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

stops for a moment. Screams of anger and rage, begging, threatening, cursing—it sounds like the din of some forgotten hell. These are the “regular” prisoners. As soon as you step through the door of Death Row it stops. More than once I’ve heard a new guard say, “My God—you can hear a pin drop in here!”
    The only time I even register the silence is late at night, when I would sit up to watch the midnight movie, keeping my fingers crossed that it would be a horror flick.
    Horror movies were a family tradition in our house. I remember when I was a child, still in kindergarten, I would sit up and watch back-to-back horror movies—Godzilla, the mummy, vampires, werewolves, or a disembodied hand that somehow made its way around town in search of its victim. I would stare wide-eyed and unmoving at the flickering screen until I fell asleep, then my dad would carry me to bed.
    I’d remember those times as I sat in the silent barracks watching a cheaply made horror movie. It filled me with nostalgia and made me want to go back in time to a place where I was safe and had no doubt that my mom and dad would take care of everything.
    At one time I lived in a cell next to a guy who got a little nervous in the silence. One night as I was watching
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
, the guy in the next cell whispered my name every few minutes, to be certain I hadn’t fallen asleep and left him alone. Finally I said, “Man, if this movie scares you that much you should quit watching it.” Others who overheard started laughing. He swore at me, stung because I’d leaked his secret. Moments later he crept back to the door to watch some more. I don’t believe he slept at all that night.

Six
    I n 1986 came the joys of junior high school. Many significant events and rites of passage took place during the time I inhabited the halls of this repugnant example of our educational system. It was beyond rural; there were probably about a thousand students in the entire school. I had my first taste of beer and my first look at pornography, I took up skateboarding, and I met Jason Baldwin.
    The beer and pornography were compliments of my stepbrother Keith Echols, who was actually a pretty decent guy despite having a drinking problem. He gave me the first of only two experiences I’ve ever had behind the wheel of a vehicle. He drove an old pickup truck with a jacked-up rear end and super-wide back tires. One day as I sat in the passenger seat listening to Alice Cooper on the radio, he tossed out the empty beer can he’d been holding between his legs, looked at me with bleary eyes, and asked, “Wanna drive?”
    I responded with the phrase every southerner uses on a regular basis: “Hell yeah.”
    He pulled over and exchanged places with me, then instructed me on how to drive the last couple of miles to his house. Keith was extremely laid-back (out in the middle of nowhere there’s not much to crash into) and told me repeatedly, “You can go faster.”
    By this time all of Jack’s kids had long since moved off on their own, but Keith, along with his wife and infant daughter, were forced to move into the tin-roof shack with us after their house and all they owned burned to the ground. While there he taught me many practical skills, such as how to shoot and take care of your gun and how to replace the engine in your car, all while maintaining a beer buzz. I never did develop a taste for the stuff and have never been able to drink an entire bottle. He’d hand me his girlie magazines while belching, “Don’t tell Dad I showed you these.” All in all, he was a pretty fun guy to be around, even though his tact was sometimes questionable (once, years later, when witnessing a neighborhood girl flirting with me, he called out a cheerful, “You better get on that, boy!”). I looked up to him then, but haven’t seen or heard from him since I was imprisoned.
    *  *  *
    M y first year of junior high I befriended a mildly retarded and majorly weird kid named Kevin. I was most likely the only friend he’d ever had, and you couldn’t make him shut up. It was as if he’d been saving up conversations his whole life. He could talk about literally anything for hours at a time—a cartoon he’d watched the previous afternoon, a magazine he’d looked at in the grocery store, or a new stuffed animal he’d acquired. This kid was a freak when it came to stuffed animals, and he had a huge collection—it’s where every cent of his money