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

by Damien Echols

  After ten years, Jason and I caught sight of each other on a Friday afternoon in 2004, while Lorri and I were in the midst of our weekly picnic. I looked up to see him about thirty feet away in the hallway, looking at me through the glass. He raised his hand and smiled, then he was gone, like a ghost. I wish I could have talked to him, if only to say, “Just hang on.”

  That’s the same thing I keep telling myself.

  Just hang on.

  Twenty-five

  I went through the HGA prayer ritual three times today. At about 8:30 a.m., around noon, and at about 6:30 p.m. I’ve been reciting the prayer exactly as written in Abramelin and then praying the prayers again in my own words, making them as heartfelt as possible. Some of the newness is beginning to wear off and cause it to seem like actual work. However, for some reason I can’t define I feel my faith in the procedure growing.

  I had a dream that I was fighting with a lion and a dog on the street where I used to live in Lakeshore. I was holding the lion’s jaws open with my hands, even though it was tremendously painful. I kept the lion between myself and the dog, so that every time the dog lunged at me it would bite the lion instead. I eventually managed to dart through the gate and close it behind me.

  When I was going through the last prayer today I had a pleasant experience. I was on my knees, head bowed, when I suddenly felt as if I were looking down into a room. The only description I can offer is that everything was white and, I’m tempted to say, made of marble. I was looking down on it from a height of between fifty and one hundred feet, but I wasn’t seeing it with my eyes.

  From ecstasy to drudgery. I move from feeling as if I’m on the verge of something huge to dread at the thought of one more round of prayer.

  Same as yesterday. All work and no joy in the ritual. I’m hoping for a second wind. I did about twenty minutes of hatha yoga asanas today to loosen up. I find that once I begin the HGA ritual it’s very pleasant. There’s something about it that has a timeless quality. It’s just the thought of beginning that I dread. I look at it as a child does homework.

  There is no angel. There is nothing.

  Everything is fractured, the pieces of everything come together, collide, then move away to collide again.

  There is no such thing as magick.

  I have lost all faith, lost all belief. I teeter on the edge of hopelessness. Everything is a fight, and I’m so tired. I’m so tired of struggling; I want to scream until I’m gargling my own blood.

  The dreams are coming fast and fierce. Dreams of freedom. It hurts so much to wake up.

  Time is coming apart for me. At some moments I can no longer feel a past, any past, trailing behind me like a snakeskin. At other moments it feels like the past is all that’s real. Today I was two people, one laughing at the other.

  The summer is on me like a ghost. I’d cry with longing if it weren’t so pointless.

  Nothing makes any sense. There doesn’t seem to be any point in trying. Everything falls apart. I’ll be thirty-two years old exactly six months from today.

  My exhaustion is beyond bone-deep. It has seeped into my soul, and every day it robs me of a little more of what I once was. Of what I was meant to be. There is no rest here, and there is no life. When I try to look ahead the light seems a little farther away each day. There is despair on my breath and no savior in sight. They say it’s only death if you accept it, but more and more these days I’m feeling like I don’t have a choice. I keep saying to myself, “I will not stop. I will not stop.” If for no other reason than that I will it to be so. If everything else fails, I will keep moving ahead on willpower alone. There has to be some magick in something, somewhere.

  It used to be that a certain wrongness danced across the ocean’s surface, crackling like chain lightning. Now the despair is more subtle, sinking silently beneath the waves and coming to rest in dark and poisonous places. The surface becomes pallid and exudes a sick, gray, greasy feeling that eventually drives you mad. It’s an endless cycle that breeds a never-ending supply of frustration. Its heartache is the color of lead, and nothing in the world can heal it.

  Summer makes me suicidal. It sucks all the magick out of life, and even sleeping becomes an exercise in fruitless brutality. I cannot comprehend what is in the souls who await this misery. Nothing worthwhile can survive the heat. The birds and the bees are harbingers of hell, ushering in a season of disease. There is nothing in these months that speaks to me. It conspires to keep me from ever reaching home.

  If you were to go down the line and ask each man what it is that he hates most about prison, you’d probably come up with a different answer for nearly every person asked. Some things are universal, like not being able to go out at night and see the stars, or not being able to be with your family—but each person also has his own pet peeves. For me they are the mosquitoes and the sleep deprivation.

  It’s better here at Varner, but Tucker was hell where the mosquitoes were concerned. Tucker was surrounded by fields on all sides, and there’s one crop or another growing as long as it’s warm enough. The entire ground is like one giant mosquito hatchery. If you think you know what a swarm of mosquitoes is like just because you’ve been camping or sat in the backyard on a summer night, then you’re badly mistaken. I’ve seen entire walls covered by blankets of mosquitoes. Every time you take a step, a cloud of them rises from the ground.

