Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  When Judge Burnett posed the formality, “Do either of you have any legal reason to show the court or give the court as to why the sentence should not be imposed?” Damien answered no.

  Jason, in his typically soft and timid voice, responded, “Because I’m innocent.”

  “Well,” the judge declared, “the jury has heard the evidence and concluded otherwise.”

  The trial and its outcome confirmed the community’s worst fears. Indicative of this was a headline in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette the same day it reported the sentences that read: MOMS STILL SCARED IN WEST MEMPHIS.

  The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper that had done much of the lead reporting on the case, ran a lead editorial that began:

  “You better get to know your kids.”

  That’s the message that West Memphis Police Inspector Gary W. Gitchell said he had taken from his 10-month immersion in one of the most shocking and grisly murder cases this region has known.

  The editorial went on to suggest that satanic involvement had warped the three defendants’ thinking and robbed each of them of a conscience.

  So, through this and other similar accounts, perception became reality.

  CHAPTER 21

  DAMIEN AND LORRI

  “After I got to the prison, I was literally sick for about two weeks,” Damien recalled for us. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was vomiting continuously. At that moment, you’re so beat down. . . .”

  His voice trailed off, until he started another thought. “You know, I used to get letters that said, ‘If that were me and I was innocent, I would have been kicking and screaming and yelling and saying, ‘I’m innocent!’

  “No, you wouldn’t—not after they beat you the first time. After that, you’re going to shut up and do what they tell you to do.”

  This was something Damien said he learned early in his stay at the Varner Unit, the Arkansas Department of Corrections (DOC) maximum-security prison near Pine Bluff, which houses the state’s death row. For eighteen days, he states, prison guards beat him regularly. It was not because they thought he was a child killer. “They didn’t care what I had or hadn’t done. It was just, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood. ’

  “I was so weak, so sick, in so much pain, that I thought I’d die.”

  He characterized his environment as “living on concrete twenty-four hours a day.”

  He was hit so many times in the face in those early days that it damaged his teeth. “Then you have two choices—either live in pain or let them pull your teeth.”

  He went on, “Whenever I was in fear for my life, it was always from a guard, never another prisoner.” Remember, he was just eighteen years old.

  Eventually, Damien and the other two would have a large and influential support network. At the time, though, no one helped him, including—as it turned out—me.

  Years later, while working for Peter Jackson on a film about the case, director Amy Berg showed me a series of letters. They had been found by appeals attorney Stephen Braga as he was reviewing Freedom of Information files from the Bureau. It was postmarked 29 September 1994 and addressed simply: F.B.I. Academy, Behavioral Science Unit, Quantico, V.A. [sic] 22135. The spelling and syntax weren’t perfect, but the printing was neat and uniform and the message very clear:

  I got your address from a friend who said you may be able to help me. I was convicted on 3 counts of capitol [sic] murder, but had nothing to do with any of them. I was framed by the West Memphis police department. They know who really committed the crime, but they refuse to do anything about it. I am going to be executed for a crime I did not committ [sic], and am desperate for help. Even if you cannot help me, could you tell me of someone who can?

  I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my letter. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Damien Echols SK 931

  2501 State Farm Road

  Tucker, Ark. 72168

  I didn’t recall ever seeing this letter, but I must have, because my handwritten initials are on the typewritten reply, next to the initialed signature of Robin Montgomery, the special agent in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group under which my Investigative Support Unit operated. This means I must have written the reply. I even misspelled “capital” as Damien did.

  Dear Mr. Echols:

  Reference your letter sent to the Investigative Support Unit postmarked September 29, 1994. In your letter you state that you were convicted of three counts of capitol murder, but that you had nothing to do with them. I must advise you that the FBI is not authorized to intervene in criminal matters under the jurisdiction of the State of Arkansas. If you believe that you have information that provides legal grounds for an appeal of your conviction or sentence, you should provide that information to your legal counsel, who could then file your appeal with the appropriate court in the state of Arkansas.

  Sincerely yours,

  Robin Montgomery

  In other words, a bureaucratic kiss-off. We only help the cops, not the bad guys. If you’re so sure you’re innocent, go through the regular channels.

  Actually, what I was probably thinking was somewhat more detailed than that. With the incredible workload we had, I was probably grateful that we weren’t authorized to take up prisoners’ requests. But even more pointedly, I would have had a reaction similar to my first misplaced impression of Lorri. So you’re innocent, just like every other convicted killer? Okay, take a number.

  In practical terms, we just didn’t have any mechanism for working that side of the street. Even in a situation like the David Vasquez case in Virginia, it was a law enforcement officer who suspected he was innocent and he brought the case to us.

  If there was anything that kept Damien going during those first few years of his imprisonment on death row, it was his own introversion, which had often been a problem for him in the past. “What would break other people down would be the solitude in there. I would literally see people go stark raving bats. People can’t take being alone twenty-four hours a day. I need time alone. If I don’t have time by myself, I can’t deal with it.”

