Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (23 page)

Twenty-two

T
o 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.