got chucked into US prison hell, just because
some cops were corrupt, and a jury were too
stupid.
The diary, half way down below, is written by the
convict himself. Notice some of
his use of language. The ideas, feelings, and experiences
were put across in incredible prose.
I'm guessing that he actually felt
like that, and that this is not a Dan Brown patented
"Novel-writing your way to riches" graduate.
checkit: Observer
Damien
Echols: how I survived death row
Damien
Echols spent 18 years facing execution after being wrongly convicted of a
triple child killing. Then Lorri Davis, a woman he'd never met, began a
campaign that would set him free. Emma John talks to him and introduces
chilling extracts from his prison diary
Emma John
Sunday 26 May 2013
In
1993, three eight-year-old boys – Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher
Byers – were murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. "It was the subject of
every newscast, on the front page of every newspaper, it was all they were
talking about on the radio," Damien Echols says. "If you went to the
grocery store, that's what they would be talking about in the checkout
line." He remembers a sense of fear coming over the town. "You could
feel it like a thunderstorm in the air."
Echols
was 18 at the time, and his friend Jason Baldwin was two years younger.
"There were three cops, a sort of juvenile task force, who used to harass pretty much every kid in
our neighbourhood." One of them, Echols says, was convinced that
Satanists were responsible for every bad thing that happened in town; he would
show people Polaroid photos of roadkill – possums and raccoons run over by cars
– and bizarrely claim it was evidence of animal sacrifices. "These cops
had been harassing me and Jason for about two years before they finally decided
they were going to pin these murders on me."
A
month after the murders Echols, Baldwin and another youth, Jessie Misskelley,
were arrested. Misskelley has an IQ of 68; after he had been interrogated for
12 hours, alone, he signed a confession that implicated both Echols and
Baldwin. At their subsequent trial, evidence introduced by the prosecution
included the fact that Echols wore
Metallica T-shirts and read Stephen King novels. Echols had an alibi for
the time of the murders – he was at home with his grandmother, mother and
sister, not to mention that he had made
phonecalls to three different people that evening. "That didn't matter
to the jury," he says. "The local media had run so many stories about
Satanic orgies and human sacrifices that
by the time we walked into that courtroom the jury saw the trial as nothing
more than a formality. It was over before we even walked in."
All
three were convicted; Jason and Misskelley were sentenced to life imprisonment
and Echols received three death sentences. "Even though I'd expected the
verdict," says Echols, "part of me was still in denial. In the US, from the time you're old enough
to speak you hear about how you're innocent until proven guilty and you
have all of these rights. Part of me was still thinking that someone's going to
put an end to this, someone's going to stop and do the right thing."
Damien
Echols Marked by pain: Echols today. Photograph: Jared Leeds/AP
Over
the 18 years that followed, Echols saw his mother a handful of times, his sister
twice. His adopted father died while he was in prison. He also met the woman
who was to become his wife – Lorri
Davis, who wrote to him after seeing a documentary about the murders. Lorri
took up his case, taking out personal loans to fund his defence. One day the
film director Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, his partner, sent Lorri a
donation to the defence fund along with a note offering any help they could.
"Peter and Fran would go to work in the daytime and make films like King
Kong and The Lovely Bones," explains Echols, "and then they'd come home at night and work on this
case. They had to give themselves a thorough education in the American
judicial system. I would be dead right now without them."
New DNA evidence couldn't exonerate the
West Memphis Three, as Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley had become known. But it did throw enough doubt on their
convictions to force a deal from the state prosecutors, and in 2011 they
were offered an "Alford plea", which allowed them to accept a plea
bargain while maintaining their innocence (so the state would not be held
accountable for any miscarriage of justice). They all were released
immediately.
...
Last
September he and Lorri moved from New York to Salem, Massachusetts, where the
infamous witch trials took place. Echols had become a Buddhist in prison, and been ordained into the same Zen tradition
used to train the Samurai. Last month he opened his own meditation centre.
Damien
Echol's diary
Damien
Echols mug shots Facing time: mug shots taken of Echols at the time of his
arrest.
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
50s 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 behaviour 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. There was a
small line at the bottom of the page that read, "PS 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 56-year-old man with one leg.
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 once drank a 16-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. 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 $1,000. 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.
...
There
is one panel of mesh wire about 2ft 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 faeces than you could shake a stick at. When you
first enter you have to fight against your gag reflex. It's a filthy business,
trying to get some exercise.
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. 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 25 and 30, 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.
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
unsee 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....
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 24 hours a day, it never stops. 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.
Damien
Echols in prison ‘I was in solitary for
10 years, so I wasn’t used to human interaction’: Echols in prison.
Photograph: Jeff Dailey/Sony
Sleep deprivation is a direct result of the
lights. They turn them off every night at 10.30.
Then they're turned right back on at 2.30, when they start to serve
breakfast. If you could 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. 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.
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 20 or 30 minutes,
whatever is in the can will be hot enough to burn your mouth. You have to be
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.
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 any more. 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. I swear to God
that I can remember a single summer day that lasted for several months.
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 off-coloured sunset.
Forever can be measured with a ruler, and eternity is no longer than a stiff
breeze.
...
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.
Damien
Echols with Johnny Depp Star and
stripes: Echols with Johnny Depp, a supporter of the West Memphis Three.
Photograph: Rex Features
A
single letter 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 10 or 20. I
would lie on my bunk and flip through the letters, savouring 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.
...
She
was from New York, college-educated, a world traveller 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.
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 OK?" It was
such a shock to her system that it took a second for her to reply. She said it
nearly killed her.
Lorri
came to visit me about six months later. I remember it was summer because she
wasn't wearing a coat. It was a slow and gradual process, forging ahead
together. 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.
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.
Lorri
and I weren't able to touch each other at all until December 1999, when we were married. After we were married, Lorri and I
were permitted to be in the same room with each other, but every visit we had
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. 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 defence 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.
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.
"Life
After Death" by Damien Echols
