Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

by Damien Echols

  Next I went on to learn about the philosophy and practice of an organization known as “The Golden Dawn.” This was a group of people who practiced metaphysical rites of passage to mark the different stages in the evolution of consciousness. It was all about the constant learning and growth process that everyone goes through, and how to speed it up. The great poet W. B. Yeats was one of the more well-known students of this school of thought. I had my nose in these books morning, noon, and night.

  Many people donated money to a college fund that was set up for Jason and me, so I began taking courses from a local college here in Arkansas. At first I was interested mostly in psychology, but I mixed in a few other subjects, such as sociology and reading German, for good measure. Psychology seemed infinitely interesting to me, with all of its experiments and nature-versus-nurture debates—but I don’t think anyone’s surprised at this point to hear I became interested in psychology. . . .

  I later realized psychology was not my love at all—it was history. I’ve grown to love history more than any other subject, and I have come to believe you can understand far more about the world through history than you can through psychology, especially military history. At first I delved into every aspect and every era of history, but gradually my scope narrowed as I began to realize what I was drawn to.

  My love is Italian history, specifically the history of the cities of Florence and Venice, in the period between 1400 and 1800. My role model is Cosimo de’ Medici, though I also like his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent. What I love about the span of time during which the Medici were in power is the social structure and all the intrigue that accompanied it. Among aristocratic circles, life was like a chess game. You had to weigh your every word, as conversations were filled with subtlety. Social success or failure could hinge on whom you were seen making eye contact with. Not to mention the decadent styles and fashions that were all the rage. No one wore baggy jeans and backward baseball caps. These days no one makes an effort.

  And yet no routine or spiritual practice in the world will dim the reality of daily life on Death Row. A normal person does not commit murder. For almost seventeen years I’ve waited for someone to walk through the door whom I could have a conversation with, but it just doesn’t happen. The people here are all mentally defective in ways that range from mild retardation to extreme schizophrenia. Others are stuck in some no-man’s-land between sanity and delusion. There are no criminal geniuses walking these halls. Most not only are culturally illiterate, but also can barely manage to express themselves in English. I have never met a prisoner with a college education, and I can count the high school graduates on one hand. Nearly all lived in absolute poverty, and most were abused in one way or another. Not a single one of them is capable of functioning normally in society, and it’s not a skill they’re likely to learn when locked in a cell among others who are as bad or worse. I’ve yet to see any sign of “rehabilitation,” or any program designed to bring about that aim. Most of the people you meet in prison have been here repeatedly. Some have been to prison three or four times before making it to Death Row. They claim to hate and despise everything about prison, but they always come back. It’s like they’re collecting frequent flyer miles in hell. They themselves can’t explain it, falling back on excuses such as “It’s hard to stay out once you’ve been in.” Why? How? It’s hard to refrain from snatching an old woman’s purse? It’s somehow difficult to prevent yourself from committing rape? Somehow you accidentally found yourself burglarizing a house and stealing a car? I don’t understand why they don’t learn their lesson the first time around. That in itself is evidence that they’ve got a couple screws loose.

  On Death Row we used to have television sets that were in stands about five feet in front of the cells. The guards were supposed to make security checks every half-hour, at which time they could change the channel if you wanted them to, but that never happened. I’ve seen up to eight hours pass without a single guard coming by. A convict once lay dead on the floor all night long after having a heart attack, and the guards didn’t find him until after breakfast.

  With no guards around we had to devise a way of changing the channel on the television for ourselves, so someone invented what quickly became known as the “channel checker.” A channel checker is made with construction paper, pencils, and bits of pilfered tape. You’d be surprised at what a sturdy spear you can make out of these materials, and in essence that’s what a channel checker is—a spear. With it you can reach through the bars of your cell and change the channel on the TV set.

  In the spirit of escalating warfare, a convict known as Chuckles and another known as “the hobo” modified their channel checkers in order to cause maximum damage. They used empty soda cans to fashion sharp metal tips, and then proceeded to stab each other in the face through the bars. They kept at it for at least an hour and both had shed blood before they finally tired. When someone asked what had started the whole thing, Chuckles pointed at the hobo and said, “He was trying to derogatize me.” No one knew quite what that meant, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Usually no one cared enough about Chuckles’s conversation to try to follow along anyway.

  I applied that moniker to him myself and it stuck. Soon the entire population of Death Row recognized him as such, and he even began to refer to himself by that name. It just seemed to suit him perfectly. Chuckles is about five and a half feet tall, of average build, and looks exactly like a possum. In fact, his alias is “Kid Possum.” He has only one tooth left in his mouth, and it’s situated right in front. He claims that drugs rotted his teeth, though I’m more inclined to believe it was the simple lack of good oral hygiene. I say this because Chuckles has the breath of a baby dragon and has never been seen in the presence of a toothbrush. I once tried to use the phone after him and the smell he left on the mouthpiece made me gag. I washed it for several minutes with soap and water, but the smell remained. In the end I had to pour cheap cologne over it. He was overheard making the statement “I don’t drink coffee because it will stain my tooth.”

