable I was, it was that kid. The anguish and the ghosts that haunted me evaporated like mist under the light of the morning sun, but would be waiting on me when darkness fell. I couldn’t seem to shake it off. That’s how I spent my summer vacation.

The beginning of my second year of seventh grade didn’t start out a great deal differently from the first. I wore my secondhand clothes and collected my free lunch. Kevin wasn’t around this year, as it was decided over the summer that he was better suited to attend a special school for kids with learning disabilities. I was on my own.

One day a week during study hall we were allowed to spend thirty minutes in the school library. It was on one of these excursions that my life was drastically changed when I came across a superior literary publication called Thrasher. For those who don’t know, it was the skateboarding magazine. This was the first time I was exposed to the world of skateboarding. It wasn’t just an activity—it was a culture. I don’t remember seeing any skaters in our school, so I don’t know how the magazine found its way into those humble archives. That magazine became my bible. All I could think about was skating, and after months of begging I received my first skateboard for Christmas. It was a cheap, heavy thing, with no nose and very little tail. It was piss yellow, with a Chinese dragon graphic on the bottom. Definitely not the best of equipment, but it gave me my start.

Day and night I did nothing but practice tricks and read Thrasher. I would stare at the ads for the new decks like a sex fiend in the porn section. I also became acquainted with a different world of music I’d never before heard of, and discovered The Cure, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and many other classics.

Nanny moved into a trailer park located between Marion and West Memphis with the dubious title of “Lakeshore Estates,” and when I went to see her, a couple of the neighbors would give me five dollars to mow their lawns. I saved the money to order clothes from skateboard companies, and replaced the cheap parts on my board with better-quality stuff, one piece at a time. Skateboarding became my life, and I did just enough work to get by in school that year. Soon enough, summer vacation was on me once again.

That summer was as hot, miserable, and lonely as the others, but it seemed to pass a little more quickly just because I now had a little life in me. I’d skate up the old deserted highway between the cotton fields, all the way to the courthouse and public library. Once there I made use of every curb in the parking lot until I was drenched in sweat and on the verge of heatstroke. If not for the old librarian allowing me to guzzle from her water fountain like a horse at a trough, I would have likely suffered terminal dehydration. I never walked anywhere—the skateboard became an extension of my body. I knew the name of every pro skater, I knew who they were sponsored by, and I knew what tricks each of them had invented. I could have quoted any of these statistics to you without even having to think about it.

Skating had an unexpected side effect, too. It started when I noticed that people who saw me skating would stop and watch. I’d never thought about it before, but this made me realize I was actually good at something. It occurred to me for the first time that this was something not everyone else could do, and they were impressed with my ability. It gave me self-confidence and raised my self-esteem. I walked with my head higher, and any feelings of inferiority withered away. It was as if I had become a completely new person. A new era had begun for me.

When I entered eighth grade the next year, school was vastly different. I was no longer invisible. It seemed that a few others had learned the pleasures of skating, and we drew together to form our own little group. We had our own style of dressing, our own obscure references, and our own rules of conduct. The way we looked made it easy for us to identify other skaters in the crowd of students, and made it easier for them to identify us. Things have changed in the years since, but back then skaters drew quite a bit of attention, and often enough it was not of the positive sort.

Perhaps I stood out a little more than the others. One side of my head was shaved to the scalp while the hair on the other side was long. I wore combat boots while everyone else had the latest Nikes. I had earrings in both ears and in one nipple. No one looks twice at that sort of thing these days, when even housewives have tattoos and every kid on the street has some part of their face pierced. A nose ring is now about as shocking as a glass of milk. Things are always different in the South, though.

My behavior wasn’t exactly low-key, either. I was thrown out of class at least once a week for disturbing the peace in general. Part of the problem was that I was just so happy to be away from the hell of home. I mocked teachers, screamed out bizarre and nonsensical answers when they asked questions, and made a nuisance of myself in a variety of ways designed to drive authority figures mad with rage. One teacher even threatened to “slap that bird nest off of your head,” in reference to my haircut. I was delighted.

When I met Jason Baldwin, he was quite the opposite. I don’t recall hearing him ever speak during his first year of junior high. I was the immature pervert who liked to amuse himself by looking up vulgar words in the dictionary during study hall. I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time on such pointless exercises as homework. One day after exhausting my sexual vocabulary for the millionth time I slammed the dictionary shut and looked up with the intention of finding someone to bother.

Looking back at me was a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet. He was wearing a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and judging by the paper on his desk he’d been drawing and doodling to kill time. There was a backpack propped next to his feet that turned out not to contain a single book. Instead it held a large collection of cassette tapes—Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and every other hair band a young hoodlum could desire. He often brought a small Walkman with him and would pass me one of the earpieces during study hall or, months later, on the bus so we both could listen. I’d see him eating lunch every day in the cafeteria and would nod in greeting as I was walking out. I never did ask how he got the black eye.

Jason usually had the latest Metal Edge and Heavy Metal magazines, and I would look at them while he examined my Thrasher collection. All of our interactions took place during school, because I still lived in the shack far outside city limits and my mom drove my sister and me to school in a blue pickup truck. The only class we had together was study hall, so there was little or no talking. Most of our communication was through gestures—finger pointing, eyebrow raising, head shaking, and so on. This didn’t change until the day Nanny nearly died.

Nanny had already suffered one heart attack, so she knew the symptoms well. Luckily she had time to call 911 and then to call my mom when the second one hit her. It was late in the evening when my mother began to shout that we had to go. We moved as quickly as we could, but the ambulance still got there before we did. We arrived in Lakeshore to see the paramedics bringing my grandmother out on a stretcher.

It was surreal because it was late enough that the sun was down, but it wasn’t completely dark yet. The sky was a beautiful mix of dark blue and purple. There was a special, magickal feel in the air that I’ve felt only a few times in my life. It touches something in you and it’s so damned beautiful that you think you’ll die because it’s too much to take. A time like that isn’t part of any season. It’s not spring, summer, winter, or fall. It’s a day that stands alone, like a world unto itself.

There was something about the way the red ambulance lights flashed through the entire world without making a sound that hurt my mind. No loud siren, just that red light flashing. I knew my grandmother would be okay. Everyone is okay on an evening like that.

My mother jumped from the truck and explained who she was. They let her into the ambulance to ride with my grandmother, who was barely conscious. We followed behind. At the hospital she was quickly rushed to surgery, where her heart doctor was already waiting.

We sat in the waiting room flipping through magazines without seeing what was on the pages, pacing the halls, and staring blankly at the television screen perched high in the corner. When the doctor finally came out, after what seemed an eternity, he pulled my mother to the side and explained that he had done what he could, but that my grandmother wasn’t expected to live through the night. We slept in the waiting room, expecting to hear the worst every time a doctor passed through. The news didn’t come that night, or the next day, either.

That afternoon the doctor came to talk to my mother again. He said my grandmother was still alive, though in critical condition. The new problem was that she had developed blood clots in her leg, and it was going to have to be amputated. He had doubts about her making it through the surgery, but she would surely die without it.

We all lived in that hospital waiting room for nearly two weeks. I didn’t mind; it was more comfortable than home. The air was nice and cool, everything was spotlessly clean, and there was even cable television. Jack brought sandwiches from home to eat or, when he scraped up enough money, hamburgers from a fast-food place. We ate in the cafeteria only once, because the food was so expensive. Every so often I’d sneak down to grab a few handfuls of crackers or breadsticks from the salad bar when no one was watching. I loved the hospital food. I thought it was delicious.

When I was allowed to go in and see my grandmother, she was so high on morphine that she didn’t know what was going on around her. She weakly raised one hand to point at a mirror on the wall and asked me to change the channel. She called me a “little shit” and told a story about how we would become vampire hunters, because you could get a huge reward for bringing in a vampire egg. She started coming back to reality once the doctor gradually decreased the morphine dosage. She was going to survive after all, though now she would have only one leg.

A sixty-five-year-old amputee with two heart attacks under her belt, she was in no condition to take care of herself. She couldn’t be expected to move into our squalid palace, so we had to move into her trailer in Lakeshore.

I couldn’t pack my few belongings quickly enough, knowing that this was my last time in the shack. It seemed too good to be true; I was escaping hell. I’d never have to see this place again. I didn’t waste time taking a last look around, as there was nothing I wanted to say good-bye to. We didn’t own a great deal that was worth taking other than our clothes and a few appliances. The furniture was all ready for the trash.

Ah, but I did find a treasure in that place before I left. A parting gift from the ghosts. There was only one closet in the house, and it hadn’t been opened in years. It was packed full of clothes that no one wore and other assorted trash that should have been thrown out years ago. My mother and Jack decided to go through it to make certain they weren’t leaving behind anything useful (yeah, right, like a pirate might have crept in and buried a treasure). Jack was pulling things out and tossing them on the floor while my mother looked on. At one point he climbed into the closet so he could reach an area that extended up to the ceiling. This was the area where the fire had started. He handed everything he found down to my mother, and she tossed it all onto the floor with her nose wrinkled in disgust.

Suddenly something dusty and black caught my eye. Until that point, I had no interest in anything they were doing. I was just eager to leave. Something about that dusty black bundle drew my attention, so I picked it up. It was a filthy, tattered, dry-rotted, moth-eaten trench coat. My heart skipped a beat because of its perfection. I had to have it.

“Whose is this?” I asked.

My mom said, “No one’s, it’s just trash.” I was slipping it on before she even finished speaking. “That’s filthy, you need to wash it,” she told me.

Jack, who had just climbed down, took one look and said, “It’ll probably come apart if you try to wash it.”

And that was how I came to own my very first trench coat. From then on, I was never without one. That seemed to be the one thing that people remembered about me more than anything else. Everyone who described me always began with “He wears a long, black coat.” It became the symbol that people associated with me. That particular coat would eventually disintegrate, but I would go on to find others. I would feel safe when wrapped in them, covered up and shielded. It was the greatest security blanket of all. I felt hidden when wearing it, as if bad things couldn’t find me. Without it, I felt exposed and vulnerable to the world. I was never self-conscious or a victim of self-doubt when draped in all that black cloth. There’s no reason to fear anything when you float through the world like a dusty black ghost.

Seven

Once ensconced in my grandmother’s “Lakeshore Estate,” we had to build two ramps—one to get her into and out of the trailer, and one to bridge the slight drop between the kitchen and living room. It was next to impossible for her to navigate her wheelchair through the narrow hallway, so we put her bed in a corner of the living room. My mother and Jack took her old room, and at long last I had a room of my own. I rarely ventured outside that room while at home. It was small and dark since the lamplight was covered by a smoky glass globe. I had a black vinyl couch to sleep on and a small metal shelf to store my things. One entire wall was covered by a three-panel mirror. The closet had an odd folding door on it, and the floor was covered with short, brown carpet. I immediately covered the walls with pictures and posters of pro skaters and set up the cheap, secondhand stereo that had been my Christmas present. I made it my place.

I’ve heard many jokes about poor people living in trailer parks, but I no longer considered myself poor. I was now in the lap of luxury—I could take a shower whenever I wanted, there was central heat for the winter, and a window air conditioner for the summer. The toilet flushed, there were no crop dusters, and we had neighbors. It was heaven.

This narrative would not be complete without a word about Lakeshore itself. It was a pretty big place, as far as trailer parks go. It consisted of two hundred trailers, give or take a few. They were nearly all run-down and beat-up, having put their best days long behind them. Nearly every one of them had a small yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. The majority of those fences held dogs, which were the only form of “home security” we knew. Without a dog and a fence, it was just a matter of time before everything in your yard would be stolen and the gas sucked right out of the tank of your car. The latter was accomplished with nothing more than a piece of hose and a bucket. The residents and locals rarely had regular jobs, although some worked at a box factory nearby. People were more often self-employed thieves or scroungers—for scrap metal, copper, anything you could sell. Addiction of all forms—drinking and meth were the most popular—were daily recreational activities.

People who have seen it in the many years since I left have told me it’s changed quite a bit, that it’s no longer the same place. Now it’s clean, the residents plant flowers in their yards, and they wash their cars. People are neighborly and friendly, and even cops live there. Old people live there after they’ve retired. I suppose it would now be considered lower middle class. That’s a big difference from the days when I knew it. To hear of these changes saddens me, because I feel that the last vestiges of what I knew as home are now gone. The world has moved on while I’ve been behind these walls. I no longer feel as if I have any roots. It seems that there’s a whole new world out there, and I’ve become an old man in body and mind if not in years.

The heart of Lakeshore was indeed a lake. A lake so green and scummy that most fish no longer inhabited it, and you were strongly advised against swimming in it, because it would not be wise to swallow the water. The bottom of the lake was an old boneyard of newspaper machines, wheelbarrows, box springs and mattresses, rusted bicycles, tangled fishing line, busted tackle boxes, broken fishing poles, and anything else your mind could conceive of. Before we went on trial, the cops claimed they found a knife there that had been used in the murders. I don’t doubt that at all, and I would not be surprised if they found a dozen more. My attorneys thought it was most likely planted there to make me look bad, which could very well be true. I also believe it’s just as likely to have been thrown in there by one of the many people who used the lake as their own personal dumpster.

That lake was a monster. I miss it terribly. I now think of it as being beautiful in its own green, scummy way, although I can understand why those who lack my nostalgia would not. In my mind, that lake has become like the Ganges, capable of washing away the pain, fear, suffering, and misery caused by years of incarceration for something I didn’t even do. That lake has become a magickal thing to me now and has come to represent “home” more than the Mississippi itself.

*  *  *

When writing about your life, it’s impossible to include every detail, or even the most uneventful life would require several volumes to record. You have to look back over your life and ask yourself, “What really mattered? What were the big moments that shaped me and made me who I am?” For me, one of those big events was becoming a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

As far back as I can recall, I’ve always been extremely interested in religion, spirituality, and spiritualism. For me those words cover a wide range of topics, including clairvoyance, ESP, apparitions and hauntings, druids, reincarnation and rebirth, prophecy, and even attending Mass or praying, among others. Around the fourth grade I started to read books on Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, astral projection, and the healing properties of crystals and stones. If it was connected to spirituality in any way at all, then I was interested. I believe this may have somehow been in response to all the sermons about hate, fear, and the wrath of God that I’d been hearing. I suppose I needed something that would balance that.

One day, while looking through the stacks in the library, I encountered a shiny new book on Catholicism written for teens. It was intended to teach young Catholics the meaning behind each thing they’re supposed to do during Mass. I was about fourteen or fifteen when I found it, and I had never been to a Catholic church in my life.

I took the book home and sat up late into the night reading it. I took it to school with me and read it when I had a spare moment. I was absolutely entranced, and I fell in love with the Catholic Church. All my life I’d been forced to go to Protestant churches against my will. Now I wanted desperately to be allowed to go to a Catholic church. I wanted to see the things I was reading about; I wanted to experience them firsthand. Genuflecting, holy water, praying with a rosary, the Stations of the Cross, and especially receiving the Eucharist—I loved the idea of it all. This was Christianity the way I had never before seen it. The entire process from the moment you enter the door, genuflect, and bless yourself is about respect, and about a dignity of the spirit. It was beautiful.

At first I was afraid to tell Jack or my mother that I wanted to go to a Catholic church. There’s still a large amount of prejudice in the South when it comes to Catholicism. The word “Catholic” is often said in the same tone of voice one uses when issuing an insult. I once heard someone comment that a Saint Christopher medal was “satanic.” These days the South is the land of the Baptist Church, and it can be a cruel place for anyone not of that persuasion.

I knew Jack was the one who would have to agree to it, and I knew I had to tell him in a language he’d understand. So one day I informed him that I felt I had a “calling” from God, and that I needed to find the place I was supposed to be. In the type of churches he attended, to say one had a calling meant that you were directly hearing God’s voice or feeling His presence, and that He was compelling you to do something. A calling could be seen by the rest of the world as anything from intuition to a psychotic episode. Still, he understood. And if I felt God was telling me to do something, then Jack Echols would be the last to interfere. He may not respect me, but he would respect what he perceived to be God’s will.

When he asked where I wanted to go, I knew I couldn’t just blurt out, “The Catholic Church,” because he would have looked at that suspiciously. Instead I told him I thought it best if I went to different places, and that I’d know the right one when I found it. He nodded, and that was the end of the conversation.

There was only one Catholic church in West Memphis; it was called St. Michael’s. It was a small place when compared with the huge cathedral-like buildings that housed the local Baptist churches, but it was well taken care of and in pristine condition. There were stone benches outside, and a small statue of Saint Francis. The lawn was raked and there was no debris or even a stray leaf to be found on the grounds. The word I keep coming back to over and over is “dignity.” The place had dignity, and it encouraged all who entered to have the same. The entire atmosphere announced that this was not a place where you would find people rolling on the floor and screaming.

I was dropped off and went inside to take a seat. I followed the lead of people around me and knelt on a padded bench to say a little “Hi, I’m here” to whatever power in the universe was listening. The place was completely silent—no screaming children or men in cheap suits bellowing obnoxious greetings to one another. Everyone quietly took their seats and waited. It was not an uncomfortable silence. On the contrary, it was very relaxing and peaceful; you could sit engaged in your own contemplations without fear of being disturbed. I felt very welcome there.

The organ began playing softly and everyone stood as the procession of the priest and altar boys made their way down the central aisle and to the front of the church. I couldn’t take my eyes off the small parade. The robes, the candles, the book held aloft—I was witnessing pure magick. I enjoyed every moment and savored the experience. After the opening ceremony the priest spoke for about thirty minutes in a calm, quiet voice about what he’d just read. There was no shouting, he didn’t beat his fist on the podium, and there was not one single word about the end of the world being at hand. I regretted having to leave once it was over, and would rather have spent the day there examining the scenes on the stained glass windows, admiring the statues that stood in the corners, or even watching the flickering of the votive candles.

That evening when Jack asked how it was, I told him that I’d found my place. When he asked how I knew, I said because it felt like home. He didn’t say another word, and dropped me off again a week later.

This time I waited around afterward until everyone had trailed out into the parking lot. I approached the priest, Greg Hart, who was a small, balding man with wire-framed glasses. I introduced myself and with no preamble asked, “How do I become a Catholic?” We sat and talked for a while, and he explained how I would have to attend conversion classes, as there was a lot to learn. He himself would teach the classes every Monday night. After getting all the information I needed, I walked outside where Jack was waiting in the truck to take me home.

I attended every single class, never missing one. Father Hart arranged a ride back and forth for me with a woman who would also be attending the classes. There were fewer than ten of us in all. We learned everything, from the teachings of the church on different points of dogma to how to pray the rosary. I enjoyed the classes almost as much as Mass itself. For my confirmation, I chose to name myself after Saint Damien.

When the day finally arrived that I was to receive the sacraments of baptism and first communion, a deacon who’d sponsored my conversion, Ben, gave me two gifts. One was the rosary his wife had used up until the day she died. The other was a suit to wear for the occasion. I was very touched by both. Unfortunately, I lost contact with these kind and supportive people in my life relatively soon afterward.

The only time my mother or Jack ever stepped inside the church was on the night of my baptism and first communion. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time. They sat in the very back row, looking uneasy and out of place throughout the ceremony. When it was over they stood and clapped along with everyone else. I was happy that they came, because I felt a sense of accomplishment and wanted someone to witness it.

I didn’t stop attending Mass until my life went straight to hell a couple of years later. I’ve long since outgrown any belief in mainstream Christian theology, and I even have some degree of animosity toward Christianity in general because of what has been done to me by people declaring themselves Christian. But I still love the ritual and ceremony of the Catholic Church. A little old priest comes here once a month, and I watch as he gives the sacraments to the Catholic convicts on Death Row. It comforts me just to watch it, and I often find myself remembering the pleasure I used to take in it.

*  *  *

Today, on Good Friday, I began performing the Holy Guardian Angel ritual as described in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. It’s a prayer that asks a higher self or outside intelligence for guidance, protection, and for forgiveness of all my weaknesses and sins. Expert practitioners wear white robes and burn candles and frankincense, and use other esoteric paraphernalia. I obviously don’t have all the materials he suggests, but I don’t believe they’re needed. I was reading through the scriptures that would be read during Mass for today and was suddenly overcome with the feeling that I need to begin now. I felt a sense of power and peace that I wanted to be closer to. I showered and put on clean white clothes, and then knelt to pray. If Aleister Crowley could do the ritual on horseback, then I could do it in a prison cell.

I prayed that I be forgiven all my transgressions, that I be protected and watched over, that I be granted the strength I would need, and that I be granted the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. I haven’t prayed like that since I was a child. Afterward I just wanted to sit and bask in the sense of peace that I felt. I know I will have to be on guard so as not to be completely swept up into devotion, or I won’t be able to remain objective. Aleister Crowley stressed the importance of neither believing nor disbelieving; I have the tendency to become a zealot.

The ritual was very informal and spur-of-the-moment, but I wanted to do it, if only for symbolic reasons, it being Good Friday. Tomorrow I’ll begin in a more formal manner, by setting up an altar and scrubbing this cell from top to bottom.

*  *  *

Today at 8:15 a.m., I prayed for the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. I repeated the prayer at 9:55 a.m. almost as a compulsion. I love how clean and focused I feel afterward. I asked for the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, along with the strength and intelligence I need to complete and endure the ritual. I swear that I will never use it for evil, but only for the glory of God, and to aid myself and others. Last, I ask for help and guidance in following the one true Way. I always end with the phrase “In Christ’s name I ask this, amen,” and then I make the sign of the cross. Afterward I feel refreshed and rejuvenated. I wonder what the difference would be if I had all the tools—the oil of Abramelin, Cakes of Light, incense, and wine.

I realized that while going through the Holy Guardian Angel prayer everything inside me becomes incredibly still. It’s like a very concentrated form of meditation. When you sit zazen, the first twenty minutes or so are maddening. Your legs ache, your nose itches, you can’t seem to find your center of gravity and so on, but once you make it past that first stage it starts to feel good. Like you could do it forever. That’s how the HGA prayer starts to feel. There’s an incredible stillness. The only thing moving inside you is the prayer itself, moving up and up. You begin to feel it seeping into the times when you aren’t praying, too. I’ll be just reading a book, and there it will suddenly be, bringing me into the present moment. I can now find that still, small point without even doing the prayer. It’s always there inside me; it takes only a split second to locate it. It’s there even when there’s no hope in it.

The prayer makes you focus. The focus makes you alert enough to notice the crack when it appears. The angel comes through the crack. The crack is somewhere inside me, as dark as a hole the sun has never touched. The angel is electric blue. I saw all of this in a matter of one-tenth of a second. It was nothing more than a flicker of endless black and electric blue.

That still, silent point of focus is back today. As soon as I knelt to begin, the feeling came over me. It’s like being the only thing that exists. Like being in an endless, silent vacuum. It’s both peaceful and powerful. My life is becoming more compact, like a tremendous amount of energy that has been compressed into a tiny sun. That’s as it should be. It feels good, as if I’ve discovered exactly what I’m meant to be doing right now. For a long time I have been overextending my reach, desperately snatching at every strand that floated my way in hopes of discovering some shred of inspiration. I’ve now come to realize that the only names I need are the ones that have been in my book of destiny since the very beginning. If I want to keep moving forward, then I have to keep looking back. I am rejuvenated by drinking from the oldest and deepest wells. I have found my way back to the source from which my magick flows. I am home.

One of the reasons I am now pushing my body beyond all its known limits is that over the years I have erected a barrier between my mind and body. I have elevated the mind until the body became next to worthless. It shows in my physical posture—the way my shoulders unconsciously slump and my head hangs. I can correct this only for short periods of time, and only by applying all of my will to it. I have to find a way to heal myself, to bring both mind and body into harmony. If I don’t, disease will set in.

Today my feet bled through two pairs of socks. It was bliss. Watching those coin-sized crimson stains bloom through the white fabric has become Holy Communion for me. Bringing my body to that point of pain and exhaustion has become my religion.

My life has taught me that true spiritual insight can come about only through direct experience, the way a severe burn can be attained only by putting your hand in the fire. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else’s insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of secondhand clothing, worn-out and passed down. I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and, in modern times, computers and television programs. On the other hand, there’s only one real source of wisdom—pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis.

I can vaguely remember life in what I call the real world. It seemed to be a chain of events that flowed one into another, not always seamlessly but at least naturally. There is nothing natural about my current situation. Nothing flows—or even moves—without someone applying a tremendous amount of willpower to one of reality’s pressure points. Even then, it’s like trying to keep a beach ball aloft just by blowing on it. Life without momentum is not truly life. A person needs movement, or they eventually begin to forget that they even exist.

I’ve read stories in which bliss, through some bizarre form of emotional alchemy, becomes lethargy or malaise. Perhaps it’s the boredom that causes a prince to give up all he knows and become a beggar. I can’t say. What I began to wonder is if the opposite may be true—if by following the thread of pain to a deep enough level, I could find something else. I knew I wasn’t the first to wonder about such a thing, because in certain Native American tribes, the men would sometimes undergo tremendously painful ordeals in search of spiritual or psychic insight.

One of the most torturous and well-known paths to opening the senses wider than usual is fasting. On my first attempt, I went for two weeks without consuming anything but water. For the first four days or so the pain of hunger, combined with the physical deterioration, was maddening. My skin was hot with fever. It reminded me of the powerful periods of fever and sickness that would come upon me suddenly as a child. There would be no warning; I would just wake up in the middle of the night with a high fever. I would be so weak that I couldn’t move, but it felt like I was floating. I could feel currents of energy passing through my consciousness, and realized they were always flowing through the world, but that I could feel them only when I was in that fevered state. The closest I can come to articulating it even now would be to say that I could hear a river of pink voices. Once I became a teenager, it stopped. During the very last fit, my fever went so high that my mother submerged me in a tub of ice-cold water in order to bring it down. The touch of that ice water on my skin was one of the most horrific experiences of my life. I wanted to scream and fight, but could only lie there gasping. I couldn’t even cry. My mother kept muttering reassurances to me and smoothing my hair out of the way as she poured the frigid water over my face. I kept thinking, How can she not know that I’m in hell? The fever never bothered me. It was comforting in a way. It was the ice water that I thought was going to kill me.

While fasting I would fall asleep fevered, hungry, and exhausted, but I was closer to that current than I had been since childhood. Still, there was something separating me from it. I could hear it on the horizon like a distant train whistle, but I wasn’t experiencing it. I needed something else to bring me closer.

I don’t know why I started running. I don’t even remember starting; I was suddenly just doing it. Being trapped in a cell meant I had to run in place, so that’s what I did. I ran so hard that I lost all track of time. Eventually, I passed out. The world just went black, and sounds seemed to be coming from the far end of a very long hallway. I did it again the next day, only this time I put on two pairs of socks, because of the blisters on my feet. I ran until I found myself crawling toward the toilet on my hands and knees, retching and dry-heaving as I slipped in my own sweat. What should have been horrible was somehow beautiful. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I felt closer to all things divine than I ever did in any church. I had run for over two hours without stopping for so much as a drink of water, and I had discovered a new world.

By the third day, my feet had started bleeding, leaving little smudges and droplets all over the floor, but I wouldn’t even notice them until later. I don’t understand how there can be magick in the repetitive movement of the body, but I’ve found it.

There are times when my mind screams at my body to stop, that it’s not possible to go for one more second. I ignore it and push beyond that point. Only by pushing beyond every boundary that my mind and body pose can I swim in the dark, deep waters that I need. That’s the place where anything worth having comes from. It’s the pain of destroying my boundaries that lets me scan the current for messages in bottles. They come from downstream with a ghost inside each one. I don’t know who or what casts those bottles, at least not yet. Those with less curiosity or ambition just mumble that God works in mysterious ways. I intend to catch him in the act.

Eight

Eventually, Jason Baldwin came over nearly every single day after school, and we’d sit in my room listening to music, talking, and laughing at other people until we reached a fevered, manic pitch. I laughed harder in those early days than I have ever since. It was the kind of laughter that causes you to lose all control and fall over. Years later, Jason and I talk about those days, trying to remember exactly what was so funny. Neither of us knows; we only recall that it was the most hilarious period of our lives.

Soon every weekend would find either me sleeping at Jason’s house or him sleeping at mine. When we were at my place we’d stay in my room, eating chips, drinking cans of generic soda, and listening to heavy metal cassettes. We were always trying to be quiet so that Jack wouldn’t hear us—if he heard even the slightest sound he’d go into a rage. He automatically hated anyone I befriended and went out of his way to make it unpleasant for all of us.

The very first night I stayed at Jason’s we decided to sneak out. I had never done this before, so I was doing it more for the thrill than to go anywhere in particular. The evening started out with Jason’s mom, Gail, dropping us off at the bowling alley in West Memphis, with the instruction to go nowhere else. As soon as she left the parking lot, Jason’s younger brother Matt departed the scene in search of other excitement. Jason and I went inside to play pool and associate with all the other hoodlums. This was the hangout for degenerates, and there were mullets everywhere you turned.

After playing a couple games and exchanging greetings with the locals, we decided to go find Matt. Perhaps there were more interesting things to be found wherever he was. We crossed the parking lots of grocery stores and strip malls to reach Walmart, which we knew to be his most likely location. While there we paid a visit to the music section, put our money together, and bought the newest Metallica tape, then sat down to read the lyrics. We finally found Matt playing video games, and all three of us made our way back to the bowling alley, where Gail soon picked us up.

The night was so cold that everything seemed crystal clear, magickal, and a little scary. The world suddenly felt very large. I remember every detail because that was the first time I had so wantonly and completely disobeyed all orders. We were free to do whatever we wanted, with no interference or adult supervision. A whole new world had opened up. The feeling of adventure and absolute freedom was amazing.

When Gail pulled up we quickly piled into the car and made our way back to Lakeshore. Back at Jason’s place we all three went into his room to listen to the new Metallica tape and play video games on the Nintendo system and old television that sat on the dresser. I can’t remember who first suggested sneaking out, but we immediately seized upon the idea. Time seemed to tick by at an agonizingly slow pace as we waited for Jason’s mom and stepfather to go to bed. After the lights went out we gave them another hour just to be certain they were sleeping.

We made our exit through the window in Matt’s room, because it was bigger than the one in Jason’s room. We could also step out onto the fence by stretching our legs out as far as possible, and from the fence it was only a short hop to the ground. Jason and Matt had both done this before and had no difficulty. I, on the other hand, got hung up with one leg inside and one leg outside. They decided to “help” me by yanking on the leg that was outside, and nearly crushed my testicles in the process.

We had no particular destination in mind, so we walked the streets of Lakeshore for a while, leaving a trail of barking dogs in our wake. It was so cold that all the puddles next to the street had thin sheets of ice over them, and the streetlights sparkled on them like diamonds. I was giddy with excitement and considered Jason to be wise in the ways of the world for having done this before.

We decided to pay a visit to the nearby train tracks, where Jason said there was a tree house in which people sometimes left bottles of wine. To get there we had to cross an empty field, and we didn’t take into account the recent rains. Our feet punched through the thin glaze of ice, and the three of us were standing in ankle-deep water. But the shivering and teeth chattering barely dimmed our sense of excitement and we plodded on.

When we finally made it to the tracks, not only was the tree house smashed but the whole rotten tree had fallen over. We continued on our way, following the tracks for about a mile, with the intention of making a full circle and ending up back at Jason’s trailer. We were quite a distance from any lights or trailers, and the night was silent. We talked about ghost tales and horror movies, urban legends and things we’d seen in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown books. Soon every hair on our necks was standing straight up and we were jumping at our own imaginations. We walked in a single file, Jason leading the way, Matt in the middle, and me bringing up the rear. Matt insisted on being in the middle so that nothing could sneak up on him. In quiet voices we discussed how some kid had claimed to see a dead man hopping back and forth across the train tracks on Halloween night. It was like we couldn’t keep from feeding our own terror. Sometime later I saw the movie Stand by Me and was overcome with nostalgia because of how much it reminded me of us.

Back at the trailer, we peeled off our wet footwear and fell asleep in front of the TV watching Headbangers Ball. I’ll never forget a single thing about that night as long as I live. It’s part of what makes me who I am. I’ve often wondered if Jason and Matt have thought about it much over the years.

As we grew older, the thrill of sneaking out lost much of its appeal because in such a small town there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Everything is closed by ten o’clock and there’s not much thrill in walking empty streets after the first time or two. Instead, we’d rent low-budget, straight-to-video horror movies every weekend and sit up all night watching them and making wisecracks. That was the closest thing to a “satanic orgy” I ever witnessed. The police had very vivid imaginations. I’m inclined to believe they may have seen a few too many of those cheap horror movies themselves.

Often at the end of these festivities we’d collapse onto the bed and sleep until noon the next day. We couldn’t fall asleep without music. I never slept better than with Iron Maiden or Testament playing in the background.

Over the years Jason and I became as close as brothers because we knew there was no one else to look out for us. We shared everything we had—food, clothes, money, whatever. If one of us had it, both of us had it. It was known without having to be said.

After we were unceremoniously released from school for summer vacation every year, we would spend the long days sitting on the ragged dock in Jason’s backyard, fishing, feeding the ducks, or making foul comments and put-downs to whatever neighborhood teenagers showed up to hang out. Sometimes we’d play video games, stare blankly at the afternoon cartoons on television, pick at each other, or listen to one of the geniuses make prank calls. Other times we’d explore out-of-the-way places in search of snakes. In our neighborhood snakes were as valuable as cash and could be traded for anything. The days were slow and lazy, hot and long, each the same as the last. This was the extent of our lives, and we thought nothing would ever change.

The first time I met Jessie Misskelley was completely unintentional. One day after school I knocked on Jason’s door, and Gail answered. Before I even asked, she said, “He’s not here, he’s at Jessie Misskelley’s.” She called him by his full name—Jessie Misskelley—and I would later learn that’s what everyone did.

Leaving Jason’s front porch, I began to head back toward home, because I had no idea where “Jessie Misskelley’s” was. I’d heard the name before, and from the sounds of it he was supposed to be one of the Lakeshore badasses. About halfway down the street I heard Jason yell, and I looked to my left to see him standing in the open doorway of a trailer. It turned out that Jessie Misskelley lived only about four or five trailers down from Jason. I entered the gate and Jason led the way inside.

The trailer appeared clean and kept up, no roaches or mice to be seen, and everything was in its place. Sitting in a living room chair next to the door was Jessie Misskelley. He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. His feet were propped up on the coffee table, and he had a bologna and cheese sandwich in one hand, and he was twirling an orange flare gun in the other. His hands had something black smeared on them all the way up to the forearms, as if he’d been working on a car. There was a mesh baseball cap perched atop his head; the emblem on the front was a Confederate flag and a grinning skull—typical truck-stop fare. From beneath the hat, long, straight, brown hair hung down to his shoulders.

Before my eyes even had time to adjust to the inside, a female voice screeched with deafening fury, “Get out from in front of the TV!” This seemed to be directed at me, and it came from a skinny, dark-haired girl sitting in another chair. This bundle of feminine charm turned out to be Jessie’s girlfriend, who was notorious in certain trailer park circles. Some guys had their girlfriend’s name tattooed on their chest. Jessie had the word “bitch” tattooed on his, in reference to Alicia.

Jason and I took a seat on the couch. Jessie’s girlfriend fell back into a silent stupor. Jessie became more animated and began to bebop around the living room. He took a glass figurine from a shelf and started making kissing noises. “This is my girlfriend,” he announced, holding up the glass figure. It appeared to be a small black woman with breasts bared, perhaps a novelty saltshaker.

An older man came out of a back room, and I took him to be Jessie’s dad. I was correct. He didn’t so much sit in the chair that Jessie had vacated as collapse into it with a groan and a sigh. He looked tired and weary, as if every day of his life had been a long day. He eyed Jessie’s sandwich and asked, “That ain’t the last of that cheese, is it?”

Jessie’s response was “Oops.” When his dad informed him he’d been saving it to take for lunch the next day, Jessie pulled the cheese from between the bread and flapped it in the air. “You can still have it,” he said, holding the cheese aloft and casting a grin in our direction. It was several bites short of being a whole piece.

His father paid him no attention. Instead he said Jessie needed to get ready to climb under the trailer and make sure all the tires were on and aired up. They were preparing to move it to another trailer park, called Highland.

Jason was suddenly very ready to leave. As we were going through the gate Jessie called out, “Y’all come back later so you can help me.” Jason said, “Okay,” over his shoulder without slowing down. A little farther down the street he told me that’s why he rarely went over there—they always tried to put you to work while they did nothing. Needless to say, we did not go back later to help, and Jessie took no offense. He knew he’d try to get out of unpaid manual labor, too.

I never did see Jessie a great deal, but we became familiar enough with each other to talk when we met. Jason and I would run into him at the bowling alley and spend an hour or two playing pool, or hang out for a little while at the Lakeshore store. Jessie was no great conversationalist, but his antics could be amusing, and the odd things he said were usually worth a chuckle. It was very apparent to anyone of even average intelligence that you weren’t dealing with the world’s brightest guy. He was a great deal like a child. He was harmless.

Nine

Going back to school the next year was like starting from scratch. I was going to high school, while Jason was staying behind in junior high. In the preceding three years, I had developed a sense of security or stability, and now it was gone. Even though the high school was only about ten feet away from the junior high, it was a whole different world.

Marion High School drew ninety-five percent of its student body from middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. This was a place where kids drove brand-new cars to school, wore Gucci clothing, and had enough jewelry to spark the envy of rap stars. This was a place where I definitely didn’t fit in. Everyone who used to skateboard seemed to have given it up and moved on to other things, which meant that my circle of acquaintances had grown much smaller. In truth, I wasn’t even skating all that much anymore.

In response to my new environment, my behavior became even more outrageous, and I was viewed as a freak. Freaks were a definite group of people, but it’s sometimes hard to explain what causes a certain person to fall into that category. Freaks weren’t really popular, but everyone knew who they were on sight. One boy had huge muttonchop sideburns, wore short pants, and had stuffed animal heads on his shoes. Another guy rarely took a bath and had a tendency to show up every now and then wearing a skirt. He wasn’t gay; he just liked skirts. A girl named Tammy (whom I had a crush on) was harder to define. She was gorgeous and a gymnast, but she wore nose rings, thermal underwear under her shorts, and white socks with black sandals. We had an odd relationship because she’d insult me and create a whole new genre of derogatory names to call me, but she’d jump down anyone else’s throat if they even looked at me funny.

I began an intense and unlikely friendship with a guy named Brian that year. He sat next to me in a couple of classes and was always very quiet, but in an arrogant fashion. He dressed as if he had a business meeting to attend every day, had immaculately groomed blond hair, and wore tiny, round, gold-rimmed spectacles. When he finished whatever work had been assigned to us, he’d pull out a novel and quietly read until the end of class. When he acknowledged anyone’s presence, it was with contempt. I couldn’t resist bothering him. When I demanded to see the book he was reading, he refused, saying that it had been a birthday gift and I looked like the sort who would damage it. When I declared that I wished to try on his spectacles, he once again refused and said he had no desire to clean my greasy fingerprints off the lenses. He seemed to think me an ill-mannered barbarian. These exchanges continued on a daily basis while class went on around us. He once hissed at me furiously, “Why can you not whisper? Even when you’re being quiet you’re still screaming.” This came after several warnings from the teacher. He had never been thrown out of a class in his life, and he had no intention of this being his first.

One day I noticed he had a cassette sitting on top of his books. I leaned over to get a look at the title, and it was no one I had ever heard of. “What’s that?” I asked. Handing me the cover so I could read the lyrics, he said it was a Christian rock band and that it was the only kind of music he listened to.

I was appalled and outraged that such a thing existed—how dare they defile the sanctity of rock ’n’ roll? He claimed he had quite the extensive collection, was active in many fundamentalist youth programs, and never missed church. He even had the nerve to invite me to come with him. My first instinct was to make a nasty gesture, but I suddenly stopped. Why not? It could be very interesting. My own religion felt so personal to me, a private thing, that his religion seemed viral, its only purpose to recruit more followers. It was all about “saving” others; once you “saved” somebody, you just moved on to “saving” others.

The function we attended was some sort of youth gathering. The Baptist church had a gym, and that’s where we went. There were teenagers playing basketball, Ping-Pong, and even a few board games. I took part in none of the above. Instead, Brian and I took a seat in metal folding chairs at the back, so we could watch everyone else. While we were talking, a group of about five girls approached us, obviously friends of his, judging by the way they greeted him.

Despite what I had been expecting, I soon found that I was enjoying myself. I struck up a friendship with one of the girls that would last for a couple of years—we talked two or three times a week on the phone, for hours at a time. Contrary to what my past experiences had led me to expect, no one preached, tried to convert me, or seemed to be even thinking about religion. We sat and talked while everyone went about their business all around us.

It also seemed to be quite the hot spot for teenage romance. Just like any other place where young people tend to congregate, you would often see boys and girls looking at one another as if they were about ready to eat each other up. We went back to this place several times during the year and there was only one awkward moment.

The awkward moment came when I showed up one night dressed in a long black coat, black pants, black shirt, and shiny, knee-high black boots that looked like they’d been stolen from a dead Nazi. This was my everyday garb now. I no longer dressed like a skater. In fact, I now never wore anything but black. Anytime I replaced an article of clothing it was with something black. I never again wore any color until after I was arrested. My appearance had been changing gradually, too. I had allowed my hair to grow long and tangled until it looked like Johnny Depp’s hair in the movie Edward Scissorhands.

I noticed Brian talking to an older man, who I later discovered was the “youth pastor.” When Brian came back and sat next to me, he said the youth pastor didn’t like the way I was dressed, that it appeared “satanic.” Brian suggested that I at least take off the black duster, so I did as he requested. His eyes grew large as he urgently said, “Put it back on!” Evidently my shirt, which was emblazoned with the Iron Maiden slogan “No prayer for the dying,” was a church “don’t.” I hadn’t even thought about it before that moment, but it drew a great deal of attention from everyone else. That moment became one of the nails hammered into the coffin that sealed my fate and sent me here.

As I sat in the Monroe County jail some years later, waiting to go to trial for murder, I saw that youth minister on the television screen. He was practically rabid as he ranted about “pacts with the devil.” He seemed psychotic. Simply the fact that I wore such a shirt to a church function was enough to convince a great many people that I had to be guilty.

My influence on Brian’s life crept in gradually. His manner of dressing changed, his hair grew long and shaggy, and he no longer listened to Christian rock bands. He soon fell into the “freak” category. He wore silverware for jewelry and chain-smoked clove cigarettes. He was no longer above sneaking into his mom’s cabinet for a drink or two every now and then. He took up skating and became better than I had ever been.

He was better because he was fearless. It was as if the possibility that he could fall and damage himself never even crossed his mind. Some part of me was always scared that I was going to fall when trying something new, so there would be a slight hesitation or a sense of holding back. Brian never had that; he hadn’t yet learned that pain waits for you around every corner—and it was apparent just by watching him.

Soon I was staying at his place on weekends, or he at mine. On spring days, we’d go to the convenience store down the street from his house to get chocolate milk, Popsicles, and cigarettes, then sit on the curb and watch people going in and out. It doesn’t sound like much fun, but it was relaxing to me.

For some reason I can no longer remember, I began keeping an odd sort of journal during this time period. It was a plain black notebook with no special characteristics, but in the years since it has become one of the most embarrassing and humiliating aspects of my existence. Everyone else is free to forget their period of teenage angst. I am not. That damnable notebook is always there to remind me. To be honest, I’m always amazed that I still get letters from people telling me how much they’ve enjoyed reading the parts that are known to the public and asking for more. There is no accounting for taste. I’m appalled that I ever wrote such trash. One day while watching my favorite sitcom a character on the show remarked, “Ever since they decided poems don’t have to rhyme, everyone thinks they’re poets.” How true. He may as well have been pointing at me.

I wrote about typical teenage bullshit: depression, loneliness, heartache, angst, free-floating anxiety, thoughts of suicide. Even after I tired of it I was enticed into writing more by the only factor that has motivated boys since the beginning of time—a girl. Ultimately she kept the notebook, and I forgot all about it. I never even saw it again until I found myself on trial a couple of years later. Not only would I find myself on trial for something I was innocent of, but the prosecutors would rub salt into my wounds by reading my most private thoughts and feelings before a packed courtroom, television cameras, and newspaper reporters. Somehow this was considered “evidence.” A bad hairdo, a black wardrobe, teenage angst-ridden “poetry,” and a taste for hair bands is enough to send you to prison. Death Row, no less.

The notebook became filled with all sorts of things I hardly remember—quotes, bits of information, lines from my favorite stories, and “poems” I had written. I can bring myself to call them that only with tongue in cheek. When I hear or read someone quote from them now, I want to crawl under a chair and hide. Ultimately, it is only my bad taste that has been immortalized.

*  *  *

The evening following our last day of school, Brian stayed at my house and we ordered pizza to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation. We sat at the kitchen table eating and watching the occasional person walk past on the darkened street outside. When I informed him that during the course of the day I had met a girl and we’d found ourselves attracted to each other, his curiosity was piqued. I told him her name, Laura, thinking he’d have no idea who I was talking about, but he surprised me by saying, more than once, “Are you serious?”

It turned out that he saw this girl and her two sidekicks on an almost daily basis, because one of them, Ashley, lived on the street directly behind him. That set the tone and daily routine of our entire summer. Every single day after Ashley’s parents left for work, Brian and I would head straight over to her house, and all five of us would spend the day watching music videos or passing the hours in her backyard pool. The third girl’s name was Carrie, and before the summer was over Laura and I broke up and Carrie and I paired off. Brian and Ashley were an item all summer. There was something magickal about that season and the small group the five of us formed. When the summer ended, so did we.

We didn’t meet them often on the weekends, because that would have involved the hassle of dealing with parental figures. We kept in constant contact by phone, but had no in-the-flesh meetings. Instead, Brian and I would spend the weekends ice-skating at a nearby shopping mall, riding around the streets of Memphis with his older brother, or watching videos and talking. That was the summer of much talking.

I also got my first job, and it was one of the most horrendous experiences of my life. I woke up one morning and decided I was tired of being broke and penniless; it was time for me to join the workforce.

I started by putting in applications at all the usual places that hire teenagers—grocery stores, fast-food joints, Walmart. No one was hiring. Then one day I remembered a small seafood restaurant next to the highway. I had never been inside the place, and I was growing desperate because potential employers didn’t seem to value the exceptional intellectual giant who was presenting himself to them. The seafood restaurant was my last option.

I stepped inside the place one afternoon, and it was so dark that it took my eyes a minute to adjust. The floors were bare concrete, and the tables were small and covered with red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloths. The cash register stood a few feet away from me, and sitting on a bar stool next to it was a small, gray-haired, humpbacked man. He seemed to be engrossed in paperwork of some sort. I approached him and asked if this fine establishment might be hiring. He looked at me for a moment in a way that would lead one to believe he was calculating shrewdly, then asked, “Can you start tonight?” I responded in the affirmative, and he told me to show up at five o’clock.

I returned home elated. I had a job and would soon be able to afford whatever I wanted. The future was wide open and my mind was filled with possibilities. Reality would soon smash my youthful idealism.

When I arrived at five I was told that I was the new busboy. My uniform was an apron that looked as if it might have once been white in previous years. I distinctly remember using my fingernail to scrape off pieces of eggshell that were cemented to the front of it. After putting it on I was shown to the kitchen, where I witnessed a vision from the very bowels of hell.

This restaurant was the only place on earth I’ve seen that was filthier than prison. You could have literally vomited on the floor and no one would have noticed it. They would have stepped over the puddle and kept right on walking. The place was family-owned, and the family consisted of a father, mother, and three children. The hunchback who hired me was the father.

The mother was a 250-pound lump who never made eye contact with anyone and never spoke a word. She was filthy from laboring day and night in this kitchen. The three children—two boys and a girl—were hell spawn. The youngest, a boy about two years old, wore nothing but a pair of filth-caked underpants. The older son, who was about three or four, usually wore shorts but no shirt or shoes. The little girl couldn’t have been older than five, and she wore a set of superhero-themed underwear and T-shirt every day. All three had crud-smeared faces, runny noses, and tangled hair.

The kids had to be kept in the kitchen and out of sight of any customers at all times. They weren’t even allowed to use the restroom. Instead, they used a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat balanced precariously atop it. This meant there was a five-gallon bucket of shit and piss sitting right in the middle of the kitchen at any given time.

The kitchen itself looked much like a room from the house in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The walls were greasy and stained black from smoke, the countertops looked like tiny garbage barges, and the entire place carried the aroma of rotting fish. As a matter of fact, my first task was to clean about ten pounds of spoiled fish out of the sink, which I did while swallowing my own vomit. More than once I walked in to find the mother giving one of the kids a bath in one side of the sink as fish fillets or crab legs soaked in the other half. On my first night, I moved a large bag of cornmeal only to discover a large rat nursing a litter of hairless pink babies.

I had been working there about three weeks when several of the other workers showed up at my door. They said they had to round everyone up and get to work quickly because someone had called the health department and they were coming to inspect the place. We cleaned, scrubbed, and hauled garbage from two-thirty in the afternoon until after eleven that night and still seemed no closer to making the place presentable. At that point I knew I couldn’t take this for another second. I stood before the hunchback with my clothes looking as if they had been plucked from a dumpster and every inch of my body covered in sludge, filth, and crud that defied any attempt at description. I told him that I was going home and would not be returning. I couldn’t escape that place in my nightmares, though. I dreamed about it much longer than I worked there.

*  *  *

Brian and I began to drift apart once we started school again. One reason was that I had once again failed and would be spending another year as a freshman. This meant I’d be celebrating my seventeenth birthday in the ninth grade. Coincidentally, one of my childhood heroes had managed to do the same. His name was Andy, and he was the only guy in eighth grade with a five-o’clock shadow. He paid no mind to trends or changing fashions; he always wore jeans with the knees ripped out and a battered green army jacket. He had shoulder-length black hair and wore a long, dangling earring that looked like a crucifix. Andy was the most laid-back guy in the school, and he’d either sleep through every class or draw. Nobody messed with him, and he didn’t mess with anyone. During the summer Brian and I had gotten rides from his little sister, Dawn, who was our age. She loved both of us, and was great just because she was so normal. She didn’t care about high school politics and didn’t fit into any particular group. She also consumed more vodka than a teenage girl should be able to.

Brian advanced to tenth grade and grew closer to the freak crowd. I completely quit skating and became what people now call “goth,” though I had never heard the word, and there were no goths in our school. I did what I did because it was aesthetically pleasing to me. In addition to Slayer, Testament, and Metallica, my musical taste expanded to include things like Danzig, The Misfits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode. All the old skateboarding posters disappeared from my room and were replaced with old prints I found in odd books. Most of them looked a great deal like images from Goya’s etchings and sketches. I caught a couple of filthy, vindictive pigeons and allowed them to fly around the room as they pleased.

I spent much less time with Brian and found myself falling back into the old patterns Jason and I had established. Brian was becoming much more melancholy. One day in the fall we found ourselves standing on Ashley’s street. He was looking at her house, lost in thought, when he asked, “Do you miss it?” I knew exactly what he was talking about, but still asked what he meant. “The way things were during the summer.”

I said, “No,” and realized it was true. Of all the people, times, places, and things in my life that make me nostalgic, that was not one of them. By that time I had other things on my mind. I was in my first real relationship.

Ten

My sister could not sing to save her life, but that never stopped her from trying. The problem was that every song sounded the same as the last one when it came from her mouth. My mother said it was because she was hard of hearing, but I have my doubts. I’m more inclined to believe it was simply a lack of talent, but no mother wants to tell her daughter she sounds like a bag of cats being beaten with a stick. Michelle was allowed to join the school choir only because the policy was to refuse no one who signed up.

The choir director had thought it a good idea to hold the first concert less than two weeks after the beginning of the school year. My sister put on her best dress and my mother prepared to drive her to the gymnasium and stay to watch the show. Normally I had no interest in extracurricular activities, especially if it was a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls caterwauling their way through “Amazing Grace,” but that night something compelled me. At the very last minute I decided to go along.

When we pulled into the parking lot, my mother, sister, and Jack all hustled inside to take their places. I stayed outside for a while longer, dragging my feet and exchanging words with people I recognized. There’s something very odd about being on a school campus at night. It doesn’t feel the way it usually does. It’s an entirely different place, and there’s a crackle of excitement in the air. I was feeling this more than thinking it as I finally made my way to the gym.

I could hear the piano playing and people singing as I approached the building. There was a greasy yellow light shining through the front windows that suddenly made me feel as though winter had arrived, even with the temperature close to eighty degrees. When I pulled the front door open and stepped into the foyer, the click of my boot heels on the hard tile only increased the winter feeling.

Ten feet in front of me were two large wooden doors that covered the entryway into the main part of the gym. There was a girl standing with her eye pressed to the crack between the doors, looking in. Her back was to me. When she heard me enter she let the door slip closed and turned to ask, “Would you like a program, sir?” She grinned at me like she knew something amusing I didn’t. Not a smile, a grin.

I’ve thought about it since, and there’s a difference. A person smiles when they’re happy. A smile indicates warmth and friendliness. A grin is a whole different animal. A grin implies pleasure. A person who grins is usually someone who is being pleased, even if it’s your misfortune that pleases them. My grandmother used to say that when I grinned you could see the devil dancing in my eyes. That’s what I saw that night—the devil dancing. It wasn’t a waltz, either. More like a mosh pit.

The girl had skin as white as my own and shoulder-length hair that was just as black as mine, with no help from dye. (Over the years many sources have erroneously stated that I dyed my hair black. That is indeed its natural color.) She was wearing a pair of slacks that were so tight many would call them vulgar, and a low-cut blouse one could only say matched the slacks. She had a handful of programs for the choir concert, and I refused the one she offered.

I never went in to see the choir that night. Instead I stayed out in the lobby with this girl who reeked of sex. It emanated from her like static electricity and was present in every gesture—the way she stood too close and looked up at me, the way she hooked her arm through mine, and cocked her hip to the side as she talked. She didn’t seem to be able to control it, like a cat in heat. It wasn’t me that brought out this behavior—it was any man. I spent the evening entertaining her, and the sound of her laughter twice brought someone to the door to cast us a warning glance.

Her name was Deanna, and she informed me that if I’d bothered to look back I would have seen her in at least three of my classes. I didn’t understand how I could have sat in the same room with her for almost two weeks and never even registered her presence. We had lunch together every day after that night. We sat alone at our own table at first, and gradually a small but loyal group of people formed around us—other couples, two younger guys who had started trying to dress like me, and a large gentleman by the name of Joey, who claimed to be my “bodyguard.”

In the evenings I often went to Deanna’s house. Her family was very pleasant, a proper and quiet southern family. They invited me into their home and allowed me to take part in their routine. Sometimes we’d watch movies, play games, or listen to music. Nothing harder than country music was allowed in the house, and watching MTV was an offense that would get Deanna and her two sisters grounded. Deanna’s parents could be very strict and even intolerant at times. After all the bad stuff went down, I thought they were evil tyrants who wanted to force religion down the throats of their children while ruling them with an iron fist. I still believe that’s an accurate picture in many ways, and I often heard Deanna make declarations of hatred against her mother, but all the years that have passed have given me a new perspective. They were looking out for their children in the best way they knew. I can see both sides of the coin now.

In the beginning they accepted me as family. I didn’t realize the honor I was receiving, because I’d never known anything like it before. I’d never met a girlfriend’s family. Every time there was a family gathering I was invited. It was so long ago that most of the memories have faded away and only the feeling remains. I can recall only a few of the more powerful ones. I remember being at their Christmas party, where Deanna gave me a stuffed gorilla and a tin of Hershey’s Kisses. We sat next to the fireplace eating chocolate while the rest of the family laughed and celebrated all around us.

Deanna was secretly a pagan, she told me quite soon after we met. What was called a witch in the old days. A Wiccan. I had never before heard the term. All that I knew of “witches” was what I had read in the old books that said they flew to meetings where they danced with the devil and cursed crops or caused babies to be born with birthmarks. I knew only the nonsense—that all religions outside Christianity are at best misguided, and at worst, satanic—passed down by the Catholic Church and the Inquisition. She kept a small green diary filled with all sorts of things: names of ancient, pre-Christian goddesses; plants and their medicinal purposes; and prayers written in flowery verse.

This was just before Wicca exploded in popularity (and notoriety) in the United States. Now there are many books written on the subject every year, and it is recognized by the United States Department of Defense as a valid religion. Times have changed. Back then I had no idea that such a religion existed. I was amazed and flabbergasted.

I began doing my own research into Wicca, reading about it and even meeting a group of local teens who were followers of the religion. They were a good source of information, but I couldn’t stand being around them. They were all extremely flaky and melodramatic. I felt embarrassed for them, as they didn’t have the sense to realize how socially inept they were. Wicca is a beautiful religion in theory, but I distanced myself from anything to do with it because I couldn’t take the people. Many of them are people in their thirties who still try to live and behave like teenagers. Wicca seems to draw a great many people who cannot or will not grow up.

It did serve as a springboard into other areas of knowledge later, though. I’ve since learned much more about Kabbalah, Hinduism, Buddhism, meditation, yoga, the tarot, Theosophy, Tantra, Taoism, the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, and the Hermetic practices of the Golden Dawn. At the time, I couldn’t get enough, and devoured what I could on Wicca. I found it infinitely fascinating for a great while, not knowing my curiosity and interest would one day be used against me in court.

The beginning of the end came when Deanna’s parents found out we’d been having sex. We would get away with it for a while, but a simple mistake gave us away.

The very first time, we planned it out. When she was dropped off at school I was there to meet her. We immediately left and walked to my place. We took a back path, following railroad tracks that kept us out of view of passing cars but also tripled the distance we had to cover. It took an hour to get there, and when we arrived we went straight into my room, where we stayed for the rest of the day. My mother and Jack both knew, but neither cared. Fittingly enough, the sound track that played in the background was Suicidal Tendencies singing “How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today?” This became our routine.

We’d been together for most of a year when the slip occurred. The problem was that one day we arrived back at school a few minutes later than normal, and her bus had already left. I had no idea, so I left her there and returned home. She had to walk home. Her mother asked her why she hadn’t told someone in the front office, so she could have gotten a ride. Instead of giving the typical teenage response of “I don’t know,” she said she had told someone, and they refused to help. Her mother promptly went to the school to complain, only to discover that her daughter had not been in school that day. That’s when the proverbial shit hit the fan.

After Deanna told her mother the entire story, she was forbidden to ever have anything to do with me. She wasn’t even allowed to speak to me. They couldn’t stop us during school hours, but they made it impossible for us to meet once she was at home. I tried, though. I tried everything I could think of, but they weren’t stupid. They even informed school officials to call them if she was ever absent from school.

We tried to work it out for months, but her parents were relentless, and it was like beating our heads against a wall. Early one foggy, gray morning Deanna met me and said she couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t take the pressure her family was putting on her, so she was breaking up with me. This was the last thing I was expecting to hear, because all we had talked about were ways to make it work. We had never even discussed the alternative. I was in shock, and my mind was having trouble comprehending her words. When the pain came it was like being stabbed in the chest with a blade of ice. I said nothing, so there wasn’t a great deal of talking. She severed everything as quickly as a razor. “I can’t do this anymore.”

I turned and wandered away like someone who’d been in an accident. “Wander” is the perfect word for what I did, because I didn’t really go anywhere. I just walked. Walked and walked and walked. It would become a hobby for me. I was the Forrest Gump of Arkansas.

The nights were the worst. Every night I’d wake up racked with sobs because of the dreams. It was the same general dream, with slight variations: Deanna comes to me and says it was all a mistake, that she’s back now and the hurt will all be gone. Each one seemed so real that waking up would drive me almost to the point of madness.

