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

by Damien Echols

  J.C. was an artist of tremendous skill, though his subject matter came from the darkest reaches of a disturbed psyche. One day he was casually standing in the doorway wearing his uniform of nothing but boxer shorts. There was a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were squinted against the rising smoke. He seemed to be looking at something over my head as he tossed me a piece of thick art paper. It was rolled up and inserted into a cardboard tube such as you find in a roll of toilet paper. “Check it out and tell me what you’ll give me for it,” he mumbled before retreating into his cell. I unrolled the paper to see a flawlessly drawn naked woman’s body in a reclining position. The horrible part was that J.C. had drawn his own head on the woman’s body. I stared at it in shock, unable to move. It came as such a shock to my mind that I had no idea what to do. Scream? Laugh? What? In the end I did the only thing I could do—rolled it back up, tossed it to him, and said, “Sorry, J.C., but I’ve already got one just like it.” He accepted this explanation as completely plausible and passed the drawing on to his next potential customer.

  Drawing was not his only medium of creativity. He once made matching handheld crossbows out of tongue depressors, Elmer’s Glue-All, and heavy-duty rubber bands. These were no mere toys, but were strong enough to pierce flesh. Some people got a little jumpy when they’d see him holding one, even though he never actually shot anyone. He wasn’t above whizzing one by your ear, but the only thing he’d actually shoot with them were rats. He thinned out the prison rodent population for a while. One day the hobo got nervous when J.C. started waving the crossbows in his direction, so he snitched to the guards. That put an end to J.C.’s gunslinging days.

  J.C.’s most irritating habit was walking stark naked to and from the shower. He’d stroll up and down the tier at a leisurely pace, like nothing was out of the ordinary. This wouldn’t have been so bad if you could have ignored him, but he’d walk right up to you and try to carry on a conversation. This would tend to make people pretty uneasy. Everyone dealt with it in different ways. As soon as he opened his mouth some men would bellow in outrage, “I done told you! Don’t try to talk to me when you ain’t got no drawers on!” Others would glance around nervously, eyes shifting left and right to see if anyone was looking, and then try to answer him as quickly as possible so he’d move on. All in all, he could be a very amusing character, and no one was happy when the state finally executed him.

  Another potentially dangerous schizophrenic was recently executed after spending twenty-two years on Death Row. He was here so long because he had been judged too insane to execute. The state finally medicated him so that he would be sane enough to appreciate the fact that he was about to die. There was no question about his insanity for those who met him. I’d known it since the day he spit in my face and accused me of giving him ingrown toenails. He was still screaming at me as the guards took him to the hole.

  That’s something you never get used to. One day a man is there, the next he’s gone. It’s hard to make yourself believe that someone you were just talking to a couple of days before is now gone forever. These are men you’ve lived with for years, yet you don’t even get to attend the funeral, so there’s no sense of closure. The preachers all get a disgusting gleam in their eyes when an execution is at hand. They hover around the condemned man’s cell like flies, threatening him with damnation unless he buys the mentality they’re selling. They don’t have time for you unless you’re about to die. They never even stop to say hello until that point. Many men vow that they’ll verbally abuse them if they hang around their cells when execution is imminent. The sentiment is “You had no time for me when I was living. Now that I’m dying I have no time for you.”

  The worst part of the weeks preceding an execution is the guards. You can tell they get off on it, because it adds a little excitement to their jobs. A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Correction will go on television to give a speech about how hard it is on them, but it’s nothing more than words to convince a gullible public how humane they are here. The truth is that the guards stand around and tell jokes about it before and afterward. They’ll actually be friendly to the condemned man for a few days before the execution, even if they’ve abused and neglected him up until then. This is done out of sheer morbidity. They want to be able to tell others that they had a conversation with the dead man.

  Some of the prisoners can’t remember what you said to them or what they said to you just hours before. If you remind them, they will argue with you that such a conversation never took place. Others are grown men in their thirties who still behave like mean-spirited teenagers. Their mental development (what little there was) stopped once they began abusing drugs and alcohol.

