Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (24 page)

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

T
he 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.