I was tossed into the back of a car and told to stay down. There were two cops in the front seat, both fat and wearing the standard mustaches. They could have passed for brothers. The one behind the wheel quickly started driving at a high rate of speed. I was curled into the fetal position on the backseat, vomiting and dry-heaving. One cop looked back at me, cursing and swearing. In disgust, he spit, “That’s just fucking great.” No one said another word to me for the rest of the trip. I had no idea where I was being taken.
When we finally came to a stop sometime later in the afternoon, it was at a small white building with several cop cars parked outside. A few old, crusty-looking men with a hose were halfheartedly spraying the cop cars. As I was being escorted inside, I heard the cops tell them to wash out the backseat where I had gotten sick.
Once inside the Monroe County jail, the chains were removed and I was told to strip. I stood naked while one cop sprayed my entire body with some sort of lice repellent. Four or five other cops looked on while conversing nonchalantly. This was nothing new to them. Soon enough I myself would begin to view such events as nothing out of the ordinary. After my flea dip, I was given a pair of white pants and a white shirt to put on. One of the old car-washers from out front handed me a towel, a blanket, and a mat like preschoolers sleep on. The induction ceremony being complete, I was pushed into a cell that would be my home for most of the next year.
Twenty
The cell I was confined to on June 4 had four concrete slabs that served as beds. There was a small metal table bolted to the floor, a shower stall, and a television suspended high in one corner that picked up two channels. For the first week or so there was only one other person in the cell with me. His name was Chad, a white guy with a terrible case of acne and unwashed curly hair. He was there on a capital murder charge. He’d killed someone with a sawed-off shotgun while burglarizing their house. His back had already started to curve into a hump, like an old man, even though he was only sixteen.
Chad seemed a bit slow in the thinking department, if you catch my drift. He claimed he had been there for years and was quite excited that he now had company. He couldn’t answer a single one of my questions: he didn’t know where we were, or how far we were from West Memphis, or how to make a phone call, or anything else I could think to ask him. He’d just smile really big, throw his hands up in the air as if to say, “Who knows? Only the gods can say,” then rock back and forth for a while. Not so encouraging.
I didn’t find out where I was for a week. My thinking was that perhaps my whereabouts were being kept secret from everyone, including Domini and my family. I was worried about how Domini was taking it. My family and I weren’t on the greatest of terms, but when you’re drowning like I was, you’ll reach for anything. I was lost and alone and empty. Floating deep in outer space would have been no more frightening. I had done nothing to deserve this, and I was goddamned if these assholes were going to make me the sacrificial lamb.
I was still taking antidepressants, which the guards gave me every night. That very first week, I had the ingenious idea of saving them up and taking them all at once. That was the only way out I could see at that point. The situation was getting worse. There was no Sherlock Holmes coming to solve the case and let me out. Besides, what did I really have to live for, anyway? I would regret not being there for the baby. It would have been nice to stick around for that.
When I was in one of the hospitals, I had heard that 800 milligrams of the particular antidepressant I was on was enough to put you into a coma you’d never come out of. I wanted to be certain I did it right, so I took 1,200 milligrams. I swallowed the pills and sat down to write a quick note to Domini and my family. It was only a few lines scratched out quickly with a pencil. I don’t recall what they were and I don’t want to. That being taken care of, I stretched out on my concrete slab and flipped through one of Chad’s magazines. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he loved those pictures. He wasn’t too fond of losing the only company he had, either. I hadn’t bothered to hide what I was doing from him, thinking there was no need.
The main sensation I had was of being so tired it was physically painful. I wanted to sleep more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I closed my eyes and just let go. That’s when all hell broke loose. About ten guards came for me. Chad had told them what I’d done, because he didn’t want to be left all alone again, especially with a dead body. I could hear them talking but couldn’t make my eyes open. Someone opened them for me and shone a flashlight in them. Someone else poured a vile-tasting liquid in my mouth and told me to swallow it. It was some sort of vomit-inducing syrup. They put me in the backseat of a car and drove about 150 miles an hour to get me to a hospital. By that point I was so confused I kept asking myself if the drugs were taking effect yet, or if I was already dead. I tried to tell the cop behind the wheel that we would have been there by now if we’d all ridden on the back of a giant spider. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to.
