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

would ride through the fields surrounding our house and set them ablaze with instruments that looked like flamethrowers. This was so all the burned and leftover vegetation would fertilize the ground for the next year’s crop. I don’t know what prevented the house from burning, because the flames would come to a halt only a few feet away. If the wind changed direction you would nearly suffocate on thick, black smoke.
    The house did nearly burn to the ground one time because the wood-burning stove started a fire in the ceiling. The fire department had to come and spray the place down. Unfortunately, the trucks arrived in time to put it out. As I watched, I desperately prayed that the entire shack would burn so I’d never have to see it again. It survived with little damage.
    Jack was a roofer by trade, and he started taking small jobs on the side, repairing residential homes to bring in a little extra cash. I started going with him, learning the process. I was only about thirteen, so mostly what I did was clean up the area when he was finished, and he’d give me a few dollars.
    Perhaps up until this point I’ve painted a completely unsympathetic portrait of Jack. He wasn’t an absolute monster any more than anyone else is. He was just a man, both good and bad. I believe he did care about both my sister and me, in his own way. He could be generous. He would stop to help every single person whose car was broken down on the side of the road, and he always gave hitchhikers a ride. He was also more tolerant of any form of self-expression I chose than any other parent would have been. I was free to dress however I pleased and listen to whatever music I liked. He had no problem with things like me wearing earrings, and I heard him tell my mother more than once, “He’s just trying to find himself.”
    My mother was also a more complicated character than she may seem. She always made certain we had enough to eat (even though it was usually junk food), she always went to Open House Night at school to meet my teachers, and she made sure we got Easter baskets with chocolate rabbits. She tried to take care of us when we were sick, although sometimes her idea of taking care was to sit next to the bed as I struggled with bronchitis and keep watch while smoking generic cigarettes.
    I’m now at a point in my life where I look back on both of them with mingled feeling of love, disgust, affection, resentment, and sometimes hatred. There’s too much betrayal to ever be completely forgiven. I am not like my mother, who may argue with you one day and go back to life as usual the next. The best I can do is say that their good deeds may have softened the blow of the bad ones.

Five
    B eing in prison and having a case as well-known as mine puts me in an odd position. In a way, complete strangers come to feel that they know me just because they’ve watched me on television or read about me. It takes away their inhibitions when they approach me. I don’t mind it at all; it keeps my days interesting. Sometimes it provokes a great deal of thought, and sometimes it leaves me flabbergasted.
    The letters I receive from people come from a variety of mental and emotional planes. I see the entire spectrum of human life. I’m like a bartender without a bar; people just tell me their stories. Some of them just want to get something off their chests, as if they just need to tell
someone
. Others look at me as some sort of oracle, and ask me questions about major life decisions. People going through divorces, people losing their children, people considering abortions—they all write and tell me their personal business. Others write and ask me about mine. I’ve even met a few of them in prison.
    Years ago I was often visited by a religious couple. They were devoutly Pentecostal and much older than I was, though with almost no life experience. They had never been out of Arkansas or ever associated with people who were outside their own walk of life. They didn’t really know what to make of me but kept returning. I must admit that I enjoyed shocking them. In some ways they were as alien to me as I was to them.
    More often than not they would bring the conversation around to sex. They truly had no idea that people practiced any sort of sex other than intercourse in a missionary position. When I informed them that there were indeed other positions, and that it could even be done orally, they looked like they were about to go into shock. They