In addition to having to deal with this, I had to deal with Jack, who had quit his job and was always home. Not only did he never leave the house, he never left the couch. He festered with hatred and made everyone’s life miserable. The only time he spoke was to spew venom at someone, and he and my mother fought constantly. She complained of a new ailment every week because the stress was wearing her down. Jack always managed to make us the most miserable when it was time for supper. He’d sit at the table with a hateful expression on his face, daring anyone to speak. I just tried to stay out of his way, but it was impossible. He made sure everyone was as miserable as he was. It was hard to swallow a single bite, much less make it through an entire meal, when he was present. My sister later claimed that he molested her during this period, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

I stayed out as much as possible. I didn’t really care where I was; I just drifted from place to place, hoping to dull the pain. I took up smoking because the nicotine helped me fall asleep at first. Later it would keep me up.

Grief sometimes causes people to do strange things. It once caused me to plant a pumpkin patch. I didn’t tend it like a farmer or anything; I just left it to grow wild, like a baby raised by wolves. I had saved every love letter Deanna ever gave me, as if they were a priceless treasure. Perhaps they were, in a way. Over the years I’ve searched my brain trying to remember what words were inscribed on those pages, but I can only draw a blank. Whether the letters were playful, passionate, or filled with longing, I’ll never know. Not that it matters much now, but it just seems like I’d be able to remember something about them because I once thought they were so important.

I needed to create a doorway through which I could enter the future and leave the past behind. I needed closure. I drifted through the days brooding and sullen, heartbroken and at a loss. My favorite holiday, Halloween, came and went. That year I didn’t feel the sense of excitement and possibility that the season usually exuded. It didn’t make me happy. Normally Halloween was like Christmas for me. I would anticipate it for weeks, decorating myself and the house, as well as strolling around the neighborhood, admiring everyone else’s decorations. Nothing lifts my spirit like a scarecrow in the front yard.

There was a magickal crispness in the air that matched the fallen leaves underfoot. One of the things I always loved most was sitting on the porch and breathing the scent in the air as I handed out candy. I always thought it was more fun to hand it out than to collect it. That year, however, not even that appeased me.

A few days after Halloween, I was at Jason’s house. He sat on the couch, staring dully at the television as I milled around in the kitchen. An old school box sitting on the table caught my eye. It was the sort that elementary school kids kept their crayons, glue, and pencils in. It appeared to be well used and was missing its top. Inside was a large quantity of pumpkin seeds that the family matriarch had deposited when carving the jack-o’-lantern. “What are these for?” I called out, picking up a handful and letting them run through my fingers and back into the box like gold coins. He looked over, shrugged, and went back to watching television. I put a handful into the pocket of my jacket.

I stayed up late into the night, lying on the couch and eyeing the canister that contained all of Deanna’s letters. It was a form of self-torture. I felt the need to do something, to take some form of decisive action. I knew it was the only way to begin reclaiming my life and enter a new stage of development and growth. I was tired of the stagnation.

Making up my mind, I got off the couch, grabbed the letters, and went into the bathroom. Using a cigarette lighter I lit each letter one by one and let it burn all the way down to my fingertips before dropping it in the sink. I went through the entire collection, consigning the past to a funeral pyre. The entire bathroom was filled with smoke by the time I was finished, and my eyes were bloodshot. It didn’t bring the sense of relief I thought it would. Still, I had committed myself to a course of action and would follow it to completion.

I collected all the ashes from the sink and put them back into the canister. I sat with that can of ashes and waited for the sun to rise. When the first rays of light touched the world I started my trip. I walked back to that spot between the hills where we had spent the spring day that now seemed to have been an eternity ago. Autumn was now in full sway; the grass was no longer green. Everything was brown, more like stalks than foliage. The sky was dark gray, warning that rain was on the way. The wind whipped my hair around my face, and the trench coat I was wearing made a sound like the sail on a pirate ship as it flapped behind me.

Using the lid of the canister I began to churn up the earth on the spot that would have been beneath us that day. I was on my hands and knees, digging in the rich soil and sprinkling pumpkin seeds like some demented creature in an ancient children’s tale. When I finished, I sprinkled the ashes of the love letters over the seeds, then covered it all up with dirt. I knew it was awfully late in the year to be planting anything, but I was hoping for a miracle. Pumpkins are pretty hearty and can withstand frost.

I don’t know if they grew or not because I never returned to the spot. I left the empty canister there and walked away. I was tempted to go back a couple of years later, just to see what the scene looked like. I fantasized that pumpkins would still be growing there, the descendants of the ones I had planted and fed with ash. Perhaps they still are, decades later. The thought pleases me. It would be a mark I left on the world that the winds of time had not worn away. Perhaps when you sit down to carve a jack-o’-lantern this year, or are enjoying a piece of pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving dinner, it’ll be with one of my magick pumpkins that has made its way to your table. I’ll be part of the festivities by proxy.

My life seemed to have no point. I went on living because that’s what my body was used to doing. I drifted from one day to the next, not really caring about anything. I began sleeping with someone else just because she was there.

Domini was a transfer student from Illinois, where she had been living with her dad. She came to Arkansas in the middle of the school year and moved in with her mother. Since her parents’ divorce she’d alternated living with one and then the other.

I was sitting through some sort of civics class when she first walked in. Deanna was sitting behind me (we were still together at the time), and two friends, Joey and Jamie, were sitting on my right. The teacher was a bad-tempered Italian man who had just finished lecturing us on how we’d have time to finish our homework if we weren’t out riding around and “partying” every night. I pointed an accusing finger at Joey and voiced a loud “That’s right,” only to have him do the same back at me.

Deanna laughed, and the bad-tempered Italian said, “Look at Damien, pointing them out.” He gave me a narrow-eyed look to let me know his comment had been directed at my crew. There was a knock on the door and he stepped out into the hallway. The class erupted, as it always did when there was no disciplinarian in sight. When he came back in, Domini was with him. He introduced her as Alia and told everyone she’d be part of the class from now on. Joey shivered as though he found her repulsive. I paid very little attention. She was a red-haired girl with green eyes who looked strangely like Axl Rose in the “Welcome to the Jungle” video. She was dressed in jeans and a denim jacket. I turned back to Jamie and Joey and continued to discuss where we would go that night once Jamie picked us up, just as we had been doing before the teacher caught us. I didn’t give Domini another thought for several months.

I encountered her out of school for the first time about a month after Deanna and I had broken up, while I was on one of my Forrest Gump walkathons. Jason was with me and we were walking through a store a couple of miles from Lakeshore. Domini was there with another girl. I never did understand why she used her middle name, Alia, at school and Domini at home. At school she seemed painfully shy—she never talked, and kept to herself. At home she was a little more outgoing. The four of us began talking and ended up at the nearby apartment complex where Domini and the other girl lived. A guy who lived there seemed to have an open apartment policy, because his front door stood open to let the breeze in and people seemed to come and go as they pleased. I figured he was a friend of Domini’s because she wandered in and started talking to him as if she had just left. Jason and I followed.

I sat in a chair minding my own business and staring blankly at the television screen while other people talked, drank beer, teased each other, or stood at the door, shouting to people in the pool outside. I didn’t care about any of it; this was not my place and I did not fit in. I could tell Jason was just as uncomfortable. The only people I spoke to were Domini and her friend, who introduced herself as Jennifer. We weren’t there long before Jason and I got up to leave. Domini tried to get us to stay, but we said Jason had to check in at home. She wanted us to come back later, and I said I would, even though I had no intention of doing so. As we were walking home Jason asked, “You’re not really going back, are you?” My answer was “Of course not.” In the end I didn’t have to, as she came to me.

That night I was alone in my room with the lights off. The radio was on and I was staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t sleep much at night anymore because that was when the hollow, empty feeling was the worst. At night there’s nothing to hold your mind to the earth, and you spend the entire time falling into an abyss. The only cure is the rising of the sun. I was following my usual routine of waiting for daylight when my mother opened the door and told me someone was there to see me.

When I entered the living room, Domini stood looking back at me. She knew people who knew where I lived, and had taken it upon herself to come calling. It was late and she stayed only for about fifteen minutes, but before she left I kissed her. I don’t really know why; I guess I felt like it was expected of me. I was still in mourning and felt no desire for her. In hindsight I know I did it for the same reason I walked nonstop—because I didn’t know what else to do, and doing something was better than doing nothing.

There wasn’t much of a courtship, no scenes of seduction. We started sleeping together two days later. It took my mind off things and gave me something to do on autopilot. It was something to lose myself in, and we established a routine. Every day Jason and I would go hang around the apartments where she lived, or she would come to Lakeshore. Jason and I did a great deal of “hanging around” and must have appeared to be pretty shady characters.

Perhaps Domini saved my life, just because I needed someone to be near me then. I didn’t want to be alone where I had to think. We had some fun moments together, but when I ask myself if there was ever a burning love for her in my heart I must be honest and say no. Domini is a good person, straightforward and loyal, and she doesn’t play games. She keeps things simple and never makes life complicated the way so many people love to do. Maybe I praise her so it doesn’t seem so harsh when I say I was never in love with her. She was and still is a friend of mine.

One other thing of interest happened at this time. I heard a piece of information that wasn’t meant for my ears and committed the only act of violence I’ve ever been guilty of. Early one morning I stood talking to a couple that Deanna and I had been close to, Josh and Lisa. Lisa let slip that Deanna had performed sexual favors for another young man while still with me.

If my wounds had started to develop scabs, they had suddenly been ripped off. This was a “whole ’nother story,” to quote Matt. Lisa immediately knew she had made a mistake, and if I weren’t so white she would have seen the blood drain from my face. I knew just where this young man would be, so I turned to go find him. I could feel fire in my blood and a gleam in my eye that let me know I was alive. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been dying inside until I felt that flame of life. I had no plan and no idea what I was going to do; I just let the current carry me.

I approached him from behind and saw something I hadn’t planned on—Deanna was standing with him. This was new. She must have realized I knew by the look on my face. I was hurt and mad as hell, and it must have been obvious, because as I walked down the hall many people stopped and turned to watch. I still don’t think my course was unalterable, even at that point. What pushed me over the edge was seeing her glance nervously at him and say, “He’s behind you.” I felt a world of betrayal come crashing down on me. She didn’t say, “Damien’s behind you.” She said, “He’s behind you,” like it was something they had been expecting. I knew the whole story when I heard those words.

“Hey!” I screamed at his back. The moment he turned around, I was on him. He was bigger than me, and I’d never been in a real fight in my life, but he wasn’t expecting the pure, raw fury that came from being hurt the way I had been. It happened so fast that all he could do was try to ward me off. He backed up, trying to escape what must have seemed like a cyclone, and tripped over his own feet and fell. I went down on top of him and about twenty people jumped in to pull us apart. As they pulled me away I desperately tried to hang on to him, grabbing at him, and left scratch marks across his face.

Later there was a rumor that I had tried to pull his eye out, but it wasn’t true. I was just trying to hang on to him. This rumor spread and grew with time, darkening my reputation. Or as they say in prison, “casting a shade on my character.” I was suspended from school for three days over this incident.

I regretted it almost as soon as it was over. It wasn’t the guy’s fault. I’ve wanted to apologize to him ever since, but haven’t seen him in many years. I truly am sorry, though, and I wish I could take it back.

Ah, but talking about such things tends to depress me, and a man in my shoes can’t afford to become depressed. And we are talking, you and I. Just like old friends. Who else would I be telling my life story to? Let us now skip ahead to when things became more cheerful, however briefly.

I had one of the greatest teachers to ever lend his skill to the realm of academic learning. His name was Steve Baca, and he taught physical science. What made him so interesting and effective was that he didn’t stick to a script or enforce rote memorization. He made you think. Sometimes he would hand us a video camera, assign a certain scientific principle to us, and then we had to invent and conduct our own experiment, while videotaping the whole thing. Instead of grading us himself, the entire class would watch the tapes and grade one another. He showed us movies like The Manchurian Candidate and introduced us to the music of Pink Floyd. Sometimes we’d take the day off and play a quick game of baseball. This is a guy who made you want to go to school. He could also tell a joke that appealed to the teenage mind, a task most adults aren’t up to. He was open to any topic you cared to discuss, and he would give advice. You don’t find many teachers like that.

It was in one of his classes that Deanna came back to me. Mr. Baca had sent us out to work on one project or another, and he assigned Deanna and me to the same team, along with three others. It’s one of the times that are fixed crystal clear in my mind. We all went into the gym, and one guy operated the video camera while another guy and girl interviewed the janitor. I was sitting on the stairs and looking out a back door that had been propped open. Summer was just arriving and the sunlight was so bright it dazzled the eyes. There was just the slightest breeze blowing in. Deanna came and sat next to me, and I was scared to move or say anything, lest she move away like a frightened deer. My throat closed up so I could barely breathe, and I wanted to cry. This was the closest she’d been to me since she left me.

“Want to talk?” she asked.

“About what?” I managed to croak. I knew damned well what. My heart beat like it was trying to escape my chest.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, referring to the fight that had taken place almost a month ago by this time. We hadn’t spoken since. I shrugged, not knowing what to say. We talked about other things for a while—the guy, who was now her boyfriend, and Domini, who was now my girlfriend. She asked me whether or not I still wanted to be with her.

If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have run for my life. I didn’t know, though. “Yes,” I said, almost hissing the word, hoping she could sense the force and determination behind it. She nodded her head as if she’d just made a decision, then without another word left me sitting there. What did this mean? Was she coming back to me?

I never even came close to sleep that night. I felt like I was on the cusp of something big. The next morning Jason stopped by and we walked to school together. My nerves were too jangled for me to be much of a conversationalist.

Deanna was standing there waiting for me when I arrived, and she indicated that she wanted to talk to me alone. I told Jason I’d see him later and followed her over to what used to be “our corner.” She was crackling with happiness as she told me she had dumped the other young gentleman. She said that since she had been the one to mess things up, she wanted to fix them properly. In a very official tone she asked if I would take her back.

I should have run like I was on fire. I should have shaved my head and taken a vow of celibacy. I should have instructed this raven-haired package of pain to go bugger herself. I did none of the above. Instead I crushed her to me, buried my face in the top of her head, and inhaled deeply. Her face was against my chest and she said she was breathing my scent. When I asked her what she smelled, her response was “home.”

She asked if I’d broken up with Domini, and I explained that I’d yet to see her, so I hadn’t been able to. She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me through narrowed eyes, but there was no real anger or jealousy, because she knew there was no competition.

Did I seek out Domini that night and tell her that it was over? Indeed I did. All was right with the world and I cared about nothing else. Domini has earned the right to call me an asshole many times over. I could tell her heart was broken and I offered no comfort. I couldn’t get away from her fast enough, because I was living in denial. I wanted to believe the split with Deanna had never happened, the tryst with Domini had never taken place. Because I knew that a vase that has been broken, even if it’s been glued back together, is never the same.

Eleven

Sleep deprivation is a direct result of the lights. They turn the lights off every night at ten-thirty. Then they’re turned right back on at two-thirty, when they start to serve breakfast. If you could manage to fall asleep the moment the lights went out, then sleep through all the guards’ activity, you would still get only four hours of uninterrupted sleep. It’s not possible, though. Doors slamming, keys hitting the floor, guards yelling at one another as if they’re at a family reunion—it all wakes you up. During the four hours when the lights are off you can expect to be awakened at least once an hour. The activity continues throughout the day, with the addition of bright, fluorescent lights. Any attempt at a nap leads to further frustration. You can never sleep very deeply here anyway, because you have to stay aware of your surroundings. Bad things can come to those caught off guard. The strain of keeping one eye open wears you down.

When Death Row was housed in Tucker Max, we at least had control of our own light. It was an older building, and each cell had a wall-mounted fixture with a bulb you screwed in to turn on and unscrewed to turn off. You had to be quick about it, or it would burn your fingertips.

One of the first things I learned when I arrived was how to cook on a 100-watt lightbulb. This is accomplished in one of two ways. The first is by using the bulb directly, as a heat source. To use the bulb like an oven, you first cut the top off a soda can with a disposable razor blade. You then fill the can with whatever you want to cook—coffee, or leftover beef stew, for instance. You make certain the can is completely dry, not a single drop of water on it, and then balance it on the lightbulb. After twenty or thirty minutes, whatever is in the can will be hot enough to burn your mouth. You have to be absolutely certain the can is dry, because the bulb will explode in your face if water drips on it. You can always tell when someone has made this mistake—the explosion sounds like a shotgun blast.

This technique can be modified to create a sort of hobo microwave. You simply flatten out a few soda cans and line the inside of a saltine cracker box with them, then fit the box over the bulb. This contraption can be used to prepare some of your more delectable treats, such as bologna or Spam.

The second way to cook with the bulb is by using it to start a fire. If you prefer to cook over an open flame, you must first create a “burner.” You do this by wrapping toilet paper around your hand a few dozen times and then folding the ends in on themselves. If you do this correctly, you have something that vaguely resembles a doughnut. There’s an art to this technique. If you roll the paper too tight, it will only smolder and you’ll choke on the smoke. If it’s not rolled tight enough, the whole thing will go up in flames in a matter of seconds. You need a nice, controlled burn that lasts for at least five minutes.

Next you wrap your bulb in toilet paper—twice around should be sufficient. All you have to do is wait for it to begin smoking, which shouldn’t take longer than three minutes. When the paper is smoldering, pull it off the bulb and blow on it, which should cause it to erupt into flames. Light the burner from this fire, and you’re well on your way to being the Wolfgang Puck of the prison world.

Set the burner on the edge of the toilet seat so that when you’re finished you can just nudge it into the toilet and flush it away. You can flush anything down a prison toilet—socks, plastic spoons, busted-up whiskey bottles, smashed cassette tapes, orange peels—I’ve seen it all go down with no effort. Once you get used to these big, industrial-sized prison toilets you will thumb your nose at the home variety. The only good thing about this place is the toilets.

I used this method to brew myself some tea on many occasions: fill a soda can with water, tie a piece of dental floss or a string from a bedsheet to the top of the can, then dangle it over the flame until the water begins to boil. Put your tea bag in a cup and pour the water over it. I love tea. Others make hot chocolate, or even chili.

One other trick that people always seem to find interesting for some reason is “fishing.” Fishing is what you do when you can’t get anyone outside a cell to pass something to someone else for you. You yell to the guy you’re trying to pass something to—“Hey! Send me your fishing line!” Soon a string will land in front of your door. You tie whatever it is to the line, and the guy reels it in. You need fifty to a hundred yards of string and something to use for a weight to pull this trick off.

Most people obtain their string by slicing sheets into thin strips and tying the ends together so that you have one long strand. The most commonly used weights are batteries, a bar of soap, or a travel-size bottle of lotion. If you use batteries, you can even fish in the toilet. It requires two people to do this. Each of you flushes about a hundred yards of string down the toilet while holding on to one end of it. If both of you keep flushing, the strings will become entangled somewhere in the pipes. One man wraps whatever he is passing to you in plastic—a cigarette, for example. He then ties it to the end of the string, and the other guy pulls the whole thing back up through his own toilet. Some men frown on this practice and refer to those who do it as “shitty fingers.”

I have no idea what it is about fishing that people in the free world find so amusing, but some of them ask me to describe it to them every time they come to see me. They know the story as well as I do by now, but still want to hear it over and over. To me it’s just another aspect of daily life in the Arkansas Department of Correction.

Most people in the outside world look at you in a different way if they find out you’ve spent time in prison. They can hold it against you for the rest of your life. You’re never trusted and always made to feel like an outcast. For most of the people in here with me it’s a different story. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for people in here to have friends and family within the prison system. It’s accepted as an everyday part of life, as if everyone goes to prison at least once. Several men on Death Row have sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins who are doing time within the ADC. None of their friends or family members would ask for a description of a prison cell because most of them have already seen one.

One of the first things people always ask is what a cell looks like—my cell in particular—and they want to know whether it looks like what they’ve seen on television or in the movies. To begin with, you have two types of walls. Some of them are made of cinder block; others are simply smooth, poured concrete. The one I live in at Varner Unit is smooth concrete, which is what I prefer. Perhaps that’s because I had to look at the cinder blocks for a decade and simply appreciate the change.

The color is a very pale blue. Everything here is blue of one shade or another. The walls are so light they’re almost white, while the door is more of a powder blue. The floor is plain, unfinished concrete, and it’s very harsh on the feet. In seventeen years I have not taken a step that wasn’t on concrete. I miss grass and dirt. Sometimes I believe one of the most beautiful things on Earth must be grass. The green of summer or the brown of winter—both are equally bewitching. I’d love to be able to touch it.

My bed is a concrete slab that stands about eighteen inches off the floor. I have a thin mat to place on top of it that greatly resembles the ones given to kindergartners to nap on. We’re given the cheapest, most horrid blankets ever designed by mankind. When you wake up in the morning you have to pick bits of fuzz out of your nose, eyebrows, and hair. Not to mention the fact that they just aren’t very warm. My pillow is composed of extra clothes—socks, T-shirts, sweatpants. We have to buy these clothes ourselves. Being that there are no chairs, or anything else to sit on, you spend a great deal of time on or in the bed.

Next to the bed is a three-foot-tall concrete block that serves as a table. You can never see the top of mine because it’s beneath a jumbled mound of books, magazines, journals, letters, pens and pencils. No matter how often I try to organize or straighten it up it will be mayhem an hour later. I can never find anything I’m looking for. Sometimes when I pass other cells I see spotless, well-organized tables, but I can never figure out their secret.

There is one wall not made of concrete, and it serves as your “bathroom area.” This wall and everything on it is made of steel. It’s nine feet tall and houses the toilet, sink, mirror, light, and shower. The toilet and sink are made of one big chunk of steel. The sink is where the tank would be on most toilets, so you have to straddle the toilet to shave or brush your teeth. The mirror is nothing more than a square of the steel wall that is slightly more reflective than the rest. It’s not very clear, and it’s impossible to make out small details in it.

Over the sink and toilet resides the hated fluorescent light. It’s the same sort of light found in the ceilings of office buildings, hospitals, and public schools. The only difference is that mine is in the wall instead of overhead. About two feet over from the toilet is the shower, which consists of a spout on the wall with a button underneath. When you push the button, the water comes on for about thirty seconds. There’s no way to adjust the temperature of the water; you must accept whatever comes out. There is a drain in the floor, which barely works. I have a small brown plastic rosary hanging on my shower button. I’ve loved holding a rosary all my life. Just running the beads through my fingers calms me.

Nanny gave me my first rosary on my fifteenth birthday. She took me to a small bookstore and allowed me to pick out the one I wanted. I chose a long turquoise strand of beads with a thin, sleek, silver crucifix. I always carried it in a small pocket of my leather motorcycle jacket. It was the first of many, though I no longer have any idea what happened to it.

The cell door is made of solid steel. It has a plexiglass window so the guards can play Peeping Tom, and a small letterbox-type opening heavily bolted from the outside that the guards open to slide your food inside. This door ensures that there will be no fresh air circulating or communication between prisoners. It took a while to get used to because I had been behind old-fashioned bars for nine years at Tucker Max.

The window is a four-inch-wide slit through which I have a panoramic view of a concrete wall and chain-link fence. The most exciting things I ever glimpse are the flocks of pigeons and sparrows that come here to roost.

My television is inside a steel box suspended high up in a corner of the cell. It picks up three channels, but there’s not much that comes on that I’m interested in watching. I have two addictions when it comes to television: David Letterman and professional wrestling. David Letterman is someone I’ve only recently discovered, but I’ve indulged in pro wrestling all my life. It’s a tradition in my house. My grandfather and father both watch, and when my son comes to visit once a year, we compare notes, too. I grew up watching it and as a child often had tag team matches with other neighborhood kids. We all argued over who got to be Jerry Lawler. Jerry “The King” Lawler was a huge deal in the Memphis area. He was the wrestler. For a while he was so well-known you’d see him on various commercials for local places, and he had his own talk show, which aired every Sunday morning.

My loyalty to The Jerry Lawler Show once outraged and embarrassed my grandmother. A woman from a local church used to make rounds through the neighborhood with a purse full of bubble gum. She would stop at houses and try to lure the kids into coming to church on Sunday. If you promised to come she would give you gum. When she arrived at our house she chatted amiably with my grandmother for a few moments before turning to me and asking, “Do you want to come to church with me on Sunday?” The gleam in her eye spoke volumes. It said, “You know you can’t resist bubble gum. You may as well sell me your soul.” Thus, she was quite shocked when I responded, “Absolutely not.” The smile on her face turned into a puzzled frown as she asked, “Why not?” I looked at her as if she’d lost her mind and said, “Because I’d miss The Jerry Lawler Show.”

My grandmother was mortified. I had just proved myself to be a heathen of the highest order. She gaped at me in disbelief. In her view I had just chosen Jerry Lawler over Jesus, which made her look bad. After the shock wore off she promised the woman, as she ushered her from the house, that I would indeed be in church on Sunday. Not only did I miss The Jerry Lawler Show, but I didn’t get a piece of gum.

At any rate, that’s the nickel tour of my cell. The only other things in here are two big plastic boxes in which I keep everything I own. They’re filled with small packs of Tylenol, packs of mustard, bars of soap, books, extra paper, and various other odds and ends I’ve collected over the years.

The best fortune I can wish for you is that you never have to see the inside of such a place for yourself. This is a hell, void of anything that makes life worthwhile.

*  *  *

Once I was looking through a magazine and I came across a piece about an art show opening in New York. The artist was a female photographer who had been badly burned as a child. She had taken photographs of herself as she slowly went through the healing process. She had to have an ungodly number of surgeries to help her along, and they continued well into adulthood. Throughout the years she kept her trusty camera in hand, documenting every step. Above the tiny article there was a photograph of her laughing, and at first glance I didn’t even notice the light ripples of scar tissue on her chest and collarbones. Only after reading it did I backtrack and realize there was indeed still evidence of her childhood trauma.

The thing that really struck me about this article was a comment the woman made. What she said was that she was much stronger as a child than she is as an adult. She had to have an understanding and appreciation for the subtle mechanisms of the mind to have come to this realization. Perhaps sometimes the memory is worse than the pain at the time of its happening. And sometimes it’s not.

The older I grow, the more I understand what the burned woman meant. Things I was able to walk through unscathed in my youth would mark me for life or damage me beyond repair now. Things I once shrugged off without thought would now bring about my collapse. I was much more flexible in both mind and body as a youth. I could absorb the impact and roll with the punches.

Twelve

It was amazing how quickly the hurt stopped. Humpty Dumpty had indeed been put back together again and he was a grinning fool. I sat slouched far down in my desk, lolling lazily as if there wasn’t a bone in my body. Deanna sat directly behind me, tracing the pattern of hair at the back of my neck and laughing low in her throat when I shivered. She leaned forward to whisper, “There’s only three days of school left. I don’t want to lose you again now that I’ve just got you back.” This was something I’d been contemplating but could find no solution to. We still had no way to see each other outside school hours. After a few moments she continued, “We can still do what we talked about.”

She meant leaving, of course. We had discussed running away together as a last resort. I hadn’t believed it would come to that; I was certain a solution would present itself. But time was quickly running out. “I’ll be your huckleberry”—never have I spoken truer words.

“Bring your things with you on the last day and away we’ll go.” That answer sealed my fate.

We talked about it nonstop, yet had no specific plan. We had no destination or goal in mind. We would be going on an adventure, and our excitement was palpable. We settled on the vague notion of “going west.” Neither of us had any idea what the magnitude of our actions would be.

When the final day of classes arrived, we came to school as usual. We would leave when it was over, simply drift off into the crowd, which would be delirious with the realization that school was over for another year. No one would even notice us. It was a daisy of a plan and came off without a hitch.

We took an extra-long route that I had never before explored. Jason walked with us. If you’re roaming aimlessly, then why not begin with the magickal land of Lakeshore? It normally took only about fifteen minutes to walk from school to our places, but this day it took two and a half hours of constant walking. We trod through empty fields far from any road, where there was zero chance of anyone eyeballing us.

At first Jason and I carried on with our usual bantering while Deanna laughed uproariously at our antics. She was amazed, because Jason never spoke in school, yet here he was chatting like a magpie. He and I could play off each other’s words all day, until eventually we were incapacitated with laughter. Not many people know it, but Jason is pretty hilarious. He has a caustic, smart sense of humor. After the first hour we got pretty quiet, though.

It was the heat, which was right at one hundred degrees. The sun beat down on us without mercy, baking our brains in our skulls. On a day when the television was warning others to stay indoors and out of the heat, we were outside maintaining a strenuous pace. Every step we took sent bone-dry clouds of dust into the air, and my mouth was so dry I could barely speak. There was nothing but flat, featureless fields in every direction. No trees, no buildings, and no shade. Not even a living blade of grass. The three of us were dressed in black, which didn’t help matters any. At one point I thought I would collapse from heatstroke. I was positive that I couldn’t force myself to keep going, yet I still did, one step after another. One foot, two foot, red foot, blue foot.

We finally arrived in Lakeshore and proceeded to an abandoned trailer that we knew would be empty. The door was unlocked so we went inside and collapsed on the floor to rest. Even that hot trailer was a relief after facing the blistering sun. I handed Jason a wad of sweat-soaked dollar bills and moaned, “Drinks.” He left and made his way to the Lakeshore store. While he was gone Deanna changed into a set of my clothes that weren’t wet with sweat, as I’d had the presence of mind to bring along some extras. I didn’t bother changing, but I became obsessed with one idea. All I could think about was how wonderful it would be to wait until nightfall, then slip into that cool, crusty green lake. I no longer cared that it was filthier than a septic tank; I could practically feel its coolness against my skin. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. We were alone, but so hot, tired, and nauseous that we could do nothing.

Jason finally returned with a paper sack of Mountain Dews and Dr Peppers. I drained a Mountain Dew in one long swallow, then popped open a Dr Pepper to drink at a more sedate pace. I felt life returning to me. He’d even had the wisdom to pick up some candy bars, so I quickly scarfed one of those. Full of sugar and caffeine, I was ready to juke and jive.

I investigated my surroundings while Jason told me breathlessly, “Man, every freak in the world is out there.” When I suggested it might help if he were slightly more articulate, he explained that all the neighborhood kids were looking for me like a pack of hounds, because the police had been looking for me, and they were now convinced they might receive some sort of reward for finding me. It seemed Deanna’s parents had wasted no time in calling the authorities to report her missing once they realized skulduggery was afoot.

“No shit?” I asked as I sat down in front of a piano, the only piece of furniture in the entire place. I found it slightly odd that someone lived in a trailer park but could still afford a piano. A few of the keys were busted, but I could still manage to play it a little (Nanny had taught me as a kid how to play church hymns on the organ), which I did while Jason told me they had tried to follow him, thinking he’d lead them to me. Deanna came and sat next to me on the piano bench while Jason peeked out a window. He turned to me and said something that hadn’t crossed my mind—“You better stop that, because if one of those freaks hears a piano playing in here they’re going to be pretty sure it’s not a ghost.” I snatched my fingers from the keys.

I sat quietly in thought for a few minutes before telling Jason that Deanna and I would sleep there that night, then say good-bye to him in the morning. There was no chance of him going with us because he was the only pillar of stability in his home. His mother, Gail, was unstable and suffered from schizophrenia; she might take medication for a period of time and improve, but once that happened, she frequently stopped taking it. She might tell Jason she was going out for a few hours and return several days later. If he was not there to take care of his two younger brothers, they would go feral like the Lakeshore dogs. He truly did have to be like a father figure to them, and I was always impressed by how competently he handled the task. Most people twice his age couldn’t do the job half as well. He left to go make supper for them.

The moment he was gone Deanna and I fell upon each other. Next came a mystery that I have never found the key to. Somehow, we were found.

For the last half-hour the sky had grown steadily darker, until the sun that had scorched us earlier was no longer visible. It signaled not the approach of night but the coming of one big, God-almighty storm. The wind picked up until I was absolutely certain a tornado would arrive at any moment. The sky was black as night and the wind continued to howl and blow so fiercely that it seemed the trailer would roll over, but not a single drop of rain fell.

The wind suddenly stopped. It didn’t die down, it just stopped all at once. A really bad feeling rippled up my spine. I stopped what I was doing and cocked my head to the side like a dog listening for a strange sound. “What is it?” Deanna asked.

I waited seconds before reluctantly admitting, “I don’t know.” All I knew was that my every cell had just been flooded with the fight-or-flight feeling, and I had a terrible sense of urgency.

“Then pay attention to me,” she said.

As I leaned forward to kiss her I heard glass shatter. “Shit!” I hissed as we grabbed our clothes. Even though I knew it was pointless and the jig was up, we still attempted to hide. It was a cop. Instead of opening the door and walking in, he felt the need to smash in a window and fulfill some sort of SWAT team fantasy. He later lied and said that we had busted out the window. He was a real piece of work—about four and a half feet tall, with the sort of mustache you see only on cops or seventies gay porn stars. He was the kind of guy who needed a badge and gun just to stop people from laughing at him. He found us almost immediately and started jerking us around.

As he was escorting us out the door, Deanna’s father approached. He put his hand on my shoulder and began breathing hard, as if he were having trouble restraining himself. I looked straight into his eyes and grinned like a jackal. I wanted him to know he could do nothing to me that was worse than what I’d already been through. The cop pushed him away and said, “Relax, just let me handle it.” He backed off and the cop put Deanna and me in the back of his car before returning to talk to her mother and father. I noticed that even her older sister had come out for the occasion, and I gave her my most charming smile.

While we sat in the car Deanna held my hands and said, “Whatever happens, you have to come find me.” I promised that I would, no matter what. She kissed me then, like she had seen the future. It was the last time we would ever touch. Another cop had pulled up, and they split us up, putting her in his car. She blew a kiss at me and waved good-bye as it drove off.

*  *  *

I arrived at the Crittenden County jail on the outskirts of West Memphis, and was escorted to my suite. It was a dark, dank cell that smelled like feet and corn chips, a tiny space with a brown solid-steel door. There was no entertainment except for the graffiti, which covered every square inch of the walls. I was amazed at the things people had thought important enough to write there. For instance, someone thought it vital that the world know someone named “Pimp Hen” was adept at certain sexual maneuvers. I felt a bit like an archaeologist in a tomb.

I was left alone for what I estimated to be two or three hours, but it’s impossible to really tell time in a place like that. It’s a form of mental torture, and I only knew that it seemed like an eternity. I kept wondering, Where is she? Is she in this building? Do they have her in a filthy hole like this one? The graffiti offered no answers to these questions. I was pacing like an animal when a guard came and opened the door, motioning for me to follow. I was led to an office in which sat a bloated, corpulent man with beady little rat’s eyes. Jerry Driver, juvenile officer for the county, and I came face-to-face for the first time.

He had a pleasant-enough attitude as he introduced himself. He started asking questions and I answered honestly, thinking there was no reason not to. He asked why we were in the trailer, and I told him we had run away because her parents wouldn’t leave us alone. No, we didn’t know where we were going, and no, we didn’t know what we were going to do once we got there. We figured it would come to us in time.

This is where things started getting weird. The smile never left his face, which looked like folds of uncooked dough. “Have you heard anything about Satanists around town?”

I thought that a bit odd, but answered, “No.”

He continued to press on. “You haven’t heard anything about Satanists, plans to commit sacrifices or break into churches?” Those beady little rat’s eyes gleamed at me, like he was really starting to get off on thinking about this stuff. You could tell something just wasn’t right about him.

I was pretty certain I would have remembered a roving pack of bloodthirsty devil worshippers if they had passed me on the street while chatting loud enough about such topics, so I told him, “I’m pretty certain I haven’t.” He seemed to be considering something as he chewed his bottom lip with tiny, yellow-stained rat teeth. Finally he shifted his obese bulk to pull something out of his desk.

I could practically see his whiskers twitch as he said, “What can you tell me about this?” The object he held was Deanna’s little green diary. I wanted to reach out for it but knew it was pointless. I didn’t answer his question, knowing that it would be futile.

“Where is she?” It was my turn to ask questions. He told me she was being held at a women’s detention center in a town called Helena. He watched me closely as he said she had had “psychiatric trouble” in the past, and her parents thought it might be best if she was sent for treatment. She was being held until tomorrow, when she would be transported to a psychiatric hospital in Memphis. This was news to me. I knew nothing of any past “psychiatric trouble.” It may not even have been true, because I would soon learn that nothing he said was trustworthy. I didn’t know that then, though, and I sat there seeing images of Deanna in an insane asylum. All I could picture was the Anthrax video called “Madhouse,” in which everyone wore straitjackets.

I was told I’d spend the week in Craighead County jail, in Jonesboro, about an hour north of West Memphis, where someone would come talk to me. Jerry Driver himself drove me there. Everyone wore an orange jumpsuit that said “Craighead County” on the back, and you slept in a cell. There was a dayroom where inmates played Uno with an ancient deck of greasy, creased cards. Time seemed to come to an absolute standstill. Later I discovered that it made no sense for me to be there, because anyone else who had been picked up the way we were would have received nothing more serious than a warning, or a year of probation at the most, before being sent home. Deanna and I were being put in jail because Jerry Driver was not finished with us.

One day during that week I was escorted to a small room in the back of the courthouse to see a mountain of a woman who looked like she applied her makeup with a spatula. She talked to me for about an hour, then gave me a test, which consisted of showing me flash cards, before telling Jerry Driver, “We have a bed for him.” I was puzzled about the meaning of this until it was explained that I, too, would be going to a psychiatric hospital within the next few days. I suddenly saw myself in that “Madhouse” video.

I was left in the jail while they made arrangements for me to take a vacation in the nuthouse. I had about three days to wait for my transportation, and during that time I continuously paced from one end of the cell block to the other. There were about ten to fifteen other guys there at any given time, and I would later learn they were all typical jailbirds. I say “typical” because over the years I’ve had the opportunity to observe many people behind bars, and most of them have a tremendous amount in common. Greed, anger, frustration, lust, hatred, and jealousy, all housed in one body. I’ve always come to the same conclusion—it’s no wonder these guys are where they are.

There’s not much to do in jail, so one day I thought I’d call home and check in. My mother had known about my plan, and she had even given me a little money, saying that if I needed anything I should call. She was at the courthouse when Jerry Driver argued before a judge that he should be allowed to keep me in jail until my court date instead of allowing me to go home, as any first-time offender would have been permitted to do. I called my mother to see if perhaps she knew more than I did. I was in for quite a shock—it had been a dramatic week for everyone. My father was back.

It seems that my mother finally came to her senses and gave Jack the boot. It wasn’t like she had much choice, either, because my sister had made accusations against him concerning molestation. Social Services sent a representative, and they informed my mother that Jack was not to be in the house under any circumstances. Records show an investigation was conducted but I’m not aware anything conclusive was ever found or decided on where that was concerned.

After Jack was gone—and by gone, I mean that he moved to another trailer on the next street over—my sister started calling people, searching for my father. I never asked her why and she never explained. Joe was in Arkansas visiting his family, and he and my mother were talking about getting back together. I was stunned. It felt like the whole world had been turned upside down overnight while I was sitting in a cage. Under other circumstances I would have been ecstatic, but right then there were other things on my mind. I’d given Deanna my word that I would find her, but time was slipping through my hands. I was beginning to feel that I would never again know what life was like beyond those walls. After being locked in a cage for weeks, the thought of ever getting out became one of those things that are too good to be true.

My mother and father came to see me the next day. There was no way to touch, and we had to talk to each other through two-inch-thick bulletproof glass. My father hardly recognized me. When he and my mother walked through the door I heard him ask her, “Is that him?” We were allowed to talk for fifteen minutes, they on one side of the glass and me on the other. That’s not much time to get reacquainted, but my father promised that he would be part of my life from then on. The guard then came and told them it was time to leave.

I look back now and find myself filled with a tremendous amount of anger at how unjust it all was. The punishment for a first-time breaking and entering charge and an accusation of sexual misconduct didn’t fit the crime by any stretch of the imagination. All I did was walk into an abandoned trailer. This made no sense.

At my court date a couple of days later Jerry Driver recommended to the court that I be put in a mental institution, which he told my parents and me was the alternative to holding me in jail for nine months until going to trial. At the time, it didn’t seem logical but it did seem like the lesser of two evils. I was given my clothes and told to get dressed. If you’ve never had to wear jail clothes, then you can’t comprehend what it’s like to finally be able to put your own clothes back on. It takes a while to get used to. The jail clothes are designed to strip you of any identity and reduce you to a number. You don’t even feel like a human being when you’re wearing them. You have no dignity.

The four of us traveled in Driver’s car, and it was a long ride. It took several hours to get from Jonesboro to Little Rock, where Charter Hospital of Maumelle was located. He restrained himself from asking more insane Satanist-related questions in front of my parents, but I could tell it almost caused him physical pain to do so. Every time I looked up I saw his beady rat’s eyes staring intently at me in the rearview mirror. For some unknown reason he had visited my mother while I waited in jail, and asked her if he could see my room. She let him in and left him back there alone. He told her that he was “confiscating” a few things, even though that was blatantly illegal. He took the Goya-like sketches from the walls and a new journal I had started. (It was in a funeral registry book, morbidly enough.) He also took my skull collection.

It sounds kind of odd to have a skull collection, but I’ll explain. There’s a hard-packed dirt path behind Lakeshore that the local youth would wander on. It doesn’t go anywhere specific, just sort of meanders around a small lake and a few fields. I often found odd pieces of the skeletons of possums, raccoons, squirrels, birds, and even the occasional dog or cat that had died out there. I began collecting them because my teenage mind thought they looked cool. I’m not the only one, and I’ve never denied having questionable taste when it comes to interior decorating. The oddest thing Jason and I ever found was a beer bottle with two tiny skulls inside. The problem was that they were slightly too large to get out of the bottle. We spent hours trying to figure out how they got in the bottle in the first place.

At any rate, Jerry Driver took my personal possessions as “evidence.” Evidence of what, he didn’t say. I wouldn’t know this for quite a while, as it would be some time before I ever saw Lakeshore again. For now, I was on my way to the funny farm.

By the time we arrived, all the other patients had been put to bed. It was about ten o’clock at night and the place was silent. My mother and father had been completely convinced by Driver’s authoritative tone, that this was Driver’s right and they had no choice in the matter. They sat in a small office giving my personal information to the woman in charge of filing paperwork on new patients. The process took about thirty minutes, and Jerry Driver sat silently listening to everything. I was exceedingly nervous, never having been in such an environment before. The only thing I had to base my expectations on was the jail I had just left, so I was expecting the worst. To me, as to my parents, Driver’s authority was not to be questioned; I believed he was a legitimate cop. None of us understood that we could protest or contest his decisions. We were simply operating out of fear of the consequences—and in the meantime, without knowing it, our rights were never explained to us and were taken from us without our knowledge.

A nurse came to escort me through two large doors, back into the heart of the building. My mother was still answering questions as I left—was I allergic to anything, my birthday, family history of illness. Nothing about my mental state or behavior. Beyond those doors, it wasn’t nearly as nice as the lobby we had just left behind, but it was also no chamber of horrors. The furniture appeared to be made of plastic, so if anyone vomited or pissed themselves, there would be no stain. It possessed the added bonus of only needing to be hosed off after the occasional fecal smearing.

I was told to sit at a small table, where I was introduced to a tall, thin black guy named Ron. He looked through my suitcase, wrote down everything I had, then showed me to a room. There were two beds, a desk, a chair, and a small wardrobe. I was alone; there was no one in the other bed. I’d been through so much stress and trauma during the past few weeks that I immediately fell into a deep sleep, which lasted until morning.

The days there began with a nurse making wake-up calls at six a.m. She’d turn on the lights and go from room to room telling everyone to prepare for breakfast. Everyone would get up, take a shower, get dressed, and perform whatever morning rituals the insane carry out in privacy. We’d then march down to the dayroom, sit on the puke-proof couches, and stare at each other until seven o’clock.

On my first morning there were only three other patients. The first patient I saw was a blond-haired girl who was sitting with her back to me and singing a Guns N’ Roses song. I looked at the back of her head for a while, until I became curious about what she looked like. When I could no longer take the curiosity I walked around in front of her. She looked up at me with ice-blue eyes that seemed either half asleep or fully hypnotized, and she smiled. By her gaze alone you could tell that something just wasn’t right with this picture. She seemed happy, and rightfully so, as she was being discharged later in the day. Her name was Michelle, and she told me she was there for attempting suicide by swallowing thumbtacks and hair barrettes.

Soon a second patient entered. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops and could have easily passed for Michelle’s twin brother. I never knew what he was there for, and he was discharged in less than three days. The third patient was a young black guy who seemed to be the most normal of the trio. He went home the next day.

If I had any fear of being left alone, it would soon be laid to rest. Patients began to come in on a daily basis, and soon the entire place was full. I had to share my room with an interesting young sociopath who was sent there after being discovered at his new hobby—masturbating into a syringe and injecting it into dogs. The entire ward was a parade of bizarre characters.

We lined up every morning and strolled down to the kitchen for a tasty breakfast of biscuits and gravy, orange juice, blueberry muffins, hash browns, scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, and Frosted Flakes. The insane do not count carbs. The food was delicious, and I enjoyed every meal. Conversation around the table was never dull and covered such topics as who had stolen whose underwear, and whether or not Quasimodo had ever been a sumo wrestler.

Once breakfast was over we walked single file (in theory) back down to our wing and had the first of four group therapy sessions for the day. At this session you had to set a daily goal for yourself, such as “My goal for the day is to learn the rules,” or “My goal for the day is to deal with my anger in a more constructive manner than I did yesterday.” This task made everyone irritable, because it’s hard to come up with a new goal every single day, and you couldn’t use the same one twice. Your last group session would be right before bed, during which you had to say whether you had achieved your goal, and if not, then why not.

Next came our weekly visit to the psychiatrist. We’d all sit on the couches and fidget while she called us in one at a time to talk. She had a small, dark, pleasant office filled with bookshelves. This was the doctor in charge of making your diagnosis and deciding what medication you needed. My diagnosis was depression. No shit. My life was hell and showed no signs of improvement, I had a stepfather who was a ten on the asshole scale, I’d spent two or three weeks in jail for reasons I still didn’t understand, I didn’t know where my lover was being held, and I was now locked in a building full of sociopaths, schizophrenics, and other assorted freaks. You bet your ass I was depressed. I’d be more inclined to believe I had a problem if I wasn’t depressed. At any rate, I was prescribed antidepressants, which I was given shortly after I got there.

Antidepressants were a horrid invention. The only thing I could tell they did was make me so tired I couldn’t think straight. I told one of the nurses that something was wrong because it hurt to open my eyes and I kept falling asleep every time I quit moving. I was told not to worry, this was natural and I’d get used to it. That’s not something you want to hear. Over time I did grow used to it, and in another month I wasn’t even able to tell I’d taken anything.

After talking to the doctor, we went to the gym for a bit of morning exercise. There was a stationary bike, a punching bag, a rowing machine, and a StairMaster. Everyone spent time on each one. There was also a foosball table and a basketball hoop we could use after lunch.

Every so often we would go to an arts-and-crafts room to work on individual projects. I made two ceramic unicorns that I took home with me when I left. I’ve no idea what eventually happened to them, but I was proud of them at the time.

For lunch it was back to the kitchen, then another group session, which was usually greeted with outraged cries of “This is bullshit!” I agreed wholeheartedly but kept my opinion silent. After suffering through this indignity, we were allowed to take a thirty-minute nap.

In the evening we went outside to a large fenced-in area to walk around and enjoy the air. We talked, looked out into the woods, or bounced tennis balls back and forth. Before bed we were allowed to choose a snack. There were granola bars, chocolate milk, peanut butter and crackers, or a cup of pudding. It wasn’t a bad place to be, as far as psych wards go.

We were rewarded for good behavior by being taken on field trips. Once, we were all loaded into a long white van with a giant handicap symbol on the side and taken to the circus. It was hard to tell if there were more clowns in the show or in the stands. Another time we were taken swimming, and I never even got in the pool. I stood under an umbrella, dressed head to toe in black, and waited to go back to the hospital. The last and most wretched trip was to a movie theater, where we watched Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act.

Life went on, with my anxiety continuing to build. After I had been there for about three weeks, I was given a twenty-four-hour pass and my mother, father, and sister came to visit. A therapist met with them privately to describe how and what I’d been doing over the past few weeks, and to tell them that the hospital had deemed me well enough to be discharged. Before leaving us alone, she informed them that they could come to her with any questions they might have. This was the first real chance I’d had to talk to my father in many years. He hadn’t kept in touch with us during his absence, and we discussed both the future and the past.

He lived in Oregon and had been preparing to come back when my sister contacted him. He had been married several times since he left, and I had an eight-year-old half brother who lived with him. I was amazed to learn that he and my mother were planning to get married again, and as soon as I was out of the hospital we were all moving to Oregon. Ordinarily I would have been thrilled, as this was everything I could possibly have wanted—Jack was gone, my father was back, I was receiving a twenty-four-hour pass to spend the next day with my family, and we were moving up in the world. Now it was a nightmare. I would be leaving Deanna behind. I started to rock gently in my chair as I silently cried. I didn’t make a sound, but the tears came so fast and heavy that I couldn’t see the room. I was looking at the world from behind a waterfall. I was sad and desperate, but something in my guts turned to steel. I knew I would keep my word to her no matter what.

I barely slept that night: one moment I was excited about the potential adventure ahead, and the next I felt devastated about what I was leaving behind. This was a whole new life. I could leave my past behind like an old skin, something at one time I would have given anything for.

When morning arrived, I got dressed and packed my things, because I would be staying in a motel that night. I love hotels and motels. There’s something exciting about them, even though you’re only sleeping. I hadn’t had a chance to go to one in many years—not since the last time my mother and father had been married.

They arrived to pick me up in my father’s Dodge Charger, and I was impressed. Chrome mags, a nice paint job, and a top-of-the-line stereo system. I loved the car immediately. They asked me what I wanted to do, so we went to McDonald’s, where I saw some people I knew. They were in the high school band and were in Little Rock for some sort of competition, and by some amazing coincidence they had wandered into this very McDonald’s. When a girl named Becky asked what I was doing there, I informed her that I was out on a twenty-four-hour pass from the nearby mental institution. After she realized I was serious, she erupted into peals of laughter.

We got a motel room, and my father and I went down to rent a VCR and some tapes. We got every Steven Seagal film they had, and went back to watch them. He already had all of these movies at home, and they were some of his favorites. I enjoyed myself more that night than I had in a very long time, even though there were things nagging at me. We ordered pizza, watched movies, and talked about what it was like in Oregon. They tried to please me and kept the curtains drawn and the air turned low so that the room was like ice. It was almost as if it were my birthday. They knew I’d been through hell lately and were being extra nice. I fell asleep early, emotionally exhausted.

The next morning I had a breakfast of doughnuts before heading back to the hospital. Before they left, the doctor told my parents I would be discharged in twenty-four hours and they could pick me up. I never understood the point of having to come back for one more day, but it passed quickly enough. After saying good-bye to the other patients, I was on my way to Oregon.

Thirteen

The trip to Oregon took almost a full week, and I enjoyed every moment of it, even with a sadness in my heart that felt like a weight. I was leaving my home behind and I was more than a little scared that I’d never see anyone or anything I knew ever again. I cried so hard I couldn’t see the road before me until we were halfway through Oklahoma. I could tell it made my father nervous by the way he kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. After the first day I had exhausted my grief supply and could cry no more for a while. That’s when it became more fun.

The trip took so long because we made it in my father’s car while pulling an orange U-Haul trailer. We listened to music all the way, alternating between my father’s collection and mine. The Eagles, Conway Twitty, and Garth Brooks were followed by Ozzy Osbourne, Anthrax, and Metallica, all played at ear-shattering volume. We ate every meal at roadside places and slept every night in cheap motels. This was the life I had loved as a young child, when my mother and father were together and we moved to a new state every month or so.

My father was in rare form throughout the entire trip, and I laughed at his insanity until I lost my breath. He spent all of one morning pointing out the prairie dogs along the side of the road and around rest stops. With the grave air and facial expression of one imparting divine wisdom, he explained that I should keep my eyes open because if I saw someone run over a prairie dog I would then see all its friends run out and start eating it. The manner in which he relayed this tidbit of knowledge caused me to erupt into uncontrollable laughter. He looked at me for a moment before snickering, then abruptly stopped, and his eyes darted around as if he feared someone might be listening in. This made me laugh even harder because I could tell he had no idea what I found so funny.

Watching my father interact with restaurant employees was an interesting and humorous experience in itself. It’s hard to put my finger on specific things, but when looking at the overall picture it’s hilarious. He’d order a cup of coffee and then look intently at the waitress as he emphasized the words two and sugars. When she turned to walk away, he’d call out to her with a “Hey!” When she looked back, he’d make direct eye contact while solemnly and slowly holding up two fingers to remind her, “Two.”

My little brother, Timothy, was a quandary, too. It sounds odd when I say he was just like my father yet completely different, but it’s true. His mannerisms were completely his own, yet everything he did seemed like something my father would do. I lost all contact with him though; when I was arrested, he went to live with his mother, yet I often think of him and wonder what kind of person he turned out to be.

We arrived in Oregon and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in a town called Aloha. It was a very nice place and I was given the biggest room, though I had nothing to fill it with. Unloading furniture from the trailer, I realized my mother had brought almost none of our personal belongings. I asked her where everything was and she said she’d left it all in Lakeshore. This was almost impossible for me to believe. She didn’t try to sell anything to get more money for the trip, she didn’t even give it to others who might need it—she just abandoned it. The only thing of mine brought along was a single suitcase containing my clothes and music. This blew my mind.

When I later returned to Arkansas, Jason told me he was walking past one day and noticed everything I owned in one big pile by the curb—television, stereo, baseball bat, antique Japanese rifle, skateboard, electric guitar, and more that had been in the house. I asked him if anyone looked through it and took anything, to which he shook his head and said, “We figured it must not have been any good, or they wouldn’t have thrown it away.” Things we had spent a lifetime collecting were now gone as if they never existed. I would have been more upset if not for the fact that in two days I’d be starting a new job. I figured I’d soon be able to replace everything since I’d be working full-time.

My father was the manager of a local chain of garages and gas stations, so he gave me a job working for him. I would be bringing home well over four hundred dollars every two weeks, and the job was easy enough. I was assigned to work shifts with an old Vietnam War vet named Dave, in a garage that attracted very few customers. We mostly sat and watched the traffic pass while sipping cold drinks and listening to country music on the radio. Dave was a cynical, cantankerous old bastard, and he became the closest thing to a friend I had in Oregon. Despite our age difference, we got along quite well together. Most of Dave’s vocabulary consisted of swear words, and he fired them like bullets at everyone and everything on earth.

Now that I had a full-time job, I was no longer in school. I never made the decision to quit; it was more like my parents made it for me. They didn’t actually say, “You’re quitting school,” but they didn’t have to. It was pretty obvious when they enrolled my sister and brother in a new school and didn’t do the same for me. I was resentful but said nothing. At least I was making money now.

My little brother began developing some odd habits. He would watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 over and over, even though it scared him so bad he couldn’t sleep at night. He mimicked characters from the movie, walking around the house scratching his head with a coat hanger while pretending to eat flakes of dandruff. He had a small plastic sunflower that wore sunglasses and a bow tie, and when placed next to a radio it danced to the beat of the music. He carried it everywhere with him, and as far as I know, it was his only playmate. My sister began to hang out with some pretty shady characters and was always drinking or partying with them. This was the first time in her life she’d experienced any freedom, and she was taking advantage of it. When we were with Jack he’d rarely let her leave the house.

After we’d been there about a month, I decided the time had come to call Deanna’s house. When her mother answered I had my sister ask for Deanna. The second she was on the line I took the phone and said, “It’s me.” Her voice sounded odd, almost like a little girl, when she asked, “Where are you?” I told her I was in Oregon and asked if there was someone hovering around her, to which she said indeed there was. My heart sang just at hearing her voice, being in contact again. It was more than just her—I was talking to home, to my familiar world. I was on the phone with someone who didn’t sound like they had a Yankee accent. I felt alive again. I felt like myself, and that was a rare thing of late.

It’s hard to describe what had changed. Ever since I walked through the doors of that mental institution I’d felt like an old man shuffling his feet along the halls of a nursing home. Talking to her sent a wave of energy through me that shook the rust off and I felt ready to get moving again. That all ended in less than sixty seconds. “Do you still want me to come for you?” If she said yes, I would leave right then, even if I had to walk.

She didn’t say yes, though. What she said was, “I don’t know.” She was hesitant, uncertain. The magick was broken. The last thing she ever said to me was “I have to go now.” She hung up the phone and we have not spoken again to this day.

Up until that point my life had at least had a purpose, a direction; some part of me still had faith that it would all work out. That was now gone and I was infinitely tired. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall for a very long time, not knowing what else to do.

My parents were going to visit relatives in California and would be gone for a few days. Nanny was flying out to meet them there because she didn’t think she was strong enough to make the road trip when the rest of us came, and would return to Oregon with them. I chose to stay at home. Once they were gone, I walked to the corner store and bought two of the cheapest bottles of wine they had—Wild Irish Rose. I spent the entire night sitting out on the balcony looking down at the street and drowning my sorrows with the foulest-tasting alcohol ever dreamed of by man. I guess I was at the point most people call “rock bottom.” I was so lonely that I no longer felt like expending the energy necessary to keep living. When the sun began to rise I went to bed and didn’t get up for several days.

Little did I know, Jerry Driver had been a busy bee in my absence. Deanna’s reluctance came from the fact that Driver had told her parents that I was a satanic monster and the head of a very large cult that was up to all sorts of skulduggery in the area. Driver had no doubt Deanna’s life was in danger as there was no telling what foul plot I had devised to trap her in. He told them he was positive I had been committing sacrifices all over town, that I’d burned down churches (even though no church in the area had burned), and that I had a hand in infinite other untold crimes. He wove a tale in which I was the very incarnation of evil, come to create hell in Arkansas.

Why did he do this? I don’t know. I didn’t learn all these facts until later, when local teenagers told me he questioned them about me every time they went out into the streets of Lakeshore, burning gas and taxpayers’ dollars as he terrorized teenage boys. He was beyond doubt a very sick individual, and I never have understood why it was me who became his obsession. He once went so far as to make Jason take off his shirt so he could “inspect him for satanic markings.” I was also later told that during the investigation after my arrest in the summer of 1993, he persuaded Deanna’s parents to send her to a “deprogramming center” to be certain she was no longer under the influence of my nefarious spell, and that they should contact him at once if they ever saw or heard from me again. That’s precisely what happened.

After I got off the phone with Deanna, her parents questioned her about the call and she eventually told them it was me. They called Driver and sent up a red alert. Driver’s reaction was to call the police in Oregon and tell them that I was on probation in Arkansas for all sorts of satanic crimes and that I should be arrested at once. The police seemed to think it some sort of joke, but when he kept demanding that I be arrested for calling Deanna, they sent someone out to talk to me. I found out about this from Driver himself, who told me in an effort to prove that at any given moment he always knew what I was doing.

An officer in plain clothes came to our apartment to find out what was going on. He sat at the kitchen table drinking, a cup of coffee as he asked me and my family questions. I told him that I had indeed called Deanna, but that I was no satanic kingpin and had no idea what Driver was raving about. The officer reported that I was breaking no law, didn’t seem to be abnormal, and that the apartment was not the hotbed of satanic activity that Driver seemed to want them to believe. I can only imagine the tantrum Jerry Driver threw when they refused to arrest me.

Meanwhile I became more lethargic and lackluster by the day. I no longer cared about anything. My mother expressed concern that I would harm myself, though I never seriously considered it. Everything exploded one night over a simple misunderstanding.

I had some Kahlúa and planned to drink it in milk. I’ve never been a regular drinker of alcohol of any sort, but this stuff had a nice chocolaty taste and helped me sleep. I poured it into the milk and stirred it briskly. My sister went and told my mother that I was in the kitchen “doing something sneaky.” Of course I was being sneaky—I was trying to spend what little money we had on the pint without being caught!