  I’ve literally cried in frustration more than once because the mosquitoes were such a torment. My hands have been bitten so many times they’ve become swollen and miserable. The skin on my knuckles was so red and tight that my fingers looked like sausages. You have to keep moving because if you are still they land all over you. Every year the walls look like abstract paintings because of the blood spots from the smashed mosquitoes. You can’t rest because they buzz in your ears, bite your lips and eyelids, and drive you to the edge of a nervous breakdown. This continues all summer long. It gets even worse when the mosquitoes discover they can breed in the toilets in the empty cells.

  As you lie on your bunk trying to get what little sleep you can, there’s nothing more annoying than having mosquitoes buzz in your ears and bite your face. When you combine the torment of the mosquitoes with the suffocating heat it becomes more than you can bear—except that you have no choice. You can either try to sleep while fully clothed, with socks on your hands and your face covered (but then the heat is worse) or you can strip down in hopes of cooling off, at which time the mosquitoes will feast.

  I’ve seen times when the entire barracks was filled with smoke because people were burning paper in an attempt to smoke the mosquitoes out. It doesn’t work. I’ve also seen a gentleman who couldn’t take it anymore, so he started to plot his revenge. He would trap mosquitoes in a small plastic cup, pull their wings off, and then urinate on them. Judging by the cursing and insane laughter that accompanied the act, I’d say he obtained a great deal of satisfaction through his efforts.

  Today a bird landed on my dingy windowsill. The window itself is only as wide as the bird was tall. It sat there as still as a stone and stared directly at me for over an hour. I stood on my bunk with my face right up to the glass, but it didn’t fly away. Our eyes were only about two inches apart as we gazed at each other. The bird’s entire body was a dusty gray, but it wasn’t a sparrow. I know what a sparrow looks like. The odd part is how it sat perfectly still, with its mouth wide open. A thin string of saliva hung from the top section of its beak to the bottom, reminding me of a strand of a spider’s web. After a few moments I raised my hand and tapped on the glass right by its head. The bird didn’t even blink. It continued to stare at me with a beady black eye and an open beak. I’ve never seen a bird behave that way before. It feels like it meant something, as if it were some sort of bird omen. I’m positive that bird smelled like a coming rainstorm.

  Twenty-six

  The twelfth year I spent in that cage, was the worst one for me by far. My nerves were at the breaking point and my life was misery. That was
the year I nearly gave up and lost all will to live. My physical health was rapidly deteriorating, the strain of trying to hold a marriage together in these circumstances was breaking my back, and I had used up every last ounce of willpower that I had. Then a miracle happened. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series. My sanity was saved by Johnny Damon.

  There’s something mystical about baseball. Some wholesome and gleaming quality that makes it as much myth as game. I watch it because it soothes and comforts, it bedazzles and bewitches. When a player steps up to the plate with a bat in his hand he ceases to be a man. He becomes the embodiment of hope. He becomes a magickal force capable of battling sickness and black despair. When someone knocks a ball over that back wall you can make a wish on it like a shooting star. A man who swings that bat becomes a force of nature, an act of divine intervention. He punches a hole through the darkness and reminds us that miracles have not vanished entirely. He is a sibyl in a sport jersey, a conduit through which all that is good shines its light.

  There are only two things within these walls that can soothe or relax me. One is to go to Mass, the other is baseball. There is a priest who comes to visit and takes up to three of us into a broom closet that functions as a chapel. He performs the whole Mass right in the closet, and he brings a bishop in for Christmas Mass, too. Having a baseball game on the television has the same effect on me as sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair. It’s a security blanket. When I have reached the very bottom of hopelessness, I will turn on a game, lie on my bunk, and pull the covers up over my head. I leave a tiny opening so that I can see the television with one eye. The sound of the announcer’s voice lulls me toward relaxation in a way that’s almost hypnotic. It helps me to heal.

  Perhaps the comforting quality that baseball has for me stems from the fact that some of my best childhood memories have to do with watching games with Nanny. She was a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and never missed a game. When she would glance at me from the television screen, I would see that she had the eyes of a young girl. Something about that scared me back then, because I was too young to understand it. I didn’t understand that in those moments she was no longer a grandmother. She was no longer old, no longer the victim of creeping arthritis. She was light and young. She was a stranger to me. She was in another world.

  I would sit next to her on the couch as she watched, or quietly lie on the floor. For Christmas she would buy me baseball cards, protective sleeves for them, and albums to store them in. Even though I grew up to be a Boston fan, there’s still a soft spot in my heart for St. Louis. When I watch them play I can still feel my grandmother near me.

  Baseball is my escape hatch. When I’m watching it I become enveloped in the feeling that everything will turn out okay. It reminds me that if I just hang on long enough, anything can happen.