  But, by and large, his most effective coping mechanism was simply to turn off.

  “Before Lorri, my life was horrific. Before Lorri stepped into it, literally, I used to buy sleeping pills off the black market in the prison just to sleep for days at a time and not have to think.”

  By the time I entered the case in 2006, we all knew there was only one reason Damien Echols had not yet had his rendezvous with the Arkansas death house. It was not due to the so-called fail-safe built into the criminal justice system. It was not due to the work of dedicated law enforcement officers or learned judges. It was not even an enterprising investigative reporter who strove for years to expose the truth. It was an outraged public and grassroots movement prompted by the 1996 airing of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s two-and-a-half-hour HBO documentary, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. This was the film that brought in Lorri and the Jacksons and everyone else.

  “Without that film,” says Steven Mark, my attorney who became a critical researcher on the case, “Damien Echols would have been long underground with a stone over his head.”

  Or, as Damien himself put it, “They thought, ‘These kids are white trash. No one’s ever going to look into this case. Nobody’s ever going to ask any questions. They look crazy, so therefore people are going to swallow it.’ They thought they would arrest us, put us on trial, murder me, and no one would ever ask any more questions.”

  As Lorri explained to me in our first phone call, she had been living in Park Slope in Brooklyn and working as a landscape architect for a firm in Manhattan when a friend brought her to a screening of Paradise Lost, even though she professed no particular interest in documentaries. She became obsessed with the topic, convinced of the WM3’s innocence, and was compelled to write to Damien on death row. When Damien wrote back, she felt an immediate bond, even though she was twelve years older than he
, a worldly professional woman who had traveled internationally, undergone an amicable divorce and lived the urban lifestyle.

  “There was a connection that I’ll never be able to explain. It was immediate, from when we first started writing. And then when we started talking to each other, we just couldn’t talk enough—the things he was interested in. . . .”

  Her visits to Damien in prison solidified the bond she had sensed. “When I first started writing, he was young, but he was such a fascinating person. From the get-go, here’s this guy who’s in prison in Arkansas, has a more fascinating mind than anyone I’d ever met. And that’s all I ever really cared about. I needed someone with a fascinating mind. I think it was probably the first time I came down to see him, I remember coming back and telling my friend, ‘I’m done. I can’t even look back.’ ”

  In 1998, she left New York and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, the place closest to the prison where she could get a job in her field. She went to work for the city’s parks department.

  It took Damien some time to come to terms with having a significant person in his life. “In those early days, I would wake up in the middle of the night, grinding my teeth, and think, ‘I hate you for making me feel this way.’ Because on top of everything else that I’m going through, this is the last thing I need in my life right now. And it was hurting me, and in a way it was because it was bringing me back to life.

  “I really had, in those two years before she found me, I had started to die, to wither up and fade away and die inside. And it was like she was forcing me to come back to life, and it hurt the way physical therapy would hurt.”

  In December 1999, she and Damien married in prison. As his wife, she would be allowed to have contact visits with him rather than having to talk through a pane of glass.

  The relationship, as one may imagine, was fraught with strain. She was consumed by her focus on getting Damien, Jason and Jessie out of prison, but she had lost much of the previous life she had in New York. Having given up her landscape architectural job, she had little money; and as she wrote to Damien, I haven’t been poor in such a long time. She knew they both needed the large network of supporters that had developed across the country, but at the same time Lorri found it difficult to “share” Damien with them. Some days he would receive hundreds of letters and felt he had to answer each one of them.

  I have never said this before about a woman who married a convict on death row, and I don’t know if I’ll ever say it again, but Lorri Davis is a true hero. Because of her interest, conscience, passion for justice and love—in that chronological order—she sacrificed a promising career and an exciting cultural and social life in one of the world’s great cities. Instead, she dedicated fifteen of her most productive and precious years for the cause of justice. It is no wonder that despite more than a decade and a half on death row, Damien never ceased to be amazed that Lorri had come into his life.

  “That’s what made me quit smoking,” he commented. “When Lorri came into my life, I decided I didn’t want anything to distract or diminish this experience in any way, whatever it is that’s going to happen. I don’t want anything going on that’s going to disrupt this connection. I put the cigarettes down and never picked them up again. I put the sleeping pills down and never picked them up again.”

  I’ve always known that maximum-security penitentiaries can be brutal places. But I have reserved most of my concern and compassion for the victims of crimes and their survivors. In this case, however, the idea of a poor teenager being beaten and facing other institutionalized cruelties—not to mention the always-present specter of death for something he did not do—turns my stomach. I frankly don’t see how he made it day to day.