  To say that someone can’t hold their mud is prison slang for anal leakage. With that in mind I leave it to you to figure out how an inmate earned the name “Mudpie.” Mudpie could be no more oblivious to reality than if he walked around with a bag on his head. His greatest talent is lying to himself, and he makes it his life’s work to distort every piece of information that passes through his senses. If self-deception were an art, Mudpie would be a master. He’s the only person who can’t see through his own smoke screen. He says things that leave everyone staring at him in disbelief.

  An example of his self-deception would be his addictions. Mudpie would sell his soul for cigarettes or marijuana. Anytime he knows someone in the barracks has some, he goes into a frenzy. He’ll beg from everyone and sell everything he owns to get it. He smokes so much that everything in his cell stinks of it. I once overheard him tell his father that he was soon going to be executed just so his father would send him money. It worked the first time, but the second time he tried it, his father called Mudpie’s lawyer and found out the truth—that Mudpie was nowhere near an execution date. Who in their right mind would fake their death for cigarettes? Ah, but Mudpie becomes very angry when you call him an addict and a dope fiend, and constantly informs people that he has “quit.” What that means is that he can’t find any right then. When called upon to explain why his father no longer speaks to him, he insists it’s because he broke off contact with his family so they wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. And he forces himself to believe it. He doesn’t see the contradiction in his actions—that if he truly didn’t want to worry his family he would not have called them with news of a nonexistent execution date.

  Mudpie has been known to launch into a sermon about how he doesn’t believe in gratuitous violence, after which he threatens to kill another inmate for trying to change the channel on the television. At least once a day he’ll condemn someone for something he himself did the day before. He can be quite interesting to watch. I’ll see him screw something up, then tell myself, “There’s no way in hell he can put a spin on that. He’ll have to live up to it.” I’m wrong every time. He always pulls some trick out of his bag. It seems he would learn from his mistakes, but he never does. He brings a world of trouble upon himself time after time, and ignores the pattern. I’ve become convinced that this is now a necessity, because he’d probably commit suicide if forced to take a long, hard look at himself.

  A great many of Mudpie’s habits and antics are repugnant, though some of them are hilarious. There have been many times when I’ve laughed at him until I couldn’t breathe. One such time was at the end of 1999, when he was making Y2K preparations.

  Mudpie listened nonstop to a radio station that was home to a string of shows all focusing on conspiracy theories. At least once a year they do a show insisting that a giant asteroid is heading straight toward Earth, and all of creation will be wiped from existence on a given date. That date comes and goes with no dire consequences, but that never stops them from doing another such story in a year or so. It also doesn’t stop Mudpie from accepting every word as the gospel truth. Bigfoot sightings, UFO crashes, alien abductions, Chinese plots to take over the world, et cetera. Mudpie couldn’t get enough of it. Once they began doing shows predicting the Y
2K computer crash, it was all he could talk about. He nearly drove us all insane with his constant prophecies of doom. The second that the calendar flipped over to the year 2000 we were all going to die, he told us.

  One day as I was on my way to the yard I noticed a large stack in Mudpie’s cell. He had several cases of ramen noodles, a pyramid of sodas, boxes of saltine crackers, and about fifteen rolls of toilet paper. He explained that he was stockpiling supplies because once Y2K arrived we would no longer have food or water. I gave this a moment’s thought before asking, “If there’s no water, how are you going to cook all those noodles?” He described to me his secret recipe—he would boil the noodles in Dr Pepper while holding them over burning toilet paper. He had already been sampling the concoction in order to accustom himself to eating it. Alas, the delectable enterprise turned out to be in vain, as our imminent destruction was postponed.

