His close friend, year-old Jason Baldwin, and a year-old acquaintance, Jessie Misskelley, were charged as well. On the basis of Misskelley's confession which he later claimed was coerced and not much else, the three were found guilty of murder. Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison, Echols was sent to death row.
Of course, their story had a somewhat happy ending: All three were released in after the discovery of new forensic evidence; while they were not exonerated, they entered Alford pleas, which means they maintained their innocence but acknowledged there was enough evidence against them to convict. But while Echols survived death row long enough to walk out a free man, it wasn't, as he admitted during a talk Thursday at the NYC true crime festival Death Becomes Us, an easy task.
For the first 10 years he had access to other people, he claimed, but as the years went by, the inmates were separated more and more until he ended up in his solitary cell, which had just one window. Barely any light came through, as there was a brick wall just a few feet in front of it.
He told tragic stories stories of fellow inmates, like a man who cut his throat with a shaving razor and curled up in a blanket so it would hide the blood and allow him enough time to die before the guards noticed, and of someone who broke his fists pounding on his cell, screaming the devil was in there, only to get out, have his hands bandaged, and be thrown back in.
And it wasn't just the bad food, the omnipresent specter of death, and the solitary confinement that made death row so hellish. Echols recalled vicious guard beatings that left him "pissing blood. I was beaten [because] of the new evidentiary hearing, less than an hour after the announcement, they destroyed and took everything in my cell because I was going back to court. But Echols said he was able to make it through all these hardships because he started practicing magick, which made conditions bearable and kept him sane.
Comedian Dave Hill, who interviewed Echols Thursday, joked a bit about magick, knowing many aren't super-familiar with the topic. Magick, as Echols puts it, "is the western path to enlightenment. We don't remember where we come from, where we're going, or why we're supposed to be going there.
Magick causes you to remember some of these things and gives you a sense of purpose," he explained. After 20 or 30 minutes, whatever is in the can will be hot enough to burn your mouth. You have to be certain the can is dry, because the bulb will explode in your face if water drips on it. You can always tell when someone has made this mistake — the explosion sounds like a shotgun blast. For a split second today I could smell home. It smelled like sunset on a dirt road.
I thought my heart was going to break. The world I left behind was so close I could almost touch it. Everything in me cried out for it. It's amazing how certain shades of agony have their own beauty. I can't ever seem to make myself believe that the home I once knew doesn't even exist any more. It's still too real inside my head. I wish I had a handful of dust from back then, so that I could keep it in a bottle and always have it near.
Time has changed for me. I don't recall exactly when it happened, and I don't even remember if it was sudden or gradual. Somehow the change just crept up on me like a wolf on tiptoe.
Hell, I don't even remember when I first started to notice it. What I do remember is how when I was a kid every single day seemed to last for an eternity. I swear to God that I can remember a single summer day that lasted for several months. Now I watch while years flip by like an exhalation, and sometimes I feel panic trying to claw its way up into my throat. Time itself has become a cruel race toward an off-coloured sunset. Forever can be measured with a ruler, and eternity is no longer than a stiff breeze.
God, I miss the sound of cicadas singing. I used to sit on my front porch and listen to those invisible hordes all screaming in the trees like green lunacy.
The only place I hear them now is on television. I've seen live newscasts where I could hear them screeching in the background. When I realised what it was I was hearing I nearly fell to my knees, sobbing and screaming a denial to everything I've lost, everything that's been stolen from me. It's a powerful sound — the sound home would make if it weren't a silent eternity away from me.
Hearing the cicadas is like being stabbed through the heart with blades of ice. They remind me that life has continued for the world while I've been sealed away in a concrete vault. I've been awakened on many nights by the feel of rats crawling over my body, but I've never heard summer's green singing. A single letter would have been enough to kindle a tiny spark of hope in my heart, but I received hundreds.
Every day at least one or two would arrive, sometimes as many as 10 or I would lie on my bunk and flip through the letters, savouring them like a fat kid with a fistful of candy, whispering, "Thank you… Thank you," over and over again.
I clutched those letters to my chest and slept with them under my head. I had never been so thankful for anything in my entire life. I had been on Death Row for about two years when I received an odd letter, in February It was from a woman who loved movies and had recently seen the documentary about my case at a film festival in New York.
Her name was Lorri Davis, and she did something no one else had ever done — she apologised for invading my privacy by seeking me out. That really struck me, because I felt like I no longer had any privacy.
My entire life had been exposed for anyone and everyone to examine and poke at with a stick. I was a fly that had its wings ripped off by a malicious kid.
Every day I received letters from people who did nothing but ask questions about the most intimate aspects of my life.
Here was a lady who understood courtesy. She said she felt horrible about what I'd been through and was compelled to contact me, but she didn't want to intrude. I immediately wrote back to her, and ever since we have tried to write to each other every single day.
Our letters to each other now fill up an entire closet. She was from New York, college-educated, a world traveller who'd been to South America and as far away as the Middle East, and an architect who had worked on projects for people I'd heard of only from Hollywood movies. We wrote to each other obsessively, and we spoke on the phone for the first time a month or so after that first letter. I just decided to call her one day — I was terribly nervous, knowing I'd need to improvise the conversation rather than script it ahead of time.
She always laughs now when she tells anyone about the first time I called her. She picked up the phone to hear a deep, Delta accent ask, "Are you OK? She said it nearly killed her. Lorri came to visit me about six months later. I remember it was summer because she wasn't wearing a coat.
It was a slow and gradual process, forging ahead together. I knew I was in love with Lorri when I started to wake up in the middle of the night furious and cursing her for making me feel the way she did. It was pain beyond belief. Nothing has ever hurt me that way.
I tried to sleep as much as possible just to escape. I was grinding my teeth down to nubs. Now, years later, it's exactly the opposite.
Now there is no pain, yet she still makes my heart explode. For the first two years we knew each other, Lorri flew from New York to Arkansas about every other month, so, in addition to the phone bill, this was an extremely expensive relationship for her. I needed to fight for my innocence, and that of Jason and Jesse, outside of the prison walls. And that is why I sought to test the evidence in the case to exonerate us and lead to the real killer s.
Once we made inquiries to the West Memphis Police to turn over the evidence in the case for advanced testing, the evidence disappeared. We will not give up until we find whatever evidence exists. We will find out who destroyed the evidence and why the legal authorities lied.
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