  It’s not only his mouth that stinks, as Chuckles chronically avoids all forms of cleanliness. He’s the only person on earth who smells worse when he gets out of the shower than he did before he got in. He doesn’t actually wash himself, he just sort of splashes around while trying to talk to other people. The guards argue about who has to escort him, because no one wants to get close.

  Chuckles arrived on Death Row after he was convicted of chopping two old ladies to death with a hatchet. Other inmates used to drive him into a frenzy by tormenting him with hatchets made out of construction paper. While making chopping motions they would imitate an old lady’s voice and cry, “No, Chuckles! Please don’t kill me! You’ll catch a capital murder charge!” Chuckles would go insane with rage and threaten to kill everyone in sight.

  Chuckles and the hobo had more than one altercation over the years, and most involved throwing either feces or urine at each other. I once witnessed the hobo dash a coffee cup of urine in Chuckles’s face, after which Chuckles didn’t even bother to wash up. He simply dried his face with a towel and went back to business.

  Men who cultivate filth are a regular occurrence in prison. They justify it by saying, “I’m not going anywhere soon, so why bother?” They’re referred to as either barbarians or Vikings. Although those called Vikings are crude, those considered to be barbarians have given up any pretense of civilized humanity.

  Each day men are selected to work in the fields. They swing a hoe from daybreak to suppertime, and when they come back inside they are sweaty, filthy, and mud-caked. A Viking will strip off his clothes and go to bed without even showering. A barbarian, though—well, a barbarian will crawl straight into bed without even taking off his mud-encrusted boots. You can smell a barbarian from the next cell. I know from firsthand experience. I once lived in the cell next to a barbarian for about three months. I couldn’t even sit at the door to watch television without holding a washcloth over my
nose and mouth. This particular barbarian even had his teeth pulled so he could avoid the formality of brushing them. Dentures would save him the effort. The thing that struck me as being the most odd was the barbarian’s insistence that he did not stink despite everyone in the barracks telling him otherwise.

  I also had the misfortune of living next to another barbarian whom everyone called “Big Blue.” This name was in reference to the fact that he wore the same pair of underwear every single day until they turned a dingy bluish-gray color. In truth it wasn’t even underwear, but long johns that he had cut the legs off of. After about a year they were nothing but a tattered rag filled with holes and dangling fringe. Unlike Chuckles or the barbarian, Big Blue had a valid excuse—he was stark raving mad.

  I noticed that Big Blue watched the news every morning with the intensity of a cat sitting outside a mouse hole. He confided in me that it wasn’t the news he was watching, it was the time and temperature readings in the corner of the screen. He wouldn’t take his eyes off those tiny numbers because he believed it was a secret message being sent to him. Who was sending him these messages? It was “they.” He either couldn’t or wouldn’t be more articulate than that, nor did he elaborate on what those messages were. I must admit that after he told me this I found that my eyes kept drifting to the corner of the screen, as if to be certain there was nothing there but numbers.

  I live with men who haven’t been in contact with reality for years. The truth is that insanity is rampant on Death Row, as is retardation. The law says that the insane and the mentally retarded (the law’s terminology, not mine) cannot be executed, yet it happens on a regular basis. It’s both sad and frightening. It’s sad because many of them don’t even comprehend that they’re on Death Row or what awaits them.

  The mentally handicapped are executed on a regular basis while the politicians all give speeches about being tough on crime. I’ve never come across a single murderer who possessed the mental faculties required to fully comprehend the horror of what they have done. They are not emotionally developed enough to feel empathy. They live lives of nightmare, yet are not even capable of realizing that. They are the dregs of humanity, by both birth and choice. Prison and the prison mentality are not what society has been led to believe they are. These people cannot even take care of themselves, and they suffer from every health problem imaginable. There are no attractive murderers here. It’s like the ugliness inside them manages to transform their facial features so that the outside resembles the inside. There are no conversations here. There are threats, taunts, and screams, but a conversation is an impossibility. Concepts such as love, honor, and self-respect are as foreign to this place as French cuisine. I waver between the extremes of pity and disgust.

  The prison system makes no effort to help the mentally ill. There are no therapy sessions, no treatments, no cutting-edge drugs. The only thing they do is shoot them full of Thorazine if they start to get riled up. You can spot a man doing the Thorazine shuffle from a mile away. His every action takes ten times longer than it should, because it takes him a Herculean effort to move.

  For many people in prison their worst fear is going insane, because once you do all hope is lost. You will be locked up not only within these walls, but also within your own rapidly degenerating mind. There is no help, and you wouldn’t even be able to work on your own case in order to get your death sentence converted. You would sit in a cell playing with feces and screaming at phantoms that no one else could see. This is not the place you want to lose your marbles. If it begins to feel like the walls are closing in on you, then you have to come up with a way to work through it or shake it off.

  Sometimes it’s even more disturbing to see the cases of mental retardation on Death Row than it is to see the insane. I say this because there is often something very childlike in the actions of the retarded. To see a retarded person being led to execution is an abomination. It’s something that should never happen, yet it does. Sometimes even innocent retarded people are executed, which is a double travesty.