  One morning in 2006, I called Lorri at our usual time, eight a.m., and she told me that several of the forensic experts had reviewed much of the evidence and come back with the same conclusion: that the vast majority of the wounds on the bodies were made postmortem, and they believed animals were responsible. It was a major development in my favor; however, there had been many of those.

  The forensic testing had been facilitated by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who saw Paradise Lost in 2005 and sent money to my defense fund. They also reached out to Lorri, who welcomed their support and their resources with open arms. It was a turning point for me and for Lorri; although it would take several more years and certainly wasn’t guaranteed, Peter and Fran had much to do with my actual release.

  * * *

  Rumors have continued to mount that animals of a more mundane variety are responsible for most of the damage to the murdered children. It’s beginning to persuade even me, and I am a skeptical sort by nature. If I hadn’t grown so jaded I’d probably be growing excited. These days I don’t hold my breath when waiting on anything, because the nature of the game is false hope. They’ll string you out like a junkie time and time again unless you grow wise to the tricks. I’m not ungrateful, but I’m also not as young as I once was. The hair-trigger reflex of enthusiasm and hope I had when I was young has died a hard death in this lonely land. My eyes won’t light up until the rumors begin to take on the weight of material form.

  * * *

  There was some part of me that always knew I would walk out of prison one day. It wasn’t something I knew on an intellectual level, and it went beyond the level people call instinct. It was something I knew not in my head, or even in my heart, but with my soul. I knew it in the same way that I knew the sun would rise and set. It didn’t occur to me to question it, or even think about it. It simply was. Perhaps it was like watching a movie when you know the hero has to win in the end. You expect him to face peril, hardship, and heartache, but you know that in his darkest hour he must still prevail. I knew that the people subjecting me to a living hell were evil, and I couldn’t conceive of a universe that would allow evil to succeed. Don’t get me wrong—I know all too well that horrors and atrocities take place every single day, in every corner of the world. However, those stories were not mine. I grew up on stories, fed on them, lived in them. I grew up knowing that my own life was a story, and the stories I read always had magick in them. Therefore it was ingrained in me, into the deepest levels of my being, to expect there to be magick in my life. I had all the faith in the world that magick would guide me and save me.

  I never really had much to do with the technical, legal work in my case. Anytime I even attempted to delve into it, read about it, or understand it, I would feel empty inside. The system was a soulless husk. Coming into contact with it sucked the hope and magick out of me, so I avoided it at all costs. I left the technicalities and legal nit-picking to the attorneys. It wasn’t that I had any faith in them—at least not the early ones—because I did not. Who I had faith in was Lorri.

  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 defense 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.

  The daily struggle was endless. The attorneys early on in my appeals would get lazy or go off to work on other cases they thought would bring them more prestige. Every day Lorri would have to plead and threaten in order to keep them moving forward, even at a snail’s pace. It was maddening, draining, and exhausting. There were times when the stress and frustration of dealing with callous and greedy people pushed her to the point of collapse, yet she still would not stop. To do so would have meant my death.

  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.

  In many ways Lorri was like a general, fighting battles on many fronts. Sometimes she fought against defense attorneys as hard as she fought the state. Some of those battles were won, others were lost. One loss came from Jason’s attorney right away. The cornerstone of his defense strategy from the outset was to make me look guilty. His plan was to dump the weight of the entire case on me and say that Jason had been sucked into the situation only because of his proximity to me.

  To accomplish this goal, the attorney lied to Lorri and me. He asked us to talk to a mitigator, who he believed could be helpful; in capital murder cases, a mitigator comes in after conviction and works to lessen the sentence—ideally to eliminate a death sentence. We agreed. I spent a day talking to a woman who wove together a mental health report that came
to be known as Exhibit 500. In it she claimed I was schizophrenic, bipolar, and suicidal, and suffered from extreme hallucinations, and anything else you could think of. To this day that report is still cited as the most damning piece of evidence against me. The woman who wrote it couldn’t even testify in court because she’d already said in the past that she had lied on the witness stand in another case. To circumvent that little problem, she simply had another person file her report on me. That person’s name is on that report to this day. Events like this honed Lorri’s skills, sharpened her claws, and turned her into the warrior she became. Without her strength and drive, I would have been dead long ago.

  The attorney I had at the time didn’t really care one way or the other. And Lorri and I were not yet educated enough in the legal process to know what was happening. By the time we understood what Jason’s attorney was doing, it was too late. The damage had been done. It had become a stain on my life that would shadow me forever. Jason himself still doesn’t know any of this as I write it. He was blameless. Throughout all of this, a new execution date hovered in the background, though one was never actually assigned to me because the legal wranglings never resulted in my case being brought to federal court. After a stay of execution, a new date isn’t assigned until the state appeals are exhausted, and from 1996, the date I was supposed to enter federal court, until my release in 2011, federal court remained out of reach.