My mother didn’t bother to come and ask me anything; she went behind my back and as I was walking back to my room I heard her talking very quietly on the phone, so I stopped to listen. She was telling whoever was on the other end that I had been depressed and quiet lately, and she feared that I might commit suicide. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was the lowest thing anyone had ever done to me in my life. This was a betrayal of epic proportions.

You must understand my mother to be able to really understand why she did this. If you don’t know her you could easily mistake her action for the concern of a caring parent. In reality it was the action of a drama queen. My mother loves to create drama, as I’ve already said. She still does. These days, anytime a reporter comes around she can’t keep her mouth shut and goes into her “poor mother” routine, complete with copious tears. I’ve seen it too many times.

I continued on to my room and listened to the radio for a few minutes, knowing she had set an unalterable chain of events in motion. I don’t know if she called Driver for advice, but within a very short time, someone knocked on the door and I opened it to discover a police officer. He asked if I would talk to him, so we took a seat in the living room. I couldn’t believe the difference between the police in Oregon and the police in Arkansas. The guy was well groomed and fit, very polite, and spoke proper English. He treated me like a human being, and I may have even liked the guy under other circumstances. The upshot of communications between my mother and the police—and possibly others—was that it was decided I should be taken to the psychiatric unit of St. Anthony’s Hospital in Portland, nearby. The cop left, and I got in the car with my parents.

I sat at the hospital, waiting to see a doctor and wondering why the hell this was happening to me. My parents had been utterly convinced by strangers that their son was suicidal and mentally unstable, and their solution was to lock me up. My mother has made more than her fair share of stupid mistakes, but I believe this one was the most ridiculous. My relationship with my father also changed that night.

It’s been so many years that I can now no longer even remember exactly what he said, but it was something along the lines of “You need to straighten up and fly right. I’m tired of you moping around all the time, blah, blah, blah.” He followed it up with some kind of threat. He was trying to be a hard-ass because I refused to speak to either him or my mother. I had nothing to say to them, not after doing this to me. I listened to his whole angry spiel without saying anything, but every word he spoke changed the way I saw him.

In that moment, I saw my father not as a man but as a boy. He was a child who had never lived up to a single responsibility in his life, and he had failed me in every way conceivable. He had abandoned me, left me to live in poverty and squalor with a hateful, religious zealot of a stepfather and a mother who wouldn’t raise a hand to protect us from his tyranny. I saw him as weak, knowing he wouldn’t have survived the despair of a life like the one he had left me to. I didn’t want to hear anything else from him. With absolute contempt I spat the words, “I’d eat you alive.” During my trial the prosecutor tried to say that I meant those words literally—that I was a cannibal, lacking nothing but a bone to put through my nose. Of course I meant nothing of the sort. What I meant was that I realized I was stronger than my father, that I had survived a life he had crumbled beneath the weight of and abandoned years earlier. I had survived without him, and he was doing me no great favor by being back in my life now. I was disgusted by his childishness.

When I finally saw a doctor, he admitted me and I was given a room. The psychiatric ward was nothing like the hospital in Little Rock; it was more like an asylum. There were no group therapy sessions, no interaction with staff, no scheduled routines, no anything. The patients spent all their time wandering the hallways, looking out the windows at the city below or whispering among themselves.

My parents came to see me the next day, and my mother behaved in her typical fashion—as if all would now be forgiven and we’d go back to being friends. Not this time. I was fed up with her. I told her that if she didn’t check me out of this place immediately, I never wanted to see her again. Her only response was, “If that’s what you want,” and they left. It was too much to ask that they stay away, and they returned the next day.

I was taken into a doctor’s office and found my parents sitting on a couch inside. I was in no mood to make friends and behaved rudely. The doctor finally asked me, “What is it you want?” Perhaps this is a question only a medical doctor has the intelligence to ask, because my mother and father certainly never did. I no longer trusted my parents and could see just one option—“I want to go home.” I didn’t mean the apartment in Oregon. When I said “home,” I meant Arkansas. I didn’t believe there was a chance in hell of it happening, so I was stunned when my parents agreed to it. As I sat there, the doctor—who had been in communication with Jerry Driver and was aware that I had been “institutionalized” prior to this—actually called Driver to tell him I would be returning to Arkansas. Arrangements were made for me to be discharged the next morning, and I would take a bus back down South.

There wasn’t much sleep for me that night. I went to bed but mostly just tossed and turned. I kept trying to form a plan of what I would do once I got to Arkansas, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. I didn’t even have a place to go once I got there, but I didn’t care. I knew it would all come together in time. All that mattered now was that I would soon be back home. The month I’d been gone seemed like years.

At daybreak I showered, dressed, and ate breakfast. A security guard led me downstairs and out the front door, where I saw my mother and father standing on the sidewalk next to a cab. My suitcase was sitting at their feet. My father handed me a bus ticket and the money left over from my last paycheck. I hugged him good-bye, but his body was stiff and rigid, as if he was reluctant to touch me. He didn’t say much. Same with my mother. I put my suitcase in the cab and climbed aboard for the trip to the bus station. I was nervous, I was excited, and I was on my own at the age of seventeen.

I’d never been on a bus before, so the experience was a little surreal. I had been waiting in the station about fifteen minutes when the intercom announced that everyone should board now. My suitcase was placed in a storage compartment and I took an anonymous seat in the middle of a row.

As I watched the bus fill rapidly, I noticed the passengers all seemed to have quite a bit in common. They were all unshaven and appeared to be in need of a bath; most were ill-tempered and barked at anyone who got too close to them. Somehow all the dregs of society had found their way onto a single bus. It was the smelly, grouchy Greyhound from hell.

I put on my fiercest facial expression in hopes of scaring away anyone who might be tempted to sit next to me. It seemed to work. No one had the inclination to sit next to a scowling creature with unbrushed hair and dressed in black leather.

The entire magickal voyage lasted for five enchanting days. We stopped mostly at gas stations and convenience stores for people to buy supplies, then we’d be off again. I survived on a steady diet of chips and soda, with an occasional sandwich. Sometimes we’d stop at a McDonald’s for breakfast, but I never went in. I stuck close to the bus in a constant state of anxiety that it would leave without me.

On the second or third day I was reluctantly pulled into a conversation with two other gentlemen who had come aboard at the last stop. One guy was young, about nineteen or twenty years old; the other guy looked to be about fifty, but it was difficult to tell because of the layers of fat and road dirt. The young guy had long black hair and was wearing a leather jacket with a picture of Madonna airbrushed on the back. He spoke in a soft, quiet voice and chain-smoked clove cigarettes every time the bus made a stop. The old guy had a loud, obnoxious voice, greasy, gray hair, and was dressed in cutoff sweatpants and a filthy teal-colored shirt. They were traveling together, and both set out to convince me that I should join them in working at a carnival that traveled from state to state. They spoke nonstop about the glories and riches I could acquire if I chose to undertake this noble profession. I thanked them but declined the offer on the grounds that I was holding out for a more lucrative deal in the porn industry. Somewhere between Oregon and Missouri they departed the scene, and I continued my journey alone.

The longest layover was in St. Louis, where I spent six hours. I left the bus station to go exploring and stumbled upon an extraordinary number of dubious individuals. An old black man who looked like a fugitive from the intensive care unit tried to sell me drugs before I was more than ten feet away from the station. This was a neighborhood in which one definitely didn’t want to be caught after dark, and since night was rapidly approaching I soon beat a hasty retreat to the station. I spent the remainder of the time talking to a guy from Germany who had come to the United States in search of his father.

We crossed the Arkansas state line somewhere between two and three a.m., but I still had trouble believing I was there. A part of me was certain the place no longer existed, that it had disappeared once I left. I looked out the window into the darkness beyond and kept thinking, I’m back, I’m back, I’m back, projecting it out into the night. It was a Saturday morning, and everyone else on the bus was asleep. I couldn’t sit still. Every landmark I recognized pushed me to a new level of excitement. When we passed the cemetery where my grandfather was buried, it took all my self-control not to tell the bus driver, “I need off now! Let me out here!”

We pulled into the bus station just as the sun was rising. No one else stirred; I was the only one getting off. I got off the bus, retrieved my suitcase, and looked around. Everything I could see looked exactly the same as when I’d left.

Fourteen

I was stopped by a cop less than ten minutes after getting off the bus in West Memphis. There was no one to pick me up, so I was going to have to walk while carrying my luggage. The closest person I knew was Domini, and she lived about three miles away. I thought that perhaps I could leave my suitcase there while searching for a place to stay, so that’s where I’d started off to.

As I crossed the street from the bus station, a cop car pulled around the corner. I was greeted with flashing blue lights and a blaring siren. I have no idea what I did to arouse his suspicion, but he pulled up next to me and rolled down the window. Behind the wheel was an insolent slob with a stomach so huge he could barely squeeze into the front seat. With a voice somewhere between a hare-lipped drone and an obnoxious whine, he began to ask, “What’s your name? Where are you going? Why are you dressed like that?”

I had broken no laws and was doing nothing wrong. He was harassing me simply because he could. The only reason he eventually left me alone is that he got a call on his radio. If not for that, there’s no telling where the situation would have gone.

Walking three miles with a large, heavy suitcase took forever. I had to stop every so often to rub my hands, which were quickly developing blisters. The day was rapidly growing hot, the morning turning into a fine example of the brutal Arkansas summer. When I reached the apartment complex where Domini lived, I was exhausted and covered in sweat.

I had an odd sensation as I made my way between the buildings. It was a complex mixture of thoughts and feelings, one of which was amazement (and perhaps pleasure) at how nothing had changed. When I had gone there to see Domini in the past, I was always struck by how different the place was from Lakeshore, and as an outsider returning home, it was surreally familiar. I was sleep-deprived and hungry, and I couldn’t decide which was more dreamlike—the time I’d spent in Oregon or being back there now.

My feelings about West Memphis and Arkansas in general have always been something of a paradox. The people there have often been cruel and hateful toward me, and I’ve been so lonely there that I thought the ennui would kill me. I didn’t fit into the social scenes, and there aren’t many opportunities to be had there, but it’s been my home. The place itself is alive with a kind of magick that can cause my heart to feel like it’s bursting. There is a scent in the air I can’t describe. I wish everyone who reads this could feel it just once. You would remember it forever.

When I stepped in front of Domini’s apartment, she was on the second floor looking out an open window. She glanced down and saw me, looked shocked for a second, then disappeared back into her room. A few seconds later the front door opened and Domini ran out. All she said was “Hi” when she hugged me. She felt familiar to me in her own way, but there was no power or passion to it like there was with Deanna.

The word I associate with Domini is just “pleasant.” Hugging Domini was pleasant. I told her I was back for good and asked if I could leave my luggage there until I figured out what I was going to do with it. She helped me get it inside and out of the way, then said she’d come with me to Lakeshore. My next step would be to let Jason know that I was back.

As Domini and I walked the mile or so to Lakeshore, I told her all about being sent to the hospital, the return of my father, and the great Oregon adventure. She was explaining that she would let me stay with her if it wasn’t for her aunt and uncle’s objections when a cop stopped me for the second time that day. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. He pulled up next to us, got out of his car, and struck a pose like some sort of obese superhero. This one asked all the same questions the first one did, and I had to go through the same routine.

As a child, I was taught in school that living in America automatically entitles you to certain freedoms, yet the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to know the harsh reality. These cops could stop me anytime and anywhere, and make demands of me that left me no choice but to comply. Even though I was doing nothing wrong I was forced to tell them where I was going, where I was from, and any other personal information they demanded of me, all because they didn’t like the way I looked. The only freedom I had was to obey or go to jail. They never taught me that in school.

When this cop finally released us, we continued on to Lakeshore. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that dilapidated hellhole until I saw it again. That trailer park was a magickal place. I still miss it now, even though the Lakeshore I knew is gone. The scummy green water and the dead fish smell in the air said “home” to me like nothing else.

As Jason’s trailer came into view, I wanted to break into a run. I knew he’d still be sleeping, so I slapped the window next to where his head would be. He peeked out the window, looking irritated and half asleep, then realized who it was and quickly ran to open the front door. He was highly excited and ushered us inside, where he was the only one home. Once we were all seated I had to explain again where I’d been and what had happened. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Jason since he’d left Deanna and me in the abandoned trailer that afternoon, so the whole thing had been a mystery to him.

He told us how he’d knocked on my door one day to discover a whole different family inside, and none of them had ever even heard of me. It was as if I had disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace, and he was certain he’d never see me again. When I told him about Oregon he just shook his head and said, “I would have never come back.” I’d have said the same thing myself before I had the actual experience.

We discussed the fact that I didn’t know for certain where I was going to stay yet and how great it would be if I could stay with him. We both knew his mother would never agree to it, but later that day he tried to convince her anyway. As we expected, the idea was met with much hostility.

My only real option was Brian. I made the trip to his house accompanied by both Jason and Domini. He started laughing the moment he opened the door and saw who it was. We all sat on the patio and I explained for the third and final time where I’d been. Brian was more amazed than I expected him to be, because he had thought I was still around and had simply dropped out of sight for a while. He found the entire story to be very amusing and laughed as if my misfortunes were the epitome of stupidity and hilarity. He asked questions when he wanted me to clarify certain points, all the while staring at me like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Brian had a plan that was both simple and ingenious—I would stay with him, but we would tell no one. As long as his mother didn’t know I was living in the house, she could not object to it. I was impressed with his logic. After much pleading and cajoling, we persuaded his brother to drive to Domini’s and pick up my suitcase.

The weekend was a flurry of excitement because I was so happy to be back and around the people I knew. We talked about what I’d missed, drove around Memphis like old times, got reacquainted with people I’d forgotten about, and generally enjoyed ourselves. I slept on Brian’s floor Saturday and Sunday night, and on Monday morning I went with him to school.

Attempting to reenroll in school turned out to be one more thing on a long list of disappointments. The principal informed me that I needed a parent present to sign me up because I was not yet eighteen years old. I explained that this would be impossible as both of my parents were now living on the other side of the country. He suggested that I consider getting a GED instead. I found the idea to be distasteful, but I could see that I was making no progress in pleading my case. Dejected, I returned to Brian’s house, where I ordered a pizza and watched television for the rest of the day.

When Brian returned home from school, I told him what had happened and we put our heads together to form a solution. In the end, the conclusion we came to was to see if the school would allow his mother to enroll me. She didn’t know I was actually staying with them, but we did get along well. We never had a chance to test this plan, and school would soon be the least of my worries. The very next day would find me back in jail.

Tuesday morning, Brian got up and followed his usual routine of preparing for school. I was jealous that he got to go and I did not. I loved going to school; I just didn’t like doing the work. I always thought school was more fun than a carnival. Everyone I knew was going to be there, so the day would be impossibly boring for me during school hours.

Brian left and I settled in for another long day of watching television. When lunchtime came I ordered another pizza. I knew I couldn’t eat the food in the house, or Brian’s mom would become suspicious. I was pretty sure I could live on pizza until my money ran out, but then I’d have to think of something else.

Twenty minutes after I placed my daily pizza order, there was a knock at the front door. Thinking that my provisions had arrived, I opened the door to discover Jerry Driver and one of his two cronies. Driver was trying his best to look official; he wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses stretched across his rotund face. His partner was a skinny black man who would one day meet the wrong end of a shotgun after sleeping with another man’s wife.

“I’m here to arrest you,” Driver wheezed.

This was quite a shock to me, as the only crime I had committed was not being in school, and that was not for lack of trying. “For what?” I asked him.

He began stuttering as if my question had caught him off guard. His jowls quivered as he managed to insult my intelligence with the crime of being under the age of eighteen and not living in the household with my parents. I seriously doubted his assertion that this was a criminal offense, but once again, I simply didn’t understand that Driver was operating outside his jurisdiction, and I didn’t know my rights. I was put in chains and shackles like a convict while Driver ushered me back to the Crittenden jail.

This time Driver’s questions became even more bizarre and outrageous. I was taken into a small office and chained to a chair, while he and the black guy tried to entice me to read texts to them that were written in Latin. He showed me odd objects that I’d never seen before, such as glass pyramids and silver rings with strange designs. He wanted me to explain the significance of these items to him. I had not the slightest clue what any of it meant, but he refused to accept that answer. When he was finished with this, I was left in a jail cell for a few more weeks.

I knew what to expect this time, but that didn’t make the ordeal any less horrendous. The endless days in a cage, the fights that erupt all around you, the inedible gruel, the humiliating orange clothes, and the way the jailers treat you like scum—it all comes together to create an incredible mental pressure that’s maddening. You feel defeated and hopeless. What made it even worse was that this time I knew I had done nothing wrong. I was being punished at the whim of an obsessive, delusional, power-hungry liar. I just couldn’t figure out why this clown had become obsessed with me.

After my time in jail, I was once again sent back to Charter of Maumelle. Jerry Driver took me himself, as he had obtained a court order for my institutionalization. He’d given me the same two options as before: either go to the hospital or wait in jail for months until a trial. It was the equivalent of a plea deal—and again I was caught between a rock and a hard place. In the absence of my parents, Driver arranged for my father’s sister Pat to give her consent, sign the paperwork, and offer answers to the questions posed at the hospital all over again. I was chained and shackled for the entire trip. When we arrived, the other patients were quite disturbed by the sight of me. Some later confided that they had believed I must be a madman of the highest order to require all the restraints. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when mental patients question your sanity.

Luckily, I had to spend only two weeks at the hospital this time. During my first conversation with the doctor she said, “I have no idea why they brought you back here, because I see no reason for it.” It would have taken too long to explain Driver’s fixation, so I just shrugged as if to say, “I don’t know why you’re asking me, I only live here.” I was kept there for two weeks just for the sake of following procedure, and then I was discharged. On my last day, I said good-bye to all the other patients, some of whom I really liked. There’s always a huge emotional scene anytime someone is released.

I walked to the front desk and standing there was none other than Jack Echols. Driver had contacted him while I was hospitalized, told him where to pick me up, and said that I was his responsibility since he had legally adopted me. If I had had a choice I would have checked myself back into the hospital. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice. I would now be living with Jack Echols again. I was caught in an endless cycle of hell.

Fifteen

The guards brought another tour in today. That happens every month or so. Sometimes they bring in a group of teenagers they want to scare into submission. The kids stand around shuffling their feet as the guards tell them that if they continue living the way they are now, then sooner or later they’ll wind up here. They always say that Death Row is the worst. They tell the tourists that in this barracks are the people who would murder their children and rape their grandmothers. In truth, the people who commit the most heinous crimes aren’t on Death Row. They’re out in the general prison population with much lighter sentences. Most of the people on Death Row are here for no other reason than that their case got more publicity than others. The difference between a man receiving a prison sentence and a man receiving a death sentence could be decided by nothing more than a slow news day.

The tours aren’t always just kids. Sometimes they bring in church groups, or people taking certain college courses. One thing they have in common is that they all know my name. I’ll often hear them ask the guards, “Where’s Damien Echols?” The guards point me out, then the people in the group gather in a circle and whisper as they stare at me. They do it without any trace of self-consciousness, as if I am an animal that has no idea what’s going on. As if I don’t have the slightest trace of humanity. Most haven’t a clue as to how socially inept their own actions are. My family has been here visiting me when a tour comes through, and they’ll stand around staring at my family and me as if we were put there for their entertainment. It would probably be humiliating if my feelings weren’t buried under a mountain of disgust.

I have always lived in my head, but once I was locked in a cell I completely retreated into the world of the mind to escape the horrendous environment. I leave my body here to cope with the nightmare while my mind walks other hallways. I have to sometimes listen to my body, but it’s hard. If my attention wanders for even a split second I automatically retreat down into those psychic rabbit holes. People tend to think of the soul as a man-shaped thing composed of a vague ghostlike substance. In reality it’s more like some God-almighty haunted house, in which the rooms are constantly shifting, moving, and reconfiguring themselves. A small broom closet becomes a cavernous ballroom behind your back. You always see movement in your peripheral vision, but never can find the source of the faint noises that seem to be coming from around some forever distant corner.

Ghosts can haunt damned near anything. I have heard them in the breathy voice of a song and seen them between the covers of a book. They have hidden in trees so that their faces peer out of the bark, and hovered beneath the silver surface of water. They disguise themselves as cracks in concrete or come calling in a delirium of fever. On summer days they keep pace like the shadow of our shadow. They lurk in the breath of young girls who give us our first kiss. I’ve seen men who were haunted to the point of madness by things that never were and things that should have been. I’ve seen ghosts in the lines on a woman’s face and heard them in the jangling of keys. The ghosts in fire freeze and the ghosts in ice burn. Some died long ago; some were never born. Some ride the blood in my veins until it reaches my brain. Sometimes I even mistake myself for one. Sometimes I am one.

Sixteen

Living with Jack was worse now than ever before. I could tell he really didn’t want me there but felt like he had no choice in the matter. While I was in Oregon he had been renting a small room in West Memphis that was barely bigger than a closet, so he had to find a new place. That place turned out to be a tiny trailer back in Lakeshore. It was barely big enough for us to stay out of each other’s way. I can’t recall speaking to my parents at all during this time, although my mother may have been in touch with Jack.

Unsurprisingly, Jack didn’t have a single friend in the world. Every moment that he wasn’t at work was spent in a chair in front of the television. Other than yelling at me, the only topics of conversation he employed were how my sister had ruined his life by telling Social Services that he had molested her, or how wrong my mother had treated him by filing for a divorce. He was sickening to me, and I hated the very sight of him in his sweat-stained shirts.

He went to bed at eight o’clock every night, which meant that I was forced to do the same. After eight I was not allowed to turn on a light because he said it would keep him awake, so there was no reading. We didn’t have a phone. I couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio—not even a Walkman. He claimed he could hear it playing in his room even with the headphones clasped firmly to my ears. I couldn’t go out after six o’clock because he would have to sit up and let me in. When I asked why he didn’t just give me a key, he said because he wouldn’t be able to fasten the chain lock, and I’d wake him up coming in. He had three locks on the door and still felt the need to prop a chair against it every night so no one could break in. The only thing a thief could have taken was the jar of pennies next to Jack’s bed or the huge picture of Jesus hanging in the living room. Only a true crackhead would break into that place.

Jack Echols was always angry. Sometimes it was at a simmer and other times he erupted into a screaming fit, but there was always anger. I couldn’t tiptoe around him or stay invisible in such a tiny place, so his rage was always directed at me. He did nothing but sit in his chair stewing and brewing, filling the rooms with misery and hatred. It was unbearable. Brian had moved to Missouri the day after I got out of the hospital, so my only refuge was Jason’s house. I slept there as often as possible.

For reasons unknown, Jerry Driver had also told Jack that I was to check into his office once a week. Every Monday I made the five-mile trek to Driver’s office, where he and his two sidekicks (Steve Jones and another, whose last name was Murray) would question me. Their approach no longer seemed friendly. They had switched tactics and become downright antagonistic. Most often Driver and I were alone, but if one of the other two were there, they’d appear to be deep in thought while Driver asked one “satanic activity” question after another.

Jack worked at a roofing company, and during the winter months and rainy days jobs were often postponed, so he would take me to Driver’s office. As long as Jack was present, Driver would refrain from his usual insanity. His beady eyes gleamed and his whiskers twitched as he stared at me across the desk, but he managed to restrain himself. After Jack came with me every week for over a month, Driver must have grown exasperated, thinking he’d never again be able to see me alone. Admitting defeat, he said I no longer had to check in.

While Jason and Domini were in school, I had nothing to do but read. I educated myself since I couldn’t go to school. I spent most of every day in the West Memphis Public Library devouring book after book. I loved that library. I reread the Stephen King novels so often that the two librarians who worked there would hold a new release in the back for me to read first. There was something a little creepy about all that knowledge housed in one place. It gave the books a slightly sinister aspect.

I eventually took my old principal’s advice and got my GED. I was hoping I’d have to attend classes or something, but no such luck. I passed the test with flying colors.

Being that I was still on the antidepressants given to me during my first visit to the hospital, I had to make periodic visits to a local mental health center, where a doctor would refill my prescription. They never bothered to reevaluate me or question whether I still actually needed them; I’d just be handed a prescription like it was a hall pass.

I thought my life was pretty dull, but Jerry Driver must have believed otherwise. One day Jason and I were sitting in Jack’s trailer watching television while he was at work. I answered a knock at the door to discover Bo, one of the local Lakeshore youths. He was sweating and breathless as he came in and helped himself to a soda before telling me that Driver was around the corner at the Lakeshore store, asking questions about me. “He asked me which street you live on and I said I didn’t know,” Bo informed me, without a trace of irony in his voice. Driver had also told everyone at the store to stay away from me because sooner or later I was “going down,” and anyone who was with me would meet the same fate.

Upon hearing this news, Jason looked at me with an irritated expression on his face and said, “What the fuck are we doing? We never do anything, but this freak is telling everyone we’re ‘running wild.’ Doesn’t he have any real crimes to solve?” Apparently not.

The last time I saw Driver before my trial was the night of the high school homecoming football game. Jason and I went to it because there was absolutely nothing else to do. We had to walk home after it was over, which is when we were intercepted by my old friend. He was driving up and down the streets of Lakeshore, probably looking for me. He asked where we were going, what we were doing, and so on. When he finished the interrogation we continued on our way to Jason’s trailer, where we passed the night watching horror movies. I forgot all about this incident until I was on trial for murder and Driver testified. He told a great many lies, some of which were that Jessie Misskelley was walking with us that night, that we were all three carrying staves and dressed in satanic regalia, and that he believed we were returning from some sort of devil-worshipping orgy. The jury ate it up like candy and loved every sordid detail. A story straight from the tabloids, right next to “Bigfoot Sighted!” or “Bat Boy Born in Cave!” This was evidence.

The misery of living with Jack reached a fever pitch when he decided that I should have a job and that I was incapable of finding one for myself. The truth is that it’s almost impossible to persuade someone to hire you when you don’t have a car or anyone willing to drive you to work. I had tried everywhere. Jack persuaded his boss to hire me to work alongside him doing roof construction.

The job was hard, boring, and dangerous, but the worst part was that I never had a second in which I was out of Jack’s presence. We got up at sunrise and didn’t get home until nightfall. The only thing I could do was come home, eat supper, go to bed, and rest for the next day. I was chained to him day and night. This went on for months. I began to hate my life and could easily see myself trapped forever. Jack became more of a bastard by the day, and it wasn’t just me who noticed it. The people we worked with tried to be friendly to him but were met with hatefulness.

I grew more and more desperate to escape his presence. I racked my brain attempting to come up with an idea that would allow me to break free. Finally I discovered the answer, which Jerry Driver himself had handed to me. He had insisted that I be confined to a mental institution on two separate occasions, and now I would take advantage of it.

At my mother’s suggestion, I went to the Social Security office and applied for disability benefits. They looked over my application, which detailed my stays in the hospital, and declared me mentally disabled. I would be entitled to a check every month. I wasn’t allowed to work and draw the check at the same time, so this was my escape from working with Jack. The chain was broken. When I told Jason about it, he laughingly called them “crazy checks.” The name stuck, and that’s what we came to refer to my income as. “Have you gotten your crazy check yet?” Yes, indeed.

Doris and Ed, my paternal grandparents, moved to West Memphis, and I began to spend time at their house a few miles away. I would keep my grandmother company while my grandfather was at work. I dearly love my paternal grandparents. No matter how old I get I always feel like a kid around them. To have that feeling around anyone else would be irritating, but I didn’t mind it at all around them. It made life seem clean and simple. You can’t stay in a black mood when visiting my grandmother; it’s impossible. Jason usually went with me because he knew there would always be food there. As soon as we walked in she would begin preparing huge bowls of chili for us, or bacon and eggs with toast, sometimes pork chops or fried chicken. Dessert was always Dolly Madison cakes and ice-cold cans of Coke. My grandmother is a saint.

One day while I was visiting her, my mother called. My grandmother told her that I was there and then handed me the phone. I talked to my mother and father, who were both still in Oregon. It wasn’t unpleasant; they mostly asked what I was doing, where I was staying, how Domini and Jason were. I had my reservations, but didn’t mind talking to them. It became a routine that when I was at my grandmother’s house I’d speak to them on the phone. We were getting along, but I remained wary of them to a certain degree, like I would a dog that had bitten me in the past.

Domini now skipped school more often than not, and she stayed with me while Jack was at work. We never had a burning romance, but we kept each other company. I had no desire to get into another situation where I risked the sort of trauma I had experienced with Deanna, and Domini was safe. We were friends who had sex, and that’s the only type of relationship I was willing to have then. Perhaps that makes me sound selfish, but I will be nothing if not truthful. My worst fear in the world was having my heart broken. When she called me one day and said to come over, I already knew what was happening.

I knew exactly what she was going to say once I got there, but curiously I felt nothing. I knew my life was about to change forever, yet I was strangely detached. I wasn’t especially happy, nor was there sadness to speak of. There was neither excitement nor dread. I was a Zen master for a day.

When I arrived, Domini was smiling, glowing. She had an assortment of papers scattered across the kitchen table and her mother was with her. The papers were medical pamphlets. I sat in a chair; she sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. She said the exact thing I knew she was going to. She told me she was pregnant.

Seventeen

For a split second today I could smell home. It smelled like sunset on a dirt road. I thought my heart was going to break. The world I left behind was so close I could almost touch it. Everything in me cried out for it. It’s amazing how certain shades of agony have their own beauty. I can’t ever seem to make myself believe that the home I once knew doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s still too real inside my head. I wish I had a handful of dust from back then, so that I could keep it in a bottle and always have it near.

Time has changed for me. I don’t recall exactly when it happened, and I don’t even remember if it was sudden or gradual. Somehow the change just crept up on me like a wolf on tiptoe. Hell, I don’t even remember when I first started to notice it. What I do remember is how when I was a kid every single day seemed to last for an eternity. Time was as long and drawn-out as a politician’s speech. I swear to God that I can remember a single summer day that lasted for several months. I was a sweaty boy with no shirt, sitting on my grandmother’s front porch while the gnats dreamily circled me. The days were so long that my young mind couldn’t conceive of a block of time that would make up an entire week. There had been summer, shorts, crew cuts, and Popsicles ever since the Big Bang, and only a fool thought it would ever end.

Then one day I turned around and realized that entire years were slipping through my hands like water. Youth had been stolen from me while my back was turned. It’s still happening now. It seems like no sooner does the sun rise than it’s already setting again. Now I watch while years flip by like an exhalation, and sometimes I feel panic trying to claw its way up into my throat. Time itself has become a cruel race toward an ash-colored sunset. It opens doorways to disease and leaves me empty-handed. I truly don’t understand how it happened. How it continues to happen. Even looking directly at it doesn’t change anything, no matter what the old people say about watched pots never boiling. Forever can be measured with a ruler, and eternity is no longer than a stiff breeze.

God, I miss the sound of cicadas singing. I used to sit on my front porch and listen to those invisible hordes all screaming in the trees like green lunacy. The only place I hear them now is on television. I’ve seen live newscasts where I could hear them screeching in the background. When I realized what it was I was hearing I nearly fell to my knees, sobbing and screaming a denial to everything I’ve lost, everything that’s been stolen from me. It’s a powerful sound—the sound home would make if it weren’t a silent eternity away from me.

Hearing the cicadas is like being stabbed through the heart with blades of ice. They remind me that life has continued for the world while I’ve been sealed away in a concrete vault. I’ve been awakened on many nights by the feel of rats crawling over my body, but I’ve never heard summer’s green singing. The last time I heard it, I had yet to see my twentieth birthday.

People in places like West Memphis don’t like anything that stands out, including intelligence and beauty. If a woman is smart enough to take care of her body so that she doesn’t become a sexless lump, she will get looks of hatred from the local women. They will cast the evil eye at her as they help themselves to another plate of biscuits and fried pork chops. If a man is a little too intelligent for the taste of the locals, he will soon find himself ostracized. Most don’t have either the self-discipline or the self-respect to better themselves, and they despise anyone who does, because it makes them feel small and inadequate. Unless you want to be the target of resentment you have to keep your head down and shuffle your feet along with the rest of the herd. The one thing above all else that is not tolerated is magick. Any trace of wonder or magick must be snuffed out at all costs. Then instead of mourning its loss, they’ll pat themselves on the back. Nothing can be mundane enough to suit the herd. Bland country faces in bland country places.

When I was a kid, somehow a story started circulating in West Memphis. I can only guess at its origin, but something about it horrified me. In fact, the whole town was pretty on edge. People were claiming to have seen a dog with a man’s head. It was rumored to have escaped from a traveling carnival freak show that had come through the area. A preacher swore that he spotted it looking through a window of his house. Neighbors stood on their lawns in the evening with the same facial expressions they wore when scanning the skies for tornadoes. “Get back in the house,” they would snap at the children who were drawn out by the hovering sense of excitement. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who began having bad dreams about the dogman.

Eventually people seemed to forget about it, and it faded from the conversations. The feeling never left, though. A vague atmosphere of dread and dangerous fear seemed to hover like a fog for the next decade. It was the sort of fear that robs people of their ability to think clearly. It was the kind of fear that usually ends up with a frightened mob hurting someone.

In this part of the world all shrines are built to honor the great spirit of mediocrity. The celebrations are for mediocre events, and everyone praises a mediocre god. Heads upon pillows dream mediocre dreams and loins all give birth to mediocre offspring. At the end of a pointless life awaits a mediocre death. Love comes wrapped in a bland little package and fulfillment of the biological urge leads to swift decline. There are no monuments to greatness in this land of stupor.

Down here in the deep, dark South we know and live with the real world. Candy-Land idealism is quietly suffocated in the relentless humidity. This is the world where fist meets face. This is where the calluses on a man’s hand are bigger than his conscience, and dreams get drowned in sweat and tears. Mutually assured destruction rides the roads on gun racks in the back windows of pickup trucks. The goodness of human nature gets packed away with childhood toys, and the only third eye I have is the one I use to watch my back. Everyone puts on their Sunday best and pays tribute to religion’s slaughterhouse and then dines on a cannibal communion. People put their backs to the stone in the field and push until their entrails rupture, and they drag their meals from the earth with bleeding hands. Education is foreign to the sunburned beasts of burden, and the painkiller comes in black-labeled Tennessee bottles. No one here moves quickly, but everyone moves with absolute certainty.

Eighteen

My eighteenth birthday, in December 1992, came and went on silent feet. There was no cake, no celebration, no well-wishers. Jack didn’t even remember it, or if he did, he made no mention. I’m certain his hatred of me equaled my disgust with him by this point. Having me in his house was a reminder of his failed relationship and disgrace. At least I was now officially an adult, and outside Jerry Driver’s jurisdiction. As a juvenile officer, he was only allowed to harass children.

Domini’s aunt and uncle had decided to move and were leaving her and her mother behind. Domini’s mother was in extremely poor health. She was diabetic and needed insulin injections, not to mention the fact that the left side of her body was almost completely paralyzed from a stroke. It took her ten minutes to walk the length of a room, and she often needed help getting dressed. Needless to say, the doors of opportunity weren’t exactly banging open for her.

After searching for a place to stay, they located a rapidly disintegrating trailer in Lakeshore. They had procured a van to move their things, but a one-hundred-pound pregnant girl and a half-paralyzed woman proved to be less than adept at the moving process. In the end most of the loading and unloading fell to me, but I didn’t really mind. It gave me a chance to look at all the interesting things they had accumulated—old birdcages, roach clips shaped like snakes, mildewed books, and other assorted treasures they hoarded. They were more than a little worried about how they were going to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, pressures continued to mount with Jack. He constantly accused me of things I hadn’t done, such as having parties and letting people go into his room while he was at work. I didn’t know enough people to put together a party, and there was nothing in his room worth going in there for. He would rant and rave, screaming at me, pressing his face right into mine, but he drew the line at hitting me. I could tell he sometimes wanted to, but he never did.

Late one night I could take it no more. He was bellowing at me as usual and I simply got up and left. I walked out while he was in mid-tirade.

It was dark, cold, and drizzling as I walked up and down the streets of Lakeshore. It must have been winter still because I remember I was wearing a leather jacket at the time. It seems it’s always cold, dark, and drizzling when I go through momentous emotional changes. I used to wear an old black slouch hat, and I liked to watch the rain drip off the brim. It made me feel like a character in a spaghetti western. That’s what I did for a couple of hours before finally going to Domini’s, where I slept that night.

I went and got my things the next day while Jack was at work and brought them back to Domini’s. Between my “crazy check” and the money Domini got from her father, we managed to pay rent and survive. We even started buying a few items for the baby we would soon have. We couldn’t afford a car, so a decent job remained beyond my grasp. I was certain that if I just had a way to get across the bridge to Memphis every day, I could find something good.

Domini quit high school because of the pregnancy, and we spent the days together. We went on walks, watched television, fed the ducks that came to the lake, or kept her mom company while listening to music. We passed the days in this fashion for several months. We talked about what we should do once the baby was born and agreed that we should get married, although we never laid solid plans.

I continued talking to my parents on the phone, and not long after I told them Domini was pregnant, they told me they were moving back to Arkansas. It seemed that things weren’t going so well for them in Oregon. I wasn’t certain how I felt about this, because I knew it meant they’d be back in my life. Could be good, could be bad. Time would tell. They would be back in about a week or so. I told them our address so they could come see us once they were in town.

During those calm, quiet, uneventful months with Domini, I fell prey to the belief that things would never change. It wasn’t that I wanted things to remain that way forever; it just seemed that I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I was wasting away. Ever since I was a child, I’d felt like I was doing nothing but waiting for my special place in life to be revealed to me. Often I was frightened that I’d miss it when it happened. I felt that the stagnant life I was living was not what I was destined for, but I had no idea what to do about it. All I could do was wait, wait, wait. I knew I wasn’t meant to live and die in a trailer park the rest of the world had never even heard of.

*  *  *

My parents arrived in Arkansas early on a weekday morning in the early spring. Domini and I were still in bed sleeping when my mother and sister knocked at the door and Domini’s mom let them in. I could hear them talking in the living room and figured I’d better get up. If anything, my mother’s southern accent seemed to have deepened while she was away. It was very odd hearing her voice in person again; it made the day seem special somehow, like a holiday.

I deliberately took my time getting dressed and brushing my hair before going into the living room, mostly because I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea how to behave in this situation. When I finally entered the room I saw my mother and sister in chairs; my sister was wide-eyed but silent. My father wasn’t there. I wondered if that meant anything. My mother turned to see me looking at her, then quickly bustled over to hug me. The first thing that struck me was how much I’d grown. I now stood a full head taller than her. While my mother theatrically shed the few requisite tears, I hugged my sister and asked where my father was. He was at their new place, unloading their things. My little brother was with him. He would meet us at my grandmother Doris’s house for breakfast.

Domini and I went with them and listened to tales of their adventures in Oregon on the way. They seemed to be well rested and cheerful despite their weeklong drive. When I first laid eyes on my father I could see something like doubt in his face, as if, like me, he didn’t know what to do. He was nervous and uncertain.

Not having a clue what to say, I hugged him. Domini did the same. That seemed to put him at ease. The awkwardness faded away, and he began behaving like his normal self. The single most familiar thing about my father to me is his cough. He coughed a great deal because of his lifelong smoking habit, and hearing him cough put me at ease for some reason. It softened my heart toward both of my parents. Perhaps because it reminded me that they were only human, subject to the same failings as everyone else. My mother had gotten pregnant with me at the age of fifteen; they were both high school dropouts and had never known any other life.

At least I was capable of knowing there was some other kind of life possible, even if I was having trouble achieving it. They believed that the way they were living was the only kind of life that existed. They had no imagination to envision anything else, and no desire to reach it. I felt sorry for them. I still do sometimes, although that doesn’t mean their constant idiocy isn’t capable of driving me to the brink of madness. They never have learned from their mistakes. It would probably be easier on everyone if I stopped expecting them to.

After they settled into their new place, I began spending time with them. I alternated living with Domini and at my parents’ place. So did Domini sometimes, and Jason was known to stay over, too. One day he laughingly called me a nomad after we made stops at both places, then traveled to my grandmother’s to see what tasty dishes she would serve. Once he mentioned it, I did feel like a bit of a gypsy. I didn’t quarrel with my parents at that point, maybe because I could always escape them.

I was now legally an adult, an expectant father, and in a relationship I was certain would end in marriage. I never would have abandoned Domini. Sometimes I think that comes from sheer determination not to make the same mistakes my father did. But I was not in love.

I thought of Deanna frequently, wondering what had happened. Through sheer coincidence (I use that word but don’t believe there’s any such thing) I found out where Deanna’s family had started attending church. The possibility of seeing her again plagued me. I couldn’t drive it out of my head. I constantly wondered what would happen, how she would react, what I would see in her eyes, and I had a plethora of questions I needed answers to. I couldn’t understand how she had so thoroughly and completely severed our connection. I needed an explanation.

Sunday morning found me preparing to descend into the hellish realm of fundamentalism. From the outside, the church looked like a Kentucky Fried Chicken shack with a steeple. I knew I didn’t belong there, but I had to do it or I would get no rest. Slinking inside, I took a seat on the last bench of the congregation and watched the activity. People obnoxiously called out greetings, shook hands, and slapped one another on the back as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. I saw people glance at me from the corner of their eyes, but no one approached me. No one smiled at me, shook my hand, or slapped me on the back. No one even said hello.

Scanning the rows, I saw Deanna sitting in the dead center of the room with her family. I hadn’t seen her in a year, but she hadn’t changed at all. I’m not sure what it was that I felt, but my heart was in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. She looked at me . . . and looked away. I didn’t see even a flicker of recognition. What did that mean? I had been expecting something—anything—but her eyes passed over me as if I were not even there.

I sat through the entire hour and a half of the red-faced preacher bellowing and beating his fist against the podium, but never heard a word of it. I stared at Deanna’s back, willing her to turn around and give me some sort of reaction, but she never did.

When it was over, I walked outside and stood on the sidewalk. I was trying to figure out what this meant as I watched her family get in their car and drive away. I turned to leave and heard someone call out, “Hey! I want to talk to you for a minute!” The preacher was staring at me without blinking as he approached.

He stood before me with crossed arms, not offering to shake my hand. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a pin on my jacket. It was the iron cross from the cover of the Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction. “That some sort of satanic thing?”

I told him it most certainly was not, but he still looked dubious.

“I don’t want you coming here making people uncomfortable.” He looked like he was working himself up into a state of anger.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be back.” I walked away, still trying to figure out what it all meant.

Nineteen

By May, Domini and I had been arguing a little, though nothing serious. It was mostly in the vein of people who have spent too much time together and just need a break. I had slept at my parents’ house for a couple of nights to create some breathing space. One morning I got up and went out to have a nice big bowl of Froot Loops for breakfast. Toucan Sam makes a mean box of cereal. While I was happily munching and contemplating the fact that I would soon have a bowl of pink milk, I flipped on the television. Nothing goes better with Fruit Loops than cartoons. There were no cartoons that day. Every channel was showing the same special news coverage of three murdered kids who had been discovered the day before. The reports all said the same thing: the bodies of three eight-year-old boys had been found mutilated in a wooded area nearby. It looked like every reporter in the world had descended upon West Memphis.

It wasn’t just the people on TV talking about it—the whole town was abuzz. It was the conversation on everyone’s lips, and the rumors were already starting to fly. I heard the same two words countless times over the next month: “Satanists” and “sacrifice.” Each day that passed without a suspect being arrested only increased the talk, as the words cemented themselves more firmly in the minds of every gossipmonger in town.

The very same day, Friday, May 7, I saw the first news coverage is when the police began to sniff around my door, although they later denied it and said they never considered me a suspect until several weeks down the road. Not long after the coverage began, a cop named James Sudbury and Jerry Driver’s sidekick, Jones, came knocking. I found it interesting that Driver himself didn’t show up. They came into the house and said they wanted to talk to me privately. Evidently they did not want my family to hear what they had to say. My mother, sister, and paternal grandmother watched as I led Sudbury and Jones into Michelle’s bedroom and closed the door. They sat on the edge of the bed, one on either side of me.

This was the first time I’d ever seen Sudbury. He was potbellied, with a horrible comb-over and weak, watery eyes. He also sported the same seventies porn mustache so popular among his colleagues. He didn’t say much, and just sat quietly while Driver’s cohort asked the questions. Jones was all saccharine and lying eyes as he said things like “Something bad has happened, and we really need your help.” Instead of questioning me about the murders, he stayed on topics such as “What’s your favorite book of the Bible, and why? Have you ever read anything by Anton LaVey? Who is your favorite author?” It seemed they couldn’t decide between conducting a murder investigation and filing a book report. Of course eventually came the inevitable “Have you heard anything about devil-worshippers in the area, or any plans to sacrifice children?” I found it sickening. Instead of attempting to find out who had murdered three children, they indulged in these childish fairy tales and grab-ass games. A fine example of your tax dollars at work.

Before leaving, they took a Polaroid picture of me. Later, I found out they showed it to nearly everyone in town, using it to plant ideas in the minds of an already frightened public. In court they denied taking the picture or ever even coming to see me that day. They had to, because Jones and Driver were from a different office and weren’t supposed to be involved in the investigation in any way. By that point in the courtroom, the blatant lies would no longer shock me because I’d seen them do it too many times.

This visit was the first of many. They were soon coming at me every single day. They came to my parents’ house, to Domini’s trailer, and to Jason’s house. It wasn’t always the same two; there was a rotating crew of about six of them. It was the same questions, day after day. It became pretty apparent that these clowns weren’t looking for a murderer. Jerry Driver and his two cohorts, Jones and Murray, put a bug in the ear of the West Memphis police department, and they couldn’t shake it. Instead of conducting a real murder investigation and checking the forensic evidence, the police started immediately chasing stories of black-robed figures that danced around bonfires and chanted demonic incantations.

Beginning that day, that’s all anyone talked about. The entire town was petrified because they were convinced hell had broken loose in Arkansas. Every redneck preacher in the area was preaching sermons about how we were in the “end times,” so you better get right with God or else the devil would come for you, too. You must keep in mind that this is a state in which one out of every four people can’t read above a fifth-grade level. Ignorance breeds superstition. People believed these stories and helped them grow. After being shown my picture, one man swore to the police that I had caused him to levitate. Another swore that the police told him they had found body parts under my bed. These sorts of stories passed for investigation.

The constant harassment continued to escalate. Within days, instead of coming to my house they were taking me to the police station. It was easier for them to play good cop, bad cop there. One of them (usually Sudbury, whose breath smelled as if he ate onions morning, noon, and night) would get in my face and scream, “You’re going to fry! You may as well tell us you did it now!” The other cop would then pretend to be my friend and act as if he were rescuing me from Sudbury’s “wrath.” I was only a teenager, and the whole thing looked pretty pathetic even to me.

This continued day after day for a month. My grandmother grew worried and sold her rings to hire an attorney to come to the police station with me, but the police refused to let him in. They lied and said I never asked for him, even though I did so several times. My grandmother lost her engagement and wedding rings for nothing.

I didn’t think there was anything wrong with answering their questions, because I had nothing to hide. I had done nothing wrong, and figured they would sooner or later get this insanity out of their system. It didn’t work that way. The more I cooperated, the more abusive and belligerent they became.

In spite of their abusive behavior, the threat didn’t feel any more escalated than the tone of the harassment we’d been through for nearly two years where Driver was concerned. That changed permanently the last time I was picked up and brought into the police station before the arrest. I was kept there for eight hours. I was not allowed a drink of water, a bite of food, or even to use the restroom. They screamed and threatened me the entire time, trying to force me to make a confession. The psychological pressure was enormous. They would have kept me all night if I hadn’t finally demanded they either charge me with a crime or let me go home. I suffered from extreme exhaustion, my head was pounding, and my body kept trying to vomit, although there was nothing in my stomach. I felt like I’d been run over. If you’ve never been through anything like that, there’s no way you can understand. There’s no word that describes what they did to me other than “torture.”

On the evening of June 3, my mother, father, and Nanny left to go to a casino for a night of gambling. My grandmother loved playing blackjack more than just about anything else in the world, and my parents were more than happy to keep her company at the table. They would be gone all night. Michelle, Jason, Domini, and I had all settled down for an evening of watching horror videos. We were making fun of a movie that seemed to have been put together with more imagination than money when someone started beating on the door. Not knocking, beating. You could feel the vibration through your feet on the floor. Outside someone screamed, “This is Sudbury. Open the door!”

My first thought was, To hell with that. I was sick of those ass clowns tormenting me day after day. I figured it was more of the same and that they’d eventually get tired of waiting and leave. When the beating continued and grew even more persistent, I knew something wasn’t right. They were being even more aggressive than usual. I went to answer the door to see what they wanted.

When I opened the door, there were three cops standing on the steps, all pointing guns directly at my face. The barrels of their weapons were less than three inches from touching my skin. Another cop stood on the ground pointing a gun at my chest. Sudbury nearly tackled me in his eagerness to handcuff me and get me into a cop car. Looking over my shoulder, I told Domini, “Don’t worry about it.” After all, it’s impossible for them to prove you’ve done something you haven’t done, right? At least that’s what I thought.

It was a scene of utter chaos. I don’t recall whether my rights were read to me amid the noise and police stampede. I didn’t see them arrest Jason; I was rushed out too quickly. I later found out they took him out right after me. After I was put into a car, I was driven straight to the police station and escorted to a small office by a cop who looked disturbingly like a pig that had been taught to walk upright. I never saw a single cop in the station who was even close to being physically fit, but this guy was the worst of the lot. He was so fat he was suffocating under his own weight. He weighed at least 350 pounds. He had no neck, and his nose was turned up like a snout. I’ve learned over the years that sooner or later a person’s physical appearance comes to resemble whatever is in their heart. I shudder to think what this guy’s true nature was. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking of him as “Piggy Little.”

Piggy Little was an old-school asshole. You could tell he’d never succeeded at anything in his life, and he was out for revenge. He seemed to think his personal God-given mission in life was to harass and torment me in every way possible. He kept his hands on me at all times—he pushed, pulled, and jerked me around continuously.

After ten or fifteen minutes, the chief inspector came into the office and sat behind a desk. His name was Gary Gitchell, and I’d seen him at the station a couple of times before, but I’d never had to deal with him. Gitchell was slightly more intelligent than his coworkers, which is most likely why he was the boss. He was no intellectual giant, but he didn’t have to be when compared with the rest.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.

I stared at him blankly, saying nothing.

“You may as well tell me something now because your friend has already confessed. This is your only chance to make sure you don’t take all the blame.” I felt like I had somehow gotten lost in this conversation, or that I must be missing something, because it wasn’t making sense to me. Friend? Confessed?

“Who are you talking about?” I asked. It was his turn to look at me blankly. I had no idea who he could be talking about, because I knew it couldn’t be Jason.

He continued along the same lines with statements like “You should just tell us something, because your friend is already pointing the finger at you. If you want to make sure he doesn’t put everything on you, this is your only chance.” This went on for at least half an hour, Gitchell talking while Piggy glared. When he finally realized this wasn’t going anywhere, I was put inside a cell that wasn’t much larger than a phone booth. I was left there throughout the night, confined to a space so small I couldn’t even stretch my legs out. There was no water, no restroom, nothing. Every so often Gitchell came in and asked more of the same. At one point he came in and said, “One of the officers told me you wanted to talk to me.” I hadn’t even seen an officer in hours. “He lied,” I informed him. This continued until well after sunrise.

When I wasn’t being questioned, I was trying to solve this mystery. Who could Gitchell be talking about? What had this friend said I had done? None of it made any sense.

A cop came in and demanded my clothes. I’d never experienced anything like this in my life and thought him some sort of pervert, judging by the looks of him. I was given more clothes—an old, ragged police uniform that was at least twelve sizes too large. I had to gather the waist and tie it in a knot to keep the pants from falling down. This is how I made my first court appearance.

At ten in the morning on June 4, I was arraigned. Jason, Jessie, and I were called separately. I was walked down a narrow hallway that suddenly opened up into a courtroom. I was stunned by the contrast. The jail itself was filthy and roach-infested to the point of making you not want to touch anything for fear of contamination. It was a place the general public was never meant to see. I’d grown used to that, so the dazzlingly clean and well-lit courtroom was jarring.

I blinked like an animal pulled from its hole and looked around me. The place was packed from wall to wall, and the only faces I recognized were my mother’s and father’s. Everyone else in the place watched me with hatred in their eyes. Every few seconds someone popped up as though in a Whac-A-Mole game and snapped pictures of me. I hadn’t slept in about thirty-six hours, so everything had an even more surreal quality to it.

The judge—his name was Rainey—began rambling while I leaned against a wall to keep my knees from buckling. Four cops kept their hands on me at all times, as if they expected me to break and run at any second. In the course of maybe ten minutes, I was charged with three counts of capital murder. I didn’t hear the charges outside the panic, fear, and exhaustion in my head. When the judge got to the “How do you plead?” part of the show, I said, “Not guilty.” I was following the instructions of a lawyer temporarily assigned to me, who’d told me minutes before the hearing what to say. My voice sounded flat, dull, and small. I felt a wave of outrage directed toward me from the peanut gallery. The judge’s droning voice sounded strangely like an auctioneer as he began talking about a confession. I was so exhausted and in such shock that I could follow very little of what he was saying. It finally dawned on me that he was asking if I wanted the confession read out loud or just entered into the record. I was starting to feel a little pissed, and my voice was a little more forceful this time as I said, “Read it.” I could tell he didn’t like that idea at all. As a matter of fact he seemed downright uncomfortable as he looked down and started shuffling papers.

Finally he stuttered that he wasn’t going to do that, but that he would call for a recess until after I had read it. During the recess I was taken into a broom closet filled with cleaning supplies, and was handed a stack of papers while two cops stood staring at me. My brain was so numb I could comprehend only about one-fifth of what I was reading, but at least now I knew who had made the confession. The name written at the top was “Jessie Misskelley.” My first thought was, Did he really do it? Followed quickly by, Why did he say I did it? Even in my shell-shocked state I could tell something about his “confession” wasn’t right. For one thing, every line seemed to contradict the one before it. Any idiot could plainly see he was just agreeing with everything the cops said. That’s when I knew why the judge didn’t want it read out loud. Anyone with even an average IQ could see it was a setup. The whole thing seemed shady.

It’s no great wonder to me how the cops could make Jessie say the things they wanted him to say. If they treated him anything like they did me, then it’s quite amazing that he didn’t have a nervous breakdown. They used both physical and psychological torture to break me down. One minute they’d threaten to kill you, and the next they’d behave as if they were your best friends in the world, and that everything they were doing was for your own good. They shoved me into walls, spit at me, and never let up for a moment. When one of them got tired, another came in to take his place. By the time I’d been allowed to go home after previous interrogations I’d had a migraine headache, and I’d been through periods of dry heaving and vomiting. I survived because when pushed hard enough I acted like an asshole, just like the cops themselves. My point is that we were just kids. Teenagers. And they tortured us. How could someone like Jessie, with the intellect of a child, be expected to go through that and come out whole?

It makes me sick and fills me with disgust to think about how the public trusts these people, who are in charge of upholding the law yet torture kids and the mentally handicapped. People in this country believe the corrupted are the exception. They’re not. Anyone who has had in-depth dealings with them knows it’s the rule. I’ve been asked many times if I’m angry with Jessie for accusing me. The answer is no, because it’s not Jessie’s fault. It’s the fault of the weak and lazy “civil servants” who abuse the authority placed in their hands by people who trust them. I’m angry with police who would rather torture a retarded kid than look for a murderer. I’m angry with corrupt judges and prosecutors who would ruin the lives of three innocent people in order to protect their jobs and further their own political ambitions. We were nothing but poor trailer trash to them, and they thought no one would even miss us. They thought they could take our lives and the matter would end there, all swept under the rug. And it would have ended there, if the world hadn’t taken notice. No, I’m not angry at Jessie Misskelley.

*  *  *

From everything I’d seen on TV and read in books, I came to believe the cops were the good guys, and that dirty cops were few and far between. So why was no one stepping up to expose this for the bullshit it was? Why were they all going along with something so fraudulent? The answer: to save their asses. The police assigned to my case were members of the West Memphis drug task force—cops who normally would not be investigating these murders; they were also offered additional help from the Arkansas State Police and they turned it down. It seems quite a few of the cops on the drug task force were being investigated by the FBI for drug dealing, money laundering, and tampering with confiscated evidence, and the last thing they needed was the entire world watching them as they bumbled around ineptly, pretending to conduct an investigation. They needed to solve this case quickly, and we were the easy solution. As one of the cops told Jason, “You’re just white trash. We could kill you and dump your body in the Mississippi, and no one would care.” We were disposable, subhuman. Feed us into the meat grinder, and the problem goes away. It’s not like we were ever going to amount to anything anyway.

After I read the script/confession, I was taken back into the courtroom. The judge was rambling again, and I was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly everyone sprang to life as an overweight man with bad skin jumped from his seat and tried to run down the aisle. He was screaming something incoherently as the cops tackled him and I was hustled from the room. I later found out that he was the father of one of the murdered children. I couldn’t really blame him. I have a son of my own now, and I might have done the same thing if I thought I was looking at the man who had harmed him. He just needed someone to blame, to take his grief out on. He wasn’t interested in facts or evidence.

Once I was back in the dark and dingy part of the building, they began putting chains on me—around my waist, my hands, my feet, and anywhere else they could think to attach them. I saw Jason a few feet ahead of me, and they were doing the same to him. He was also wearing one of the old, ragged police uniforms. In front of him was Jessie Misskelley. He, too, was shackled, but he wore his own clothes. Perhaps this was another small way of punishing Jason and me for not giving them the confession they wanted.

They rushed Jessie through a door, and outside I saw sunlight and heard the roar of a crowd. It sounded like a referee had made a really bad call at the Super Bowl. Next they walked Jason and me out the doors at the same time. There was a circle of cops around me, all trying to drag me. I would have had to run to keep up with them, but there were chains on my legs and I had no shoes on. They dragged me across the concrete, ripping off two of my toenails and a fair amount of skin. The crowd went into a frenzy at the sight of us. It looked as though the entire city had turned out to see us, and they were all screaming, yelling, and throwing things. They wanted to crucify us right then and there. I imagine that was the closest a modern man could come to knowing what it was like in the Roman Colosseum.

I was tossed into the back of a car and told to stay down. There were two cops in the front seat, both fat and wearing the standard mustaches. They could have passed for brothers. The one behind the wheel quickly started driving at a high rate of speed. I was curled into the fetal position on the backseat, vomiting and dry-heaving. One cop looked back at me, cursing and swearing. In disgust, he spit, “That’s just fucking great.” No one said another word to me for the rest of the trip. I had no idea where I was being taken.

When we finally came to a stop sometime later in the afternoon, it was at a small white building with several cop cars parked outside. A few old, crusty-looking men with a hose were halfheartedly spraying the cop cars. As I was being escorted inside, I heard the cops tell them to wash out the backseat where I had gotten sick.

Once inside the Monroe County jail, the chains were removed and I was told to strip. I stood naked while one cop sprayed my entire body with some sort of lice repellent. Four or five other cops looked on while conversing nonchalantly. This was nothing new to them. Soon enough I myself would begin to view such events as nothing out of the ordinary. After my flea dip, I was given a pair of white pants and a white shirt to put on. One of the old car-washers from out front handed me a towel, a blanket, and a mat like preschoolers sleep on. The induction ceremony being complete, I was pushed into a cell that would be my home for most of the next year.

Twenty

The cell I was confined to on June 4 had four concrete slabs that served as beds. There was a small metal table bolted to the floor, a shower stall, and a television suspended high in one corner that picked up two channels. For the first week or so there was only one other person in the cell with me. His name was Chad, a white guy with a terrible case of acne and unwashed curly hair. He was there on a capital murder charge. He’d killed someone with a sawed-off shotgun while burglarizing their house. His back had already started to curve into a hump, like an old man, even though he was only sixteen.

