The Moth (9 page)

But they did.

They took us to trial, and the evidence was the Stephen King novels that I read, the music I listened to, the clothes that I wore. And they found us guilty. I was sentenced to death. Not once, not twice, but three times. The judge read these death sentences in this really bored, monotone voice, like it was just another day at the office for him.

People asked me later, “What were you feeling when he was sentencing you to die?” It’s almost impossible to articulate. If you’ve ever been beaten, a lot of times, you know, when you’re punched in the head, you don’t register pain. You see a bright
flash of light, hear a loud noise, and you’re completely disoriented, you have no idea where you even are for a few minutes. That’s what it was like when he was reading those death sentences; it was like being repeatedly punched in the head.

They sent me to death row. I was in a cell for about a week before I noticed a shadow on the wall. It was from the man who had already been executed, who was in the cell before I got there. He had stood against the wall and traced around himself with a pencil really, really lightly, and then very subtly shaded it in. I mean it was so subtle I didn’t even see it for about the first week. And then after I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it. So for years I slept on a dead man’s mattress, stared at a dead man’s shadow, and lived in the cell with ghosts.

They filed appeal after appeal on my behalf, all before the same judge who sentenced me to death. He denied them all. Even when new DNA evidence came in that excluded me and the other two guys from the crime scene, and instead pointed the finger at one of the victims’ stepfathers and the man who was providing the stepfather with an alibi, the judge still said, “This is not enough.”

Then we were allowed to appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and by this time awareness of what’s going on, public interest in the case, had been building. There’d been documentaries, there’d been books, countless newspaper articles and magazine stories and TV shows. So the Arkansas Supreme Court knew they were being watched. And in the end that was the only thing they really cared about, winning the next election. So they ruled that all of this new evidence would be heard, and the prosecutors realized that meant there was gonna be another trial.

So a deal was hammered out—an Alford plea. What an
Alford plea means is that I plead guilty, and I walk out of the courtroom, and I can still publicly maintain my innocence, but I can’t sue the state.

And people have asked me what I was thinking about the day that I went into court knowing that I could very well go home that day? And the truth is, I wasn’t thinking anything. By that time I was so tired and beat down that all I wanted to do was rest. I was dying. My health was deteriorating very rapidly. I was losing my eyesight. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it much longer.

The prosecutor said that one of the factors for him making this deal was the fact that the three of us together could’ve collectively sued the state for $60 million. I knew they could’ve had me stabbed to death for $50 any day of the week. Happens in prison all the time. So I knew if I didn’t take that deal, one way or another I would never live to see the outside of those prison walls. So I took it.

I’ve been out of prison now for a little over ten months, and I live in terror every single day. I’m scared of everything, all the time. But I’m trying to fight my way through it. I have to force myself to every day that I get up. And I know that I will eventually. I’ll do it, and I’ll be free of it, because if there’s one thing that I learned from eighteen years in prison, it was how to fight.

Born in 1974,
Damien Echols
grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. At the age of eighteen, he was wrongfully convicted of murder, along with Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley Jr., thereafter known as the West Memphis Three. Echols received a death sentence and spent almost eighteen years on death row until he, Baldwin, and Misskelley were released in 2011. The WM3 have been the subject of
Paradise Lost
, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and
West of Memphis
, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Echols is the author of the
New York Times
best-selling memoir
Life After Death
(2012), and a self-published memoir,
Almost Home
(2005).

ARI HANDEL

D
on’t fall in love with your monkey.” My advisor warned me, but I didn’t listen. There are some things you have to learn for yourself.

It was 1992, and I was a young graduate student getting ready to take Santiago out of his cage for the first time. So, I put on these bouffant boots and a little blue cap and a big pair of welders’ gloves, and I turned to my advisor. And my advisor gave me this one last piece of advice, “Be as inevitable as the tide.” And he sent me up to the monkey room.

So I go upstairs, and I unlocked the door, and a waft of warm air comes whooshing out at me, and it smells like a combination of Purina monkey chow, monkey feces, and just plain monkey. And I walk in, and it’s a small room. It’s cinder block, and it’s just big enough for eight cages, four on the top, four on the bottom. Santiago’s cage is in the bottom right-hand corner.

I lean down and unlock the door, and I try to go and take Santiago out of the cage. I stick my hand in, and it’s a little scary.

Santiago is a wild animal. He does not want to be taken out of his cage. He keeps batting at me and trying to hit my hand when I reach for him, and he’s big, and he’s fast, and he’s nimble. And I’m slow, I’m in bulky clothing, and I’m starting to get hot. I’m starting to sweat. And the monkeys in the room can sense that there’s a conflict going on. They’re starting to hoot and holler and screech.

Finally I get one hand around Santiago’s bicep, and Santiago does exactly what you would do if some blue ogre reached into your house and grabbed you by the arm and tried to take you out. He bites me as hard as he possibly can right here in the soft part of my hand. And it hurts. It really hurts. It hurts a lot. And every nerve in my hand is screaming to me,
Drop the monkey
.

But I am as inevitable as the tide, so I do not drop the monkey. Instead, I reach my other hand in, grab his other bicep, and pull his arms behind his back, and I take him out, and I stick him into his monkey chair and bring him down to the lab.

Down in the lab, Santiago is now the one who is frightened. He is quaking, he is shivering in his chair. So I take a bottle, and I fill it with juice, and he starts to suck on the juice. It’s Hawaiian punch. He starts to suck the juice, and I can see his little mouth around the edge of the bottle, and the juice is dripping down his chin, and he is so cute. I’m looking at him, his little eyes, and I see this look in his eyes, and it is joy. And I know what that joy is—it is the fake fruit flavoring in the bottle. But I can’t help feeling that some of that joy is for me.

