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

possible to overstate the impact all this had on my young mind. I would lie in bed at night scared to move, while my imagination conjured up horrific images. I had already had scenes of hell and damnation drilled into my head by Jack and his wonderful church-folk friends, and these new discoveries did nothing to ease my terror. If I would have known then that in just a few short years I would be subjected to the same kind of witch hunt, that I would have some of the same accusations made against me, and that the same merciless zealots would imprison me and sentence me to death, then my heart probably would have burst of fright right on the spot. Who would have thought you could see the future by reading a book about the past?
    I was miserable and under tremendous pressure, believing I would burn in hell for all eternity because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking bad things about people—not to mention the fact that I was entering puberty and knew with absolute certainty that my uncontrollable lust was earning me a one-way trip to the Lake of Fire. I had recently discovered masturbation and applied myself to the act with the utmost diligence. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, and afterward would pray to God, begging his forgiveness. I had no idea that it was normal to have such urges, for no one ever explained such things to me.
    There was a nonstop war going on inside me—I wanted to be “good,” but couldn’t quite seem to manage it. My sexual appetite was insatiable, and as a typical adolescent, I thought most people were morons. I was on my way to the devil’s playground, all right. It all seems so ridiculous now, but back then it was the most deadly serious thing in the world.
    Oddly enough, that same children’s book was where I first encountered Aleister Crowley. Now I know it was all propaganda, but at that young age I was amazed that someone could be so brazenly hedonistic and “sinful.” I’ve read much about this man and his life’s work over the years, and it’s incredible how people have misunderstood him. One of my favorite examples is his “How to Succeed / How to Suck Eggs” wordplay. It comes from chapter sixty-nine (wordplay: get it?), in which he talks about sexual practices; anyone not reading closely won’t pick up on the “suck seed” reference. His words have been misconstrued, twisted, taken out of context, and misunderstood continuously. If you don’t know the key with which to decipher him, then you’ll never understand what you’re reading. Others don’t even want to understand, and would rather use his name or image to sway and scare the ignorant, just as the prosecutor did during my trial.
    Our financial situation continued its steadily downward spiral, and the tension continued to build. We started trying to grow our own food, and it was hot, backbreaking labor. We had no irrigation system, not even a hose and running water, so we had to haul water by the bucketful to our “garden.” Everything was done manually. Some days you’d go up one row of cucumbers or potatoes and down another with hoe in hand, busting up the dry, cracked ground. Other days you’d spend hours hunched over, pulling weeds from between plants with bare hands. That task was especially hazardous, as you had to constantly be on the lookout for poisonous snakes, bumblebees, and wasps. If you let the monotony of the task lull your mind into a stupor you’d often receive a nasty surprise. After all the hard work, only about half the food would be edible. The bugs and animals would have gotten some of it, while other areas couldn’t be saved from rot.
    The only thing we didn’t have to do ourselves was crop-dusting. Our house was in the middle of the field the plane flew back and forth over, and it gave us a healthy dose of poison every time it passed overhead. If you didn’t run for cover when you heard him coming, you’d get dusted, too. During that time, I inhaled enough pesticides to put a small country out of action. My mom’s and Jack’s advice? “Don’t look up at the plane, and try not to breathe deeply until he gets a little ways past.” I developed allergies so bad that my mother had to start giving me injections at home. She had no bedside manner and wielded that syringe in an entirely unpleasant way.
    You had to be certain you had all the food out of the garden by the end of summer or there was a chance the fire would destroy it. Every year after the final harvest, farmers