  The Y2K debacle wasn’t Mudpie’s only questionable culinary habit. Mudpie is a cheapskate of the highest order. Once, after he had eaten the last of the peanut butter from a jar, I saw him fill it with hot water and set it aside. I thought perhaps he was washing it out to use as a storage container. Instead he went back and drank the cloudy water in which the peanut butter scum was floating. Just getting his money’s worth. Others witnessed him do the same with a “squeeze cheese” bottle. From that day on, anytime he would argue with people, they would fire back with “At least I don’t drink cheese water.”

  Mudpie was often seen wearing what he called “fart masks.” He fashioned these contraptions out of cologne samples he would tear out of magazines and position over his nose and mouth with rubber bands that stretched over his ears. They resembled surgeons’ masks. He wore them, breathing in pure cologne, at least twice a week, during the times he said the hobo had gas so bad it was gagging him.

  In prison, pornography is more valuable than money. You can trade it for anything you may want. Mudpie collects pornography so that he can swap it to dealers who are capable of feeding his habits. I once had the chance to view his collection and found it more disturbing than erotic. One large sheet of paper featured nothing but row upon row of breasts. Another sheet was covered with vaginas. Yet a third featured anuses. There were no heads, arms, or legs. They had all been cut off. When I inquired about this, his response was that he did not need to see an elbow in order to “get off.” Although I found his taste to be crude and not very aesthetically pleasing, it made a certain amount of sense. Or at least it seemed to make sense until I saw that he also had a matchbox full of eyes. He had gone through a stack of magazines and meticulously cut the eyes out of every picture with a razor blade. He seemed deeply offended when I suggested that this might be abnormal, and insisted it related to a work of art he was creating. The tiny box of eyes then disappeared and was never seen again.

  You can tell the long-term users by sight because of the toll it takes on their bodies. The most obvious are the ones whose teeth are crumbling in their mouths. Sometimes their breath smells like they’re rotting from the inside out. They smile with ruined teeth as they tell you how good dope is. No, thank you. I’m far too vain to indulge in anything that’s going to damage the way I look.

  Just because they’re in prison doesn’t necessarily mean they no longer use. For the right price, guards are more than willing to help them get a shot of whatever they need. Some are alcoholics who brew their own. That’s very common. It’s made from the most God-awful ingredients you can imagine, and just the smell of it can turn your stomach The prison slang for such unpalatable crud is “bootleg.” It’s no Merlot, and you won’t see this stuff being bottled by Turning Leaf anytime soon.

  I watch as men hand-roll cigarettes in pages they ripped from the Bible. They call it “smoking the Holy Ghost.” The ones with no tobacco will smoke anything they find—old tea bags, toilet cleanser, whatever. I saw one man fall to the floor jerking and foaming at the mouth after smoking something that looked like a handful of baby-blue rock salt. His eyes rolled back in his head while his feet tried to propel him across the floor in a concrete backstroke. These are hard days for fiends, and the addicts have long since sold their souls.

  You don’t make many memories in prison—at least none you’d want to keep, or look back on fondly. It’s more like you have horrific scenes and situations burned into your psyche like a branding iron. The ability to create good memories, though . . . is gone. The ones you came in with are the only ones you’ll ever have. I would revisit mine constantly, trying desperately to wring every ounce of nourishment out of them that I possibly could. I was like a vampire, sucking them dry and then sifting through the dust in hopes of finding a drop I’d overlooked the previous hundred times. Sometimes I’d revisit a profound life experience; other times I’d chew over a minuscule detail like a hyena trying to find the marrow in the center of an old bone. For two weeks I remembered the handle on my grandmother’s front door. I remembered what it was like to look at it on a winter morning, knowing it was going to be as cold as ice in my hand. I remembered the way it felt to raise my arm and reach for it, to curl my white fingers around the gray metal. And then the best part—the gush of warm air that poured out as I pushed the door open. It wasn’t just warmth pouring over me, it was home. Bathing me, enveloping me, welcoming me. And then the door was closed again, the process beginning anew for the tenth time that day, or perhaps the hundredth. I lost count. The number was insignificant—only the experience mattered. You’d be amazed at all the little things you begin to remember when there are no new experiences to distract you.

