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

exactly what he looked like. If you were to catch an old, stray tomcat and shave all the fur off its head you would be looking at the spitting image of this fellow. Cathead was sitting on the ground, soaking up the sun and chewing a blade of grass that dangled from the corner of his mouth. He was staring off into space as if absorbed in profound thought. I had been walking laps around the yard and taking in the scenery. As I passed Cathead for the millionth time he looked up at me (actually it was more like he was seeing some other place, but his head turned in my direction) and he asked, “You know how you keep five people from raping you?” I was caught off guard, as this was not a question I had ever much considered, or thought I’d ever be called upon to answer. I looked at this odd creature, waiting for the punch line to what I was hoping was a joke. He soon answered his own question: “Just tighten your ass cheeks and start biting.” I was horrified. He was dead serious, and seemed to think he was passing on a bit of incredibly well-thought-out wisdom. The only things going through my mind were
What kind of hell have I been sent to? Is this what passes for conversation here?
I quickly went back to walking laps and left Cathead to his ponderings.
    Prison is a freak show. Barnum and Bailey have no idea what they’re missing out on. I will be your master of ceremonies on a guided tour of this small corner of hell. Prepare to be dazzled and baffled. If the hand is truly quicker than the eye, you’ll never know what hit you. I know I didn’t.

One
    M y name is Damien Echols, although it wasn’t always. At birth I was different in both name and essence. On December 11, 1974, when I came into the world, I was named Michael Hutchison at the insistence of my father, Joe Hutchison. My mother, Pam, had a different name in mind, but my father would hear none of it. They argued about it for years afterward.
    The hospital where I was born still stands in the small run-down town of West Memphis, Arkansas. It’s the same hospital where my maternal grandmother, Francis Gosa, died twenty years later. As a child I was jealous of my sister, Michelle, who was lucky enough to be born, two years after me, across the bridge in Memphis, Tennessee. In my youth Memphis always felt like home to me. When we crossed the bridge into Tennessee I had the sensation of being where I belonged and thought it only right that I should have been the one born there. After all, my sister didn’t even care where she was born.
    My mother and grandmother were both fascinated by the fact that after I had been delivered and the doctor had discharged my mother from the hospital, I was placed in a Christmas stocking for the short journey home. They kept the stocking for years, and I had to hear the story often. I found out later that hospitals all over the country do the same thing for every baby born in the month of December, but this fact seemed to be lost on my mother, and it marked the beginning of a lifetime of denial. After saving the stocking as if it were a valuable family heirloom for seventeen years, it was unceremoniously left behind in a move that was less than well planned.
    Other than the stocking I had only one memento saved from childhood—a pillow. My grandmother gave it to me the day I left the hospital, and I slept on it until I was seventeen years old, when it was left behind in the same ill-fated move. I could never sleep without that pillow as a child, as it was my security blanket. By the end it was nothing more than a ball of stuffing housed in a pillowcase that was rapidly disintegrating.
    Being born in the winter made me a child of the winter. I was truly happy only when the days were short, the nights were long, and my teeth were chattering. I love the winter. Every year I long for it, look forward to it, even though I always feel as if it’s turning me inside out. The beauty and loneliness of it hurts my heart and carries with it all the memories of every winter before. Even now, after having been locked in a cell for years, at the coming of winter I can still close my eyes and feel myself walking the streets as everyone else lies in bed asleep. I remember how the ice sounded as it cracked in the trees every time the wind blew. The air could be so cold that it scoured my throat with each breath, but I would not want to go indoors and miss the magick of it. I have two definitions for the word “magick.” The first is