Chad seemed a bit slow in the thinking department, if you catch my drift. He claimed he had been there for years and was quite excited that he now had company. He couldn’t answer a single one of my questions: he didn’t know where we were, or how far we were from West Memphis, or how to make a phone call, or anything else I could think to ask him. He’d just smile really big, throw his hands up in the air as if to say, “Who knows? Only the gods can say,” then rock back and forth for a while. Not so encouraging.

I didn’t find out where I was for a week. My thinking was that perhaps my whereabouts were being kept secret from everyone, including Domini and my family. I was worried about how Domini was taking it. My family and I weren’t on the greatest of terms, but when you’re drowning like I was, you’ll reach for anything. I was lost and alone and empty. Floating deep in outer space would have been no more frightening. I had done nothing to deserve this, and I was goddamned if these assholes were going to make me the sacrificial lamb.

I was still taking antidepressants, which the guards gave me every night. That very first week, I had the ingenious idea of saving them up and taking them all at once. That was the only way out I could see at that point. The situation was getting worse. There was no Sherlock Holmes coming to solve the case and let me out. Besides, what did I really have to live for, anyway? I would regret not being there for the baby. It would have been nice to stick around for that.

When I was in one of the hospitals, I had heard that 800 milligrams of the particular antidepressant I was on was enough to put you into a coma you’d never come out of. I wanted to be certain I did it right, so I took 1,200 milligrams. I swallowed the pills and sat down to write a quick note to Domini and my family. It was only a few lines scratched out quickly with a pencil. I don’t recall what they were and I don’t want to. That being taken care of, I stretched out on my concrete slab and flipped through one of Chad’s magazines. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he loved those pictures. He wasn’t too fond of losing the only company he had, either. I hadn’t bothered to hide what I was doing from him, thinking there was no need.

The main sensation I had was of being so tired it was physically painful. I wanted to sleep more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I closed my eyes and just let go. That’s when all hell broke loose. About ten guards came for me. Chad had told them what I’d done, because he didn’t want to be left all alone again, especially with a dead body. I could hear them talking but couldn’t make my eyes open. Someone opened them for me and shone a flashlight in them. Someone else poured a vile-tasting liquid in my mouth and told me to swallow it. It was some sort of vomit-inducing syrup. They put me in the backseat of a car and drove about 150 miles an hour to get me to a hospital. By that point I was so confused I kept asking myself if the drugs were taking effect yet, or if I was already dead. I tried to tell the cop behind the wheel that we would have been there by now if we’d all ridden on the back of a giant spider. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to.

I don’t remember much about the hospital that night. I know it was somewhere in Monroe County. I woke up for a moment when someone put a tube up my nose and down my throat. Two cops were sitting before me, watching, while all the doctors and nurses were moving double-time. Can’t let the star of the show die, can we?

Strangely enough, all the doctors and nurses looked like therapists from the mental institution. I was so discombobulated that I hardly knew what was happening to me, much less could think about where I was at that point. I was awakened a couple of times during the night by someone shining a light in my eyes and asking if I remembered my name, but I slept through the entire stomach pumping procedure. When I finally woke up sometime the next day, I found myself in the intensive care unit.

My court-appointed lawyer, Scott Davidson, first came to see me while I was in the hospital. He stayed for maybe ten minutes, just long enough to introduce himself and tell me my family knew where I was being held. He looked incredulous when I told him I was innocent. I would see him about three more times over the course of the next year, and never for longer than thirty minutes at a time. You would think that if a guy were going on trial, and could very well be sentenced to death, that his lawyers would spend a lot of time preparing him for court. Mine did not. He didn’t tell me what he would be doing to prepare for the trial or give me any idea of what to expect or to do in the meantime. Perhaps this is how capital cases are handled, I thought. After all, this guy is a lawyer, so he must know what he’s doing, right? Surely they wouldn’t appoint me a lawyer who was ineffectual or uncaring. I had a lot to learn.

The same court that was putting me on trial was also paying my lawyer. Look at it this way—are you going to employ someone who makes you look stupid and rubs your face in your own mistakes? No. You’re going to pay the guy who knows his place and sticks with the program. These guys get paid the same amount whether they win or lose, so why try too hard? Later, during the trial, when I asked why they didn’t push a point or challenge a ruling, they answered, “We have to work with the judge on a daily basis and don’t want to piss him off.”

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” disappeared, and “Innocent until proven guilty” had left the building. Once they go through all that trouble to accuse and arrest you, you’re going down unless you’ve got a couple million dollars on hand to hire some real gunslingers to come to your aid. I was a fool back then, though. Still wet behind the ears. I thought the purpose of the justice system was to see that justice is done. That’s the way it works on TV. While I was counting on divine intervention, they were plotting my demise.

The court system does not have the sane man’s mentality, even though it’s built on his back. It’s an insane snake of mammoth proportions, all tangled up in itself. It’s vicious and demented, biting any flesh it can reach. It’s so entangled and drunken that it will eventually strangle itself to death. There’s no way to convey its madness to anyone who hasn’t come into contact with its sluggish embrace. The people who operate within it have become as deranged as the lunatic snake itself, and justice is a foreign concept. They accept pointless and drawn-out procedures as religion. Nothing outrages them more than an idea that makes sense, and there’s nothing they’ll fight harder against. It’s no wonder there are so many jokes about lawyers. It’s only growing worse since the time of Kafka. There’s no way to understand it. It is a world without logic.

*  *  *

Once I was released from the hospital and taken back to the jail, I was put in a padded cell with no clothes. I lived in only my underwear for days. I’d heard of padded rooms all my life and imagined them to be like a giant pillow. It’s nothing of the sort. Everything is coated in a thick, greasy substance similar to rubber. More like a bicycle tire filled with cement than a pillow. Since I had no clothes, it was pretty chilly. One of the guys passing by slid some copies of National Enquirer under the door. I read them during the day and covered up with them at night. There was nothing else to do in there. It was just an empty room.

There was a small opening in the door, and sometimes one of the other prisoners on the block would sit by the door and talk for a while. Everyone on the block, with one exception, was a young black guy who had already been to prison at least once in the past. The only exception was an old man in his fifties. His hair was as white as his skin was black, and all the other guys would abuse and take advantage of him. He was given absolutely no respect. He would sit by my door and cry for a half-hour straight at times, like I could help him somehow. He was there for having two children with his own daughter. He was their father and grandfather at the same time. He tried to stay quiet and out of everyone’s way, but it didn’t always work.

I spent a week in the padded cell, talking to people through the opening in the door and freezing. Contrary to what I had been led to believe by movies and TV, none of the other prisoners seemed like hardened criminals who would kill their mothers for a nickel. Some of them were pretty funny. Every night after lockdown, someone would call to the guy in the next cell, “Hey, man, come here a minute, I need to show you something.” There would be laughter, then, “Shut up, fool, I’m trying to sleep.” Several times a day someone would beat on my door and ask, “You all right in there?” Their constant antics kept me from feeling quite so sad, at least until the lights went out. Once the lights went out and everyone was in bed, the despair came back full force. I cried myself to sleep many nights.

After I was back in jail for a couple of days, I was taken into an interrogation room by a guard. There I was introduced to two visitors: Ron Lax and his associate, Glori Shettles. Ron was a private investigator, he said to me, and had taken a particular interest in the case as soon as he saw the media coverage of our arrests. They started to ask me questions—did I know the children or the families, where had I been the night of the murders—direct and specifically about what had happened. They told me they had a strong interest in the case because they were very much against capital punishment, and could see that my being singled out made me the defendant most likely to receive the death penalty. They had contacted my attorneys immediately and requested to be the court-appointed investigators—a common part of a defense team—on my case. I was too shattered to take in what they were saying or to understand that they might prove helpful to my case.

When I got out of the padded cell a week later, I was taken back to the cell block with Chad. He was as pleased as could be because, counting me, he now had three roommates. While I was gone, two more guys had come in. Both were black teenagers, one named James and one named Nikia (everyone called him Kilo). Kilo turned out to be the second-best friend I’ve ever had in my life. This guy was really smart and extremely funny. We’d often say the same thing at the same time, or when I would try to explain something he would get excited and say, “Yeah! That’s it exactly!” He would slide across the cell-block floor on his knees, doing a flawless Michael Jackson impersonation, and I would laugh until my sides hurt.

We got a chessboard from somewhere, and I taught him the game. I had learned at some point to play by reading the instructions on the box. After playing several games a day for about a month, I could never beat him again. He kicked my ass every time, unless we played speed chess by my rules. This was a variation that I invented, and its purpose was to prevent you from thinking about your next move. Your opponent had until the count of five to move a piece, or you could legally start thumping him in the forehead. It was a very fast five-count, which gave you slightly under two seconds to grab a piece and move it.

Chad’s family brought him some games, too, so the four of us passed the time playing Monopoly, checkers, and dominoes. We all pooled our money, so that even the person with the smallest amount wouldn’t have to play without stakes. If my family left me twenty dollars, I’d buy twenty dollars’ worth of candy and chips, which was considered to belong to all of us. Kilo, Chad, and James did the same. We never had a single fight, which is a very rare thing when you’ve got guys who are forced to be in each other’s faces twenty-four hours a day.

The guards at the Monroe County jail were different from any I’ve ever seen since. They were nice, polite, well groomed—not abusive in any way. I was fooled into thinking all guards were this way. I didn’t realize I was experiencing a miracle. They treated us like human beings, and even let us do things the other prisoners didn’t get to do, like stay up all night. The four of us never were locked up alone; we made small pallets in the common area between our cells, and lived like we were having an eternal slumber party.

Kilo and I both looked with great anticipation to Saturday at midnight, when a television show called Night Flight came on. We were so starved for music that we’d listen to anything, and this was our only fix. It wasn’t the music either of us loved, but it was all we had. You never know how much you need music until you don’t have it. I missed it so much my heart hurt.

*  *  *

My mother, father, and Domini came to visit me once a week. We were allowed twenty minutes, and had to talk through bulletproof glass. Domini had been almost five months pregnant when I was arrested, but you still couldn’t tell it by looking at her. In the last three or four months of the pregnancy, she grew at an alarming rate. By July, her body was still the same size it had always been, but her stomach had become huge and tight.

On August 4, I was taken to a pretrial hearing with Jason and Jessie, where all three of us pleaded not guilty. Judge David Burnett, who had been assigned to the case after the first hearing with Rainey, presided. He was a Craighead County judge, his demeanor administrative and assuming—in his eyes, we were already convicted. He was just going through the formalities and paperwork of a trial. He did at this point “sever” Jessie’s trial from mine and Jason’s—Jessie’s lawyers were effective in arguing that the publicity surrounding all of us would damage his own case. In the back room, seated just a few feet from Jessie and Jason, it was impossible to speak. The three of us were shell-shocked. Jessie never lifted his head; he sat staring at his feet. Jason appeared angry, and if we managed to make eye contact, he shook his head at me in sheer bewilderment and disbelief.

I wouldn’t get to be there for the birth of my son. That was one more thing taken from me. A guard stuck her head in the door on the morning of September 9 and told me that I was now a father. So much for a celebration.

We had a boy. Domini gave him my first name, only spelled differently—Damian. I gave him the middle name of Seth, which is what everyone calls him. We gave him a third name, Azariah, just to be certain he’d never have an inferiority complex. I wasn’t there to sign the papers, so he has Domini’s last name. She brought him to see me for twenty minutes every week, but I couldn’t touch him. The only time I was permitted to touch or hold him was during the trial, a few months later; while the cameras were running, the court allowed me to hold my son for the sake of the film.

My father or grandmother would bring me five paperback books from a local secondhand bookstore every week, and I’d usually have read them all by their next visit. I had always loved reading, but at that point those books became my only way to forget about the nightmare of my life. I would hide in them and go someplace else for hours at a time. The other guys were amazed by how much and how quickly I could read. It was a trend that has continued to this day. I’ve read a few thousand books over the time I’ve been locked up. Without books, I would have gone insane long ago.

Five months passed in this way. I was still being given antidepressants, and there were the momentary distractions but they lasted only a short period of time—the unknown threat of an upcoming trial hung over me daily. In an October hearing, it was decided that Jason, only sixteen when he was arrested, would be tried as an adult. Despite the evidence that Ron and Glori told me they had uncovered, their findings often only underscored the thought that I would likely be given the death sentence. They told me that I would surely be convicted of murder, and that they were working toward the possibility of winning a case later on down the line by appeal. But first I would be convicted of murder.

Christmas Day came and went—it may as well have been the Fourth of July, such was the vacuum I lived in. Everything I’d known was gone, absent completely. Between this time and February 1994, I rarely saw or heard from Ron in person, though I was told he was investigating the case, and coming up with useful information on an almost daily basis. He reviewed the West Memphis police records and discovered inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and unreliable information and leads in the reports and offered them to my defense lawyers. Unfortunately, my lawyers (I was assigned a lawyer named Val Price in addition to Davidson) didn’t use or follow up on any of the information he found or leads he offered. They didn’t even call the witnesses who could have testified to my whereabouts on the night of the murders, witnesses Ron had tracked down and interviewed. In order for the information to be used, my lawyers needed to get a sworn affidavit from those witnesses, the extra “mile” that they never bothered to go for me. They never attempted to prove my alibi.

Glori did come to see me nearly every single weekend, and she always brought pizza. It seemed to me at the time that she really cared about the case, because she and Ron both went to tremendous lengths, visiting me on off-hours and telling me about their progress. I found out later that they were being paid by the court and hadn’t in fact done anything beyond what any investigator is obliged to do in this situation. But on my birthday Glori even brought me a box of cupcakes. We sat alone in a small office eating cake and going over the case. She gave me hope. What I’ve discovered in the years since then is that this is their job, to give hope. It’s a ploy, really, because they are just as much a part of the predetermined courtroom defense formula.

*  *  *

On January 26, 1994, Jessie went to trial. I watched news coverage from my cell—it was utterly painful to see. Jessie’s false confession was the centerpiece of the proceedings—it was the only so-called evidence the prosecutor, John Fogleman, had. It cemented our guilt in everyone’s mind and ensured our conviction before we could go on trial ourselves. On the eighth day, Jessie was convicted and sentenced to life plus two twenty-year sentences.

We were also being made the subjects of an HBO documentary. On June 5, the day after the West Memphis police held a press conference to announce they had caught the alleged perpetrators of the crime, an HBO executive named Sheila Nevins saw an article half-buried in The New York Times and shared it with two filmmakers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The headline, “3 Arkansas Youths Are Held in Slayings of 3 8-Year-Olds,” offered the potential for a provocative and salacious film about Satanism, human sacrifice, and debauchery of gothic proportion. Joe and Bruce immediately took a production crew to West Memphis and began interviewing locals, the parents of the victims, my friends and acquaintances, my family, Jason’s family, and Jessie’s. What began to emerge for them was a far different picture of the circumstances. Joe and Bruce both acknowledged that after speaking with locals, it was clear to them that the three of us were being put on trial for crimes we didn’t commit.

A few weeks before my trial, I was transferred to Craighead County jail in the town of Jonesboro—ostensibly, I was moved there to be closer to my lawyers, so we could strategize in the weeks before my trial. It was nothing like the Monroe County jail. The guards were all cruel and abusive. They talked to you as if addressing a lower life form, no matter how polite and civil you were to them. I witnessed them beating prisoners on an almost daily basis. Years later, as I was lying in my cell on Death Row watching the news, I saw that five guards had been fired in Jonesboro because they had handcuffed a prisoner and beat him unconscious. They were fired. No charges were filed against them. Most of the time they’re not even fired, only demoted. If you walk up to a man on the street and punch him in the face, you go to prison for assault. Do the same thing to a man in prison and you get demoted.

There was a small Mexican guy in jail there who suffered from catatonic schizophrenia. He would sit or stand in odd positions for hours at a time because of his mental illness. The guards would beat him just to see if they could make him move. It was a game to them. They often spit in your food to see if they could get you to fight. If you said anything at all, they’d call in five or six of their friends to beat you. Once you’re behind the walls, there is no help. The world doesn’t care.

In Jonesboro, I was put in a cell block by myself. There was no one to talk to, no books to read, no television to watch, and no going outside. I was locked in an empty concrete vault all day and night. I knew Jason was in the next cell block, because it was so noisy I could hear the guys on that side through the wall. He was on a block with about ten other people. It would have been a huge comfort to be able to sit in the same room with him and talk, perhaps try to figure out what went wrong, but the guards made certain we never even saw each other.

I slipped deeper and deeper into despair. Without a miracle we would die in prison. Jason and I were scheduled to go to trial together, though the attorneys were all fighting tooth and nail. Jason’s attorneys wanted a separate trial for him, to remove him somehow from my already established guilt. It seemed like the entire world was howling for my blood.

Twenty-one

February 19, 1994, the first morning of our trial, Jason and I were given bulletproof vests to wear to and from the courthouse. Emotions were running high and the cops were taking no chances. We would ride to court every day in a convoy of police cars—six of them, to be exact. When we pulled up out front we had to walk a gauntlet. There would be a huge crowd of reporters, and people who wanted us dead, and we had to walk right through the middle of them like Moses parting the Red Sea. The screams of hatred were so loud you couldn’t discern individual voices. Reporters shoved cameras and microphones into your face at every step, all shouting questions at once.

An interesting thing began to happen as the days passed. People who supported us and believed in us began to appear in the crowd, one or two at a time. They would smile or give me a slight nod as I made my way in or out. They were mostly young boys or girls standing apart from the rest, many dressed in black. I started to receive little bits of poetry scratched on scraps of paper. Someone sent me a single red rose. The supporters never matched the haters in number or volume, but they mattered a great deal to me.

There were a few odd cases, too. Ron started a ritual of pointing out the girls he said were “eye-fucking” me. As I got out of the car one morning a girl screamed, “Oh my God, he looked at me!” like she had just seen John, Paul, George, and Ringo rolled into one.

The reporters were the worst. If people knew how much of what they read in the papers or see on the news is distorted or outright lies, media corporations would soon go out of business. I’ve seen more fiction on local news broadcasts than I’ve read in novels. Quite often, the newspaper accounts didn’t match anything I saw go down in the courtroom. Valuable information went unreported and preposterous new developments were invented. One day, sitting in my cell watching coverage, the broadcast was interrupted with breaking news: a stick covered in a red substance and hair had been found in my mother’s now abandoned trailer. The announcement was made and regular programming resumed—but in everyone’s mind here was a possible murder weapon. In fact, it was a paint stick, the kind you use to stir a freshly opened gallon of paint. My mother had been disciplining her two Pomeranians with the end of a used stick—and before anyone did the logical thing, the media had their hands on it somehow. In a later example of the hysteria, during a post-trial hearing, new evidence was presented—they had found teeth marks on one of the bodies, and they did not match my teeth. There was no mention of it in the next day’s paper.

Burnett and Fogleman welcomed the media’s presence, and they (in addition to my attorneys and Jason’s) agreed to allow Joe and Bruce to film the trial for their HBO production—one would suppose because they assumed that they were going to be the centerpieces of a major legal victory when the trial concluded. Since both Joe and Bruce had visited me often in jail, pretrial, at this point, I had gotten to know them fairly well and I was used to the cameras by then. They didn’t discuss the specifics of the case with me, but asked me about my background and childhood, and often asked why the police might have focused on me as a suspect. They interviewed Jason and Jessie extensively, too. Their presence was comforting in the courtroom—amid the sea of outraged and angry people, their conversations and attention to me was the only familiar part of my life at that point.

It’s maddening to sit there hour after hour, day after day, on trial for something both you and the cops know you didn’t do. You feel hundreds of eyes drilling into you, taking in your every shift and move. Many seemed to think this was the greatest form of entertainment they’d ever witnessed. Vultures were stripping the flesh from my bones while I was still alive.

I never stood a chance. During breaks, the judge and prosecutors told jokes about me and smiled like they were awaiting a pat on the back. Burnett would comment on what a nice ass one of the female potential jury members had, and Fogleman’s teeth would stick out while he yuk-yuk-yukked it up. Convincing twelve people they should vote to have me murdered was just another day at the office for them.

Whenever evidence was introduced that could have helped me, the jury was escorted out of the room so they wouldn’t hear it. It was discovered that John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the children, had a knife with blood on it that matched the blood of at least one of the victims. My lawyers were not permitted to ask him directly, “Did you murder those children?” in the presence of the jury. Why? Because, they were told, he wasn’t the one on trial here, I was. It wasn’t really a trial. More like a formality to get out of the way before the guilty verdict. The parents and family members of the victims didn’t speak or act out in any way in the courtroom, though they spoke often and volubly outside for the cameras. I’d watch them on the news later in my cell. My parents, Jack, and Michelle, as well as friends of our family, sat watching every day. When I looked back at them from my seat at the defense table, they would stare back at me helplessly. I believe they wanted to do something for me, to help with my defense, though they simply did not know what to do and hardly understood the proceedings unfolding in front of their eyes. After listening and paying attention for a short period of time, I stopped trying—it was too painful to register the blatant “railroading,” a term everyone started using early on. Jason’s attorneys were very strict about our communicating; they did not permit him to come near me or speak to me, though we made eye contact once in a while.

It would be redundant to go over every detail, because the murder case and the trials have been documented at length in four documentaries and several books—in fact, you can read more about the proceedings at damienechols.com, wm3.org, freewestmemphis3.org, or at my publisher’s website. Many of the details that came to light during the trial I wasn’t informed about until much later, and much of the evidence (or lack thereof) that finally established my innocence was not found or introduced until many years after this time.

Jason and I were both found guilty on March 18, 1994. Ironically, it was the longest trial in the history of the Arkansas criminal justice system. I didn’t need to call a psychic hotline to see that coming, but it was still a complete shock. Perhaps it’s human nature to clutch at any little bit of hope you can conjure up. I did, all the way to the very last second. It’s devastating, even when you see it coming a mile away. As the verdict was read, I heard Domini start sobbing and run from the courtroom. I couldn’t turn around to look because my legs would have buckled. I was determined not to let them know how badly they were hurting me. I refused to give them that satisfaction. I would not cry, I would not faint, and I would not show weakness. I had to hold myself up by placing my hands on the table, but I tried to make it look casual. Inside, I started to die. There was no safe place in all the world for me. My stomach was filled with ice water. Hearing Domini was the final straw. Something in me broke. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men would never be able to put me back together again.

I did not sleep. A trustee—a prisoner who works for the jail—was stationed immediately outside my cell to watch over me that night to make sure I didn’t harm myself.

The following day I was sentenced to death, Jason to life without parole plus forty years. After the reading of the sentence, I was immediately rushed out of the courtroom and into a waiting car. As I walked through the crowd outside, someone screamed, “You’re going to die!” Someone else screamed, “No you’re not!” The car door slammed, and we pulled out of the parking lot. I was on my way to Death Row.

Twenty-two

To get from the Craighead County Courthouse to Tucker Max took about three hours. That’s an eternity to a man who doesn’t know what kind of situation he’s walking into. Everyone in jail has horror stories to tell about prison. A lot of people think jail and prison are the same place, and that they know what the penitentiary is like because they were once picked up for being drunk. Jail is preschool. Prison is for those earning a Ph.D. in brutality.

My mind was numb and I couldn’t think. I know now this was a combination of shock and post-traumatic stress disorder—the same thing experienced by soldiers who have been in a firefight. I shivered uncontrollably, though I didn’t feel the cold outside. My life was over. That’s the closest thing to a thought I could formulate. My execution date was set for May 5. That was a couple of months away. The attorneys had told me, “Don’t worry about that, your first execution date means nothing. Everyone gets one of those, but getting a stay of execution is automatic.” I’d like to see how well they’d laugh it off if it was their names on a piece of paper with a date next to it. Har har har, you jokers. That’s a good one.

My attorneys were so incompetent that they didn’t realize a motion needed to be filed in order to obtain a stay of execution. They found out before it was too late, but just by a hair. I managed to have a phone conversation with Glori, who told me that somehow one of them had discovered the oversight at the last minute.

Most people who go to prison first stay at what is called the Diagnostic Center. That’s where they give you a complete physical and mental evaluation. Jason was there for about three weeks, I believe, and Jessie was there for the better part of a year, at least. If you’re going to Death Row, there’s no layover at the Diagnostic Center. What would be the point? Physical health and mental health don’t really matter if you’re going to be standing before a firing squad. I went straight to the big house itself.

It was dark outside when we pulled up, but the place was still lit up like a Christmas tree. The lights are never turned completely off in prison, and there are searchlights constantly moving to and fro. I was taken out of the car and into the base of the guard tower behind the prison building, where I was strip-searched and given a pair of “prison whites.” That’s what they call the uniform you’re issued.

There was some fat clown in polyester pants, a short-sleeved shirt, and clip-on tie issuing orders. His air of self-importance would lead you to believe he was a warden or something. He had a horrendous little boy’s haircut and the requisite seventies porn mustache. He was not the warden. During the first week, another prisoner told me he was assigned to the mental health division and had no authority whatsoever. And since there is no budget, no resources or structured mental health services for Death Row inmates, he had no professional reason for being there anyway.

That’s a common thing in the prison industry: take some losers who have spent their life bagging groceries or asking, “Would you like fries with that?” and put them in polyester guard uniforms, and they blow up like puffer fish and march around like baby Hitlers. This is the only place they can feel important, so they fall in love with the job. It becomes their life, and they’d rather die than lose it.

The clown screamed in my face, “Your number is SK931! Remember it!” At that moment, I happened to glance at a digital clock, which read 9:31 p.m. I wondered if everyone’s number was the same as the time they came in. (It was just a very bizarre coincidence.) A nurse checked my temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate. They seemed to find it hilarious that my pulse registered like that of a rabbit’s in a snare.

After they finished, I was taken to a filthy, rat-infested barracks that contained fifty-four cells. Death Row. You’d be amazed at how many letters I’ve gotten from people who say they’re sorry I’m on “Death Roll.” I always picture that thing an alligator does when it grabs you and starts spinning around and around. It rips you to shreds and drowns you at the same time. The death roll. I was put in cell number four, and immediately fell asleep. I was exhausted from the trauma. Shutting down was the only way my mind could preserve itself.

I think my first phone call was to my parents, to let them know that I was alive. I don’t remember when I made that call, because the phone system at the time was so convoluted. You had to fill out paperwork just to make a five-minute call. It took about a week for the paperwork to be reviewed and then approved or not. It’s vastly different now, because the prison system has an agreement with a phone company to split the charges on any call; now, anyone can make a call just about anytime they want, as long as you can afford it. The prison profits enormously; a fifteen-minute call can cost you about twenty-five dollars.

When I arose from my concrete slab to begin my first full day of prison life, I noticed someone had dropped a package in my cell. Opening it, I saw that it contained a couple of stamped envelopes, a pen and some paper, a can of shaving cream, a razor, a chocolate cupcake, a grape soda, and a letter of introduction. The letter was from a guy upstairs named Frankie Parker. No one called him by that name, though. Everyone called him either Ju San or Si-Fu. He was a Zen Buddhist, and was ordained as a Rinzai priest before his execution. That’s where the name Ju San came from. Si-Fu is a generic term that means teacher in Chinese. He was a huge white guy with a shaved head and tattoos of Asian-style dragons on his back. The package he sent was something he gave to every new person who came in, to help them get on their feet.

His constant companion was a guy who greatly resembled a caveman. His name was Gene, and he had dark hair that reached the small of his back and a full beard that reached his chest. Gene was a Theosophist, a follower of H. P. Blavatsky. They both loaned me books on Buddhism and Theosophy, and answered countless questions. Listening to them debate each other on the yard was like watching a tennis match. Both of them lit a fire in me that grew into a decade-long educational process. I made my way through texts such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Isis Unveiled.

These two guys were no dry scholars. They loved to laugh, and nothing was more hilarious to them than the perverse. They were completely irreverent. It was not unusual to hear one or the other make comments such as “I like the way your butt sticks up in the air when you bow to that little Buddha statue.” Gene was a remarkable artist, and I once saw a canvas he had painted to look like a giant dollar bill. If you looked closely, you’d notice it wasn’t George Washington in the middle, it was Jesus. Look even closer and you’d realize Jesus had a penis for an ear. Gene lectured for an hour on what such symbolism meant. Believe it or not, I actually learned quite a bit from him.

I also learned quite a bit from the guy in the cell next to me, though I’ve never put the knowledge to use. He was an old biker from a gang called the Outlaws—rivals of the Hell’s Angels. He was a horrendous sight—three hundred pounds, blind in one eye, and barely able to walk. He was the epitome of hateful, old-age cunning. He was too old to fight, so he devised other ways to get revenge on those who did him wrong. He was known to befriend his enemies and then feed them rat poison and battery acid. A guy once stole five dollars from him, then found himself on the floor puking up blood after drinking a cup of coffee. He told me everything I needed to know in order to move and operate within the system. He also sold me my first radio. After not hearing music for a year, Lynyrd Skynyrd sounded like a choir of angels.

My first two weeks on Death Row were spent vomiting and sleeping. I suffered a pretty fierce withdrawal from the antidepressants I had been on for three years. The prison system spends a bare minimum on medical care for inmates, so there was no way in hell they were going to pay for a luxury item like antidepressants. Instead of gradually weaning me off the medication the way they should have, I was forced to go cold turkey. My sleep was troubled and I could keep nothing in my stomach. Even though it was agony, in hindsight it was for the best. After the drugs had made their way out of my system, I felt better physically and clearer mentally. I also lost all the weight I had gained while sitting in the county jail. You don’t get much exercise when locked up in a cage, so I had gained over sixty pounds by the time I went to trial. I lost that and more. At one point I was down to 116 pounds. My attorneys visited me maybe once, telling me they would file an appeal—none of it made sense to me, and nothing they said offered me any idea as to how I might take the next steps legally to appeal my conviction. Their primary goal was to keep me from participating in my own defense, and so nothing was explained to me clearly, and nothing was asked of me.

Almost immediately, though, I started to get requests from media sources asking me to do interviews. I thought this could be my chance to tell my story to the rest of the world, since no one else had articulated my side of the story. It was obvious that no one else was going to do it for me. So I granted a couple interviews, with disastrous results. A local news station got ahold of the footage of one of my interviews and claimed I had talked “exclusively” to them. In truth, I never talked to anyone from their station; they cut and spliced the footage to make it appear that I had done so. A newscaster would say something like “Here’s Damien Echols, talking about his leadership of a satanic cult!” They would then show clips of me speaking about something completely unrelated to anything they had said. That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst was when the prison administration decided to teach me the folly of my ways.

People in prison have their own language, and it takes a while to grow accustomed to it. For example, “Shoot me a kite” means “Don’t discuss business out loud—write it down and pass it to me.” “Catch out” means “Shut up and leave, or violence will soon follow.” “Reckless eyeballing” means you’re looking at someone a little too closely. “Ear hustling” or “ear popping” means someone is trying to listen in to your conversation. “Shakedown” means the guards are coming to destroy your cell in search of contraband. A shakedown is how my lesson started.

I was listening to the radio one day not long after my arrival when two guards came to my cell and barked out, “Shakedown!” They began knocking my things to the floor and walking on them, deliberately trying to destroy what little property I was allowed. My family had sent photos to me, along with a few books and the radio. One of the guards pulled a knife out of his boot and tossed it onto my bunk, then called for a camera. He took a picture of the knife and wrote a report saying he found it in my cell. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I thought being set up for things I didn’t do would stop once I got to prison. I was wrong.

One night at almost twelve o’clock I heard keys jingling in the hallway and knew they were coming for me. Two guards came into my cell, handcuffed me, and took me up to the warden’s office. One guard held me up by the hair as the warden choked me. I could smell the alcohol on his breath as he ranted and raved about how “sick” I was. One of the guards kept punching me in the stomach while repeatedly asking, “Are you going to tell anyone about this? Are you?” I had never been subjected to anything like that in my life. I thought adults were that barbaric only in movies.

They threw me in “the hole.” The hole is a group of cells located at the back of the prison, out of sight and hearing of everyone else. Temperatures can reach nearly 120 degrees in the summer, and it’s even darker and filthier than the rest of the prison. You aren’t allowed to have anything when you’re in the hole—no toothbrush, no comb, no deodorant, and no contact with the outside world. Its purpose is complete and absolute sensory deprivation. If sent to the hole, you spend a minimum of thirty days there alone, no matter what your offense. Beating someone half to death or making a homemade lampshade to go over your light both carry the same penalty: thirty days in the hole. The only thing that differs is how you’re treated while you’re back there.

While I was in the hole, I was beaten, starved, spit on, threatened with death, and subjected to various other forms of abuse, both large and small, all at the hands of guards. The reason? Because the warden said I had made the ADC look bad in the interviews I was doing.

It happened more than once during this particular episode. On three more occasions, guards came into my cell and beat me. Once I was chained to the bars of the cell while three of them took turns. Another time it was five of them. I was told that they planned on keeping me in the hole for a very long time. Every time the thirty days were up, they could just give me another thirty for something else. What saved me was that word leaked out to the rest of the prison, and a deacon from the Catholic Church heard about it. He told the warden that if it didn’t stop he would start telling people what was going on. They didn’t want to risk it, so I was taken out of the hole and put back into the barracks.

The thing about the prison administration is that they will abuse you as long as you’re quiet. The only way they can’t hurt you is if someone is paying attention. I started talking to more people, doing more interviews, because I knew only that would make them leave me alone. They can’t afford to harm you if the world is watching. They could not drag me into a dark alley if I had a spotlight shining on me. I even filed a lawsuit against the warden and some of the guards responsible.

In the end the suit was a waste of my time, as they once again chose the attorney who would represent me. I saw him once, about ten minutes before the “trial” began. He wouldn’t do one single thing to help me. I was refused the right to a trial in front of a jury, and he just shrugged as if to say, “Oh, well. That’s life.” Instead, a judge alone decided my case. I wasn’t even allowed to talk during the proceeding. We didn’t go to a courtroom; the judge came to the prison so the session could be held in a small room out of public view. The lies the administration told were pretty incredible. They “proved” that the warden couldn’t have done anything to me because he was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. Did the lawyer appointed to me investigate that claim? No. He sat quietly, drinking a soda.

Ultimately, that warden was fired, although it wasn’t because of anything he’d done to me. Some of his other foul deeds caught up to him. The worst of those particular guards were also either fired or promoted and shipped to other prisons in the state. The one who put the knife in my cell continued to work at Tucker Max for many more years, despite constant reports of abuse. Eventually, the ADC had no choice but to “take action” against him when he was caught on camera beating a handcuffed inmate in the face. No charges were ever filed against any of them. After all, it’s not like they were actually abusing people, you know. Just prisoners.

The cells of my body store fear the way others’ do fat. Every terrifying and traumatic thing I’ve ever experienced is still held within my muscle fiber as well as in my brain tissue. It pervades nearly every aspect of my life and influences nearly all of my actions. Everyone thinks of me as being so brave, but I recognize my own cowardice in all I do. Sometimes I feel fear building up in my throat like a scream.

One day a couple guys from another barracks had some sort of disagreement. They weren’t on Death Row, but were often on the yard at the same time we were. The disagreement escalated into a shoving match, and soon enough one of them produced the most infamous of all prison artifacts: the homemade knife. The man who had no knife tried to climb the fence to escape the one who did. If he had succeeded, the guard in the tower would have shot him dead and called it an escape attempt. However, he did not make it over. Instead, he became entangled in the razor wire that lines the top of the fence. Razor wire is far more unforgiving than barbed wire and will produce horrendous damage when it meets with human flesh. As the gentleman cut himself to shreds in the razor wire, the other guy stepped up and began stabbing him repeatedly in the ass. It was horrific. I have no idea how many wounds were delivered to the gentleman’s rear end; suffice it to say it was more than he wished for. This guy was none too liked by his comrades, who chose to taunt him by asking which hole he would now shit out of. This is a harsh world in which you often search in vain for a bit of sympathy.

As unpleasant as that scene was, there was one worse. There was an image that kept me staring at the ceiling on more than one sleepless night. The ignorance and cruelty of prison guards can’t be overstressed. They make their living by abusing men who are down on their luck. Never was a more cowardly profession devised. They love nothing more than to have a man chained and shackled so they can torture him at leisure. If that same man were unchained and unshackled, the guards would run for their lives, or at least gather up ten or twelve of their friends to provide “moral support.”

Two of these despicable men (I use the word “men” in its loosest sense) had been ceaselessly tormenting an inmate on Death Row. It went on for several weeks before he finally snapped. They soon realized you can push a man only so far, especially when he has nothing left to lose. Some of the guys on Death Row were playing a game of basketball on the yard when someone tossed the ball over the fence. When the guards opened the gate to toss the ball back in, all hell broke loose. Kurt, the man they had been tormenting, began to viciously stab both guards over and over. The one with the least amount of damage had been stabbed about seven times. Blood was everywhere. His weapon of choice was a piece of the chain-link fence he had pulled free.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you how this affected me. To see two men curled up in the fetal position and lying in puddles of their own blood is not something that ever fades from your memory. For quite some time afterward I would walk around in a daze, thinking to myself, What kind of world is this where such things happen? The only thing that’s ever affected me the same way was footage on the TV news of Iraqi terrorists beheading an American hostage. It’s hard to comprehend that such things still take place in this day and age.

As for Kurt, he didn’t look much better than the two guards once it was all over. When I was really young—about nine or ten years old—my stepfather took me on a form of hunting expedition called “frog-gigging.” My stepfather, stepbrother, brother-in-law, and I would go out at night into the swamp and float silently in a twelve-foot boat. I was the light man. This means while the other three were armed with implements that looked like extremely long pitchforks, I was in charge of sweeping a spotlight up and down the banks to find the frogs. I never was much good at it, because I found the whole affair to be entirely repulsive with not a single redeeming quality. At any rate, by the time twenty guards were finished beating Kurt to a pulp, he looked like a team of frog-giggers had been at him. That’s what I thought of every time I saw him after that. In my mind I saw him as a giant bullfrog. They had beaten him so badly it looked like he had two heads. It was even worse than it sounds. They tortured him right up until his death. You could see fear in their eyes because of what he had done to the two guards. They were so scared of him that they would go out of their way to appear unafraid. I’ll never forget it for as long as I live. What makes it all worse for me is that I know I should never have been sent here to witness it in the first place.

Twenty-three

The crew from HBO were still working on the documentary they’d started before we went on trial. I had mostly forgotten about it after I had been in prison for a year or so, thinking nothing had come of it. They had interviewed me, Domini, my family, the cops, the victims’ families, and anyone else who would talk. They had also filmed the entire trial, from beginning to end. I didn’t see the documentary when it finally aired in 1996, but many other people around the world did.

On a daily basis I started receiving letters and cards from people all over the country who had seen the film Paradise Lost, and were horrified by it. The overwhelming sentiment was, “That could have been me they did that to!” If you are to understand the impact this had on me, you have to understand that up until that point I had received no sympathy or empathy from anyone. Everywhere I turned, I found nothing but disgust, contempt, and hatred. The whole world wanted me to die. It’s impossible to have any hope in the face of such opposition. Now I was suddenly receiving letters from people saying, “I’m so sorry for what was done to you. I wish there was something I could do to help.”

A single letter like that would have been enough to kindle a tiny spark of hope in my heart, but I received hundreds. Every day at least one or two would arrive, sometimes as many as ten or twenty. I would lie on my bunk and flip through the letters, savoring them like a fat kid with a fistful of candy, whispering, “Thank you. . . . Thank you,” over and over again. I clutched those letters to my chest and slept with them under my head. I had never been so thankful for anything in my entire life.

I don’t want a “holy” life of prayer and contemplation. I want a life of strife, lust, striving, seeking, struggling, and debauchery. I’m not content to settle for one experience when there is a whole lifetime of experiences to be had. I am so hungry for knowledge that I live several lives at once to acquire it. A Catholic and a Buddhist, a reader and a writer, a sinner and a philosopher, a husband and a father, a Native American and a white man—I no longer have any desire to fit into any one category. I see no reason why I can’t love pornography and the art of Michelangelo equally. I want to see life from every angle. I feel as if I’ve learned a tremendous amount from my excursion into the realm of Eastern thought, philosophy, and practice—things I’ll carry with me to the end of my days. Still, it doesn’t come close to the lessons I’ve learned from, and with, the woman who is now my wife.

I had been on Death Row for about two years when I received an odd letter in the mail, in February 1996. It was from a woman who loved movies and had recently seen the documentary about my case at a film festival in New York. Her name was Lorri Davis, and she did something no one else had ever done—she apologized for invading my privacy by seeking me out. That really struck me, because I felt like I no longer had any privacy. My entire life had been exposed for anyone and everyone to examine and poke at with a stick. I was a fly that had its wings ripped off by a malicious kid. I was the proverbial ant under the magnifying glass. Every day I received letters from people who did nothing but ask questions about the most intimate aspects of my life, almost as if everyone in the world felt entitled to demand anything of me they wanted to know. Imagine being hounded by the paparazzi, but instead of taking your picture they throw rocks and try to dissect you.

Here was a lady who understood the value of common courtesy. She said she felt horrible about what I’d been through and was compelled to contact me, but she didn’t want to intrude. I immediately wrote back to her, and ever since we have tried to write to each other every single day. Our letters to each other now fill up an entire closet.

She’s the most magickal thing on earth, but it took me at least a year to be able to understand her, because she was so foreign to anything I’d ever known. She was from New York, college-educated, a world traveler who’d been to South America and as far away as the Middle East, and an architect who had worked on projects for people I’d heard of only from Hollywood movies. I was introduced to a whole new way of life through her.

We wrote to each other obsessively, and we spoke on the phone for the first time a month or so after that first letter. I just decided to call her one day—I was terribly nervous, knowing I’d need to improvise the conversation rather than script it ahead of time. She always laughs now when she tells anyone about the first time I called her. She picked up the phone to hear a deep, Delta accent ask, “Are you okay?” It was such a shock to her system that it took a second for her to reply. She said it nearly killed her. She still sometimes teases me about my accent, but her friends in New York often tell her that she’s started to sound like me.

Lorri came to visit me about six months later. I remember it was summer because she wasn’t wearing a coat. We had no idea what to expect, and both of us were on autopilot, for lack of a better way to describe it. We both knew we needed to talk to each other, and then to see each other. Lorri flew in the night before to be at the prison at eight a.m., when the three-hour visitation period began. She flew back to New York the same day.

It was a slow and gradual process, forging ahead together. In the beginning, I couldn’t have even articulated what we were doing because I had no concept of subtlety. Now it’s a personal obsession of mine, to know more of subtlety. I believe this obsession started with literature. The Latin American writer Julio Cortázar had had a huge impact on her life, and his books were among her most valued possessions. When she sent them to me, I was dumbfounded. I truly couldn’t understand why anyone thought these stories important enough to commit to paper. They made no sense to me. I had been raised to believe a real story had a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion in which the loose ends were tied up. These stories seemed to defy logic.

I knew I was in love with Lorri when I started to wake up in the middle of the night furious and cursing her for making me feel the way she did. It was pain beyond belief. Nothing has ever hurt me that way. I tried to sleep as much as possible just to escape. I was grinding my teeth down to nubs. Now, years later, it’s exactly the opposite. Now there is no pain, yet she still makes my heart explode. Now there is only fun and love and silliness. She drives me to frenzy, because I can never get enough.

For the first two years we knew each other, Lorri flew from New York to Arkansas about every other month, so in addition to the phone bill, this was an extremely expensive relationship for her.

When she came to see me, there was a sheet of glass separating us. It was maddening, and we would often blow through the screen at the bottom of the glass just to feel each other’s breath. I loved to sit and look at Lorri, as she has an absolutely perfect body. It’s every man’s fantasy, like a 1950s pinup model. To have such intelligence in a body like that is a miracle. She takes exquisite care of herself, and it shows. It inspires me and makes me always try harder to be better for her.

The thing is, I do things just to dazzle her. She says I know everything, and she is always amazed by the information I can supply on any topic she thinks of. I devour books by the boxful, just to impress her with what I know. I exercise twice a day—push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, running in place, and yoga—just so she’ll be as enamored of my body as I am of hers.

Lorri and I weren’t able to touch each other at all until December 1999, when we were married. We had the only Buddhist wedding ceremony in the history of the Arkansas prison system. The guards had no idea what to make of it. It was a small ceremony that lasted about forty-five minutes, and we were allowed to have six friends there to witness it. They were friends and supporters of us both. Afterward, people said it was so beautiful they forgot it was taking place in a prison. At one point, I broke out in a cold sweat and nearly fainted, just because that’s every man’s genetic predisposition to weddings. After we were married, Lorri and I were permitted to be in the same room with each other, but every visit we had while I was imprisoned was chaperoned.

Lorri had moved to Little Rock in August 1997 to start a whole new life and to be near me. She kept and still keeps every aspect of my life—and my ongoing legal case—neatly filed and managed, even when I rebel against it. She now represents me to the world at large. When she attends a meeting on my behalf, everyone has learned that it’s the same as if I were sitting there. She’s the only person I’ve ever trusted to take care of me as if she’s taking care of herself. When things need to be done “out there,” I can rest easy knowing she will tend to it.

I spend every day of the week looking forward to Friday, when we have our weekly “picnic” in a visitation cell. Everything else is just a countdown to those three hours. We don’t spend all our time waiting on some distant day when I’m out of prison, because we have a life together right here and now. This is our life, and there is not a moment when we’re not in each other’s minds and hearts.

Her parents are extremely supportive of our relationship and make trips to the prison for occasional visits. They’ve been a hell of a lot more accepting than I would have been if I had a daughter and she announced that she’d married a guy on Death Row. My son loves her as well, and she gets to take on the role of stepmother whenever he comes for a visit. She’s better suited to the role of parent than I, because I’ve still not gotten used to someone addressing me as “Dad.” In the early years, Domini brought Seth to visit me twice—after that, she would send him by plane to meet Lorri, who brought him to visit, though after he was about twelve, he and his mother just stopped visiting. This happens all the time: in the first year or two family will visit weekly or monthly; after that, their lives continue on, and the visits taper off.

I would go through everything I’ve been through again if I knew that’s what it would take for Lorri to find me. She found me when I was drowning and breathed life into me. I had given up and she gave me hope. For the first time in my life I am whole.

Any friendship that is worth its weight is like a dark and secret place where you hide bits of yourself. The door can be opened only by the two people who have the key, and you carry it with you wherever you go. Magnify that by a billion, and you begin to get an idea of what marriage is like.

Lorri and I have struggled, fought, wept, and laughed as we were forced to discover new connections. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who has the tenacity and willpower to keep going when all others would have given up and walked away in defeat. We’ve had to take turns guiding each other through dark places. In the end it has helped us create a stronger bond than those who get to live together under the same roof. We’ve grown together as a single organism.

Times have been both hard and magickal. I’ll never forget the Christmas we spent brokenheartedly whispering to each other on the phone, listing all the presents we would so dearly have loved to be able to give the other. Sometimes we decide on television programs to watch at the same time, and it’s as if we’re going to the movies on a date. We adjusted our sleep schedules so that we go to bed and get up at the same time. We talk to each other all day long. For example, I’ll think of something she said or did when she was last here and suddenly find myself laughing at her antics and saying, “You monkey!” out loud, forgetting for a moment that I’m alone in a prison cell. Instead, for that time period we are playing and cavorting together. We both do this.

*  *  *

I have a propensity to glance around the visitation area to see what others are doing or talking about. You see a wide variety of experiences and activities taking place. Some people are incredibly happy to be there with a loved one, and others show up late and act like they’d rather not be there at all.

One father showed up every week hoping to persuade his son to drop his appeals and allow the state to execute him. He had two reasons why this was such a good idea. The first was that he believed it was the Christian thing for the son to do. The second reason was that the trip to and from the prison was difficult to make when he came to visit. I turned away in disgust, unable to comprehend a parent who would encourage his child to commit suicide.

A great many visitors appear awkward, because they don’t know what to say to the loved one they came to visit. They glance around, clear their throats, and ask, “How ’bout them Cowboys?” thinking football the only safe topic. When visitation time comes to an end some people jump up, relieved the painful experience is over and eager to be on their way. Others clutch hands and hug, trying to get in one last kiss. A few cry as they leave; a few more laugh and call out raucous good-byes. Some convicts shuffle their feet and look at the floor; others stare at the retreating forms of loved ones until they’re out of sight.

Some convicts and visitors don’t even get to touch each other and have to speak through a pane of glass, like Lorri and I did for the first three years of our relationship before we were finally approved to sit in the same room together. Some people never get approved at all. Children stare at fathers without being able to hug them, sometimes for years at a time.

My parents separated again during the first year I was in prison. They both continued to live in the West Memphis and Marion area. My father came to visit regularly during the first year, and brought his new wife. He stopped visiting after 1997. My mother also remarried. She usually came to visit me two, maybe three times a year in the early years. She couldn’t come more often, because she couldn’t afford it. She has never owned a car that cost more than a few hundred dollars and so had no means of making the long trip to the prison—nor could she afford a trip to the vet when her beloved cat got into a fight with a possum.

During one visit she sat across from me in a hard plastic chair, slowly eating her way through a bag of pork skins bought from the prison vending machine and describing every detail of performing an amputation on the family pet. She spoke with a tremendous amount of pride in her accomplishment as I squirmed in my chair and tried to keep from becoming violently ill. She was clearly pleased with her handiwork and couldn’t understand why anyone would not be in awe and pat her on the back. She seemed to view herself as the Mother Teresa of the cat world.

The unfortunate feline came home with one of its back legs bitten most of the way off. She held the little guy’s leg together and bandaged it up, hoping it would miraculously grow back together. It did not. Soon the cat began to stink of rotting meat as gangrene set in. After she realized the smell was not going to get any better, she called the vet and asked for advice. The vet told her she had two choices—the cat could either be “put to sleep,” or they could amputate the leg, which would cost what amounted to a small fortune when you’re poverty-stricken.

My mother couldn’t stand the thought of having the animal put down, and she couldn’t afford the amputation, so she decided to do it herself. From old movies she had learned that ether renders people unconscious, so she figured it would work on the cat. Her first step was to buy something from an auto parts store that was in a can labeled “Ether.” Since ether isn’t something a person can just march into a corner store and buy, God only knows what the can contained. She poured the liquid into a Mason jar and held the cat’s head over it, forcing her patient to inhale the fumes. Other than causing the creature to struggle, it didn’t seem to have any effect.

She decided pills were the next-best option, and she scoured the medicine cabinet. The cat was promptly forced to swallow both a Valium and a muscle-relaxer that had been prescribed for my mother. The cat had ingested enough painkiller to fell a large adult human. After a few minutes it was no longer even moving. The only sign of life was the loud, nonstop purring that emanated from its small, inert form.

Her next step was to lay out her surgical instruments, which were limited to a garbage bag, a large pair of shears, and a small sewing kit. The garbage bag was used to cover the kitchen counter and contain the mess. The unlucky bastard was placed on the makeshift surgical table, where my mother stood with shears in hand. She realized she couldn’t bring herself to do the actual cutting “because the cat trusted me too much,” so she recruited her new husband to take part in the operation. The husband took up the shears and severed the tiny leg with one good chop while my mother held the cat’s head and gave it what comfort she could.

The stump was then washed with cold water under the kitchen faucet (“I figured the cold water would help stop the bleeding”) and the wound was drenched in hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. After finding it impossible to sew the wound shut, she decided to experiment with a new product on the market called Liquid Skin. This stuff would normally be used in place of a Band-Aid to cement together the edges of a minor cut. My mother used it to seal off the cat’s stump.

I was doubled over and clutching my head in my hands. When I managed to sit up straight I saw my mom dusting the last of the pork skin crumbs from her hands, and Lorri looking like she was going into shock.

“So the cat’s okay?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, he’s just fine. He falls over sometimes when he loses his balance, and sometimes he forgets he doesn’t have a leg and his stump twitches when he tries to scratch his head with it, but other than that he’s hopping around just fine.” She was clearly proud of herself and beamed with pleasure.

Mothers are odd things. We’re quick to think of their nurturing aspects, but there is also some sort of strange darkness there. It tends to be much stronger in connection with sons than with daughters. It’s easy for a mother to cross an invisible line and enslave a son with kindness. There’s nothing more revolting than a man incapable of slipping his mother’s apron strings. He will always revert back to a boy in her presence. I see boys with unnatural attachments to their mothers all the time. It’s a sign of the times in which no one ever grows up. We live in soft times.

My mother’s just not capable of feeling things very deeply. Or at least not as deeply as I do. Not anger, love, hatred, or anything else. You could insult her, tell her you hated her, and she’d play off the drama of the moment, but the very next day she’d act as if nothing ever happened. My grudge is always there, and my moods are not flippant.

Twenty-four

I am a Sagittarius, a fire sign. Sagittarians are known for their need to keep moving, exploring, learning. Much like fire, Sagittarians must be fed or they will die. What they must be fed is a constant stream of new experiences. There aren’t many journeys to be undertaken when locked in a cage. Outward motion comes to a complete standstill. You have two choices: turn inward and start your journey there, or go insane.

There is no time in prison, unless you create it for yourself. People on the outside seem to believe time passes slowly in prison, but it doesn’t. The truth is that time doesn’t pass at all. It’s an eternal vacuum, and each moment is meaningless because it has no context. Tomorrow may as well be yesterday. That’s why there’s so much stagnation inherent in prison life—because there is no momentum of any sort.

There is only one way to avoid being swallowed whole by malaise, despair, and loneliness, and that is to create a routine you stick to no matter what. A physical routine, a mental routine, and even a spiritual routine. You don’t pass time—you create it.

I began measuring time by doing thirty push-ups a day, and pushing myself until several years later I could do one thousand. I began doing ten minutes of meditation a day, and then pushed myself until I eventually reached five hours a day. It was only by becoming more disciplined, more focused, and more driven that I could prevent myself from falling into entropy and internal death.

One of the first things that both Ju San/Frankie and Gene told me was that you must turn your cell into a school and monastery. You will spend a minimum of twenty-three hours a day in that cell, all alone. After I was moved to Varner, I spent only three hours a week out of my cell, when Lorri visited. Most people can’t take being forced to come face-to-face with themselves, so they become loud and mean, like baboons looking for a shiny object to distract themselves. The number one distraction is television. Most people in prison grow fat and out of shape as they spend endless hours in front of the TV. They’ll watch football, basketball, baseball, soap operas, The Jerry Springer Show, Judge Judy, and anything else that crosses the screen. They watch TV from the moment they get up in the morning until the moment they go to bed. If I didn’t want to become a brain-dead, shuffling, obese Neanderthal, I had to nip it in the bud and not allow myself to fall into the pattern.

I moved from one area of study to another. In addition to the Theosophy texts from Gene and the Buddhist texts from Ju San, I began practicing a kind of Christian mysticism described in A Course in Miracles. I was introduced to this school of thought by a gentleman named Mike. I never could figure out if the guy was a genius or a psychopath. He wasn’t actually a Death Row inmate, he was what is known as a “porter.” He was doing a life without parole sentence, and his job was to keep Death Row clean. Sweeping, mopping, washing windows, scrubbing the showers, dusting, et cetera—those were his jobs.

I awoke one morning at two because of a scritch-scritch-scritching noise. Getting up to see what it was, I saw Mike on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush. When I asked him exactly what in the hell he was doing, he explained that he no longer needed sleep so he figured he might as well use his time constructively. That was a typical Mike answer. He said only the ego needs sleep. He was also prone to having visions. He once told me he was shown in a vision that if he fasted for a week, he could reward himself with ice cream. (If someone indeed sends you money for your account, the prison has a short list of things you can buy. Ice cream is one of them.) Just when you were positive he was insane, he would do something to stop you dead in your tracks with wonder.

A Course in Miracles is a book of practices that takes you a year to complete if you follow each lesson. Its aim is to completely change the way your mind has been programmed to think since birth. You come to experience reality in an entirely different manner, in which anything is possible. It’s based on quantum physics but uses biblical terminology. It’s become rather popular in recent years, and there are study groups devoted to A Course in Miracles all over the country.

Mike hung out in front of my cell every day, sitting on a five-gallon bucket. Our only topic of conversation was A Course in Miracles and how it related to the Kabbalah, a book of Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalah is what we dedicated our time to learning about after finishing Miracles. Mike was learning from a guy in general population who was a Kabbalist, then he would come and explain things to me. You’d be amazed by how many students of various forms of mysticism you can find in prison. These prisoners are usually determined to make the most of their time and not repeat the same mistakes. These are men starving for a kind of knowledge not given in the mundane world, ready to learn and pass on what they already know. I would continue my study alone for a while after Mike was sent to another part of the prison.

Next I went on to learn about the philosophy and practice of an organization known as “The Golden Dawn.” This was a group of people who practiced metaphysical rites of passage to mark the different stages in the evolution of consciousness. It was all about the constant learning and growth process that everyone goes through, and how to speed it up. The great poet W. B. Yeats was one of the more well-known students of this school of thought. I had my nose in these books morning, noon, and night.

Many people donated money to a college fund that was set up for Jason and me, so I began taking courses from a local college here in Arkansas. At first I was interested mostly in psychology, but I mixed in a few other subjects, such as sociology and reading German, for good measure. Psychology seemed infinitely interesting to me, with all of its experiments and nature-versus-nurture debates—but I don’t think anyone’s surprised at this point to hear I became interested in psychology. . . .

I later realized psychology was not my love at all—it was history. I’ve grown to love history more than any other subject, and I have come to believe you can understand far more about the world through history than you can through psychology, especially military history. At first I delved into every aspect and every era of history, but gradually my scope narrowed as I began to realize what I was drawn to.

My love is Italian history, specifically the history of the cities of Florence and Venice, in the period between 1400 and 1800. My role model is Cosimo de’ Medici, though I also like his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent. What I love about the span of time during which the Medici were in power is the social structure and all the intrigue that accompanied it. Among aristocratic circles, life was like a chess game. You had to weigh your every word, as conversations were filled with subtlety. Social success or failure could hinge on whom you were seen making eye contact with. Not to mention the decadent styles and fashions that were all the rage. No one wore baggy jeans and backward baseball caps. These days no one makes an effort.

And yet no routine or spiritual practice in the world will dim the reality of daily life on Death Row. A normal person does not commit murder. For almost seventeen years I’ve waited for someone to walk through the door whom I could have a conversation with, but it just doesn’t happen. The people here are all mentally defective in ways that range from mild retardation to extreme schizophrenia. Others are stuck in some no-man’s-land between sanity and delusion. There are no criminal geniuses walking these halls. Most not only are culturally illiterate, but also can barely manage to express themselves in English. I have never met a prisoner with a college education, and I can count the high school graduates on one hand. Nearly all lived in absolute poverty, and most were abused in one way or another. Not a single one of them is capable of functioning normally in society, and it’s not a skill they’re likely to learn when locked in a cell among others who are as bad or worse. I’ve yet to see any sign of “rehabilitation,” or any program designed to bring about that aim. Most of the people you meet in prison have been here repeatedly. Some have been to prison three or four times before making it to Death Row. They claim to hate and despise everything about prison, but they always come back. It’s like they’re collecting frequent flyer miles in hell. They themselves can’t explain it, falling back on excuses such as “It’s hard to stay out once you’ve been in.” Why? How? It’s hard to refrain from snatching an old woman’s purse? It’s somehow difficult to prevent yourself from committing rape? Somehow you accidentally found yourself burglarizing a house and stealing a car? I don’t understand why they don’t learn their lesson the first time around. That in itself is evidence that they’ve got a couple screws loose.

On Death Row we used to have television sets that were in stands about five feet in front of the cells. The guards were supposed to make security checks every half-hour, at which time they could change the channel if you wanted them to, but that never happened. I’ve seen up to eight hours pass without a single guard coming by. A convict once lay dead on the floor all night long after having a heart attack, and the guards didn’t find him until after breakfast.

With no guards around we had to devise a way of changing the channel on the television for ourselves, so someone invented what quickly became known as the “channel checker.” A channel checker is made with construction paper, pencils, and bits of pilfered tape. You’d be surprised at what a sturdy spear you can make out of these materials, and in essence that’s what a channel checker is—a spear. With it you can reach through the bars of your cell and change the channel on the TV set.