  There was a guy here who had the IQ of a child, and it was common knowledge that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of. He was here because he was taking the blame for something his brother had done. He was eventually executed in his brother’s place. The guy was blatantly and obviously retarded, and he lived on a diet of potato chips, candy bars, and cake. He acquired the money for these things from a nun who came to see him every so often. Sometimes his mother would come see him, and since they had nothing to talk about they would both put their heads down on the table and sleep. It was heartbreaking to witness. I don’t recall ever seeing him take a shower. He just sat silently in his cell until the day he was killed.

  Everyone seems to agree that it’s wrong to execute the retarded, yet it continues to happen. There are retarded people awaiting execution right now. There’s one who often has to repeat himself several times because no one can understand what he’s saying. Another strings words together that make no sense. He calls people names such as “Fish More” and “Fuck Bart.” He paces his cell at four o’clock in the morning yelling, “Twiddle your fingers! Twiddle your fingers! Let’s roll!” and then follows it with a string of obscenities.

  A sane man can be reasoned with and talked to; you can guess his motives and predict his actions. A madman, on the other hand, may try to kill you, because he’s convinced it’s God’s will. Like Nu-Nu.

  The threat of violence hangs over Nu-Nu like a black cloud. He’s not someone you would want sleeping under your roof or hanging around behind your back. If ever there was a clear-cut case of schizophrenia, this man is it. Nu-Nu shot and killed a man in a coin-operated laundry. When the cops came to investigate they found a security tape with footage of Nu-Nu break-dancing around the body. I’ve often been awakened at two o’clock in the morning by Nu-Nu screaming at the top of his lungs. He claims that the nurses in the inmate hospital are drinking his blood and defecating in his food. The entire barracks has listened to him argue with a mirror for hours at a time, threatening to kill his own reflection. He’ll then stop and begin preaching a sermon in a very calm voice, instructing his congregation to “open up to the Book of Psalms and hold it down by your left nut.”

  Others are equally insane but more harmless. I’ve no doubt that they murdered someone at one time, but it’s almost as if their drive to kill died along with their victims. Now they’re just burned-out lunatics.

  We have a character here who is stuck with the unfortunate name of “Patches.” Patches despises this name and would gleefully murder anyone who uses it. Anytime you call him by that name he stares at you with the glint of pure, unadulterated hatred in his eye. He was given this name because he sports a hairdo exactly like George Jefferson in the old sitcom The Jeffersons—an Afro around the sides and nothing on top. Someone once pointed out that he had patches of hair missing, and it stuck. Patches was born.

  Patches isn’t the sort of guy you’d want to strike up a friendship with. He goes out of his way to cause more frustration for anyone he can. Patches is the guy who will change the channel just because he knows you’re watching television. He’ll pretend to be on the phone just so you can’t use it. To put it bluntly, Patches is an asshole. No one stays in a cell next to him for very long, because they quickly grow to despise him, then do whatever it takes to get moved away from him. Patches loves nothing more than to see misfortune visited upon others, and that is the only time you will ever hear him laughing.

  Patches has a rather interesting collection, even by prison standards, and he’s rather touchy about it. If you approach him when no one else can hear the conversation he’ll show it to you. If you say something about it where others can hear, he’ll deny that it exists and then swear at you for the rest of the day. The odd thing is that nearly everyone has seen his collection at one time or another and knows that he is lying when he pretends ignorance. Those who wish to torment him will yell out across the barracks and ask him about it. This ac
tion is met with either explosive rage or deathly quiet. The only other thing that infuriates him even half as much is when someone starts singing that song from the seventies, “Patches, I’m depending on you, son.”

  So what exactly is it that Patches collects? She-male porn. Patches collects pornography that falls under such colorful titles as “chicks with dicks.” Not only does he hoard it like treasure, he turns it into pop-up books that are cleverly disguised as birthday cards. He guards them like a Fort Knox of perversity, as if he believes everyone is out to steal his hard work. You see, this hoard of pop-up she-male porn is interactive. He takes a razor blade and combs through porn magazines in search of penis pictures. He carefully cuts out the picture of the penis and then cuts slits in the pictures of his half-men, half-women so he can slide the penis in and out of the slit. It is indeed disturbing, but no one can deny that Patches is a man who knows just what he likes.

  As odd and unpleasant as Patches can be, there are those here who more than match him. A fine example of this sad species would be J.C.

  I first noticed J.C. after I’d been here a few months and was moved up to a cell on the third floor. I could not look at him without being reminded of a scarecrow, and he greatly resembled Iggy Pop. He had long, graying hair and was rail thin, every muscle in his torso greatly defined. He constantly worked out, which is what he was doing the first time I really paid any attention to him. I looked over to see him doing squats and wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I did a double-take to see what the little black spots scattered over his body were. Closer scrutiny revealed them to be crickets. Big, black crickets. They were stuck to his shoulders, chest, and stomach with tiny pieces of Scotch tape. There was even one on his neck. He was fond of calling them his “babies” and knew how to make them chirp simply by touching them in a particular way. He had them, or their descendants, for quite a while before the guards went into his cell and flushed them all down the toilet. J.C. seemed to be genuinely torn up over their loss, as if he were truly attached to them.