I don’t remember much about the hospital that night. I know it was somewhere in Monroe County. I woke up for a moment when someone put a tube up my nose and down my throat. Two cops were sitting before me, watching, while all the doctors and nurses were moving double-time. Can’t let the star of the show die, can we?
Strangely enough, all the doctors and nurses looked like therapists from the mental institution. I was so discombobulated that I hardly knew what was happening to me, much less could think about where I was at that point. I was awakened a couple of times during the night by someone shining a light in my eyes and asking if I remembered my name, but I slept through the entire stomach pumping procedure. When I finally woke up sometime the next day, I found myself in the intensive care unit.
My court-appointed lawyer, Scott Davidson, first came to see me while I was in the hospital. He stayed for maybe ten minutes, just long enough to introduce himself and tell me my family knew where I was being held. He looked incredulous when I told him I was innocent. I would see him about three more times over the course of the next year, and never for longer than thirty minutes at a time. You would think that if a guy were going on trial, and could very well be sentenced to death, that his lawyers would spend a lot of time preparing him for court. Mine did not. He didn’t tell me what he would be doing to prepare for the trial or give me any idea of what to expect or to do in the meantime. Perhaps this is how capital cases are handled, I thought. After all, this guy is a lawyer, so he must know what he’s doing, right? Surely they wouldn’t appoint me a lawyer who was ineffectual or uncaring. I had a lot to learn.
The same court that was putting me on trial was also paying my lawyer. Look at it this way—are you going to employ someone who makes you look stupid and rubs your face in your own mistakes? No. You’re going to pay the guy who knows his place and sticks with the program. These guys get paid the same amount whether they win or lose, so why try too hard? Later, during the trial, when I asked why they didn’t push a point or challenge a ruling, they answered, “We have to work with the judge on a daily basis and don’t want to piss him off.”
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” disappeared, and “Innocent until proven guilty” had left the building. Once they go through all that trouble to accuse and arrest you, you’re going down unless you’ve got a couple million dollars on hand to hire some real gunslingers to come to your aid. I was a fool back then, though. Still wet behind the ears. I thought the purpose of the justice system was to see that justice is done. That’s the way it works on TV. While I was counting on divine intervention, they were plotting my demise.
The court system does not have the sane man’s mentality, even though it’s built on his back. It’s an insane snake of mammoth proportions, all tangled up in itself. It’s vicious and demented, biting any flesh it can reach. It’s so entangled and drunken that it will eventually strangle itself to death. There’s no way to convey its madness to anyone who hasn’t come into contact with its sluggish embrace. The peop
le who operate within it have become as deranged as the lunatic snake itself, and justice is a foreign concept. They accept pointless and drawn-out procedures as religion. Nothing outrages them more than an idea that makes sense, and there’s nothing they’ll fight harder against. It’s no wonder there are so many jokes about lawyers. It’s only growing worse since the time of Kafka. There’s no way to understand it. It is a world without logic.
* * *
Once I was released from the hospital and taken back to the jail, I was put in a padded cell with no clothes. I lived in only my underwear for days. I’d heard of padded rooms all my life and imagined them to be like a giant pillow. It’s nothing of the sort. Everything is coated in a thick, greasy substance similar to rubber. More like a bicycle tire filled with cement than a pillow. Since I had no clothes, it was pretty chilly. One of the guys passing by slid some copies of National Enquirer under the door. I read them during the day and covered up with them at night. There was nothing else to do in there. It was just an empty room.
There was a small opening in the door, and sometimes one of the other prisoners on the block would sit by the door and talk for a while. Everyone on the block, with one exception, was a young black guy who had already been to prison at least once in the past. The only exception was an old man in his fifties. His hair was as white as his skin was black, and all the other guys would abuse and take advantage of him. He was given absolutely no respect. He would sit by my door and cry for a half-hour straight at times, like I could help him somehow. He was there for having two children with his own daughter. He was their father and grandfather at the same time. He tried to stay quiet and out of everyone’s way, but it didn’t always work.
I spent a week in the padded cell, talking to people through the opening in the door and freezing. Contrary to what I had been led to believe by movies and TV, none of the other prisoners seemed like hardened criminals who would kill their mothers for a nickel. Some of them were pretty funny. Every night after lockdown, someone would call to the guy in the next cell, “Hey, man, come here a minute, I need to show you something.” There would be laughter, then, “Shut up, fool, I’m trying to sleep.” Several times a day someone would beat on my door and ask, “You all right in there?” Their constant antics kept me from feeling quite so sad, at least until the lights went out. Once the lights went out and everyone was in bed, the despair came back full force. I cried myself to sleep many nights.
