Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (22 page)

I wouldn’t get to be there for the birth of my son. That was one more thing taken from me. A guard stuck her head in the door on the morning of September 9 and told me that I was now a father. So much for a celebration.

We had a boy. Domini gave him my first name, only spelled differently—Damian. I gave him the middle name of Seth, which is what everyone calls him. We gave him a third name, Azariah, just to be certain he’d never have an inferiority complex. I wasn’t there to sign the papers, so he has Domini’s last name. She brought him to see me for twenty minutes every week, but I couldn’t touch him. The only time I was permitted to touch or hold him was during the trial, a few months later; while the cameras were running, the court allowed me to hold my son for the sake of the film.

My father or grandmother would bring me five paperback books from a local secondhand bookstore every week, and I’d usually have read them all by their next visit. I had always loved reading, but at that point those books became my only way to forget about the nightmare of my life. I would hide in them and go someplace else for hours at a time. The other guys were amazed by how much and how quickly I could read. It was a trend that has continued to this day. I’ve read a few thousand books over the time I’ve been locked up. Without books, I would have gone insane long ago.

Five months passed in this way. I was still being given antidepressants, and there were the momentary distractions but they lasted only a short period of time—the unknown threat of an upcoming trial hung over me daily. In an October hearing, it was decided that Jason, only sixteen when he was arrested, would be tried as an adult. Despite the evidence that Ron and Glori told me they had uncovered, their findings often only underscored the thought that I would likely be given the death sentence. They told me that I would surely be convicted of murder, and that they were working toward the possibility of winning a case later on down the line by appeal. But first I would be convicted of murder.

Christmas Day came and went—it may as well have been the Fourth of July, such was the vacuum I lived in. Everything I’d known was gone, absent completely. Between this time and February 1994, I rarely saw or heard from Ron in person, though I was told he was investigating the case, and coming up with useful information on an almost daily basis. He reviewed the West Memphis police records and discovered inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and unreliable information and leads in the reports and offered them to my defense lawyers. Unfortunately, my lawyers (I was assigned a lawyer named Val Price in addition to Davidson) didn’t use or follow up on any of the information he found or leads he offered. They didn’t even call the witnesses who could have testified to my whereabouts on the night of the murders, witnesses Ron had tracked down and interviewed. In order for the information to be used, my lawyers needed to get a sworn affidavit from those witnesses, the extra “mile” that they never bothered to go for me. They never attempted to prove my alibi.

Glori did come to see me nearly every single weekend, and she always brought pizza. It seemed to me at the time that she really cared about the case, because she and Ron both went to tremendous lengths, visiting me on off-hours and telling me about their progress. I found out later that they were being paid by the court and hadn’t in fact done anything beyond what any investigator is obliged to do in this situation. But on my birthday Glori even brought me a box of cupcakes. We sat alone in a small office eating cake and going over the case. She gave me hope. What I’ve discovered in the years since then is that this is their job, to give hope. It’s a ploy, really, because they are just as much a part of the predetermined courtroom defense formula.

*  *  *

O
n January 26, 1994, Jessie went to trial. I watched news coverage from my cell—it was utterly painful to see. Jessie’s false confession was the centerpiece of the proceedings—it was the only so-called evidence the prosecutor, John Fogleman, had. It cemented our guilt in everyone’s mind and ensured our conviction before we could go on trial ourselves. On the eighth day, Jessie was convicted and sentenced to life plus two twenty-year sentences.

We were also being made the subjects of an HBO documentary. On June 5, the day after the West Memphis police held a press conference to announce they had caught the alleged perpetrators of the crime, an HBO executive named Sheila Nevins saw an article half-buried in
The New York Times
and shared it with two filmmakers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The headline, “3 Arkansas Youths Are Held in Slayings of 3 8-Year-Olds,” offered the potential for a provocative and salacious film about Satanism, human sacrifice, and debauchery of gothic proportion. Joe and Bruce immediately took a production crew to West Memphis and began interviewing locals, the parents of the victims, my friends and acquaintances, my family, Jason’s family, and Jessie’s. What began to emerge for them was a far different picture of the circumstances. Joe and Bruce both acknowledged that after speaking with locals, it was clear to them that the three of us were being put on trial for crimes we didn’t commit.