In the spirit of escalating warfare, a convict known as Chuckles and another known as “the hobo” modified their channel checkers in order to cause maximum damage. They used empty soda cans to fashion sharp metal tips, and then proceeded to stab each other in the face through the bars. They kept at it for at least an hour and both had shed blood before they finally tired. When someone asked what had started the whole thing, Chuckles pointed at the hobo and said, “He was trying to derogatize me.” No one knew quite what that meant, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Usually no one cared enough about Chuckles’s conversation to try to follow along anyway.

I applied that moniker to him myself and it stuck. Soon the entire population of Death Row recognized him as such, and he even began to refer to himself by that name. It just seemed to suit him perfectly. Chuckles is about five and a half feet tall, of average build, and looks exactly like a possum. In fact, his alias is “Kid Possum.” He has only one tooth left in his mouth, and it’s situated right in front. He claims that drugs rotted his teeth, though I’m more inclined to believe it was the simple lack of good oral hygiene. I say this because Chuckles has the breath of a baby dragon and has never been seen in the presence of a toothbrush. I once tried to use the phone after him and the smell he left on the mouthpiece made me gag. I washed it for several minutes with soap and water, but the smell remained. In the end I had to pour cheap cologne over it. He was overheard making the statement “I don’t drink coffee because it will stain my tooth.”

It’s not only his mouth that stinks, as Chuckles chronically avoids all forms of cleanliness. He’s the only person on earth who smells worse when he gets out of the shower than he did before he got in. He doesn’t actually wash himself, he just sort of splashes around while trying to talk to other people. The guards argue about who has to escort him, because no one wants to get close.

Chuckles arrived on Death Row after he was convicted of chopping two old ladies to death with a hatchet. Other inmates used to drive him into a frenzy by tormenting him with hatchets made out of construction paper. While making chopping motions they would imitate an old lady’s voice and cry, “No, Chuckles! Please don’t kill me! You’ll catch a capital murder charge!” Chuckles would go insane with rage and threaten to kill everyone in sight.

Chuckles and the hobo had more than one altercation over the years, and most involved throwing either feces or urine at each other. I once witnessed the hobo dash a coffee cup of urine in Chuckles’s face, after which Chuckles didn’t even bother to wash up. He simply dried his face with a towel and went back to business.

Men who cultivate filth are a regular occurrence in prison. They justify it by saying, “I’m not going anywhere soon, so why bother?” They’re referred to as either barbarians or Vikings. Although those called Vikings are crude, those considered to be barbarians have given up any pretense of civilized humanity.

Each day men are selected to work in the fields. They swing a hoe from daybreak to suppertime, and when they come back inside they are sweaty, filthy, and mud-caked. A Viking will strip off his clothes and go to bed without even showering. A barbarian, though—well, a barbarian will crawl straight into bed without even taking off his mud-encrusted boots. You can smell a barbarian from the next cell. I know from firsthand experience. I once lived in the cell next to a barbarian for about three months. I couldn’t even sit at the door to watch television without holding a washcloth over my nose and mouth. This particular barbarian even had his teeth pulled so he could avoid the formality of brushing them. Dentures would save him the effort. The thing that struck me as being the most odd was the barbarian’s insistence that he did not stink despite everyone in the barracks telling him otherwise.

I also had the misfortune of living next to another barbarian whom everyone called “Big Blue.” This name was in reference to the fact that he wore the same pair of underwear every single day until they turned a dingy bluish-gray color. In truth it wasn’t even underwear, but long johns that he had cut the legs off of. After about a year they were nothing but a tattered rag filled with holes and dangling fringe. Unlike Chuckles or the barbarian, Big Blue had a valid excuse—he was stark raving mad.

I noticed that Big Blue watched the news every morning with the intensity of a cat sitting outside a mouse hole. He confided in me that it wasn’t the news he was watching, it was the time and temperature readings in the corner of the screen. He wouldn’t take his eyes off those tiny numbers because he believed it was a secret message being sent to him. Who was sending him these messages? It was “they.” He either couldn’t or wouldn’t be more articulate than that, nor did he elaborate on what those messages were. I must admit that after he told me this I found that my eyes kept drifting to the corner of the screen, as if to be certain there was nothing there but numbers.

I live with men who haven’t been in contact with reality for years. The truth is that insanity is rampant on Death Row, as is retardation. The law says that the insane and the mentally retarded (the law’s terminology, not mine) cannot be executed, yet it happens on a regular basis. It’s both sad and frightening. It’s sad because many of them don’t even comprehend that they’re on Death Row or what awaits them.

The mentally handicapped are executed on a regular basis while the politicians all give speeches about being tough on crime. I’ve never come across a single murderer who possessed the mental faculties required to fully comprehend the horror of what they have done. They are not emotionally developed enough to feel empathy. They live lives of nightmare, yet are not even capable of realizing that. They are the dregs of humanity, by both birth and choice. Prison and the prison mentality are not what society has been led to believe they are. These people cannot even take care of themselves, and they suffer from every health problem imaginable. There are no attractive murderers here. It’s like the ugliness inside them manages to transform their facial features so that the outside resembles the inside. There are no conversations here. There are threats, taunts, and screams, but a conversation is an impossibility. Concepts such as love, honor, and self-respect are as foreign to this place as French cuisine. I waver between the extremes of pity and disgust.

The prison system makes no effort to help the mentally ill. There are no therapy sessions, no treatments, no cutting-edge drugs. The only thing they do is shoot them full of Thorazine if they start to get riled up. You can spot a man doing the Thorazine shuffle from a mile away. His every action takes ten times longer than it should, because it takes him a Herculean effort to move.

For many people in prison their worst fear is going insane, because once you do all hope is lost. You will be locked up not only within these walls, but also within your own rapidly degenerating mind. There is no help, and you wouldn’t even be able to work on your own case in order to get your death sentence converted. You would sit in a cell playing with feces and screaming at phantoms that no one else could see. This is not the place you want to lose your marbles. If it begins to feel like the walls are closing in on you, then you have to come up with a way to work through it or shake it off.

Sometimes it’s even more disturbing to see the cases of mental retardation on Death Row than it is to see the insane. I say this because there is often something very childlike in the actions of the retarded. To see a retarded person being led to execution is an abomination. It’s something that should never happen, yet it does. Sometimes even innocent retarded people are executed, which is a double travesty.

There was a guy here who had the IQ of a child, and it was common knowledge that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of. He was here because he was taking the blame for something his brother had done. He was eventually executed in his brother’s place. The guy was blatantly and obviously retarded, and he lived on a diet of potato chips, candy bars, and cake. He acquired the money for these things from a nun who came to see him every so often. Sometimes his mother would come see him, and since they had nothing to talk about they would both put their heads down on the table and sleep. It was heartbreaking to witness. I don’t recall ever seeing him take a shower. He just sat silently in his cell until the day he was killed.

Everyone seems to agree that it’s wrong to execute the retarded, yet it continues to happen. There are retarded people awaiting execution right now. There’s one who often has to repeat himself several times because no one can understand what he’s saying. Another strings words together that make no sense. He calls people names such as “Fish More” and “Fuck Bart.” He paces his cell at four o’clock in the morning yelling, “Twiddle your fingers! Twiddle your fingers! Let’s roll!” and then follows it with a string of obscenities.

A sane man can be reasoned with and talked to; you can guess his motives and predict his actions. A madman, on the other hand, may try to kill you, because he’s convinced it’s God’s will. Like Nu-Nu.

The threat of violence hangs over Nu-Nu like a black cloud. He’s not someone you would want sleeping under your roof or hanging around behind your back. If ever there was a clear-cut case of schizophrenia, this man is it. Nu-Nu shot and killed a man in a coin-operated laundry. When the cops came to investigate they found a security tape with footage of Nu-Nu break-dancing around the body. I’ve often been awakened at two o’clock in the morning by Nu-Nu screaming at the top of his lungs. He claims that the nurses in the inmate hospital are drinking his blood and defecating in his food. The entire barracks has listened to him argue with a mirror for hours at a time, threatening to kill his own reflection. He’ll then stop and begin preaching a sermon in a very calm voice, instructing his congregation to “open up to the Book of Psalms and hold it down by your left nut.”

Others are equally insane but more harmless. I’ve no doubt that they murdered someone at one time, but it’s almost as if their drive to kill died along with their victims. Now they’re just burned-out lunatics.

We have a character here who is stuck with the unfortunate name of “Patches.” Patches despises this name and would gleefully murder anyone who uses it. Anytime you call him by that name he stares at you with the glint of pure, unadulterated hatred in his eye. He was given this name because he sports a hairdo exactly like George Jefferson in the old sitcom The Jeffersons—an Afro around the sides and nothing on top. Someone once pointed out that he had patches of hair missing, and it stuck. Patches was born.

Patches isn’t the sort of guy you’d want to strike up a friendship with. He goes out of his way to cause more frustration for anyone he can. Patches is the guy who will change the channel just because he knows you’re watching television. He’ll pretend to be on the phone just so you can’t use it. To put it bluntly, Patches is an asshole. No one stays in a cell next to him for very long, because they quickly grow to despise him, then do whatever it takes to get moved away from him. Patches loves nothing more than to see misfortune visited upon others, and that is the only time you will ever hear him laughing.

Patches has a rather interesting collection, even by prison standards, and he’s rather touchy about it. If you approach him when no one else can hear the conversation he’ll show it to you. If you say something about it where others can hear, he’ll deny that it exists and then swear at you for the rest of the day. The odd thing is that nearly everyone has seen his collection at one time or another and knows that he is lying when he pretends ignorance. Those who wish to torment him will yell out across the barracks and ask him about it. This action is met with either explosive rage or deathly quiet. The only other thing that infuriates him even half as much is when someone starts singing that song from the seventies, “Patches, I’m depending on you, son.”

So what exactly is it that Patches collects? She-male porn. Patches collects pornography that falls under such colorful titles as “chicks with dicks.” Not only does he hoard it like treasure, he turns it into pop-up books that are cleverly disguised as birthday cards. He guards them like a Fort Knox of perversity, as if he believes everyone is out to steal his hard work. You see, this hoard of pop-up she-male porn is interactive. He takes a razor blade and combs through porn magazines in search of penis pictures. He carefully cuts out the picture of the penis and then cuts slits in the pictures of his half-men, half-women so he can slide the penis in and out of the slit. It is indeed disturbing, but no one can deny that Patches is a man who knows just what he likes.

As odd and unpleasant as Patches can be, there are those here who more than match him. A fine example of this sad species would be J.C.

I first noticed J.C. after I’d been here a few months and was moved up to a cell on the third floor. I could not look at him without being reminded of a scarecrow, and he greatly resembled Iggy Pop. He had long, graying hair and was rail thin, every muscle in his torso greatly defined. He constantly worked out, which is what he was doing the first time I really paid any attention to him. I looked over to see him doing squats and wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I did a double-take to see what the little black spots scattered over his body were. Closer scrutiny revealed them to be crickets. Big, black crickets. They were stuck to his shoulders, chest, and stomach with tiny pieces of Scotch tape. There was even one on his neck. He was fond of calling them his “babies” and knew how to make them chirp simply by touching them in a particular way. He had them, or their descendants, for quite a while before the guards went into his cell and flushed them all down the toilet. J.C. seemed to be genuinely torn up over their loss, as if he were truly attached to them.

J.C. was an artist of tremendous skill, though his subject matter came from the darkest reaches of a disturbed psyche. One day he was casually standing in the doorway wearing his uniform of nothing but boxer shorts. There was a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were squinted against the rising smoke. He seemed to be looking at something over my head as he tossed me a piece of thick art paper. It was rolled up and inserted into a cardboard tube such as you find in a roll of toilet paper. “Check it out and tell me what you’ll give me for it,” he mumbled before retreating into his cell. I unrolled the paper to see a flawlessly drawn naked woman’s body in a reclining position. The horrible part was that J.C. had drawn his own head on the woman’s body. I stared at it in shock, unable to move. It came as such a shock to my mind that I had no idea what to do. Scream? Laugh? What? In the end I did the only thing I could do—rolled it back up, tossed it to him, and said, “Sorry, J.C., but I’ve already got one just like it.” He accepted this explanation as completely plausible and passed the drawing on to his next potential customer.

Drawing was not his only medium of creativity. He once made matching handheld crossbows out of tongue depressors, Elmer’s Glue-All, and heavy-duty rubber bands. These were no mere toys, but were strong enough to pierce flesh. Some people got a little jumpy when they’d see him holding one, even though he never actually shot anyone. He wasn’t above whizzing one by your ear, but the only thing he’d actually shoot with them were rats. He thinned out the prison rodent population for a while. One day the hobo got nervous when J.C. started waving the crossbows in his direction, so he snitched to the guards. That put an end to J.C.’s gunslinging days.

J.C.’s most irritating habit was walking stark naked to and from the shower. He’d stroll up and down the tier at a leisurely pace, like nothing was out of the ordinary. This wouldn’t have been so bad if you could have ignored him, but he’d walk right up to you and try to carry on a conversation. This would tend to make people pretty uneasy. Everyone dealt with it in different ways. As soon as he opened his mouth some men would bellow in outrage, “I done told you! Don’t try to talk to me when you ain’t got no drawers on!” Others would glance around nervously, eyes shifting left and right to see if anyone was looking, and then try to answer him as quickly as possible so he’d move on. All in all, he could be a very amusing character, and no one was happy when the state finally executed him.

Another potentially dangerous schizophrenic was recently executed after spending twenty-two years on Death Row. He was here so long because he had been judged too insane to execute. The state finally medicated him so that he would be sane enough to appreciate the fact that he was about to die. There was no question about his insanity for those who met him. I’d known it since the day he spit in my face and accused me of giving him ingrown toenails. He was still screaming at me as the guards took him to the hole.

That’s something you never get used to. One day a man is there, the next he’s gone. It’s hard to make yourself believe that someone you were just talking to a couple of days before is now gone forever. These are men you’ve lived with for years, yet you don’t even get to attend the funeral, so there’s no sense of closure. The preachers all get a disgusting gleam in their eyes when an execution is at hand. They hover around the condemned man’s cell like flies, threatening him with damnation unless he buys the mentality they’re selling. They don’t have time for you unless you’re about to die. They never even stop to say hello until that point. Many men vow that they’ll verbally abuse them if they hang around their cells when execution is imminent. The sentiment is “You had no time for me when I was living. Now that I’m dying I have no time for you.”

The worst part of the weeks preceding an execution is the guards. You can tell they get off on it, because it adds a little excitement to their jobs. A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Correction will go on television to give a speech about how hard it is on them, but it’s nothing more than words to convince a gullible public how humane they are here. The truth is that the guards stand around and tell jokes about it before and afterward. They’ll actually be friendly to the condemned man for a few days before the execution, even if they’ve abused and neglected him up until then. This is done out of sheer morbidity. They want to be able to tell others that they had a conversation with the dead man.

Some of the prisoners can’t remember what you said to them or what they said to you just hours before. If you remind them, they will argue with you that such a conversation never took place. Others are grown men in their thirties who still behave like mean-spirited teenagers. Their mental development (what little there was) stopped once they began abusing drugs and alcohol.

To say that someone can’t hold their mud is prison slang for anal leakage. With that in mind I leave it to you to figure out how an inmate earned the name “Mudpie.” Mudpie could be no more oblivious to reality than if he walked around with a bag on his head. His greatest talent is lying to himself, and he makes it his life’s work to distort every piece of information that passes through his senses. If self-deception were an art, Mudpie would be a master. He’s the only person who can’t see through his own smoke screen. He says things that leave everyone staring at him in disbelief.

An example of his self-deception would be his addictions. Mudpie would sell his soul for cigarettes or marijuana. Anytime he knows someone in the barracks has some, he goes into a frenzy. He’ll beg from everyone and sell everything he owns to get it. He smokes so much that everything in his cell stinks of it. I once overheard him tell his father that he was soon going to be executed just so his father would send him money. It worked the first time, but the second time he tried it, his father called Mudpie’s lawyer and found out the truth—that Mudpie was nowhere near an execution date. Who in their right mind would fake their death for cigarettes? Ah, but Mudpie becomes very angry when you call him an addict and a dope fiend, and constantly informs people that he has “quit.” What that means is that he can’t find any right then. When called upon to explain why his father no longer speaks to him, he insists it’s because he broke off contact with his family so they wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. And he forces himself to believe it. He doesn’t see the contradiction in his actions—that if he truly didn’t want to worry his family he would not have called them with news of a nonexistent execution date.

Mudpie has been known to launch into a sermon about how he doesn’t believe in gratuitous violence, after which he threatens to kill another inmate for trying to change the channel on the television. At least once a day he’ll condemn someone for something he himself did the day before. He can be quite interesting to watch. I’ll see him screw something up, then tell myself, “There’s no way in hell he can put a spin on that. He’ll have to live up to it.” I’m wrong every time. He always pulls some trick out of his bag. It seems he would learn from his mistakes, but he never does. He brings a world of trouble upon himself time after time, and ignores the pattern. I’ve become convinced that this is now a necessity, because he’d probably commit suicide if forced to take a long, hard look at himself.

A great many of Mudpie’s habits and antics are repugnant, though some of them are hilarious. There have been many times when I’ve laughed at him until I couldn’t breathe. One such time was at the end of 1999, when he was making Y2K preparations.

Mudpie listened nonstop to a radio station that was home to a string of shows all focusing on conspiracy theories. At least once a year they do a show insisting that a giant asteroid is heading straight toward Earth, and all of creation will be wiped from existence on a given date. That date comes and goes with no dire consequences, but that never stops them from doing another such story in a year or so. It also doesn’t stop Mudpie from accepting every word as the gospel truth. Bigfoot sightings, UFO crashes, alien abductions, Chinese plots to take over the world, et cetera. Mudpie couldn’t get enough of it. Once they began doing shows predicting the Y2K computer crash, it was all he could talk about. He nearly drove us all insane with his constant prophecies of doom. The second that the calendar flipped over to the year 2000 we were all going to die, he told us.

One day as I was on my way to the yard I noticed a large stack in Mudpie’s cell. He had several cases of ramen noodles, a pyramid of sodas, boxes of saltine crackers, and about fifteen rolls of toilet paper. He explained that he was stockpiling supplies because once Y2K arrived we would no longer have food or water. I gave this a moment’s thought before asking, “If there’s no water, how are you going to cook all those noodles?” He described to me his secret recipe—he would boil the noodles in Dr Pepper while holding them over burning toilet paper. He had already been sampling the concoction in order to accustom himself to eating it. Alas, the delectable enterprise turned out to be in vain, as our imminent destruction was postponed.

The Y2K debacle wasn’t Mudpie’s only questionable culinary habit. Mudpie is a cheapskate of the highest order. Once, after he had eaten the last of the peanut butter from a jar, I saw him fill it with hot water and set it aside. I thought perhaps he was washing it out to use as a storage container. Instead he went back and drank the cloudy water in which the peanut butter scum was floating. Just getting his money’s worth. Others witnessed him do the same with a “squeeze cheese” bottle. From that day on, anytime he would argue with people, they would fire back with “At least I don’t drink cheese water.”

Mudpie was often seen wearing what he called “fart masks.” He fashioned these contraptions out of cologne samples he would tear out of magazines and position over his nose and mouth with rubber bands that stretched over his ears. They resembled surgeons’ masks. He wore them, breathing in pure cologne, at least twice a week, during the times he said the hobo had gas so bad it was gagging him.

In prison, pornography is more valuable than money. You can trade it for anything you may want. Mudpie collects pornography so that he can swap it to dealers who are capable of feeding his habits. I once had the chance to view his collection and found it more disturbing than erotic. One large sheet of paper featured nothing but row upon row of breasts. Another sheet was covered with vaginas. Yet a third featured anuses. There were no heads, arms, or legs. They had all been cut off. When I inquired about this, his response was that he did not need to see an elbow in order to “get off.” Although I found his taste to be crude and not very aesthetically pleasing, it made a certain amount of sense. Or at least it seemed to make sense until I saw that he also had a matchbox full of eyes. He had gone through a stack of magazines and meticulously cut the eyes out of every picture with a razor blade. He seemed deeply offended when I suggested that this might be abnormal, and insisted it related to a work of art he was creating. The tiny box of eyes then disappeared and was never seen again.

You can tell the long-term users by sight because of the toll it takes on their bodies. The most obvious are the ones whose teeth are crumbling in their mouths. Sometimes their breath smells like they’re rotting from the inside out. They smile with ruined teeth as they tell you how good dope is. No, thank you. I’m far too vain to indulge in anything that’s going to damage the way I look.

Just because they’re in prison doesn’t necessarily mean they no longer use. For the right price, guards are more than willing to help them get a shot of whatever they need. Some are alcoholics who brew their own. That’s very common. It’s made from the most God-awful ingredients you can imagine, and just the smell of it can turn your stomach The prison slang for such unpalatable crud is “bootleg.” It’s no Merlot, and you won’t see this stuff being bottled by Turning Leaf anytime soon.

I watch as men hand-roll cigarettes in pages they ripped from the Bible. They call it “smoking the Holy Ghost.” The ones with no tobacco will smoke anything they find—old tea bags, toilet cleanser, whatever. I saw one man fall to the floor jerking and foaming at the mouth after smoking something that looked like a handful of baby-blue rock salt. His eyes rolled back in his head while his feet tried to propel him across the floor in a concrete backstroke. These are hard days for fiends, and the addicts have long since sold their souls.

You don’t make many memories in prison—at least none you’d want to keep, or look back on fondly. It’s more like you have horrific scenes and situations burned into your psyche like a branding iron. The ability to create good memories, though . . . is gone. The ones you came in with are the only ones you’ll ever have. I would revisit mine constantly, trying desperately to wring every ounce of nourishment out of them that I possibly could. I was like a vampire, sucking them dry and then sifting through the dust in hopes of finding a drop I’d overlooked the previous hundred times. Sometimes I’d revisit a profound life experience; other times I’d chew over a minuscule detail like a hyena trying to find the marrow in the center of an old bone. For two weeks I remembered the handle on my grandmother’s front door. I remembered what it was like to look at it on a winter morning, knowing it was going to be as cold as ice in my hand. I remembered the way it felt to raise my arm and reach for it, to curl my white fingers around the gray metal. And then the best part—the gush of warm air that poured out as I pushed the door open. It wasn’t just warmth pouring over me, it was home. Bathing me, enveloping me, welcoming me. And then the door was closed again, the process beginning anew for the tenth time that day, or perhaps the hundredth. I lost count. The number was insignificant—only the experience mattered. You’d be amazed at all the little things you begin to remember when there are no new experiences to distract you.

Gradually, as the years passed, I could slip more and more deeply into this state of remembrance. Eventually the prison disappears altogether, and only the world in the mind’s eye holds any importance. I called this state by many names, one of which was the Land of Nod. Nod was the city Cain was banished to in the book of Genesis, and that’s how I felt—exiled, cast out. The world didn’t want me, so I would retreat deep into the Land of Nod.

Other times I thought of it as December. In my memories it was always December. December became another word for home to me. Then there were other times when I would swear the past almost had a personality. At those times I thought of it as Nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only friend that stays with you forever.

The most potent and powerful means I had of entering the Land of Nod was through writing. Every day I disappeared into the pages of my journal, scribbling from margin to margin, wallowing in the memories of a thousand December afternoons as my hand moved the pen. I filled a dozen leather-bound journals, many with the same memory examined from every angle. I never wanted to go back and read what I’d written because it didn’t really matter to me. I hoped, too, that perhaps someday the pages would be of importance to someone, somewhere—but not to me. The memories were for me, but the journals were for someone else. The journals were a castle I was building for some future magician to find and explore. There were rooms full of beauty, pain, magick, love, horror, despair, and wonder. Every page was a hidden corner. When I was inside those journals, deep in the Land of Nod, the prison ceased to matter. I was no longer slowly dying in a godforsaken cage. In the land of Nod I was more alive than ever before.

*  *  *

On August 22, 2003, I was transferred from Tucker Max to the Varner Super Maximum Security Unit in Grady, the same prison where Jason and Jessie were (though ironically, Jason was soon after transferred to Tucker). I was awakened at two a.m. by a group of madcap guards, funsters with M-16 assault rifles and attack dogs. They roused all thirty-seven of us in the barracks and two others who were in the hole, wrapped us in chains, and packed us into vans like sardines. There were eight prisoners and two guards in each van. It was a tight fit and a long, uncomfortable ride.

Once we arrived, we were placed in what amounts to solitary confinement. It’s a concrete cell with a solid steel door. We never came in contact with other inmates, and you could talk to the person next to you only by pressing your face into a crack and screaming. It was filthy. They cleaned the hallways and visiting areas if an inspection was coming through, but never inside the cells. I hadn’t felt sunlight on my skin in months. It took a while to adjust to the absolute confinement and isolation, but I had a hell of a lot more privacy, which is a rare commodity in prison.

I was forbidden to communicate with Jason and Jessie, per prison administration orders, though nothing had been declared legally and in spite of the fact that they were housed together and had been sleeping in beds side by side for a couple of years.

My first appeal was turned down by the Arkansas court system in 1994. Big surprise there, eh?

My second appeal, known as a Rule 37, encompassed the myriad complaints of ineffective counsel in my defense, and ultimately opened the door to the incomprehensible and unending legal labyrinth that became my ongoing defense and effort to be freed.

As I already mentioned, Joe and Bruce’s efforts culminated in the documentary Paradise Lost, which was released at Sundance and other festivals in 1996 and played in several small theaters, including the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and a theater in Little Rock. It had a huge impact on our case and raised awareness about the murders. Among the many people who saw it over the next several years was Eddie Vedder, of Pearl Jam, who was intrigued enough to reach out to my attorney at the time. Unfortunately and ironically, my attorney had never heard of Pearl Jam, so it took some time for Eddie to find someone receptive to his offer of support. In 1999, he finally made contact with my team and became involved in the fight to prove my innocence. His financial donations to my legal fund and his sheer devotion and energy in advocating for my release marked a pivotal moment in the years spent on my case. Eddie has shown himself to be a true friend time and time again. How many rock stars do you know who visit guys in prison when they come through town? It’s always a tremendous amount of fun whenever he stops by and tells of his latest adventures.

After ten years, Jason and I caught sight of each other on a Friday afternoon in 2004, while Lorri and I were in the midst of our weekly picnic. I looked up to see him about thirty feet away in the hallway, looking at me through the glass. He raised his hand and smiled, then he was gone, like a ghost. I wish I could have talked to him, if only to say, “Just hang on.”

That’s the same thing I keep telling myself.

Just hang on.

Twenty-five

I went through the HGA prayer ritual three times today. At about 8:30 a.m., around noon, and at about 6:30 p.m. I’ve been reciting the prayer exactly as written in Abramelin and then praying the prayers again in my own words, making them as heartfelt as possible. Some of the newness is beginning to wear off and cause it to seem like actual work. However, for some reason I can’t define I feel my faith in the procedure growing.

I had a dream that I was fighting with a lion and a dog on the street where I used to live in Lakeshore. I was holding the lion’s jaws open with my hands, even though it was tremendously painful. I kept the lion between myself and the dog, so that every time the dog lunged at me it would bite the lion instead. I eventually managed to dart through the gate and close it behind me.

When I was going through the last prayer today I had a pleasant experience. I was on my knees, head bowed, when I suddenly felt as if I were looking down into a room. The only description I can offer is that everything was white and, I’m tempted to say, made of marble. I was looking down on it from a height of between fifty and one hundred feet, but I wasn’t seeing it with my eyes.

From ecstasy to drudgery. I move from feeling as if I’m on the verge of something huge to dread at the thought of one more round of prayer.

Same as yesterday. All work and no joy in the ritual. I’m hoping for a second wind. I did about twenty minutes of hatha yoga asanas today to loosen up. I find that once I begin the HGA ritual it’s very pleasant. There’s something about it that has a timeless quality. It’s just the thought of beginning that I dread. I look at it as a child does homework.

There is no angel. There is nothing.

Everything is fractured, the pieces of everything come together, collide, then move away to collide again.

There is no such thing as magick.

I have lost all faith, lost all belief. I teeter on the edge of hopelessness. Everything is a fight, and I’m so tired. I’m so tired of struggling; I want to scream until I’m gargling my own blood.

The dreams are coming fast and fierce. Dreams of freedom. It hurts so much to wake up.

Time is coming apart for me. At some moments I can no longer feel a past, any past, trailing behind me like a snakeskin. At other moments it feels like the past is all that’s real. Today I was two people, one laughing at the other.

The summer is on me like a ghost. I’d cry with longing if it weren’t so pointless.

Nothing makes any sense. There doesn’t seem to be any point in trying. Everything falls apart. I’ll be thirty-two years old exactly six months from today.

My exhaustion is beyond bone-deep. It has seeped into my soul, and every day it robs me of a little more of what I once was. Of what I was meant to be. There is no rest here, and there is no life. When I try to look ahead the light seems a little farther away each day. There is despair on my breath and no savior in sight. They say it’s only death if you accept it, but more and more these days I’m feeling like I don’t have a choice. I keep saying to myself, “I will not stop. I will not stop.” If for no other reason than that I will it to be so. If everything else fails, I will keep moving ahead on willpower alone. There has to be some magick in something, somewhere.

It used to be that a certain wrongness danced across the ocean’s surface, crackling like chain lightning. Now the despair is more subtle, sinking silently beneath the waves and coming to rest in dark and poisonous places. The surface becomes pallid and exudes a sick, gray, greasy feeling that eventually drives you mad. It’s an endless cycle that breeds a never-ending supply of frustration. Its heartache is the color of lead, and nothing in the world can heal it.

Summer makes me suicidal. It sucks all the magick out of life, and even sleeping becomes an exercise in fruitless brutality. I cannot comprehend what is in the souls who await this misery. Nothing worthwhile can survive the heat. The birds and the bees are harbingers of hell, ushering in a season of disease. There is nothing in these months that speaks to me. It conspires to keep me from ever reaching home.

If you were to go down the line and ask each man what it is that he hates most about prison, you’d probably come up with a different answer for nearly every person asked. Some things are universal, like not being able to go out at night and see the stars, or not being able to be with your family—but each person also has his own pet peeves. For me they are the mosquitoes and the sleep deprivation.

It’s better here at Varner, but Tucker was hell where the mosquitoes were concerned. Tucker was surrounded by fields on all sides, and there’s one crop or another growing as long as it’s warm enough. The entire ground is like one giant mosquito hatchery. If you think you know what a swarm of mosquitoes is like just because you’ve been camping or sat in the backyard on a summer night, then you’re badly mistaken. I’ve seen entire walls covered by blankets of mosquitoes. Every time you take a step, a cloud of them rises from the ground.

I’ve literally cried in frustration more than once because the mosquitoes were such a torment. My hands have been bitten so many times they’ve become swollen and miserable. The skin on my knuckles was so red and tight that my fingers looked like sausages. You have to keep moving because if you are still they land all over you. Every year the walls look like abstract paintings because of the blood spots from the smashed mosquitoes. You can’t rest because they buzz in your ears, bite your lips and eyelids, and drive you to the edge of a nervous breakdown. This continues all summer long. It gets even worse when the mosquitoes discover they can breed in the toilets in the empty cells.

As you lie on your bunk trying to get what little sleep you can, there’s nothing more annoying than having mosquitoes buzz in your ears and bite your face. When you combine the torment of the mosquitoes with the suffocating heat it becomes more than you can bear—except that you have no choice. You can either try to sleep while fully clothed, with socks on your hands and your face covered (but then the heat is worse) or you can strip down in hopes of cooling off, at which time the mosquitoes will feast.

I’ve seen times when the entire barracks was filled with smoke because people were burning paper in an attempt to smoke the mosquitoes out. It doesn’t work. I’ve also seen a gentleman who couldn’t take it anymore, so he started to plot his revenge. He would trap mosquitoes in a small plastic cup, pull their wings off, and then urinate on them. Judging by the cursing and insane laughter that accompanied the act, I’d say he obtained a great deal of satisfaction through his efforts.

Today a bird landed on my dingy windowsill. The window itself is only as wide as the bird was tall. It sat there as still as a stone and stared directly at me for over an hour. I stood on my bunk with my face right up to the glass, but it didn’t fly away. Our eyes were only about two inches apart as we gazed at each other. The bird’s entire body was a dusty gray, but it wasn’t a sparrow. I know what a sparrow looks like. The odd part is how it sat perfectly still, with its mouth wide open. A thin string of saliva hung from the top section of its beak to the bottom, reminding me of a strand of a spider’s web. After a few moments I raised my hand and tapped on the glass right by its head. The bird didn’t even blink. It continued to stare at me with a beady black eye and an open beak. I’ve never seen a bird behave that way before. It feels like it meant something, as if it were some sort of bird omen. I’m positive that bird smelled like a coming rainstorm.

Twenty-six

The twelfth year I spent in that cage, was the worst one for me by far. My nerves were at the breaking point and my life was misery. That was the year I nearly gave up and lost all will to live. My physical health was rapidly deteriorating, the strain of trying to hold a marriage together in these circumstances was breaking my back, and I had used up every last ounce of willpower that I had. Then a miracle happened. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series. My sanity was saved by Johnny Damon.

There’s something mystical about baseball. Some wholesome and gleaming quality that makes it as much myth as game. I watch it because it soothes and comforts, it bedazzles and bewitches. When a player steps up to the plate with a bat in his hand he ceases to be a man. He becomes the embodiment of hope. He becomes a magickal force capable of battling sickness and black despair. When someone knocks a ball over that back wall you can make a wish on it like a shooting star. A man who swings that bat becomes a force of nature, an act of divine intervention. He punches a hole through the darkness and reminds us that miracles have not vanished entirely. He is a sibyl in a sport jersey, a conduit through which all that is good shines its light.

There are only two things within these walls that can soothe or relax me. One is to go to Mass, the other is baseball. There is a priest who comes to visit and takes up to three of us into a broom closet that functions as a chapel. He performs the whole Mass right in the closet, and he brings a bishop in for Christmas Mass, too. Having a baseball game on the television has the same effect on me as sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair. It’s a security blanket. When I have reached the very bottom of hopelessness, I will turn on a game, lie on my bunk, and pull the covers up over my head. I leave a tiny opening so that I can see the television with one eye. The sound of the announcer’s voice lulls me toward relaxation in a way that’s almost hypnotic. It helps me to heal.

Perhaps the comforting quality that baseball has for me stems from the fact that some of my best childhood memories have to do with watching games with Nanny. She was a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and never missed a game. When she would glance at me from the television screen, I would see that she had the eyes of a young girl. Something about that scared me back then, because I was too young to understand it. I didn’t understand that in those moments she was no longer a grandmother. She was no longer old, no longer the victim of creeping arthritis. She was light and young. She was a stranger to me. She was in another world.

I would sit next to her on the couch as she watched, or quietly lie on the floor. For Christmas she would buy me baseball cards, protective sleeves for them, and albums to store them in. Even though I grew up to be a Boston fan, there’s still a soft spot in my heart for St. Louis. When I watch them play I can still feel my grandmother near me.

Baseball is my escape hatch. When I’m watching it I become enveloped in the feeling that everything will turn out okay. It reminds me that if I just hang on long enough, anything can happen.

One morning in 2006, I called Lorri at our usual time, eight a.m., and she told me that several of the forensic experts had reviewed much of the evidence and come back with the same conclusion: that the vast majority of the wounds on the bodies were made postmortem, and they believed animals were responsible. It was a major development in my favor; however, there had been many of those.

The forensic testing had been facilitated by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who saw Paradise Lost in 2005 and sent money to my defense fund. They also reached out to Lorri, who welcomed their support and their resources with open arms. It was a turning point for me and for Lorri; although it would take several more years and certainly wasn’t guaranteed, Peter and Fran had much to do with my actual release.

*  *  *

Rumors have continued to mount that animals of a more mundane variety are responsible for most of the damage to the murdered children. It’s beginning to persuade even me, and I am a skeptical sort by nature. If I hadn’t grown so jaded I’d probably be growing excited. These days I don’t hold my breath when waiting on anything, because the nature of the game is false hope. They’ll string you out like a junkie time and time again unless you grow wise to the tricks. I’m not ungrateful, but I’m also not as young as I once was. The hair-trigger reflex of enthusiasm and hope I had when I was young has died a hard death in this lonely land. My eyes won’t light up until the rumors begin to take on the weight of material form.

*  *  *

There was some part of me that always knew I would walk out of prison one day. It wasn’t something I knew on an intellectual level, and it went beyond the level people call instinct. It was something I knew not in my head, or even in my heart, but with my soul. I knew it in the same way that I knew the sun would rise and set. It didn’t occur to me to question it, or even think about it. It simply was. Perhaps it was like watching a movie when you know the hero has to win in the end. You expect him to face peril, hardship, and heartache, but you know that in his darkest hour he must still prevail. I knew that the people subjecting me to a living hell were evil, and I couldn’t conceive of a universe that would allow evil to succeed. Don’t get me wrong—I know all too well that horrors and atrocities take place every single day, in every corner of the world. However, those stories were not mine. I grew up on stories, fed on them, lived in them. I grew up knowing that my own life was a story, and the stories I read always had magick in them. Therefore it was ingrained in me, into the deepest levels of my being, to expect there to be magick in my life. I had all the faith in the world that magick would guide me and save me.

I never really had much to do with the technical, legal work in my case. Anytime I even attempted to delve into it, read about it, or understand it, I would feel empty inside. The system was a soulless husk. Coming into contact with it sucked the hope and magick out of me, so I avoided it at all costs. I left the technicalities and legal nit-picking to the attorneys. It wasn’t that I had any faith in them—at least not the early ones—because I did not. Who I had faith in was Lorri.

During the first two years of my incarceration, not one single thing was done by anyone on my behalf. It was Lorri, and Lorri alone, who changed that.

It didn’t happen all at once. As Lorri became a part of my life, she began to educate herself, learning more and more about the legal process. When it became apparent that the public defender was going to get me killed, Lorri started doing research into defense attorneys. When she found someone she believed could do the job, she’d hound them until they agreed to take the case. When it was time to pay them, she begged and borrowed until it was done. She took loans from family members and friends, too.

The daily struggle was endless. The attorneys early on in my appeals would get lazy or go off to work on other cases they thought would bring them more prestige. Every day Lorri would have to plead and threaten in order to keep them moving forward, even at a snail’s pace. It was maddening, draining, and exhausting. There were times when the stress and frustration of dealing with callous and greedy people pushed her to the point of collapse, yet she still would not stop. To do so would have meant my death.

She had to learn every single detail of the case, inside and out—names, dates, places, everything. She had to be my spokesperson, my representative. There is no one else in the world who could have done what she did, accomplished what she accomplished.

In many ways Lorri was like a general, fighting battles on many fronts. Sometimes she fought against defense attorneys as hard as she fought the state. Some of those battles were won, others were lost. One loss came from Jason’s attorney right away. The cornerstone of his defense strategy from the outset was to make me look guilty. His plan was to dump the weight of the entire case on me and say that Jason had been sucked into the situation only because of his proximity to me.

To accomplish this goal, the attorney lied to Lorri and me. He asked us to talk to a mitigator, who he believed could be helpful; in capital murder cases, a mitigator comes in after conviction and works to lessen the sentence—ideally to eliminate a death sentence. We agreed. I spent a day talking to a woman who wove together a mental health report that came to be known as Exhibit 500. In it she claimed I was schizophrenic, bipolar, and suicidal, and suffered from extreme hallucinations, and anything else you could think of. To this day that report is still cited as the most damning piece of evidence against me. The woman who wrote it couldn’t even testify in court because she’d already said in the past that she had lied on the witness stand in another case. To circumvent that little problem, she simply had another person file her report on me. That person’s name is on that report to this day. Events like this honed Lorri’s skills, sharpened her claws, and turned her into the warrior she became. Without her strength and drive, I would have been dead long ago.

The attorney I had at the time didn’t really care one way or the other. And Lorri and I were not yet educated enough in the legal process to know what was happening. By the time we understood what Jason’s attorney was doing, it was too late. The damage had been done. It had become a stain on my life that would shadow me forever. Jason himself still doesn’t know any of this as I write it. He was blameless. Throughout all of this, a new execution date hovered in the background, though one was never actually assigned to me because the legal wranglings never resulted in my case being brought to federal court. After a stay of execution, a new date isn’t assigned until the state appeals are exhausted, and from 1996, the date I was supposed to enter federal court, until my release in 2011, federal court remained out of reach.

As soon as I was sentenced and incarcerated, people far and wide sent letters of support and often monetary donations, too—anywhere from a dollar to thousands of dollars—which were used by my defense team. Inquiries were made on countless levels, from investigating the murders to the missteps in our trial to finding new evidence and witnesses we could use in future appeals and ultimately to effect a second trial for ourselves. All of these efforts cost money that we didn’t have, and nothing happened without it, apart from the hiring of new lawyers (I had seven working on my case at various times through the years) for my defense, who in turn were tasked with opening new investigations, finding forensic experts, and filing paperwork. One of the costliest aspects of a major defense is paperwork—you wouldn’t believe how the cost of photocopies and more photocopies can add up.

In 2001, a new law regarding DNA testing went into effect, which ostensibly would open the door to proving our innocence. The law dictates that the state will pay for all necessary testing, although then one has to wait for the state to get around to one’s case. In order to get anything moving, we had to pay for all of the DNA testing up front—the evidence tested included articles (clothing and so on) that had been found near the crime scene and beyond, as well as a number of items that had not been kept in the courthouse or crime lab. Quite a few of these items had been kept for years at the West Memphis police department, where any number of people had had access to them without supervision or even gloves.

The person who helped us tremendously at this point was Henry Rollins, who not only appealed to his celebrity and musician friends but also produced an album, took it on tour, and raised enough for the first round of DNA testing. In 2002, the motion for DNA testing was filed, although we wouldn’t hear anything resembling results until 2006.

*  *  *

I’ve also got my fingers crossed right now, hoping the results of a DNA test come back soon. It seems to take forever sometimes. DNA testing has come quite a ways in the eleven years I’ve been locked up. They can do things now that they couldn’t do a decade ago. There was no way to do it until now because no one could afford it. The difference now is a one-man army named Henry Rollins, who has worked his ass off to make sure it happens. I’m still stunned every time I see a letter in the mail with a return address for “H. Rollins,” because it hits me that I’m trading correspondence with a living legend. He’s determined to see the truth come out, and nothing stops him once he’s made his mind up about getting something done. It’s things like that that really let me know how far this case has come. Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared sometimes. Every once in a while I’m damn near petrified, but I have no choice but to struggle on.

*  *  *

In 2004, I was, oddly, adopted (again). I had been exchanging letters and phone calls with a woman who had seen Paradise Lost, and had contacted me around the same time Lorri did. She was a psychologist who wanted to help me. We spoke on the phone often, and she became a therapist for me in many ways. It was an escape to talk to her. We never talked about the case—instead she was humorous and entertaining, and we would bicker and laugh with each other nonstop. And so she adopted me in order to visit and spend time with me. Cally, also known as “Mama Mouse,” decided she was no longer content with a houseful of cats and decided to adopt me despite my constant sarcasm. The nastier I was, the more she bragged to all her friends about me. Her job is to help shape the minds of today’s youth by giving advice at a school in California. And people wonder how Californians gained the reputation of being fruitcakes. I point the finger of blame at Cally.

This is a woman who has pictures of barnyard animals on her socks and listens in on every conversation around her in the coffeehouse. She insisted on sending me progress reports on the health of her ninety-nine cats, including which ones had diarrhea. You know she can’t be normal—she voluntarily chose to adopt me, after all. Cally lives in San Francisco, where she says the weather is pretty much the same all the time. There are no tornadoes, no blizzards, no scorching heat waves that leave the earth dead and brown. It’s just one eternal, mind-numbing seventy-degree day. At first I was intrigued by this. In fact, it seemed somehow magickal. However, the more I contemplated it, the more uneasy I became. Then I realized why. It’s because something about it is vaguely prisonlike. It seems almost dispassionate in some way. How is a person supposed to experience different emotional and psychic states while living in an eternally static environment? Because that’s what life comes down to in prison—a continuous, soul-stealing environment. Something like that can lull you into a stupor long before you realize it’s happening, and before you know it, your spirit has atrophied and calcified.

Cally also donated extraordinary sums of money to our defense efforts, and she never wavered in her support and affection for me through all the years I was incarcerated.

In the early years, Jason and I actually exchanged letters through our various visitors. We told each other not to give in, not to give up hope, to keep fighting no matter what. He described living conditions in the general prison population—everything you’ve read about prison is true, only more so. The violence is incomprehensible, and Jason was brutalized in unspeakable ways. Among other things, he suffered a fractured skull and had to be hospitalized after he was thrown headfirst onto the concrete floor by another inmate. He told me he never saw his attacker. He’d been my closest friend and I missed him during those years, though he lived just nearby. The guards and wardens were obsessed with making sure we never spoke; when a letter was discovered, Jason was threatened and so we didn’t try communicating often.

I was still a child when I was sent to Death Row. I grew into adulthood, both mentally and physically, in this hellhole. I came into this situation wide-eyed and naïve. Now I view most everything and everyone with narrow-eyed suspicion. I’ve learned the hard way that the world is not my friend. I thought that pretty much the entire human race wanted me to die a slow, painful death, until a miracle occurred. It seems my hopes of receiving divine intervention weren’t completely ignored.

One thing I’ve noticed time and time again in prison is how quickly people in the outside world forget you. Their lives do not stop simply because yours does. Sooner or later they get over the grieving process and move on. Even your family. Two years is a very long time for someone to stick by your side once you’re in prison. Most don’t even last that long. Domini moved on with her life; she’s now married, has a beautiful daughter, and lives all the way on the other side of the country. I haven’t seen my father in many, many years. He has another family to worry about and care for now. There’s not much he could have done for me anyway.

Between October 2009 and September 2010, we filed a motion to make an oral argument in front of the Arkansas Supreme Court requesting a new trial based on all of the new evidence and DNA findings we’d accumulated over the past ten years. A hearing isn’t guaranteed, and by this point Lorri and I were both worn down by the process. We had exhausted every possibility in terms of uncovering new proof of my innocence, and none of it had worked. We had all of the elements we needed in this battle—we simply could not get the court system to pay attention and we were running out of time. In fact, it looked to us like we would spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of something just out of reach.

All around me were people who had been abandoned to their fates. No one came to see them or offer encouragement. No one wrote them long letters with news from home. They had no one to call when they were so sad or scared they felt they couldn’t go on. No one sent them a few dollars so they wouldn’t have to eat the rancid prison food.

They are the true living dead. The world has moved on, and they are forgotten. The thought that I could have so easily been one of them fills my heart with terror. I’m fortunate beyond my ability to describe because I’ve had a few friends who have stuck by my side since almost the beginning.

*  *  *

Morphic field. That’s what it’s called when a certain kind of energy pattern is repeated over and over until it creates something like an aura. This prison, for example. All of the hatred, ignorance, pain, humiliation, and greed constantly being put out by everyone in here has created one hell of a negative morphic field. The thing about morphic fields is that they behave like magnets. Like attracts like. It draws more of the same energy to itself, and it touches everyone who comes here. The people who come to see me immediately feel disgust, anger, and repugnance for the kind of people they have to deal with here. It also explains why every new batch of guards who come to work here are a little more brutal and ignorant than the last. As the morphic field grows increasingly worse, it draws in the kind of people who resonate with it.

Even the best-laid plans seem to go bad in a split second. All you can do is stand there in a state of shock, wondering what went wrong. It’s one of the worst feelings possible, to helplessly watch as the world slips through your fingers like sand. Your heart seems to run out with it.

What happened to me was a great disruption. It was the violent shuddering jerk of something that has slipped horribly off track. I sit in this cell now, filling someone else’s place. It is a murderer who should be here, not me. I often wonder if this mistake was made deliberately, by those who have something to hide. Other times I wonder if it’s for some great and secret purpose known only to a power much higher than myself. But I believe the most important question of all is what will it take to set things right? What will it take to restore my life to its right track and clockwork precision? Is it already happening?

I come from a line of men with no fathers. I have no paternal traditions to pass on to my own offspring, and can count the number of times I’ve seen my son on one hand. They say that blood calls to blood, but I have thirty-two years of doubt and no contradiction. No one was there to teach me how to knot a necktie or explain the mechanics of sex. I had to learn on the run, wherever I could. My own son doesn’t even know me. All he has is a handful of someone else’s dusty memories, most of which aren’t even accurate.

There are long stretches of time that fly by so quietly that another year has crept up on you before you realize it. The year can feel as oily as the steel of a gun barrel. Other times the stress comes in and floods out everything. It steals your sleep and your clarity of mind. Consciousness becomes a mental misery that takes a toll on the body. All the worldly concerns drop in to introduce themselves at a time you least suspect. Hairline fractures trace their way across the skull and settle into a deep throb. There is never enough time, patience, money, or enthusiasm. The pressure is relentless, and I twist in the wind like a sheet on a clothesline. The constantly shifting strategy wears me down and tires me out. The cycle is endlessly repetitive and I have no distractions. Matters of life and death are no more than afterthoughts to the cogs that turn the wheels. I keep feeling that if I could only get one break, then I could find a way to get ahead. It never comes. I am at the end of my rope.

Last night I dreamed that a bunch of rednecks burned me at the stake in a Walmart parking lot. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I was still conscious after I became smoke, and it felt good to spiral in the air. I didn’t just float around the way smoke tends to. I flew quickly, and with a purpose. I was following someone, but can’t remember who or why. I only remember watching them cross a gray winter field from a great distance as I formed a giant white spiral in the sky. I felt free and strong, vibrating with purpose. Sometimes we forget the raw power of that feeling when we leave the purity of youth behind. I recognized and remembered it in the dream. When I awakened, it lingered like an aftertaste.

In my best dreams I always run on all fours, like an animal. I still have the same body, but I travel like a quadruped. I’ll be running and suddenly realize that I can move much faster if I use my hands. I lean forward just enough to get my hands on the ground and then use all four limbs to thrust myself forward like a rabbit, a cheetah, or a deer. It’s a feeling of absolute freedom and power. These dreams feel ten times better than the few dreams I’ve had in which I can fly. I’ve had these running dreams for as long as I can remember, and it’s always seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Someone once told me that in these dreams I am becoming my totem animal, that I am taking the form of my spirit guide, and that it probably has something to do with my Native American bloodline. The only flaw in that theory is that when I see myself in these dreams I don’t look like any animal. I look like myself, only running faster than any human ever could.

The trauma of living circles me like a pack of wolves. It waits for the exhaustion to drive me to my knees so that it can devour me at leisure. It lingers over my bones, taking pride in its ghoulish feast. When life eats you, it always starts with your heart.

I’ve always sneered at weakness, and at those who need a painkiller to make it through the day. My sneers were caused by false pride. The only thing strong about me is the grip I have on my masks and delusions. Now all I feel is surgery without the anesthetic. All that I know is fear, and I can’t find my way out.

I have a new next-door neighbor. He hasn’t slept in several days. He paces his cell throughout the night, arguing with himself in several voices. One is a deep bass mumble, one is a screeching shrew, and a third does nothing but curse and swear at the other two. Sometimes they all merge into a bug-eyed, strangling gargle. It doesn’t stop until daylight comes.

For the first time I see how I’ve spent my entire life on a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the two faces of God—the face that hides in shadow and the face that shines forth from the light. The cigarettes, the yoga, the sleeping pills, the meditation, the trashy horror movies, the music of Bach, the losing of myself in sex, the Catholicism, the self-destructive urge, and the abandonment of myself to the ecstasy of love. I saw the face of light as I struggled to understand life through the heart of the Rose.

What I crave more than anything today is to sit at an outdoor café on a cool autumn day. I just want to feel that end-of-the-year breeze as I sip a cup of green tea and take my time with a piece of pumpkin pie. I would slump in my chair and allow my mind to roam wherever it chose. Nothing else in the world epitomizes absolute freedom to me more than that thought. I could be alone or with a friend I know so well that we wouldn’t have to speak. Sometimes I wake up in the morning thinking about pumpkin pie.

I’m convinced that people see the ghosts of themselves all the time, but most just choose to block them out. The words don’t even make sense to me, and I know it’s true. When I was seven years old I saw the ghost of myself at the age of eighteen. Ever since that day I’ve kicked myself for not asking questions. I’ve no idea what my eighteen-year-old self could have told me at that point—perhaps nothing at all. Still, I can’t help but think of it as a lost opportunity. Somehow there was a slight fluctuation in the current, and two of me bled through the fabric at once.

Trying to figure out the meaning behind such events can drive you mad, because there is no answer. Perhaps it was some sort of hiccup. Then again, perhaps I was making some Herculean effort to reach out to myself, and that was all I could manage.

I used to wonder if some other me had died on Death Row, causing all of my selves to snap back like a broken rubber band and haunt each other. Now I doubt it, even though no other answer is any more likely. It just doesn’t feel right.

These things are always strongest in December, when the year is as thin and transparent as plastic wrap. Something in the center of my chest rejoices that this is my birth month—it swoons like a religious zealot with a mouthful of Hallelujahs.

DECEMBER 11

I have never seen the sun on my birthday. It simply does not shine. This one single day is immortal, eternally waiting for me to return to it once every year. It is a sentient gray room that sits outside the world’s rotational authority. This is the day of the winter eclipse, and the graveyard of my alienation. Time is marked with an hourglass filled with snow instead of sand.

This day is one of the closest things to ritual or tradition that my family ever embraced. It’s the quietest day of the year—no birds sing, no cars backfire, and there is no laughter. It enwraps me in a soft and soothing cocoon, and it holds me like a secret. Even the pictures on the walls silently sing its grace. If there was ever only one day on Marlou Island, then this would be that day.

DECEMBER 25

Christmas Day itself is always bittersweet, because it’s the last day of that beautiful magick that’s been building up like a tidal wave for the past month. In just a week it will be hard to even remember what it’s like. I’ll be brokenhearted at the thought of it being gone again for an entire year.

At home I always preferred Christmas Eve to Christmas. All the family would come over for the party. There would be sandwiches, homemade cookies and candy, chips and dip, and everyone would be in a great mood. After they left, my sister and I would be allowed to open up all of our presents at the stroke of midnight, unless I was at St. Michael’s for the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. If I was, then we opened them the second I got home. The house was always so warm. No one was ever in a bad mood, because we were experiencing the magick that had been accumulating for months. It sparkled in my mother’s eyes.

It’s been about fourteen years since I’ve really celebrated Christmas, or even had a decent meal on this day. The feeling the day carries manages to seep in through these concrete walls, but there’s no one here to share it with and nothing I can do with it. I’d be happy to pass a stranger on the street and hear them say, “Merry Christmas,” or to be able to say it to them. I want to be bundled up as I walk beneath the slate-colored afternoon sky. I want to sit and look at twinkling trees while sipping eggnog. In the outside world the air would feel like a music box, just like in the old days.

This is the time of year when it hurts the most to be here. The summer may be a misery to my body, but missing this magick hurts me to my soul.

December tastes like Hershey’s Kisses. The month of December and those little Hershey’s Kisses candies are connected in a way that I can’t quite articulate. For me, at least. I do know that eating a Hershey’s Kiss is like an act of communion—like taking a tiny taste of December into myself. I don’t like to eat them at other times of the year, because I don’t want that special association to fade.

Sometimes I think the vast majority of the year is about anticipation for me. The year is the journey, December is the destination. On November 30, I always sit up all night long so that I can greet December as it arrives. I like to meet it at the door, so to speak. And then I stay up all night on December 31, not to see the New Year in, but to savor the last few moments of my favorite month. October and November are really, really good, but December is great.

My favorite time of year is from December 20 until sunrise on December 25. During that stretch of time I can feel the entire world come to an absolute standstill. On those few days the hair on my neck stands on end, and the world feels like a pendulum that has swung all the way to one side and hangs suspended for a split second before beginning the reverse swing. At sunrise on December 25 the spell is broken and we begin the swing back in the other direction. Those magickal days are gone for another year, and my vigil starts all over again.

Strangely enough, the song that sounds the most like December is a ballad called “High Enough” by the Damn Yankees. I have a whole list of December songs: “Love Is on the Way” by Saigon Kick, “Don’t Cry” by Guns N’ Roses, “Wait” by White Lion, “House of Pain” by Faster Pussycat, and “Don’t Close Your Eyes” by Kix. That’s the sound track for the month of December. Oh yeah, I forgot one—“Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Till It’s Gone)” by Cinderella. Yes, I still love Cinderella. And yes, I can hear your snorts of disgust. Doesn’t bother me one bit, though. I’m used to it by now, as I even hear it from Lorri.

When I try to picture heaven, I see a place where it’s always December, every radio station plays hair bands, and every time I check my pockets they’re full of Hershey’s Kisses. There’s a Christmas parade on every street, every day is my birthday, and the sun always sets at 4:58 p.m.

The inertia is killing me, wearing me out one day at a time. The legal system is content to let me die of old age. If someone doesn’t do something soon there will be nothing left of me to save.

I woke up this morning to discover a spider on my breakfast tray. It was smashed to a piece of bread. Something about it seemed too malicious to have been an accident. I haven’t felt right all day. Every time that spider pops into my head I feel my stomach lurch again.

Tonight I separated and saw myself again, just as I did when I was seven years old. Tonight I was the ghost of sixteen. It went so fast that I couldn’t say or do anything. It was just a flicker. I was gasping for breath like a fish pulled from the water and my heart beat like thunder. It’s the fasting that triggered it. I haven’t felt like eating because of the spider. A dead spider has given me the ghost flickers. There is a field between me and the ghost of sixteen. Things wait in that field, unable to cross the line that divides me now from the ghost of me then. Step lively and move with purpose, or the ghosts will swarm all over you. They almost never get the chance to touch us, but they’re always waiting should the chance arrive. They can’t usually even see you unless you ride the ghost flickers. I am moving forward and backward at once. Some part of me is always in the ghost flickers.

Or the flicker is in me. It’s getting hard to tell. Everything is happening at once, and I can’t pinpoint anything. It’s all too much. The flickers are like inhaled gasoline fumes. They are a vulgar shimmer with no false grace, and a world unto themselves. The flickers are a place where everything exists as a series of jerky movements.

I can’t stop my hands from shaking, but I cannot feel the cold.

Last night the Rose had a dream of prophecy and bureaucratic bullshit. She was swimming in a competition, able to literally pull herself through the water by finding handholds in it. After she easily won, the judges disqualified her over some small technicality. She was furious because she recognized it for what it was—pointless bureaucracy.

She knew it symbolized the case. We’ve seen it time and again. The good thing was that the dream filled her with certainty. She knew that if she could win once, she could win again. Next time she would beat them at their own game. Fuck the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judge, the liars, the police, and everyone else that stands against us. They will never win, because we won’t give up. Knock me down ninety-nine times, and I will get back up one hundred.

I was sealed inside a concrete box deep in the heart of a super-maximum-security prison several years ago, and since that time have not had fresh air, sunlight, the feel of grass, or anything else people associate with real life. My living space is as confining and unnatural as that of astronauts in outer space. It’s all brought me to the conclusion that I am being treated like veal, and for the same reason.

The prison administration doesn’t want you to be too healthy, because then you would be strong. The weaker they can keep you, the easier their job is—especially when an execution comes up. If they keep you soft by putting you in a tiny space so that you can barely move, then feed you nothing but grease and carbs, while maintaining a constantly elevated stress level, then when an execution comes up the man tends to die pretty quickly. Hell, most men are usually at least a quarter of the way dead by the time they make it to the death chamber. Actually, I don’t even think I’m supposed to call it that anymore—the death chamber. In these politically correct times they’ve given it some other less self-explanatory name that I can’t quite remember. Still, everyone here knows it’s where they do all of the official killing.