Now, I think that I became a neurobiologist in fourth grade when my mom gave me this coloring book of the human brain for a book report, and it said that this part of the brain back here is for seeing things, and this part up here, that’s for thinking
about stuff, like when you have to do your math homework, and there’s a part in the middle that’s for feeling things, that’s like when you get scared of the dark, and you don’t want to go downstairs into the basement. And that meant to me that when we see, perceive, think, and feel about the world, we are using this [
points to his head
], so if we want to know how to understand the world, what it’s like to live inside the human mind, then we just have to understand this [
points to his head again
].

When neurobiologists want to study the human mind, they look at the brains of monkeys. And I wanted to ask complex questions about mental functioning, which meant that I had to use a complex behavioral task, and that meant that Santiago had to learn to play a video game.

So I would put him in a room facing a giant screen with a tube connected to his mouth that contained juice, and I would go into the next room, where I had a computer and could control all these lights that would flash on that screen. And Santiago’s job was to look at the lights in the right order and with the right timing, and if he did it right, he would get some juice.

Now, this was not actually a very complicated game, but it was very hard to teach Santiago how to play. And the reason was that I could not just tell him how to play. Santiago could not speak English. In fact, Santiago lacked the capacity to speak any human language whatsoever, so we had to invent our own language.

And I would watch Santiago’s eye movements, and I would see that if they were drifting slowly, that meant that he was very frustrated, but if they were shimmering very fast, that meant he was excited. So I would watch his eye movements, and I would adjust the difficulty of the task accordingly, to cajole him
forward or to calm him down, so that slowly and surely, the teacher and the student, we learned this task together.

And when we did, Santiago got very, very happy. He was like a gambler who had just cracked the code of the blackjack tables, because now he could just get juice, juice, juice, as much as he wanted, and he would sit in that room, and he would play that game all day long. And he would drink tremendous, tremendous volumes of juice, and that made me happy too, because I could do the thing I wanted to do, which was to lower a probe down into Santiago’s brain.

And I would listen to the activity of individual neurons while he performed this task. And what I found was that there were neurons in Santiago’s brain that would become activated every time he made an eye movement. But the thing that was cool, so cool, so cool it was mind-blowing, was that these neurons did not get activated just when he made a movement; they got activated as soon as I gave him enough information that he could choose which eye movement to make.

Listening to these neurons, I could predict in advance what he was going to do even before he did it. That meant I was eavesdropping on him while he was making a decision. I was inside that coloring book. I was reading my monkey’s mind.

We did this for quite some time. Santiago would get juice, and I would get data out of his brain, and we would do this for days and days and days. And at night I would go up to the monkey room, and I would give all the monkeys treats. I would give them apples and oranges and grapes and bananas. And I would also give an extra big handful to Santiago because he was my boy, and I wanted him to know that. We went on like this for some time. And then something happened that had not happened in a long time.

I went upstairs to get Santiago, and he tried to bite me. And when I brought him downstairs to the game room, he just would not work, he just banged and banged and aborted every trial.
Bang, bang, bang!

I couldn’t figure it out at first, and then it slowly dawned on me that Santiago was a smart animal. I mean, he was smarter than a dog or a cat. He was primate smart. And I realized he must have figured out sometime during the night that I was not bringing him down to that room so that he could play games, so that he could have fun. I was bringing him down there for my benefit. He was my servant. He realized that, I think, and that realization made the juice taste bitter, and he didn’t want to do it anymore. He was having no part. And I had a monkey who was on strike.

So I did the thing you do when that happens. I turned off the water in Santiago’s cage. Now, the idea is that he’s only going to get
enough
water, and anything extra, he’s going to have to earn.

The problem with this plan was that every night I would go up to the monkey room, I would give Santiago his little supplement of water, and he would drink it right down in front of my face, and then he would have nothing. And I would go home and get a glass of iced tea, and I would drink it, and I would think about Santiago living in his cage with no water. And the iced tea would turn into a beer, which would turn into a bourbon. And I would wake up in the morning, and I would be filled with guilt over what was happening to Santiago, what I was doing to him.

But when I got up in the morning, when I put him in that booth, and he still wouldn’t work, that guilt turned to anger, because whose fault was it really that Santiago was not drinking?
Whose fault was it that I felt guilty every day that I was forced to be the asshole? It was Santiago’s fault. I mean, he was sitting with the juice tube in his mouth, there was a game he knew how to play, and he wasn’t playing. And I would get so angry with him. I would get so frustrated, I would storm into that room and I would scream at him, “Santiago, why don’t you just work already? The game is here and you know how to play. Why don’t you just go back to the way it used to be? You were getting the juice. I was getting the data. We were so happy!”

But he wouldn’t listen. And I would get so angry sometimes, I would pull on his little monkey ear and he would go “EEEH.”

And then the anger would turn back to guilt. And I would run into the other room, and I would find the button that controls the juice. And I would just press it
shsh, shsh, shsh,
giving Santiago juice until the guilt disappeared.

And this went on day after day after day after day. And I got so frustrated that eventually, I walked into the room one day and said, “I know you’re thirsty. I’ll show you how thirsty you are.”

I poured myself a huge glass of Hawaiian punch. I took my mask off. I made eye contact with Santiago. And I drank that juice down, taunting him. And he just looked at me. And I realized that I had long ago left scientific objectivity behind. I needed help. This was not working.

So I went to my advisor, and he said to me, “Stop playing ‘Who’s the Monkey.’ ” And what he meant was, I was engaged in a battle of wills and a battle of wits with an animal whose brain was the size of my fist, and I was losing. I was supposed to be training him, and he was training me. And what he was training me to do was to get guilty, get angry, cross the line, get guilty again, and give free juice. And believe me, free juice is
the sweetest-tasting juice there is. But now, no more. I was going to be hard. I was going to be serious.