A few weeks before my trial, I was transferred to Craighead County jail in the town of Jonesboro—ostensibly, I was moved there to be closer to my lawyers, so we could strategize in the weeks before my trial. It was nothing like the Monroe County jail. The guards were all cruel and abusive. They talked to you as if addressing a lower life form, no matter how polite and civil you were to them. I witnessed them beating prisoners on an almost daily basis. Years later, as I was lying in my cell on Death Row watching the news, I saw that five guards had been fired in Jonesboro because they had handcuffed a prisoner and beat him unconscious. They were fired. No charges were filed against them. Most of the time they’re not even fired, only demoted. If you walk up to a man on the street and punch him in the face, you go to prison for assault. Do the same thing to a man in prison and you get demoted.

There was a small Mexican guy in jail there who suffered from catatonic schizophrenia. He would sit or stand in odd positions for hours at a time because of his mental illness. The guards would beat him just to see if they could make him move. It was a game to them. They often spit in your food to see if they could get you to fight. If you said anything at all, they’d call in five or six of their friends to beat you. Once you’re behind the walls, there is no help. The world doesn’t care.

In Jonesboro, I was put in a cell block by myself. There was no one to talk to, no books to read, no television to watch, and no going outside. I was locked in an empty concrete vault all day and night. I knew Jason was in the next cell block, because it was so noisy I could hear the guys on that side through the wall. He was on a block with about ten other people. It would have been a huge comfort to be able to sit in the same room with him and talk, perhaps try to figure out what went wrong, but the guards made certain we never even saw each other.

I slipped deeper and deeper into despair. Without a miracle we would die in prison. Jason and I were scheduled to go to trial together, though the attorneys were all fighting tooth and nail. Jason’s attorneys wanted a separate trial for him, to remove him somehow from my already established guilt. It seemed like the entire world was howling for my blood.

Twenty-one

F
ebruary 19, 1994, the first morning of our trial, Jason and I were given bulletproof vests to wear to and from the courthouse. Emotions were running high and the cops were taking no chances. We would ride to court every day in a convoy of police cars—six of them, to be exact. When we pulled up out front we had to walk a gauntlet. There would be a huge crowd of reporters, and people who wanted us dead, and we had to walk right through the middle of them like Moses parting the Red Sea. The screams of hatred were so loud you couldn’t discern individual voices. Reporters shoved cameras and microphones into your face at every step, all shouting questions at once.

An interesting thing began to happen as the days passed. People who supported us and believed in us began to appear in the crowd, one or two at a time. They would smile or give me a slight nod as I made my way in or out. They were mostly young boys or girls standing apart from the rest, many dressed in black. I started to receive little bits of poetry scratched on scraps of paper. Someone sent me a single red rose. The supporters never matched the haters in number or volume, but they mattered a great deal to me.

There were a few odd cases, too. Ron started a ritual of pointing out the girls he said were “eye-fucking” me. As I got out of the car one morning a girl screamed, “Oh my God, he looked at me!” like she had just seen John, Paul, George, and Ringo rolled into one.

The reporters were the worst. If people knew how much of what they read in the papers or see on the news is distorted or outright lies, media corporations would soon go out of business. I’ve seen more fiction on local news broadcasts than I’ve read in novels. Quite often, the newspaper accounts didn’t match anything I saw go down in the courtroom. Valuable information went unreported and preposterous new developments were invented. One day, sitting in my cell watching coverage, the broadcast was interrupted with breaking news: a stick covered in a red substance and hair had been found in my mother’s now abandoned trailer. The announcement was made and regular programming resumed—but in everyone’s mind here was a possible murder weapon. In fact, it was a paint stick, the kind you use to stir a freshly opened gallon of paint. My mother had been disciplining her two Pomeranians with the end of a used stick—and before anyone did the logical thing, the media had their hands on it somehow. In a later example of the hysteria, during a post-trial hearing, new evidence was presented—they had found teeth marks on one of the bodies, and they did not match my teeth. There was no mention of it in the next day’s paper.