A friend recently told me there was an article in a national magazine about how super-max prisons drive the inmates insane. I already knew that, because I see it every day. Not so long ago a guard made a mistake and pushed the button that opens all the doors in a cell block at once. One schizophrenic man immediately smashed another’s skull with a steel bar, killing him. Neither man could have been considered sane by any stretch of the imagination.

Perception becomes distorted in here, which leads to bizarre behavior. It’s because there is nothing for a person to compare themselves to. There is no barometer for judging what is “normal,” so the thought processes begin to gradually drift in odd directions. The next thing you know, someone snaps and begins screaming that there is blood in his food. At first when something like that happened I was horrified and in a state that I can only describe as terrified awe. Now I find a raving lunatic to be only mildly annoying.

After a while it makes you wonder if you yourself may have lost your mind. How would you know if you had? And the crazy people all seem to think themselves completely sane, so they must not be able to tell the difference. I can’t think about it for very long or I get stomach cramps. The last thing I need to add to my current list of woe-inducing problems is insanity.

The courts have ruled that executing an insane person is inhumane, so what they do now is begin pumping the lunatics full of drugs a few weeks before the execution date. By doing so they can make them lucid enough to comprehend that they’re being murdered on a given date, which qualifies them as sane. Somehow that strikes me as being far more inhumane than allowing a person to remain in a state where they don’t realize they’re being murdered.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no bleeding-heart liberal who believes everyone is a victim and no one is responsible for their own actions. However, I do possess the intelligence and acumen to realize that something is horribly wrong with this system. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it’s not veal.

FEBRUARY

The temperature dropped to around twenty degrees last night. I woke up at 2:30 a.m. when a guard began beating on my door with a metal bar and yelling for me to get up if I wanted a breakfast tray. When I got up it took me a minute or two to get my hands to work right because they were so cold. I slept in two sets of clothes, but my bones still felt like glass. Not that I’m complaining—I’ll take the cold over the heat any day, and summer in here is hell. I actually like the cold. It fills me with nostalgia, reminds me of my youth. When I was a kid the fire would always go out in the middle of the night and the cold would roll in and coat the entire house. I was always amazed to see that the water in the toilet had frozen over. Something about the cold always makes me feel young again.

They set another execution date this week. There’s now one scheduled for March and one for April. It’s looking like there’s probably going to be at least one a month for the next four or five months, not counting February. The non–Death Row prisoners like when there’s an execution because it’s the only time the prison serves fried chicken. I’m still not one hundred percent positive what the point of the fried chicken is—either placating the rest of us or celebrating the execution. Whatever it is, it’s looking like the fried chicken may be coming fast and furious this year.

I can feel the daylight hours growing. I can’t see it, but something in my core feels it happening. It’s strange how I can still feel when the sun is up, even after not being out in its light in seven years. I’ve heard of experiments where people were closed away from sunlight for long periods of time, and eventually they lost the ability to feel if it was day or night. Perhaps I would have, too, were it not for the solar and lunar energy-circulating practices I do. Last night was the full moon. The Storm moon, which usually falls in February. That means the Chaste moon will be in February this year, instead of its usual time in March. I would have loved to have been able to go out and look up at it. That’s one of the things I miss most—the night sky. The stars, the moon, the crisp air. Maybe soon.

Time to get busy. My routine is not going to do itself.

The Boston Red Sox are big, big magick. I’ve heard that some analysts are saying they won’t even make it to the play-offs this year. I don’t like sports for the most part. It seems like a tremendous waste of valuable, precious time to me—time that could be used for something constructive, productive, or to further your growth: studying, meditating, working out, talking to loved ones, et cetera, but there’s something about the Red Sox that soothes my nerves, like a security blanket or a rocking chair. I like to have them on the TV or radio playing in the background as I go about my business. It’s better than one of those ocean sound tracks.

I’d better get to work. Talk to you soon.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for the Charlie Brown Valentine’s Day special. I know it will be on soon, and I never miss a Charlie Brown special. The best one is the Halloween show about the Great Pumpkin—which I’ve only missed one year in my life, due to the local ABC station having technical difficulties—but all the Peanuts shows make me feel like I’m one step closer to Halloween.

When I was in second grade we were told to write a letter to someone we admired. Most kids wrote to the president or an athlete. I wrote to Charles Schulz. He wrote back and even sent some autographed Peanuts drawings. The teacher took them and put them on display for the whole class to see—and I never got them back. She kept the drawings. I wonder where they are now.

The thing I like about the shows isn’t the characters—it’s the background. The colors are so amazing it almost takes my breath away. Every time I watch The Great Pumpkin I feel like I’m going to have a seizure during the scenes where Snoopy is in a dogfight. Just look at the background in those scenes. It really is too much to take. I can barely keep from holding my head in my hands and involuntarily groaning like I have a mouthful of the best chocolate cake ever made. I look at them and can literally smell the crisp autumn air—even in this cell. No horror movie in the world makes me feel the magick of Halloween as strongly as The Great Pumpkin.

The Valentine’s show is good, too.

I’m excited today, and happy. Not for any particular reason, other than the fact that good things are coming. Good things are always coming; sometimes we just forget it.

P.S. Wednesday, February 10. That’s the night that love is in the air for Charlie Brown, on ABC.

In a way I’m thankful for all the physical pain and suffering I’ve had to endure in here because it has forced me to keep learning and moving forward. If I didn’t have pain, I’d probably take the day off. And that day could become a week. And that week could turn into months. But as it is I know I have two choices—practice every single day without fail, or hurt so bad that life is a misery. So I keep reminding myself that the pain is a gift from the Divine, and that I should be thankful for it.

Today the guards made me bleed again. They chained my feet so tight I could barely move. I bleed through my socks—last month it was my left ankle, today it was the right. When I wash the soap burns like fire, but I have to keep my ankles clean because I don’t have any alcohol or peroxide—nothing to kill bacteria or infections. And this place is filthy.

I can’t remember what it’s like to walk as a human being anymore. My cell is so small that I can only take two steps. Anytime I’m brought out—however briefly or infrequently—I have chains on my hands and feet as well as guards hanging on me. It’s been well over sixteen years since I’ve actually walked anywhere. Sometimes I still can’t wrap my mind around that. I’m working on my seventeenth year now. There are times when I’ve thought, “Surely someone is going to put a stop to this. Surely someone is going to do something.” But no one ever does. Time just rolls on. It’s insanity. I am truly amazed at what they’ve been allowed to get away with, and for how long—especially Burnett and the Arkansas Supreme Court. If Burnett gets that senate seat, I really do fear how many people he’ll be able to hurt. If he’s engaged in this much corruption as a judge, the thought of what he could do as a senator is horrifying.

Ah, well . . . does no good to dwell on it. Either I waste my energy by focusing on things I cannot change, or I conserve my energy and apply it to the small things I can change. That’s what the I Ching calls “the taming power of the small.” Every great victory is made up of many smaller victories.

Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I’ve ever read. It said “What is to give light must endure burning.” It’s by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I’ve been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it’s why we all suffer. It’s the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it’s amazing beyond words.

All my life I’ve heard people say, “Why would God allow this to happen?” I think it’s because while we can see only the tragedy, God sees only the beauty. While we see misery, Divinity sees us lurching and shambling one step closer to the light. I truly do believe that one day we’ll shine as brightly as the archangels themselves.

To the person who sent me that quote—thank you. I stuck it up so that my eyes will travel over it several times a day. It’s something I’ll never forget.

Just about every time I do an interview they ask me what I miss most. When they do, a hundred things flash through my mind—the memories giving me that free-fall feeling in the pit of my stomach. I miss the rain. I miss standing beneath the sky and looking up at the moon and stars. I miss the wind. I miss cats and dogs. I miss wearing real clothes, having a real toothbrush, using a real pen, drinking iced tea, eating ice cream, and going for walks.

I’m tempted to say the thing I miss most is fruit. I haven’t had a piece of fresh fruit in about eight years, and before that I only got it once a year. The prison used to give everyone two apples and two oranges on Christmas, but then they stopped, said it was a “threat to security,” along with tea bags and dental floss. So I haven’t had any in nearly a decade now. They prevent scurvy by giving everyone a cup of watered-down orange juice for breakfast. It doesn’t have much taste, but enough vitamin C to keep your teeth from falling out.

In the end, it’s not the fruit I miss most, though if you rolled all the deprivations into one thing, it would be this: I miss being treated like a human being.

FEBRUARY 12

This place is hell on the body. One of the reasons I cannot write letters the way I used to is that living in this cell twenty-four hours a day has destroyed my vision. I used to read three or four books a week. Now I average about one a month, if the print isn’t too small. The eye works like any other part of the body—use it or lose it. A person confined to a small space never has a chance to see anything that’s more than a couple feet away, so the first thing to go is your ability to see at a distance. Even with my glasses on, I can see maybe ten feet. Without glasses, maybe four inches—anything beyond that is color and movement.

The teeth go because dental care is practically nonexistent. Several years ago I was brutally beaten by a pack of sadistic guards, which caused nerve damage to several of my teeth. The prison gave me the choice of living with the pain or having my teeth pulled out. I’ve been in pain ever since (prison policy says no root canals, even if the guards themselves cause the damage).

Diabetes and heart disease come about from being unable to move. These cells are just big enough to take two steps forward and two steps back. Even if you work out for an hour a day, that leaves 23 hours when you are practically not moving at all. Add to that the cheapest diet you can find—plain noodles, white rice, white bread, grits, et cetera—and you’ve created a recipe for disaster. If you don’t work very hard, and aren’t very, very careful, you’ll die in here.

Last year there was a brief mention on the news about a sick prisoner who had to be put on life support after he was left lying in his own feces for several days. They eventually fired two guards for it, but only because it was mentioned on the news. Just about every guard in the prison had to pass that man’s cell on a daily basis. They all saw him. The two guards who got fired were simply scapegoats.

I don’t want to complain. No one likes a whiner, I know. Sometimes I just get so tired, though—tired of the abuse, tired of the cruelty, tired of the apathy. It wears you down to nothing. But I know that allowing myself to be sucked down into it, allowing myself to waste time dwelling on it, does nothing but create and feed more frustration. Tomorrow is a new day. I will put this one behind me and move forward into a more productive place. Today, however, what you get to read is me whining and complaining. As Billy Bob says in the movie Bad Santa, “Well, they can’t all be winners now, can they?”

FEBRUARY 26

I’ve been asked by quite a few people why the prison serves breakfast at 2:30 a.m. The answer to that would be slave labor. The prison is run by what amounts to slave labor—planting crops, digging ditches, construction and maintenance—any job you can think of other than guard is done by the prisoners. They have the choice of doing whatever job the administration gives them to do, or go to the hole. They throw you in there, then drag you out every thirty days to ask if you’re ready to go to work yet. If you say no, they toss you back in. This goes on until the person’s mind or soul has been broken. So breakfast is at 2:30 a.m. because they want to have everyone out in the fields as early as possible so they can get as many hours of work out of them as they can.

It’s a brutal system. In other states prisoners get paid, even if it’s only five cents an hour. Not here, though. Here you get nothing. They still charge you if you need to see a doctor, even though many people have no money and no way of getting any. The reason other states pay prisoners to work is that in prison you have to buy everything—they don’t give you even the basic necessities, from soap and toothpaste to coffee and candy bars. So they charge you for all of it and take back the money they’ve paid you anyway.

They can also put you in the hole for giving something to another prisoner who can’t afford it. For example, say the guards decided not to feed a guy one day to teach him a lesson. If you give him a candy bar, they can give you thirty days in the hole. Give someone soap who can’t afford it—thirty days. A cup of coffee? Thirty days. It’s cruelty and madness. I once saw a man get thirty days for giving another man construction paper. The only thing you can do is keep your head down, be quiet, and try to avoid notice.

FEBRUARY 27

I just received a letter from Amy in New Jersey, asking if I believe in God. What I think is that belief is irrelevant. Belief doesn’t play much of a role in my life. What matters to me is experience. I experience the Divine in my life on a daily basis. For me, effort is far more important than belief, and the effort I put forth is to spend every single moment of my life in the presence of the Divine.

I like to compare spirituality to riding a bicycle. You can believe with every fiber of your being that it’s possible to ride a bicycle, but until you start practicing you won’t be able to do it. Spirituality has to be about action, not belief.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Oscar Wilde. When someone asked him if he believed in God, his response was “No, I believe in something much bigger.” I feel the same way. There is no old man waiting in the clouds to inflict pain on us for our failures. What there is is beyond words. Our concepts of God are tiny and insignificant compared to the reality of what Divinity is. Does that answer your question, Amy?

Speaking of such things, I gave up all cursing for Lent in an attempt to practice a more mindful way of speaking. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I’ve slipped several times, but I’m still trying. What trips me up most is dealing with the abusive guards. When they’re deliberately trying to hurt me, or when they’re harassing Lorri, I find myself cursing them under my breath and have to remind myself “No cursing!” Lorri and I are supposed to be able to see each other for three hours once a week, but this week a hateful guard deliberately took an hour of our time. The more attention the case gets, the more hateful and vindictive the guards become.

FEBRUARY 28

I’ve never felt anything like what I’ve been feeling for the past few days. It’s like there’s a tremendous tidal wave hovering over my head. It’s just been growing and growing ever since word of Johnny Depp being a supporter and friend began to make the rounds. Johnny contacted Lorri for the first time in 1999, calling her up on the phone while she was at work one day. From that moment on, he corresponded with us both, with emotional and financial support in equal measure. He learned everything he could about the case, down to the finest details, and when he appeared on 48 Hours his participation was startling where his knowledge of events was concerned. To be honest, it’s a little scary. It just feels so huge. I can only imagine what the energy would feel like out there. One thing I’ve discovered is that I wouldn’t want to be a celebrity for anything in the world. They have to live with far more energy than this directed at them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I can’t even imagine how it would be to have to try to lead a normal life when there are people constantly trying to ask you questions, catch you on film, et cetera.

I know there must be a lot of support being generated out there because the level of hatred directed toward me by the guards has increased tenfold. I don’t even care. It just lets me know that good things are happening. The feeling in the air is almost the same thing I feel when a thunderstorm is coming. That’s what I pray for—rain. Enough rain to wash away the corruption, the cover-ups, the darkness, and the apathy that has stolen the past seventeen years of my life.

MARCH 16

The prison refused to let me see Harada Roshi. Communication between us has suddenly become a “security risk,” even though nothing has changed since the last time. I gave up trying to understand prison logic long ago—Rolling Stone magazine is a security risk, sodas are a security risk, salt and pepper are security risks. The list goes on and on. It’s incredibly disappointing that we didn’t get to talk. It would have been like getting a breath of fresh air to have been able to see Roshi and Chisan. Chisan is Roshi’s translator, and a female priest who does tarot readings in Japan. They carry an incredible energy with them wherever they go. It’s like love, happiness, compassion, discipline, and fun all rolled up into one current of golden light. At least Lorri got to meet them for dinner and talk about where our practice has taken us. I can’t wait for the day when we can go to Japan and visit the temple. It’s a way of life that hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years, and life in the temple is practically a world unto itself.

Roshi had no idea who Johnny Depp was when he heard about the 48 Hours episode. That’s how I wish I could live—cut off from modern society and focused entirely on self-development. In a way I do live that way, except that my days are a dark and distorted version of monastic life.

In other news, the execution that was scheduled for tonight was not carried out. The attorney general is furious, and the guards are less than pleased. No one knows what to expect next.

APRIL 9

This is to the raven-haired lady I spoke to today from the Innocence Project: Thank you. Thank you for speaking to me like a human being. A lot of times they’ll bring tours through here and they come to my cell and just stare at me as if I’m some sort of exhibit in a museum. I’ve had teenage girls from a community college criminal justice class stand and watch me in the shower, and they didn’t even speak. They just stood around as if they had every right in the world to do so. You, raven-haired lady, were only the second person to ever speak to me. I was very happy to hear that you have been reading these letters. I have been slacking on the updates lately, but now I want to do a better job. In some ways I feel like I’ve been throwing messages in a bottle into the ocean, wondering if anyone is finding them. Now I know that someone is.

Not much is changing here. I’ve been moving deeper into my studies, my meditating, and my energy work. The days continue to fly past at an incredibly high rate of speed. The only thing of interest to anyone is that I think Marilyn Manson is quickly becoming my new best friend. Lorri loves him to pieces, too. He’s going to be speaking out for us on VH1 at an awards show that will air in July. He’s also painting my portrait, which I am incredibly excited about. Manson got involved to help with my case, although he has stayed behind the scenes—he thought his presence might be as hurtful as helpful in the public perception.

The air is filled with that odd, powerful energy that you only feel when the seasons are changing. It stirs up old memories of when I was young and free, and it nearly drives me mad. It was during this time of year that I experienced my very last days of freedom nearly seventeen years ago. The energy in the air makes those memories feel as if they only happened a few days ago. It hurts me somewhere deep in the core of my bones, but it’s an exquisitely beautiful kind of pain.

APRIL

They stopped the execution that was scheduled to take place last night. They had already taken the man to the death house, where the executions are carried out, when the Arkansas Supreme Court issued the order to stop. Now there will have to be a hearing before anyone else is put to death. That probably bought an extra year for those scheduled to be executed soon. Maybe. You can never be certain.

More than anything, I’d like to go to a park today. I want to sit in a swing, drink chocolate milk, and not think about anything in the world except the pleasure of that moment. I want to know what a normal life feels like because I can’t remember anymore. I want to drag my feet on the ground as I swing back and forth. I want to feel the fresh, spring chi on my skin. I’m very tempted to get out my Halloween decorations today because looking at them always gives me a little burst of excitement. I can’t, though, because I have a rule: No Halloween decorations before June 21. That’s the summer solstice, so after that we’re officially in the second half of the year.

Another rule I abide by is no peppermint until November 1. I only eat peppermint between November 1 and January 6, because that keeps it special. If you don’t do things like that in here, then there’s nothing to look forward to.

APRIL 18

Many people have asked me why I cut my hair. The answer is because I didn’t have a choice. One day the prison decided it was a “security risk” if my hair were to touch my ears or my collar. If I refused to let them cut my hair, I would be thrown in the hole for thirty days, my visits would be taken for one year, and I would not be allowed to use the phone for one month. Same deal with facial hair. Sideburns that extend beyond mid-ear are “detrimental to the order and discipline of the unit.”

The whole purpose was to rob everyone of their identity. Dress everyone exactly alike, give them the same haircut, take away their name, and give them a number. To the prison system, I am not Damien Echols. I am inmate SK931. I still don’t let them cut my hair, though. I cut it myself, with a disposable razor. It’s a time-consuming process, but better than the alternative. The prison “barber” is just a prisoner they choose at random and assign to the job. It’s usually someone who has never cut hair in his life, and I don’t fancy being the training dummy.

APRIL 27

With every day that passes I feel more and more as if I’m playing Russian roulette. It’s nothing to do with the case, because I know that sooner or later someone will step in and correct this situation. The danger I feel comes from trying to survive in here. Every day the odds continue to stack up. Sooner or later the hammer will fall on a chamber with a round in it. Could be anything—diabetes, starvation, food poisoning, skull cracked by a bored guard, heat stroke, or about a million other things. I feel like the frog trying to cross the street in that old video game Frogger. Sooner or later he always gets squashed. The only question is how long you can prevent it from happening.

MAY 1

The next execution is scheduled to take place in three days. Chances are high it will be called off, since the last one wasn’t carried out. There’s another one scheduled for May 24, but it probably won’t take place, either. Everyone seems to think they’ll be put on hold until after a hearing about procedure. Arkansas is the only state in the country that has a law that says the prison director can carry out executions in any way he sees fit. This means it’s legal for the prison to starve you to death. Or burn you alive. Or stone you. The law in Arkansas gives these people the power to do anything they want. What is legal and what is right are often two different things.

Even if the execution gets called off at the last minute, the man who is scheduled to die will never be the same. When someone comes back from the death house, they’re far, far older than when they entered. There’s no life in their eyes, they don’t talk much, and when the guards take them anywhere they shuffle like someone in a nursing home. It’s almost as if everything dies except the body. Guards are the opposite. When an execution date nears, they get a little pep in their step.

MAY 5

Today I saw a campaign commercial for Fogleman. He hasn’t aged well at all. There is a tremendous sense of darkness about him. It was there when he was a prosecutor, but now it seems to have grown to horrendous proportions. Am I the only one who finds it repugnant that they began airing on May 5?

In the commercial he was bragging about how many years of experience he has. Anyone who wants to see that experience in action should just watch Paradise Lost.

I must admit that I was a little hurt that he didn’t mention us in his commercial. I mean, he could at least thank all the little people he stepped on in his climb up the political ladder. Seriously, folks—please don’t forget to vote on May 18. Don’t let this guy keep hurting people, or get away with such corruption.

Today was our first ninety-degree day of the year. The humidity is already suffocating. Summer is here. Over the past few days I’ve been cleaning my cell from top to bottom and throwing out tons of junk. I’ve decided I want to live my life as if I am leaving this place at any moment. From now on I will live in a state of joyous expectation.

MAY 2010

I don’t want to be a nag, or drive this into the ground, but I do want to ask everyone one more time to vote on May 18. The Good Ol’ Boy Network, which includes everyone from the West Memphis police department to the Arkansas Times, is out there promoting Fogleman. They want to promote a man who not only helped condemn three innocent men, but has also allowed a child-murderer to walk free for seventeen years. If this is to be amended, it will have to be you who does it. If you live in Arkansas and are reading this, please turn out on May 18 to make certain this man is not rewarded for his corruption. You have the power and ability to see that justice is done. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. This is a chance to demonstrate that not everyone in Arkansas embraces ignorance and corruption. This will be my last plea on the subject. Please, people—vote. Shut Fogleman down May 18.

And by the way, has anyone else noticed that on his commercial Fogleman looks exactly like Mr. Burns?

MAY 8

Today is the feast of the Apparition of Saint Michael. Old herbal almanacs say you should collect angelica root on May 8 because it’s sacred to the archangel Michael.

They say that if you keep angelica in the house it will change your fortune for the better, because it brings blessings and healing energy into the home. The fact that angelica is so beneficial is the reason it was named after the angels.

You can eat it, brew it like tea, put it in your bath water, or just keep a piece in your pocket.

It’s one of the most used charms in the herbal realm, along with St. John’s wort (named after John the Baptist) and High John the Conquerer (Conqueror) root. Don’t eat High John, though. He’s poisonous.

The day after tomorrow is another interesting day. May 10 is the memorial day of Father Damien. Actually, now he’s Saint Damien. I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime. I think it’s a good sign.

It’s only ten more days until the election.

MAY 10

Today is the memorial day of Saint Damien. Time is passing so quickly. September is going to be here before you know it. I often feel like I’m living on faerie time. In the old stories about the Fay, time is an unstable concept. People who find themselves in the realm of the Fay may pass a hundred years in a single day, or a single day in a hundred years. They may return to the physical world after one night in faerie, only to discover everything and everyone they knew are long gone. Or they may return after having an entire lifetime of adventures and discover they’ve only been gone from the “real” world for a single night. Either way, time is not the same. When I learned that my case would be heard in September, I thought, “That’s not long at all.” Others asked, “Why did they set it so far away?” Then again, I can feel the closeness of Halloween on the Fourth of July, and I can feel Christmas looming at the end of August.

I wanted to ask if everyone will make plans to come to the hearing on September 30 while there’s still plenty of time. The only thing the corrupt politicians in this state care about is people watching them. If the Arkansas Supreme Court sees how many people care about this case they may think twice about trying to sweep it under the rug. Your presence can make a huge difference. It sends a message. If you can come, please do. We need a packed house. This is the final stretch, and things will begin to move very quickly once September arrives. We need you there, folks. Please come.

JUNE 5

The governor has now put together some sort of committee to figure out how the state can save money on prison costs. Perhaps it would help if they stopped spending millions of dollars to keep this case covered up. They’re literally spending millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money just to keep from having to admit they made a mistake.

Instead of doing what’s right, they’ll just cut the food budget again. That’s what they usually do. They reduce the number of calories each person gets per day. They’ve also decided we’re no longer allowed to have headphones. They used to sell us headphones for about thirty dollars, and that’s how you listened to music. Unfortunately, one of the guards’ favorite things to do was stomp on the headphones when they came into a cell. Prisoners began filing claims in small claims court, and the guards were being forced to pay for the headphones. Instead of telling the guards to stop maliciously destroying what little property people have, the prison just said no more headphones.

That’s their answer to everything. Everything is always the prisoners’ fault, no matter what. I’ve even seen them try to imply it was a prisoner’s fault for being raped by a sadistic, homosexual guard.

JUNE 22

I’ve been told there’s a picture of Axl Rose on the Internet wearing a WM3 T-shirt. That made my month. Everyone who knows me is well aware that I believe there never has been and never will be another band that even comes close to Guns N’ Roses. There have been months at a time when I’ve listened to nothing but GNR. I don’t even care who else is in the band, as long as Axl is singing. When I was a kid I used to wear GNR T-shirts until they disintegrated, which makes it all the more amazing to me that Axl Rose has a WM3 shirt. Thinking about it makes me smile. It feels like getting exactly what you wanted on your birthday.

JUNE 29

Two of the men on Death Row recently had to be shipped to an insane asylum. In these politically correct times, they’re no longer called insane asylums, though. They’re now called “long-term treatment facilities,” even though a padded room is a padded room, no matter what name you stick on it. Both men snapped and went stark raving nuts. They actually went nuts years ago, but it took a while before a judge could be convinced to even look at them. That happens all the time in here. I once saw a man go nuts and start punching the wall until both his fists were broken and bloody. They simply bandaged his hands and sealed him back up in a cell.

The law says the state cannot execute the insane or the mentally retarded, but it’s still done quite often. The prosecutors just get an “expert” to testify that the guy is okay. They’ve killed guys who had no idea they were even being killed. The most morally repugnant execution Arkansas has carried out so far involved a man who had shot himself in the head. He only managed to give himself a lobotomy with a bullet. When asked what he wanted for a last meal, he said, “Pie.” He ate half the pie, then wrapped the other half up to save for after his execution. He couldn’t even be made to understand that he wouldn’t be able to finish the pie after his death.

These are the kinds of things I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Sometimes I think the biggest challenge in life is overcoming the urge to recoil in horror when you see the blackness that lies slightly beneath the skin of the world.

AUGUST 16

Today I received a letter in the mail from Vice President Joe Biden. It was asking for money. The essence of the letter is that the Republicans are going to take over the Senate and violate my civil rights if I don’t donate money. He says that even if I can only send $5 it would help. I had to look at the envelope three times just to ensure that it was actually sent to me and I hadn’t accidentally received someone else’s mail. This is insanity. I considered writing back and informing him that my entire existence has been violated, but he could help by donating a few dollars to my fund. I decided against it. The last thing I need is to be on some Secret Service watch list.

SEPTEMBER 11

Every so often the wind carries the radio signal of a classic country station to the prison, and I feel like I’ll lose my mind. It’s like hearing the sound track to my early childhood. My parents listened to this music all the time, so it constantly filled our home. Sometimes I’ll hear Waylon Jennings’s voice and for a split second the sensation of being twelve years old is so overwhelming it feels like I’m short-circuiting. When I hear that Eddie Rabbitt song “Rocky Mountain Music,” it takes all my will to keep from sobbing or screaming. All of that old music—Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton—when I hear it I feel like my heart is being squeezed in a fist. It hurts me beyond words, but I won’t be able to stop listening. I’ll sit frozen, listening and remembering, for as long as it lasts. George Jones. Johnny Cash. Mickey Gilley. It’s like drowning in some kind of beautiful, velvet pool of despair. Then the wind shifts direction and it’s gone again, the spell broken. I’ll completely forget about it until the next time it happens, which could be several months.

SEPTEMBER 20

There are only three days left of Virgo, and then we move into Libra. Libra is ruled by the archangel Zuriel, which I think is an excellent sign for the upcoming hearing. Zuriel is the archangel you call on when you are in need of balance, fairness, or help with any kind of legal matter. I never even thought about the fact that the hearing would take place under the time ruled by her until now. And now I’m even more excited about the prospect of a fair hearing. I really do have a good feeling about this hearing. If you would have asked me a year ago I would have said there’s no chance in hell of the Arkansas Supreme Court doing anything to help us in any way. I don’t feel that way now. It’s nothing concrete that I can put my finger on; it’s just something in the air. Maybe it’s Zuriel.

In addition to the archangels of the zodiac, there are also archangels that oversee the seasons. Raphael presides over spring, Michael over summer, Gabriel over autumn, and Uriel over winter. That means this week we move out of Michael’s season and into Gabriel’s. Not only does Gabriel rule autumn, she’s also over the cups suit in the tarot deck and is the archangel of emotions. Anytime a lot of cups cards come up in a person’s tarot reading you know that Gabriel’s energy is very active in that person’s life.

It’s nine days until the Feast of the Archangels and ten days until the hearing.

SEPTEMBER 30

Today was the hearing before the Arkansas Supreme Court. I haven’t heard all the details yet, but I’ve been told it went well.

I’m exhausted. The guards spent the day doing their best to destroy everything in my cell. They took my books, my journal, my shoes, and left a pile of destruction behind. I was told it’s because the prison is tired of me doing interviews. Every time a camera crew comes in here it’s another chance they’ll catch a glimpse of what goes on back here. That makes the officials extremely uneasy, so they decided to teach me a lesson. I guess they want me to lie quietly on my concrete slab while they’re trying to kill me. I’m trying to look on the bright side—since I have nothing to read, I have more time to meditate.

I’m very curious to hear all about how the hearing went and what happens next. I hope the court won’t take too long to make a decision. Seventeen years is long enough.

I’ll write more soon. Right now I’m just tired beyond words.

Twenty-seven

The oral argument, when it finally happened, was a mob scene. I watched on the news, seeing hundreds turn out for the event from nearby and as far away as Australia. I was granted a full evidentiary hearing—after which we would be going back down to circuit court for a new trial with the old evidence and all the new evidence, without a jury, and with a new judge.

OCTOBER 5

The days are passing so quickly. This is the only time of year when I want to slow time down. I spend the entire year trying to get here as fast as I can, then once I’m here I want to slam on the brakes. I’m beginning to have those moments when the feel of autumn is so strong it drowns out everything else. Lately it’s been making me think about the perfect sound track for a Halloween party.

The top of any Halloween music list has to be the theme song from the movie Halloween; right on its heels is “Pet Sematary” by the Ramones. For some reason I’ve always equated the old Van Morrison song “Moondance” with Halloween, too. I love that song. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus is an October classic, as well as anything by Type O Negative. And Midnight Syndicate. If you’ve never heard anything by Midnight Syndicate, look them up right this moment. If you distilled the raw essence of every spooky story you ever heard, you would have Midnight Syndicate. I have a friend who swears by them, believing them to be a vital element of any Halloween party. To finish off the list you must have “The Lyre of Orpheus” by Nick Cave and “I Feel Alright” by Steve Earle.

Strangely enough, I’ve already heard the first Christmas song of the season. It was the one by Paul McCartney—“Wonderful Christmas Time.” One of the radio disc jockeys wanted to be the first person to play a Christmas song this year. Shortly afterward the prison forced me to fill out a form indicating who I wanted my remains to be released to.

OCTOBER 12

Rat season is about to start. There are two seasons in here: rat season and cricket season. During the summer the prison is overrun with big black crickets. Once the weather starts turning cold, the rats from the surrounding fields all come into the prison in search of food and warmth. I prefer the rats to the crickets because they’re quieter. The crickets can drive you to the breaking point with the chirping and singing. It’s not like when you hear them outside. In here everything is concrete, and it echoes. A single cricket in here can make more noise than ten outside. They get into the drains and crawl spaces and scream like banshees for days at a time. When they start to die, they’re everywhere. Once I was taken down the hallway and the whole floor was littered with dead crickets.

The rats are a millions times more destructive, but at least they do it quietly. You have to be constantly on guard against them because they’ll eat holes in everything. They’ll gnaw your books, shred your clothes to make nests, and God help you if you’re trying to save food. You can’t even let your blanket hang off the bed or they’ll climb it like a rope. I couldn’t begin to count the times rats have woken me up by running across the bed. The guards used to put poison out for them until an inmate put it in someone’s coffee.

OCTOBER 14

It’s getting cold at night. The temperature has started to drop into the 40s. I woke up shivering, and it felt like the summer had never happened. It suddenly seemed like I’d spent most of my life shivering. I don’t mean that in a bad way, although if you hate the cold it’s probably horrible. For me it just feels like home.

I miss the snow. I miss looking at it, walking in it, tasting it. I used to love those days when it was so cold everyone else would be tucked away inside trying to stay warm. I would be the only one out walking, so I could look across the fields and see miles of snow without a single footprint in it. It would be completely silent—no cars, no birds singing, no doors slamming. Just silence and snow. God, I miss snow. The stars, the moon, the wind, and blankets of pure, pristine snow.

Have you ever seen that movie Cold Mountain? I’ve seen it a dozen times and could watch it a dozen more. Not only does the music played by Jack White and company make me cry every time I hear it, but the winter scenes are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. It’s so real it seems like you should be able to see your breath in the air, no matter what time of year you’re watching it. Absolutely magickal. I love the stark, bare tree limbs and the ice.

Can you believe it’s been over seventeen years since I’ve touched snow? Since I’ve heard that soft, comforting sound it makes as it crunches beneath your boots? It won’t be much longer. I can feel it in my bones. Soon I’ll have snow again. I’ll stand in it and look up at the stars until I can no longer feel my feet.

OCTOBER 15

Mannheim Steamroller is coming to Little Rock next month. People have asked me what concerts I’d want to see, and the top two on my list are Mannheim Steamroller and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Both put on amazing shows of Christmas music that make my heart ache. The TSO is half symphony and half hair band, with all the magick of Christmas sprinkled on top. Last year the local PBS station played one of their concerts during the holiday season, and I wallowed in every moment of it. It was beautiful. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is to Christmas what Midnight Syndicate is to Halloween. If I could get anything I wanted for my birthday, it would be to see either a TSO or Mannheim Steamroller Christmas show.

P.S. I just watched Dustin McDaniel’s debate against the Green Party candidate for attorney general. He claimed during the debate he’s not scared of new evidence being heard in my case—that in fact he’s helped us by testing even more evidence and giving us the results. Yet the representative sent from his office argued during the September hearing before the Arkansas Supreme Court that the new evidence should not be heard. Is it just me, or does this sound like political double-talk to you? You can’t have it both ways, little buddy.

He also said that the past seventeen years of suffering we’ve been put through are a testament to the fact that the system “works.” Otherwise, I’d already be dead. Three innocent people spend almost two decades in a living hell while a child-murderer walks the streets, and the attorney general’s office does everything possible to keep evidence from being heard—that’s his proof that the system “works”? Perhaps he’s helping us all to see the bright side: instead of just torturing me for seventeen years, they could have murdered me.

I will not give in to anger. If I do, then they have won. Pythagoras believed numbers held the secret to enlightenment. He devised a mathematical formula for discovering the number that represents your life’s path. Using that formula, my number is eight. In tarot, eight is the “strength” card. It shows a smiling woman gently closing the jaws of a lion while it licks her hand. That lion represents all the harsh, negative aspects of ourselves we must learn to master—our anger, fear, jealousy, greed, et cetera. The woman does not tame the lion with force. She does it with patience, with gentleness, and with perseverance. Pythagoras said that is the lesson to be learned by those whose birth number is eight. Succeed and the lion carries you to heaven on its back. Fail and it swallows you.

Please consider voting for Dustin McDaniel’s opponent, even if you’re usually not a big fan of the Green Party. Every vote McDaniel does not get is a message that you do not approve of what he’s doing. Dustin McDaniel is the heart of the problem. He is the driving force behind all that is wrong with this case. He will have the entire local establishment backing him. If there is going to be a difference, then you must make it. Please vote. Please send him a message. Don’t let him win. You stopped Fogleman dead in his tracks. Perhaps you can do the same to McDaniel.

OCTOBER 16

It seems like the World Series is being played later and later in the year. I don’t mind, for the most part. Baseball is a summer game, played when it’s hot and nasty outside—which is why the play-offs have that incredibly “special” feel when you see them in autumn. It gives them a whole different aura because it’s cool or cold and late at night—the exact opposite of regular-season baseball games. It causes that fluttery, excited feeling in the pit of your stomach that makes you giddy and happy to be alive. The whole world becomes simple, easy, uncomplicated. It’s like you’re a child again. I don’t want to know statistics or numbers and records. I just like the autumn magick. That said, November games are just wrong. October is perfect; November is too late. Baseball season should not be nine months long.

Someone recently asked me if there were other innocent people on Death Row in Arkansas. The answer is yes. There are two, besides me. There used to be three, but one was executed.

OCTOBER 25

Halloween is this week, and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is coming on two nights back to back. They’re airing it on both Thursday and Friday. Does time pass as quickly for you out there as it does for me in here? For me it seems like the month of May was just a few weeks ago, and the year went by so fast it’s stunning.

At any rate, the ancient Celtic people called Halloween “Samhain,” which means “summer’s end.” That’s because they only recognized two seasons (summer and winter) instead of the four we have today. Halloween was the transition point from summer to winter. It’s also the time to honor our family members and ancestors who have died. In fact, that’s why it’s called Halloween. It’s a shortening of “All Hallows’ Eve,” which is what people call Halloween. November 1 is to honor the saints, and November 2 is to honor departed family members. In Mexican culture they have big “Day of the Dead” celebrations. Catholics walk through cemeteries saying prayers for the dead while priests sprinkle the graves with holy water. The Chinese set aside the entire month of August as “ghost month” to honor their dead.

The archangel who presides over these things is Azrael. He’s commonly known as the “Angel of Death,” although I think that sounds a little scary to most people. Azrael not only escorts the dead to heaven but also helps the living get through the grieving process. We can also give him the emotions and states of mind we’ve outgrown, so that we can move forward. Azrael takes away fear, doubt, anger, worry, stress, and resentment. If it stands in the way of your developing a closer relationship with the Divine, Azrael will remove it.

NOVEMBER 4

As you’ve most likely heard by now, we’re going back to court. Jason, Jessie, and I will all be there at once, and a new judge will hear all the evidence. In the opinion handed down by the Arkansas Supreme Court, the judges pretty much slapped down all the absurd jabber that Dustin McDaniel and company offered. Someone described it as a “sweeping victory” for us. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’ll see any actions of honesty, integrity, or sanity come from the attorney general’s office in the near future. They’ll continue to do as they’ve always done. They’ll fight to defend a corrupt trial until the state goes bankrupt. The statement they released to the media says it’s their constitutional duty to defend the guilty verdict. Perhaps I’m wrong here, but I thought their duty was to defend justice. Their comment was pretty revealing.

At least we no longer have to deal with Burnett. I never thought I’d actually be hoping that Burnett would win a senate seat, but when he did I breathed a sigh of relief. It boggles my mind that a community of people actually chose to have someone like that represent them, but I’m glad they did. By welcoming his poison into their lives, they have removed it from mine. The Lord works in mysterious ways, as my grandmother used to say. Seriously, though—it truly is odd how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?

DECEMBER 4

My thirty-sixth birthday is in one week. This will be my eighteenth birthday in a cage. It’s official—exactly half my life has been spent in here. In some ways it seems like I’ve only been here for a very short period. In other ways it seems like centuries. It doesn’t feel like I’m turning thirty-six. It feels more like two hundred thirty-six. Yet at the same time I can still remember being seven years old as if it were last week. Time is an incredibly strange thing. I think all of the most magickal things are probably connected in one way or another to the phenomenon we call time.

I’ve heard about the Fox News station in Memphis doing a “special report” in which they “analyzed” my body language. They commented on things like how I move my mouth. I wonder how their mouths would move if they’d been repeatedly punched in the face by sadistic prison guards. Or how it would change the way they moved if they were forced to wear chains that cut into their skin for seventeen and a half years. I wonder how they would move if they’d been beaten until they pissed blood, hadn’t been exposed to sunlight in years, and were suddenly being asked invasive questions by rude people after a decade in solitary confinement. They have no idea how strange and overwhelming other people’s energy can be when you’ve been alone for a very, very long time. Ah, well. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect them to understand. Or even be respectful. All I can do is keep moving forward.

*  *  *

On January 4, 2011, Judge Laser held an open hearing in Jonesboro, and a conference call with my lawyers and with Jason’s and Jessie’s.

FEBRUARY 6

Today I had one of those brief flashes where I remembered what the sunset looks and feels like. I completely gave myself over to the memory, letting it wash through me, losing myself in it. I’m afraid that soon such memories will be gone because it gets harder and harder to conjure them up. It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve actually seen a sunset. I regularly receive letters now from people who had not even been born the last time I saw a sunset.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. That doesn’t mean much to me, even though I can feel the energy of it in the air. It almost feels like a really old holiday, perhaps the not-so-bright child that would result from the mating of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. I’m always amazed at how such things gradually take on a life of their own. I’m more interested in the energy of it than the actual game. If I had to articulate it, I’d say it’s like a happy tension. It’s kind of a pleasant feeling, actually. Kind of nice. And there’s not a guard in sight. They’re all down the hall somewhere, watching the game. If you ever decide to escape from prison, you should do it during the Super Bowl.

FEBRUARY 10

Today I received a letter from Senator John Kerry, asking me for a donation. Much like the one I received last year from Joe Biden, this one also says that if I don’t help the Democrats they won’t be able to stop those evil Republicans from violating my civil rights. After reading it I could only quote the great Elvis Presley when he said, “What the hell, man?”

Lately I’ve been looking back over the past year at how much I’ve learned and improved. My health and strength have improved by tenfold at least. Around this time last year I was worn-out, exhausted, and in extreme pain. I dedicated nearly all of my time and energy to improving healing techniques and mastering my internal energy flow. When I reflect on how far I’ve come in one single year, I’m absolutely amazed. This year I’m doubling my efforts again, and I’m excited to see what will come next. I want to push myself beyond all of my previous boundaries. A great deal of esoteric work is like lifting weights—over time you grow stronger and stronger. You get as much out of it as you put into it. This past week I’ve pushed myself harder than ever before, and when I lie down at night I immediately fall into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. It’s satisfying, though. It’s the kind of satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve put all you have into getting something done.

MARCH 21

The hearing has now been pushed back all the way to December. I guess they haven’t had enough of my blood yet. And am I the only one who thinks it’s strange that the state is fighting so hard to prevent any more DNA testing from taking place? Why wouldn’t they want the evidence tested? The whole situation is becoming more insane by the day. In no way does anything happening here fall under the rubric of “justice.”

It’s officially spring. The wheel is turning again. The sun has entered Aries, and soon it will be April. The year is nearly a quarter over. How can you not be amazed by that? Sometimes I can feel time so vividly that I can almost reach out and touch it, like reading Braille.

JULY 10

It’s been a while since I’ve written, eh? I just had to take a little time off. I felt worn-out and ragged, angry at those responsible for dragging this situation out for yet another year.

This time of year is always hard. It seems like July and August take longer to pass than the rest of the year combined. I’m longing for those magickal autumn days with every fiber of my being. I ache for the return of October all the way into the core of my bones. I need those short days and long nights when every moment is haunted and beautiful. I want to hear Type O Negative playing “Christian Woman” while I fill the house with candlelight and jack-o’-lanterns. I want to smell cinnamon and dragon’s blood incense burning while watching The Great Pumpkin and eating caramel apples. I want to have a Halloween party sleepover.

JULY 24

Did you know that Christopher Columbus saw mermaids? In fact, he saw them so often he treated them as nothing out of the ordinary. They don’t teach you that fact in your average public school textbook, but it’s easy enough to find. Just research his captain’s log for the date of January 9, 1493. On that single day he described sighting three of them. And in 1531 the people of a small village near Germany recorded having captured one. They called it a “bishop fish.” It was male and died of starvation after refusing to eat.

My point? The world is full of magick and wonders, most of which are being completely ignored. People like to congratulate themselves for having the world all figured out when nothing is further from the truth. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how so many people spend their lives in front of televisions, dismissing any phenomenon that doesn’t have its own reality show as “unreal.” Think about how many places you’ve traveled to in your car—like the grocery store. But you’ve never actually gotten out and explored the spaces between your home and the store. Who knows what you could find in those “familiar” places if you were to explore them?

AUGUST 1

The harvest season has finally arrived. Today marks its opening. Our next stop on the wheel of the year will be the autumn equinox. I’ve always seen the opening of the harvest as a kind of stairway we walk down to reach the dark and magickal part of the year where all the good things await. The cool, comforting energy that feels more like home than any place can. Today is the landing at the top of the stairs. All we have to do is put one foot before the other, and before you know it, we’ll be watching The Great Pumpkin again. And then . . . the hearing in December. If you come to the hearing, we’ll be celebrating my thirty-seventh birthday together. That will be exciting, won’t it? It will be my nineteenth birthday in prison.

Twenty-eight

That’s the end of my writing from Death Row. I called Lorri the morning of Saturday, August 6, 2011, and her voice when she picked up the phone was completely different. She said, “I need to talk to you about something very important.” My immediate thought was that I’d done something wrong, but in fact it was quite the opposite: Lorri told me that my lawyer Steve Braga had e-mailed her the night before, requesting to talk to her before she and I spoke. Braga and Patrick Benca (the Arkansas state attorney we were working with) had made contact with the attorney general, Dustin McDaniel, and after some negotiation, McDaniel and Scott Ellington (the county prosecutor) offered to release all three of us if we pleaded guilty. Braga refused the offer, which called for my admission of complete and total guilt, period. Braga had countered immediately with the Alford plea: all three of us would plead guilty yet we would maintain our innocence. We would be released but not exonerated by the state.

I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My first reaction was to think: Tell them anything. Tell them I’ll say I’ve done anything if they’ll let me out. I had reached a breaking point—my soul was damaged, and my physical health was even worse. Freedom was terrifyingly within reach.

We got off the phone and a week of sheer hell began—I often think it was worse than the previous eighteen years combined. It didn’t help matters that I hadn’t really slept or eaten in days. By the time the offer was made, I knew I didn’t have much time left. I was dying. Every day that passed made me a little weaker, a little sicker. And I was losing my eyesight as well. If I didn’t jump on this deal, then the prosecutors would drag the case out for years—going to trial would be a terrible gamble to take. I would never live to see outside these walls again. I was willing to do whatever the courts and lawyers wanted by that point, just to avoid a miserable death in a filthy prison cell.

When Benca and Jason’s and Jessie’s attorneys arrived at the Little Rock office of the attorney general on Monday the eighth, they were surprised to find a conference table lined with state prosecutors, all wearing their best suits and ties. It seems McDaniel and company meant business. They wanted to avoid the upcoming hearing, which would inevitably have led to a new trial for us. They wanted to put this case to rest, out of their lives for good—at one point, McDaniel said to Braga, “Is this going to get rid of Lorri Davis?” So everyone had turned out to make sure the deal went down, that day. As McDaniel asked each of our lawyers, starting with mine, for a vocal acknowledgment and agreement of the plea deal, things began to fall apart. Benca agreed, Jessie’s lawyer agreed, but when they got to Jason’s lawyer, he said they were not prepared to accept the deal—they hadn’t yet discussed it with their client. McDaniel went berserk, I hear. He said he’d get Jason on the phone from prison immediately. Jason’s lawyer said that wouldn’t do, he wanted to discuss the plea in person with his client. McDaniel said he’d get the lawyer into the prison in a matter of hours that day. Still, Jason’s lawyer refused, saying he had a brief at home he needed to work on. He’d get into the prison to see Jason within a few weeks. We could have been released the next day. Even McDaniel was shocked. He said, “Do you mean to tell me you’re going to allow your client to sit in prison for weeks when he could be out tomorrow?”

So that was it for the day. At that point, everyone from our lawyers, Lorri, our friend Jacob Pitts, and more were camped out at the Capital Hotel, and all efforts became focused on getting word to Jason. By the night of the twelfth, as far as everyone knew he still had not responded or perhaps even heard from his lawyers. If word got out to the media, the state had made it clear the deal was off, so secrecy was a must. On that night, Lorri called Holly, the woman Jason had been corresponding with most often in recent years, and discovered that Jason had in fact heard about the deal, and he had said no.

The prosecutor wanted all three of us—Jessie, Jason, and me—to take the deal or there would be no deal. Over the years Jason had grown to love prison. His circumstances were not the same as mine. He had a job, he had befriended the guards, and was actually looking forward to the next year in prison school. Jason had also said previously that he wasn’t willing to concede anything to the prosecutors. I understood that with all my heart, and I also knew he still believed he would be exonerated one day and walk freely through the prison gates. But his attorneys weren’t nearly good enough, and the state was too corrupt to ever let that happen. In many ways Jason was still the sixteen-year-old boy he’d been when we first went in. I was trapped in a nightmare, chained to someone I couldn’t even communicate with.

And Holly’s response to Lorri was cavalier—she and Jason both felt morally superior to the terms, despite the fact that there were no guarantees in our future. Lorri got off the phone and called Eddie Vedder to update him. He in turn called Holly and begged her to talk some sense into Jason when he called her from prison the next morning, as he did every Saturday.

I paced back and forth in my prison cell, two steps to the door then two steps back. Over and over and over I paced, at all hours of the day and night. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t read, couldn’t even sit still. I wept. I cursed. I raged. To see home so close and yet still beyond my reach was pain beyond articulation.

By Monday night, August 16, still no word. Lorri was frantically making preparations for my release anyway: figuring out how to get me an ID, what to do about travel outside the state, not to mention the imminent upheaval of her own life. We had talked often about what would happen if I were freed—she would have to walk away from everything she’d built for herself in Little Rock, because there was no way I could stay for any period of time in the state of Arkansas.

On the night of the seventeenth, word came through to Lorri that Jason had finally agreed. He had finally realized that I was in danger, and that we were all at the end of our rope. He also realized he was going to be left behind if he didn’t come along with us on the deal. My own case had garnered much of the WM3 publicity, and if we managed to be freed without him, there would be very little interest left in his case. The funds were nearly gone as it was. During all this time, I called Lorri constantly throughout the day for updates. I couldn’t eat or sleep and my nerves were raw. There was nothing that could hold my attention—if we didn’t pull this off, Lorri and I both knew this would be it. We were out of energy, out of options. I found out that night, too, that Jason had said yes—and for the first time in days, I sat down on my bed.

We had no idea when we’d be getting out—only the warden and head guard knew what was happening within Varner, and any information leaked would put the media into a frenzy. On the afternoon of the eighteenth, after being seated alone in a prison office for a while, I was shackled and led outside to a van. Jessie was sitting inside and started talking immediately, as though not a day had gone by since we were arrested. He talked about the girlfriend he’d had at age seventeen and going back home to West Memphis. It was overwhelming. We drove to Tucker to pick up Jason. As he got in the van, he looked over at me and I said, “We’re going home.” He replied, “Yep,” and after a few minutes we started talking. There were two guards up front and they wouldn’t stop talking, either. They stopped at a gas station and bought us candy bars and Mountain Dews, and we sat in the backseat in shackles, drinking through straws. It was the strangest celebration I’ve ever been to.

We got to the jail in Jonesboro in the late afternoon. As we pulled up, one of the guards said, “Shit, they’re already here.” Someone had leaked to the media and there was a crowd. We were told to get down as we drove into the garage, where we were unloaded and taken into the jail. We were put in separate cells overnight, no phone calls allowed. Steve Braga, Patrick Benca, and a couple others came to visit that night and dropped off clothes for the hearing. They told me that the word was spreading now, and that Lorri, friends, and supporters from all over were making their way to Memphis that night. They told me to expect a fairly quick hearing—I’d be entering my plea, and the judge would formally accept it. I sat on the edge of the bed all night, waiting for morning.

The hearing started at about eleven on the nineteenth. I was roused by one of the guards, given my clothes and a shaving razor, and after I dressed I sat on a bench waiting for Jason and Jessie. I watched a guard knotting Jessie’s tie for him. We were shackled for what would be the last time, and before we got into a van, a security guard informed us that if he said the word, we were to drop to the ground without thinking. A convoy of vehicles drove to the courthouse. We were taken into the jury deliberation room, and sat, still shackled, for about a half-hour. Lawyers for all of us came in finally, as well as Lorri—neither of us has much recollection, it was so crazed. There was a separate room for family members, and Patrick Benca kept texting photos of us to various people next door—as far as I’ve been told it was emotional pandemonium. My mother and sister were there, though my mother sat in the courtroom throughout, giving interviews and talking to the press. My father didn’t come. He sent an e-mail through the WM3 website with his phone number, in case I wanted to be in touch.

We rehearsed our statements. Originally our lawyers were going to enter our pleas for us, but at the last minute Ellington threw a fit, demanding that we accept the plea ourselves, out loud, in front of the family members of the victims, who were nearly all in attendance. Over the years, I’d corresponded with John Mark Byers, and with Pam Hobbs’s daughter, Amanda. I was so tired that I hardly registered individual presences. The crowd and the noise from reporters was overwhelming as we were walked, finally unshackled, into the courtroom. It was over with very quickly. Everything went off just as we had rehearsed. I remember seeing Lorri and Eddie sitting right behind me, and then I was declared free.

Judge Laser allowed the three of us to be escorted from the courtroom, and then he spoke to the remaining audience. He said that the plea deal was a tragedy on many counts. It wouldn’t bring the children back, and it wouldn’t replace a minute of the time we’d spent in prison. He thanked outside forces—supporters, celebrities, and friends—for getting involved and for their enduring loyalty. When I watched the speech on tape afterward, it was the first time I believed the justice system was anything other than corrupt to the core.

Twenty-nine

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

In three days I will have been out of prison for six months. It’s passed in the blink of an eye. Part of that sensation is due to the shock I felt upon my release, and for weeks afterward. It’s taken a great deal of time for me to begin coming back to myself. It’s still not complete. Anytime I become exhausted or deeply stressed, the shock begins to creep into the periphery of my psyche like a fog rolling in. I have no idea how long it will take before I’m acclimated to the outside world again. Perhaps never.

People keep asking me what I was thinking the day I walked out of prison. The answer to that is nothing. I wasn’t thinking anything at all, much like the day I walked into prison. The trauma was just too great. I had been in the solitary confinement of that concrete cell for nearly a decade, with few visitors. To be suddenly thrust into a courtroom packed with people, reporters, cameras, and action was overwhelming. Each and every person had their own specific scent and energy. It was pleasant and cloying at the same time, but it was sensory overload. Just wearing real clothes for the first time was disorienting in itself, but then you add in everything else and it felt like someone had set off a grenade in my head. Activity swirled all around me, but it all also seemed very far away.

The moment it was over and the chains were gone, Jason and I were taken straight to the Department of Motor Vehicles in a small town called Marked Tree and issued ID cards. From there we drove to the Madison Hotel in Memphis. Eddie Vedder met us there, and an aide-de-camp had set up a hotel suite for us. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a buffet table. Cheeseburgers, fries, sandwiches, salad, soup, just about anything you can imagine. My first meal out of prison was a Black Angus burger, a turkey sandwich, fries, and a glass of Merlot. I felt sick immediately afterward, but it was worth it. Eddie sat on a couch, laughing the entire time. It was just a few of us, but there was a huge party going on in the main dining room downstairs—everyone was celebrating. When we went down to say hello, I tasted champagne for the first time in my life.

That day, Jessie Misskelley returned to his father’s home in a small trailer park in West Memphis. Jason and I were given a rooftop party at the Madison in the evening. Eddie and Natalie Maines sang. It was surreal. For the first time in eighteen years I stood outdoors in the dusk, looking at the Mississippi River and watching the sunset. My heart exploded, over and over. I stared at the bridge between Memphis and West Memphis for a long time. And then the night fell. I was drunk on it.

The next morning we boarded a plane (my first) with Eddie Vedder, who flew us up to his place in Seattle. It was heaven. I rested, and just spent time with Lorri. My nerves were frayed and raw. Still are, to a certain degree. And Lorri is still my only comfort.

And then I came to New York. When I walked the city streets for the first time, I was dazed. I walked out in front of cars. I stumbled over my own feet because I hadn’t walked any great distance without chains on them in eighteen years. Again, it was Lorri who helped me, saved me. I couldn’t truly appreciate the wonders of the city that first time because the surroundings were so unbelievably different from what I’d ever known. Only after a couple of months had passed and I returned to the city could I begin to take it all in. People still recognize me on the street. They shake hands, they hug me, some want to take pictures. I thank them all. And I’m grateful to them. After all, it was the fact that they care that saved my life.

I did speak to my mother on the phone once after my release. It was a difficult conversation to say the least. I’ve asked my mother and my sister not to talk to the press about me and my life, though they haven’t respected my wishes. They’ve given false information and salacious interviews, and they appear to enjoy the attention it brings them. I haven’t had contact with them because every conversation I’ve had becomes public knowledge immediately.

Jason came to visit me in New York a couple of times in the fall. It’s hard to describe our friendship—it’s a struggle to find the connection and the common ground now. We are navigating the world in very different ways, and I think of him as I always have: he is a good kid. There is a moment at the end of Paradise Lost when Jason’s lawyer asks him if he thinks I’m guilty. Jason responds that he doesn’t know—maybe. I haven’t seen the film for myself and I didn’t think of it over the years, but I think of it more often now. It’s a moment that is emblematic of the betrayal, pain, and deceit we were all subjected to—everyone involved in the case.

*  *  *

Sundance, late January 2012. Even I had heard of it, inside the prison walls. Now I would see it for myself. Our documentary, West of Memphis, would be premiering there. Lorri and I had both been producers on it, and we would see people’s reactions firsthand. We would also be meeting some members of two of the victims’ families.

When we arrived we were met by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, both producers of the film. Lorri and I hadn’t seen them in over a month and had missed them a great deal. As soon as I heard those New Zealand accents, the feel of “home” washed over me again. They have been with me every step of the way since my release, helping me. Thinking of them now makes my heart feel like it’s about to burst with love.

To say that Sundance was overwhelming would be a huge understatement. It’s not something I can write about, even now. I just haven’t had enough time to digest the experience. I’m still turning it over and over, examining it from every angle.

I met members of two of the victims’ families—John Mark Byers and Pam Hobbs and some of her family. They were there to promote the film alongside the rest of us. It was indescribable, sitting down to dinner with them all. The Hobbs family gave me a black pocket watch and chain, engraved with the words “Time starts now” and the date of my release from prison.

My son, Seth, came to Sundance. He was eighteen when we sat down together to talk outside a courtroom or prison. We’re slowly, tentatively, trying to create a bond. We don’t know each other, but we’re learning. When we talk on the phone, I have the entirely new and foreign feeling of being a father. It’s something I’m gradually becoming accustomed to, though I can’t say I know what I’m doing when Domini calls to tell me about some new parenting problem and asks me to get involved. There will be more to tell, I’m sure, as time passes. I want to have a relationship with him.

Our film was one of nine chosen to be shown in other parts of the country. In January, I also went to Nashville as part of the Sundance tour. Returning was an unexpected hell for me. I hadn’t been back to the South since my release. I had severe panic attacks; the fear that I would never get out of there made it hard to breathe and impossible to sleep. My temperature rose to above 103 degrees, and Lorri nearly called an ambulance. I don’t like looking back at it.

The memory from Sundance that I hold dearest is a snowball fight. One night I went outside with Lorri, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh. It was the first time I’d touched snow in almost twenty years. It was perfect. It was pure and unblemished, and as white as the moon. And then we went into a frenzy, running wild and throwing snowballs at each other. Peter was laughing like a child, and Fran squealed in delight as she was pelted. I’ll see it in my head until the day I die.

*  *  *

These days, I try to look forward. I’m tired of looking back. I’m tired of the case. And I’m sick to death of the “WM3.” I am not the West Memphis Three, and it’s a title I’d prefer never to hear again. It does nothing but remind me of hell. Sometimes it seems as if I live in a world where I have no identity outside the case. That I am the case and the case is me.

