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

nests, and God help you if you’re trying to save food. You can’t even let your blanket hang off the bed or they’ll climb it like a rope. I couldn’t begin to count the times rats have woken me up by running across the bed. The guards used to put poison out for them until an inmate put it in someone’s coffee.
    O CTOBER 14
    It’s getting cold at night. The temperature has started to drop into the 40s. I woke up shivering, and it felt like the summer had never happened. It suddenly seemed like I’d spent most of my life shivering. I don’t mean that in a bad way, although if you hate the cold it’s probably horrible. For me it just feels like home.
    I miss the snow. I miss looking at it, walking in it, tasting it. I used to love those days when it was so cold everyone else would be tucked away inside trying to stay warm. I would be the only one out walking, so I could look across the fields and see miles of snow without a single footprint in it. It would be completely silent—no cars, no birds singing, no doors slamming. Just silence and snow. God, I miss snow. The stars, the moon, the wind, and blankets of pure, pristine snow.
    Have you ever seen that movie
Cold Mountain
? I’ve seen it a dozen times and could watch it a dozen more. Not only does the music played by Jack White and company make me cry every time I hear it, but the winter scenes are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. It’s so real it seems like you should be able to see your breath in the air, no matter what time of year you’re watching it. Absolutely magickal. I love the stark, bare tree limbs and the ice.
    Can you believe it’s been over seventeen years since I’ve touched snow? Since I’ve heard that soft, comforting sound it makes as it crunches beneath your boots? It won’t be much longer. I can feel it in my bones. Soon I’ll have snow again. I’ll stand in it and look up at the stars until I can no longer feel my feet.
    O CTOBER 15
    Mannheim Steamroller is coming to Little Rock next month. People have asked me what concerts I’d want to see, and the top two on my list are Mannheim Steamroller and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Both put on amazing shows of Christmas music that make my heart ache. The TSO is half symphony and half hair band, with all the magick of Christmas sprinkled on top. Last year the local PBS station played one of their concerts during the holiday season, and I wallowed in every moment of it. It was beautiful. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is to Christmas what Midnight Syndicate is to Halloween. If I could get anything I wanted for my birthday, it would be to see either a TSO or Mannheim Steamroller Christmas show.
    P.S. I just watched Dustin McDaniel’s debate against the Green Party candidate for attorney general. He claimed during the debate he’s not scared of new evidence being heard in my case—that in fact he’s helped us by testing even more evidence and giving us the results. Yet the representative sent from his office argued during the September hearing before the Arkansas Supreme Court that the new evidence should not be heard. Is it just me, or does this sound like political double-talk to you? You can’t have it both ways, little buddy.
    He also said that the past seventeen years of suffering we’ve been put through are a testament to the fact that the system “works.” Otherwise, I’d already be dead. Three innocent people spend almost two decades in a living hell while a child-murderer walks the streets, and the attorney general’s office does everything possible to keep evidence from being heard—that’s his proof that the system “works”? Perhaps he’s helping us all to see the bright side: instead of just torturing me for seventeen years, they could have murdered me.
    I will not give in to anger. If I do, then they have won. Pythagoras believed numbers held the secret to enlightenment. He devised a mathematical formula for discovering the number that represents your life’s path. Using that formula, my number is eight. In tarot, eight is the “strength” card. It shows a smiling woman gently closing the jaws of a lion while it licks her hand. That lion represents all the harsh, negative aspects of ourselves we must learn to master—our anger, fear, jealousy, greed, et cetera. The woman does not tame the lion with force. She does it with patience, with gentleness, and with perseverance. Pythagoras said that is the lesson to be learned by those whose birth