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

into effect, which ostensibly would open the door to proving our innocence. The law dictates that the state will pay for all necessary testing, although then one has to wait for the state to get around to one’s case. In order to get anything moving, we had to pay for all of the DNA testing up front—the evidence tested included articles (clothing and so on) that had been found near the crime scene and beyond, as well as a number of items that had not been kept in the courthouse or crime lab. Quite a few of these items had been kept for years at the West Memphis police department, where any number of people had had access to them without supervision or even gloves.
    The person who helped us tremendously at this point was Henry Rollins, who not only appealed to his celebrity and musician friends but also produced an album, took it on tour, and raised enough for the first round of DNA testing. In 2002, the motion for DNA testing was filed, although we wouldn’t hear anything resembling results until 2006.
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    I
’ve also got my fingers crossed right now, hoping the results of a DNA test come back soon. It seems to take forever sometimes. DNA testing has come quite a ways in the eleven years I’ve been locked up. They can do things now that they couldn’t do a decade ago. There was no way to do it until now because no one could afford it. The difference now is a one-man army named Henry Rollins, who has worked his ass off to make sure it happens. I’m still stunned every time I see a letter in the mail with a return address for “H. Rollins,” because it hits me that I’m trading correspondence with a living legend. He’s determined to see the truth come out, and nothing stops him once he’s made his mind up about getting something done. It’s things like that that really let me know how far this case has come. Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared sometimes. Every once in a while I’m damn near petrified, but I have no choice but to struggle on.
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    I n 2004, I was, oddly, adopted (again). I had been exchanging letters and phone calls with a woman who had seen
Paradise Lost
, and had contacted me around the same time Lorri did. She was a psychologist who wanted to help me. We spoke on the phone often, and she became a therapist for me in many ways. It was an escape to talk to her. We never talked about the case—instead she was humorous and entertaining, and we would bicker and laugh with each other nonstop. And so she adopted me in order to visit and spend time with me. Cally, also known as “Mama Mouse,” decided she was no longer content with a houseful of cats and decided to adopt me despite my constant sarcasm. The nastier I was, the more she bragged to all her friends about me. Her job is to help shape the minds of today’s youth by giving advice at a school in California. And people wonder how Californians gained the reputation of being fruitcakes. I point the finger of blame at Cally.
    This is a woman who has pictures of barnyard animals on her socks and listens in on every conversation around her in the coffeehouse. She insisted on sending me progress reports on the health of her ninety-nine cats, including which ones had diarrhea. You know she can’t be normal—she voluntarily chose to adopt me, after all. Cally lives in San Francisco, where she says the weather is pretty much the same all the time. There are no tornadoes, no blizzards, no scorching heat waves that leave the earth dead and brown. It’s just one eternal, mind-numbing seventy-degree day. At first I was intrigued by this. In fact, it seemed somehow magickal. However, the more I contemplated it, the more uneasy I became. Then I realized why. It’s because something about it is vaguely prisonlike. It seems almost dispassionate in some way. How is a person supposed to experience different emotional and psychic states while living in an eternally static environment? Because that’s what life comes down to in prison—a continuous, soul-stealing environment. Something like that can lull you into a stupor long before you realize it’s happening, and before you know it, your spirit has atrophied and calcified.
    Cally also donated extraordinary sums of money to our defense efforts, and she never wavered in her support and affection for me through all the years I was incarcerated.
    In the early years, Jason and I actually exchanged letters through our various visitors. We told each other not to