Ultimately, I know that freedom isn’t enough. I’m a young man, and the only way all three of us will be able to live the rest of our lives is by being exonerated. I need the person or persons who murdered those three children, and who put me on Death Row for eighteen years, found and brought to justice. Wm3.org continues to be a vital source of information about all three of us and the case. West of Memphis I hope will shed even more light on our struggle for freedom. My legal team and several others are working constantly on new leads, DNA testing, and investigative work, and we’ll continue to do so for as long as it takes.

I want to make the world a more magickal place. To give magick a form that people appreciate, and that changes their lives. To create art that will make people want to forever reject the mundane and mediocre world they’ve been surrounded by. Whether my tools are the tarot, group energy work, or photography, I want to share with people all the wonder and beauty I discovered while trapped in a cell for nearly twenty years.

EPILOGUE

A person can starve to death in prison, and not through lack of food. What I’m talking about is the withering and death of the human spirit from lack of decency or love for fellow human beings. The talking heads on television project the image of prisoners as animals, and it’s true. It’s true because the spirit that once made them human has been starved to death, and they become a black hole in human form.

Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You’re not allowed to so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you. They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent’s funeral. It’s not just that things work out this way—they are designed that way.

I believe there are only two unstoppable forces in the universe. One is love, the other is intelligence. I also believe that a person’s capacity to love is directly related to their intelligence level, just as hate corresponds to a person’s level of ignorance. The only thing that makes it impossible for the system to destroy you and grind your spirit into nothing is to be more intelligent than it is.

In certain tribal cultures, spirit guides are represented by animals. The animal guides usher people into the next realm of development in their lives. In plain language, they make each of us grow as a person. My guide to growth is a beautiful monkey.

My wife is the single most erotic and intelligent creature that has ever existed. She can have all the poise and grace of a feline, but shining from her eyes is pure monkey mischief. She is my strength and my heart. Without her to keep me going, I would have died long ago. I have no reason to keep breathing, outside of her. She is my life.

In some ways maintaining a relationship while entombed behind these walls is like trying to overcome brain damage. When one area of the brain is damaged, the other areas have to find ways to compensate by evolving and developing new neural pathways that would never have come about under normal circumstances. In here, the normal ways of expressing, giving, and receiving love aren’t possible. If you don’t evolve, your relationship will die very quickly. You can’t kiss your wife good-bye every morning before heading off to work. You can’t hold her when she cries, or sneak up from behind with a surprise hug. There is no going out for dinner, or heading to a hotel for a weekend getaway. It creates tremendous stress fractures on a relationship that eventually cause the entire thing to crumble. When you have an argument you can’t even hold hands and talk sweetly to each other when making up. You’re limited to whatever emotion you can express in a ten-minute conversation on a telephone that other people are listening to and recording every word. The vast majority of people in prison find themselves alone, left behind by people who have moved on.

One of our—Lorri’s and mine—greatest inventions was moon water. Another prisoner once discovered me making moon water and said it was so illogical it nearly drove him insane. For months afterward he would stomp his feet in frustration and bellow, “This shit is crazy! It makes no sense! That shit is making my head hurt!” For some reason the thought of it seemed to hurt his mind. Then again, he was a little unbalanced to begin with.

Moon water can be made only once a month, on the night of the full moon. After the sun goes down and the moon rides high, you fill a container with water and set it on a window ledge so that the moon casts a reflection in it. You must leave it there all night, so that it catches as much of the moon’s light as possible. You have to remove it right before morning so that the sun’s light never touches it. It must then be kept in a dark place. My wife and I did this every full moon for years, and we would take a single sip of the water at the same time each night while thinking of each other. In that moment we were united, no matter how far apart we might be. You take a single sip each night so that you have enough to last the entire month.

For every way the system attempts to separate us, we can’t help but seek out new ways to pull ourselves together. In the end, hatefulness and ignorance always fail in the face of intelligence and love. The proof is in the moon water.

Hope

Immortality

And glorious nonsense

A sunburst in my brain

And plans of things to come

—DAMIEN ECHOLS, VARNER UNIT

Me, around second grade. This is the only picture of me I know of that survives from this time.

At Tucker Max, 1996. After nearly two years in prison, I had only recently begun to have visits from strangers who were sympathetic to my cause. (Grove Pashley)

Both of these photos were taken outside hearings, probably around 1997 and 1998. (Grove Pashley)

In 1996, I met my future wife, Lorri Davis, when she wrote me a letter telling me she’d seen the first documentary made about the West Memphis Three. She gave me these photos, which I kept hidden in my cell for years.

(FROM TOP)

The wedding altar. The ceremony, December 3, 1999. Lorri and I are married. It was the first time we were permitted to touch each other. Afterward, author Mara Leveritt and her partner, Linda Bessette, hosted a reception at their home in Little Rock. (Grove Pashley)

Lorri and me; with Lorri’s parents, Harry and Lynn Davis; and my adoptive mother, Cally Salzman, visiting me. The prison charged five dollars for each Polaroid, and to judge from the stacks and stacks of them that Lorri has—one from nearly every visit—the prison photo business was lucrative during my tenure.

A birthday card that I made for Lorri one year. Occasions like this were especially painful; I wanted so much to be with her, to give her gifts, to spend the day with her.

I felt truly blessed, though, just to know she had found me.

Domini brought my son, Seth, to Arkansas, and Lorri would meet them and take over, acting as stepmother for a day or two. These pictures were taken at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock, a historic landmark. Lorri and Seth got along well, and it was a relief to share my anxieties about fatherhood with her. (Grove Pashley)

Lorri brought Seth to visit several times in the first ten years or so that I was incarcerated. The prison photographer, you may have noted, was not exactly a professional artiste. . . .

I wasn’t the only artist on Death Row. A Christmas card I still have from another inmate, Robert Robbins. His sentence was commuted to life without parole, and he is still in an Arkansas prison today.

I made the piece above and those below to decorate my cell. I think the photo of the figure comes from a National Geographic; unfortunately I can’t recall what the characters mean.

Most of my art was made from the inner casings of book covers. These are my paintings of the Egyptian god Anubis.

I kept an astrological pocket planner some years. These pages are from 2009.

Lorri showing some of my artwork to wm3.org cofounder Burk Sauls at her home in Little Rock. All the pieces I have left were for the most part smuggled out by Lorri while I was inside. (Grove Pashley)

This piece was given to me by Harada Roshi, and I have it to this day.

Once in a while I saved clippings about the case. This one, from 2005, reports on the state’s refusal to reconsider my conviction. But that denial did provide the opportunity to take my case ultimately to the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Me in 2004. It was a terribly difficult and dark year. Even though we had tremendous support and sympathy in the outside world, our case had made no progress. (Grove Pashley)

Jason and Jessie, around 2004. They were often incarcerated together in prison, even sleeping in beds side by side for a time. (Grove Pashley)

With several people who helped save my life, some of whom worked at it for years. Left to right: Miu and Burk Sauls, Chad Robertson, Kathy Bakken, me, Lisa Fancher, and Grove Pashley. (Grove Pashley)

With Lorri, August 19, 2011, at the party for Jason, Jessie, and me at the Madison Hotel, Memphis—my first day of freedom in eighteen years. I hadn’t slept in nearly a week. (Grove Pashley)

With Eddie Vedder and Lorri.

With some of my family. Left to right: Lorri, my nephew August, my niece Shae, Lorri’s sister Sherry, my niece Sydney, and Sherry’s husband, Sam Chico.

My first visit to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, with friend Danny Bland. A far cry from the art scene on Death Row.

With Helen Carr, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Lorri, at an all-ice bar in New Zealand—the start of many surreal travels and adventures.

Lorri, Amy Berg, and me, spring 2012. Amy, who directed West of Memphis beautifully, has become a dear friend.

With Lorri at Sundance, January 2012. I’m starting to look a little less dazed here, right? It was a beautiful place, and the sight of that snow falling was better than just about anything else I’d seen since getting out.

With Marilyn Manson, on our way to the 2012 Revolver Golden Gods Awards in Los Angeles. I introduced Manson that night—my first “public speaking” appearance—and I was nervous as hell. Manson was a supporter of ours behind the scenes for years; he will always be a hero of mine.

With Johnny Depp, a true friend and brother, and tattoo artist Mark Mahoney, Los Angeles, 2012.

Lorri and me with Jacob Pitts, another good and deeply loyal friend.

Lorri and me, New York, June 2012.

A recent photo shoot for a magazine, 2012. I hardly recognize the man posing for the camera, but I know he’s a lot more comfortable in his skin than I was for many years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the following people, this book would have never seen the light of day. I offer them my deepest appreciation.

First and foremost, my wife, Lorri Davis. You are the reason I am still alive. Without you, there is nothing.

Thanks to Johnny Depp, who has proven himself time and again to be my brother in all but blood.

To Eddie Vedder, who has been my friend and safety net for nearly two decades now. We love you.

To Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, the two most intelligent people I’ve ever encountered. What I owe you can never be repaid. When I hear your voices, it feels like home.

To Philippa Boyens and Seth Mills, you were and are always there.

To Jacob Pitts, for being what you are and doing what you do. The third leg of our tripod. Thank you.

To our songbird, Natalie Maines. We love you.

To Henry Rollins, god of punk. You never tired, never failed, and never once let us down. You were always there, and I aspire to be more like you.

To my legal team, Steve Braga, Patrick Benca, Lonnie Soury, Dennis Riordan, and Don Horgan. Thank you so much for all you’ve done.

To my editor, Sarah Hochman, at Blue Rider Press, who worked tirelessly to make this book a reality. Without your energy and guidance this book would not exist.

Also to David Jauss, for planting the seed and tending it in the early days.

A special thanks to Michele Anthony; Ken Kamins; my agent, Henry Dunow; and to David Rosenthal, Aileen Boyle, and Brian Ulicky at Blue Rider Press. To Gregg Kulick and Claire Vaccaro at Penguin for art direction and design, and Shepard Fairey for a beautiful book jacket. You did for me what I couldn’t do for myself. Thank you dearly.

Thank you, Nicole Vandenberg, Christi Dembrowski, Josie Leckie, and Matt Dravitzki, for your ever-present work behind the scenes.

Without the following people, I wouldn’t be here today: Burk Sauls, Lisa Fancher, Kathy Bakken, Grove Pashley, Chad Robertson, Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky, Anna Cox, Shodo Harada Roshi, Chisan, Kobutsu, Father Charles Thessing, Father Jack Harris, Cally Salzman, Kate Tippet, Stephanie Shearer, Chris Bacorn, Terry Reed, Theresa Reed, Jen DeNike, Danny Forester, Danny Bland and Kelly Canary, Jene O’Keefe Trigg and Aaron Trigg, Steve Mark, Brent Peterson, Sam and Young Chico, Cotton and Ladybug Davis, Rachel Geiser, Amy Berg, Mara Leveritt, Betsey Wright, Don Davis, Marcel Williams, Tim Howard, Jason McGehee, Elliot Groffman, Kelly Curtis, Jill Vedder, Stephen Deuters, Nathan Holmes, and Ruth and Bill Carter. Thank you all so, so much.

All my love and appreciation go to Capi Peck, for taking care of Lorri and me when we needed it most. Otter Firk. Also to the whole Arkansas Take Action group. Thank you.

And love and thanks to Margaret Cho, the first person to ever take a chance on my writing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Damien Echols was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. At age eighteen he was falsely convicted, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.—afterward known as the West Memphis Three—in the case known as the Robin Hood Hill murders. Echols received the death sentence and spent eighteen years on Death Row. In 2011, together with Baldwin and Misskelley, he was released in an agreement with the state of Arkansas known as an Alford plea. The West Memphis Three are the subject of Paradise Lost, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and West of Memphis, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Echols is the author of a self-published memoir titled Almost Home. He and his wife, Lorri Davis, live in New York City.

Appendix

the Case of the West Memphis Three

DAVID JAUSS

In 1993, three teenagers who have come to be known as the West Memphis Three were arrested and charged with brutally slaying three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, as part of a purported “satanic ritual” that involved sexual molestation and mutilation. In 1994, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were convicted of these crimes in trials that rival the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–1693 for their reliance on rumors, lies, superstition, and religious hysteria. Baldwin and Misskelley were sentenced to life without parole and life plus forty years, respectively, and Echols, who was deemed the “ringleader,” was sentenced to death.

The three teenagers were convicted of these heinous murders despite the fact that there was not then, nor is there now, any physical evidence tying them to the crimes. No DNA, blood, hairs, fingerprints, or footprints—nothing. Nor was there any evidence at the crime scene to suggest that the murders were part of a satanic ritual—no pentagrams or other occult symbols, no sign of fire, no candles, no incense.[1] In part, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were convicted on the basis of the “satanic panic” that resulted from testimony (since recanted) by a woman who claimed she’d witnessed the three teenagers at an esbat[2]—a witches’ meeting—and by testimony from a self-described “expert” in the occult who admitted on the witness stand that he received his Ph.D. in occult studies from a fraudulent mail-order diploma mill without ever taking a single class.[3] But chiefly they were convicted on the basis of a false, coerced, and grossly error-riddled “confession” by Misskelley, a mentally challenged teenager with the IQ of a third-grade child,[4] who was interrogated for the better part of twelve hours without a lawyer or parent present and who believed he would receive a $35,000 reward in exchange for his statement.[5] He immediately recanted his confession and refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, even after he was offered a significantly reduced sentence to do so.[6] Despite the fact that his confession was ruled inadmissible in Echols and Baldwin’s trial, the jury included it in their deliberations, thus violating Echols’s and Baldwin’s Sixth Amendment right to confront their accuser.[7] And despite the fact that substantial exculpatory evidence has been discovered since the trials, including DNA evidence that excludes the West Memphis Three as suspects and potentially implicates others, including the stepfather of one of the murdered boys,[8] for eighteen years the State of Arkansas consistently rejected appeal after appeal and refused to order new trials.

This incredible injustice did not go unnoticed. The West Memphis Three have received widespread international attention and support, thanks in large part to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Emmy- and Peabody-winning 1996 HBO documentary, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, and its two sequels, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and the Academy Award–nominated Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. Amy Berg’s documentary West of Memphis has also galvanized support for the West Memphis Three, as has journalist Mara Leveritt’s book on the case, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three. The website wm3.org, the first of many sites devoted to the case, has called worldwide attention to the case. The website was created in 1997 by Burk Sauls, Kathy Bakken, and Grove Pashley (who were later joined by Lisa Fancher), and by 1998 it had become “the most extensive resource of its kind on the Internet relating to a single case.”[9] Its mantra, “Free the West Memphis Three,” was eventually the rallying cry of thousands upon thousands of supporters from all around the globe, and more than fifteen years later, the site continues to play a vital role in enlightening the world about the case. Several organizations also provided invaluable support for the imprisoned men, among them The Innocence Project, Arkansas Take Action, the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The cause of the West Memphis Three also received a great deal of international attention because of the support of many high-profile celebrities, including director and producer Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh; actors Johnny Depp, Jacob Pitts, Lisa Blount, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and Winona Ryder; comedian Margaret Cho; musicians Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines, Peter Yarrow, Patti Smith, Henry Rollins, Steve Earle, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, Jonathan Richman, Michale Graves, Marilyn Manson, and the members of Fistful of Mercy and Metallica; television writer and producer Norman Lear; and writer Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking. Jackson, Walsh, Depp, and Vedder have been particularly supportive, offering not only their advocacy but also generous financial support to the cause, estimated at “many millions of dollars.” Jackson and Walsh have been especially generous; since 2005 they have funded most of the scientific testing and investigative research, and they also produced the documentary West of Memphis. Echols’s attorney Dennis Riordan has said the DNA testing alone “cost the defense more than $1 million.”[10]

As essential as support from Jackson, Walsh, Depp, and Vedder has been, perhaps the most important has come from Echols’s wife, Lorri Davis, a landscape architect from New York City who began exchanging letters with Echols in prison after she saw Paradise Lost in 1996, then made numerous trips to Arkansas to visit him, and eventually decided to devote herself not just to the case but to him as well. In 1998, she gave up her successful career with a leading New York design firm and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and moved to Arkansas. In December 1999, she and Echols married in a Buddhist ceremony at the prison. That same year she created Echols’s defense fund and began raising money to hire lawyers, investigators, and forensic experts and to pay for DNA and other scientific tests; she has shared all of the findings and legal advice with Baldwin and Misskelley and their legal teams.[11] She also cofounded, with Capi Peck and Brent Peterson, the organization Arkansas Take Action, which did much to raise awareness about the case. Without her diligent, passionate efforts to right this wrong, the West Memphis Three might well have suffered the fate of so many other men and women convicted of crimes they did not commit: they might have been forgotten entirely.

Thanks to all of the people mentioned above, and the many thousands of everyday supporters who joined the grassroots effort to free the West Memphis Three, the clamor for justice steadily increased over the years and, in August 2011, led the State of Arkansas to grant their release through a rarely used, paradoxical legal maneuver called the Alford plea, which required them to plead guilty while legally maintaining their innocence.

The story of the trials of the West Memphis Three, their eighteen-year-long battle for freedom, their controversial release, and their continued efforts to clear their names is long and complicated. What follows is a relatively brief summary of its bizarre and byzantine developments.

The Murders, Satanic Panic, and the Investigation

On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys went missing in West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. Chris Byers, Michael Moore, and Stevie Branch were last seen alive at approximately six-thirty that evening.[12] Family members, friends, neighbors, and two police officers searched for the boys that night without any luck. The search resumed the following morning, and at approximately one that afternoon, their bodies were found submerged in a stagnant, rain-filled drainage ditch in a four-acre patch of woods near Interstate 40 called Robin Hood Hills. They were naked and their wrists and ankles were bound with their shoelaces. The left side of Stevie Branch’s face was gouged, and Chris Byers’s scrotum had been removed and his penis skinned. The boys had numerous abrasions, contusions, fractures, cuts, lacerations, and scratches.

Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the murders were part of a satanic ritual. Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell, the lead investigator on the case, announced that the murders may have resulted from “cult activity,” and although he said he had seen no evidence to support that conclusion,[13] the rumors continued. Dr. Martin D. Hill, a forensic linguist who has studied the case in great depth, has said, “There were no ritual markings or emblems found at the crime scene, nor was there any physical evidence that rituals had taken place there in the past. The mutilation of the bodies was savage but not systematic.”[14] Nonetheless, as early as two weeks after the murders, People magazine was reporting that townspeople suspected the killers were members of a “Satanic cult.”[15] Numerous West Memphians, mostly teenagers, reported rumors of cult activity, and one apparently mentally ill fifteen-year-old named Ricky Climer told police that he had been a member of a satanic cult since he was ten and that the cult had committed a number of murders (none of which could be corroborated). He also claimed that the cult’s members had been attacked by Smurfs, a claim that apparently didn’t discredit his testimony enough to keep him off the prosecution’s witness list.[16] Indeed, Detective Bryn Ridge, who would later testify that he didn’t consider Misskelley to be mentally challenged, wrote in his notes that Climer “appeared to be quite street wise and able to carry on a conversation with me that appeared to be normal for his age group.”[17]

Chief among the suspected Satanists was eighteen-year-old Damien Echols, a ninth-grade dropout who stood out in the small, intensely conservative community of West Memphis because he dressed in black, listened to heavy metal music, read such writers as Stephen King and Anne Rice, and had checked out two “occult” books from the local library, Magic by Maurice Bouisson and Cotton Mather on Witchcraft, a reprint, ironically, of The Wonders of the Invisible World, Mather’s 1693 defense of his infamous role in the Salem Witch Trials.[18] Innocuous though these facts might seem, they would become key “evidence” in a contemporary version of those trials.

The first person to associate Satanism and Echols with the crime was, perhaps, Jerry Driver, the county’s chief juvenile probation officer. Driver claimed to be an expert on the occult and sometimes gave seminars on occult-related crime.[19] Echols had told Driver that he was a Wiccan—and indeed, he was a student of the Wiccan religion—and Driver thought he dressed “like one of the slasher-movie-type guys.”[20] Echols had had numerous run-ins with Driver in previous years, most notably in May 1992, when he and his then girlfriend, Deanna Holcomb, attempted to run away from home together and broke into an unoccupied trailer to escape hundred-degree heat. They were partially undressed when they were apprehended, and Echols was convicted of breaking and entering and second-degree sexual misconduct.[21] Driver also suspected Echols of Satanism because of a drawing Echols had made of four tombstones, which Driver inexplicably interpreted as evidence that Echols and Holcomb intended to have a baby and sacrifice it to Satan.[22]

Driver confided his suspicion that Echols was involved in the crime to his assistant, Steve Jones, who reportedly said, “Looks like Damien finally killed somebody,” when Detective Sergeant Mike Allen discovered the first of the boys’ bodies the next day.[23] Driver also confided his suspicions to Lieutenant James Sudbury, a West Memphis narcotics detective who, along with other members of the department’s Drug Task Force, was under investigation at the time for stealing confiscated drugs and guns from the department’s evidence room. (Interestingly, in November 1993 the West Memphis Evening Times reported that one of the people who had received confiscated guns was Judge David Burnett, who would be the presiding judge in the 1994 trials of the West Memphis Three.) Sudbury survived this initial investigation but was fired in 2003 after a police inquiry into various alleged criminal acts, including “destruction of evidence that would implicate his son in the drug trade.”[24] Like Sudbury, Driver would get in trouble with the law; he pled no contest to charges of the 1997 theft of $30,000 from his department’s funds.[25]

When Driver confided his suspicions to Sudbury, he also gave him a list of eight teenagers and predicted that one or more of them would eventually be charged with the murders. In addition to Echols’s name, the list contained the names of his best friend, Jason Baldwin, and his girlfriend, Domini Teer.[26]

As a result of Driver’s suspicions, Echols and Baldwin were the first two suspects questioned. On May 7, less than twenty-four hours after the bodies had been discovered, Sudbury and Jones went to the Echols family’s trailer home in West Memphis to question Damien. The following day, Sudbury gave Driver’s list to another West Memphis narcotics detective, Investigator Shane Griffin, and Griffin and Detective Bill Durham drove to the Baldwin family’s trailer home in nearby Marion to question Jason. Echols and Teer were also there, so Echols was questioned a second time. As Mara Leveritt reported, “They were not read their Miranda rights or told they could have a lawyer present. None of their parents were there.”[27] In any case, all three had alibis for the night of the murder, alibis that were corroborated.[28] Echols, for example, had spent the post-school hours on May 5 first at a friend’s house, then at a pharmacy, where he picked up a prescription, and finally at his family’s home, where he spoke on the telephone with a girl from Memphis until eleven-thirty. All of the people involved—one of whom was Meredith McKay, the daughter of Ricky McKay, a West Memphis police officer involved in the investigation[29]—confirmed Echols’s account.[30]

Back on May 6, Driver had also given his list of prime suspects to Detective Donald Bray of the Marion Police Department, whose office was across the street from his own. That day, Bray was interviewing a thirty-two-year-old truck stop waitress named Vicki Hutcheson, who was suspected of stealing $200 by overcharging a customer’s credit card. Hutcheson told Bray that her eight-year-old son, Aaron, was a close friend of the murdered boys and that Chris Byers and Michael Moore had asked Aaron to go to Robin Hood Hills with them that fateful day but she had refused to let him. Thinking that Aaron might know something that would help solve the murders, Bray urged the West Memphis police to interview the boy.[31] The following day, Aaron told police that Michael Moore had been picked up at school on the afternoon of May 5 by a tall black man with yellow teeth who told Michael that his mother had asked him to take him home. Since Michael lived just two doors down from the school[32] and his mother said that he had come home immediately after school, the police dismissed Aaron’s report.[33]

Unfortunately, they did not entirely dismiss his later reports, even though each time he was interviewed, his account grew more bizarre and contradictory. At first he said he wasn’t in the woods when the three boys were murdered; later he said he was there and witnessed Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley committing the murders. Two other men, one of whom was black, were with them, he said, but he didn’t recognize them. He said Misskelley was holding Stevie in the water, waiting for the order from his “boss,” Echols, to kill him; then Michael and Chris found two guns, hid behind a tree, counted to three, then jumped out to shoot the five men, but the guns weren’t loaded. Then Echols cut Michael’s neck and blood poured all over his T-shirt, and when he was dead, Echols took off his clothes and raped him. Misskelley then cut off the genitals of all three boys. At this point, Misskelley saw Aaron and started to chase him, but Aaron tripped him and escaped.[34] At other times, Aaron said that he had been tied up but managed to untie himself and escape by outrunning the five men who chased him[35]; that Stevie had been stabbed in the stomach[36]; that John Mark Byers, the stepfather of Chris Byers, helped murder the children[37]; that Echols and Misskelley had poured his friends’ blood into a glass and made him drink it[38]; and even that he had castrated Chris himself.[39]

During a second interview with Vicki Hutcheson a week later, Bray asked her if she knew anything about “an occult or devil worshippers,” and she said no, but a few days later she called Bray and said she would “play detective”[40] and get more information. Hutcheson later told Bray that she had, for investigative purposes, initiated a romantic but sexless relationship with Echols and that, on the night of May 19, Echols had picked her up in a red Ford Escort and driven her and Misskelley, who had often babysat her children, to an esbat in a field outside Marion, where she witnessed approximately ten young people, whose faces and arms were painted black, engaging in an orgy.[41] In 2004, overcome with guilt, Hutcheson would confess that “every word” of her testimony “was a lie.”[42] But at the time, Bray was convinced of her veracity and again contacted the West Memphis police.

On May 27, Inspector Gitchell and Detectives Ridge and Allen interviewed Hutcheson. They were aware that Echols did not have a driver’s license and had never been known to drive a car, yet they did not question her claim that he drove her to the esbat. Nor did they pursue the claim that he drove a red Escort, a car that did not match the description of any vehicle owned by his family or anyone else he knew. And neither did they ask her how she was able to witness the orgy in the field when there had been no moon that night.[43]

On May 28, Ridge and Sudbury asked Hutcheson for permission to plant a tape recorder in her house in an attempt to record Echols discussing the murders. According to Hutcheson’s 2004 admission of perjury, she recorded conversations with both Echols and Misskelley that weekend and neither made any incriminating statements. Nonetheless, acting on Hutcheson’s claims, the police picked up seventeen-year-old Misskelley on the morning of June 3 and began interrogating him.

The “Confession”

Misskelley was held by the police and interrogated over the course of twelve hours without an attorney or parent present. The reason no attorney was present, besides the fact that the interrogators would not have wanted one there, is that Misskelley had signed a form waiving his constitutional right to have one present. According to Arkansas law, a juvenile’s waiver form must be signed by a parent or guardian, but Misskelley’s was not. However, the Arkansas Supreme Court, which heard Misskelley’s appeal of his conviction, ruled that no parental signature was necessary in his case since he was charged as an adult. Misskelley’s attorney at the time, Dan Stidham, argued that this ruling meant that “a minor charged with a relatively light offense, such as throwing a rock through a window, could not sign away his constitutional rights without a parent also signing the form with him—yet a juvenile charged with a serious crime, for which he might receive a sentence of life in prison or even death, did not get that protection.”[44] Despite the absurdity of such an interpretation of the law, the court did not alter its ruling.

And not only was Misskelley a juvenile, he was mentally challenged. In 1983 he had scored 67 on an IQ test and was therefore diagnosed as “mildly mentally retarded.”[45] At a pretrial hearing, a psychologist testified that Misskelley’s current IQ scores “hovered at around 70” and that, scholastically, he had achieved a “maximum level” of third grade.[46] Further expert psychological testimony established that he “tended to think like a six- or seven-year-old child” and that his academic skills had advanced “only to the second- or third-grade level.” Because of his mental impairment, a psychologist testified, he “at times can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality,” especially when under stress.[47] He had definitely been under a great deal of stress during his relentless interrogation throughout the day on June 3. Although Allen later testified that he and the other investigators did not know that Misskelley was mentally challenged when they interrogated him, their questioning suggests otherwise, for Ridge asked this almost-adult if he knew what a penis was.[48]

The interrogation had already gone on for several hours before the police began to tape it at 2:44 p.m. All we know for certain about those first hours of interrogation, beyond the fact that no parent or attorney was present, was that until shortly before the detectives began to tape him, Misskelley denied any knowledge of the crime beyond the rumors he had heard around town.[49] However, after Durham administered a polygraph test—and falsely told Misskelley he had failed it[50]—he began to tell the police what they wanted to hear. (It’s interesting to note that Durham had excused another early suspect, Quirt Gregory, from taking a polygraph test because he was “mildly retarded” and had “the mental capacity of about a 10-13 yr. old,” but didn’t excuse Misskelley despite his even lesser mental capacity.[51]) From 2:44 to 3:18 that afternoon, Misskelley answered the questions that Gitchell, Ridge, and Allen posed. As Leveritt has written, “Most of his answers were vague. Many were contradictory. Almost all began with a prompt by one of the detectives.”[52] Armed with Misskelley’s confession, the police attempted to obtain a search warrant, but the judge rejected their request because of significant discrepancies between Misskelley’s statement and the known facts of the case, most particularly Misskelley’s claim that the boys were killed the morning of May 5, when, the police knew, the boys had been in school.[53]

So the interrogation continued. A second, twelve-minute statement was taped, probably around five p.m., and this time Misskelley said the murders took place at night, not in the morning. After taping this second statement, Gitchell, Ridge, and Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Fogleman prepared an affidavit, and at 9:06 p.m. they appeared in court again to request a search warrant, this time before Judge William “Pal” Rainey.[54] This time the warrant was granted, a fact that shouldn’t be too surprising given Ridge’s later testimony that Judge Rainey had come to the police station to advise the police on how to prepare it. Leveritt notes, “This was highly unusual, as it later placed the judge in the position of ruling on the legality of a document that he had helped prepare.”[55]

Although Misskelley was in police custody for approximately twelve hours, only forty-six minutes of his interrogation were recorded. Misskelley recanted his confession within hours, but it was allowed to be used against him in his trial and was later used illegally, as we shall see, by jurors in the trial of Echols and Baldwin. Misskelley said that he “confessed” because he thought the police would let him go home if he did. He also said that Allen told him he would receive the $35,000 reward if he “help[ed] them out,” and that he wanted the money so his dad could buy a new truck.[56] But, as Dr. Hill has observed, it is ultimately both impossible and unnecessary to determine why Misskelley confessed. “For whatever reasons,” the forensic linguist said, “instances of false confession exist. The primary question is: is this one of them?”[57]

To answer that question, Hill conducted a meticulous linguistic analysis of the confession and concluded that “none of the key, specific, verifiable details were provided by the confessor [Misskelley],”[58] that “the police were the source of nearly all of the substantive information regarding the crime,”[59] and, further, that the information that Misskelley supplied was “contradictory”[60] and “incorrect.”[61] Significantly, much of the incorrect information merely repeats the erroneous rumors that were circulating at the time (such as the rumor that the boys had been sodomized). The few facts that Misskelley got correct—for example, that the boys had been severely beaten and that the genitals of one were mutilated—had been reported as early as May 7 in both the Memphis and West Memphis newspapers and were common knowledge in the community.[62]

At Misskelley’s trial, Dr. Richard Ofshe, a nationally recognized expert on false and coerced confessions, testified that, in his opinion, “the questions were more than leading. The questions were very directly specifying what the answers should be.”[63] In private, he was less politic; after first reading the transcript of Misskelley’s confession, he called Dan Stidham and said, “That’s the stupidest fucking confession I’ve ever seen.”[64]

There are so many errors and contradictions in Misskelley’s statement that it would take many pages to discuss them all. Here are only some of the most prominent:

1. TIME OF DEATH

Initially, Misskelley said that he, Echols, and Baldwin had murdered the three boys shortly after encountering them early that morning while the boys were waiting on their bikes for the school bus. This is false for several reasons. First, the boys did not take the bus—two of them lived virtually next door to the school—nor would they be allowed to bring their bikes onto the bus. Also, although Misskelley claimed the boys skipped school, in fact they were in school all day.[65] The detectives knew the boys could not have been killed in the morning, and they returned to the issue of time of death no less than eight times during the recorded part of their interrogation (and who knows how many times when the tape recorder was turned off). After repeated prompting, Misskelley changed the time of the murders from nine in the morning to “about noon” to after school let out that afternoon. Although Misskelley had not once stated that the murders took place at night, Ridge said, “Okay. The night you were in the woods, had you all been in the water?” After this prompt, Misskelley for the first time mentioned night: “Yeah, we’d been in the water. We were in it that night playing around in it.” Later, when Misskelley was again asked what time they were in the woods, he said, “I would say it was about five or so—five or six.” But that was still too early, since the boys had been seen alive later than that. Gitchell said, “All right, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time is it?” But, as Dr. Ofshe testified, “nowhere in the record—including the record of what the detectives say, the notes, the specific statements by Detective Ridge, the transcript of the first interrogation—is there any indication that Jessie ever said” any such thing.[66]

The confessions show Misskelley offering a wide range of times, from nine a.m. to eight p.m. or later, for the time of death. And although the prosecution proceeded with the assumption that the murders took place between seven p.m. and eight p.m. on May 5,[67] a time during which there would have been sufficient light to carry out the murders and clear the crime scene of evidence, Dr. Frank Peretti, the associate state medical examiner who conducted the autopsies, testified that he and two other medical examiners he’d consulted had determined that the murders took place “between 1 a.m. and . . . five or seven in the morning” on May 6. Unfortunately, this testimony wasn’t given until the trial of Echols and Baldwin, after Misskelley had already been convicted. (During Misskelley’s trial, Peretti twice said he was unable to determine a time of death.) Despite the fact that Misskelley had an ironclad alibi for the newly proclaimed time of death, Judge Burnett denied his lawyer’s motion for a new trial.[68]

2. PLACE OF DEATH

Although Ridge stated, both in the trial and in Exhibit B of the search warrant, that Misskelley had a knowledge of the crime scene that only the killer could possess, in fact, as Hill has said, “Misskelley demonstrated no substantive knowledge of the interior of the woods where the bodies were found.”[69] Indeed, he referred to the woods as a “park.”[70] Hill has further noted that “the police provided a nearly complete description of the crime scene,” but “the only details that Misskelley presented regarding the inside of the woods were that the path (brought up by the interrogators) is little, and the tall bank (brought up by the interrogators) has a top and bottom.”[71] Furthermore, Misskelley’s statements about where the murders took place contradict the evidence,[72] and he wrongly claimed that a path that leads away from the crime scene goes “close to the interstate.” (There were paths that led in every direction except toward the interstate.[73]) He also described one location as south of the principal crime scene when it is north of it.[74] Other suspects, including some who had also confessed to the crime, were taken to the crime scene and then released when it was clear that they could not identify where, exactly, the murders took place. Misskelley, however, was never taken to the crime scene.[75]

3. SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

Misskelley stated that the boys were beaten while still wearing their clothes. Since the autopsy reports state that their clothes had “no rips, tears, blood stains or skin scrapings,” the victims were presumably naked when they were beaten.[76]

4. LIGATURES

Misskelley stated that the boys’ hands were tied with brown rope but their feet were not tied and they could have run away. In fact, both the boys’ hands and the boys’ feet were tied, and they were tied with black and white shoelaces (five of the laces came from the boys’ shoes; the source of the sixth lace was never determined), not brown rope. The actual killer would certainly have remembered these details, especially since the boys’ hands and feet were bound in such an unusual way: their left wrists tied behind their backs to their left ankles and their right wrists tied behind their backs to their right ankles. Also, until the police brought up the possibility that the boys were tied, Misskelley had said they were restrained simply by being held. After the police suggested that tying the boys’ hands wouldn’t have prevented them from running away, Misskelley offered four explanations for their inability to escape—they were beaten too badly to move, they were sat upon, their legs were held up in the air, and they were knocked down.[77] At no time did he mention that their feet were tied, much less tied to their hands. Indeed, he even said that one of the boys was “kicking . . . his legs up in the air.”[78]

The fact that the boys were tied with shoelaces was one of the few inside details that hadn’t been leaked to the press, and of all the suspects the police interviewed, only one identified their ligatures correctly: James Martin, a thirty-three-year-old man who had been previously convicted of sexually molesting his stepdaughter and stepson. According to Durham’s reading of Martin’s polygraph test, Martin failed two questions: “Do you know what was used to tie up those three boys?” and “Do you know who killed those three boys?” Nevertheless, Durham believed Martin had passed the test, since his belief that shoelaces were used as ligatures was based on “logic.” The police also either overlooked or ignored the facts that Martin drove an eighteen-year-old Toyota Corolla and that the manager of the Blue Beacon truck wash, which was very near the crime scene, reported that a man who drove a “small car, Toyota older model” had been at the truck wash around ten p.m. the night of the murder.[79] Martin is only one of several plausible suspects the police stopped investigating after receiving Misskelley’s confession.[80]

5. SEXUAL MOLESTATION

Misskelley claimed that two of the boys were sodomized both before and after they were killed and also that they were forced to perform oral sex.[81] At various times Misskelley said that only Echols raped Chris Byers, that only Baldwin did, and that neither of them did.[82] Asked if the autopsy revealed any evidence that the boys had been sodomized, Dr. Peretti said, “If the penis enters the anal canal, I would expect to find bruises and abrasions to the opening. I couldn’t find any physical evidence of that.”[83] Furthermore, microscopic analysis of the boys’ anuses failed to reveal even broken capillaries, much less bruises and abrasions. There was also no bruising to the backs of any of the boys’ mouths, as Peretti said would be expected with forced oral sex, nor was there any semen found in the boys’ mouths or rectums.[84] Additional forensic tests conducted later confirmed Peretti’s conclusions.[85]

6. CAUSE OF DEATH

Misskelley stated that one boy was hit and choked with “a big old stick.” In fact, there was no evidence that anyone was choked, with a stick or otherwise, and “no splinters or trace evidence [was] found to confirm the victims were struck with sticks.” Misskelley brought up the stick only after the police asked him if sticks were used in the attack. He likewise mentioned knives and belts as possible causes of the boys’ wounds only after the police had suggested them.[86] Led by the detectives’ prompts, he stated that Baldwin had cut two of the boys with a knife. As will be discussed in detail later, six nationally renowned forensic experts, each working independently, concluded unanimously that the cuts, lacerations, gouges, and scratches on the victims’ bodies were caused by postmortem animal predation, not by a knife. Only bruises and fractures could be attributed to human causes.

Hill has noted that of the thirteen statements made by police about Misskelley’s “inside knowledge” of the murder in Exhibit B of their request for a search warrant, the only one supported by the evidence is that all three boys were severely beaten, and that was a matter of public record well before Misskelley’s statement. Hill concludes: “The other statements were provided by the police during the interrogation, were unsubstantiated, contradicted the evidence or were simply invented when composing the search warrant.”[87]

According to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which upheld Misskelley’s conviction in 1996, his confession was “virtually the only evidence” against him, “all other testimony and exhibits serving primarily as corroboration.”[88] As I hope this summary of the implausibility of the confession reveals, there actually was no legitimate evidence—none—that Misskelley, Echols, or Baldwin were guilty of the crimes.

You might think that the discrepancies between the facts and Misskelley’s confession, coupled with the lack of any physical evidence tying Echols, Baldwin, or Misskelley to the murder scene, would have made those who investigated and prosecuted the West Memphis Three at least a little cautious about claiming they’d arrested the right people. But you would be wrong. When a reporter asked Gitchell the day after the confession to rate on a scale of one to ten how solid his case was, he said, “Eleven.”[89]

There is good reason to believe, however, that Gitchell knew just how little evidence he actually had, or at least that the prosecutors did, for after the arrests the prosecution took the unusual step of asking the court to seal the documents supporting the search and arrest warrants. Because the court complied, the public was unable to discover just how meager the evidence was. An editorial in the West Memphis Evening Times criticizing the decision concluded: “The case remains shrouded in secrecy, and the public’s questions remain unanswered. We hope, above all else, that our faith in the law enforcement and judicial system is justified. We just wish we knew for sure.”[90] Now—too late—I believe we do know for sure that the people’s faith was not justified. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the case against Gitchell and the others responsible for coercing Misskelley’s false confession, then hyping the so-called “evidence” of the three teenagers’ guilt, is an eleven.

The First Trial

Because Misskelley retracted his confession and refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, two trials were required—one in which the confession could legally be used, to determine Misskelley’s guilt or innocence, and another in which the confession was not admissible, to determine Echols’s and Baldwin’s. The confession was not admissible in the second trial because Misskelley’s refusal to testify would have deprived Echols and Baldwin of their Sixth Amendment rights to confront and cross-examine their accuser. The prosecutors had offered Misskelley a deal to testify, but he refused. Although the details of the offer were never divulged, his attorney described Misskelley’s decision as “the most difficult . . . he will ever make,” a statement that implies that testifying would have significantly reduced his sentence.[91]

The first trial began in January 1994 and took place at the Clay County Courthouse in Corning, Arkansas. The presiding judge was David Burnett, and the prosecutors were John Fogleman and Brent Davis. Misskelley was represented by two court-appointed public defenders, Dan Stidham and Greg Crow, neither of whom had served as the lead lawyer in a capital case. Stidham, the lead attorney, was only twenty-seven.[92] The defense had virtually no budget to pay for experts to testify on behalf of their clients. In fact, the total budget for investigations and expert witnesses for the three accused teenagers was a mere $7,500.[93] Stidham paid for the few experts he was able to bring in by using his own credit card.[94]

Misskelley’s trial was lost even before it began. In repeated pretrial motions, Stidham argued that Misskelley’s case should be tried in juvenile court since he was a minor, and that his confession should not be admitted into evidence because he was mentally challenged and the confession had been coerced. Burnett rejected all of these motions. As a result, Stidham was faced with the difficult task of convincing a jury that his client’s confession was false. This task was difficult not because he lacked evidence of its falsity; it was difficult because most people simply cannot imagine confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. But, as counterintuitive as it may seem, false confessions are far from uncommon. According to The Innocence Project, more than half of the eighty people convicted of murder and later exonerated through DNA evidence had given false confessions.[95]

Stidham made a valiant effort to convince the jurors that Misskelley’s confession was false and coerced. He brought in Warren Holmes, a nationally recognized polygraph expert who had conducted polygraph tests in such high-profile cases as the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations and the Watergate break-in. Holmes, who received no payment for his appearance, was prepared to testify that Misskelley had passed the polygraph test, showing deception on only one question, the question of whether he had ever used an illegal drug. However, Burnett refused to allow Holmes to express an opinion on the validity of the polygraph examination.[96] Consequently, the jury never learned that Misskelley had in fact passed the polygraph, and they were left to believe that he had failed it.

Similarly, Burnett ruled that Dr. Richard Ofshe, an acknowledged expert on false and coerced confessions who received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, could not testify before the jury that he believed Misskelley’s confession was involuntary. “I’ve already ruled it was voluntary,” Burnett said. “Now, am I going to let a witness get up here and contradict my ruling?” In several bench conferences, Burnett also stated that he would not allow Ofshe to express an opinion on the validity of Misskelley’s statement, but after the prosecution referred to coercion while cross-examining Ofshe, Stidham asked the judge if he could “use the word coercive like the prosecutor used,” and Burnett gave him permission to ask Ofshe about possible evidence of coercion. However, Ofshe was not allowed to express his opinion that police coercion rendered the confession involuntary or invalid, and Burnett allowed Ofshe to testify for only a few minutes on the subject of coercion, ostensibly because it was late in the day (approximately three p.m.) and the court reporter was getting tired.[97]

It was left to Stidham, then, to attempt to convince the jury that Misskelley’s confession was false. The fact that Ridge misrepresented the confession, both in Exhibit B of the search warrant and in his testimony during the trial, was a significant obstacle. For example, Ridge said that Misskelley “told us that it was Steven Branch that received the cuts to the face.” Misskelley did say “one of the little boys” was cut in the face, but in neither the taped statements nor Ridge’s notes of the unrecorded parts of the interrogation does he say which one.[98] The fact that a child’s face had been cut was already common knowledge, and Ridge had shown Misskelley a photograph of Michael Moore, who also had a laceration on his face, so Misskelley could have been thinking of Michael.[99] Similarly, Ridge stated that “Misskelley also described the area where the murders occurred very specifically,” when in fact, as the recording makes clear, Ridge himself was the one who described the crime scene.[100]

Stidham pointed out that details of the crime that the police claimed “only the killer would have known” had in fact been leaked by the investigators and been widely reported,[101] and he further pointed out the numerous discrepancies between the facts and the confession. When Gitchell was questioned by Stidham, he shrugged off these discrepancies by saying, “Jessie simply got confused. That’s all.”[102] This response was evidently enough for the jury, especially after Vicki Hutcheson took the stand and, in testimony reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials, falsely claimed that she had gone to a witches’ esbat with Echols and Misskelley, thus “proving” to the jurors’ satisfaction that the murders were part of a satanic ritual.

The only physical evidence Fogleman presented were fibers found at the crime scene: two green fibers taken from a Cub Scout cap and a single red fiber taken from a white shirt.[103] According to Lisa Sakevicius, an employee of the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, the green fibers were “microscopically similar” to fibers from a size six Garanimals T-shirt that belonged to Echols’s stepbrother, and the red fibers were likewise “microscopically similar” to fibers from a robe that belonged to Baldwin’s mother.[104] As Leveritt commented, “In light of the bloodiness of the crime, its hands-on physicality, and the number of victims and defendants, the discovery of a few mass-produced fibers from items available in Wal-Marts and other clothiers all over the country” constituted “an infinitesimal amount of evidence.”[105] Sakevicius acknowledged that many fibers are microscopically similar and that the similarity “proved nothing.” She further said she was not contending that the fibers came from the garments in question.[106] The fact that the shirt and robe did not belong to Echols or Baldwin made the suggestion that the clothing linked them to the crime even more tenuous. Essentially, the State was arguing that the only evidence the killers left behind at the scene of this grisly murder were three fibers from garments owned and worn by other members of their families.[107]

Despite this lack of convincing physical evidence, on February 4, 1994, Misskelley was convicted and sentenced to life plus forty years. After the trial was over, juror Lloyd Champion told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that he believed Misskelley’s confession was not coerced. He added—with, as Leveritt has noted, “irony that was apparently not intentional”—that he wasn’t surprised that Stidham didn’t have Misskelley testify on his own behalf because, if he had, “I think that prosecuting attorney could have tore him apart and made him say anything.”[108]

The Second Trial

The trial of Echols and Baldwin began on February 28, 1994, and was held at the Craighead County Courthouse in Jonesboro. As with the first trial, the defendants were represented by court-appointed public defenders with minimal budgets for forensic experts and tests. Echols was represented by Val Price and Scott Davidson, and Baldwin by Paul Ford and George Robin Wadley. Again, the prosecutors were Fogleman and Davis, and the judge was Burnett.

This time, the prosecutors would have a more difficult burden of proof. Because Misskelley had informed the State that he would not testify against Echols and Baldwin, his confession was, in theory at least, inadmissible evidence, for to admit it would deny the defendants their Sixth Amendment right to confront their accuser. (I say “in theory at least” because Ridge did mention it during the trial, and there is evidence that the jurors discussed it during their deliberations.) Misskelley had made the decision not to testify despite the fact that he had been strongly pressured to do so. Shortly after his conviction, he was taken, without the permission or knowledge of either his attorney or his father, to a small town near Jonesboro, where Davis tried to persuade him to testify.[109] Misskelley said he was told that if he didn’t testify, Echols and Baldwin would walk free and then they’d “go after” his girlfriend. Misskelley’s father and stepmother helped talk him out of perjuring himself, saying that if he lied he would have to live with that fact for the rest of his life. Because he refused to lie, he said, “if I ever do get out, my name will be clear, and I can live pretty much a decent life.”[110]

Because Misskelley’s confession was inadmissible evidence, the prosecution had to rely on dubious physical and hearsay evidence to secure a conviction. Again they submitted as evidence the three fibers introduced at the first trial. Fogleman said he believed this evidence was strong, but admitted, “We can’t say it came from that particular garment to the exclusion of all others.”[111] The prosecution also introduced two sticks that the police took from the crime scene nearly two months after the murders,[112] but as Peretti testified, there were no wood fragments or splinters or anything else in the boys’ wounds to connect these sticks to either the murdered boys or the defendants.[113]

In addition, Sakevicius testified that blue wax was found on one of the victims’ shirts and one of Echols’s books, Frank Donovan’s Never on a Broomstick: The True Story of the Faith, Mystery, and Magic of Witchcraft, Classical and Contemporary. In a bench conference held out of the presence of the jury, the defense asked why they hadn’t received a crime lab report about the wax, and Fogleman stated that Sakevicius “said that what she puts in her report is when there are matches. She claimed that [the wax] didn’t match anything.” The jury never heard this statement. What it did hear was Fogleman’s claim, in his closing argument, that the waxes could be matches and that candle wax was evidence of a satanic ritual. According to notes taken by jurors, the wax was cited as one of the reasons for Echols’s conviction.[114]

Most important, the prosecution also introduced as evidence a knife that was found in Lakeshore Lake, near Baldwin’s home, under suspicious circumstances. According to Fogleman, he had a hunch—six months after the arrests—that the killers had disposed of the murder weapon in the lake, and he contacted the Arkansas State Police, which sent a dive team there on November 17. Fogleman described the discovery of the knife that day as “quite a coincidence” and dismissed any suggestion that the knife had been planted by saying that no one but the investigators knew they were going to search the lake, much less “when we were going to do it.” But if no one but the police knew when they were going to search the lake, how was it that a reporter for the West Memphis Evening Times happened to be on the scene to take a photo of the diver surfacing with a knife in his hand? Was that, too, “quite a coincidence”?[115] To make this “coincidence” seem even more suspicious, a member of the dive team has since stated that the divers “were given precise directions on where to find the knife.”[116]

The “Lake Knife,” as it came to be called, was a nine-inch non-folding Rambo-style survival knife that did not match the description of the six-inch folding knife that Misskelley had claimed was the murder weapon.[117] It did, however, roughly resemble a knife Echols was reported to have once owned, and that fact was evidently good enough for the prosecution.[118] Still, no testimony was introduced in court to connect the knife in any way to the crime scene, for Peretti had said (wrongly, as we shall see later) that the boys’ wounds could have been inflicted by any serrated knife.[119]

The absence of testimony linking the knife to the crime did not prevent Fogleman from performing an experiment during his closing argument that strongly implied that the Lake Knife was the murder weapon. He held up a grapefruit and whacked it with the knife, then showed the jury the marks and claimed that they matched an autopsy photo of the wounds to Chris Byers’s groin. “I submit the proof shows this knife caused this,” Fogleman said, then corrected himself—but not until after he’d already given the impression that he was holding the murder weapon in his hand—“Well, true, it could be another knife like this, but I submit to you the proof—the circumstantial evidence—show [sic] that this knife, State’s exhibit seventy-seven, caused those injuries.”[120] One of Echols’s later attorneys, Dennis Riordan, has said that this was “a classic instance of prosecutorial misconduct.”[121] In an October 29, 2007, filing, he and fellow attorney Donald Horgan wrote: “No evidence in the record permitted the conclusion that the Lake Knife was used in the crime, yet Fogleman informed the jury in closing that he was able to reduplicate the marks on Byers’s body by cutting into a grapefruit with the knife in question. The prosecutor’s unsworn testimony in this regard violated petitioner’s Sixth Amendment right to confrontation.”[122] Dr. Richard Souviron, a prominent forensic odontologist who examined the autopsy records, also expressed outrage at Fogleman’s claim that the knife marks on the grapefruit matched those on Byers’s skin. “That is the most ridiculous statement that I’ve ever heard anybody make. And to sell that to a jury is unconscionable, in my opinion.”[123]

The absence of physical evidence tying Echols and Baldwin to the crime was not due to any lack of effort on the part of the investigators. They took samples of hair, blood, and saliva as well as fingerprints and shoeprints from all three suspects and found nothing that matched the evidence at the crime scene. Nothing.[124] As Dr. Peretti had testified at the first trial, and would testify again at this trial, there was also no physical evidence that the boys had been sodomized by anyone, much less by these two particular defendants. Because of Peretti’s testimony, the defense lawyers asked Burnett to bar the prosecutors from claiming the boys had been sodomized, but he ruled that they could continue to make this claim despite the lack of any supporting evidence.[125]

The prosecution’s hearsay evidence was every bit as dubious as the fiber evidence (and Misskelley’s confession). In addition to the now admittedly false testimony of Vicki Hutcheson, there was the equally false testimony of a sixteen-year-old jailhouse informant named Michael Carson. On the witness stand, Carson claimed that, in August 1993, Baldwin, whom he’d met less than twenty-four hours before, had confessed the crime to him. “He told me how he dismembered the kids,” Carson testified. “He sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.”[126] Leaving aside the fact that only one “kid” had been “dismembered,” and the fact that over the course of several interviews with the police Carson named five different days as the day Baldwin confessed to him (one of them a day after Carson was released from the detention center),[127] his statement is hard to accept. First, Baldwin had maintained his innocence from the very beginning, so it seems highly unlikely that he would confide his guilt to someone he had known for less than twenty-four hours; second, Carson waited five months to mention this conversation to anyone; third, he had a long history of drug abuse and lying; and fourth, given the criminal charges against him at the time, he might have been hoping that his testimony would win him some leniency.[128]

The prosecution was clearly aware that Carson’s story was difficult to swallow, for when Fogleman and Davis met with the victims’ families before the trial, they warned them that the jury might not believe him.[129] What they didn’t tell the families—or the jury—was that Danny Williams, a former counselor at the juvenile detention center where Baldwin and Carson had been held, told Davis on February 14 that Carson’s claims were false and that they were based on rumors he had himself told Carson during a therapy session. Williams offered to testify in the trial, but Burnett ruled that his testimony could not be admitted because it would “violate the therapist/client privilege of a minor.”[130] It is perplexing how testimony that did not include a single word that Carson had said in confidence could be construed as violating his right to confidentiality. The court inexplicably chose to protect a minor from losing his right to confidentiality (even though nothing confidential would be revealed) rather than protect another minor from being wrongly sentenced to death or imprisoned for life.

Like Hutcheson, Carson has since retracted his testimony. Their retractions and further evidence of their perjury will be discussed in more detail later.

The final hearsay evidence came from two girls, one twelve and the other thirteen, who claimed they had overheard Echols tell a group of people at a softball game that he’d killed the three boys. The older girl, Jodee Medford, also said that Echols had said “he was going to kill two more and he already had one of them picked out.”[131] There were discrepancies in the girls’ testimony that cast doubt on their accounts, however. In a June 7, 1993, statement, Jodee Medford said that her sister Jackie and her friend Christy Van Vickle, the younger girl who testified at the trial, were with her at the time Echols supposedly confessed and that Baldwin was not present. Four days later, however, she changed her story to say that Baldwin was present, and in her testimony in court she repeated that claim but this time said her sister Jackie and Van Vickle were not with her. Van Vickle testified, on the other hand, that Jackie Medford was there when she overheard Echols but Jodee Medford was not. Also, Van Vickle’s testimony was nothing if not vague. She said she could not remember anything Echols had said before or after his “confession.”[132] Both girls said they’d reported this incident to their mothers, but no one had alerted police about it until after the arrests.[133] Donna Medford, Jodee’s mother, also testified, confirming that Jodee had told her what Damien had said. She has since signed a sworn affidavit indicating that “Echols’s statement was not serious and that neither she nor her daughter believes he committed the crime.”[134]

The State’s case was not limited to physical evidence and hearsay, however. It also relied on inaccurate testimony from investigators, particularly Detective Ridge, and unsubstantiated statements by the prosecutors. Whether by mistake or design, Ridge said under oath that Echols told him that “all people have a demonic force in them and that the person [who committed the murders] would have no control over that demonic force.” According to Ridge’s notes of his interview with Echols, however, Echols had stated the exact opposite, that people do have control over the demonic force in them. Ridge also said that Echols told him Anton LaVey was his favorite author. There is no reference to LaVey in Ridge’s notes, and Echols testified that he told Ridge that “I haven’t read anything by him, but I am familiar with him.” Similarly, Davis tried to suggest that Echols had told Ridge that he had read works by Aleister Crowley, but again, there is no evidence of that in Ridge’s notes. The fact that Echols testified that he would have read Crowley’s books if he’d had the opportunity suggests that he was not trying to hide his interest in occult writers and would have admitted to reading LaVey and Crowley if he had done so.[135]

The emphasis on the occult in Ridge’s misrepresentations of the truth suggests that the State’s case relied less on any physical or even hearsay evidence than it did on the premise that the crimes were satanic in nature. As Leveritt has said, the State’s case was based on a ludicrously illogical “triangulation”: “By linking the crime to the words ‘the occult,’ then linking Damien and Jason to those words, [the State] indirectly linked them to the crime. The judge allowed the tactic and—voilà! That easily—and that insubstantially—the bedeviling absence of evidence was overcome.”[136] The prosecution’s central argument could be summed up, in short, via this deeply flawed “syllogism”:

Major Premise: Echols and Baldwin were interested in the occult.

Minor Premise: The murders were part of a satanic ritual.

Conclusion: Echols and Baldwin committed the murders.

Of the three parts of this quasi-syllogism, only half of one is demonstrably true: Echols was indeed interested in the occult. No testimony or evidence established that Baldwin shared his interest, however. There was also no evidence that the murders were part of an occult ritual, and even if there had been, the fact that a person has an interest in the occult doesn’t constitute proof that he committed murder.

But this lack of logic didn’t deter the prosecution. They proceeded to make the case that the murders were occult-related by introducing as “evidence” such things as Echols’s taste in literature, music, art, and clothing. Among the items introduced as evidence were: his testimony that he liked to read Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz; lines he’d copied into his journal from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, The Twilight Zone, and Metallica’s And Justice for All, which Echols described at his trial as being “about how warped the court systems are”; the cover from the Metallica tape Master of Puppets[137]; testimony from various people that Echols regularly wore black T-shirts, black jeans, and a black trench coat[138]; and his own poems and drawings. Ridge testified that the fact that Echols read Stephen King novels was “strange”[139] and was one reason he suspected Echols was involved in the murders. Fogleman cited “obsession with heavy metal music” and “wearing all black” as common indications that someone was involved in occult activity, and he read into evidence the number of black T-shirts and heavy metal music posters Echols owned.[140] Later, in his closing argument, Fogleman would refer to this and other evidence he admitted was “circumstantial,” saying to the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, each item, in and of itself, doesn’t mean somebody would be motivated to murder—not in and of itself. But you look at it together, and . . . you begin to see inside Damien Echols. You see inside that person, and you look inside there, and there’s not a soul there.”[141]

Once Fogleman had linked Echols to the occult through his taste in literature, music, art, and clothing, he proceeded to link the crime to the occult and, by implication, to Echols. He called to the stand “Dr.” Dale W. Griffis, a self-described “cult expert” who admitted on cross-examination that he had received his Ph.D. from an unaccredited mail-order institution—Columbia Pacific University, a diploma mill eventually shut down by the State of California for fraud in 2000—without having taken a single class.[142] (Paul Ford, Baldwin’s lead attorney, said in his closing argument that Griffis “didn’t go to college, he went to the post office.”[143]) Griffis testified that he had read 4,800 books on the occult since 1976 (an average of one a day)[144] and had written four books of his own, The Four Faces of Satan; Runes, Glyphs, and Alphabets; The Investigation Manual for Non-Traditional Groups; and A Primer for Law Enforcement on Non-Traditional Groups. In fact, the first of these “books” was an article in a newsletter, the second was a mere thirty-two pages long and “prepared by the staff of Dale W. Griffis,” and the third and fourth titles appear to refer to a single fifteen-page text. All of these “books” were self-published.[145] Griffis did later coauthor a full-length book, one that demonstrates just how unreliable a witness he was. Titled Secret Weapons: Two Sisters’ Terrifying True Story of Sex, Spies and Sabotage, the book claims that two sisters were inducted at the age of six “into a covert, government-authorized, mind-control program designed to spawn spies and assassins,” subjected to rape and torture, given “weaponry, martial arts and flight training,” and then, as teenagers, under new identities (one of them male), forced to take part in covert military operations and assassinations, after which they were brainwashed to forget all of these experiences. According to this 2001 book, Griffis, who now claimed to be a “ritual abuse expert,” was instrumental in helping the girls recover their “lost memories.”[146]

Riordan has said, “There is probably no greater disgrace in the history of death penalty litigation in this country [than] that Dale Griffis was placed on the stand.”[147] It is particularly disgraceful that such a person was allowed to testify about his opinion of the crimes’ satanic nature when legitimate experts like Warren Holmes and Richard Ofshe were not allowed to testify regarding their opinions that Misskelley’s confession was involuntary and false.

