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.
Ultimately, that warden was fired, although it wasn’t because of anything he’d done to m
e. 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
The 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 bu
t 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.
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 22