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Thursday, Jan 8, 2009
Six years after the conviction of three young men in the "Paradise Lost" triple homicide, a burgeoning movement insists they're innocent.
Aug 10, 2000 | Despite the shouts coming from fellow death row inmates, Damien Wayne Echols' voice sounds relaxed as I listen to him on a speakerphone in the Los Angeles home of one of his supporters. In a matter-of-fact tone, the "star" of the Emmy Award-winning 1996 HBO documentary "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" and its recent sequel, "Paradise Lost 2: Revelations," describes his surroundings in the Tucker, Ark., maximum-security unit: "I'm in a 9-by-12-foot cell," explains Echols. "Kind of squatted down here in the doorway. The telephone is a pay phone on wheels they can push up to the door. The phone's sitting outside. I have the receiver inside. I have to reach out to dial the number."
A recorded voice interrupts the collect call to tell us there are two minutes left. Calls are cut off after 10 minutes, though Echols can call back as long as no other prisoners wish to use the phone. Echols continues without comment.
"In my room, there's a concrete slab in the back where you put one of those mats like kindergartners take naps on. That's where you sleep. There's a sink, a metal toilet and a little table bolted to the wall. You're allowed to have one blanket, an Army reject. Sometimes, you can see through them because they're so old.
"The entire cell is concrete, except for the door, which is a sliding bar door they control from a booth. The walls are bare. You're not allowed to have anything hanging on them. They do have air conditioning, but they don't run it too often in the summer to save money. If you move, you're covered in sweat."
Echols is locked in his cell 24 hours a day, except for Mondays and Thursdays when guards take him outside for an hour, though he says this doesn't always happen. He's also out of his cell for a 10-minute shower on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. When he has visitors (he's allowed one per week), he gets three hours with them. On the plus side, Echols has a radio he can listen to, though he's not allowed CDs or tapes. He can receive printed matter, and he has subscriptions to several magazines such as the New Yorker and Harper's. Sometimes supporters send him books via Amazon.com.
As for death row cuisine: "They don't even wash a lot of it," says Echols. "They grow it here themselves, certain vegetables and stuff. You can't really tell what it is because they cook it all the same. Sometimes you'll find grasshoppers or crickets in it." Then the recording announces the end of the call, and the line goes dead.
What did you expect? It's Arkansas' death row, not the Marriott. The reason Echols has spent six years in this little patch of hell is that in 1994, at the age of 19, he was found guilty of capital murder in the deaths of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. The boys -- Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Chris Byers -- were discovered May 6, 1993, naked and hogtied with their own shoelaces at the bottom of a creek bed in a patch of woods known as the Robin Hood Hills. All three had been brutally beaten. Two died from drowning. The third, Byers, bled to death from wounds to his groin. He'd been repeatedly stabbed, and castrated.
The West Memphis police said that Echols was the leader of a makeshift satanic cult, and that the murders were ritualistic and intended to confer demonic power on the killers. The cops said that Echols' accomplices were two other local boys: a soft-spoken 16-year-old named Jason Baldwin and Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., a mentally handicapped 17-year-old with an I.Q. of 72.
Echols and Baldwin were tried together and convicted in '94. Echols, regarded by the jury as the ringleader in the killings, was sentenced to death. Baldwin got life without parole. Misskelley, tried before the other two, was found guilty on the basis of his confession and sentenced to life plus 40 years. Baldwin and Misskelley are each doing their time in different prisons from Echols.
Darkly charismatic and obviously intelligent, Echols has always been the enigma at the epicenter of the tragedy. Even he admits that most people "cannot separate me from the case." In the first "Paradise Lost" film, Echols' disaffected manner, his encyclopedic knowledge of all things occult and his comment that he would be forever feared as the "West Memphis boogeyman" made him look like one of the nihilistic teens in the 1986 movie "River's Edge." On the stand, he was a defense attorney's worst nightmare.
"It was pretty much just scared childishness," says Echols of his infamous "boogeyman" comment. "That's how I was at the time. Young and stupid."
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