But allowed to testify Griffis was. In testimony every bit as unreliable as any that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, three centuries before, he claimed that wearing black clothing was a common indication that someone was involved in Satanism.[148] “If any person wears a black tee shirt,” he said, “that is a factor that I would consider in determining if this case has trappings of occultism.”[149] In addition, he testified that injuries on the left side of one victim were evidence that the murders were part of a satanic ritual. Satanists, he argued, “use a mid-line theory, drawing straight down through the body. The right hand side is usually related to those things which is [sic] synonymous with Christianity, and the left hand path is that which is [related to] practitioners of the satanic occult systems.” Hill has commented: “Although the majority of the injuries were on the right-hand side of the body, Griffis didn’t suggest this meant a Christian killing.”[150]

Griffis also testified that since eight is a “witches’ number,”[151] the fact that the boys were eight years old was evidence that the murders were part of a satanic ritual, as was the fact that there were three victims. “One of the most powerful numbers in the practice of satanic belief,” he explained, “is six-six-six, and some believe the base root of six is three.”[152] (Evidently Griffis’s expertise did not extend to other religions, for when Val Price, one of Echols’s court-appointed public defenders, asked Griffis if the number three was “also significant in Christianity, for example, and other religions,” he responded, “I cannot make that statement.”[153]) While there’s no evidence that Echols ever invoked the number 666, there is evidence that the police did: the original docket number assigned to Echols’s case was 93-05-0555, but someone changed its final three letters to 666.[154]

Griffis said that a drawing Echols had made of “an individual that had the head of a satanic goat” further convinced him that the murders were cult-related, though he didn’t explain what made the goat’s head “satanic.” He also cited Echols’s writings as evidence that he was involved in the occult. Fogleman agreed, saying Echols’s drawings and writing revealed his “belief system” and “state of mind.”[155]

To back up this assertion, in his closing argument Fogleman read one of Echols’s poems to the jury, a poem he described as defining the conflict between the good and the satanic within him. The poem read:

I want to be in the middle,

in neither the black nor the white,

in neither the wrong nor the right,

to stand right on the line,

to be able to go to either side with a moment’s notice.

I’ve always been in the black, in the wrong.

I tried to get into the white,

but I almost destroyed it

because the black tried to follow me.

This time I won’t let it.

I will be in the middle.

Though the poem was written long before Echols was arrested, it nonetheless reads like a commentary on the investigators, prosecutors, and jurors and the wrongs they committed in their self-righteous pursuit of justice—the “blackness” that followed them into their “white.” But Fogleman didn’t see it this way, of course. After reading the poem, he told the jury, “That right there tells you Damien Echols. He don’t wanna be in the white. He don’t wanna be good. He wants to be both, where he can go to the good side or the bad side, however it suits his purpose. If he wants to do bad, let’s go to the satanic side. If he wants to be good, he goes to the Wiccan side. That poem right there tells you about Damien Echols.”[156]

When I asked Echols in June 2005 how he felt when Fogleman used his poem as evidence against him, he said that at the time he was more upset about having his private thoughts and feelings made public than about being convicted and sentenced to death. At first his answer surprised me, but then I remembered that he was still a teenager when he was convicted, and at that age the fear of embarrassment trumps virtually all other fears, even the fear of death. Also, as Echols explained, back then he didn’t believe it was possible for an innocent person to be convicted of a crime without any evidence, and he thought that everything would be straightened out soon. Having his private thoughts and feelings revealed to the world upset him so much that for three years he didn’t write another word—and this was someone who had filled several notebooks with poems by the time he was arrested.

While Fogleman was able to link Echols’s poetry and literary tastes to the occult, all in an effort to persuade the jury that the murders were part of a satanic ritual, he had no evidence that Baldwin shared this interest. Even the wildly imaginative, not to say delusional, “Dr.” Griffis said he was unable to find “any evidence that establishes a link between Jason Baldwin and the occult.”[157] So the prosecutors approached Baldwin with a deal: if he’d testify against Echols, he would receive a substantially reduced sentence. But just as Misskelley refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, Baldwin refused to testify against Echols. In a 2009 letter published in the Arkansas Times, he wrote:

One day I was offered a choice. I was told the only hope in the world I had was to turn “state” against Damien Echols and testify under oath that he murdered those three boys. The problem with this choice was the fact that I did not know who murdered those boys. For the life of me I did not believe Damien did—and even if I had a “belief” as to who could have done the murders, the simple fact remained that I did not know who committed them. . . . [Sixteen] years later I do not regret my choice. . . . Tonight I rest easy knowing that when I was confronted with the choice to protect innocent life, I made the right one.[158]

The jury, however, made the wrong choice. Misled by the police, the prosecution, news reports, the false testimony of Hutcheson and Carson, and the bizarre fantasies of Griffis, on March 18 they found Echols and Baldwin guilty, and on March 19 they sentenced Baldwin to life in prison without the possibility of parole and Echols to death.

The Appeal Process and New Evidence

The process of appealing a conviction is extremely slow and convoluted, and to summarize all the steps would be tedious and time-consuming. Suffice it to say that from 1994 through 2010, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley filed a series of motions and appeals based on ineffective counsel, prosecutorial and juror misconduct, new evidence, and other grounds, and that virtually all of them were denied, usually by Burnett, the very judge who heard the original trials. Even though Burnett officially retired in December 2008, he continued adjudicating the appeals in this case (and no others) until mid-January 2010. What’s more, he continued to oversee the appeals even after he announced his intention to run for the state senate. According to the Arkansas State Constitution, when a judge files for a non-judicial political office, he automatically vacates his judgeship. Since Burnett didn’t formally file for the senate until March 2010, he did not technically violate the law, but as a declared state senate candidate serving as a judge, he certainly violated its spirit. Journalist John Brummett has noted, “There’s a rule of judicial conduct that requires a judge to avoid even any appearance of impropriety. But Burnett has disregarded that.”[159]

The only appeals that were not rejected were the result of a 2001 Arkansas law (Act 1780; amended in 2005 by Act 2250) granting prisoners access to DNA testing to prove their innocence. The law states that the court may grant a motion for a new trial if DNA test results exclude a person as the source of the evidence and if those results, “when considered with all evidence in the case regardless of whether the evidence was introduced at trial, establish by compelling evidence that a new trial would result in an acquittal.”[160] In July 2002, Echols filed a motion seeking DNA testing on crime scene evidence, and in June 2004, after several court-instigated delays, Burnett finally issued an order allowing DNA testing. After further court-instigated delays, the testing began in December 2005 and continued into 2007.

In July 2007, Echols’s attorneys filed a status report with initial DNA test results, indicating that those results excluded Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley as possible sources, and in October of that same year they filed an amended Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in federal court calling for a new trial. This petition included not only the results of the DNA tests but also, as the Arkansas DNA statutes allow, all of the additional evidence of Echols’s innocence discovered since his conviction. The federal district judge returned the case to the state circuit court, and in September 2008, Burnett denied the petition. In March 2009, Echols’s attorneys filed an appeal with the Arkansas Supreme Court, arguing that Burnett’s decision violated the state’s DNA law. The court heard oral arguments in the case on September 30, 2010, and on November 4 the justices issued a unanimous ruling reversing Burnett’s decision, which they said “erroneously interpreted the Arkansas DNA testing statutes,” and remanding the appeal to the circuit court. They instructed the court to “hear Echols’s motion for a new trial and consider the DNA-test results ‘with all other evidence in the case regardless of whether the evidence was introduced at trial’ to determine if Echols has ‘establish[ed] by compelling evidence that a new trial would result in acquittal.’”[161] Although the motion was filed by Echols’s attorneys, the justices ruled that Baldwin and Misskelley were also entitled to a similar evidentiary hearing. This hearing was assigned to Craighead Circuit Court judge David N. Laser, who had replaced Burnett after he was elected to the state senate, and it was scheduled to begin December 5, 2011.

Following is some of the evidence and testimony that Judge Laser was ordered to consider, in addition to the previously discussed evidence that Misskelley’s confession was false, in determining whether the West Memphis Three would receive new trials.

1. DNA

If the prosecution’s claim that two of the boys had been sodomized was accurate, it would have been impossible for the perpetrator not to leave DNA evidence. Yet when nearly seventy pieces of crime scene evidence were finally tested in 2007, the results excluded Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley as possible sources.[162] Five hairs recovered at the scene were found to have different DNA profiles from those of the convicted men and the victims.[163] Thomas Fedor, a forensic serologist with the Serological Research Institute in Richmond, California, reported that possible sources for two of these five hairs had been determined: Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of Stevie Branch, and Hobbs’s friend David Jacoby, who was with him the day the three boys disappeared.

According to Fedor, a hair found on a tree root at the crime scene contained mitochondrial DNA that matched Jacoby’s, and a hair tied into a knot that bound one of Michael Moore’s wrists to one of his ankles contained mitochondrial DNA that matched Hobbs’s. Since mitochondrial DNA is common only to a maternal line, it is not possible to say with absolute certainty that the hairs belong to Hobbs or Jacoby; they could have come from relatives of either men. Fedor estimated that approximately 7 percent of the population could be the source of the hair on the tree stump and about 1.5 percent the source of the hair in the ligature.[164]

The mitochondrial DNA sequence of a third hair, this one recovered from beneath Chris Byers’s ligature, was also successfully determined, but as yet no possible source has been identified. According to Fedor, however, the following can be excluded as possible sources: the three victims, the mothers and siblings of the victims, Terry Hobbs, and the West Memphis Three.[165]

Fedor also discussed the fact that a piece of genetic material—an allele—that could not have come from any of the West Memphis Three or the three victims was found on Stevie Branch’s penis. Unlike the hairs, this allele could be tested using a method called STR (short tandem repeat), which, if there is sufficient information, can identify with virtual certainty the individual who is its source. At present, STR testing is not sophisticated enough to identify the source of the allele, but Fedor said that new DNA technology, which can “work with samples that are even smaller and more degraded,” is in development, and the allele “has much greater potential for identifying a person than the hairs.” For now, however, all we can say with certainty is that the DNA evidence excludes the convicted men and potentially implicates Hobbs and Jacoby.[166]

In July 2011, additional DNA testing revealed that human DNA discovered on Byers’s shoes and Branch’s body[167] came from two individuals who remain unidentified. Once again, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were conclusively excluded as possible sources.[168]

2. POSTMORTEM ANIMAL PREDATION AND THE CAUSE OF DEATH

As mentioned earlier, six prominent forensic experts, each working independently, unanimously determined that the numerous lacerations, cuts, and gouges on the boys’ bodies were not inflicted by a knife, as Dr. Peretti and the prosecution contended, but were the result of postmortem animal predation. Because the wounds were postmortem, the experts concluded, Chris Byers did not die as a result of blood loss, as the prosecutors had argued, but instead had drowned, as had the other two boys. Unlike Peretti, who has never passed the exam for board certification in forensic pathology,[169] the six experts who reviewed the evidence and Peretti’s reports are among the most eminent authorities in their fields. They included Dr. Werner Spitz, considered the “grandfather” of forensic science; Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City; Dr. Vincent Di Maio, author of the textbook Forensic Pathology; Dr. Janice Ophoven, a pediatric pathologist; Dr. Robert Wood, the chief of forensic dentistry of the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service; and Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic odontologist who was instrumental in the conviction of serial killer Ted Bundy. At a press conference held on November 1, 2007, to announce their findings, Dr. Spitz stated that “the injuries on the body surface of all three victims . . . including the emasculation of Chris Byers, were produced by animals, after death. None of the injuries were caused during life, and none were caused by a serrated knife, or any knife for that matter.” And Dr. Souviron said, “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to look at these things and know that these are bite marks and that they occurred postmortem.” He added, “There are no stab wounds. If somebody’s going to use a knife, what do you do with a knife, you run around and scrape with it like this? I mean, come on. You stab with a knife. There are no stab wounds on these bodies.”[170]

According to these forensic experts, what the prosecutors insisted was a castration performed with a knife was actually a “degloving” caused by an animal. (This would explain the scrapings around Stevie Branch’s genitals, which the autopsy report had noted were consistent with teeth marks.[171]) Riordan summarized the scientists’ conclusions, saying, “It is well established in the medical literature that if . . . an animal pulls on the testes, the skin of the penis comes off like a glove, leaving the corpus of the penis on the body, which is exactly what happened in this case.”[172] Dr. Spitz later said, “There is no question in my mind” that the genital mutilation “was from animal predation.”[173] Further, “the injury in the groin area was almost bloodless or was bloodless for all intents and purposes. And showed ripping, chewing by a predator animal, a carnivorous animal, a large animal with evidence that this did not occur during the life of the boy. So there could not have been bleeding from that source.” Spitz concluded, “I think the medical examiner was wrong. I think they all drowned.”[174]

3. JUROR MISCONDUCT

In recent years, substantial evidence of juror misconduct in the case has been discovered. Both notes taken by one of the jurors and statements by the jurors themselves make it clear that Misskelley’s inadmissible confession played a key role in the jury’s deliberations in the Echols/Baldwin trial.[175] And although no juror admitted knowledge of the confession during the jury selection process, many, if not all, did know of it—a fact that Burnett himself acknowledged when he said during the trial that every juror had no doubt learned of the confession from media reports.[176]

Even more significant, Lloyd Warford, a prominent Arkansas attorney, revealed in a sworn affidavit to the Arkansas Supreme Court that the jury foreman, Kent Arnold, phoned him repeatedly while the trial was in progress, in violation of Burnett’s orders that the jurors not discuss the trial with anyone. According to Warford’s May 2008 affidavit, Arnold admitted that he had prejudged the defendants’ guilt on the basis of news reports of Misskelley’s confession[177]; misled the court about his opinions in order to secure his selection as a jury member; and planned to use Misskelley’s confession to sway the jury to return a guilty verdict.[178] Arnold also stated that the prosecution had presented a “weak, circumstantial” case[179] and that “if anyone is going to convince this jury to convict it is going to have to be me.” Warford concluded that “Kent Arnold saw himself as the real hero of this trial” because he had won the conviction by introducing the confession into the jury’s deliberations.[180]

Warford’s affidavit is supported by two other affidavits, both sealed because they contain the names of jurors. In one, Lyndall Stout, a former Little Rock television news anchor, states that Arnold “admitted to her in the spring of 2005 that he and his fellow jurors discussed” Misskelley’s confession.[181] In the other, two Arkansas attorneys say that Arnold defended the jury’s consideration of the confession, saying he found the judge’s instruction to ignore it “unreasonable.” They also report that he stated that the confession was “a known event” and, moreover, that it was the “primary and deciding factor” in the decision to convict Echols and Baldwin since the evidence introduced by the prosecution in the trial was “scanty” and “extremely coincidental.”[182]

In a June 2008 article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Arnold publicly acknowledged that he may have asked Warford “questions about procedures during the trial”—something Burnett had expressly forbidden the jurors to do—and that the confession “may have been one” of the subjects on a “large list of pros and cons” the jury compiled.[183] (A large flip chart that the jurors used during deliberations and a small chart in a juror’s notes prove that this inadmissible evidence was indeed on the list of pros and cons.[184]) He acknowledged no guilt or shame for these actions, however. Instead, he expressed frustration at the fact that the confession was ruled inadmissible. “Why not let the decision-makers have all that information?” he complained.[185]

Riordan has stated that “the jury foreman’s misconduct is shocking and convincingly proves that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin could not possibly have had a fair trial. The jury foreman engaged in deceit and bias from his first contact with the court during jury selection, throughout the trial testimony, during jury deliberations and, finally, during the penalty phase after conviction, when Damien Echols was sentenced to death and Jason Baldwin to life without parole.”[186] Representatives of both the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers seconded Riordan’s conclusion in their joint amici curiae brief, saying: “Echols’s conviction and death sentence have been gravely tainted by the jury’s consideration of the extraordinarily prejudicial—and extraordinarily unreliable—confession of Jessie Misskelley. If any reasonable juror were confronted today with evidence of the Misskelley confession’s unreliability, he would surely conclude that Echols is not guilty.”[187]

4. VICKI HUTCHESON’S PERJURY

In an interview contained in Amy Berg’s 2012 documentary West of Memphis, Vicki Hutcheson admits that her testimony at the Echols/Baldwin trial was false. But this is just the latest in a series of admissions that she lied on the witness stand. As early as April 1994, she began making self-incriminating comments about her testimony. After the trials ended, she contacted Ron Lax, a Memphis private investigator, several times about the case. She told Lax that Detective Ridge had promised that the police would “take care of her hot checks in return for her testimony,” a promise which, if it was indeed made, would provide her an additional motive to perjure herself beyond the $35,000 reward she apparently expected to receive.[188] Then, in May 1994, she called Glori Shettles, who worked with Lax, and according to Shettles, “she stated she was thinking of calling Channel 13 News in Memphis to advise she had, in fact, perjured herself.” She did not make that call, nor did she admit to perjury when Stidham interviewed her that August about her conversation with Shettles, but later in the decade, she consented to an interview with Burk Sauls, one of the founders of wm3.org, who briefly posted a transcript on the website. (The posting made Hutcheson fear for her safety, she said, and so it was removed from the site.) In that interview, she said that “basically I said what the West Memphis police wanted me to say. And that was that I went to the meeting. The esbat meeting. It was all their stories.” She also said, “You know what I want to say more than anything? I want to say that I’m sorry. I just want to tell Jessie and Jason and Damien that I’m sorry.”[189]

It wasn’t until 2004, however, that Hutcheson followed through on her 1994 desire to admit her perjury. In an Arkansas Times interview, she said that “every word” of her testimony “was a lie.” She wanted to set the record straight, she said, because she could no longer carry the burden of being responsible for the conviction of three innocent men. Hutcheson, who was being investigated for hot checks and credit card fraud at the time of the murders, said she had felt “scared to death” by the police and that they told her what to say during their taped interviews with her. “It was like this: I was either going to say exactly what they needed—or else. ‘We’re going to make this easy on you, Victoria, and you’re just going to say exactly what we need or things can get rough on you. You could be implicated in this murder. You could lose your son.’” She said the detectives would turn off the tape if she said something they didn’t want her to say and tell her, “No, that’s not the way it happened, Victoria. You come up with something better.” She also said that the esbat story was dreamed up by Jerry Driver at a meeting detectives held with her. In addition, she refuted the police’s claim that their secret recording of a conversation she had with Echols and Misskelley in her home was inaudible. “The quality of the tape was excellent. You could hear Jessie, you could hear me, you could hear my roommate Christy. You could hear Damien excellent because he was sitting right next to the lamp” where the microphone was hidden. Neither Echols nor Misskelley said anything incriminating on the tape, she said. The police later claimed the tape had been lost.[190]

Hutcheson repeated her statements in a sworn, videotaped affidavit to Nancy Pemberton, Misskelley’s private investigator, in 2004, and this affidavit was entered into evidence at Misskelley and Baldwin’s 2009 hearing for a new trial.[191] On August 14, 2009, Hutcheson attended the hearing and said she wanted to take the stand to set the record straight. Burnett informed her that there is no statute of limitations on perjury in Arkansas, so if she testified she could be found guilty of a class C felony. She requested immunity, but it was denied, an act that suggested the State was more interested in enforcing its perjury laws than in correcting an injustice that might cause innocent men to be imprisoned for life or executed. As Leveritt commented, “If there was any lingering doubt, that act erased it: Arkansas officials are not interested in either truth or justice in this case. They care only about preserving the ill-gained convictions.”[192] Given the likelihood of a felony conviction for perjury, and a long prison term, Hutcheson decided not to testify at the hearing.

5. MICHAEL CARSON’S PERJURY

Like Hutcheson, Michael Carson also recanted his testimony against Baldwin. Interviewed in Berg’s West of Memphis, he apologizes to Baldwin and blames his lies on LSD and other drugs he was taking at the time.[193] But even if he had not recanted, substantial evidence has surfaced since the trial that he lied on the witness stand. Danny Williams, the former counselor who warned the prosecutors that Carson was about to commit perjury, wrote to Baldwin shortly after Christmas in 1994, stating that “every word” of Michael’s testimony came from him. “We were discussing the case in a meeting,” he wrote, “and I told him what people were saying about the victims and about what was allegedly done to the bodies. This young man then went to the police and stated that you had confessed these details to him while [you were] in detention together.”[194]

Furthermore, in a May 29, 2008, Writ of Error Coram Nobis, Baldwin’s attorneys reported that their investigators had “interviewed all available staff or detainees who were in the facility with Baldwin and Carson (a total of approximately 10 persons)” and “none could corroborate Carson’s story.” What’s more, Joyce Cureton, who was the facility’s unit supervisor at the time, said, “There was only one log entry of Baldwin and Carson being together and this was under staff observation.” She also “reported that she was actually told by law enforcement personnel to leave town at or near the time that she might have been called as a witness for the defense.” And in a May 30, 2008, Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion for New Trial, Baldwin’s attorneys reported that when Cureton was asked to speak on his behalf during sentencing, she “was told by the sheriff that she should not be in court.” As this evidence indicates, law enforcement officers put pressure on an employee of the detention facility in order to prevent her from testifying to her belief that Carson’s testimony was false.[195] If she and Williams had been allowed to testify, the jury might well have discounted Carson’s testimony and Baldwin might never have been convicted.

6. JODEE MEDFORD’S RETRACTION OF HER TESTIMONY

As mentioned earlier, Donna Medford, the mother of Jodee Medford, has signed a sworn affidavit stating that Echols’s so-called “confession” to her daughter at a softball game “was not serious” and that “neither she nor her daughter believes he committed the crime.”[196]

7. AARON HUTCHESON’S TAPED INTERVIEWS

There is now evidence that police ignored obvious evidence that Aaron Hutcheson did not witness the crimes. Police tapes of their interviews with him, tapes not made available at the time of the trial since Aaron did not testify, make it clear that news reports and people close to the investigation were the sources of the few facts included in his wild imaginings. In his first tape-recorded interview, conducted by Ridge on August 25, 1993, Aaron correctly reports that the boys were beaten, drowned, and submerged in the water (although he says their bodies were held down by bricks, not by sticks), then adds, “I heard that from the news.” He then goes on to say, “Diane, Michael’s mom, said that she seen his face and it had knife stabs on it.” Ridge apparently ignored not only these obvious indications that Aaron did not witness the murders but also his inaccurate description of how the boys were tied. As Tim Hackler pointed out in an October 2004 Arkansas Times article, Aaron “made the assumption most children or adults would make if they heard that someone had been hog-tied. He assumed the murderers had ‘put their feet together and their arms together,’” when in fact each boy’s wrists were bound to his ankles. Hackler concludes that “it would seem that the terrible way that the boys were actually tied up would make a lasting impression” on anyone who had witnessed it.[197]

According to Hackler, who interviewed the then nineteen-year-old, Aaron was not sure “whether he actually witnessed the murders or whether his mind was playing tricks on him during a traumatic period.”[198] He was sure, however, that the police had “tricked” him into saying things that weren’t true and “messed with my words.” He also said he would like to become a lawyer to help people avoid the kind of injustice that took place in the West Memphis Three case.[199]

8. DEPOSITIONS IN TERRY HOBBS’S DEFAMATION SUIT AGAINST NATALIE MAINES

In November 2008, Terry Hobbs filed suit against Natalie Maines Pasdar (the married name of Natalie Maines) and the Dixie Chicks, whom he claimed had defamed him in letters on the Dixie Chicks website and MySpace page and in a speech at a December 2007 Free the West Memphis Three rally in Little Rock. As a result of the suit, attorneys for Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were allowed for the first time to obtain sworn depositions from both Hobbs and those who suspect him of the murders. Hill has stated that “Hobbs was required to defend his past behavior, his criminal record and his actions the night the children went missing. Under scrutiny, Hobbs’s stories became inconsistent and incoherent.”[200] The witnesses accused him, under penalty of perjury, of threats of murder; physical and sexual assault of a neighbor; sexual abuse of his daughter, Amanda, and his son from his first marriage; physical abuse of Amanda, his stepson Stevie Branch, and his ex-wife Pam; drug abuse; and lying about his actions the night of the murders. They also discussed the fact that he was arrested for drug possession and convicted of aggravated assault after shooting his unarmed brother-in-law in the stomach (for which he was sentenced to time in the workhouse and probation).[201] The suit was eventually dismissed and the judge granted Maines a summary judgment in her favor and ordered Hobbs to pay her $17,590.27 for legal expenses.[202]

9. AFFIDAVITS FROM TERRY HOBBS’S NEIGHBORS

Suspicions that Terry Hobbs may have been involved in the murders were heightened in October 2009 when three of his former neighbors presented sworn affidavits to the Arkansas Supreme Court stating that they saw the three boys with Hobbs at approximately six-thirty p.m. the day they were killed, making him the last known person to have seen them alive. The neighbors, who lived three doors from Hobbs and were never interviewed by police after the murders, came forward with their statements after learning that Hobbs had denied seeing the three boys the day they were murdered. Hobbs made this claim under oath in a July 21, 2009, civil deposition prompted by his suit against Natalie Maines. Hobbs was asked, “It’s your testimony that you did not see Stevie Branch at all the day of May 5th of 1993, correct?” and he answered, “Correct.” When he was asked, “Did you see any of the three boys that day?” he answered, “No, I did not.”[203]

In her affidavit, neighbor Jamie Clark Ballard stated:

Between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., I saw Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers playing in my backyard. I am absolutely, completely and totally positive that I saw Terry Hobbs hollering at Stevie, Michael and Christopher to get back down to the Hobbs house at approximately 6:30 p.m. If Terry Hobbs said he did not see Stevie Branch, Michael Moore or Christopher Byers on May 5, 1993, he is not telling the truth. I know for a fact that Terry Hobbs saw, was with and spoke to Stevie, Michael and Christopher on May 5, 1993.[204]

Sworn statements from Brandy Clark Williams, Ballard’s sister, and their mother, Deborah Moyer, corroborate her testimony.[205]

10. AN FBI PROFILER’S ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE

As an October 11, 2009, motion prepared by Echols’s attorneys notes, “Hobbs was never questioned by police during the original investigation of the crimes, despite the fact that the lead detective in the investigation of the murders [Gary Gitchell] has conceded both that when a child homicide occurs, police should always consider the parents of the child as potential suspects, and that it is ‘statistically proven that homicide victims are usually the result of family, close friends, [and] known acquaintances.’”[206]

At the request of Echols’s defense team, Special Agent John Douglas, a criminal profiler who was chief of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit for twenty-five years, interviewed Hobbs twice in 2007. Douglas reported that “I had one interview where he was very, very credible because I didn’t have any background information on him. But then five days later, when we get this more detailed information, specific information, I talked to a total liar. . . . He’s a total liar, the guy I’m talking to now is being confronted with his lies, and it’s a totally different type of bird. The person responsible for this crime can look at you right in the eye, can look at a camera and say ‘I didn’t do it’ because he’s a psychopathic personality. There is no remorse.”[207]

After analyzing all of the case evidence, Douglas concluded, “I would say put him on the front burner.” He explained that “it was pretty easy . . . to define this case as Personal Cause Homicide. This is not a homicide . . . perpetrated by a stranger. The person responsible for this crime . . . knew these victims relatively well,” and “the initial intent . . . was not to kill but to taunt and to punish.” However, the killer lost control, perhaps because of “comments made by one of the children,” and then “went beyond just the taunting, the teaching these kids a lesson,” and killed them. The killer hid the boys, their clothes, and the bicycles so carefully because “he lives nearby” and wanted to delay the discovery of the crime so he would have time to establish an alibi. Teenagers aren’t “criminally sophisticated” enough to commit “crimes like this” without leaving substantial physical evidence, he added, so the killer was likely an adult “who’s been violent in the past, who’s violent now . . . and would also be violent in the future.”[208] Since Hobbs was charged with physical and sexual assault in 1982 (the charges were dismissed when he agreed to undergo counseling),[209] and charged with aggravated assault, fined, and given probation for shooting his brother-in-law in 1997,[210] Douglas determined that Hobbs fit this profile.[211]

11. PAM HOBBS’S DISCOVERY OF HER SON’S POCKETKNIFE

According to an October 21, 2009, article by George Jared in The Jonesboro Sun, Pam Hobbs said that she found her son Stevie’s pocketknife in her ex-husband Terry’s drawer in 2002. Her father had given Stevie the pocketknife, she said, and he carried it with him at all times. The knife had not been among Stevie’s personal effects after his murder, and she had always assumed that it had been taken by her son’s killer. She sent the knife, along with more than a dozen others from the drawer, to one of the defense lawyers rather than to the prosecutors because, as she said, she “didn’t trust the prosecution . . . because of the evidence that was not presented at the trials.”[212]

Pam Hobbs also told Jared that she had suspected Terry Hobbs from the beginning. Her sister Jo Lynn McCaughey also told Jared she had suspected him from the start, pointing out that he had “repeatedly washed already clean clothes and other items around the house” the night Stevie vanished.[213] Another sister, Judy Sadler, has likewise reported that Hobbs uncharacteristically washed curtains, bed linens, and items of clothing that night.[214] Hobbs has denied these claims.

Pam Hobbs is not the only parent of a murdered child who believes Terry Hobbs may have been involved. According to another of Jared’s 2009 Jonesboro Sun articles, “John Mark Byers has also said he thinks Terry Hobbs was involved with the murders, and he now adamantly supports efforts to free the so-called ‘West Memphis Three.’”[215] “They’re innocent,” Byers said. “They did not kill my son.”[216] As he told People magazine, “I was fooled for 14 years. But now I know an injustice was dealt upon these boys by the State of Arkansas.”[217] Also, Rick Murray, the biological father of Chris Byers, has expressed his belief that the West Memphis Three were wrongly convicted. In a letter posted on wm3.org, he said, “I want to know who murdered my son. . . . I don’t want three innocent people to suffer for something they didn’t do.”[218]

12. “THE HOBBS FAMILY SECRET”

The most recent new evidence was not discovered until December 11, 2011, when the evidentiary hearing was scheduled to be in session. As West of Memphis reveals, three witnesses came forward after watching a 48 Hours special on the case and testified under penalty of perjury that Michael Hobbs, Jr., the nephew of Terry Hobbs, told them his uncle was responsible for the murders. All three witnesses subsequently passed polygraph tests. According to one witness, “Michael [Jr.] said to us, ‘You are not going to believe what my dad told me today. My Uncle Terry murdered the three little boys.’ According to Michael, his dad called this ‘The Hobbs Family Secret,’ and he asked us to keep it a secret and not tell anyone.”[219] A second witness said that Michael Jr. told him the same thing the winter before while they played pool in his basement and that “Michael was dead serious when he said this.”[220] The third witness said that when he was at Michael Jr.’s house in 2003 or 2004, he and Michael stood at the top of the stairs and listened to Michael Hobbs, Sr., and Terry Hobbs talking about the murders in the basement. He said, “I heard two men talking. One appeared to be very upset, even crying, and he said, ‘I am sorry, I regret it.’ The other man was trying to console him and said, ‘You are in the clear, no one thinks you are a suspect, those guys are already in prison.’”[221]

All of the evidence and testimony recounted above strongly supports the claims of innocence of the West Memphis Three, and strongly points to a possible suspect for further investigation. But none of this new information would be presented at the evidentiary hearing scheduled for December 2011. Before the evidence and testimony could be heard, the State agreed to release the West Memphis Three, and on August 19, 2011, the three men walked free under highly unusual and controversial circumstances.

The Alford Plea and the Release of the West Memphis Three

Shortly after the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered the circuit court to hold an evidentiary hearing, Stephen L. Braga took over Riordan’s position as the defense team’s lead attorney. Braga asked Little Rock attorney Patrick Benca, another new member of the defense team, to meet with Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel and ask the State to agree to skip the evidentiary hearing and hold new trials instead. Braga and Benca believed it was virtually a foregone conclusion that Judge Laser would order new trials on the basis of juror misconduct alone, and they believed the prosecution, like the defense, would prefer to avoid presenting the same evidence once for Judge Laser at the evidentiary hearing and again for jurors at new trials. Benca met with McDaniel on August 3, and although McDaniel had always staunchly defended the convictions and vehemently opposed the motion for new trials, he agreed to raise the issue with David Raupp, the deputy attorney general, and Scott Ellington, the prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’s Second Judicial District, who had been assigned to argue the State’s case at the evidentiary hearing. At a second meeting two days later, Benca suggested that they avoid not only the hearing but the trials as well and, through negotiation, simply resolve the case. McDaniel said, “If you’re interested in resolving it, I can make arrangements for you guys to present your argument to Mr. Ellington.”[222]

On August 9, Braga, Benca, and Blake Hendrix and Jeff Rosenzweig, the Little Rock attorneys for Baldwin and Misskelley, respectively, met with McDaniel and Ellington and their teams. Braga and Benca proposed that “the state and three defense teams not only agree to new trials, thereby avoiding the hearing, but that they also avoid the risks of new trials . . . by negotiating a plea agreement to be entered as soon as the new trials were ordered.”[223] New trials posed serious risks to both sides. The defense was worried that jurors might once again be swayed by Misskelley’s false confession, and the prosecution feared that the men would be acquitted[224] and the State would become liable for wrongful-conviction suits that could cost it as much as $60 million.[225] What Braga and Benca proposed, specifically, was “an Alford plea with time served.”[226]

The term “Alford plea” derives from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1970 ruling in the case North Carolina v. Alford, which involved a man who, in order to avoid the possibility of a death sentence, pled guilty even though he insisted that he was innocent. The Supreme Court ruled that a defendant could plead guilty while maintaining innocence if that plea was in his best interest.[227] Hence the Alford plea is also known as a “best-interest plea.” It allows a defendant who has reason to believe he might be convicted despite his innocence to register “a formal claim neither of guilt nor innocence” while accepting “the ramifications of a guilty verdict,” all in order to avoid the possibility of receiving a more severe punishment if he pled innocent and were convicted.[228] As Riordan has said, an Alford plea is by its very nature oxymoronic: before it can be accepted, the judge must decide that there is sufficient evidence both to acquit and to convict the defendants.[229] Because of its oxymoronic nature, an Alford guilty plea doesn’t resolve the question of guilt or innocence. In the words of Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, “Alford pleas resolve things legally but leave a huge question mark in the air about what really happened.”[230]

The State agreed to the deal Braga and Benca proposed, provided Judge Laser and all three of the imprisoned men approved the deal. Ellington approached Laser ex parte—i.e., outside a formal hearing—and Laser accepted the plan. Both Echols and Misskelley also immediately accepted it. Baldwin, however, initially refused.[231] When Blake Hendrix approached him with the deal on August 10, he “turned it down flat, saying he didn’t want to be saddled with convictions for crimes he didn’t commit.” Hendrix has noted that Baldwin’s refusal was a clear sign of his innocence. “Rejecting an offer that let him immediately get out of jail? That’s one of the for-surest signs that he’s innocent,” he said.[232] On August 16, however, Baldwin agreed to abandon his principled stand after he learned that Echols’s health was deteriorating because of “the conditions and abuse he suffered on death row.” As he said, “Once I realized that this could save Damien’s life, it was a no-brainer.”[233] But he continued to be angry about having to accept the Alford plea as a condition for release, as did Echols and Misskelley. On the day the three men were released, he said, “This was not justice. In the beginning we told nothing but the truth—that we were innocent—and they sent us to prison for the rest of our lives for it. We had to come here and the only thing the state would do for us is to say ‘Hey, we will let you go only if you admit guilt,’ and that is not justice any way you look at it. They’re not out there trying to figure out who really murdered those boys, and I did not want to take the deal from the get-go. However, they are trying to kill Damien, and sometimes you just got to bite the gun to save somebody.”[234]

After Baldwin approved the deal, the legal teams for both the defense and the prosecution spent the next two days preparing the complex Alford plea agreement that would allow the three men to be released in exchange for pleading guilty to reduced charges (while legally maintaining their innocence) and agreeing not to sue the State for false arrest and imprisonment. Echols and Baldwin, who had been convicted of capital murder, would plead guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, and Misskelley, who had been convicted of one count of capital murder and two counts of first-degree murder, would plead guilty to one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.[235]

On August 17, Judge Laser announced that he would “take up certain matters pertaining to the cases of defendants Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley” at a special hearing on August 19.[236] On August 18, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were transported from their respective prisons to the Craighead County Jail.[237] When the morning of August 19 dawned, the parking lot surrounding the Craighead County Courthouse, where the hearing would be held at eleven a.m., was already filling up with satellite trucks, media representatives, and people who hoped to attend the public hearing or at least learn if the rumor that the men would be released was true. By seven a.m. there were hundreds of people outside the building, far more than the fifty or so that could fit in the small courtroom; by nine a.m. there were “easily a thousand” and “the parking lot was a circus.”[238]

Meanwhile, inside the courthouse, the three prisoners and their attorneys met with Judge Laser for a “dry run” of the hearing that was to follow.[239] After Laser was assured that everyone was in agreement with the plea as written, the public hearing began. The judge vacated the previous convictions, ordered new trials, then accepted the prearranged plea agreement that allowed both the prisoners and the State to avoid those trials. He then sentenced Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley to eighteen years and seventy-eight days, the amount of time they’d already served; imposed and suspended an additional ten-year sentence; and warned them that if they reoffended they could be sent back to prison for twenty-one years.[240] In a few minutes, it was all over, and the West Memphis Three were free men.

Although their case had reached a legal conclusion, the controversy surrounding it was far from over. In an article in The New York Times, Campbell Robertson noted that “the circumstances of the release were bizarre, divisive and bewildering even to some of those who were directly involved,” and he pointed out the irony that the West Memphis Three left prison “as men who maintain their innocence yet who pleaded guilty to murder” and “as men whom the state still considers to be child killers but whom the state deemed safe enough to set free.”[241] Leveritt noted the additional irony that “they remain convicted felons, but they are not even on parole.”[242]

Neither those who thought the West Memphis Three were innocent nor those who thought they were guilty were satisfied by the plea agreement. Most of the criticism of the agreement came from supporters of the West Memphis Three, who have long wanted them to be exonerated. Fran Walsh said, “The Alford plea was the out for the state. They’d get the case to go away and they didn’t have to pay a cent.”[243] John Mark Byers said, “There’s certainly no justice for the three men that’s been in prison or my son and his two friends. To me, this is just a cop-out from the state for not wanting to admit that they made a mistake.”[244] Stephen Braga defended the resolution while acknowledging its imperfect nature. “This is a compromise resolution,” he said. “Damien, Jason and Jessie maintain their innocence, but recognize that it was in their ‘best interests’ to accept a certain resolution like this before another eighteen years passed while they were fighting for their freedom in an imperfect criminal justice system.”[245]

After the hearing, there was a brief press conference and then the men were released. In 1994, when they exited the same courthouse after their convictions, a huge crowd of people was waiting outside to curse and vilify them. But this time they were greeted with cheers and applause from the throng of spectators.

A Conclusion in Progress

The release of the West Memphis Three is not the end of the story. Their supporters have vowed to continue working for their exoneration. The website wm3.org has established an Exonerate the West Memphis Three Support Fund, and Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have promised to continue to fund efforts to prove the convicted men’s innocence, including more scientific “evidence testing and further investigation which will hopefully lead to the unmasking of the actual killer.”[246] Because the West Memphis Three were released before the evidentiary hearing could be held, the new evidence already gathered was never given its day in court. This evidence, in addition to the evidence that Misskelley’s confession was false, now constitutes the bulk of the West Memphis Three’s case for exoneration.

Despite all of the new scientific evidence, which wholly discredits the Salem Witch Trial–like “evidence” used to convict them, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley remain convicted murderers today. They are free of their prison cells, yet they remain imprisoned by their legal status as convicted murderers. Jason Baldwin once said, “I know one thing, and that is how long is too long to keep an innocent person in prison: one minute! One minute is too long to deny an innocent person his freedom.”[247] When they were finally released, on August 19, 2011, eighteen years and seventy-eight days after they were arrested, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley had each spent 9,573,120 minutes too long in prison. How much longer they will have to endure the burden of being falsely convicted before they are exonerated and the true killer or killers are brought to justice remains to be seen.

Endnotes

1. Mara Leveritt, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (New York: Atria Books, 2003), pp. 94, 215–216.

2. Ibid., pp. 295–297.

3. Ibid., p. 236.

4. Ibid., p. 32.

5. Ibid., p. 82.

6. Ibid., pp. 212, 381.

7. Arkansas Times staff, “WM3 Revelation,” Arkansas Times, Apr. 16, 2009, http://arktimes.com/arkansas/wm3-revelation/Content?oid=948533.

8. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference, William H. Bowen School of Law, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Nov. 1, 2007, http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/press_conference.html.

9. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 390.

10. Marc Perrusquia, “Hollywood Directed Defense, Challenged Old Case Against ‘West Memphis Three,’” The Commercial Appeal, Aug. 28, 2011, http://commercialappeal.com/news/2011/aug/28/hollywood-directed-defense-of-three/celebrities’-deep-pockets-funded-new-probe-in-1993-slayings-of-three-boys.

11. Mara Leveritt, “The Architect and the Inmate,” Arkansas Times, Jan. 9, 2004, http://arktimes.com/gyrobased/the-architect-and-the-inmate/Content?oid=1886039. For more information about Davis, her relationship with Echols, and her role in the effort to free the West Memphis Three, see Geoffrey Gray, “A Death-Row Love Story,” New York, Oct. 13, 2011, http://nytimes.com/2011/10/16/magazine/a-death-row-love-story.html?_r=2.

12. Arkansas Take Action press release, “New Eyewitnesses: Three Boys Last Seen with Terry Hobbs,” Oct. 12, 2009, http://freewestmemphis3.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77:new-eyewitnesses-three-boys-last-seen-alive-with-terry-hobbs-&catid=37:press-releases&Itemid=83.

13. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 14.

14. Martin D. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/enter_satan_2.html.

15. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 64.

16. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/enter_satan_2.html.

17. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/ricky_climer.html.

18. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/echols_vs_ridge_2.html.

19. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 40, 45.

20. Ibid., p. 43.

21. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/damien_echols_2.html.

22. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/damien_echols.html.

23. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/enter_satan_2.html and http://jivepuppi.com/jivepuppi_the_discovery.html.

24. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/west_memphis_confidential.html.

25. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 341.

26. Ibid., p. 58.

27. Ibid., pp. 58–59.

28. Ibid., pp. 65, 171–172, and http://westmemphisthreediscussion.yuku.com/topic/2221.

29. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/rumors.html.

30. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 65.

31. Ibid., pp. 56–57.

32. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/victims.html.

33. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 26.

34. Ibid., pp. 101–102.

35. Tim Hackler, “‘They Messed with My Words,’” Arkansas Times, Oct. 7, 2004, http://arktimes.com/arkansas/they-messed-with-my-words/Content?oid=964537.

36. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 102.

37. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/search_for_the_cult.html.

38. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 204.

39. Ibid., p. 165.

40. Ibid., p. 66.

41. Ibid., p. 72.

42. Tim Hackler, “Complete Fabrication,” Arkansas Times, Oct 7, 2004, http://arktimes.com/arkansas/complete-fabrication/Content?oid=1886107.

43. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 72.

44. Ibid., p. 286.

45. Ibid., p. 68.

46. Ibid., p. 132.

47. Laura H. Nirider, Steven A. Drizin, and Barbara Bergman, “Brief of Amici Curiae,” Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Sept. 17, 2009, p. 14.

48. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/polygraph.html.

49. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” Forensic Linguistics 10, no. 1 (2003), p. 24.

50. Nirider, Drizin, and Bergman, “Brief of Amici Curiae,” p. 16.

51. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/polygraph.html.

52. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 82.

53. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

54. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 90.

55. Ibid., p. 127.

56. Ibid., p. 76.

57. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

58. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” p. 23.

59. Ibid., p. 40.

60. Ibid., p. 37.

61. Ibid., p. 32.

62. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

63. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 187.

64. James Morgan, “John Grisham, Meet Dan Stidham,” Arkansas Times, June 7, 1996, http://arktimes.com/arkansas/john-grisham-meet-dan-stidham/Content?oid=1886139.

65. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

66. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 187–189.

67. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” p. 32.

68. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 226–227.

69. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” p. 32.

70. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

71. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” p. 30.

72. Ibid., p. 37.

73. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

74. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/exhibit_b.html.

75. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 90–91.

76. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/a_twilight_kill_part_twelve.html.

77. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” pp. 38–39.

78. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 86.

79. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/jivepuppi_jkm.html.

80. Perhaps the most compelling suspect of all was one who was never identified or investigated, because of police ineptitude. The night of the murders, the manager of a Bojangles restaurant near the crime scene called police to report that a bloody, disoriented black man with mud on his pants had entered the women’s rest room and left “blood and feces on the floor, stall and walls,” and a roll of toilet paper “soaked to the core with blood.” Minutes after the man left, a police officer arrived and took a report, but even though the police were aware that the three boys were missing, the officer didn’t examine the rest room or investigate further. Instead, she left the restaurant to investigate a complaint about someone throwing eggs at a house. The rest room was not examined for evidence until the following evening, when the manager repeated his story to an off-duty police officer who happened to be eating at the restaurant. The officer found some blood that hadn’t been cleaned up and he called the police department, which sent Allen and Ridge to investigate. They took blood scrapings from the wall and a pair of sunglasses the bloody man had left in the toilet, but this evidence was lost and therefore never tested. In any case, once the police had Misskelley’s statement, they showed little interest in the so-called “Mr. Bojangles” or any other potential suspect. For more on this, see Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 6, 141, and 219, and Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/bojangles_man.html.

81. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 82, 84.

82. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/exhibit_b.html.

83. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 208.

84. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/exhibit_b.html.

85. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

86. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,” p. 35.

87. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/exhibit_b.html.

88. Supreme Court of Arkansas opinion, delivered Feb. 19, 1996, regarding Jessie Lloyd Misskelley, Jr. vs. State of Arkansas, CR 94-848, http://courts.state.ar.us/opinions/1996/cr94-848.txt.

89. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 95.

90. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_misskelley.html.

91. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 212, 381.

92. Ibid., p. 106.

93. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/damien_echols_2.html.

94. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 175.

95. Beth Warren, “No False Confessions? Science Has Found Dozens, Often Wrung from Coerced Young Suspects,” The Commercial Appeal, May 22, 2011, http://commercialappeal.com/news/2011/may/22/plea-pressure-hours-of-threats-and-promises/. For more on false confessions, see Steven A. Drizin and Richard A. Leo, “The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World,” North Carolina Law Review 82, no. 3 (2004), pp. 891–1007, and http://innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php.

96. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 176–177.

97. Misskelley trial transcript, http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/ofshe.html.

98. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/exhibit_b.html.

99. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/a_twilight_kill_part_five.html.

100. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/echols_vs_ridge_3.html.

101. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 161.

102. Ibid., p. 163.

103. Ibid., p. 167.

104. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/a_twilight_kill_part_eight.html.

105. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 120.

106. Ibid., pp. 166–167.

107. Ibid., p. 209.

108. Ibid., p. 190.

109. Ibid., p. 199.

110. Ibid., pp. 212–213.

111. Ibid., p. 195.

112. Ibid., p. 218.

113. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/jivepuppi_the_sticks.html.

114. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/wax.html.

115. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 136–137.

116. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/recent_additions.html.

117. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/jivepuppi_knives_2.html.

118. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 137.

119. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/jivepuppi_the_injuries.html.

120. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 263.

121. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

122. Dennis P. Riordan and Donald M. Horgan, “Second Amended Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus,” Oct. 29, 2007, pp. 7–8.

123. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

124. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 94, 215–216.

125. Ibid., p. 208.

126. Ibid., pp. 209, 228.

127. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_baldwin.html.

128. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, pp. 209–210.

129. Ibid., p. 196.

130. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_baldwin.html.

131. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 240.

132. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/rumors.html.

133. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 240.

134. Dan D. Davison and John E. Moore, “Statement of Facts in Support of Defendant Natalie Pasdar’s Motion for Summary Judgment,” p. 91, http://dpdlaw.com/pasdarfacts2009.pdf.

135. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/echols_vs_ridge_2.html.

136. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 349.

137. Ibid., pp. 242–243.

138. Ibid., pp. 232, 235, 239, 288.

139. Ibid., p. 235.

140. Ibid., pp. 232, 239.

141. Ibid., p. 262.

142. Ibid., p. 236.

143. Ibid., p. 265.

144. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/a_twilight_kill_part_seven.html.

145. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/dale_griffis.html.

146. Publishers Weekly, quoted at http://amazon.com/Secret-Weapons-Sisters-Terrifying-Sabotage/dp/0882821962/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266264131&sr=1-2.

147. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

148. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 239.

149. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_baldwin.html.

150. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/a_twilight_kill_part_seven.html.

151. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/dale_griffis.html.

152. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 237.

153. Ibid.

154. Ibid., p. 15.

155. Ibid., pp. 237–238.

156. http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/ebtrial/closefogleman.html.

157. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 238.

158. Mara Leveritt, “A Letter from Jason Baldwin, As He Contemplates Heading Back to Court,” July 21, 2009, http://maraleveritt.com.

159. John Brummett, “Judging David Burnett’s Blunders,” Arkansas News, Dec. 29, 2009, http://arkansasnews.com/2009/12/29/judging-david-burnetts-blunders/.

160. Arkansas Code, annotated sections 16-112-208(e) and 16-112-(e)(3). For a discussion of the DNA statutes and a critique of Judge Burnett’s ruling, see David S. Mitchell, Jr., “Lock ’Em Up and Throw Away the Key: ‘The West Memphis Three’ and Arkansas’s Statute for Post-Conviction Relief Based on New Scientific Evidence,” Arkansas Law Review 62, no. 3 (2009), pp. 501–532.

161. Supreme Court of Arkansas, 2010 Ark. 417, pp. 15–16, http://arkansasappeals.com/2010/11/04/arkansas-supreme-court-west-memphis-3-cases-reversed-and-remanded/.

162. Mara Leveritt, “Full Moon over West Memphis,” Memphis, May 1, 2010, http://memphismagazine.com/gyrobase/Magazine/PrintFriendly?oid=oid%3A2112079.

163. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/DNA_results_part_four.html.

164. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

165. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/DNA_results_part_five.html.

166. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

167. Perrusquia, “Hollywood Directed Defense, Challenged Old Case Against ‘West Memphis Three.’”

168. Arkansas Take Action press release, “New DNA Found on Victim in West Memphis 3 Case Excludes Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin or Jessie Misskelley,” July 18, 2011.

169. Dennis P. Riordan and Donald M. Horgan, “Petitioner Damien Echols’s Reply in Support of Motion for a New Trial,” Aug. 12, 2008, p. 23, http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/motions/de_new_trial_reply.html.

170. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

171. Hill, “Identifying the Source of Critical Details in Confessions,”p. 38.

172. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

173. Johnny Dodd, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?,” People, Jan. 21, 2008, p. 92, http://people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20171260,00.html.

174. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

175. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/case_for_innocence_baldwin.html.

176. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 218.

177. Arkansas Times staff, “WM3 Revelation.”

178. Arkansas Take Action press release, “Supporters Call Judge’s Ruling a ‘Mockery’ in the Case of the West Memphis Three,” Sept. 12, 2008.

179. Arkansas Times staff, “WM3 Revelation.”

180. Mara Leveritt, “‘The ‘Big Ask’: An Insider’s View of the Legal Maneuvers That Freed the West Memphis Three,” Arkansas Times, Aug. 24, 2011, p. 10, http://arktimes.com/arkansas/the-big-ask/Content?oid=1888389.

181. Cathy Frye, “Lawyers for 3 Raise Juror-Talk Claim,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 11, 2008, http://westmemphisthreediscussion.yuku.com/topic/6740.

182. Nirider, Drizin, and Bergman, “Brief of Amici Curiae,” p. 6.

183. Frye, “Lawyers for 3 Raise Juror-Talk Claim.”

184. Arkansas Times staff, “WM3 Revelation.”

185. Frye, “Lawyers for 3 Raise Juror-Talk Claim.”

186. Arkansas Take Action press release, “Arkansas Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments in Damien Echols’s Appeal for a New Trial,” Sept. 27, 2010, http://freewestmemphis3.org/index.php?option=com_content&viewe=article&id=187;arkansas-supreme-court-hears-oral-arguments-in-damien-echols-appeal-for-a-new-trial-92710&catid=37;press-releases&Itemid=83.

187. Nirider, Drizin, and Bergman, “Brief of Amici Curiae,” p. 24.

188. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 295.

189. Ibid., pp. 295–297.

190. Hackler, “Complete Fabrication.”

191. Lisa Fancher, “Vicki Hutcheson, Rock and a Hard Place,” http://blog.myspace.com/almosthomevol1.

192. Mara Leveritt, “Arkansas, Scalia and Thomas Would Execute Despite Innocence,” Aug. 20, 2009, http://maraleveritt.com.

193. Amy Berg, West of Memphis, Sony Pictures Classics, 2012.

194. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 281.

195. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/recent_additions.html.

196. Davison and Moore, “Statement of Facts in Support of Defendant Natalie Pasdar’s Motion for Summary Judgment,” p. 91.

197. Hackler, “‘They Messed with My Words.’”

198. Hackler, “Complete Fabrication.”

199. Hackler, “‘They Messed with My Words.’”

200. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/Terry_Hobbs.html.

201. Davison and Moore, “Statement of Facts in Support of Defendant Natalie Pasdar’s Motion for Summary Judgment,” pp. 19, 94, 96–97. For copies of the depositions, see http://callahan.8k.com/hobbs_pasdar/hp_38.html.

202. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/Terry_Hobbs.html. For the facts in support of the summary judgment in favor of Pasdar, see http://dpdlaw.com/pasdarfacts2009.pdf.

203. Arkansas Take Action press release, “New Eyewitnesses: Three Boys Last Seen with Terry Hobbs.”

204. Ibid.

205. George Jared, “Ark. High Court Given Affidavits About WM3 Case,” The Jonesboro Sun, Oct. 15, 2009, http://wm3org.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/ark-high-court-given-affidavits-about-wm3-case-2.html.

206. Ibid.

207. Ibid.

208. Ibid.

209. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/recent_news.html.

210. Mara Leveritt, “New Evidence in West Memphis Murders,” Arkansas Times, July 19, 2007, http://arktimes.com/gyrobase/new-evidence-in-west-memphis-murders/Content?oid=868140&sgiwFullText=true.

211. Damien Echols Defense Team press conference.

212. Leveritt, “New Evidence in West Memphis Murders.”

213. George Jared, “Where’s Stevie?,” The Jonesboro Sun, Oct. 21, 2009.

214. Hill, http://jivepuppi.com/Terry_Hobbs.html.

215. Jared, “Ark. High Court Given Affidavits About WM3 Case.”

216. CNN wire staff, “‘West Memphis 3’ Freed in Child Killings After 18 Years,” Aug. 20, 2011, http://cnn.com/2011/CRIME/08/19/arkansas.child.killings/index.html?hpt=hp_11.

217. Dodd, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?,” p. 92.

218. Leveritt, Devil’s Knot, p. 313.

219. Kurt Orzeck, “Peter Jackson’s West Memphis 3 Doc Reveals New Allegations,” The Wrap, Jan. 20, 2012, http://thewrap.com/movies/article/peter-jacksons-west-memphis-3-doc-reveals-new-allegations-34623.

220. Ethan Anderton, “‘West of Memphis’ Documentary Reveals Three New Key Witnesses,” Jan. 20, 2012, http://firstshowing.net/2012/west-of-memphis-documentary-reveals-three-new-key-witnesses/.

221. Orzeck, “Peter Jackson’s West Memphis 3 Doc Reveals New Allegations.”

222. Leveritt, “The ‘Big Ask,’” p. 11.

223. Ibid.

224. In “Hollywood Directed Defense, Challenged Old Case Against ‘West Memphis Three,’” Marc Perrusquia quotes prosecuting attorney Scott Ellington as saying, “These defendants, the state believes, could very easily have been acquitted.”

225. Berg, West of Memphis.

226. Leveritt, “The ‘Big Ask,’” p. 11.

227. John Lyon, “Case Put Justice System to Test,” [Fort Smith, Arkansas] Southwest Times Record, Aug. 28, 2011.

228. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, http://law.cornell.edu/wex/alford_plea.

229. Mara Leveritt, “FLASH: West Memphis 3 Freed in Plea Bargain,” Arkansas Times blog, Aug. 19, 2011, http://arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2011/08/19/flash-west-memphis-3-freed-in-plea-bargain-on-1993-murders.

230. Dodd, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?,” p. 98.

231. Leveritt, “The ‘Big Ask,’” p. 13.

232. David Koon, “Jason’s Choice,” Arkansas Times, Aug. 24, 2011, p. 15, http://arktimes.com/arkansas/jasons-choice/Content?oid=1888400.

233. Dodd, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?,” p. 92.

234. David Lohr, “‘West Memphis Three’—Convicted of Killing Boy Scouts—Free After Serving 17 Years in Prison,” The Huffington Post, Aug. 19, 2011, http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/19/west-memphis-three-free_n_931449.html#s333742&title=Craighead_County_Court.

235. Leveritt, “The ‘Big Ask,’” pp. 12–13.

236. “Chronology of Events,” http://callahan.8k.com/custom3.html.

237. Leveritt, “The ‘Big Ask,’” p. 13.

238. Koon, “Jason’s Choice,” p. 14.

239. Leveritt, “The ‘Big Ask,’” p. 13.

240. “Chronology of Events.”

241. Campbell Robertson, “Deal Frees ‘West Memphis Three’ in Arkansas,” The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2011, http://nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20arkansas.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Deal+frees+west+memphis+three&st=nyt.

242. Leveritt, “FLASH: West Memphis 3 Freed in Plea Bargain.”

243. Mike Fleming, “2012 Sundance: Q&A with ‘West of Memphis’ Producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh,” Deadline, Jan. 18, 2012, http://deadline.com/2012/01/2012-sundance-qa-with-west-of-memphis-producers-peter-jackson-and-fran-walsh/.

244. MSNBC staff and news service reports, “Convicted Child Killers Freed After Plea Change,” Aug. 19, 2011, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/44199686/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/convicted-child-killers-freed-after-plea-change.

245. Arkansas Take Action press release, “The West Memphis Three Are Free,” Aug. 19, 2011, http://freewestmemphis3.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=266:the-west-memphis-three-are-free&catid=37:press-releases&Itemid=83.

246. Ken Kamins, Jackson’s manager, quoted in Chris Nashawaty, “Peter Jackson Still Seeking Justice for West Memphis Three—EXCLUSIVE,” Entertainment Weekly, Aug. 23, 2011, http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/08/23/peter-jackson-west-memphis-three-investigation-exclusive/.

247. Mara Leveritt, “Jason and the Warden,” Jan. 8, 2008, http://maraleveritt.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Jauss is the author of five books and the editor or coeditor of three anthologies. He has published nearly four hundred essays, short stories, and poems in magazines and anthologies and has received numerous awards for his work. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. A longtime supporter of the West Memphis Three, Jauss met Damien Echols in 2005; over the next six years he transcribed, edited, and archived Echols’s writings, and conducted interviews that have become the basis for the appendix in Life After Death. Jauss has also worked for Arkansas Take Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to the release and exoneration of the West Memphis Three.

also by Damien Echols

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