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

by Damien Echols

  This time I waited around afterward until everyone had trailed out into the parking lot. I approached the priest, Greg Hart, who was a small, balding man with wire-framed glasses. I introduced myself and with no preamble asked, “How do I become a Catholic?” We sat and talked for a while, and he explained how I would have to attend conversion classes, as there was a lot to learn. He himself would teach the classes every Monday night. After getting all the information I needed, I walked outside where Jack was waiting in the truck to take me home.

  I attended every single class, never missing one. Father Hart arranged a ride back and forth for me with a woman who would also be attending the classes. There were fewer than ten of us in all. We learned everything, from the teachings of the church on different points of dogma to how to pray the rosary. I enjoyed the classes almost as much as Mass itself. For my confirmation, I chose to name myself after Saint Damien.

  When the day finally arrived that I was to receive the sacraments of baptism and first communion, a deacon who’d sponsored my conversion, Ben, gave me two gifts. One was the rosary his wife had used up until the day she died. The other was a suit to wear for the occasion. I was very touched by both. Unfortunately, I lost contact with these kind and supportive people in my life relatively soon afterward.

  The only time my mother or Jack ever stepped inside the church was on the night of my baptism and first communion. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time. They sat in the very back row, looking uneasy and out of place throughout the ceremony. When it was over they stood and clapped along with everyone else. I was happy that they came, because I felt a sense of accomplishment and wanted someone to witness it.

  I didn’t stop attending Mass until my life went straight to hell a couple of years later. I’ve long since outgrown any belief in mainstream Christian theology, and I even have some degree of animosity toward Christianity in general because of what has been done to me by people declaring themselves Christian. But I still love the ritual and ceremony of the Catholic Church. A little old priest comes here once a month, and I watch as he gives the sacraments to the Catholic convicts on Death Row. It comforts me just to watch it, and I often find myself remembering the pleasure I used to take in it.

  * * *

  Today, on Good Friday, I began performing the Holy Guardian Angel ritual as described in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. It’s a prayer that asks a higher self or outside intelligence for guidance, protection, and for forgiveness of all my weaknesses and sins. Expert practitioners wear white robes and burn candles and frankincense, and use other esoteric paraphernalia. I obviously don’t have all the materials he suggests, but I don’t believe they’re needed. I was reading through the scriptures that would be read during Mass for today and was suddenly overcome with the feeling that I need to begin now. I felt a sense of power and peace that I wanted to be closer to. I showered and put on clean white clothes, and then knelt to pray. If Aleister Crowley could do the ritual on horseback, then I could do it in a prison cell.

  I prayed that I be forgiven all my transgressions, that I be protected and watched over, that I be granted the strength I would need, and that I be granted the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. I haven’t prayed like that since I was a child. Afterward I just wanted to sit and bask in the sense of peace that I felt. I know I will have to be on guard so as not to be completely swept up into devotion, or I won’t be able to remain objective. Aleister Crowley stressed the importance of neither believing nor disbelieving; I have the tendency to become a zealot.

  The ritual was very informal and spur-of-the-moment, but I wanted to do it, if only for symbolic reasons, it being Good Friday. Tomorrow I’ll begin in a more formal manner, by setting up an altar and scrubbing this cell from top to bottom.

  * * *

  Today at 8:15 a.m., I prayed for the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. I repeated the prayer at 9:55 a.m. almost as a compulsion. I love how clean and focused I feel afterward. I asked for the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, along with the strength and intelligence I need to complete and endure the ritual. I swear that I will never use it for evil, but only for the glory of God, and to aid myself and others. Last, I ask for help and guidance in following the one true Way. I always end with the phrase “In Christ’s name I ask this, amen,” and then I make the sign of the cross. Afterward I feel refreshed and rejuvenated. I wonder what the difference would be if I had all the tools—the oil of Abramelin, Cakes of Light, incense, and wine.

  I realized that while going through the Holy Guardian Angel prayer everything inside me becomes incredibly still. It’s like a very concentrated form of meditation. When you sit zazen, the first twenty minutes or so are maddening. Your legs ache, your nose itches, you can’t seem to find your center of gravity and so on, but once you make it past that first stage it starts to feel good. Like you could do it forever. That’s how the HGA prayer starts to feel. There’s an incredible stillness. The only thing moving inside you is the prayer itself, moving up and up. You begin to feel it seeping into the times when you aren’t praying, too. I’ll be just reading a book, and there it will suddenly be, bringing me into the present moment. I can now find that still, small point without even doing the prayer. It’s always there inside me; it takes only a split second to locate it. It’s there even when there’s no hope in it.

  The prayer makes you focus. The focus makes you alert enough to notice the crack when it appears. The angel comes through the crack. The crack is somewhere inside me, as dark as a hole the sun has never touched. The angel is electric blue. I saw all of this in a matter of one-tenth of a second. It was nothing more than a flicker of endless black and electric blue.

