The Peace Project and NCDC teamed up to bring Damien Echols of the “West Memphis Three” to Harris Hall for a lecture titled “Life After Death.” Echols, who spent 18 years on death row in Arkansas after being convicted of triple murder, spoke without a moderator for more than an hour Tuesday night.
At 18 years old, Echols was arrested in his trailer home for the murder of three young boys. “When I opened the door, I don’t even know how many cops were standing there but all of them had guns pointed at me,” Echols said. He, along with his “only real friend” at the time, Jason Baldwin, were then handcuffed and taken to jail.
At his arraignment hearing, Echols was told that another teenager, Jessie Misskelley, had confessed to the crime and implicated both Baldwin and Echols. Echols asked to hear the confession, but the judge refused to read it in the courtroom, instead sending Echols to a broom closet in the back of the jail with a typed transcript to read for himself.
“I’m 18 years old, I’m sleep-deprived, I’m hungry, I’m in complete shock and trauma from having my entire world destroyed … and even in that state, I could see that it didn’t make sense,” Echols said. The statement was “full of contradictions,” including a time for the murders during which all three of the victims and one of the accused were in school, but the police “didn’t care. All they cared about was the fact that they got him to say yes.”
Despite the lack of concrete evidence against Echols or the other two defendants – “there was nothing that tied us to the crime, just stuff that made us weird, bizarre, freaks” – they were found guilty and Echols was sentenced to three consecutive death sentences. He likened his emotions during the sentencing to experiencing physical abuse. “When this judge was reading off these death sentences in this bored, monotone, just-another-day-at-the-office voice, for me it was like getting beaten, repeatedly, in the head,” Echols said.
A week into his stay on death row, Echols noticed that the cell’s previous occupant had drawn a faint silhouette of himself on the wall. He said he couldn’t bring himself to erase it because it was the only remainder of this man’s life.
“I spent the next almost two decades sleeping on a dead man’s mattress, staring at a dead man’s shadow,” he said.
Eventually, new DNA evidence was discovered that pertained to the case – and none of it was linked to the three teenagers who had been convicted. New eyewitness evidence and confessions of lying from original witnesses prompted the Arkansas Supreme Court to grant a new hearing 17 years after the original ruling.
While Echols said that the prosecution admitted the defendants would likely win the new case, the prosecution’s threat to drag the proceedings on “forever” prompted him to accept a plea deal. Morever, his health was failing. “If I didn’t take that deal, I was never going to see the outside of [those] walls,” Echols said.
Though he spent the first few months of freedom “terrified by everything,” Echols said he believes he will feel normal one day. He fights the fear by doing one thing each day that scares him.
“If there’s one thing I learned from almost 20 years in prison, it’s how to fight,” he said.
After his narrative, Echols fielded questions from his wife, Lorri Davis, whom he met in 1996 and married in 1999 while still on death row. He said that his relationship with Davis was one of the two things that got him through his time in prison. “We had to forge a world for ourselves,” he said. “Taking refuge there preserved my sanity and gave me a place to go that was outside the prison.” He also said he relied heavily on meditation and energy work to remedy the physical pains that ailed him during his time behind bars.
Echols suggested that the media’s role in the case was a large factor in both why the teenagers were imprisoned and why they were released. He also acknowledged the celebrities who supported the defendants, including Johnny Depp and Henry Rollins, and elaborated on his time spent with Peter Jackson in New Zealand shortly after his freedom.
Echols also answered audience questions, where he revealed that he is still investigating the case and hoping for eventual exoneration. He said the ordeal “completely destroyed” any chance Misskelley had of a normal life and while Baldwin is attending college in Seattle and eventually hopes to study law, he won’t be allowed to practice unless he is exonerated.
Echols emphasized that he did not want the audience to leave upset.
“The point of this is not to make you think, ‘God, life is fucked up,’” he said. Instead, he said, his message is to “make the most of the short life we’re given. I want you to leave here more determined to do something with yourself than you were whenever you came in.”