Burnett and Fogleman welcomed the media’s presence, and they (in addition to my attorneys and Jason’s) agreed to allow Joe and Bruce to film the trial for their HBO production—one would suppose because they assumed that they were going to be the centerpieces of a major legal victory when the trial concluded. Since both Joe and Bruce had visited me often in jail, pretrial, at this point, I had gotten to know them fairly well and I was used to the cameras by then. They didn’t discuss the specifics of the case with me, but asked me about my background and childhood, and often asked why the police might have focused on me as a suspect. They interviewed Jason and Jessie extensively, too. Their presence was comforting in the courtroom—amid the sea of outraged and angry people, their conversations and attention to me was the only familiar part of my life at that point.

It’s maddening to sit there hour after hour, day after day, on trial for something both you and the cops know you didn’t do. You feel hundreds of eyes drilling into you, taking in your every shift and move. Many seemed to think this was the greatest form of entertainment they’d ever witnessed. Vultures were stripping the flesh from my bones while I was still alive.

I never stood a chance. During breaks, the judge and prosecutors told jokes about me and smiled like they were awaiting a pat on the back. Burnett would comment on what a nice ass one of the female potential jury members had, and Fogleman’s teeth would stick out while he yuk-yuk-yukked it up. Convincing twelve people they should vote to have me murdered was just another day at the office for them.

Whenever evidence was introduced that could have helped me, the jury was escorted out of the room so they wouldn’t hear it. It was discovered that John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the children, had a knife with blood on it that matched the blood of at least one of the victims. My lawyers were not permitted to ask him directly, “Did you murder those children?” in the presence of the jury. Why? Because, they were told, he wasn’t the one on trial here, I was. It wasn’t really a trial. More like a formality to get out of the way before the guilty verdict. The parents and family members of the victims didn’t speak or act out in any way in the courtroom, though they spoke often and volubly outside for the cameras. I’d watch them on the news later in my cell. My parents, Jack, and Michelle, as well as friends of our family, sat watching every day. When I looked back at them from my seat at the defense table, they would stare back at me helplessly. I believe they wanted to do something for me, to help with my defense, though they simply did not know what to do and hardly understood the proceedings unfolding in front of their eyes. After listening and paying attention for a short period of time, I stopped trying—it was too painful to register the blatant “railroading,” a term everyone started using early on. Jason’s attorneys were very strict about our communicating; they did not permit him to come near me or speak to me, though we made eye contact once in a while.

It would be redundant to go over every detail, because the murder case and the trials have been documented at length in four documentaries and several books—in fact, you can read more about the proceedings at damienechols.com, wm3.org, freewestmemphis3.org, or at my publisher’s website. Many of the details that came to light during the trial I wasn’t informed about until much later, and much of the evidence (or lack thereof) that finally established my innocence was not found or introduced until many years after this time.

Jason and I were both found guilty on March 18, 1994. Ironically, it was the longest trial in the history of the Arkansas criminal justice system. I didn’t need to call a psychic hotline to see that coming, but it was still a complete shock. Perhaps it’s human nature to clutch at any little bit of hope you can conjure up. I did, all the way to the very last second. It’s devastating, even when you see it coming a mile away. As the verdict was read, I heard Domini start sobbing and run from the courtroom. I couldn’t turn around to look because my legs would have buckled. I was determined not to let them know how badly they were hurting me. I refused to give them that satisfaction. I would not cry, I would not faint, and I would not show weakness. I had to hold myself up by placing my hands on the table, but I tried to make it look casual. Inside, I started to die. There was no safe place in all the world for me. My stomach was filled with ice water. Hearing Domini was the final straw. Something in me broke. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men would never be able to put me back together again.

I did not sleep. A trustee—a prisoner who works for the jail—was stationed immediately outside my cell to watch over me that night to make sure I didn’t harm myself.

The following day I was sentenced to death, Jason to life without parole plus forty years. After the reading of the sentence, I was immediately rushed out of the courtroom and into a waiting car. As I walked through the crowd outside, someone screamed, “You’re going to die!” Someone else screamed, “No you’re not!” The car door slammed, and we pulled out of the parking lot. I was on my way to Death Row.