  “I think the people who don’t make it are the ones who can’t find another world to live in,” Damien observed. “We had to build a world, Lorri and I, and build something where we didn’t think about that prison. Whether it was improving meditation techniques, whether it was doing artwork, whether it was writing, whether it was physical exercise, whatever it was, I had to find ways to push myself, to keep pushing myself further every single day so that I felt like I was making progress. I felt like I was making improvement. And it distracted me from the prison.”

  “Damien is the most disciplined person I’ve ever met,” said Lorri.

  “I built up to where I was doing five to seven hours a day of meditation, over a thousand push-ups a day, running in place for a couple of hours at a time.”

  Still, the prison lighting, nutrition and medical care, and the lack of sunlight and outdoor exercise, were taking its toll on Damien’s eyesight and health. Lorri worried constantly.

  She also had to worry about every aspect of the appeals case. “We had a lot of funding. But as soon as you’d get it, it would be gone,” she said.

  The reason there was money or support at all was because of the same factor that had brought her and Damien together. After seeing the HBO film, a number of people got together in Los Angeles to form the Free the West Memphis Three Support Group. They included Burk Sauls, Kathy Bakken, Grove Pashley and Lisa Fancher. The group raised money, developed a website and spread its message around the United States and the world. Every time there was a hearing, its members would marshal supporters from all over to come to Arkansas.

  Their efforts were augmented by the celebrities who had lent their names to the cause. In fact, they did a lot more than lend their names. They maintained an active interest, contributed their own money, held benefit concerts and made sure the case stayed in the public consciousness. Actor Johnny Depp, Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines Pearl Jam rock guitarist and songwriter Eddie Vedder, and musician Henry Rollins, among others, remain close friends of Damien and Lorri to this day.

  And there were two others who would turn out to be absolutely critical.

  In Wellington, New Zealand, director Peter Jackson and his writer-producer wife, Fran Walsh, saw the documentary in 2004 and were moved to get involved. Jackson had attained worldwide fame with his blockbuster movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but he had done fine work before that, such as Heavenly Creatures, with Kate Winslet, for which he and Fran had also written the screenplay. That film was based on the gripping, horrifying story of the cold-blooded 1954 murder of Honora Parker by her sixteen-year-old daughter, Pauline, and Pauline’s fifteen-year-old friend, Juliet Hulme, probably the most notorious murder case in New Zealand history.

  Peter and Fran sent in a contribution through PayPal with a note that said if there was anything else they could do to help, to let them know. In her own special, highly intuitive way, Lorri sensed a spiritual kinship. In thanking them for their donation, she wrote a long e-mail expressing her feelings and laying out what she thought they were facing in the struggle to get Damien and the others freed.

  In December 2005, Peter and Fran were scheduled to be in New York for the premiere of Peter’s remake of King Kong and invited Lorri to attend. They met and grew even closer.

  “I think they were so shaken by the documentary Paradise Lost,” said Lorri, “they thought surely everything would have been taken care of. Surely, they would be out of prison. And when they learned that they weren’t, Fran told me, they got in a room together and Fran said, ‘Let’s help them.’

  “So they already had it in their mind from seeing Damien in the film, and wanting to help, and I think it was just the fact that I wasn’t crazy, Damien was innocent and an intelligent being, and was being tortured. And Fran has this innate sense, there’s something about her, that loves this work, and she’s good at it. She came on board. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d try to figure out things as I was going along. We hired a few horrible lawyers, had money stolen.”

  Not being American, Peter and Fran didn’t know whether their public influence would help or hurt the WM3 effort, so they kept it private. But as it turned out, with all the other efforts that had been launched, they represented the tipping point in the entire p
rocess.

  “When Fran and Pete came on board—they’re directors, they’re producers, they know how to run a big project,” Lorri said.

  Damien added, “They would ask, ‘Why is this not being done now? Why didn’t someone get on this the second we said do it?’ Peter is scary smart. He can look at a situation and know what people are going to do three or four moves down the road. And he’ll tell you, ‘We’re going to do this because they’re going to do that, and then we’ll be in a position to do this.’ And every single time, whatever he said would happen, happened just as he said it would.”

  “And Fran’s the same way,” said Lorri. “Her intelligence is off the charts. So to have the two of them in there . . .”

  Soon she and Fran became active correspondents. Lorri discussed all critical strategy with Fran and Peter. Eventually they became long-distance shoulders she could lean on; and when needed, to cry on.

  Peter and Fran’s strategy and backing brought me to West Memphis in 2007. Fran had read our books and knew a lot about profiling and criminal investigative analysis.

  “Fran was adamant she wanted John Douglas on the defense team,” Lorri told Mark Olshaker.

  I asked her, “Can I mention you and Pete?” She said I could, once I agreed to take part.

  “I called Steve Mark back and mentioned Dennis Riordan, our lead appeals attorney. They’d gone to college at Colgate together, so I think Steve realized this was something concrete.”