  That still, silent point of focus is back today. As soon as I knelt to begin, the feeling came over me. It’s like being the only thing that exists. Like being in an endless, silent vacuum. It’s both peaceful and powerful. My life is becoming more compact, like a tremendous amount of energy that has been compressed into a tiny sun. That’s as it should be. It feels good, as if I’ve discovered exactly what I’m meant to be doing right now. For a long time I have been overextending my reach, desperately snatching at every strand that floated my way in hopes of discovering some shred of inspiration. I’ve now come to realize that the only names I need are the ones that have been in my book of destiny since the very beginning. If I want to keep moving forward, then I have to keep looking back. I am rejuvenated by drinking from the oldest and deepest wells. I have found my way back to the source from which my magick flows. I am home.

  One of the reasons I am now pushing my body beyond all its known limits is that over the years I have erected a barrier between my mind and body. I have elevated the mind until the body became next to worthless. It shows in my physical posture—the way my shoulders unconsciously slump and my head hangs. I can correct this only for short periods of time, and only by applying all of my will to it. I have to find a way to heal myself, to bring both mind and body into harmony. If I don’t, disease will set in.

  Today my feet bled through two pairs of socks. It was bliss. Watching those coin-sized crimson stains bloom through the white fabric has become Holy Communion for me. Bringing my body to that point of pain and exhaustion has become my religion.

  My life has taught me that true spiritual insight can come about only through direct experience, the way a severe burn can be attained only by putting your hand in the fire. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else’s insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of secondhand clothing, worn-out and passed down. I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and, in modern times, computers and television programs. On the other hand, there’s only one real source of wisdom—pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The
greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis.

  I can vaguely remember life in what I call the real world. It seemed to be a chain of events that flowed one into another, not always seamlessly but at least naturally. There is nothing natural about my current situation. Nothing flows—or even moves—without someone applying a tremendous amount of willpower to one of reality’s pressure points. Even then, it’s like trying to keep a beach ball aloft just by blowing on it. Life without momentum is not truly life. A person needs movement, or they eventually begin to forget that they even exist.

  I’ve read stories in which bliss, through some bizarre form of emotional alchemy, becomes lethargy or malaise. Perhaps it’s the boredom that causes a prince to give up all he knows and become a beggar. I can’t say. What I began to wonder is if the opposite may be true—if by following the thread of pain to a deep enough level, I could find something else. I knew I wasn’t the first to wonder about such a thing, because in certain Native American tribes, the men would sometimes undergo tremendously painful ordeals in search of spiritual or psychic insight.

  One of the most torturous and well-known paths to opening the senses wider than usual is fasting. On my first attempt, I went for two weeks without consuming anything but water. For the first four days or so the pain of hunger, combined with the physical deterioration, was maddening. My skin was hot with fever. It reminded me of the powerful periods of fever and sickness that would come upon me suddenly as a child. There would be no warning; I would just wake up in the middle of the night with a high fever. I would be so weak that I couldn’t move, but it felt like I was floating. I could feel currents of energy passing through my consciousness, and realized they were always flowing through the world, but that I could feel them only when I was in that fevered state. The closest I can come to articulating it even now would be to say that I could hear a river of pink voices. Once I became a teenager, it stopped. During the very last fit, my fever went so high that my mother submerged me in a tub of ice-cold water in order to bring it down. The touch of that ice water on my skin was one of the most horrific experiences of my life. I wanted to scream and fight, but could only lie there gasping. I couldn’t even cry. My mother kept muttering reassurances to me and smoothing my hair out of the way as she poured the frigid water over my face. I kept thinking, How can she not know that I’m in hell? The fever never bothered me. It was comforting in a way. It was the ice water that I thought was going to kill me.

  While fasting I would fall asleep fevered, hungry, and exhausted, but I was closer to that current than I had been since childhood. Still, there was something separating me from it. I could hear it on the horizon like a distant train whistle, but I wasn’t experiencing it. I needed something else to bring me closer.

  I don’t know why I started running. I don’t even remember starting; I was suddenly just doing it. Being trapped in a cell meant I had to run in place, so that’s what I did. I ran so hard that I lost all track of time. Eventually, I passed out. The world just went black, and sounds seemed to be coming from the far end of a very long hallway. I did it again the next day, only this time I put on two pairs of socks, because of the blisters on my feet. I ran until I found myself crawling toward the toilet on my hands and knees, retching and dry-heaving as I slipped in my own sweat. What should have been horrible was somehow beautiful. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I felt closer to all things divine than I ever did in any church. I had run for over two hours without stopping for so much as a drink of water, and I had discovered a new world.

  By the third day, my feet had started bleeding, leaving little smudges and droplets all over the floor, but I wouldn’t even notice them until later. I don’t understand how there can be magick in the repetitive movement of the body, but I’ve found it.