  Gradually, as the years passed, I could slip more and more deeply into this state of remembrance. Eventually the prison disappears altogether, and only the world in the mind’s eye holds any importance. I called this state by many names, one of which was the Land of Nod. Nod was the city Cain was banished to in the book of Genesis, and that’s how I felt—exiled, cast out. The world didn’t want me, so I would retreat deep into the Land of Nod.

  Other times I thought of it as December. In my memories it was always December. December became another word for home to me. Then there were other times when I would swear the past almost had a personality. At those times I thought of it as Nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only friend that stays with you forever.

  The most potent and powerful means I had of entering the Land of Nod was through writing. Every day I disappeared into the pages of my journal, scribbling from margin to margin, wallowing in the memories of a thousand December afternoons as my hand moved the pen. I filled a dozen leather-bound journals, many with the same memory examined from every angle. I never wanted to go back and read what I’d written because it didn’t really matter to me. I hoped, too, that perhaps someday the pages would be of importance to someone, somewhere—but not to me. The memories were for me, but the journals were for someone else. The journals were a castle I was building for some future magician to find and explore. There were rooms full of beauty, pain, magick, love, horror, despair, and wonder. Every page was a hidden corner. When I was inside those journals, deep in the Land of Nod, the prison ceased to matter. I was no longer slowly dying in a godforsaken cage. In the land of Nod I was more alive than ever before.

  * * *

  On August 22, 2003, I was transferred from Tucker Max to the Varner Super Maximum Security Unit in Grady, the same prison where Jason and Jessie were (though ironically, Jason was soon after transferred to Tucker). I was awakened at two a.m. by a group of madcap guards, funsters with M-16 assault rifles and attack dogs. They roused all thirty-seven of us in the barracks and two others who were in the hole, wrapped us in chains, and packed us into vans like sardines. There were eight prisoners and two guards in each van. It was a tight fit and a long, uncomfortable ride.

  Once we arrived, we were placed in what amounts to solitary confinement. It’s a concrete cell with a solid steel door. We never came in contact with other inmates, and you could talk to the person next to you only by pressing your face into a crack and sc
reaming. It was filthy. They cleaned the hallways and visiting areas if an inspection was coming through, but never inside the cells. I hadn’t felt sunlight on my skin in months. It took a while to adjust to the absolute confinement and isolation, but I had a hell of a lot more privacy, which is a rare commodity in prison.

  I was forbidden to communicate with Jason and Jessie, per prison administration orders, though nothing had been declared legally and in spite of the fact that they were housed together and had been sleeping in beds side by side for a couple of years.

  My first appeal was turned down by the Arkansas court system in 1994. Big surprise there, eh?

  My second appeal, known as a Rule 37, encompassed the myriad complaints of ineffective counsel in my defense, and ultimately opened the door to the incomprehensible and unending legal labyrinth that became my ongoing defense and effort to be freed.

  As I already mentioned, Joe and Bruce’s efforts culminated in the documentary Paradise Lost, which was released at Sundance and other festivals in 1996 and played in several small theaters, including the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and a theater in Little Rock. It had a huge impact on our case and raised awareness about the murders. Among the many people who saw it over the next several years was Eddie Vedder, of Pearl Jam, who was intrigued enough to reach out to my attorney at the time. Unfortunately and ironically, my attorney had never heard of Pearl Jam, so it took some time for Eddie to find someone receptive to his offer of support. In 1999, he finally made contact with my team and became involved in the fight to prove my innocence. His financial donations to my legal fund and his sheer devotion and energy in advocating for my release marked a pivotal moment in the years spent on my case. Eddie has shown himself to be a true friend time and time again. How many rock stars do you know who visit guys in prison when they come through town? It’s always a tremendous amount of fun whenever he stops by and tells of his latest adventures.