Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (39 page)

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

I
n 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

O
n 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