  There are times when my mind screams at my body to stop, that it’s not possible to go for one more second. I ignore it and push beyond that point. Only by pushing beyond every boundary that my mind and body pose can I swim in the dark, deep waters that I need. That’s the place where anything worth having comes from. It’s the pain of destroying my boundaries that lets me scan the current for messages in bottles. They come from downstream with a ghost inside each one. I don’t know who or what casts those bottles, at least not yet. Those with less curiosity or ambition just mumble that God works in mysterious ways. I intend to catch him in the act.

  Eight

  Eventually, Jason Baldwin came over nearly every single day after school, and we’d sit in my room listening to music, talking, and laughing at other people until we reached a fevered, manic pitch. I laughed harder in those early days than I have ever since. It was the kind of laughter that causes you to lose all control and fall over. Years later, Jason and I talk about those days, trying to remember exactly what was so funny. Neither of us knows; we only recall that it was the most hilarious period of our lives.

  Soon every weekend would find either me sleeping at Jason’s house or him sleeping at mine. When we were at my place we’d stay in my room, eating chips, drinking cans of generic soda, and listening to heavy metal cassettes. We were always trying to be quiet so that Jack wouldn’t hear us—if he heard even the slightest sound he’d go into a rage. He automatically hated anyone I befriended and went out of his way to make it unpleasant for all of us.

  The very first night I stayed at Jason’s we decided to sneak out. I had never done this before, so I was doing it more for the thrill than to go anywhere in particular. The evening started out with Jason’s mom, Gail, dropping us off at the bowling alley in West Memphis, with the instruction to go nowhere else. As soon as she left the parking lot, Jason’s younger brother Matt departed the scene in search of other excitement. Jason and I went inside to play pool and associate with all the other hoodlums. This was the hangout for degenerates, and there were mullets everywhere you turned.

  After playing a couple games and exchanging greetings with the locals, we decided to go find Matt. Perhaps there were more interesting things to be found wherever he was. We crossed the parking lots of grocery stores and strip malls to reach Walmart, which we knew to be his most likely location. While there we paid a visit to the music section, put our money together, and bought the newest Metallica tape, then sat down to read the lyrics. We finally found Matt playing video games, and all three of us made our way back to the bowling alley, where Gail soon picked us up.

  The night was so cold that everything seemed crystal clear, magickal, and a little scary. The world suddenly felt very large. I remember every detail because that was the first time I had so wantonly and completely disobeyed all orders. We were free to do whatever we wanted, with no interference or adult supervision. A whole new world had opened up. The feeling of adventure and absolute freedom was amazing.

  When Gail pulled up we quickly piled into the car and made our way back to Lakeshore. Back at Jason’s place we all three went into his room to listen to the new Metallica tape and play video games on the Nintendo system and old television that sat on the dresser. I can’t remember who first suggested sneaking out, but we immediately seized upon the idea. Time seemed to tick by at an agonizingly slow pace as we waited for Jason’s mom and stepfather to go to bed. After the lights went out we gave them another hour just to be certain they were sleeping.

  We made our exit through the window in Matt’s room, because it was bigger than the one in Jason’s room. We could also step out onto the fence by stretching our legs out as far as possible, and from the fence it was only a short hop to the ground. Jason and Matt had both done this before and had no difficulty. I, on the other hand, got hung up with one leg inside and one leg outside. They decided to “help” me by yanking on the leg that was outside, and nearly crushed my testicles in the process.

  We had no particular destination in mind, so we walked the streets of Lakeshore for a while, leaving a trail of barking dogs in our wake. It was so cold that all the puddles next to the street had thi
n sheets of ice over them, and the streetlights sparkled on them like diamonds. I was giddy with excitement and considered Jason to be wise in the ways of the world for having done this before.

  We decided to pay a visit to the nearby train tracks, where Jason said there was a tree house in which people sometimes left bottles of wine. To get there we had to cross an empty field, and we didn’t take into account the recent rains. Our feet punched through the thin glaze of ice, and the three of us were standing in ankle-deep water. But the shivering and teeth chattering barely dimmed our sense of excitement and we plodded on.

  When we finally made it to the tracks, not only was the tree house smashed but the whole rotten tree had fallen over. We continued on our way, following the tracks for about a mile, with the intention of making a full circle and ending up back at Jason’s trailer. We were quite a distance from any lights or trailers, and the night was silent. We talked about ghost tales and horror movies, urban legends and things we’d seen in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown books. Soon every hair on our necks was standing straight up and we were jumping at our own imaginations. We walked in a single file, Jason leading the way, Matt in the middle, and me bringing up the rear. Matt insisted on being in the middle so that nothing could sneak up on him. In quiet voices we discussed how some kid had claimed to see a dead man hopping back and forth across the train tracks on Halloween night. It was like we couldn’t keep from feeding our own terror. Sometime later I saw the movie Stand by Me and was overcome with nostalgia because of how much it reminded me of us.

  Back at the trailer, we peeled off our wet footwear and fell asleep in front of the TV watching Headbangers Ball. I’ll never forget a single thing about that night as long as I live. It’s part of what makes me who I am. I’ve often wondered if Jason and Matt have thought about it much over the years.