After I was back in jail for a couple of days, I was taken into an interrogation room by a guard. There I was introduced to two visitors: Ron Lax and his associate, Glori Shettles. Ron was a private investigator, he said to me, and had taken a particular interest in the case as soon as he saw the media coverage of our arrests. They started to ask me questions—did I know the children or the families, where had I been the night of the murders—direct and specifically about what had happened. They told me they had a strong interest in the case because they were very much against capital punishment, and could see that my being singled out made me the defendant most likely to receive the death penalty. They had contacted my attorneys immediately and requested to be the court-appointed investigators—a common part of a defense team—on my case. I was too shattered to take in what they were saying or to understand that they might prove helpful to my case.
When I got out of the padded cell a week later, I was taken back to the cell block with Chad. He was as pleased as could be because, counting me, he now had three roommates. While I was gone, two more guys had come in. Both were black teenagers, one named James and one named Nikia (everyone called him Kilo). Kilo turned out to be the second-best friend I’ve ever had in my life. This guy was really smart and extremely funny. We’d often say the same thing at the same time, or when I would try to explain something he would get excited and say, “Yeah! That’s it exactly!” He would slide across the cell-block floor on his knees, doing a flawless Michael Jackson impersonation, and I would laugh until my sides hurt.
We got a chessboard from somewhere, and I taught him the game. I had learned at some point to play by reading the instructions on the box. After playing several games a day for about a month, I could never beat him again. He kicked my ass every time, unless we played speed chess by my rules. This was a variation that I invented, and its purpose was to prevent you from thinking about your next move. Your opponent had until the count of five to move a piece, or you could legally start thumping him in the forehead. It was a very fast five-count, which gave you slightly under two seconds to grab a piece and move it.
Chad’s family brought him some games, too, so the four of us passed the time playing Monopoly, checkers, and dominoes. We all pooled our money, so that even the person with the smallest amount wouldn’t have to play without stakes. If my family left me twenty dollars, I’d buy twenty dollars’ worth of candy and chips, which was considered to belong to all of us. Kilo, Chad, and James did the same. We never had a single fight, which is a very rare thing when you’ve got guys who are forced to be in each other’s faces twenty-four hours a day.
The guards at the Monroe County jail were different from any I’ve ever seen since. They were nice, polite, well groomed—not abusive in any way. I was fooled into thinking all guards were this way. I didn’t realize I was experiencing a miracle. They treated us like human beings, and even let us do things the other prisoners didn’t get to do, like stay up all night. The four of us never were locked up alone; we made small pallets in the common area between our cells, and lived like we were having an eternal slumber party.
Kilo and I both looked with great anticipation to Saturday at midnight, when a television show called Night Flight came on. We were so starved for music that we’d listen to anything, and this was our only fix. It wasn’t the music either of us loved, but it was all we had. You never know how much you need music until you don’t have it. I missed it so much my heart hurt.
* * *
My mother, father, and Domini came to visit me once a week. We were allowed twenty minutes, and had to talk through bulletproof glass. Domini had been almost five months pregnant when I was arrested, but you still couldn’t tell it by looking at her. In the last three or four months of the pregnancy, she grew at an alarming rate. By July, her body was still the same size it had always been, but her stomach had become huge and tight.
On August 4, I was taken to a pretrial hearing with Jason and Jessie, where all three of us pleaded not guilty. Judge David Burnett, who had been assigned to the case after the first hearing with Rainey, presided. He was a Craighead County judge, his demeanor administrative and assuming—in his eyes, we were already convicted. He was just going through the formalities and paperwork of a trial. He did at this point “sever” Jessie’s trial from mine and Jason’s—Jessie’s lawyers were effective in arguing that the publicity surrounding all of us would damage his own case. In the back room, seated just a few feet from Jessie and Jason, it was impossible to speak. The three of us were shell-shocked. Jessie never lifted his head; he sat staring at his feet. Jason appeared angry, and if we managed to make eye contact, he shook his head at me in sheer bewilderment and disbelief.
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 eve
ry 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.
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 20