Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (8 page)

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

I
n 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.

*  *  *

M
y 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.